references

[Guest guest]

says:

>>Asking for money to provide bona fides is a tactic I

associate with you .<<

--It takes me about 5-10 minutes to write a few

paragraphs on an email list. Digging up references for

footnotes would take an hour or more. Since I'm not in

the academic world, I don't really see it as a

requirement to provide exhaustive references. I spread

ideas I find interesting. If others want to find

evidence to prove them, they will. This is, after all,

an email list. Not a classroom.

>>I think a lot of your intuitions don't, just on

their merits, have any real roots outside of your

intuitive eruption.<<

--That's fine. I don't expect anyone to accept

anything I say as Gospel. If my ideas are interesting,

they will spread, and others will do the detail work

to prove or disprove them. By then, I'll have moved on

to other ideas. I'll never have time to prove

everything I think, nor do I really think it's

necessary. I consider myself part of the " hypothesis

matrix " . Some of my ideas will necessarily be

incomplete, or even wrong. But some will spark ideas

in other people, and that is what I enjoy.

My intuitions about fundamentalists, including

fundamentalist Muslims, is derived from numerous

encounters with members of those groups, examination

of sermons and so on. There is probably not enough

hard data yet to confirm anything about Islamic family

life, although I have strong suspicions. It really

doesn't seem unreasonable to talk about perfectionism

in fundamentalist groups. They talk about it too. If I

had to PROVE it, I'd never be able to say anything

about the issue, and it's too interesting an issue for

me to avoid mentioning.

If you're a thinking type who needs proof before

finding an idea interesting enough to ponder, then my

posts aren't meant for you. I often consider ideas

without proof, because those are the ideas that are

*new* (to me, anyway) and exciting. I'd get bored

quickly if I couldn't do that, since I have too many

interests to prove everything I find worthy of

attention. I don't think it's fair for you to declare

anything about my " character " from that, since this is

NOT an academic forum but a place for discussing ideas

in general. I don't ask for proof when Alice talks

about astrology. I just listen, and I find many of her

thoughts interesting, without proof. I like that she

can speak freely, without having people pick on her

for proof of the validity of astrology.

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