Something about this post feels a little insane, but I've started so I'll finish...

traditionally in philosophy, anything that can be said to be is a being — Jamal

That is one I will need a citation for. — Wayfarer

τὰ ὄντα (ta onta) is what appears in ancient Greek philosophy. It's the plural form of the participle of the verb to be and it means things that are, or, to say exactly the same in a different way, beings.

In English versions of Aristotle it has been translated in different ways, often avoiding beings and opting instead for things that are. The Loeb Classical Library notes that it avoids "beings" while at the same time acknowledging that it is a standard translation, that it has the same sense.

The plural neuter form of the participle, ta onta, occurs frequently to indicate things, things that are, beings (but we have tended to avoid the translation 'beings') — Early Greek Philosophy, Volume I: Introductory and Reference Materials

I don't know the reason for the general avoidance of "beings" in translations of Aristotle, but it could be the prevalence of the more modern use, which restricts it to sentient things (subjects of experience if you prefer). This is reasonable in a translation that aims to avoid confusing non-specialists, but it doesn't invalidate the use of "beings" generally in philosophy (to mean "things that are"). At least, it hasn't stopped scholars from continuing to use it.

The main point is that τὰ ὄντα can interchangeably be translated as "things that are" or "beings". In philosophy they usually mean the same.

Aristotle deals with τὰ ὄντα in his Categories and Metaphysics. In those works, τὰ ὄντα is plainly not restricted to sentient individuals or subjects of experience (it can't be, because of what it means).

But to avoid translation issues I won't quote Aristotle directly. Following are quotations from a fairly small and random sample of articles in the search results for the term "beings" on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, showing that it's commonly used in philosophy to mean τὰ ὄντα or "things that are" or "things that can be said to be", especially when the subject under discussion is traditional metaphysics. Many of the quotations are from scholars of ancient and medieval philosophy.

The Categories begins with a strikingly general and exhaustive account of the things there are (ta onta)—beings. According to this account, beings can be divided into ten distinct categories. (Although Aristotle never says so, it is tempting to suppose that these categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the things there are.) They include substance, quality, quantity, and relation, among others. Of these categories of beings, it is the first, substance (ousia), to which Aristotle gives a privileged position. — SEP: Aristotle's Metaphysics

The correlatives form, therefore, a complex structure that is reproduced throughout the ladder and in each one of the beings, from God to a stone, to ontologically explain the continuity among all beings. In each one of them, the chain of the whole of creation is reproduced. — SEP: Ramon Llull

Aristotle announces that there is nonetheless a science of being qua being (Met. iv 4), first philosophy, which takes as its subject matter beings insofar as they are beings and thus considers all and only those features pertaining to beings as such—to beings, that is, not insofar as they are mathematical or physical or human beings, but insofar as they are beings, full stop. — SEP: Aristotle

On Heidegger's interpretation (see Sheehan 1975), Aristotle holds that since every meaningful appearance of beings involves an event in which a human being takes a being as—as, say, a ship in which one can sail or as a god that one should respect—what unites all the different modes of Being is that they realize some form of presence (present-ness) to human beings.

[...]

The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be.

[...]

Moreover, if science may sometimes operate with a sense of awe and wonder in the face of beings, it may point the way beyond the technological clearing, an effect that, as we shall see later, Heidegger thinks is achieved principally by some great art.

By revealing beings as no more than the measurable and the manipulable, technology ultimately reduces beings to not-beings. — SEP: Martin Heidegger

Aristotle’s study does not concern some recondite subject matter known as ‘being qua being’. Rather it is a study of being, or better, of beings—of things that can be said to be—that studies them in a particular way: as beings, in so far as they are beings.

Of course, first philosophy is not the only field of inquiry to study beings. Natural science and mathematics also study beings, but in different ways, under different aspects. The natural scientist studies them as things that are subject to the laws of nature, as things that move and undergo change. That is, the natural scientist studies things qua movable (i.e., in so far as they are subject to change). The mathematician studies things qua countable and measurable. The metaphysician, on the other hand, studies them in a more general and abstract way—qua beings. So first philosophy studies the causes and principles of beings qua beings. — SEP: Aristotle’s Metaphysics

It is not easy to think about God’s relationship to the created world, because without such a world there can be neither space nor time. Not space, because space is nothing more than the existence of bodies, where bodies are beings that possess parts outside of parts, and so constitute the three-dimensional extension that we think of as space. — SEP: Thomas Aquinas

Similarly, according to Aristotle, things in the world are not beings because they stand under some genus, being, but rather because they all stand in a relation to the primary being, which in the Categories he says is substance. This explains in part why he says in the Metaphysics that in order to study being one must study substance. — SEP: Aristotle’s Categories

Recall that for Wolff a being in the most general sense is any possible thing. [...]

