Philosophy Now Forum

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:18 am One of the things that atheists such as myself find most disgusting about christianity is the core message: children are born in 'sin' and unless they accept jesus as their saviour, agony extended into eternity is precisely their fate..

Where does that nonsense come from?

odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 8:02 pm Atheists enjoy their, what shall i call it, pride

Pride is the opposite of Humility, and one of the Seven and not relevant to Athiesm.

your bias is noted, so ignored the rest of your post.

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 3:20 am

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:18 am One of the things that atheists such as myself find most disgusting about christianity is the core message: children are born in 'sin' and unless they accept jesus as their saviour, agony extended into eternity is precisely their fate..

Where does that nonsense come from?

from the concept of age of consent. if one is old enough -even as a child; dies they are born to burn.

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 3:20 am

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:18 am One of the things that atheists such as myself find most disgusting about christianity is the core message: children are born in 'sin' and unless they accept jesus as their saviour, agony extended into eternity is precisely their fate..

Where does that nonsense come from?

It's 'original sin', me old china. The 'fall' of Adam and Eve is in genesis. That christians insist on our collective guilt is down to the likes of St Paul, Tertullian and St Augustine.

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:30 am

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 3:20 am

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:18 am One of the things that atheists such as myself find most disgusting about christianity is the core message: children are born in 'sin' and unless they accept jesus as their saviour, agony extended into eternity is precisely their fate..

Where does that nonsense come from?

It's 'original sin', me old china. The 'fall' of Adam and Eve is in genesis. That christians insist on our collective guilt is down to the likes of St Paul, Tertullian and St Augustine.

Yes, since I have been on this forum, I have heard of this 'original sin' nonsense. I had never heard of it prior - not through my catholic schooling or anytime I sat in a church.

I don't see any 'core' message of Christianity there.

Immanuel Can wrote

Right. And I see you don't want to be an ethical nihilist.

But what proves to you that that is not the most realistic thing to be? After all, "I don't want to be a nihilist" is nothing to that question.

Meanwhile, what convinces you that "experience" has either "value" or "intrinsic meaning"? A nihilist would say it has neither. The burden of proof's on you to show he's wrong. How do you do that?

But then I have put the same idea out there repeatedly and you don't look at it, discuss what you think of it. There is the argument from the difference between contingency and absolutes; the claim that ethical questions rest with metaethical matters; the business of "presence" in strong and demonstrative cases of suffering. There is more. But this is all absent from your responses. Curious. You may claim the burden of proof lies with me, but I have made arguments with specific content. Yours is now to discuss this, not merely insist it is insufficient. How is it insufficient? Lay it out.

Not at all. It's quite possible...indeed, it's certain if there's no actual God. For then, there can be no "reason for" suffering. It's just a contingent fact that we all suffer, then.

My claim is that it is impossible, though it is not easily argued. It takes a willingness to see.

Consider: our affairs certainly have a history, but I (on the shoulders of others) argue that the present can be "reduced" to a kind of revelatory moment in which all presuppositions are put aside, and the immediacy of the moment looms before one. Husserl and others thought there was something religious edifying about this kind of experience, but the point I would make here is that when one makes this rather dramatic existential exist from the familiarity of everydayness, the world presents itself anew, as if seeing it for the first time. If this freedom from an imposing history that otherwise define the world is realized, then the phenomenon stands out in a clarity not available in ordinary perception, and in this reductive state, one can observe without the bias of language's insistence that all that lies before one is settled. Indeed, the apple cart of epistemic confidence is completely overturned.

This condition of modified of reduced consciousness is not a fiction, but I am certain brings the "sense" of the real into poignant relief: the affairs of perception that all along had been apperceptive, bringing spontaneous interpretation to each moment, are now in a clarity unacknowledged before. the phenomena of all things are observed "in themselves". You're a Kant fan. What Husserl has in mind with this phenomenological reduction (epoche) is, on my interpretation, just like the impossible noumena Kant talks about and discovering it embedded In the empirical presence. It is quasi mystical ( Kant's rolling over in his grave, but so what), and by my lights, the kind of thing Eastern religions of "liberation" are precisely about.

The reason I put this in the argument is because I suspect people's reluctance to look clearly at pain simpliciter has a LOT to do with fact that they cannot do this, and they cannot do this because their apperceptive biases, their perceptive certitude that they are interpretatively free, when all along they are seriously compromised and this is just the way its goes given the fixity of conditioning.

