Philosophy Now Forum

promethean75 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:34 pm "Exactly WHO is driving the dream bus?"

If I may, the WHO drives a magic bus, not a dream bus.

There's there's an an echo echo in here here.

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:34 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:25 pm Gary? When will you grovel to admit your errors?

I thought Gary handled you very well.

That proves all my points about you!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 5:28 pm That proves all my points about you!

Okay.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 8:06 pm Let's run all this by Douglas Murray.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 9:05 pm You mean because he is homosexual?

Yeah. He embraces what are deemed by some to be extremist right-wing views on race and gender. But what do you know, when it comes to what many right-wing extremists argue in regard to the sexual deviancy that is said to be embedded in turn in the "crisis" consuming our culture, well, that's different. For him.

But that's how these things generally unfold: existentially. As individuals thrown adventitiously at birth out into a particular world historically, culturally and experientially, we are indoctrinated as children, and then, as adults, we accumulate particular personal experiences, acquire particular personal relationships, and come into contact with particular information and knowledge relating to things like race and gender and sexual orientation.

What, like that isn't also applicable to you?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 2:16 pmWhat I said, and I arrived at the stance after considerable deliberation, is that homosexuality must be accepted because it has always existed. But homosexuality and other deviancies (from a normality defined as the man-woman family) should be repressed lightly but generally — as the ethical standard.

Right, and what I suggested is that this reflects your own political prejudice...a subjective frame of mind rooted existentially in all of the particular personal experiences you had, relationships you sustained, information and knowledge you acquired such that had, for any number of reasons, your life had been different you may well be here instead embracing multiculturalism and homosexuality yourself.

Just as, I suspect, had Douglas not been a homosexual himself, he'd be including them in his own "demographic crisis".

But, no, the moral and political objectivists among us have to roundly debunk that. That can't be a description of them!! After all, after "considerable deliberation" they have come to what is certainly the optimal argument with respect to race and Jews and homosexuals. At least the optimal ideological argument.

On the other hand, when it comes to ideological arguments claimed to be the most rational...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies

...welcome aboard.

What, you don't think the folks embracing each of them won't insist that you are wrong because you are not "one of us"?

Then [of course] straight back up into the clouds...

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 9:05 pm Yet I know that this won’t happen — at least not now. Things work in cycles and the present cycle must complete itself.

The destruction of the family ideal — this is simply a fact — leads to social sterility. So in my ethics the family and the productive, fruitful relationship would be recognized by all to be the principle one.

It is not an irrational position but a sensible, even middle of the road position.

Any homosexuals here? Fit yourself in there as best you can, okay?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 2:20 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 7:19 am Even indirectly.

I refuse to read these 20” cut’n’pastes Iambiguous ole boy.

No, what he refuses to do is to actually respond to the points I make repeatedly. Bringing his theoretical contraptions down out of the didactic/pedantic clouds. And I make them repeatedly because he continues to respond to me with yet additional worlds of words.

Is he a racist? Is he sympathetic with those who walk his talk more or less in the general vicinity of the Nazis? Would black and brown and red folks have anything to be concerned about if the "demographic crisis" was resolved to his own satisfaction?

I'm just curious is all. Why won't he go there?

iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 9:51 pmNo, what he refuses to do is to actually respond to the points I make repeatedly. Bringing his theoretical contraptions down out of the didactic/pedantic clouds.

My assessment of you is that you are *intellectually neurotic*. You are fixated on a specific approach and you are certain that your approach is the right one. You keep insisting (like a broken record) that I do your bidding. And you imply that there is something wrong with the way I approach these topics and issues.

I can only politely suggest that you modify your obsession.

In my view (which means according to me, according to my methods and preferences, and this means also not in accord with yours) it is necessary to start from a somewhat removed position (what you call 'theoretical clouds') and work out a whole group of issues that surround the questions we are discussing.

This requires a slower approach than your impetuous and really quite irritating broken-record approach.

If I am not mistaken I have already said this in previous posts.

I'm just curious is all. Why won't he go there?

There are few places I won't go, but I will only go to such places through slow development.

The reason I do not go where you insist that I go is for the reasons I explained. I wonder if you will be able to read and assimilate what I have said? Or will the broken record keep skipping over the same point?

