[XogGyux]

His book is actually against the warmongering New Atheists who are religious in their politics where they go around attacking religion and acting like anyone who believes in any are ignorant etc. He's not attacking the everyday atheists who simply don't believe but don't care what others choose to believe.

This is not accurate. It was not an atheist opening this thread to complain about religious people, it was the other way around.
In fact, I have never had an atheist stop me on my way to work at the traffic interception to try to sell me their "non-god" .

If you godless Leftists are so "intelligent," then why:
1. Are you so bitter, and angry and profane,
2. Do the statistics show you are less happy in your personal lives,
3. Do the statistics show that you commit suicide at higher rates than those of religious faith,,
4. Are you less healthy, mentally and physically, such that your life expectancies are shortened,
5. Did your fellow atheists mass murder as Stalin, Chairman Mao, and the Pathet Lao, who each murdered millions?

There is a beautiful explanation for the unsurpassed arrogance, the condescension, the exalted pretension of atheists.


"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius." - Arthur Conan Doyle

Mediocre atheists know nothing higher than themselves.

"Let him who hath no sword sell his garment and buy one." - Jesus Christ

Swords are not used for plowing.

We, Atheists, suck so much because God made us this way. Your quarrel is with someone else.

[Crantag]

Skinster isn't the enemy of the people, nor the donkeys.

She wasn't talking about the thread starter, she was responding to me on the topic of Chris Hedges.

If there wasn't a confusion about that, I'm just a dipshit loser, no higher up on the totem poll than a dipshit eating nightcrawler (which is pretty high up, I must say).

I was just trying to clarify. (If I could, but somehow I feel like I did the opposite.)

Carry on ladies and gentleman.

[XogGyux]

Skinster isn't the enemy of the people, nor the donkeys.

She wasn't talking about the thread starter, she was responding to me on the topic of Chris Hedges.

If there wasn't a confusion about that, I'm just a dipshit loser, no higher up on the totem poll than a dipshit eating nightcrawler (which is pretty high up, I must say).

I was just trying to clarify. (If I could, but somehow I feel like I did the opposite.)

Carry on ladies and gentleman.

Ok my bad, misinterpreted.

[Verv]

It's a matter of character, not only belief, though the latter shapes the former. At least if you buy into virtue ethics, which I'm currently reading about .

If they believe something is necessary when it isn't, they are ignorant. Not sure that makes them immoral, but I'm not interested in that question, since I don't believe in free will in the first place.

Ignorance generally is not regarded as making someone immoral. A man who accidentally shoots his son sneaking in late from a night of partying is not thought of as a cold-blooded murderer; he is thought of someone who made a rather terrible & tragic mistake, out of ignorance of the situation.

Who steals from whom though?

Yes, exactly.

Depends on what moral philosophy you adhere to. How does God solve anything in that regard? It's just a tool that has ceased to be effective, if it ever was.

God makes the objective possible.

[Verv]

No, law is secular because they wanted to avoid sectarian conflict. The religious wars in Europe were recent history to them.

The Thirty Years War is less about religion than you think. It's essentially a war for the Hapsburg dominance of Germany, which is why Catholic France is siding with the Protestants.

Likewise, the long history of France & England courting the Ottoman Empire to serve their interests against Mediterranean powers or in hopes of advancing themselves in some other way show that religion, while a factor, is rarely every a prime motivator for conflict. Material gain is.

Doesn't matter. You are desperately hunting for excuses. It's a snipe hunt.

You are babbling. And repeating yourself...

"Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive vocabulary is useful insofar as the patterns it highlights are usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours. Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical touchstone for our various descriptive practices.

Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited to further the secularization and democratization of society that Rorty thinks we should aim for. Accordingly, there is a close tie between Rorty's construal of the naturalism he endorses and his most basic political convictions.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language.

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest.

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language.

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way.

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests.

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves.

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed.

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such.

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted.

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language.

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.

The task of the intellectual, with respect to social justice, is not to provide refinements of social theory, but to sensitize us to the suffering of others, and refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify with others, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways. (EHO Part III; CIS Part III) Reformist liberalism with its commitment to the expansion of democratic freedoms in ever wider political solidarities is, on Rorty's view, an historical contingency which has no philosophical foundation, and needs none."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/#3

This is an amazing idea.

