There is so much information, its hard to make heads or tails of things. — Yohan

This is why a course of action that aims to be successful cannot afford to depend on information, it cannot afford to depend on taking someone's word for gold. It cannot afford to depend on trust.
It has to depend on what people know for themselves, what they can experience themselves. Everything else is too abstract to generate motivation to act constructively.

I think there should be kibbutz like mandatory education camps where every person would need to live for at least two consecutive years, producing all of their food by themselves, with manual work. I think the biggest problem nowadays is that most people are so far remote from food production that they fail to recognize it for the vital activity that it is and so don't appreciate it. Because of that, they act irresponsibly in regard to food and food production. And they won't change their ways simply by listening to a lecture or reading a book. They need to do it, they need to put in all the work that is necessary in order to grow food.

The right to be taken seriously is earnt, it's not a birthright. — Isaac

And it goes both ways. The environmental activists need to earn their right to be taken seriously as well.

if your response is to attack the speaker - "this person is a moron" - you have changed the subject from global warming to the person saying it
— yebiga

Yes.

this is the death of discourse.
— yebiga

Why?

The person being told they are a moron has nowhere to go - even if they were to suddenly flip their view - they would only confirm the moronic title.
— yebiga

They could educate themselves, do their due diligence with regards to sources, do the work required to join the discussion in question.

This form of ad hominem is all too common and all too unproductive.
— yebiga

That's an empirical claim. Is it unproductive? Do you have some reason to think so? — Isaac

This year, we had a drought like we haven't had in decades. At a time well into the drought, I was talking to two ladies with whom I otherwise chit chat about the weather, gardening, and such. Of course we all complained about the drought. Both of them said, on two separate occasions, "Well, it's not like there's anything we can do about it." It struck me that on the same day, in two conversations with two people, I got the same reply.

Now to think how your attitude that you outline above would fare in such real world situations. Both of them are middle class ladies in their fifties. You think calling them morons would somehow be helpful?

I actually doubt that there exist studies on this particular topic. But if I remember correctly, there are those studies where people were being insulted prior to taking an IQ test and the people did worse on those tests. This certainly speaks against your attitude.


Another anecdotal example: I know people who have been gardening for more than fifty years and who don't know that certain fruits and vegetables require pollinators, like bees and butterflies, or else they don't produce fruit. I know a lady, an avid gardener her whole life, who bought a new plastic greenhouse, planted tomatoes in it, and then kept it closed. When there were no tomatoes, she blamed the plants and the nursery where she bought them. Knowing her, she wouldn't take information from someone younger than herself. I know many people who are like that. It's not necessarily that they are closed off to new information, it's that they are closed off to it when it comes from sources they don't already respect.

The supremacist attitude that some environmental activists have certainly isn't getting through to such people, and if anything, it's only making them dig their heels in even more.

James' theory is actually a combination of doxastic determinism and doxastic voluntarism. Absolute doxastic voluntarism would mean that one could choose believe anything, simply by whimsical choice. This is what some ill-informed critics accuse James of, even though this is precisely what he rules out when he posits the three qualifiers that make for a genuine option (namely that a genuine option is one that is experienced by the person as forced, living, and momentous).

The determinism is due to the person having no immediate power over what in particular they consider forced, living, and momentous. The voluntarism is in that they can reflect on their situation and make a choice, given their circumstances.

In contrast, the general trend (among all walks of people, religious or not, scientifically minded or not) is to try to depersonalize issues of epistemology and try to conceive of them as if they are properties of "things outside the person" (hence the quest for "facts" and "truth").

I conclude, then, that the harmfulness of death is mainly post mortem. — Bartricks

In the sense that death deprives the person of their future. It's a harm one can predict with some measure of certainty at any point of one's life.

For a time, in some legal systems, the punishment for murder was calculated in a peculiar way: an autopsy was performed on the murdered person and the doctors estimated how long the person could have lived had they not been killed. This was then the duration of the punishment for the murderer.
This system didn't last, apparently it was too tricky to make such calculations. But the idea is interesting: the murderer should be deprived of as much time in which they could live a valuable life as their victim.

As many things are not certain or are not clear, room is left for choice. How you choose is up to you, which allows for an expression of preference.

If you choose to disbelieve that which lacks sufficient proof, as you deem "sufficient" to be, that is a choice. — Hanover

There is a difference between a post-hoc justification of one's belief and the actual process by which one has arrived at that belief. The search for "sufficient proof" is one such post-hoc justification.

