I’ll say this Ned, that wasn’t at all the reply I was expecting… i’ll also say this…
I don’t see how saying what I said above is anti-religion… I’m against extremist Idealogies, regardless of whether or not they believe in god… you just happen to believe in god, thus are especially uspet about my statement that god is a personal subjective experience (which it is.)
Uccisore,
I could have toast for lunch and then tomorrow tell you that I had toast for lunch and you’d have no way to verify it. In courts, any sort of evidence requires corroboration.
If you tell me some ancient dude, had toast with his buddies, in the name of his body… this again is subjective. you’ve got only a collection of stories (all written from the same copy.) about the event. There’s no alternative versions of the story… no corroboration.
The situation with god gets even sketchier. we have corroboration, but what the witnesses tell us of god, is so unbelievable and so vastly different that the only way to account for it, is that god is not something external, but something internal.
Ok, so now we’re hearing more about your agenda. As I said before, you “moderates” always have one. How would you define an "extermist idiology? Any idiology that differs substantially from your own?
I’ve replied to this somewhat above but I’m going to … expound upon it.
If I think I have waffles, it’s because someone’s told me they are waffles. if I’m wrong, because everyone you know calls them pancakes, how important is it to tell me I’m wrong?
Does my decision to call these pancakes, waffles effect your life in anyway?
Your taking the absolute grade too far… Their just pancakes.
If he’s sawing people’s heads off for his god, then fine… it’s a waffle. Tell him so. I’ll help you.
for something trivial though?
Why not let it be subjective? The only reason it’s called a pancake is because that’s what we call it here…
Let me elaborate. We call the rear hatch of a car a trunk. In europe, it’s called a boot.
ahem… position. NOT agenda. I’m not trying to convert you to my position. just telling you it. And I think you’d agree, when idealogies turn on others, they need to be stopped.
No, I don’t care if you believe in god. I care when you hold a gun to my head and tell me to believe in god or die.
Ok, so far all I’m hearing is that an “extremist idiology” is one that uses force to impose itself on others
I’d like to point out that in WWII those “extremist” Allies forced their idiology on unsuspecting Hitler, and that the “extremist” US is currently forcing it’s democracy idiology on Iraq. Are you against both of these? If not, then why not?
Second, what degree of force is acceptable to a “moderate” like you? Obviously you don’t like my gun at your head. But what if I stand on a busy street corner yelling at you? Does that alone make me an extremist? Are you simply troubled the methodology of “extremists” or do you have some other definition that would describe particular ideologies that you dislike?
I was using it as broadly as possible: By stating your opinion, you are acting according to your overall agenda, which includes stating your opinion. The implication you derived from it was more specific; that it was a part of a process that had a subtle or hidden goal in which stating your opinion was only a part of the aim–for example, attempting to change someone’s ideas to that opinion. But enough about “agenda.”
To jump ahead for a minute (I like Ucc’s example):
That doesn’t make the breakfast subjective, but it demonstrates how the two individuals’ respective knowledge of what was for breakfast is subjective.
It’s true to me, but it isn’t true to everyone, and it may not be true according to external reality.
Sorry, I didn’t interpret it that way. I agree; I also think it’s important to distinguish between acting as if the related ideas were absolute, and believing the ideas were absolute.
I liked the examples, but I’m still a bit shaky on how this ties back to your initial usage of “ideology”. Are you saying that an ideology can become absolute to someone, and hence make them an extremist? If so, I agree with the thinking, but again, not with the terms.
don’t you think we have enough problems with semantics already? Ned is still pining me with negative agenda, like I’m some sort of anti-religious extremist, even though I’ve stated the following:
here’s me explaining why under most circumstances it’s better to live and let live:
I’ve no problem with you using the word, what happens though when you broaden the term, someone takes the word and further misapplies it and it gets the conversation no where.
