If they are irrelevant points to your position, it should be simple to point that out and shouldn't require any leg-work at all. Use the guidelines listed in the OP. Don't be lazy. Go about showing how it is irrelevant rather committing the very first logical fallacy - the ad hominem - by calling them a troll. — Harry Hindu

No one has ever accused me of being intellectually lazy, and I do know the difference between a troll and other silliness or just plain lack of intellectual sophistication. You might want to lose the supercilious and flawed conclusions you jump to. You don't know me at all, so avoid the logical fallacy the slippery slope before you really know what you're talking about.

I think there are less public figures with tremendous power who do not bother to claim to be Christian. They will tend to speak up for other ideologies, like neo-liberalism or neo-conservatism and the atheist technocrats do their bidding without blinking. — Coben

Perhaps that's true. No public figure is going to come out and proudly announce his/her atheism. As I wrote above, my conclusion after observing the behavior of so many public figures is that they aren't really christians at all, don't really believe and merely claim the label so as to fit into the dominant paradigm. I also see Zukerberg as a very corrupt and contemptible person, but he never claims to be a good jew.

It doesn't really matter what label folks slap on themselves; their behavior tells the whole story--you can tell by their fruits, plain as day. It's fundamental to both christianity and to judaism to love others; many of the Torah commandments focus on having ethically respectful and compassionate relations with others, whether they are fellow jews or gentiles. I've read the gospels, but not the rest of the NT, and it certainly seems to me that Jesus, jew that he was, was preaching the same message, although I conclude that parts of the message have been distorted by editors who were strongly anti-judaism.

But I think the real threats come from people who are much more cynical about belief and generally secular. — Coben

Trump claims to be a christian; I'm sure all the sociopaths running corporate america do as well. That's the problem: there are millions of people who claim to be christians whose hypocrisy is flagrant. Unless it is perfectly all right for christians to lie, cheat, steal, worship money, grab women by the pussy, etc.

I think you're right: they are cynical and deceitful, but they know how to play the game of christian piety so as to appeal to the masses. For example, Ken Lay of Enron fame claimed to be a christian; I could go on and on, but I won't. Well, maybe just a little: Ferdinand and Isabel; so many horrific popes; Torquemada; KKK; ok, that's enough.

This is great information. I have a question: How to respond to people who make irrelevant or intentionally trollish attempts to derail your initial argument?

If the response is irrelevant, one can get caught up in a labyrinth of trying to steer someone who doesn't really understand the initial premise back on track; as for trolls, how do we get them to go back into the woodwork and stay there?

Pharma, the gm industry, the nanotech industry, the neo cons....the list is long. — Coben

Yes, Coben, I absolutely agree: the fundamentalists are the tools of those groups because they are easy to whip into a frenzy of self-righteous support for those same groups who addict them to opoids, lead them to believe that they have their best interests at heart, that there's no such thing as global warming, that they are the ones who can make america white again. I live in a particularly backwards southern state; one day I found myself driving behind a large truck with a bumper sticker proudly proclaiming, "My carbon footprint is bigger than yours." Talk about the most destructive death wish possible disguised as redneck bravado...

Fundamentalism can be thought of as one making political statements about a something. — 3017amen

I perceive it more in terms of its adherents' modes of behavior, the impacts it has in a given society.

Perhaps fundamentalism is on the extreme edge of the bell curve as a 'refuge for those who can't handle reality', but that covers most of us to varying degrees. — Coben

Yes, indeed it does, but whose delusions cause harm to other people?

Just because fundamentalism provides a kind of artificial refuge for those who can't handle reality, doesn't make it right. — Wayfarer

Nobody here is arguing that fundamentalism is right. In my opinion, christian fundamentalism has been used as an ideological rationalization/justification for unspeakable acts of terror, greed and theft. christians stole most of the world and enslaved its peoples. It's the most repugnant historical obscenity in my view--not that I approve of what some Muslims and the Israelis are doing; they just don't have the numbers.

His philosophy lacks any basis for compassion - 'hell is other people'. ) — Wayfarer

I agree with him, but that's not his only perspective on humanity; put it back in the context of the absurdist/existentialist play it came from. Some people are horrifying, and make others' existence a living hell; many more people than we tend to think are psychopaths with absolutely no conscience or concern for others outside of a very small inner circle. History bears me out on this.

