>>"the answer to the universe isn't 42...it's 4:20!"<<

Greenwich Time or Eastern Standard?

Pinky, I agree with most of what you say here but I wonder about this comment:

<"This also brings up the illogicalness of evangelization. What is true for you may not be true for others, so why try to convince them it is?">

If you mean religious evangelization, then I agree fully since I think that religion is *usually* made up of bad models that have little contact with anything observable in the world. But the activity of trying to convince people of ideas through argumentation is one of the driving forces of human social and conceptual progress. Where would we be if Copernicus and Galileo had never tried to convince their collegues that current geocentric theories of astronomy were bad models, or if Darwin had never argued that species are mutable and that humans were not divinely created "as is," or if Crick and Watson had never tried to persuade anybody that the basic structure of DNA is a double helix? What if Duchesne had thought "well for me pennicillin kills bacteria, but why try to convince anyone else?"

I think what you're saying might be based on the (correct) intution that people can become huge pains in the ass when they dogmatically cling to thier own beliefs come what may, but going too far in the other direction leads to an extreme subjective relativism that is self-defeating and potentially harmful to society and intellectual progress.

What do you think?