Some atheists do and some atheists don't. — andrewk

Care to answer for yourself?

You don't need to convince me that all humans rely on faith. — andrewk

Ok, cool, so I'll ask again...

Will atheists make the same acknowledgement you are requesting of theists? Which was...

It does however mean that any statements of belief in the trinity, or indeed about any aspect of God whatsoever, must be acknowledged by those making them to be pure items of faith, not reasoned as they are so often presented to be. — andrewk

I'm not disagreeing with your request quoted above, I'm just asking if we are going to apply this equally to all parties to the debate, given that it appears to be agreed that all parties are operating from faith.

As example, if an atheist wishes to discuss "any aspect of God whatsoever" such as perhaps a claim that no such God exists, should they acknowledge that their claim is a "pure item of faith", and "not reasoned as they are so often presented to be"?

I think that's an excellent position. It was the position of Immanuel Kant, a devout theist who essentially said that we were incapable of doing any reasoning about God. — andrewk

To be a bit more precise, we are clearly capable of reasoning about God, but we have no way of knowing how relevant that process might be to the reality.

It does however mean that any statements of belief in the trinity, or indeed about any aspect of God whatsoever, must be acknowledged by those making them to be pure items of faith, not reasoned as they are so often presented to be. — andrewk

Will atheists make the same acknowledgement?

THEISTS: Are holy books the word of God? There is no proof, so such a claim is faith.

ATHEISTS: Is human reason applicable to everything everywhere? There is no proof, so such a claim is faith.

See? Both sides are doing the same thing, accepting the validity of their chosen authority without proof, as a matter of faith.

It's interesting to see that even those that reject faith, sometimes adamantly, are themselves using faith. This suggests that there is a deep human need to know, or at least create the illusion of knowing. It may also suggest that by offering a method of creating that illusion of knowing theists have been addressing and serving the human condition in a fairly realistic manner. The evidence of this is that even in the age of science faith based religion continues to flourish all over the world.

Of course it's also true that religion doesn't work for everybody, and probably never has. And so many people are required to look for other authorities to have faith in, other methods of creating the illusion of knowing.

Perhaps it's helpful to mention that Christianity is not exclusively about ideological assertions, as seems to so often be assumed on philosophy forums. Christianity is also about the act of surrender called love, an act whose value can be observed and validated in one's own experience without reference to any holy book, ideology, opinion, clerical structure etc.

Well, no. What's illogical would still be illogical, and what's contradictory would still be contradictory. — Ciceronianus the White

Agreed, but it still hasn't been proven that these human concepts would be binding on a creator of everything everywhere, should such a thing exist.

What you're claiming is that God isn't bound by the rules of logic, — Ciceronianus the White

To be more precise I'm claiming that it has not been proven that a God would be bound by the rules of logic. I'm doing the very same thing atheists reasonably do, declining to accept things on faith, asking for proof etc.

My guess would be this claim wouldn't impress many atheists. — Ciceronianus the White

Agreed. That's because they're often not really that interested in reason, but in ideology, and typically don't understand the difference between the two. That's why I said...

The fatal flaw in atheism is not that it rejects theism, but that it rejects it's own most fundamental principles. Many or most atheists accept as a matter of faith (ie. without proof) that the rules of human reason are automatically binding on everything everywhere. By accepting this as a matter of faith they are heretics to their own chosen methodology.

since triune (where 3=1) is illogical and contradictory on its face. — Hanover

Please prove that human logic would be binding on a God.

HUMAN: A single half insane species only recently living in caves on one little planet in one of billions of galaxies.

GOD: Proposed to be something like the source of everything everywhere.

Unless you can prove that something as small as human logic would be binding upon something as large as a god, then gotchas like "illogical" and "contradictory" are basically meaningless.

The fatal flaw in atheism is not that it rejects theism, but that it rejects it's own most fundamental principles.

So, if one is willing to face the possibility of human error and unintended launches, one is then required to understand that the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) which we are counting on to keep us safe is largely an illusion.

MAD assumes that all parties will have technical control of their weapons at all times, an assumption undermined by a series of incidents where such control was lost.

MAD assumes that the players involved are sane intelligent actors who will make rational calculations. While this is typically true, it's also sometimes not true. As example, it was nuts for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, as his generals tried to tell him, but Hitler was a high stakes gambler addicted to the next roll of the dice.

