Messages

Well, I'm glad that we're far past the point where we need to distort the evidence to suit our a priori conclusions.  No one would ever be able to get away with that these days.

They get away with it here on this very forum. 

Brought to mind & heart Foucault:

Further explanation:

The inhabitants of Foucault's limbo of non-identity are similarly unaware of their privation. Insofar as one renounces the interest in the authenticity of one's identity and the techniques of its actualisation, the promise of diagrammatic liberation begins to be received with a mild and somewhat uncomprehending amusement.  Isn't the very discourse on identity, in all its varieties, beguilingly strange in its promise to deliver to the subject the truth of his individuality by subjecting him to the knowledge that is entirely alien to him or, conversely, tirelessly teaching him what he is presupposed to already know? Isn't there something ludicrous in the effort to extract the truth of being from the depths of subjective interiority by filling these very depths with a plethora of discursive constructions? Isn't the very notion of identity little more than an amusing artefact, which stops being amusing when one's entire existence becomes subjected to it, when it brands and penetrates one's very being?

1 word.  Yes.

I liked how you expressed this feeling.

Have I told you lately how much I love your writing? 

You have both freed & captured the absurdity of life here. 

Icarus was a fool & so am I & so is anyone who thinks they can understand any of this. 

Another wonderful illustration of this principle, from the world of science (taken from my current reading "On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology is Reshaping the Nature-versus-Nurture Debate"):

...

How could Morton have managed to misinterpret these data so drastically? Pulling no punches, Gould argues that Morton's interpretation represents nothing more than ''a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions.'' In other words, Morton knew what he wanted to prove and he simply massaged the data until they appeared to yield the conclusion he desired. Some of the fudging and finagling that Gould identifies is so blatantly obvious that we must wonder how Morton himself managed to remain blind to it. For example, Gould notes that ''Morton often chose to include or delete large subsamples in order to match group averages with prior expectations.''

Hence, when a particular racial subgroup, say the Inca Peruvians, showed average skull sizes that were below the average for their racial group (North and South American Indians in general) they were included in the sample of all Indians in order to drive down the overall average. But when another racial subgroup, say Hindus, showed average skull sizes that were below the average for their racial group (Caucasians) they were excluded from the sample of all Caucasians in order to drive up the overall average. The result, of course, was to make it appear as though Caucasians on average had bigger skulls than Indians on average—precisely the claim Morton was trying to establish.

The underlined is the part I was referring to as not aligning with the scientific method.  When the data, observations, etc. do not fit or prove your hypothesis, it's "back to the ole drawing board."  & Yes!  Cognitive bias, etc. is probably one of the underlying root causes.  Scientific method is good when used it leads to new hypotheses to examine & explore. 

IGNORANCE =

IT
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT IT

TRUTH =

WHAT I THINK HAPPENED
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

(trying to express these^ as mathematical equations)

perfect example of cognitive bias, thinker thinks/prover proves, Law of Fives, etc.

another example of hokey holy scientific method too.

Trembling! 

WoW!  Yum.

I'd dissagree with Einstein's bolded statement if it is indeed about biological evolution. There's no inferior or superior in evolutionary biology. Whatever works, is more the doctrine. Heh, "god plays dice".

I dunno if he was speaking about biological evolution?  Where my mind went with it (in the context of the book) was that he was speaking about the evolution of ideas.  Karl Popper once said, "Life is not a clock, it is a cloud."  Chaos is everywhere.  Including here.  I also got (dunno if I read this somewhere or dreamt it) "To measure is not the same as understanding."

