Re: Missionaries (was: "Mormon Asshole?" re: GAK)

[Stephen Humble <deeb@x.org>]

attila <attila@primenet.com> sez:
> why would any rational individual espouse ANY cause he thought was
> wrong!

Biblical creationism is "wrong": there's ample evidence that the Earth
is *much* more than 6000 years old.  Yet lots of seemingly rational
people believe biblical creationism.

Newtonian mechanics is "wrong".  Even an tiny velocity causes space-
and time-dilation, even a vanishingly small mass distorts spacetime,
and Heisenberg's principle applies to macroscopic objects too - it's
just hard to detect these effects under the conditions we're used to.
But you won't catch me using general relativity to calculate catapult
ranges.

Humans only have 2 kinds of colors receptors, so artists can mix
colors and get seemingly new colors.  That doesn't mean that blue and
yellow paint mixed together will reflect monochromatic green.  People
who try to transfer images from one medium to another suddenly have to
confront the more complicated reality.  Surely that doean't make my
kindergarten art teacher irrational for telling me about color mixing.

Or maybe it does.  Excuse me, I need to find my crayons...

Stephen