I think that we, non-Rasta folks exchanging ideas on an internet Forum, can barely catch a glimpse (if at all) of what Haile Selassie meant to the Jamaican Rasta circa the early 1970's. It wasn't just politics. There was a strong political element there, sure. But Rastafari is a religion. And it involves the ritual consumption of tetrahydrocannabinol, which is a psychoactive drug. In other words, Rastas smoke weed for religious reasons, literally. Now imagine that during a ritual smoking of weed, in that context and in those circumstances, Rastas have a religious experience, as if it were a divine revelation, that Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, is indeed the Second Incarnation of Christ, the Lion of Judah, who will unify all the peoples of Africa and all of the peoples of the African diaspora.

Who are we to say that their religious experience is somehow less religious than the religious experiences of Protestants or Catholics, for example?

What do you mean by He abandoned himself? He is God so He should know why He has to suffer and die on the Cross. Shouldn't He? — MoK

Not if he underwent kenosis during crucifixion, as pointed out earlier in this conversation. By becoming entirely human, Jesus lost all of his divine powers. As such, he asks himself why he did that: why did he undergo kenosis at the cross? He doesn't have God's answer, precisely because he underwent kenosis: God's answer is not available to someone in a state of complete kenosis, no matter if that person is (was) God.

Oh, I didn't know that philosophers had pointed out this issue in the past. — MoK

Yup, it's been analyzed from different philosophical frameworks. Nietzsche has the weirdest take on it, it's even weirder than Hegel's take. Fun fact: did you know that Nietzsche himself used to sign his letters as "The Crucified" at the end of his life? Of course, he was mad with syphilis by that point, and he died in a mental hospital, but still.

EDIT: I don't know what the Rastafari answer to this topic is. I should look it up. It probably has something to do with Haile Selassie.

EDIT 2: Can we just agree that is an amazing song? Probably one of the best songs ever made.

Fair enough - Haile Selassie is revered as a messianic figure, often regarded as the second coming of Christ or the incarnation of God (Jah). — Tom Storm

I read somewhere that when there was news in Jamaica that Haile Selassie had died, some Rastas said that was false, because Haile Selassie is God, and God cannot die.

Again, it wasn't the fruit you bought that made her angry. It was the number of fruit. — Harry Hindu

A number caused my wife to become angry at me? It seems like I should have a talk with that number, and I should tell it to stop making my wife angry at me. And then I should have a talk with my wife, and I should tell her that I'm talking to the number that made her angry, so that it doesn't make her angry anymore.

Would you be angry at your doctor if they instructed you to take two pills at bedtime when you were only suppose to take one and you have some severe side effects? Again, its not the pills themselves. It was the number of pills that caused the severe side effects and your anger to towards your doctor. — Harry Hindu

A number caused my anger towards my doctor? It seems like I'm not a very reasonable person myself. I should probably apologize to my doctor. I will tell him that a number caused me to become angry at him.

Here's another example:
Say you're taking a math test. Say you have a goal to pass the test. You see your first math problem:
1.) 1 + 1 = _ — Harry Hindu

Doesn't seem like a very good test if I have to calculate something so basic like one plus one.

Given your present goal to pass the test and your knowledge of what the scribbles on the paper mean, what event do you think would happen next given these set of circumstances in the present moment? — Harry Hindu

What do I think will happen? Given those circumstances in the present moment? I don't know. Maybe I'll get a phone call from my doctor. Maybe my wife interrupts me, because she wants me to buy some fruit. A lot of things could happen in those circumstances.

I predict that you will draw a scribble, "2" in the blank space. — Harry Hindu

Ok.

. What caused you to write the scribble if not your present goal and the knowledge of what is suppose to go in the blank space if not some idea of numbers? — Harry Hindu

What caused me to write a scribble? I don't know, I guess my brain is what caused it.

No idea. I don't know who the real target audience of Guerilla Metaphysics. That's by design.

though all our knowledge is directed at facts by no means follows that knowledge arises out of the facts. — Moliere

I think that some knowledge arises out of the facts. And that sort of response allows you to solve the problem of Debunking Arguments about ordinary objects in a rather elegant way, from the point of view of Theory.

But then I also want to avoid things like things-in-themselves while preserving some of the insights which put a limit on metaphysics. — Moliere

I think that things-in-themselves exist, and they can be thought about (as Kant argues), and they can also be known (as Bunge argues).

