Rogue Man
— Srap Tasmaner

Rogue Moon, right? — Noble Dust

Heh. Yes, you ordered the right book. I can’t even blame autocorrect, but I should’ve gone to sleep hours ago.

Yeah Rogue Moon is a little like that. Not quite ordinary people, but quite definitely people, with their own personal issues, and the book’s mainly about that. Which is why I thought of it — and because it’s curious that people don’t know it these days since it used to always be on “All Time Best SF Novels” lists. I don’t understand why it’s been out of print for so long, and it was presumably Budrys’s decision. (I only know one other book of his, Michaelmas, which I also loved.)

(An unrelated case of being — less inexplicably — out-of-print is Cordwainer Smith. Whole different deal from Dick, or from anyone. Really, anyone. Of all publishers, Baen did a two-volume paperback set several years ago, but it’s already gone. Worth hunting down. Robert Silverberg used to say that the only consolation he could find for Cordwainer Smith writing as he did was that he was actually from the far future.)

In modern times, universals are always interpreted as conditionals. Just translate in your head like this:

“All F’s are G” means “If anything is F, then it’s G”
“No F’s are G” means “If anything is F, then it’s not G”

The upshot of the translation is that the bits on the right are still true, even when there’s nothing that’s F.

You may also have to sit a while with this understanding of conditionals (known as “material implication”) until it feels natural.

A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay — Noble Dust

I know of it, of course, but I’ve never read it, so thanks for the endorsement!

I'll throw in a book not by Saint Phil that's nearly forgotten and strangely out-of-print: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

his mystical preoccupations — Noble Dust

Some of the novels amble along doing this and that, and then like 2/3 of the way through veer sharply into religious territory. Like he's really not able to control it. But then he saw a giant metal face in the sky, so ...

I should read more. It's been too long. Maybe I'll try the VALIS books after all.

I think really I just value his company. Like Bill Hicks. Just another confused guy you meet on the road, and he makes the journey more bearable.

There's also at least one collection of interviews available and it's good

Both good.

Scanner is really special. That and Radio Free Albemuth are the most autobiographical I guess.



I loved Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Has some of that Alfred Bester dazzle to it, and very Phildickian themes. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Another early one, Clans of the Alphabet Moon. Plus all the usual ones we've already mentioned. Only stuff I've deliberately stayed away from is VALIS. There's an edited version of the Exegesis out now, but I won't be reading that I think.

I've never been even slightly disappointed by any novel or short story of his. They used to be hard to find so my collection is slightly random. Feels like I'm forgetting an important one but I can't think of it

Ubik is excellent. I'm probably in the minority wishing the last sentence wasn't there.

I've read a lot, but not everything, and I love him not for the what-is-real? stuff but just for the humanity. Somewhere he said that his typical novel is a guy who loses his job, stops at the bar on the way home to drown his sorrows, comes home drunk and out-of-work so his wife leaves him, and *then* aliens land in the front yard.

He was a haunted man.

And affect (happiness, sadness, misery, joy suffering pleasure, and so forth) is foundational for ethics. — Astrophel

Ah, then we're not having the conversation I thought we were.

I have some attraction to a very old-fashioned "moral sentiments" view, such as you'd find in Adam Smith.

Terms like courage are dangerous, because they imply a hostility toward and condemnation of those who we judge as lacking in courage. — Joshs

I can think of circumstances, institutions, where this is probably true, maybe in the military or in public safety. But in general? I think people mainly just marvel at courage. It's okay to be awestruck by Martin Luther King -- doesn't mean you implicitly condemn everyone else, does it?

Anyway, don't you think your argument is overbroad? How you can you praise anyone for anything if it implies condemnation of everyone else?

I mean they are likely to be constructs we have developed that seem to reflect human experience and we use them conceptually in daily life to help us manage our environment. — Tom Storm

I really don’t get this argument. What could “our environment” possibly mean, if you don’t use space and time in defining it?

don't know how to verify one way or the other — DavidJohnson

Drawing a Venn diagram is always the right thing to do.