I think it falls entirely in line with the Christian heritage; love thy neighbor as thyself. Moreover, Christ's tenderness & mercy towards even the outcast demoniacs, the lepers, the prostitutes, the adulteresses.

I think that religion does this all better than politics, though.

Reformist liberals think they are liberating the world, but it really consists of them getting convinced by oligarchs to bomb Syrians & Yemenis and support neocolonialism, or it results in more extreme forms that are even more self-defeating, like the failed revolutions of Communism.

But it is an admirable goal.

I think this is a case where political "liberation" will not work.

[late]

The Thirty Years War is less about religion than you think. It's essentially a war for the Hapsburg dominance of Germany, which is why Catholic France is siding with the Protestants.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language.

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest.

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language.

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way.

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests.

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves.

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed.

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such.

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted.

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language.

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.




This is an amazing idea.

I think it falls entirely in line with the Christian heritage; love thy neighbor as thyself. Moreover, Christ's tenderness & mercy towards even the outcast demoniacs, the lepers, the prostitutes, the adulteresses.

I think that religion does this all better than politics, though.

Reformist liberals think they are liberating the world, but it really consists of them getting convinced by oligarchs to bomb Syrians & Yemenis and support neocolonialism, or it results in more extreme forms that are even more self-defeating, like the failed revolutions of Communism.

But it is an admirable goal.

I think this is a case where political "liberation" will not work.

I talk about religious wars to keep it simple. There is much, much more to it than that.

I've literally never seen Rorty described as cynical before, and I doubt I ever will again. Watch some of his lectures.

Rorty is a pragmatist. That's not dishonest, you just can't deal with his analysis.

In fact, you don't actually understand it. I've seen a number of works critical of Rorty, but they don't use words like dishonesty or the hypocrisy of the modern world. You're not doing philosophy. You've understood a small part of it, but his work implicitly uses that of a number of others like Derrida, and that context you don't have.

Sorry, but this has become dreary.

[Verv]

In fact, you don't actually understand it. I've seen a number of works critical of Rorty, but they don't use words like dishonesty or the hypocrisy of the modern world. You're not doing philosophy. You've understood a small part of it, but his work implicitly uses that of a number of others like Derrida, and that context you don't have.

OK, I am really just emphasizing that to view language as a toolset employed for a purpose is inherently cynical.

Even if Rorty is saying that the average person really does believe that people think their descriptive language is accurate and is subconsciously just duping themselves, just trying to serve their greater personal goals, this is still very cynical to me. It would mean that people can't even really trust themselves.

But maybe Rorty really just means that the various forms of descriptive language before are irrelevant, and ultimately all descriptive language was off, and we can now just treat language properly as a tool aiming for something..? In this case, I think it is cynical because it dismisses the thoughts & ideas of our dead ancestors and many dead philosophers as irrelevant.

I am sure some scholar somewhere has had to have had similar thoughts.

But hey, I think I am doing philosophy; I am not saying it's good. I am not a Rorty expert, and I do not have much under my belt dealing with what we are talking about, but this is philosophy. I am thinking about our relationship with language and the world, after all.

Rorty is a pragmatist. That's not dishonest, you just can't deal with his analysis.

I think he is honest. As I actually said above:

]Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way.

It is not some assessment that is unmerited.

But I think this is my most important point on this:

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.

So, like, people in the 15th century rolled their eyes when the Priest talked about sexual chastity because they knew he was bonking the pros (a euphemism for Lady-of-the-Night, which is a euphemism for a secks worker)...

They would maybe chuckle when the Lord who taxed them into the ground and was in bed with corrupt merchants talked about good stewardship...

But they would not question language itself. Good stewardship; sexual chastity... These things have meaning, objective meaning, and there are many good people who want to be good stewards and sexually chaste. Maybe it is only a minority of Lords that are good stewards, and a minority of clergy that are even sexually chaste, but the problem is not flowery language used to manipulate people or that language... It's the people who are abusing language.

It's not that vocabularies are tools. It's that people use vocabularies as tools, when they should be using vocabularies honestly.

[Potemkin]

^ Spoken like a good Confucian, @Verv. This is precisely what Confucius called for with his "rectification of names" - an honest use of vocabulary.