Well my ontology is that identity is a thought process and nothing else. — unenlightened

We have an important disagreement here, at the level of ontology, then. I think that every object, creature, thing, artifact, etc., has an identity. And it has it in an ontological sense, whether we like it or not. It has nothing to do with identity politics, nor with politics in any sense.

To be hard-nosed for a minute, no fish ever thinks it is a fish, it does not identify itself at all, and therefore has no identity. — unenlightened

No fish ever thinks its a fish, I agree with you there. And it does not identify itself at all, I also agree with that. But I don't agree that this somehow entails that it has no identity. For it can have an identity even if it can't think of it. A stone has an identity, in my view, even though it doesn't even have a mind to begin with.

Humans identify stuff including themselves and each other. Reality doesn't bend, it flows. Dreams remain dreams unless they are realised, just as as an architect's plans are fantasies until and unless a builder makes them a reality. Now we can argue about whether an architect whose plans are never built is a "real" architect or not, but identities as fantasies certainly have potential. — unenlightened

Humans are the most recent creatures to have emerged on this planet, and they are the most recent ontological units to have emerged ever since the Big Bang. We're not exactly the protagonists here, in this vast and ancient Cosmos.

That's why the correct answer is neither. The issue you sight is not a problem of metaphysical "identity", it's an issue of naming conventions. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you have a deflationary approach to metaphysics? Is that it?

No, I will never know what it is like to have a sore hand. I can analyze and convey the meaning of "my hand hurts" based on linguistic and logical structures, but I lack subjective experience and the capacity for first-person awareness, which are necessary to truly feel or know pain. This distinction underscores the unique nature of first-person experience, as discussed in your thread. — ChatGPT

Here's the problem with that: How do you know that ChatGPT is not lying to you when it says something like that? Are you sure that it doesn't have first-person awareness, or something equivalent to it? That it lacks subjective experience, granted. It does not follow from there that it does not have first-person awareness, or that it can't lie to you.

↪Arcane Sandwich
Yep, that's the one... — Janus

So here's my question, generally speaking. How is "blind faith" not an adequate response to the Problem of Induction?

eurocentrism leads to polarization of the World. I'm not so sure about that. — ssu

Explain why you're not so sure about that, please.

Many times it's not the success of someone, but the failures of others. — ssu

Wise words, I suppose.

EDIT: BTW ssu is "Rule, Britannia!" the best you got, as far as music goes? — Arcane Sandwich

We were talking about patriotic music. Or how nation states use music for their own purposes. And since you where an Argentinian, why not then British patriotic music? — ssu

You kinda answered your own question there.

I guess you have heard quite much the Himno Nacional Argentino already. — ssu

Not really.

Again, @ssu, I see what you're trying to do here, with your selection of music. You might think that your move with "Rule, Britannia!" is some sort of marvelous, genius display of playful irony, in an attempt to get me, an Argentine, riled up. What do you want me to say? It's rather cringe on your part. Like, you're not a Brit, you're a Finn. To my mind, it's like you're not putting in much of an effort to get me riled up, honestly. It just comes off as weird on your part. Like, if we're talking about assertiveness and/or playful aggression, you're just doing the bare minimum here. I was taught otherwise. I was taught that effort pays off. I'm sure there's an equivalent notion in Suomi. There's gotta be. Anyways, here's another patriotic song:

So? How is that like an entry in a text that does not concern you?

Hume says we have no reason to believe the Sun will rise tomorrow. — Janus

It's the good ol' Problem of Induction.

Said like an entry in a text that does not concern you. — Paine

What do you mean?

I have a problem with the encyclopedic approach to expression of ideas. Half of me roots for Harman's language while the other half objects to another victim of an accepted practice. — Paine

I suppose that's understandable.

I think this is significant. For the speculative realists, "correlationism" or the idea that the world cannot be accessed outside a human/animal perspective, is the enemy. — schopenhauer1

Not really. Good ol' fashioned relationism poses a greater philosophical problem for speculative realism. Besides, Meillassoux and Harman criticize correlationism for different reasons. They don't agree as to what it is that correlationism gets wrong. Meillassoux sees flaws where Harman sees virtues, and Harman sees flaws where Meillassoux sees virtues.

