Philosophy Now Forum

Arising_uk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2017 1:39 am

Nick_A wrote:If you don't know what it means to educate rather than indoctrinate, methods are meaningless for you. ...

I know the difference and that is why I know that that is exactly what you propose, indoctrination. Specifically an indoctrination into your religious beliefs.

For example I assert that teaching conscious attention skills is essential for an educated as opposed to an indoctrinated human being. ...

Will you be teaching Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, English, History, Geography, Art, Music, et al, along with these 'conscious attention' skills?

You don't know what conscious attntion is and how it differs from directed or reactive attention so there is no sense in introducing it to dedicated secularists insisting on indoctrination.

Why not? After all our kids would be going to your school if you got your way so surely we have the right to know what you'll be up to.

I have my own ideas about what 'conscious attention' skills are but I doubt they are the same as yours as I'm guessing yours will be about your 'God' in some way. What will you do with the kids who have other 'god's' than yours?

fooloso4 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2017 1:35 am Nick_A:

In the pure state, a person remember what the soul is born with which are expressions of the good and apriori knowledge.

But you are not in a “pure state”. You are merely repeating what you have been told and although you believe it to be true, you do not know if what you have been told is true. The acceptance of mythological tales is not knowledge and is not philosophy.

However a person can also remember what the soul has acquired ...

You have not remembered having acquired the knowledge of the good. I did not ask about “a person”, I asked about you. You simply accept a myth as the truth.

You have not answered the question. As I said the first time I asked the question: And now, once again, the dance of equivocation …

“The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. ~ Simone Weil

As a secularist you are limited to belief and denial. You either believe or deny and argue on that basis. You don't respect contemplation as a quality of an open mind.

You want me to blindly believe or deny as a secularist does.

I prefer contemplation and letting the truth open from a higher level of reconciliation like a blooming flower.

fooloso4 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:48 amYou hope that what you believe is true but you have no knowledge that any of it is true. You believe that the truth will be revealed through contemplation. The thing is though that you do not STFU and contemplate. You come here criticize those who do not share your beliefs and talk as if what you belief is not simply what you believe but is higher knowledge. Don't tell us what is at the end of a road you have not traveled.

The problem is not secular intolerance it is secular tolerance. Secularism treats your beliefs the same as it treats others. It does not prevent you from holding or expressing these beliefs but it does not elevate them above others. It does not treat them as special. They lack the merit to rise above the others on its own and so you lash out and blame everyone else for your own failure. It is not that the Great Beast rejects religion or spiritual concerns. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. It is simply that you have failed to persuade those with such interests.

The question has nothing to do with what I or other secularists are limited to. The question is whether you are merely “open to remembering the good” or do you remember and thereby know it? Saying what secularists are limited to is just evasion.

No, I want you to answer a simple question. The question says nothing about blind belief but if you believe that you can remember the good or if you have remembered it.

Your little game of evasion is transparent. You hope that what you believe is true but you have no knowledge that any of it is true. You believe that the truth will be revealed through contemplation. The thing is though that you do not STFU and contemplate. You come here criticize those who do not share your beliefs and talk as if what you belief is not simply what you believe but is higher knowledge. Don't tell us what is at the end of a road you have not traveled.

The problem is not secular intolerance it is secular tolerance. Secularism treats your beliefs the same as it treats others. It does not prevent you from holding or expressing these beliefs but it does not elevate them above others. It does not treat them as special. They lack the merit to rise above the others on its own and so you lash out and blame everyone else for your own failure. It is not that the Great Beast rejects religion or spiritual concerns. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. It is simply that you have failed to persuade those with such interests.

Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:46 am

Fooloso4 wrote:The problem is not secular intolerance it is secular tolerance. Secularism treats your beliefs the same as it treats others. It does not prevent you from holding or expressing these beliefs but it does not elevate them above others. It does not treat them as special. They lack the merit to rise above the others on its own and so you lash out and blame everyone else for your own failure. It is not that the Great Beast rejects religion or spiritual concerns. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. It is simply that you have failed to persuade those with such interests.

