Whole Reason

On a barely related note, I heard an anec­dote about a man abducted by Irish ter­ror­ists, where he was asked “Are you a Catholic or a Protes­tant?“
“I’m an athe­ist” the man replied.
“Well,” asked the ter­ror­ist, “Are you a Catholic athe­ist or a Protes­tant athe­ist?“
LOL. Lots to learn from that story.

All this tail-chasing leads to just one con­clu­sion: we can’t really know any­thing for cer­tain. The­ists are skep­ti­cal of skep­ti­cism but cred­u­lous about credulity. Athe­ists are skep­ti­cal about credulity but cred­u­lous about skep­ti­cism. “Be still and know that I am God” seems a bet­ter strat­egy for the­ists, sci­en­tific research for skep­tics. Per­haps admit­ting the ten­ta­tive­ness of all knowl­edge would be best for both.

I think that there are two extremes here — we can know noth­ing for cer­tain, or we can know every­thing for cer­tain. The first is defeatism, the sec­ond is hubris.
I think a more rea­son­able approach is the three tiered approach:

Some things we can know beyond a rea­son­able doubt
Some things we can know, but not cer­tainly
Some things we will never know at all

This is an ana­logue of the fol­low­ing pithy sayings:

In the essen­tials, unity
In the non-essentials, lib­erty
In all things char­ity
There are some things in the bible I think I under­stand
There are some things in the bible I will never under­stand
There are some things in the bible I can not misunderstand

In light of this, how are we to act? A wise man would take the first ideas (beyond a rea­son­able doubt) and live con­fi­dently as if they were absolutely true, employ the sec­ond cat­e­gory (know, but not cer­tainly) with cau­tion, all the time look­ing at the results, and not waste his time spec­u­lat­ing about the last cat­e­gory (will never know), except as an intel­lec­tual exercise.

“There is no god.“
if one were to replace ‘god’ with ‘fsm’, then i would tend to see the wis­dom this arti­cle. as well, i can see the value in seeker’s(OP) attempt to define cer­tain out­comes given cer­tain inputs. gen­er­ally, i tend not to see the value in espous­ing moral rel­a­tivism if given an inde­ter­minable sys­tem. but it is dif­fi­cult to see otherwise.

The prob­lem with his approach is that he ignores the dif­fer­ences between indi­vid­u­als and their approach to real­ity. We are both fairly intel­li­gent and well-educated men who hap­pen to see things in com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways. It’s impos­si­ble to see essen­tials is such a way as to achieve unity, nor can we agree beyond a rea­son­able doubt on much. This is what I meant when I main­tain that we can’t really know much of any­thing with cer­tainty. Real­ity is, at base, unknow­able. We must live it, not know it.

Hi Louis:
I like these lines:
The­ists are skep­ti­cal of skep­ti­cism but cred­u­lous about credulity. Athe­ists are skep­ti­cal about credulity but cred­u­lous about skep­ti­cism.
I think the real­ity is more com­pli­cated, but real­ity is always more com­pli­cated and the phrase was a good one. I agree with you that we can­not know any­thing with cer­tainty a, rec­og­niz­ing that one of things we might be wrong about is whether or not there is any­thing we know for cer­tain. IMO the best we can do is take in what infor­ma­tion we can and exer­cise our best judg­ment. Now when I do that the argu­ment seeker cited wrt con­scious­ness seems very con­vinc­ing to me. It seems to me that there is a con­cep­tual dif­fer­ence between the inner expe­ri­ence of aware­ness and the behav­ior of atoms fol­low­ing the laws of physics. One can eas­ily con­ceive of atoms being arranged in a pat­tern so that they respond to exter­nal stim­uli to pro­duce the kind of behav­iors we asso­ciate with con­scious­ness. In fact, the col­lec­tion of atoms could behave that way with­out actu­ally BEING conscious–the behav­ior is dif­fer­ent from the inner expe­ri­ence, it seems to me. Mate­ri­al­ism IMO leaves no room for the most obvi­ous thing in the world: that we are actu­ally con­scious of things. It seems to me there­fore obvi­ous that mate­ri­al­ism is wrong. None this by itself implies there is a deity, but I can tell you that this idea was one of the things that nudged me toward Chris­tian­ity.
“Be still and know that I am God” seems a bet­ter strat­egy for the­ists, sci­en­tific research for skep­tics. Per­haps admit­ting the ten­ta­tive­ness of all knowl­edge would be best for both.
I like both strate­gies, applied in the are­nas for which they are suited. Dif­fer­ent tools for dif­fer­ent jobs, just like the spoon for soup and your hands for KFC.
Any­way, I’ll get back to cel­e­brat­ing my state’s most recent repeal of civil mar­riage dis­crim­i­na­tion. Catch you later.
your friend
Keith

