So sad. :groan:

It would be so great to have a time machine and go to the future when the mind is more fully understood. :smile:

I've been a small-time victim of a woke-leftist (whom I counted as a good friend). I rejected the necessity of the working class acquiring marxist enlightenment as a necessary prerequisite to solving the environmental crisis of global warming. "If that's the way you think," he said, "I never want to talk to you again!" and he hasn't. — BC

That's crazy. Maybe you popped his hope-balloon and he couldn't forgive you?

I'll still vote for Biden over Trump, but let's not pretend things have gone well in the last four years. There's a reason Biden is losing to Trump in numerous polls. — RogueAI

I think it's mainly because large numbers of Americans are nuts.

The world has gone to shit under his watch. Afghanistan was a humiliating debacle. The border situation is a festering wound. The Democrat NY mayor says New York might be "destroyed" by an influx of migrants. Americans are still reeling from historically high inflation. There's a stench of corruption around his whole family. Stores are pulling out of Democratic run ci — RogueAI

Sounds terrible. Although inflation is down. The Fed is probably through raising rates.

Biden will be the nominee unless he decides not the run. I think he's doing an excellent job. Do I wish he was younger? Yes. Every year after 80 is a year of decline toward the drain for most people.

The condemnation due to Israel is rather due to their broader historical role in creating the situation, not simply that there has been an attempt to destroy Hamas at all. They are at fault in that they helped create Hamas and the situation they find themselves in, not because they are using military force to remove a hostile government that carried out an attack against their population. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you think Israel would have been more brutal and careless about civilian casualties if they'd been unhampered by international pressure and hostages?

my position is due to the clear and powerful emphasis that jesus places on the afterlife and avoiding hell. he preaches a hard line. do you disagree? — BitconnectCarlos

His predominant message was about love and forgiveness when he wasn't talking about the end of the world. Yes, the afterlife comes up from time to time, but Jesus didn't inject that into Judaism. It was already there.

with Jesus his teachings tends to focus more attaining the ideal even if it puts one at great danger. — BitconnectCarlos

Where is this in the gospels?

Did you make an argument for the gospels being life-denying? I didn't see that.

Jesus is unquestionably life-denying if we regard his teachings in the gospels as accurate representations of his thought. — BitconnectCarlos

No, I don't think so. I think you misunderstood something.

Yet, again, it seems that you and me, are the ones who are interested in 'hallucination' regarding this topic, Frank. — javi2541997

I couldn't conclude that we never see things correctly due to the possibility of hallucination. Detecting an hallucination presupposes that at some point I determined what was real to some suitable level of certainty.

What the possibility of hallucination does is confirm that there certainly is very good reason to occasionally doubt what you're seeing. For instance, a 15 year old boy with new onset schizophrenia tells his parents that he's hearing voices telling him to do harm to the people around him. He is in a state of doubt. He's looking for guidance. If he finds himself in the 21st century, the people around him will tell him the voices aren't real. If it was the year 1410, he would be told that he is possessed. So the resolution of his doubt really comes down to the hinge propositions of his time. It does not come down to some absurd rule that there's never reason to doubt your senses.

But indirect realism isn't a matter of saying that we never see what's real. The indirect realist does believe she has access to the truth. She just thinks her access to truth is indirect by her definition of indirectness. You don't have to be a direct realist to be a realist. Obviously.

Sometimes there is reason to doubt what you're experiencing, say if they just gave you ketamine and you're now convinced you're a character in a video game, screaming "I'm not real! I'm not real!" That happened, btw.

But if no one is telling you that you're drugged and hallucinating, you probably would just take the whatever as real.

but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche. — Joshs

I don't think he's trying to let each "epoche" speak for itself. He's myth making to explain why we have directly opposing conceptions of goodness. His answer is that it's our heritage, built into our language. One could easily swap that answer with something about the structure of the human psyche.

For sure, they are not going to do you any good. — Banno

:grin:

It depends on what the goals of those countries are. Are they expansionist? Are they threatening other Western countries and/or countries that are friendly to Western interests? Do they fund anti-West terrorists? The West should definitely be antagonistic towards China, Russia, Iran, and N. Korea. — RogueAI

I think we'll find reason to be at odds with each other one way or another.

