Philosophy Now Forum

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote: The reason I write is to clarify my thoughts and ideas to myself. The value of the forum is only in being given reference points or material to work with.

I do that, too, but outside the forum. For me the forum is more of a distraction than anything.

The Inglorious One wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

henry quirk wrote:If Christendom were to (again) become the primary driver globally, what is to become of the unbeliever (like myself)?

In the short term they'd be too buy joining up with the Jews and killing Arabs.
When they had turned Mecca into a radioactive glass bowl, then they'd come for us.

Hmmmm. Good idea!
.

NB: Inglorious One thinks its a good idea to nuke Mecca, then kill all the atheists.

I'll have to remember that.

"You're only fooling yourself, living in a make-believe world."

Sez the one promoting the Magic Jew and the Invisible Sky Father.

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"I don't *feel* anything Henry (fyi)."

Liar.

Also: you're not interested in a conversation (which is why no one is giving you one). This thread is your soap box to lament the loss of the christian ethic, nuthin' more or less. At best, you entertain commiserators (like Inglorious).

It is always interesting how some seem really to believe that, over the Internet and on a forum as this, they can discern that their interlocutor is 'lying'. Lying means deliberately misrepresenting the truth, consciously. It is a symptom (again) of the breakdown in the ability to converse and faith in the productivity of conversation that time and again on these pages any attempt to converse falls to pieces with accusations, animosity, bickering and inanity. I find that the more interesting aspect: People do not know how to talk to each other anymore. There is a sense of a total breakdown in the sort of trust required to have 'human interactions' that mean something. That is a thing worthy of consideration.

All of my writing, from day one here up till now is in a sense a 'soapbox' insofar as anyone with a defined discourse can be said to have a soapbox, and all throughout the process I have been as clear as can be as to what my purposes are. Nothing has been hidden and I am sure there has been no lying. So, instead of saying that you are a 'liar' for making inaccurate statements about my efforts - I could not assume and do not believe you or anyone else is engaged here in the bad-faith that would be required to lie so constantly, and so I must believe that you are in fact telling the truth - I will say that you don't understand what I am up to, or what concerns me.

It would be superficial to say that it is 'the Christian ethic' that I lament the loss of and it would be flatly wrong: There is a great deal in the so-called Christian ethic that I do not and cannot support, and as I have said (and it is not a lie!) I am not a Christian (though I share some features). This is really for information purposes only since you may have no interest in getting what I wish to communicate: but each effort over the last few, on PN (I have written in other forums too), has had somewhat different purposes, and different results. What I have gained from this last one is much of what I wrote in the first paragraph here. I would support it with the excerpt from Waldo Frank. But I don't think that you can understand what is being talked about. You do not have 1) the preparation to grasp it, 2) nor any desire to grasp it, and 3) you have a will that opposes dialectic in this sense, and too as a result of a strong juvenile intellectual attitude you'd have to scoff at my demeanour (also understandable). So you will refuse to grasp it. These are the blocking efforts that one notes in almost every conversation (and even those that do not have to do with religion) all over the whole forum! It is as if people say Whatever you have to say I will not believe, nor listen, because I know that you are a liar!

So again, it is more interesting to step back from that and to see that there is no longer a platform for conversation. And I think that this is one of the effects or consequences of living in a dying cultural body. That is what Frank describes in precise but clipped form: the death of a shared metaphysic, and the death of a collaborative project. But what you will likely hear, and perhaps all that you can hear, is that this means that I lament the loss of the Christian ethic, or Sunday at church, or some sort of false piety of 'good Christians' with saccharine sermonising on Christian talk radio. You have not really read what I have written if that is the case.

I was thinking last evening that, no, it is not accurate to say that I do not feel anything as I go over the transformations in culture that lead to such deadlock, though it is accurate and honest to say that no one here (of the 'opposition') has had much of an effect on me since no one seems to have an organised discourse (except Uwot whose interactions I have always appreciated though we see things radically differently), but you see it is hard to take much very seriously here when very few seem to have much of a position at all. Even you - or especially you in this case - reduce the possibility of conversation (on important themes) to absurd cliches! I do very much understand them though: Magic Jew and Invisible Sky Father (etc. etc) Once you have defined the absurdity in that way, there is no hope to (er-hum) 'resurrect' any level of sensible or productive conversation.