Wolff explains:

"A being is called composed which is made up of many parts distinct from each other. The parts of which a composite being is composed constitute a composite through the link which makes the many parts taken together a unit of a definite kind."

In one respect, simple beings and composite beings are not simply two different species of beings. It is not the case, for example, that within the realm of all possible things simple beings exist separate from, and in addition to, composite beings. — SEP: Christian Wolff

Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time, the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand. — SEP: Postmodernism

Forms are marked as auto kath auto beings, beings that are what they are in virtue of themselves. — SEP: Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology

There are pages and pages of this, but I have other sources aside from the SEP if you need them.

Straw poll: who else participating in this thread accepts that rocks are beings? — Wayfarer

I vote "question is unclear".

transcendental idealism and not empirical realism better describes Kant. — Hanover

Your summary of Kant is fine, but here you miss the fact that transcendental idealism and empirical realism are complementary. Kant says it explicitly: he's arguing for both, because they go together. And on the other side, he's against transcendental realism and empirical idealism. This is the structure of his system.

That is one I will need a citation for. — Wayfarer

Still on mobile so it's a hassle.

But I do rather resent being asked for citations. You've been given this information numerous times, often by very knowledgeable people. Is it fair to reject it until they can prove it with quotations? Don't you want to go and check by yourself? I'm not mistaken here, just go and look.

But sure, I might be able to get some stuff together tomorrow.

Not using the built-in search unfortunately.

But there is a way. The Google crawler likes TPF and has indexed most of our content. So you can search Google like this:


Just put that in the Google search box.

EDIT: I just made a correction because I originally got it wrong. It should be site:, not in:

They are different words, obviously. But in common usage the basic concepts to be and to exist seem to be more or less synonymous. 'To exist' does seem to carry the implicit notion of standing out, whereas "to be", perhaps not so much, but this has nothing to do with being, or existing as, a conscious entity, being or existent — Janus

There's a difference in pre-modern philosophy, which is what @Wayfarer is getting at. Something like... existence partakes of being, the latter being more fundamental. I only mentioned it because Wayfarer keeps bringing it up.

I will henceforth agree that anything that exists can be called an existent or an existing thing and that of anything that exists can be said to be. I'll add that as a caveat in all such discussions. Would that help? — Wayfarer

Only if you take the next step, the one that follows: accept that traditionally in philosophy, anything that can be said to be is a being.

Okay let me try to work out what you're thinking...

Physicalists and such people reduce the difference between sentient individuals (e.g., humans) and non-sentient individuals (e.g., trees) to a difference in degree, rejecting the idea that they are different in kind. In parallel with this, being has been rejected in favour of existence. Therefore to use "beings", which commonly these days refers to subjects of experience rather than inanimate things, to refer to the latter, is to support the physicalist reduction of the difference between subjects and objects.

This seems to me a simple misunderstanding. To say that inanimate things are beings is not in fact to say anything at all about subjectivity, when the word is being used in the traditional philosophical sense.

That is only what I tried to argue in the first place! — Wayfarer

Well no, what I have been responding to is your claim that beings are subjects of experience, that things which are not subjects of experience are not beings. The difference between being and existence is an independent issue.

I don't think I've done that, anywhere — Wayfarer

I don't recall telling anyone that they're wrong — Wayfarer

I think you've done it many times. Are you going to force me to go and look? You have said to people, for example, that inanimate things are not beings, in conversations about metaphysics, where "beings" standardly refers to anything which can be said to be.

What I said was that 'beings are subjects of experience'. That, of course, is not the only meaning of 'being' or 'to be', which is not and has never been at issue. You and I and the cat on the mat and the tree and the rock are all existents - we all exist. But the cat and you and I are also subjects of experience, and it's a difference that makes a difference. — Wayfarer

Sure, but that's not the issue here.

