So if true, what does this matter? Any unfortunate ripening seems to be predestined, right?

Religion is really old. — Tate

So is prostitution. :cool:

I understand Hitchcock is the director the cognoscente love to hate. — ucarr

Not really, they voted Vertigo the best film ever made over Citizen Kane just a few years ago. I personally am not a Hitchcock fan these days, as the films have badly dated to my eye, but in his time he was terrific. Psycho remains in my top 20 - the others not so much.

When the title Psycho is uttered, does anyone first think of Bernard Herrmann? — ucarr

Consider this. Not to think about Herrmann doesn't mean he isn't a primary reason for the film's success, as Hitchcock himself felt. The genius in a score is that it is felt and often remains undetected. But who can think of the infamous shower scene without those staccato violin screeches? There's a reason Martin Scorsese used Herrmann for Taxi Driver twenty years later and there's even a musical quote from Psycho in it.

you never get a thrill of power and preeminence when USA unloads a heep of whoop-ass onto the enemy? — ucarr

It's not power as such; the fascism is in the aesthetics, the fetishisation of weapons, uniforms and the body beautiful, posed and choreographed mawkishly the way Leni Riefenstahl posed her Nazi superheroes. But really I just don't appreciate the overstated visuals and underpowered ideas. Doesn't mean anything much as my views are irrelevant to the Marvel bottom line. Just like my views on McDonald's food.

nd this too is an accusation one reads on social media: Rushdie did this to seel books. Back to what my door keeper told me: don't write a novel, a work of fancy about Mohammad, in part because that would be disrespectful but also because it would be lowly commercial, hence consumerist, capitalist, sensational, etc. Not serious. Not good. — Olivier5

Rushdie is probably one of the greatest living fiction prose writers in the English language, whose complex stories of identity and colonization are woven in the context of his own Indian/Islamic/English background. The Satanic Versus is exactly the kind of novel one would expect him to write. He should be free to make any choice he wants to make. Best way to understand Rushdie is to read his gorgeous, reflective essays - I'm particularly partial to the compilation Imaginary Homelands.

Faith means Trust. — Adamski

Some people think that. Faith is the excuse they give for believing in something when they have no good reasons. If you have good reasons to believe something, you give those reasons. If you have nothing, you can say it's down to faith. And there's nothing you can't justify using faith - I remember well some devote Christian South Africans telling me that apartheid was god's will and that they had this on faith. No reason necessary.

In his interviews, Hitchcock made it clear visual storytelling without dialogue was the best-loved part of his work. He called it pure cinema. — ucarr

Hitchcock of course said anything he thought the critics would dig. Hitchcock, like many directors today, relied shamelessly on the ultimate special effect - the film score. That sequence you mention is nothing without Bernard Herrmann's superb music. As Hitchcock said to Herrmann after he saw the scored version of Psycho - "You've just saved my movie."

The reality is that most movies would be utterly diminished without the sound effects and music - the cues which give the visuals their power. Hence the tendency for movie composers to Mickey Mouse productions so dreadfully and make use of way too many brassy fanfares, saccharine themes and garish musical ticks - like they do in the Marvel products.

I have a robust dislike of the Marvel films - to my taste they are terrifically vulgar pieces of nascent fascist pap, straight out of the Leni Riefenstahl style manual. Their overstated and simple-minded crassness reminds me of those rich folk who end up with 20 bedroom shopping malls for homes, complete with gold toilet seats and all surfaces festooned with shiny crap. Cliché on a stick.

What's a superhero movie without the slam, bang, crunching, crashing, smashing, blasting, hubcab twirling of auditory global mayhem? — ucarr

Exactly. But it 'works' in combination with all that overstated CGI.

has been so widely adopted precisely because it remains more self-correctively adaptive to nature than modern science's precessors. Nothing mentioned yet suggests a demonstrably more adaptive alternative to modern science which, if there were such an alternative, would be reasonable to consider. — 180 Proof

This is of critical importance. Reminds me of Jacob Bronowski : -

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Next time please try to comment on my whole point. Both of you. — Alkis Piskas

I did, sorry if I missed that part of it. :pray: Nevertheless, I enjoy pontificating about the notion of atheism as a faith regardless of your clarifications.

Are you too trying to find mistakes in secondary and unimportant points and stick on them, — Alkis Piskas

No. I often find the subsidiary points people make far more interesting than their primary argument - this is not a comment on you, but a general observation.

