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A very intelligent friend of mine who has a mental illness remarked to me that ‘sane' was the absence of symptoms of insanity. I protested that you can't define a term that way. I looked it up, and, of course, she was right, or at least that was one of the definitions. I called her to tell her that I found out she had a good case, she said, no, you were right; that's not a good way to define a word Somehow this led to her assertion that she is an absolutist and I am a relativist. She often makes assertions. I guess that is part of being an absolutist. So I looked those terms up and got nowhere at all. It seems obvious what she meant but I couldn't get any sense out of any of the dictionaries I consulted. She is a born-again Christian, which seems consistent with absolutism. I am an atheist. That doesn't seem especially relativistic. I am as absolute in my conviction as she is in hers. Both of us base our beliefs on the absence of evidence. I see no evidence for God. She has faith, which is believing with out evidence. Absence of evidence makes me doubt, it makes her believe. So I am left not quite knowing what to think. It seems to me that an absolutist is inflexible. What's right is right. A relativist is open to evidence. Nothing is right or wrong, or if it is, there is no way of knowing unless you have an authority, and there is no way to determine where authority comes from. She says she is being old-fashioned and I am being fashionable. That is neither absolutely right nor wrong. Relatively speaking. Jack Wilson is a writer and artist in Tempe, AZ http://www.geocities.com/galimatio/jackwilson.html
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