Dear Josephus,

I keep harping on about pagan deities because that is what Jesus is. As I pointed his description in many ways coincides with the description given to other pagan deities. Jesus is a pagan god crafted on to Judaism to make a new religion acceptable to pagans. Unlike Judaism and Islam which are monotheistic Christianity with the Trinity continues the polytheism of the ancient pagan religions.

Sorry, I will be offline for a few days.

Dear Josephus,

I've got degrees in ancient history and anthropology and this is the first I have heard of practices by Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors of inseminating virgins with tubes. Can you please let me know where you got this information? BTW I just loved your book on the history of the Jewish people.

Yuyutsu, you seem to be contradicting yourself.

1. You say the sun rising in the east is 'true' (recognising that this a perspective from earth of the earth's movement around the sun). That to deny this would be lying or at least deluded; but that it depends on our sensory perception, and a Martian with different sensory perceptions might conclude something different. Problem: the earth moving round the sun is independent of human or Martian perceptions. It was moving round the sun long before there were humans (not sure about Martians), when there were dinosaurs, and even before dinosaurs. Dinosaurs might not have had a word for 'east' but to them the sun would have appeared to rise from the same direction every morning.

2. You say 'Truth itself is not relative, it does not depend on a point of view, but is about what actually is, the thing in itself rather than how we perceive it.'
But earlier you wrote: 'if two people entertain two different beliefs that are good for both respectively, then they are both right and not in conflict and it does not matter if those beliefs happen to factually contradict each other and/or objective evidence, so long as they are both good to believe in, for those two people respectively.' This suggests to me that your 'truth' is indeed relative and different people can have different views. Unless, you think that all these different beliefs are really different versions of the same truth. In either case I'm happy to accept that Martians could have a totally different 'truth', as a result of a different sensory apparatus and different society. In other words I think this 'truth' is in fact a human invention, based on the nature of human evolution, biology and culture.

The problem does seem to be that people use the same word for very different things: evidence based knowledge and socially constructed belief. Maybe we should all stop using the word 'truth' and come up with some new words (with no semantic hangovers).

Also Yuyutsu, Re your earlier comment about the influence of science on my childhood perception "[if you] grew up under the influence of science, then you learned from early age to take that requirement of factuality for granted and reject beliefs that are not based on fact or have no evidence."

That wasn't it at all: I wasn't rejecting beliefs not based on fact, (I hadn't got that far yet!) I was puzzling out how adults worked. I can see now that I was working on pure logic - that if each group believed they were right and all the others were wrong, then how could any of them be certain they were right given that for each group, everybody else thought they were wrong. Then, maybe, I thought, they were all correct about all the others: that each of them was wrong.

Maybe I was just realising that all adults don't agree, and that this was a problem for kids in knowing who to believe.

My ability to analyse logically was, I think, what led me to science. (Just realised I'm qualifying even that statement - I remain sceptical of my own 'beliefs' as well as everyone else's!)

Dear Cossomby,

Beliefs are never the truth because they are just ideas and the truth is not an idea. So why do people still insist that their ideas be true? not even that, but why do they still fight each other about their different ideas?

It is important that our beliefs be good for us, that they serve us to become better - rather than that they be factual, or correspond to objective observations.

Now there is a claim of overlap and some even go as far as claiming identity - that it is always good to believe in what we observe objectively and never good to believe in things that cannot be verified objectively.

The former claim I consider "practical", the latter "nonsense".

Our attachment to our human body is so great and overwhelming that we tend to consider that which pleases the body as "good" for us and that which displeases it as "bad". Further, this has become a social convention. Evolution developed our senses and brain to maximise survival and propagation - to discover food, shelter, enemies, mates and technology - but not to discover truth, which from a genetic point of view is a superfluous waste of energy.

That is the basis of the overlap: if we listen to our senses and our brain, which in turn seek the objective, then we please our bodies, which we then consider "good". Doing so is practical and due to the social convention: in everyday life what is practical normally passes for "truth" and in a limited relative sense it is, but only in this limited social sense where it is agreed that equating "practical" with "good" is not a lie.

To the extent that humans, dinosaurs and Martians share that same social convention, adopting the perspective of their bodies, they could all agree about the sun, which warms them all. Whether Dinosaurs and Martians actually share that perspective, I cannot tell.