You abandoned your original argument.

You are a bot.

What is the data again?

I understand that position. But how does that relate to observations about race? How could anybody say anything about race if you don't believe your own eyes' and ears'
reports of what is going on around you?

Descartes was saying the opposite of your point of view. Why would any agent bother making us stupid on purpose? We are pretty stupid out of the box.

You are not owning the presumptions of your list of why people are racists. This Cartesian stuff is just a sideshow to your own deficits.

I was referring to the examples of racism that you provided. They all are expressed from the point of view of why the "white" thing should be criticized or not.
If you want to argue about matters on those terms, you should own them.

Your original comments are directed at a "real" world. I don't see how your latest reply relates to your narrative.

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We don't actually know that the external world exists. So when someone says the N word, a person could say that they are dreaming and has uttered the N word in his dream. So why should they stop uttering the N word, if they have no real reason to believe they are hurting anyone. — telex

So, I am being asked to object to an objection to using certain language while also doubting the reality of what I perceive?

If the latter is the case, the former is meaningless.

In taking on the Church as he did as a requirement of individual conscience, he mapped out the mind space of future expressions.
The rejection of the established Church as the necessary way to connect to God surprised Luther when people heard that as requiring a removal of state authority.
What the hell were they thinking?

A lot of things are scripted. And you have to decide if you will try to meet those requirements or do something else.
A lot of the non-scripted narratives are scripted too.
Not caring what others think is not a place. There is no army arrayed against you. Unless one has been been arranged.
But they would not do that just for you.

I thought my ratio was pretty good but realized it was only me not saying very much of interest.

Spinoza's argument that God is not "free" to change stuff as the whim might occur to him is presented as a projection of a human process on to the Creator. Men ponder alternatives to achieve various ends. To depict the God we are in as sharing the same conditions that we do is presumptuous.

The funny thing about the presumption is that we use it conceive an agency in ourselves. We take the model of coercion and liberty that we must navigate to live and turn it into something beyond our experience.

The lesson on humility is not directed toward saying everything must be as it is as a matter of predestination. That sort of thing is beyond us. The freedom we experience is not something we have, like a property or a hand tool. The difficulty surrounding the possibility is a feature, not a flaw.

From the point of view of understanding causes, this from Ethics, Proposition 8, Scholium 2 points to what is being resisted:

Those who do not know the true causes of things confuse everything. They have no more intellectual qualms about conceiving of trees talking than of people talking. They as easily suppose that human beings are formed from stones as from semen. They imagine any form being changed into any other form. Similarly, people who confuse divine nature with human ​nature readily attribute human emotions to God, especially so long as they also remain ignorant of how emotions are produced in the mind.
-Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (pp. 7-8). Cambridge University Press.

Spinoza's rejection of the idea of free will as an agency in the stream of events is at odds with his clear message that we can make things better by being smarter and less arrogant.
Or it is not at odds. Both claims are true.
So, how would one distinguish between the two perspectives? Spinoza did not seem interested in helping others answer that particular question.

DNA and RNA mechanics underlay all species differentiation. The need to develop an idea like ecology is necessary to the discovery of that process. We understand things happening in a certain situation. We don't know what that situation is.

Nihilism is not a policy to pursue or not. It would be absurd to encourage the absence of meaning as a social end. So, what it is it doing there? In much of the work, it is presented as the removal of a previous condition, not something wished for or hoped against.

As for the meaning it had when Nietzsche opposed "Christianity" as such, it is not a threat but a conviction. Guilty as charged. That sort of thing.

I thought Camus was trying to re-frame the questions concerning belief. The assertion that his view is a solution of some kind does not fit with the exhaustion expressed about the conversation.
I thought we were in the still pissed off stage where the previously offered solutions all sucked.

After reading a lot of Jung, the work from the early days, working with very troubled people, strikes me as the kernel of his approach. The people described don't care about our descriptions. Especially his.

I guess I must not have understood the end of your first post. Rereading it now I’m still not following. You’re saying you’re uninterested in architectonics? But more interested in... what, and why? — Pfhorrest

I am of two minds on that matter.

Any system replaces not trying to have one. That spirit is alive in the language of all sorts of diverse philosophies. Something like: I could have kept my thoughts to myself but you all have pissed me off to the point that I will talk until I die. There is a animus to collect thoughts that isn't necessarily about a last word upon arguments.Consider how Wittgenstein distanced certain observations about ethics from his own philosophy. People pursue ends that others perceive as contradictory.

I am more interested in why those thinkers did not have the same problem with those contradictions other people did.

And I brought up Aristotle as an example because he "inherited" ideas but preserved a process of conversation where we don't get to decide what is true or not.

I guess I could do that. But that project does not directly involve what I care about.
The divergence of interest.

In this thread I'm interested to hear if other people have their own core principles that they think entail all of their positions on all of the different philosophical sub-questions, and if they think that there are common errors underlying all of the positions that they think are wrong. — Pfhorrest

That is a good way to approach the matter if for no other reason than to decide for oneself if one's thinking is an expression of a yet to be articulated system or just a reluctance to join in the enthusiasm exhibited by others.

In that regard, systematic philosophy like Whitehead, Hegel, and Kant have the merit of owning the responsibility of owning the conversation they started.

But I am more interested in Aristotle in being interested in our capacity to experience what is happening. Knowledge as perception. And that the structure of what is happening is connected to that sort of thing as a natural process.

