Reply #54: Your responses never suggest that you have any idea what is being said.

[struggle4progress]

I do not mean thereby to imply that if you understood what I said you would automatically agree with it, since I commonly encounter people who clearly understand what I say and yet disagree: I mean that your responses suggest no understanding whatsoever of what I say

I did not claim lack of belief in gods or the supernatural automatically asserts that things or people cannot change. Nor did I claim that because someone is skeptical, and doesn't believe in any gods, they are automatically without imagination. Perhaps you ought to review carefully what is meant by "straw man" before you jam words in my mouth and then indignantly ridicule those words, that I never said and that you yourself jam into my mouth.

BurtWorm's #45 suggests BurtWorm believes all human experience can be covered by a naturalistic view. In response, I quoted the very suggestive opening from Kierkegaard's long essay on the commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." BurtWorm's #48 indicates BurtWorm considers that I do not examine my own illusions with an adequately critical mind. While I am not certain what BurtWorm means by "illusion", I expect he means something like "an imagined state of affairs contrary to actual fact." While not made entirely explicit, I suspect that BurtWorm intends something like: "It is undesireable for people to flee from reality into dreamworlds" -- and if this is the case, I largely agree with BurtWorm, but the point of my reply was: "It is also undesireable for us to abandon completely our dreamworlds."