The God of the philosophers is the only interesting God. He functions simply as a productive constraint on thought, an intellectual rough ground or limit that is wonderful to work with and through, if one is open to that sort of thing. It may be a stuffed animal, but then, they all are.

No doubt the Mayans said the same of the decline in the belief of Quetzalcoatl.

Which is not to say curiosity isn't relavent. I'm curious about Quetzalcoatl. The stories are cute and of course sometimes gruesome. The social and anthropological dimensions of belief are interesting. Theology is a grand exercise, well worth studying. Lots of fun to be had with artefacts.

Let a thousand flowers bloom; they just don't have to take root in me.

:blush:

Blessedly, no. And even if I did I wouldn't try and ween them off their belief, which would just be a recipe for disaster.

To a theist, this just comes off as arrogant and condescending. They will not come to the conclusion that you are wiser than they, and that they should just give up on the idea as well. — ProbablyTrue

That's fine. I don't care enough to want to convince a theist otherwise. If they're happy beliving in a God, more power to them.

Yes, that was a statement on a position I hold in a thread on the topic; not unlike a statement by a theist on his or her own views on God, which would here be perfectly fine. It's also not a position I'm going around advocating for. I don't care enough to.

As for you own case, your threads were poorly composed. The thriving of religious discussion on this forum puts paid to any idea that there is some kind of editorial bias against it. You're confusing the moderation of your own poor posting with an editorial bias against religion. No doubt you'll see consipiracy here regardless. Everyone who gets modded tends to think it's a matter of philosophical principle, and not the fact that their posts are garbage. Funny that. But the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is stuffed full of religious threads.

It's also ironic you're quoting Marcus on 'censorship', who was of the view that religious threads should be excluded from the forum on the grounds of not being philosophy - a sentiment which was roundly put down by all including the mods. That we've have two sides of the complaint within a week - on the one hand too much, on the other not enough religion - is something of a mark of pride for the forum I reckon.

Also yes, reasoning is a minimal requirement for posts here, if you don't like it, kindly find somewhere else you can be unreasonable among.

*Every 3rd thread on the front page is about religion*

"The forum is biased against religion!"

Lol.

A distinction; a demonstration of its significance; an argument; a conclusion (or a question).

Idealism is... a pattern of thought; it's much harder to be indifferent to. We're idealists everytime we're not careful about how we think. God is small fry by comparison, I think. A small reply, but it's late here and I don't want to talk about idealism :/

Not enough indifference. Still treats the problem of God's existence as a legitimate question, even if answered in the negative. Only true atheism is: 'God? What's that?' 'Never heard of it' 'Lets get on with it then'. Ruthless, uncaring abandonment of the debate as beneath the dignity of sense, let alone truth.

To treat God like we treat Quetzalcoatl: an artefact of distant bemusement.

It's not a punishment to not be granted the honor of sitting on the highest juridical seat in the land while - what? slumming it? - as a federal judge in the meantime.

This idea that the withholding of privilege constitutes some kind of punishment is one among the more insidiously imbecilic tropes that seem to have emerged in the wider debate.

do you find the converse equally abhorrent? — Rank Amateur

The converse of installing an alleged attempted rapist to the supreme court would be not installing an alleged attempted rapist to the supreme court. Which would be nice for all parties involved, I imagine. Bar the alleged attempted rapist of course.

it should have been investigated by the process in place as soon as it was raised. But it was not. — Rank Amateur

Ah, well, guess you'll install an alleged attempted rapist then to make law for your country for the next 20-30 years. Messed up the timing. Got it.

Yes yall should probably put an alleged attempted rapist into the high court of the land because its too inconvenient to do the due diligence, and the democrats were being a bit fiddly anyway.

I'm basically Brett Kavanagh. Without the alleged attempted rape stuff.

And have you been romantically involved with some of them? :razz: — Agustino

I also have disproportionally more lady non-ex friends than I do lady friend exs!

I have disproportionately more lady friends than I do guy friends. But I'm not going to make weird generalizations based on that.

No it's about philosophical principles!!! :death:

Ah yes, the supreme act of philosophical rebellion: taking for granted the well-positioned, power-wielding, politically and institutionally backed man of the elite, coiffed class. Contrarity overwhelming! Can you imagine not giving him the benefit of the doubt? How scandalous. What's the point of philosophy if it's not as a lapdog to power?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-is-a-class-traitor.html

"It strikes me that Republicans are scared of Ford because she is essentially a class traitor. Two of the accusers whose names we know, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, were immediately marked as outsiders by the circle of old school friends and Republican operatives that closed around Brett Kavanaugh from the start. Deborah was, the Times reported, “the daughter of a telephone company lineman and a medical technician” — nearly a townie, half Puerto Rican, doing her time scrubbing dorm toilets and serving her classmates food while Kavanaugh was, according to his roommate, coating his dorm bathroom in vomit. Julie Swetnick was worse, by the lights of Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep defenders: “Never heard of her. I don’t remember anyone from Prep hanging out with public school girls, especially from Gaithersburg."

On the dynamics of power at play with respect to how nobody is talking about the other accusers at all.

