Things are not truth. Truth is a relationship between facts and statements. A statement is true if it corresponds with the facts.

Yeah.
I love those guys work. What would we have done without Faraday? Well, I'm sure someone brighter than 25 watts would have come up with a Faraday cage

You're eating this stuff up, aren't you?
Your definition of truth needs honing. Until you can prove the reality of a thing you cannot determine whether it is true or not. If I can prove that the moon has shoe factories on it's dark side, and I send a camera in orbit around it and sure enough, elves are hard at work making shoes. I theorized this through a series of equations which led me to believe the hypothesis. That's reality proving truth. Also, I have now revealed, to my deep regret, how my twisted brain often works.

I misunderstood you. Good discussion, though.

The thing that differs between man and all other life is volition. That is why only Man understands the difference between good and evil - because it can only apply to Man. It's his glory and his curse..

But Islam never stopped.

Actually, what I said was that trying to understand it will lead to contradiction, ie the contradictory and self-defeating principles upon which it (Progressivism) is based. That's why it is useless to try to "understand" Progressivism: one can't "understand" or comprehend contradiction. One can understand the misguided motives and fundamentally unsound principles, but one can not "understand" Progressivism.

"Understanding a bad philosophy exposes contradictions, it doesn't create them." Precisely.

"Still at what point"? What "it"? You could say the same "it's something, we don't know what,..." about countless discoveries in science. There is always more to discover, and new knowledge can always make the past seem limited in comparison, but it's not a big religious-like mystery "confounding scientists", just the normal progress of discovering and learning more, always with difficult and puzzling problems to solve and new ideas to develop, but nothing like woozy confounding mystical ideas.

If you want a good example of a major breakthrough and how it was done, a very readable account without complex mathematics is Forbes and Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field. Faraday's evidence in the mid 19th century for a field associated with electrical and magnetic effects, as something real but not understood was at the time a perfect example of your "it's something, we don't know what,..." -- followed by a rational explanation achieved over years of work.

"True" in contrast with what, falsehood? There is no theory of a "true" nature of gravity, the "true" universe, or a "true" anything else other than what we know to be true. Truth is a relation between facts and statements about them, not something intrinsic in reality that is found. We discover, conceptualize, and explain additional facts, expanding our knowledge, we do not search for something called "true nature" in contrast to the object of our current knowledge deemed to be not true, i.e., false. There is always more to learn, but it's not the "real truth" as opposed to what we know. It's just more.

Not knowing more than we do is not "math not working". Math doesn't "lead" us to truth, letting us down and not working when it doesn't. People have to think and make discoveries using it. I don't know what it means to say "predicted actions prove a theory, but the math doesn't work".

Understanding the enemy is not nonsense. He said that understanding it leads to contradiction. You can understand a contradiction without embracing it.

War and conflict were 'normal' everywhere in medieval Europe and north Africa.

Human behavior, being rooted in animal evolutionary survival mechanisms, follows a simple algorithm: What are the rules? What must I do to live?

A newborn lacks most physical skills but is hardwired to learn, to connect causes and effects, to mimic others' learned behaviors. If I were the programmer of this lifeform, I would work on the assumption that the existing order and behavior patterns are the successful ones, since the current mature practitioners are alive and presumably thriving, and so their behaviors, like a template, should be replicated. From the earliest physical actions of feeding, sleeping, moving, finding protection, safety, comfort, hygiene, reproduction, a young human acquires and integrates data at a prodigious rate. Moment by moment both the data base and the rules become more complex of what must or must not, may or may not be done.

Fast forward to the accumulation of enormous concept webs within which an individual must choose and find courses of action that are acceptable to the group within which it needs to function. Whether cultural taboos within families and clans, or the millions of pages of laws and regulations that a nation has built up, there is a massive pressure to conform. Any deviation sends an alarm, and the system will seek to eliminate the defective elements, the disobedient units, whether by gentle persuasion or severe punishment or terminal removal. This has a micro parallel in the body's immune system that attacks any alien substance at the cellular level. It may even attack its own natural system, as in lupus, destroying itself from within. Likewise a society can fall into a self-destructive mode, formulating ever more restrictive rules until a totalitarian rigor mortis is reached.

