I cited an article describing the current pope's view — unenlightened

What Francis said was frankly surprising, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Even more interesting to me was the chorus of children who thought God would not send this non-believer to hell. Where did that come from? Had they been improperly catechized? Were they too young to remember the right answer? The article makes them sound pretty confident they knew the right answer. Were they relying on that clever Catholic fallback, purgatory? (Hoping I end up in heaven’s waiting room if it turns out I was wrong to leave mother church.) Were they ignoring their catechism and substituting their own morality for what they had been taught? Geez, I don’t even know what doctrine is here, so maybe I’m roughly in the position of those children.

If we (the secular) aren't 'getting' what the Christians are saying, then we need to try harder. All of us. So that the baffled secular and the agonised Christian can help each other sort out the painful contradictions. Simply saying that the Christians issues are not within our understanding, by fiat, seems a bit of a cop out. — Isaac

Agreed, and to the extent that’s what my take looks like, that’s on me.

There is the spectre of believers getting a “free pass” — Dennett wrote a whole book about it, and @Banno has invoked the idea of a “taboo” hereabouts. Am I claiming Christians should get a free pass? A free pass for what? To believe what they believe? To experience the world as they do? Well, none of that is up to me anyway, not a choice I face. To remake my country’s political institutions in accordance with their creed? Fuck no.

I think I’m being asked to disapprove of their beliefs, yes? Well, I already don’t share them. Is there a stronger form of disapproval I should plump for? Yes, there is: they shouldn’t believe what they believe either. Why not? Because what they believe is irrational, inconsistent, contradictory, unsupported by the evidence, or morally reprehensible, something from that list. Because presumably that’s why I don’t believe what they believe, paragon of rationality and morality that I am. But here’s where I get stuck.

God being the creator of the universe having no implications at all for whether we worship him. A thing being divinely revealed doesn't have any necessary implication for whether one follows it. — Isaac

When a deity speaks to me, I’ll let you know. People worship human beings, of all things, how do you expect them to react to what they take to be actual divinity? Something or everything in the range covered by the phrase “fear of God” would be my guess. I keep coming back to such experiences because I don’t see how it could be anything but overwhelming.

I’m not trying to dodge the question about doctrine, just put it in some perspective. Without the feeling of having encountered the divine, it might be much easier for a Christian just to call bullshit on the concept of hell and bolt. On the other hand, such experience is exactly what empowers some to leave: the loving God they know is misrepresented by what Lewis calls the orthodox view.

I’m still not much addressing the intended thrust of the thread, I know, which was not supposed to be about what believers go through, but about how non-believers should think about believers, insofar as they accept some version of eternal damnation. There is, as the paragraph just above suggests, room for us to expect a true believer to hold onto their personal religious experience but abandon certain chunks of Christian doctrine. (And loads of Christians do this. American bishops are more or less continually frustrated that a whole lot of American Catholics don’t believe everything they’re supposed to.) That seems like a pretty reasonable course, but in practice it means holding people accountable for not breaking with their family, their friends, their social circle. It’s a big ask, as the kids say, but maybe it’s the right one:

For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. — That Guy

Of course, That Guy thought he was divine. I don’t feel like I quite have the standing to ask something like that of people. Also, I by and large don’t give a shit what people believe in the privacy of their own homes and places of worship. (Until a couple generations ago, evangelical Christianity in the United States was almost uniformly and resolutely anti-political. Same doctrine before as now.)

Why would we assume the Christians have somehow got it all beautifully stitched together — Isaac

Yikes, I hope I haven’t given that impression. I pointed out that it’s not unusual for Christians to struggle with or have misgivings about the concept of hell. And it’s not a secret either. There’s lots of writing. There’s lots of public discussion.

After all, our secular world is similarly constituted. — Isaac

That point I like a lot. I think it’s a great idea just to take Christianity as an example of a process of meaning-making that is of a type with what non-Christians do. As you pointed out before, though, the psychology here is almost too easy for you.

