Bateson wrote about how paradoxical injonctions can make people skizophrenic. The same apply IMO to self-contradicting philosophies: they can literally make you mad if you believe in them.

Most people here see getting the shot as doing almost nothing, practically zero-cost. Even small marginal benefit is a good bet for close to zero cost. — Srap Tasmaner

Quite true; I found taking the shots fun, not unlike skydiving. :-)

For a hard determinist there are no non-physical events — Janus

Err, that's simply not true. Whether the future is fully predetermined has siltch to see with whether there exist "non-physical events" or not.

What you confuse with determinism is naïve materialism or "physicalism". But if everything is physical, then ideas are also physical, and the word "physical" loses its meaning. Or ideas are not physical and thus do not really exist, and so the idea of physicalism does not exist... So physicalism is either meaningless -- if it accepts ideas as physical -- or self-contradictory -- if it assumes ideas are not physical and thus inexistent.

My point, (which was clear and is really unnecessary in this otherwise interesting discussion) is that if Jesus was not real then Christianity, as is practiced by 2.5 billion people, is false. — Tom Storm

Your point remained unstated until now, so it could not possibly be described as clear, at least not to me. I know it's clear in your mind but you still need to write it down.

Christians have good reasons to believe that Jesus was a historical character, and that his message is recorded by and large faithfully in the Gospels.

I'm not the one saying that — baker

So what are you saying, exactly? Sorry but I'm tired of guessing.

If Jesus was a real person, and has the power as stated in the Bible, then, if you don't accept him as your lord and savior, you will burn in hell for all eternity with no chance of salvation. — baker

If Jesus was a real (normal) person, he was the son of a man and a woman, and the narrative was tampered to make him the Son of God.

What you are saying is: If Jesus was a magical person as stated in the Bible, then all miscreants go to hell.

A summary from Wiki: — Fooloso4

Awful.

The story has it that one good Rabbi Shlomo from Riga was so righteous in the way of G.d that G.d decided to grant him a wish. He send an angel down here to deal with it. Since our good rabbi wished to see heaven and hell, the angel first carried him to hell.

Surprisingly, hell was a luxurious garden. The rabbi arrived at a beautiful palace, in which he found people sitting on both sides of a long table loaded with all sorts of food. But the people looked all sad, angry and emaciated. That's because both their hands were tied to long wooden spoon with which it was totally impossible for them to eat.

So Shlomo thought: "So this is hell: being constantly tempted but unable to satisfy oneself."

But then he was brought to heaven. There was the same luxurious garden, the same beautiful castle, and in it, people sitting along a similar table, with the same long spoon on their hands. And they were all eating, and merry, because they were serving each other food across the table with their long spoons.

So Shlomo asked to be sent back to hell so he could explain to those poor people the solution to their problem. When he reached there, and told one man at the table that he should try and feed the guy in front of him, and vice versa... the man replied: "I'd rather be hungry for eternity than feed this asshole!"

The central theme of this belief is that we all contain a divine spark that can be discovered. It is at hand. — Fooloso4

Or more prosaically, that human beings make their own heaven or hell here on earth, depending on how they treat each other. That cycles of violence need to be broken. You must know the Jewish story of the long spoons.

We do not know what his message was in distinction from the messages that emerged in his name and was in some cases suppressed. — Fooloso4

Legend and the evangelists added a lot, but I doubt they voluntarily suppressed anything. The gnostic tradition 'pretends' or implies that the 4 canonical evangelists did hide -- or were not privy to -- all sort of escatological stuff... I don't know. The gnostics may have started with good intentions but lost themselves in considerations of overt polytheism, too far from the original (monotheist) Jesus IMO.

With Jesus there's rather more at stake. — Tom Storm

Would you like to expand on this? What more is at stake with Jesus?

Actually you haven't described this difference.

We lose nothing if [Socrates] turns out to be 'made up'. With Jesus there's rather more at stake. — Tom Storm

Nothing is "turning out". In both cases there's a body of texts, and there's us. Either you trust (by and large) those sources or you don't. Either you are interested in those texts or you are not.

