There is so much to reply to, I don't know if I can get to all of it.

It all comes down to "why do anything?". Once you go through the dialectic, it leads to questioning procreation and survival. And rightfully, it questions modern secular philosophies like hedonism, "economics as religion", and existentialism. This doesn't mean to then turn to the warm embrace of religion. That is a falsehood as well.

However, the universality of some religious ideas (the One, Nirvana, etc.) can counteract the absurdity of minutia-mongering. If you JUST figured out how that transmission works, you would be a better person, more useful. If you JUST figured out how to start an innovative X, more useful. If you JUST figured out how to solve the meaning and essence of words (philosophy of language debates), or the best physics model (theoretical physics debates), or know the intricate details of any subject, you will be edified with your knowledge. You will be BETTER, you will be USEFUL. QUESTION ALL OF THIS THINKING, whether you think minutia-mongering is more USEFUL, makes you BETTER, or you think MEANING comes from delving deeper into the minutia of a topic at hand you think is important.

As for the "religious experience", people generally seem to mean "flow states" or "meditative psychological states". These are ways to preoccupy the chatter of the restless mind. — schopenhauer1

As for the first paragraph, it seems to me that all values are arbitrarily asserted. So you have to arbitrarily decide whether life is worth living, and then go from there. I have decided that it is worth living.

It seems like the second paragraph is how we often get stuck looking for the "next thing".

I'm aware that religious experience often is associated with alternative states of mind, which I think are still important. I am more concerned with changing the general/usual state of mind.

Sounds like a fairly conservative take on good. I am uncertain what 'good' means and how it can be identified. The only thing I can say is that to cause suffering deliberately would appear to be bad. Does it follow that to prevent suffering is good?

Aren't all human choices motivated by wanting to feel satisfied in some way, regardless of whether it involves pleasure or pain? Isn't that why we have the idea of psychological egoism? Even when people act in ways that appear to be self-sacrificing or aimed at benefiting others, they are actually motivated by the pursuit of personal satisfaction, whether it be through direct pleasure, the avoidance of guilt, or the fulfilment of a sense of duty.

Doing good to satisfy a philosophy or please a god would ultimately seem to be a pursuit of personal pleasure. Do you think one can transcend self-interest? — Tom Storm

First paragraph. I think values are arbitrarily asserted. Although in a state of nature, before a person has developed much, it seems like good is associated with pleasure and bad is associated with pain. However, humans can learn to associate good and bad with almost anything as adults. Consciously thinking about what things we ought to consider good and bad is the point of this discussion. Because of the arbitrariness of value-assertion, using an external guide as a rule (such as a religious tradition) can be very helpful.

Second paragraph: I know subjectively speaking, I might think to myself, "I'd rather be playing video games, but it would be better for me to do the dishes," and then I will do the dishes. So my subjective experience is that I don't always do what I want. I suppose it could be argued that I get some satisfaction from doing the right thing, or that I really just don't want to feel guilty, or that I don't want to have to eat off a dirty plate later. Or maybe I choose to do the dishes because I know that otherwise my wife would do them, and I want to make things easier on her. It seems to me that if it is possible to think that I am good and therefore I do good things for myself, then it ought to be possible to think that another person is good for their own sake, and to want to do good things for that person (although this kind of thought probably requires some degree of training). It might be possible that if I didn't get some kind of personal satisfaction somewhere deep inside from helping another person, that I wouldn't do it. But my subjective experience is that I can value another person for his/her own sake.

Perhaps this is a problem with considering a monastic life to be conducive to developing psychological insight? Considered from a neuroscientific perspective, a monastic life could be considered to be starving one's brain of the input that comes with interacting with diverse people in diverse situations. It doesn't seem to me like a monastic life would be very conducive to developing robust intuitons regarding human psychology.

To take it back to Christianity, do you think the diversity of people who Jesus is purported to have associated with might have been relevant to Jesus being particularly psychologically insightful? — wonderer1

I actually lived at a monastery once, and it was very useful for learning about myself. I would not have gotten the psychological insight that I have without having been at the monastery. I suppose if I lived my whole life at the monastery, however, without having had experience of the broader world, then I probably would not be as psychologically developed.

If I understand the story of Jesus correctly, he was basically a mature person and ready to do his mission by the time he was 30. Maybe he developed more after that, but it seems like he was mostly already who he was by the time he started ministering.

Well, obviously all of our instincts, desires, and emotions are wired to keep us alive. But it seems to me that the way emotions do that is that they make us try to make ourselves happy. It seems like a common-sense thing that we prefer to be happy rather than sad.
— Brendan Golledge

You make two unrelated statements. First you say the way emotions help keep us alive is to try to make ourselves happy. This is mostly wrong. Then you say that we prefer to be happy than sad, which is generally true, but irrelevant. — T Clark

I don't understand what the problem is. I would assume that most of the stuff that makes us happy would have been useful for our ancestors for staying alive, and that therefore aiming towards happiness is generally useful for our survival. This seems to me to be the same as that we prefer to be happy than sad. Where is the confusion?

Next you argue about instincts/desires/emotions. It seems to me that you are arguing about the definition of words. I realize that if you're talking about how those words are commonly used, then what I said was not right. But when I was talking about instincts/desires/emotions, I was giving definitions that I find useful for the purpose of discussion. They seem to me to be a complete description of the sensations that we feel that encourage us to do one thing or another.

This seems like a very simplistic analysis. More than that - it's presumptuous unless you are a student of religion, which you indicate you are not. — T Clark

I have not studied every single religion in the world in-depth (although I do have a cursory knowledge of Taoism, which you mentioned before). I have studied Christianity a great deal. I even lived at a monastery for a few months.

I disagree with just about everything in this paragraph. — T Clark

Lots of people have told me things like, "What you said is contradictory", or "I disagree", but if they don't provide an argument, then I have no reason to change my mind.

Re Kafka - I suspect that if you don't discover him in your 20's, he may be less affecting. I like The Metamorphosis and The Trial best. — Tom Storm

I think I was made to read, "The Metamorphosis" in high school. I only understood it at the surface level that some dude turned into a bug, and that it was meant to be a horror story. If there was some kind of psychological lesson to be learned from the story, then I missed it.

Considering that psychology is a science
— wonderer1

Hardly. Surely not in the sense he is meaning there: giving explanation to natural events (Zeus and lightning). — Lionino

I don't think there is much knowledge of physical sciences in religion. But I do think that religion is how people understood their psychology. The morals of the people were embedded in their religious stories.

Even though I don't believe in the literal truth of these stories, I am still inspired by them sometimes. The first example that comes to mind is that in Norse mythology, all the gods know ahead of time who they are going to fight in ragnarok, and that they will all die. But they all choose to go fight anyway. This seems inspiring to me. It seems to me to be a good thing that even if things are bad and you know you can't win, it is good to fight anyway. But in real life, we don't have prophecy, so we never really know with certainty that something is hopeless, like the Norse god do.

