I think everyone should read postings through thoroughly before leaving their critical messages. — god must be atheist

I went back and checked and I did read the post thoroughly the first time, so you can't blame my response on that. Given your response to that, I apologize for attributing racial or ethnic attitudes to the posts you made. In my defense, that type of argument is often used as evidence of racial superiority. It was wrong of me to make those assumptions about you.

That leaves the question of whether worrying is what lead to the technological and military superiority of northern peoples. I'll stand by my statement that it is not sound anthropology. Nuff said. I've gone off-OP and we should save this for some other time.

Sorry, but I've just peeled a mandarin. And it is indeed divided. In fact almost every sensible object is divisible into parts, some of them, like mandarins, into sub-parts. So whatever the sentiment you're wanting to express here, it regrettably doesn't conform with the testimony of sense. — Wayfarer

I'm surprised. I always think of you as someone experienced in eastern philosophies. Certainly more experienced than I am. Maybe you have a different understanding of the ground of being, Tao, reality, existence, or being than I do.

But for the rest, you've got a lot going on. I buy the idea - not my idea - that at one time generally, but now mainly with children, and in those occasional moments when experience irrupts into adult consciousness, as with poetry, or again with an experience of redintegration, or music, that words were not as they are now, i.e. mainly the abstract signs of abstract categories of things, but rather the names of things the things themselves being the source of experience, and their names then becoming a secondary source of that same experience. — tim wood

Whereas words as signs - univocal - are shorn not of meaning but of significance, shorn of the immediate experience of them, leaving only their abstract "gesturing/pointing" at objects we have little or no real interest in, being, rather, disinterested observers/watchers of them. — tim wood

I'm not sure if I get the distinction between words and names, at least not in this context. I wrote previously:

Fiction can be experienced without words in the same way that visual art or music can. In reading fiction, it is the experience, not the meaning that is important. — T Clark

You describe "...moments when experience irrupts into adult consciousness, as with poetry, or again with an experience of redintegration, or music.... " I'm saying that those moments, i.e. direct experience of art without descriptions or meaning, can happen with literature as well as music, etc. I have that experience all the time while reading literature. I'm not sure, are you disagreeing with that or saying something else entirely?

I also said that is the purpose of art, the proper goal of art, including literature. It seems to me that the meaning of a work of literature is something different from that and that the purpose of the process of interpretation described by Adler is to establish the meaning of the book or story.

In short, in reply I'd venture that what you encounter in art is a lost part of yourself that is not easily recognizable as such, and attribute it to the art itself - which is also legitimate because it reminded you of that which makes for you possible the experience of the art as art. — tim wood

I don't think I understand. Of course a work of art, including literature, interacts with my feelings, memories, attitudes to have its effect. Everything we experience does.

I think I am probably missing your point. Also, I think I confused myself.

Through what agency? If, for example, I am undivided and whole, then who breaks me up into the people who further breaks me up into the 10,000 things? — Trinity Stooge

It's not that you are undivided, it's that everything is undivided. There is only one essence, e.g. the Tao. Other philosophers call it something else. Many philosophers don't include it in their understanding of reality. The agent of the spit into the 10,000 things is processing by the human mind.

To be clear, this is a metaphysical view. It's not true or false, it is useful or not. I think it is a very fruitful way of looking at things.

Sure, and until and unless He manifests himself in some unambiguous and clear way, the possibility is without significance, importance, or meaning, except possibly as a regulative or instructive idea. — tim wood

I disagree with your statement, but as I said in my recent post, I don't think this is the thread to have this discussion. I have no problem with assuming that there is no God, but I thought @Daniel C was a bit presumptuous in how he phrased his OP, as if it were self-evident. I realize this is off-topic. There's no need to distract from the OP any more.

T Clark will be along soon to tell us that this is a trivial thread. — Banno

Remind me. When did I do that before? I don’t remember it.

If you think Christianity deserves respect, you are not a moral person nor good. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

You wrote that you "love a lot." I just commented that I have not seen evidence of that in your time here on the forum.

I think that the quoted statement is a sign of hatred and intolerance of a class of people based on your personal prejudice. Most legal and moral classifications of discriminatory behavior include specific reference to discrimination of people on the basis of religion. I think the fact that the forum does not include that in its guidelines is a sign of the prejudice against religion and religious people that many people here feel. I also think it is wrong.

