I try to be aware of the various interpretations people hold. — Tom Storm

Why? To what end?

Interesting how?

Unless we're talking about a simple curiosity (or more like: attempts to relieve one's existential boredom), the pull one feels toward an acient text surely has something to do with the historical reception and influence of said text.
— baker

The Bible is not just a religious text. It is linked to ethics, literature, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. The Bible is also a huge topic for Philosophy of Religion. Some books in the Bible such as Psalms and Job has huge significance in Literature, and people read and study them for the literal merits. — Corvus

But there is more!

Whence the significance of the Bible?
Why the assumption that there is something powerful about the text itself?

There is no restrictions saying, only the religious people must read the Bible.

The question was, why do the non-religious read it.

One's interests can be further analyzed, and I think this is the relevant aspect of reading ancient texts.

Oh. A hobby, then, with no real life application?

It's well known that when people face adversity together it can bring them together. — Janus

Hatred and contempt bind people closer together than love, indeed.

In any case I was taking with your generalising human nature by implying that everyone is primarily motivated by self-interest,

That is your inference, not my implication.

I wasn't generalizing human nature. I'm saying that the people who do as described above (from aggressive drivers to employers who have their employees work in unsafe conditions) often happen to be the same people who are enthusiastically in favor of the covid vaccine. When a person proves, with their behavior, that they do not care about others, it's hard to believe that they got vaccinated out of concern for others.

Mr. Riley and Mr. Wood, for example, certainly didn't get vaccinated out of concern for me. They don't even care enough to actually read what I say; they don't care enough to check whether the hatred and the contempt they have for me is in fact over something I actually said.

That some vaccinated people, due to breakthrough infection, are spreading covid is undeniable. That they are superspreaders has not been established. That said I think even the vaccinated should be adhering to the normal protocols designed to minimise transmission as long as there is covid in the community.

Like I said:

In fact, they are superspreaders, given the freedoms they have. — baker

That said I think even the vaccinated should be adhering to the normal protocols designed to minimise transmission as long as there is covid in the community.

But they don't. In fact, the whole idea of covid vaccination is that one can "go back to normal" once vaccinated.

He is certainly not avoiding persecution by not going into exile, which would have been a way of avoiding it. But can we say Socrates is not hiding something?
— Leghorn

That's the big question. If he is hiding something, what exactly is it that he is hiding?

And, if he is not afraid of prosecution, why hide anything? — Apollodorus

Viewing him as a martyr makes sense of his trial and death sentence.

Then why bother with the God concept at all?

Someone who uses this line of reasoning needs to show a necessary causal link between omnibenevolence (being all loving) and the removal/prevention of suffering. — Ghost Light

Indeed. But there appears to be no such causal link.

Other than perhaps -- "God lets us suffer because he wants us to be happy."

Cool. Coherent but unlikely.

For me if God is the jealous, dictatorial, error-prone fuck-knuckle he appears to be in the Old Testament, then we should blow a raspberry in his direction. — Tom Storm

This is what God loves and rewards:

I think you are worthless. — James Riley

I'm not willing to pay any of your bills. If you don't social distance, don't mask and don't vax, and if you get sick and go to the hospital and take up a bed that my wife or kid or me need for covid or some other reason, I will not only not pay your bills, but I'll rip the vent out of your mouth and dump your worthless carcass out the window and tell the Hippocratic Oath doc to forget your ass and get to work on me or mine. — James Riley

:100: — tim wood

Regarding the rest of your post, it's not worth my time. It's stupid Faux News, Tucker Carlsonesque BS. — James Riley

It's because right-wingers are doing so good in life that one should believe in God, _their_ God. They always win.

then we should blow a raspberry in his direction. — Tom Storm

And how is that supposed to help you?

Nah. I doubt anyone in this whole thing really thinks of others. It's just politically correct to say one is doing it "for others". It makes for such good PR.
— baker

How did you come to be such an authority on the motivations of others? — Janus

You think people change just like that, over night? Because of a pandemic?

we're supposed to believe that, for example, people who drive aggressively, who tailgate, cut in front, run others off the road etc. suddenly become paragons of compassion and empathy when a pandemic strikes? That men who refuse to wear condoms and who routinely risk the health and life of their female sex partners suddenly grew a conscience? Employers who have their workers work in unsafe conditions now suddenly "care about others"? Really? — baker

And don't forget that the fully vaccinated are still spreading the disease. In fact, they are superspreaders, given the freedoms they have.

