I don't think the important stuff is about saving religion or condemning it.
We are here now. There are different ways to look at it.
We are the important thing, in the time given to us to do something.
Some ways of thinking draw closer to that and others do not.
I am only interested in the former.

Does atheistic evangelism count as religion? — Noah Te Stroete

No.
Whatever complaints you may have for the atheist point of view, it does not help the discussion to subsume those points of views as another creed.
If you have a "creed", putting these other people into a group is just a result of whatever you were thinking in the first place. And that kind of classification is why atheists got started wondering if there was another way to look at things.

I appreciate your remarks upon remarks 36 to 39 as they look at how "corresponding" is assumed so often while not looking at how it is done.

I dunno. Maybe your words could say it, if you said the right words.
Feels like the poet is mailing it in.

if there is a intra-religious debate, it can be taken to one of the multiple religious forums that exist out there. — StreetlightX

Leaving to the side the question of how to regulate the site, your observation was what first struck me about the number of posts of that sort.

Maybe the attraction of this place over others is the openness to logical arguments that makes it easier to isolate the issue that interest the posters without going through a lot of other qualifications and arguments typical of theology discussions where the topics are intertwined with centuries of other discussions of them.

Perhaps there could be a "theological" version of the Lounge where discussions go for those who want to pursue them on that basis.

Yes, nobody sees you as you are as well as your kids.
One could write a history of the world based upon strategies to limit the results of the perception.

Hah.
Children are the most dangerous thing in your home.

Justice is but an aspect of the "best polis" and in that respect but an aspect of the best person. — Benkei

Yes, that view is especially reflected in how the tyrannical soul is seen by itself and in the context of rule in the later books.

Your point is well taken regarding separating the ideal from the best.

Because in the beginning Socrates and his interlocutors speak about justice and whether it is better and more profitable to be just or unjust and then Socrates jumps into creating this "State" which with little mention to justice which I believe leaves the reader confused. — Dagny

Glaucon takes up part of Thrasymachus' argument after the latter was not able to defend himself against the questions Socrates posed. Glaucon observes that it in some sense it was one kind of intimidation being over matched by another kind. The issue of power that underlies the talk about the "strong" is not illuminated by Socrates besting Thrasymachus. So Glaucon is asking for Socrates to not simply win a contest but get rid of the argument for all time. That is the meaning of the first passage I quoted above.

Socrates explains that is a formidable enterprise which will involve a commitment to an investigation that requires patience and resolve to carry out. The brothers agree to follow it under those conditions.
Then Socrates begins as heard in the second quote I gave above.

The rest of the book is the "mentioning" of justice, if you will. We were warned.

I have been checking out the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy a lot lately to understand themes and theories I am not familiar with. I have also been checking out articles on things I think I am familiar with. Wayfarer recently referred me to the site that made a careful comparison of how properties of "substances" were described in Descartes, Spinoza, and other philosophers in that time period. It was helpful and accurate as a matter of bringing those differences into focus. But I was struck by how differently those properties appear in the actual texts of Spinoza and Descartes. The point of view used to compare the two from the outside misses elements of how meaning is developed on the inside.

There is something about the history of philosophy and how ideas are explained by other ideas that puts works at a distance. Description as a form of judgement, if you will.

It helps me to go through the arguments with Thrasymachus. He is the one proposing that hiding injustice in the body of what the "state" calls justice is what is going on. If you read the rest in that context, the words mean what they otherwise would not mean. Ideas are not just islands of thought. We think some things and lose or gain something through thinking them.

Let me put it this way. When these arguments first appeared, it was life and death. Either a certain way of talking was how to proceed or it would be shut up, forever.

Was Socrates meaning to say that you must either work or die, and if you don't work and aren't a sufficiently contributing member of society, then you are as good as dead? — Dagny

I read that passage to say that we make our decisions upon information we either regard or do not regard as important. How will we make that judgement? We decide all kinds of things without knowing the answer.

Would it be fair to say that keeping the conversation within the bounds of the text makes the argument strictly theological in contradistinction to a philosophy of religion approach?

For instance, would you include the arguments between Luther and Erasmus on this subject?