What I would bring to your attention, though I am pretty sure you won't have an interest in hearing it, is in just one 'essence' within the whole question. That is one thing that came home to me rather powerfully over the last month here: The question of 'repentance'. I imagine that the word itself, loaded as it is, cannot function as a term of discourse given all the baggage accreted around it. (I have problems there too). But if one were to define an essence in Christianity (I can't say this is so within the Hindu forms which I have also studied to some extent as 'repentance' doesn't quite exist in the same or similar way) I would say that that essence is 'repentance', and this repentance is at the core of Occidental ethics.

It is part-and-parcel of how we live, relationally, with others. And to have a *conscience* (about anything really) is to have a relationship with repentance. And to have experienced repentance at any level, is to link through that essence and core to a real and considerable thing. Everything I would say at this point would take on the intolerable tinge of speaking down to you, but if it ever happened that you were to gain more familiarity with the most important literary and also religious attainment in Western culture - Shakespeare - you would understand how these refined and very high sentiments of conscience are central and crucial to a way of seeing and being in the world. It is in these things (if they can be called 'things') that the best and the finest human achievements are discovered. But by no means do I mean the most useful. It is impossible to consider or to imagine the depth and intensity of Hamlet without grasping the inner world of conscience. Or the transformation of Lear. (I keep going round in these circles because all that I do now revolves around Shakespeare studies, essentially). Insulting though it must be, I doubt you have any interest in this level of sentiment nor do you understand its origin. Nor do you wish to. And you will, I can only imagine, work even harder to keeping up the walls of defence. One of the consequences of the destruction of a conceptual pathway that had been defined religiously, is the destruction of the possibility of relationship to *meaning*. Makes no sense though, does it?

This is how you and others here have established your counter-discourse: sheer opposition. I simply suggest that you could do very well to consider all that you oppose. For me, this is the area I have defined for myself: To understand this better, to be able to talk about it.

But what you must understand - I have said it enough times - is that I don't give a flying fuck what you can grasp of what I think and write, nor anyone else, I am here for my own purposes, and I have achieved them.

Too much protest. You'd have done better (and been more convincing) if you'd just said 'go fuck yourself'.

*shrug*

I'll take it under consideration.

Your response though leaves nothing to be desired.

henry quirk wrote:"You're only fooling yourself, living in a make-believe world."

Sez the one promoting the Magic Jew and the Invisible Sky Father.

You do not know what I am "promoting," neither do you know, understand or care about the ideas I entertain about the "Invisible Sky Father."

Yes, I do at times quote from the Bible, but I'm not a Christian. I will also quote from an Andy Capp cartoon strip if it suits my purpose. But my question is this: is there something wrong with the logic I used, or are you just another in-denial "new atheist" shooting off his mouth without knowing what he's talking about?

"Your response though leaves nothing to be desired."

Meh, I'm a simple creature incapable of finer thought...would rather hit you with a stick than keep on with the back and forth...can't hit you a stick, so, I just get tidy and direct.

##

"You do not know what I am "promoting,"..."

Probably not.

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"...neither do you know, understand or care about the ideas I entertain about the "Invisible Sky Father."

True.

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"Yes, I do at times quote from the Bible, but I'm not a Christian. I will also quote from an Andy Capp cartoon strip if it suits my purpose."

Pogo is better.

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"is there something wrong with the logic I used..."

Hell if I know...your esoterica makes my head hurt.

henry quirk wrote: Pogo is better.

Indeed. "We have met the enemy and it is us."

I have been struggling for a number of years now with the issue and the question of what I would call a modern 'fall'. I will try to explain what I mean. Just recently, reading through various titles by Basil Willey, I noticed that his earlier titles were written as if communicating with an audience prepared to understand his theses. Intelligent, dense, somewhat complex sentences and paragraphs, a presentation of ideas that requires a persevering effort but certainly worth that effort.

