Are we relativists all religious fanatics?

[littleendian]

So what's your opinion about this and Plato's allegory of the cave? Do you think that it's true that relativists don't differ much from religious men?

I believe Plato was right in stating that we can always only get indirect information of the world. Imagine your mind to be the captain of a sub-marine, having to trust his instruments and readings to determine what is going on around him. Same for the mind, the mind has to trust the sense organs. Even more, the mind actually constructs the space around us from the information that arrives. A gross simplification, but I believe delivers the intuition: The photon only ever hits our retina, it is the mind that projects the light source out into space and says "based on this or that metric I can determine that the objects must be this and that far away", then it constructs our representation of the space around us.

But I would still say trusting our own senses and our own reasoning is vastly superior to merely copying someone elses senses and reasoning as written down in some religious book. Scientific books differ in that I could if I wanted verify the information with my own senses and reasoning.

I can't do the same with whether Jesus walked over water or not. Until further evidence arrives I'll assume he just stepped in a puddle and simple people went "Wow, lets write that down".