Last call. — tim wood

Last call? Last call before what? Are you an admin. What he said made sense to me.

Then you explain it to me. Our topic is the "EOG." What is 3017amen talking about?

By talking to them, by listening to them, by reading about them and the writing they themselves do, by studying religion in an academic setting and by way of personal experience. — DingoJones

Same. I'm going to take your claim to authority with a slight pinch of salt if I'm honest.

Not sure where we are missing each other here...secular concerns are mortal concerns. Do you understand what I mean by that? Some believers view this world as a pale shadow of what awaits them after they/we leave this world, this world only exists as a stepping stone to whats truly important, being with god forever in paradise. — DingoJones

Right, so personal concerns then.

You asked me to explain existence, hence yours and my quotes:

Me: We are talking about the existence of something. In this case, in human terms, it would be the human being called Jesus. Using your words, what does knowledge have to do with existence?

You: I asked you what you know, and you have answered with what you believe. That both is and is not an answer. As to knowledge it is nothing, but given the context it also says that you don't know.

Me: As I've said over in the Lounge, existentially, one does not know the true nature of their own existence, and so why should this be any different (?).

Now if you want to speculate metaphysically, you're more than welcome to elucidate there.

Me: What I meant was explaining your own existence metaphysically. In other words, your conscious existence.

Make any sense now...and so, what would be the distinction between the two explanation's of the man called Jesus who had a conscious existence, and your own conscious existence? Or, in the case of the cosmological God, if space and time are a mystery, how should one go about explaining it? Isn't space and time a theory? — 3017amen

For one he is saying that the very nature of feeling or awareness makes it very hard for us to assume that we know everything about feeling or awareness. I would argue feeling and awareness will be the final frontier of Scientific study. This is why consider myself somewhat of a Pan-psychist. There are over 11 forms of pan-psychism.

My assumption is the End of Grade thing is he is saying hes taken the metaphorical end of grade tests for the study of philosophy. Arragance is common on philosophy forums and i can't claim to be excluded from that boat.

Is there anything else you wanted me to reinterpret that he stated?

It's laudably charitable, imo, for you to claim you're interpreting 3017amen. Because I don't think he's up to your clarity of thought and clarity of expression, at least insofar as you have expressed you thought.

For one he is saying that the very nature of feeling or awareness makes it very hard for us to assume that we know everything about feeling or awareness. — tilda-psychist

People assume all day long. Instead, makes it hard for any thoughtful person to with reason claim that they know everything about feeling or awareness.

And to be sure, we don't know yet if even we're speaking about what they are, or how they're experienced, or how they're understood and interpreted.

EOG = Existence of God.

Same. I'm going to take your claim to authority with a slight pinch of salt if I'm honest. — Kenosha Kid

Im not claiming authority, you asked how I know what they pray for and I told you. I didnt intend to indicate you should concede the point because of my knowledge or anything like that. Indeed, fair play on the grain of salt id be disappointed if you didnt. It should be about the points being made, not someones “authority”.
Then I asked you how you knew what they prayed for, which I thought was fair.

Right, so personal concerns then. — Kenosha Kid

The part you bolded is meant as something important for everyone, not just themselves. Its a greater good, the greatest good, to many believers.

well since you gave me a compliment, i like you now.

you win. no sarcasm intended.

What wasn't to like??

good point.

What wasn't to like??

Well you didn't address the issue at hand (EOG).

Can you say that I am not God?

I would have to know what you mean by God, and probably also try to make clear what I understand by the term.

No. I am confident you are not a supernatural being able to defy natural law. Yes, in that whatever idea of God anyone has, just is God, and they're God, greater or lesser, in having it. Whether any individual idea is any good another topic.

I operate on the rule that we cannot know what we cannot know, and that which is unknowable, cannot be known. That leaves what we can know, and what can be known. Which is to say that the road to any knowledge and understanding of God starts, travels, and ends in reason - if it is to be intelligible. And if it is to be intelligible, must be reasonable. In this, the idea of God - which I say is all there ever is, and that far from inconsequential - is akin to number.

Can you say that I am not God? — Punshhh

Because I get the feeling this question might easily be misconstrued by many (here hoping I'm interpreting it properly enough):

A Yogi informs his pupil that his pupil is God. The pupil then sits on a street and attempts to telepathically stop an elephant from further approaching the pupil from afar. The ridden elephant approaches and nearly knocks over the pupil, who quickly runs away at this point - leaving an audience of spectators to laugh at the pupil in an uproar. The pupil informs his Yogi of this, who then laughs at the pupil in turn, saying, “Well, yes, you are God … just as the elephant you tried to stop and all spectators that laughed at you are also God.”

