Contrariwise / Joseph Dunphy's Mathematics Blog

There are many questions we should ask of you in return, that you’ve left unanswered.

How much deliberation did you put into your judgment? Did you think things through, or just jump to conclusions? A trusted friend can talk you away from a hasty mistake.

Did the friend explain his reasons to you, or just expect you to surrender your independence to him? A real friend would respect you enough to want your understanding, not just your compliance.

Does your friend stand to benefit from the decision he wants you to make? Are his motives pure? Sometimes, though not always, we find our trust misplaced.

How much do you feel you stand to lose if you don’t act on your intentions? Just how well do you trust that friend, and how much does he feel you will be harmed by neglecting his advice?

Do you find that his judgment is noticeably better than your own, in general? Is it likely that he would see something that you wouldn’t?

These questions and more would need to be answered before we could really answer you. Without a lot more detail about your situation, we just don’t know enough to give your worthwhile advice. The question you pose is too broad to be answered, meaningfully. But it is good that you listen to both your head and your heart.

Ignore those who say “always listen to your heart”. The members of a lynch mob are listening to their hearts, and they have certainly been lead astray, remaining so mislead until somebody, as he listens to his head, decides to calm them down.

Ignore those who say “always listen to your head”. Logic, at best, gives one the implications of one’s assumptions – where is one to find those assumptions, if one dulls one’s perception of the experience of life, making a machine of oneself? Is one so sure that one’s logic will always be without error? Think of the doctors in the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, who in their devotion to perfect experimental design, watched syphilis patients who could have been cured slowly die. Their reason did not overcome their heartlessness; pure reason is no better a guide to life than pure passion.

It is when each serves as a check on the other, doubt being felt until head and heart are reconciled, that something akin to sound judgment and a decently pursued life will result. One won’t necessarily end up as either a klansman or commit crimes against humanity as a result of failing to respect passion or reason, but few take either failure to its logical extreme. Even so, there are a lot of less extreme ways of going crazy that one can see people devoting themselves to, every day, and less drastic ways in which they make themselves a menace to those near them, and themselves.

Best not to walk toward either of these extremes, but rather to follow a middle path, making a habit of seeking balance in one’s life.

Ever read “why can’t I buy a Canadian”?

http://celticwander.wordpress.com/2003/0…

The Mosaic law is tribal law, for a tribe to which almost none of those quoting from it in such a pick and mix manner belong. Unlike Christianity, which seems to have been born with universalist aspirations and a self-conscious discarding of tradition in favor of adhering only to what was seen as universal, moral law, Judaism is a tribal religion, one growing out of a convenant relationship between G-d and one particular tribe, in which far more than just the moral law is to be observed.

While Fundamentalist Christians will say that one must be a Christian to be saved, it is a rare Jew who will say that one has to be Jewish in order to have a portion in the life to come; one isn’t going to burn in some sort of Hebraic Hell for having a BLT. To say “you can’t violate this tribal taboo, and be a member of the tribe” is not the same as saying “how dare you do this”, in a world in which there is and is supposed to be more than one tribe, and worthy individuals are to be found in them all.

Christian Fundamentalism, in seeking validation for its own intolerance in Torah, has lifted scripture out of the context in which it arose, while conveniently discarding those passages which don’t suit its purposes, projecting its own mission upon a people who would have found the very notion of a universal church a completely alien one, at the time Torah was written.

You mean “omniscent”, I assume – omnipotent means “all powerful”, not “all knowing”. If so … maybe He didn’t do it for Himself? Why do you assume that the creator would act only out of selfish motives?

Further, your question would seem to presuppose a deterministic creation, one in which all future events are absolutely foreordained. What if reality doesn’t work that way? Omniscence only guarantees that the one who is omniscent knows all of the answers – it offers no promises as to what the form of those answers will be at any given moment.

Ie. Ask G-d “will this man step through that door three minutes from now”, and maybe G-d will give you a probability that he will, and one that he won’t, not because this represents a limitation on His knowledge, but on reality itself – that there is no “yes or no” answer that would be valid at that time, and so even an omniscent being can not give you one, much as a man with perfect vision staring at a blurry image will still see a blur.

No.

At first sight, all one sees is the physical appearance of the person, the body. Love is something that one might feel as one connects to the spirit within the body.

What can one possibly know about another’s personality, within seconds of meeting that person? The spirit has not yet had a chance to let itself be seen by you, in that moment.

My answer: Englewood is a nightmare. Don’t go there, even in the middle of the day, even with a police escort. Even in the “good old days”, as a little girl, one of my relatives had to carry a knife under her clothes on her way to school. When the last member of her family moved out, murders were no longer reported in the neighborhood paper, because they were no longer considered newsworthy.

The South and West sides are mostly bad – but there are exceptions. Hyde Park isn’t so bad. I’ve heard good things about Chatham, but can’t vouch for them. Surprisingly enough, the Southwest side is very nice, and pretty in places, if a little quiet and dull.

The North Side is mostly OK, but I’d be careful around Montrose, more than a few blocks in from the Lake – I can remember seeing a teenager walking into a building with a very large gun drawn, and nobody seeing anything odd about this – and Rogers Park (Howard Stop, Red Line) looked a little dicey. I’ve heard other people saying that they had run into trouble, there.

Cabrini-Green is a lot smaller than it used to be, but it’s still there. Bad history, so avoid Division and Halsted. … You might do better to ask about a few specific places you had concerns about; It’s a big city. Too much to cover.