The Straight Dope on -
The story of Schroedinger's cat (an epic poem)
May 7, 1982

Dear Cecil:

Cecil, you're my final hope
Of finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schroedinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously live and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, the other I ain't.
If you understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will and won't see you in Schroedinger's zoo.
— Randy F., Chicago



Cecil replies:

Schroedinger, Erwin! Professor of physics!
Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics!
(Not bad, eh? Don't worry. This part of the verse
Starts off pretty good, but it gets a lot worse.)
Win saw that the theory that Newton'd invented
By Einstein's discov'ries had been badly dented.
What now? wailed his colleagues.
Said Erwin, "Don't panic,
No grease monkey I, but a quantum mechanic.
Consider electrons. Now, these teeny articles
Are sometimes like waves, and then sometimes like particles.
If that's not confusing, the nuclear dance
Of electrons and suchlike is governed by chance!
No sweat, though--my theory permits us to judge
Where some of 'em is and the rest of 'em was."
Not everyone bought this. It threatened to wreck
The comforting linkage of cause and effect.
E'en Einstein had doubts, and so Schroedinger tried
To tell him what quantum mechanics implied.
Said Win to Al, "Brother, suppose we've a cat,
And inside a tube we have put that cat at--
Along with a solitaire deck and some Fritos,
A bottle of Night Train, a couple mosquitoes
(Or something else rhyming) and, oh, if you got 'em,
One vial prussic acid, one decaying ottom
Or atom--whatever--but when it emits,
A trigger device blasts the vial into bits
Which snuffs our poor kitty. The odds of this crime
Are 50 to 50 per hour each time.
The cylinder's sealed. The hour's passed away. Is
Our pussy still purring--or pushing up daisies?
Now, you'd say the cat either lives or it don't
But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.
Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),
Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.
To some this may seem a ridiculous split,
But quantum mechanics must answer, "Tough shit.
We may not know much, but one thing's fo' sho':
There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know.
Shine light on electrons--you'll cause them to swerve.
The act of observing disturbs the observed--
Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing
To see if a particle's moving or resting
Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor!
We know probability--certainty, never!
The effect of this notion? I very much fear
'Twill make doubtful all things that were formerly clear.
Till soon the cat doctors will say in reports,
"We've just flipped a coin and we've learned he's a corpse."'
So saith Herr Erwin. Quoth Albert, "You're nuts.
God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.
I'll prove it!" he said, and the Lord knows he tried--
In vain--until fin'ly he more or less died.
Win spoke at the funeral: "Listen, dear friends,
Sweet Al was my buddy. I must make amends.
Though he doubted my theory, I'll say of this saint:
Ten-to-one he's in heaven--but five bucks says he ain't."

— Cecil Adams

I like the Egyptian? Arabic? expression, "Not all fingers are the same."  When you say it, it's also nice to wiggle or wave your fingers.   

If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy.  So one must find out how to become happy oneself.  Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones & thorns.  It is much simpler to wear shoes.
-Ramana Maharshi

Make mine spiked!

Pan is not dead.  Neither is Eris.

Also from Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer:

The Blessings of Chaos

"How does our DNA inspire such indeterminacy?  After all, Middlemarch had an author; she deliberately crafted an ambiguous ending.  But real life doesn't have an intelligent designer.  In order to create the wiggle room necessary for individual freedom, natural selection came up with an ingenious, if unnerving, solution.  Although we like to imagine life as a perfectly engineered creation (our cells like little Swiss clocks), the truth is that our parts aren't predictable.  Bob Dylan once said, "I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."  Molecular biology, confronted with the unruliness of life, is also forced to accept chaos.  Just as physics discovered the indeterminate quantum world – a discovery that erased classical notions about the fixed reality of time & space – so biology is uncovering the unknowable mess at its core.  Life is built on an edifice of randomness.

One of the first insights into the natural disorder of life arrived in 1968, when Motoo Kimura, the great Japanese geneticist, introduced evolutionary biology to his "neutral theory of molecular evolution."  This is a staid name for what many scientists consider the most interesting revision of evolutionary theory since Darwin.  Kimura's discovery began with a paradox.  Starting in the early 1960's, biologists could finally measure the rate of genetic change in species undergoing natural selection.  As expected, the engine of evolution was random mutation:  double helices suffered from a constant barrage of editing errors.  Buried in this data, however, was an uncomfortable new fact: DNA changes way too much.  According to Kimura's calculations, the average genome was changing at a hundred times the rate predicted by the equation of evolution.  In fact, DNA was changing so much that there was no possible way natural selection could account for all of these so-called adaptations.

