on discussing god and religion

All I can do here is to note the many times [over the years] I have reduced objectivists down to one or another rendition of this.

The irony being this is almost always indicative of how close I have come to yanking them down into the hole that I’m in!

Bottom line [mine]: They have so much invested psychologically in one or another God or political ideology or deontological philosophical contraption, it’s just too much to lose.

And no one knows this better than I do? Why? Because I lost it all myself! All that comfort and consolation rooted in one or another “real me”, embracing one or another objective moral narrative, one or another “meaning of life”.

In other words, what if that is just an existential contraption rooted in the components of my own existential contraption?

Let’s set aside the self-flattering, superior facet of this, since this has been pointed out before. ‘How close you come to yanking them down.’ Since you do not know the good, what is moral or immoral, better or worse for people, why would you take on the role and incredible effort of yanking them down? Why not, say, be kind to someone?

A billiard ball is incapable of changing direction YET when struck by another ball it does. Humans are being struck by information balls and change direction. Notice also that you speak of yourself as if it is hypothetical. Why did you, YOU, not change direction when informed? See what you find there.

The things that people say is an input to a decision making process. One changes one’s behavior based on the input.

If you come to an intersection and the light is red, then you manage to stop. Right?

You don’t argue that stopping or not stopping is beyond your control. That would just be bizarre. :astonished:

Deterministic universe or free-will universe? Doesn’t make any difference for that decision at that intersection.

A billiard ball has no control, but when hit by another changes course. A human can have its course changed by information. You got that information. You keep it all hypothetical. No description of what happened when that information hit you. What happened? You really do not understand determinism.

But yet you are a determinist. Oddly you believe you are not an objectivist despite the role that determinism plays in your epistemology, from which you judge what you call objectivists.

Sure label it abstractly and generally what you did not understand. Not ‘OK, here at the beginning I did not understand X.’ Not classify, dismiss and don’t put in any effort to understand.

It is relevant since I was pointing out that objectivism is inevitable and present in you. Not simply as occasional regressions, but as a rule. This is relevant because if you can notice that your current position is objectivist, if I do my job well enough, than you are not a lone non-objectivist in world of mad objectivists, but rather one amongst many. Which might lead to your understanding the enemy better. Since you think you have extricated yourself, in the main, from objectivism, you do not understand them, yourself and what it is to navigate in the world as an embodied person. The same holds for many skeptics and atheists who many or may not identify as ironists or nihilists.

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You say in the OP that you are not looking for simple answers. To show you that you are not a non-objectivist or to show a skeptic or atheist that IN FACT they do not have the epistemology they claim to have and in fact draw conclusions about the world (and values) intuitively, in ways parallel to and or exactly the same way theists and other types of believers do, is not easy. It requires a type of introspection you may not be capable of. Notice your repeated demand: that someone demonstrate to you and everyone else objective truth regarding say abortion. What if reducing the problem to conflicting goods requires people to do something more personal, such as noticing how they are like other people?

You keep touting compromise, negotiation and moderation as the only possible good - let’s set that irony aside - and just notice how you behave. No compromise - [i]there is only one way to tackle this issue, and if you do not do what I want in the way I want in a way I can immediately understand, I will label you as an objectivist - which is pejorative - or Will Durant’s epistemologist - or label what you have written in a dismissive way, since if I did not understand it, it is gibberish. No moderation in that either and no negotiating a way to communicate. I didn’t get my fucking answer the way I demanded it come. I will not try to find your God through your practices, I want you to prove it over the internet in words. I will not approach the issue in the style of discussion you work with, and I will sweep it aside and repeat my demands.

I will repeatedly make value judgments while blaming objectivists, that is other people than me, for thinking they can make value judgments.

You do not go out like the Inquisition did and use violence. But the process is the same conceptually.[/i]

What you dismissed above and intellectual gibberish was my attempt to bridge a very complicated conceptual and experiential gap. You claim not to want easy answers. That would be good but it is not true. I do understand that it likely was very hard when you became skeptical about your own abilities to come up with objective values. I understand that for some who have not done this, in this way you have been brave.