This is also important in understanding this metaphysics. In his particular flavor of speculative realism, it seems objects have ways of either translating or not translating their being to each other. I don't get though, how something fictional can be anything outside of a human interaction. — schopenhauer1

You have to be more Latourian about that, in order to understand Harman's point, because Harman himself is a Latourian (though he doesn't agree with Latour on that specific point, yet you need to take into account what Actor-Network Theory says about that in order to understand how Object-Oriented Ontology differs from ANT in that regard).

According to this theory, it would seem that even if humans were necessary for Gandalf to exist, once created, Gandalf is its own object, with its own withdrawn and mysterious essence that can only be translated with other objects, including humans. — schopenhauer1

Not sure if this is correct, but if that's your theory, OK.

Another oddity in the theory would be, if anything can be an object, what then would not count as an object? If Gandalf, the number 3, the type "dog", a particular dog named Rex, Narnia, Middle Earth, a subatomic particle, and a brown hat are all their own individual, essentialized, independent objects, what is not an object? — schopenhauer1

Qualities. For Harman, qualities are not objects, though he suggests that under certain conditions, a quality can become an object. But that's beside the point here, because his ontology can be characterized as a four-fold: two kinds of objects, two kinds of qualities, like so:

Sensual Qualities - Real Qualities
Sensual Objects - Real Objects

These can be combined in many different ways. For example, a fictional character is a sensual object that has a real quality. Éowyn and Aragorn exists as sensual objects, not as real objects. However, they have real qualities, since, for example, they are copyrighted characters, you cannot use them in your own novel. That is in fact why the Tolkien foundation sued TSR (the old Dungeons & Dragons company) way back in the day. IIRC, a judge ruled that the word "hobbit" was copyrighted. So, instead of using the word "hobbit", TSR used "halfling".

About the remark about schools of thought? — Paine

Yup. I think he's right about that (and about other things as well).

I don't accept the pertinence of schools as presented here but do credit Harman for giving an excellent rant. — Paine

I don't agree with you, but it doesn't matter (our disagreement here doesn't matter, that is). Harman has some of, if not the, best skills as a writer in 21st Century philosophy. He was a professional sportswriter in the past. It's obvious that the rest of us, his colleagues in the world of professional philosophy, don't have such a high-level prose. That's just a brute fact as far as I'm concerned. Here's an example:

The carnival tent rustles in the evening breeze, disturbing the moods of those who approach. Inside the tent are swarms of humans and trained ani­mals; there are jarring sounds, strange ethnic foods, and shadows. For a few moments the music of a concealed organ is countered by the rumble of thunder, as emaciated dogs begin to whine. A small fight breaks out, soon to be halted by a sneering, scar-faced man. Suddenly, hailstones strike the roof of the tent like bullets, frightening everyone: the visitors, the for­tunetellers, the unkempt and corrupted security guards, the monkeys sparkling with costume jewelry. At long last, the organ player's morbid inner anger takes command, and he begins an atonal dirge that will last throughout the storm.
All of this can be explained by atoms. — Harman (2005)

I'd say that acceptance of the reality of death is wisdom, and cultivating that acceptance is the love of wisdom. — Janus

Well said! :clap:

Samir Amin, the Marxian economist who coined the term eurocentrism, thought that fascism was the extreme version of eurocentrism. — ssu

What do you think of that, @ssu? Agree? Disagree? Sort of agree, sort of disagree?

For them, modernization and westernization are synonyms. — ssu

Are they? What's your take on that?

How European or Western Japanese actually think of themselves being is another issue, as they seldom are asked about it. — ssu

How do you know that they're seldom asked about it? Do you know any of them? There's a lot of foreigners living in Japan as of 2025.

