We're drowning in a plastic-infused ocean of feeeeellliiiings. Could use a solid life-preserver of logical reasoning. But that's just my opinion.

Would you count the convictions that you know you hold as opinion or knowledge? — Moliere

I count them as convictions. This a separate class of mind-content from either opinion or knowledge: it is far more complex than any single instance of either opinion or knowledge; built over time from facts, experience, learning, examples seen and read, results of actions witnessed, emotional responses, opinion, reasoning and evaluation, it become part of one's moral structure, which then guides one's actions. If the convictions are inconsistent, so is the behaviour.

I don't particularly care about religion - though I find it very interesting, I don't much mind who believes in it, which one or how sincerely. I mind when religious beliefs impinge on the secular legislation that limits my freedom. It plays only a marginal role in my life, since I don't live in a theocratic state. For people who do, the religious/political dogma (Oxford: "a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.") is overweeningly important, one way or the other: they impose it on others or have it imposed on them by others.
The only certainty I express is what I accept and reject: on that subject, I have no more doubts than does my friend the bolded union activist.

(Another certainty brought to my attention by the number of edits i just had to make is the necessity of cleaning this keyboard.)

1). "The subject" (ones mind/awareness).
2). "the subject-object" complex or SOC (mind + body)
3). "The object" - (body and external environment excluding minds/subjectivity). — Benj96

I wouldn't extarnalize my body to lump in with all the other stuff of the universe as "object". The mind-body complex is what I regard as myself. I cannot determine what proportion of my response to the universe is the result of how much contribution from present awareness, reason, memory, conditioning, sensation, emotion, association, instinct, genetic imprinting or "brain hard-wiring".

I cannot regard even so much as a toenail of my own with the same degree of objectivity as I regard a stalagmite, nor can I bring the same objectivity to bear on my child slamming a door as I do on a black hole consuming a distant solar system.

Which is a rather long-winded way of saying I don't find it useful to divide the entity with which I identify as "self" into duality or triad. No more use have I for 'schools of philosophy' - Some philosophers had some good ideas; some philosophers seem to have had mostly crappy ideas; some had a mix of good and bad ideas; nearly all - in my unapologetic, unhumble estimation - blew a lot of hot air into the spaces between ideas, to inflate their opinions into systems of thought.

Another attempt on dogmatics, from the morning walk: Dogma is opinion which is treated as if it's known. — Moliere

E.g. I'm certain that I do not believe any of the deities described by any of the religions I know about actually exist. I do not believe that the directives attributed to these gods should be the rules by which I live my life, except insofar as they correspond with my concept of good behaviour. I know that this is the conviction that I hold.

[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. — Adam Smith

Of all the criticisms one might make of this, and they are serious and fundamental, I think the weakest and most pointless would be to argue that invisible hands do not exist. — unenlightened

It's very convenient to misdirect criticism to the metaphor - look, look, is that in an invisible hand? - no, it's a moving finger, writing... or picking your pocket... - so that one may ignore the blatant lie at its core.
Just as Leviticus gives a nice little nuanced example of why not to tattle on your neighbours, and while we focus on that, we ignore the smoking pile of horribly slaughtered sacrificial cattle behind it.
Both canons tell us how to live - so long as we interpret them "correctly" - which is to say, just fluidly enough.

Well, see, whether atheists disbelieve because the scriptures and canon and practice of a religion are not congruent with perceived reality, or they don't see the stories, commandments and tenets of a faith as conducive to human happiness and betterment, or find them self-contradictory or because they object to religious indoctrination of the young, or to religious organizations' interference with secular legislation - as long as your objection is consistent and persistent, it's atheist dogma.

Whereas the infinitely intepretratable, adaptable, reframable, malleable, divisible, re-inventable, religious narrative never can be, since it instructs each believer in believing whatever he wants to. Aesop is a static pedant in comparison, even if he did teach better lessons.

agree with you about the importance of facts, but this should never reduce our ability to fantasize about a better life and how we might achieve it. — Athena

The two aspects of thought can coexist, but should never be confused. You can imagine a "better" life - in relation to something known, charted, qualifiable and quantifiable - else "better" has neither meaning nor goals.
I'm not that worried about being separated from other animals. The more philosophical distance we put between our aspirations and our biology, our connection to the living world, the less sense our philosophies make. (See religious dualism.)