When I state my opinion or position, I’m not trying to be the next christ and bring sheeple to my flock. I"m very misanthropic and don’t much care what other people do, unless they are harming others besides themselves.
right, I’m waiting for uccisore’s response to my trunk/boot statement, another way to put this is, POV. The person eating pancakes who thinks they were waffles, could very well think that’s what a waffle is and tastes like. Just because it doesn’t have the squares in it (which I believe you are using to define waffle) doesn’t mean it’s not a waffle to him…
What if this person held the waffle in such high regard that he placed it on a shelf… then you told him it was a common pancake and shattered his illusory subjectiveness… is it our duty to stop such trivial lies?
I get the external reality part… there are many instances where our internal reality doesn’t mesh up with what’s real. BUT, how could that statement not be true for everyone? We all apply the dream of our mind to the reality we see.
As an example today while riding home at 60 mph in the carpool lane, I was constatly scanning the cars in the next lane over to make sure none were going to dart in front of me or into me. For a brief moment my measure of time and conception of time slowed down. It looked like I was moving 10 mph, even though my speedo still read 60.
The mind is incredibly powerful, and it’s dreams control the way all of us view reality.
absolutely. otherwise it’s all relative and useless. We need a baseline to compare behavior to, and generally it’s something we all agree upon… perhaps all objectivity/absolutism is, is agreed relativity. We agree that certain behaviors/actions/words are good, bad, etc.
As an example, Islam believes in Honor killing, we don’t. If you look at it froma relative point of view, “who’s to say what’s right and wrong…”, if you look at it from an absolute point of view, their behaviour is deplorable.
And we all agree about that.
Semantics are the devil that bind our tongues.
Idealogies are from ground up, a group of relative ideas that we all agree upon… at that moment an idealogy is formed. Where it becomes dangerous is a gray area… it really depends on what that idealogy holds sacred, how that idealogy treats people in other idealogies, etc.
From a moderate stand point, the dangerous idealogies are the ones that bind control to the idealogy. They take away as much freedom/relativity as possible. Dictating which behaviours are right and wrong, dictating how to treat outsiders, etc.
Islamo Fascism fits perfectly into this, as does communism. Both take the extreme view point of minimizing opposing idealogies. (usually through destruction…)
NED,
Not just “others” but it’s own members are subject to the force of the idealogy. It’s how it treats it’s members and non-members that is important.
sometimes violent force is necessary to stop a more violent and more dangerous idealogy. If we hadn’t “forced” our idealogy upon an unsuspecting (which is a crock of crap) hitler, we all would be National Socialists today.
I am against forced democratization of Iraq. They don’t understand freedom, because they are still oppressed by the Islam Idealogy. Look at what years and generations of hatred have done to them… they get out on the street with signs that say “death to america”. They don’t appreciate their freedom, because they didn’t have to lose anything for it. We gave them freedom for free.
in the case of Islam, we’ve got to run proganda campaigns, and take out the mad Imams. We’ve got to bombard their countries with porno and music and art. heard of Radio Free Europe? It’s how the USA countered the propaganda of Hitler and communism in the 40’s and 50’s. We need something like that again. We aren’t fighting “terrorists” we’re fighting an idealogy that breeds terrorists.
And as I’ve seen posited elsewhere, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place… if we do nothing they’ll spread their death machine (look at thailand, the USA and Israel have nothing to do with that country.) and if we attack in traditional terms (like Iraq) it is also futile… It actually strengthens the reserve of the enemy.
The Iraq war is giving the enemy propaganda… we need to stop feeding their propaganda and start giving them OUR propaganda. Whether it’s christian or atheist it doesn’t matter, anything is better than what they are in now. (which raises a whole other question… What type of god, would born someone into that rat pit of a religion, where a child is engrained with such hatred for non-muslims?)
it depends on how far you go. If you follow me down the street yes. If you stand on the street corner yelling holding signs… borderline.
well since there isn’t really any idealogy I like (hence I refer to myself as a misanthropic humanist occasionaly) I have to come up with clear terms as to when it’s an extreme idealogy, and a healthy one. I think when an idealogy exerts control over it’s “members” it’s becoming more extreme… I think when that idealogy preaches hatred from some sort of group… it’s becoming more extreme. I think when that idealogy convinces it’s members to strap bombs to it’s chest.
