Christianity

[Dubious]

You said...

Truth is not a matter of consensus

...which I countered by saying truth can be rooted in dogma

Are you proud of that claim?

No idea what "proud" has to do with it. Again, I merely pointed to the distinctions of mandated truths as erected by humans and that which exists external to him yet seeks to unravel. Articles of faith standardized as Dogma is what WE create acknowledged as truth for whatever period. Then there is the kind of truth where our preferences and wishful thinking has no relevance, forced to forgo all preconceptions if we intend to understand the nature of it.

[Harry Baird]

IC, is your belief in the Bible literal? That is to say, do you generally (or universally?) think that when it is written in the Bible that "so and so did such and such", that is generally (always?) a factually accurate reference to an actual historical character in an actual historical event? If only generally, and not universally/always, how do you distinguish between those which are and those which aren't?

This question, a good one, went unanswered.

Yes, my friend, but so did this one:

What I mean is that on this theme you seem to talk exclusively in generalities: about "certain truths" which lie behind Christian (and other religious) "Stories". What are those truths though? I understand that you are in movement in this respect and that you don't necessarily have anything definitive or immutable to say, but if the dialogue is to progress, then surely you can't be content with mere generalities, and ought to be interested in laying down some at least potential specifics?

What I have come to understand is that it and questions like it will always be side-stepped. I think I understand now why this is so.

Do elaborate...

[Immanuel Can]

IC, by your own admission - i.e., paraphrased, "All of the religions other than Christianity are wrong"
I had made no such "admission," and no such claim.

If you think I did, then find it.

Aha. Let's try it another way though

No, let's see you answer for what you said. You asked: there it is.

What have you got to say for yourself?

[Immanuel Can]

You said...
...which I countered by saying truth can be rooted in dogma

Are you proud of that claim?

No idea what "proud" has to do with it.

I mean, "Are you happy when you talk twaddle?"

Just curious.

[Harry Baird]

IC, by your own admission - i.e., paraphrased, "All of the religions other than Christianity are wrong"
I had made no such "admission," and no such claim.

If you think I did, then find it.

Aha. Let's try it another way though

No, let's see you answer for what you said. You asked: there it is.

What have you got to say for yourself?

What I have to say for myself is that if I trawled patiently through this (or other) threads, I could easily find such an admission, and you and I both know it. Apparently, you take me for a fool. I offered you the opportunity to honestly admit that, yes, you do believe that all of the religions other than Christianity are wrong, as everybody familiar with your views knows to be the case. I also affirmed that if you took that opportunity, I would maintain some intellectual respect for you, otherwise...

You've gone with "otherwise". That's too bad. I personally like you and think that you're a good guy, and that when you direct your intellect appropriately, you have a lot that is rational and useful to say. Unfortunately, you chose the wrong option with me.

[uwot]

You want to brag about what you know...

Well I will reference my published work at the drop of a hat, which I accept might be construed as bragging. And I'm not shy about the postgrad stuff I did at King's and UCL, so fair enough. When it comes to what I know though, I'm fairly diligent in crediting Parmenides and Descartes with the two things (one really) that we definitely know.

...but the true person of wisdom has come to experience they know nothing and contemplate why they don’t.

Well yeah, the Oracle at Delphi's estimation of Socrates is as foundational as Plato's Cave, but any undergraduate who is still having to contemplate either of those by the second term of their first year is going to struggle.

...That is the secret of escaping the prison of Plato’s cave, the goal of philosophy...

Plato's escape was the theory of forms. It's often at this point where students of philosophy lose some enthusiasm for Plato. Whatever your personal goal for philosophy may be, if philosophy itself can be said to have a goal, or at least a function, it is to equip people with the tools to contextualise the phenomena they are presented with - to write stories that make sense of this crazy world.

...but is also the most offensive idea for the human ego as has been proven here.

No Nick_A, what is offensive is you holding up your shabby portraits of us and saying that's what we look like. As for ego, there is certainly some of that among philosophers, but another key lesson is this from Cicero: "There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." That was true 2000 years ago and all but the biggest egos are humbled by the fact that however clever their ideas might seem, someone else thought them first.

[Dontaskme]

"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it."

That was true 2000 years ago and all but the biggest egos are humbled by the fact that however clever their ideas might seem, someone else thought them first.

