If Christianity (love it or leave it) is our model for what a religion looks like, then features of Christianity are features of religion. — Ennui Elucidator

I agree. Why would Christianity be our model for what a religion looks like?

This attitude of fundamentalism (founding document to be understood literally as the only source of religious authority/authenticity) is precisely the problem with people like Lewis - actual people are being judged for having beliefs that they do not have based upon a facially incorrect understanding of what religion is/says/etc. — Ennui Elucidator

I'm not arguing that people must take the Bible literally. I'm arguing that if they do not do so then they have reasons for choosing what to take literally and what to not. Those reasons must, necessarily, come from outside the text (otherwise they're subject to the same problem). As such, they can be interrogated.

The argument around worship is that what makes god worshipful is not inherently what makes god admirable (if at all). Lewis critiques those that admire. If someone worships a god that tortures people for fun, are they in the same boat of moral repugnance as someone that admires a god that tortures people for fun? — Ennui Elucidator

Well, yes. I think the case has been made quite clearly for people (if worshipped Hitler I would be morally repugnant). I'm simply saying that there's nothing inherent about a God which changes that.

What use is illusory fairness? — baker

None. You argued that the situation I described as 'fair' was not, in fact, the case. What's 'fair's and what's 'the case' are two different things. So the 'fairness' of x is not made illusory by showing that x is not the case. If you want to argue that x is not fair (ie, it's apparent fairness is merely illusory), then the matter of whether x is the case is immaterial.

Again, ↪Isaac
, the two mentioned things aren't the same. — jorndoe

Which two mentioned things?

As an aside, would you actually like to join Strang and his many colleagues around the world? (They differentiate.) — jorndoe

Differentiate what?

You're being quite opaque here.

Because there’s no evidence whatever to believe these numbers are inaccurate. — Xtrix

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_statistics_on_England_mortality_data_suggest_systematic_mis-categorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355437113_Discrepancies_and_inconsistencies_in_UK_Government_datasets_compromise_accuracy_of_mortality_rate_comparisons_between_vaccinated_and_unvaccinated

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/we-could-be-vastly-overestimating-the-death-rate-for-covid-19-heres-why/

I think we've got to start moving to that, otherwise as infection becomes endemic we are going to be frightening ourselves with very high numbers that actually don t translate into disease burden. — All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus - Professor Hunter.

Reasons for what? — Xtrix

Reasons for believing your claim. That it's just...

From scientific journals and medical journals, mostly. The Lancet, Science, Nature, etc. I also read the Times, WSJ, etc. — Xtrix

None of those publications record death rates.

Hospitals are government and media? Medical journals are government and media? — Xtrix

So you're polling hospitals directly yourself? And yes, journals are media.

The reality is you’re as much a victim of the info-demic as the suckers who believe the election was stolen, repeating exactly the same lines and “challenging” sources and the very nature of truth and facts just to maintain their conditioned beliefs. — Xtrix

Uh huh, and "thankfully you’re here to weed it all out for us."

It's not clear how this is the case. — baker

My argument is about what's fair, not about what's the case.

I see no reason to distrust the figures from hospitals and medical establishments on this particular issue. — Xtrix

Yes. That's clear from what you've already written, but since you're not the Oracle of Delphi we expect reasoning or justification for your beliefs. Its a discussion forum. It gets a bit boring if it's just an exchange of pronouncements. I'm not interested in your opinion, I'm interested in your reasons.

There's no contradiction. They've simply created a monster, as I said before, that now they cannot subdue. — Xtrix

Again, reasons please, not just opinion. Unargued for opinion is boring, there's nothing for me to respond to.

I'm not using information from the sources I mentioned. I don't get my information from social media or corporate media (NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS, etc). — Xtrix

So where do you get your information from? Direct from the source? You personally interview medical experts? Take the death counts yourself? Ask the MEs what the cause of death was?

But even if I did, there's a real difference between straight reporting and opinion sections. "Commentators" like Sean Hannity et al. are far more influential than the Fox Newsroom. Take a look at the Wall Street Journal, as well. A very good newspaper -- yet their editorials are to the right of Attila the Hun. — Xtrix

So corporate media is prepared to steer society off a cliff, encourage mass deaths and leave no habitable earth for our grandchildren, but apparently infusing actual news stories with bias is one step too far for them? Who are these people?

I never accused medical experts of leading us astray. I've accused the corporate media for leading many people astray — Xtrix

But the data you're basing your conclusions on doesn't come from medical experts. It comes from the government and the media. Unless you've taken some private poll of medical experts yourself, if so I'd be really interested in the results?

I'll try and make the distinction really simple for you...

If Professor Bob of Oxford University tells you something - that's you getting the information from medical experts

If the government agency say "our medical experts say..." that's you getting your information from the government, not the experts - I really don't know how much more gently I can break this to you, but governments lie.

If a newspaper says "most experts say..." that's you getting your information from the media, not the experts - again, not to shatter your comfort bubble, but newspapers are biased (yes, heaven forbid, even in their news reporting - I know, the scoundrels!)

Even if a medical journal publishes a paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216501/), the WHO publishes advice (https://gh.bmj.com/content/bmjgh/6/6/e005216.full.pdf), or even the American Association of Really Smart People issues a statement, those are all filters applied to expert opinion. Filters largely controlled by corporate or political interests, filters with their own personal biases.

The principle of charity only calls for a reading of a speaker's statement in the most rational way possible; it does not call for fantasizing. What you replied to so strongly was a direct response containing direct quotes from you... you are not entitled to demand charitable misrepresentations of my position. A charitable interpretation of my accusation of your bias distracting you would be that I perceived your bias to distract you. And it appears that I indeed did: — InPitzotl

Well then there's little point in continuing. I'm not here to act as straw man for you to interpret what I'm saying in such a way as to make a fun decoy for your target practice. Either respond to what I'm saying or don't bother, insisting that I simply must have meant the thing you think I meant is pointless.