LOUIS WROTE: It’s impos­si­ble to see essen­tials is such a way as to achieve unity, nor can we agree beyond a rea­son­able doubt on much
Again, when defin­ing essen­tials, there are two extremes — mak­ing the list too long, thereby exclud­ing all but a few who agree entirely, or so short as to be mean­ing­less.
When we say ‘these are the essen­tials of what we hold true,’ we will auto­mat­i­cally exclude some, but that is unvavoid­able. What we must hon­estly do is define the essen­tials as the min­i­mum set of pri­mary assump­tions needed to com­plete the core of our ide­ol­ogy, or in other words, to deter­mine the set of core beliefs that are the irre­ducible set, below which the ide­ol­ogy lacks log­i­cal coher­ence.
So for exam­ple, regard­ing Chris­tian­ity, if one of your core tenets is that Jesus died for our sins, you might rea­son that you must also hold to the related doc­trine of sal­va­tion by grace and not works.
KEITH WROTE: Any­way, I’ll get back to cel­e­brat­ing my state’s most recent repeal of civil mar­riage dis­crim­i­na­tion.
And I will get back to mourn­ing the fur­ther col­lapse of truth and health in my nation, and wipe the vomit off of my chin after watch­ing men kiss on TV. Soon, we may be like Canada, fin­ing and impris­on­ing peo­ple who declare homo­sex­u­al­ity to be a dys­func­tion and a sin.

What we must hon­estly do is define the essen­tials as the min­i­mum set of pri­mary assump­tions needed to com­plete the core of our ide­ol­ogy, or in other words, to deter­mine the set of core beliefs that are the irre­ducible set, below which the ide­ol­ogy lacks log­i­cal coher­ence.
The prob­lem here is that what you describe are assump­tions, to be taken on faith. You need the agree­ment of most (if not all) involved to achieve this level of agree­ment. Obvi­ously, this is an arbi­trary arrange­ment. It may be nec­es­sary to some kind of order, but it must be under­stood by all involved to be ten­ta­tive and sub­ject to change when new con­di­tions or facts arise. This is illus­trated by your extreme com­ments re: gays being treated as equal cit­i­zens and human beings. You are nau­se­ated by such a con­cept while I, in turn (and most oth­ers), am nau­se­ated by your reac­tion. I’m also nau­se­ated by the long his­tory of cru­elty, irra­tional­ity, and stu­pid­ity inflicted on us all by monothe­ist reli­gion and its abso­lutist pro­gramme based on lit­tle more than evidence-free asser­tions.
I main­tain that humil­ity in the face of ulti­mately unknow­able real­ity is the bet­ter pol­icy. In Chris­t­ian terms, this means humil­ity before God, some­thing xians refuse to admit. This, to me, is the essence of all reli­gions (some­thing peo­ple like seeker need to learn):
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do jus­tice, to love kind­ness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8
If we are to agree on a core set of assump­tions which all can agree on, this, to me, is the one.

Those are great gen­eral prin­ci­ples. You don’t even have to be faith­ful to a par­tic­u­lar reli­gion to fol­low those. If that is your entire sum­mary of spir­i­tu­al­ity, that is good. How­ever, it lacks the speci­ficity which Jesus required. What about Jesus com­mand to preach the gospel? What about his warn­ings about com­ing judg­ment and hell? What about his com­mands to not lust or be sex­u­ally immoral? Is this excluded from the above?
Peo­ple who want to exclude either love or truth from the equa­tion are prob­lem­atic. The for­mer want to excuse sin, the lat­ter want to forgo mercy. We need both.
I believe we should fol­low the exam­ple of Jesus with the woman caught in adul­tery — “I do not con­demn you, [but] go and sin no more.”

That’s because you, seeker, are at heart a moral­ist. Moral­ity is your pri­mary con­cern, not jus­tice or kind­ness or com­pas­sion. As I was taught from child­hood on (before I encoun­tered the real­ity of chris­tian­ism), love is the pri­mary force in the uni­verse because God is love. Every­thing flows from that. Jus­tice is more than a set of dic­tates and rules and reg­u­la­tions that moral­ists and reli­gion­ists get to use for con­trol and self-aggrandizement: it is the flip side of love, a con­cern for fair­ness and bal­ance and the eter­nal worth of each and every indi­vid­ual before God — love in action, as it were. This is the prob­lem with the Phar­isees and those of like mind: they think rules and reg­u­la­tion (the Law) are the end and goal of reli­gion, and there­fore they attacked Jesus for his pen­chant to dis­re­gard them. One can cer­tainly pick and choose among Jesus’ reported words to build a case for legal­ism, but only by dis­tort­ing his over­all mis­sion and actions.
As I’ve charged before, seeker, your cru­elty and heart­less­ness puts you in the camp of the Phar­isees and other legal­ists. For you, man was made for the Law. And, of course, you get to be the judge.