I see being overly concerned with facts as fascist. — Athena

Nobody knows what anyone else means by "overly." (or fascist)

This is a serious cultural problem and it is what the US stood against. — Athena

A faction of it certainly does now.

The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.

...so I'd go easy on the facile labelling.
It's fine to build castles in the air; I more or less do it as way to stave off Alzheimer's. But I don't move in.

We have agreement but perhaps how we feel about these facts is different? I think what has happened is wonderful. It makes me happy. It might have been better without the wars. — Athena

No. It would have been entirely different without the wars. You don't get to cherry-pick history and plug in different components for the results you want. If you change even one significant event, the whole thing turns out differently. If you're happy with how human history played out, fine. I accept it because there is no available alternative. Neither of our feelings makes the slightest smidgeon of difference.

Another good thing about war is it stimulates technological advancement. — Athena

As long as we're substituting preferred past events, how about doing birth control research instead of weapons research and promoting women's rights instead of fighting over which version of prohibitive Christianity to impose on the masses?

How do you feel about it all? — Athena

Pessimistic.

But I think there is a distinction between valid and invalid, difficult though it is. — Ludwig V

I'm sure. A brutal execution can morph into a ritual of sharing bread and wine, because, that, too, was written. A wrathful deity turns into a benign one, because you can juxtapose the passage about his loving the world. Appeasement sacrifice becomes the very invention of forgiveness through the correct interpretation. I comprehend it. But as available as all that is for embracing, it is equally open to rejection.

Yes, you all convinced me:
once a work is in the public domain, anyone can bring anything to it, put it to any use and make their contribution as important as or more important than the original and turn it into something quite else from what it was intended to be.

I have often encountered people who have commented upon what I wrote and come to me with interpretations of my work I did not consciously intend but, on reflection, where defiantly there. — Tom Storm

Somebody else can add an insight, see an extra dimension. That's great. But are you really telling me you didn't know what you intended to write, that you just had some kind of vagae association, when you were writing it?

And I'm not claiming that any interpretation is "privileged", although in cases where the wordsmith had very definite ideas in mind, then her intentions should certainly be acknowledged as authorial intentions, although in cases where the author is no longer with us to answer questions about her intentions, we cannot determine with certainty what they were. — Janus

That's exactly why I'm defending the dead authors - seems like nobody else will. Nothing is privileged.
When you read something, anything, even the user's manual for an electric toothbrush, you bring something to that text and you take something from that text: it becomes partly yours, just as it becomes part of you. If it's something significant, like War and Peace, it occupies a fair bit of space in your head. Of course you take ownership of that - it's your head the thing's taken up residence in! You interact with it; you add your own ideas to it; the result is an edifice of thought that never existed before and can never exist anywhere else, ever again.

But it's not always a symbiotic relationship.

Once a work is in the public domain, you can say anything you like about it. You can appropriate it to any purpose, dissect it, lecture on it to your heart's content, discuss, write monographs about the characters' significance to stereotyping of the period, entire books about the author's sexual shortcomings as expressed in the following passage, read in subtexts and secret spy codes, say Hitler was influenced by it, whatever. Have at it!

The only thing I will not countenance is : "He didn't know what he meant."

there is no substantive argument in this latest response, I think we are definitely done here. — Janus

Okay. Just saying there are very few insults you can offer a wordsmith graver than "I understand what you say better than you understand it yourself."

Oh yes, fantasy, the first step to human progress, resolving problems, creating a better world. — Athena

And that - even if it's about a fictional past, an imaginary present, a non-existent reality - turns it into "philosophy"? Plato might go for it. I don't.

You seem to be stuck in black and white thinking: you seem to think that either the author has no idea what they mean, or they are one hundred percent certain about it. — Janus

They are a 100% certain about it. What makes it worth their while to make the effort - and believe me, constructing a novel is a lot of hard work! - is that they have something to say. The "no idea" nonsense is not an option... except maybe for some juveniles with a vague notion about maybe sorta writing, but they don't actually finish anything.