Corruption requires Purity to have proceded it, a flaw implies flawlesness. This is duality, because each requires the other and implies it. — Lucid

Duality is an invention of the human mind, a very very small electro-chemical mechanical device which operates by a process of conceptual division. Declaring God to be good or evil, powerful or powerless, perfect or imperfect, existing or non-existing, small or large etc is an attempt to reduce God to human scale so that it would be comprehensible to us.

Assuming something the scale of a God exists, it seems quite unlikely it would be bound by the dualistic "this or that" paradigms created by the minds of a single species on one little planet in one of billions of galaxies. As example, consider the vast majority of reality, space. It can reasonably be said to both exist, and not exist. Our dualistic minds demand that it be one or the other, exist or not exist, but reality is not required to comply with our human limitations.

Any perceived division between perfection and imperfection, purity and corruption etc, are just illusions created by a device which operates by dividing the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.

Point being, all such conversations are doomed from the start as they are incurably limited by the medium in which they are taking place. All we can hope to accomplish is entertainment.

About 6 years ago my chronic mid-range-severity depression lifted. Since then I have had a quite positive outlook on life. — Bitter Crank

I knew your screen name must be a scam, a lie, fake news, a conspiracy, a coverup, and that therefore, logically and obviously, you must be an agent of the Trump administration. :smile:

Personally, I refuse to learn from anybody who has not written about nuclear weapons. — John Doe

It may help to make the distinction between philosophy and reason. As example, writing an article about Plato as your kitchen catches on fire could be labeled philosophy given that Plato is generally seen as an important philosopher. But surely such an activity could not be labeled an act of reason.

If a philosopher can spout facts and analysis about Plato all day long in great detail, but they aren't capable of simple obvious common sense reason involving issues of the greatest importance to the largest number of people, are they really experts in the art of reason?

If members wish to define philosophy as an activity with no necessary relationship to reason, then in such a case my points on this subject can be discarded. If members wish to read philosophers who would keep on writing a Plato article while their house burns down around them, surely that is their right. Personally, I choose not to give much attention to thinkers who can't reason their way to grasping that the kitchen fire is a more pressing matter than their Plato article.

What nuclear weapons can teach us is that as human beings we have a very tenuous relationship with reason. We think we are reasoning, but usually what we are doing is referencing authority, typically in the form of the group consensus. As we look through that group consensus lens we see that the culture at large including almost all intellectual elites are not focused on nuclear weapons, and so we assume we shouldn't have such a focus either.

If we were to instead look at nuclear weapons through the lens of reason, an entirely different picture emerges. There's really little logical basis for largely ignoring one issue that could almost immediately bring an end to all other issues.

What can obstruct such an observation is that it can quickly reveal than we, including almost all the so called "experts", are not the intelligent rational people we like to assume ourselves to be. When we observe ourselves and the "experts" what we're really seeing is not the processes of reason, but a carefully constructed pose of pseudo intellectual sophistication. Academics have mastered this pose to such a degree that they can charge for it.

If members wish to study thinkers who have mastered the projection of authority but aren't capable of simple common sense reason, it would be wise to at least know that's what you're doing.

The pendulum has swung far one way, will it swing equally far back the other way for a bit? This ought to also be taken as a warning away from being too extreme, as your extremeness is the fuel for the genesis of your antithesis. — All sight

While the rest of the post didn't do that much for me so I almost didn't comment, your concluding summary seems to about nail it.

Didn't realize writing about nuclear weapons is a prerequisite for good philosophers to abide by. — Posty McPostface

Well, now you know, so that's good. If a philosophical "expert" can not focus on the issue which can quickly end all other issues, they aren't a logic expert after all, and thus do not merit any particular attention.

Hope I clarified that issue somewhat. — Posty McPostface

You clarified that you are a member of the philosophy culture group consensus in good standing. You also have an excellent screen name! :smile:

Well ok, a few suggestions.

1) Forget about all dead philosophers.

2) As to living philosophers, check to see how much they've written about nuclear weapons. If not much or none, discard them too, as they're not capable of basic reasoning.

Pay no attention to whether a writer is famous or not. Think of fame like you do popularity contests in high school.