But I see a person who demands to have an answer in just one way, just one form, who seems unable to notice, i.e. introspect, patterns that several people have put intelligent effort into pointing out about you. The idea that you might be missing something important and relevant to the issue and that understanding that might come in a form you are not comfortable with nor understand at first is NOT ON THE TABLE at all in your mind.

That is relevant to this discussion as a discussion. It is also relevant to the specific topic for reasons mentioned above.

You judge others over and over for not living up to what you consider the only rational approach to living with others: moderation, negotiation, compromise. It should be a hint to you, oh billiard ball, that you do not live up to your values when you, label others, do not compromise, dismiss approaches that are not the one you have ordered others to follow and cannot negotiate a discussion process.

Until you are human enough to live up to your own ideals, people will continue to think you are being an ass on good grounds and you will keep interpreting this as

I almost yanked them into my hole, pats himself on the back, but their fears kept them from where my bravery led me.

I know the nihilist hole. There are much harder things to face. Get off your low horse. You seem very comfy to me.

Note to others: what might his motives be for not living up to his own rational processes of negotiation, compromise and moderation?

Hell, these exchanges always come down to the extent to which we are able to nudge others in a direction that “here and now” seem more reasonable to us.

Admittedly, as a polemicist, I do tend to be more provocative than others in these exchanges. And that revolves largely around this:

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Just don’t ask me to explain it. As it relates to motivation and intention, my own psychology in no less problematic [even enigmatic] to me.

I always measure another’s reaction here by their willingness to bring their “intellectual” analyses and assessments down out of the scholastic clouds and situate them out in the world of actual conflicting human interactions.

When they choose not to, I presume [erroneously or not] that they really only feel comfortable talking about moral and political conflicts in the technical language of Durant’s “epistemologists”.

Like you, basically.

Otherwise, in the spirit of the thread, they would themselves explore the existential relationship between the behaviors they choose on this side of the grave and their imagined fate on the other side.

As this relates to the narrative they embrace [here and now] relating to God and religion.

Yes, this approach to determinism “works” for you. Somehow in your head there’s this “compatible” reconciliation between the immutably laws of matter and a conscious human mind choosing one behavior rather than another.

And, sure, sometimes I’m able stuff my own frame of mind into that too.

Just not all the time.

Think about dreams, for example. I don’t know about yours, but in mine, I am choosing what to do and how to react to others. It all seems so fucking real “at the time”. In the dream. However distorted or improbable “my” behaviors unfold.

Really, how do you go about measuring how real things seem to be in the dream compared to our waking hours?

In other words, to what extent are the behaviors I choose upon waking really my own: Wholly, freely, autonomously?

Either this exchange is unfolding in accordance with folks able to freely choose these particular words, rather than those, or whatever the words turn out to be were only the words that could ever have been chosen. If mind is itself wholly embedded in the immutable laws of matter.

And then on a religious thread there’s the part about reconciling the autonomy of mere mortals with an alleged omniscient God.

I said changed, you are adding in choosing. Neither the billiard ball nor the human have control. But unlike a billiard ball a human can, as you have, changed when information impacts his or her mind. You made it seems like it would not. My pointing out the consequences of believing in determinism could not change your mind, according to you, but in fact they can.

This is strawman stuff here. I never said those things. The fact that you think these are precluded by determinism, which is compatible with my sense of determinism, means, for example that your confidence in the is/ought divide - we can know one but not the other - is undermined completely. And also the use of ‘wholly’ is confused. It is as if one could choose partially.

The latter, yes.

i am sure the contradictions of certain theists is a welcome distraction from your own epistemological and moral contradictions.

You are not responding to my very concrete, moral question. Here i am asking a specific person about a specific act. This is not abstract, it is not about epistemology, I am asking

since you do not know what is good or evil or bad or right, by your own admission

why would you pull someone down into your hole, a process that you seem to think makes them suffer?

This is a more concrete and real situation than all the abstract discussions and proofs you demand, for exampel around abortion in general. None of us pregant or aborting and not universal case. All along I respond to you and what you are doing in the world, sometimes in terms of epistemology, sometimes in terms of social interaction. This is concrete and grounded and nowhere near as abstract as how you want to discuss the issues.