That's right. Hatred and contempt are the noblest emotions of all.

Vote for Trump!

We are at the mercy of the free will of fools. Act accordingly. — Cheshire

See, you're just looking for a scapegoat. Instead of acknowledging the complexity of the situation, you opt for a simplistic outlook which makes it okay for you too see the world in black and white terms, making it easy to point fingers and to bask in righteous indignation.

The pleasure you get from despising those who aren't enthusiastically in favor of the covid vaccine is so intoxicating, isn't it.

It's more of a context for discussion. I'm trying to create a more of a space than a target. I think some people had/have doubts. Telling a person what they can not doubt is wrong in a way. So long as everything is prefaced with...this is about doubting certainty not informing public policy; then maybe people can raise their concerns without anyone being threatened by ideas. — Cheshire

But public policy is the problem.

For one, the official government outlets are offering simplified and thus misleading information about covid and about the covid vaccines. They paint a black-and-white picture of the situation which, indeed, makes things easier from an administrative/bureocratic perspective for the government, but not in terms of handling the pandemic. The fully vaccinated now get barely ever tested, and they behave as if all was well: and so they spread the disease unchecked (because being vaccinated doesn't stop one from being contagious).

For two, if one does get bad side effects from the vaccine, there is, at least in some EU countries no medical protocol for that, no protection. One is left to oneself. Because the covid vaccines are legally
still treated the same way as any other experimental medication.

For three, there are medical practices related to covid that have greatly complicated things for people. For example, people have been diagnosed with covid by their doctor, but no test done to confirm it. Now, when they try to get a covid pass (which is necessary for so many things in the EU), they can't get it, because a covid pass requires an old enough positive test. Further, those that have had bad side effects after the first dose of the vaccine, are left to themselves; even their doctors advise them not to take the second dose. But if they don't, they can't get a covid pass.


In short, the government and the medical establishment, given some very bad practices they have done in the past and are still doing them, are demanding too much trust from people.

If some bad shit happens because I got the vax, then Baker, et al, can say "I told you so!" — James Riley

See, that's just it. _I_ wouldn't tell you "I told you so".

But you don't care. You just put me into the same category with anyone who isn't all that enthusiastic about the covid vaccine.

But here's the thing: they didn't tell me anything, because they don't know anything. All they did was speculate. They aren't smart enough and don't have the training to tell me anything. All they can do is question, wonder, speculate or regurgitate what others have said to make them scared. There is nothing wrong with that, I guess. But I don't live my life that way.

But here's the thing: You don't care. You don't listen. You think in black and white terms, all or nothing. No nuance, no detail, nothing. Like a total redneck. This is what puts many people off.

You're sending the message that anyone who is rabidly in favor of the covid vaccines is entitled to spew hatred and contempt at those who aren't, and that those others are obligated to accept that hatred and contempt on their knees.

Here making a note to myself to reply to these posts. I need to think some more to make my reply concise.

You speak like a true believer.

Now, the question is how come some people are bothered by this. (For they are bothered, given the extensive critical communications on the topic).

For your own part, you already have an explanation for this: they are spiritually inferior to you.

For their part, I'm not sure. It could be many things -- envy, feeling threatened, bewilderment. It's something I've been keenly trying to figure out.

I have to say the more I think about this idea of a god the less coherent and comprehensible I find it. If you reduce the idea to an anthropomorphized cartoon - a fundamentalist style of deity - it become more coherent, if less believable to me.

Do you have a view about what the most plausible form of deity could be? — Tom Storm

The God of the Taliban.

What do you think of the Paul Tillich style 'ground of being' conception?

That it's impotent.
At the end of the day, life is a struggle for survival. If a concept of God doesn't reflect that and doesn't help one to get the upper hand in said struggle, then it's impotent.

My question was, if philosophical inquiry leads to aporia, then why would anyone engage in philosophical inquiry? — Apollodorus

Well, this is why people quit philosophy, no?

According to Socrates, knowledge of higher realities can be acquired only by looking into them with the soul alone by itself.

Through the Socratic method, under the guidance of the teacher.

The claim to the effect that "philosophical inquiry leads to aporia" is spurious and unfounded IMHO. — Apollodorus

Not at all. The above claim probably best describes many people's experience with philosophy, namely, that it "goes nowhere".