Some are very good at this, though, as I think I am. Husserl's epoche is a METHOD, not an idea, of clarifying perception, and it is in this one can witness pain as it is: it's presence looms large free of the presumption of knowing, and at this juncture the ethical intuition which I have been arguing for is revealed.

It's a poor word, I think. "Redemption" means "to buy back," as when one purchases another out of slavery. Who will "buy you out of" the world of suffering into which contingency has "thrown" you?

No Who. It is an error theory, careful to avoid bad metaphysics. Grounded in what is there, in the world to be accounted for, and in this accounting there is a profound deficit. Profound? well, how important is suffering, after all? And not just in the extreme cases. Value is the very stuff of the meaning of life.

Hitler's favourite, you mean? Or was that Nietzsche?

Heidegger is arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Analytic types love Wittgenstein. Rorty like Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. H's joining the party lasted for a very brief time. It is his inability to condemn strongly what they did afterward that makes him reviled. Matters not, though.

"Issues from nature"? Nature, qua nature, my dear fellow, has no opinions. She is an unconscious grinder. And "the nature of pain" doesn't "demand" anything...except perhaps that you die.

I believe you have found it, though it has been there all along. I am not here talking about what nature DOES. The issue is the what of "nature". What is suffering? I say it is in the what of ethics that presents the call for redemption. Examples make this clear. The poor girl burned at the stake: first, do the epoche and clear your thoughts about the pain of preconceptions and behold the matter itself only, that is, the terrible experience. Observe the pain itself. The other attendant circumstances are not the issue; it is only the pain, as the flames lick the toes. It is the what of this and only the what of this that is my focus. Its presence as a presence.

Nature does not, obviously, come to one's rescue; it is, as you say, entirely ethically arbitrary. this is why an empirical analysis will not reveal the the ethical nature of the affair at all. And put death aside, or anything else that leaps to mind. Like I siad earlier, I am doing something akin to what Kant did with reason: there is no "pure reason" to be empirically discovered, nor does one's specific entanglements in the world impact analysis. Kant was looking to logical form, and this had to be abstracted out of experience. Same here.

That''s not Descartes view. Descartes view is that all that can be deceptive. The existence of the subjective entity is the most you can get from him: no more follows from his argument.

Well, you get "thinking" as well, or, thinking is an assumption (how one gets "I am" out of it is a question. But going Cartesian is not meant to go with Descartes. It is meant to look to what is confirmable in the playing field of the most immediate.

I did not say "pain is thin." I said I find your argument thin.

See the above at the beginning. finding the argument adequate or inadequate requires looking at the argument and explaining your thoughts. You need to take what I have said, and do this. Thin? Do tell.

Yeah, they are.

No two people "feel" exactly the same things. Some people have less or more "feeling." But feelings notoriously are not trustworthy.

If you are in love, there is no doubting this. There may be doubt about calling it love, but that is a matter for analysis which is intrinsically propositional and interpretative. the hot iron my hand is not mistakable, though your interpretation of it is: perhaps you feel you are being punished, or it is undeserved, or that pain is a word of questionable application. What we SAY in contingent, nested in entangled theory, that is, ideas about the world and how pain fits into it vis a vis you experience. (I should as a note say that Heidegger and many others do not agree with me for reason hard to express here).

I can't make sense of that claim. You, yourself, appeal to physical phenomena, then claim, "it's transcendental". Nope. You're going to have to show that.

I have. Take what I've said and tell me where it goes wrong.

Then you can't "get" it at all. For experiences do not justify good and evil, if good and evil are mere personal impressions created by an indifferent universe.

The Atheist case isn't even rocking yet. Have you got more?

There is always more. But consider how I began in this post. You have to take what has been said to task, not simply say it's not adequate.

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:47 am...since I have been on this forum, I have heard of this 'original sin' nonsense. I had never heard of it prior - not through my catholic schooling or anytime I sat in a church.

I don't see any 'core' message of Christianity there.

Really? So during your catholic schooling or anytime you sat in a church, did no one say anything about why jesus died on a cross?

uwot wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 5:23 am

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:47 am...since I have been on this forum, I have heard of this 'original sin' nonsense. I had never heard of it prior - not through my catholic schooling or anytime I sat in a church.

I don't see any 'core' message of Christianity there.