How is knowledge known by you?
It is known as and through every word. Every word uttered or known by you was either read from a book, authored by someone else, or was transmitted directly to your ears via someone else's voice/words.

The question is...Who was the very first knower of knowledge?

You are the very first knower of knowledge. The only knower there is....echoing with yourself, for yourself, and by yourself, for there is no self other than self. . . https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/infinite-regress/

There is nothing new under the sun...you are all knowing, you just don't know it. You cannot know it because you are IT

Relative truths about the absolute are absurd.

[uwot]

...in the irony void between Mr Can's ears:

I mean, "Are you happy when you talk twaddle?"

Just curious.

[uwot]

You are the very first knower of knowledge. The only knower there is....echoing with yourself, for yourself, and by yourself, for there is no self other than self. . .

That is a logical possibility, but I have no wish to take full responsibility for this mess.

[Dubious]

Are you proud of that claim?

No idea what "proud" has to do with it.

I mean, "Are you happy when you talk twaddle?"

Just curious.

I have a question for you.

Do you have any idea how pathetic you've become?

Just curious!

[Walker]

I C

But "ontology" is broader than you suggest. Ontology focuses on the really-real, to put it colloquially: it answers the sorts of questions as, what are we, where are we, what's here, and what are we working with? It's the basic study of Being, broadly considered, and is not at all subordinated to questions of what we know at a given moment about what we are, where we are, and so on. Our knowledge will change -- and hopefully, continue to improve, though there are no guarantees -- but our level of knowledge about our existence will not change the facts of our situation.

So epistemology is always tentative, partial and revisable; ontology refers to what is, regardless of our knowledge. Ontology is what, in fact, makes possible the reforming of our epistemology.

True, but it never will be accepted with philosophy students who know everything and classifies theoretical knowledge as epistemology. What the Oracle said about Socrates was deemed ridiculous. "For the only thing I have wisdom of is that I know nothing. However, knowing this allows me to experience the world as it truly is.” It was then that the Socrates finally understood what the Oracle meant. “I know nothing except the fact that I know nothing, and that is what makes me the wisest man of all.”

What do we understand on the ontology of being? Nothing. But who admits it? Why don't we experience the world as it is? Yet the Oracle told a friend Socrates was the wisest man in Athens since he knew nothing

Wrong, a concept which has appeared in the thread, is an interesting concept in this context.

Just as the veracity of scientific forensics is meaningless to the scientifically ignorant, the veracity of God is meaningless to the God-ignorant. But, here’s the difference. Curing the ignorance of scientific forensics requires adding to one’s knowledge. Curing God-ignorance requires subtracting one’s knowledge*, which is difficult, because folks are reluctant to part with knowledge that can often accumulate in odd ways (which accounts for superstitions).

Folks want an answer, folks demand an answer, that fits into what they know. If it doesn’t fit into what they know, then it’s wrong. Compound this tendency with mental ossification and an old man appears, shouting get off my lawn. If they're clever, wrong can be made right with some equations.

Correcting their conclusion of “wrong,” then requires correcting what they know. That makes the correction a re-education project that is somewhat more extensive than simply answering a short, loaded question, particularly if what they know has been working well-enough so far.

However, asking questions is an indication that it’s not working. Either that, or the questioner is simply an inspector, making sure that answers meet specifications of the known, rather than asked as one seeking to expand knowledge and understanding.

In other words, inspectors are simply asserting a bias to insure that what is being inspected must conform to what is known to work a certain way, or else the inspected is wrong.


* Because it gets in the way like a slow-rolling roadblock on life's highway, which may be literally caused by an electric vehicle on low-charge mode.

[Walker]

If you're trying to say that conclusion does contradict that premise, I'd wager that of two possibilities, you stumbled on the right one, the other possibility being, does not.

[Age]

The latter (which I've coloured red) is still a modal statement (with a predicate), which can be strictly reformulated as: "It is impossible for everybody to agree on some thing as true or right if that thing is possibly not true or right". You affirm, however, (in that which I've coloured blue) that the type of impossibility referred to in this statement is not logical impossibility. So, you must have some other sense of possibility in mind. What is it?

It is NOT 'physically' possible for EVERY one to agree on some thing being true or right if that thing is NOT true NOR right to begin with.

