They merely use it when convenient, when it serves their self-interest. — Art48

I hear you and there is much merit to what you say here but I also think this is a limited notion of self-interest. It is impossible to read anything without a lens of self-interest or subjectivity. We are meaning making creatures who use language to manage our environment. A book of wisdom literature (whatever it is) is always going to be interpreted or shaped by one's worldview and perspectives, no matter how innocent or malicious. It's unavoidable. There is no direct access to a text.

Let's move the Bible to one side and take the Koran.

Believers can interpret the Koran in ways which seem barbaric or enlightened. I don't think it is fair to say that one group is self-interested, while the other is doing god's work. The fact is they are both doing god's work from their own self-interested positions. There is nothing in barbarism that precludes sincerity and good intentions.

think there are very few neo-luddites who are against all technology and the original ones were not against all technology. Nor would many disagree with the idea that technology can enable humans. So, coming up with an example of when someone might need to reluctantly or not start using new tech doesn't really address the concerns of people who identify as NLs. And I would be on that spectrum. — Bylaw

Nicely put.

I'm not against technology per say. But it does have a significant shadow side and many negative, often unforeseen consequences and tech should not be seen as the solution to all of human challenges. For instance, people in Australia who are from an Aboriginal background and or who are disadvantaged are asked to conduct much of their lives via websites or call centers to access vital community, health and government services.

Many disadvantaged people over 50 do not own a computer and cannot use them. Many don't have cell phones. They are unable to access basic services because they can't access the technology which is the gateway to access. In many instances, there are no viable work arounds to this. A presumption of digital literacy and access to technology is arrogant and should be challenged . I do not own a phone or computer myself. I have access to them because they were supplied by my work. I am probably hooked now. It's impossible to conduct a life without them. :angry:

I have always thought of humanism as a perspective that sees the world from the viewpoint of human values. If that's a valid definition of humanism, and I think it is, then there is no contradiction. — T Clark

I agree.

There is of course a view from some folk, who believe in transcendent realities, that it is impossible to elevate or enshrine 'the human' because any such valuation is religious in nature, evoking a sense of the sacred, which in a godless world, where values are arbitrary, can have no justification. It's an old argument.

The evolutionary argument against naturalism seems to be a nice companion this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism#:~:text=The%20evolutionary%20argument%20against%20naturalism,evolution%20and%20philosophical%20naturalism%20simultaneously.

My glib response is there are lots of things people will argue can't be done and yet they are done.

I don't think naivety or some kind of purity myth plays a big role in this. The problem is no one has any way of demonstrating precisely what the correct interpretation of Christianity is (or any other religion for that matter). And perhaps it is naive to think there is a correct version. Hence thousands of denominations and sects, with versions of Christian morality across the world varying so much they can hardly even be compared. Surely the best account for this is that this is what happens when humans try to manufacture truth out of an old book that says a bunch of contradictory things.

Ok, that's useful. Thank you.

For Derrida it’s relative to time . The same self is already an other with respect to itself moment to moment. — Joshs

Not sure I have ever understood this properly. I don't have a sense of difference (only continuity) so how do I know the me of yesterday is in any way different to me of now, apart from as a technicality? Is there an idiot's guide to Derrida and time?

That's a nice point. I often think that if there is a true interpretation but it is impossible to identify in practice, is this almost like saying there's 'no truth', or at least that the true interpretation remains as inaccessible to us as Kant's noumena and therefore almost moot?

Nice. Thank you

It was a nod to attacks on relativising narratives requiring a fixed background to articulate the relativising critique in. How do you even start doing anything without some conceptual framing device or shared standard of intelligibility? — fdrake

This frequently intrigues me. I guess it is difficult to contextualize a thing without a conception of its opposite. I bet there's a clever-arsed way out of this, or around it.

Well, we know from the pejorative expression, 'keeping up with the Joneses' that there is something problematic and to be resisted in this superimposed values system of keeping up. It is ultimately about conforming to a worldview you did not participate in creating and may have no interest in sustaining. A system generally implemented and choreographed by marketing and technocracy.

Ah... but what precisely does it mean 'to keep up'?

Water Margin and Monkey.