Don’t hide behind semantics. If you need someone to tell you you’re eating waffles, you’re either blind or stupid. Now, years ago, someone may have told you that the word for those things is ‘waffles’, but that’s quite another thing. I’m assuming you have the ability to tell a waffle from a pancake.
I think you're completely missing my point, so I'll try again. Forget pancakes, forget waffles, ok? Take anything you want that you consider to be absolute. The Moon landing, 5+24 =29, whatever. Whatever you take to be absolute, it's possible for someone else to believe otherwise (because they are wrong). Just because somebody can be ignorant or wrong about something, does not make the nature of that something relative. That's why your atheism/christianity example fails. Just because two people have a different opinion on the nature of Jesus, does not make the nature of Jesus subjective. One of them could be right, the other wrong.
“Let it be subjective”? As if it’s seriously up to us which things are subjective and which aren’t? If it’s up to us to decide which things are subjective, then everything is subjective, by definition. What’s more, the nature of something ‘waffle or pancake?’ and the words we use to describe that nature ’ “Waffle” or “Pancake”'? Are two very different things. Yes, the words we use to label things are subjective. No, that has nothing to do with my point.
Trunk? Boot? Completely irrelevant. Now, if I thought the trunk of your care was a boot, as in, a leathery object with laces that you strap to your foot, then I would be wrong about the objective nature of your car’s trunk, whether I called it a trunk, a boot, or the Duchess of York.
It could be untrue to different people because people are different and seeing things from different perspectives.
Other than that and political positions, I think I agree with you.
(sorry, I’m gonna hijack your example again) The nature of Jesus isn’t what we’re arguing is subjective; our knowledge of the (historical) nature of Jesus is subjective. You cannot absolutely rule out, for example, that you’re living inside a giant conspiracy, or that you don’t exist outside of your mind. Your knowledge is true depending on how much your perspective gives you an accurate picture of reality, so your knowledge is subjective. That doesn’t mean reality itself is subjective, it means our understanding of it is.
Sure, I have no problem with that. The question then would be, how to procede from that knowledge. It would be similar to the question of free will- if we decide that determinism is true, we can either treat each other like we have no free will (eliminating punishments, education, things like that which seem pointless), or we can behave as though we have free will, realizing that the metaphysics is basically academic.
With the subjective/objective situation, we can respond one of two ways to the acknowledgemnt that our knowledge is subjective. First, we can decide that it [i]doesn't really matter [/i] what we believe, so long as it makes us content, and drop all this playing at evidence, argument, and so on as so much wasted breath. Or, remembering that the reality of things is objective, we can continue to strive to be reasonable, knowing that while our belief has subjective elements, there is at least a concrete goalpost out there (the Truth) that we're trying to approach.
So, that's what I mean when I say the existence of Jesus is an objective truth- first, like you said, that his nature is objective, and second, that that objectivity ought to be kept in mind, and inform how we approach the issue of Jesus. That our knowledge will ultimately have subjective elements, that's certainly true, but that's just as true of every other field, too.
That is basically how I now interpret scythekain’s point; his argumentation seems a bit off-beat, in that I think a lot of the terms gained meaning from rolling around in his own mind and are thus difficult to decipher at first, but he isn’t really talking about anything very unreasonable. His main targets, I think, are base assumptions of entrenched ideologies that few even bother to question their knowledge of anymore.
I’d just like to know what the practical result of this is. If all scythekain wants is for these ideologies to pay academic lip-service to the concept of all knowledge being subjective, and then carry on practically as they always have, well that’s one thing, and I wouldn’t be against it- though I don’t see the point.
I had assumed scythe’s point was that this subjectivity should be taken to heart- that people should realize that their ideologies are subjective in some unique way that other sorts of beliefs (say, scientific) don’t share, and that this special subjectivity takes away the legitimacy of some ideology-based actions, such as proselytization, dogmatism, and so on. That is something I would disagree with.
I often spend too much time rolling thougths around within my own mind.
I think far too few people question their reality. Whether it be entrenched idealogy or not.