I just don’t know what moral courage is — Joshs

Isn’t there a difference between the man who, being completely selfish, doesn’t give a shit about the Jews being rounded up and does nothing to help them, and the man who sympathizes and wants to help them but is too scared to follow his conscience?

the self is some sort of fortress that has to be breached by force of will in order to want to do things for others — Joshs

But it’s quite specifically not a question of whether you want to do the right thing, but whether you can muster the courage to do so. Are we wrong to admire that sort of thing? Often enough, someone who behaves heroically doesn’t see themselves as having done anything particularly extraordinary, and thus has no explanation, since there’s nothing to explain. (“I just did what anyone would’ve done.”) And often enough, people talk of hoping they would behave as the hero did, but admitting that they don’t know whether they would — in short, people will admire behavior that they also think of as not quite a matter of choice. It’s a funny thing all around.

mysterious — Joshs

transcendent or magical — Tom Storm

Timothy Snyder has an interesting book about the Holocaust, called Black Earth. He makes a particular point of explaining collaboration by pointing to the destruction of local institutions and the lack of "political capital" to organize resistance. It's understandable, he suggests, that people behaved badly in desperate circumstances. But then he spends a few chapters examining individuals who behaved heroically; he tries to find some explanation, but comes up empty. It's a really striking asymmetry.

Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? What's so awful about acknowledging that?

didn't Hitler think he was doing the right thing? — Astrophel

But that's an argument, not phenomenology, right? It's also not an argument I find all that persuasive as it stands: I've always been struck by the Nazis trying to destroy evidence of the Holocaust as the red army advanced -- they were like children caught doing something they knew perfectly well was wrong.

But, yes, history and anthropology seem to teach us that different communities have different values. Some apparently have no problem with practicing slavery, say, or genital mutilation, and then we seem forced to conclude that there is something relative about our moral judgments. This is all still argument though, rather than a phenomenology of ethical experience. It's just that the argument suggests such a phenomenology is useless, because in every case we'll find people experiencing what seems to them ethical in the same way. (Orson Welles explained Touch of Evil by quoting Jean Renoir: "Everyone has their reasons.")

There are two ways to begin to answer the relativist (or perspectivist): one is to say that the claims of variation are overblown, that there is obvious and substantial overlap in the mores of different communities, and even some research to back that up; the other is to question the experience more closely. If those who practice genital mutilation have to overcome their recognition of a young girl's fear and trauma, have to suppress their sympathy for her, then that's not evidence that their conscience is constituted differently from ours, but that they choose not to listen to it, that they let some other consideration overrule it.

I think the jury is still out on whether phenomenology is doomed to failure here.

I think I'm trying to say that we experience the ethical as absolute, as something beyond our opinions, not up to us, something in a way external.**

There is a word for this experience: 'conscience'. Maybe it's more phenomenologically sound to start with conscience than with The Good, which looks a little theorized already.


** There’s a nice bit of writing in “The Train Job” (Firefly, episode 2) that captures a difference I’m interested in:

“Sheriff: When a man finds out more about a situation like ours, well, then he faces a choice.
Mal: I don’t believe he does.”

What the Sheriff says is nice, spotlights individual responsibility — things don’t just happen, people do them. Acknowledge your part. That’s a solid starting point, certainly. Mal’s not disagreeing with that, but shifting the locus of responsibility away from the choice. If you know what is right, the real question is whether you will do it. It’s not a matter of choice but of character.

You see that sort of thing all through Confucius, as well: there are no moral dilemmas, there’s only degrees of courage and fortitude in doing what everyone acknowledges is right.

Ethics is something to do with behavior, and in particular something to do with our behavior towards one another, but there are many ways to describe two (or more) persons in relation to each other without an ethical ‘dimension’, as we might say — biological, economic, and so on.

I’m tempted to say something like this: suppose we start not with persons only, but with another element, something like The Good. Seriously, full-on Plato. Suppose we think the minimum configuration we’re interested in is two people in relation to each other and also in relation to The Good. This, rather than just taking “good” as a way we might categorize the relations obtaining between people, because we want more than that: an ethical act, an ethical moment would be one that is not just a matter of what I do to you “being good” or not, but also of my “being good”, of my acting out of goodness, of my sharing in goodness with you, inviting you also to be good, of inviting you also to take up a relation to The Good as I have, recognizing your capacity to relate to The Good as I do, and so on. Not a matter only of categorizing an action, but of a multifaceted interaction with this third thing.