People are born without instruction manuals. The only instruction manuals are written by other players. So, I think it's no wonder that people got everything mixed up. Ancient people likely didn't have the concepts of "objective" (existing independently of the self) and "subjective" (occurring from within the self), or the idea of the unconscious, so it's no wonder that they got everything all mixed up. Google says that the first occurrence of the word unconscious was only a few hundred years ago. It seems to me that if people didn't even have a word for a thing, then they likely didn't have the concept either. But we have the experience that thoughts and feelings come to us from we know not where. So where did people think that they came from? They thought their spontaneous inner experiences came from gods (like Aphrodite = lust and Ares = anger), or from angels and demons. So, in a certain sense, people really did experience their gods. Modern people just don't believe in their interpretations of their experiences. So, although most religious people don't know this, their religious beliefs are actually how they model their psychology.

The paragraph does seem to be consonant with recent thinking on the relation between affectivity, cognition and values. For instance, enactivist approaches to cognitive psychology insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it, — Joshs

I don't really disagree with anything you said there. What I said was a simplification. I realize that emotions don't occur without a thinking process, or without knowledge of events. I also think that we wouldn't think much without emotions. Without some kind of stimulant like an emotion, our brains would probably just sit there doing nothing like a computer that is not receiving instruction. So in a very simplified sense, our values determine our emotional responses, our emotions determine what we think about, and we select our behavior from our thoughts.

Positivist approaches in psychology were based on the same assumptions concerning human behavior, which is why they excluded ‘unobservable and untestable’ concepts like emotion and cognition from their models. Fortunately, things have changed significantly with respect to what is considered empirically testable for both humans and other animals. — Joshs

Part of the point of my original post was that psychology cannot be studied like a hard science because it is difficult/impossible to observe inner psychological states. I was arguing that people ought to be interested in their own psychology as a real subject of study, even if they have to go it alone. And people like myself who make general claims about psychology have a hard time because we can't easily demonstrate that things are the way we say they are.

All thinking animals (such as birds and mammals) appear to be hardwired to try to improve their emotional state
— Brendan Golledge

Contentious statement. First, there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. ‘Thinking animals’ is also a contentious claim, as what ‘thinking’ implies, and whether animals are capable of it, is vaguely defined and probably untestable. Then the first paragraph glides directly into ‘animals such as ourselves’, when it is precisely self-consciousness, language and abstract thought that differentiates h.sapiens from other organisms. Ergo the argument is based on questionable foundations. — Wayfarer

You said yourself in a later post that it's obvious that dogs have feelings.

When I think about what is actually happening when I feel an emotion, it seems clear that it is impossible for it to occur unless some cognitive process has taken place. Take anger, for instance. It seems to me that anger happens when you realize that some entity is attacking something that you care about. How can you figure this out without using your brain? If you aren't awake and paying attention, then it's impossible to feel angry no matter how people may be trying to hurt you at that moment. This is different than physical sensations like hunger and pain, which occur without your conscious participation. So it seems to me that that thinking and feeling go together. And whereas emotions cannot occur at all without a thinking process, emotions in turn guide the topic of thoughts (such as when you're angry, you're likely to think of ways of hurting the person who made you angry).

Oh, and I wasn't thinking of "animals like ourselves" as including a great ability for abstract thought. I was thinking only that they have some capacity to model the world and to feel emotions as a result. It seems obvious to me that all mammals and birds can do this. Reptiles and fish seem to have at least the ability to feel fear and anger. If they didn't, then why would they run/swim away from danger, or why would a crocodile attack things that approach their nests? That they feel fear and anger in a similar manner that we do seems like the most obvious answer.

If human beings prefer to feel happy rather than to feel sad, and if we have the capacity to lie to ourselves, then it seems immediately apparent that we have the problem of lying to ourselves to make ourselves happy. I would think that the main point of disagreement would be how common this is.

Given that there is enormous disagreement about a variety of topics which people have strong opinions about (politics, religion, economics, morality, etc), it seems clear that most people have to be wrong about much of what they believe. If 10 people have conflicting opinions about a subject, then it's clear that it's not possible for more than 1 out of 10 to be right. It is clear that this is the state of affairs for many subjects that people get worked up over. I believe that much of people's false beliefs come from pride, but I admit I have not demonstrated this.

I will give some examples of stuff that I'm guessing may not have been clear.

Starting with how we lie to ourselves: It seems to me that in whatever way a person happens to be gifted, he tends to think that that is the most important thing. For instance, a beautiful woman may think that being beautiful is most important, a smart person may think that being smart is most important (I have done this before), a physically fit person may think that being physically fit is most-important. We tend to elevate whatever we are good at and dismiss whatever we aren't good at.

Much of entertainment involves unconscious deception. It seems to me that fans of spectator sports sometimes get so worked up because they imagine that they actually have some connection to the team involved when they really don't. Video games can give a false sense of accomplishment (I have fallen prey to this). Social media gives a false sense of social validation (I think this is something more common to women). Participating in great and distant causes (like voting for a political party, or giving to a charity to help people in Africa) can be a way of feeling good about ourselves while we neglect the simple and humble things in our own lives that we have much more control over.

I came up with a pride filter once. It seems to me that the only thing that we experience having control over (whether or not free will truly exists) is our choices. So, the only thing it is proper to congratulate ourselves on is that we have made good choices. Self-congratulation about any other thing involves deception, because in reality, anything else good in our lives is outside of our control. It is better in those cases to feel grateful. I tried practicing for a few months rejecting every positive feeling about myself that did not come from choosing to do my best, and it was exhausting. I later decided that it was easier to focus positively on good things than to avoid the bad (as Paul says once in the New Testament).

On the feeling of offense: It seems to me that people can only ever be offended by the truth. If you will tell a beautiful woman, "You're ugly and no man will ever want you," she'll probably pay it no attention. Same as if you told Elon Musk for Bill Gates, "You're a poor stupid loser." So, whenever a person gets offended by an idea, he is admitting that he finds truth in what he is offended by.

It is also possible to be offended by circumstances rather than ideas. For instance, most people probably find flat-Earthism to be ridiculous, and so they aren't offended by the idea. But they may get offended if their kids were to be taught the subject at school.

On harsh pointless judgment: It seems to me that the emotional motivation for harsh judgment is distraction from our own faults. For a truly humble person, if, for instance, he saw a fat smoker on the street, he'd probably notice that those were bad things, and then move onto the next thing without being bothered. Or maybe he'd feel sorry for the guy. However, a person who maybe had a drinking problem (but was a healthy weight and didn't smoke), might see the fat smoker and think, "That guy has no self-control. What a loser." The motivation for this kind of judgement is to distract from one's own faults. I think sometimes you have to judge, such as when you decide whether to work at a certain company or whether to marry a certain person. But in those situations, there is a specific purpose for the judgment. If one judges just for the sake of it, then there's a pretty good chance that whatever you throw at the other person is actually an arrow pointed right back at yourself.

I will quit here because I'm supposed to be working.

