Jesus is unquestionably life-denying if we regard his teachings in the gospels as accurate representations of his thought. — BitconnectCarlos

No, I don't think so. I think you misunderstood something.

Yet, again, it seems that you and me, are the ones who are interested in 'hallucination' regarding this topic, Frank. — javi2541997

I couldn't conclude that we never see things correctly due to the possibility of hallucination. Detecting an hallucination presupposes that at some point I determined what was real to some suitable level of certainty.

What the possibility of hallucination does is confirm that there certainly is very good reason to occasionally doubt what you're seeing. For instance, a 15 year old boy with new onset schizophrenia tells his parents that he's hearing voices telling him to do harm to the people around him. He is in a state of doubt. He's looking for guidance. If he finds himself in the 21st century, the people around him will tell him the voices aren't real. If it was the year 1410, he would be told that he is possessed. So the resolution of his doubt really comes down to the hinge propositions of his time. It does not come down to some absurd rule that there's never reason to doubt your senses.

But indirect realism isn't a matter of saying that we never see what's real. The indirect realist does believe she has access to the truth. She just thinks her access to truth is indirect by her definition of indirectness. You don't have to be a direct realist to be a realist. Obviously.

Sometimes there is reason to doubt what you're experiencing, say if they just gave you ketamine and you're now convinced you're a character in a video game, screaming "I'm not real! I'm not real!" That happened, btw.

But if no one is telling you that you're drugged and hallucinating, you probably would just take the whatever as real.

but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche. — Joshs

I don't think he's trying to let each "epoche" speak for itself. He's myth making to explain why we have directly opposing conceptions of goodness. His answer is that it's our heritage, built into our language. One could easily swap that answer with something about the structure of the human psyche.

For sure, they are not going to do you any good. — Banno

:grin:

It depends on what the goals of those countries are. Are they expansionist? Are they threatening other Western countries and/or countries that are friendly to Western interests? Do they fund anti-West terrorists? The West should definitely be antagonistic towards China, Russia, Iran, and N. Korea. — RogueAI

I think we'll find reason to be at odds with each other one way or another.

Might lead to qualia — Banno

That might be painful.

If you don't let go of the past, your heart won't have any room for the present

Waking from a dream.

Rising to the surface as a sun, exhaling streams of light

Making the world

Is a loveless job

:cool:

I'm a big fan of Nietzsche. I feel a connection to his writing that goes deep, like into the realm of dreams. He was the forerunner of people like Freud and Jung. Like you, I'm fascinated by the way consciousness evolves, but I think we're limited to metaphors in describing that. Historical accuracy isn't required or called for by Nietzsche's project. That was my point, I guess.

This quickly becomes a precarious topic because on the one hand, Judaism is possibly the most influential orientation of consciousness in human history. On the other hand there are huge, unhealable wounds that humanity bears that are touched upon by the OP.

And for someone who has been called out for not knowing much of anything, but rather just running their mouth, I'd wager you've not read much of Nietzsche at all — Vaskane

Yea, but that was by someone who's not all that bright himself. :razz:

That provides Nietzsche with a less bias fiction on what happened. — Vaskane

He didn't know anything about the Bronze age because little was known about it at the time. I remember overlooking a fair amount of false conclusions from him, though I'd have to look back at it to remember details. My take was that his outlook should be taken as myth making. There is truth in there, but it's not necessarily based on facts on the ground. I'd go with MI Finley over Nietzsche as far as history goes.

I would just say it's important to take Nietzsche's history with a grain of salt, not just because of his own attitude regarding the mythical nature of truth, but because there was much information about the ancient world that just wasn't known at the time.

Isn’t it true you can’t have it both ways, you either have universal rights and liberal principles are a thing or they are not. — schopenhauer1

Do you mean the west should be antagonistic toward countries that don't value rights and liberal principles?

You can measure anything as a standard for what makes an enemy- ideology, religion, power. For much of history it was power. In the West, religion and ideology gradually replaced power alone, but certainly, power was never dead as a reason. — schopenhauer1

Exactly. Where there are multiple cultures in competition, there are two primary survival tactics: military prowess and intolerance of foreign ways. It's shouldn't surprise us that the world is now full of both. It could be seen as a kind of natural selection.

When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.” — Joshs

What we know is that there was no religious intolerance throughout most of the ancient world. That changed when monotheism and the concept of false gods became prevalent. It's probably overly simplistic to say the Jews were responsible for that. It's probably more that the western world in general went through a transformation that the Jews had gone through much earlier.

Either way, that transformation was accompanied by a new emphasis on truth and an association of falseness with evil.

