Tell them! — Vera Mont

“Them. They.”

Calling all Hispanic people criminals (which no one ever said) is as wrong as calling all MAGA racist (which a lot of people say).

Both statements allow one to ignore the details of actual issues, and people’s lives.

“They are all……..”.

No “they” are not.

Too many politicians think we need a “they” in order to attract our votes. Most people seem to love this. I don’t.

When will “we” truly wake up from our caves and clans?

If liberals were truly tolerant and inclusive, liberals could subsume the conservative principles and form a larger consensus. That is how America was formed. But liberals today are like everyone else - intolerant, hateful, deplorable, bigoted, paranoid, prideful, arrogant, ignorant - people.

Did you spend a lot of time talking with a lot of people who call themselves “maga”? Or do you know “maga” from the news and media?

You really might want to spend some time with a person before you judge that individual, particularly if you want to judge that person to be “cancer.”

I get it - there is no need to think kindly of Naziism, and any Nazi’s are bad. But unless we are ready to line up all the Nazi’s and kill them all, we have to talk with them. And if we have to talk with them we need to hope we can convince them to change and renounce the evil that is Naziism. The only way to have that conversation is to believe a Nazi is actually, somewhere in there, a whole human being, who can change his views and make amends for wrong-doing, and see the light we good people see.

Otherwise, it sounds like you just want to kill all MAGA people (like a Nazi does to its opponents).

Those of us ordinary humans who suffer and witness the abuses of these sinners cannot love the perpetrators of those abuses — Vera Mont

And that’s why we will always make war, always victimize, always feel victimized - because all of us are perpetrators of abuse, and none of us are saints.

It’s the feeling “I’m better than them, and they are lower than me” that is the problem, the abuse.

Saying all 40 million “MAGA” hat wearers are sub-human is abuse, same as any oppressor abuses.

Humble respect for fellow human beings - one and all.

The only sinner we can know is a sinner is our self. Judge not, lest you bring condemnation on yourself.

There are MAGA and BLM marxists who sit at my table, together, in my family, loving each other. All ordinary humans. They get along because they don’t judge the whole soul and body of each other based on some stupid, temporary, political opinion. They don’t overlook all of the broad ways they are lovable despite narrow political views.

We need to have hope, not just criticism, in our conversations. People, all of us, should have more hope for each other.

To apply the notion of justice to your suffering in the absence of the presumption of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient God would be a category error. — Janus

So why must we apply the notion of justice to suffering with the presence of of God? There is no other way?

What you dismiss as a category error, I dismissed as justification - it’s the dismissal of trying to justify suffering that is the point.

Because we know how powerful God is, and we know what God would want to do with suffering, and we know God knows everything - we know God must not exist because we suffer?

We know how all of that works, how suffering, power and goodness would all be justified, and that this new justified world would have no suffering in it? There is no other logical conclusion? We might not understand what we mean by “God” or “all-good” or “all-power”?

God only wants there to be beauty and has the power to make what he wants. I have an ugly mole. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

In your own view, what are The Forms — Shawn

Essences, or universals, or ideas - intelligible/mental stuff.

Or in art, you have the medium (paint, bronze) and the particular form the artist gives them (Starry Night, The Thinker).

Plato’s theory has a lot of issues, as he recognizes in the Parmenides. That only gives him more credibility. And he was having the same conversation we are right now, but about 2500 years ago. So he must have been prettty smart. Not just “a mistaken theory” at issue.

“What is the sum of 2 plus 2?”

Isn’t the number all of us say in answer to this question not only symmetrical, but identical?

Is it even possible that your answer be the slightest bit different than mine?

So now, does the answer possibly affect the world? What if we asked this question to tally up the parachutes needed on a crashing airplane? Do two minds exchanging symmetrical notions of “4” affect the world in which say three or five people need parachutes?

Suffering holds no intrinsic meaning. — Tom Storm

That’s kind of my whole point. Someone who uses suffering to prove God doesn’t exist is putting some intrinsic meaning into the suffering. Suffering = evil doer doing evil.

But since you said suffering holds no intrinsic meaning, it makes sense that:

predation and cruelty … is not a disproof of god. — Tom Storm

Which is my whole point.

So it sounds like you might be agreeing with me even though you are saying you don’t.

The point of this quote:

Without God or anything behind it, pain is just another experience, justifiable and justified as any experience might be justified. It is what it is; that’s how evolution works. Pleasure draws things toward each other, pain repels things apart; the living grow and take over, the dying diminish and are consumed. Suffering is no longer something to be eliminated or something that can even be imagined as eliminated. Pain is now a badge of honor to those for whom that which does not destroy us makes us stronger. — Fire Ologist

is this: the existence of suffering, which in nature has no intrinsic meaning, can be taken to mean nothing, or can be taken to mean there must be no good God, or can be taken to mean that I am a hero who overcame suffering. And my point in saying that is irony is that, we can give ourselves a break and turn suffering into heroism (if we want to insert meaning into it), but for the God who created us and is supposedly all-good, it seems easier to only see God as an evil-doer, or just non-existent, despite using the same formerly meaningless suffering as the evidence.

MAGA is a choice. It denotes a set of morally repugnant attitudes and beliefs. — RogueAI

Ok, so you can hate those attitudes and beliefs, but the people, they can still be loved and respected. Is that what you mean? Because that is what I mean.

The fact that someone votes for trump or against Harris, or for Harris or against Trump, or doesn’t vote, or votes someone else - that can all be hated as repugnant if you so choose to look for repugnance or stupidity or ill-intent - but the individual people themselves, and their whole individual lives when they aren’t voting or aren’t saying what politics they are for and what they are against, the people are as good as any other people, right?

Or are you saying all good people should all hate every person who votes maga because “maga” as understood by good people, says enough to sum up each maga voting individual?

There are plenty of men who understand… — RogueAI

Then there is no reason to say “because you are a man” (which you did) as an explanation for something bad/wrong someone says?

Which is my simple point.

There are no actual baskets more than one person can fit in at a time. It’s wrong to see whole human beings as fitting in some notion of “maga” or “marxist” or “white”.

Politics, like the state, by nature, treats people as “citizens” or “voters” or as some other small facet of what a whole human being actually is. We are wrong to buy into the propaganda that holds any individual out to be some mere member of some mere class or type.

Classes or types like “maga” can be useful shortcuts when speaking politics, but they are woefully inadequate to characterize an individual person.

Hating “MAGA” (if that means people who wear maga hats), like hating “Mexicans” (if that means people who are from Mexico), is not addressing any actual people, and only shows a lack of interest in actual people.

You only hate your own ideas when you hate whole groups of people for all being members of your idea of that group.

The experience [of suffering] doesn’t change with or without a deity. — Tom Storm

But using all of the same terms from the flip side, the problem of evil says our experience of God changes with or without suffering.

The argument says suffering can’t coexist with an all-good/powerful/knowing God. We suffer. Therefore, we either do not experience God at all (because God doesn’t exist), or our experience is of a God who isn’t all-good or all-powerful.

You said “the experience of suffering doesn’t change with or without a deity.” I’m saying that may be true, but my point is “the experience of a deity changes with or without suffering” and that changed experience is supposed to be of the deity’s non-existence.

The experience of our pain co-existing with God re-characterizes the pain as something God controls, and this creates a new problem for us that isn’t a problem without the presence God - how can Good God leave us to suffer so much pain? This is a new experience of suffering. It is suffering inflicted by God, and not simply the suffering that happens in nature.

