In thinking about taboos recently, it occurred to me that while some of them are obvious (no peeing in public, for example), some of the cultural standards with the deepest impact are the ones which are hardest to see: those dealing with ideas. Here in the United States, we champion our freedom, and get into heated debates over the limits of freedom of speech. Usually, those arguments center around saying things which could be damaging in some way to another (libelous or slanderous), and occasionally we get caught up in whether or not it is wrong to be “disrespectful”. Rarely do we consider, however, that there are some ideas and beliefs which are completely socially unacceptable, to the extent that even sounding like you might be about to say them is cause for a full-blown attack from anyone in the vicinity. Continue reading
Musings
A Question of Reality
We think we know what reality is. Our lives are filled with work, sex, and food that we consider to be real. The processes within your mind, where you categorize the input of your senses and turn it into recognizable patterns, you also consider real. For most of human history, reality has been a fairly easy to define thing: reality is the world around us that we can see and touch and smell and taste. But the boundaries of reality are shifting. With the ever-expanding world we are creating in the spaces between our computer screens, we suddenly find ourselves in the position of questioning what is more “real”: the things we can feel with our hands, or the things we feel with our hearts? Continue reading