Dr. Liz Jackson defeats the objections to "Pascal's Wager."

He’s talking about some stupid thing that the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld (aka “Rummy”) said.

Again:

This time respond specifically to the points I raise here. Your cryptic – clever? – effort above is more in the way of something I might expect from Meno.

You mean the “unknown unknowns” bit?

Yes.

Demanding much are you? You may have higher standards than I can meet or you may have a cognitive disorder which doesn’t allow you to comprehend what I’m saying. “Shrugs”?" I’ll keep trying to do the best I can to communicate with you.

I avoided conversing with you for a long time because of your habit of calling concepts contraptions instead of investigating them in dialogue. But if you can’t comprehend my posts for whatever reason I don’t know how long I will persist in trying.

I actually think there is some common ground between us in our thinking as I have tried to suggest in recent posts. But you may disagree. We’ll see.

:handgestures-thumbup:

It is only a lie if one of us can demonstrate whether you are or are not a fulminating fanatic objectivist. I’m not arguing that in fact you are…only that given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, I react to your posts subjectively/subjunctively such that to me you appear to be. But that down the road something might happen to change my mind and “I” won’t see you that way at all.

Lies of course can be tricky things. Do I believe what I do about you here and now. Yes, that is the truth. Are others then obligated to think and to feel as I do here and now as well. Is that the truth, or is that a lie?

Well, in regard to value judgments such as this, my own “fractured and fragmented” frame of mind is entirely ambivalent. In fact, in regard to “I” in the is/ought world I don’t believe there is a clear distinction to be made between true and false. Not in a No God universe.

Again, my point revolves around taking the dictionary definitions – or your definitions – of words like this and evaluating the conclusions you come to in regard to Pascals Wager pertaining to a God said to be omniscient given what may or may not be a wholly determined universe.

In other words, the gap between the definitions and the demonstration that your conclusion is the optimal or the only rational one.

And for most, as you note, that’s only after they define God Himself into existence.

So, in turn, do concepts and theories in regard to the relationship between an omniscient God and human freedom. Or concepts and theories in regard to the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility.

Right. Like the correct conclusions here can be defined into existence.

And, sure enough, straight back up into the general description intellectual contraption assessment clouds you go:

That must settle it then. “In refusing to agree with what he says here, you misread and mangle what he says here.”

No, once again, my focus instead is on the gap between what you and others claim to believe about God, omniscience, causality, and Pascal’s Wager [by definition or otherwise] and what they are able to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to believe in turn.

I always come back around to that.

Right, like in regard to such things as God and omniscience and causality and moral responsibility this…

…is preposterous.

Even his fulminating fanatic assertion that Rumsfeld is a war criminal is disputed by many. Now, subjectively/subjunctively “I” happen to share this political prejudice myself. Just not [as he does] objectively.

Okay, in regard to, well, anything, note something that you, this infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the vastness of all there is, know such that there can’t possibly be any unknown unknown bits that you missed.

I think therefore I am?

On the other hand, way, way, way out on the metaphysical limb, there are those who will subsume even that in such “alternate realities” as sim worlds or demonic dream worlds.

Again, why do you suppose the film The Matrix was so wildly popular? For many that was the first time they had really thought about what they think they know with absolute certainty about themselves in the world around them.

Okay, perhaps, but again:

Pascal was a brilliant polymath. If anyone could have laid out the relationship between God and humanity with electrical engineer like precision it might have been him. And if he could have done that why would then he propose a wager in which one is asked to bet one’s life because of the uncertainty of the proposition? I think the answer is that he wouldn’t.

To me that implies that he was thinking in a modern epistemologically agnostic context not unlike we are today. So I don’t think the engineer-like objective precision you’re looking for is possible in theology. Sorry to disappoint you.

Pascal was trying to appeal to agnostics with a gambling example. He was a mystic and had no doubts about God’s existence.

Pascal was a fool. A parochial ignorant Catholic, who hadn’t a clue about the million faces of god, and the richness of human experience.
He was too dull and stupid to realise that there is no coherent massage to follow to ensure your passage into heaven.
You could easily waste the only life you have backing the wrong god.
By the time he was writing his religion was already out of date and proven by biblical analysis to be antichristian.

Only a fool would give him the time of day.

By the 21st C Pascal’s version of Christianity is not practiced by zero people. It’s beliefs are dead and where not completely replaced by a dozen Protestant creeds has also been much abandoned by his own church.

Take the gamble
IT’S A SUCKER’S BET.

:laughing:

The only “fulminating fanatic” here is you!

So, you share my opinion of Rumsfeld, just not objectively, as I supposedly do. WTF?? An opinion is subjective by definition! That is my OPINION of Rumsfeld, and I never claimed it was anything but.

You really do not know how to hold a conversation on a message board with other people.

My points:

Your point:

Apparently a “lesson learned” on “holding a conversation” here at ILP.

Note to others:

Did you get that? :-k

Again…

There are those who argue that Rumsfeld [or Nixon or Kissinger or Cheney or Bush] is a war criminal as though this could be established objectively. Using either the tools of philosophy or the tools of science. When, in fact, there are those on the political spectrum who argue that destroying Communism or Islamic jihad by any means necessary is acting morally, even heroically. And that people like pood are inherently/necessarily wrong in not joining them.

Now, me, given my own existential trajectory – re Song Be – I came to abandon Christianity and embraced Marxism. For the next 10 to 15 years, I came to embrace a radical left wing political agenda. As an objectivist. But then as a result of the wrenching experience I had with Mary and her abortion along with my introduction to existentialism in William Barrett’s Irrational Man, I came to abandon Marxism and over time “I” came to recognize instead that my staunch doctrinaire political values were basically just political prejudices derived from my experiences. My dogmatic frame of mind in regard to morality configured into this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Yes, a part of me is still convinced that Rumsfeld and all the others are war criminals. But another part of me recognizes how, had things been different in my life, I might have rejected that point of view. And that, again, there is no way in which to establish beyond all doubt whether they are in fact war criminals.

Mostly, if they genuinely believed in the cause they pursued in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan they were failures.

Next up: Is Truman a war criminal for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or for the fire bombing of Dresden?

Or was doing battle with the Axis powers back then different?

Okay, just out of curiosity, what might Pascal’s argument have sounded like?

Come on, how precise could his argument have been when, unlike with the electrical engineer and her light bulb and grasp of electro-magnetism, Pascal had neither a God/the God around to point to, nor anything even remotely approaching the laws of nature in grappling with the relationship between God and mere mortals.

Pascal was a child prodigy and a true genius.

Read “Pensees” where he destroys atheism. He was also arguing Jesus was the God Man.

gutenberg.org/files/18269/1 … 8269-h.htm

I can’t agree with that. He seemed to be missing some very relevant details concerning justice (for example). He claimed that all nations should have the exact same laws (“globalism” - a very Catholic concept). But that is not justice - far from it. It is actually an injustice.

If the laws are true, they are one. So, i think we should all share the same true laws, to a degree anyway.

What is a “true law” versus any other kind of law? :-k