This is a philosophy forum, and the concern ought to be what is real, what is true. — Wayfarer

I probably belong on a psychoanalytic theory/cultural criticism forum... My main concern is how to move humankind in a direction away from pretty much everything I wrote above.

Fundamentalism attempts to solve that by simply clinging to the literal meaning, which is obviously futile. — Wayfarer

Fundamentalism may seem futile to us, but it seems to gain strength every day. The force of the irrational is extremely powerful: it wins over and over again throughout much of history.

So in my view, a lot of the reason why these questions keep coming up on the forum is because they're real questions, they're deep questions, and very hard to fathom. — Wayfarer

I guess I thought Sartre answered that question in "Existentialism is a Humanism"--or I accepted it as such back in the 1970s. It never relieved me from suffering bouts of angst, depression and a feeling that things are absurd and meaningless, but I didn't expect it to. Those feelings are simply part of the human condition for some of us. And sometimes I think that if fundamentalism prevents someone from feeling those feelings... Is that all right? As long as I don't get burned at the stake or thrown in a concentration camp for differing in my beliefs, what's my beef with fundamentalism? Am I going to change a fundamentalist's views? No way in hell. I mean, I think it's incredibly stupid, irrational, cowardly and psychologically unhealthy, but... it seems to be quite popular.

The question I continue to ask myself is, How to muddle through the hard times? At the very least I can say that I am better at muddling through now than I was in my 20s...

Thus my question, why is that? — 3017amen

Cuz the Inquisition would get you if you didn't mention the G word. Now the G word deployed by Descartes, for example, has caché in an albeit flawed argument, but it's not like that anymore. We no longer need to kowtow to the church. Now I enjoy a good discussion about an all-loving and forgiving God who will nonetheless condemn pagans and sinners to eternal hellfires and exactly how that works, but though many have tried, no one's ever convinced me that that idea makes any sense at all.

Aren't we pitifully confined to this teensy rock we call earth, possibly in the backwaters of the galaxy — TheMadFool

I have no problem with the hood I live in, and I'm not particularly concerned with infinity and infinite potential, except to say that I find it a comforting thought. Critters that we are in this backwater, we have our concerns, and until we dry up and blow away, we'll no doubt continue to stare at our navels. :razz:

Sometimes, I think we are lured into careless, combative language. — Amity

Amity, when I first arrived I caught heavy artillery from a few individuals (with whom I now have polite exachanges); I felt like the new kid on the block and that I was being mocked, rejected, made fun of, not taken seriously, etc. I was really pretty shocked right there at the beginning, like I had to go through some initiation with paddles and hot irons. It really put me on the defensive for a while, cuz some folks wanted to set me up to take a fall. But I've stuck around because there are some very fine people on here, I know that it takes time to establish lines of communication with others, and that mutual understanding comes slowly, as does trust.

I've been on another forum--a growing Cannabis forum--for over three years now, and I have some real good buddies on there now. It's worth slogging through a few trolls...

Fair enough, Wayfarer; in a sense, this place is philosophy for the masses and not so much the place to hammer out our academic, ivory tower positions. These days I'm referring to spirituality as ethics and morals; just trying to walk it like I talk it...

Go back and look at the title of the this post. If this is not the place to think about what kinds of discussions and focus we want to see on this forum, I don't know where that place is. la la land, perhaps.

Is being a generous intellectual the same as having 'intellectual generosity' ?
Or is that just another intellectual game my mind is playing... — Amity

I will do my best to "unpack" my idea so you can see what's in my mental suitcase.

A generous intellectual, in my book, is patient with others, never puts others down or dismisses them, shares her/his ideas on a level and in a language that is appropriate to the interlocutor's level of understanding. Kinda like Socrates... Intellectuals should be out to assist each other--not beat each other. At least that's my idea of a utopian forum... community.... mutual understanding...

Irrelevant, immaterial, superfluous and avoidant of my point. If you go on the defensive and go wandering away from the topic, I won't play with you.

Perhaps you could use having your third eye opened a bit...

Poor quality discussions are my speciality.