Basically, when I started with this

:

I'd say that for the case of simplicity, we should stick to deterministic terms. As in, cause-effect, more classical mathematics. — john27


It's to assume the fact that rain is the effect of "something". Water cycle, the earth, something like that.
So when I translate that fact into mathematical terms:

and the mathematical term 1+2=3 can be used to represent rain, specifically the number three, as an effect of something. — john27


It's to say that yeah, 1+2=3 doesn't actually encompass fully the fact that its raining; rain is much more complicated than that. But it's the same function, that is, the effect "rain" is just a bunch of other effects added together. In other words, It's just a simpler way of saying that rain is due to a bunch of effects. You could describe the water cycle mathematically for maybe a more precise translation, but this is honestly way simpler. — john27

OK, I get that bit.

Therefore you get:

If the universe (a) recognizes that this addition of effects (1+2) is happening, he will say it is raining (=3)

Hence the universe exists, and there's only one universe (probably), the (a) is always equal to 1.

Hence:

ax(1+2)=3 / it's raining

or,

ax3=3 / it's raining — john27

...but this seems to be just saying that if an observer recognizes that 1 and 2 are occurring then it's raining (because 1 and 2 lead to rain). But that just kicks the can down the road. Now we're assessing if the observer has correctly recognised that 1 and 2 are occurring.

Prosperity is possibe without either capitalism or materialism. — Isaac

So give an example as we are talking about poor societies and rich societies. — ssu

I don't think there is one. Not a clear one anyway. That's the whole point. You're simply assuming the way things are is they way they ought to be, that, in order to have a viable solution, I must present it from history, like all the ideas ever have been tried and we only get to pick from among them. I don't hold to that belief, I think it's incoherent. Why now? Why at this point in time have all the ideas been tried?

There seem to be a number of common threads in the responses I've had (plus some of the posts not directed to me), so I'm going to try and sum them up rather than repeat myself to each poster.

I'm making the argument that it is fair to interrogate the beliefs of Christians in the same way we interrogate the beliefs of non-Christians, we do not need to 'stand in their shoes', nor understand their faith, nor give special dispensation - that if we find something apparently contradictory, incoherent, or morally objectionable, we can legitimately point that out and expect some justifications in return (normal discussion methods - exchange of justifications).

Some points of contention have been..

1. That Christian faith is different from more ordinary belief and so not a proper subject for the same kind of interrogation (or that the grounds - coherence, consitency etc. - are different) - this mostly from @Srap Tasmaner. I think this is plausible but I don't see much by way of a clear line at religion. I can see the idea that not all beliefs are of similar kind (we already have such a notion with hinge propositions), maybe some beliefs are 'revelational' such that they're not subject to sensible interrogation. The thing is, how would we go about identifying such beliefs. I've raised the problem of us not having unfiltered access to the causes of our beliefs. I think this gets in the way of a good category of 'revelational' belief. A second issue I see with this is the generally vague nature of 'revelational' belief. It may be my limited experience, but I don't know of many such beliefs that we should not eat chicken on Wednesdays, they're usually so vague as to need interpreting anyway...and it's the interpretation that can then be interrogated. Which leads to...

2. How do we judge people's beliefs if we're admitting that their beliefs cannot make sense as a whole? If someone believes that we should both torture (in the afterlife), and be kind to (in this life), sinners, then do we hold them accountable for the former and assume the latter to be something they 'don't really believe because it's inconsistent', or vice versa. Judging them for both seems odd, since they can't coherently hold both. I know not everyone agrees with this, but... the overwhelming majority of our beliefs are justified post hoc. The justification isn't to arrive at the belief, it's to check it. We don't start with a blank slate and work through an algorithm to fill it. So the fact that two of the Christian's beliefs don't match doesn't mean we have to pick which one to judge, it means that we interrogate the post hoc rationalisation that results from the two.

3. That the power of God somehow renders judgement of those who worship him either redundant or even unfair - he's God after all, whatcha gonna do? Well - Have you ever read The Lord of the Rings? That's what I personally expect. Sauron was a God, and a good deal more obvious a one at that. Bad is bad - we fight it. Our myths are full of people fighting the Gods, it seems more than a little weak-chinned to say "well, he's a God, we'd better do as we're told".

4. That many Christians don't hold to whole 'torturer' thing anyway. If one takes some parts of the Bible literally and other parts allegorically, then one is not following a creed. I think this is unarguable, because you could create any set of beliefs at all from the bible by doing so. We could say that that God's smiting of unbelievers is literal, but Jesus's kindness to the poor was only allegorical and didn't really mean the we ought to be kind to the poor. Once you personally (or some other group) are in charge of what's to be taken literally and what isn't, you no longer have a religion (from ligāre - to bind). You pick and choose which bits really mean what they say and which bits are just adding a bit of colour to a more generic message.

I also don't see how deciding (even arbitrarily) which interpretation is under this particular microscope makes any difference at all to the power of the argument - (mis)labelling a group is not excluding them, they're still welcome to argue the case. No-one is saying that Christians (or those who identify as Christians) are not welcome to talk about this conflict. If Lewis takes aim at all Christians, yet his accusation applies only to a subset, then it's on those to whom it doesn't apply to make their case - I don't think an assumption that Christianity necessitates a belief in a God, Heaven, and Hell is an unreasonable assumption to use as a starting point. The idea that sinners go to hell is hardly a fringe Christian sect that Lewis has dug up from the ruins of Alexandria to use as a straw man, if some Christians don't hold to it, then I think the integrity of their doing so (and remaining Christian) is fair game.

title is"The moral character of Christians" as though no Christian has ever had the moral fibre to even consider the problem. — unenlightened

I don't get that from it. I don't see anything in the presentation of the problem that excludes Christians from joining in the dissection of it. On the contrary, the view of some Christians in this would be very interesting - so long as that view isn't "you wouldn't/couldn't understand" that's the response (albeit by proxy) that I'm objecting to.

