A BLACK AND WHITE way of thinking is, in fact, the reality of a person.. Some would call it their "perspective."

The following words work hand-in-hand with BLACK OR WHITE:

          fundamentalism      any religion

         orthodoxy              in religion and medicine

         science                  excluding psychology, statistics, and usually Quantum Physics.
                                      so that is thus, "orthodox"

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A similar type of thought exists in a FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN as in the ZEALOTS who call themselves "skeptics."

While the facts of the Word Of God are infallibly correct, the so-called infallability of man-made scientism is not.
 

THE FACTS

To Joseph Campbell, whether Jesus Christ existed or not is not material. To him, the MYTH is the essence of truth, whether it, in fact, happened or not. The same is true of readers of Carlos Castenada, that whether certain things happened. Whether a person named "Don Juan" actually existed on the Mexican desert is not the issue, rather what the teachings are, and what they mean to certain people.

To both the fundamentalist and the so-called skeptic,

are all that matter. Fundamentalists take literal meaning from every word in their books, whether Hindu, Moslem or Christian. There can be some symbolic meanings. It's all just fact to the fundamentilist.  Only the Christian fundamentalist has justification for such belief.  The scientism of man is man-made, not God made.

A Fundamentalist must believe all parts of the Bible, the Koran or whatever. If any say they believe only part, the rest of their group will consider them "heretics."

EITHER - OR

The scientific method, is the orthodox Scientist's Bible. It, like the Bible of the fundamentalist Christian, is absolutely and without any variation, the true.

And the facts, to that mentality are often:

To give an explanation of what is referred to as "orthodox," I'll use a comparison to "orthodox" medicine. The old establishment of medicine, the AMA, (American Medical Association) insists upon certain procedures as the only "authorized" one's for certain ailments. They even attempt, and sometimes succeed, to take the licenses of physicians (the "heretics"). The less "orthodox," yet perfectly legal (in certain states of the US) procedures are the "variations." That does not imply that the orthodox methods are not valid, only that there is requirement, at times, to vary from them.

This analogy, and the message of my writing, is that orthdox science is useful when applied to certain circumstances.

Another message is that the use of science, as it is commonly practiced today, consists of a mixture of orthodox methods and, at times, variations from that orthodoxy.

Revision, for this page and others in this section, is necessary. There is need to add to this writing. The subject, "Science and the so-called 'skeptic'" was covered with more writing in "'Skeptics' What they do and why," in the USENET ARCHIVES (There's an explanation about how to access the archives, in a coming page.) However, there's need to revise that writing before placing it on these WEB PAGES.