Reality is objective. Our interpretation and actions are not always objective though. If you act like UFO’s are real, and base your actions on that belief… you are living in a completely relative world, because no one else agrees with your subjective belief. If you have belief in christ, you aren’t alone in that belief, but that doesn’t make the belief more objective… that just means that you’ve come to an agreement about what christ is. BUT, as we can see, even that isn’t 100% agreed upon between the various christian denominations.
Politically, I also try not to tie myself to any idealogy… the liberals believe in defending the Islam threat, the conservatives don’t know how to fight it.
I am curious how you would deal with the issue? or maybe you don’t see an issue? or maybe that’s a topic for another thread? like I said… thoughts are thinking.
The waffles are only waffles because you call them pancakes.
Make sense?
Christ is only god, because your idealogy calls him god.
Mohammed is only a great prophet because the idealogy has built him up.
christ and mohammed are just plain old pancakes… Would you be upset if someone kept telling you that christ is a pancake and not a waffle?
The mormons and the JW’s believe that christ is a danish pastry.
it’s all semantics in the end, but it’s also the subjective way our idealogies describe the world. The idealogy your in before you were born decided to call christ a waffle. The mormons and the JW’s in the mid 1800’s decided to call christ a danish pastry.
I their personal ideology becomes entrenched if it’s beyond their capacity to question.
Well, I don’t suppose there’s much wrong with the topic creator taking his own thread in a different direction. Politically, I generally say I’m a liberal–as Ucc said in your other thread, ideological labels save time. I try pretty rigorously to avoid taking up a certain position without looking at multiple sides and thinking about it myself–the usual. As for Islam, I think it’s irresponsible and selfish to leave Iraq too early, but I think our “strategy” there should never be repeated. I think terrorism shouldn’t be fought with a war, as that just makes it worse, but rather collective international pressure. I also think the current situation has very little to do with Islam itself, and that we should be trying to bring the countries in the Middle East into the international community, rather than keep them at arms length; a large part of what we’re fighting is the idea that the US is at war with their faith.
While you may not agree with all (or much) of that, does it seem much like irrational dogmatism?
Absolutists don’t deny relativity, and they accept that many things are relative to certain standards.
Relativism is majorly flawed for the following reason. If a person claims that something is relative, it must be relative to something, meaning that some constant must exist for there to be a variance of something.
For instance, the color of light is relative to its wavelength, wavelengths are relative to their frequency, and a frequency is relative to the rate of repetition, and so on. However, the relative qualities for individual colors does not apply to colors as a whole. Absolutely, we can correctly say that all colors are wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation between 405 and 790 THz (I had to look that one up.). There is a problem between understanding things as we perceive them (red, orange, yellow…) and as they behave universally (electromagnetism, frequency…)
To second the problem with relativism, I will write it as a paradox. Relativists claim that things are relative to their perception. However, if that is written as a steadfast rule, then there is at least one absolute, and absolutism is true. If it is false, then relativism is false and absolutism is true. Either way, absolutism is true.
In metaethics, the question comes to whether moral judgments are relative or absolute, and I would again contest that the judgments made can be absolute, but that the objects of each rightness and wrongness is relative to the agent (egoism). Some like sweets. Some don’t. However, everyone does or does not like sweets because it does not satisfy them. Notice that moral abolutism allows for relative judgments, but moral relativism falls into an infinite regress and, ultimtely, skepticism.
Relativism doesn’t argue that things are all relative, it argues that our knowledge of them is relative to us. Thus, even that absolute statement is relative to us; it is only absolute from an individual’s perspective.
That’s still entirely dependent on the perspective; the individual’s liking sweets or defining whether they like sweets because they are satisfied by them depends on the individual, and the sweets can’t absolutely have any good or bad qualities that we can know absolutely.
Infinite regress? No, just a recognition that everything we know depends on our viewpoints.
