Seeing is believing – this shows incontrovertible proof that bigfoots exist!-0-
. What do Bigfoot believers, ‘Intelligent Design’ cheats, and ‘Panaphonic’ and ‘Somy’ electrical gear fraudsters have in common?
– my response to Brendan Cook’s article ‘Bears in the Woods’
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Brendan Cook has written an extraordinarily well-crafted piece entitled – The Bears in the Woods. It clinically exposes various kinds of fraud and fraudulent thinking.
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This post of mine is by way of an appreciative response, and an attempt to show what underlies the kinds of fraud about which Brendan so eloquently writes.
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The subjects of The Bears in the Wood are a roll call of evils buzzing around in our world – deception, self-deception, sowing confusion, superstition, fundamentalism, forms of truth-telling masquerading as their opposite number……
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These, and a whole fist-full of others, are the symptoms – but what is the disease?
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The disease is the inability, or unwillingness, to understand the different forms of truth-telling. Ken Wilber has described the three ways of truth, and their telling, in two or three of his books. He called them the ‘I’ ‘WE’ and ‘IT’ voices, three means by which we investigate reality and express ourselves.
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There’s nothing strange about I, WE and IT they are our forms of expression that correspond to the three major academic groupings the Arts, The Sciences and The Humanities.
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If you are a Scientist you are concerned, primarily, with IT-truth i.e. the kind of truth-telling about objective reality, using the methodologies of science.
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If you are an Arts-person you are primarily concerned with I-truth – the subjective truth that says ‘this is how it looks and feels to me, where I am, being me’.
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If you are a Humanities person you are, primarily, concerned, primarily with moral truth – as action in the world.
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Of course each form of truth-telling makes use of the other two – we are after all a single individuation of the human spirit!
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Interestingly spiritual-mystical experience is inevitably an ‘I’ form of truth-telling – it can be no other, and the mystical is the core of religion and religiosity. However the study of religion and the action of religion falls under the moral truth of the Humanities.
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Religion is harmful, useless even, not only if it is the cause of conflict but also if it fails to lead to right action, in the world, in service of others.
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I have published 21 posts (of varying length and quality!) on our three I, WE and IT ways of being, expressing, and doing, i.e. HERE
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The reasons that people are deceived, or self-deceive, are of course, a different subject. They might include the need for a security blanket, the need for certainty, the need to be right, the need to be on a side that looks like the winning group, the desire to be of the chosen people etc.
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Of course there are also plenty of snake-oil salesmen willing to start a religious group through which they can manipulate and exploit those with such needs as I’ve listed above. Fundamentalism is as Karen Armstrong says ‘the lust for certainty’. Intelligent design is an unwillingness to focus on the real benefit of religion as an inspiring story and focus instead on mind-bending, mind-destroying literalism.
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Karen Armstrong is one of two writers who brilliantly expose the nonsense of misappropriating the methods and claims of one form of truth-telling in trying to operate in another. (Terry Eagleton is the other). Key to this understanding is the restitution of Mythos (heart-knowing, intuition) as the partner to Logos (reason, head-knowing). For more on this see my posts, (of variable length and quality!) – HERE
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There is I believe a positive correlation between the historic subjugation of women and the sustained attempt to eliminate the voice of Mythos. Although the in-validation of Mythos is not strictly a gender issue, more the invalidation of the feminine, heart-knowing ,voice. (Mythos unlike Logos isn’t in the WORD 2007 dictionary – it slipped away like women in history)
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Armstrong again writes at length about the restitution of Mythos, to counter-balance Logos, in her latest book HERE
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Two of the key phrases in The Bears in the Woods are;
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1) ‘and his standard of proof changes‘ – (the Bigfoot believer, Intelligent Designer believer etc) – this of course points up the need to have moral integrity and the ability to understand the positives and negatives of the three major forms of truth-telling. Above all it points up the hypocrisy of relying on a set of criteria only when it suits pre-judice.
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2) ‘he’s doing for personal fulfillment‘ (the Bigfoot believer) – this is a clear example of what happens when we are demanding one set of truth by misapplying and distorting one set of truth-telling rules. The individual, the big-foot believer should be doing art about fantasy creatures instead of trying to justify the unjustifiable via unwarranted ‘scientific’ assertions. This of course is ‘scientism’.
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Is ‘religionism’ a co-equivalent term for scientism? – to describe the mis-application of its form of truth-telling? There is dire need for such a term.
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Another excellent cultural critic Terry Eagleton has also recently published a book highly relevant to this discussion. There is a review of both Armstrong’s book and the Eagleton book – HERE
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What do Bigfoot believers, ‘Intelligent Design’ cheats, and ‘Panaphonic’ and ‘Somy’ electrical gear fraudsters have in common? – ultimately an aversion to truth and integrity and honesty. What is the antidote?
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Education is the answer, but between the cynical exploitation of children and youth, as in the deification of wretched specimens like Michael Jackson, and the equally cynical exploitation of the parents by snake-oil religionists it takes special souls to escape the morass!
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Understanding the difference between I truth, IT truth and WE truth can help some. Others are just on the make, or simply feel snug in their fundamentally-wrapped-up world.
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Why see shades of grey when black and white thinking gives so much more self-satisfaction?
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Soul Needs - One Garden 