'Seventeenth Century Background' was published in 1934 for example. It is a study that requires an intellectual investment but with a bit of effort it is accessible. 'Christianity Past and Present', 1952, is similar but I sensed that it represented the beginning stages of writing to an audience losing its background in the topic.

'Religion Today', 1969, seems almost a plea to an audience with little or no relationship to the question and is an attempt to speak to people who have come under the influence of other ideas, or who have 'broken continuity' with the Occidental relationship to ideas and to what, historically, has made the Occident the Occident. It reads like the beginning of a plea - a useless project overall - to people who have lost the desire to grasp the importance of the topics he explores, and to whom you have to provide enticements.

There are for example collage courses titles 'Religion 101' and 'Psychology 101' for those who are coming in to an idea-world they do not have experience with. The idea is to bring them up to speed at least to the degree necessary to proceed further. 'Religion Today' could be described as a title for one heading out the door, for one beginning a descent away from Idea and comprehension and a certain fineness of intellectual capacity and sensitivity, but the question I'd ask is 'Away from what' and 'Toward or to what'?

While on the one had the Sixties represented an expansion and a delving deeper (?) it also seems to represent a falling away and a loss. The postwar era is the time when a huge class of person entered the university cycle, but also the time when a popular will (a child's will?) began to assert itself and to say 'No!' and to resist the hierarchical establishment. Now, one would no longer receive top-down, one would delve oneself, even when 'unprepared', and report back to one's elders and peers what one had 'discovered'. It is through this and of course much else (so much more) that one begins to trace the process of 'breaking continuity' and of a disruption in the 'conceptual pathways' to understand the Ideas that have 'lived' in the Occidental body and animated it.

I will rather cruelly refer to Henry here as an example of the 'outcome'. We have to be willing to be a little hard in order to make a point. No interest in, and no inner capacity, to sense the importance of higher or finer ideas. Allow me to say that throughout this forum, even among those who really should know better and give evidence of a finer intellectual preparation, there is almost zero. Zero! Take poor Hobbes as an example. A teacher - at least according to him though it seems incredible given that he struggles to write a coherent sentence - and whose background is, supposedly, the History of Ideas. And he understands nothing, and he has next to no discourse. So bear with me before you think I am just being mean: I suggest that today, and quite generally, yet pervasively, we are surrounded by people who have attended University, who have a four year background and sometimes longer, but who yet stand outside of the Occidental intellectual canon! They have come up to the frontier of it, the outer surface, but they are very much outside it.

Sadly, we are all 'outcomes' of these processes of degeneration. Breakdowns in continuity, in intellectual links between disciplines, in conceptual pathways, such that it represents a genuine struggle to reclaim the territory, to make it 'ours' again. However, when one has left that *world* it is not so easy to come back into it. In fact it is quite difficult. This means that it simply won't happen, not on any scale. *The World* (and I mean the entertainment world, the world of noise, the world of shifting sights and endless modifications, but especially the more or less pure, physical and sensual world (pornography to put it in direct terms), is the *world* that people prefer to live in, and which dominates their perception. Thus 'life' shifts from a life within finer sensibilities and that fruit, so to speak, to a 'life' lived in brute sensation. And the person who lives in brute sensation goes from one sensation to another in complete incomprehension of what 'higher sentiment' can mean and should mean.

