Cost Is Always An Object - The

The Theoretical Fruits Of Deliberate Oversimplification Through Idealization Are Not To Be Denied... Reality In All Its Messy Particularity Is Too Complicated To Theorize About, Taken Straight. The Issue Is, Rather (since Every Idealization Is A Strategic Choice), Which Idealizations Might Really Shed Some Light... Which Will Just Land Us... Diverting Fairy Tales.

I Think That There Are No Forces On This Planet More Dangerous To Us All Than The Fanaticisms Of Fundamentalism, Of All The Species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, And Buddhism, As Well As Countless Smaller Infections. Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion Here? There Most Certainly Is.

I Don't Think The 9/11 Attacks Taught Us Anything We Didn't Already Know About Religion. It Has Long Been Obvious - Even To The Deeply Religious - That Religious Fanaticism Is An Extremely Dangerous Deranger Of Otherwise Sane And Goodhearted People.

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.

The Only Answer To The Endless Chains Of Why, Why, Why Is That The Alternatives Died