Reifying it like this can also serve to cut off the temptation to ‘finish’ good instrumentally — that is, as “good for” something or other. An ethical action is one that is good, full-stop, not good for you, or for your happiness, or your well-being, or for society, or for anything. Not in furtherance of some purpose, higher or lower, something we might eventually attribute simply to individual (or social, or biological) preference or habit or desire, but only in relation to The Good. If I act with one eye on you and the other on this third thing, The Good, with a commitment to you but also to this other thing, that is ethical. It’s not just you that has a claim on me, but this other thing as well.

I generally go in fear of Platonism, but off the top of my head I can’t really think of another way adequately to convey the absoluteness of the ethical, if you see what I mean. And I can’t imagine how we give substance to this third thing, The Good. I’ve no idea what to say about it. Maybe it’s just a way of throwing everything that touches our ways of behaving toward each other into one basket — all the biological, social, cultural factors, all those little hints and warnings and exhortations about what is good. All of that taken together seems to have a life, or at least an existence, of its own, that we find ourselves beholden to as much as we are beholden to ourselves and to each other.

The person in question refused to accept that you must either believe God/s exist is more likely, or no God/s exist is more likely, or you believe that the likelihood of Gods existence is perfectly balanced. — Jon Sendama

Yeah, okay.

Here’s the thing: “... is God” just isn’t like any other predicate, and neither is “... exists”. If you’re hoping to deal with this situation by appealing to straightforward logic, you’re out of luck. That you can cast the issue in numerical terms makes no difference, I’m sorry.

Yes, for any two values between 0 and 1, they’re equal or one is greater than the other. It’s a ways from there to belief formation or belief attribution. It’s especially far if it’s not clear how anyone could derive the values to be compared. I just don’t think the usual ways of putting a number on it are much use here, so there’s no point to this analysis. (For instance, suppose you want to set your prior for God existing to the baseline, how commonly universes were created by God — how you gonna do that?)

Formal methods are swell where they apply. You don’t get to assume they apply always and everywhere.

Maybe google “false dichotomy” as that seems to be what the person who doesn’t want to choose is claiming to be a fallacy in the reasoning of the person offering a choice. Should be some discussion of when that particular claim doesn’t apply — which is what you seem to be looking for.

Surely it's their burden to demonstrate that their objection has grounds by showing that there could be other options, rather than just claiming — Jon Sendama

Shrug. I don’t think there’s much joy in obsessing over fallacies and certainly not this burden-of-proof thing people get exercised about when debating online. Most philosophical arguments are informal and persuasive. If I tell you there are only two options, I should want to persuade you I’m right about that. What’s the point of not doing so?

Since humans only live for a finite number of years (and can commit only a finite number of evils during this time), they can commit only a finite amount of evil.

Is that how that works? We count how many evil acts you’ve committed? More is worser?

God could have done a better job letting people know about it (for example, God could have given Hitler, Stalin, etc. a few more hints on what would happen if they continued on their evil path.)

So the argument goes like this:

1. It would be appallingly unfair of God to allow Hitler and Stalin to experience eternal damnation (in any of the several forms contemplated, including annihilation).
2. At most they should get a lot of damnation, but not an infinite amount.
3. Honestly, they probably shouldn’t even get that, because how could they possibly know — really know — there would be a price to pay in the afterlife.
4. The whole system was rigged against Hitler (and Stalin!) from the beginning.
5. Guy that would set up a system like this, basically to entrap Hitler (and Stalin!), that’s not a good guy.
6. Anyone who thinks it’s okay to treat Hitler (and Stalin!) so shabbily, is also morally suspect.

Because of the magnitude of knowledge that is needed to support our daily living, the power rests solely in the dictates, goals, etc. of the business overlords that horde and produce that technology. — schopenhauer1

Are you still talking about the same thing now? Aren’t the business overlords by and large just as ignorant of the workings of the technology on which their own fortune is based?

he shows the people how to defy the cruel overlord — Isaac

Well no -- the villain here is the Pharisees.