[Rugoz]

Ignorance generally is not regarded as making someone immoral. A man who accidentally shoots his son sneaking in late from a night of partying is not thought of as a cold-blooded murderer; he is thought of someone who made a rather terrible & tragic mistake, out of ignorance of the situation.

Isn't ignorance a choice though? In your case the man chose to be ignorant of the person he shoots at. He chose to not check on his son first. Unless people lack the mental capacity to know certain things, aren't they guilty of ignorance and the actions that proceed from it?

God makes the objective possible.

Is the existence of God an objective truth? Are his supposed moral laws an objective truth? Don't we have them from prophets, people who claim to have communicated with God? Can a material thing even communicate with an immaterial thing?

Isn't it much simpler to believe in the categorical imperative?

Spoken like a good Confucian, @Verv. This is precisely what Confucius called for with his "rectification of names" - an honest use of vocabulary.

Somebody explain the hype around Confucius to me, because it's the most boring kind of "practical philosophy".

[Potemkin]

Somebody explain the hype around Confucius to me, because it's the most boring kind of "practical philosophy".

Confucius wasn't trying to be a 'philosopher' in the Western sense of that word, nor was he trying to be innovative or original. On the contrary, he was essentially conservative (at a time when being conservative was a radical position, during the chaos and bloodshed of the Warring States period). And he wanted to express himself as simply and directly as possible, so as many people as possible could understand him. And, ultimately, he believed that the truth is fundamentally simple - respect other people as fellow human beings, have proper reverence for tradition, and don't be selfish. What's wrong with that?

[Rugoz]

Confucius wasn't trying to be a 'philosopher' in the Western sense of that word, nor was he trying to be innovative or original. On the contrary, he was essentially conservative (at a time when being conservative was a radical position, during the chaos and bloodshed of the Warring States period). And he wanted to express himself as simply and directly as possible, so as many people as possible could understand him. And, ultimately, he believed that the truth is fundamentally simple - respect other people as fellow human beings, have proper reverence for tradition, and don't be selfish. What's wrong with that?

Per se nothing, it's simply uninteresting.

[Potemkin]

Per se nothing, it's simply uninteresting.

Only in the same way that Buddhism is 'uninteresting'. Once a very old king went to see an old hermit who lived in a bird's nest in the top of a tree, "What is the most important Buddhist teaching?" The hermit answered, "Do no evil, do only good. Purify your heart." The king had expected to hear a very long explanation. He protested, "But even a five-year old child can understand that!" "Yes," replied the wise sage, "but even an 80-year-old man cannot do it."

link

[Rugoz]

Only in the same way that Buddhism is 'uninteresting'. Once a very old king went to see an old hermit who lived in a bird's nest in the top of a tree, "What is the most important Buddhist teaching?" The hermit answered, "Do no evil, do only good. Purify your heart." The king had expected to hear a very long explanation. He protested, "But even a five-year old child can understand that!" "Yes," replied the wise sage, "but even an 80-year-old man cannot do it."

[Crantag]

Confuscism is still very influential in east asia. I interpret it as everyone knows their place. The child is subordinate to the parent. The wife to her husband. The husband to his boss. The 36 year old dude to the 37 year old dude. Etc. I find it authoritarian and distasteful. It's been effective though.

The reason why when you meet a korean they are interested to know your age is they are trying to figure out where you are on the social hierarchy of things.

[Rugoz]

Confuscism is still very influential in east asia. I interpret it as everyone knows their place. The child is subordinate to the parent. The wife to her husband. The husband to his boss. The 36 year old dude to the 37 year old dude. Etc. I find it authoritarian and distasteful. It's been effective though.

The reason why when you meet a korean they are interested to know your age is they are trying to figure out where you are on the social hierarchy of things.

Disobedience towards parents and prince is certainly not justified under any circumstances (unless I missed something). There's stuff like this though:

The Duke Ai asked, saying, "What should be done in order to secure
the submission of the people?" Confucius replied, "Advance the upright
and set aside the crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the
crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit."

or

The Master said, "When good government prevails in a state, language may be
lofty and bold, and actions the same. When bad government prevails, the
actions may be lofty and bold, but the language may be with some reserve."

Hence disobedience and lack of free speech (my generous interpretation of the latter) are symptoms of bad governance.

I've only read The Analects.