Might lead to qualia — Banno

That might be painful.

If you don't let go of the past, your heart won't have any room for the present

Waking from a dream.

Rising to the surface as a sun, exhaling streams of light

Making the world

Is a loveless job

:cool:

I'm a big fan of Nietzsche. I feel a connection to his writing that goes deep, like into the realm of dreams. He was the forerunner of people like Freud and Jung. Like you, I'm fascinated by the way consciousness evolves, but I think we're limited to metaphors in describing that. Historical accuracy isn't required or called for by Nietzsche's project. That was my point, I guess.

This quickly becomes a precarious topic because on the one hand, Judaism is possibly the most influential orientation of consciousness in human history. On the other hand there are huge, unhealable wounds that humanity bears that are touched upon by the OP.

And for someone who has been called out for not knowing much of anything, but rather just running their mouth, I'd wager you've not read much of Nietzsche at all — Vaskane

Yea, but that was by someone who's not all that bright himself. :razz:

That provides Nietzsche with a less bias fiction on what happened. — Vaskane

He didn't know anything about the Bronze age because little was known about it at the time. I remember overlooking a fair amount of false conclusions from him, though I'd have to look back at it to remember details. My take was that his outlook should be taken as myth making. There is truth in there, but it's not necessarily based on facts on the ground. I'd go with MI Finley over Nietzsche as far as history goes.

I would just say it's important to take Nietzsche's history with a grain of salt, not just because of his own attitude regarding the mythical nature of truth, but because there was much information about the ancient world that just wasn't known at the time.

Isn’t it true you can’t have it both ways, you either have universal rights and liberal principles are a thing or they are not. — schopenhauer1

Do you mean the west should be antagonistic toward countries that don't value rights and liberal principles?

You can measure anything as a standard for what makes an enemy- ideology, religion, power. For much of history it was power. In the West, religion and ideology gradually replaced power alone, but certainly, power was never dead as a reason. — schopenhauer1

Exactly. Where there are multiple cultures in competition, there are two primary survival tactics: military prowess and intolerance of foreign ways. It's shouldn't surprise us that the world is now full of both. It could be seen as a kind of natural selection.

When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.” — Joshs

What we know is that there was no religious intolerance throughout most of the ancient world. That changed when monotheism and the concept of false gods became prevalent. It's probably overly simplistic to say the Jews were responsible for that. It's probably more that the western world in general went through a transformation that the Jews had gone through much earlier.

Either way, that transformation was accompanied by a new emphasis on truth and an association of falseness with evil.

The element of being literate and educated certainly played a part but it should not be ignored that great efforts were made to convert them to Christianity or confine their civic rights and participation. — Paine

@Jamal

True. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Germans tried mandatory education for Jewish children to force assimilation. It didn't work. The USA would later use the same tactic on the Lakota. It destroyed their culture.

But by the 1500s the Italians provided Europe with banking to finance wars and what not.

I think the stereotype of the money-minded Jew comes from the fact that they were usually wealthier (and more educated) than the local peasants. Envy, basically.

Philo Judaeus, a Jewish Plantonist was the first to synthesize faith with reason creating the Logos philosophy, which is responsible for the Evangel of John. Philo’s primary importance is in the development of the philosophical and theological foundations of Christianity. — Vaskane

I read about him. Fascinating guy.

Cool! Thanks.

It's what we do? — Banno

Maybe it comes from an analysis of what we do. Where does the framework for that analysis come from? Not sure.

The Law of excluded middle is not a rule? i don't follow. — Banno

It is. There's just no fact about whether you've ever followed it.

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution. — Banno

It's not rule following. It's probably something innate.

Would you agree that the varieties of contemporary anti-semitism expressed by the likes of Henry Ford, Heidegger, Hamas, Charles Lindburgh, Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan have less to do with the judaism of the middle ages than with their interpretation of the motives and practices of the modern world Jewish community? — Joshs

Sure. I was trying to explain earlier that anti-Semitism has to be understood with reference to the problems and stressors of the times in which individual cases of it appear.