There is a real sticking point — which I mentioned before as well:

Unless we're actually going to believe religious claims to divine access — Isaac

What are we supposed to do here? I don’t believe in God, so I don’t believe in revelation either. I don’t seem to have much choice but to say that revelation must be somewhere on a spectrum running from delusion to misinterpretation.

But on the other hand, all I can really say is that I haven’t experienced anything I understand as revelation, and I can recognize that if I had such an experience, I might be exactly on the other side of this argument.

I get the impulse to say, all I can do is judge things by my own standards, rely on my own faculty of reason like some Enlightenment hero — it’s what a lot of people here find exhilarating and liberating about philosophy. If an argument doesn’t convince you, then by god it doesn’t! Aaarrgh!

But I’m not inclined to shrug off my recognition that I could hold different beliefs from the ones I do, could have had different experiences from the ones I’ve had, and possibly understand a great many things quite differently. Maybe it’s just that I’m not all that committed to what I happen to believe at any given moment. However it works, I lean away from being as dismissive of other’s views as I was when I was twenty.

I wasn’t complaining about your typing skill, but about your habit of what one might call “controlling” or “manipulating” the conversation, rather than participating in it.

And again, your part int his conversation is tedious. — Banno

Please stop doing that.

Have you considered the possibility that you may have "tin ear" when it comes to religion? — Janus

That's an interesting analogy.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't. — Banno

Just how general is this maxim? Does what we can put into words about, say, playing music "trump" playing music? In what possible sense? And how does the case of faith differ from playing music?

Obviously I like a lot of this, so thanks.

Not much time at the moment, so more later, but one thing I found myself struggling with was that putting things into language is, at least for the cases we usually deal with around here, a sort of categorizing. You can deliberately avoid that, either through paradox, as mystics and zen masters are wont to, or through notation as Frege did (who complained that talking about concepts is to treat them as objects).

One bit I've been thinking about is this: imagine teaching someone how to pray. You tell someone they can ask God's forgiveness. "How do I do that?" First you must have a contrite heart. "How do I do that?" Open your heart to His grace. "How do I do that?" I've run out of words here, though an experienced pastor may have more. At some point you will have to give up describing the experience of prayer as you might a technique and suggest your pupil try it and see what experience they have. I think this is true as well of, say, woodworking or meditation or rock climbing. A lot can be put into categorical propositions, maybe eventually everything, I don't know, but every learner will have the experience of the teacher's words not making sense right up until they have a particular experience and then everything is clear. "This is what he meant!"

I think it'd be a hard argument to make that any Christian could talk about their faith without assenting to a proposition as an integral part of that discussion. — Isaac

There are indeed a whole lot of propositions!

Suppose you’re a Christian and you’ve been struggling with the concept of hell. On its face, it doesn’t look like something an all-loving god would set up. It’s a problem; how will you go about dealing with it?

First step for a lot of Christians would be talking to their pastor. There will be recognizable propositions here, sure, in the pastor’s explanation, but there will almost certainly also be some statements that strike us as paradoxical, and some statements that are deliberately incomplete (apophatic). It’s unlikely there will be anything you can test empirically, say, in a lab. There may be some reference to experience though: the pastor might connect the concept of hell to the feelings you had when you had done wrong; he will almost certainly counsel you to pray on it.

It just seems to me that whatever’s going on here, whatever the purpose of all this talk (right through to prayer, which is also a sort of talking), it’s not well-modeled as decision making under uncertainty. Consider this: Christians can believe that a proposition is true without understanding it, and will freely say so. That doesn’t fit our model of language use at all! You’re supposed to figure out exactly what’s claimed first in order to figure out whether it’s true. (Meaning and truth are always running mates in our world.) Christians are not expected to understand everything that they believe. Surely that has some implications for analysing their beliefs as a system of propositions, as if it were a scientific theory!