In the beginning man created "God". As far as ancient historians can go back into history they find indications of man being "religious" in some way or another. The only expanation for this phenomenon which makes sense to me is a psychological one. There must have been this overwhelmimg need in man, right from the "beginning" to find a Superior / Transcendental / Cosmic Being to enable him/her to bear the pain / suffering of being alive and to give meaning to their lives and also a sense of morality. Without finding such a Being the "inner chaos of human experience" would have destroyed everything with no survivors left to give continuity to the human race. Therefore, human beings created the concept of "God" which eventually led to many different conceptions of this concept which is today still in a process of evolution. — Daniel C

There is another possibility, of course, i.e. that God exists. It is at least worth a mention. We don't have to get into a discussion on the existence of God. There are dozens, hundreds of them here on the forum with new ones starting all the time.

Here's a quote from the Tao Te Ching that I think is relevant to your position:

The Tao ...is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

The Tao is what exists as an undivided whole. People break it up into the 10,000 things, which are the objects and phenomena which make up the reality we live in. God is one of the 10,000 things.

And there is yet another way of thinking about God which I find satisfying and which is consistent with the Tao Te Ching but separate from your psychological explanation. If there is no objective reality, which is a reputable and defensible metaphysical position, then what we call "reality" is a fundamentally human invention. The religious impulse is just recognition of this living nature of our world.

There's a SEP article on them. Other post I used sortals in is referencing type 2. — fdrake

I read the first page. It's still something of a mystery to me. The idea that popped into my head was the Ship of Theseus, which I think is relevant. I might be able to define the word, but I don't think I could say how it might be used. No need to go into more explanation. Unless you feel like it.

I love a lot and that brings out my hate against the misguided causes of Christian hate. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I don't remember seeing any love in any of your posts, just bitter hatred against not just religion and religious institutions, but religious people. I've tried to make it clear how repellent I think that is.

the effect that a work of the imagination has on you. — tim wood

I wasn't going to respond to this. When someone focuses on a writer I am not familiar with, it seems disrespectful of the OP, but I find that I can't stop thinking about your post. I've only got a little time right now, but I'll come back later and give a more comprehensive set of thoughts. For now, I'd like to focus on one aspect of reading fiction I think is relevant.

There was a recent thread I found really interesting - Is meaning something separate from words. In that thread, I tried to make the case that non-verbal art, e.g. music and painting, doesn't mean anything until someone puts it into words. The paradox of fiction is that, even though it is an art of words, it also doesn't mean anything until someone puts that meaning into (different) words. Seems like Adler is describing a process for extracting meaning from a book. For non-fiction, I am less at odds with Adler's approach than I am with fiction.

Fiction can be experienced without words in the same way that visual art or music can. In reading fiction, it is the experience, not the meaning that is important. Here is a link to a passage from a book by John Gardner - October Light - that I used in that previous thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/326674

Fiction can be experienced in the same way that the French horn player describes for music in the linked passage. I think that is the important thing for us to get out of fiction - the experience, not the meaning. I'll write more later.

I hope you think this is relevant.

How am I supposed to deal with the fact that I'll just expirence life through my eyes and thoughts when there are so many verions of reality out there? — raindrop

Here's the trick - like people. Be interested in them. Try to see them as they are. Try to empathize - we are empathic animals. There is only one world, we all just have different illusions, but they overlap.

If I'm real and everyone else is real and have a sense of "me", is the sense of "me" just an illusion then? And if I'm an illuson my brain creates, do I really exist? — raindrop

This is at the heart of many eastern philosophies. Everything we experience as a separate entity or phenomenon is an illusion which, as you say, is created by the brain, or rather the mind. The "self" is an illusion, maybe the biggest one. In a sense, it leads to all the rest. The "real" reality is an undivided whole, e.g. the Tao in Taoism. Of course, reality is as big an illusion as all the rest. I don't see this as a mystical idea.

As for "being" - in Taoism, things do not come into being until we separate them from the undivided whole. As the Tao Te Ching says:

Return is the movement of the Tao. Yielding is the way of the Tao. All things are born of being. Being is born of non-being.

You can find the Tao Te Ching for free. Here's a link -

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html

You can read the whole thing in an hour.

There's a SEP article on them. — fdrake

Thanks. I'll look.

Sortal - @fdrake used this in a post, so I looked it up. See the Wikipedia description below. Even with that, I can't figure out what it means.

Sortal is a concept that has been used by some philosophers in discussing issues of identity, persistence, and change. Sortal terms are considered a species of general term that are classified within the grammatical category of common or count nouns or count noun phrases.[1] This is based on the claim that a perceptual link allows perceptual demonstrative thought if it enables sortal classification.

I find it really reassuring to weaken identity mismatches to sortal equivalences — fdrake

I'll make "sortal" the word of the day.

I actually did not say that, and I deny the truth of your statement. — god must be atheist

No. You just spouted some jingoist pseudo-anthropology that said the same thing.

I don't get it. What does morning have to do with red blood cells?