Now, here is a peculiar thought:

Creatures arise in Nature and are expressions of Nature. They are bound by Nature, and there is no will in them that would allow them to do anything that is not directly determined by Nature. One cannot, in respect to Nature, speak of 'freedom' or 'free choice' nor essentially of 'idea' and anything else by which and through which we are 'human beings'. A huge part of every aspect of what has been spoken of in these pages over the last couple of months, and which has not been at all understood! is to be discovered in this area:

The first question, the forst topic, is the 'freedom of the will'. Man is certainly ensconced in Nature and is subject to Nature (this is I personally think the locus of the Christian, but really it is a universal idea, of 'sin' 'evil' and 'satan'), so allow me to say that it is Nature that is understood as man's enemy! Why? Because Nature is unfree and determined and there is no 'thought' in Nature. In man Idea comes into the picture, and a contrary will, and the possibility of both employing Nature to benefits (channeling), and also to opposing Nature. And here we come, I suggest, to an essential core. But you'll have to allow your mind to be bent a little bit, and to be pulled in to a zone where - evidently - you do not wish to go. It is speculative (on my part) but not inconsiderable.

'Jesus Christ' represents in a pure symbolical form the entrance of the possibility of the pure idea of freedom. This is meant at the moral level but also at a group or perhaps 'cluster' of levels in which are found all that is best and highest in man's possibilities. Again, Nature is, by intuitive understanding (which understanding is in this sense a 'divine act' if we really wished to be accurate), a realm of completely determined movement of energy and matter. It simply cycles and recycles energy and matter in endless mutations of pattern. And yet in us we have - somehow - come into the realm of mind, of spirit, of language, of concept. And yet we conceive at even a higher level, perhaps at an absolute level, the possibility of 'the most high'. What is this? What is being talked about?

At the Platonic level I suggest we have the best means to grasp it intellectually, yet I will suggest that at a, shall we say, truer level, or at the experienced level, at the level of the 'total man', one can only approach the Meaning here in a spiritual sense. Meaning, you can't approach Nature on Nature's terms because Nature is pure determinism and is thoughtless and non-moral. What is meant by 'spiritual' is that, within oneself, in one's own spirit, and in a relationship to *something* about which one has no comprehension, one enters a relationship, and toward which one cannot wilfully act (determine and control) but from which one must be willing to receive. This is where all the submissive rhetorical imagery enters in, which has been taken to absurd but not incomprehensible levels of piety and against which many, myself included, recoil.

And here is the supreme stumbling block:

To become knowledgeable in *that world* - and I will say that intellectual knowledge is a lower but in no sense insignificant rung - requires an uncomfortable surrender. On one hand it is quite obviously 'the natural man', and the man of 'terrestrial will', and in this sense the wilful child who brings himself to the point of flexibility or receptivity to new understanding possibilities, but too also requires a willingness to be led out of the captivity of Nature, but Nature as I have carefully (begun to) define it.

So, the first order for the understanding is to entertain that such things are possible. I would further suggest that this is what 'revelation' means in essence. And it is in response to 'revelation' - the awakening of understanding - where the possibility of remorse as opposed to mere regret (a significant difference) enters the picture: One becomes aware of one's condition and of what conditions one. The possibility of remorse (sentiment and idea that function together through a 'new' consciousness) is the tone or perhaps the note or the 'song' that is heard and which leads one to 'repentance'.

But before one can even begin to understand what 'repentance' is, can mean, should mean, one has to I think understand it in a very different sense: As awareness of the condition we find ourselves in. Human consciousness struggles between two poles, doesn't it? The purely natural and determined pole, and another pole which we do not really know how to define. Is it the 'moral' pole? Is it the pole to which transcendence refers? Is it 'escape' from Nature? Is it 'becoming natural' all over again, or more purely? (But of course it has to be said that at a simpler level 'repentance' is a realisation, within consciousness, that leads into a process of self-reconstruction).

Henry? Are you still here? 'We have seen the enemy and it is us' ...

"I will rather cruelly refer to Henry here as an example of the 'outcome'."

HA!

Assholes and opinions: every one has both and, to most, both stink.


My turn: we live in an absurd world...I fault not a one for trying to make his or her way through it, as best as he or she can, sussing out whatever he or she can in the process. No need for me to condemn since the world does that well enough in its own. By 'world' I mean reality, blind and independent of what folks think of it.

