OFFICIAL TRUTH, OFFICIAL LIES
                    (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz

Humanity is distinguished among Terran organisms by its dogged 
relay, with the highest of fidelities, of its ancestral thought 
to descendants.  This discourse evolves through four stages of 
operational significance each for the three great divisions of 
analysis:  Religion, the imposition of personal will; philosophy, 
the perceived interrelationship of observation; and science, the 
interactive understanding of empirical reality.

Stage One - Innocence - Revelation/Data/Discovery.  The priest is 
touched by a hairy thunderer or a jeweled kingdom, often enhanced 
by starvation, physical trauma, recreational pharmaceuticals, or 
overt psychopathology.  He then seeks to impose his catharsis 
upon unenlightened folk.  Philosophers view the world and acquire 
raw data, which must reach a critical mass of diversity, relation 
and correlation before further progress can be attempted.  
Scientists' prepared minds encounter that which is unexpected and 
unprecedented, and seek to analyze it.  

Stage Two - Growth - Belief/Information/Science.  The priest 
embraces his god and proceeds to defend his construction against 
challenging tests of faith, otherwise conceded to be neutral 
manifestations of reality.  Having amassed data and divined its 
self-consistency, philosophers exercise the process of logic to 
create an elegant world model embracing all and unsullied by the 
crass dilettantism of physical trial.  The scientist pursues the 
serendipitous surprise of discovery, decomposing and then 
elaborating it into a model capable of testing against prediction 
that which has not yet occurred or been observed.  

Stage Three - Maturity - Politics/Knowledge/Technology.  Religion 
is not content with worship, appeasement and proselytizing in the 
name of its lord(s).  It seeks to shepherd its masses along the 
corridors of correct thought and exact a modest and unceasing fee 
for the privilege that its priests might touch the divine 
splendor on Earth that is the default prestige of its god(s).  A 
coalesced philosophical system becomes recognized as knowledge 
and is embraced by a new generation of thinkers.  When a research 
grant is milked for its last dollar or a patron exhausts his 
patience, science transforms into technology as stuff becomes 
things and studies evolve into implementations.  

Stage Four - Obsolescence - Schism/Wisdom/Engineering.  As 
religion hoards wealth and influence it turns inward to delight 
in its corruption, increasingly alienating its lunatic fringe who 
are engaged in a self-proclaimed closer and more imaginative 
relationship with the god(s).  They are not shy about proclaiming 
revelation.  Existing without the test of reality, philosophical 
systems beg to be overthrown by more fashionable thought endorsed 
by the situational ethics of the time and promulgated by 
newcomers hungry for a taste of their own wealth, publicity and 
power.  Science begets technology which erects its monuments 
through engineering.  When something is properly built in large 
quantities it is axiomatic that ongoing science has pulled a much 
better rabbit out of its hat.  Everything is obsolete as we look 
for ever more subtle refinements to our understanding and 
manipulations.  

Religion has been the single greatest source of human suffering 
and death, waste of material and intellectual resources, poverty, 
ignorance, and resolute disavowal of even the possibility of 
betterment (except by divine gift, which is forever delayed).  A 
single religion can bring forth disaster - the Christian 
condemnation of cats in Europe led to the Black Death of two 
thirds of the population.  A clash of religions will spread blood 
and poverty across geography and time without end.  That a 
species which brought forth flush toilets would worship a taco 
browned with Elvis Presley's beheld image is ghastly.

Five millennia of philosophy have not defined truth, goodness, 
beauty or freedom in a formalism that serves as a social matrix.  
Aristotle set forth internally consistent procedural logic of 
immense value, and then proceeded to process and codify the most 
reprehensible drivel.  Boolean logic, fuzzy logic, the Talmud, 
language deconstruction... all seek an intrinsic inner truth in 
vain.  Philosophy reduces to chewing on a rubber bone.  It is 
fine exercise and very entertaining, but affords no nutrition.

The last two hundred years of science have utterly changed the 
face of civilizations embracing it, rendering them possessed of 
unheralded wealth and happiness.  Fifty years ago antibiotics 
were discovered and man was no longer held in thrall to disease.  
Forty years ago telecommunication exploded to create the Global 
Village and no man was untouched by civilization.  Thirty years 
ago we stepped into space.  Twenty years ago computers became 
accessible to the common man and his mind could now avail itself 
of such powerful prostheses that the content rather than the 
process of contemplation became important.  We are at the 
threshold of grasping that which philosophy and religion have so 
long coveted:  We are close to discovering why we are here.