Again, a concrete moral situation in which you have concrete effects, by your estimation, in the world…

Why do you do things that you seem to think trigger fear in people,
yanking them down into your hole,
when have no way to know if this makes the world better or worse?

and let’s remember: your philosophy does not simply entail that you cannot be certain about what is good, it entails that you cannot know at all. The statement ‘I think X leads to a better society, but I might be wrong’ goes against your philosophy. It should read ‘It appears to me that X leads to a better society, but I have no way of knowing and cannot even estimate a percentage chance what appears to me to be true is true.’

And now that you have been told that, we will see how this information impacts your determined course. Some humans are more like billiard balls, only physical interactions can change their course, information generally fails. I make no assumptions about this collision.

I always acknowledge here that points such as this [raised in regards to determinism] may well be correct. That, in fact, the problem revolves more around my being unable to grasp these points correctly.

That, once I do, I will change my mind.

But…

If this is unfolding in a world in which the immutable laws of matter propel/compel all material interactions only as they ever could/would unfold then, for all practical purposes [on or off the billiard table], the changes are “beyond my control” given the manner in which free-will advocates speak of human autonomy.

If chemical and neurological interations in my brain propel/compel these changes then all of the new information I receive would seem to be just so many more dominoes toppling over only as they ever could have.

The change is made and I’m convinced I made it of my own free will. But that is only an illusion. Just as in the dreams I have, I’m absolutely convinced “in the moment” that I am calling the shots.

Last night for example I dreamed I was back in the company I was employed at for 27 years. I was interacting with my old boss in very familiar surroundings. And if it ever became possible to film this dream, you would have seen me absolutely convinced that I was calling the shots then and there too.

But then I woke up.

As for my own “epistemological and moral contradictions”, if we do interact in a determined universe what does that really mean as it relates to the arguments I make here?

I make them. Period. I was never, ever going to make any other arguments. They just weren’t “fated” to be.

But:

That still leaves the profound mystery emdedded in 1] why this something exists and not nothing at all and 2] why this something exists and not another something.

What propels/compels one set of material laws rather than another?

And who on earth among us here and now can rationally, logically, deontologically, epistemologically, ontologically, teleologically, etc. etc. etc., pin that down for us?

And then, on this thread, some will argue it is all subsumed in one or another God.

And that’s where I come in with my own queries here.

My point however is this: that the answers mere mortals give when asked very concrete moral questions revolve around the manner in which I constue the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. As that pertains existentially to actual conflicted behaviors that most here are likely to be familiar with.

And, in acknowledging that my own narrative is in turn merely an existential contraption, I am clearly suggesting that, while I might yank others down into the hole I am in, they may well succeed in yanking me up out of it.

First, though, they need to describe for me contexts in which they are convinced that they are not down in it already.

Thus, with regard to an issue like abortion, I root the evolution of my own value judgments in the manner in which I construe the meaning of “I” here:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

In other words, as an existential contraption rooted in a particular sequence of actual experiences.

Then it becomes a matter of forging a philosophical argument in reaction to that. An argument that is able to transcend it such that a moral narrative can be derived able to be demonstrated as applicable to all rational [and virtuous] men and women when confronted with their own unwanted pregnancy.

From my frame of mind, it’s not a question of whether “the hole” here makes the world better or worse, but whether [in the is/ought world] it is reasonable to believe that it exists.

But my philosophy here is no less an existential contraption. I start with the assumption that it is rooted in the components that are embedded in my own rendition of moral nihilism, in my own rendition of a No God world.

So, sure, there certainly may well be a way in which to know necessarily what is a good or bad, a right or a wrong behavior.

I simply ask those who embrace this to demonstrate why all rational men and women are obligated to share their own moral narrative and their own political agenda.

If you were never not going to provide me with this new information and I was never not going to react to it as I do, well, what exactly does that tell us about this exchange?

“Dualism” applies here such that the conscious human brain is either able to embody these change in whatever manner one construes the meaning of “autonomous”, or dualism itself is just another illusion embedded in the only way that anything can ever interact with anything else.