This is paraphrased from a parable told by someone whom I can’t currently recall. Still … it’s a mystic’s take on the existence of God.

The part you bolded is meant as something important for everyone, not just themselves. Its a greater good, the greatest good, to many believers. — DingoJones

Right. So it's not just the personal concerns of the person in question but those of others. Like people who oppose injustice, oppression, etc. But not like people whose concerns are beyond people. This is still not sounding like more important concerns. Like most problems with religion, it attempts to make a virtue of anthropocentrism. The best of the human race has rather moved beyond that, and without the carrot of eternity with the big man, or the stick of eternity in the other place. Even if God himself has concerns that are purely anthropocentric, they still appear, at best, the equal of secularist concerns.

Or, as Woody Allen put it better, "I wouldn't call God evil exactly. The worst you could say is he's an underachiever."

Religion is contra-philosophy because it starts with givens that aren't, which (imo) honest philosophy, at the least, tries to bracket and quarantine. — tim wood

Irony being that so much thinking is driven by what is not religious. I'm studying a few topics from late antiquity and medieval philosophy, and there is a lot of common ground between philosophical and theological ideas - as there must be, because one easily shades into the other. They have, at the least, a common boundary.

Obviously I agree those secular things are more important but thats becuase neither of us are believers. To a believer they are much, much less important.
So to me you are still being fallacious, using different premises to reach a different conclusion and acting as though there is something wrong with the believers conclusion because it doesnt follow from your premiss. Of course it doesnt, you’ve replaced their non-secular premises with your secular one. Can you answer that criticism specifically? (A request, not meant as snark or a leading question)
I won’t belabour the point, as I said Im not a fan of religion so its not like I have a dog in the fight per say.

I would have to know what you mean by God, and probably also try to make clear what I understand by the term.

This is where we hit our first problem, I can't define God because I am not up to the task, but I still might know God, or have met God. So the question could now become;
Can you say that I am not this thing that I know, or have witnessed (through revelation), but for the life of me can't explain, but I know it and it is with me always.

No. I am confident you are not a supernatural being able to defy natural law.

This would not be a requirement. I might have a spark of the spirit of God in me, which is God just like a drop of water is the same as the ocean it came from. Or to put it another way, I don't have to be able to create a world at will to be God. I might be unaware that I am God and unable to use my powers. Or I might be God in a way in which I bare witness, but don't act, for example.

Yes, in that whatever idea of God anyone has, just is God, and they're God, greater or lesser, in having it. Whether any individual idea is any good another topic.

But this confines the God in me to human discourse. The God in me might be life itself and the act of creation is the progression of life. But this might be totally unknown to humanity in the domain of intellectual knowledge, although it could well be known in some other unarticulated living way.

I operate on the rule that we cannot know what we cannot know, and that which is unknowable, cannot be known. That leaves what we can know, and what can be known. Which is to say that the road to any knowledge and understanding of God starts, travels, and ends in reason - if it is to be intelligible. And if it is to be intelligible, must be reasonable.

This is probably at the root of the difference between us. I have pursued an interest in other ways of knowing things about nature. Precisely because I had come up against the limitations of human reason and the scope and results of the human intellect in addressing the issue (this is not to diminish the discoveries of science). Regarding intelligibility there have been aural and linguistic traditions developed specifically to render religious experiences intelligible. Such traditions are concerned with conveying understanding of such experience and accepting the reality of it into the self. This does not include rational analysis of what is being conveyed. Or the requirement for the intellect to know the experience through the power of the intellect to rationally understand what is to be conveyed.

In this, the idea of God - which I say is all there ever is, and that far from inconsequential - is akin to number.

I'm not sure of what you are saying here, but it sounds reasonable to me.

In this, the idea of God - which I say is all there ever is, and that far from inconsequential - is akin to number.
I'm not sure of what you are saying here, but it sounds reasonable to me. — Punshhh

Agreement, maybe?

Just a capstone: no mind, no number; no mind, no God. Both exist as they do in/as ideas, and both have been fantastically useful.

It strikes that number is in a sense only a descriptor - a way of describing. And similarly God. God is simply a name for a way of thinking people do when they think about how things should be or how they would like them to be.

This and this alone, to my way of thinking, empowers the idea of God, that it be limited only by combined imagination and reason - and not by mere material/physical being.

So to me you are still being fallacious, using different premises to reach a different conclusion and acting as though there is something wrong with the believers conclusion because it doesnt follow from your premiss. Of course it doesnt, you’ve replaced their non-secular premises with your secular one. Can you answer that criticism specifically? — DingoJones

I disagree, I think rather you have not yet shown that the content of this concern of ultimate importance is actually any higher than secular concerns. That is the claim I am disputing. There's verbal innuendo toward something beyond secular scope, but it has no actual content under inspection. So someone wishes good things to happen to them and other people they wish good things to happen to. Well, you know what? Who doesn't?