I’m bothering with all this because the argument presented here is not that some Christians have done things we non-Christians consider wrong — bombed an abortion clinic or something — and we need to rule out their faith as a defense for such wrongdoing; the argument is that their holding of certain beliefs is in itself wrong and their persistence in doing so is evidence of their moral bankruptcy.

I’m skeptical of that project in general, I’ll admit. I think people ought to be judged for their actions and the effects of their actions on others, not for what was in their head at the time. *** That’s a bias of mine I have trouble getting around. But here we’re not even talking about what any Christian has done on the basis of their beliefs, but whether the holding of those beliefs at all is morally acceptable. I don’t think we should go down that road, but if we are then I think it behooves us to consider carefully what we mean when we say someone holds the forbidden belief. I think religious faith is peculiar in a number of ways that haven’t been adequately addressed, and is not exactly like everyday or scientific occasions of ‘assenting to a proposition’. I don’t even share the faith in question, but I can see the mismatch without half trying.

Lewis argues that belief in hell is per se immoral, even though he believes those who hold such a belief are merely indulging in fantasy. We’ve barely talked about whether that argument is any good, but I think we get off to a bad start by not bothering to understand what the word “belief” means here.


*** Oops. That's obviously not right. Intentions matter, but as they inform the act. (Hurting someone intentionally is morally different from hurting them unintentionally, duh.) To focus on the thoughts and desires themselves, independent of any action they might or might not inform, as moral or immoral, strikes me as a needlessly "Christian" view.

My suspicion, voiced above, is that hell is unjust, and further that belief in hell may sometimes lead to cruelty here on earth. — Banno

And for evidence, we need look no further than the all but indistinguishable lives of Desmond Tutu and Steven Anderson. Yeah, I see what you mean.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't. — Banno

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to?

an excuse to forgive those who consider hell appropriate — Banno

What exactly is it you would be forgiving them for? For having a thought, one you consider a fantasy? Why would that be something that needs forgiving?

You have gestured at a connection:

Belief in hell has implications in terms of explaining the behaviour of the believer. Perhaps there is some potential to understand the cruel behaviour of so many who call themselves christian in understanding the cruelty inherent in their belief. How much of their behaviour can be explained as resulting from fear of damnation? — Banno

but Lewis doesn’t, does he? He upbraids Christians for going along with divine evil — which Lewis believes, as an atheist, is just a fantasy. No one is eternally tormented by a god who doesn’t exist. Hell isn’t real. Christians aren’t collaborators because there is no tyrant to collaborate with. They are willing to collaborate, he says, and that in itself is evil, somehow, even though they’ll never get the chance to act on that willingness.

But you draw a direct line from Christian theology to Christian behavior you disapprove of. (I’ll admit I read the paper hastily, but I don’t think Lewis makes this part of the case.)

Here’s a question for you, Banno. You say above, that “perhaps there is some potential” to explain Christian behavior you find abhorrent by reference to Christian doctrine. And you finish with a question, not a claim. So I take it you don’t consider the case made, at this point, that the doctrine of eternal damnation explains why Christians suck so hard. Will you stick by that? Or are you now going to treat this “potentiality” as established fact?

Something like a conceptual scheme? — fdrake

I wouldn’t think so, not exactly. I suppose when I hear “conceptual scheme” I think “taxonomy”, more or less. But I don’t mean what categories you assign things to.

On the one hand, there might still be something here like a conceptual scheme, as my “created natural world” example indicates: there’s an over-arching category into which, well, just about everything goes. But it seems to me the nature of the (now) sub-categories changes if you relate them to a creator — there was no such relation before.

And you can say something similar elsewhere, but with similar issues. If I perform an act of kindness for a stranger, I don’t experience that as following the example of Jesus, for instance. You could say that this is a matter of categorization, but is that all it is? I don’t know, not having experienced the alternative, but I suspect it isn’t. Categorization would be retroactive, right?*** But we’re talking about me comporting myself as someone who believes himself to be within the sight of God. That’s not just a matter of how I categorize myself or my behavior, is it?