But quite a lot to do with Bruce Lee and David Carradine of Kung Fu fame — David S

I'm not intending to be provocative, but I've got to ask, do you think you might be holding a romanticized, Western notion of 'orientalism' rather than an authentic cultural awareness? Westerners often seem to love to fetishize the Eastern and cherry pick partial truths because these seem more palatable or intriguing than the dull Christianity of their upbringing and the dominant culture.

"post-truth" is an inevitable consequence of this fragmentation and accelerated communication; but you will probably have noticed that fixed reference points and stable subgroups do believe the same things. "post-truth" is not really an attack on truth; things still fall down due to gravity; but a result of how banjaxed people came to realise sharing common frameworks, and even the idea of common frameworks, actually are in practice. You can easily come to agreement about the trivial; things fall down;, but the chaos makes agreement over what matters most in life and what guides society largely a matter of ideology (which is oscillatory, destablised, isolated in echo chambers, containing internal contradictions, known to be historically conditioned etc etc). "post-truth" is a statement of the irrelevance of truth to the world's trajectory except on things which are either trivial to verify; things fall down when dropped, you need water to live...; or sufficiently contextually demarcated; scientific knowledge in a given paradigm, legal interpretations. And even then, the latter two can have its presumptions doubted; the validity/incommensurability of paradigms + the suspicion towards the narratives of experts and the class bias introduced into law by who gets to lobby for its changes.

The social role of truth changed. Or it was realised to never be as it seemed to be. — fdrake

Thanks. I enjoyed this acute summary of postmodernism.

Philosophically it was prefigured by Kant; he was the trope codifier in the Western tradition of relativising judgement to humanities interpretations without relativising accuracy of those judgements with respect to what's judged — fdrake

Can you provide a few points more on this?

Two things, postmodernism, as much as it is a philosophical concept with one meaning, is a bunch of arguments and analyses about how concepts are unstable in interpretation. That claim itself is true or false, but difficult to check. — fdrake

I'm interested that you say this is difficult to check. Are you saying it is hard to tell if there are multiple interpretations regarding a given concept?

Christians have a long history of taking scripture out of context and deluding themselves into believing that it supports using scripture to support whatever self-serving belief they may have. — Art48

Would we need to demonstrate that they intended to misinterpret the Bible? It seems more likely that they are sincere and that the Bible is like a Rorschach test - people see whatever is in them in it. Which is why arguing about the meaning of a Bible verse (in the full realization of scripture's interpretative fecundity) is about as useful as an extra dick.

I'm not a mythicist, so I'm not saying that Jesus wasn't based on an actual person. Just that we have nothing reliable to go by. This matters when we project God status onto the narrative; unlike the other first century folk.

If we say 'Well, Jesus - whoever he was - probably didn't say that' then we would be guilty of chucking out whatever he is said to have said that we don't like on the grounds that it's all unreliable anyhow - but still keeping the bits we like. Let's keep the sermon on the mount and let's chuck out 'the poor will always be with you' and consigning the fruitless vines to hell and whatever else makes us squirm, according to taste. — Cuthbert

Incidentally, this is exactly how Christianity functions as it stands (but without the skepticism). Religious folk base their version of Jesus on subjective grounds or personal preferences, cherry picking a verse here or there, or even just holding an interpretation based on no familiarity with the text at all. Can there be any living faith that doesn't ultimately come down to subjective preferences?

Ok, but I would venture there is nothing in the gospels that is true or actually happened. I think we can safely chuck all of it out. :wink:

I am a Christian and I have heard this point made before but I cannot help thinking that it sounds terribly like a dog-whistle excuse. — Cuthbert

Surely the big problem here is we have no reason to think anything in the NT is quoting whoever the character of Jesus was based on. The gospels were anonymously written decades after the events and were translations of copies of translations and it's hard to accept that their contents (which is essentially fan fiction codifying a legend) represents anything which happened.

Even Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong thinks literalism is off -

“Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world."

- John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy

“This point must be heard: the Gospels are first-century narrations based on first-century interpretations. Therefore they are a first-century filtering of the experience of Jesus. They have never been other than that. We must read them today not to discover the literal truth about Jesus, but rather to be led into the Jesus experience they were seeking to convey. That experience always lies behind the distortions, which are inevitable since words are limited."

― John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die

You made an amusing choice of wording and you seek to walk it back. I understand, Comrade, it’s not really that significant.

Cain was immediately condemned and sentenced, by God, to a life of misery.