This procedure will clear the investigation of a lot of dead wood wasted space. You may be left with nobody to study except yourself, which would be great.

The duality "good vs. bad" is a conceptual invention of the human mind. Should something the scale of a god exist, it would not be either good or bad but outside of that dualistic paradigm, outside of all dualistic paradigms.

The less of a wall of text it is the better. — fdrake

Casting my vote for this.

wouldnt worry too much about the lack of academically oriented threads. — Akanthinos

Agreed. After exploring academic philosophy blogs for awhile in the hopes of finding higher ground, I've come away with the impression that academic philosophy is really more about the philosophy BUSINESS than it is about philosophy itself, and that there are significant conflicts between the agendas of business and philosophy.

Academics excel at creating polished presentations, but when it come to the quality of thinking, I see little improvement over what can be found on a general public philosophy forum like this one.

My vote, do whatever you want to do and if the mods find it objectionable they'll probably let you know. Personally, I see no reason why you should respond to posts that don't interest you. I make that mistake sometimes, and it often doesn't work out that well. :smile:

And so this is non-responsive to the question, which was whether the media has the power to bring about world peace. — Hanover

This thread is not about world peace.

You really think that the media possesses the power to bring about world peace? — Hanover

Media has the power to direct our attention. Every time Donald Trump farts they do a three hour special on the smell. If they can get us all talking about that, they can get us talking about cities that just vanished too.

You are now arguing that nuclear weapons are the way to get rid of nuclear weapons. — unenlightened

I'm arguing that what the evidence shows is that little else is likely to earn our attention. Like I keep saying, reason and philosophy have PROVEN that they are insufficient to get our attention.

Look at this forum. How many threads can you find about nuclear weapons? Look at the writings of academic philosophers. How many articles do you find about nuclear weapons? Evidence. Evidence that reason and philosophy are not adequate for getting us to focus on the pending end of everything.

I don't like this evidence, but I'm willing to look at it.

You guys don't like this evidence either, so you're ignoring it.

I don't imagine it would change the consensus at all; if anything, it would demonstrate the need for 'us' to have nuclear weapons - because 'they' have them. — unenlightened

It would change the group consensus in that the round the clock media coverage (which would dwarf 9/11) would focus everyone on the issue. Whether that focus would have positive or negative results is indeed unknown, agreed.

That said, a terrorist nuke may be our best hope. We're in a race between a limited event like that and The Big One. Every day that we drift along blindly complacent to the threat is another pull on the russian roulette trigger.

The mods already have this button, it is the power that confers authority. — unenlightened

Thanks for playing, but um, you've completely dodged the hypothetical analogy here.

One often overlooked opportunity to be heard is the letter to the editor section of your local paper. I used to submit letters regularly before the Net came along, and almost certainly had more readers then than I do now.

The letter to the editor format tends to require a writer to know what their point is and get to it quickly, which is good training. And it can be interesting to work with a real editor, which most of us don't get to experience on the Net.

But the solution is trivial; take the gun out of your mouth, get rid of the weapons. One doesn't need to be perfect to understand that, and it needn't take centuries. So one has to ask why such an obviously sensible course is not being followed. — unenlightened

I've been attempting to point to one cause.

Most of us, most of the time, don't really reference reason but authority. To a degree, this makes sense because nobody has the time to think through every issue for themselves. So we look to experts and the community around us, and go with the flow.

The experts and the community have formed a group consensus which assumes that since the end of the cold war nuclear weapons are no longer really something to worry about. So we don't worry. Logically this lack of concern is unsupportable, but we're not using reason, so what is logical is largely irrelevant.

Given that we're not capable of addressing this threat through reason alone, some event is going to be required to engage our emotional energy. As example, imagine how the group consensus might dramatically shift if a terrorist sets off a nuke in some major city.

What can we do? We're doing it now.

Look at the threads on this forum, on any philosophy forum, and look at the articles being written by academic philosophers too. The vast majority of this content can be described as intellectually interesting, but of little importance in comparison to threats to human civilization. That is, it's mostly a parlor game.

What can we do? We can use reason. We can prioritize our attention. We can stop playing the parlor game, and direct our public attention to issues which if unsolved will lead to the end of all other issues.