*** That’s not right. It would be both: if I’m emulating Jesus, that would also be forward-looking, seeking to perform an act that I will later, if successful, be able to categorize in the desired way.

Believers do not experience a different world. — Banno

I genuinely don't know what the right thing to say here is. I'll admit I'm tempted to make Christian faith "adverbial": they experience loneliness, for example, "jesusly" (meaning they feel His divine presence) but I don't. There'd be something you could call "the same" there, but they're still having an experience I just don't. They could try to describe that for me, and some Christian writers have tried to do so, but without the experience, I don't really know what they're talking about.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression there's "something it's like" to have faith, something not describable as holding certain opinions but something that saturates your experience.

If we were to follow Srap Tasmaner's argument, we would be debarred from critique of any worldview unless we had been properly initiated into it's creed and understood it from the point of view of the true believer. I doubt he would apply this argument to Cartesianism, liberalism or Cricket, so again it is a form of special pleading. — Banno

I've tried, a little, to suggest how I think it's different from these examples. To me, faith seems to imply a meaning-world I am not privy to. I think believers experience the world quite differently from me. I think cricketers experience cricket different from how I would if I experienced it as a spectator, which I don't, but you get the idea. Some of that can be translated, with effort, but I'm not sure whether that's almost everything or quite a bit less. I do not know, for instance, how to see the natural world as created, and I can't imagine how people who do experience it.

It is obvious to the point of tedium that christians will not be dissuaded from their belief by the arguments here. They are not the audience, either for Lewis' article or for this thread. That Srap supposes otherwise is just plain odd. It seems to be little more than a veiled ad hom directed at Lewis and myself. — Banno

It's worth mentioning, in a sort of defense of Lewis's argument, that a great many Christians are uncomfortable with the traditional teaching on hell that Lewis takes aim at. It's not hard to find well-known Christian authors and theologians who have struggled with the idea, including at least one Catholic priest I used to know. I think I've known people who left the church (if not religion altogether) over this exact issue.

It is indeed a tough one, and many Christians consider themselves Christian despite deep misgivings about the concept of hell.

The OP says: — baker

I stand corrected.

I've been discussing the premises of this argument, not it's suggested conclusion.

I am intimately familiar with the problems unshared faith can cause.

I don't know what solution you're proposing, and I'm not convinced it's relevant to this discussion.

Near as I can tell, DL and @Banno think maybe they can, you know, refute Christianity. With an argument. I mean ...

But why should I care?
— Srap Tasmaner

Because they hold it against you. — baker

But why should I care?

What do you imagine as the remedy here? I already don't share their faith, so reasons for me not to have no purpose. Must I "deprogram" them? Why? So that I don't feel judged by them? Why should I care?

faith that... — Isaac

But this is a question: can faith be captured without remainder in propositions? I can't imagine any believer agreeing to that.

But, as you say, there may be more to faith than the propositions, but there are still the propositions: the believer must take some attitude toward them, and we are entitled to do so as well.

That's persuasive, on its face, but I don't think it can be right. Articles of faith don't hook up to whatever proposition-handling machinery you might imagine being handy elsewhere. (Gathering evidence, testing, refining, etc.) I mean, there is such a thing as theology, but I don't understand what that's supposed to be either! Hovering over all this is the problem -- as it would seem to a non-believer -- of revelation, which "links" to propositional knowledge in, let's say, a non-standard way... Everything about how a believer might characterize their faith -- much less their God! -- using ordinary logico-linguistic means, will be very misleading if you don't share the underlying experience. That's my hunch, anyway.

But why should I care?

Christians are specifically enjoined not to judge the state of another's soul. It seems to bother Lewis that they believe he will be judged, even if not by them. It bothers him that they "support" this judgy asshole in the sky, but Christians don't experience their faith as "supporting" God's decisions. They don't get a vote.