I found a lot to disagree with and I think you make many over-broad statements that aren't necessarily consistent with my understanding of ethnology, human psychology and cognitive science, and sociology. I also think your tone is a bit presumptuous - expressing your opinions as fact. — T Clark

I wouldn't be surprised if I made some mistakes. It felt like years ago that my opinions on things developed to the point where there was no name for what I believed, and then I just kept thinking. And then when I try to share my ideas, most people don't engage or are vacuously hostile. So, I have very little other than my own opinions of my ideas as a check on whether they are right or not.

I agree that a lot of human and animal motivation and behavior is hardwired, but I think your take is over-simplistic. As I understand it, animal, including human, behavior doesn't aim at improving their "emotional state." It aims at maintaining the equilibrium of their living systems - homeostasis. Emotions are, among other things, a sign that things are out of balance and a motivation to act. — T Clark

Well, obviously all of our instincts, desires, and emotions are wired to keep us alive. But it seems to me that the way emotions do that is that they make us try to make ourselves happy. It seems like a common-sense thing that we prefer to be happy rather than sad.

I've thought before that instincts appear to be those behaviors which act without thinking (like blinking), desires are from the body but require conscious action to act upon (like hunger), and emotions require conscious thought for both the feeling to occur and to act upon them (like happiness). I spend most of my time focusing on emotions because they are most under our control.

This is confusing. You say you are looking for objective morality, but you also acknowledge that moral values are arbitrary. Perhaps a better word would be "formal" rather than "objective." — T Clark

That word choice may have been better. I suppose I think a morality has to seem "objective" to the believer in order to mean anything, even if in reality there are many conflicting moralities believed in by different people with no way of proving which is right.

If humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to make themselves feel good, then it becomes clear that our opinions are not to be trusted. A great deal of our energy is spent in foolishness, and most of our personal opinions are false.
— Brendan Golledge

Now we get into the part where I agree with some of what you say. My goal in life is to become more self-aware, what you call paying conscious attention to my inner state, and philosophy is one of the ways I pursue that goal. I can't speak with any authority about Buddhism or Christianity, but I question your assertion those two religions are the ones most concerned with that. My personal adult experience is with Taoism, and, as I understand it, it is all about self-awareness. — T Clark

I suppose we are very similar in that respect. I am not an expert on every religion, so I am not surprised if I neglected to mention some other religion which is more inward focused.

It seems clear at least that Christianity is more inward focused than many other religions. Take Islam, for instance. All the commands are outward focused, like professing a belief in Muhammad, taking a pilgrimage, giving to the poor, etc. The two main commandments in Christianity are to love one's neighbor as one's self and to love God with all one's heart. And the 7 deadly sins (I know this is a Catholic thing) are inward orientations of the soul rather than particular actions. And the Jewish commandments are also outward focused (although Jesus said they are aimed at loving God and neighbor). I've seen interviews from 2 different Jews who said for instance that they don't care if people hate Jews; they only care about how people treat Jews. And they said themselves that Judaism is more Earthly focused than Christianity.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka — T Clark

I'd never heard that quote before. Maybe I should read Franz Kafka.

When properly understood, I think religion, psychology, and morality are all actually only one subject.
— Brendan Golledge

This doesn't strike me as a particularly true or particularly useful way of looking at things. — T Clark

I believe values (what we care about) are the root of our emotional experience, and our emotions drive what things we think about, and what we think about drives what we do. So, studying the self is really the same as studying values. And that's really the same as morality. And this is also what religion is concerned with.

Oh wow I thought I'd reply to everything during my lunch break, but it looks like there is too much.

I read a book a long time ago called, "The History of God". I remember I liked it a lot at the time, but I can't remember much about it.

I really like Jordan Peterson's Biblical lecture series. But he treats the stories from a psychological standpoint rather than a literal one.

I am confused by the original post. It says it wants to clear up some things before making an argument, and then doesn't seem to make an argument. The follow up post describe strong testimonial evidence. I would guess that the implied argument (which I don't see stated anywhere) is that the abundance of testimonial evidence for life after death is good evidence for life after death?

Once I found a youtube channel that posted nothing but testimony of NDE (Near Death Experiences). I listened to the first 13 I heard and wrote down claims (like whether there was hell or not). I don't remember the exact numbers, because it was so long ago, but I remember concluding 2 things. 1. If you assume nothing about an afterlife, other than that it is consistent, then it is possible that 60% of the testimonies I heard could have been true. 2. If you assume Christian theology, then only 25% of the testimonies could have been true.

Some NDE testimonies said that there was a heaven/hell, and others said there was no hell. Some saw Muhammad, and some saw Jesus. One saw God the father as an old man, which is against the theology I was taught because God the father isn't supposed to have a body. So, these are the types of things I looked at when deciding whether or not the testimonies could have been true.

Given the large amount of disagreement on what life after death looks like, I concluded that NDE are subjectively experienced phenomena of a dying brain, rather than of an objective reality.

If I recall correctly, 2/13 of the testimonies claimed to have been able to see things while "dead" which they could not have seen, such as details about the operation that was being performed on them. I have no explanation for how this could have happened, if the testimony is true. Maybe sometimes people make lucky guesses, or maybe they guess in retrospect after they have the information and neglect to tell you that.

I haven't done much research myself and I'm mostly going off testimony of scholars. Based on this, it is nigh impossible that the existence of Jesus was a myth. The wikipedia page on the Historicity of Jesus says, "Virtually all scholars dismiss theories of Jesus's non-existence or regard them as refuted.[note 1] In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory and finds virtually no support from scholars." People arguing with me that Jesus is like Spiderman or Harry Potter are just not familiar with the research that has been done on this subject.

So yes, among people who actually know what they are talking about, it's universally accepted that Jesus at least existed and was crucified.

I think I could rewrite the main idea of my original post much more succinctly.

I believe these three things:
1. There are historical elements to the testimony in the New Testament
2. Early Christians were willing to die for their belief in the content of the New Testament
3. Current evidence does not support the faith of the disciples & early Christians (the claims are extraordinary compared to our usual experience, and there is confusion in the church)

Points 1 & 2 would ordinarily lead me to believe the testimony, but point 3 throws everything into confusion.

Coming to these 3 conclusions would take a lot of time and whole books could be written on each point. So, it's not surprising that this post has not made much progress. I could still try to briefly summarize my beliefs in each of these 3.

1. Based on the testimony of scholars, there are many unplanned coincidences within the gospels (which corroborate each other) and geographic knowledge in the New Testament. Also, nonchristian sources agree on some of the main points, such as that Jesus was crucified.

2. I was surfing Wikipedia just now, and I found, "The consensus of scholars dates Matthew and Luke to 80-90 AD", and "Literary analysis of the New Testament texts themselves can be used to date many of the books of the New Testament to the mid-to-late first century. The earliest works of the New Testament are the letters of the Apostle Paul. It can be determined that 1 Thessalonians is likely the earliest of these letters, written around 52 AD."

If Jesus was crucified in 33 AD, then that easily puts the earliest manuscripts within living memory of his crucifixion. This is why I don't believe it was a myth. I think of a myth as a story whose origin is unknown. An event within living memory cannot be a myth, because people are still alive who remember the events.