What if the text was read without the assumptions you claim are the only ones possible? Salvation is not a board game.

I didn't say "You can't find an idea in a brain" though. You can find an idea in a brain, but from a third person perspective, it's not going to be the same as it is from a first-person perspective. — Terrapin Station

This difference is why theories of perception and understanding ever appeared. However much it can or cannot be said that things ultimately are one kind of thing or another, the ontology is only helpful as a way to understand the difference. Making it all physical is interesting but will that lead to a theory where the difference between first and third person is illuminated? To say nothing about that tricky second person.

My reasons are mostly what you gave.
I am certainly running into some of my own fallibility. I already regret saying some things the way I did.

My work life is very far from this sort of thing so I am trying to keep the ember from going dark.
I have spent years closely reading some works but there are many perspectives I am only marginally aware of, if at all, in others.

This modern terminology of distinguishing various theories from each other that is the lingua franca on the forum has been a trip for me. The practice makes me nervous, not the disputations involved but the unspoken agreements.

Enough about me.

However, that said, a comparison of the two works might still be interesting in its own right, even if one accepts the objective of each is significantly different from the other. — Mentalusion

That is an excellent point. They both take the viewpoint of the "city" as a whole. They both see different "arts" and their relationship with each other producing different kinds of life for the citizens.

My two cents:

Although many other matters are addressed in the Republic, I think its purpose never strays from answering Glaucon when he asks:

But the case for justice, to prove that it is better than injustice, I have never yet heard stated by any as I desire to hear it. What I desire to is an encomium on justice in and by itself. And I think I am most likely to get that from you."
358d

The discussion of the city begins with:

"I will tell you, I said. There is a justice of one man, we say, and I suppose, also of an entire city?
Assuredly, said he.
Is not the not the city larger than the man?
It is larger, he said.
Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object, and more easy to apprehend. If it please you, then, let us look for the quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.
I think that is a good suggestion, he said.
If, then, said I , our argument should observe the origin of the state, we should see also the origin of justice and injustice in it?
It may be, said he."
368e

It is good to keep this framework in mind while considering the "ideal city" as the discussion is also about the other kinds and where they came from. Also observe that while Socrates does stay with his plan to consider the nature of the state before taking up the nature of the individual, he will also proceed to use the comparison the other way to make his argument on the way.

Yes, that is what I am trying to argue.
But I had not thought of panpsychism as something that could further muddy the waters.
What a tangled web we weave.

I am having trouble separating your claims from your questions. You state that, "motivation behind altruistic action is personal gain" and also ask "does selfish intention taint altruistic action?"

I am also having trouble with accepting as a premise that "intention is considered an action." As a matter of parts of speech, intention qualifies an action. I am willing to hear other ways of listening to the idea but I don't know what it means to assume it.

It is standing in for rain which is a noun.

The sentence is ostensive, pointing at the rain. As a matter of grammar that would separate agent and action, the rain is raining.

It.

But that's what I was saying. In other words someone could parse "intellect" as "mind" — Terrapin Station

I was responding to the discussion of whether the Cartesian duality of mind/body was the same or not as the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. So, yes "intellect" can be parsed as "mind" but the difference between usages is important regarding how perception is said to happen. I quoted from Aristotle in response to the wiki article to make the difference sharper.

Aristotle is closer to your statement that physical things are "directly" perceived than Descartes in that the difference between the one who perceives and the object perceived are not presented as fundamentally different kinds of beings. While it is noted that "it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form", the stone is not less real as a consequence.

In regards to your position of "direct perception", I don't see it framed as a difference between ideas and matter but conflicting models of causality. The model for the mind and the model for the rocks have to converge in this direct perception that you refer to. How does that work now that you have thrown out previous attempts at the question? I am not asking a rhetorical question. It is what I cannot understand when you present your position to be a physicalist and a nominalist.

Nothing the Russians made possible is separate from interested parties in the U.S.A.. The same goes for leverage exerted by China. What Trump conceals is exactly who the benefactors of such arrangements may be. And he does it while pretending to be opposed to them.
Pretty slick side show.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned rules or that rules have been stipulated in some way prior to the learning of the game. — Sam26

Would it be too simple to observe that we check our grammar by trying out phrases and knowing they are wrong or right without checking on the basis of another authority?