OK, perhaps I have misunderstood you: I had thought you were claiming that the belief in the freely determining capacity of reason is compatible with the "hard determinist" dictum that all events, including thoughts and decisions, are wholly and inexorably determined by antecedent physical events — Janus

Fixed. There is no reason to confine causality to certain "physical" events and not others. This is the essence of compatibilism. Reason is a type of cause.

do we have good reason to believe that Jesus was actually a living person and that the Gospels contain anything this Yeshua (if he lived) might have said or done? — Tom Storm

The same question could be asked of Socrates, who could be a figment of Plato's imagination... Either one trusts the source or one doesn't.

if Jesus was with the Essenes in opposing the Sadducee leadership in the Temple, this is not an indication that Jesus was opposed to or advocated something contrary to Judaism. — Fooloso4

Correct. Of course he never thought of founding a new religion.

He did change the world, in the end.
— Olivier5

I think that is an open question. — Fooloso4

Shut and closed, rather. That others such as Paul piggy-backed on him only shows how vibrantly the message was resonating.

Some interpreted the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God as an internal transformation rather than the geo-political transformation envisioned in some messianic views. — Fooloso4

And this may be one of his deepest intuitions: the solution is perhaps not one big kaboom, with angels blowing celestial trumpets. Maybe it's already here, in every one's own longing for justice and love.

In addition to differences between sects there were also differences with regard to such things as militantism and @Tzeentch quietism. Passages in the NT that support quitism are not evidence of a break with Judaism. — Fooloso4

Indeed, they align well with the House of Hillel, and against the House of Shammai.

. With knowledge of this diversity the idea that Jesus broke with or taught things contrary to Judaism becomes far less tenable. — Fooloso4

But didn't we agree that Judaism at the time was plural? Jesus was certainly, along with the Essenes, opposed to the Sadducee leadership in the Temple. He is also affiliated with John the Baptist, who was a sort of anti-establishment prophet of doom and redemption (quite typical of the culture). The anti-Hasmonean element is difficult to miss.

Crypto anti-Hasmonean, anti-Sadducee... That's already a lot. But he seemed to have also taken issue with the by-then up and coming Pharisees. Or at least with some of them.

He was radical alright. In my view, in a good way, though a bit improvised perhaps. Not the most methodical religious figure ever. Not the clearest either. But inspired and inspiring, yes.

He did change the world, in the end. Absolutely not the way he envisaged it -- which in my view was the typical messianic angelic war, as reflected in the Book of Daniel where the title 'Son of Man' comes from. Jesus expected the end of days, quite clearly; he thought he was ushering it all in. Didn't work out this way but as I said, he still had a huge impact.

The plot thickens...

Thanks. I was aware that vaccination was not recommended for kids. I was asking about medical doctors who "question the use of the vaccine, against the official advice".

1) This is official advice, not going against it, and 2) Isaac is retired I think, so this does not apply to him.

the Torah appears to be a patchwork rather than a doctrine. — Fooloso4

It's prescriptive in any case. It tells people what to do and not do, whom to worship and whom not to, how to worship, what to eat and not eat, etc. Maybe it is not a credo but it's a value system. One in which believing in God is strongly encouraged.

He says: — Fooloso4

He says many things, not all of which point to literalism. I mean, there's a certain ambiguity in Jesus, as recorded.

Judaism never had the "official doctrines" that are found in Christianity — Fooloso4

The Torah is an official doctrine, though. And it prevented the social evolution of the Jewish people for centuries. Until the Talmud sort of updated the whole thing.

Then the neighbors got involved. — Valentinus

They always do. :-)

Perhaps unfortunately, we all have neighbours, and our relationship with them is important. One of the questions salient in John is "who is my neighbor?"

Jesus is not rejecting the Law. He exhorts his followers to righteousness beyond the Law. — Fooloso4

Or according to the spirit of the Law, rather affording so much importance to its letter. As any rabbi of the time, he had his own interpretation of the Torah. Things like: the sabat is made for man, not man for the sabat.