I think James' theory of doxastic voluntarism is the most adequate one and it always applies.

If you deny doxastic voluntarism (the belief you can decide your beliefs) outright, then what triggers your belief other than a deterministic force,
— Hanover
The facts as I understand them determine my belief. — Art48

James' Will To Believe is pertinent here:

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3}individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

{4}
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm#P1

What you consider to be relevant facts is not necessarily what someone else considers relevant facts. This principally has to do with the particular circumstances that the person is in, and not with either faith or intelligence. For example, if you were born and raised in a Mormon community and earned your living there, it would be of utmost relevance to you whether Joseph Smith is God's prophet or not. In that particular setting, your entire social life and your earning a living would depend on your membership in the Mormon church, and as such, where you stand on the matter of Joseph Smith would be paramount to your membership (in James' terminology, you'd be facing an option that is living, a complete logical disjunction, and momentuous). If, on the other hand, you wouldn't live in such a community, under such restraints, the matter of Joseph Smith's prophet status would be irrelevant to you (dead, avoidable, and trivial). But in that other setting, some other option would be living, a complete logical disjunction, and momentuous.

I actually lived under reverse racism for a period time. That was back in elementary school. I lived in a culture that was about 99% white. There was one black girl of my age in the entire municipal entity, and perhaps a handful of schoolchildren of other races altogether. The authorities back then uncritically adopted American theories of racism and so pushed on us the view that we're all white supremacists who are repressing blacks. This resulted in this girl getting away with all kinds of shit (things that other children would be disciplined for if they did them). We had to stand back and let her be that way because any criticism of her was automatically interpreted as "racist". All sense of justice and fairness was gone.

I notice this trend of anti-racist overcompensation sometimes now as well. Not in regard to all races and all socio-economic classes, of course. In our culture, it's generally acceptable to be viciously racist against the Romas and people from former Yugoslav republics. Also against poor immigrants and refugees from poor countries, regardless of their actual skin color. But being critical (or saying anything that can be interpreted as critical) of anything that an educated enough/well-off enough black person does is likely going to be interpreted as "racist". It makes for uneven, unfair interactions. And this in a country that has no history in the trade of black slaves or any history of systemic repression of blacks.

You made the claim, the burden of reference is on you.

it is to recognize that all of reality is hostile to life and that we are a mistake in the eyes of reality that will one day be corrected. — 64bithuman

Do you think that this is what, for example, Caesar was thinking when he crossed the Rubicon?

if you buy a lottery ticket and win, it's your (good) karma and if you lose, it's your (bad) karma. — Agent Smith

Do you have any doctrinal support for this idea?
Which established theory of karma says this?

n Asia there's plenty of ethnic prejudice as well, including some that is institutional (eg the treatment of non Siamese folks in Thailand) but to my knowledge it hasn't been made into an ideology yet. — Olivier5

It's not uncommon for Asians to believe that Westerners/whites are inherently incapable of spiritual advancement. I've encountered this attitude among Buddhists and Hindus.

(Whites are also banned from visiting some Hindu temples.)

Because the people who defend her maintain the idea that she is young and she is free to have fun because we are living in a “modern era” — javi2541997

We're living in an era of secular tyranny.

I think that as far as Slavic people go, Ukrainians are better than Russians. The latter have always been slaves. — Olivier5

Complete the following sentence:

Because Russians have always been slaves, they should ....

Why would any hatred of a large people or a country be morally right? — ssu

Why should hatred be morally right?

This is what this whole Ukraine thing is about: the sanctity of hatred, the sacred right to hate, and the duty of the hated to kneel before the hater.

People just love to hate, and they will not let anyone question that.

A god could surely just implant complete knowledge in all human minds, without the need for any long-form narrative. — Tom Storm

The story goes that this is precisely what he did, but some people are just wicked and don't love God.

The big question for me is why is it that god/s are never known directly? — Tom Storm

Because you're not good enough, you're not qualified to see and hear God directly.

Well the theists always use the same argument in that context: God is not guilty of human's free will. — javi2541997

Enter the evolutionary survival of the fittest.

