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Aswad -> RE: Faith to the faithless, a perspective (2/22/2008 3:01:41 PM)
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ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
You mean "anything", right?
Depends on whether you mean my world (i.e. the world I live in), or just my corner of it.
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There are certainly ideas I wish to keep out of my environment, such as the idea that it'd be productive and easy to kill me and take my wallet.
I'd prefer to let the idea stay, since it's a pretty accurate perception, and then change the circumstances that make it accurate.
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Like it or not, we live off of a huge number of assumptions we've made.
Which is the point I have been trying to make all along.
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Sadly, even science is based off of them.
Yeah. Like the assumption that we exist in the first place, or that reality does.
I believe in those two assumptions, and suspect you do, as well.
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Personally, though.. I want my young and the young of those around me to be perferentially exposed to assumption that's based in empiracle observation and reason as opposed to the wild claims of some deranged mind.
Then you shall have to shield them from humanism, for instance.
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Not because it's impossible for a good idea to come from a psychotic, but because they're more likely to come from a rational mind.
Rational minds are as rare as psychotic minds. I used to think that was unfortunate.
Open minds are even rarer, which I also used to think was unfortunate.
Nowadays, I just view both as a human state of affairs.
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And, again.. we're mortal. We do not have forever to sort through the good and the bad.
Seems physics may not be the ideal subject to pursue, perhaps? [;)]
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Of course, this is all humoring the individualistic approach to viewing the world, which I'd like to point out is an idealization.
Which is another thing I've been pointing out. Barring the solipsist position, there's an objective reality that does not have subjective qualities. Such subjective qualities are projected by humans, and that includes the myriad assumptions upon which our lives are based. The idea that it is wrong to kill a child at 16 weeks is subjective, and widely debated. I can reduce it in a given frame of reference, but without assumptions to go by, it's simply an idea... a belief. There is nothing empirical about it, one way or the other. You can, of course, construct a goal, and then use empirics to determine the extent to which that belief conforms to the goal, but that's just taking the same problem to a different level: the basic conundrum remains.
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My friend, I think history'll reflect that the notion of keeping a person with black skin as a slave was far more acceptable in historical southern America than it is in even current southern day America. I'd argue that the social climate is largely responsible for this shift.
Correct. And it seems arrogant at best to think that there will not be other shifts in the future. Hell, if nothing else, circumstances will eventually (on a long enough timeline) exert selection pressures that entail paradigm shifts. Bear in mind that the one you reference is neither the first, nor the last, major shift in thinking. I should like to think that humanity will not be standing still in the future, either.
Finally, indulge me in a thought experiment, if you will...
Envision the OT and the NT as two points in the "space" of paradigms. Subtract the former from the latter, so you have a vector. Make a line that retains the origin and the gradient along each axis. Then you've done basically what a certain someone was suggesting a couple of thousand years ago, with the limited precision of the languages available to him at the time. Perhaps you will reach the same conclusion as me and Nietzsche: that this line is the center of the volume of the evolution of humanist thought and indeed prevailing morals in the West. In my own religion- which I do hope will eventually snatch some followers from others (just as secular humanists do, and as you suggested doing with a different target)- I'm mostly applying a few minor deltas to the points used in the example (e.g. cutting Saul) and following the line as far as people can.
That's actually rather apropos what you said in another thread about gender, if you pause to think about it.
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This is working under the heavy idealism, my friend.
Things are rather a lot clearer in Plato's cave when one gets up to watch the objects, rather than their fuzzy shadows.
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And I'd argue that there's far less dishonesty in Newton ranting about how gravity makes things fall than a priest ranting about why God hates gay people.
Quite. Yet there are secular people wielding as much, or more, influence and/or authority than such a priest, who do equal or greater harm, and perpetrate equal or greater intellectual dishonesties. Even in the various fields of empirical science. So, again, I am forced to conclude that the danger and dishonesty you and others are pointing out (and I certainly don't deny that I get a nigh-irresistible urge to slam some fundies' heads against the wall at times, so no lectures on rose-tinted glasses) is symptomatic of an element of the human condition, rather than being intrinsic and unavoidable properties of religious beliefs.
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So, I sharply disagree that it's all equally dishonest.
Positing values and assumptions that are not empirically proven is one level.
But positing values and assumptions that are empirically disproven is another level.
Apart from that, you get into the nuances of empirical proof, which has diminishing returns.
I don't particularly appreciate faiths that ignore life; that misses the point of religion, in my opinion.
But I also realize that the reason such faiths have followers has to do with said followers, not their faiths.
Which is part of the reason why I've decided to have a go at forwarding my own religion, whose intellectual honesty you're free to review off-board.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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