I'm not sure offering both problem and solution is better than offering only solution. — Isaac

And I would assume it is. If you show both, you show not just an answer (Rubric 15 in The Little Book of How to be Perfect — memorize by Wednesday), but how solution and problem fit — which is, what having a solution looks like, and what solving a problem looks like. Of course it’s better.

Maybe a kind of deep psychological game whereby we're shown the false way only the more to feel the redemption. God's a bastard so that his son can show us how not to be? — Isaac

The word ‘dialectic’ fair lunges to mind here.

I’m no Bible scholar, so I can’t tell you what’s really going on here. After the would-be stoners leave, Jesus also refuses to condemn the woman — is Jesus not without sin? Couldn’t he have cast the first stone? But he never offered or agreed to; the first stoner was to come from them. — All he says to her is, go and sin no more. He doesn’t deny that she has sinned. He denies only that men are to be enforcers of the law he acknowledges. Where is that in the law? Why are the Pharisees ashamed, instead of arguing that whether they’re also sinners has nothing to do with it? It feels like what Jesus pulls off here is not a reinterpretation of this particular edict, but of the sense in which the law is law: it’s not something we are to enforce, so that means it’s not other-facing; and that fits because he gets there by getting the would-be stoners to look inward, to look at themselves rather than the adulteress — and that makes the law a matter of what God expects of you, not what you are entitled to expect of others.

Which is somewhat curious, because the original problem is adultery, which is something of a threat to family and community stability, for which this religion offered a solution — tell them it’s forbidden, and if they keep at it, go nuclear on their ass. (These fuckin’ adulterers, man, it’s like talking to a wall, amirite?) Jesus calls bullshit on that, without saying that adultery is just fine. Right here, you can see a flip from a proscriptive scheme — these specific behaviors are forbidden — to a prescriptive scheme — here’s how you should live. That raises the troubling specter of human perfectibility, but you only get that idea, as here, by acknowledging human imperfection. There are some hints here about how to feel about that, but not everyone took the hint, so instead we have sometimes gotten a new, much more sweeping enforcement regime — because under a prescriptive model, any deviation is by definition forbidden.

But that’s a tangent. (He said, as if he had a point.) The question is what resources could Jesus draw upon in the existing Jewish tradition he was born into to pull off anything like this sort of reinterpretation? Because besides being, you know, God, he also looks a lot like a really interesting Jewish rabbi.

I think a book in which the main object of worship advocates stoning girls to death within the first 28% of the book (better Ennui Elucidator?), is laying the thorns on pretty thick, with the whole love and compassion redeeming theme makes a very late and understated entrance by comparison. — Isaac

I keep writing these posts that are somewhat complementary to yours — trying to add in whatever I feel you’ve left out that’s important — and I never really get around to trying to deal head-on with the arguments, such as they are. (And I’ve never given @fdrake that response to Mengele I promised.) Maybe it’s just my temperament, but when an argument is at loggerheads like this, I tend to think both sides are wrong (and right, in their own way) and try something else.

In this case, we might consider a claim like this: Christianity condones stoning. and is therefore bad. I am invited to defend the other side — either that stoning is actually okay, or that in fact Christianity does not condone stoning if you read the Bible with some special sophistication.

We know that Christianity, like other religions, does change over time — here taking “Christianity” to denote a sort of big tent that can hold people holding newer views, newer versions of older views, and people who hold to that old time religion. If we consider, rightly or wrongly, stoning to be a practice recommended in the scripture, and possibly also an element of the old time Christianity, then we might want to ask something like this: how does an individual Christian decide where to sit under the big tent? Why would an individual Christian choose to sit among stoners or non-stoners?

We can approach this in a slightly different way. If a Christian and his fellows do not practice stoning, despite whatever the Bible says and despite what their parents and grandparents (and so on) said about the virtue of stoning, why not? Why would any Christian not practice something condoned by scripture and their forebears? How do they come to think this is a possible way of being Christian, and how do they convince others to accept this as a kind of Christianity?