But if natural selection wasn't driving the evolution of our genes, then what was?  Kimura's answer was simple: chaos.  Pure chance.  The dice of mutation & the poker of genetic drift.  At the level of our DNA, evolution works mostly by accident.  Your genome is a record of random mistakes.

But perhaps that randomness is confined to our DNA.  The clock-like cell must restore some sense of order, right?  Certainly the translation of our genome – the expression of our actual genes – is a perfectly regulated process, with no hint of disarray.  How else could we function?  Although molecular biology used to assume that was the case, it isn't.  Life is slipshod.  Inside our cells, shards & scraps of nucleic acid & protein float around aimlessly, waiting to interact.  There is no guiding hand, no guarantee of exactness.

In a 2002 Science pare entitled, "Stochastic Gene Expression is a Single Cell[/i], Michael Elowitz of Caltech demonstrated that biological "noise" (a scientific synonym for chaos) is inherent in gene expression.  ..." 
- Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist

Hi LMNO et al,

I was re-reading Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, & came across this & it made me think of your Dad's speech.  Different fields but somehow simpatico.

"In 1989, Elizabeth Gould, a young postdoc working in the lab of Bruse McEwen at Rockefeller University, in New York City, was investigating the effect of stress hormones on rat brains.  Chronic stress is devastating to neurons, & Gould's research focused on the death of cells in the hippocampus.  But while Gould was documenting the brain's degeneration, she happened upon something completely miraculous: the brain also healed itself.

Confused by this anomaly, Gould went to the library.  She assumed she was making some experimental mistake, because neurons don't divide.  Everybody knew that.  But then, looking through a dusty 27 year old science journal, Gould found a tantalizing clue.  Beginning in 1962, a researcher at MIT, Joseph Altman, published several papers claiming that adult rats, cats & guinea pigs all formed new neurons.  Although Altman used the same technique that Rakic later used in monkey brains – the injection of radioactive thymidine – his results were ridiculed, & then ignored.

As a result, the brand-new field of neurogenesis vanished before it began.  It would take another decade before Michael Kaplan, at the University of New Mexico, would use an electron microscope to image neurons giving birth to new neurons.  Kaplan discovered these fresh cells everywhere in the mammalian brain, including the cortex.  Yet even with this visual evidence, science remained stubbornly devoted to it's doctrine.  After enduring years of scorn & skepticism, Kaplan, like Altman before him, abandoned the field of neurogenesis. 

Reading Altman's & Kaplan's papers, Gould realized that her mistake wasn't a mistake: it was an ignored fact.  The anomaly had been suppressed.  But the final piece of the puzzle came when Gould discovered the work of Fernando Nottebohm, who was, coincidentally, also at Rockefeller.  Nottebohm, in a series of remarkably beautiful studies on bird brains, showed that neurogenesis was required for bird song.  To sing their complex melodies, male birds needed new brain cells.  In fact, up to 1 percent of the neurons in the bird's song center were made fresh every day.  "At the time, this was a very radical idea," Nottebohm says.  "The brain was thought to be a very fixed organ.  Once development was over, scientists assumed that the mind was cast in a crystalline structure.  That was it; you were done."

Nottebohm disproved this dogma by studying birds in their actual habitat.  If he had kept his birds in metal cages, depriving them of their natural social context, he would have never observed the abundance of new cells that he did.  The birds would have been too stressed to sing, & fewer new neurons would have been created.  As Nottebohm has said, "Take nature away & all your insight is in a biological vacuum."  It was only because he looked at birds outside of the laboratory's that he was able to show that neurogenesis, at least in finches & canaries, had a real evolutionary purpose.