NOTE TO OTHERS:

[a bunch of ridiculous grandstanding *questions*]

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 3:04 am Right...

It may interest you to consider a great deal associated with the Covid pandemic as being exemplary of Fifth Gen Warfare. The thing is that so much surrounding is murky, deliberately so, that getting to *real information* and verified true information is made very difficult.

So as I was reading this article, and the author used the term Fifth Gen Warfare, I thought I would submit it to you.

Note please that I do not *believe* anything I read these days. Meaning, I 'consider' it but always hold back from granting 'belief'. That is the point! To make it so difficult to know what is really real and really true.

What is the purpose? To keep people in a state of confusion and not-knowing? To make it impossible to discern the truth from 'conspiracy theories'?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:44 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:19 pm My larger point is that there are dozens of strains of Christians, and there are also those who, perhaps similarly to myself, value and even highlight *Occidental Paideia* (the understructure of Occidental knowledge) (the term I prefer is Greco-Christianity) as a valid and life-giving fount even if those who get involved with it, in the sense of involvement with ideas, ideals and values, might not think, see and act as you believe they should. They might hold to different doctrinal views. So I would tie this back to a prospect that I mentioned earlier: the possibility for a renovation, a reconnection, a reanimation within the social body I refer to as Europe.

I think that if you look to the "Occidental Paideia," then what you're looking to is the same variation of alleged "Christianity" that allowed Hitler to bring institutional religious and moral elements into his program....namely, a soulless religiosity devoid of the life of God. And no, I don't suppose this will "renovate" Europe or anywhere else, though I have no doubt it will promise it will.

Yet you seem to state, and repeatedly, that there is only one way possible.

Immanuel writes: "Shema, Yisrael. There is one Hashem. His way is the only way possible."

In the first post in this thread RWStanding wrote:

RWStanding wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 7:23 am
Christianity

Britain used to refer to itself as a Christian country. There seems to be little agreement as to what we are today.

What interests me is this statement:

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:44 pmI think that if you look to the "Occidental Paideia," then what you're looking to is the same variation of alleged "Christianity" that allowed Hitler to bring institutional religious and moral elements into his program....namely, a soulless religiosity devoid of the life of God. And no, I don't suppose this will "renovate" Europe or anywhere else, though I have no doubt it will promise it will.

What I have concluded is that Christianity is and has been utterly fractured. In fact it cannot be said to have ever really existed since, I will say, an 'unreal thing' can only be imagined to have existed. Christian beliefs involve a willed stream of 'impositions' to be placed on and over realistic and bona fide perceptions of The World. These involve not 'perceptions of truth' and what is True but the will and the resolve of the men who choose "to see things in this way".

There is no 'factual evidence' of the existence of the god that Christianity defines as real. In fact, the more that one examines the question (with an open mind) the more one is forced to see that this god does not exist in the world that we see in front of us.

What god exists then? If The World is god's creation then whatever sort of divinity one could extrapolate from the evidences of the world is a radically different entity.

So if I see RW's statements as questions the *answer* to those questions is that, no, there really is no longer any sort of agreement that is possible. But it goes so much further than the former view, and as Immanuel Can has implied, the false but comforting view, that a "Christian culture" has ever existed when in fact it never could have existed because the god-premise on which it was based is not real. Or certainly not real enough.

So the 'belief' collapsed. It more or less went up in smoke. Or evaporated in the light of the (Nietzschean) day.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:03 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:44 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:19 pm My larger point is that there are dozens of strains of Christians, and there are also those who, perhaps similarly to myself, value and even highlight *Occidental Paideia* (the understructure of Occidental knowledge) (the term I prefer is Greco-Christianity) as a valid and life-giving fount even if those who get involved with it, in the sense of involvement with ideas, ideals and values, might not think, see and act as you believe they should. They might hold to different doctrinal views. So I would tie this back to a prospect that I mentioned earlier: the possibility for a renovation, a reconnection, a reanimation within the social body I refer to as Europe.

I think that if you look to the "Occidental Paideia," then what you're looking to is the same variation of alleged "Christianity" that allowed Hitler to bring institutional religious and moral elements into his program....namely, a soulless religiosity devoid of the life of God. And no, I don't suppose this will "renovate" Europe or anywhere else, though I have no doubt it will promise it will.