However, imagine we always demand the best, most well considered and perfect discussions. How would anyone ever learn? A child doesn't immediately start doing calculus or philosophy. S/he needs to be taught and mistakes are an integral part of learning. — TheMadFool

I think this is a weak analogy--perhaps another one of your specialties. A child learning something for the first time has nothing in common with the process of this forum and the people who have done serious reading and in far more than a Philosophy 101 class.

You are too funny if you think that decisions about how we act and the ideas upon which they are based don't pertain to philosophy. Funny and silly.

This is the bane of society, and the bane of forums. Anachronistic, outdated, mindless, logicless submission to religious ideation. The owners are happy to see increases in number of users and in volume of traffic, but they seldom if ever realize that this is the Judas-kiss of death of resonable and reasoned discourse: letting in too many with very storng religious world views. — god must be atheist

Very interesting. This takes the ban on proselytizers a step further. What do you think we should do? Have a serious discussion about re-organizing the rules and guidelines regarding religion? Stipulate that religious discussion must be firmly anchored in the arguments of philosophers who wrestile with the g_d issue? ???

Interesting. What do you mean by 'intellectual generosity' ?
What would you say is 'a hallmark of this forum' ?
Intellectual selfishness ? — Amity

Interesting indeed how you jump from my opinion to the extreme opposite. I'd say a hallmark of this forum is quite a bit of confusion and digressed discussions, and while there are some very generous intellectuals on the forum, there are also some who consider themselves too superior to take someone else's comments seriously. The same old kinds of intellectual games that have been played all along...

The trouble is, atheist humanism has no conception of why humans are in the universe in the first place. — Wayfarer

I don't agree: we appear to have knowledge of what we are supposed to do on the face of this planet in our corner of the universe. We may not dwell on the universe as much as others, because that's not our focus. One has to make choices about where we focus our energies and actions.

Religion is a critical cultural activity, and has been for quite a long time--far longer than atheism. Longer than philosophy. Longer than agriculture. — Bitter Crank

And yet religion has concealed massive amounts of athiests: all you have to do is look at history and it's easy to conclude that these people didn't follow what they'd been taught as God's laws--not a whit! Especially the popes, who were the greediest, most lustful, power-hungry bastards of them all. They were all acting a part or mouthing the words when appropriate. I say actions speak much louder than words, and these crusaders, conquistadores, pilgrims, etc. weren't fkn christians. They were sociopaths with a mask. Still far too fkn many of them around.

but I think it's because people really do have questions about it, and its a very hard topic to articulate by its very nature. — Wayfarer

At one point I was convinced that there were some proselytizers aboard; I did get some PMs from someone wanting to witness to be but I said no thanks.

Proselytizers scout forums like this and the occasional Jewish forum precisely in order to ply their ware. It's repugnant to me, these fanatical, optimistic, naive carriers of the word think they will convince people on this forum or a jewish forum. Cheeeee rist!!!!!!!

we need to figure out how to not be such bigheaded jerks. — Terrapin Station

I wouldn't say that intellectual generosity is a hallmark of this forum.

but then the question becomes, --- how do we get the legislation passed wherever we are? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

It certainly won't be passed in the US with its hypocritical piety and the puritannical mask it wears while it drinks, smokes and opiates itself to death. BUT: we could all learn a lesson from the Netherlands and how its pollcies have worked since the 1970s: http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-holland-learned-after-decades-evolving-its-drug-policy

And a quotation about Portugal's legalization of all drugs: "In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the use of all drugs and the results have been encouraging. Drug addiction, overdoses and drug-related HIV transmission have decreased dramatically in Portugal, without a significant increase in drug use."

The US has made billions and trillions of dollars off its war on drugs: that's the newspeak name for what's been going on. What it really should have been called: The Creation of the Industrial Prison Complex and the Neo-Monroe Doctrine. What the U.S. did in countries like Colombia to farmers growing coca and cannabis was inconscionable, since it provided no alternatives to keep these people from starving to death. It sprayed them with Monsanto's toxins. NAFTA should have been called Let the U.S. suck Latin America dry.

You have to be living in a rational country with a rational government, which is about as opposite of what we have right now if you want to change the laws. I personally feel that in many ways, I'm living in a Nazi Germany doppelganger right now. Hmmmm, perhaps I'll have to get out my yellow star patch...