3. I understand that it was the historical position of the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox that the others were anathematized (and therefore probably damned). All 3 would not agree with the protestants either. So, historically speaking, whoever was right, a large portion of Christian believers were wrong.

There is also the issue that I found inconsistencies in the testimonies of near death experiences (indicating that these experiences were probably psychological in origin rather than divine). And I cannot understand why an omniscient omnipresent omnipotent God interested in a personal relationship would hide himself from sincere seekers.


I attempted to resolve these issues by suggesting that the gospels were based on actual events, but that the disciples were confused and mistakenly believed in miracles which had not actually occurred. I suggested several ways that natural phenomena could have convinced people that there were miracles, but those were of course all speculation.

I also described a psychological interpretation of Jesus' teachings which actually make them sensible advice and verifiable through personal experience.


This interpretation of events explains points 1 - 3, it explains why the Christian story resembles earlier myths (when the disciples were confused, they interpreted their experiences in relation to their prior knowledge), and it explains why so many people historically have found Jesus to be a compelling person (this make no sense if the story was completely made up nonsense).

I suppose the one thing I can conclude for sure is that humans are bad at figuring things out. If it isn't even true that Jesus was a historical person who was crucified, or that his early believers weren't willing to die for him, then that throws all historical knowledge into doubt. It also means that all Christians are very badly mistaken. If his disciples were mistaken (as I believe), then that means that it is sometimes possible for a dozen grown men to be unable to tell whether another man is dead or alive. If the events really did transpire as described, then it still leaves the issue of the confusion within the church, in which large portions of the church did not recognize the other portions. I suppose that does mean for sure that a God who leaves his teachings in the hands of human testimony is not very wise, unless he thinks it's funny to cause confusion.



BTW, I think most events in the Bible were probably at least based on true events. Take this for example, gotten from a quick google search:

"In 1997, William Ryan, Walter Pitman, Petko Dimitrov, and their colleagues first published the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. They proposed that a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea freshwater lake occurred around 7600 years ago, c. 5600 BC"

For the people living in the area, it probably seemed like the whole world was flooding. The survivors would have given testimony that the whole world had flooded. People who lived far away would never even know that the flood had happened, so they would have not bothered to give testimony that the whole world had not flooded. A long time from then, the testimony that the world had flooded would probably have been widespread and taken to have been a historical reality. Or the story could have been based on any really large catastrophic flood.

Another thing I heard of is that they think they found Sodom and Gomorrah. Apparently, a big asteroid exploded in the air and vaporized everything for miles.

It's likely then that much of the testimony in the Bible is actually based on history, but that the details and the interpretation of what happened are not entirely accurate. But even the interpretations which might not be true are of psychological significance, because the people who lived back then had the same hearts and minds that we do, and they were very concerned with proper living. They were very ignorant on material things, but much of the testimony about what it feels like to be a human and about how to orient one's self properly are still true.

The problem being that we don't know what (if any) events described were real. It might be as simple as a man preached and stories were told about him It's probably safe to say that anything supernatural didn't happen. What mechanism do you have to demonstrate which parts of the NT happened and which parts did not? — Tom Storm

This is in line with the general idea of my main post. I believe that there are historical elements in the NT, but I do not know how much of it is true, or how it happened that nonmiraculous events could have occurred to convince people that they were miraculous. I argued that probably the trivial details which the different gospels agree on are probably true, but that the disciples' excitability and impressionability led them to occasionally see miracles which weren't really there.

So? Spiderman comics are set in New York city - doesn't mean Spiderman is real.

I just don't find the idea that they were entirely fabricated plausible at all.
— Brendan Golledge

Spiderman would be a good comparison to Jesus, if there were people living today who were willing to be put to death for the sake of spiderman. It's not just that the people knew details, but that people from the time period knew details and were willing to die for their testimony regarding the details they provided.

I honestly had never heard of Sai Baba before. I don't think people are claiming that he was uniquely raised from the dead, are they? Or are people willing to die for their belief in his miracles? I guess I'm not surprised that some people believe in miracles that didn't really happen. The existence of people like that today I think might actually support my view that the disciples could have sincerely believed in the miracles of Jesus while being mistaken.

Can you name a single big event from the New Testament that has extra-biblical corroboration - other than some geography and later the claim that there were followers of an itinerant rabbi who had stories? — Tom Storm

I think the least controversial claims regarding Jesus were that he was a historical person, and that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate.

If it's religious fiction, then why did the disciples die for it?
— Brendan Golledge
What apostles died for it? (And, BTW, what "it"? The NT? It doesn't make sense.) — Alkis Piskas

I asked Chat GPT this:

"
Read the following quote:
"If it's religious fiction, then why did the disciples die for it?"

What do you think "it" refers to in this sentence?

ChatGPT
In the context of the quote, "it" likely refers to the beliefs or teachings propagated by religious fiction. The implication is that if the beliefs espoused in religious texts were merely fictional, then it seems unlikely that the disciples (referring to the early followers of the religious figure in question, such as Jesus Christ in Christianity) would have been willing to die for those beliefs. This argument is often used to suggest the sincerity and conviction of the early followers of various religious traditions.
"
^ ChatGPT has better reading comprehension than you.


I am confused by your next quote, because it talks about apostles dying, as if to answer your own question about what apostles died.

If it's entirely fabricated, then why is it universally accepted that Jesus was baptized and crucified?
— Brendan Golledge
Because it is a religion, Brendan. And people who follow a religion believe in whatever that religion says. This does not change the fact religions may be based on fiction. (Most are.) — Alkis Piskas

The source I used was Wikipedia, which last I checked, is not a religious source. I used Wikipedia merely to show that it is the consensus view.

You have not presented any serious argument. Only childish questions. You cannot defend your position. No wonder you are confused, as you say yourself. I tried to give you something to get out of this condusion. — Alkis Piskas

I searched for your name on this page, and read your posts, and I did not find anywhere where you argued about anything I wrote in my original post.

If it's religious fiction, then why did the disciples die for it?

If it's entirely fabricated, then why is it universally accepted that Jesus was baptized and crucified? Your argument is not even consistent with the wiki page on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Gospels

The New Testament has a lot of gaps and ungrounded, senseless stories that raise a lot of questions. E.g. According always to NT, when Jesus prayed to God, his disciples were sleeping and there was no one else near. Who has listened to his prayer and recorded it? Totally silly. — Alkis Piskas

The quality of the prose in the NT is totally unrelated to its historicity. The disciples didn't have to know the content of the prayer to know that he was praying. I would presume they assumed he was praying when they were sleeping because he told them that is what he was going to do.

You have not addressed any of the arguments in favor of the historicity of the NT.

I don't know what Paul has to do with my original post, because I was talking about the 4 gospels, and unless I'm mistaken, Paul didn't write those. Even if his physician wrote Luke, that still leaves 3 gospels that weren't written by Paul. The entirety of my argument was based on accounts of events that took place before Paul's conversion, by people who recalled similar details and who had a lot of geographic knowledge of the region. I don't think Paul is very relevant at all to my original argument.