When I eliminate God from the landscape, my suffering remains, only now I can accept or judge it differently; I can’t judge anyone or any deity or other personal force for inflicting it upon me, and I can’t expect any such outside force could eliminate the suffering. Life has pain in it. No reason to seek blame or harbor resentment anymore. And in fact, I have to start taking responsibility for my own suffering, embrace it, and see what it is telling me, especially if I want to alleviate it or change, or grow from or overcome or prevent it.

Without God or anything behind it, pain is just another experience, justifiable and justified as any experience might be justified. It is what it is; that’s how evolution works. Pleasure draws things toward each other, pain repels things apart; the living grow and take over, the dying diminish and are consumed. Suffering is no longer something to be eliminated or something that can even be imagined as eliminated. Pain is now a badge of honor to those for whom that which does not destroy us makes us stronger.

So my point is, why should I think my own experience of suffering where there is NO deity, takes on a new character of “preventable bad/evil” where there IS a powerful, good, deity in the mix? Basically, why is God held accountable for making me suffer unjustly if I can be made to suffer justly by nature without God anyway?

We have to assume an all-good God who was all-powerful would use that power to eliminate all of our suffering. That’s not a necessary, logical assumption.

So the problem of evil tells me I have no idea of the significance of “suffering” or “all-goodness” or “all-power” or “all-knowing.” Or no understanding of all of the above. The presence of suffering doesn’t mean that “God” doesn’t exist, any more than the presence of suffering means that pleasure doesn’t exist.

If you want to be able to feel hardness, with that ability, you will be able to feel softness. If you want to know pleasure, you will learn of pain.

We have to be without, in order to receive.

So unless the argument is against the universe for being the universe, and you wish you were never born, I see no reason to conclude Good God and evil pain cannot coexist.

God is loving and good, and yet the world is filled with devastating suffering — especially natural suffering that doesn’t seem to arise from human choices. — Wayfarer

Far more damning is the design and creation of a world that uses death and pain as the engine of survival. That’s pretty twisted. — Tom Storm

That is the irony of the problem of evil. The argument assumes the existence of God, assumes moral objectivity and normativity (suffering is evil), judges God as immoral because we suffer, all in order to support the conclusion that God must not even exist. God's definition, plus my suffering, proves God's non-existence. We need a certain and specific God in the argument to prove the conclusion that such God must not exist.

But if we take God out of the mix, we still have nature; what does that make of the use of death and pain as the engine of survival in nature (the physics of it)? The world is still as it is, with it's pain and death.

We can't call death and pain "twisted" as natural processes without a creator God behind them.

In a world without God, don't we have to jettison "evil" when we jettison "God" and say that pain, like pleasure, is just another sensation, and that death, like birth, is just another moment in a biological entity's life? Shouldn't we move beyond good and evil too?

So now, with no one to complain to (no God to appeal our case of suffering to), why even call suffering, pain and death, evil or bad? There's nothing twisted about pain and death so long as God does not cause them. It's still the same world, same pain and death, just now, because there is no intention behind them, we are without any need to judge or justify pain or pleasure as bad or good.

But in the case that pain and suffering are no longer adjudged evil or bad, why did we think God wouldn't want us to suffer in the first place? Now the premise about what God would want (God would want to prevent pain and death) in the problem of evil argument seems ridiculous. Why would God want to prevent suffering and pain if these are not evil?

But the real irony is, without God, for some reason, this same life is now seen as the triumph of nature, with life finding a way despite calamity after insufferable calamity. If we take God out of the equation, we see those beings that bear suffering and overcome pain as heroic and good. Suffering almost becomes justified by all of the lives that follow it. Suffering adds to the good of living once it is overcome.

Yet though we can, in a secular way, save our triumph and heroism, we haven't found a way to save our God (at least not in the minds of modern geniuses and academics).

the Bible deosn't help as it depicts a pretty nasty deity who has no issues with slavery and genocide and behaves like a mafia boss, demanding deference and worship to sooth his seemingly fragile ego, so there is that. — Tom Storm

You sound like a hotel guest who doesn't have enough towels (or who can't read his Gideons Bible).

Bottom line to me is, the only way for me to be me, for me to become free one day, for me to participate in the structure of my own character, for me to be able to love, for me to recognize something as good and to choose that good - the world has to be as it is. And this is for each of us. for me to be different than Tom, and for Tom to be different than all others, the world can only be as the world is.

Individuated entities, like Tom, or the moon, don't get to sit in existence, for however long they might exist, without breaking free, which causes suffering.

I suffer so that I can be me. Suffering has to be, for something precisely like me to come into existence.

Its not a 'best of all possible worlds' argument; its a 'there is only one world anyway' argument. I think God does not have the power to create me as me in any other setting besides the world as it is, with pain, and earthquakes and suffering and death of babies and extinction of species, etc.. I don't know what an "omnipotent" being actually means or is. There is no other possible world, if I am to be in it, as me. Maybe it means, God has the power to do anything, but in order to do me, as I am, the world I live in could be no different than it is. This is the same for all beings that exist.

The only position against God, then, to me, is, God should not have created anything. We should never have been given the opportunity to weigh in on our own lives or God's creation. Fine, if you are antinatalist or a miserable solipsist, or just contrarian. But the position that God must not exist because pain exists? Seems ultimately like a complaint to the hotel manager.

The instant you think there is something that exists that should be or could be improved upon, some pain that should be relieved, you now subject yourself to all of the forces that brought you to have that opinion in the first place. And those forces include the ability to suffer, and the suffering itself; you would not imagine the improvement otherwise.

conservatives can model what liberals think, but liberals have no idea what conservatives think and they think that conservatives are just evil. — Brendan Golledge

There are two moves made in this statement. First, liberals have no idea what a conservative thought process is or how conservative ideals can be rationally supported. And second, liberals conclude that conservatives are just evil. Both conservatives and liberals are too quick to make this second move, but I see it as more essential to way the left talks to conservatives (or won't talk to conservatives).

Most liberals can't (or won't) think like a conservative at all. It's why they are shocked Trump won both elections. It is more essential to the leftist methodology to put people into buckets and baskets, and when the people in those baskets won't use leftist language to reason and argue their way out of the simplistic bucket, the leftist can quickly conclude that such people must simply be deplorable, or evil, or just stupid. So the explanation for how Trump won is that, most of America is stupid and/or evil. There is no rational explanation.

But conservatives know how to behave and think like a leftist, and can even see the justification and rationality of leftism. There is much room for negotiation and an ability to compromise with a conservative; there is nothing to negotiate (only absolutes exist) to a leftist. And compromise is only defeat to a leftist (unless it is one leftist compromising with another leftist, presumably to fight another day anyway).

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the image of Brendan sitting in the middle of a group of MAGA supporters and saying to himself “Gee, these people are so much more morally developed than leftists!”. — Joshs

I don't know if you (or Brendan) are liberal or conservative, but this quote sounds like an example that "liberals have no idea what conservatives think and they think that conservatives are just evil."

MAGA is not equivalent to conservative, just like Marxist or Socialist aren't equivalent to liberal. So maybe this doesn't really address the OP.