In today's world, the belief systems that move towards total control will command their members to total obedience, submission and surrender, at the opposite end of a healthy system where enlightened cooperation does not require any destruction of fellow humans and, in fact, requires their participation for one's own wellbeing and survival. But destructive belief systems are not a reasoning entity, only a defective piece of software, and they embed themselves through humans' emotional (diagnostic) apparatus. This apparatus, that evolved as a guardian feature for survival in a simpler environment, can, in an overwhelmingly complex matrix of perceptions and concept formation, break down into self-contradictions. And the one thing it will not do is to admit any error. All the highly evolved brain's creative powers and defensive resources rise to deny error and to fake reality.

Should we, then, accept as unavoidable that humans will continue to persist in delusion, self-delusion, and mutual murdering? How can we free them from the compulsion to fight against self-correction and repair; how to persuade them that it is more valuable to be right than merely to appear to be right? To go against a lifetime of conditioning, of praying to a non-existent deity, of faithfully following rules rooted in centuries or millennia of cultural indoctrination? Why is it so much more difficult to wean people from believing in invisible rulers than to get over believing in Santa Claus? Where is their free will?

Submission started as a survival necessity. It has become cancerous. How to teach that Reason is the antidote, and that misplaced hatred of otherness is an unintended mutation? Check your own reaction to this analysis. Feel your hackles rise?

No problemo. However, we are still at a point that would be like explaining Quadratic equations to a dark ages merchant. As Neils Bohr said when trying to explain the atom, (Not quoting accurately) "it's something, we don't know what, somewhere, we don't, know where, doing something, we don't know what."

Trying to illustrate the true nature of gravity, trying to find the elusive overcoming of the speed of light, the true nature of the Universe, i:e: string theory, chaos theory, etc. To date, we have not made substantial progress past Einstein.Dark Matter, Dark Energy, still to be discovered and no math has led the way to a coherent demonstration. I'm not saying that eventually it won't be discovered, perhaps via an explosive new look in another direction, such as an electromagnetic universe.

Nonsense.
Progressivism, collectivism, socialism, etc., etc.all eventually lead to misery, starvation, demoralization and death. Even contrasting it with a mixed economy, like ours, that contains only 50% capitalism, easily shows its superiority. The thing that capitalism realizes that collectivism can't comprehend is that all men are not created equal and as a result some will succeed more than others and some will fail more than others. But treating everyone the same regardless of ability, ambition and application is the road to eventual poverty of wealth and spirit.

From the time of Mohammed to the present Muslims have been at war.At first with each other as the various tribes and factions vied with one another for leadership. It was a numbers game. As it spread, more and more the object was the "infidel' in other words everyone Not Muslim.In between, some tribes grew more in numbers and became more powerful. But war and conflict are as normal to Islam as peace is to Buddhists

Religions sometimes adjust their dogmas when the conflict with science becomes too embarrassing. Science doesn't become closer to religious faith, it wouldn't be science, but there are scientists who have gone astray, abandoning scientific method and becoming mystics (like the "Tao of Physics"). You might find the biography of David Bohm to be interesting.

I didn't say you thought of math as an entity.

There may be false premises, or an incomplete theory, or something too difficult to solve, but where do you think "math doesn't work"?

He said that trying to "Understand [Progressivism] will only lead to contradiction because of the misguided belief of elitism". There is nothing to take to an extreme in that, in or out of context. Understanding a bad philosophy exposes contradictions, it doesn't create them. Understanding what it is so you know what your're dealing with is good, not impossible or contradictory.

The medieval wars were crude and evil across the board for a very long time. 'Good' does not suddenly appear by picking a particular moment when one side happens to be attacking the other.

It was evil versus evil. The notion that it was all the fault of Muslims is a revisionist account trying to evade the nature of religious wars arising from Faith and Force.

Oh, shit - a stroke!?
So sorry.
You just took the wind from my sails. I can't think of a single one of my famous smartass remarks.
Hang in there

Sorry. Don't give up.

she's doing pretty well, but I had a stroke in Jan and
we're still fighting back. whatta life! -- j

Crude indeed.