If, rather, you're merely saying something like "obviously the Christians themselves will have already thought of this", then I think that's an excessively reverent special pleading. We secular folk are constantly starting discussions about moral claims, they're never shut down with "well, I expect the people concerned have already thought about that"

I pointed out that it’s not unusual for Christians to struggle with or have misgivings about the concept of hell. And it’s not a secret either. There’s lots of writing. There’s lots of public discussion. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh absolutely. But here I find these struggles are presented as segregated from ours. We can't understand theirs, they can't understand ours. The point I was making was that since we seem to all be in the same boat (and they hardly seem to have it all worked out), a more parsimonious approach (and dare I say possibly even a better one for all) would be to assume, for starters, that we're not so incommensurable after all. That, if the Christian is struggling with the concept of hell, Lewis might actually be able to help - just in the same way as your (sometimes quite pointed) critiques of my positions have helped me. It's what we do. Put our positions into the crucible of public debate to have the edges taken off, the loose ends picked at. We do this by sharing a language.

If we (the secular) aren't 'getting' what the Christians are saying, then we need to try harder. All of us. So that the baffled secular and the agonised Christian can help each other sort out the painful contradictions. Simply saying that the Christians issues are not within our understanding, by fiat, seems a bit of a cop out.

Lewis has raised a concern about what Christian doctrine says. His argument (as I read it) is basically "Isn't is a moral danger to allow people to worship a torturer whose punishments are out of proportion to the crime?". That's a legitimate concern on it's face. There's lots of evil in the world to account for. Much of it is religiously motivated or carried out by the religious (or those raised in a religion). So pointing out a potential cause seems to be well within the wheel-house of normal conversation.

If Lewis has made a mistake, then that mistake can be pointed out in specific terms. What I find odd is the implication that Lewis most likely has made a mistake. That Christians most likely don't really believe that. That it most likely isn't a problem. That it most likely is not responsible for much of the evil we still see. That @Banno probably ought to back off. Where are we getting all these 'most likely's from?

What are we supposed to do here? I don’t believe in God, so I don’t believe in revelation either. I don’t seem to have much choice but to say that revelation must be somewhere on a spectrum running from delusion to misinterpretation. — Srap Tasmaner

We could discuss that which is revealed. We don't necessarily have to get into the method by which it was arrived at, do we? Kind of like I was saying about God being the creator of the universe having no implications at all for whether we worship him. A thing being divinely revealed doesn't have any necessary implication for whether one follows it. If I said that it's been divinely revealed to me that I should jump off a cliff, I'd rather hope you'd have the courage to say "I still think you didn't ought to do that"

I’m not inclined to shrug off my recognition that I could hold different beliefs from the ones I do, could have had different experiences from the ones I’ve had, and possibly understand a great many things quite differently. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, I agree entirely. (I mean such an assumption is literally my life's work, so...) but...

I lean away from being as dismissive of other’s views as I was when I was twenty. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is good, but needs a guide (which I think is what's missing here). You thought @Banno made a point which was wrong in some way (and here I mean 'wrong' in the broadest sense, maybe missing something, an unhelpful frame, an inconsistency...not necessarily empirically wrong). You pointed that out and we proceeded to discuss it (quite robustly!). All of this took place in normal language with expressions we all assumed the other would understand without having to literally stand in our shoes.

Should we beat each other over the heads for our incommensurable beliefs? No probably not. But no-one's advocating Christian-beatings here. We're just saying they're wrong, using their own words as written (or spoken).

Do I need to stand in your shoes to fully understand why you believe the things you believe? Almost certainly, yes. Do I need to stand in your shoes to even critique the things you believe? I hope not, that would rather render the whole forum (not to mention the whole of consensus-building politics) pointless.

The right feeling for the religious is love and compassion. And I think it's fair to say that those who are authentically religious, whether Buddhists, Christians, Hindus or Muslims, believe in compassion and love for others regardless of cultural or religious differences. — Janus

I can't make sense of this. The right 'feeling' is love and compassion (as if it isn't also for the non-religious!), but later you say they "believe in" it? What would it mean for someone to not "believe in" it? That they don't believe the emotions exist? That they don't believe they'll work (for what)? That they don't believe they're 'right (by what measure)?

Those who admire God for punishing the faithless I imagine would be a very small percentage of Christians, and much less of a percentage of the religious in general. — Janus

You see here you're equivocating (a common theme - it's not just you). When we treat Christian doctrine as it's written we're told that it's not literally what it says, but rather it all hangs perfectly together - if you're a Christian. (see my response to Srap above). Yet here you take eternal damnation literally, as it's written and say that most Christians don't believe it.

Either Christian doctrine is written in a special allegorical language that non-Christians have no access to, or it's written in the same language we all use and the secular critique thereof is fair. In the former case, there necessarily need be no crossover between the Christian world and the secular one. We'd have to each have our own reservations with independent government (where have I heard that idea before?). In the latter, if it is written that those who do not worship God will be cast into eternal damnation, then that's a proposition we (the secular) can take on it's face and critique the implications of.

I think it's extremely disingenuous for us to have pages and pages of dispute about the nature of belief, the meaning of truth, the morality of veganism, the solutions to overpopulation, the morality of certain presidents, the value of autonomy...and quite heated ones at that... all based on the very simple premise that when an expression is used, it's used to mean what it appears to mean and responded to as such. Yet when religious statements are made, we're implored to assume they make sense and it's us, the secular, who merely don't understand.

The religious are somehow thereby immunised from making the same mistakes of inconsistency, incoherency as are the bread and butter of the discussion we have here.