No. Secular intolerance is an attitude which expresses contempt for any conscious attempt to open the mind to the experience of eros. It treats them all as meaningless so are meaningless in the mind of the secularist and the Great Beast becomes their god. My concern is for the minority who have not yet spiritually died to the human connection with higher consciousness.

The devout, like Nick, should be grateful for the fact that western secular(ish) societies are far more civilised and understanding and tolerant of human differences than theocracies.

Simone Weil has observed: "There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."
- William Robert Miller (ed.), The New Christianity (New York: Delacorte Press 1967) p 267; in Paul Schilling,
God in an age of atheism (Abingdon: Nashville 1969) p 17

All created things refuse to be for me as ends. Such is God’s extreme mercy towards me. And that very thing is what constitutes evil. Evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world.

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

By putting all our desire for good into a thing we make that thing a condition of our existence. But we do not on that account make of it a good. Merely to exist is not enough for us.

The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other and there is no end to this. They are intermediaries leading to God. We have to experience them as such.

The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not know how to use them. We thought they were intended to have houses built upon them. We have erected skyscrapers on them to which we ceaselessly add storeys. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them, and that by passing along them we go towards God.

Only he who loves God with a supernatural love can look upon means simply as means.

Power (and money, power’s master key) is means at its purest. For that very reason, it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

This world, the realm of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing except means. Our will is for ever sent from one means to another like a billiard ball.

All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If, however, he is totally devoted to me, he does not exist any longer, and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.

Desire is evil and illusory, yet without desire we should not seek for that which is truly absolute, truly boundless. We have to have experienced it. Misery of those beings from whom fatigue takes away that supplementary energy which is the source of desire.
Misery also of those who are blinded by desire. We have to fix our desire to the axis of the poles.

What is it a sacrilege to destroy? Not that which is base, for that is of no importance. Not that which is high, for, even should we want to, we cannot touch that. The metaxu. The metaxu form the region of good and evil.

No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.

The true earthly blessings are metaxu. We can respect those of others only in so far as we regard those we ourselves possess as metaxu. This implies that we are already making our way towards the point where it is possible to do without them. For example, if we are to respect foreign countries, we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.

All the faculties being freely exercised without becoming mixed, starting from a single, unique principle. It is the microcosm, the imitation of the world. Christ according to Saint Thomas. The just man of the Republic. When Plato speaks of specialization he speaks of the specialization of man’s faculties and not of the specialization of men; the same applies to hierarchy. The temporal having no meaning except by and for the spiritual, but not being mixed with the spiritual—leading to it by nostalgia, by reaching beyond itself. It is the temporal seen as a bridge, a metaxu. It is the Greek and Provençal vocation.

Civilization of the Greeks. No adoration of force. The temporal was only a bridge. Among the states of the soul they did not seek intensity but purity.

__Excerpted from Simone Weil‘s Gravity and Grace. First French edition 1947. Translated by Emma Crawford. English language edition 1963. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London

How does someone remember the Good? The good is beyond the limitations of time and space.

Yes I have remembered the truth of thou shall not kill for example.

I am discussing philosophy as the love of wisdom. This includes the idea of objective right and wrong as an attribute of objective conscience reflecting universal meaning and purpose.

Secular intolerance is an attitude which expresses contempt for any conscious attempt to open the mind to the experience of eros.

This paraphrases exactly what Fooloso was saying.

Are you now pretending you have not appealed time and again to Plato’s myth of anamnesis? According to the myth, which you have insisted in not a myth, knowledge of the good is in the soul but forgotten at birth. To remember the good is to remember the knowledge you forgot at birth. So you either remember and know again or you do not know. You do not know and your little gig of evasion goes on and on. The reason for the evasion is obvious. Without knowledge your claims are nothing more than belief and opinion, and thus are not elevated above other beliefs and opinions.

Many of us have experienced meditative and contemplative states. A feeling is not knowledge. The issue is not the reality of the state but the claims you make about objective reality and objective values based on your being "open to an experience" (the equivocation of is amusing).

Is this something you had forgotten? Were you a mass murderer until you remembered you should not kill?

The idea of objective right and wrong, of universal meaning and purpose is not the same as knowledge of them. What you fail to realize, or perhaps it is just another pretense, is that without knowledge they cannot be placed on another level above opinion. The desire to move beyond opinion is not sufficient to transcend it. You are no different than those of us you criticize, you too are in the cave arguing opinion.

Have the secular police done anything to prevent you from your conscious attempt to open the mind? What secularists are intolerant of, and rightly so, is the pious fraud who demands that others conform to his beliefs, that whatever it is he attempts is what others must attempt. The only intolerance here is your intolerance of allowing others to seek and follow the paths of their own choice or making. You are intolerant of anything but your own beliefs, going so far as to accuse Christians of not being Christians. Excluding others by claiming that you are "of God’s people", and so, if they do not agree with you they cannot be of God’s people. The circle of self-delusion is complete when you call your intolerance "universalism".

Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:32 pm

Greta wrote:The devout, like Nick, should be grateful for the fact that western secular(ish) societies are far more civilised and understanding and tolerant of human differences than theocracies.

I have written the same idea countless times and even quoted Simone on it:

Simone Weil has observed: "There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."

The theistic abuses you refer to are just the results of secularizing the god concept in order to serve Man. Atheism helps to refute this absurdity.

As usual you just carry on about things you don’t understand. All we can remember of the GOOD is the forms which is a big thing.

According to Socrates and Plato, the most important forms of knowledge come not from instruction, but by a re-awakening of already existing dormant or latent knowledge. This is called anamnesis (an- = un-, amnesis = forgetting, as in amnesia; ).

It involves only certain forms of knowledge: moral (e.g., what is goodness?), existential (e.g., what is the authentic 'me'?), spiritual/metaphysical, and mathematical.

(http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/wor ... nesis.htm)

You deny soul knowledge so will deny any of my experiences.

People experience many things and most are just fantasy. What does this have to do with objective conscience?

But first a person must admit that they are a slave to opinion. If a person wants to be less of a slave they have to admit they are a slave. I am willing to admit it . You want to defend your slavery.

This is just idiotic and just a typical usual expression of blind secular intolerance.

Once again, it is not a matter of what I deny but a question about whether your claims are just a matter of opinion or if they are things you know from experience. We all know the answer but it is both telling and entertaining to see you trying to evade the question. You avoid answering because an honest answer would mean that you do not have objective knowledge of the good, that your opinions are on an equal footing with those of the rest of us.

Exactly! Your experience of the "openness to experience of objective consciousness" has nothing to do with having attained objective conscience. What you call objective conscience is just fantasy. Here again I note your equivocation. Being open to an experience is not the same as actually having had that experience. You know no more about objective reality and objective values then the rest of us, which is to say, nothing.

A confession? You are a slave to opinion. Admitting it and then parroting those opinions you are a slave to as if they are truths means nothing. You are not less of a slave because you say you are a slave. You become less of a slave when you are able to be critical of those opinions and realize that you have no idea whether they are right or wrong. You clearly are unwilling to do that. Instead you invoke claims of objective meaning and purpose and objective value, when all this really means is that you have certain opinions about meaning and purpose and value.

Right, allowing others to seek and follow a path of their own making or choosing is an expression of secular intolerance, while your intolerance of others who do not accept your perversion of Plato is an expression of tolerance. Indoctrinating children to your views instead of allowing their families decide what is an appropriate education for their children is an expression of tolerance. You can call it teaching “conscious attention skills” but it is nothing more than cult practice, planting absolutist ideas in susceptible minds and turning them against their families and society.

."Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." ~Simone Weil

Nick_A wrote: ↑Fri Aug 25, 2017 3:56 amI’ve been fortunate to have had the experience of objective conscience which has allowed me to experience the difference in quality between objective and subjective conscience. You have only experienced subjective indoctrinated conscience so cannot be expected to know the difference.

It is objective knowledge of the vertical direction leading to the good.

You are closed to it and find those open to it to be entertaining.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the experience of objective conscience which has allowed me to experience the difference in quality between objective and subjective conscience.

The Oracle considered Socrates to have the greatest wisdom because he could admit he knew nothing.

You are busy defending opinions of the ground and arguing right and wrong as the purpose of philosophy.

The horror of your secular intolerance denies choice through intimidation.

You are even against conscious attention …