In the excellent video series "The Truth Project", they asked the question: "Do You Really Believe That What You Believe Is Really Real?" Once you parse through all the (intentional) "reallys" there's a good question hidden inside. :-)

It's a unicorn because it corresponds to what we consider to be a unicorn. However, it's not a real unicorn, because reality corresponds to what really is and the way things really are.

I've never tried rhubarb, so I have no idea. It doesn't have a very pleasant name; but I suppose with enough sugar almost anything tastes good. :-)

It seems to me the ultimate example of "rhubarbiness" is God Himself. He is "not far from us." Yet we see Him through our own lenses. Much is made of the variety of beliefs about God or the gods; some would draw the conclusion that there is no ultimate Reality - either the atheist answer that there's no God there at all, or the relativist answer that your god and my god are objectively different.

Neither of them makes much sense to me, but at least the atheist view is consistent. The relativist view, on the other hand, that you can have your god and I can have mine, makes no sense at all to me. God is Who He is. We view Him differently, but that's not due to him, it's due to us - our lenses. The old story about different blind men describing an elephant, rather profoundly I think, shows the blindness being in how we see Him. It is often misused to imply that nobody really sees clearly. It's true, if left to our own devices, none of us would see Him clearly; but that's why revelation is necessary.

Eric, I find your comments on William Blake interesting. A while back I was very taken with Blake, based on C.S. Lewis's comments on him. I am merely a taster, so am not deeply familiar with his poetry. I do own a couple of his books though; and the ideas behind some of his poems very much bother me, though. For example, I have commented on his "Garden of Love" here:
http://cajoneador.blogspot.com/2009/10/commentary...

Scott, thank you for starting this forum. I grew up in the Catholic church and lost what remnants there were of my "faith" in college. I never was a Christian, so I really just went from one kind of heathen to another. Over the next 15 years or so I alternated between having a deistic view of God, to an agnostic, to an atheist, to a Zen Buddhist. We sometimes attended a Unitarian Universalist group to get our fill of churchiness. Finally, at 34 years of age, God shook my mechanistic world and saved me from my sins. I'm a software architect and a volunteer pastor at a retirement home. I'm fluent in Spanish, which I learned to minister to our Latino community.

My banana story is not much: my father-in-law (a confirmed unbeliever - much as I was before God changed my heart) moved to Costa Rica to retire. The first time we visited them down there, I remember standing and looking at banana trees in their front yard. Along with the monkeys I had seen earlier, I thought "wow, this really isn't Kansas!"

By the way, I do have to take issue with one statement above. When you said "Cognitive space is much bigger than space/time", you are equivocating on the word "bigger." You are comparing apples and (to follow the theme) bananas. You're comparing the logical size of a phase space with the physical size of the universe. A more accurate comparison would be to compare the physical number of electrons in our brains vs. the electrons in the universe, or to compare the size of phase space of our brains vs. the total phase space of electrons in the universe. Each electron can have a large number of states: you have spin states +1/2 or -1/2. Then, since most electrons are bound to atoms, each electron can have a large number of energy states; the number corresponds (according to Pauli's exclusion principle) to the number of electrons bound to the atom.

Clearly, the total phase space size of the universe is completely overwhelming. Either of these comparisons demonstrates the size of the human brain for the tiny and (cosmically) insignificant thing it is. I think recognizing what we really are in comparison with the size of God's creation is vitally important. There are many who like to imagine (as in the movie What the Bleep Do We Know) the human mind has this amazing power over the universe and all our circumstances. Now, the human mind is amazing, no doubt; but not because of its incredible power, but because it carries the imago Dei - the image of God. And because God deigned to come to a minuscule, prideful, sinful person like me and saved me.