Bastardization
Hmm. I know a great many scientists, including myself, who would vehemately disagree that there is a difference between fact and truth. If there was, what would be the point of science?
This is a debate for another thread, however.
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Well, no it's not.
Those scientists, yourself included, would be wrong, BTW.
My house in the mountains of New Mexico is quite cool, most summers. Some days, though, it gets close to 100 F, which is pretty warm for some.
Of course, I like it like that, so when I come home and the wife has the very rarely used air conditioning going, with the thermostat set at 68 F, I find the ouse quite chilly, and go and turn it up to a far more reasonable 74 F.
It's cold inhere, I say to the wife, who promptly sets the thermostat back to 68 F and says,
It's hot, what's the matter with you.. I point to my goose bumps, she points to her sweat, and the thermometer on the thermostat points to about 70 F.
So, the fact:it's 70 F.
My truth: It's cold.
My wife's truth:It's hot.
All equally valid, one fact and two truths.
I'll address the rest of your excellent but flawed (by prejudice, insistence, or a lack of study?) post a bit later. Do yourself a favor, though, go back to the dictionary and look up syncreticism. Remember, Scott, I'm not a Christian in any but the most remote sense of the word anymore. I don't have a particular dog in this hunt other than your use of the facts around the pagan elements is just a little
less twisted than the "Christian" anti-Christmas screed's
IF you're really going to educate your kids about religion and the traditions of all us crazy believers, you need to properly educate yourself-and I don't mean trying to imvalidate whatever religious indoctrination it is that you've rejected,
if any, or trying to poke holes in the various religions traditions, but look at the works of people who have undertaken a serious,
scientific anthropological study of religion, people like Mircea Eliade, just for starters. I might go a long way towards establishing some understanding of how these things came to be, rather than simply enforcing your hostility-whatever the reasons for it, and you may well be entiltled to them (no one knows better than I how religion can be used to abuse people, or how many of the world's ills it's been directly involved in) in the end your insistence on your interpretation of the
facts (and, in this case, lack of scholarshp in the area) being everyone's
truth, rather than simply
your truth only come across as agenda driven, rather than trying to simply share some interesting facts...