I know. Likewise, progressive American Christianity is fairly interfaith.

You're fond of taking the high ground and lecturing people about what they have to do to know the stuff that you know, but your posts show very little evidence of having a clue about anything, to be frank. — Jamal

Was there something specific you disagreed with?

I can’t speak to what the average jew in the biblical or medieval period said about gentiles, but I can speak from my own experience growing up in a Conservative jewish home, and living in Israel for a year with my family. I can tell you that no jew I’ve encountered, of any age, ever expressed such sentiments to me. — Joshs

I can easily imagine that. But remember: the topic is the origin of anti-Semitism. You're going to have to dig into history to dredge that up. To state the obvious, anti-Semitism starts with the fact that Jews remained separate. Some Jews ditched their Jewishness and became Christian, but if you're Jewish, it means your ancestors embraced being a stranger in a strange land, so to speak. Pretty much the same thing happened to them everywhere they went, but each case was shaped by local stresses. For instance, the Germans wanted to become a nation-state like England and France, but their fragmentation was an obstacle. The worked to try to assimilate everybody into a single identity, but with limited success. One group they had absolutely no success with was Jews. Jews were an obstacle to their goals. In each case where Jews were persecuted, you have to sort through the events to discover why their separateness ended up making them victims this time around.

Do religious jews believe their faith offers them a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics which is preferable to that of other religions? I would hope so. Otherwise, why bother to remain within the faith? — Joshs

The majority of Jews for the last 2000 years would say they adhered to their faith because the Torah explicitly condemns straying from the faith. For these Jews, other religions are not alternate paths to God. They're all paths to the Devil. The gods of other religions are false gods, and it's evil to worship them. There's nothing anti-Semitic about commenting on this. It's traditional Judaism. Look into it.

But you seem to have a stronger notion of ‘superior’ in mind that you may have to spell out for me. — Joshs

No, it's just that Jews didn't traditionally separate themselves from their faith. Jewish was pervasively who they were, not just a religion they had.

From Wikipedia:

1)aThe belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human. This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion. — Joshs

That does sound concerning. But you said you'd never even heard of the idea that Jews think they're superior to Gentiles. That's actually why they've traditionally refused to assimilate. It's repeated explicitly in the Torah. As I mentioned earlier, Isaac Asimov said the Jews invented religious intolerance and went on to become the world's greatest victims of it. I think he was right. Christian condemnation of Judaism is a reflection of Judaism's own fierce devotion to their own identities.

The fact that you haven't heard of it, and that it seems wrong to you, indicates that you are probably the end of the line for Jewishness in your family. Your children probably won't be Jews. Your heritage lived as long as it did because of a sense of having a superior position among humanity in terms of connection to God and morality.

By the way, reading the history of Jews in Russia is an excellent way to see how anti-Semitism would appear at the grass roots level when Jews acted as tax collectors for the boyars.

Given that some neural processes experience qualia, and even knowing that neural networks are exquisitely correlated with a world around, how are qualia inside the brain about that world rather than just the inside of a brain? — Danno

I think this question is kin to how do we know what's real? That distinction is a function of rationality. It's a way of dividing experience up into different categories: magical, mechanical, mystical, and mundane. Though these categories have probably always been part of human consciousness, there's reason to believe human societies weigh the available data differently. For instance, what one society deems internal is treated as external to another. In other words, the very question here is likely to be an aspect of our culture and worldview. It would seem we don't have much of a vantage point on ourselves in this regard, so attempting to answer it may just be a journey in around our present cultural landscape.

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places. — Joshs

It was both. They weren't welcome in the court of the Czar, but they also abhorred the possibility of adulteration of their communities with foreign ways. So wherever they went, they had their own governments. They were more educated than the locals. They took roles as middle men.

Why exactly you find any of this to be insulting, I don't know.

How quaint. I had never heard this before either, and certainly not from jews. So I googled it and what I learned is that it is a long-standing prejudice, probably stemming from a misinterpretation of the phrase ‘chosen people’, or else a convenient application of that term to justify a sense that jews wield too much power in the world. — Joshs

You don't think I could have come across the idea from historians?