As it happens, stoning is a terrible example, and it’s odd that it’s come up here, because if you were to listicle the all-time top five quotes Jesus of Nazareth is famous for, one of those would be: “Let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone at her.” So stoning’s not one of the interesting cases at all, because Jesus made it awfully clear where he stood, and he did so without giving the Pharisees reason to accuse him of going against the law. Christians are all set on this one.

On the other hand, we might look at what Jesus did here as an example of the technique. There’s the law that authorizes and even requires the stoning of the adulteress. Jesus does not question the law or those calling his attention to it. Elsewhere he even says that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law, so what’s the deal? Our question now might be, why doesn’t Jesus agree to join in an afternoon’s stoning? And further, how does he get away with it? That is, how does he not stone the adulteress and still manage not to be accused of impiety?

The question of Jesus’s piety is slightly odd. You could say the gospels assume it’s an impossibility, what with his being God and all; but then again, what with his being God and all, the idea of him being pious doesn’t quite make sense. Nevertheless, Jesus provides here an example of how religious practice can change without directly challenging existing doctrine. He just adds a little twist that makes it impossible for people of good conscience to engage in that practice.

Does he, in doing so, implicitly condemn any who, in the past, engaged in stoning in his father’s name? That strikes me as a prickly question. I expect he’d wriggle out of it somehow.

Should have also said that traditional realism clearly has issues, so I'm not really up for denouncing either in the name of the other.

Eh. Almost the whole discussion has been pretty far from Gettier, but still valuable.

"If a belief is false, then there's no way it can be justified," is a pretty common reaction to JTB theories, and it just happens that a lot of people don't even encounter JTB outside Gettier.

You've been arguing that we call beliefs 'true' when we have especially strong justification for believing them, perhaps even the strongest we can imagine.

Naturally then you'll equate 'false' with not or very poorly or weakly justified. It's consistent, but way off the reservation for talking about Gettier, which assumes you can have, in your circumstances, what anyone would consider very good reasons for your belief, which happens to be false. You have to keep track of everyone's perspective here, and you just take the extra step of saying that this last step is also perspective-bound.

You argue this position consistently, or at least as consistently as you can, because it sure looks like our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about the world have a built-in commitment to realism. (I know you describe your position as a kind of realism, but it's not a kind anyone wants.) That makes it hard even to state your position. Whether it makes it incoherent -- that's a tough one. I tend to think so, but I'm not sure it's a battle worth fighting. -- That is, the best way forward might be to pass right by this debate and try a different approach.

If a belief is false then it clearly was not well-justified. — Isaac

Have you read Gettier’s little paper?

Maybe it is better to learn from a book with some prickly parts and some rough edges.
— Srap Tasmaner

You might have to draw this out a bit for me. — Isaac

I think I really fell in love with Wittgenstein in the Preface to PI, where he says, “I should not wish to have spared anyone the trouble of thinking.”

If you want to help people develop a moral sense, and an understanding of their relationship to God, you need to give them stuff to really chew on, stuff that isn’t necessarily easy to understand or readily assent to. I remember being really impressed with the way Kierkegaard opens Fear and Trembling with four different versions of the story of the binding of Isaac (not the video game), drawing out its complexity, not just as a matter of faith but also psychology.

The alternative — well, you could shorten the Bible to the ten commandments, and maybe the beatitudes. A pamphlet. Maybe you could extract enough material to make something about the size of the Sayings of Chairman Mao. Or you could make a storybook with only nice things in it — like Bible Stories for Children. All of these look more dangerous to me than what we have, because people will be spared the trouble of thinking and feeling their way to a deeper morality, and though I’m not in principle concerned with their relationship with God, I think if they’re going to have such a thing in their lives, it shouldn’t be easy or simple.

a trivial social media forum — Isaac

Hey now

But one narrative among many, yes? — Isaac

I can’t help but think so, yes.