Plato does no more than to put us on the right track. The Truth-hunting has to be done by each lover of wisdom or seeker after truth, personally. — Apollodorus

Provided we take for granted that Plato knows and take him as our teacher.

At any rate, I think we are more likely to arrive at truth by actively hunting for it than by perpetually questioning things and living a life of self-imposed ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt.

"And what is the result of stress?
There are some cases in which a person overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, grieves, mourns, laments, beats his breast, & becomes bewildered.
Or one overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, comes to search outside, 'Who knows a way or two to stop this pain?'
I tell you, monks, that stress results either in bewilderment or in search. This is called the result of stress.
AN 6.63

How are we to hunt for the truth, if we do it in some kind of vacuum, with no teacher or guide?
And how do we know whom to turn to to help us in our search?


Note how our notion of truth probably entails some kind of relating to others, however "thinking for ourselves" we might otherwise believe ourselves to be.

We should trust the experts, simply because we have nothing else to go on when it comes to making judgements in fields where we have little or no expertise.

What's the alternative? Trust no one? — Janus

No. But desist from making many judgments to begin with.
Obviously, this wil make one unpopular in certain circles where having a lot of definitive opinions is required. But realistically, there are rather few things that one actually needs to have a definitive opinion about.

On the other hand if someone wants to question everything and think for themselves, they will be obviously happier if they do that, no?

Because philosophers are known for being such a happy bunch!

Outside/inside certainly is a meaningful distinction — Constance

Why?

And, having read one dialogue that allegedly leaves the reader in a state of "aporia", why read another dialogue that leaves the reader in the same "aporetic" condition?

What I fail to see is how additional aporia can resolve the initial aporia.

Or is the intention to maximize the aporetic state until all reasoning ability has been suspended? — Apollodorus

Perhaps not deliberately. This is also how the practice of koans works. Namely, contemplating a koan is supposed to bring one's mind to a halt, from whence on one can "see things as they really are".

But nor should they claim that other people's personal experience is just imagination. — Apollodorus

But there is still an issue of power. Defining what is real for another person is an act of power.
It's not possible to do away with issues of power in interpersonal interactions of any kind, not even in philosophy.

There is also such a thing as lack of imagination. — Wayfarer

But then again, it's possible to be so open-minded that one's brain falls out.

Some think that dialectic is a method that leads to knowledge of the Forms. But how can someone know this unless they have completed the journey? That it does is something we are told not something we have experienced. It is a matter of opinion. Dialectic leads to knowledge of our ignorance. It leads us to see that philosophical inquiry leads to aporia. — Fooloso4

Not under the Socratic method.

Inherent in the Socratic method is the inequality of the teacher and the student, and the student's submission to the teacher.

Also while searching for info on him, I found an article on philosophical counselling. — Wayfarer

Are you familiar with Alain de Botton?
His Consolations of Philosophy was quite famous.

I personally don't know God's mind. But threatening others on the account that that one knows God's mind can be a very powerful tool in social interactions, in order to subject the other person, or get some leverage over them, or at least to gain psychological distance from them. (For this, it is actually irrelevant whether the threatener knows God's mind or not.)

What do you think has driven monotheistic conquerors to kill, rape, and pillage, if not the conviction that they have God on their side?

I'm trying to make sense of the God idea.
— baker

And in doing so you renege on your responsibility to decide right from wrong. — Banno

If there is objective morality, my decision about morality is moot.
If there is no objective morality, my decision about morality is irrelevant.

You're simply taking your brand of morality for granted, as if it was objective, absolute.

A benevolent parent does not spoil their child, does not wrap them in cotton-wool but pushes them towards independence and responsibility. — unenlightened

Exactly, which is the justification for a Social Darwinist monotheism.

I agree but since we don't (can't?) know God's mind, how could anyone assume to know if God's standards based on the information available? — Tom Storm

Maybe you in particular don't know God's mind, but who's to say nobody else does either?

The power of God belief, as far as it concerns interpersonal interactions, is precisely in one party having more uncertainty about God than the other person.

By the way, what is a humanist standard of good? Isn't this largely Christianity without Jesus?

No.
Humanism.

I was thinking more in terms of this forum, but yes. — Banno

Oh, the irony!

Philosophy is overrated anyway. At the end of the day, philosophers, too, are "just people". And forum moderators at a philosophy forum don't even wait for the end of the day!