Period.

Unless of course there is a God who created all of this in such a way that no mere mortal will ever by privy to how or why He did it.

I asked you a concrete question about your behavior in the context of your beliefs and you did not answer it.
The closest you come is to say

So it does not matter whether your actions make the world a better place or not, and even though you think, as you have said elsewhere, your arguments trigger other people’s fears (iow make them suffer), all that matters to you is whether you get an answer to your question.

The rest you have said hundreds of times and frankly just seems like squid ink to distract from your not answering the question.

Please restate this concrete question.

Now, if someone were to ask me about the evolution of my value judgments/behaviors relating to abortion over the years, this would be my concrete answer:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

What would your concrete answer be? And if not relating to abortion, another set of well-known conflicting goods.

If I am of the opinion [embedded here and now in a particular existential contraption embedded in my own subjective take on moral nihilism] that descriptions of a world said to be better or worse are rooted intersubjectively/intersubjunctively in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy [out in a particular world], then others will react to that depending on the extent to which they share that opinion.

If they are of the opinion that, on the contrary, an objective morality is within reach [re God or political ideology or deontology or descriptions of “natural behavior”] then they fear nothing of what I suggest.

Then it comes down to the extent to which we are able to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to embrace either moral nihilism or objective – universal? – morality.

But I am the first to admit that my own frame of mind is not something that I can demonstrate in such a manner. I am not at all certain of it. If for no other reason then the fact that I recognize the gap between what I think here and now and all that would need to be known about Existence itself in order to be certain.

I asked a pretty damn clear question. I then phrased it statement form in the previous post. In neither response do you make an effort to interact with what I wrote, but do manage to be reminded or triggered by what I wrote to repeat things you have repeated endlessly. What you said made me think of something i like to say. I do understand that things need clarification, often. But when no effort is made and my posts are simply used as excuses to repeat yourself, it is just rude. I can only hope I really do stay away from you.

Look, you will either repeat the question clearly again and elaborate on the manner in which I did not “interact with it” or you won’t. And the fact that above and on other threads you do not even respond to many of the points I raise may be less rudeness than the realization that you really don’t have an effective argument.

Let’s focus just on this point for now:

[b]Now, if someone were to ask me about the evolution of my own value judgments/behaviors relating to abortion over the years, this would be my concrete answer:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

What would [u]your[/u] concrete answer be? And if not relating to abortion, another set of well-known conflicting goods.[/b]

I’m just trying to grasp the extent to which you are yourself an objectivist. In the manner in which I construe the meaning of that from above.

Also, the aim of this thread is to connect the dots between your moral narrative on this side of the grave and your imagined fate on the other side of it — as that relates to your God/religion narrative.

Go ahead, give it a shot.

Someone can assert something of this magnitude without ever once 1] demonstrating the existence of these gods 2] describing that which constitutes stupid shit or 3] noting how, in being like the gods, this is actually manifested in their day to day interactions with others out in a particular world.

In other words, it is just something that they believe in their heads because in believing it, it brings about a mental and emotional and psychological “sense of reality” that allows them to feel in touch with something analogous to a true identity anchored in a true understanding of themselves in the world around them.

Again and again: it’s not what they believe that counts, but that they believe it.

Nothing is actually able to be pinned down empirically but the human “I” is still capable of believing all manner of such fantastic “truths” about the “meaning of life”.

And that’s the beauty of it. You can believe practically anything. And it only has to be true for you.

On the other hand, so are any number of secular narratives that make an attempt to reduce the complexity of human interactions down to one or another scripted dogma.

Maybe God is not up there to provide us with the one and only sanctioned set of commandments, but any number folks down here are eager to provide you with the next best thing: the “natural” way in which to live. Or the “idealistic” way in which to live. Or the “rational” way in which to live. Or the “enlightened” way in which to live.

Now, tell me all of these hopelessly conflicting and contradictory agendas don’t have their origins historically in one or another psychological rendition of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

And how then are all of the secular facsimiles not meant to enable mere mortals to embody in turn much the same comforting and consoling foundations for “I”?