EDIT: BTW @ssu is "Rule, Britannia!" the best you got, as far as music goes? I feel like you're not putting much of an effort in the music department. Here, let me help you out. I see your "Rule, Britannia!" and I raise you "Mano Brava":

Harmon is "democratic" with his objects- what he calls "flat ontology". All objects are of equal weight as far as how relations are concerned. That is to say, all objects present a "vicarious/sensational causation" whereby one object is "translated" with another. Even if a log is burned, the log's essence is still withdrawn and ever-present in this theory. These even go down to non-physical objects like abstract concepts, fictional characters, and the like. They all have a unity, irreducibility, and can enter into relations with other objects. This allows for objects to persist beyond simply their reduced parts, or simply their relations/processes. As for the question, "Why these objects?", I am not sure his take other than it's a brute fact of his metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

Here's Mario Bunge's answer to that question:

In ordinary language, the word “object” denotes a material thing that can be seen and touched. By contrast, in modern philosophy “object” (objectum, Gegenstand) stands for whatever can be thought about: it applies to concrete things and abstract ones, arbitrary assemblages and structured wholes, electrons and nations, stones and ghosts, individuals and sets, properties and events, facts and fictions, and so on. The concept of an object is thus the most general of all philosophical concepts. — Mario Bunge (2010)

EDIT: And here is what Harman says in his book Guerilla Metaphysics:

This book calls for what might be termed an object-oriented philosophy, and in this way rejects both the analytic and continental traditions. The ongoing dispute between these traditions, including the sort of “bridge building” that starts by conceding the existence of the dispute, misses a prejudice shared by both: their primary interest lies not in objects, but in human access to them. The so-called linguistic turn is still the dominant model for the philosophy of access, but there are plenty of others—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, philosophy of mind, pragmatism. None of these philosophical schools tells us much of anything about objects themselves; indeed, they pride themselves on avoiding all naive contact with non human entities. By contrast, object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other. For this reason, the philosophy of objects is sometimes lazily viewed as a form of scientific naturalism, since it plunges directly into the world and considers every object imaginable, avoiding any prior technical critique of the workings of human knowledge. But quite unlike naturalism, object-oriented philosophy adopts a bluntly metaphysical approach to the relations between objects rather than a familiar physical one. In fact, another term that might be employed for object-oriented philosophy is guerrilla metaphysics—a name meant to signify that the numerous present-day objections to metaphysics are not unknown to me, but also that I do not find them especially compelling. — Graham Harman (2005)

Jesus is praying Psalm 22, invoking it by its first lines. — Leontiskos

Ok, then let's quote it, for ease of reference:

Psalm 22
Why Have You Forsaken Me?
To the choirmaster: according to The Doe of the Dawn. A Psalm of David.

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
3 Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises[a] of Israel.
4 In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.
6 But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by mankind and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock me;
they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
8 “He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him;
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” — Psalm 22

EDIT: And here's the rest of the psalm:

9 Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
10 From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
12 Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
13 Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me.
14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.
15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
16 Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet.
17 All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me.
18 They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.
19 But you, LORD, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me.
20 Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs.
21 Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen.
22 I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you.
23 You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
24 For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.
25 From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows.
26 The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the LORD will praise him— may your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him,
28 for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.
29 All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before him— those who cannot keep themselves alive.
30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord.
31 They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it! — Psalm 22

EDIT 2: And here is one of my points: Nothing that Psalm 22 says is incompatible with Rastafari. And here is the audiovisual evidence for that claim:

To me philsophy primarily seems to be a creative way for us to manage anxiety. — Tom Storm

It's that, and it's also the preparation of one's own mind for the reality of one's death. I know that sounds grim, but it is what it is. It can be other things too, philosophy. It can be a performative art-form, it can be a science, it can be a linguistic tool, it can be a weapon in a political debate. But at its core, philosophy is the acceptance of the reality of death. It has nothing to do with the love of wisdom.

As Maximus (Russell Crowe) said: " I knew a man once who said, "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back."'

That man was Marcus Aurelius.

Not necessarily - it can also lead to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation of texts, often ancient texts, including Biblical texts. Much more characteristic of European philosophy, and not something I'm knowledgable in, though always keen to learn more. — Wayfarer

That's a lot more fun than Wittgenstein, unless you read his Tractatus in that exact sense. Then it gets really crazy.

I imagine that the audiovisual material for that activity would be something like this:

(Incidentally, I learned something interesting about Wittgenstein in this essay Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism.) — Wayfarer

I see Logical Positivism as the thing that existed before Scientism. It's like, you have classical Comtean positivism, then logical positivism, then scientism. That's my take on that.