The starting point of this whole debate was years ago, when I opined that the noun 'ontology' ought not to be understood simply as 'the classification of what exists'. That, I said, was properly the domain of the natural sciences, whereas ontology was originally conceived strictly as 'the meaning of "being"', while noting in passing that a source I had found (no longer extant) said that the etymology of the term 'ontology' was derived from the first-person participle of the verb 'to be' - which is 'I am'. I took that to mean that it refers to an exploration of the meaning of being, in terms different to those accepted by the natural sciences, which naturally pursues science along objective criteria. This is what provoked an (one could only say) hysterical denunciation from a former member here. I was then sent the Charles Kahn article The Greek Verb To Be and the Problem of Being, which, as I already showed, clearly demonstrates that 'ontology' as classically understood embraced a wider range of meanings than the modern notion of 'to exist'. And the fact that this is no longer understood by analytical philosophers is no credit to them, simply a reflection of the zeitgeist. — Wayfarer

I've already agreed that being and existence are different concepts. Again, that doesn't support your attempt to restrict the use of "beings". And I'm aware that ontology is about being rather than existence. Can you explain why you think this is relevant? A being to Aristotle is whatever can be said to be. What is your reason for telling him he is wrong? (As you have told people here many times)

I've tried to explain that our differing uses of the word are independent of metaphysical views.

In the end, I and even the vitriolic ex-member you mentioned—who you'll admit was very well-read—are giving you information. It feels weird to have to argue for it and to be asked to prove it.

WAYFARER: I'm going to the capital of Canada next week!
JAMAL: Cool! Ottawa is nice this time of year
WAYFARER: No, I'm going to Toronto
JAMAL: But the capital of Canada is Ottawa
WAYFARER: Citations please!

What I'm not certain about is how Jung fits into all of this. He was included in the OP. — T Clark

That's a fair point. I confess I'm not interested in the OP and that I'm carrying on a conversation I've been having with @Wayfarer for many years. I suppose I've derailed the thread. We'll see what @Mikie does about it :razz:

When I said you were being aggressive, I didn't mean you were being impolite. I tend to be pretty aggressive sometimes. I'm just not used to seeing that from you. You're supposed to be nicer than I am. — T Clark

How little you know, TC. I took a break from robust philosophical debate for five or six years, and now I'm back.

Honestly though, I don't see where I've been aggressive. Muscular, perhaps.

To repeat my point for anyone interested: a being in pre- and non-analytic philosophy is anything that is—anything that can be said to be. — Jamal

Incidentally, the reason I said "pre- and non-analytic" is that in analytic philosophy, being has pretty much been replaced by existence. What is important about this for my purpose here is nothing to do with the fact that the difference between being and existence has been denied, but simply that most analytic philosophers don't talk about being or beings any more, and if they do use the term "beings" they're probably just as likely to use it in the popular modern sense as the traditional sense.

I love it when I reply to myself.

:up:

To repeat my point for anyone interested: a being in pre- and non-analytic philosophy is anything that is—anything that can be said to be.

This is not an attack on any worldview or ontological claim; it is information.

I don't understand why you've being so aggressive — T Clark

I forgot to respond to this. I don't think I've been aggressive. If you look at all my posts here you'll see I've been polite. I have argued forcefully, that's all. If I'm wrong about that please let me know; I don't want to come across as aggressive.

The definition of "being" that Wayfarer is using can be perfectly reasonable in both everyday and philosophical discussions, depending on context. — T Clark

Yes, I agree.

The problem is that his use is often not in fact reasonable in context. I've demonstrated this in my posts. You might be interested in reading them.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, and many others use the term to mean anything that is, i.e., anything that can be said to be. Nobody has to follow them in this usage, of course, but @Wayfarer actually attempts to correct people who use the word in this traditional way, by saying that, actually, only sentient individuals are beings.

Can you see the problem? Can you see that if you say to Aristotle "hey, actually only sentient individuals are beings", you're not making a philosophical point, but just refusing to use Aristotle's terminology and expressing your refusal in a misleadingly substantive statement?

I can say that rocks are beings and also say they're conscious — Jamal

I was showing that when philosophers say that everything that can be said to be is a being (which should be obvious), they are not advancing a metaphysical view. They can equally say that rocks and other non-human beings are conscious as say that all beings are material or whatever. It's neutral.

I don't understand your point.

I say that beings are subjects of experience, which is a simple fact — Wayfarer

Looks like I failed again.

You're using the word in the common modern way in conversations about metaphysics, where others are using it in the traditional philosophical sense. This causes confusion. You are not entitled to say to people in a philosophical conversation that, hey, by the way, trees are not beings because they are not subjects of experience.

Imagine joining a zoology forum and saying, "in my opinion, the word 'primate' refers only to apes."

