For the discussion of all things philosophical.
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The cup is on the table.
Mencken, H.L. wrote:• The struggle is always the same, but in its details it differs in between ages. There was a time when it was mainly a combat between the natural instincts of the individual and his yearning to get into Heaven. That was an unhealthy time, for throttling the instincts is almost as deleterious as breathing bad air: it makes for an unpleasant clamminess. The Age of Faith, seen in retrospect, looks somehow pale and puffy: one admires its saints and anchorites without being conscious of any very active desire to shake hands with them and smell them. Today the yearning to get into Heaven is in abeyance, at least among the vast majority of mankind, and so the ancient struggle takes a new form. In the main, it is a struggle of man with society – a conflict between his desire to be respected and his impulse to follow his own bent. Society usually wins. There are to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them. What was once a great itch for long flights and the open spaces is gradually converted into a fading memory and nostalgia, sometimes stimulating, but more often merely bashful. The free man, made in God’s image, is converted into a Freudian case. Democracy produces swarms of such men, and their secret shames and sorrows, I believe, are largely responsible for the generally depressing tone of democratic society. Old Feud, living in a more urbane and civilized world, paid too little heed to that sort of repression. He assumed fatuously that what was repressed was always, or nearly always, something intrinsically wicked, or, at all events, anti-social – for example, the natural impulse to drag a pretty woman behind the barn, regardless of her husband’s protests. But under democracy that is only half the story. The democrat with a yearning to shine before his fellows must not only repress all common varieties of natural sin; he must also repress many of the varieties of natural decency. His impulse to tell the truth as he sees it, to speak his mind freely, to be his own man, comes into early and painful collision with the democratic dogma that such things are not nice – that the most worthy and laudable citizen is that one who is most like all the rest. In youth, as everyone knows, this dogma is frequently challenged and sometimes with great asperity, but the rebellion, taking one case with another, is not of long duration. The campus Nietzsche, at thirty, begins to feel the suction of Rotary.
• Astronomers and physicists, dealing habitually with objects and quantities far beyond the reach of the senses, even with the aid of the most powerful aids that ingenuity has been able to devise, tend almost inevitably to fall into the ways of thinking of men dealing with objects and quantities that do not exist at all, e.g., theologians and metaphysicians. Thus their speculations tend almost inevitably to depart from the field of true science, which is that of precise observation, and to become mere soaring in the empyrean. The process works backward, too. That is to say, their reports of what they pretend actually to see are often very unreliable. It is thus no wonder that, of all men of science, they are the most given to flirting with theology. Nor is it remarkable that, in the popular belief, most astronomers end by losing their minds.
• The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.
• [The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
• No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse. it is not only that the actual evidence they offer is extremely dubious; it is mainly that the great majority of the men they seek to reach are quite incapable of comprehending any evidence, good or bad. They must get at such men through their feelings or resign getting at them altogether.
agree you will. happy you are. use the force to think like the other side:creativesoul wrote:I was being sarcastic chaz. It seems that we agree on the uselessness of claiming that 1. God's will is unknowable 2. God's will is the Truth.
such a pretty belief still, about the concept of god. good thinking, keep it!Truth has nothing to do with the concept of God, other than it's being necessarily presupposed within such a belief.
logically speaking, sounds like some one believes in absolute?Satyr wrote:claim to know the absolute truth
others bad is others good? like word absurdity in absurdism or holocaust in nazism? like atheist and teist could both say: hell no!Does not the faithful man consider the absurdity of his beliefs an indication of his commitment to His God?
would it be too radical to doubt those labels too?call it "radical skepticism" or a self-doubt
perhaps? sounds good question to start another new philosophical thread?Perhaps all philosophy can be ended with a trite sentence:
"I exist"
Youngling, you remind me of Christians who, in their desperate haste to defend their absurdities and to redirect the absence of evidence or arguments, they accuse the ones rejecting their absurdities of being like them: blind believers.Mark Question wrote:logically speaking, sounds like some one believes in absolute?Satyr wrote:claim to know the absolute truth
like non-absolutist would claim to know the non-absolute truth?
coherent or what?