Imagine that hackers added a button to this forum which would allow every reader to erase the entire forum and the backups too. This issue would immediately go straight to the top of focus for the mods, right? Obviously, that's because if they don't get rid of that button it's only a matter of time until somebody clicks it and then all the other threads vanish. Thus, it's not rational to focus on the other threads until the button is gone.

Hi unenlightened,

I don't mean to dismiss your interests, they are my interests too, and I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss them together some time. If you start a thread on such topics and I don't show up, please zip me a reminder.

I do agree that human psychology is the root of the problem. I'm just making the point that we don't have time to fix that first, if it even can be fixed. Such a process would take centuries at least, and we just don't have that kind of time. Imperfect flawed human beings are going to have solve this one, if it is to be solved.

Hi Crank,

In democracies at least, we are the government. Politicians will say and do whatever it takes to get our votes and stay in office. If we view the pending collapse of modern civilization as just one of a thousand issues, politicians will too. If we make nukes a high priority issue, they will too.

Everybody always wants to pass the buck to politicians and the government, when the real problem is actually their employer.

Ok, so your plan is that we should leave the nuclear gun in our mouth until we achieve a radical transformation of human psychology, such as is referenced by Krishnamurti. How long do you expect this process to take?

How does it help, to focus on the gun? Why not focus on the mouth and the hand? — unenlightened

Please reference the opening post. Is this what you would say to a friend with a gun in their mouth? Would you try to teach them how to be enlightened, argue for a radical transformation of human psychology etc?

That's why I offered the hypothetical in the opening post, an attempt to make nuclear weapons real, instead of some fancy abstract issue. I attempted to make them real in this thread, because they are real.

Hi Unenlighted,

Have you read The Ending of Time? — unenlightened

Yes, I read a LOT of Krishnamurti in my youth and consider him a significant influence on my thinking to this day. While I do appreciate his insightfulness we might note that JK wrote and spoke extensively for almost 80 years, and while his philosophy is indeed interesting and entertaining, nothing much has changed.

Both you and Krishnamurti are helping me make my point. Krishnamurti is yet another example of an intelligent educated person who failed to focus on the gun in our mouth, and you are using Krishnamurti to aim us away from focusing on the gun in our mouth. Everybody is interested in everything, except the gun. That's fundamentally irrational, and demonstrates the weakness of philosophy.

I've seen this phenomena a number of times on many forums. Some young person will start a thread asking some profound personal question, everyone will jump in to try to answer, but meanwhile the original poster has vanished. Maybe I'll learn the lesson this time. :smile:

I found it very interesting to learn that time runs at different rates. I saw a documentary which explained this. Scientists set up two atomic clocks (accurate to a billionth of a second). They kept one in their lab, and took the other to the top of a mountain. When they brought the clocks back together they showed different times.

Apparently large bodies such as the Earth effect the rate at which time unfolds. I can't remember whether they speed it up or slow it down, sorry.

As example, GPS satellites have to take this time difference in to account and if they didn't GPS would be so inaccurate as to be largely useless.

Time seems fixed to us because of our extremely limited perspective on the surface of the Earth. As example, the time rate difference between sea level and mountain top is real, but very small, measured in billionths of a second. So we don't perceive the difference.

Hi there Monkey,

Well, if you had actually understood the other thread...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion

... you would realize that nukes open the door to a purely philosophical discussion. What is our relationship with knowledge if not a philosophical topic???

I'm not asking philosophers to be politicians or activists. I'm asking them to address the relationship with knowledge which gave rise to nukes and other products of civilization. I'm asking them to dig below the surface and examine the underlying assumptions which bring all these phenomena in to being. That's philosophy!

Seriously. I've been trying to have such discussions all over the net for years. The best discussions always happen on open to the public forums such as this one. Attempting to engage scientists, philosophers and other intellectual "elites" in our relationship with knowledge has proven to be largely a waste of time.

Oh wait, no point asking you, you're as mad as the rest of us. — unenlightened

Good point, that's true, I am as mad as the rest of us. If there is any difference it's only in that I know I'm nuts. And I know most everyone else including the "experts" are nuts too. So I have this awareness of living in an insane asylum. Which as you've seen, tends to make me even more nuts. :smile:

What better solution for a trust issue can there be than mutually assured destruction? — VagabondSpectre

You make good points about how nukes have sobered the great powers. But you're not taking important factors in to account.