Alun, the relativisism you describe above seems like it would be difficult to take beyond the personal. Like, a relativist can say “MY knowledge of things is relative to me,” or “Everything I know depends upon MY viewpoint,” and so on. But by what reason can they extend that to other people, and insist that the same is true of them as well? Perhaps the relativist is suffering from some cognitive malady, that keeps them from percieving things as they are.
Very little direct influence. Relativism is mostly, directly relevent in terms of ultimate truths in that we can’t know them. Beyond that, I’d say it just provides a basis for reserved judgement and a ward against claims to knowledge of broad, absolute principles of reality.
But direct usefulness isn’t everything; relativism is more of a foundation in thinking. What use is belief in God? --well, any specific examples would be difficult to derive, since it’s so deep within other ideas.
The thinking that relativism can be extended to others isn’t a necessary quality of relativism I think; one could basically be solipsist. It’s by faith that people ultimately claim relativism applies to others. There is considerable evidence to the point, but clearly any claim of absolute knowledge of such a union would contradict relativism. It’s much easier to challenge an absolute claim on a case by case basis than with broad philosophies anyway.
Well, I would agree with that, but relativism is [i]so very often[/i] brought up in the context of it being a global reality. Even in this thread, the focus has been on what ideologues of various stripes should be doing, how they should be thinking and feeling towards each other. In fact, I would say I see relativism used externally more than internally- almost always, when I see it brought up, it's as a lever to show that [i]somebody else[/i] is being intolerant or unreasonable.
That’s kind of what I was wondering about, how well a relativist could level evidence without contradicting themselves. Relativism denies absolute knowledge, but simple math shows that if it denies absolue knowledge of everything, it also must deny probable knowledge as well- there’s no such thing as merely adequate evidence, much less perfect. Am I right?
But then, I’m treating absolutism like skepticism now.
that doesn’t seem like a liberal position though either. I agree “terrorism” can’t be fought like a traditional war, but that also mis-states the Islamic problem we are dealing with.
In Turkey, the most “moderate” muslim country, 20+% still support suicide bombing in defense of Islam. That number goes even higher when it’s against Israel…
Lebanon, far less moderate is in the upper 60’s for mere defense of Islam.
I agree we should use more intelligence and not fight this like a traditional ground war… but idealogically speaking, we also need to remove or change their belief system. 98+% of Islam/muslims believe the Quran is the literal word of god.
I never said that relativism existed in a vacuum outside of the absolute truth.
For example, here’s two relative ideas:
God and the Sun.
If everyone stopped believing in god, he would stop existing.
If everyone stopped believing that the sun would rise… the sun would still rise.
The truth can’t be stopped, simply because we don’t believe in it, and that’s what makes it absolute.
Some things only exist upon belief. And those are the relative beliefs… Some things exist outside of our beliefs… those are the absolutes. The status of god and or christ, exists only within the mind of the believer. Sure we have some “historical” documents about him, but they are cherry picked for what the believer wants to believe. If anything is relative, it’s the christian theocracy about the bible.
For instancee, in Deuteronomy, god makes it okay to stone resilient children… Any christian today (including yourself) would say that “it was okay then, but it’s not okay now.”
So god is a relativist? If god were absolute, it would be just as good to stone children now as he commanded then.
Let’s also look at jesus (for those of you who think he’s a good guy, and the old testament law is invalid)
Jesus told us, “it’s better to be a eunuch for those who can, than to marry.”
Jesus also told us “If your eye offends you pluck it out, if your hand offends you cut it off.”
How many christians follow these commands from christ?
Because that’s the truth of beliefs… What god is like here, he is not like in Thailand, or Iraq. In Iraq, Allah commands that they march out on the street and hold signs that say “death to Israel”, and “death to america”.
Are you saying that an absolute god, would allow his word to be distorted?
If anything it proves that god is created from within by the charismatic leaders who start religion, so any hatred, or condemnations get built into that god. For instance, mohamed for all intents and purposes was a mad conqueror… but because he created a god to back him, he becomes a holy warrior.
NOW, if we drop the relativism… we can find the absolute truth. Like I stated above. If we suddenly stop believing in everything, the truth will make itself self apparent.
Now, years ago, someone may have told you that the