Maybe an even better analogy would be to say, "in my opinion, the word 'animal' refers only to mammals."

The verb 'to be' has many other meanings, including 'whatever exists'. That is the sense in which Mikie and Jamal believe it should be used — Wayfarer

Use it how you like, but make it clear if you're not using it in the way it's used in traditional metaphysics.

I can't think of another way to put it. Appeals to the obvious or to authority are no good in philosophy, but I'm not making any philosophical point or promoting an ontological view; I'm just talking about what a word means in the philosophical literature.

anything that exists can be said to be — Wayfarer

So anything that exists is (also) a being.

But you said that only conscious individuals can be said to be, i.e., to be beings. That's what I'm criticizing, not the difference between being and existence.

In other words, Kahn is not supporting you on the specific issue of the use of "being".

I agree with you on that, and I agree with Kahn. There certainly are differences in philosophy between being and existence, although I think they've been collapsed in most modern philosophy.

That's why I avoided anything to do with existence in my analysis above.

But you can go against modern philosophy on this and yet use "being" to refer to anything. It still means anything which can be said to be.

Well it does seem like you're associating what I've said on the use of "being" with secular materialism, physicalism, etc, the kind of views that are prevalent here. But it's really not a related issue. I can say that rocks are beings and also say they're conscious, or I could say that while rocks, pangolins and humans are beings, only humans are animated by a soul, or that humans are nothing but material just like the other beings, and so on.

How to understand the being of beings is maybe a different matter again.

Even the chatbots get it. — Wayfarer

As I say, that’s because it’s the everyday, likely modern, usage. In philosophy, anything which can be said to be is a being.

There’s this from Britannica:

For Aristotle, “being” is whatever is anything whatever. Whenever Aristotle explains the meaning of being, he does so by explaining the sense of the Greek verb to be. Being contains whatever items can be the subjects of true propositions containing the word is, whether or not the is is followed by a predicate. Thus, both Socrates is and Socrates is wise say something about being. Every being in any category other than substance is a property or a modification of substance. For this reason, Aristotle says that the study of substance is the way to understand the nature of being. The books of the Metaphysics in which he undertakes this investigation, VII through IX, are among the most difficult of his writings.

Not easy at the moment because I’m on mobile, but I’ll try later. Heidegger, Aristotle, and the scholastics spring to mind.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I’ll just pick out this at the moment:

I don't think you would refer to trees, mountains or rivers as beings, would you? — Wayfarer

That’s the point: yes, I would, and that’s how it’s always been used in philosophy. It doesn’t commit one to materialism.

Ever wonder about why humans are, in fact, designated as 'beings'? What significance does that term have? And to what category does the word 'being' apply? I would think, apart from human beings, that there would be agreement that some of the higher animals - apes, elephants, whales, dogs - might be considered 'beings'. Obviously the religious believe in spiritual beings - whether deities or celestial bodhisattvas in Buddhism, for example - but it's not essential to the point.

So - is not consciousness invariably associated with beings? Isn't consciousness a fundamental attribute of beings, generally? (as jgill suggests) A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing. So consciousness is intrinsic to being, isn't it? I'm tempted to say that to be, is to be conscious. — Wayfarer

I guess you probably find it annoying or condescending when people challenge you on this, and I don’t want to be annoying or condescending, but it is rather rude (not very rude, just slightly rude) of you to ignore people’s helpful corrections for literally years (granted, not everyone’s comments about it have been made in a good-natured spirit of mutual philosophical exploration, but that’s another matter).

The term “being”, referring to an individual, has a standard philosophical sense, meaning something which is.

(I avoided reference to existence and objects in that definition but I can’t very easily avoid the “thing”, just because of the way language works—I suppose you could take “something” here to mean an individual or particular)

Your refusal to use the term in that way, if it has substance to it, must be something like the following: if the term etymologically derives from a first-person utterance, like “I am”, we model our notion of being on what it is to be conscious, without even knowing it. Therefore, we should say that only conscious beings are beings at all, to reveal and emphasize the centrality of consciousness to being.

That’s the strongest I can make your position on this. But I think it still fails to justify the way you’re using the term, because you rarely make it clear that you are using it in your own technical way. You will just say, for example, that inanimate things are not beings, to people who are using “being” to mean anything, animate and inanimate, which is. And they are in line with standard philosophical usage, not you.