I bought it because I didn't know how to read a book, but then I realized that I couldn't read How to Read a Book, either.

Finally someone explained to me that the first step is to open the cover. — Terrapin Station

Woody Allen once said "I took a class in speed reading. We read 'War and Peace' in 20 minutes. It involves Russia."

What's the difference? — Rufoid

As I said, it's more important that you be willing to stand behind the decisions you make than it is how you make up your mind. It's your job to figure out how much justification you need for your decisions. In order to do that, you have to have a good understanding of the potential consequences of your actions.

How many decisions do you make every day where it makes a big difference which way you go?

So how about finding the perfect balance between planning and living, how to find the right path, without letting your mind run amok? — Ariel D'Leon

This is at the heart of many eastern philosophies and practices such as meditation. And, yes, of course, I am guilty of living somewhere other than here.

Ultimately, it is worry that placed the northern hemisphere societies that elevated them politically and in war industry that helped them to create industrial societies, which subjugated the rest of the world. It was all due to worry, because other features of humans living elsewhere were and are comparably equal to norhtern hemisphere denizens. — god must be atheist

Ah, yes. That's why we northern Europeans are the Master Race.

Suppose I believe in making decisions based on which kind of bird I see first thing in the morning, and that I believe this due to my own unpublished scientific research.

Is this an irrational belief? — Rufoid

First off, you said you've done some appropriate research, so your way of doing things sounds justified, which I guess means it's rational. I'm going to ignore that and talk instead about what would happen if your belief in bird based decision making was not justified based on your experience.

I make a lot of decisions as part of my work, so I've thought about the decision making process. It's clear to me that with 90% of the decisions I make, it doesn't matter what I choose. The only things that are important are 1) I make a choice and 2) I take responsibility for the consequences of my decisions.

Given that, I'm allowed to make most decisions on any basis I want, which allows me to be as playful as I want. Generally, I just go with what feels right without too much introspection. Alternatively, I could do it by your bird method, although maybe you'd have to carry around your field guide all the time. In the spring in the eastern US, there are a lot of warblers migrating north. There are dozens of species and many of them are hard to tell apart. What if you saw a Myrtle Warbler but thought it was a Prairie Warbler and made the wrong decision?

Most decisions are made by such non-rational, not irrational methods. Which is fine.

I don't think I'm a particularly stubborn person. — uncanni

I put that in for rhetorical purposes. I have seen that you are strong and opinionated. It just didn't feel right to leave out the stubborn part. For the record, I don't consider stubbornness a vice. Ok, ok, I'll say "strong-willed."

And for the record, @Bitter Crank is as far from a hater as there is on this forum.

I think empathy overrides that cause we can imagine ourselves as not humans. — IuriiVovchenko

I didn't say we can't imagine things that aren't human, I said we are constrained by a brain and mind that evolved along with the rest of us. It is structured to address the issues we and our ancestors dealt with. It leaves a lot out that isn't relevant, or at least wasn't 200,000 years ago.

Our minds are structured to feel empathy. There's no reason I can't apply that to geese, frogs, or creatures from Tao Ceti.

But it just so happens that our world has been largely man-controlled, and history tells the story of men behaving badly on the grand stage of things. There's no current need to neuter the term when men systematically kept women outside of all spheres of power and cultural creation. — uncanni

Women raise all these terrible men, and yet you want to take away their responsibility for their own lives and the consequences of their actions. That's the opposite of showing respect. Your position relegates women to the status of children. I hang around with strong, opinionated, stubborn women. They would not tolerate anyone telling them that.

Hey, wait a minute - aren't you a strong, opinionated, stubborn woman?

Our capitalism is a patriarchy because it has these relations, whether they are enacted by men or women. This question isn't about whether someone belongs to a virtuous sex or gender, it's about how they understand and treat women. Women can partake in this just as much as men. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't believe that our society is a patriarchy and I don't believe women in the US are oppressed as a class. I can understand @Bitter Crank's point that woman are oppressed in the sense that everyone who is not in power is oppressed. Pardon if I've misstated your position BC.

what about empathy? we can make ourselves feel as other being and not necessarily human. — IuriiVovchenko

I don't understand the question. Our minds are structured to feel empathy.

I'm not denying that women are oppressed here; I'm saying that "patriarchy" isn't real. What oppresses men and women these days are the usual culprits: corporations, churches, and states--all large institutions with domination-of-everything-else on their agenda. — Bitter Crank

I don't remember the context of our back and forth. Maybe I misunderstood. I guess I think when people say that women are oppressed, that means that they are oppressed by men. Perhaps I am jumping to conclusions, at least in your case.

