I like to use role playing games to work through ideas or issues that are on my mind at the time when I make a character. Per my recent post about death and my growing fear of it, I decided that my character in Ars Magica (adventures of wizards set in Europe of the 1200s, with an otherwise consistent history: that makes this game science fiction, by the by) should be a necromancer driven by a desire to extend his life beyond the normal bounds because the typical wizard ways of doing this do not work for him. We had our first session last night and I realized that I had no idea how to play the character as he was. Just now it came to me; he is my father. In less charitable moods, I have opined that he had an overpowering fear of death which drove him to his 'faith'. Seeing as how it dovetails so well with that post, I think I should go with it. My father's fear of death made his early death more tragic, in a dramatic sense (not ironic, because that's not what the word means). I am not sure where this will take me and I don't have time at the moment to give this a longer treatment, but I wanted to put it down now so it can percolate in the background for the next few days.

Those last drops are often bitter. They are accompanied by the usual suspects: regret, anger, and the sense that forgetting this feeling is Pascal-ian diversion.

What is the role of dissent in society? How can it be reconciled to the ultimate necessity of legitimacy that a political institution requires?

Is it possible to move beyond the seeming end point where personal inclinations have dug in so strongly? I struggle to find a way to accept how wrong things are in the face of what seem to be obvious solutions. "Nothing learned, and everything forgotten." "The lesson of history is that humanity learns nothing from history." To believe one's own solutions are obviously the right path is almost always the surest sign that one is drastically wrong. But Mr. Dawkins, what if you're _right_? Can there be a point where building consensus is not a viable option? History, as far as I know, does not bear that out. We are political animals. We need consensus. No political insurgency succeeds (generally) by being simply principled. Success comes about when smaller groups bring larger groups into a conflict on the side of the smaller group. So the only way in which we can justify non-consensus building is when there is no chance that a larger (ie more powerful) group can be persuaded to agree with your smaller group's position. How does one determine this? If one can, does that mean the position is untenable and it is time to give up, or is martyrdom excusable then? As the received wisdom says on the subject, dying for a cause is easy. There seems to be room for dying for the cause somewhere in the spectrum, but as it stands it must be considered a special case. Why must the true believer be required to accept less than the true expression of their belief? As always we are drawn to the conflict between religion and society, where a society which means to preserve itself must react to religious movements that subvert the authority of the government's sovereignty. A functional society cannot tolerate true believers. Whether the suicide bombers are Christian or otherwise, belief in the state and/or the goals of the state has to come before goals of a religious movement in the mind of a member of society or conflict will result. Given the ultimate stakes on the line that religion represents, we must expect that those beliefs will come into violent conflict with any system that is not that religion (else they would not be different systems).

The conflict lies in being able to know with any kind of certainty whether position X or position Y is the correct one. Certainty, i.e., belief, is a prerequisite for action. I reject utterly the claim that belief in 'science' (rational beliefs tested by experiment) is the same as
'belief' in anything else. It is a misrepresentation of the world as it is experienced and a disingenuous move toward non-constructive nihilism (as opposed to general nihilism, which is unassailable in my opinion but has no input on this particular subject whereas non-constructive forms are attempts at diversion through sophistry when the argument seems lost) to say that empirically testable claims are somehow the same as untestable claims. If we want to throw out all ideas of causality, then we may as well declare victory right now for whatever idea we favor (perhaps unsurprisingly this is something we do frequently) and be done with the effort. Ergo, if your goal is merely to destroy certainty as the last resort to prevent your own error from being drawn into the spotlight, then you are wrong by default. We must accept conventional human limitations as a necessary stop on the way toward truth, but that doesn't mean we must exit the highway at the truck stop of non-being.