Jerry (and others),
I find most (all?) of your response agreeable. I am thankful for your explication/improvement of my point regarding formal systems. Some general and specific comments follow.
Formal systems (thus far; Ian will bring us up to date, perhaps, w.r.t newer developments such as paraconsistent logic -- but note that I am not talking about bivalence, here, but specifically contradiction -- and perhaps I should say contradiction and not "pain of contradiction") are particularly sensitive to (and intolerant of) contradiction since they exclude it (or equivalently, rely on it) axiomatically. Permitting a contradiction will yield proofs of all results. As you have pointed out, this understanding of contradiction leaves us on safe and stable ground, and we may wisely choose to leave it at that.
I would be the last to give precedence to technical use of a general term, over common usage. However the common usage has become irredeemably tainted by the technical one. So it is felt that the pain of contradiction paralyses one or demands that one stop all related activities and re-examine this or that thing (either one's reasoning or the real world). But, on the other hand, one finds that assuming that a proposition and its negation are [simultaneously] true often leads to interesting and fruitful results. Which makes us wonder if perhaps only idle men and pomo-hunters should worry about such things in the general sense?
Re: the Big Bang, perhaps the person who mentioned it (CB?) meant not "contradiction" but "singularity"?
--ravi