And maybe it doesn't help anyone to manage the border, and so the US, they way Biden did. Maybe Maga is onto something moral? To better the planet? Impossible to conceive? How about China - no reason whatsoever to be suspicious of their progress around the planet?
____________

it doesn't seem normal to me that a person ought to put killing their babies on the top of their priority list. — Brendan Golledge

Because you're a man. You take bodily autonomy for granted. And you also can't think. You will never be raped and forced to carry the rapist's child to term. Can you imagine how awful that would be? No, because your posts show a total lack of imagination. There are nine states with laws like that on the books. The fact you can't understand why women are passionate about abortion rights tells me your level of moral development is very low. — RogueAI

This is a great example (assuming Brendan is the conservative and RogueAI is the liberal). Brendan maybe shouldn't have said "killing their babies" and should have just said "terminating pregnancy", but he is discussing priority lists. RogueAI responds to the idea that abortion may be bad, or a lower priority issue with "because you're a man" putting Brendan's whole thought process and his humanity in a bucket - men - and downgrading that bucket with "you take...for granted" and "you can't think" and "you will never be...forced" and "lack of imagination" and "you can't understand" and "level of moral development is very low."

Brendan is sub-human now - no reason to argue an opposing point with him. Who would want to debate anything with such a "man"?? Who would want to use their imagination to understand how Brendan could say killing human fetuses isn't normal or good? What kind of human could think abortion rights is not a priority? Rhetorical questions in no need of exploring - because liberals have no idea how conservatives think, or if they think at all.
_______________

There are as many political beliefs as there are people, and the term “Left” and “Right” are by now slurs meant to impugn another, or otherwise to signal one’s political purity, and not much else. A whole host of fallacy results. — NOS4A2

Spot on. There are no true baskets of people. The basket called "maga" is smaller than any one of its members. Just like the basket called "marxist" is antithetical to the individual working man or woman. We are each a political party of one member, or we should be, resisting anyone who thinks they know anything important about us because we registered "democrat" or "republican", and resisting our own biases when we learn someone else is registered some other way.

If we want to emerge from the subjective at all, from the realm of ideas, we must conceive of knowledge as an activity that does not create what is known but grasps what is already there.
— Basic Laws of Arithmetic, 23 — J

An idea qua idea is made in the mind and exists as an idea based on the existence of the mind in which it exists. There is the ontology of ideas.

But what is an idea, but an idea of something. Like a word, an idea, sitting in the mind, is about something "already there" before the idea of it was formed.

So we have to juggle both the subjective ontology of idea formation, and the objective metaphysics of what is thereby formed.

We set our ideas free and independent by holding them in our minds.

This is demonstrated when two people see the same idea. When one person conceives of the idea of mathematical addition and testifies to such subjective experience by asserting "2+2=4" and then a second person says, "Yes, like 3+17=20", the subjective ontology of addition as it is formed and exists in each subject, is simultaneously objective (independent and "already there"), as they both agree the idea of addition also must exist in each other's minds; it's the same addition each sees separately, in each other's minds, in 2+2 and in 3+17. This is both mind-independent (shared between two different subjects), and only there because of the minds that know addition.

Is yours knowledge of a theory, or of the thing itself? — tim wood

I get the issue. Kant is fundamental. Mind-independent reality is provisionally acknowledged. But what could distinguish the ontology of "theory" from the ontology of "thing itself", if not some thing in itself? How to draw lines without a knife to carve them?

It's as if the question of mind-independence can't be asked without mind-independence.

Kant clarified that we can't know things in themselves. But this epistemological/methodological observation of our constructing limitations is distinct from the notion that mind independent reality (thing in itself) is not even there (in some unknowable manner) independently of our minds.

We must see mind-independent reality in order to say we see any change. We may not see causation itself, or things as they "are" apart from our constitution of those things, but we see there are things apart from any constitution in order to wonder about causation or an act of constituting.

And if we see two things, distinct from each other, like the sun and the sky, we have learned about "independent reality" - identity, unique from other identifiably unique things in themselves.

We just can't explain or justify this wondering. But that doesn't mean we cannot really be smacked in the face. It can't mean that, because I've been smacked in the face. My mind is unable to explain how or why, but does not need to wonder whether[/i] "smacking things" exist, because I became one of them, despite my lone dependence on myself to define what "smacking" is, in response to being smacked in the "face".

if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe.

Exactly. Without mind-independence, "explanation" itself has no explanation.

Is anyone willing to defend a mind-independent view? — noAxioms

Who are we all talking to if not something independent of our minds? What do I think can or will respond to my question? Why do I bother to ask, if I can’t see anything independent of my own mind to be an answer?

But, no I can’t defend my view that there is mind independent reality any better than Moore or Aristotle.

I just can’t defend speaking without mind-independent reality either, so, by speaking to you, I reveal my belief in your independence and my ability to reach through the world from me to you, and for you to hurl something mind-independent back towards me.

If no one responds to my post I will probably give up on the mind-independent facts I think I’ve gleaned and go try walking on my unique concept of “water”. (I’ll tell you how it goes in case you are really there.)

to arouse the approbation of all things indifferently — Clément Rosset, Joyful Cruelty, pg 36&37

I agree that music and poetry are under-appreciated and misunderstood forms of truth expression. Plato downplayed the significance of art and just didn’t get it. Aristotle got it much better, but when you really get it, you fire off some poetry.

The philosophical and deep impact of music is why people feared rock and roll as devil’s music - because good music immediately transports/supplants the self for something both wholly other, and completely intimate. One is both lost completely and found completely when taken over by the inspiring (spire meaning spirit, so in-spiriting or devil-possessing) rhythm, tone and melody; rhythm (beat/tempo) representing the logical/mind/structure, tone (particular sound of particular instrument) representing the body/form/appearance, and melody (song played on any instrument at any tempo) representing the spirit itself, uniting the rhythm with the tone as one.

When the takeover is complete, “approbation of all things indifferently” could be one way to put it.

Music provides the shortest distance to be transported. It can be the quickest way to the intoxicated self/ loss of self. But it is not the only vehicle. Mytics get there through meditation. And any true artist can describe their own version of this, like Keats does above. Even sports, like dance, when muscle memory supplants intention and something beautiful is born (a dance form or an impossible football grab) through no intentional/human effort, despite it simultaneously being born through a total commitment of the body. Dancers and athletes play their bodies like an instrument to channel the same muse.

One can even do this with any physical labor, as in Karma Yoga devotions.

The loathing of mankind, of the rabble, was always my greatest danger — Ecce Homo

Yeah, Fred, we know your struggles. I just don’t see the gap between the rabble and the overman as so wide as you. Many have found God and uttered poetry, against all odds. The rabble is full of artists.

So you’re unhappy with liberalism? — Joshs

I'm not. I like thinking for myself. I like knowing that class distinction is accidental and unimportant. I like democracy.

Just not at the expense of metaphysics, of universal truth. I need these to think for myself. Universal truth and goodness is what prove there never was such a thing as a divine right of kings.

I don't believe mankind can be his own salvation, just that mankind can contribute to and participate in it. So liberalism has wisdom, but not enough. That's why I say it is a method. It has no content or goal defined. Just amorphous "progress". I don't see any progress unless we have an ideal and goal defined towards which we can progress. Once you try to define goals and ends and ideals, you need metaphysics, institutionalizable systems, and definitions of truth and beauty and goodness.

What are the rational grounds for deeming someone or something beyond the pale and dismissing them or writing them off? — Leontiskos

An unwillingness to engage in a rational discussion.

I'd say the fact that a person is being irrational is grounds to write off their views, their arguments, their thought processes, their senses of the facts. You may get the the point that conversation is impossible.
But this still is never grounds to write off the whole person. No grounds for any basket of deplorables, or any other simplistic caricature of something less than a person.