Whilst everyone seems to find it draining to even try and question anything interesting to me. — Razorback kitten

I have a neighbor lady who will only talk about her children and her garden club. I stopped talking with her...

my worst nightmare, someone who believes in ghosts and believes they saw the ghost of a loved one after they died. — Razorback kitten

Yes, I had a student trying to tell me that witches and witchcraft are real; she's a fundamentalist christian, so all I said was I won't discuss this with you. My brother use to love to debate those folks, but it makes me nauseous.

My life has been too easy, so I can only feel bad...there is almost no way I can relate. — ZhouBoTong

You shouldn't feel bad; we all need to teach our students to subvert the dominant paradigm!!! ;-}

How does the future look from your perspective? Am I overly optimistic in my hopes that things will be improving as more liberal (accurate?) understandings of history become the norm in school classrooms? Is it just a privilege to have the time to worry about the distant future? — ZhouBoTong

Dear fellow teacher: I'm glad to hear about the high school textbooks, and I believe that things are improving for black Americans, little by little. The wheels of history grind slowly

I'm in SC, one of the most backasswards southern states; I'd say that around half of my students are solid middle class, and the other half is solid underclass. I think about the differences between these two groups every day, because it's a catch-22 to expect middle class values, understanding and behavior from the latter group. While it's gratifying to see many of these millenials with "post-racial" mentalities--by which I mean that they know that they don't always have to think in racial terms or mistrust every single white person they meet--, students from the underclass tend to come from so much familial trauma, all the pernicious effects of either inner city or rural southern poverty and lousy k-12 education, that sometimes I'm afraid that I can't help them at all: their defenses and modes of behavior are too set. One does the best one can.

As for the distant future, I'm so cynical about the usa and its entire mythology of who it is: the nation's defenses are also too deeply set in place for it to come out of denial. What I call the Obama backlash, which I believe is a huge part of what put trump in office, was so strong, so many people who seethed with rage for 8 years at having a black man in the white house, runs so deep and so strong in provincial white america. I l taught for 18 years in TX--the scariest and most provincial place I've ever lived. The bible belt is a horrifying place--pathologically ignorant and irrational.

I teach at an HBCU and I significant number of students whose parent has been incarcerated. One girl, who's been missing for a month, showed up today and told me all about her bipolar and schizophrenic father (a veteran) who was in jail for 15 years and spent a year in solitary. It's a systematic plan to continue to destroy the black family that's been going on since slavery. Another of my students did a presentation in class on the impact of public housing on the black family, and the insistence by the govt that women accepting govt aid could NOT have a man living in their apartment. It's really all psychopathic, like the prez and all his cronies, but psychopaths will never call each other out.

What a coincidence. I just posted about Michelle Alexander's book.

Nope. Just saying that FAR more black people have been NOT HIRED because they are black for the last 50 years than those who were hired to fill diversity quotas (and obviously it was WAY worse before the civil rights movement). — ZhouBoTong

As Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'd also add that probably far more black folks have been murdered by paranoid policemen and women (who took over the job after the KKK's glory days waned) than have been hired due to EEOP. The usa's foundational fictions deny the supreme importance of genocide and slavery in forging this great democracy, but you don't have to look very hard to see that all social institutions are permeated with white supremacy. You just have to come out of denial.

I teach at an HBCU; I hear about the subtle and not so subtle operations of white supremacy every day, and I see their effects on my students. This is no democracy; there is no equality.

The only meaning to modern life I can see is to have fun and the people who have the most fun do less thinking. We are all meaningless sacks of meat and bits. Might as well party. — Razorback kitten

Carpe diem, for tomorrow we die. I don't think the mindless partiers are any happier than the depressed philosophers; they just pretend to be. I am an intellectual, but I rub elbows with a lot of folks who aren't, and what strikes me so powerfully about so many of them is how phony they can be. The mask of pretense is perfectly in place, but the mask has cracks through which the desperation can be sense. Mindless prattle is an efficient way of blocking depression and angst... until one shuts up.

The answer seems to be the horse, despite it's ability to sin, — robbiefrost

I didn't know that horses could sin. That just doesn't make sense to me within the (I assume) Christian framework you're employing.

So you need someone else to tell you what to do? — Banno

Absolutely not. That doesn't mean that I don't reconsider my actions in light of new information.

As for Jesus being disowned, and "one," you lost me there.