Despite the elegance of Nottebohm's data, his science was marginalized.  Bird brains were seen as irrelevant to the mammalian brain.  Avian neurogenesis was explained away as an exotic adaptation, a reflection of the fact that flight required a light cerebrum.  In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote about how science tends to exclude its contradictions.  "Until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way, the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all."  Evidence of neurogenesis was systemically excluded from the world of "normal science."

But Gould, motivated by the strangeness of her own experimental observations, connected the dots.  She realized that Altman, Kaplan & Nottebohm all had strong evidence for mammalian neurogenesis.  Faced with this mass of ignored data, Gould abandoned her earlier project & began investigating the birth of neurons. 

She spent the next eight years quantifying endless numbers of radioactive rat brains.  But the tedious manual labor paid off.  Gould's data shifted the paradigm.  More than thirty years had passed since Altman first glimpsed new neurons, but neurogenesis had finally become a scientific fact.

After her frustrating postdoc, during which time her science was continually attacked, Gould was offered a job at Princeton.  The very next year, in a series of landmark papers, she began documenting neurogenesis in primates, in direct contradiction of Rakic's data.  She demonstrated that marmasets & macaques created new neurons throughout life.  The brain, far from being fixed, is actually in a constant state of cellular upheaval.  By 1998, even Rakic admitted that neurogenesis was real, & he reported seeing new neurons in rhesus monkeys.  The text books were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself.

Gould has gone on to show that the amount of neurogenesis is itself modulated by the environment, & not just by our genes.  High levels of stress can decrease the number of new cells; so can being low in a dominance hierarchy (the primate equivalent of being low class).  In fact, monkey mothers who live in stressful conditions give birth to babies with drastically reduced neurogenesis, even if those babies never experienced stress themselves.  But there is hope: the scars of stress can be healed.  When babies were transferred to enriched enclosures – complete with branches, hidden food, & a rotation of toys – their adult brains began to recover rapidly.  In less than four weeks, their deprived cells underwent radical renovations & formed a wealth of new connections.  Their rates of neurogenesis returned to normal levels.  What does this data mean?  The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis.  As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing.  The brain is not marble, it is clay, & our clay never hardens. 

Neuroscience is just beginning to explore the profound ramifications of this discovery. ... "   

- Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist
from Chapter 2 George Eliot: The Biology of Freedom (the whole chapter is interesting, also Walt Whitman: The Substance of Feeling, Marcel Proust: The Method of Memory, Paul Cezanne: The Process of Sight, Igor Stravinsky: The Source of Music, Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language, Virginia Woolf: The Emergent Self, Auguste Escoffier: The Essense of Taste)

God some people are just never fucking sastified

I call a lot of them "Discordians."

Desire brings discontent; happiness springs from a peaceful mind.
-Buddhism

& this ^ is the main reason why I prefer Discordia to Buddhism.  Desire is all there is.  Without desire, there's no breath. 

Desire is the spark! 

& I'm too damn jumpy to *sit*.  I prefer the meditation provided by the practice of movement.  Happiness schmappiness – Joy leaps from a heart & mind filled with passion!

[About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that. But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!]

"Thats my thoughts on the subject now, though like most people who have been even slightly interested in what seems to be an ever consuming topic my thoughts are ever evolving."
-Thurnez Isa

I like WHAT you said (the whole thing) & HOW you said it!

Brought to mind my long time obsession with the notion of Time & how that fits into all of this.  Also reminded me where I got the quote in my sig.

This is from Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig:

Author's Note:  What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

And what is good, Phædrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

(^from beginning & then many pages later)

In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.

Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.

What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.

Phædrus had finished his first year of University science at the age of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds now known as molecular biology. He didn't think of this as a career for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind of noble idealistic goal.

The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask them, and was unsatisfied with the answers.

