Dump The Physics Textbooks

 ... and instead, derive the equations for yourself.

I've been pondering the conversations we had at a recent dinner party and then pondering my ponderings of that.

If you're going to trash wacky Christian sects, progressive politicians or gun-toting libertarians who like to wear beekeeper outfits while engaging in sex fantasies, you've got to have something better, at least in the areas their worldview covers. It works best if your worldview covers even more topics than the people at whom you're pointing and laughing.

That's what gets me the most about some of our dinner parties with secular people who like to mock the unsophisticated. Yes, there are Christian groups out there who cling to silly ideas and all of us Christians are hypocrites. Ha ha ha. You got us, pardner. Right between the eyes. Oof, I'm dead.

So what do you have? What's your cosmology? What's the meaning and purpose of life? Please derive why slavery is wrong, from first principles.

My most recent thoughts have been along these lines: Even if any particular faith has got some things wrong, why throw it all away? Like a physics text from 1820, it gives you a significant head start on puzzling out things. In the case of Catholicism, we can give you a 6,000 year boost towards deriving the ultimate, most perfect philosophy.

What is gained by dumping it all?

Turning the question around, how much of it do you know? I found Pope Benedict's writing to be so dense as to be inscrutable and I'm pretty well-read. I recognized in my failure to climb his particular theological mountain, that the problem was my ignorance, not his lack of clarity. To the point of this post, what do you know of the things to which you object?

Personally, I have zero interest in writing my own physics textbook. I'll take the one I had in college and move on to something more rewarding, thank you very much.

Someone else can deal with the electromagnetism. I hated it.