Your main point about non theistic faiths was fine, which is why I left it alone. :wink:

Just a follow up - when people say atheism is a belief, I general say, 'actually it's a lack of belief.' Just as not believing in fairies is not a belief. No one belongs to the 'Not A Believer in Fairies' school. Of course, I am talking here about a specific usage of 'belief', not just what a person believes...

At the end of the day, you're supposed to think, feel, and speak about a literary text the way your superiors expect you to, or you fail the grade. — baker

Sure, that happens. But the point is you don't risk death or maiming by strangers all around the world for decades. Nor will anyone throw acid in your face for being a woman daring to gain an education. For my money you can't compare these expressions of 'authority'. And even if they were exactly the same, this would amount to a tu quoque fallacy.

Artists in the West can generally be hatefully critical towards power elites and government and religions and not face these problems.

I've seen it myself that when such an invitation is accepted and the requested challenge in fact posed, the religious get offended. All too often I've seen religious people be like one person in their public talks, but then, when personally addressed, it's like they become someone else, another person — baker

Whatever you may have seen does not necessarily warrant calling the quote 'politically correct' as a kind of pejorative. That's a Fox News style comment. But you are correct that some people are hypocrites. Sometimes you can tell if they are or not by how much their public comments have cost them.

Optimism is seen as naive and stupid while pessimism as realistic and intelligent. So perhaps we should rip our clothes and put ash on our head. Sackcloth and ashes. — ssu

Yep, the cool kids never like optimism or happiness - such responses are viewed as gauche, and don't you know life is grave and dreadful?

Name one instance where it's not like this. — baker

Literature.

Oh, the political correctness! — baker

What point are you making?

Then, we have: Agnosticism, Atheism — Alkis Piskas

Huh? Isn't this just a misplaced notion that evangelicals sometimes produce? You might call some expressions of humanism a religion. Atheism, however, is just a position on one thing - they are not convinced god/s exist. If there is more to it than this, it's probably something else.

But still, I don't see why belief in God requires being religious. — Yohan

Belief in god doesn't need religion just as religions don't need a belief in god. For the latter I think of Soviet era communism. The distinction between having religion and having a belief in god/s is an old one. Religion of course is notoriously difficult to define; Karen Armstrong, a popular writer on religions has stated that religion can't really be defined. She knows more than I do about religions so I am happy to accept this view. Besides, my friend Suzy, an academic here, believes in god but holds no holy book as sacred and attends no church or temple or follows any doctrines. She is a theist with no religion. There are many such folk.

For me, it means knowledge I have that I can't connect with a specific rational or perceptual source. That doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one, just that I wasn't aware of it when it happened, it isn't associated with a single event, or it is lost to memory. — T Clark

I remember you making this point and I think it's a useful one.

Scratch, scratch. When faced with the existential crisis of German bombing, Witti took a job as a hospital orderly. Otherwise philosophy becomes waiting for Godot, something of which i am intensely susceptible, especially on wet days.

But today it is sunny. — Banno

Hear, hear to this.

Simmons especially embodies a caricature of selfishness/narcissism, much like Donald Trump (an epitome of pathological narcissism made president). — Nils Loc

And to me Simmons appears to be someone who has, what in common parlance might be called self-esteem problems. He is playing a role of swaggering confidence and success which to me seems unconvincing. The person with grandiose self-talk, who has to have the big mansions and the wanky cars and all the collectable baubles to 'prove' their success and merit is often involved in constructing a projection of perceived accomplishment in order to prop up a shaky sense of self. I remember a quote by Alain de Botton - The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think, 'This is somebody who's greedy.' Think, 'This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.'"

Do you have a useful working definition of mysticism? Reflective understanding is a term I would use in work or grounded practice with complex individuals which has built into it a 'wisdom' that is acquired gradually though experience and by making many mistakes.

I am not sure that the idea of the ineffable is particularly helpful, but that may be an overgeneralised simplification of mysticism. — Jack Cummins

Sure, it's shorthand, I'm thinking of the apophatic traditions in theology as a for instance.

Within philosophy, mysticism may be dismissed but simply replaced by blandness, which may say little of any meaningful consequence. — Jack Cummins

So you operate via a presupposition that non-mysticism is impoverished and disenchanted - a la Weber

Figures like William Blake, Walt Whitman and WB Yeats may stand out as making major contributions to human thought. — Jack Cummins

Examples?

A couple of wonderful, beutiful adds. I think they're from the early 2000s. Neither is made with computer generated images. — T Clark

Interesting. To me the first one seems like barely suppressed or symbolic violence and is striking but not beautiful, especially linked with Rossini's music, so well associated for some of us with the urban violence in A Clockwork Orange. And clowns are creepy. But that's the nature of beauty, it's very personal. I am generally unaffected by artworks, but I do enjoy antiquities. I am more likely to find music or prose 'beautiful' not so much visual works.