I would say science is much less stable than theology. Protestants, Orthodox, and Catholics can all look back and agree on much in St. Augustine, St. Maximus, etc. What science agrees with attempts at scientific theories from the years 400-800? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue that modern science didn't even really exist until Isaac Newton, so there is no science from 400-800. Science went from not formally existing at all to putting a man on the moon in less than 300 years. That is very impressive.


If God acted like you think God should act, sure. But if God is truly God couldn't God just autopilot us into all being saints and agreeing? So even if Christianity led to far more consensus than science you could still throw out the same argument, claiming that "if it isn't perfect, it isn't divine."

I was not imagining that God would autopilot us. I was imagining that if the Church were truly being guided by 1 person, that there would be much less confusion. I'm not aware of any human ruler in history whose followers were so confused about what he wanted while he was still alive.

"if it isn't perfect, it isn't divine." Actually, for some things, this is not a bad argument. I can accept that humans trying to follow God's will are imperfect. But I cannot accept it if a church claims that its teachings are infallibly inspired by God, and then even 1 of their doctrines was found to be inconsistent with something they said earlier. If a human was 95% right in everything he said, I would forgive him for being human. But if somebody is claiming inspiration from God and gets 1% wrong, then he is 100% wrong about being infallibly inspired.


Here is what I wrote in my original post:
"Even if I did decide that I believed every word written in the New Testament, I would not know what to do next. What doctrine of salvation would I choose? What would be my relationship to the sacraments? What church organization would I attend? How would I deal with the fact that I'm commanded to pray, but I've never received a tangible answer to prayer from an external entity?"

It is a serious problem for me if I'm trying to follow a God who commanded me to participate in church life, but his church is split into factions, who for most of their history didn't recognize each other as being legitimate. Unless there's some really clear way of figuring out which church is right, then my salvation is in question, even if I believed every word of the gospels. Also, if God is a person trying to have a relationship with me, and he's omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, then why can't he personally reveal himself to me when I'm confused about his will?

Whether people were willing to be martyred for their beliefs (and many of these stories are unlikely to be true) is irrelevant to the truth of those beliefs. Suicide bombers and martyrs to religious or political causes are not uncommon. Hinduism. Buddhism and Islam all have martyrs. So? People do astonishing things for belief, whether true or not. Note also that the early church probably fabricated martyr stories. Candida Moss, a Christian scholar, writes about this in The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom — Tom Storm

It is not surprising to me that people continue to believe things that lots of other people believe. It is more surprising to me that a dozen men were so totally convinced that Jesus had come back from the dead when nobody else did. If their beliefs were caused by peer pressure (as I presume the beliefs of suicide bombers are), then the pressure only came from the original 12 (or 11, depending on how you count Judas & Paul).

I suppose maybe it would be simpler to conclude, "People believe crazy things" and not worry about it more. It just troubled me how those beliefs were formed in the first place without precedent, and how the testimony regarding these beliefs have at least some verifiable historical elements.

A lot of people were talking about Bart Ehrman. I never read him, so I didn't really follow.

People were also arguing about whether Jesus/Peter/Paul actually claimed that Jesus was divine. My argument was that the disciples definitely believed he was divine (or else why die for him?) but I'm not certain that's what Jesu actually meant. Considering the confusion the disciples have about what Jesus meant both before and after the crucifixion, it wouldn't be at all surprising to me that Jesus said some word similar to the words they reported that he said, but that they misunderstood what he actually meant.

It seems like some of the conversation about Ehrman was actually about an argument which is different than the argument I made.

I do not find the arguments that the New Testament was entirely myth convincing at all. They were at least based on real events. I made an argument in my original post about the unplanned coincidences. Apparently, the writers were very familiar with geography too. There are lots of other arguments you could look at which I won't go into. I just don't find the idea that they were entirely fabricated plausible at all.

I googled again for the study on eye-witness accuracy, and found this:

Link: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/testbookje/chapter/eyewitness-testimony-and-memory-biases/

Quote:

"The misinformation effect has been modeled in the laboratory. Researchers had subjects watch a video in pairs. Both subjects sat in front of the same screen, but because they wore differently polarized glasses, they saw two different versions of a video, projected onto a screen. So, although they were both watching the same screen, and believed (quite reasonably) that they were watching the same video, they were actually watching two different versions of the video (Garry, French, Kinzett, & Mori, 2008).

In the video, Eric the electrician is seen wandering through an unoccupied house and helping himself to the contents thereof. A total of eight details were different between the two videos. After watching the videos, the “co-witnesses” worked together on 12 memory test questions. Four of these questions dealt with details that were different in the two versions of the video, so subjects had the chance to influence one another. Then subjects worked individually on 20 additional memory test questions. Eight of these were for details that were different in the two videos. Subjects’ accuracy was highly dependent on whether they had discussed the details previously. Their accuracy for items they had not previously discussed with their co-witness was 79%. But for items that they had discussed, their accuracy dropped markedly, to 34%. That is, subjects allowed their co-witnesses to corrupt their memories for what they had seen."


I recalled (I originally found this info a long time ago), that the stats were 80% and 40%, but the actual numbers were 79% and 34%. I hadn't remembered the detail that the test participants were shown different videos at all. I suppose this is an example of my own memory not being entirely reliable.

If I were speaking from a Hindu context, I probably would have talked about cows. My best guess is that cultures can evolve the same way biological organisms do (the unfit varieties die), and that caring about cows was useful for the people living in India. I've heard an argument that cattle are very important for agriculture in that region, so that a tribe which killed and ate their cows during a famine would not have been able to continue farming next year. So, those who by chance happened to really love their cows flourished and spread out across the whole region.

I do not know if there is some psychological significance to cows being holy, as I believe there is psychological significance to much of Christian teachings. I don't know much about the Hindu religion.

Human cults are much bigger. Based on the definition I invented, which is a social unit which claims for itself the right to decree truth, then cults can be huge. The entire Soviet Union was a cult for instance. They cared more about the truth of their doctrine than the empirical evidence that their country was falling apart. I would argue that the political affiliations in the USA (Democrat & Republican) are also cults. For instance, it is argued by some that gender is a social construct, even though this would have appeared absurd even to medieval peasants. There is also the view that criminals are victims and need support, and thus some large cities have done bail reform and let out lots of prisoners. These cities have seen an increase in crime and closure of stores such as Wallmart and Walgreens as a result, but the cult members blame the stores for closing rather than the city government for not punishing looters. My view is that cults are THE primary way that humans organize themselves in large groups, and thus you should expect to see them wherever there is large scale social cohesion. Some cults have more absurd beliefs than others. Identification with a cult is basically the same as asserting agreement with the truth statements of that cult.

My motivation for writing it was that I was lonely because nobody lived in the same world that I did, I was trying to understand why it's so hard to convince people of things, and I was woken up at 3am by my baby and couldn't get back to sleep,

I do not believe that my motivation was to make myself feel better than other people. I remember what this feels like. The main way it feels is that I feel better about myself when I convince myself of the truth of what I'm saying, and I feel offended when people don't agree. I was not feeling superior, but lonely and depressed, but if I imagined that it's just not in human nature to love truth and that most people are not going to ever understand what I care about if I care about the truth, then everything became simple, if a bit disappointing. I think I was also a bit curious to see what kinds of replies I'd get.