1) Technical errors leading to unintended launches. See the last post in this thread for a real world example.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion

2) Human History. There is a consistent pattern throughout human history that every so often we go bat shit crazy and have fight to the death conflicts using every tool available. There's really little evidence that this longstanding pattern is now completely over.

3) The Hitler Effect. It was very irrational of Hitler to invade Russia. But rationality had little to do with it. Hitler was a compulsive high stakes gambler who lived for the next role of the dice. Every so often such people come to power and think they are smarter than everyone else and that they can get away with anything.

So, you're right that it's good that nukes have sobered the great powers in our lifetime, but that's not going to last forever.

We post WWII baby boomers grew up during the tension of the Cold War and the anxiety about nuclear war. Speaking for myself, I remain worried about nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. — Bitter Crank

Good point Crank. Perhaps much of what is happening here in the thread is a generation gap problem. I was 10 years old living in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Walter Cronkite was on the TV saying the bombs could start falling at any moment. That's a different experience than younger members of the forum have been through. For them it's the falling of the Berlin Wall and the notion that the cold war is over and thus the problem of nukes is largely resolved.

Since perestroika and glasnost, the threat of imminent use of nuclear weapons has been decreased -- but not eliminated. — Bitter Crank

In a sense yes, but the potential for unintended launches continues. See the last post in this thread for an example.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3728/the-knowledge-explosion

The difference between nuclear war and climate change is that the latter is happening, and the former has not (so far). — Bitter Crank

The two issues are related. Climate change threatens to push fragile states over the edge in to chaos, which brings us closer to the conditions in which nukes would be used.

Even without climate change, there is a long pattern in human history of things going along pretty well for awhile and then chaos emerges for a time. We've always survived the chaos periods in the past because the powers available to us were limited. Nuclear weapons change that equation. The next time chaos emerges is likely to be the last, at least for modern civilization.

Giving roughly 7.4 billion people credit, I don't think people are indifferent to either nuclear weapons or global warming. It is the case, however, that no individual, no small group, no large group, no major political party that is not very securely in power can do much about either problem. — Bitter Crank

We can't do much about the problem because 1) we insist we can't do much about the problem and 2) we spend almost all our time focused on other much smaller issues.

I would say philosophy is capable of "addressing issues of great scale" — Bitter Crank

Then why are the vast majority of professional philosophers the vast majority of the time not addressing the subject of nuclear weapons?

It's not because they're stupid. It's not because they're poorly educated. It's not because they're heartless monsters. It's not because they lack the relevant facts. We can rule all that out.

And once we do that, we are left with the methodology which they are using, philosophy.

We could propose that what is really needed to address nuclear weapons is not intellectual intelligence, but emotional intelligence. We know the gun is in our mouth, but we don't really care that much, and so we are easily distracted by almost every other topic.

Emotional intelligence would involve the ability to open ourselves up to the horror of nuclear war. Philosophy doesn't really open us emotionally, because it instead focuses on detached objectivity. And so we have a lot of facts, and can write clever articles about those facts, but the facts have little impact upon us and our behavior.

Thus, the process of philosophy, while being beautiful in itself, is proven basically worthless for the issues of largest scale, such as the end of everything everywhere.

If you literally had a gun in your mouth, I'd be intrigued. — RainyDay

I do literally have a gun in my mouth, as do you, as do we all. My hypothetical is a hypothetical only in the sense it referenced a handgun instead of a hydrogen bomb.

I do literally have a "gun" in my mouth, as do you, as do we all, but you're not actually intrigued. The moment I drop out of this thread the rest of you will as well, and the focus will move back to a thousand other things.

And that is my point. Philosophy isn't working at making us rational.

After that acceptance of death I spoke about, discussions on how to avoid it etc become extremely dull. — RainyDay

Ok, so what you're saying is that the prospect that the next many generations of human beings won't get to enjoy modern civilization is an extremely dull topic. Again, you're helping me make my point. You're expressing the group consensus of the society at large generally speaking, including the most highly educated philosophers.

Hi RainyDay,

You're referring to our personal situation. And of course you're right, we're all going to die one way or another. Just lost a family member here yesterday. We all have to make peace with this, agreed.