Some endorsement of murder that is. — Moses

I'm not saying it's an endorsement of murder - Yahweh as genocidal thug is well understood - just the Noah's Ark story accounts for that. Yahweh's entire project is an endorsement of murder.

I was simply drawing attention to this comment from you:

It does give me reason to pause, however, when a culture's founding tale involves bloodshed, especially between brothers -- it just seems to start a questionable precedence. — Moses

Foundational narratives about a dud siblings are not rare.

It does give me reason to pause, however, when a culture's founding tale involves bloodshed, especially between brothers -- it just seems to start a questionable precedence. — Moses

Like Cain and Abel?

Well, that's a puzzling question. I suppose some folk do. — Banno

I guess I was wondering if some of those plaintive cries that there is no truth is a type of commitment avoidance.

Do you think that truth is something some people fear?

I'm not entirely sure what point you are making in your OP - that could be my fault. I have no particular gripe against the present era. I don't think it is worse than other times and how would this even be measured? The behavior of religions across time is one of crass materialism and souless consumerism. Just look at the lengths Luther thought he needed to go to against consumer Catholicism and its mass marketing of indulgences, etc. And now look at the crass materialism of evangelical Christianity which grew out of Luther. The prosperity gospel!?

I think we should constantly criticize the modern world without canonizing Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and other thinkers giving them the last say just as we shouldn't suggest Aquinas gets the last say. I think the emphasis on freedom and responsibility, something we find in all these thinkers, is crucial in understanding the way our world is going. — Dermot Griffin

I'm not trying to be hostile, but I'm not sure anyone is much concerned about Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche outside of a small segment of academe, or amongst a few dilettantes. How do you see freedom and responsibility as being crucial in 'how the world is going'. And how is it going?

Made famous by Dostoevsky, the question of whether we can be moral without God has always haunted secularism and has consistently been the most vocal criticism of unbelief. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted?" Moral Life in a Secular World — javi2541997

Yes, but I think the problem for this particular narrow band of thinking is that it overlooks the fact that a god belief provides no objective basis to morality. All we have is theists starkly different and often appalling interpretations of what they think a god wants us to do. Which is why Christian morality (as a for instance) ranges from the KKK to Desmond Tutu.

Without God Everything is Permitted — Dostoyevsky

I think this is Sartre. Dostoyevsky alludes to similar sentiment in The Brothers Karamazov but does not put it so directly.

"'But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?'"

I think this quote is inaccurate. It should be recast the way Slavoj Zizek has it:

"If there is a God, then anything is permitted."

In other words, the opposite is true. There is no crime or misdeed going that theism hasn't sanctioned or advocated in the name of doing a god's will.

I used to incorporate Aspidistra in some of my garden designs...they used to be readily available from wholesale nurseries. Now the "Cast Iron Plant" seems to be out of fashion, but I have no doubt there are many gardens that still sport them. — Janus

It's funny how plants come in and out of fashion. I remember when the rubber tree (ficus elastica) was everywhere in the 1970's. It vanished for decades and suddenly came back (here anyway) as a kind of retro-chic-artisanal-hipster-indoor-irony-decoration.

Nice. I sit here sipping my glass of oily Victory gin whilst watching a washer woman through my window who is at least a meter across at the hips.

:ok:

Thanks

Keep in mind that uncertainty only exists against a background of truth. — Banno

By the way this is a juicy morsel. Pretty sure I agree. Can you expand in it a little?

:wink:

I watch some YouTube and attend this site which is the sum total of my screen life.

I know this is probably going to sound disingenuous, but when people talk about social media are they referring just to Facebook, twitter, TikTok, and Instagram? Anything else? I've read a few tweets and seen Facebook and Insta used by friends and colleagues, but I struggle to imagine the point of these things.

Not sure it is meant to be read as a futuristic novel or sci fi as such. It's a seminal text about politics and society; a kind of meditation on propaganda and the role 'truth' plays in creating a shared and brainsick worldview.