The element of being literate and educated certainly played a part but it should not be ignored that great efforts were made to convert them to Christianity or confine their civic rights and participation. — Paine

@Jamal

True. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Germans tried mandatory education for Jewish children to force assimilation. It didn't work. The USA would later use the same tactic on the Lakota. It destroyed their culture.

But by the 1500s the Italians provided Europe with banking to finance wars and what not.

I think the stereotype of the money-minded Jew comes from the fact that they were usually wealthier (and more educated) than the local peasants. Envy, basically.

Philo Judaeus, a Jewish Plantonist was the first to synthesize faith with reason creating the Logos philosophy, which is responsible for the Evangel of John. Philo’s primary importance is in the development of the philosophical and theological foundations of Christianity. — Vaskane

I read about him. Fascinating guy.

Cool! Thanks.

It's what we do? — Banno

Maybe it comes from an analysis of what we do. Where does the framework for that analysis come from? Not sure.

The Law of excluded middle is not a rule? i don't follow. — Banno

It is. There's just no fact about whether you've ever followed it.

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution. — Banno

It's not rule following. It's probably something innate.

Would you agree that the varieties of contemporary anti-semitism expressed by the likes of Henry Ford, Heidegger, Hamas, Charles Lindburgh, Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan have less to do with the judaism of the middle ages than with their interpretation of the motives and practices of the modern world Jewish community? — Joshs

Sure. I was trying to explain earlier that anti-Semitism has to be understood with reference to the problems and stressors of the times in which individual cases of it appear.

I know. Likewise, progressive American Christianity is fairly interfaith.

You're fond of taking the high ground and lecturing people about what they have to do to know the stuff that you know, but your posts show very little evidence of having a clue about anything, to be frank. — Jamal

Was there something specific you disagreed with?

I can’t speak to what the average jew in the biblical or medieval period said about gentiles, but I can speak from my own experience growing up in a Conservative jewish home, and living in Israel for a year with my family. I can tell you that no jew I’ve encountered, of any age, ever expressed such sentiments to me. — Joshs

I can easily imagine that. But remember: the topic is the origin of anti-Semitism. You're going to have to dig into history to dredge that up. To state the obvious, anti-Semitism starts with the fact that Jews remained separate. Some Jews ditched their Jewishness and became Christian, but if you're Jewish, it means your ancestors embraced being a stranger in a strange land, so to speak. Pretty much the same thing happened to them everywhere they went, but each case was shaped by local stresses. For instance, the Germans wanted to become a nation-state like England and France, but their fragmentation was an obstacle. The worked to try to assimilate everybody into a single identity, but with limited success. One group they had absolutely no success with was Jews. Jews were an obstacle to their goals. In each case where Jews were persecuted, you have to sort through the events to discover why their separateness ended up making them victims this time around.

Do religious jews believe their faith offers them a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics which is preferable to that of other religions? I would hope so. Otherwise, why bother to remain within the faith? — Joshs

The majority of Jews for the last 2000 years would say they adhered to their faith because the Torah explicitly condemns straying from the faith. For these Jews, other religions are not alternate paths to God. They're all paths to the Devil. The gods of other religions are false gods, and it's evil to worship them. There's nothing anti-Semitic about commenting on this. It's traditional Judaism. Look into it.

But you seem to have a stronger notion of ‘superior’ in mind that you may have to spell out for me. — Joshs

No, it's just that Jews didn't traditionally separate themselves from their faith. Jewish was pervasively who they were, not just a religion they had.

From Wikipedia:

1)aThe belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human. This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion. — Joshs

That does sound concerning. But you said you'd never even heard of the idea that Jews think they're superior to Gentiles. That's actually why they've traditionally refused to assimilate. It's repeated explicitly in the Torah. As I mentioned earlier, Isaac Asimov said the Jews invented religious intolerance and went on to become the world's greatest victims of it. I think he was right. Christian condemnation of Judaism is a reflection of Judaism's own fierce devotion to their own identities.

The fact that you haven't heard of it, and that it seems wrong to you, indicates that you are probably the end of the line for Jewishness in your family. Your children probably won't be Jews. Your heritage lived as long as it did because of a sense of having a superior position among humanity in terms of connection to God and morality.

By the way, reading the history of Jews in Russia is an excellent way to see how anti-Semitism would appear at the grass roots level when Jews acted as tax collectors for the boyars.

Given that some neural processes experience qualia, and even knowing that neural networks are exquisitely correlated with a world around, how are qualia inside the brain about that world rather than just the inside of a brain? — Danno

I think this question is kin to how do we know what's real? That distinction is a function of rationality. It's a way of dividing experience up into different categories: magical, mechanical, mystical, and mundane. Though these categories have probably always been part of human consciousness, there's reason to believe human societies weigh the available data differently. For instance, what one society deems internal is treated as external to another. In other words, the very question here is likely to be an aspect of our culture and worldview. It would seem we don't have much of a vantage point on ourselves in this regard, so attempting to answer it may just be a journey in around our present cultural landscape.