The contradiction between 'an eye for an eye' and 'to turn the other cheek' is to me a fundamental one, because the two present entirely different approaches to responding to injustice. — Tzeentch

That is true as far as contrasting the OT and NT goes. And it's not just about injustice, it's also about the relationship with gentiles.

Nine centuries separate Leviticus from the OT. Things changed a lot during this time, even within Judaism. So the people Jesus was talking to were not all fundamentalist followers of the Law of Moses to the letter. They all had their own personal and/or sectarian interpretation of the Law, some more lenient and modern, others more strict and literal.

One of the issues, as said above, was the relationship with gentiles. While the Law was written for the Jewish nation conceived as a territorial entity, at the time of Jesus many Jewish communities were already living as a minority among pagans, ie in the diaspora. Some of the Leviticus makes it difficult to develop business relationships with non-Jews. More fundamentally, the status of chosen nation was being ruffled by centuries of pagan domination. Being infeodated to Rome was humbling if not humiliating. The posture a pious Jew should adopt vis à vis Rome is broached upon in the Gospels (give to Caesar...).

Another issue calling for an agiornamento was capital punishments, liberally given in the Leviticus to anyone from an unruly child to a fan of lobster, and evidently to adulterous folks. It was already heavy-handed in the original Law, I think, and 9 centuries later it must have felt a bit 'stone-aged'.

Thanks for the precision. Indeed this development came way after Gama and Columbus. My mistake.

Your position is that, whoever he was, he was not speaking about or from Judaism. I take issue with that position. — Valentinus

I do agree with you that he was speaking from within Judaism. Yet he was trying to reform Judaism, and as a result some of his teachings are at a variance with the Torah.

When were the first mechanized timekeepers used in science? Was Galileo the first one? Did this use further science a lot? — VincePee

I am aware of the importance of mechanical chronometers for navigation around the world and the explorations of Vasco de Gama, Columbus and others. The only way to calculate one's longitude was to compare time zones: if where you are, the sun reaches its zenith X hours later than in Lisbon or Madrid, then it follows that you are at longitude Y. And the only way to do this reliably was to have precise chronometers.

There are properly and appropriately qualified scientists without any ulterior affiliation who question the use of the vaccine, against the official advice. — Isaac

Like who, and with what arguments?

De nada.

Wittgenstein's law: It doesn't take long before any discussion on language in philosophy begins to turn into a discussion on Wittgenstein. — TheMadFool

That's true in anglophone settings. Beyond that, nobody cares about him.

at what point in time do we stop trusting our government/media? — Isaac

The moment you turn paranoid.

If reason is merely a part of the determinant nexus of events, that is if it is fully determined by other non-rational physical events, then it is not uniquely self-determining in the way we intuitively think it is. — Janus

This is not the hypothesis I was raising, though. The idea was rather that reason could be fully determined by reason herself, by prior thoughts, goals and collected data, not by non-rational physical events.

English is the mixture of a Germanic method of language, with a Greco-Roman epistemological field. — Gus Lamarch

Well put.

it's the synthesis of more than 2,000 years of Western culture, — Gus Lamarch

Yes. Including pretty much the entire old French lexicon, which got absorbed into English starting from Hasting.

English is only the "Universal" language, — Gus Lamarch

I'm a big fan of English. It's a very powerful language with great flexibility and vitality to import or create new words. It is perhaps weakest in the area of romantic love, but that may be my ignorance. I haven't read romance novels in English yet.

Why do you think the Brits and Americans are opposed to Islam?

when I try to explain that disagreement, my brain freeze — Athena

That could indicate the presence of a cliché. Something you took for granted without prior examination.

why the British and Americans are opposed to that? — Athena

Last time I checked, the British and Americans were NOT opposed to Islam at all. Nor should they be, I agree.

I have some sympathy with this view, at least if we dial back the optimality a little and just assume we're learning organisms that get better at being rational, something like that. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. It is the only logical point of view on this matter that I can think of. Otherwise one falls into the liar's paradox, as @Hanover rightly pointed out. Mechanical puppets don't usually make much sense.

Name names man, they need to be held to account. — Isaac

Trump, Bolsenaro, BoJo and co.

Nobody cares about fake philosophies.