Really? So during your catholic schooling or anytime you sat in a church, did no one say anything about why jesus died on a cross?

Apparently it was to save us from our OWN sins.

odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 8:02 pm Atheists enjoy their, what shall i call it, pride in being able to look unflinchingly at the hard truths of the world. But really, atheism is at least just as indefensible as theism. I mean, if you're thinking that theism is just a joke about an old man ina cloud, then you don't understand theism, or any defensible form of it. If your atheism is just the justified denial of a medieval anthropomorphism, then so what. Try arguing a against a more respectable thesis: that of ethical objectivism. Anti-objectivists here deny that ethical values need for their theoretical underpinning something absolute, like god or Plato's FOG (Form of the Good). Objectivists, like myself, think they do need this. In order to make sense of this world there must be something that, and I will use a fragile word, redeems it. We do not live in a stand-alone world, meaning that the ideas that constitute all that we can bring to bear on the problem of being here qua being here, just plain being here and all that it possesses, are wholly incommensurate with what they purport to explain. In other words, atheism explains nothing. It simply walks away on a cloud of value nihilism, you know, like Jesus walking on water (both absurd).

If you can't argue well an anti-objectivist view, then you are a lot closer to theism then you think, for you have to admit that the world needs redemption.

You are confused. This is a typical type of confusion that is an endemic problem. It is the problem of nationalist excpetionalism, racism and other forms of bigotry. It is the confusion of a category with those you choose to associate with that category. SImply put prejudice.
Atheism does not entail any of the things you attribute to it except one negative factor. The only thing that can be said of an atheist qua atheism, is the absence of a belief in god.
Until you get that you shall be doomed to repeat your confusion.

uwot wrote
Well, all my post-grad work has been in philosophy of science, so this should be fun.

Fun but exhausting. The idea I defend here is going to be unfamiliar to you, no doubt. This means I have a lot of writing to do, and you will simply repeat, what do you mean by that? you know how philosophy gets: intra-referential.

Post graduate work in philosophy of science? I read other things, but so what. The proof is in the pudding, and that applies especially here because what is needed is a willingness to think phenomenologically, that is, with an attention solely on the "giveness" of the world. Of course, among phenomenologists, this is a very debatable idea, which is why focus on what is said apart from the

So what are the circumstances according to which you believe extending into eternity the agony of millions of innocent children is analogous to choosing a blunt knife as a stage prop? One of the things that atheists such as myself find most disgusting about christianity is the core message: children are born in 'sin' and unless they accept jesus as their saviour, agony extended into eternity is precisely their fate. Is that your idea of an absolute underpinning?

I have always had a special place in things I have no patience for, for original sin. Until I read Kierkegaard. It is not like like Luther's "abomination before God" at all. But then it's not very religious is the familiar sense of the term. One day when you're in a experimental mood, you might want to read his Concept of Anxiety where he lays the foundation for existential thinking.

Look more plainly at the idea presented and try to forget mundane associated ideas. This argument is anything but mundane. Analytic philosophy is very good at taking concepts apart. Phenomenology is, too, but it does not rely on the authority of empirical science. It puts this aside with the intention of exploring what is presupposed in science. In my argument, this is important because God is posited as being exclusively about ethics, and ethics is not an empirical concept. It is apriori, but not because it's simply analytical, but intuitive. Intuition is an unwelcome word in philosophy, and not defensible when language is put to the task. I think of ethics as similar to the principle of sufficient cause: Causality is not an empirical concept, but as to what it is, it cannot be foundationally said. But it IS intuitively irresistible, carries a force that is emphatic and coercive to the understanding. Ethics is the same way.

To see this we have remove the explanatory contexts that would claim it. Heidegger would call these "ontic" and to borrow his thought, this argument is about ontology, ethical ontology: what IS ethics. Not what one should do and how to determine this; rather, when examining the meaning in the world and come across suffering and bliss, pain and pleasure, what is their nature taken as they are given, or, "in themselves" or phenomenologically (though this is debatable). Put aside are notions of representation and correspondence and dualism and the like. The argument here goes exclusively to the given.

This would be an empty inquiry were it about qualia, the bare presence of "being appeared to redly". Such things are not IN language and logic. But ethics is VERY different: the intuition of pain (best exemplified in extreme cases to make the idea clear) is not analytically exhausted by its empirical and conceptual content; it has this mysterious Other (a notion not to be dismissed. Wittgenstein was very much in these waters, only he refused to talk about it). Here we find, I argue, the very center of all religious thinking, the bedrock of the God concept.