Examples (chosen for their lack of ambiguity)

The homosexual obviously is dis-ordered and dis-eased in his or her thinking. This is obvious to any one considering what sex is for. I don't fault gay folks for wanting to normalize their dis-order ...not gonna participate in their insanity, however. The world, not caring, will not normalze buggery, will not accept a cancer, and cares not a whit for gay self- or collective-esteem. The gay man and woman is marginalized by his and her dis-ease. The world in its workings condemns them.

The transgender man or woman obviously is dis-ordered and dis-eased in his or her thinking. This is obvious to any one considering what 'maleness' and 'femaleness' is, and where these qualities extend out from. I don't fault, Mr. Jenner for example, for wanting to normalize his dis-ease...not gonna participate in his insanity, however. The world, not caring, will not normalize 'Caitlyn trapped in Bruce's body', will not accept a cancer, and cares not a jot for transgender self- or collective-esteem. The trangender man and woman is marginalized by his and her dis-order. The world in its workings condemns them.

The communitarian is yet another head dis-ordered and dis-eased in his or her thinking. The desire to see the individual reduced to mere piece and part of 'society' (society as the communitarian defines it) is obviously in conflict with the natural sense of self-direction and self-efficacy a normal, healthy person has. In my experience: the folks who seek to dissolve the one in favor of the many are the least capable of self-direction. Such folks look to bury themselves (and every one else) in a great buffering, insulating, 'we'. If such follks, in their weakness, could band together and leave the more capable alone, I would have no complaint, but such folks will not just go about their collected business...all must comply, all must contribute, all must submit. The world, however, has no interest in the communitarian's schemes and does not comply. Capable folks continue to 'be', continue to say 'no', and utopia (the grave) is delayed one more day.

Pretty sure my first two examples make me a monster in the eyes of many...them folks can take a flying leap offa short pier. If you're cancerous and want to coddle your illness, that's your business, but I won't hold your hand. I make no appeal to morals, only to the way the way the world works.

Pretty sure, as it was directed at you, Gus and you, Inglorious, my third example just cements your poor assessment of me squarely in place...the both of you (and all the other communitarians [including the gays and the trannies who you communitarians are very much like]) can take a flying leap as well. You all wanna sew yourselves together, ass to mouth, under the banners of 'god' or 'equality' or 'jesus (the ideal if not the reality)' or 'equity' or 'mohamed' or 'rights' or 'liberty' or 'enlightenment' or whatever fiction you can pull out of your asses. As you like, that's your business. Me: not kneeling to fictions, not getting sewn up with you folks. You wanna worship the moon, go ahead. I respectfully decline to participate.

'nuff said.

No, by no means 'nuff said! I broke out in tears when I read it. That post wins you an A++ and applause!

I assume this is the 'third example'?

• The communitarian is yet another head dis-ordered and dis-eased in his or her thinking. The desire to see the individual reduced to mere piece and part of 'society' (society as the communitarian defines it) is obviously in conflict with the natural sense of self-direction and self-efficacy a normal, healthy person has. In my experience: the folks who seek to dissolve the one in favor of the many are the least capable of self-direction. Such folks look to bury themselves (and every one else) in a great buffering, insulating, 'we'. If such follks, in their weakness, could band together and leave the more capable alone, I would have no complaint, but such folks will not just go about their collected business...all must comply, all must contribute, all must submit. The world, however, has no interest in the communitarian's schemes and does not comply. Capable folks continue to 'be', continue to say 'no', and utopia (the grave) is delayed one more day.

I can work with this. But later....

Right now 3 mysterious Waika shamans who walked for three months across Venezuela to get here, have arrived, silent and a little grim, and bid me to prepare myself for the virola-snuff (rapé) ceremony. Just now they are slaughtering a tapir and preparing the herbal anointment that I will slather over my body, and then the parrot feathers, the jungle ointments ...

Here's the home video from last month.

I promise a report a bit later. When I am purified and clear as a bell!

Wow! I'll admit you surprised me, Henry. Great post!

Like Gus, I'll get back back to you with the third example.