Is there a way to point out that our mind type is capable of understanding any concept of any complexity given enough time? — IuriiVovchenko

Our minds are specifically structured to mentally process phenomena that are specifically important to human beings and other similar animals. We are probably unable to conceptualize anything that does not fit into that structure. Our vision of reality is unavoidably human-centric. We are limited in what we can see or understand not by our level of intelligence but in our kind of intelligence.

The reality we experience is made up of just those pieces we are able to jam into the mold of our physiological, neurological, and psychological processes.

I still think "patriarchy" is a noun naming a non-existent phenomenon which is the Number One imaginary Bogeyman of feminists. — Bitter Crank

I haven't kept up with this discussion, so I was just going through your comments to see what you had to say. I have a question about the statement above. Unless my memory is off, in a previous discussion you said that women are oppressed, which I disagreed with. How does that tie in with your statement about patriarchy?

But then again, I don't really care, because every misbehaviour tends to be its own punishment. I will just be laughing when it predictably goes wrong again. — alcontali

I wasn't writing about the issue we discussed in that previous thread, i.e. getting rid of men, I was writing about the attitude I try to take into discussions like this one.

There is still a difference between sexual orientation and engaging in hate speech on the other gender. I have never heard gay men saying hateful things about women, irrespective of the fact that they don't fancy them sexually. There seems to be a real need to rein in the lesbian hate speech on men. — alcontali

I don't think @Bridget Eagles's idea for gender segregation makes sense and reflects a lack of respect for men, but it isn't hate speech. I don't think it will be effective in meeting her goals on a societal scale, but it may on a personal level.

There was a thread started a bit more than a year ago by a man speculating that technological advances in the near future will make it possible for women to give birth without men. He proposed men be allowed to die out so that only women remained as a way of ending violence in society. I reacted ....vigorously to that thread. I said that writing something like that about women would never be allowed on the forum. Ultimately, the thread was deleted and the poster quit the forum.

@TimeLine and I talked that over and she made me recognize that pitting men against women here was not the way to deal with these issues. I wish she were here to participate in this discussion. She had a unique attitude toward relations between men and women. I'd like to hear what she has to say. Alas.

There is not much feminist discussion here on the forum. I hope you find enough positive reaction to make it worth your while to hang around.

Just so you'll know where I'm coming from, I'm a straight male. I have a couple of thoughts:

• The idea that homosexuality is a choice is strongly resisted by many gay people. You seem to be arguing the opposite, that it is a choice. I don't understand that.
  
  
• Most women aren't sexually attracted to other women. Being a heterosexual woman is no more a choice than being a homosexual one is.

It appears that you also don’t find your explanation convincing, being that you don’t know what to say in response to a counter-view of it. — praxis

It's not that I don’t think my response was adequate. The opposite. I thought I’d said what needed to be said. Nothing you wrote contradicted what I said. I can understand that you don’t agree, but I don’t know what else to say to convince you.

I don't believe the first amendment says anything about special respect and tolerance for religious believers and their beliefs over non-believers and their beliefs, indeed, that would seem to be against the principle of the amendment, to favor one group over another.

What is your reasoning??? — praxis

I haven't responded to your post yet. I don't want to ignore it, but I don't know what to say next. I gave you my explanation. It's clear you don't find it convincing. What else is there to say?

I am a member and my opinion is different. This is strictly a value based opinion. I reject the validity that some members' idea what constitutes "ruining" should be accepted by all members. This is my right as a member, much like you think you all members must assume your position. The difference is you take ownership of all members' opinion ("our forum") whereas I allow differences to be coexisting, and to thrive. You deny that right form others, "becaus they ruin OUR forum". This is not a direct quote, but a quote to denote this is what I think you are saying and are expressing with your words. — god must be atheist

I think you damage the forum with your mean-spirited, disrespectful, insulting, intolerant posts. A lot of other members are sympathetic to my position.

You claim ownership of this forum. This is rich. — god must be atheist

The forum is a community of which I am a member. It's not ownership, it's membership.

You can't even separate your personal hatred from your world view. You can't not introduce your personal bias into any argument, claim or statement. You are one of the strongest examples of the tribal behaviour I described, along with my own persona. — god must be atheist

I don't hate you or your beliefs. I don't hate anyone or anything. I do find your beliefs distasteful and mean-spirited. I think the unrestricted expression of them hurts the forum. I don't want the moderators to get involved, so I've taken it on myself to do what I can by expressing my disapproval.

This is so much human nature. Nobody can override this. Not the MODs, nobody. This is the bread and butter of humanity. — god must be atheist

I don't think anyone here wants to change human nature, or even your warped view of it. We just want to stop the assholes from ruining our forum.