Though you introduce the modality of "physical" possibility, you're still talking in terms of logical possibility. Your claim as-is can be strictly reformulated as "It is physically impossible for everybody to agree on some thing as true or right if that thing is possibly not true or right". But why should I accept this? I can easily imagine a scenario in which a physical group of people believe something to be true when it is not.

Did you even SEE and RECOGNIZE where I used the words 'EVERY one'?

If yes, then what does the word 'EVERY' refer to, to you, EXACTLY?

How about we LOOK AT an example here;

Would you agree that human beings NEED air or oxygen, to live?

If yes, then is this A truth that EVERY one could also agree with?

If no, for either, then what are you basing that answer 9n, EXACTLY?

Dude(tte), I don't, and I don't believe anybody else can, definitively claim a human need for air or oxygen as an incontrovertible truth.

To test this claim, we could just put a human being, or human beings, into a room and remove the air or oxygen, and just wait to see what happens.

Truths like that are empirical and contingent. Just to bring this into the realm of reality: there are plausible claims that various Hindu sages have been buried underground for weeks, and thus did not, during that time, need air or oxygen to live.

WHY did you use the 'plausible' word here?

What proof do you ACTUALLY have for this claim here?

Even if you utterly reject those claims as plausible, they are nevertheless logically possible.

HOW is it 'logically' possible that human beings can live without air or oxygen?

You allow that you are not working with logical possibility, but that's what your "physical" modality reduces to.

But things might well be VERY DIFFERENT, that is; if you cared to LOOK AT this DIFFERENTLY, and NOT from what you ALREADY BELIEVE WHOLEHEARTEDLY is true.

You'll need something else to convince me, then...

But there is absolutely NOTHING in the WHOLE Universe that could convince you of absolutely ANY thing, contrary to what you are currently BELIEVING is absolutely true.

[Alexis Jacobi]

That, along with the rest of your message, is such a slippery response that my mind is made up: you are not an honest player, and it's not worth continuing to prove as much. I'm out of this exchange, except for one final dynamic:

See, you got right to the core of IC’s presentation and method. Curiously, none of this matters to him. He is fundamentally dishonest. And the other aspect is that his function, unconscious in my view, is to drive people away from an appreciation of Christianity. He has left a very bad taste in many mouths.

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ. OK. Look: your bird's eye view seems to be that Earth is a realm which is, intrinsically - that is, in and of itself, and in and of its own nature - amoral if not immoral, and that God - whether as a literal agency or merely as the imagined agency enabled via the God-concept in the mind of man - imposes a (higher) morality onto this, by nature, amoral if not immoral realm.

Except I would extend it a bit further and say that all who examine 'the earth' and this vast, weird system, realize that it is amoral in the sense that we humans, the sole aware entities who cohabit the realm, define morality. So it is not that 'my view is' but rather something more solid: It must be understood that the Earth is like this.

The immorality that you refer to requires someone, some looker & seer, to have defined the earth as immoral! And when you do this, I think this is an important point, you show that you voluntarily operate with what I have called an 'imposing' ethics.

If I refer to a 'god-concept', which would seem to negate the possibility of a 'real god', I do so for clarity's sake. Because I believe that people more often than not employ the concept. We are conceiving and conceptual creatures.

In the light of my post to which you were responding, then, what you mean by "metaphysical truth" is "(a higher) morality" - roughly, the third of the possibilities which I put to you. So be it.

Any introduction of a morality that, as I have suggested, operates contrarily to the way the earth-system functions (dynamically amorally), must come from outside. That is, must enter as an 'imposition'. Obviously you cannot mediate the dynamic between lions and their prey and convince them that the dynamic they are trapped in is 'wrong' or 'evil'. But the man whose mother is prey to a lion, and the man who is prey to the return of his body, and perhaps all his conscious awareness, back into an ecological system at his death, that man may begin to balk at 'the nature of things'.

What I have also tried to do is to suggest how a picture of Satan is conceived. Satan is said to have 'free reign' in this realm. I also said that in the Christian concept it is man's action and man's fall that drags the cosmos down with him. And man's redemption, by a Redeemer, will return the world-system to a non-fallen and non-chaotic state. To understand the Christian concept one has to grasp these things. Now what exactly does Satan symbolize? What is he an emblem for? In my view for the intrinsic nature of the world! To be enticed or trapped by Satan is to fall into *the ways of the world*. Therefore the objective for a pious Christian is to avoid entanglement. To renounce the world in order to obtain and attain something higher.