I don't read either the article, nor Banno's OP as an attempt to 'understand' why Christians think they way they do. We could invoke upbringing, group membership tokens, and cognitive biases to have that job done in a jiffy. — Isaac

I like the use of “invoke” there: you pray to your gods, they pray to theirs.

Anyway, I haven’t argued for an explanation of Christians faith, only that you ought to know what something is before judging it.

And I have suggested that this may be difficult from an outside perspective, because faith is not just an opinion someone holds, but that’s just how Lewis discusses it. (A view held in relative ignorance.) If you must, you could say it’s a language-game you just don’t understand, and move on, but there’s no point in insisting that those playing it must be playing a game you do know, and playing it wrong.

We’re here because @Banno believes Davidson refuted incommensurability in all its forms, and that means religious experience must be translatable without loss into terms he can understand. I doubt that, but I don’t even see much effort being put into the translation.

Understanding Christian psychology and discussing Christian ethics are two separate things. The OP, as a understand it, is about the latter. — Isaac

I believe I made that point in the very paragraph of mine you were quoting, but your second sentence is clearly wrong: the OP presents an objection to Christian theology. No Christian is called upon to decide whether anyone else receives eternal reward or punishment; it is not only not an ethical choice they face, it is one they are, in so many words, warned against. As Lewis sees it, you do face such a choice for yourself — is that an ethical choice? — but are denied crucial evidence you would need to make an informed choice. I have suggested this is a ridiculous model of the experience of faith. Lewis’s principal point is that you might as well worship Hitler, but, and this should sound familiar, no Christian believes themselves to be in a position to evaluate God’s job performance.

Is God beyond our petty and all too tellurian morality? But if so, then why follow his edicts, why pursue a place in heaven? — Isaac

Because you have faith.

If, like me, you have no such faith, then move on. But my lack of understanding of someone’s faith is no objection to it.

in so far as they admire those who do accept eternal damnation — Banno

You know, the way you say this, it’s as if a Christian might say, “I approve of the job God Almighty is doing.”

You see how ridiculous that is, right?

the view that christianity ought be judged only (or mainly) from a christian perspective — Banno

If you want to shun Christians because their ethical views don’t align with yours, have at it. But you want to find their faith wanting, without bothering to understand it. Indeed, there may be a barrier there: I’m not sure you can really understand that life without living it. I don’t, and I don’t, that’s all I can say.

I’m trying to read the article — no, I hadn’t read it before — and I come to this:

He places people in a situation in which they must make a judgment that binds them for eternity, and he knows that some will be so inadequately informed that they will opt for an eternity of torment (or a state for which torment is an apt metaphor). — p. 233

Evidently David Lewis doesn’t know any Christians, and hasn’t so much as eavesdropped on any conversation among Christians, because no Christian ever talks this way. Christians don’t believe that you gather information and then make a decision about how you’d like to spend eternity; they believe you either open your heart to His grace or you deliberately shut Him out.

Whatever Lewis is talking about, it’s nothing remotely like what Christians in my experience actually believe.

He could leave incompatibilist freedom intact while doing far more luring and urging than he does. Assuming we have to make a choice, why must it be made through a glass darkly? God seems negligent at best.

Ugh. He sent His only begotten son here to die so that our sins might be forgiven, and Lewis says, “Big whoop.” And, again, grace: Christians believe God is constantly luring and urging us, offering us His love unconditionally, and reminding us that He will forgive any sin, all we have to do is ask.

From my mundane perspective, I may judge myself happy enough in my denial of God. Once I am fully informed, however, I will appreciate the grossness of my swinish satisfaction, and torment will be an apt description of my insubordinate condition.

Christians believe you are “fully informed” right now. What does Lewis mean? By “fully informed” he seems to mean, when he sees the afterlife with his own eyes, and finally knows what’s what. Such knowledge is irrelevant to Christians. This whole paradigm is wrong. No sensible evidence is needed because God is happy to speak to us directly, creator-to-soul, and does so all the time.

