Christianity

[Lacewing]

Truths within specific localities are subjective. But the variability only seems to apply within certain limits.

"Truths" are also based on time, circumstance, awareness, agenda, payoff, etc. -- all kinds of factors! And yet we think, with our obviously limited perception/ability/awareness, that WE can know ultimate truths?

If there are moralities in the natural world they are ecological.

What do you think nature is limited to? What is outside of nature?

To say 'there are no truths' is a way of arriving at the knowledge that you (the individual) cannot make any true statements except those of material relationships, biology, and chemistry.

For some, saying 'there are no truths', can be a way of acknowledging that human beings can perceive from many moving and variable perspectives (of many qualities) while/yet not needing to claim/see any ultimate truth.

There is value and capability and sense throughout all -- much of which, we human beings are oblivious to much of the time as we favor our 'greatest stories'.

It seems to me that one has to be trained up in being moral and "doing good ... from the perspective of caring about the entire life-community". To arrive at that, to achieve that, requires educational processes. And what is taught (to children, to the young) is not 'science-facts' or hard & cold truths from the world of vicious nature.

Well sure, this is one part of our development. But it would be absurd to think that we having nothing instilled in us already. This is why it's absurd to be told that we must learn about a god that we otherwise have no clue of. We don't need anyone between us and our connectivity with what we're part of and related to. We can see it for ourselves in many different ways. We don't need the convoluted and controlled creations of other human beings -- that's unnatural!

So a strange problem confronts us: though we see that a great deal in Christian mythology is technically false, and cannot be supported as *truth*, nevertheless the moral and ethical systems that derive from it are indispensable. Except perhaps in some of the details.

I agree that insights and wisdom can be passed around and are valuable regardless of the vehicle through which they are delivered. Naturally, the Bible includes words of wisdom because there is wisdom through humankind. Wisdom can be delivered via many different vehicles. This is what's so beautiful about our naturally divine belonging and connectivity. To pretend that it's not this way -- to pretend that it only comes through one channel -- to pretend that only a certain few will receive it -- is a demonstration of man's distortion and manipulation, and is rather evil if not simply stupid. It is dishonest and greedy.

one can turn one's attention to non-Christian cultures where, say, Buddhism is the dominating religious and ethical mode and recognize there very decent moral and ethical admonitions.

Exactly. It's naturally throughout humankind, and is likely limited only by the limits of belief or the ownership/control that humankind places on it.

Therefore (in my view) it always seems to have to do with connoted metaphysical values that *exist* (are part-and-parcel of things) but require being divined by human intelligence.

Do you think that is outside of nature?

As far as I am aware there is no comparable intelligence in the natural world except of a conditional sort.

Well, I think we humans are part of nature (not better or separate), and we have no clue how much intelligence and cooperation and connection is going on across various channels. Many cultures have understood/seen life (and our place in it) in this way. Perhaps it just depends on how much humankind wants to sense, and how much humankind wants to create.

[Lacewing]

It's obvious that one can't "categorize" and "analyze" something one can't even recognize...

Yet YOU do it all the time, even if you must distort and lie to do it.

You skipped the question. What are your criteria?

I didn't skip anything -- you were talking to promethean75.

Question yourself and answer as if your ego weren't at risk.

[Immanuel Can]

Yet YOU do it all the time, even if you must distort and lie to do it.

You skipped the question. What are your criteria?

I didn't skip anything -- you were talking to promethean75.

Yes, I was. And I asked him.

But I asked the same question of AJ, and he had no answer at all. So if you have one...

[Alexis Jacobi]

Are you claiming that "to believe in truth is a folly" is TRUE, or are you only saying, "It seems to me that to believe in truth is subjectively what I feel would make me personally into a fool"?

I believe, based on months of conversations with you, that you have a tendentious sense of truth.

Yes. It "tends" to be truthful. At least, in this case, it certainly is.

But you dodged the obvious self-contradiction. Either what you said isn't objectively true, or it is. But if it is, it's false. And if it's not, it's not objective, and so nobody needs to be concerned.

Which is it?

I meant tendentious in this sense:

tendentious
ten·den·tious also ten·den·cious (tĕn-dĕn′shəs)
adj.
Marked by or favoring a particular point of view; partisan.
[From Medieval Latin tendentia, a cause; see tendency.]

What you seem to do is to confuse a mathematical truth for a 'life-truth' and I think this is where significant error lies. What you have done is to confuse a mathematical truth (the law of identity works best and works constantly in mathematics) as being directly applicable and appropriate for things we refer to as true and truthful within the field of life.

You seek out a contradiction that really does operate within mathematical logic and put emphasis on it -- hoping thereby to win your point. But I look at things (that have to do with life) through a less rigid framing. Once proposed to you that there are other more nuanced predication systems. So in an Aristotelean predicate system one is either inside of the doorway or outside of it. Language and conceptual mathematics prohibits considering anything that does not conform to the binary division. Yet one can be half-in and half-out and thus one's position -- realistically -- can be between the two established poles. To realize that this is so seems to me to be a more mature position. But this does not mean that the strictly binary example is not useful.