I am this or I am that. But make no mistake about it, I am that which makes me “one of us”.

What is this but yet another stubborn attempt to imagine that we can come up with words, put them in a particular order, and communicate them to others so as to suggest [or even demand] that they too ought to use the same words put in the same order in turn.

Or is this just the self-delusion that in terms of God and religion there really are a set of words able to be set up in the right order such that they really do capture Jesus and love and ideology and self and good.

Of course the even more stubborn reality seems to revolve around the particularly stubborn fact that there are very, very different meanings ascribed to these words by men and women who have lived very, very different lives in very, very different times and places.

But then for some is the belief that philosophy was invented and/or discovered precisely in order to lead rational men and women to the one true rendering of such words.

If and when the philosophers themselves can ever come to agree on the most precise meaning of the words placed in the most precise sequence.

On the other hand, what do all of these things seem to share in common?

This: that to each and every unique, individual human being there will be a unique, individual understanding of what a “transcending concept of enlightenment” means.

On the other other hand, given particular historical, cultural and actual lived contexts there will inevitably be considerable overlap such that communication regarding this does not appear to be just gibberish to others in your own particuar community.

And since throughout history and across all cultures there is clearly a capacity to experience what is construed to be an enlightened frame of mind, there would appear to be a biological component in turn.

Thus, we all come into the world hard-wired congenitally to make sense of the idea of enlightenment, to experience the feeling of being enlightened.

Instead, the part that gets considerably more problematic is when, in the course of interacting with each other from day to day, our behaviors come into conflict regarding just what exactly it means to choose wisely when our own enlightened self is not in sync with another’s enlightened self.

For example, ask the folks in Gaza and Israel if they do not in fact embody an enlightened frame of mind regarding the behaviors that they choose.

So much for that “transcending concept of enlightenment”. Let alone a practical agenda in which behaviors in conflict might come in sync around an optimal political narrative.

It’s always easy to discuss “enlightenment” in one or another general description of human interactions. But what the idealists tend to steer clear of here is in probing why those general descriptions always seem to fall apart when it comes down to actively legislating one or another set of behaviors designated as either prescribed or proscribed.

Here struggling to sustain conflicting renditions of “the best of all possible worlds” may well be as enlightened as the human species can get.

Whatever the particular path chosen to God or to spirituality or to enlightenment, the religious narrative will invariably get around to the “true self”.

And, sure, to the extent one is able to believe that, if your peel away all the historical, cultural, and experiential layers, there is a “real me”, a “core me” that reflects [necessarily] the foundation needed [psychologically] to embody a greater certainty in one’s interactions with others, it’s a wonderful thing to have.

A soothing frame of mind.

But with respect to tumultuous human interactions as we know them to be, what does it really mean to be more in touch with the “animal” in us? To be more in sync with the limbic brain?

Doesn’t it really just come down to everyone either agreeing or disagreeing [in any one particular context] as to what it is more “natural” to do?

How do folks in sync with the “real me” in sync with the “animal” in them deal with others who insist that they too are in sync with the “real me” in sync with the “animal” in them when their moral values come into conflict?

Yeah, I can imagine a community of Buddhists living together, all sharing the same set of values. They get along just fine. They simply agree to embody a particular set of behaviors. Right makes might.

But as soon as they take their argument out into a world in which there are either 1] countless other paths to enlightenments, or 2] countless nihilistic agendas, they become just one more voice in the crowd.

If Buddhism works for someone more power to them. My only reservation revolves around the extent to which some might try to argue that their path [and only their path] is the one true road to enlightenment.

Especially when they get around to indoctrinating children to follow that same path.

I say defend it with the next generation if that is your wont. But always encourage them in turn to consider alternatives.

Edit:

Consider this practice among particular Amish communities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa

Now, I’m not really at all familiar with how this works “in reality”, but it is certainly going in the right direction in regards to children. You show them your way and you defend it. But you let them challenge it…even to the point of going out into the world and seeing how others choose to live.

Then they make a more informed decision regarding which direction they want to go.