BTW, pls read responses I make to others. Otherwise, I will be writing the same things over and over. It is a complex defense. And unfamiliar to most.

FlashDangerpants wrote
It seems like the best case for that argument is that it ends up claiming an IS from an OUGHT. Some version of there ought to be some celestial undergarments of morality, therefore there is. If I am an atheist just as a matter of non-belief in the celestial undergarments of anything at all (which is indeed the case), then I'm not very likely to find that argument terribly persuasive, no matter how amazing your objectivist argument might ever be. The complete awesomness of the ought will never convert to the IS.

One has to separate ought's: Contingent oughts are easy: This is a good knife, sharp, carbon steel. But if I want to use the knife for Macbeth, it is the very opposite of a good knife. It is now a bad knife and I shouldn't use it. Obviously, good and bad are relative terms, contextually determined. But take Wittgenstein's argument: ethical good and bads do not change like this at all. Beating my spouse to a pulp is bad, but had I not, she would have, say, nuked Chicago (just a silly supposition). There is a strong argument of utility here in favor of beating my spouse, but unlike the knife, the "badness" of the pain of the beating---the broken bones, internal injuries, and so on loses none of its potency.

Trouble is, as Witt points out, the "badness" of the pain, while unassailable, irreducible in its simple intuited presence, is not empirical. Make a long list of the things that constitute the empirically accessible features of the pain, and you will not find the very strange intuited bad of pain at all.

The reason why oughts and is's have such sway in theory is that no one is willing to posit something this strange. But as the the person behind you twists your arm ask, what is this. It's not about our attitude, or what to do about it, or how pain figures into our survival or any theoretical way you can contextualize it. Attend to the phenomenon itself.

Keep in mind that philosophers like Quine, Wittgenstein, adn others were very religious, but they simply refused to talk about the phenomenology of religion, thinking this was unsuitable for discussion. They were qualifiedly wrong on this point.

Also note that God is being taken here as a metaethical foundational concept, which I think is what God reduces to. If you're an atheist, the question is always begged, what do you mean by God? This is what I mean. It is important to resist bringing in extraneous incidental content.

gaffo wrote
speak for us, all are individuals.

i affirm Humility, not Pride.

you?

But this in no way responds to the OP.

odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 8:02 pm If you can't argue well an anti-objectivist view, then you are a lot closer to theism then you think, for you have to admit that the world needs redemption.

That's hardly the problem.

The problem is that I can argue the PRO and ANTI objectivist views exactly as well as I can argue the PRO and ANTI subjectivist views.

I can argue ALL views, including the view that I can't conclude which view is true.

Against atheists I argue a theistic view-point.
Against theists I argue an atheistic view-point.

The truth is always somewhere in the middle.

If the world is "all that exists", what exactly is it that you think the world needs redemption from? Itself?

Sculptor wrote
you are confused. This is a typical type of confusion that is an endemic problem. It is the problem of nationalist excpetionalism, racism and other forms of bigotry. It is the confusion of a category with those you choose to associate with that category. SImply put prejudice.
Atheism does not entail any of the things you attribute to it except one negative factor. The only thing that can be said of an atheist qua atheism, is the absence of a belief in god.
Until you get that you shall be doomed to repeat your confusion.

You have to put your philosopher's cap on: What is God? I mean, apart from the narratives, fictional thinking and bad metaphysics, what is there in the world that religion is all about? If you want argue about God as an anthropomorphic agency of infinite power and compassion and knowledge, then you are free to do this. But you're just repeating the contrived, popular conception. To which one looking for philosophical answers to things says, so what!

I have no interest in some facile catechism about God, nor should you be if you want to be taken seriously.

As to nationalist exceptionalism, I have absolutely no idea how you can possibly construe what I said as being even remotely related to this.

odysseus wrote: ↑Sun Nov 08, 2020 3:56 pm You have to put your philosopher's cap on: What is God? I mean, apart from the narratives, fictional thinking and bad metaphysics, what is there in the world that religion is all about?

This exact same line of attack works against philosophy.

What is Philosophy? I mean, apart from the narratives, fictional thinking and bad metaphysics, what is there in the world that Philosophy is all about?

If I reject Philosophy exactly like I reject Religion - give me a good reason to do Philosophy.