I didn't know that George Orwell wrote about the idea of a 'post-truth society' and it is interesting that he was able to perceive the possibility at that time. — Jack Cummins

1984 it's the story about how truth becomes irrelevant to the ongoing sustainability of a military dictatorship much like North Korea.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

1984 George Orwell

The era from which it probably stems from though is postmodernism and I do have a fair amount of sympathy for some of the postmodern writers, like Baudrillard and Derrida. I am not sure about Lacan because I have found his writings difficult to read — Jack Cummins

I wonder if that's a different phenomenon. One would have to call the era of Joseph Goebbels an era of post-truth and a hallmark of fascism is when the lie becomes institutionalized. George Orwell wrote a definitive study of the ultimate post-truth society back in 1948. None of this has anything to do with post-modernism. Do you think post-modernism has had any real influence on public discourse, other than in poorly understood and misconstrued vignettes?

The idea of post-truth is so ambiguous because it can just be an excuse for the acceptance of falsity and dishonesty. — Jack Cummins

What do you mean by post-truth? My understanding is this is a term used by critics to describe unethical positions held in politics and culture. I don't think it is an era as such - is a plumber post truth, a chiropodist? And no one proudly proclaims themselves a post-truth ambassador. In fact, the post-truth activists, like Trump, are more likely to be insistent on the importance of certainty. They are not like those nefarious post-modern relativists that Jordan B Peterson is always warning us about.

I wonder it what is important about post-truth is located not in the purveyors of untruths, but in those who accept the lies. Because for many people public discourse no longer has to map onto or match real world events or facts. It's the general public's judgment ultimately which makes post-truth realizable.

I think people often take for granted the idea that some process is taking place which has some hook into the real world (such that following it is more likely to yield truer beliefs than not doing so would), but I find very few people can explain what they think that mechanism is nor how it works. — Isaac

Indeed. And this is a fascinating subject. While I think the 'art' of making judgments is complex and somewhat perplexing, I think it's likely we can determine when it is badly executed e.g., when people make calls on life decisions based on someone's hair color or on numerology, or on what a clairvoyant tells them.

Do you have a tentative model for identifying when judgements are likely to be well founded? To me it seems to be about a web of information which comes together to provide a kind of coherence and satisfaction. But as human beings we are inconsistent and we do not always have time or opportunities to be vigilant.

I'd also add that, although it's not always clear cut, one can identity (and so rule out) obvious conflicts of interest. For example, if a climate expert is directly paid by a fossil fuel company. — Isaac

Yes, that's a very important one, where it can be known.

That's an interesting approach, but then, what would you use as your criteria for then believing that expert? What's the convincer? — Isaac

On this I can only make judgements based on the arguments provided and assembled. Am I convinced or not? So I am not for a moment suggesting the method is foolproof. Me being the potential fool in this instance. But I do think that in general it is good to expose yourself to diverse thinking on any given subject to try to enrich or change your own views. I am quite happy to be wrong.

On some subjects I simply don't have the expertise to make a call like this. Take the so-called many worlds theory versus the Copenhagen interpretation. In this instance it's a case of buggered if I know. But I do know on judgement I am more likely to accept Sean Carroll than Deepak Chopra.

I don't have anything specific in mind. I see people quote Jordan Peterson as an expert on any manner of subjects, for instance - climate change, feminism, geo-politics and the war in Ukraine. Generally he is used because he already represents the general outlook of News Limited or Fox News. A giveaway is when people use 'experts' who don't really have qualifications in the area but hold a view they agree with and have some kind of nominal credibility somewhere else.

I would privilege an expert qualified in the subject for starters, and then maybe pay additional attention to someone who holds a different view to mine because they may know something I don't. I did this on the subject of Jesus as a real person. I used to be a mythicist but read additional work by Professor Bart Ehrman, who presents the argument Jesus was likely a real person, even if the NT is recounting a legend. I found him convincing.

We have an attitude of reliance on the informedness and honesty of the "experts" in the various fields of inquiry, knowledge and information. — Janus

Agree.

Probably people believe what they want to believe or what is presented by those whose ostensible values they identify with, — Janus

Yes, that's likely too.

These days even the notion of an expert is highly contentious. And setting aside philosophical questions about epistemology for a moment, it does seem that people chose the experts or commentators who provide the scaffolding in support of their preexisting biases or beliefs.

I am still wondering about factors like QAnon and how it is that this emerging religion and untruths told in its wake seems to be attractive to people. Is it what happens when people no longer trust a mainstream narrative? Or is it a concatenative end result of economic and social factors, like diminished education, lack of opportunity, primitive forms of Christianity and a spread in magical thinking as a kind of protest against scientism and the technocratic approach to social concerns?