Yet you seem to state, and repeatedly, that there is only one way possible.

Well, let Jesus say it, instead: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:6)

Meanwhile, the superficial, cultural religiosity (combined, as it is, with racist suppositions above) that I have indicted will, as I have said, "renovate" nothing.

Sorry, I was still working on that post and added a good deal.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:17 pm Meanwhile, the superficial, cultural religiosity (combined, as it is, with racist suppositions above) that I have indicted will, as I have said, "renovate" nothing.

Yes! And this is what interests me. Again, and to be as clear as possible and also honest, I have participated in this long discussion only for my own purposes. And all my purposes are still intact, as it were.

The reason I focused on your statement -- that without Hashem all roads lead to a Hitlerian Hell -- is because, and this is odd, you and Iambiguous's notwithstanding apparent irreconcilable differences, are actually 'birds of a feather'.

It may be true that overt Christian belief has collapsed and become impossible, but something remains. In Iambiguous' case it has all shifted to the plane of 'social justice' and an applied universalism that reduces men to one thing, to one substance, to one moldable material that must allow itself to be ruled over by a sort of determining spirit. And if it happens that any person comes along with a different idea about things -- social organization, national homogeneity, but especially any self-affirmation that is the opposite of self-negation -- a strange guilt-slinging shows itself. One is bashed with a moralizing tool that had its origin in Christian guilt. One is 'sinful' but in a new sense.

And this opens up into the domain of examining the present -- that is the present determining ideology -- as being ruled by a weird sort of therapeutics. I say this because every thing that Iambiguous has said has had the tone of social and ideological therapy. It is simplistic, perhaps, but Iambiguous demonstrated the ideology of Homo americanus through-and-through.

No other way but the (Hiterlian) highway . . .

So this is what it seems to come down to: Hitler is an emblem of Satanic Reality. A living ontological emblem in the hands of men who *wield* it. Hitler is really an emblem of the Devil. But what is godly? That is, if the operative ideology of the Present is understood to be a real thing operating independently from a defined Christian belief?

Immanuel says: Meanwhile, the superficial, cultural religiosity (combined, as it is, with racist suppositions above) that I have indicted will, as I have said, "renovate" nothing.

First, 'cultural religiosity' cannot then be any sort of ideal. We have determined that the Christian belief-system is founded on entire sets of false-premises. Because that is true those false-premises have to be abandoned. So as RW says we no longer have any sort of structure of a metaphysical sort on which to agree.

We once defined ourselves (falsely as you point out) as Christian but we cannot any longer continue with dishonest (false) belief!

If the same false system is revivified, even if it is modified, that certainly won't work. And those certainly won't renovate.

According to your definitions, then, there is no alternative to the Hitlerian Hell model. You are actually affirming such a thing and not denying it.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:39 pm ...without Hashem all roads lead to a Hitlerian Hell

I'm curious about your penchant for wanting to rewrite my claims into language you wish I'd used, or to express conclusions I never drew.

This is false: I did not say this. You made it up.

Immanuel says: Meanwhile, the superficial, cultural religiosity (combined, as it is, with racist suppositions above) that I have indicted will, as I have said, "renovate" nothing.

First, 'cultural religiosity' cannot then be any sort of ideal.

Of course. There's nothing "ideal" about defending one's culture by calling it "Christian" when it's nothing of the kind. And it has no particular "ideals" in view...just the advocating of a contingent and flawed culture, and the decorating of it with the false association entailed.

We have determined that the Christian belief-system is founded on entire sets of false-premises.

"We" have not said any such thing...far less "determined" it. You may have wished it, and you may have claimed it, but nothing "we" said has led to such a conclusion.

What we know is that Western culture itself is not, in any substantive sense, "Christian." It fails, on far too many points, to reflect any of the values and beliefs taught in the corpus of the Tanakh and New Testament, and has thus been assigned, by the ignorant and dishonest, a dignity and moral status to which it, in reality, has always never even come close to attaining.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 5:06 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:39 pm ...without Hashem all roads lead to a Hitlerian Hell

I'm curious about your penchant for wanting to rewrite my claims into language you wish I'd used, or to express conclusions I never drew.

