The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

> Community: sharing and testing ideas with others.

Where do you find community interested in serious amatuer research?

As someone who's had quite a few dealings with animals (the family business is a horse farm) my interpretation is that human psychology is basically animal psychology with a "language instinct" bolted on as a peripheral.

You might very well misinterpret an animal's experience or motives but it is not just mistaken "anthropomorphism" but could just be the same kind of misunderstanding you might have about another person's experience or motives.

From time to time I see a paper proving that horses or dogs could do something that people who work with horses or dogs always believed they could do or that some bird or mammal has a "theory of mind" -- I believe all birds and mammals have a pretty good "theory of mind", it's just hard to do an experiment to prove it.

We've had a cardinal that has been coming to our window for a few years that we can't agree on naming "bad bird" or "noisy bird" that sets up a nest a few yards from a bird feeder and spends all day fighting it's own reflection in the glass. My interpretation, which could be wrong, is that it believes it is a very successful bird that has found an excellent nesting spot and finds meaning in its life by fighting off "competition" for its nest -- certainly it does not need to spend a lot of energy foraging and has the time and energy to peck at the window all day.

What you describe you want is, in a sense, the definition of 'serious' literature. A value of it is that it has real insight about real people and life.

A lot of people reject it - because of school/authority associations, because they didn't understand it in high school, for culture war reasons, etc. When you put all that aside and just read the book, it is what you describe - the 'great' writing offering soaring, beautiful, tranformative insight, the work of genius.

I think it's hard to understand without experience in the world and life - real responsibility, pressure, failure, success, real injury, healing, trauma, seeing evil and good in yourself - whatever your age. I'm not sure it's accessible for most high schoolers and often people don't try it again.

The secondary sources take the primary source facts (if the author is serious and honest) and add someone's subjective perspectives, etc. Those facts are the 'truths'.

For more, look up reading on the scientific method and empiricism.

I'm not disparaging all secondary sources; I read them too. But there's a reason serious research requires primary sources.

> Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.

You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.

> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.

So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:

"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]

The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.

Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.

[1] https://quran.com/111

[2] https://quran.com/2/62

[3] https://quran.com/search?query=polytheist

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira

[6] https://archive.org/details/johnofdamascuson0000saha