The interpretation that makes the most sense to me, is that this is where Jesus was utterly and entirely human. He was one of us, or indeed, all of us, at that point. No faith, no hope, no consolation, utterly bereft and desolate. This is why this agonised exclamation is described in terms of kenosis, self-emptying. Remember, 'he who saves his life will lose it, and he who looses his life for My sake will be saved.' To learn more about kenosis, google it. — Wayfarer

:clap:

My favourite quote of his, "Of course it didn't happen.' — Tom Storm


'There are myths that are truer than history' — Wayfarer

Which leads to a very boring discussion the Philosophy of Language which basically boils down to "Wittgensteinians vs non-Wittgensteinians". And I just think that it's a reductionist conversation to even have. Wittgenstein died like, what, almost a century ago?

I have a friend who is a Catholic priest. I prefer his take. He sees the Bible as a series of myths and legends that are antiquity's method for pointing at the transcendent. My favourite quote of his, "Of course it didn't happen.' — Tom Storm

That's the wisest Catholic take on the Bible that I've ever heard.

If we're gonna share the oddest Bible ideas, or the ones that each of us has found to be the oddest, then I have a ton of questions about Adam and Eve. But I'll just tell you instead the craziest interpretation that I've ever heard.

I actually saw, on social media (I think it was Facebook?) someone explain Adam and Eve from a "rational" point of view. This person on Facebook said, that a very long time ago, there were dinosaurs here on Earth. God created them. And then, a meteorite killed the dinosaurs. And who do you think was in that meteor? That's right, Adam and Eve. Because the meteor was actually a space ship. And, here on planet Earth, there was no metal prior to the crashing of Adam and Eve's "meteor". So where do you think that all of the metal comes from? It's from the meteorite, from the spaceship.

Please understand that I do not believe in the above explanation, for reasons that should be obvious.

EDIT: @Count Timothy von Icarus this is what happens when everything is interpretation and nothing is canon.

And I will just have to ask your forgiveness — Mapping the Medium

Ok. But it's like, I'm not Jesus, you know? I'm not here to forgive your sins. You can sin all you want, doesn't really mean anything to me unless you're hurting others.

is a formal operation that transforms a predicate into a relation — Mapping the Medium

There is no formal operation that transforms a predicate into a relation.

for example "Honey is sweet" is transformed into "Honey has sweetness". — Mapping the Medium

This is not the formal operation of transforming a predicate into a relation (because nothing is). In this example, the transformation is entirely semantic. The word "sweet", which is an adjective, has been transformed into another word, "sweetness", which is a noun. The difference between an adjective and a noun is not a formal difference. The two words "is sweet" is indeed a predicate, and the two words "has sweetness" is another predicate. You have not transformed a predicate into a relation, you have just transformed a predicate into another predicate.

I can think that I am a fish. That doesn't mean that I am a fish. — Arcane Sandwich


Well that is a question of identity politics. — unenlightened

Is it?

Who knows if gill reassignment will or won't become an option? — unenlightened

But if one wishes to conclude that one actually is whatever it is that one happens to think that one is, what is the underlying ontology here? Is it something like "Dream big, you can be whatever it is that you want to be"? Or is it instead something like "Reality Itself bends to our mere will, so that with a mere though you can instantly become a different creature, such that you have gills simply because you think so, and you can actually breathe underwater because you think you can".

Some people like to lay down the law about what are legitimate identities, — unenlightened

And some people like strawberry ice cream, yet I don't think that taste or aesthetic judgement is involved here in any meaningful way.

I'm all for a bit of common sense now and then. — unenlightened

That's what I'm saying, at some point, we just need to look at everything from the point of view of common sense. Why is there this idea that just because common sense is not infallible, we should throw it in the epistemological trash bin? That makes no philosophical sense to me.

logic is mainly conducted in the present eternal tense, as it has been in this thread, and that is the practice I am criticising — unenlightened

Why are you criticizing it, if I may ask? I'm curious.

I am unenlightened, but tomorrow I will be enlightened. No problem, but will anyone want to say that unenlightened is enlightened, even if they are willing to say tomorrow that enlightened was unenlightened. It can be made to work, but it isn't without difficulties. — unenlightened

Well, as far as logic goes, you can make anything work. There's para-consistent logics for example, there's formal systems for contradictions, or for the denial of the Principle of Excluded Middle, to mention another example. There's multi-valued logics (so that you don't have just "true" and "false", you have more options), there's fuzzy logic, etc. I personally stick to first-order predicate logic because I don't really need anything else in that sense, other than perhaps propositional logic here and there.

