That assertion does not follow from the stated premise. There is no such thing as “truth”. Truth is what is considered to be objective knowledge. All knowledge is subjective. Nothing can be known that cannot be verified empirically. The notion of objective knowledge is not empirical. The limit of knowledge is the singular human mind. There is no “collective conscious” or knowledge that is shared across minds. Because every person has his own, distinct mind, all knowledge is subjective to all people.
Why are you sharing your own subjective drivel with us then? It is not provable empirically, so what makes you think any of us are interested in hearing it? In fact, why do you even believe it? You seem to be breaking your own rule there.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
orion wrote:
Professor X wrote:
orion wrote:
Professor X wrote:
I think the entire population knows what the real problem is. Religion itself isn’t the real problem. Humans would find some reason to hate each other no matter how many aspects of culture you trimmed away.
And you think that a form of belief system that has no empirical foundation, clearly divides people and has a built-in lack of tolerance is exactly what a doctor would prescribe such a species?
If people truly understood what the bible is speaking of, they wouldn’t be teaching a lack of tolerance. Humans spread hatred. Maybe it is simply in us to be divisive. Jesus used to commune with the outcasts of society. He didn’t spit on them or cast them away.
If people truly understood what the OT is telling us, is that Jahwe is a God of genocide…
Is someone following Christs teachings, while seriously doubting that he is the son of God a Christian?
Would it change something if he believed in an universal builder, without necessarily connecting those two?
Someone doubting whether Christ is Christ would obviously not be a Christian. Isn’t that painfully obvious? A God of genocide? How about you get real specific.[/quote]
I thought (and I’m not being sarcastic here) that Thomas doubted that Christ was Christ.
I thought (and I’m not being sarcastic here) that Thomas doubted that Christ was Christ.[/quote]
John 20: 24-29
"Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’
So he said to them, ‘Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.’
And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, ‘Peace to you!’ Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.’
And Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’
Jesus said to him, ‘Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’"
He doubted that they had seen Jesus resurrected.
It is hard to understand exactly when the disciples became born again Christians and how their spiritual state changed through Jesus life, death, resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit.
One kind of difficult passage is when Jesus said to Peter in Luke 22:32(KJV):
“But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”
There is controversy there though, and a lot of translations read along the lines of “when you have turned back to Me.”
What we do know for sure though, is that the Holy Spirit was not given to the believers until the day of Pentecost. The fact that God’s Spirit now dwells permanently in the believer changes things.
Of course every Christian will struggle with doubts at times, but a believer will not allow those doubts to influence his behavior. Instead, we cast away the doubts and pray for more faith.
I’m under the impression, that the books of Old Testament have been edited. It would be strange if they weren’t. The Book of Kings have been credited to Jeremiah.
Yes, I know that Kings is attributed to Jeremiah and that he was working from other texts.
What do you mean “The books of the Old Testament have been edited?”
[/quote]
That, what you just said. Jeremiah was working from other texts. He rewrote the story.
[quote]orion wrote:
Dustin wrote:
Whether there is a God or not(I believe there is), I’m thankful that I live in a country/world that the vast majority of people do believe in a higher power.
I shudder to think what the world would be like if this was not the case.
Dustin
like large parts of western Europe?[/quote]
Atheists are a minority in Europe, the U.S., and the world for that matter.
European culture didn’t flourish through (or because of) Atheism.
[quote]karva wrote:
To be precise, you grant every universal lecitimacy in its popular notion. Otherwise there would be no way to discuss about it.[/quote]
You make a valid point about the nature of linguistic universals (language). When I write and speak to others, I obviously have to make certain assumptions about their capacity to recieve and interpret my meaning. Due to the seperation of minds mentioned earlier, there is no way for me to verify these assumptions empirically.
[quote]JPBear wrote:
I completely reject the existence of all universals and follow empiricism to it’s precise, surgical limit. Ethical and moral relativism come with the territory.
Well that’s kind of scary, but I’m just curious, how is that working out for you in real life?
[/quote]
Fantastic. In all seriousness, you and quite a few other people here could benefit greatly from reading the following book. I wish there was a way for me to quote some of the chapters. It is some of the best writing on individualist/egoist philosophies that I have come across and this is despite the fact that it is NOT a philosophical text – it is written for the common person and is immensely readable and understandable.
Please consider checking it out at your local library. I think many people here could take something from it. It’s far better than Rand, for instance.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
Unless the verification can change from moment to moment, then there are some rules outside of perception. To believe that all existence is entirely subjective and not mutually sensed is a far more ambitious claim than to propose that there exists a world outside of us which may be known imperfectly. In fact, you might say that your claim is a very metaphysical one.[/quote]
Well, in that case, call me amibitious, because that’s precisely the position I take.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
All human knowledge is subjective only in the sense that it must be known by a mind. The knowledge may be objective, however, which means that it may be corroborated by other minds and by observations. It seems plain enough that there is a world that exists independent of our perception of it. Solipsism is silly.[/quote]
Agreed, but with a stipulation: that notion of an external world, while certainly plausible sounding, can be no more than an assumption. It cannot, by definition, be “known”, for it cannot be verified empirically. However, I can’t agree with your notion that mass acceptance of a concept grants it objectivity. That type of thinking is better suited to “softer” philosophies, such as ethics. In metaphysics and ontology, we have to abide by the rules of hard science. Argumentum ad populum is not a valid method of advancing a position.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
We can quibble over the reliability of intellect and senses (both can be fooled). It’s hard to approach Truth. We can, in the final analysis, only approach it (some moreso than others). There are plenty of things that can be known non-empirically. Mathematical truths, for example. [/quote]
Not by the definition which holds knowledge to be the full extent of that which is empirically verifiable. Radical nominalists such as myself do not grant legitimacy to mathematical abstractions. We reject the notion of an infinitude of numbers. Empirical credibility is limited to applied mathematics. If you’d like, you can read about this in-depth here:
[quote]nephorm wrote:
How do you know that? Once you start making claims about all knowledge being subjective, you lose the ability to make claims about the human mind. After all, we could all be some “master-mind’s” dream. That’s silly philosophy with a small p, unless you’re Descartes, but that’s what your position reduces you to.