The horror, suffering, and anguish of a situation is all the more reason to invoke anekantavada. One party involved has failed to give the other's point of view the attention it deserves. — TheMadFool

It deserves such attention? "Deserves" by whose standards?

Waiting for others only makes one a victim, and if persisted in, eventually, a martyr.

The BIV scenario takes for granted that there is an outside and an inside.
— baker

Does it? — Constance

Of course, which is evidenced by asking questions such as, "How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats?" You wouldn't be asking this if you wouldn't think that inside vs. outside is a meaningful distinction.

This makes the BIV a metaphysical problem, for there is nothing foundational presented.

No, it makes it a poorly conceived one.

There are, despite the ubiquitous, absurd pop philosophy to the contrary, very many things that we know. — Banno

List 3.

Many people are interested in the ancient texts be it bible or literature, because they are interesting in many ways. — Corvus

Interesting how?

Unless we're talking about a simple curiosity (or more like: attempts to relieve one's existential boredom), the pull one feels toward an acient text surely has something to do with the historical reception and influence of said text.

IOW, you're someone who wants to read and understand the Bible on his own terms, quite cut off from the religious tradition it is part of.

Why on earth would anyone want to do that??

Take the No True Scottsman fallacy, for example. In most cases of it, which concern terms that denote national, racial, political, ideological, or religious identity, what is actually going in is an equivocation, because terms that denote national, racial, political, ideological, or religious identity are complex, multilayered, thus, internally incoherent.

Without the basic knowledge of the literal meanings, one cannot progress to the other levels, be it faith or spirit. — Corvus

I am confident that actual religious people will say it's the other way around.

This, I suppose, is the Buddha's madhyamaka/the middle path. — TheMadFool

The Middleness of the Path

Anyway, there's a right perspective i.e. though everyone is entitled to an opinion, we can still get to what might be called an objective truth (see addendum 2 in my OP) which no one in faer right mind can/would deny. This however doesn't imply that two parties in a dispute, philosophical or otherwise, are wrong though. All it means is the real (?), the whole truth is more intricate, thus more beautiful even if also exasperating, than we imagine it to be. — TheMadFool

This is a romanticism that someone living in the real world wouldn't indulge in.

You've, I'm afraid, missed the point of anekantavada which is to point out that there are no real contradictions but only apparent contradictions. Your whole argument is predicated on the former. In true anekantavada spirit, my response would be you're right but, for better or worse, I'm not wrong. Let's just leave it at that. Feel free to disagree though. — TheMadFool

No. What you're failing to acknowledge is that in your quuest for egalitarianism, you're bulldozing over the opposition, or at least trying to do so.

Underneath your optimism, idealism, egalitarianism burns a fire of supremacism
— baker

From a certain perspective that could be true and I feel sorry that I could be read that way:

After all your speeches and posturing you're nothing but a common thief.
— (Die Hard)

All I can say is I'm just an African ape, like Richard Dawkins takes great pains to point out when referring to h. sapiens, trying to make sense of faer world.

Hey, false humility makes for false pride!

It would be difficult to imagine that one can understand the Bible without knowing the rich meanings of the old, exotic or even plain words in it, when it even says that God has given the language, so that men could study with it their way to know him. — Corvus

It is vital to read the Bible in the right spirit, with faith and humility.

Understanding specific old words like "ephah" is, for the most part, irrelevant.

Without the right spirit, one can be a scholar in ancient languages, and still miss the point of the ancient text.

Reading the Bible has never really been a question of understanding a literal account, it is embedded in a 'community of discourse, faith and practice', within which it is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Exactly. Which is why outsiders who are not thusly embedded cannot hope to have a meaningful experience with the Bible. Similar goes for other ancient texts.

In original Christianity, those who heard that were never expected to understand it. They were expected to believe it. There was no question of ‘interpretation’. Interpretation was having an opinion, which is what ‘heresy’ means.

We live in a different world now. We wonder about what it means. But in the original setting, it was simply recited by the priests, and you simply listened to it. — Wayfarer

Exactly. The fact that at the time, the majority of the population was illiterate actually helped this state of affairs and probably made the whole experience of listening to sermons more meaningful for the people. (Note that the Roman Catholic Church was not in favor of simple people reading the Bible because the probability of misunderstanding was too great.)