Do you think that we can say things like" the cat is on the mat" or "it is raining" and that it is the case that what we say in those simple kinds of observation statements is either in accordance or not in accordance with what is there to be observed? — Janus

No. I don't think it makes any sense at all for statement to be 'in accordance' with a state of affairs. States of affairs are causes of our sensations (and recipients of our actions). Statements are constituents of language - a tool we use for communication etc. They're an article of behaviour - speech acts. They're just not the kind of thing that can accord or not with a state of affairs.

Statements can be felicitous. They can do what we intended for them to do (the objective of the behaviour). I don't see any way they can 'accord', I'm afraid.

Do you think that when the statements are in accordance with what is observed then what we have said is true and when they are not in accordance what we have said is false? — Janus

No. Notwithstanding the issue laid out above, I don't think the words 'true' and 'false' are used that way, and for good reason. Since we cannot ever tell for sure what the hidden states we attempt to refer to are, we routinely use words like 'true' and 'false' to communicate our level or certainty.

Do you agree that this is pretty much how people generally understand truth and falsity, and that our legal system is also based on this kind of understanding? Say when people are called upon to give evidence, for example? — Janus

Yes, I'd say it's generally how people 'understand' truth and falsity. People 'generally understand' morality as judgement according to set rules too (yet fMRI scans tell us there are other considerations, several different brain regions are involved). People 'generally understand' infinity to be just a really big number that can be treated like any other - mathematicians tell us that doesn't work. People 'generally understand' their perception to be a direct unfiltered reflection of their environment - neuroscience tells us otherwise. People 'generally understand' their decisions to be the result of rational calculation - experiments frequently show us we can't make sense of their behaviour that way. I could go on, you get the picture. I don't see any reason at all to use what people 'generally understand' as a guide for what is actually the case. If we did, then what would we be doing here (with philosophy/science) at all?

AH, but the point I woudl make is that each of the people who believe that the door is open may well have a different brain state for that belief. — Banno

@AgentTangarine - Not just may. It's almost a mathematical certainty that they will.

You did draw a line, but I think you're back on track now. Worms are conscious. — frank

I was trying to estimate the line you were drawing with...

Is it appropriate to think of a worm's consciousness as intention driven? Are going to end up equivocating about "intention" if we do? — frank

All, I've been trying to do this whole time is get what you think the properties of a worm are that would give you pause when assigning it 'intentions'.

I hadn't even started on what I actually think about that question.

Chemicals are instructed by a mind? What? — frank

The release of certain chemicals is a result of the state of a mind. Since the likely consequence of those chemicals both fixed, and has priors within the model doing the releasing, then I think 'intention' is reasonable term relating the consequences of those chemicals to the model for which their release was a means to an end.

Say I intend to pick up my cup. Somewhere in the long chain of events I have to release acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft between my motor-neuron and my muscle cell, so my intention to pick up the cup released the chemical (albeit not proximately), no?

It seems that we're talking across each other along a rather cryptic journey. Is there some point you're getting to such that we could perhaps take a short-cut?

and others...

So, I'm going to come out and say that I don't think Christians, by and large, actually believe the things they say they believe. I think the simplest explanation for why the things they say make no sense to a secular audience is that they things they say make no sense. I think the simplest explanation for why it seems contradictory for God to commit genocide yet us be repulsed by it is because it is contradictory. The simplest explanation for why the Bible condones stoning adulteresses, but we are sickened by it is because it's just a book, it was written thousands of years ago and isn't relevant to modern sensibilities.

We could raise an objection on private-subjective grounds - only they have access to how they feel. But do they? Have you never found yourselves confused about how you feel, never found you have biases and prejudices that you didn't realise, never caught yourself justifying something post hoc? So it seem our private-subjective access is sketchy at best.

It seems more than a little like special pleading to say that Christians have some incommensurable world-view which makes sense of these contradictions when, in everyday life, we know full well that we personally juggle a half dozen contradictory feelings and urges every day. Why would we assume the Christians have somehow got it all beautifully stitched together when we can't even make a consistent choice between the ease of driving to the shop and the harm of additional greenhouse emissions?

Unless we're actually going to believe religious claims to divine access, it seems far more parsimonious to believe that the mess of contradictions, inconsistencies and post hoc rationalisations we perceive in Christianity are, in fact a mess of contradictions, inconsistencies and post hoc rationalisations. After all, our secular world is similarly constituted.

So what's happening here? Lewis has said something about Christianity, you (referring generically to those critical of @Banno's approach), take him to task, point out where he's gone wrong, where what he says doesn't make sense to you, where you think he's missed an inconsistency, or might be looking at things through an unhelpful frame... it's what we do here, right?

But the original protest, that the Christians have said something which doesn't make sense, something inconsistent, perhaps an unhelpful way of looking at things... That's out of bounds, they are assumed, not to be mistaken, benefiting from our discussion, but rather to be completely self consistent in a flawless, neatly stitched together world-view whose utter perfection we just fail to understand?

It just seems really odd that a group of people who - let's be clear - do take part in the world of discourse, do say things to the secular, do expect to have their beliefs acted upon in our shared world... are given a sort of diplomatic immunity as if merely ambassadors from some other world where their beliefs have only impact on them and not us.

I have tried (and tried, tried again - as per boy scout instruction), but I'm afraid I can't make head nor tail of what you've done there.

Any chance of a more step-by-step explanation

these other issues you mention are simply minor compared to the society becoming more prosperous — ssu

From 'Determinants and Consequences of High Fertility' - Robert T. Lazarus, Professor in Population Studies, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

Age at first union is relatively young in most high fertility societies (less than age 20 on
average). Several years delay would contribute to fertility decline, and it would have other health and socio-economic benefits.

many of the high fertility countries have moderate to high levels of unmet need for family planning—the prevalence typically ranges from one-fifth to one-third of married women.

Income is a relatively weak predictor of fertility decline, net of mortality and education.
Poor economic performance is not in itself an obstacle to fertility decline

Just gainsaying what I said isn't 'addressing' it. There are proximate determinants of reduced birth rates, these are those I listed. They may or may not be correlated with prosperity, but even if they are, it's an historical association, there's absolutely no justification for assuming it's how it must, or ought to, be done, simply because it's how it has been done. We could just as easily say that being a white man is strongly correlated with scientific breakthroughs, I could show you a graph that would correlate even more strongly than your GDP vs Birth Rate one between Race/Gender and scientific advancements. So to get all the best new developments we should make sure our universities are stocked with white men, yes? Or would that be to confuse the way things happened to have been with the way things ought to be?

There are facts of biology. Those criteria need to be met to reduce the birth rate. The fact that those criteria are often (but not always) met where there's an increase in GDP does not in any way mean that an increase in GDP is either the only, nor the best, way to achieve those criteria.

As for...

Well, put there the term "capitalism" or anything — ssu

Well no. Materialism, capitalism and prosperity are three completely different things. One is about ownership of goods, one bout the distribution of the means of production and the other about the affordance of needs. They are not simply interchangeable. Prosperity is possibe without either capitalism or materialism.

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to? — Srap Tasmaner

Possibly, by way of a bridge, I think the difference being expressed here does not require the 'just'. It is sufficient to carry Lewis's concerns that faith cashes out to propositions you assent to, it needn't be 'just' that, it could be an entire boatload of completely incommensurable feelings/understandings in addition to that (though I doubt it is, personally), but Lewis's argument stands if any component of faith ends up as consenting to some proposition, regardless of what else faith constitutes.

I think it'd be a hard argument to make that any Christian could talk about their faith without assenting to a proposition as an integral part of that discussion.

Hear Desmond Tutu's faith being discussed above. It's replete with propositions about the nature of the God he has faith in and the consequences of that nature are cashed out in exactly the way they would be if 'God' were replaced with 'King'. there seem to be no special laws of cause and effect invoked, no unique moral concepts (he uses 'good', 'right', 'awful', 'reverence', 'autonomy'... and fully expects us to know what the words mean). His faith seems to be describable in ways which require no incommensurable concepts here.

Even though the cause of his faith might be incommensurable - he might have to say "It's just a feeling, you wouldn't get it unless you had it" - what it is he has faith in seems entirely translatable to secular language -

He (Tutu) can do the 'wrong' thing and God won't strike him down with a thunderbolt because God cares about Tutu's autonomy and wants him to make the 'right' choice on his own.

We (the subjects) can do the 'wrong' thing and Our King won't strike us down with a sword because Our King cares about our autonomy and wants us to make the 'right' choice on our own.

At the very least, if Christians really do believe that the subject (rather than just the origin) of their faith is non-translatable to secular terms, then one would expect them to do a good deal less talking than we actually find!

Mostly because such propositional attitudes are so mercurial. — Banno

It might surprise you then to learn how mercurial neural networks are. The concept is known as redundancy and degenerative architecture (or just degeneracy). Excellent primer here. Basically, neural networks do not seem to be restricted to carrying out (representing) only one task (mental state), but rather can carry out different (usually related - but not always) tasks, in sequence. So there's plenty of room, no worries on that score, but... On what grounds are they 'the same' or 'different' tasks then? Which I think is where you're going with...

If we examine person 1001, who claims to believe that the door is open, and do not find in them that specific neural network, do we conclude that we have not identified the correct specific network, or do we conclude that they do not really believe the door is open? — Banno

...yes?

I'd agree with you here. I think we make a mistake if we model beliefs only in a single brain. Beliefs (for me) are a relationship between the state of some neural network (a snapshot of it), the world it's trying to model, and (for us anyway) the relationship between that system (neural state-world) and other people's systems toward the same part of the world. How do we know it's 'the same part of the world'? I think the system is iterative and constructive, so it's collaboratively built, me-society-world, we create a unified model using the consistency of the world's hidden states in the same way as one might use a primary key in a database, to link the models we each have.

So my belief that the door is open cannot be just a state of some neural network (though it is encoded in such a state - which is where I think I misunderstood your position previously), it's a relationship between a model I have (which is a neural network), and the hidden state of the world (the door), and the models other people have (neural networks), of what we assume (by constant experimentation and communication) is the same hidden state, the primary key by which we create social constructions like 'door'.

So I don't see a problem with saying that my belief is a model (a neural network) in my brain, but we get stuck when we want to say what it is a belief that..., it's just a belief (in my brain) a tendency to act some way or other. But to get a belief that... we need both a world toward which that belief intends to act, and a social construction (lots of us all trying to get our models of the same hidden states to vaguely match) to fill out the ellipses.

Non-social creatures, of course, only have the first part, or the second is of trivial importance. I'm not wedded to the idea of calling what they have a belief, but I'm not averse to it either.

My apologies for this not being clearly expressed. — Banno

No worries, I bet a random sample of readers would understand your post to a considerably greater degree than my response!

A worm demonstrates functions of consciousness. — frank

Maybe. I'm not trying to draw a line here, I'm trying to establish the line you want to draw. The type of thing/process 'intention' is reserved for.

I know a tad about computer architecture. There are no purposes in there. — frank

Yet "what's the purpose of that wire?" is not an incoherent question.

Almost the exact reply I've just written to Srap. I think we're very much on the same page here.

So basically, you can't condemn these people without condemning anyone who wants revenge. — frank

Happy with that.

Articles of faith don't hook up to whatever proposition-handling machinery you might imagine being handy elsewhere. (Gathering evidence, testing, refining, etc.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's true, but they must have some ties into the world, else what are they by little antigonish's? They need coherence, implication, consequence...something like that, to be real at all in a social world. I'm happy with incomplete commensurability, but not with no commensurability. No commensurability just means we have an entire mental world without a single tie-in to ours and that seems completely implausible on the face of it. It's not a good model of the behaviour we actually see.

So if there are some threads of commensurability, we can tug on them.