Perhaps a superfluous question given the ineffable nature of the subject matter, but what would you say is an example of a useful contribution mysticism has made in the world?

the Satanic Verses does NOT read like a criticism of Islam at all, more like an independent exploration. — Olivier5

Independent exploration is criticism to a theocracy. Don't forget also that Rushdie is viewed as an apostate which in itself calls for the death penalty.

I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?

- Irshad Manji

The ego seems to be the selfs tendency to apply a degree of value on itself. — Benj96

But all is not what it seems. The person who appears to have the 'biggest' ego and the most assertive sense of self may well be a fragile individual, with low confidence and high vulnerability. The self being a role one adopts to project a preferred identify, a form of compensation.

One being that it brings you closer to the truth, the other being it brings you further from it. — intrapersona

I'm more about the truth rather than The Truth.

It becomes grey because the first broadest sense of atheism is almost identical to agnosticism. I see atheism used more commonly in philosophical debates with the context of the narrower sense: of the rejection God/s and belief that no such God/s exists or can exist. If Atheism isn't the correct term for such a belief, I don't know what term is.

You write well and I would be interested in hearing more of what you have to say, especially on my previous comments on epistemology/ontology. — intrapersona

Thank you. People tend to get fixated by terminology. Generally agnosticism goes to knowledge and atheism goes to belief. I would consider myself an agnostic atheist if pushed. Not sure anyone 'knows' there is/are no god/s. But you can't help what you believe. If you are not convinced there are god/s, that kind of ends the discussion. At least in my case. Most agnostics I know are practical atheists. They might say they don't know if there is a god or not, nevertheless as a matter of practice most do not have a belief in any god/s.

I rarely use the word atheist, unless I am talking to Americans. It pertains to just one thing- the belief in god/s. The nature of time or consciousness have no impact on this. In terms of epistemology and ontology - I leave such weighty subjects to the experts. I don't have a significant interest in the origin of life or the nature of the universe. I hold that no answer in that space will make any difference to how I live my quotidian life. I think these sorts of yearning questions are an inevitable by-product of human beings as meaning making creatures. As you say in the video, most of the putative answers here are wild, speculative and imaginative.

Most questions of metaphysics are just people telling stories to each other to try to ground the 'mystery' of life in some kind of foundational meta-narrative. I am happy to be a partially reflective follower of the crumbling remnants of the post-enlightenment world, who holds no real answers to any of the portentous questions and isn't all that fussed.

Can we imagine an ironist or jester, who plays at being earnestly systematic ? — Pie

Gore Vidal, although not a philosopher, springs to mind. :wink:

But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at all — Brandom

Nice.

Again, the master-idea of Foucault’s critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons. — Brandom

I think this is well put and interesting point. I wonder what a Foucauldian riposte to this would be. Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit.

Why should I be reasonable ?' asks for a reason. Brandom might stress that we just are inferential animals. That's what 'rational' means. — Pie

Indeed. :up: Pinker defines reason as the use of logic to attain a goal. Which, if you accept this, supports Nazism as nicely as it does Liberalism. My concern is not the privileging reason per say but the fact that reason can underpin mutually exclusive belief systems. You still tend to begin with suppositions which are values based and not rationally derived.

Rorty didn't trust theories of human nature, but I'm not afraid to keep trying to make explicit what we are, wary of course of abuses of the phrases 'human nature' and 'rationality. — Pie

Would it be fair to say you are a romantic of a kind? I probably side with Rorty here but largely because I eschew system building and he (though dead) remains smarter than I am, so there's that...

I enjoy your use of the English language.

So it looks to me more like there is a problem with supposing a something which determines that the statement is true or false; an unneeded reification. — Banno

I see your point. It becomes further mystification.

our western perception of it is not an accurate — Noble Dust

Certainly in pop-culture but most people I know admire Islam's past cultural history and its capacity for pluralism and diversity. There's a great book by Stephen Schwartz about this called The Two Faces of Islam.

It's part of the reason for the OP, in trying to figure out the real theology because it's often very distant from its literal decrees. — Hanover

I thought your question was reasonable and apropos given what has happened. And if this claim is true: -

a Muslim cleric daring to defend Rushdie would become a potential target. — Olivier5

- then we have a religion with some considerable problems above and beyond any sectarian variations. I spoke to two Sunni collogues of mine. Their response about what happened to Rushdie was - "You mock Islam, what do you expect? He's lucky to still be alive." Were they against the attack? "I wound't do it myself, but I understand the anger." This may be the nub of it and we forget how violently this religion often feels about blasphemy and apostasy.