[/quote]
The answer is, I don’t “know” it. By my own definition, it can’t be known. That makes it yet another assumption on my part. And now, I’ll provide a word of clarification.
Every statement uttered by every person in every language, relies upon a pyramid of hidden assumptions; a hierarchy, if you will. At the base of this pyramid lie the fundamental assumptions governing the nature of “communication”: the notion that other, organic entities exist apart from the individual speaker, yet comparable to him in their ability to recieve sensory input and process it through mental cognition. The speaker further assumes that these other, individual, human entities, will recieve linguistic sensory input from him and interpret it in a certain way, as intended by him. All other assumptions (and they are countless in number) grow from these premises.
Examined from an external, 3rd person perspective, it becomes clear that person-to-person communication simply does not exist. There is no way of transferring (“communicating”) memetic concepts (“ideas”) intact between seperate minds. What language becomes, when stripped of its underlying assumptions, is a system employed by humans which uses a set of stimuli to elicit a desired response from others. I’ll simplify this with an anology to another system of human interaction which relies upon physical means of sensory-input. Let’s say you club someone over the head to get a desired response. The action of clubbing them is the stimuli, in this scenario, provided by the so-called “speaker” in order to elicit a particular response from the “reciever”. Now, consider the same scenario in the case of verbal interaction. The speaker, once again, is merely trying to elicit a desired response from his target through the use of an external stimulus – it just so happens that in this case, the stimulus is language. That is the basis of all human interaction. When we speak, we are, effectively, clubbing ourselves over each other’s heads. We use different clubs (words) to bring about different responses.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
If you followed empiricism to its true limit, you’d realize that empiricism can make very limited claims and, in fact, cannot make any claims whatsoever about whatever reality exists independent of human observational capacity. If there is “stuff” out there that is independent of us, that we sense, then whatever statements we make could be measured against the way that “stuff” really is.[/quote]
And how are we to determine just WHAT that stuff “really is”? Or am I missing something?
[quote]nephorm wrote:
Well, it’s easy to call anyone anything when you make up your own definitions.[/quote]
EVERYONE makes “their own definitions”. That is the essence of my philosophy.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
How can you agree with it? It’s not very empirical.[/quote]
They recorded empirical observations and drew general conclusions from them. I happen to agree with those conclusions based on my own, empirical observations.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
Clinical Psychiatrists torture people until they convert to Christianity? Why are we not fighting this?
Obviously hyperbole isn’t denied to an empirical nominalist.[/quote]
Yes, it is my firm convinction that the latter group tortures individuals for the purpose of making them conform to the psychological norms of their society. The notion of altering and supposedly “fixing” the brain chemistry of “insane” individuals is all but identical to the Nazi practice of surgical experimentation on live, conscious patients.
I never said that mass acceptance of a concept grants it objectivity. That’s just silly. I said that what objectivity means (in the sense of being objectively knowable is that something can, at least in theory, be corroborated by other minds. Objectivity at a deeper level means to exist independently of observation or opinion, which is the “stuff” I was talking about earlier. But in terms of the human experience, objective truth has the quality that it can be understood by more than one mind, that the experience can be shared. Those that are capable of sharing in the experience might be elite (high levels of mathematics, for example). So no, it is not an argumentum ad populum. And certainly, even the elite may be wrong, which is why the pursuit of Truth is a process.
While we cannot, I think, truly see the world objectively, we can come closer and closer.
That is intellectual laziness, and that’s all I can say about that. That, and, I hope you don’t build or design things for a living.
I have never been a fan of Quine.
Yes, I understand all that.
One answer (Popper’s) is a continual process of falsifying theories. I differ from Popper by saying that I think dialectic has its own value in finding truth. We may never be capable of saying just what it really is… but we can come closer and closer to it.
I really don’t think that’s philosophy.
You have a weird idea what empirical study is, I think.
[quote]
Yes, it is my firm convinction that the latter group tortures individuals for the purpose of making them conform to the psychological norms of their society. The notion of altering and supposedly “fixing” the brain chemistry of “insane” individuals is all but identical to the Nazi practice of surgical experimentation on live, conscious patients.[/quote]
Allowing someone to not be quite so schizophrenic is equivalent to removing their eyes, or genitalia, or killing them outright without even benefit of anesthetic.
If this is the sort of moral logic that your “philosophy” leads to, I’m glad I don’t buy it.
No offense, but this is the sort of stuff that most college freshmen or sophomores suddenly have occur to them when they stop for a while to ponder how they know what they know. I grew bored of these kinds of debates in college. That college professors get paid to continue to spout off on these sorts of fruitless ideas is beyond me.
The fact that we experience the world through imperfect sensory and intellectual faculties is a problem. I realized that as a small child. And for a time, I too thought similarly to you. After all, there is no way to truly verify the existence of anything beyond myself, loosely understood as myself.
Great.
But the world appears to have some sort of order to it, and appears to have other people that populate it, and appears to have immutable, non-arbitrary rules. Your position is less in-line with experience than mine is, and I doubt you can really live your life keeping all that nonsense in mind all the time.
I was coming here to make a point about something new related to this issue . . . but catching up on recent posts I see there’s no point. It’s past rational discussion. Gotta love the internet.