Or are you saying that only consciousnesses are, whereas inanimate objects merely exist? I doubt you want to go down that route. I think you probably agree that inanimate things are, even though this is plainly, linguistically, in contradiction to your wish to restrict being to animate individuals.

The thing is, you don’t even have to stick to your non-standard terminology to carry the same point. I mean, you can say that consciousness is essential to being in some way without misusing the term. Your position on ontology doesn’t depend on your eccentric use of “being”.

I’ve said the following before and I think you might have taken it as insulting or dismissive, but I still suspect there is something in it. “Being” colloquially is in fact used in the way you want to use it in philosophy: “the being from another world”, for example. I haven’t looked into the history of this usage, but I suspect it comes from our use of “human being”, which allowed people to imagine non-human consciousnesses, which thereby became non-human beings. That’s fair enough, but it just isn’t the way that it’s used in philosophy.

If you’re saying it should be, that’s also fair enough, but it doesn’t entitle you to contradict others who are using it in the traditional philosophical sense.

And that is my final statement on the matter! :grin:

One of my very favourite musicians. I love his compositions and his co-leadership of Weather Report but I first got to know him through his work with McCoy Tyner:



Wayne solos at 5:09 and it’s brilliant. A great man who enriched our lives, RIP.

But tonight I am partying…

Great stuff. I’ll deal with the myth issue in this post and the more difficult stuff some time in the next few days, I hope.

In like manner, the myth of meritocracy which you’ve repeatedly mentioned can to my mind only consist of the roundabout notion of “this system we’ve got is the pinnacle of meritocracy in action—despite all appearances to the contrary—so don’t question the status quo and let those in power do their thing”. Otherwise, (a perfected) meritocracy is, and can only be, a target aimed at—from which we can gauge what needs improvement. To call this target a “myth” would be equivalent to calling any ideal that can be held a myth, including that of “health”. Is the ideal of “being healthy” valueless or a myth—here in the sense of being a falsity—on grounds that it is unreachable in absolute form? I take it that most would answer “no”; that all can distinguish better health from worse, and that we all would desire to be relatively healthy if we’re not—thereby making the ideal of health something substantial, even if unobtainable in perfect form.

In this light, I don’t view the concept of meritocracy as a myth but as an ideal worth struggling for—again, this as much as health (or, else, a healthy economy and politics) is an ideal that is worth pursuing. What I then mean by “a meritocratic economy” is not some Orwellian system that claims to so be while simultaneously not so being (requiring its double-think) but an economic system that—while not perfectly—does facilitate a functional meritocracy; one which thereby can become even more meritocratic in time, despite this being very gradual. — javra

I confess I’m vacillating between saying that meritocracy is a myth tout court and saying that it’s a myth to some extent. I haven’t sorted that out yet. In any case, I think you underestimate the mythic nature of it, how it really functions in the world.

Sociologist Jo Littler argues that…

…the idea of meritocracy has become a key means through which plutocracy – or government by a wealthy elite – perpetuates, reproduces and extends itself. Meritocracy has become the key means of cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture. — Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy

Proponents of meritocracy can admit that we don’t yet have meritocracy and that it’s an aim we should work towards, but that what we need to get there is more neoliberal policies. After all, it’s the market that rewards talent and hard work. This undercuts your distinction between meritocracy as myth and meritocracy as aim. The former swallows up the latter.

The idea of meritocracy will always be used to justify the present order, so that it can be plausibly argued that those at the bottom are either less talented or haven’t worked hard enough, and that those at the top deserve to be there. Successful entrepreneurs do this all the time, with their self-servingly inspiring narratives of failure, hard work, and eventual success (while conveniently omitting the luck, the top-class education, the comfortable childhood, etc.).

The idea cannot be used to achieve the society you envision, because by design it floats free of any comment on or critique of the fundamental economic structure of society, which I contend is the issue that has to be addressed if equal opportunity is the aim. The idea of meritocracy is neutral with regard to economic system, which means that effectively it is not neutral in a world in which capitalism is for the most part unquestioned and unchallenged. The notion that democracies and elected governments might actually make some real changes to how economies work has gone by the wayside. Democracy and government are no longer about envisioning a different society but about tinkering with what we’ve got, and mostly leaving capitalism alone except to prop it up when it goes wrong (very roughly speaking).

To push this point home, I’d say that if you do supplement your idea, or ideal, of meritocracy with conditions with respect to how the economy works—and you produce something like an ideal of social democratic meritocracy—then there is nothing much left for the idea of meritocracy to do, because what is crucial here is a vision of real equality of opportunity where merit is valued, and “meritocracy” is left merely emphasizing the -cracy, i.e., rule, which I know is not really the thrust of your concept.