Or at least this is the hope of the suicidal person, that they become nothing or return to nothingness, the same nothingness that existed before they were born. That's the rationale as far as I can tell of a suicidal person. To become nothing. — Wallows

You are projecting a purpose where it may not be. Consider changing the focus from one of motivation influenced by a desire to achieve a particular result to just looking at the agency itself. To be the one who acts in a certain way is what fascinates many killers.
So what is happening with a person who is going through this fixation will make one intervention smarter than another but the persuasion is not happening on the level of disqualifying a rationale.
I have had some close encounters with this thing with some family members and close friends and my experience is not a part of learning something like how to draw or shoot arrows. I know less everyday.

Aristotle's conception
Aristotle gives his most substantial account of the passive intellect (nous pathetikos) in De Anima (On the Soul), Book III, chapter 4. In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, the passive intellect "is what it is by becoming all things."[1] By this Aristotle means that the passive intellect can potentially become anything by receiving that thing's intelligible form. The active intellect (nous poietikos) is then required to illuminate the passive intellect to make the potential knowledge into knowledge in act, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. The analysis of this distinction is very brief, which has led to dispute as to what it means.

There is no doubt there are a lot of disputes about what Aristotle is exactly saying but the writer is being a poor reader by not putting the question in the context of what Aristotle said quite clearly elsewhere in the book:

431b20. "Now summing up what has been said about the soul, let us say again that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either objects of perception or objects of thoughts, and knowledge is in a way the objects of knowlege and perception the objects of perception. How this is so we must inquire."
431b24. "Knowledge and perception are divided to correspond to their objects, the potential to the potential, the actual to the actual. In the soul that which can perceive and that which can know are potentially these things, the one the object of knowledge, the other the object of perception. These must be either the things in themselves or their forms. Not the things in themselves; for it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form. Hence the soul is as the hand is; for the hand is a tool of tools, and the intellect is a form of forms and sense a form of objects of perception."

De Anima, Chapter 8, translated by D.W. Hamlyn.

So In Aristotle, there is passive and active intellect (which someone could easily parse as mind in a nonphysical sense) and passive and active material states (which someone could easily parse as material/physical stuff in the contemporary sense). — Terrapin Station

In regards to De Anima, that parsing would be incorrect as the "mind" is on both sides of the intellectual perception. That is why understanding is "the being becoming what it is" before the one who understands.
Cartesian duality only has the mind on one side; There is the one who knows and the known thing that is not the one who knows.

TheHedoMinimalist has a good list.

Thinking about it as a continuation of the Stoicism thread, it occurs to me that suicide controls an outcome but the life in question doesn't belong to the agent that would end it. I don't own my life. I don't own anything after it is done. I fear my death and it has brought me great anxiety thinking about it at some points in my life. But I won't be the one to experience the loss except perhaps at the moment it happens. The fixation on that moment has no relation to the thinking about when I am gone. The experience of that moment will be mine but that experience does not own the moment when it is over.

The fixation upon suicide is like the fear of death in its mistaken belief that one's life belongs to oneself but is a violation in the way fear is not. When overwhelmed with fear, we lose control of what preserves our lives and become too weak to be responsible for what nourishes it. With suicide, one agent wants to dominate the rest at the expense of life itself. That is why so many instances of suicide are combined with an orgy of violence against others, either in the form of actual mayhem or psychological torture of survivors. In the framework of an immortal life, the reason the suicide is not saved is that the act of domination causes irreparable damage to the soul. In a framework of virtues as understood by the Stoics and the ancient Greeks, when the will to dominate is not balanced by other ends, the result is hubris which tends to ruin the person and those in the immediate vicinity.

What "psychiatry says" needs to be heard together with other forms of psychology, including clinicians who are not doctors in the way psychiatrists are trained to be. The very terms of diagnosis found in the DSM are not "physical" in the way other problems of the body are described. At the very least, evidence in regard to what is wrong involves engagement with the person and what they say. It is not an MRI.