We are all on the same earth, so if we find someone in our midst who is "beyond the pale" we should ask ourselves, "how is it that I am standing right next to them?"

What manner of dismissal is rationally justified or rationally justifiable? — Leontiskos

Ending the conversation is justified. Preventing them from causing harm in their irrationality is justified. Teaching others about the rational and the irrational, using the irrational opinion as an example of such irrationality is justified.

Is a material position sufficient for deeming someone beyond the pale and dismissing them? — Leontiskos

Never. We are mistaken every time we equate a whole person with any one thing they say or do, or even the many things they say or do. We are mistaken for identifying ourselves or others, with some group or ideology. It's is just not the case that people are so simple they can be known completely by other people. Personhood, is an ocean. Opinions, ideologies, life's work, these are rivers, creeks, puddles. (The only scenario where the simple identification of a person with something outside that person is someone who identifies with Christ, who lives in Christ, but this would not pose a question of writing them off - it would be more like they wrote the entire universe off and joined Christ, but I digress.)

In my view, if you think someone else is a person, but that person has immoral, destructive beliefs and behaviors, and that person is always irrational, then that person is beyond you. You are justified in refuting everything they say, disengaging in any conversation, telling them they should stop, stopping them when they assault or worse. Such irrational immoralists do not cease being persons because they are buried in confusion, irrationality, immorality and destruction. And it is the fact that they are always people that forecloses both the ability to truly write them off, and forecloses the possibility that it can be justified that I write them off. Such a person should be our goal to assist in their salvation.

In my view, anyone who writes off another human being is condemning themselves with them. How much better is a saint than a Hitler? Who among us can accurately measure the distance between them? Is there enough of a gap between them that would permit the saint to write Hitler off? Is that what saints ever do when faced with Hitlers?

___

I think the point of you posing these questions is to demonstrate just what I'm saying - writing off people is a mistake in itself. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Writing people off who are otherwise trying to be rational and discuss their views, whatever they are, is weakness. Once we identify another person as a person at all, it is too late for us to be in a position to write them off.

When we have to shake the dust off of our sandals and turn our backs on people, we shouldn't think of this as foreclosing all hope for such people. We just foreclose our individual ability to reach them, today. Who knows how and whether reason and truth will penetrate their hard hearts some other way, some other time? They are people, just like me, who grow. We should hope and pray hardest for those people who we cannot even fathom how they think and do what they do.

So my short answer is, there is no criteria for ever writing people off as beyond the pale. Perhaps only criteria for writing off my own ability to reach them. Perhaps criteria for writing off other people's ability to help themselves, but then, they only beg for more of my attention, not less of it.

the goal of education under liberalism. It is, in theory: "enabling people to do what they want." — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how are people to know or trust that what they want is what will lead to happy good lives, when liberalism teaches that only gray or illusory or socially imposed lines are all that can define anything we might want or pursue? Liberalism is a good method to achieve a goal, but useless as a goal in itself.

Liberalism, in its broadest sense, since the enlightenment, is the reification of experimentation as an end in itself. There is no single, happy goal, or truth, or conclusion to be drawn, as the coup that toppled religion, metaphysics, and kings was quite thorough. Anything institutional, other than liberalism itself, is oppressive. But liberalism itself is a method, a system of due process, a scientific method, devoid of any actual content or judgment of goodness or truth or value. Instead of admitting there is nothing left to progress towards, liberalism teaches that the excitement and adventurousness one feels in putting a hypothesis to experiment is the best there is for mankind and should be satisfying enough. The thrill of discovery is the goal, but once something is discovered, it too must be taken down, deconstructed, to make room for more "discovery." Such as the eternal recurrence of the same arguments against truth and goodness and virtue.

And then, hundreds of years go by with liberals leading the charge, but today, people still wonder whether they are free. Nothing is left to grab onto and build a freedom. Now we see that the wisdom of liberalism could only take us so far. Now, we must recover (rediscover) something permanent, something conclusive, something objective about goodness and beauty and humankind.

I sound anachronistic, to the myopic. Interesting post brother.

The moral wrong here is that someone set up the contraption. — Banno

That’s where I would have gone with the experiment.

The moral relativist can have a moral framework — Tom Storm

What is the difference between a framework and an objective measurement?

Because those are the presuppositions of the objective moralists who claim there is no reason to ever end an infant's life. — DifferentiatingEgg

You are not being careful enough in your presentation here.

Moral principals.
And objective “good.”
Sound like things a thought experiment won’t be able to dispel, especially one that relies on some notion of good in order for it to make any sense.

Bottom line, to me, morality puts something in between two or more people. We put it there, but there it is. That’s an object. If nothing “objective” is between them, at least not provisionally assumed to be objective among the participants, then morality and moral frameworks are nonsense.

I’m not saying a moral relativist couldn’t be a saint. I’m saying, without something objective about the topic (like any topic), they can’t explain why, or tell anyone what is moral and what is not. And if they were certain about their moral relativity, they wouldn’t bother to try.

Once two people agree on a concept, like “murdering babies is to be avoided if possible” (whatever law you want), we see objectivity rearing its ugly head.

Any objective moralist who claims unequivocal, rigid “good” or “bad” is a fallacious liar or pathetic ignoramus.

Is that what you are saying?

Because it sounds like you are saying objective moralists are objectively bad, and your thought experiment will take them down absolutely, rigidly, every time.

Without something objective in the mix, what is even the difference between a suffering baby and non-suffering baby? They both make noise and wriggle. So what?

Why does anyone have any opinion about what others do or don’t do to others and their babies?

Once you care about others, only objectivity can to mediate a mutual, communicative, interaction among them. And a moral objectivity is supposed to make the interaction a “good” one.

Like this post. There is something objective here, or you wouldn’t know I was disagreeing with you.

My question is, for all moral relativists, why do you bother?

If there is no moral objectivity whatsoever, how can you say pushing the button to prevent the baby from suffering is “actually doing some good”? If you were beyond good and evil, there is no difference no matter what you do or don’t do - no good or evil results in any case.

one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'. — Jeremy Murray

The fact that people keep making inquiry of morality, to me, is a reasonable basis for a hope all of these same people who even ask “yeah, but is it good?” might one day make a morality that is not futile. But, to me, if all is only relative, or we reduce the responsible agent to neurons and prior forces, we are not talking morality anymore. So we have to address relativity in the face of objectivity.

If we want to be more scientific/analytic about this, I have to show you where I’m coming from. I see three ways the specter of futility creeps into the conversation.

First, if all metaphysics is futile, as an unfalsifiable exercise in the logic of tilting at angels dancing on the head of a windmill, there is no such thing as any “system” and so all moral systems are futile attempts to merely describe a fabricated windmill. Morality merely adds the concept “good” to the parallel question “are all systems futile?” which they may be, if we are honest.

(At this threshold spot where we see the futility of identifying any “system”, you find a similar but different threshold futility due to our reliance on language alone to point out all of these musings and figures of speech like “moral system”.…. This is also where epistemological problems lie, where how we know anything is questionable, so how is knowing about morality knowing anything “true” about morality and not simply about my own construction of something? There is a lot of potential futility to any philosophy before we even get started on morality.)