Nevertheless, the possibility that you raise - that God is merely a concept imagined by mankind - fits the first category of metaphysical truth that I put to you - so don't think that you're getting away with anything, because I'm noting that.

First, it is obvious beyond any doubt that God for you and for many is indeed a 'concept'. Just examine how you use the concept. Just examine how the concept is used. You seem to be asking me if I assert that God is either 'real' or 'unreal'. But I will respond and say This is the core of your problem! You cannot make the distinction. And when I say *you* I also extend it to *many of us*.

So I have often said that God as a concept operates within man's conceptual world and in his imagination. Fact! But this does not even begin to touch on the issue of whether God is a real entity. I have only begun with preliminaries.

But I have also said that if we are to start with The Earth as a natural, material and biological system, that if a God is extrapolated from that world, and also from the vast, incomprehensible universe that we now lay our eyes on (really for the first time), that that God must be defined very very differently from the general image and concept of God that had been common. And I have suggested that if that God is defined it will be, as Hesse proposed, an Abraxian God. A God composed of evil and good. I have written that in the late 1800s the 'idea of God' began to shift. The former imago could no longer be sustained. One had to think about 'God' in a different way.

So you are not referring enough to a good deal of what I have stated and it is not fair of you to insinuate that I am avoiding questions!

It would have been helpful if you could have clarified this yourself, but no matter. Let's ignore in this post, then, metaphysical truths other than the moral.

It would be helpful as well if you would realize that you'll have to move more slowly through very complex ideas and to sort them out carefully and conscientiously.

Now, what is the upshot of your sentiments given this brief synopsis of them? I think that it is basically that either a very, very rigorous theodicy needs to be provided, and/or that a very rigorous proof of God as the moral being we envisage to Him to be is provided in the light of the empirical facts, and/or that we ask even harder questions about the basic grounding of reality at the deepest level: is the deepest level of reality moral, amoral, or immoral, and why does or does not that correspond with our level of reality, in the light of God, whether as an actual or conceptual Being?

Perhaps you need that theodicy in order to reconcile the former picture of God with the inevitable shift in how any 'God' would need to be conceived in order to square it with *reality*? Is that not more true?

I do not require a theodicy because I accept that, for whatever reason, I exist and am a part of a 'world' that is both good and bad, delightful and terrifying, effervescent with images and sensations of brightness and light, and also extremely horrifying with the rank smell of death.

If you wish to try to re-inflate an 'old concept' and try to propose an 'infinitely good God' that stands in opposition (in a Manichean sense!) to the Lord of this World -- have at it! But I will suggest that you will enmesh yourself in the old, insurmountable problem that such duality entails: a division within your own self.

or that we ask even harder questions about the basic grounding of reality at the deepest level

My assertion would be that we do not have a choice except to go with this one. Now, if you accept that this is what in fact happened within Occidental ideation (I refer to Freud, Jung, Lawrence and Reich as did Phillip Rieff who I have referred to) you will quickly see that theology turned inward. The idea of a God 'out there' could not be sustained. And if God were to be found he or it would have to be looked for in a different way. Therefore, the attention of leading men was drawn to other religious modalities, other metaphysical conceptual systems. The 'self' necessarily became the focus of attention and examination. Is this good or is it bad? Well, it is a mixed bag.

What I am doing is tracing-out what happened, and why it happened, and how all of this impinges on us today.

Now if you ask me Do you believe in God? I would answer that I have had a range of different experiences within the general conceptual order that I present to you here. But my 'picture' is not like the standard Christian picture! It is infinitely more nuanced. But if you were to push me to talk about this, surely and inevitably, it would move into descriptions of realms of subjective experience. This is my fate and, I suggest, this is our fate (in the old Indo-European sense of the word fatum).

If you had read carefully what I've written you'd understand better that I veer away from the 'imposed' system (Judean, Christian) and back toward older and I think in many sense truer views of *reality* and the nature of things.

How could I, and how could any of us, ultimately and definitively define God? Try to answer such a question yourself given your own position and orientation.