That's, uh, one way to put it :sweat:

And Alan Dershowitz, of all people, is seconding their motion. — Pierre-Normand

:gasp: Woah.

Purely speculating, I wonder if it was just a question of cloaking his theories in the prestige of Socrates. Employing his name, as Cic said, to simply draw more attention to himself. Plato was a wanker anyway.

I knew these take a while but wow this keeps going.

Its just like: it is too much to ask that a supreme court judge not have a sordid sexual past with allegations of sexual assault? Like it's 7 people. There's already one. Let's just not bump that up by another. Just, y'know, nominate someone else to the most important judicial spot? Boy's not going to jail. Just not getting a promotion. Jeez. The worst possible outcome for him here is that literally nothing will happnen.

This is kind of Nietzscheque in that it's drawing a captivating narrative out of a chunk of facts that can be just as easily used to draw the opposite conclusion. — frank

This is kinda Frankeque in that it's a random unsubstantiated assertion.

Cool.

A question of tactics then? I dunno, I think the corruption is too deep-set; I'm not convinced tinkering is the right way to go. We've had literal centuries of that. I'm not too crash-hot on the (re-)turn to Aristotle either. His hylomorphism, his inability to think either difference or singularity, his watered-down essentialism, his exclusionary (bio-?)politics, his taxonomic obsession, even his dominant 'method' or approach - his unwavering search for an arche of everything under the sun - the more I study Aristotle the more I find his philosophical influence to be detrimental.

Agamben, whom I cited earlier on his work on the will, attributes to Aristotle the opening of the way to 'free will' precisely on account of his compromised take on potentiality and act (this follows after a discussion of the specifics of the problem): "Aristotle could not have in mind anything like the free will of the moderns—for this the words were lacking for him—but it is significant that, to cure in some way the split that he himself had introduced into potential, he had to introduce into the latter a “sovereign principle” that decides between doing and not doing, potential and impotential (or potential not to)". But this is straying from the topic.

Not a lot of substance to this thread. — Hanover

I suppose it's only fitting that I'm now going to close this thread as a result! :)



Woof!

That seems to me more incoherent, and possibly more dangerous, than the rather innocuous religious accounts and myths that rather clumsily attempt to explain how or why animals such as us can be rationally and morally autonomous. — Pierre-Normand

I think there's a deep continuity between both though: the turn to agency and responsibility as illusory are essentially direct responses to the failure of 'free will' as a sensical philosophical position; yet the latter still governs the vocabulary and the grammar of the former, each playing on the same rotten terrain even as they negate each other. Personally, I see the issues stemming from an inadequate theorisation of the subject on both accounts: one offering the thinnest, most emaciated notion of what it is to be a subject ever proffered, the other, denying subjectivity altogether on account of the theoretical poverty of the former. The only way forward is out, to reject even the terms of the debate, let alone the answers to it.

Also, there's a whole thing to be said about how freedom-as-liberal-choice feeds right into a liberal-capitalist worldview which is all too happy to keep such a debate running for as long as possible, all the better to deprive people from having even the barest of vocabulary to speak about questions of genuine human freedom. But that's another story.

Make better threads and we can zeal all day and all night :smile:

(I suspect he fancies me) — Marcus de Brun

I've been found out :yikes:

If you have a particular problem, raise it, otherwise threads like these tend to descend into alot of trash talk. So get to it - what's your issue?

Cool. Yeah, people who haven't looked into the history of 'free will' - i.e almost everyone - don't tend to realize what a culturally partial, historically shallow, and conceptually empty idea it is. It was essentially a device for self-loathing Christians to address the problem of evil and subject human beings to the masochism of its sister-concept, God's grace. Its theological fetters have largely fallen away, and now the idea is rootless and even more nonsensical than ever. Those who ask whether or not we have free will today may as well be asking if colorless green ideas sleep either furiously or gently. It's all bollocks.

No. People are stupid.

You don't disprove what doesn't make sense. Truth and falsity are the least of its worries.

Yes, I think the third-rate literature that StreetlightX deplores, because of the confused ways in which it problematizes 'the freedom of the will', can be viewed as a reductio of the attempt to account for agency and practical knowledge from a third-personal disengaged view on the material process of decision making. — Pierre-Normand

I was referring to the idea that 'free will' was in any way at stake in philosophies before its contrived invention by the modern Church fathers. Simply a historical point, with the OP in mind: i.e. that 'free will' is a perineal problem is a bunch of historically myopic trash. That said, I can take embodiment and the rest of it; but the will can go into unintelligible hell where it belongs.

Spinoza is pretty irrelevant to dealing with the causal level here issue. — apokrisis

:lol:

So, merely scrubbing dubious notions (such as the purely mental acts of 'volitions') because they are tainted by their theological origins will leave the roots that currently nourish the philosophical confusions on the topics surrounding rational agency and personal responsibility firmly in place. — Pierre-Normand

I don't doubt this, but I think a good first step is in putting to question the very vocabulary involved: freedom, but no 'will' please. This I think would have at least a primarily disorienting effect, which, given just how entrenched the idea is, would have value in itself.