Yes, your christian god acts in immoral ways. The Bible tells us so. — Banno

Actually, the book of Job is in the Tanakh, and is thus not the christian god, but the god of the hebrews.

That being said, I'd like to hear your ideas on doing what is right. Is there a secular theme somewhere with regard to suffering and doing what's right?

His counter was that actually admitting to your mistakes increases your credibility and shows that you care about the facts so much that you’re willing to let go of pride so the truth gets the spotlight. — Mark Dennis

Brave, ethical man--except that we seem to living in a culture that values the opposite: deny the truth at all costs--just like the lawyers for big pharma have been doing, and of course the republicans are in deep, utter denial about what's been going on, but they only care to protect their own interests, so of course they deny it.

When we admit to our mistakes, it shows some psychological maturity. When we can't admit to our mistakes, we're in denial, and that can end up distorting the hell out of reality. People in denial can become extremely violent when they project onto others whatever it is about themselves they can't face. History tells the story over and over.

The Emmett Louis Till case is a very specific instance of what I'm talking about; if you care to, you can scroll down and watch a short documentary about the pictures taken of the boy's body after he'd been beaten to death by white men who insisted they were defending southern womanhood. http://100photos.time.com/photos/emmett-till-david-jackson#photograph

This was the kind of atrocity inflicted on black people throughout Jim Crow era: all of white men and womens' sick projections onto black people of their own sick and sadistic urges. Black men never wanted white women: we know that in reality, it was always white men, since they were slave owners, raping black women. But they couldn't live with their own psychopathic urges which they acted out of the bodies of black men and women, all the while maintaining that the black people were the sexual predators.

Being in denial can be some scarey ass shit.

This to me describes the 'infinity' of the godless/divine wanderer. — jellyfish

I wasn't attracted to Hegel and read very little of him. I believe that for various German writers, it's a travesty to translate them to English; Martin Buber's work is practically unreadable in English.

What does he mean, "absolute inwardness"? Why does he keep using the word absolute over (4 times)? It makes me suspicious."A pure and infinite self-identity": does "infinite" acknowledge the différance of that self-identity? "Absolute independence"? "Free unity with itself"? I don't get it.

I'm uncomfortable. I don't think I understand or know his discourse at all, like the way I do Bakhtin, Freud, Lyotard and a few others that I read repeatedly to understand really well. I'm outside of Hegel, and I know I'd have to study him intensely to get him.

What strikes me about the passage is that it seems to contradict what you've written about our need for the monologician in our midst so that we remember not to transform our own dialogic notions into any kind of self-righteous, authoritarian or repressive take on other views. The float like a butterfly sting like a bee struggle against or dance around stasis (or hypostasis as Adorno called it), and certainly against the concept of a stable self-identity. Just as my philosophy continues transforming, so do myselves. Freud's ego has been dehisced like a seed pod into infinite selves of which we may or may not be conscious. Of course, some of these selves are completely unconscious, and it would take serious psychoanalysis to abreact them. Myselves are kind of infinite like the cosmos...

I prefer aspects of Modernism to Romanticism.

Did you watch this video that came with this post? I’ve been wondering if anyone has. — Mark Dennis

Hi Mark, I started watching it, but it didn't grab me; I was at work anyway and distracted. But I felt like I understood the gist of what you wrote, and that's what I responded to. :smile:

It's as if every ideal or principle casts a shadow. It offers us a welcome refuge from the abyssal complexity within. Can any community exist without some foundational blindspot? I don't know. I guess I'm suspicious of any ideology, including my own anti-ideology, claiming a Final Triumph and mistakenly believing it has exiled its own madness. — jellyfish

You're a deconstructionist in the finest sense of the word. Knowing that madness can never be permanently banished is a step in the right direction. My madness is my old friend.

We see life and death in the cosmos — leo

So you perceive the death of a star as evil? Or the big bang, or a black hold? I can't agree with that. I see evil as a strictly human action. Although sometimes I'm not sure whether cats are being evil when they toy with their prey....

I think you read that line out of context. If you read more of my posts in this thread, I think you'll see that I am defending angst. — jellyfish

I knew that, because I did read you carefully. I have been in an existential funk for weeks and if anyone said to me right now, "get over it," I'd go medieval on their ass:

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around"