Philosophy is about so much more than facts. — Athena

Yes. But if it isn't grounded in factual information about the world, it is fantasy.

As for central idea of Christianity, it is a horror story.
God Omega creates A, B and C, then invents the concept of sin.
A&B commit a sin facilitated by C. This sets in motion a chain of events wherein J,K,L etc. must inevitably commit fresh sins that are invented along the way by the god and his agents.
The only means of relief from those sins is through the blood sacrifice of sinless entities: a bull, a young boy, a ram, a lamb....
The cumulative sins of a nation grow so enormous in the eyes of this grudge-holding, compound interest hoarding god that no amount of animal sacrifice can atone for them, and every individual member of the species of AB, down to the newborn babes, becomes guilty through the procreative act.
Solution: Omega implants within an unwitting virgin M a new entity, X, which is therefore born free of sin.
X must be sacrificed by R in order to appease the wrath of Omega on behalf of whatever may remain of the human alphabet - as long as they're duly grateful and obedient.

However it's spun - unpacked, excavated, commentated-on, encyclicaled or eviscerated - this story doesn't work for me. It is morally repugnant and aesthetically dissonant.
(The fact that this idea is not exclusive and original - to the nation which popularized it doesn't render it any more palatable.)

I think the choice of wording here is needlessly negative. It might instead be put that a classic work may be so fecund in aesthetic possibilities that it allows us to generate interpretive prospects and evolves in meaning and nuance over generations, staying relevant in new ways as culture changes. — Tom Storm

IOW, if it outlives its historical/cultural context, it will be appropriated by the generations that follow and put to their own purposes. That may be inevitable: those generations don't experience the circumstances to which the original text relates. The author doesn't experience the situations in which later readings will take place, and doesn't know how his work may apply to those times and people.
If future readers can relate it to their own lives in some way, fine. But that does not mean that the author himself didn't know what he meant when he wrote it; that he was a mere tool of the idea, rather than the other way around. (I'm not mad keen on scavengers of other people's creative output.)

If you don't agree that multiple interpreatations of literary works are possible I think either we must agree to disagree or we are somehow talking past each other, so I'll leave it there. — Janus

Of course they're possible! Probable, maybe inevitable, especially if any amount of time passes from one reading to the next. And I'm sure each one serves a purpose. Sometimes, each interpretation serves a different purpose, a different agenda, from the last.
What I object to is reducing the author of a literary work to the unconscious amoeba at the bottom of its evolutionary pond.

Behind every original story is a person - somebody with a name, an identity - an aware, intelligent, purposeful individual. His or her story may be adopted by other people; it may be commenated, interpreted, changed, distorted, disfigured, transmogrified or whatever. But that shouldn't make the creative originator of an idea a mere passive conduit from one ear and one era to another.
Golding didn't understand Pincher Martin until Professor Eberheardt published that monograph on it... I just don't buy that!

Not every writer of fiction "drudges out the third draft" or necessarily has anything more than a general more or less vague sense of allusions and associations, — Janus

Can you imagine a biologist or lawyer or horticulturist or historian doing a day's work for the sake of a general more or less vague sense of allusions and associations - let alone a year's work? Why do you think writers live in some kind of Cloud Coo-coo-land, incapable of composing a coherent idea, living in the hope that their steaming pile of meaningless verbiage will be laid out neatly and interpreted by some intelligent life-form?

Close reading will always reveal more layers than a single "literal" reading; and that is all I mean when I say "unpacking". You could call it 'excavating' if you find that more palatable. — Janus

I call it reading while awake. In some cases, it may be necessary to do it twice, because the author is smarter, wittier, better-informed or more subtle than I am. I never assume he just didn't understand what he wrote.