[Verv]

Confuscism is still very influential in east asia. I interpret it as everyone knows their place. The child is subordinate to the parent. The wife to her husband. The husband to his boss. The 36 year old dude to the 37 year old dude. Etc. I find it authoritarian and distasteful. It's been effective though.

The reason why when you meet a korean they are interested to know your age is they are trying to figure out where you are on the social hierarchy of things.

They ask you your age to know the language with which to engage you and to what extent they can be formally deferential.

But no, the 37-year-old guy does not boss around the 35-year-old guy unless he's literally the boss or their senior in a class or in the military unit; and, even if he is the senior in class, if he is uncharismatic and a loser, his own peers will look down on him for trying to do this and he'll get deflated very quickly. These people are not retarded -- they don't let ugly & angry dudes punch downward on everyone. This is a Confucian society, after all, not the wild west.

Being two years older than people does not mean that they have to be completely submissive; it means they have to be polite. What this sytem also means is that the older guys buy the meals, and the older guys are obligated to provide guidance and advice.

Older guys will also sometimes bring the girls out -- and older girls bring out the girls even more. They love being match-makers. The workplace can even get a little bit unprofessional because this will occur in the office.

... I would also say that, sure, there are these Confucian norms that persist between genders and what-not, but it's really quite complicated.

A stuffy old woman who is Confucian in her thought may literally insist that her daughter becomes a successful doctor, and even after becoming successful, to marry for money, not love. The father may be completely out of the picture, and this passive voice of liberty in the background, quietly suggesting she does as she pleases and marry for love...

This doesn't fit smoothly into any Western gender narrative, I think.

[Verv]

Isn't ignorance a choice though? In your case the man chose to be ignorant of the person he shoots at. He chose to not check on his son first. Unless people lack the mental capacity to know certain things, aren't they guilty of ignorance and the actions that proceed from it?

That's true. There is such a thing as being negligent or lazy.

But ignorance does tend to function as an excuse in social settings because nobody can be expected to have all their bases covered, and anyone who insists that we all have to act like everyone should be on board with us, knowing what we know, being responsible for the things that we know, is viewed as pushy, IMO.

Is the existence of God an objective truth? Are his supposed moral laws an objective truth? Don't we have them from prophets, people who claim to have communicated with God? Can a material thing even communicate with an immaterial thing?

Yes, they are, but since God is not provable, we do live in a state of total moral chaos.

We also do have the moral laws from the prophets; we also have fake moral laws from fake prophets.

And religion does not say that man is a material thing -- it insists that man is material and spiritual.

Isn't it much simpler to believe in the categorical imperative?

The cat. imperative is just classical neckbeardism.

Go tell a highland tribe that they can't raid their neighbors because it'd violate the cat imp.

Go tell a poor guy to not violate the cat imp.

Tell a drunk, horny man wandering through Yongjugol to not violate the cat imp.

Do you really want to be the guy in the godless universe stuck with a cat imp? Do you really want to treat everyone as your equal? Yuck.

You know the saying -- nice guys finish last. Religion added "... but they go to heaven."

Somebody explain the hype around Confucius to me, because it's the most boring kind of "practical philosophy".

He's the foundation of most Eastern philosophy.

[late]

Yes, they are, but since God is not provable, we do live in a state of total moral chaos.

No, you live in a state, same as me. Mine is called Maine. We have thousands of laws, all secular, mostly moral.

Your chaos is between your ears.

[Verv]

No, you live in a state, same as me. Mine is called Maine. We have thousands of laws, all secular, mostly moral.

Your chaos is between your ears.

Our laws are effective because men with guns will put you in a cage if you disobey them, not because they have achieved some actual moral consensus among everyone.

And this is the way it will always be. It's how God likes it...

Free will. Nobody is forced to believe in anything they don't want to.

Just ask the Q-Anon crowd.

[Godstud]

@Verv Most people do not follow the rules because of fear of retribution, but because they see it as being right, and being conducive to a productive society. Most people only break laws that are dumb, and those tend to be minor and almost insignificant ones. Fear has nothing to do with this.

I don't NOT kill someone because of fear of retribution, but because it's wrong, and I don't need a Bible nor faith to tell me this.

Claiming there is God because you say so, means nothing. It actually diminishes your argument by calling upon a potentially non-existent spiritual being as your claim for evidence.

Talking about the Qanon people as an example of free will, is tantamount to donning a tin-foil hat, and howling at the moon.