When people want to feel part of a group, want to find some meaning to the whole charity, forgiveness, compassion thing...do we want them reaching for Christianity as their story (the one with all the misogyny, homophobia and abuse in it too), or would we rather they reach for something a little less fraught? — Isaac

When I was young, I thought the main problem with Christianity was that it wasn’t true — just a culturally transmitted delusion, wishful thinking and fantasy. I’m a bit more inclined to see it now as you describe here, with the caveat that the narrative Christians use to structure their world may not be the one in the Bible, or in the Catechism, no matter what they say. It’s connected to the Bible, but in a great number of different ways, and it’s complicated. I think that’s fine. We all agree there isn’t just one narrative in the Bible to start with, so why pretend it’s simple and people have a simple relationship to it?

I get the reformist impulse — Jefferson, the Enlightenment slave-owner — made his own version of the gospels where he snipped out all the supernatural bits to present Jesus of Nazareth as a guy worth listening to, not a divine presence. There’s lots of ways to snip. But I wonder if maybe it isn’t better not to. Maybe it is better to learn from a book with some prickly parts and some rough edges. If there was nothing in it to reject — or at least to have to wonder pretty hard about — you’d have a religion where everyone did believe everything in The Book exactly as it is written, and that starts to look like not such a great idea. I think it might actually be good for Christians that their book is such a mess. (Back to the rough ground, you know.)

I’m not sure what to say next that would have any value as philosophy, so I’ll give a couple examples.

A very nice piece of qualitative sociology is Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her method is to try to come up with a sort of ‘story behind the beliefs’, and it’s interesting stuff. It’s another way you might try to deal with inconsistency you perceive that your subjects don’t.

There’s a preacher I know slightly, has a small church in semi-rural Georgia, and like a lot of communities theirs has a noticeably larger immigrant population than it used to, mostly from Mexico I think. Some of his longtime parishioners came to him to say they didn’t really like what he’d been doing, letting in all these new folks. “Which ones do you want me to chase off?” he asked, and they got all embarrassed, we didn’t mean that, it’s not like it, but he stood his ground, and told them it’s exactly like that. “Who do you want me to turn away?” (You might think the shame would be enough, but casual racism has been so normal here for so long that it’s tough to get around. What did the trick, he told me, was that he’s known some of these people since they were born, so he could say, “These people are new to our community and they come to us because they need a little help. As I recall, you’ve needed a little help now and then too.” And then he can remind them of such times in their lives. Putting it like that, he told me, he could see the light go on, and they could see that these new folks weren’t really so different from them.)

I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be this virtuous, but it’s a fact that being Christian is his way of being virtuous, and I think it would be just as big a mistake to say he’s virtuous despite being Christian. What about his parishioners? Aren’t they Christians too, but bad? I think they’re just not quite as far along as their pastor, and Christians do very much talk about being a Christian as a struggle to be the sort of person God wants you to be, not something anyone’s ever finished with. As it turns out, a lot of evangelical pastors have found their congregations changing, becoming more political and less religious, in a sense, and not all of them are handling it quite as well as my guy. A lot are quitting because they’re exhausted.

All philosophy involves thinking. — Xtrix

If you mean “philosophy” aspirationally.

Not all thinking is philosophy. — Xtrix

It’s a good starting assumption. Thinking may or may not turn out to be philosophy.

These two points together seem headed for a question like, “What makes some thinking philosophical?”, but instead you ask

What is thinking? — Xtrix

We could come back around now, and just say that it’s something that has within it the possibility but not the necessity of being philosophy. That’s not bad, but it looks like the goal here might be to understand what philosophy is, or understand it better, by understanding what thinking is better — so we can dangle philosophy out there as a possibility but we’ll have to decide whether to treat it as something already determinate or, what seems closer to what you intended, as something we figure out along with figuring out what thinking is.

So I’ll assume we’re not relying on a given understanding of what philosophy is and take a stab at what thinking is: it’s allowing thoughts to occur, to come to me. When I’m puzzling over a problem — people at work often find me just staring intently at things — sometimes I’m doing something like calculating: this can go there, and I can change that, and then this other thing’s fine. But sometimes when I’m “just thinking” I’m waiting, not calculating. And you have to wait in a certain sort of way, not forcing your thoughts into given channels. It’s a little like finding the perfect filter, one that keeps out stuff that’s no use, but doesn’t select a solution before the problem’s even clear. I don’t think there’s a method, in particular, for keeping out only what needs to be kept out, because associations and analogies are so powerful, you almost need to let everything in, somehow without getting distracted or bogged down. — And that’s a funny thing too, because of course just thinking might be daydreaming or musing, the sort of thing that undermines any sense of “distraction”, but you can also mull over a problem, which is a sort of focused musing. It is possible to be just thinking about something or not.