Yes, philosophy of religion probably gets something of a bad rap... But that's mostly due to the sheer volume of utterly incompetent discussions of philosophy of religion (especially online), mainly from fanatics and committed partisans, who are almost without fail completely unschooled in academic philosophy- and so its just sloppy and uninformed and amounts to little more than a personal confession.

I think most people can distinguish this, from the actual philosophy of religion, which is a perfectly respectable discipline and much of the time is every bit as rigorous as any other in philosophy (and so it comes down to ones personal interests). And of course most of the "Great Philosophers" dabbled in philosophy of religion to varying extents (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Russell, etc). As always, its not philosophy itself that is the problem, just bad, sloppy, uninformed and ill-considered philosophy.

Alright, I guess we are talking about different things.

But another factor in a secular culture such as ours is the general absence of spiritual literacy; people have little grasp even of the terminology and the common ideas that underlie philosophy of religion. Couple that with humankind's inchoate yearning for a 'beyond', and you do indeed get a lot of sloppy and uninformed philosophy, but often animated by a sense of urgency, that 'somewhere here, there's an important question, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.' Quite aside from the obviously evangelical and militantly atheistic, these kinds of threads make up a fair percentage of the total.

Indeed, and the fact that its an area where people can (and often do) have intense and passionate views even when (or especially if?) they lack any particular familiarity with the subject matter (i.e. the philosophical study of religion) is no doubt part of the problem. Political philosophy is similar in this regard, and ethics/moral philosophy as well (although probably to a lesser extent).

Is that any different than any other topic? Lots of people always have the “dogma” of their particular side they put out and it ruins it for the minority who are actually interested In real discussion?
Topic dependent I suppose. Someone attached to a topic emotionally generally holds discussion back rather than helping it along. Passion is the enemy of reason.

True, but I'm not sure many people get especially riled up about e.g. the ontological status of universals. Nor is it quite so common for people to be casually interested in other, more abstract sub-disciplines of philosophy as they are the phil of religion.

Good point. There is probably a few specific areas where what I said applies and a bunch where it doesnt. The ones where it applies are the areas accessible to the uneducated, religion, politics etc, the ones where everyone has an opinion even if its uninformed. Thats probably why they tend to be such toxic/poor discussion topics, they are diluted by the standard idiocy of mankind.

Is that any different than any other topic? — DingoJones

Well, yes, because it's much closer to philosophy than some other subject.

That's why there is a constant stream of newcomers trying to articulate some idea that sounds religious or philosophical, bubbling up from their unconscious.

The other point is, to state the obvious, there is a 'culture war' around religion, or rather, religion is one of the main drivers of the culture wars. At issue are radically divergent visions of what human life means. The militant atheism of e.g. Dawkins/Dennett sees humans in terms of being gene-carriers or 'moist robots' or even in Stephen Hawking's memorable phrase 'chemical scum'. There are many ideological and commercial interests that seek to exploit human nature for various (often nefarious) ends.

The religious side of the culture war wants to see human nature as being something other than simply a species or an organism or in mechanist or materialist terms. But as noted up-thread, it's not even possible to really explain what religious belief entails, to many it's simply unintelligible or nonsensical.

This forum generally has a natural presumption in favour of secular philosophy because of its cultural context. And I do respect that (when in Rome...) but as one of the resident idealists, I frequently rub up against that and have been involved in many pretty intense debates over the ten years since I started posting on forums.

I'm not sure many people get especially riled up about e.g. the ontological status of universals. — Enai De A Lukal

:angry: I do. But I've learned to hold my fire most of the time, I have a lot more study to do.

Fair enough, but I expect that those of us that do are a rare breed and more exception than rule. Many people will get heated talking about politics or religion, but it takes a philosopher to get revved up about something so abstract (and philosophers certainly do get heated- just Google "Wittgenstein and Karl Popper").

I imagine the universals thing ties closely into religion: that the nominalists are naturalists and atheists, and then the Platonists are Christians, and the war over universals is a proxy war over the admittance of non-physical things into our ontologies. First universals, then souls, and gods...

And religion is a proxy for politics...

Yes I stumbled on that review in NY Times, if that’s the one you mean. My sympathies were with Popper.

:up:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences

Any Blavatsky Mews
— Punshhh

Nope, that’s not a familiar name to me.

Helena Blavatsky was the driving force behind the creation of Theosophy.