Silence. — Banno

The problem is, it seems to me, worship – idol-making – not g/G per se. Theism is idolatry. The apophatics got it right, I think: anything said or imag(in)ed (e.g. "graven images", scriptures, theologies, sermons) about the infinite is necessarily finite and thereby false; even (especially) the belief that the infinite "exists" is idolatrous. — 180 Proof

That's ironically escapist when it comes from people who have a combative, authoritarian attitude toward people; but when it comes to God, they turn to putty. Even Job had more fighting spirit!

Nothingness. If he would exist I would imagine him as the pure representation of silence and emptiness. — javi2541997

Nah. I imagine God as a Trumpista.
Look at the world: it's full of killing, raping, and pillaging. If God exists and has created the world, then he approves of all this killing, raping, and pillaging. It's how he wants things to be. Anything that proposes to tbe "the genuine word of God" needs to reflect that.

NONE OF IT WAS DOWN TO GOD(s)! It was all down to our behaviour! — universeness

God, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, could have arranged for less bloody ways of humans acting on their free will. But he didn't.

What a genuine word of God would look like

In order to be credible, it would need to be in line with scientific theories, specifically, the Theory of Evolution. That is, it would need to be a narrative full of killing, raping, and pillaging; life would need to be presented as a struggle for survival; full of might makes right. IOW, exactly the way mainstream theologies do. As such, the Bible is an excellent contender for being The Genuine Word of God.

Communism is on the rise in the U.S.? That's news to me. — Pierre-Normand

Americans have ... a peculiar understanding of communism.

I still see Republicans defending him or arguing that prosecuting him could lead to violence, which in bait-speak is saying people should riot if Trump is prosecuted. — Benkei

Is it only Republicans who think that way?
It seems that one of the likeliest explanations for why the Democrats (and the US general public) are so ineffective against Trump is precisely because they fear what being a tad more effective could bring about.

From the perspective of the Democrats, the really offensive thing about events like Jan. 6 is not that it was orchestrated by Republicans, but that a bunch of plebeians stormed an establishment in which they, the plebeians, are anything but welcome.

Nobody, not the Republicans and not the Democrats, wants the disenfranchized, the poor, the plebeians.

You're conflating hardship with the psychological experience of hardship.

Hardship, as in, a broken bone, poverty, hunger, cold, heat, working 12-hour shifts 6 days per week for minimum wage, etc.

The psychological experience of hardship is how one thinks and feels about having a broken bone, living in poverty, being hungry etc.

Again, an overreaction. — Banno

Only to someone in a position of power.
For everyone else, might makes right, and one must hold as true whatever the person says who holds more power than oneself. Or else, face socioeconomic consequences.

So what are you going to do about it?

I expect death to be just like it was for me two hundred, two thousand years ago. In other words, nothing. To me that sounds perfectly fine. Nothingness is not to be feared or lamented. Am I happy about it? Happiness is such a puerile term. — Tom Storm

The question is whether an oulook like yours can be arrived at deliberately.

But now we are here in the phase where she apologizes with nearly breaking up in tears ... — ssu

Why did she do that?

If partying and drinking are so great and make her so capable of ruling her people, then why apologize for partying and drinking??

If she were to stand by her partying, the whole thing wouldn't be suspect at all. But if she's making it clear that even she herself doesn't believe in what she's doing, then why should we believe in her, how can we believe in her??

Why didn't she say something like, "Yes, I'm a Prime Minister. Yes, I party. Yay!" ? And perhaps throw a "Deal with it!" in the mix.
It's the absence of her approving of her partying that is conspicuous and a reason for doubting her.

If she wants to be a politician of a new era, then she should behave like one consistently and play by the new rules, not the old ones.

I support the idea that statesmen and leaders shouldn't behave like how she behaved in that party. She has a responsibility to her entire nation and a role model to the public. — L'éléphant

No. It is not about double standard. She is the PM and public representative of a nation. She has the aim to act in the most honorable and rectitude way possible. We are living in a difficult social context and we expect from a statesman to be, at least, professional. Right?
It is quite contradictory, isn't it? Probably she has the average discourse of how to be an exemplary citizen and look at her dancing and acting like an immature teenager. — javi2541997

Agreed.

The actual difficulty has to do with making sense of democracy and the standards of morality for democratically elected officials.

A person in a position of power isn't an ordinary person anymore, because they have that power.

But at the same time, since they have been elected from and by the people with whom they are at least nominally equal, they are still ordinary in one sense.

I still think people in positions of power should be beyond the need for frivolous fun. It's not even about "being responsible"; it's about being so capable, so smart, so superior to the masses that one doesn't need the cheap emotional outlets that the masses do.

