God and Terror in the Mountains

The following story is absolutely true.

A friend of mine once worked for private detective agency. She took the job on a temporary basis, just to make a little extra money on the side. She didn’t sign up for any of the dangerous work; mostly she would just watch houses to see when people left, check legal records, that kind of thing.

One time, however, the situation turned ugly. In a remote area in the Rocky Mountains, she was watching a driveway from a safe distance when she realized that her quarry and his friends were stalking her with rifles. These were desperate men, drug smugglers; and they were skilled veterans of the Vietnam War. Realizing that the way back to her car was blocked, she headed the other direction, up the mountain, into the forest as night was falling. Read the rest of this entry »

Television is Plato’s cave.

Plato described the following thought experiment. Suppose some children were taken from their families at birth and set in chains inside a cave. They were bound head and foot, so that they could barely move, and were all set facing the same wall. Behind them, someone lit a fire, so that light was cast on the wall. Insidious conspirators, for unknown nefarious purposes, made a shadow play up on the wall, and the children believed that the shadows they saw on the were was the whole of reality. Their voices echoed off the wall, so they identified themselves with certain shadows, and interacted with the shadows as if they were real.

Now, Plato was trying to make a point similar to the one that Steve Pavlina makes in his series on subjective reality. Some will say that the thought experiment just proves that Plato was the sadistic wacko who got his kicks thinking about torturing little children. But of course, he only thought about it. We actually do it. Read the rest of this entry »