Said in a different way, the attempts we make to relate our explanations of causality are mixed up with many problems. The underlying thing is an acceptance of conditions we do not understand.

One way to look at it is that your experience (or mine) is the closest anybody will get to whatever is happening. Each individual is incommensurate to the other individuals.
If that is not true, then something else is happening.

Because what that sentence might mean has been interpreted in so many ways from different premises and modes of talking about ourselves, it is best to give it your best shot and see what people say afterwards.

My friends who are gone now frame the discussion with their absence.
I don't have anything clever to say. The "just for fun" introduction makes me want to hurt you.
But that doesn't matter.

There is something you will eventually understand. It won't be because of a superior argument.
Whatever.

I don't understand the Randian thing as a philosophy.
The scene in Fountainhead about how charity is a depletion of personal power, especially for a woman to undergo, seems to be the "message" or what have you.
For myself, that moment is the time at the party when you realize that you do not belong. Privilege has a certain style and collective quality.
A fork in the road.

One of the elements Kierkegaard introduced in his Works of Love is the idea that what is taken as examples of the highest discrimination of pagan Love actually requires another ingredient.

That the interest in another person is not just a bundle of instincts but a kind of emptiness of self. Not as a exemplar of perfection but as a means to a way of seeing.

The situation is pretty overwhelming. In this matter, the universal view, as disheartening as it may be, is not as dark as the closure with friends and family where each of us are extinguished like candles after a party.

This remaining space, as small as it may be, is what is asking for something other than submission.

Is belief in god then a symptom of slave mentality? — TheMadFool

Symptoms are spoken in the language of disease. Disease registers Health as a credible possibility. So this is the actual concept to investigate.

The various ways to talk about a good life are connected to condemnations of bad ones by various means. The only thing anybody really cares about is the first part.

I should add that the problem of what the bad thing is is central to caring about the good thing.

Racism is systemic in the U.S. The emphasis upon the inequality built into various policies Is important as history and means to preserve influence over the future. There is an element of signification that is usually removed from such considerations in the name of objectivity. That element is what Ralph Ellison focused upon in the Invisible Man; Blackness is needed to experience Whiteness.

That quality has a political dimension where the Buchanans can talk about preserving "Western Civilization" instead of race. But that trick works only because of a dynamic where the unifying principle of many very different groups is that they are not black.

But what Ellison observed, along with Martin Luther King Jr., is that there is a psychological dimension to the problem of identity. If it is based upon a negation: Only the difference can connect a person to what is happening. The "race" in that picture is not a picture at all. Just an empty frame.

Do you have something to add to your expression of strong disapproval?
My statement was not a thesis as much as an explanation of interest.
What do you think it is all about?

[reply="Hot Potato;419279"
I look at my objections as a call to do better, to myself as much as it may involve other people.
It is much easier to call out other people for their shortcomings than come up with something better that one personally understands. That contrast is what I understand is peculiarly Christian. A kind of self awareness more than a certainty about what is good and necessary.

It will be best if you make your arguments in that regard as you see them.
I am a cantankerous old guy on the verge of being banned for losing his temper periodically.
This venue has given me more than I have given it.

That is a bullshit response. You are the one who has put the the whole Christian tradition into question.
It was interesting until you abandoned your own project.

The Christianity I understand is not very soft. It calls for a lot from a person. Pretty much everything one has to give.
There are many points of view that object to that demand. They are interesting and include valid considerations arguing that such an either/or is not correct or necessary.
You stake out this other place that does not seem to have anything to do with that conversation.
Why should anybody think your point of view exists?

I am not here to hide. If you do not like it, and think you have a better moral stance, share it. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I did not mean my remarks about self righteousness to be a charge against you as a person. You see no good coming from a certain tradition. I recognize that it has brought much needless suffering. The language of tearing out something root and branch is in your language and the worst of those you condemn. I object to both.

Arguing about previous arguments always has the problem of not being about a claim upon the present.
But some of those previous arguments tried to address that problem and not blow it off.
There is a certainty of self righteousness in your point of view that makes it as boring as other examples of self righteousness.
Of the kind you militate against.

When a right is given to us by governments — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Given? Is not anything of that sort taken?
Taken by people who accept other claims to authority than given by a State?
Christianity argued there was such a point of leverage before it became the State.

In so far as Marx proclaimed he was a "materialist", he did so to emphasize that what many take to be a state of nature is actually a social arrangement.
Thus all the rather torturous attempts to explain the meaning behind the meaning of cultural products.
The arguments about whether private property is a necessary institution or not started as a question of how it works. The question is still more interesting than the answer.
The rush to politics as the antidote to academy turned out to be the most academic response of them all.

The modesty asked for by religious communities is bound up with attitudes about sexual display. In some communities, it is about promoting the idea of equality despite the differences of gender, race, and class.
It is just not about one set of beliefs or cultural norms. It is wired into why there are norms.

Sounds like a YouTube documentary.

We all have to find our own way out. Or not. We all throw the dice.
But I object to your thesis that depression is a choice in that simple fashion.

At this point in the argument, I have to ask, why do you care? There are people experiencing things you do not. Why do you care if their suffering is necessary or not?

How does judgment about their experiences relate to yours? Everybody has to like the idea of choices versus just taking what they get but some portion of that has to be a response to phenomena.

There is this real world. I am more interested in an interesting insight in to what is going on than demands that it be one way or another.