There are lively disputes in the profession how to establish good models. I linked to the most far flung global example to suggest how steamy it gets when you get close to actual cases. But that background lets me point out that most institutions use teams where different kinds of evidence are considered before deciding upon treatment.

It seems to me that consciousness plays different roles in different dreams. Many dreams are like experiencing a play where the desire to be immersed in the narrative is in conflict with varying levels of understanding that the scene is "artificial." I often "wake" up when I can no longer suspend disbelief, as the expression goes.
Dreams where I become aroused often "wake" me up enough to ruin the initial seduction. That kind of experience makes me wonder if most of our memories of dreams pivot upon something going wrong.
I am curious about how often dreams are devoted to sequences of decisions. Making decisions is certainly a big element of being conscious in actual life. My working life consists of 75% of my energy being directed to solving problems. How much that percentage shrinks or grows directly affects how much of my dreaming becomes another place where it happens. Sometimes, the distance between the illusions and remembered facts grows too small and leads to insomnia because it just becomes thinking about real problems. On the other hand, that boundary is where I often have figured a way out that I had failed to do in full waking life.
And that brings me to something else that seems to happen so often in dreams, one finds oneself with a daunting set of circumstances and the decision you take makes it worse. And there is a "consciousness" that the game is rigged.
So, I am certain that these experiences point to something true but I am unable to turn the observations into a story or a dream, if you will.

You can download many of his books from this site: Memory of the World library. A fellow member of this forum showed me the library. It is an awesome resource.

I recommend Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality as works that directly address your interests.

Thank you for the warm welcome.

So, are you saying that courage and understanding are the proper responses towards Strife? How does one not indulge in too much indifference, then? — Wallows

I am not saying what is a proper response. That is your problem given only to you as it is given to me as my problem. We all have these peculiar assignments, given to each of us. Our attempts to sort these elements out either lead to some kind of policy for ourselves or not.

The courage part is accepting those conditions and not waiting for better ones.

A central theme in those "manuals" is that passion clouds perception of what is going on. Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus struggled with those around them. The indifference that was proposed was done in the face of others who were invested in their demise or denigration. They are making a connection between courage and understanding.
Or put another way, the stoic response assumes the ever present influence of Strife.

More of a drive by shooting than a hijack.
Maybe you could start a thread on what you want people to focus on.

Well, it will be difficult to explain how Illich may be germane to the discussion if I am the only one who has read him. He discusses methods of education and its role in validating personal authority in our society. He agrees with your emphasis upon humans being needed. He also agrees that technology is a critical part of what is going on.
But his narrative of what is happening and why is much different from yours.
Why read me when you could read him to explain?

So if we're defining things so that it's impossible to learn anything solely via ostension, why would we even ask the question in the first place re whether it's possible to learn a language via ostension? — Terrapin Station

That observation wasn't brought up as a definition. Why anybody would ask the question is because there are experiences with language that do not seem to be about agreeing upon definitions before the talking begins. There is that language game but there are others.

I disagree that the emphasis on technology is solely driven by the prerogatives of warfare. I appreciate you fleshing out what that argument entails for our future as a society. I agree that we need to re-evaluate our future. Who we are to do that and what it requires is a question that goes in many directions.
Have you read Ivan Illich? He is someone who is speaking to your concerns about education from a different direction. I don't think he is the last word on anything but he does bring up the problems in a manner that reveals their deep complexity in a world so invested upon techniques of industry.

I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not. — Kranky

Let's look more closely at this use of possession as exemplified in "my thoughts." The property of ownership is bound up with other people recognizing your claims. If you are sure that you have a right to something and nobody around agrees, that really sucks. The whole world is literally against you on that score. On the other hand, if all the ways you claimed other peoples' space was met with only nods of the head, you would have good reason to believe you are the king of everything. There are a number of ways one can see ourselves reflected in various ranges of isolation and communication. As a matter of everyday experience, we do better in one situation and worse in others

That is why it is hard for me to understand what you want when the act of reaching out to others disproves your premise. Not from anything that is said in response but from you, asking for stuff.