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places. — Joshs

It was both. They weren't welcome in the court of the Czar, but they also abhorred the possibility of adulteration of their communities with foreign ways. So wherever they went, they had their own governments. They were more educated than the locals. They took roles as middle men.

Why exactly you find any of this to be insulting, I don't know.

How quaint. I had never heard this before either, and certainly not from jews. So I googled it and what I learned is that it is a long-standing prejudice, probably stemming from a misinterpretation of the phrase ‘chosen people’, or else a convenient application of that term to justify a sense that jews wield too much power in the world. — Joshs

You don't think I could have come across the idea from historians?

I have never heard this idea -- that Jews are superior to gentiles -- uttered by anyone. It doesn't make sense and I don't really care to entertain it. — BitconnectCarlos

Nobody wants to entertain parts of their heritage that aren't attractive.

They do not believe the gentiles get worse afterlife. — BitconnectCarlos

It's in the Talmud. The rabbis would debate exactly how long a Gentile needs to be tortured to make up for being a Gentile. In the World to Come, God brings the Gentiles low and raises the Jews up so the Gentiles finally see how horribly wrong they were. Both of these ideas were adopted by the Jews from external sources, but they shaped them into mechanisms for revealing divine justice.

The reason for this goes back to the Covenant. The Covenant was like a contract: they follow the Mosaic Law, and God protects them. Since a fair portion of the Law was about hygiene, it was obvious that it was protective, but then through a series of catastrophes, it became blatantly obvious that God wasn't protecting them. The only way to continue on with their faith was to devise alternate scenarios for the manifestation of God's justice.

I doubt Jews need this kind of mechanism right now. They're free to evolve. But the danger is they'll evolve right out of Judaism into something else.

Like the belief that jews “refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart.” — Joshs

Do you have any concerns about the future of Judaism? Do you think that integration will cause you to become the end of the lineage? Would it bother you if you did?

I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging. — Joshs

Like what?

Yes, chosen to carry out the 613 commandments, only 320 of which are applicable without the temple. Chosen to perform such commandments such as placing a mezuzah on one's door. — BitconnectCarlos

No, they believe they have a special relationship with God, the gentiles will suffer when they die, and God will eventually put the Jews in charge of the world.

It probably would still be there, just in a less dominant position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But when the British gave up trying to govern Palestine, it was pretty much up to the US to settle Israel's status. If the US had been opposed to recognition of the state of Israel, it's political standing would have been pretty weak. I'll put it this way: without a strong ally, Israel wouldn't be there.

The Jews continued to live in the region after the Babylonian Captivity, restablishing a Second Temple (Books of Ezra and Nehemiah) under Persian rule. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The USA is kind of like Cyrus. I don't think Israel would be there without US support.

The NY Times gives the impression that Hamas fighters may be experiencing an intelligence black-out. Israel didn't give any notice that they were going in. Maybe Hamas just doesn't know how to react to that? It said Israel isn't calling it an invasion, which is probably due to American pressure. Is Israel getting American military advice?

When did some groups start disliking or hating Jewish people? — TiredThinker

Isaac Asimov said the Jews invented religious intolerance and then went on to profoundly influence the rest of the world, setting the stage for becoming victims of intolerance themselves.

The basic idea is that in the ancient world, it was normal for people to respect foreign gods. If you went to city X, you stopped by to honor their gods and then proceeded with your business. The concept of a false god is Hebrew in origin.

I agree. The Japanese Empire's behaviour and actions against China, South Korea and the Philippines were disgusting and totally bad. Nonetheless, which nation never had a bloody bellicose past? Whether you like it or not, that's how the past used to be, just before diplomacy and dialogue started to be more effective. In addition, I still maintain my position that Nagasaki and Hiroshima destruction were not really justified at all. It was the first time that a nuclear attack was used on a population. Your arguments are like: 'the ends justify the means'. — javi2541997

Javi, the Sino-Japanese war was 1937-1945. If you file away the deaths of 20 million people with which nation never had a bloody bellicose past?, then you have to give the US the same treatment. Oh well, who hasn't killed millions of civilians?

I agree that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a crime. But there was no imbalance of power. The USA did not destroy Japan's traditions. When Japanese warlords decided to go to war with the USA, the UK, the Soviet Union, and China, all at the same time, they were killing their own culture. I'm finished trying to explain this to you. Carry on. :razz: