Difference and Repetition majorly.

Obviously, I'm putting into specific analytical terms with respect to the point of contention. I don't think, you'll find him saying things like "All things are a difference itself, never subject to alteration" because it's horribly misleading in any wider context (which he usually works in). Things are always changing, new differences coming into being, other ones passing out. The world is never still like moments of our logical analysis.

Joshs' approach is a strange inversion in this respect. They appear to be trying to do an analytical analysis of logical distinctions, of difference between things, yet they speak like they were just talking about what was here one moment and gone the next. I do wonder what the distinctions are meant to be if they are nothing more than our language or experience. Are we the distinctions being spoken about? Am I the keyboard I'm using write this message?

I'm pretty salty here because it is this kind of idea, supposing forms define the distinction between things, which Difference and Repetition is critiquing/rejecting/refuting.

Deleuze doesn't put difference before identity (at least in the sense you seem to be using it here), he puts "prior" to form. For Delueze, the identity of a thing by this difference itself. The distinction between things, between you and me, between one rock and another, between one plastic spoon and another, is not found in any of those forms or linguistic which might present. Each has an identity on account of difference itself. No matter how similar or not in form, the logical distinction of a particular thing is given by this difference. Were there no difference, there would nothing with identity to possess a form.

In this respect, Deleuze is refuting these kind suggestions of relativism, chaos, indeterminacy. Unlike in Derrida's analysis, which puts us in a swirl of language, or Heidegger who puts us in the whims of Dasein, Deleuze is specifically pointing a thing and its identity are beyond us. They are true by difference itself, not by our particular interpretation or experience.

For all the chaos and indeterminacy of the world, Deleuze is pointing out difference/identity of things is never subject to change. All things are a difference itself, never subject to alteration, no matter how someone might complain we are now speaking different. (change, is of course, also around, but that's given in new differences, in repetitions).

In terms of this thread, Deleuze more or less agrees with SX's position. The major point of difference itself is to recognise distinctions between things aren't made by our interpretations or experience.

I'm talking about the context of the statement, about what they hold women to be in society and to others. It's not a question of emotional harm (there would no doubt be some women who like the idea of being their husbands possession and have a positive emotional response to Scruton's connect). The concern is about the idea of who women are and who they ought to be.

Offence laws are miswritten in stating emotional harm. Emotional harm is a common response to being subjected to the actions which come under those laws, but is it not how they are hateful or discriminatory. The reason is the status or expectations about the group in question. In this case, the idea women are just objects for men .
The issue isn't women being emotionally upest. It's Scruton's understanding of who women are and ought to be. His statement would still be sexist if no women was upset by it and every women agreed with it.

I'm not describing him as a sexist because of some kind that of emotional feeling, I'm doing so because it is a fact of his understanding of women, that he holds they are just objects. No prejudging, I'm just describing what his understanding of women holds.

It does apply because the in question is defined not on a comparison between intentions of men and women, but by the effect on a woman. The effect of denying women volition and action is given not by whether or not the same is done to man, but on the impact it has on women.

Yes, I would. My response would not be exactly the same, since there isn't the same expectation men should be passive things, with no act or personal involvement. While Scruton wouldn't be latching on to the same social expectation of passivity in the case of men, it would still define a relationship by objectification and possession. In that respect, it has all the same pitfalls. No-one should be approaching their relationship like it was just them achieving something.

My point was the comment had more in that just a case against general masturbation. He specifically referred to how a woman touching her clitoris was terribly because then the man wouldn't be in his rightful postion as sole actor/pleasure giver.

I care entirely about the context he's speaking in here: that the act is so terrible because it means the woman is more than a man's object.

At the moment, I'm not interested about how sexually repressive it is or not (though there are those arguments to be made). I'm concerned about the sexist notion of a relationship he is advocating, for the damage it will do. Primary to women, for how presents a woman with her own action and volition as disgusting.

But it's also terrible for men, what is the man who cannot satisfy his wife with his penis to do? He is doomed to an abject failure, who cannot request the help of his wife. It's a shit understanding that a relationship is made by possessing. (in this case, to be the man who is the sole actor bringing his wife sexual pleasure, as if it were just a game he was playing).

I'll have to get to the other stuff later. I've got to get ready to go out.

I find it too eager to abandon the question of what one is doing to others. The distinction between "sexist" and "a person who does something sexist" is not one I'm down with.

People are always rasing the distinction to contrast their moral worth against those who are "the actual sexists." Supposedly, they get to hold they are really just fine in their actions, for it is someone else who is the real monstrous sexist. It's a comparison which doesn't take the effect of their action seriously.

In this social context, people are described as sexist for a good reason: to indicate what they've done is not some trival act, but one of morally seriousness (just like the stuff monstrous sexists do).

The guilt analysis doesn't fit with my experiences, even amongst "Tumblr" style communities people are always complaining about. I've have seen "wokeness" turned into a social credit and used in popularity contexts, but this is distinct from guilt.

In my experience of these sort of communities, let's call them intersectional, guilt doesn't factor into much. Coming from a position of knowing structural power relations, there's not really space for this kind of guilt.

If one has done something sexist in past, for example, it's a descriptive fact one has done something sexist/was sexist. One can regret or be ashamed of what they did, but agonising gulit isn't part of equation. You know you were sexist. You can't do anything about it or change it. You know you can only to better in the future.

Gulit, it seems to me, is a response or implication taken by those who do not understand this social context. Those who are unwilling to accept they have done wring. People who cannot stand the thought of being sexist because it would mean they've done something wrong.

I don't doubt guilt is choking people, but it's not found from people identifying sexists, even in Tumblr popularity hunts. It in our unwillingness to accept we have done wrong. We are guilty because we insist we could never be the type of person who is a sexist.

It's got nothing to do with a general postion against masturbation nor the sexual revolution. The sexism of the statement is in the expectation the man will be the only one who takes action within a relationship.

He didn't attack any old masturbation in that context, he specifically spoke of the women touching herself during coitus, only account it was meant to be the sole provision of the man to deliver her pleasure within their sanctified relationship-- that the man would (and should) be disgusted she took some action, felt something, unless he was the one doing it.

It's a toxic and possessive masculinity which doesn't recognise the woman as a person within the relationship.

Far worse than that: it's a deeply sexist expectation that woman must have no interest in her own pleasure when engaged in sex with a man.

He attacks the important point without quarter: that our meaning is given through tradition. We have to remember these traditionalists, to Nietzsche, are nihilists: they suppose we are meaningless and that, through these traditions, we become meaningful brings (i.e. "if there is no God, life is meaningless/there is no truth).

For these traditionalists, Nietzsche is the ultimate enemy. He denies the terms of their tradition. He puts meaning is us (regardless of our tradition! ) and the world, denying it's a specific tradition (e.g. God, Christianity, maleness, femaleness, etc.) gives us meaning. Nietzsche sees value in tradtion, but he refutes what matter these traditionalist, that we are meaningless unless we follow a specific tradition.

With respect to similarities between Nietzsche and other "postmodernists", it in that both worldly focused. In describing and analysing social situations, they describe what people are doing in society. They describe relationships of power between people and how this forms their social situations. Neither accept people and society formed on the basis of these traditional narratives in question.

Insofar as "postmodernism" is used in relation to philosophers, there is a reason Nietzsche is counted. The critcism of "postmodernism" isn't directed at what a philosopher says (none of them are nihilsts or reject objective truths). It's a vauge response to denying the application of some kind of tradition narrative.

The "postmodernist" philosopher is misunderstood to be a nihilist or rejecting objective turth on account of abandoning a traditional narrative which is understood to be a source of meaning.

For gender studies, for example, the movement away from the tradition of what a man must be and a women must be, is understood to be destroying the tradition that gives meaning to life.
Hence they are "nihilists" and "subjectvists", since they are understood to be abandoning the only objective truth. (the fact they are making objective arguments about people and their relations doesn't matter to these critics).

Nietzsche is counted because he is an arch-anti traditionalist. He attacks our religious, philosophical and moral traditions without quarter. Indeed, he utterly refutes the idea traditions are accounts or our existence or the reason for our living. For Nietzsche, no-one lacks value and needs to have it granted by a tradition. He utterly undermines what the traditionalist understands to be objectivity. He makes us all worldly and our accounts of ourselves a question of what states of the world do.

I'm coming from a Deleuzian postion, but I don't think it's really a counter. The moves made by SX suggest to me he's been trying to talk about a certain kind of relation to us all along. I don't think they're after existence itself (difference itself), but a specific kind of relation formed by these differences.

SX is talking about the concepts we have beyond pure difference, certain conceptual relations of form and how they are defined. The point, I think, is these conceptual distinctions mean something. They aren't just an arbitrary whim of an interprating actor. Scepticism wins no battles here.

We can use pure difference to understand this consequence. Difference itself is the present of an object. If something is so, difference has defined it, amounts to the presence of a thing (and its absence; it will be unless another difference comes along).

At this point must bring formal relations back in. The object I'm considering may be pure difference and present only in difference itself, but that's not all it is.

These objects, these differences are actors and performers upon our plane of forms and phenomena. They aren't just differences, but differences which do something in relation to each other, in relation to us.

The screen I'm looking at, for example, is a pure difference. It's not existent by its form. At any moment it might disappear or even turn into a flower. I cannot use the forms I expect of it to judge whether it exists.

This, however, doesn't mean my screen is without form and its impacts upon me. My screen may possibly do anything, but that does not mean it does nothing. On the contrary, the difference of my screen does a lot of very specific things to me. It's my visual interface for communicating messages on this forum, for example. If it turns into a flower, it will do other very specific things to me.

In any case, the screen, the pure difference, the screen is acting upon me in certain ways. The difference (the existence of the screen) has consequences for my experience and my relations. The difference and its effects, are neither a whim of language (Derrida) nor ultimately mysterious and inaccessible (Heidegger).

In short, I agree with what SX is saying. I just think they've misdiagnosed the object of their critique. SX isn't attempting to talk about existence itself, to get beyond any talk of relations. They are trying to talk about the impacts of a difference itself (a thing that exists) upon the world of relations, the forms and relations a given difference performs in its presence.

So it's that not our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers because they have 'essential properties', but because what we call houses (the kinds of things we count as being houses) are not the kinds of things that turn into what we (happen to) call flowers (what we count as being flowers). So at stake here is a question of intelligibility, not properties and (substantial) essences. Or, if essences, then essences pertaining to what we count, call, or recognize as houses and flowers: a question of how we relate to the world around us, and not questions about the world 'in itself'. — StreetlightX

I'm uneasy about this because it would seem that it is our kind of houses and our kind of flowers which are always at stake.

It seems to me there is no situation in which we would not be talking about our kind of house or flower. In any case, we are referencing an object beyond its form(s) (the difference itself), no matter where it might be located. In this respect, there is no distinction between a real or fictional house of flower. Both are our kind of houses and flowers, they are just happening in different places/we are experiencing them in different places.

Faced with the object (difference itself), it's not just what we call an object which no longer matters, our very concepts of the object become disrupted because they are no longer constitutive of it. No object is so on account of its concept, not merely in what we name it. Only the object itself, difference itself, can be the presence of a thing. Form is as epiphenomenal as a name.

To be concerned with "kinds of things which do not turn into other kinds of things," even in the sense of intelligibility you are talking about, would still seem to be caught in questions of how we relate to there world. When we move to the world itself, I don't think it intelligible to speak about "kinds of things," even in a conceptual sense, as that is really our relation.

With difference itself, it would seem we could only ever speak of difference in relation to a distinction of kind. That's to say, we can take a difference itself and say that it might be any kind of thing.

You say it when you insist "women," whomever that is meant to be, then assert they must of some kind of weakness, which supposedly makes men, whomever that is meant to be, superior.

This is greatly sexist in at least four ways.

Firstly, you apply there is some trait which applies to all women, such that you are free to assume and conclude it about any individual you encounter. You have a narrative insisting women will have these weaknesses without taking into account the fact of whether it is true or an individual.

Secondly, you got an implicit value judgment about what having a trait means. In instances where women do have a certain emotional trait, you've taken it to be a weakness which affects her value and trustworthiness, when if fact the emotional trait may either be just irrelevant (she does what she's meant to well anyway) or even a strength (for the task she's doing, the emotional trait provides a benefit).

Thirdly, as others have pointed out, you take implications from studies which are not there. You haven't even substantiated women have this trait of weakness you're describing.

Fourth, you use this supposed weakness as a bludgeon to disregard the input of women. The way you've positioned women implies this supposed weakness makes their input irrelevant or untrustworthy. You seem to suppose, not-women (and I assume you) have some kind of upperhand in commenting on what is true or engaging in reasoning.

This an assertion of the superiority of not-women.
It's not loving or respecting women. You are positioning them as irrelevant and disregard what they might have to say.

I mean it entirely earnestly. (and it is a contrast, hence the emphasis, to Peterson's approach of suggesting our social organisation is given by a tradition myth).

Foucault's method of takes observation of our society seriously. Instead of approaching our social relationships in terms of whether they follow a myth or tradition, he looks at how we are states of the world who have produced a particular social organisation through our actions and social expectations.

The move is analogous to when we shift from insisting the causality of the world is given in myth, to act of observing and describing what the world is doing. Foucault does it with our social organisation in relation to our culture and structures of power.

Any distraction from the Brexit debacle will do?

Diffuse is probably worse to Peterson. It means understanding a social relation though the specific and individual, rather than a lens of a singular tradition.


It's hard to cite the meaning of a myth as one's social origin, when you concive one's social situation as an individual event caused by a range of complex interactions with many other things and people.

It's actually the analysis of power which Peterson has a problem with. All the stuff about "postmodern" is circling a certain move of social analysis, in which social relationships and expressions of power are understood.

Peterson, for lack of a better term, is a certain sort of traditionalist, who understands the organisation of society based on a certain kind of our myth. In his view our society is organised by meaning of myths. It's not, as Foucault analyses, a set of material states organised through how people exist and relate to each other.

For Peterson, it doesn't matter Foucault is aligned with some version of neo-liberalism and capitalism. The way Foucault analyses society is too scientific . Describing our society being organised in terms of how people exist and relate to each other tosses Peterson's precious myths. It means we understand the organisation of our society to be formed by our existence, by how we choose to treat people, rather than through a mythical tradition.

For the mythical identies of Peterson, his supporters and the closely aligned alt right, this is never acceptable because it topples the mythical tradition as the means by which social organisation occurs.

Not throwing gay people of buildings is better.

This doesn't make The West better than everyone else. We used to do it to.

Sometimes places start up again or make things worse (e.g. Brunei recently, 19th England specifically codifying homosexuality and its punishments, etc.). Other places may change just have we did. Throwing gay people off buildings isn't and essential Muslim trait any more than it is a Western one. Muslims have as much reason, from a Muslims point of view, to undo this cultural aspect of murdering gay people as the West did.

It's insulting to equate a people, their entire history and culture with nasty aspects of culture at one time or another. Imagine, for example, suggesting we ought to replace (or "assimilate" ) Notre Dame (since its a topical Western achievement) and Christianity with another culture because our Western, Christian culture abused gay people terribly 150 years ago? Absurd. People and culture are more complex.

In these general terms, all cultures and people live and build things of value. All of them are bound to an ethical responsibility of creating a community. The fact people and their culture are not just their horrors or abuses is something everyone has. One culture or people doesn't become essentially better because , at one point, they stop murdering gay people. Such horrors are present cultural aspects to be overcome, not reasons to abandon entire cultures and history.

For sure, but it's not about a specific cause, it's about a result. Are capable women contributing? If not, quotas address that problem (aside from specific instances in which women are almost entirely disinterested/don't have the skills to enter form outside), whether we are talking people direct intervening to keep women out or some kind of instance or a wider social context in which capable women haven't been interested.

Again, people are being picked on merit here because we are discussing capable women. An organisation concerned with merit has nothing to fear because the people the quota insists they pick are capable. In terms of merit, there is no reason for an organisation to complain.

Quotas work on the opposite basis, that's to say, because of the capability of women (whether equal or greater than a man), we get more of them in position, bypassing other cultural elements which would overlook capable women in favour of men.

The objection of merit doesn't work in this context because the issue at stake is that capable women are being excluded. Remember, the question of capability isn't a status by which we judge whether one person gets a position over another capable person, it's a measure of whether someone fits skills and knowledge of the position.

As such, merit objections to quotas contain the underlying assumption that women are not capable. If women are capable, there is no objection to be made, on the grounds of capability, about them getting a position by a quota (or any other means).

I'm not sure the comment was addressing those issues.

It just seemed to be commenting on how our statements lose subjective character because we talk about things outside ourselves.

I can follow it.

We are subjective entities who make statements to report to objective things. Our statements are, however, states of our own existence and out talk about existing things.

Thus, our statements lose the subjective character of only being us or about ourselves. They talk about things outside. Things which are true (or not) regardless of our belief.

I like to disrupt that thought process because people cannot beyond the object they are no longer seeing.

My question in these situations runs more like this: since the person has looked away, how do they have any evidence the tree is gone? They aren't looking that spot anymore... they don't have a leg to stand on empirically.

I'm going to be a little bit meaner. In terms of the "independent world" set out in leo's quote, I don't think it can be coherently rejected. Even if we take existing things depend upon u to exist, they are still distinct from us.

If the tree is only there when I am looking at, it doesn't make my experience the tree.

Even if the presence of our experiences is causal of the things we see, our experience is still a window into the independent (i.e. things which are not our experiences). You cannot get out of this even taking an idealist position in which things we experience only exist due to the presence of our experience.

I tend to think there is less of a difference in that context than we might expect. In either case, I think "subjective" is referring to the fact the object of discussion is one person and never any other.

It saying the fact, be it the presence of a memory or a preference for vanilla, in question is formed entirely in this individual and so cannot be true on other terms (often referred to as "objective." ).

I think Banno is correct here. "Experience of remembering" is a more detailed reference to what is present in the instance of someone "remembering." It's specially talking about how an experience is occurring aninstance of "remembering".

Some of the statements made in the OP are, but they just don't mean what the OP says they do.

I pick one to show you what I mean.

"Beauty is only relative or culturally dependent."

Lots of people say this one. I'll eliminate the edgy "subjectivist" who equate it with their opinion, since The OP is talking about in the context of social analysis.

In term of analysing who we are and our social relations, beauty (to humans) is culturally dependent because it existence is a human reaction and culture. The point is that beauty is some how "subjective." It's that our understanding of beauty is a state of human understanding and culture. Thus, no matter how widely held (or not) a standard of beauty might be, it is a cultural fact, present in virtue of a particular human existence.

The point is not that beauty lacks objectivity, but that it is a feature of human the human world as it occurs, rather than some truth of a different realm which pre-exists human understanding.

I've got a long post to finish, but I'll just point this out now: by the measure being applied to Muslims in these sorts of threads, Christianity, or rather Christian cultures, have been morally bankrupt all over the place. Many of them in ways similar to instances of Islamic cultures people criticise (e.g. gay rights, women, etc. ).

The various comments the Muslim community being distinct from the Australian one, dog whistles about our identity bring lost to migrant (and Muslim) interlopers, the underlying notion we are a superiority Australian community to which the Muslims living here do not belong. They've been barraging us with it for years.

Morrison, Dutton, the Liberal party, et al, have been terrible with respect to the postion of Muslims in the Australian community. Their rhetoric and understanding of Muslim has been postioning them as an outsider and a threat for years. Parts of the Christchurch shooter's manifesto read exactly like comments our politicians have made. They been drumming up and trading on anti-islamic sentiment for years.

Spinoza does clearly disregard God has any particular traits which characterise a creator or particular forces the world. It's the major distinction of his philosophy. Substance (God) is that which is infinite and cannot be subject to change. That which is beyond creation and destruction, a universal constant of all. God, that which is the same, regardless of what the world does or how it acts.

A theistic God could never hope to achieve this status. They are mere beings who change, alter and may even die/be destroyed. They are not infinite. They change not creating at one point, to creating at another. They are not constant.

With respect to the classical God, Spinoza is the ultimate heretic. His point is that an infinite God, the constant, beyond change and destruction, cannot possibly exist at all. To exist means to be finite, ephemeral, possible (as opposed to necessary), changeable and destructible, everything an infinite God is not.

The infinity of God can only be given in God's non-existence (in the sense a being who take actions, thinks,creates, etc.).

I was just talking about Wayfarer's metaphysical error.

There is nothing wrong with suggesting instances of things we don't obsevre have the same properties as instances we do. Indeed, this is how we make commentary on things we don't observe with descriptions like those we have: the unobserved stuff behaves similarly.

But Wayfarer won't get this point until he stops equating things of the world with our experiences and our knowledge of things with empirical observation-- it amuses he complains so much about "scientism," when his own position reduces knowledge of things to purely when they are empirically observed.

That's only a realism-- the presence of a distinct entity measured at that instance-- it doesn't suppose anything about the rest of reality, particularly unobserved instances which might be present.

Your whole approach of trying to use the appearance experience as a measure of which things can be aid to exist does not work for unobserved presence-- in that situation, we cannot use a standard of observation or not precisely because the state in question is not object to observation.

If we are to propose an unobserved quantum events, atom, person, universe, etc., are knowledge of must be given without observation of it, for our concepts are referring to the unobserved instance in that case. As such, we cannot use our observations to dismiss those instances because they are states present prior to our act of measurement. The addition of us and any measurement device changes what we are dealing with, an instance of an unobserved object to an observed one.

The reason you are degraded as "idealist" is because you are taking exactly the opposite conclusion about the limits of our observation. You try to use it as a measure of things we have not observed: an oxymoron if there ever was one.