Ask yourself this: Are you willing to think about a logically viable world where a God does not exist? Or are you more concerned with getting other people to think of a logically viable world where a God must exist? — Philosophim

I was concerned with understanding and describing how people actually experience and think about God. I was concerned with phenomenology rather than ontology (apart from some speculative metaphysics related to the cosmological argument which I have not mentioned in this post). Since I was thinking about how people think about God, removing God from the equation would make no sense.

They're not curious as to whether there really is a God, they just want to preserve the emotional comfort and benefit their worldview gives them. — Philosophim

. This is the main point of this post.

Second, try to keep your topic focused. The values of necessary thought started with complaints about other people not reading or thinking about your topic, accusations that we're all cultists, and then a reference to fear of God. It's a bit all over the place right? And as you can tell from the replies that you got, people are going to take one or two salient points and address those. — Philosophim

. I agree with this criticism. But I do genuinely believe that humans are hardwired to live in cults. This is most of our social organization. This belief makes everything easier to understand. Of course, some cults are more extreme in their detachment from reality than others.


I am not so thin-skinned that I am not able to receive your criticisms. I have said much worse to myself.

I suppose I do think I am intellectually more capable than most people, but that is not what I meant in this post when I was talking about "stupid". I meant that a lot of people choose not to use what intelligence they have, because they just don't care about the truth. I would imagine that choosing to post to a philosophy forum is an intelligence filter, so that probably at least 1 person replying to my original thread has a higher IQ than me. At any rate, IQs are given to you for free at your birth, so they are nothing to be proud of.

It is a bit ironic, maybe, that I felt lonely because of how rare it is to be able to talk to someone who understands the things that trouble me (this is probably my own cult-instinct trying to find a group to attach myself to). But if everyone were in perfect agreement, I feel like there'd be nothing to discuss, and it would be boring.

I am a bit handicapped in pointing out what I believe to be the most stupid in arguments about things that are in the social consensus, because I believe that if I mention the topic, I might get immediately booted from the forum. But I have made arguments in the past (not on this forum), such as, "The same person cannot get killed twice," "Causes must precede effects", and then linked to some New York Times articles about the relevant subject. I got replies which denied all of these points. I literally got a reply that quoted me saying, "Causes must precede effects" and it gave a one word answer, "false". I also got a reply denying the existence of the New York Times articles which they could have found themselves on the New York Times website. These are the replies which are most stupid, and I believe that they are so stupid because it is a matter of social consensus, and most people are unable to think outside of the social consensus because of the extreme discomfort that it would cause them. If you are willing to understand the argument, it is easy, because it is kindergarten level deduction. But it is impossible to understand if you do not want to understand.

You begin with "On the Values Necessary for Thought" and end with 3 paragraphs on "Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom." And you raise many issues in between. I do not wish to discuss all the issues raised and I do not know which of the many issues raised is the one you wish most to discuss. — Arne

I see that it is rambling. I suppose if I wanted to summarize the things I thought were most important for this particular post they would be: humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to please themselves, and to lie to themselves for social consensus, and these are blocks to understanding truth.

I started with talking about the importance of values (because otherwise the argument that values determine one's success in finding truth would not make sense). Then I talked about how it is I believe that humans are hardwired to live in cults, and evolutionary reasons for how this might have happened. Then I talked about what I consider to be the main point (how people lie to themselves, described in the above paragraph). Then the conclusion is basically that fear of having big problems from real life causes people to not want to lie to themselves.

BTW, I didn't get any replies to this thread so far that I thought were stupid. I don't agree with absolutely everything that was said, but everyone wrote coherent thoughts that were on topic that I was able to understand. What I consider to be most stupid is when people are completely off-topic, or when I am not able to figure out a coherent argument from what they have written. Maybe pointing out the behavior that I didn't like made people self-conscious and not post those things.

For my part, I'm with Dewey in believing that we only think when confronted by problems or situations we wish to resolve. What we consider problems or wish resolved will be determined by what we value in many cases, obviously. — Ciceronianus

So we are not really in disagreement on that point.

I guess this is hard for most people to understand because it's a new way of thinking about it, but when I was thinking about God, I was thinking about, "What things do people actually experience that they associate with God? What are these things and how do they work?"

So then you get God as morality, God as creator of the universe, God as the ordering principle of the universe, God as social consensus, etc. These are things that people actually experience and associate with God. You are free to redefine God as a bowl of fruit if you want, but I don't think very many people experience God as a bowl of fruit, so, it wouldn't really explain much about our behavior.

Because people experience these other things, you can ask questions like, "How do they work?" So like, for instance, Christians, and especially Protestants, seem to associate their conscience with the Holy Spirit, which they believe is infallible. If the conscience is actually just a subjective private voice, then this would go a long way towards explaining why there is so much confusion in the church when so many people are convinced that they are right.

God as the ordering principle of the universe is not distinguishable from the laws of nature. If you imagine that there is an unconscious God who makes matter operate according to fixed laws, then this is really not different than a secular person's conception of the laws of nature.

It is a whole other question entirely to what degree the ordering principle of the universe is associated with a persons' conscience, but they are related by both being things that people typically associate with the idea of God.

The main point of this post, however, was that it seems like a lot of people reply only to buzzwords and do not try to understand the content. So they see an argument like this, and reply as if I were asserting that God were a magic man in the sky who tangibly answers prayers.

You can use a truth table to prove NOT X <-> (X -> F).
(X -> Y) <-> (X -> F) in the case where Y is false, so this applies to Curry's paradox as well as "this sentence is false".
— Brendan Golledge

Yes:

|- ~X <-> (X -> F)

If Y is false then (X -> Y) <-> (X -> F) is true.

That's not Curry's paradox.

Then you take your definition X := (X ->F) and substitute NOT X for the second part.
— Brendan Golledge

Who does that? You? Did someone previously define?:

X := (X -> F) — TonesInDeepFreeze

To add to the above:

If X := X->Y then X <-> (X->Y).

But we don' t have the converse that if X <-> (X->Y) then X := X->Y.

So X := X->Y is not equivalent with X <-> (X->Y).

So we can't dispense the paradox by incorrectly saying that it reduces to X <-> (X -> Y). — TonesInDeepFreeze

It seems to me that everybody is being super-pedantic about this. I am studying formal logic informally (without being in a class), so I'm not surprised if I'm not using some symbols correctly. However, the logic should still work

Who does that? You? Did someone previously define?:

X := (X -> F) — TonesInDeepFreeze

"X -> F" is supposed to mean, "This sentence is false." "X := (X -> F)" is supposed to mean "This sentence says, 'This sentence is false'."

That's not Curry's paradox. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I've seen in multiple sources that Curry's paradox is defined as X := (X -> Y), and some of them then change it to X <-> (X -> Y).