In this little section seems, Lewis addresses my “hell is a spiritual state” thing, but he interprets his experience as “contented atheism”, not something for which “torment” is an apt metaphor. But, of course, he’s just wrong about that. If there is a bliss surpassing all imagining that he knows not, then from that point of view, his contentment looks like torment.

I think there is a good question here, about why some people experience themselves as touched by God and some people don’t, but it’s nothing like this intellectualized business Lewis is on about.

I’ll try to read the rest, but the whole thing seems to me — and I’ve been an atheist at least my entire adult life — extremely shoddy and ill-informed.

I’ve been going over this in my head for awhile now and I came to the conclusion that there has to be something necessarily. — Paul Michael

One way to look at this: you’ve rediscovered the cogito. The ‘necessity’ comes from asking the question at all — if there were nothing, there would be no question.

's all good, man

Not what I was saying and missing the point of this discussion.

You're just saying that you don't agree with what gets marked as right and wrong in the Bible, and I'd largely agree with you, but so what?

The issue we were addressing was the afterlife story about heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment. What you're rewarded or punished for is a separate issue.

The need to engage in such a process speaks loudly to the poverty of those scriptures. — Banno

I don't think it's anything special about the Abrahamic religions. Wisdom literatures always accumulate interpretations and theories of interpretation. Even Zen, which you might think would be immune. We still have knockdown drag-out fights here about our preferred ancients.

It seems you mean something else. — Banno

I think Genesis is an indication of what I mean. Many many Christians take the story in Genesis to be, well, a story, just a picturesque way of conveying the idea of a creator. Only certain sorts of believers take it literally. A lot of the interpretation of scripture relies on various sorts of symbolic analysis. It's normal. I'm suggesting that it's open to a believer to take a lot as just storytelling to convey some pretty abstract stuff. Hellfire needn't be taken literally, nor torment. All that stuff could reasonably be taken as storytelling to convey ideas about one's spiritual state. (Didn't Kierkegaard somewhere say you could replace the whole New Testament with "There was a man among us whom we believe was God"?)

How does one determine the difference between the extraneous 'fairy tale' and the significant 'spiritual life'? How do you know what's in and what's out? — Tom Storm

Dunno. Biblical interpretation can get pretty sophisticated. It's clear enough that Christians do this, as the Genesis example shows. Must you believe Moses literally parted the Red Sea to be a Jew or a Christian? Obviously not. And theologians have often taken much, much more to be fairy tale than normal believers.

I grew up Catholic, so I've never even read the Bible. ;-)

It remains difficult to see how a finite number of transgressions merits a non-finite punishment — Banno

Agreed, that's an unsolvable problem with the fairy tale.

I was trying to find a way to take 'eternity' as a way of conveying that our actions have inconceivably high moral stakes, rather than something to do with duration. (Nietzsche uses eternity to convey stakes, in a way. Thoreau had that line, "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," and he doesn't seem to be talking about 'lots of time' either.)

I don't really see the point in arguing against what I'm calling the "fairy tale". You always have the option of taking lots of scripture as illustrative storytelling. (Hardly anyone doesn't take Genesis that way.) What the stories are meant to convey is a certain way of living a spiritual life, so if you focus on the fairy tale, religious folks will always feel like you don't really get it. Every time you say "evidence", for instance, believers yawn.

God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. — the catechism

Hell isn't God's problem, it's ours. If that's where we end up, it's our fault. And okay, maybe there's some fire there, but the real punishment is "eternal separation from God" so the fire can't be that bad. — Ciceronianus

As I understand it, some theologians these days take the talk of fire and torment to be “picturesque” or “metaphorical”, and take hell to be the state of being turned away from god. The torturous language would be an attempt to capture the magnitude of the difference between union with god and whatever else you might get up to.

The part I never understood was why there’s a deadline — right up until your last breath on earth, you can do the right thing, but after that forget it.

