I think it's obvious when you buy a t-shirt for £2.50 that you are complicit in an exploitative low wage economy if not actual slavery. How could it be otherwise?

Benkei, why not just wash the plastic tray as you would a plate or bowl and then it will not smell? How does Dutch garbage separation work - does somebody go through your bin to pull out the fishy bits of plastic? In the UK we pay a Chinese contractor to take rubbish to the other side of the world on a ship and pile it up next to some village where the people's votes and opinions don't count. That's the cost of our democracy and beautiful countryside.

The holy texts are expressions of conscience and our consciences tend to speak loudly if not always very effectively. The authority doesn't come from the text alone. It comes from the consciousness that the text has a point to make.

I can see that the lands where Jumblies live would be *few*, sieves being so unbuoyant, but how did they make it *far*? Oh, perhaps they set out from far away and are still far away. Yes, that must be it. That would explain why a person never meets a Jumbly.

On the main question, we rely on conversations with others for all the measurements we make, not just assessing how we and others are feeling. Without being able to compare experiences with other people I would not know how to read a thermometer or what a thermometer is or whether the reading that I take is the same as or different from another person's reading or what kind of thing thermometers are presumed to measure. If we can reliably compare experiences of that sort and for that purpose, then I would not assume that we cannot compare experiences of mood, emotion, thought etc equally reliably and equally fallibly.

He'll be even more astonished when he finds out it isn't true. If that's what he finds out.

"I don't think the mere passing of time would prevent us from understanding what a civilization is like in the future. Do you know of something that would prevent it?"

One thing preventing it could be the lack of knowledge and experience to be accumulated between now and the future. The ancient Greek mathematicians would not have been able to conceive differential calculus but not for any lack of imagination or intelligence, simply for the lack of centuries of mathematical endeavour.

...the point of Anslem' ontology is that which is ultimately a perfect being cannot be thought that it cannot even be thought of as not existing.

If we cannot conceive of something then we cannot speak about it meaningfully. Conversely, if we can speak meaningfully about something then we can have a concept of if.

If the outcome of all this is that God must exist but that we can neither speak nor think meaningfully about God, then nothing will have been proved. God drops out of the equation. He might as well be a square circle.

But of course we can speak meaningfully about God and we can think about God. And these things are quite independent of God's existence. Obviously - or perhaps not.

Sure. We were being invited to entertain the contradictory of the obvious; so to point out the obvious was the best reply.

You wrote:"Surely there is a logic behind St. Anselm' “that than which no greater can be conceived.”"

I pointed out that this is (obviously) false, because capacity to conceive and existence are logically independent.

Surely there is a logic behind St. Anselm' “that than which no greater can be conceived.”

The existence of something and our capacity to conceive it are logically independent. We can conceive things that don't exist and equally things that do; and we probably fail to conceive things that do or alternatively don't exist. So to consider what we can or cannot conceive will tell us nothing about what exists.

"God exists. Get over it."

OK, I'm over it. Now someone else tells me that God doesn't exist and to get over it. OK, so now I'm over that, too. So I'm over both. Now what? I'm not sure that getting over a question is quite the same as answering it.

"whatever begins to exist has a cause."

I don't think it's particularly weird. But it's an assumption, not a necessary truth. It's not self-contradictory to suppose that something begins to exist and yet has no cause. It's perhaps a sign that the person making that supposition has a rather unenquiring mind but it's not necessarily a false supposition. One slightly weird thing about the statement and also about its contradictory, is that nothing could ever be found either falsify or to confirm such a statement. Maybe there's some event going on right now that has no cause but I happen to know nothing about it. Maybe there never has been and never will be such an event. Any candidate 'uncaused' event may turn out to have a cause after all - just a cause that I failed to identify.

"Why do you insist that it's nonsense to compare things which are not within your experience? This appears to be an assumption which is totally unwarranted, and unjustified, yet you'll defend it to your wits end, for no apparent reason."