A second layer of futility arises, if we somehow address the problems with systematizing human experience, and come to agree that metaphysics and moral system-making is as concrete as any science, that we can use reason to agree on universal moral laws and a means to adjudicate our own and others’ actions - we still have to come up with those laws and reasonably apply those laws to situations. What is a moral system and whether it can even exist, becomes, what action reflects the moral law? Making universal laws seems just as futile as making a system, even if we have solved the threshold metaphysical/epistemological problems, given how opposed people are to each other in life. In a practical sense, in today’s climate of distrust, and just stubborn ignorance, no one wants to even listen to each other, let alone devise together a law that will equally tell all parties what to do and what not to do. We face the futility that we will never actually be able to agree on one “system” and so we will never actually create the metaphysical “system” we assumed was possible before but now can’t agree on, and moral systematizing remains a futile attempt. The “law” part of the “moral system” is still cloudy and dubious for us even if we agree the type “law” is clearly possible.

But third, even if we worked out all of the metaphysical questions, and we built an entire system of just, moral laws that the entire world’s citizenry agreed was best for one and best for all, threw a party like New Year’s Eve to celebrate because everyone is happy, together if only for a night - now we each still live in time, and the party ends, and we have to go separate ways, and in future moments we have to pit morality against opposing desires, but protect and keep this morality by being moral, daily, being as good as we can. Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile.

But then, is it futile build a moral system in attempt to resist or temper these human passions and reasonings of thought and body, anyway?

Wasn’t it myself I was really trying to regulate with morality in the first place, or, can’t I live according to my morality despite the futility of it?

Can I learn to do better, next time? Is there a “better” I can make in the future that guides my actions in the present and makes them better now as I act?

Is there a moral system that I would create out of my own actions despite anyone else, even myself?

Even though moral systems seem futile and I fail my morality every time, is it still better, and so, good, to be moral?

“Good to be moral” - that’s seems either self-perpetuating, or empty tautology.

I think this is the space the existentialists carved out from which to sit on the question of morality. It’s before good and evil, not beyond it - it’s the understanding that we never got there, because we can never get there. So not beyond anywhere.

But here, for some reason, we can still “be moral”, we just have to be moral, anyway. It’s just that now, morality is a creative act merely among persons.

My sense is this was always the case - we learned to speak, we shared communications, and morality was born all simultaneously.

Making a moral system is self-defining act at the same time. So the universal (system) is the particular (self-defining). So maybe making a moral system simply means making myself better. I still have the problems of defining what’s “worse” from the “better” and identifying what is responsible, and how to codify it in law, but I’m doing all of these things looking at the law as a sculpting of my very soul itself.

We define ourselves when we define our morality and, also when we, ourselves, act according to our morality. The moral sense of things, the sense of “good” agreed upon with another, is tied up with what human beings are. Making morals, universalizing, is tied up with being a person, which is tied up with speaking to other speakers, because being a person is tied up with other human beings being people with you. We each define ourselves, together, with the others. Separate, but with each other. This is what morality is, or comes from, or makes. Being moral is an act as much as it is a law that could be acted upon or a system that could teach us how to live best.

We dont need to equate the law with oppression and stagnant resistance to change. The law is just as necessary for us to rejoin as “us”, as is the lawless relativity necessary for us to be apart in our lawless, silent separate subjectivity.

If I saw nothing objective about our existential condition, and left all things relative to forces of undoing and remaking, then what would be the point of speaking at all? Speaking itself can be futile, even thinking logically if thinking about something that isn’t there. Without objectivity, nothing else is there with us, each, a lonely, cut-off subject.

There are a lot of holes in the above. But hopefully something to chew on in between those holes.

International Law has no enforcement mechanism. It gets enforced when countries agree to enforce it, and the same law can be ignored when countries don’t care to enforce it. But without the individual countries taking steps to impose the law, international law is more like a suggestion, or guideline among pirates.

So, yes.

If country A doesn’t like what country B is doing, A can get a whole bunch of other countries to agree with them and then together, go after B. That’s the world before International Law. That’s the law of nature.

Or country A can appeal to international law and make a case to the UN and the International Court. But then, the opinion of the UN as a body and the ruling of the International Court, no matter what they say, will mean nothing, unless a bunch of other countries agree to the ruling and go out and enforce the ruling. Which is the same picture of things as before international law.

So yeah, International Human Rights are more of a political talking point, and means to make arguments for and against other countries, and propaganda (for a good cause), than they are something with the force of law.

No country will give up their sovereignty to some outside body like the UN, or like an International constitution of laws and rights.

The only real jurisdiction of International law is outside of national jurisdiction, like the open seas.

In the middle of the ocean, no country can claim jurisdiction, and all have agreed to abide by international law. (Basically all have agreed we won’t fight each other for sovereignty over the oceans, just ten miles off the shoreline.). But there is no police either, none with any teeth to enforce that law. So if country A doesn’t like what country B is doing on the open seas, and the international court agrees country B has violated the international law, you still need some country or group to use their own enforcement power to actually stop country B.

And if country A doesn’t like what country B is doing to its own people, within its own jurisdiction, International Law has even less significance. To enforce international law on a country that disagrees with the ruling, you basically have to go to war with the country.

Hello Mr. Murray,
(16 years of Catholic school and that’s the only way I can address high school teachers. And it was because of my senior year English class, where we read the Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, that I became a philosophy major in college.)

Welcome to the forum.

is this not simply a question of whether or not moral relativism is inevitable? — Jeremy Murray

Many people deep in the weeds of moral philosophy might disagree, but I see that as THE question.

Can a morality of universal, objective rules be built using logic? And by using logic, do we avoid the inevitable descent into relativity that being a mind itself seems to promulgate?

Personally, I don’t think so. If one doesn’t see objective truth in experience, morality discussions are always reducible to something like sentiment, or habit, or psychology, or a bit of bad beef - or some combination thereof.

But I also don’t see why it is so hard to see objectivity in our experience. Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether ‘logic is objective or not’, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove ‘you can only use logic to prove’ as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth.

And human beings deliberate some of their actions. That’s demonstrable to myself about myself (as I edit and revise this post, deliberating my choice of words), and clearly the case when you observe, or better, ask, other people about their actions. We think, using logic, about what we do using our bodies. More objective truth.

To skip to the end, to play the game of morality at all, I think you need the following playing pieces, and if any one of them are missing, morality is no longer the discussion:

1. more than one personal subject (people/society)(if you are on a desert island, you either have to treat yourself in the third-person to care about morality, or interact with God, otherwise how could anything be immoral);

2. Reason. We have to know things. We have to be able to deliberate about what we know. We have to be able to express it, so language and logic and reasoning are just as essential as multiple people are to the discussion;

3. Responsibility. There is no point to moral judgement without subjects who take responsibility for their actions - the moon pulling the tides is not a moral act because the moon can’t admit it is responsible for that - and if the subjects on the game board of morality discussion are like the moon, then nothing they can do or say or be, or have done to them, is a moral act. There must be a deliberative subject with agency (even if this agency can be questioned) before we can talk morality;

4. Objectivity. If you take this piece off of the game board, then there is no means to distinguish between any of the other pieces. And further, because our logic and deliberations are only captured in language, objectivity becomes the ground to codify things as Law. If a law isn’t objective, to be applied and enforced universally, it’s not a law. And what would be the point of the whole discussion if we could not distill how to act and how not to act towards each other in some form that we can all share and look to - there must be law, law with the goal of it being universal/objective.

So yeah, maybe we are wasting our time thinking about all of this because we don’t believe in or experience some of those game pieces. Maybe we’re resisting the inevitable conclusion that all conclusions are temporary (so not conclusive), and relative (so not conclusive), and all objectivity awaits its implosion into the same stormy seas objectivity sought to fix as knowledge and morality seeks to make calm. I currently hope not.