When we are dealing with unobserved events, we are dealing with what we haven't seen. A question not of empirical observation of an instance, but a conceptual grasp of something we've not yet seen or measured, much like correctly imagining who is standing behind you in a room, even though you haven't looked or made any other empirical observation of who it is.

It's true: when we encounter objects, we use our perceptual system. The appearance is our response to the outside, to the thing we are encountering. All it means is our observations will entail how something appears to us (essentially, Kant).

It doesn't mean what we are observing is somewhat not present outside ourselves or not "objective". At most it means there might be more to what we have observed, other "objective" aspects of a thing our system of perception doesn't pick up-- e.g. colours to bees, smells to dogs, echolocation of bat, etc.

The story is not one of experiences creating things that are only themselves, but of how our experiences are/can be a limited in their grasp of "objective" reality. Our cone of vision is limited. Objective reality extends beyond it. We live in a world where flowers are colours bees see, we each have a particular smell a dog senses and trees have an echolocation profile to bats-- all "objectively."

The fact we don't sense those doesn't make them any less of the things we do observe.

I don't think you do, at least if your argument against "thought policing" is of the usual form, that is, directed at any serious moral demand upon what we think about others.

The "SJW" point is what we think about others and discrimination are tied together. We can't have people thinking "minorities don't belong as much" without those people having a basic foundation which grows into discriminatory action towards minorities. The very idea itself is a discrimination-- "These people (my group) have more value than others (minorities) here"-- against minorities.

If our goal is to tackle these discriminations, part of our goal is to recognise thoughts like these are damaging and false, that individuals ought not be thinking them. The "SJW" point is without taking what people think or believe about others, any one will be free to discriminate a they wish in these respect. (as is the case in the "centrist" liberal society which the progressives have been opposing).

We have to be able to say, "No, that is a thought we ought not have about others."

The idea, for example, that certain ways of thinking about others ought to be avoided. I mean this in the serious moral sense. Many "modern progressives", for example, hold we ought to avoid/stop think about minorities in certain ways-- use of stereotypes, beliefs the bon't belong, thoughts they fall outside the "natural" order, etc.-- in a serious moral sense. They hold people ought to be shamed for those beliefs.

In this respect, your motive is exactly aligned with the hard right. You want to to stop the "modern progressive" making this situation a social reality. You want a society in which people can "think whatever they want," where one's beliefs and speech about others, isn't subject to a "shouldn't" or "you ought not" sanction.

The society you want to produce is like the hard right in this respect: one without the moral obligation to hold certain respectful beliefs about the minorities. You, along with the hard right, are in direct opposition to the social moves "modern progressives" want to make to reduce discrimination against these minorities. You'd rather a society in which the hard right are free to get away with whatever the want, so long as they don't cross a certain line of physical action.

I understand andrewk to be saying "moderate progressives" are making some sensible arguments about society, people and their relationships.

He is then saying that "SJW" has become a term of ridicule amongst the hard right for these "moderate progressives" and their sensible policy, a way denigrating them as being ridiculous and extreme.

The question being, are you using "SJW" in the fashion the hard right does? Are you saying these "moderate progressives" have this dangerous "SJW ideology?"

*Edit*

I already understanding you are not talking about just extremists. My earlier posts were partly directed at this, that you had in mind anyone who would make certain points regrading our how we ought to think about others.

That's why lots of people will criticise you like the hard right; you share their rejection that certain beliefs about minorities ought to be abandoned.

That's exactly the issue though: such a God is not a causer at all. Since God is the most perfect simple, unaltered over time and beyond contingent events, they can do nothing. No matter what happens in the world, God remains the perfect simplicity, infinite and never changing.

Such a God cannot be the contingent difference that causes me to be cured rather than not. God is identical whether I get cured or not.

I need an imperfect being, with the complexity of the form of causing my cure, to do the work.

What are the "extreme" positions of those in the "SJW" movement you are referring to?

We can then relate these to the "moderates" andrewk is talking about and yourself, to tell who means what, where that sits in the political context and how it relates to usage of "SJW."

I know that's that argument, my point is it doesn't make sense.

If our prayer is to be answered, something or some being act in the world, to produce one contingent state or another (e.g. curing my illness, rather than me being sick and dying). Our prayers are answered because they are definable, something we know happens in the world, on account of the moving and changing through action of its entities.

So if we take the happening of answering of a prayer, like in the OP, to be evidence of God, we are talking about the entity which caused that contingent state to occur (e.g. the doctor, who, with the right knowledge, cured me), we are taking that entity to be God (in this case the doctor, since they are the one who answered my prayer to be well).