I am reminded of the work of gay Islamic writer and feminist Irshad Manji who has argued quite vociferously for years now that Islam desperately needs a reformation - a point alluded to earlier by @Bitter Crank.

It is time for those who love liberal democracy to join hands with Islam's reformists. Here is a clue to who's who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.

— Irshad Manji

FWIW, I think it's hard to divorce rationality from anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-classism. It goes with free speech, democracy, and science. — Pie

Thanks for your answers to my earlier question. This one strikes me as somewhat tendentious. To me this position - which I generally share - seems to originate from a value system which already holds that reason and progressive politics are synonymous, or flip sides of the same coin. How does one make this case in philosophic terms? Rationality can also be mustered successfully to support conservative and libertarian positions, right? What process do we use to determine if a rational framework is being put to work appropriately, other than following the arguments back down to foundational value systems and agreeing or disagreeing with those?

What distinction do you make between truth and values and do you consider it preferable (or even possible) for one's values to be mostly determined by true things? By values I mean things like democracy, secularism, scientific evidence (e.g., medical treatment versus prayer), feminism, etc.

I suppose the sentiment is typical of skeptics. — Jerry

I think so. I am a skeptic. I don't generally say this, however.

The familiar epistemological conception of us as believers, who might ideally share a common representation of the world in the scientific image, thus conflates particular moves within discursive prac­tice or the space of reasons with the space or practice itself.” — Joshs

Food for thought. Thanks.

-How can I have true beliefs ? — Pie

Skeptics will often say things like they want to believe as many truth things and as few false things as possible. Easier said than done. Whatever its limitations, I am happy for most quotidian affairs to be settled by correspondence. As it happens, Pilate's question was needlessly abstract and seems to construct 'truth' as a mystical property. As Simon Blackburn reminds us, the question for Pilate was, is Jesus starting an insurrection? This can be investigated. No need to calibrate the notion of truth. The best we can do is test everyday claims. Truth is not a property that all true propositions have in common. In the end what we call true about many matters will come down to presuppositions and value systems and often be at odds with other's presuppositions and value systems.

make sure your beliefs are warranted and justified. — Pie

Rorty says that we know nothing of truth 'out there' but we can only justify beliefs. I imagine there are better and worse methods to go about doing this, right? Do you have any simple thoughts for a non-philosopher?

Absolute means unchangeable and unqualified. It cannot even be measured or determined exactly, "exact" being also an attribute of "absolute".We say "absolute zero". — Alkis Piskas

Interesting. I personally don't see how the word 'absolute' placed in front of some words does anything useful. It's often a way of rhetorically exaggerating or reinforcing something. Surely zero needs no absolute. To my thinking absolute zero is no different than zero.

I think I can say I am not 'absolutely certain' about something because in this context absolute is a way of describing a continuum of certainty and doubt. But there is no continuum of zero. But there may be a continuum of 'empty'. E.g., the box was mostly empty vs the box was absolutely/completely empty.

Just playing the paradox card. — universeness

I think you are responding to my first question. Self-refuting axioms are some of my favorite things.

That I am in a dialog with the universe by way evidence, I guess would be one way of characterizing it. — Pantagruel

I'm, not trying to be a dick but I don't understand this either. What is a dialogue with the universe? And how is it a feedback loop? :smile:

1. There are no Absolute Truths
2. There are no Absolute Truths — Alkis Piskas

So you're saying these are absolute truths?

a universal feedback system. — Pantagruel

What does this mean?

human consciousness is the most potent force in the known Universe. — Bret Bernhoft

I don't understand what this means, it needs context, Bret. Can you demonstrate what you mean by this is a couple of sentences. What is a potent force? And how is human consciousness an example of such? And can you show us how this potent force is more potent (what does potent mean in this context?) compared to, say, nature?

This means that this discussion is not meant to be a philosophical discussion. If this is not a philosophical discussion, what kind of discussion is it? In other words: what are you talking about? — Angelo Cannata

The discussion seems very clear. He is asking us:-

Even with the knowledge that we humans can achieve about the external world via science, the things that we can actually be sure about universe isn't much at all. And I want to know what are some of these things that others take for granted about universe/cosmos. — dimosthenis9

:up: Everyone seems to be rifling though Plato's cabinet...