Not to mention the fact that Christians, bless them, are a part of our world, and moral actors within it. If we simply set them outside of our moral talk we undermine the whole project of morality (which is about us, not about me, you, them). Morality relies on at least a sufficient degree of commensurability to give a baseline of understanding common to all in the community.

I think that baseline, that commensurability, is in the concept of moral judgement. A Christian child doesn't need to understand the bible to understand that hitting people to get sweets is wrong. Christian adults don't routinely consult their bible or their priest in novel situations to work out who they should and should not spit in the eye of. So it seems 'wrong' comes first, religion then tries to piggyback off that to say 'here's some other things that are also 'wrong' you might not have thought of'. So with the most charitable interpretation I can muster, I find it virtually impossible to believe that a Christian has an incommensurable understanding of 'wrong'.

It's raining can be translated into a mathematical term: hence, it is both an independent fact and mode of expression. Do that for every linguistic mode of expression you have some qualms with and boom, everything relates back to its independent fact. — john27

That sounds consistent. We'd need to see the demonstration of reducing "it's raining" to mathematical terms.

although we can never be 100% sure we have knowledge, we can reasonably believe that we do, while still acknowledging that we could be wrong. — Janus

Yes, I think that's perfectly coherent. It's just not how I think language works. For me, there's a difference between something which we can't be 100% sure about for pragmatic reasons and something we cannot be 100% sure of definitionally. For me, the 'truth' of whether the cat is on the mat, is simply the state of belief my community of epistemic peers would have about the world if they threw every test possible at it. The ultimate champion model. So, it's plausible, but pragmatically unachievable. That way I could say that I think my model is the ultimate champion model, but I can't be sure because I can't actually carry out the tasks required to check.

But with 'truth' meaning something other than 'justification' (of the ultimate champion model type), some sort of additional property a belief could have...well... I just grind to a halt there. I don't know what it would be for my model of the world's hidden states not just to be accurate (survive all tests), but to actually somehow be the same as the external world, match it precisely (where precisely means something other than predictive function). I've honestly no idea what that might mean.

We've been skirting around it, but I suspect this whole issue comes down to this incomprehensibility (for me) of non-pragmatic notions of 'truth'.

I like the use of “invoke” there: you pray to your gods, they pray to theirs. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, indeed. Did you notice how I avoided using the word 'narrative'. I think I've grown.

I'm going to start at the end...

Is God beyond our petty and all too tellurian morality? But if so, then why follow his edicts, why pursue a place in heaven? — Isaac


Because you have faith. — Srap Tasmaner

Faith in what?

Faith that God exists? Faith that he is what the bible claims him to be? Faith that he's right about everything? These are three quite different faiths with quite different ramifications for the matter in question.

One can have faith that God exists and still need to address the issue I raised in my previous posts. His mere existence (even as the creator of the universe) does not necessitate that one either agree with or worship him.

If one has faith that God is right/good, then one still does not escape the final two questions. Is one's faith (one's feeling) that God is right according to one's own definition of 'right'? Faith is still some sort of a feeling, and more so it's a feeling that such and such... so we can still analyse the implications thereof.

Even if we imagine the extremes of a Christian entirely overcome by rapture, they will emerge with a deep and unshakeable faith that...

So It makes sense still to ask, of this faith, what is it a faith in. Is it that God is good, that God is right? Both these terms ('good' and 'right') have meanings which are embedded in human culture. I still don't see how our gloriously enraptured Christian escapes having to decide what to do about the fact that he now unquestioningly has faith that, say, God is good.

If God is described as doing something which our COG feels is not good, then what does he do. His faith that God is good is unshakeable. Not, as you rightly say, a decision he makes, but a foundational principle. He's still got to decide if God's version of good is different to his, or if his version of good is no longer to be trusted. Some decision has to be made as to how to handle the dissonance. If God orders the genocide of the children of Belial for worshipping false Gods, does that mean genocide is OK, or that God's playing by his own rules? If the latter, then what about heaven. Is that only a 'good' place by god's rules (lots of genocide and psalms), in which case is that where our Christian wants to be? These are questions, note, that still need answering even with a completely unshakeable faith that God is 'good'.

Or maybe the faith is that God is 'right'. That whatever he does or instructs is the right thing to do? But again, our Christian has to answer to what he means by 'right' in his unshakeable belief that God is it. 'Right' as in best for everyone concerned? Best in the long run?, Best for the chosen ones, but not the others? Best for God?

Alternatively I suppose, he could have faith that x is simply the right thing for him to do (where x is some Christian doctrine or other). That gets us around what 'right' and 'good' mean (for they're interpreted just as the person concerned means them), but then every action is simply laid out before them. what purpose do the scriptures and the sermons serve?

...I've run out of ways I can think of that a person could have faith, but I may not have scraped the pot. Have I missed what you mean by 'faith'?

We’re here because Banno believes Davidson refuted incommensurability in all its forms, and that means religious experience must be translatable without loss into terms he can understand. I doubt that — Srap Tasmaner

I doubt that too. @Banno and I have a difference of opinion about incommensurability, but I don't think it's relevant here. I'm trying to argue that we don't need to understand the nature of Christian belief to talk about the consequences and decisions for the Christian which result from believing that...

in summary...

no Christian believes themselves to be in a position to evaluate God’s job performance. — Srap Tasmaner

Agreed. But they are, regardless, in a position to have to decide what to do about that.

There's an incredibly poignant story here about oppression and the ways it twists the soul (so to speak.). It's sad that in the quest to shit on somebody else you folks are missing that story. — frank

Well do expand then. I'd hate to miss a good story.

Well you said "conscious species." You can't be a functionalist and use that kind of language. — frank

I define 'conscious' (earlier in this thread, even, I think) as a process of logging certain mental states to memory. So I think I can be functionalist and still use that language (if I wanted to be functionalist, that is). I used to be flat out behaviourist, in fact. You wouldn't recognise me in my earlier work.