The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he understands something he didn't understand before. Until it's tested the hypothesis isn't truth. For the tests aren't its source. Its source is somewhere else.

Einstein had said:

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it -- He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task -- is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them --.

Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.

A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, "But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses." But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only experimental data.
A lesser mind might then have said, "Well then, man provides the hypotheses." But Einstein denied this too. "Nobody," he said, "who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles."

Phædrus' break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson's law that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it.

If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.

About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that. But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!

But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.

He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!

What Phædrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos.
http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/part2.html

Here's another guy I like:

The Need for Religion in Our Present Lives.

One reason for the pursuit of religion is that material progress alone will not give lasting pleasure of satisfaction.  It seems, indeed, that the more we progress materially, the more we have to live under constant fear.  Scientific technology has made marvelous advances, and no doubt will continue to develop.  Man may reach the moon and try to exploit its resources for the advantage of human beings-the moon which some ancient believers regarded as the home of their god; and planets may also be conquered.  Perhaps in the end, this progress will reveal potential enemies outside our world.  But in any case, it cannot possibly bring ultimate and permanent pleasure to human beings, for material progress always stimulates desire for even further progress, so that such pleasure as it brings is only ephemeral.  But on the other hand, when the mind enjoys pleasure and satisfaction, mere material hardships are easy to bear; and if a pleasure is derived purely from the mind itself, it will be a real and lasting pleasure.

No other pleasure can be compared with that derived from spiritual practice.  This is the greatest pleasure, and it is ultimate in nature.  Different religions have each shown their way to attain it.

One of the Many Religions of the World: Buddhism and Its Founder
Just as a particular disease in the world is treated by various medical methods, so there are many religions to bring happiness to human beings and others.  Different doctrines have been introduced by different exponents at different periods and in different ways.  But I believe they all fundamentally aim at the same noble goal, in teaching moral precepts to mould the functions of mind, body, and speech.  They all teach us not to tell lies, or bear false witness, or steal, or take others' lives, and so on.  Therefore, it would be better if disunity among the followers of different religions could come to an end.  Unity among religions is not an impossible idea.  It is possible and in the present state of the world, it is especially important.  Mutual respect would be helpful to all believers; and unity between them would also bring benefit to unbelievers; for the unanimous flood of light would show them the way out of their ignorance.  I strongly emphasize the urgent need of flawless unity among all religions.  To this end, the followers of each religion should know something of other religions, and that is why I want to try to explain a little of the Buddhism of Tibet.  . . .
-Dalai Lama of Tibet

& Ramakrishna too:

Mother, Mother, Mother!  Everyone foolishly assumes that his clock alone tells correct time.  Christians claim to possess exclusive truth. . . . . Countless varieties of Hindus insist that their sect, no matter how small and insignificant, expresses the ultimate position.  Devout Muslims maintain that Koranic revelation supersedes all others.  The entire world is being driven insane by this single phrase: "My religion alone is true."  O Mother, you have shown me that no clock is entirely accurate.  Only the transcendent sun of knowledge remains on time.  Who can make a system from Divine Mystery?  But if any sincere practitioner, within whatever culture or religion, prays and meditates with great devotion and commitment to Truth alone, your Grace will flood his mind and heart, O Mother.  His particular sacred tradition will be opened and illuminated.  He will reach the one goal of spiritual evolution.  Mother, Mother, Mother!  How I long to pray with sincere Christians in their churches and to bow and prostrate with devoted Muslims in their mosques!  All religions are glorious!
-Ramakrishna

A tad naïve maybe?  but then again, soami.

Prelate Diogenes Shandor?  I'm sorry for over-reacting to your question.  I was frustrated by a wild goose chase & the ensuing orwellian doublethink, duckspeak, blackwhite yatta yatta blah.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words

Please forgive me?  & I hope you got the answer to your question.

& again, my sincerest apology to Cain.