With regards to Mr. Leonard’s article, he claims that if one believes all things are relative (including religion), then one is then trapped in the position of having to decree all types of behavior acceptable. This would be high comedy if it weren’t so sad.

This all-or-nothing reasoning totally ignores the complexity of the world in which we live. Saying the world is complex and everything is not black and white is NOT the same as claiming that anything goes.

It is quite possible to acknowledge the fact that the world is relative while coming up with completely arbitrary laws to protect the general populace. The failure to consider such a conclusion points toward the lack of intellectual rigor to which Mr. Leonard alluded.

I am not interested in and put little stock in the little word games Mr. Leonard plays to convince the reader that there is an absolute truth. They are so dependent on semantic tricks as to ultimately mean nothing. The “fact” is, there is no such thing as absolute “truth.”

Everything that claims to be “truth” must be considered within the context of all the factors that influence it. Politics, science, social institutions and mores are just a few of the hundreds of things that influence every one of our beliefs.

Everything, more or less, is interpretation. Some would say that a solid object such as a brick exists and the fact that it is a brick is, in a sense, the truth. Again, they would be wrong.

It is an evolutionary accident that we happen to see the portion of the EM spectrum that we do, and a shift in the wavelengths we see would result in a brick that would look entirely alien to what we’re accustomed to.

I could go on and on like this (and I already have), but I won’t. Just remember: Absolute truth equals bad, relative equals good.

I am not advocating a world where every semi-sarcastic idiot runs around throwing bricks and claiming they don’t exist. I’m just saying the world is far more complex than any of us can possibly hope to interpret, and we should try to do the best with what we have.

I mean, scientists will admit that light does not act like a particle or a wave exclusively, but as some weird combination of both.

While these two models of light don’t completely capture the essence of what light is, it is the best we have and is an adequate approach until a better one is devised.

In a better world this would be a possible approach to dealing with people and their points of view, to admit the complexity of the world while adhering to a general arbitrary yet adequate moral code.

Perhaps this would be preferable to individuals using prejudice and shoddy intellectual shortcuts to prop up their personal belief system in newspaper columns.

Shawn Hanson

Senior

Ceramic engineering