"Directedness" just sounds teleological. At the chemical level we just need chemicals and no purposeful events. — frank

Yeah, maybe. But all those chemicals are instructed by a mind which is itself several models which have a function. I don't have any problem in saying that the purpose of the printer cable is carry information from the computer to the printer, or that the purpose of some sub-routine in the program is to translate the key inputs into binary code. None of these has purpose as a system isolated, but it has purpose as part of the larger machine. It has a purpose given the purpose of the machine of which it is part.

But there's nothing in philosophical about "They suck" — frank

True. I hardly think that's a fair summary though.

It's about bad people [not?] getting away with their crimes. — frank

Is it. How do we know they're 'bad' people if the arbiter of justice must be divine. If we abdicate moral judgement to some higher authority, then it might be the 'good' people being punished, or we end up only tautologically concluding that it is 'the punished' who are punished.

For us to have faith that God will punish the 'bad' people we must also have faith that his notions of 'good' and 'bad' are similar to ours.

But if they're similar to ours, then what need do we have of scripture?

If they're dissimilar to ours (as the Bible seems to indicate), then why support them?

Yes, agreed. All this helps. So, how's that working for us so far? — Roger Gregoire

We don't know - people are barely doing it because we've been sold the fantasy that the vaccine will save us like some Disney prince, so there's barely any investment in protecting the vulnerable at all, they're still stuffed in overcrowded, understaffed, under-ventilated, under-supplied health facilities, and half the world still doesn't have access to a vaccine for it's vulnerable because the parasitic arseholes who run the pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about their quarterly profits than they are about people's lives and won't release the fucking patents, that we fucking paid for them to discover in the first place...

If the woman is truly vulnerable, then a vaccine won't protect her (as evidenced by empirical evidence). — Roger Gregoire

What empirical evidence? Literally all the available evidence is that the vaccines are highly effective at reducing the risk of severe outcomes in the vulnerable. Do you have some contrary studies?

There is nothing "inefficient or risky" about it. This has been Mother-Natures way of protecting mankind for eons. — Roger Gregoire

The second sentence is unrelated to the first. The risk is obvious - that the person you think is 'healthy' turns out not to be and actually increases the number of viruses in 'the room'. A risk completely eliminated by just leaving the vulnerable person in isolation and cleaning her room.

There are many tens of thousands of experts/scientists that see the logical flaw in Dr. Fauci's advice/opinion — Roger Gregoire

I don't doubt that for a moment (and have written extensively about it). The point here is that they don't agree with you either. Most scientists who disagree with Fauci's approach advocate a policy of protecting the the vulnerable with vaccines, healthcare, social distancing, masking, and hygiene.

Again, if you know of any scientists who agree with you, then cite them, otherwise we're just making shit up, and that's a pointless and dangerous exercise.

People use the phrase “you’re wrong” when they disagree with the other person. — Michael

Rarely, in my experience. They mostly use it when they disagree with the other person and they think the other person ought to believe what they themselves believe (or they want to signal as such to others). That's why we don't often say "you're wrong" when we disagree about minor tastes, or matters which are complex and difficult to judge (like scientific theories).

So no. Here "you're wrong" is used in a context where we'd reasonably expect an appeal to rational thinking (an 'argument', a set of reasons, some justification). The implication of "you're wrong" in a discussion forum whose sole purpose is to exchange reasons, is that you have some.

Hence my joke. Your comment, unargued for, unsupported, was acting like it's pointing out the obvious, as if I'd look and say "oh yes, you're right, so I am, I hadn't noticed"

I’ve been expressing my disagreement — Michael

Your disagreement is not under scrutiny, your reasons are.

It’s almost as if you understood something else by my claim that you’re wrong. I wonder what that could possibly be. — Michael

I did, and I explained above what the 'else' is. Justifications

What do you mean by “whether it actually is raining”? Are you referring to your beliefs? — Michael

No, as I've said quite a few times now, in expressions like this I'm referring to the notion of the beliefs a community of my epistemic peers would have once they've thrown all the tests they can think of at it...which is clearly not the same notion (though might have the same content) as the belief I currently hold.

The reality is Lewis nor anyone else will ever be able to know why every individual believes what he or she believes or even precisely what they believe or how they interpret religious texts. — laura ann

you want to find their faith wanting, without bothering to understand it. Indeed, there may be a barrier there: — Srap Tasmaner

I don't read either the article, nor @Banno's OP as an attempt to 'understand' why Christians think they way they do. We could invoke upbringing, group membership tokens, and cognitive biases to have that job done in a jiffy... I read it more as a simple ethical question. God is presented as behaving in ways which we humans think of as unethical (or at the very least ignoble). The Bible is quite unequivocal on those matters, no matter what might later be said about his many redeeming qualities. So we're left, no matter our actual beliefs, with a quandry to solve.

Is God beyond our petty and all too tellurian morality? But if so, then why follow his edicts, why pursue a place in heaven? Simply having created the place doesn't seem sufficient ( I don't follow the moral code of the architect every time I enter a new building).

Is the Bible perhaps a loose allegory, not to be interpreted so literally? But if do, then whence organised religion? If all that remains is a general message to be kind, share stuff, and forgive, it seems our ancestors of many thousand years ago already had that nailed. The message seems more like a wistful reminiscence than the bureaucratic edifice of scripture, sermon, authority and rite we see in modern Christianity.

Is the accusations that believing in God equates to approving of him misguided? Maybe, but this then raises the interesting moral question of doctrine/law vs morality. If Christians don't follow God's law in any way then I think we're back to the problem above (Christianity becoming a meaningless distinction from just 'nice'). If they do, then what are we to make of the relationship between morality and law? That the former should be subservient to the latter?

Understanding Christian psychology and discussing Christian ethics are two separate things. The OP, as a understand it, is about the latter.

People get infected by being in contaminated environments. Period. — Roger Gregoire

So clean the environment. It's quite simple. SARS‑CoV‑2 is killed quite easily, most anti-bacterial wipes will do it, soap and water, just time with UV light, opening a window will clear many airborne particles...