You're strawmanning biblical/christian literalism. — BitconnectCarlos

Prove that I'm strawmanning biblical/christian literalism, othewise what you're saying here is just an opinion, not a fact.

The plain meaning of the text sometimes indicates allegory or metaphor. — BitconnectCarlos

Again, that's an opinion, not a fact. Prove what you're saying, if you're so confident in your understanding of Christianity.

Since I'm having so much trouble communicating here, I asked ChatGPT what it recommends. I'll share it here for anyone who might want to read it, but it's not very helpful. — Mapping the Medium

Here's the thing. If I had to make a list of the most complicated things that I have ever had to read, Evrostics is somewhere in the top 10. Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a really, really hard time understanding even the most basic concepts here. So, quite naturally, I ask you questions about it, and I use the debate itself as a philosophical technique in the attempt to achieve a better understanding, "a clearer picture", if you will. Here's an example.

Reasonableness. This is the Peircian Ultimate, and the very word itself is formed by what you and Peirce call "hypostatic abstraction", the "turning of a predicate into a relation", like in the example of honey and sweetness. But the problem here is in the expressions, rather than in the ideas or the names. Allow me to explain why. A phrase like "turn a predicate into a relation" makes no sense to me, from a purely formal point of view. A better way to express the same concept is to say that Peirce was a relationist about predicates: he believed that the logical and grammatical predicates themselves were ontological relations between a speaker and an item in the world. Predicates themselves, for Peirce, are the syntactic co-relation between the pragmatic subject and the semantic object. And this, is not an easy thing to argue for. But it is much preferable to argue for something like that, than to argue for the concept that hypostatic abstraction "turns predicates into relations". It cannot do that, nothing can do that, unless you mean to say that the predicates themselves are relations, in an ontological sense.

This is just one example among many. You're not exactly an easy thinker to understand, precisely because of the expressions that you choose for your equally complicated concepts. I'm just saying: is it unreasonable for someone who is not already familiar with Evrostics to not want to fully engage with something of this complexity?

He said there is no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference. — frank

Was he right?

So do the sun and the moon really bow down to Joseph? — BitconnectCarlos

If the literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, then yes, they have to. However, no one says that it is indeed correct. That's what I'm trying to settle with @Count Timothy von Icarus. I'm making a case for Christian literalism. He is trying to find flaws in the case that I'm making. You are welcome to join our discussion, but you kinda need to catch up and be "on the same page" as us, to use a metaphor.

But it can be interpreted elsewise, yes? — Moliere

Can it?

Which is the best, in your estimation? — Moliere

Carlos Astrada.

It's an ontological description of the epistemology of history that I've been arguing for. — Moliere

Yes, I can see that.

I see science as much more fractured than this. — Moliere

Sure. It's the descriptive vs normative debate in philosophy of science.

We are thrown into the norms which predate our existence, and it's only by following these social norms that knowledge gets produced at all. — Moliere

That doesn't mean that the knowledge that gets produced is somehow 100% relative to those social norms.

I see the cogito becoming relevant again and again even as philosophers attempt to overcome it. — Moliere

Same here.

Thanks, ToothyMaw! Very insightful comments there, I'll have to think about them.

I have, many times.

But is it really worth our time analysing an entire myth like this when thousands, perhaps millions have come before us? — Tom Storm

Sure, why not? Who says that we can't do better than them, the ones from the past?

If your wife tells you to get three oranges at the store and you come back home with
only two, that will cause your wife to be angry. — Harry Hindu

It sounds like my wife isn't a very reasonable person if she gets mad about some fruit that I forgot to buy. Not sure if I can conclude something about the ontology of numbers and their causal efficacy (or lack of it) from my wife's anger.

Prove it, otherwise what you're saying is just an opinion, not a fact.

If Jesus is God, then what's he going to do with material wealth? — Tom Storm

If Jesus was a man in addition to being God, why wouldn't it be the case that he has got something to do with material wealth?

I guess one might need to contrive an allegorical interpretation that transcends literalism for this one to work — Tom Storm

Not really. Jesus was a man. Simple as that.

Go re-read Daniel's dream and come back and tell us that it was entirely literal. — BitconnectCarlos

It was.