Despite successive attempts to resolve this paradox, it seems as if the tortoise still edges-out Achilles. — Nemo2124

Achilles takes one step. That’s a physical event.

You need to add concepts to this picture to say whether he has moved a fraction of some other step, approached some other limit infinitely, or already won the race. You can not add other physical steps (like infinitely smaller fractional actual steps) to the step that was already the subject of inquiry without denying the existence of the step in the first place. So is there a step, a motion to discuss, or not?

If Achilles can’t catch the tortoise, the tortoise can’t move either, and there is no paradox, because there is no race.

There’s something like a category issue going on here to fabricate the paradox, and mess with the betting odds at the racetrack.

Measured distances, fractions thereof, and infinity, are concepts. Mental things. We grasp physical things with our hands. We don’t grasp infinity like that, ever. Achilles’ stride and the tortoises’ pace need have nothing to do with any of those concepts. Strides and pacing are physical things.

If I move ten centimeters, I can be said to have moved one-tenth of a meter. Or I can be said to have moved one whole decimeter. So was this a fraction or whole motion? Does that motion have infinite parts or no parts?

These are concepts, mental constructs, we can only assert apply to physical things. Only by first positing a conceptual scheme in which one meter is equal to ten decimeters can I then name something “one tenth of a meter.” And only by positing a whole meter (or going the whole distance conceptually) do I fix the denominator that names the decimeter 1/10th meter (“10” here meaning “whole one”). You don’t get fractions before wholes; you take wholes and divide them, to conceptualize fractions.

So the race had to be over before anyone could tell you at what point Achilles moved one tenth of a distance, or any fractional distance.

There is no fraction of a physical thing - it is only made a fraction conceptually by relating that whole thing to some other whole thing and seeing the relation is fractional according to your conceptual relational scheme.

You cut an apple in half. You can say you only have a fraction of a whole apple. But let’s say you never saw fruit before, and someone hands you a single “half-apple” - you would have one whole thing in your hand and no means to determine it relates to some other “half”. You would have a whole thing. And physically, that’s all there ever is. The determination of whole versus half of that whole requires concepts, not physical steps or physical processes.

So to reasses who conceptually wins and loses a non-conceptual physical race, one would have to wait until it is physically over before one could properly conceptualize the fractions and partial movements that can be said to make up that whole race.

All of these measurements are post-hoc measurements asserted of some external thing. And for this paradox, they are post-hoc concepts turning a physical thing into a conundrum for those concepts, not for the spectators of the race.

No one ever actually moves one-tenth of any distance. They move an actual, finite, whole distances. In every move.

So, unless Achilles brakes his heel and drops out, the tortoise always loses the physical race. That has nothing to do with any math nor provides any more information about the paradox.

The paradox is really just the irony that it is impossible for the smartest people in the universe to explain a simple motion )which it truly is). Or, it takes sheer genius to prove through concepts, that motion right before your eyes can’t happen.

A guy chooses to eat vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate.

Instead of asking the question “was that choice free” which looks at the situation before any ice cream was eaten, I see it all from a different angle. I ask “why is the vanilla ice cream now gone”. If the guy answers “I did it - I’m the cause of the missing ice cream” then I have the starting point for digging deeper into whether there was a free choice involved - I have to ask him more questions to see if he really was the cause or if some subconscious forces or some tyrant, or other cause determined him to eat the ice cream.

In the end, it is solely up to the guy whether we find free choice was involved. At any point in the investigation into underlying causes of the missing ice cream, he can either cut it off and say “that’s enough - it’s all my fault, I are the ice cream, I am responsible.” Or we need to keep digging into the behaviorists/material causes.

That moment is the moment freedom is inserted into any otherwise completely deterministic system.

We don’t choose to want what we want. We want it, and are determined to want it by whatever we are. We choose to call what we want “my choice” - we create the character of “me” as what is known by the rest of the world by consent and by staking a claim - “that’s me - the ice cream eater.”

So my choice and my will and me in the first place are all made one and the same by simple assertion - “that’s my will”. The forces that carry us to the ice cream and force us to see vanilla as best and allow us to eat it - will isn’t found there. Will is found when one steps outside at any of these moments and says “that’s my will - I am walking myself to the refrigerator”. Or “Vanilla is better than chocolate”.

We are our wills.

This is only true when we are willing.

It’s not a complete picture.

And the only way we preserve the feeling of freedom as normally seen as free from or free to, is to see the process described above as happening instantaneously on everything we do. If I am free in each moment, I am consenting to each moment.

There are few folk as dangerous as those who are certain they know the will of god. — Banno

Really? You’ve conducted this survey and know that’s a fact? I know a bunch of real softies, no danger at all, who would say they know what God wants.

There are few folk as dangerous as those who are certain there is no God. How many of those folks turned up on your survey of people who know the will of God?

There are few folks who have sacrificed their lives to save others who did not believe in God.

We can throw people in the buckets we like and the buckets we don’t like all day.

It takes a good lawyer to explain this away. — Banno

Or change the subject to child abuse lawyering, which has nothing to do with Isaac or the story.

You just won’t give an inch.

I haven’t moved you one tiny bit.

Seems to me you think religion is at best, a waste of time, but more likely, a bad thing, that leads to all kinds of harm; that God certainly does not exist; and that faith, of any sort, is a weakness and the better life would have no faith in anything, because having faith is weakness, and prone to irrationality.

That’s what I see as your basic point. I see only your negative account of faith.

Do you have anything positive to say about faith itself?

Not faith in God, or religion. Just faith in other people - what is left of faith, to you?

...to the extent of performing an abominable act. That the decision was as you suggest "fully informed" only serves to add to the affront. — Banno

What affront? Are Abraham or Isaac complaining? All were safe and sound at the end of the story. Sounds like you just can’t stomach the brutality of human kind. We’re a bitch to wrangle my friend. All we need is to trust God and no one gets hurt. That’s all in the same story that affronts you.

But we are never fully informed. — Banno

Ok, I’ll concede fully informed was imprecise. Abraham knew what he was doing, he wasn’t blind. He didn’t know how God could make good out any of it, but he trusted God would make good.

The oddest thing is why anyone with faith would object to the claim that The Binding of Isaac is essentially about obedience. — praxis

I said the story was about obedience. It was a test of faith that required obedience or it would not play out.

God could have tested obedience many ways. Why did God promise descendants, tell Abraham to kill the first descendent, then save him from death? The story is about more than obedience. It’s about what or who we freely choose to obey. We can’t be blind and discern what or who to obey.

Why did God not let Isaac die? One could say the test could not be over until Isaac was dead.

Abraham was blind to how sacrificing his beloved son was going to work out for him, and his son. He had to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son if he wanted to find out. But Abraham had faith, and fully believed that sacrificing Isaac was good and justified, because God said to do it, and Abraham trusted God, absolutely (obviously absolutely - you don’t get more absolute in your trust than Abraham did). That’s not blind faith - that’s trusting that whatever God gives you to see, or takes away from your sight, in the end, He will justify, and it will be good in your eyes as well.

It’s like denying that it’s about blind obedience is an admission that you don’t really believe. — praxis

Did Abraham have absolutely no evidence that God would make good on his word? Abraham was given Isaac when Isaac was thought to be impossible because Sara was old. God had a proven track record. So Abraham had reason to trust God. That’s not blind either.

