From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   When I told an astrologer friend that I was reading Aristotle, he told me that   
   Aristotle started the meanness that has been ongoing in the Western   
   civilization. The confusion there is one between the value and the misuses of   
   the value. Aristotle invented    
   a system of logic. Logic is not a bad thing at all. It becomes bad when it   
   gets misused to commit emotional violence.   
      
   In fact, many of the people who use logic that way can be easily shown to be   
   illogical. We see this for example with Freudians. These people think that   
   children are in love with the parent of the opposite gender, and that love in   
   adulthood is    
   transference of these feelings. This can be logically shown to be wrong. At   
   the time of Freud there were few single-parent households and homosexuals to   
   study; now there are plenty of them. And what we find again and again, is that   
   women raised by single    
   mothers, men raised by single fathers, homosexuals raised by the parent of   
   opposite gender, and people raised without either parent, fall in love just as   
   readily as do the people who are raised in nuclear families.   
      
   Since these people don’t have a transference figure, their feelings cannot   
   be transference.   
      
   Finally, since the feelings developed by people raised in the nuclear families   
   are of the same character as theirs, their feelings cannot be transference   
   either.   
      
   So we have people thinking that romantic love is irrational. I have known   
   highly rational people – including scientists, teachers, inventors and   
   military personnel – who started their matches with romantic love and are   
   still going strong when they    
   are in their 90s. These people are far more rational and responsible than   
   people who militate against love. And it is they that should be setting the   
   tone for man-woman relationships.   
      
   When I was writing about my spiritual experiences, people were claiming me to   
   be illogical. That is wrong. I have had experiences with less than a billionth   
   chance of happening whose only possible explanations are spiritual. I would   
   have to be completely    
   psychotic to deny these experiences. When faced with an experience that   
   contradicts the worldview, the logical thing to do is not to deny the   
   experience but to correct the worldview.   
      
   So we have people claiming that one must live “on Earth.” These people   
   have an inadequate view of what is Earth. The Earth is not just its crust. It   
   is also the molten metal in the center, the oceans and atmosphere at the top,   
   and all the life that    
   lives on it. The people who see only the crust do ignorant things. And it   
   sometimes takes a reasoned argument from a perspective that they haven’t   
   considered to correct their errors.   
      
   I am not against logic, and I am not against science. Both are important   
   pursuits, and a lot is owed to both. I am however against bigotry, whether it   
   is done in the name of religion or in the name of logic. The people who think   
   such things as that    
   romantic love or spiritual experience are irrational are not being logical,   
   they are being bigoted. And it then takes a strongly reasoned argument, that   
   they cannot claim to be illogical, to correct their errors.   
      
   Logic is a useful tool, and I highly recommend that people learn how to use it   
   correctly. What I do not recommend is that it be used to attack such things as   
   romantic love and spiritual experience. Misuses of the value discredit the   
   value itself. This    
   then feeds irrational ideologies. And the person who truly respects logic will   
   respect it enough not to use it to do wrong things.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)