That doesn’t make sense to me theologically, but it makes sense if your religion is not about eternity at all — no matter what it says — but is about how one ought to live. Of course, you could also adjust your understanding of eternity to something besides “a whole lot of time, in fact all of it, or all the rest of it”. For instance, you could take the idea of eternity itself a somewhat picturesque way of claiming that history is real. If you hurt someone, that moment of you hurting them never goes away, is permanent in itself, lasts forever as the moment you hurt them.

To see how you relate to eternity (in some TBD sense) as the essence of how you live, to have turned toward or away from god (in some TBD sense), that’s a whole different thing from the fairy tale Lewis is talking about.

Not completely laughable. People died. Mostly laughable.

But not a riot. They weren't just expressing themselves destructively. They were there to stop Congress from certifying electors. They were there, as they themselves said, to take back their government. That's not a riot.

The interesting part of the day to me is the couple hours of radio silence from Trump. I think he hoped, perhaps even believed, that people in uniform would stand with him, so he was waiting to see what the cops did. There were off-duty cops in the mob, after all. But then it became clear that those in uniform were not siding with Trump's mob, and tanks didn't roll in to support him, nothing like that, so he finally told everyone to go home. But I believe he was waiting to see what happened, and would have been perfectly happy to stay in power at gunpoint.

As it turns out, it was just violent LARPing, but it wasn't clear early on that's all it would be, and those involved had bigger ambitions.

1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about?
— Srap Tasmaner

Whatever it is I'm modelling as 'the grass'. — Isaac

As you mean it, that's incoherent. You want to say there’s no grass ‘out there’, that ‘grass’ is only a term of your model, but then it’s meaningless to say you’re modeling anything as grass. It’s not the “whatever it is” that’s the problem; it’s the “as grass”. You have to pay your semantic debts at some point, and if ‘grass’ doesn’t square your accounts, something else will have to.

Philosophy (in the past at least, and it seems for some now) cherished certainty and perfection. Philosophers sought immutable truth, beauty and goodness. They treated the "real world" and ordinary day-to-day life as imperfect and consequently inferior, unhelpful in seeking the absolute. — Ciceronianus

I get that, and I get wanting to call that a “retreat from life” or something, but of course it’s not — there’s no such thing. It’s just another way of living. What you can do is point out how this way of living works, and how it differs from other ways, what enables it, and so on. But don’t take them at their word.

Maybe an example would be clearer. Suppose you know someone who believes in an afterlife, and they explain to you that they give no thought to their temporary stay here on earth but only to the eternal life to come. Now you could, as someone who does not believe in an afterlife, tell them that they are giving up earthly rewards for nothing, since nothing is waiting for them in the afterlife. Or you could point out that believing in an afterlife is a particular way of living here on earth, that it’s simply not true that they give no thought to this life but only to the eternal life to come: they give it enough thought to arrange this life in a particular way, as a preparation for the eternal life, and we can see them living that sort of life, in accordance with that idea, right here, right now.

Imagine "the grass is green" is false, then imagine it's true. Describe the difference between the two states you're imagining. — Isaac

That the grass is not green, is the case when, for instance, it’s brown.

I think you wanted: what’s the difference between ‘Today is Wednesday’ and ‘It’s true that today is Wednesday’?

When I say "the grass is green" I'm attempting to refer to the grass, I'm actually referring to my belief about the grass (there might be no grass, yet I still refer). — Isaac

1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about?
2. If I am referring not to the grass but to my belief, then am I predicating, of my belief not the grass, that it is green? My beliefs can be green?

as long as rules are not broken, anything goes. Even fascism. — StreetlightX

Well, no, it’s just that there’s no point in striving for just laws in a lawless nation. Rule of law alone is certainly not enough, but it’s a requirement — so we believe. We also tend to support civil disobedience and jury nullification when we have failed to make the law just. But we are trying to build something better than the war of all against all. So are you, aren’t you? You think the state is no solution, and you may be right — I think you’re wrong, but I don’t consider you my enemy. The mob that attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power are my enemy and yours as well, because they believe power should only and forever be in the hands of ‘the right sort of people’.