Well, it's not without all reason and many people have gone down the road of thinking that every concept is based in experience. If there are concepts that are independent of experience, where the heck do they come from? Possibly we are born with ideas and knowledge that we acquired in a previous life - see Plato. Or maybe there are concepts which we must invent in order for even our sense experiences to mean something to us - see Kant. Or perhaps the concepts that seem to be independent of experience are actually based in experience in the end - empiricism. On the empiricist view even the immutable laws of logic are a function of our experience, although they seem to be quite independent of particular experiences. It may well be a mistake. But it's not mere folly.

Andrew4Handel: "Imagining what it's like to be" heterosexual is different from having heterosexual feelings. I think you can probably do the first even if you happen not to do the second. We can recall sexual feelings and we can *imagine* having these feelings towards anything at all, even if we don't actually have the feelings. Indeed, if we did in fact have the feelings, then imagining would be redundant. I would argue that it would be impossible. It's impossible for me to (merely) imagine what it would be like to sit at a computer typing this post because I really am sitting here composing the post: so (mere) imagining is out of the question. I'm saying that, far from being unable to imagine what it's like to be heterosexual, you can *only and merely imagine* what it's like. I doubt whether you are unable to imagine it. But I accept that you don't have the feelings.

What you have described is how Plato's Socrates might approach the question - x is true, y is true, z is true - what is this 'truth' that all true things have in common? But it's not always the best way of tackling the problem. Leaving truth aside for a moment, we would have a problem working out what a 'bus' is by asking what all buses have in common. And on reflection we would find out they have no one thing in common. But we would not then conclude that talk about buses is all nonsense. So if the method doesn't work for a straightforward concept, like 'bus', then we might wonder whether it's going to be a good method for a trickier concept like 'truth'. And the fact that we cannot identify a commonality to all true statements may tell us nothing very interesting about the concept of truth because that lack of commonality applies equally to the concept of a bus.

"Foundation of almost all modern thought" only if you ignore Wittgenstein and many others, e.g. Searle.

First, there are lots of meaningful sentences that are not descriptive. "Please don't be rude," is a meaningful sentence and contains no descriptions.

Second, some descriptions are perfectly accurate. "The only integer greater than two and less than four" perfectly describes the number three because it does describe something and it could describe nothing else.

Third, the truth of a sentence is not necessarily a function of the accuracy of the descriptions in it. Vague descriptions can yield truth. "I met her some time around the birth of rock 'n' roll" is true if I met her any time around the mid to late 1950's. It's false if I met her in 1967.

On the 'unicorn' point, it's time to go back to Aristotle. To speak truth is to say of what is that it is *or of what is not that it is not*. That neatly deals with unicorns and Parmenides.

I am tempted by a theory that defines as 'not real' all of my debts, responsibilities, pangs of conscience and regrets. But I don't think it's altogether, well, realistic. And it also excludes my triumphs, friendships and acts of charity. None of which can be tasted or smelled, thank goodness.

But to a person on the receiving end of the evil the theological justification can start to look a little shakey. I've never heard someone say - "I was devastated when my husband started beating me, but I thank God that he had the choice."

It's a way of misreading Scripture. You take a bunch of Biblical references from various authors spread over several centuries and with very different purposes and contexts. You knit them together as if they make a single coherent story. Then you sit back and wonder what this nonsense is all about.

What it's all about is that the passages are not and were never intended to be a coherent story. Some are metaphors. Some are manners of speaking. Some are revelations hidden in dreams. Some are cautionary tales.

I'm not knocking the OP. There are some good questions here. Especially: is it actually a good thing that people can choose to do bad things?

David Crystal gives some interesting examples of words that were once shortened and have now been lengthened. 'Waistcoat' was 'weskit'; and 'forehead' was 'forrid' (hence the rhyme with 'horrid' in 'There was a little girl...'). I would add that the 'l' has re-entered the pronunuciation of the place name 'Holborn' having been absent for about a hundred years.

"jolt of adrenaline" - OMG
"the cingulate kicks in with the rote expletives" - WTF
"curious behavior e.g. hysterical laughter" - LOL

It would make a good T-shirt slogan. I think it already has.