He didn't but he was passing on the communal narrative so that you fucks can get along and find jobs and gt laid.Mark Question wrote:by the schoolway, that was what i didnt get at all. why the hell the teacher was bothering us if he knew what is 1+1!? idiot! Antediluvian bulldozer! Arabian Nightmare! Balkan Beetle!
Youngling, you remind me of Christians who, in their desperate haste to defend their absurdities and to redirect the absence of evidence or arguments, they accuse the ones rejecting their absurdities of being like them: blind believers.Mark Question wrote:logically speaking, sounds like some one believes in absolute?Satyr wrote:claim to know the absolute truth
like non-absolutist would claim to know the non-absolute truth?
coherent or what?
He didn't but he was passing on the communal narrative so that you fucks can get along and find jobs and gt laid.Mark Question wrote:by the schoolway, that was what i didnt get at all. why the hell the teacher was bothering us if he knew what is 1+1!? idiot! Antediluvian bulldozer! Arabian Nightmare! Balkan Beetle!
where is your here? what is your argument? when is your earlier? can you be more precise? i believe that you can and you are not daydreaming or delusional. i believe.Satyr wrote: But here you are repeating the argument I explained earlier.
Youngling, you are now using Socratic dialogues to merely point out that all human conceptions are flimsy and inaccurate...yet you demand accuracy, as if I am pretending to be a god rather than one offering a superior vantage point.Mark Question wrote:where is your here? what is your argument? when is your earlier? can you be more precise? i believe that you can and you are not daydreaming or delusional. i believe.Satyr wrote: But here you are repeating the argument I explained earlier.
thanks! that answer of yours shed some degrees of light on what you was thinking when you wrote that sentence, right? it seemed to me that you argue that i have argued something, or am i looking it wrong? what argument i was repeating in your mind or shall we say opinion? whos argument you have explained earlier? can you raise a little bit your degree of precision about that quite a mystical sounding argument after these long posts? always joy to read your educational stories.Satyr wrote:But here you are repeating the argument I explained earlier.
Why, was it in the dark before?Youngling wrote:thanks! that answer of yours shed some degrees of light on what you was thinking when you wrote that sentence, right?
Are you; have you?Youngling wrote:it seemed to me that you argue that i have argued something, or am i looking it wrong?
It seems reading more than one sentence is difficult.what argument i was repeating in your mind or shall we say opinion?
But here you are repeating the argument I explained earlier.
The notion that the sentence "The truth is there is no truth" or "There is absolutely no absolute" is based on semantics which projects and presupposes what is nowhere in evidence except in the mind and in the symbols the mind uses to express its abstractions.
The person who made it.Youngling wrote:whos argument you have explained earlier?
Definitely.Youngling wrote:can you raise a little bit your degree of precision about that quite a mystical sounding argument after these long posts?
I know...and if you continue in this vain you might challenge the princess in who can pose the most questions in a single post and who can drive someone mad first.Youngling wrote:always joy to read your educational stories.
Odd expressions here, Satyr. You're inverting history. Truth with a capital "T" was presupposed in the classical bottom up approaches. You know, by the likes of Hume and Spinoza. Of course, the 'God' concept played a major role in the thinking, Berkeley's Idealism had forcably instilled doubt in our access to reality, and as a result Truth was largely held to be a matter of only coherence(just like your 'superior' viewpoint holds). Those approaches used self-evident truths(Axioms) and build upwards, not downwards(just like your 'superior' viewpoint holds). It was only after correspondence to fact/reality took hold that we began to climb out of the dark-ages that your 'superior' viewpoint still dwells in, unbeknownst to you.One does not begin with a presumption, like the Truth, and then work backwards. One begins with a perpetuation of ignorance, of weakness, and then build upwards, never placing there what is unnecessary.
creativesoul wrote:I would not dare argue against the psychotherapeutic notion. That much is more than obvious. Dasein gone awry.