We don't have to make peace with many generations to come being denied the opportunity to enjoy what we've enjoyed, because we were too stupid and selfish to protect it for them. What nuclear weapons can teach us is how little we really care about each other, even our own children.

You've not yet made the case why any methodology which allows us to be calmly bored with the gun in our mouth, and the mouths of billions of people to come, should be considered useful and important.

Please observe how everyone is ignoring the logic of the opening post. If I literally had a gun in my mouth, and was too bored by the gun to bother discussing it, would you not consider me nuts?

Now please observe how posters will continue to ignore that specific challenge, or look for some clever way around it. Observe how philosophy is not helping us to be clear minded enough to simply admit that we are all quite literally nuts, almost psychopathic in our lack of concern.

A homework assignment... :smile:

As you're going about your daily business, reserve a little attention for observing the structure of civilization all around you.

See the streets, the traffic signs, the houses and shops, the hospitals and schools. See the grocery stores, reliable food, a miracle! When a police car goes by take a moment to think of everything that goes in to keeping the bad guys at bay so they're not in your face. Consider the number 911, you dial three digits on the phone in your pocket and highly trained people come rushing to assist you.

Look at all the stuff you have, that almost everybody has. Cars and clothes and computers, too many comforts and conveniences to begin to list. Think of all the millions of scientists working hard every day to make things better for you.

Just observe all this stuff as you pass through your daily life. Give some thought to how much work has gone in to building this miracle we call modern civilization. And think what your life would be without it.

If a reader does this homework, over time they too will become ever more amazed at how casual we are about what we have, and how easily it could all be lost.

Hi Gloaming,

He's right, as are you, in providing evidence which supports the key claim of my posts in this thread, which is...

Society wide, including the intellectual elites, philosophy and reason has failed to guide us to prioritize our focus. And so, just as we see in this thread, we are so easily distracted from aiming our attention and intelligence at existential threats like nuclear weapons.

We are, just like the hypothetical person in the opening post, people with a huge gun in our mouth, which we can't focus on for more than a few minutes. We find almost any subject more interesting, for example, ego head butting on an Internet forum. Ego head butting seems interesting to us, but the fact that there is machinery in place to crash civilization in almost the blink of an eye, a snooze, not really that interesting.

If this was true only for this or that person, we could place the blame on their personal limitations. But it's true of the whole culture generally speaking, including those most highly educated in the art of reason.

Here, look for yourself...

https://blog.apaonline.org/

That's a leading academic philosophy group blog with a couple years of publishing daily by many different professional philosophers, and there's only ONE article on nuclear weapons, and that ONE article exists only because I demanded it. It's the same everywhere I go, except that most philosophy blogs have zero articles on nuclear weapons.

I know the APA editors a bit, they're nice people, quite intelligent, articulate and very well educated. None of that is the problem.

The problem is that philosophy appears to be inadequate for addressing issues of such great scale. Thus, I'm proposing that philosophy is basically a clever parlor game which some folks are lucky enough to get paid to play.

You don't know that. You couldn't possibly know that. — Sapientia

Look, you yourself just said you don't want to research it. Look above a couple posts and read your own words.

Again, if you have researched it, prove me wrong, and show us your articles. Or sit down and shut up.

You strike me an irrational alarmist fixated on a single issue. — Sapientia

Please explain to us the reasoning which concludes that we shouldn't be alarmed by thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed at our heads.

Please explain to us the reasoning which concludes that if I have a loaded gun in mouth I shouldn't make that the single focus of my attention?

You're doing a very understandable thing, so I apologize for giving you a hard time, even though, um, you deserve it. :smile:

You're referencing the group consensus, led by elevated "experts", which assumes nuclear weapons are just one of a thousand issues. You look around you, and see almost everyone takes this position, and so you believe it must be correct. You understandably want to believe that the group consensus is generally sane and rational.

You're pushing back at me because you're starting to see the group consensus is not sane, not rational, not intelligent, but much like the man in the opening post. Gun in mouth, and bored by it.

This is a quite troubling thing to see, so I don't really blame anyone who doesn't want to see it. So if you don't want to see it, just stop reading, and go back to sleep. I don't object.