In Jaina seven-valued logic there are different poles recognized (this is one example of a philosophical system that allows for more nuanced views).

My own view is that our conventional predicate system is inadequate to what we have to analyze. Things cannot be divided into strict binaries -- not in the real world of our lived experience. It leads to errors when one insists -- imitating mathematical logic -- that truths in life can be reduced to easy binaries.

I think that strict binary truths (or absolute truths) exist in an ideal and conceptual realm. It would be nice if we lived in a mathematically pure world and an absolutely ideal world. But we don't. This is why absolutist truth-claims are problematic.

[Alexis Jacobi]

But I asked the same question of AJ, and he had no answer at all. So if you have one...

AJ always has an answer. But IC does not always have a mind capable of receiving it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Truths within specific localities are subjective. But the variability only seems to apply within certain limits.

"Truths" are also based on time, circumstance, awareness, agenda, payoff, etc. -- all kinds of factors! And yet we think, with our obviously limited perception/ability/awareness, that WE can know ultimate truths?

If there are moralities in the natural world they are ecological.

What do you think nature is limited to? What is outside of nature?

Certainly I agree on the first point. One has to examine all the angles.

As to the question you ask:

When I refer to 'nature' I refer, for example, to the Earth without any humans in it. It is easy for us to visualize that system because we can examine, let's say, the ecological system in the jungle. It is a thoroughly 'brutal' and 'heartless' system. It is 'cruel' by our standards. But when you really examine it it is also completely amoral. There is no moral idea operating in it.

Moral ideas come through man and man's psyche. We conceive of other possibilities, other ways that things could be done, and in this sense we make propositions that act against *the way things really are*.

Are 'moral ideas' and 'moral predicates' real? I propose that people who see and think like BigMike would have to say no. They are 'inventions'. They are arbitrary. They are conditional. They are local. They almost propose, and sometimes do propose, that they are therefore false.

But what is an idea? Or a 'sense'. Or the moral feeling that something is right and something else is wrong? We cannot gain that sense from nature. Nature is amoral. We can only gain that sense from something peculiar to ourselves. Again, it arises in our psyche.

Is the psyche 'part of nature'? It is certainly part of what is real or what is manifest. But the psyche seems to draw down into the world of nature a realm of things that are not, not really, part of nature.

Nature is limited to ... nature. Nature can only do what nature does. But what we do is of another order (according to my way of seeing).

[Dubious]

To believe in truth is a folly.

Depending on the perspective from which it's perceived, truth is more functional than actual. Only when truth negates itself as absolute does it render service among humans or likely anything else that developed through trial and error. If there's anyone left here interested in science as much as philosophy, truth is a measure of probability and can never be absolute. Science doesn't search for truth or absolutes of any kind. That is the function of philosophy and especially religion.

In effect, that which has no palpable reference of being true such as gods, religion and mysticism of all sorts has the least probability of being true though usually affirmed as being the very essence of truth. There is no greater split in the psyche, even among those raised in the same culture, than what truth actually denotes, any form of metaphysic being ultra vires to it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Largely true but also notably false. Pretty obviously false yet with notes of veracity that pop up like gophers pushing dirt.

[Dubious]

Largely true but also notably false. Pretty obviously false yet with notes of veracity that pop up like gophers pushing dirt.

Care to specify or are you just going to adopt the IC method of response? You know, the guy you find indispensable to your purposes!

[Immanuel Can]

I meant tendentious in this sense

Do I need to explain to you what a "quip" is?

You seek out a contradiction that really does operate within mathematical logic and put emphasis on it -- hoping thereby to win your point.

Actually, yes, it does.

And yes, for any rational person, the point is obvious.

You've contradicted yourself. That you don't care that you have, is probably the most telling thing.

[Immanuel Can]

But I asked the same question of AJ, and he had no answer at all. So if you have one...

AJ always has an answer.

Not in this case, apparently.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Largely true but also notably false. Pretty obviously false yet with notes of veracity that pop up like gophers pushing dirt.

Care to specify or are you just going to adopt the IC method of response? You know, the guy you find indispensable to your purposes!

Take it only as a feeble attempt at humor …

[Dubious]

Largely true but also notably false. Pretty obviously false yet with notes of veracity that pop up like gophers pushing dirt.

Care to specify or are you just going to adopt the IC method of response? You know, the guy you find indispensable to your purposes!

Take it only as a feeble attempt at humor …

Feeble indeed it is! I'm always intrigued when someone counters with "obviously false" which possibly it may be, but how would I know if the one who presumes such won't elaborate. Obviously true, ideas gratuitously accepted for purposes of personal worth or given some external lamination of ultimate meaning are usually the most indefensible and least open to a reasonable explanation.

As for gophers pushing dirt, such is the existential necessity of gopher life; we have a lot in common with gophers, only our piles are a lot bigger. As for any gopher dabbling in metaphysics, the future looks bright trusting there will still be one without any delimiting countdown of days all earthly life must endure.

Woe is me! I wish I could be that gopher (no wry comments please) if only logic and reality weren't such potent immunizers!