This is false: I did not say this. You made it up.

Generally speaking, Christians say that unless one submits to Jesus that the end-result of this choice is life in a hell-realm. This is a basic, a core assertion of Christians.

We have already established time and again that you hold to this belief. Therefore, when men or if men work to create civilizations and social organizations through their own efforts, and without god (whatever the heck this actually means since 'having god' is a very complex assertion) that no creation will be godly, good, productive for man, and all the rest.

It stands to reason -- and you have said it in various forms -- that without god man creates an anti-Christian world. How could you admit to any other view? You could not. And the most emblematic examples we have of such creations are Hitlerian Germany and Stalinist Russia. These examples, especially of Hitler and "Nazis" are especially operative in our present. And note that you also employ this reduction. It is part of your preaching-assertions.

Whether you will admit to it or not I know that this is the essential assertion operating in you.

And this is what you said:

I think that if you look to the "Occidental Paideia," then what you're looking to is the same variation of alleged "Christianity" that allowed Hitler to bring institutional religious and moral elements into his program....namely, a soulless religiosity devoid of the life of God. And no, I don't suppose this will "renovate" Europe or anywhere else, though I have no doubt it will promise it will.

AJ: We have determined that the Christian belief-system is founded on entire sets of false-premises.

Immanuel:"We" have not said any such thing...far less "determined" it. You may have wished it, and you may have claimed it, but nothing "we" said has led to such a conclusion.

No, really, we definitely have. In the course of this conversation of course. But in the larger theological field.

If you still believe it it is because you have 'willed' yourself to belief. But what sustains belief is the forced-willed belief in a set of fictions. I certainly realize that you do all in your power to hold up the pillars -- you simply must and you realize this. Yet for all intents and purposes those pillars collapsed. They certainly have collapsed overall in the European Occident.

I assert that they have also collapsed even for many 'believers' but that it is their will that holds the belief-system up.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:17 pm
Well, let Jesus say it, instead: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:6)

The usual propaganda as far as the salvation racket is concerned. Create a monopoly with oneself being the final arbiter. Jesus would have made a great TV evangelist! I guess he forgot to mention in this severely limited definition, the countless generations that came before him never aware of this supreme mandate regarding the way, truth, and life as centered in a single person called Jesus! There must in all fairness be some divine bureaucrat ready to account for this egregious default!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:17 pmMeanwhile, the superficial, cultural religiosity (combined, as it is, with racist suppositions above) that I have indicted will, as I have said, "renovate" nothing.

If it is possible, I hope very much that you will be able to sideline yourself from this thread for awhile. It will make it easier for me to develop my newly forming ideas. Can you just hang back and listen for once?!

It has occurred to me -- I admit it is a strange thought and a stranger possibility -- that everything that is vehemently and often violently rejected in our ultra-moralizing present -- when the lunatics come crashing down on those necks they shriek are *immoral!*, that the categories or concerns that they do condemn with such vehemence are likely to have virtues and value and may well require preservation and defense.

So you have mentioned (depreciatingly) superficial, cultural religiosity. What you mean is things not Christian!

But what are the 'racist suppositions'? That also interests me. I looked over the sentence and the designation was to Europe. So you mean to say that if something is strictly or specifically European -- a cultural identity, a European paideia, and indeed a European spirituality or existential ethics -- that it is 'racist' according to you?

This is fitting with what has been called Christian Universalism. All of Yahweh's children must all bow their knee to the singular god, the singular concept, which does imply One World Government at some eventual state, no? Anyone who does not, or will not, is thusly on the Devil's side of things: obstructions at best and workers of willed iniquity at the worst and most potent.

And according to you if Europe (and the English-speaking world) is in disarray and does require 'renovation' -- the only viable means in your view is Christian revivalism. No other means will bring the proposed object. But what would that object be?

So this is what I am interested in bringing more out into the light.

The question is relevant because it is true that when an entire culture loses its *belief* in a defining and organizing metaphysics, surely that culture is in great danger. Because when a man loses the same he goes adrift, or even develops pathologies, and maybe goes insane.

In some way -- perhaps because of increased connectivity -- the general insanity is communicated to one and to all like a contagion. But can people speaking generally understand what has beset them?