Some people think that humans have landed on the moon while others argue that those landings are a hoax. Some people think that 5 or 6 million Jews where annihilated by the Nazis while others doubt it. Some people think their lives are governed by the stars while others think the unconscious has more relevance. I don't think that all of these issues have the same standing. But they are issues where people's passions and desires have a strong bearing on what kind of reasoning they will accept.
Western science asserts that reality is to be determined by reason alone.
And we must live most of our lives outside those arenas. In those other arenas, what we accept as real depends strongly on our hopes and desires, on our passions. In those arenas, the difference between reality and fiction is difficult to maintain. The question of O.J. Simpson's culpability has such a very heavy burden of symbolic freight that it may well exist in this limbo between truth and desire. Continued . . .