Along those lines, generally the interpretation of a poem isn't accomplished by cross examining the poet. — Hanover

Of course not. You either geddit or you don't.
He says (I think it's attributed to Browning) "When I wrote that, two of us knew what it meant, myself and God. Now, only he does."
Excavating, unwrapping, decoding, deconstructing or blasting it with dynamite may uncover something, maybe even something you find satisfactory - but not what was in the author's mind.

Author's intentions are transcended. — Tom Storm

IOW Don't matter what he wrote; I read into it what I need.

The idea that an important text only has one interpretation would be naïve. — Tom Storm

I guess it gets to be important by somebody appropriating it to a timeless cause.

This is an unstoppable process. — Tom Storm

Okay. Have at it! All those dead guys can't stop you or save their work, any more than they could from the Council of Nicaea.

Neo-Marxism is the name for this school - usually an attempt to provide a more modern, sophisticated account. — Tom Storm

Their problem, not his. Marx made his observations and wrote what he saw in his own world, in his time. A lot of what he wrote is not relevant today, because it was disputes with thinkers and critics who didn't last. But he wasn't coy or obscure in his ideas.

Perhaps the author did not know precisely what she meant when she wrote. — Janus

Yes, they did, or they wouldn't have drudged out the third draft to make every word fit just where it's most effective. If you read what they wrote, get the veiled references, hidden jokes, allusions - terrific, you're the ideal reader, the one they were addressing all along. If not, and you get something different, that's okay too, if a bit disappointing. Being "unpacked" like a dodgy traveller going through Customs is no fun at all.

But of course the key is to find the right sophisticated interpretive framework to transmogrify the book from a lowbrow literal interpretation to efficacious exegetical insight — Tom Storm

IOW Turn a straightforward tribal mythology with a heretical post-Greco-Roman twist, into convoluted apologetics for an odiously oppressive death-cult. I guess you could... but I doubt it would convince me.

Marxists would say the same thing about Marx. — Tom Storm

I haven't heard them do so. And I don't see why they'd need to.

But try telling them that! — unenlightened

Whom?
I became an atheist directly through the Jesus story. "They" may have had other reasons. We really are none of us reading from the same chapter of the same edition of the same book in the same language.
I just wondered, idly, as one does when not painting signs, how this all relates to the title of the thread.

To live in time is to live a narrative that is always negotiated, never entirely free or original. This is of course the story that I am telling, and I am illustrating it with a cultural artefact of undeniable power that is also a story of personal identity – an identity that changed the world. — unenlightened

What's that to do with dogmatic atheism?

If defer to rabbinic interpretation as much as you'd defer to a literary critic. — Hanover

I wouldn't consult either on how to live, any more than I would consult them on water filtration.

I didn't defer to an interpreter. — Hanover

rabbinic interpretation — Hanover

Didn't you? If an interpretation does not prove the existence of an interpreter then I shall consent to be called a fool.

This leaves open rabbinic interpretation as important as the text is itself. — Hanover

I wasn't summarizing; I was interpreting:
The book tells us how to live, but we can't understand it, so we need a priest/ rabbi/ pastor / imam to tell us how to live.
If that's not what it means, what does it mean?

This leaves open rabbinic interpretation as important as the text is itself. — Hanover

The book is holy, but the what the priest says, goes.

On the whole, I prefer Lao Tzu and Zen Buddhism, personally. — unenlightened

Unless I disagree with the priest, and the book, and go shopping for a different one.

Well, at least it's not dogmatic.

Perhaps if I went back and performed textual analysis I could come up with something, but off the top of my head, no. I cannot precisely formulate anything I learned from reading those works. — Janus

You take away whatever you take away; you interpret however you want to interpret; it says whatever you want it to mean; it's as exactly as profound as you want it to be.
Bah! Good fiction doesn't yield to "textual analysis" - it says what it means to say and you either get it or you don't.

And we should assume in the best written of novels, no word is superfluous, but adds something to the novel. — Hanover

How much of the available literature is best-written? Or, indeed, has any value at all?

This is to say, if we can find deeper truths in fiction, surely we can do the same with non-fiction. — Hanover

How do you gauge the "depth" of a truth?