I think the feeling is mutual with the Slavophiles in Russia. — ssu

Why should the Western hatred of Russians (and Slavic people in general) be considered morally right?

The assumption by many seems to be 'politics is sober and serious, please don't have a life too.'
— Tom Storm

I wonder who else is covered under this assumption, doctors, lawyers, Sunday school teachers? — Fooloso4

Politics _should_ be sober and serious. Similar applies to many other professions.

It's frightening the way people are willing to lower their standards and to consider various professions as "just another job".

Russia takes upon itself the role of the shortest man in the gang. — Banno

I can't actually think of a single American film or tv series where I could say with certainty that it doesn't ridicule Russia or present Russians as anything other than stupid or hostile. Russophobia is pervasively present in American culture and has been for a long time.
And similar for other Western cultures.

Then US presidents, esp. the Democrats: all Russophobes to the bone.

I can't think of an EU politician who hasn't been a Russophobe. It's part of what counts for "being civilized" around here, and it's been like that for as long as I can remember, at least 30 years.

And to then hear someone claim that the Russians chose this negative image that Westerners have of them!

In fact, Russia is fighting the notorious collective West, defending its very existence as a country, a people, a civilization.
We must constantly remember that Russophobia in Europe has deep roots. And what is happening today is not a sudden, short-term episode, but a constant component of the social and political life of the West.

That's odd. Sure, there was Sovietphobia in most or many places. After that, things changed, there was optimism, friendships, seeking trust. 2-3 decades ago, something like that, I personally know people that went to Russia, business and otherwise. But now, ironically, Putin and compadres stomped that out good and well. To the extent it's real, Matviyenko's "Russophobia" was/is like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Except, who has been wanting Russia to cease existing...? — jorndoe

Russia takes upon itself the role of the shortest man in the gang. — Banno

Wow. The pretense is astounding.

The Fine-Tuning Argument says “that the present Universe (including the laws that govern it and the initial conditions from which it has evolved) permits life only because these laws and conditions take a very special form, small changes in which would make life impossible.” — Art48

This is typically Western theology infused by secularism; a bottom-up approach, explaining theological matters from the perspective of humans.

So, why would God bother to create an intricately fine-tuned universe for the sake of souls

"Because it pleases God to do so," a more old-fashioned theologist would say.

Many Christians love to cite the following verse. Aren't WE special?

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:16. — ThinkOfOne

It's interesting that some people think this is about humans being "special".

I've always interpreted it in the sense of, "Even though humans are so bad and evil and undeserving, God still loves us! Isn't God great!!"

When hatred and contempt are normalized, it's only a question of time before there will be a war.

I said:

What you're asking for cannot be done in the framework of secular culture and science. — baker

Indeed. And as I've been saying, both antinatalists and the natalists tend to be hedonists.

The trick is in having the power to define what is pure and what is evil — praxis

And this is also one of the problems with an intrapersonal understanding of karma. Without regard for other people, who gets to define what the pure deeds are and what the evil ones?

There is nothing that would stop such a self-referential-only person from developing into an absolute egomaniacal narcissist that goes around killing, raping, and pillaging, feeling good about himself because he defined those deeds of his as pure and good.

Yes. If you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword. — Tate

Only in fatalistic conceptions of karma. Such fatalistic conceptions deny that in the present moment one has any chance to act any differently than in the past and that one is hopelessly at the mercy of one's past actions.

But I'm having the impression that the OP is only after the intrapersonal theory of karma and considers the interpersonal one "irrational".

Karma presupposes supernatural record keeping and judgment.
— creativesoul
Why can it not simply be natural cause and effect? Very few (if any) actions absolutely terminate in their intended consequences. Anything you do continues on, past, and through what you intend. — Pantagruel

Various theories of karma have in common that they view karma as a feedback loop, but they differ in the scope of this feedback loop (and thus in the applicability and usefulness of the concept of karma).

For some, like the OP, the scope of karma is strictly intrapersonal, psycho-physiological, operating only within the particular person.

Some populist theories of karma propose an interpersonal scope of the feedback loop (what you do to others, others will do to you).

Some theories go further and expand the feedback loop over several lifetimes, ie. they introduce the notion of reincarnation/rebirth (whereby they can conceive of the feedback loop as being either intrapersonal only, or interpersonal, or both).