If that’s unconvincing, then merely as a practical move I think it would be wise to abandon the idea, because of the way it functions in the real world. Meritocracy can be achieved only by opposing meritocracy.

On the difference between the idea of meritocracy and the idea of health…

Interesting! An extremist might argue that the idea of health is a myth because it obscures the systemic barriers to health in capitalist society. Since I don’t agree with this, I have to explain how meritocracy is different.

The difference is that meritocracy is fully predicated on equality of opportunity across society, whereas health does not have an equivalent dependency. Health is not a social concept, but a personal one, at least in your example. The correct parallel concept of meritocracy would be something like a society in which everyone is healthy. The reason I had to think for a moment to work that out demonstrates the mythic nature of meritocracy: as a credo for personal advancement expressed in social terms it actually hides its dependence on social circumstances that the present society cannot provide. And in the other direction, the parallel concept of health would just be something like personal success on the basis of merit, which, like health, is achievable in actually existing society, and therefore not a myth.

So, it is not the fact that “meritocracy is unreachable in absolute form” that makes it a myth. It is that it obscures and justifies existing inequality. The aim itself is unclear, because the important debate about how to achieve equal opportunity is hidden beneath it or relegated to a side-issue; whereas the aim of ideal health is clear (it does not obscure the fact that I should reduce my consumption of wine).

Everything I’ve written so far is probably unfair with respect to your own vision of meritocracy, because it’s taking aim at the real ideology. Your own vision is much more agreeable, I admit.

I’ll stop now. The good but difficult points I still have to answer concern the need to reward merit and the need for incentives. But I’ll leave you with this: a meritocracy is by definition an oligarchy of talent, so it is essentially anti-egalitarian. From this perspective, maybe what you are arguing for is not really meritocracy at all?

Atheism, then, interests me more as a social phenomenon than as a topic for philosophy. I just can't see enough substance to gods to start serious thought. — Dawnstorm

That’s pretty much how I feel.

So I sort of wonder if it's possible for a more philosophical version to take off. — Moliere

Some off the cuff thoughts…

New Atheism feels like jumping the shark. My reaction is always something like, do we really still have to talk about this stuff? New Atheists, famous and not, tend to just make me cringe. I have to tell myself that many vocally atheist atheists have grown up religious or live in countries in which religion does damage.

And that’s the thing. There’s plenty of bad religion around. Intolerant theism in the US and the Middle East, a whole Christian church in the service of an authoritarian state in Russia. So maybe we need some better New Atheism after all.

But no, I don’t think so (I’m thinking as I write here). I’m an atheist but I don’t think the problem is religion as such, just the bad stuff. Take Islam. It’s stupid for Western atheists to tell Muslims that their whole way of life, in its most important aspects, is not only false and a sham but is also responsible ultimately for some terrible crimes against humanity. This does not help reformers at all.

So throw New Atheism in the bin and foster tolerance and understanding for religious people while helping reformers within religions. This is a basis for fighting the bad religion.

It has nothing to do with believing in things without evidence or all that. It’s not about faith. What someone is expected to do for their faith, how far they will go, and exactly how the holy texts should be interpreted, are political and historically specific.

Fair enough.

I should probably respond to the OP instead of just badgering Benj…



If your question matters, then there is something that matters, a speck of significance at least.

You are that being for whom being is an issue, precisely because you’re “like dust in the wind”. It’s the gods who will never find a reason to do anything.

“If we’re just insignificant specks in the universe, what is the point in doing anything?”

So your answer is: to leave a legacy, if you’re the kind of person who wants to leave a legacy, and if you’re the kind of person who just enjoys life and doesn’t worry, you should just enjoy life and not worry. Is that a fair summary?

our lifespan is ultimately limited — Benj96

Like our legacies.

But the longer and bigger the better, is that it? If I were @niki wonoto, I don’t think I’d be reassured.

So the point of doing anything is to do it for the collective with the opportunity to influence said collective far beyond your living years. — Benj96

Why?

I'm just uncertain how to make more of a differentiation at this point — Moliere

Squeeze the myth so hard that the truth pops out.

I can definitely hear the influence.

I love that album. Despite the perceived corniness, they seem to have remained cool ever since the eighties. An affection for Hats by The Blue Nile signals your aspiration to be a sophisticated urbanite.