A bunch of Plutocrat-enabling grifters felt uneasy for a bit - the horror. — StreetlightX

They may be scumbags one and all — that’s not the issue. They were not targeted as scumbags but as elected representatives carrying out their constitutional duty. It’s not the attack on Pence that bothers us — not mainly, I mean, he’s a dangerous Christian dominionist, but also a human being who ought not be pummeled to death by a mob — it was the attack on the rule of law itself that was unsettling. That bothers us whether it’s done by a mob or by current and former government officials ignoring Congressional subpoenas and court orders, or by Reagan funding a secret foreign policy through arms sales. The rule of law itself is not up for negotiation, so we liberals believe.

Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. — Janus

There must be something different about us, and the smart money says it’s to do with language or something about us that shows itself most clearly in language. It would also make sense for our world or worlds to be different from the worlds of non-linguistic animals (again, whether that’s because of language itself, or because of whatever underwrites language), but I’m inclined to agree that the difference will not be that only in ours do things mean something, only in ours do things matter.

Margaret Wise Brown was a fine phenomenologist:

The important thing about rain is
that it is wet.
It falls out of the sky,
and it sounds like rain,
and makes things shiny,
and it does not taste like anything,
and is the color of air.
But the important thing about rain is
that it is wet. — The Important Book

I merely think it was a pretense. — Ciceronianus

I get the impulse to say that Descartes was conjuring a pseudo-problem, and ‘solving’ this so-called problem is offered to the over-educated as a pointless game they can play in their ivory tower. I’ve had such feelings about philosophy, and I’d guess most have.

But I find myself wanting to defend Descartes, because this was a bold act of imagination on his part, was it not? And as such, yes, something like playing — but play is serious business.

For instance, when you say

traditional philosophical discussion ... sometimes distances itself too greatly from life and the world and becomes pretense — Ciceronianus

I wonder about that. For Descartes to respond imaginatively to his experience as he did — is that “distancing” himself from life, rather than another possibility of life? Is there no imagination in the life and in the world you suggest are our proper study?

And more than that: by imagining other possibilities, he can, as science fiction writers do, show us how the world we do live in works — not by saying it works like the world he imagines, not because his imagined world is some explanation of ours, but because he can show us, perhaps more clearly in imagination, how a world works. You have to conjure, imaginatively, a way of bringing out what is most taken for granted, what you can’t see because it’s too close. You have to, as Pound said, “make it new!”

None of this is judgment on the success of Descartes’s experiment, but I’m inclined to applaud the attempt, and his use of imagination.

Are you offended that Descartes had thoughts that he didn’t have to?

Overwhelmingly agree.

Language: there is a temptation to look at computers and say, that's just syntax without semantics, which leads to a further temptation to say that our ability to "attach" meaning to symbols is what makes us special -- but now we're distinguishing ourselves not just from machines but from animals that don't have language. Lacking our higher mental capacities, their behavior is, insofar as it is instinctive, mechanical.

But I think that's wrong. I think Chomsky might have been right to focus on recursive, generative grammar as what's special about language, because I think maybe you find semantics anywhere you find life -- and that's why you don't find it in computers.

What I mean is something like this: a living thing is something things matter to. Nothing matters to a machine. But nutrients matter even to a bacterium, and this is not a question of how the bacterium 'conceptualizes' or 'categorizes' bits of its environment. For everything living, food matters, threats, shelter, offspring, and thus these things have meaning, and there is the potential for their environment to be a meaningful world, something that could be understood. (I remember reading years ago that wolves are sometimes clearly puzzled by cattle, because they don't behave like wild prey.)

There's plainly an 'affinity' between natural science and the mechanical, as an object of knowledge, which might not quite define the limits of possible science. Don't care. I think there's a similar 'affinity' between philosophy and the meaningful. Whether it's possible for them to meet in the middle is not my concern; I'll be arriving from the meaning side.