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May 7, 2007
I'm a Materialist. OK, But What About All That Other Stuff?
 | You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.
What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com |
Of all the quizzes like this I've taken, this one gave the strangest results. First, I don't believe that "Everything that exists is purely physical matter." Things like love and moral direction aren't "purely physical matter" even if they may have a physical basis and origin. Also, I am far more an idealist than a postmodernist. And I'm not much of an idealist except in mathematics and perhaps ethics. But, I'll bet my response to the statement, "Meaning always depends on the context" got me in trouble. Perhaps the automatic grader of this question was "thinking" of something other than linguistic meaning. But what other kind of meaning is there?
I also think that my response to the statement, "The majority of religious scripture should be taken literally" got me a much higher than expected score under "Fundamentalist." I believe that any literature should be taken literally unless there are clear indications within that literature or within its near literally context that tells me to take it some other way. Even then, one must start with a literal meaning. However, that sure doesn't mean that I must agree with the literal meaning. The literal meaning of much scripture is quite clearly wrong. But this is not the first time I have been called some kind of a fundamentalist. When I was in graduate school, a good professor called me a fundamentalist because I suggested that a religious experience was any experience that someone chose to describe in the special language of their cult (i.e., "This was a blessing from God." or "It is the work of Satan."). At the time, I thought that the good professor was not only good but nuts. Now that I am older and presumable more mature, I am not so sure that he was such a good professor.
Also, there were a few statements that I had no idea what they meant, literally or otherwise (for example, "Evolution is taking us closer to the spiritual realm, whatever that may be." or "Mankind is condemned to be free."). I tended to respond to these questions in a completely neutral way.
I actually think I am closer to being what the quiz calls a Modernist. Go read Sandwalk to find out what that means.
Note: my CSS style sheet prevents the tables like those used in to display these results from working correctly. I've tried several things. Done of them seems to work and at the same time do what I want done with other tables. Maybe I should stop taking these quizzes.
Posted by Duane Smith at May 7, 2007 2:51 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
My takeaway from this post: Duane is a middling fundamentalist :)
Posted by: Charles Halton at May 8, 2007 4:13 PM
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