Science doesn't have a monopoly on analysis of the world, — Hanover

It does on some aspects of the world. You don't get much useful information about space travel from Jules Verne or medical knowledge from R.L. Stevenson.

but the world is as much subject to literary analysis as are the creations of our minds — Hanover

Human psychology and sociology, certainly. The world itself, not so much.

If this discussion does not improve, it might be time to end it. — Athena

I think the facts on the ground won't change. So, probably yes.

But I am waving vaguely at a story, not a fact about the world. — unenlightened

I see. It doesn't need to be a true story.

How many diseases ought we medically challenge? And how many are covert beneficiaries to our future, which ones are merely adaptations that are becoming more advantageous with time? — Benj96

There is no way to know; no way to see that far down any road - assuming the road even continues beyond the next bend. We don't plan progress in any field of human endeavour; we respond to perceived present threats, current problems. We bandaid and fire-fight as best we can at any given moment. It's up to the future to take care of itself.

Why the universe seems so cruel to me? — niki wonoto

Because it has nothing more important on its agenda. Think about this: You are the most significant, the most attention-worthy individual in the entire universe! Stand up tall and proud, turn to face the universe and declare: I will succeed. Respect me!

Like the way society was caught in an eye for an eye mutual blindness, until someone invented forgiveness. — unenlightened

That's a fairly small snapshot of a fairly large world. One little 'developing' nation as all "society"; one instance of ritual sacrifice to a vengeful tribal god for the very invention of forgiveness....

But I think it should be acknowledged that some of those who vote for political leaders who opt for military involvements in other countries and promote massive defense budgets, may not have specifically voted for those things, but voted on the strength of agreeing with their favored party's policies on other issues that concern them more. — Janus

Sure. They signed up for the tax cuts, but stayed for the invasions. Exactly like religion. They converted for the promise of eternal life, but stayed on for the witch-burning.

Wonderful and why did we attempt to have a democracy? — Athena

There wasn't any "we" involved. A couple of dozen well educated, privileged men decided the government they set up needed a framework that would work for their own vision of a new country. Obviously, it had to be different from the imperial monarchy against which they'd just finished leading a lot of good, loyal foot-soldiers into death. They had to promise the people something different and hopeful. Most of them probably believed some aspects of the form they put forward. It probably wouldn't even have occurred to them to wonder what the miners and farm workers wanted; it certainly wouldn't have crossed their minds that women might be political actors. The classical form of democracy probably looked as good to them as it does to you. And then, in order to get everyone on board, they started compromising....

What makes it different from the kingdoms of the Bible? — Athena

Nineteen hundred years of European history and philosophy.

What are the characteristics of democracy? — Athena

That's the trick question, innit? The joker in the political deck. It means something entirely different to me from what it meant to Pericles or Robert Walpole. Each iteration of the form of governance called 'democracy' is different from every other.

What is the best way to prepare our young for citizenship? — Athena

In my opinion, to teach them how both governance and economy actually work, and the true jingo-free history of both.

The title of this thread is Culture is Critical. What does that have to do with democracy, liberty, and justice? — Athena

Not enough. Culture includes a lot of material, both valuable and potentially corrosive, but it doesn't necessarily include critical analysis.

I'm with you on that, not being a believer myself. But I think it's fair to say that the majority of believers have never been asked to do those terrible things by their god. — Janus

No... just to support their religious leaders' right to do those things. Much like the political extremists: most of us don't actually do it; all we do is vote for it, finance it and defend it.

Like I said, it's really none of my concern to figure out where you are and to try to move you. — Hanover

Likewise! Now, if only we could translate that healthy attitude to the political arena....

That's really not the case, and I think it's why some religious people try to persuade non-believers to their point of view because they feel that non-believers are missing out on something meaningful. — Hanover

Why waste it on those who have lived in a religious environment and rejected it? Very few people have been complete strangers to religious ideas and need to be informed. Most unbelievers came to their unbelief through experience and do know exactly what they're missing - what they often feel they have escaped from. In many cases I know of, atheists had simply stopped believing over time because they found the doctrine unconvincing. None of these people will be lured back into the fold by someone saying, "But it works for me."