If X := X->Y then X <-> (X->Y). — TonesInDeepFreeze

You yourself said that this is allowed, so I don't know why you are arguing with me about this.


I am new for formal logic, but I understand algebra just fine. If I define Y := X + 1, then it is impossible to say that Y is false, because Y has no outside definition. However, if I define X := X + 1, then this obviously involves a contradiction. It seems the same ought to apply to formal logic. I do not see how you guys can argue about this so much.

Maybe the difference is that I come from a physics background rather than a math background. If I can make the math give me the answer I want, then I think it must be right. What I'm doing here gives me the answer I want, because the truth table for "This sentence is false" shows that X <-> NOT X, which is the same answer you get by working through the paradox with human language. In Curry's paradox, the truth table gives that the sentence is self-contradictory if the assertion is false, which resolves the paradox. It seems to me that mathematicians get stuck on arbitrary definitions & distinctions, like := vs <->, even if doing so makes everything harder and nothing easier. If the proof of Curry's paradox is correct, then we get that logic is broken, because there is a paradox. However, using a truth table to check the definition shows that the definition is contradictory, and thus there is no paradox. It seems bizarre to me that people are arguing with me that I can't check the definition for consistency when doing so makes everything so simple.

To add to the above:

If X := X->Y then X <-> (X->Y).

But we don' t have the converse that if X <-> (X->Y) then X := X->Y.

So X := X->Y is not equivalent with X <-> (X->Y).

So we can't dispense the paradox by incorrectly saying that it reduces to X <-> (X -> Y). — TonesInDeepFreeze

I can do the same thing without equating := to <->


You can use a truth table to prove NOT X <-> (X -> F).
(X -> Y) <-> (X -> F) in the case where Y is false, so this applies to Curry's paradox as well as "this sentence is false".

Then you take your definition X := (X ->F) and substitute NOT X for the second part.

Then you get X := NOT X

Clearly, there has to be something wrong with that definition.

yea, I missed option 2

Somebody asserting that something is logical doesn't make it logical. I'd have to actually read their arguments to be able to judge their reasonableness. We do know that the supreme court can make mistakes, because it has reversed its decisions before. Considering that there is no precedent in the history of the USA prior to SS of arbitrary wealth transfer from one person to another, and that intellectuals during the time period repeatedly warned about the dangers of such things, I am still really skeptical that the founding fathers would have agreed with the modern conception of welfare. If you continue this principle, if white people wanted (or any majority), they could simply vote to have everyone else's property, call it "welfare", and it would be legal.

Yes, I really don't like the 16th amendment, but I decided to focus this post on unconstitutionality, and since the 16th amendment is part of the constitution, it is not unconstitutional.

I think I got the basic idea. I've never seen anybody else say stuff like this before. You would think that this stuff would be fundamental to our way of being, but most people don't care.

I had a very similar idea about existence itself being good, but from a totally different argument. I like the original post, because it does seem to objectively prove (if we treat a "reason" as being "something", and assume noncontradiction) that morality cannot exist if there is no existence. My proof just shows that it's possible to believe that existence is good without contradiction.

I started the proof with the a thought experiment: What would the moral value of the Earth be if all life on it died? It seemed to me that the obvious answer would be that it would have about the same value as Mars, whatever it's value is. But it does not seem to me that Mars is evil.

If we assume that existence is good, then bad can only be the loss of existence (such as how murder is bad because it takes away the life of a man, which is good). In this case, God can't take anything from us which he didn't give us first. We cannot be killed until we have first lived. We cannot lose our health until we had it first. If pain signals the loss of health (which it usually does, since this seems to be its purpose), then we cannot feel pain unless we have first had health. From this line of thought, it makes eternal torture seem like a strange idea, because if you felt pain continually without losing all your health and dying, then it means that that pain is meaningless. I suppose if God did create a place where we could be tortured indefinitely without dying, that would be a very strange and bad thing.

Anyway, if a person can accept that nothing is not evil, and his bad circumstances are not worse than a meteor destroying all life on Earth, then it must follow that his circumstances are on the net good. What appears to be very bad is actually just the change from good to less good.

In Genesis, it said that every time God created something, he said it was, "good." So, I think people have been wrestling with this idea for a very long time.

I typically think of values as being arbitrarily asserted, so, it is more natural for me to make the claim, "It is possible to claim that existence is net good without contradiction," than to prove, like you appear to have done, that existence must be good if morality exists at all.

I have 2 more similar arguments: It appears that only living beings have the experience of "good" and "bad" (this observation is so fundamental, you might actually define life as being those things which have preferences). So, if we want our values to have an affect on the material world, then we must limit our morality to the actions of living beings. It could have an effect, for instance, if I teach my daughter not to steal. It will have no effect whatever if I said the same thing to a rock.

The second argument comes from evolution/game theory. It seems to be necessarily true that those moralities which are good at propagating themselves will become more common, and those that are less good will not propagate themselves. I like to call this "God's morality", because assuming that God made the world the way he likes, then God likes moral beings to try to propagate themselves and their morality. This is the morality that WILL BE.

Technically speaking, the is-ought dilemma still holds, so that these observations are only objectively moral if we assume that we want our morality to have an effect on the material world, and if we like for our morality to not be self-defeating.

The second argument leads me to the idea that morality is enlightened self-interest. I am composed of several parts, including a body, mind, and "heart". I am also a cell within a social body, and I am incapable of propagating myself into the distant future by myself. So, it makes sense that I ought to take care of each of my parts: take care of my bodily health, educate my mind, try to find (or assert) the good, try to do good to my social unit, etc. This train of thought leads roughly to the standard morality that most people would recognize.

I'm skipping over the middle pages btw, because it's too much to read.

I think there is some confusion about moral subjectivity/relativity/objectivity.

The question can only have 3 answers: there are no true moralities (nihilism), there is one true morality (objective morality), or there are many true moralities (subjective/relative morality).

If you are treating morals as being "real" in a similar sense to how we believe our sensory experience is real (like that there really is something that one ought to be doing), then the only true answers are that there are either 0 or 1 morality. If we believe in reason (noncontradiction), then we cannot believe that there are two distinct moral systems that are equally valid that have different prescriptions. There is either only one true morality, or there is no morality.

I think in practice, many people claim to believe in relative morals because they want to have their cake and eat it too. If there is a contradiction in a logical system (such as evidently exists in the simultaneous reality of contradictory moral systems), then anything can be proven to be true. This means that such a person can be filled with righteous indignation when somebody does something that they don't like, and likewise feel righteous when they themselves do the exact same thing.

When you say that you are a moral relativist, if you mean that you observe that different people appear to have different moral opinions, then this is a sensory observation rather than a moral stance.

It is not subjective because it is necessary to avoid a contradiction in the question of morality, and necessary for morality to exist.

This is a metaethical claim, and what justification or argument do you have for it? Avoiding contradictions, as a normative judgment, is not necessarily a judgment that expresses something objective. — Bob Ross

If noncontradiction is not an objective stance, then there is no logic. "Objective" as I understand it means that it's something that everyone can look at and agree on. If noncontradiction is not an objective preference, then no argument can convince, and we are all wasting our words.