Or give the vulnerable woman a vaccine so she can do the virus-killing herself.

You still haven't answered my question as to why you're even discussing such a massively inefficient and risky strategy as using a healthy person's immune system to do the virus-killing when there are so many less risky and more efficient methods.

Nor is this just an American thing. The UK government have recently approved the roll out to children against the advice of their own Advisory committee (the JCVI).

Anyone who thinks governments are 'following the science' is dangerously deluded. Finding some scientists who say what they want to hear and ignoring, smearing and sacking the rest, does not constitute 'following the science'.

I honestly wouldn't want you as a pandemic manager, — jorndoe

So who would you want as pandemic manager? The government?

A little query for you (and any other nothing-to-see-here, business as usual advocates) to help me to see the other side of...

The following is mainly from Vinay Prasad's blog, I'm going to paraphrase...

In April 2021 Pfizer CEO declared "People will likely need a booster shot of Pfizer's vaccine within 12 months"

Immediately, the CDC, the WHO and various vaccine advisory boards responded, with Fauci saying it should be a 'public health decision' and Pfizer should not be making such announcements. The WHO were even more condemnatory.

In July 2021 Pfizer announced they would be seeking FDA approval for their boosters.

A few days later, there was a private meeting between Pfizer officials and the White House administration.

A short while later, the White House launched a media campaign advocating boosters in defiance of the advice from the WHO, the advice from their own FDA, the advice from their own ACIP, and the advice from several independent experts.

The Director and Deputy Director of the FDA's Office of Vaccine Products both resigned over the political influence on scientific advice and wrote a paper for the Lancet detailing their concerns https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext as well as several pieces in popular newspapers.

The White House declared a meeting (with the newly standing-in FDA team and the ACIP) to respond to the article. Both teams of scientific advisers recommend scaling back the booster advice to only the more elderly population.

Walensky (CDC Director - a government appointee) unilaterally overrides the advice of all of her advisors, yet again, to roll out boosters to all age groups.

They are told, in no uncertain terms that this is unscientific - by the former chiefs of vaccine safety at the FDA, by the former FDA vaccine Advisor Paul Offit, by several independent experts, by their own Advisory committee (the ACIP), their own Vaccines and Related Biological Product Advisory Committee, and by the WHO.

In December, they expand the booster programme to 16-17 year olds with no new evidence and all their advisory boards advising against it.

---

So, the question for you is - what happened at that private meeting that gives you such confidence in the government's approach here?

Did the Pfizer officials hand over some super robust scientific evidence that neither the WHO, the ACIP, the VRBAC, Harvard and Maryland Medical Schools, nor their own advisors had access to?

Or did they offer a substantial donation to party funds?

And these are the people you'd prefer to have in charge of pandemic policy? People who ignore the advice of literally all of their scientific advisory boards to pursue a political (or worse, economic) agenda?

I think of beliefs as being more obstinate than expectations. For example say I always put my keys in a particular place; then I 'automatically' expect them to be there even though I know that sometimes I fail to put them there. On the other hand if asked whether I believe they are there I might say 'no' because I acknowledge I might have put them somewhere else, someone might have moved them, and so on. — Janus

Interesting, thanks. I've run into a lot of trouble for lack of a full grasp of just how many different ideas there are of what 'belief' means. I've been in something of an echo-chamber in terms of the working definition of belief, and talking about these ideas in a wider community has proven problematic on that account.

it's worth noting that we have language not just for agreement and disagreement (i.e., whether our model matches up with other people's models), but also for being correct and mistaken (i.e., whether our models match up with the world we are modeling).

Consider a Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island who doesn't communicate with anyone. Mistakes in his world modeling can be costly (nope, no precipice there...) — Andrew M

I can definitely see the need for our models to at least be consistent with the world (they don't have to match, just work), but I don't see a role for language in that. Are you thinking of the link between grammar, naming, and though enabling?

at least part of this discomfort regarding modality is rooted in the idea that models of neural networks don't seem to compute possibilities, they tend to compute probabilities. — fdrake

Were there other reasons you thought that employing modality as Chalmers does might not be okay? — fdrake

No, the above pretty much covers it. It sounded too much like the 'other' option was part of the decision-making process, as if it's likelihood (or lack of it) helped determine the decision to maintain the prior, and I don't see that being the main case. Like the prior might be 'that's a dog' and somehow establishing that 'well, if it's not a dog then it must be a unicorn and that seems very unlikely' helps decide that it is, in fact, a dog. I can see situations at higher level processing where that might be the case, but rarely, and even then it's still falls under the general case of 'have I got any reason not think that's a dog?', which seems to me to be a better way of expressing Bayesian inference than the modality Chalmers introduces.

I'm not really convinced by that reasoning, but there you go. — fdrake

Yeah, me neither, but good effort, it's good to treat the positions of others as charitably as possible (seems in rather short supply these days). I was thinking that a sort of modal tree could be built where options were gradually eliminated at each branch such that we could maintain the rest of Chalmer's model. A kind of one-by-one checking to see if there's reasons not to hold the prior, but that seemed too much like unnecessarily elbowing his work into my preferred model...

the microsaccades having directional biases towards required coloured stimuli. Assuming that the content of the attentional template of a microsaccade has its information being passed about the brain in the way you mentioned, anyway. — fdrake

Yeah, that's the idea. All very much to play for though in terms of this cashing out in what these links actually do (although I'm not bang up to date on this anymore).

Hold up. What do you mean by "conscious" here? What is a worm missing that it would need in order to be conscious? — frank

I meant 'conscious of...'

Not that you couldn't ask the same question there too, but I'm really just trying to get at whatever distinction you're applying to 'intent' that you think a sub-conscious process couldn't satisfy the definition. You want to reserve the word for some types of directed behaviour but not others, right?