____________________

"Tolerance and Apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." ― Aristotle

In The Last Superstition, Edward Feser puts forward what I think are some powerful arguments for Aristotelian philosophy. I agree where he says. “Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought” (emphasis his). The demise of the Occident is inevitable inasmuch two of Aristotle's four causes, formal and final, are rejected. I do not mourn the demise of the Occident for this reason: it's a simple case of 'be careful what you wish for,' and the wish was for not having to answer to a Formal Cause or Final Cause (beautifully illustrated in the first two examples).

Nevertheless, it does disturb me that the West is so eager to appease inferior, howbeit more vital cultures in the name of “tolerance.”

henry quirk wrote: The desire to see the individual reduced to mere piece and part of 'society' (society as the communitarian defines it) is obviously in conflict with the natural sense of self-direction and self-efficacy a normal, healthy person has.

Like I said, my quarrel of the with the atheist's skepticism is not in the least that it denies the existence of God; it is that it denies the existence of man as man.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but human beings are innately social creatures or "communitarian"; they are dominated by the craving of belongingness. (Just visit any high school campus to see it in action.) Like it or not, the individual is part and parcel of society. It is literally true: “No man lives unto himself.” Yet, it is also true that this is in conflict with "the natural sense of self-direction and self-efficacy a normal, healthy person has," but that's exactly why fostering values is so vital.

"Relationships exist between two objects, but three or more objects eventuate a system, and such a system is much more than just an enlarged or complex relationship. This distinction is vital, for in a cosmic system the individual members are not connected with each other except in relation to the whole and through the individuality of the whole."

In my experience: the folks who seek to dissolve the one in favor of the many are the least capable of self-direction. Such folks look to bury themselves (and every one else) in a great buffering, insulating, 'we'. If such follks, in their weakness, could band together and leave the more capable alone, I would have no complaint, but such folks will not just go about their collected business...all must comply, all must contribute, all must submit. The world, however, has no interest in the communitarian's schemes and does not comply. Capable folks continue to 'be', continue to say 'no', and utopia (the grave) is delayed one more day.

The world is very much interested in the "communitarian's schemes." It's why nations exist in the first place.

The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. You simply cannot establish the "brotherhood of men" while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God.

54:1.3 (613.5) Liberty is a self-destroying technique of cosmic existence when its motivation is unintelligent, unconditioned, and uncontrolled. True liberty is progressively related to reality and is ever regardful of social equity, cosmic fairness, universe fraternity, and divine obligations.

54:1.4 (613.6) Liberty is suicidal when divorced from material justice, intellectual fairness, social forbearance, moral duty, and spiritual values. Liberty is nonexistent apart from cosmic reality, and all personality reality is proportional to its divinity relationships.

54:1.5 (613.7) Unbridled self-will and unregulated self-expression equal unmitigated selfishness, the acme of ungodliness. Liberty without the associated and ever-increasing conquest of self is a figment of egoistic mortal imagination. Self-motivated liberty is a conceptual illusion, a cruel deception. License masquerading in the garments of liberty is the forerunner of abject bondage.

54:1.6 (614.1) True liberty is the associate of genuine self-respect; false liberty is the consort of self-admiration. True liberty is the fruit of self-control; false liberty, the assumption of self-assertion. Self-control leads to altruistic service; self-admiration tends towards the exploitation of others for the selfish aggrandizement of such a mistaken individual as is willing to sacrifice righteous attainment for the sake of possessing unjust power over his fellow beings.

54:1.7 (614.2) Even wisdom is divine and safe only when it is cosmic in scope and spiritual in motivation.

"You simply cannot establish the "brotherhood of men" while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God."

Got no interest in the 'brotherhood of men'...humans are sociable creatures, yes, but while many are more so, a small few are less so...I skew toward the solitary. As for the 'sky father', if he exists, I'm bettin' he's more like Howard's Crom than anything else (which is to say: you're on your own).

Again: I got no call to condemn or intervene in your (or any one's) schemes to establish utopia (as any of you see it) cuz you all got a snowball's chance in hell of making a go of any of those schemes. Good luck, though.