Your distinction between normative and metaethical confused me. Do you have the idea that there ought to be a basis for morality outside of morality? We have the experience that values are arbitrarily asserted, so this doesn't really work. Because of the is-ought dilemma, it is impossible to make moral conclusions without assuming moral premises. If you are looking for a basis for morality outside of moral assumptions (such as that we do not like contradictions), then your search is futile. In my phenomenological metaphysics, I treat sensory experience, reason, and values as all being independently properly basic. This is because we cannot prove the validity of our sensory experience without reference to our sensory experience, we cannot prove that reason is reasonable without reason, and we cannot prove that anything is valuable without first assuming that something is valuable.

So what's the difference? One is a definition and the other is a logical equivalence? I don't think you can get away with any arbitrary definition. If I define X to be equal to 2, then it must be that X is also equal to 2. I feel like you are just playing semantics. If I define X to be NOT X, then that is a contradiction. C := "If C, F" is also a contradiction, if F is false.

I think these paradoxes can be solved by using a truth table on the definition.

If you say, "X is false", clearly that could be represented as X -> F. Then if you say that X is "this sentence," then you could write something like "X <-> (X -> F)". This is very similar to the sentence used in Curry's paradox: "X <-> (X -> Y)", where Y is any arbitrary statement.

If you do the truth table for X, Y, (X -> F), & (X -> Y), then you see that the definitions are simply false. "X <-> (X -> F)" is exactly backwards, so that "NOT X <-> (X -> F)" is a tautology. "X <-> (X -> Y)" is only true if X = T and Y = T.

Michael said earlier that a definition is not truth apt. I can see how that would be the case if you defined an entirely new variable, such as Z <-> (X -> Y). However, since you are setting X equal to itself, you can do a truth table on it.

I remember hearing that if a system contains a contradiction, then anything can be proven. So it makes sense to me that the premise in Curry's paradox contains a contradiction, hence its ability to prove any arbitrary statement.

I believe this is the logic of humor: It is something we find both valuable and unexpected.

This explains why a new joke is funny, but its funniness rapidly diminishes with familiarity.

It also explains why jokes which some people find funny are offensive to others. For instance, I remember a joke I heard while visiting relatives out of town. A guy said he saw a chain of Obama-voters going to the voting booth with their heads stuck up each others' butts. His friends thought it was funny, but my parents voted for Obama, so they did not think it was funny. I believe this is the logic: the man believed that Obama was bad, and that the conservative tribe was good. So, his joke was in essence a way of saying, "Obama bad. I am in conservative tribe," but he said it in an unexpected and graphic way, so his friends, who shared the same values, thought it was funny. My parents, who had opposite values, thought it was offensive. My mother, however, who hates trump, used to make anti-trump jokes and comments, and to her surprise, this alienated some of her relatives. To give another example, one of my favorite jokes (which I hardly ever share), is, "My pee pee is big enough to fit inside two women at the same time." I believe this is the logic behind why I think it's funny: I have polygamist tendencies (which I've never acted on), and like most men, I like to imagine myself to have sexual prowess. So, when I make this joke, it is a way of expressing this is an impossibly extreme way. My wife, however, who is jealous of my affection, hates this joke, which is why I only ever told it to her once.

I believe humor is an evolutionary way of making us pay attention to important information. Much of humor is social or sexual in nature, because we are hardwired to care about these things.

I read through the previous posts to see if anyone else had already said something similar to what I was going to say. I think this is the closest one.

The philosophy of humour has its very own Stanford encyclopaedia entry by John Morreall. Plenty of philosophers have wondered about humour; most unexpectedly, Thomas Aquinas. Humour involves play and incongruity, the recognition and upturning of norms. It’s bound to be a worrying phenomenon for sensible philosophical types. Perhaps its time has come. If the world has become absurd enough for more people to get the joke. — mcdoodle

Welfare is Unconstitutional:

The 10th amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Nowhere in the constitution does it say that the government can take money from one person to give to another person for private use. The constitution does say, "The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States," but the meaning of the word "Welfare" here is different from the modern usage. It is one thing to take money from both person A and person B in order to provide for common defense, or to build a road that they can both use. It is entirely another matter to take money from A to give it to person B, entirely to person A's detriment and person B's benefit.


"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury." Alexander Fraser Tytler (not a founding father, but an educated person sharing an opinion from the time period)

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” – Ben Franklin. This quote is directly applicable to the issue of modern "welfare"

Personally, I hate social security in principle. In the best-case scenario, it is a way of forcing irresponsible people to save for their retirement. As it is actually implemented, it is a pyramid scheme which transfers wealth from the younger generation to the older generation. It exists to take food out of the mouths of the children so that the grandparents can be idle. IMO, one's elders are due honor because they made sacrifices in order to give you life which are impossible to repay. If, however, your elders try to force you to pay them back the debt you owe them, then they have voided all honor due to them.

Anyway, looking up a pie chart of US government spending, it looks like roughly 50% of the federal budget is spent on welfare, which is 100% unconstitutional. Another 16% is spent on the military, which has only been used illegally since 1945. Also, as discussed in the first post, 100% of our money is illegal. So, we can see so far that 100% of our money, and roughly 70% of what the government spends money on is illegal.

Contradiction 9: 100% of our money, and +70% of what the US government spends its money on are unconstitutional.


BTW, Washington DC could disappear, and everyday life for most working people would change very little, apart from getting the equivalent of a 50% pay raise from reduced taxation. Most of the services that people use every day (like roads, police, courts, firefighters) are paid for by state and local taxes. There is very little that the federal government takes in taxes from a working person that he will ever see back again.

Slavery is legal:

The 13th Amendment says, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Court ordered alimony is literally involuntary servitude, and in the case of no-fault divorce, it is not a "crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

Contradiction 7: The constitution says that slavery is illegal, but alimony from no-fault divorce fits the literal definition of involuntary servitude.


There are no familial rights:

The 5th amendment says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." If you have a right to liberty and to property, then how much more should you have a right to your own children? Yet many men are divorced for literally no reason and denied custody of their children. Child protective services can also take your children from you without "due process of law". The first amendment also grants freedom of assembly, and yet many fathers in the USA who have been convicted of no crime do not even have the right to see their own children.

Contradiction 8: A person nominally has the right to assemble, to liberty, and to property, which cannot be taken away without due process of law, yet many fathers who have not even been accused of a crime are barred from seeing their own children.

All wars are illegal:

The constitution says, "The Congress shall have Power To ... To declare War ... "

The last time the US declared ware was during WW2, and yet wikipedia lists 33 separate armed conflicts that the USA has fought since WW2.

If the founding fathers intended for the president to be able to wage war without a declaration of war, then the power of congress to declare war is meaningless. If they did not intend for the president to be able to wage war without congressional approval, then all of these wars since WW2 have been illegal.

Contradiction 6: All US wars are unconstitutional.

If definitions aren't subject to truth apt, then can I say, "Let 'X' mean a married bachelor," and that this sentence is not truth apt?