[Age]

It's obvious that one can't "categorize" and "analyze" something one can't even recognize...

Yet YOU do it all the time, even if you must distort and lie to do it.

You skipped the question. What are your criteria?

"Immanuel can" has not yet recognized who nor what the word God refers to exactly, but "immanuel can" does 'try to' categorise and analyze some 'thing' that 'it' has not yet recognized.

[BigMike]

Do not look to members of organized religion, or their followers, for solace or guidance. They are brainwashed liars, hypocrites, and deep down they know it. Over the course of thousands of years, they have honed the skill of offering explanations that don't really explain anything at all.

Then the implication is still open to considering those of *unorganized religion*?

It is not hard for moderns like us to examine the structures of the traditional religions, in their historical forms, and to see that they functioned as extensions of cultural governance. And it is possible to see all of that in the harshest light.

Instead, you should look for the truth; the kind of truth that cannot be refuted in any way. The scientific consensus.

The problem is that -- if what you say is true -- that any sense of what is true or important in our life, in life itself in the widest sense -- is undermined. The truths in the physical and biological world (scientific consensus) indicate that a power-system requires no moral justification. What becomes powerful in nature dominates and there is not a question as to whether it is right or wrong. Right and wrong are moral questions and they pertain to a non-scientific world of imposed values.

True, there are true things about material facts (the temperature water boils and all the laws of nature) but these are not truths in the largest sense (what truth has come to mean). A human world governed by science-truths -- I mean if this were really enacted -- would I think result in a world dominated by force and power. However, I am open to hearing a counter-argument as perhaps there is something I am not seeing.

Let’s start with the confusion regarding the truth. Axiomatic deductive theories, such as mathematics and logic, contain theorems that have been demonstrated to be true due to the fact that they are derived from axioms that define the theory that is under discussion. Every other scientific theory, such as physics, biology, psychology, medicine, social sciences, etc., is based on hypotheses rather than axioms. Hypothetical-deductive theories are tested by how well they explain and predict what happens in the real world. If a real-world fact is different from what the theory predicts, the theory's underlying hypotheses are changed to better fit reality. We can never be sure that a hypothetical-deductive theory is "true." All we can be sure of is that it fits with everything we know about the world so far.

As more and more observations match the theory, we have more and more reasons to think it is "true," which means it matches all the observations. The way that "absolute truth" is used in axiomatic deductive theories is very different from how "truth" is defined here. But we shouldn't give up because of this. Instead, it should make us more careful as we look for better and better explanations that make sense with what we can see. In our search for "truth," we must remember that we are getting closer and closer and never give up.

An English mathematician and philosopher named William Kingdon Clifford said we should only believe things with enough proof to back them up. "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to ignore evidence that is relevant to his beliefs, or to dismiss relevant evidence in a facile way," he said.

The first truth, then, in the human world is that there is no truth, no moral truth, no morality that can be said to be *real*, and that in the ultimate sense there is only power and what power can achieve. To believe in truth is a folly.

Based on what we know about science right now, things like energy, momentum, and four other quantities can never be created or destroyed. Instead, they change from one form to another. This leads to Leucippus' idea of determinism, which says, "Naught happens for nothing, but all things from a ground and of necessity." So, free will can't change the way things work in nature unless free will itself is physical and follows the same physical laws as everything else. That, in turn, means that no one is morally responsible for what they do because their actions are caused by things they can't change.

However, not being morally responsible does not make us immoral. As mammals, we are genetically programmed to love and provide for the needs of our offspring and close relatives. If we didn't, the human species would go extinct. Our children need food, water, warmth, safety, love, a sense of belonging, to feel proud of themselves (esteem), to grow up, and to have children of their own. Maslow tried to figure out what our basic needs are in a more detailed way.

Taking Maslow's ideas as "truth" (in a limited way), it's easy to see how this could lead to a social contract: a promise that if you promise to take care of me, I'll take care of you. I think it's clear that such a deal would be good for the evolution of humankind, an evolutionary advantage.
As long as it does not jeopardize our own needs, it seems to me that assisting those who are unable to meet their own basic needs is the foundation of what we could call moral behavior. This does not contradict determinism or the physical laws in any way.

To pursue the illusion that we call spirituality, religious awakening, or faith, as opposed to actual facts based on real physical observations is a waste of both your time and your sanity; you should avoid doing so. And above all, don't believe the massive onslaught of lies that will tell you that if you don't, you'll turn into a robot-like zombie. Nothing of that is true.

I think this is a fundamentally false statement. It is a truth-claim however and one constructed in assumed certainty and adamancy. In actual fact everything pertaining to "spirituality, religious awakening, or faith" have no basis in science or science-facts. But no one could say (fairly) that spiritual awakening or spiritual insight or increased awareness are not real things. There is no person writing on this thread (I would assert) who has not experienced spiritual increase or awareness-awakening in some form or other. And whatever that is has no relationship to the facts of material science and physical relationships.

Then you have to name one effect that "spirituality, religious awakening, or faith" has on the world that isn't caused by something else physical. Without that, it has nothing to do with anything and should be thrown out according to Ockham's razor.