It is precisely because Abraham was not blind about his choices that only a dramatic test, like killing your only son, would actually test Abraham’s trust. Anyone willing to trust blindly has no idea what they are trusting or even why they are trusting.

Blind faith, if that is all you think faith is, is not the faith I see, or I have. God, according to the Bible, wants us to know him, not emptiness and blindness.

Blind faith in God is not faith in anything.

Faith is faith in. To know in what, we must be fully informed and see.

thoughtless obedience. This is not admirable. — Banno

On a surface reading, the lesson would simply be obedience, like when teaching this story to a child, because a child is thoughtless or incapable of reasoning and knowing what to do. To an adult, the same lesson is trust, capable of reason and knowing what to do, but able to trust someone else's reasons. So obedience is part of the story, but if one concludes it's the only lesson, then much is missed.

Today's first reading at Catholic Mass is about Abraham and Isaac, and, we hundreds of millions hear this:

The Lord God took Abram outside and said,
“Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.
Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.”
Abram put his faith in the LORD,
who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.
- Genesis 15:5-6

This is essential background to the story of Abraham. He had no child at the time and was promised many descendants by God.

Then, later, Abraham and Sara have a child, a child born when thought impossible, but nevertheless a first of many promised descendants.

So next essential thing is that Isaac was most precious to Abraham. He loved him and did everything a good father would, everyday, to keep him safe and raise him. We know Abraham loved Isaac because he was distressed about Ishmael, his other son, and needed to know he would be cared for as well, so of course we know Abraham was a good father and loved his children. Love is essential.

And it is essential that Abraham was sane and rational throughout the story.

Otherwise, without love of his son, or without his mind and reason, the killing of Isaac could not be a sacrifice for Abraham. If Abraham was nuts and somehow didn't know what he was doing, then he wasn't sacrificing a cherished, beloved son; he was acting out some psychosis. That wouldn't be anything other than a tragic accident, and couldn't yield any lesson we can't learn from looking at much other human behavior. Abraham had to love Isaac and know what he was doing for the killing of Isaac to be a sacrifice made by trusting God. And, indeed, a MASSIVE sacrifice.

But despite his love for Isaac, the precious little boy who asked Abraham such a great question on the way to the deed, Abraham stayed faithful to his trust in God, above his own heart.

He found reason to believe God will make good on all of His promises in some other way.

That was the sacrifice - not the act of a madman; not someone blindly obedient - it was a fully informed decision to, despite all else, trust God.

Abraham in his heart trusted God to care for his descendants, even though he could not possibly understand how anymore, since he was killing his single legitimate descendent.

Last, it is essential to the story that God intercedes and saves Isaac.

Abraham showed what obedience and trust and faith are; God showed what obedience, trust and faith in Him are - salvation from death, progeny that number the stars. And Abraham's progeny are the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims at the very least.

Abraham loved Isaac, but trusted God above all else, and because of who God is, Abraham was given Isaac, and the fatherhood of history.

And for further context besides the father of descendents, the Abram/Isaac story is made a part of the Book of Genesis with Adam and Eve. So it shows us God asking himself, why would I ever trust a man again? Why would God bother to talk to any of us. Trust is two-way. God trusted Adam and Eve with the keys to paradise, with one instruction - don't drive faster than 55 miles per hour or you will die - and Adam and Eve decided to trust some snake and try driving 100 miles an hour for themselves - and then they ran and hid from God and needed clothing to stay hidden when God found them, and they blamed the snake and blamed each other for what was their own choice. It was certainly reasonable for God not to trust Abraham's faith, and reasonable to test Abraham, to see if any one of us people could ever be trusted again.

Abraham had reason to trust God - God made Isaac possible in the first place. Luckily, for all of us, Abraham figured out the most rational thing to do in every case, is trust God.

That's the story to me. Not one hint of blind obedience or irrational murderers.

"Obedience" is an adolescent or a slave's word for what a consenting adult does in every act directed towards some purpose. We make our actions ours, using our reasons and willing them, and then enacting our own law accordingly. Call it obedience, or call it enacting your own will - these are the same thing if your will is the will of another. If you trust another, you can say you are obeying another, or just say you are trusting another and take more responsibility for whatever you are doing.

But I need to clarify one last thing. I still do not think faith is opposed to reason; but faith approaches the same world from a different direction; faith is other than reason, and can confound reason. But reason is always there (allowing one to distinguish whether one can trust someone else to conduct a certain action, or one can't, or shouldn't trust someone else.

And little Isaac turned out to be okay. I have faith that you, Banno, will one day be able to ask him yourself if he holds that day against God or his father.

Faith, understood as belief without or even despite the evidence, is not a virtue. — Banno

Anything anyone thinks without balancing it with their own experience, without reason, is foolish. That’s not good faith.

Faith, understood as trust, might foster commitment or dedication and these are (perhaps) virtues. — Banno

Magnanimous of you to say. Doesn’t go far enough. Perhaps you don’t have to trust anyone for anything. Certainly trust can be broken, so when it is, does that mean we should shoot for a world where we don’t have to trust anyone? Trustworthiness is the virtue; trusting is more like, being vulnerable.

The Binding of Isaac and the Trials of Job speak of acts of cruelty, where unjustified suffering is inflicted in the name of faith. Moreover these are held up as admirable, to be emulated. — Banno

But the story of Abraham does not tell us how to show faith - Jews and Christians don’t need to do any violence ever, based on faith (those who say and do otherwise, like you, misunderstand all of it). Isaac lived. Abraham fathered children who, like him, knew God, as countless as the stars, just as God said he would. The story of Abraham means that God will justify your faith in him. We can trust God no matter what. It’s not about, what crazy murder can someone commit. At all. Abraham was rational, he trusted God, and was right and justified.

I’m not going to defend the prosecution of God with you here.

I will defend faith. Anyone who thinks abandoning your own reason is ever right or good, is a fool, or not a functioning person. Faith is not opposed to reason.

If a person performs some ritual, to praise God and bring blessings, they are using reason throughout, as necessary to complete any task successfully. Just because you don’t see God and don’t see blessings, doesn’t mean they are not there, or that the faithful person is not seeing something you don’t.

So you still haven’t found one good thing about faith. How belief in certain things, like Santa Clause, or justice, or some other person’s faith in you, might actually be an important, even necessary part of improving the world. Not even on a raw, practical, people managing their hard lives level.

Fine, but then, good luck working whatever muscle allows people to trust each other, and good luck building a world where trust between two people is not needed. Good luck building love.

Faith is not opposed to reason. That’s a shallow, essentialist view of “faith”, creating a use function and truth value suited towards insulting other intelligences.

You could just trust me about it, but I hope you use your own reason and figure out a deeper, broader significance to faith than you currently display.

Hence it does not follow that acts done in faith are always good. And so it cannot be that acts are good in virtue of being done in faith. — Banno

I agree. Not all acts done in faith are good. I’m not saying an act is good because it is an act of faith. An act is what it is.

But if some acts done in faith ARE good, then it doesn’t follow that all acts done in faith are bad.

You say you are not arguing that all acts done in faith are bad, but by the way you talk about faith (willfully resistant to reason, used to justify and praise badness), you still seem to be building a case that all faith leads to no good. I’ve seen nothing even neutral, let alone good about faith in your estimation of it.

But that is demonstrably false. Tons of real charity, life giving sacrifice, happiness, comfort, all brought into the world, daily, for thousands of years, directly in the hope and belief in things only known in faith. Tons of goodness because of faith and religion.

