Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities

  • Thread starter Thread starter altmin
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 604
  • Views: 11K
  • Politics 
doctor_octopus said:
Take this God shit elsewhere.
Click to expand...
The issue is that we need to reach voters and many of those voters believe in this stuff.

Maybe we could use a specific thread if the conversation here is to detailed and broad for the score of this thread.
 
breepf said:
Kierkegaard never wavered in his Catholicism because he was, in fact, a Lutheran or, at the very least, a Protestant. It's why his interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story recapitulates a grace-works distinction, i.e. why he ultimately prizes the faith motivating Abraham's actions rather than the actions themselves. You might also add that it's why Kierkegaard gives zero shits about what was happening to Isaac, a point of real consternation for Jewish and Catholic interpreters over the years.
Click to expand...
Haha. I knew that he was a Lutheran. Then I forgot, apparently. I think it's because his cloistered life, while not exactly monastic, seemed sort of monastic and I guess I associate that with Catholicism. I've most read Kierkegaard from a philosophical perspective rather than a theological one.

I don't think the grace/works distinction is very helpful for assessing Kierkegaard's interpretation of Abraham. I didn't read him as justifying Abraham at all. In fact, I think his position is much closer to "Abraham wasn't at all justified in doing it." It's been a long time now since I've really thought about Kierkegaard deeply and longer since I read any of his books, but that's how I interpret it.

I also don't think the "zero shits" critique is fair. He's not attempting to provide a comprehensive account of the story. He's just pondering Abraham's mindset (and incidentally Fear and Trembling was a product of his Johannes de silencio persona, raising questions about just how much of it represents Kierkegaard's own views), musing on the nature of the "higher" form of mental processing, the teleological suspension of the ethical. It's true that Isaac is more McGuffin than man in Kierkegaard's version, but Isaac isn't really central to the point Kierkegaard is making. We don't normally say that a person gives zero shits about something just because they focus on something else.

That said, it seems like you are pointing to the ethical quandary that exists at the intersection of the suspension of the ethical and real life. And that's a valid question to ask. I think there's one really poor interpretation that is easily discarded: that the knight of faith is "better" than an ethical person, or that faith is a better form of self-regard than ethics. He calls the teleological suspension of the ethical a "higher" form, if I recall correctly, which isn't the same thing. I remember reading a couple of decades ago a claim that distinguishing X and Y is a higher-order mental process than finding similarities between X and Y. Whether that's true is irrelevant: the point is that even if it was, we wouldn't be saying that distinctions are better than similarities, or that we'd be better with more distinctions and fewer comparisons, or anything of the sort.

But that only answers the charge that Kierkegaard would support Christian fascism. It doesn't answer the question: "what should Abraham do, having been called by God to kill his son." Killing his son is the wrong answer -- unless Abraham was motivated by genuine faith, thus raising the question of how Abraham would know that about himself. But disobeying God is also the wrong answer, at least within a paradigm that assumes its participants to be attempting to follow God's will. And Kierkegaard never really talks much, at least not that I remember, as to what a person should do when the requirements of faith and ethics conflict. That's why he's considered one of the creators of existentialism, not one of its finishers so to speak. He was better at asking questions than providing answers.
 
an0maly said:
I am going to concede this as a standoff, because I don't know how to find any percentages, but all the religious people and most of the religious public doctrine I have seen points to things like the efficacy of prayer and god's providence as real world evidence. They take it that way and I do not, as contra temps research on prayer not doing anything and the basic data of most religious people being more often poor and suffering (complex nexus of stuff there, in America, and worldwide, but anyway).

Long years ago, long in two respects, I read through all his works. To me, most of the reading was like trying to jog through mud, but I get his stance. I don't think that path leads to success in human realms, and the subjective focus defies societal benefits of the awareness of other perspectives on actual, workable and tested means of improving things for people. The idea of a leap of faith in personal choice is bound up with forgetting ethical acts that objective research can demonstrate helps our species as a whole. I could go on but enough said, I think there.

It does not. This is a major error. You can read what I wrote again, but atheism is the lack of one single belief. An atheist can (possibly) doubt or hate science, they can have dozens or hundreds of other metaphysical beliefs but simply lack the specific god belief. The a- prefix means a lack, not a privileging stance on anything else. In the seventies a missionary to the Amazon discovered the Pirahas tribe, who had zero notions of any god or gods, or even of an afterlife. They were atheists, zero theism, and did not arrive at atheism in the way that I did, or the way that most atheists in Western society do, which is to find ourselves in the stance due to valuing facts, evidence and logic. Atheism is nothing other than the lack of one single belief, however the lack arises.

One cannot prove a negative. I can't disprove my invented notion above of flying arctic giraffes (they could be invisible, etc.) One can provide a provisional rule-out in science research, as I wrote about, but that is not proving in a permanent way.

These assertions are separate and mostly beyond anything but cultural invention that is designed to be free from objective analysis. When I use the general term universe, I am attempting to discuss all that exists. These "outside" all that exists propositions seem to me like a nonstarter for any discussion. It's to me like saying, "I have my own view of a square, and my view is it is a circle." Okay, I cannot do a thing with this in conversation.
Click to expand...
1. I don't recognize the version of atheism you're presenting here. In ordinary conversation, atheism refers to the belief that God does not exist. That's my understanding. Maybe your version of atheism is also recognized. I'm not going to argue about it, as this might just be terminology.

2. Using the term "universe" to describe "all that exists" begs a lot of questions. You're attempting to use a definition to wipe away actual philosophical quandaries. For instance, the first cause problem is a thorn for every theory of the cosmos. Pretty much, the options are: 1) accept that something outside the universe exists and is responsible for it; or 2) deny that causation is a fundamental concept of the universe. I'd go with the second choice anyway, so I wouldn't have to decide on the first -- but it's also true that causality is a really important part of how humans think. Quantum mechanics is something of a rejoinder and it tends (in my view) to model the universe in a way that de-emphasizes causality, but still.

Let's assume the universe is expanding for the moment (which it probably is). What does that mean? For a physicist, it refers to the observable fact that galaxies are moving away from each other. But does it mean that there's a coordinate point in space that exists now that didn't exist before? And if so, what was "there" before? The second question suggests that the first question is best answered in the negative, and various cosmologies usually account for this problem by saying that the coordinate was there all along; it was just "closer" in some sense to the other particles than it is now. But that theory breaks down at the singularity of the Big Bang, meaning that we can't have any insight as to whether there is something "beyond."

3. You are right that there can be no scientific conversation about God. I guess that's ultimately my point. And if scientific conversation is what you're interested in -- I mean, there are way more scientists these days than theologians. Saying you don't to want to have any other conversation isn't exactly saying there's nothing to talk about; it's saying that you don't know how to talk about it, which isn't the same thing.

That's why I think the stuff about "you can't prove a negative" is mistaken. You can't prove a positive about God either, which again is different than saying God doesn't exist. Assume God exists, and tell me what would be different about the universe if so. Nothing (at least on some theories of God). So science makes no prediction about God at all. That leaves the god-denier left with Occam's Razor or some other hermeneutic principle, neither of which are actually scientific or grounded in anything at all. The god-denier and the theist are situated in the same place.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top