Response to Katherine's "Removal of Art"

The comparison of tattoo removal and painting destruction is unfair. For the simple fact that a tattoo is a marking on your own body and you have the right to your own body(Let's avoid bringing abortion into this.) While burning a famous work of art would be destroying someone else's property. Or one could argue a piece of shared property. Think about it, would you go around trying to remove other people's tattoo's?

Question: If one creates a work of art that becomes a focal point of a community's culture, who owns the art, the artist or the community?

Response to Shawna's "Seeing is Believing."

I've always taken the phrase to mean something different. I don't believe that the statement means that ideas solidify into indisputable facts in our minds as soon as we're introduced to them. Rather it means that when we see something in front of us it is an undeniable fact that it is there. Now, just because someone shows me a movie with dinosaurs firing lasers at F-22s, doesn't mean that I believe that they're real.
The existence which I cannot deny is the existence of the film itself.
If there is an apple in front of you then you will believe that the apple is there. Should the apple feel waxy when you touch it you realize that it was a false apple. Just because you believe in something doesn't mean that that belief is permanent.

Is there such a thing as color?

There are certain properties which make objects reflect certain parts of light that make us see colors. An apple reflects red light and thus the apple appears red. The apple's properties do not change just because the light is turned out. Perhaps the properties that make light reflect a certain way are the colors, just not always revealed. This apple is always red, but under a black-light or no light our ability to see the red is hampered.
If we use the truth as correspondence theory we can surmise that the apple is red and that it has scientific properties that allows us to see it as red. A desk is determined to be wood because it looks like wood, feels like wood and possesses the chemical properties of wood. So if we stop observing the desk we still retain the knowledge that it's chemical structure is wood. If we stop observing the red apple we remember that it has the microscopic properties that make it red.