All of the pain and suffering and barbarity and lies and badness - it was always already there as it remains. Faith didn’t cause it. Science doesn’t cause it either. Science helps some of it; faith does too.

I’m not even really trying to argue faith is good. Just trying to keep straight what it is from what it is not, and recognize faith as necessary - you really don’t believe in anything that you haven’t already proven? Of course you have some beliefs that are not yet proven. You are interested in philosophy, so I know you don’t know a lot of things for sure, yet you must act anyway like anyone else. You have your beliefs, like everyone else. Beliefs are a necessity, and some of them are a good.

Why say reason is an enemy of faith, when you are a reasonable person who occasionally acts on faith like everyone must? I think you are selling faith short, to your own disillusionment with organized religion.

In short, if you maintain that if you were to set the entire world state back to what it was before a decision (including every aspect of your mental being, your will, your agency), and then something different might happen... well, maybe something different might happen, but you can't attribute that difference to your will. — flannel jesus

I think that’s right. I don’t like using the word “will” as a noun. Willing is the thing, not the will.

There is only one place to find freedom. In consent. Not in some pre-meditated, deliberated choice. I may never get to choose anything, but once the “choice” is made (as once any other deterministic action takes place), I can still give or withhold my consent, and claim that choice as mine, or remain consumed in a world of necessity.

I make the inevitable contingent on me by my consent or my denial, not by my actions.

If I crash my car, I can show all the ways this was determined, or I can just give my consent and say “I am the reason the car crashed, nothing else.”

We take responsibility and only then give birth to free agency. Freedom, for us, first, is an act of defiance. We have to make our will by ourselves, and make it out of necessity that encompasses and drives all else.

We don’t have a will sitting somewhere inside waiting to cause some effect. We see the effects and we claim them after the fact, and in this claim, demonstrate for the first time our will.

Another way to say this is that the “will” used as a noun does not exist until we are willing something. We are not free first - we free ourselves afterwards with our consent or our denial of the pre-determined circumstances always already in front of us.

Or if not, maybe there simply is no freedom. Which seems impossible, just as freedom is impossible to explain.

I have argued that they are not good in virtue of or due to their faith — Banno

You just stated it. You didn't argue it.

rather than to address the arguments presented. — Banno

You haven't addressed mine.

Why fabricate ethics, good, and laws at all? Why do you do that if you can only base your actions on reason and science (which can not tell you what to do)? If science cannot tell you what to do, how are you not uncomfortable with any ethics, any assessment of some platonic "good"?

Curious that some folk have such difficulty with this: that what is good and what is commanded are not the very same thing. But consider: of whatever is commanded, it makes sense to ask "is that good?".

It's pretty naive to suppose, unargued, that the only form ethics can take is that of a series of commandments. — Banno

That is all off topic. Law speak is more akin to science. You need reason to sift through laws and commands, like reason navigates us through physical laws and necessities.

I thought we were talking about faith.

I don't agree that it was faith that delivered us to our present sate of enlightenment; — Banno

How about just one good person, who believes in God, has faith, and is a rational, good, fun, functioning, contributing member of society? Ever met one of those? If you have, go figure, all that despite the plague of faith.

You sound to me like you have no idea what faith is. And no curiosity.

Science describes how things are, it doesn't tell you what to do about how things are. — Banno

That's precisely correct.

So I have to assume nothing tells you what to do, since you are a man of science, and since you can't use faith to build authority behind the law, and since such authority will never come from science. It would be nonsensical to uncover the facade of a faith community making moral law, and then turn around fabricate some other ethical, moral code anyway (and why would anyone care to follow laws they didn't have to make in the first place).

But you seem to think faith justifies praise of barbarity, so you have a moral code where elevating barbarity is bad enough to be useful to denigrate the faithful. And so you think barbarity is immoral, and false praise immoral - where did these laws come from anyway? They sound like the bible just as much as the bible does to me.

If you want to denigrate faith as a pastime, that's fine, but if you want to be consistent, just admit that just like faith, morality and ethics make no sense to you, because they can't be weighed, or measured or proven sound, or logically derived, or tested or falsified. Why ought I not follow an unethical law anyway? Why can't I follow whatever I want?

No-faith may be a blessing in disguise.

Which is pretty much my problem with faith. There is no act so barbaric that it can't be justified by an appeal to faith. As a way of deciding action, it is very poor and entirely unaccountable.
— Tom Storm

Yes; and yet by some it is elevated to such heights that it is seen as the greatest virtue. — Banno

That's all true. Barbarity and false virtue, blessed in the dogmatic mask of some religion, happens.

But is that all faith is to you both, or just some misuse of faith that corrupts only some people?

Does absolute faith corrupt absolutely? If that is what you think, I wonder if I could change your mind?

Because I see the opposite in what springs from faith. Equating barbarity and false virtue with faith is a much more, let's say, particular view of faith than I've generally experienced. Looks like the TV version, or maybe from a sociology class, or anthropology class. Not from an actual church, or most actual churches and mosques and synagogues. Lot's of good, rational, faith-going people, exist and do things because of their faith everyday. For centuries, since people started writing, maybe because of words themselves - faith driving the discussions among people. Delivered us all to our currently enlightened state. Are you saying they all, because they would base their actions and justifications on some religious faith, they've all just strayed so far from the same reality you and I experience today that all faith is about is justifying things like barbarity and false virtue in the name of their religious beliefs?

Or is that just one small point in a broader understanding of "faith"?

You can't pull some lemonade out of "faith in God" at all? Even on a psychological or social level?

Do all opiates of the masses lead only to wife and child abuse, barbarity and praise of barbarity?

I think that misses everything about faith.

People wrote the law, whether they thought they were writing the will of god or not.

But, and over, that, if the law is unethical, you ought not do what the law says.

Hence, the law does not tell you what you ought do. — Banno

This is all confused to me. It sounds like you are overthrowing the law, but using the law to do it, so I don't know the function of "law" for you.

You talk about the writing of the laws by whatever means codified, then pose an unethical law, and from this conclude "you ought not do what the law says."
And this was in response to Frank saying

The law tells you what to do. — frank

But your determination of "unethical" can only come by appealing to some other law. So the law is still telling you what to do.

The determination of "unethical" is done here by seeing that one law (which tells you what to do) is in conflict with another law (which also tells you what to do). You replaced ought with another ought, not a refutation of ought.

If you said the law was just silly, or the law was impossible to understand so there is nothing to follow, you could say "hence the law does not tell you what you ought to do." But you said "the law is unethical" - so you are still looking to some law, some ethic, to tell you what to do.

The law always tells you what to do. That's what a law is, what it does.

The question is only "what is the law", and separate from whatever answer you get, there is what you actually do, following the law or not, or some other law. But if there is a law, it tells you what to do.

Isn't believing in impossibility faith? — Corvus

It would take faith to believe in something one’s own reason found to be impossible. I only mentioned my belief because there’s an open wound right now, talking about life after death with a bunch of sad folks recently.

But on a philosophy forum, life after death seems like pure conjecture. We can’t even say what a mind is, let alone how it could exist absent a body.

Where is the place for the religious belief or faith in life after death? — Corvus

Seems like there would be a different answer to that question for every believer.

The same place for a belief that a miracle ever happens.

Just last week was Ash Wednesday when Christians are reminded from dust they came and to dust they will return.

No reason to believe otherwise, unless willing to believe in the impossible.