I think the filtering idea is off. The thoughts that come to you come for their own reasons, and some thoughts are up front about what those reasons are and some aren’t. (If they’ve come to help with your problem, you should see that in a flash; if they didn’t, that’s sometimes immediately clear sometimes not.) The ones that don’t immediately explain themselves are obviously often the most interesting. It’s very tempting to say that those are the sorts of thoughts that mark the beginning of philosophy. Maybe. If so, then philosophy would in some way be thinking that is truest to what thinking is, beginning in the allowing to come to you of thoughts that even once they’ve come haven’t fully arrived, can’t just be grasped and filed away for use in reasoning. I like reasoning, but it’s not what I’m doing when I’m just thinking.

Or he might hang out in Purgatory until his relatives pay the priest an indulgence. — frank

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the souls in purgatory. Have they brought back indulgences?

Anyway, after twenty pages of the iniquitous punishment God doles out, I thought for a change people could be offended by God not being nearly harsh enough.

What does he deserve? — frank

But there’s also the question of what he gets — if he genuinely seeks forgiveness from God, he’ll get it.

I haven't been trying to give Christians any more deference than I would anyone else whose beliefs are quite foreign to me:
— Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't for a minute think you'd do so deliberately, but I think it's the result nonetheless. — Isaac

Maybe it’s this: Christianity has an outsize presence in the politics of my country, especially where I live, in the Bible belt. It’s been on my mind — a lot. (It’s entirely possible that what I’m concerned about isn’t even exactly Christianity anymore, but a heretical offshoot of Christianity. This is the Jesus and John Wayne idea, but I’ve heard a few variations at this point.)

For some generations now, young intellectuals have been cheerfully leaving religion behind as they went off to college — we had science and the arts and humanities and no need for religion, which we used to assume belonged to humanity’s infancy and would fade away. That didn’t work out. There are a lot of us who face no question about whether to be for or against Christianity and just about all religion; we’re against. But the world has changed, and we can’t just ignore it as we intended; now we need to understand it. I don’t have a problem with ‘external’ approaches, in general, with doing psychology or sociology of faith, that sort of thing; but that ought to include some phenomenology (at least as the term is used in qualitative social science) of the life of believers, else those theories might hook up to some fantasy of Christian life instead of the real thing.

Christian doctrine has no particular urgency for me, but how real Christians live does — they’re people, after all, and fellow citizens, and quite likely my political enemies. I think that might explain why I’ve approached this discussion as I have.

Jumping in midstream here, so if what I say misses the point, ignore me. — Hanover

No, no. That's good. I was practically begging for someone to correct me there. But I've sometimes wondered how to read the first commandment if not as a holdover from an older tradition.

If you begin with the notion that the text of the OT isn't meant literally and that it is meant as a guide to ethical behavior and a meaningful life, I don't think you'll be burdened by any particular passage. — Hanover

Sound. And is this the way it's commonly read and thought about, in your experience?

People believe it's edicts for cultural reasons, it's not metaphysically compelling. — Isaac

I don't know. First part is incontestably true, but the incarnation is pretty interesting, a god emptying himself of his divinity that he might be sacrificed (to himself). Big deal for the Greeks too with Dionysus.

The mentalist approach is upside-down. — unenlightened

Yes yes yes yes yes.

Why the protected status, why the concern for Christians being morally judged? — Isaac

(( Sorry for the little replies. Writing as I can squeeze it in. ))

I haven't been trying to give Christians any more deference than I would anyone else whose beliefs are quite foreign to me: I ought to put some work in before shooting my mouth off. Thoreau tells us that anyone who has lived truly is from another country -- so maybe there's no harm in generalizing the attitude.