Jus­tice is more than a set of dic­tates and rules and reg­u­la­tions that moral­ists and reli­gion­ists get to use for con­trol and self-aggrandizement: it is the flip side of love, a con­cern for fair­ness and bal­ance and the eter­nal worth of each and every indi­vid­ual before God — love in action, as it were.
That is well said, and I agree. How­ever, I am not a mere moral­ist. I am one who is con­cerned for those in the val­ley of deci­sion, who might give cre­dence to hard­ened skep­tics who ‘sup­press the truth in unright­eous­ness,’ — I care for those who might be tricked by such liars — espe­cially chil­dren.
As I’ve charged before, seeker, your cru­elty and heart­less­ness puts you in the camp of the Phar­isees and other legal­ists. For you, man was made for the Law. And, of course, you get to be the judge.
I may be guilty of being harsh and a bit unkind with the law at times, and need to repent and stop doing that. How­ever, I do not reject the law, nor do i expect men to keep it well. What I do expect is that, illu­mi­nated by the law, men learn to avoid sin and love what is good. While you want to reject the law, I want to use it prop­erly, and NOT Phar­i­saically. How­ever, I think that you reject the con­cept of rebuke, which is entirely accept­able.
As Paul so elo­quently said:

Romans 7:7
What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Cer­tainly not! On the con­trary, I would not have known sin except through the law.
Romans 13:8–10
Owe no one any­thing except to love one another, for he who loves another has ful­filled the law. For the com­mand­ments, ‘You shall not com­mit adul­tery,’ ‘You shall not mur­der,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false wit­ness,’ ‘You shall not covet,’ and if there is any other com­mand­ment, are all summed up in this say­ing, namely, ‘You shall love your neigh­bor as your­self.’ Love does no harm to a neigh­bor; there­fore love is the ful­fill­ment of the law.

Note that in that last state­ment, “if there is any other com­mand­ment” would include promis­cu­ity, bes­tial­ity, and homo­sex­u­al­ity, even though they are not named here, they are named among the moral com­mand­ments.
And as he said to Tim­o­thy about the proper use of the law for unre­pen­tant sin­ners who flout the law:

1 Tim­o­thy 1:8–11
Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it law­fully, under­stand­ing this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the law­less and dis­obe­di­ent, for the ungodly and sin­ners, for the unholy and pro­fane, for those who strike their fathers and moth­ers, for mur­der­ers, the sex­u­ally immoral, men who prac­tice homo­sex­u­al­ity, enslavers,liars, per­jur­ers, and what­ever else is con­trary to sound doc­trine, in accor­dance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

Well, you are a fun­da­men­tal­ist xian after all. Excuse me if I find much of this irrel­e­vant, and cer­tainly no basis in which to for­mu­late law in a sec­u­lar society.

My point is that there is a proper use of rules, and one of them is to cor­rect the non-penitent who insists on hurt­ing him­self and oth­ers. You also called me a Phar­isee, which gave me per­mis­sion to use scrip­ture to out­line the cor­rect use of the “law” as it were.
You may cer­tainly find that irrel­e­vant, but I take issue with your def­i­n­i­tion of love, which avoids the truth of homo­sex­ual ill­ness, and the dam­age of push­ing it as wellness.

You can take issue with what I have to say all you want. That doesn’t, how­ever, make you the arbiter of the truth or what con­sti­tutes ill­ness. In fact, you sound a lit­tle mad (as in “insane”) with your insis­tence, in the face of the entire sci­en­tific establishment’s find­ing to the con­trary, of the “truth” of hx “ill­ness.” You speak of “dam­age” as if you are free of it or the will to inflict it. You delight in judg­ing (“rebuk­ing”) oth­ers; too bad you can’t apply the scalpel to your­self. As I said before, no humil­ity, as if God requires it of all His fol­low­ers but you.
For­get me and our feud for a moment. What if you are wrong? It’s pos­si­ble, you know. Your’s isn’t a mild or mod­er­ate objec­tion, but a fevered jihad (and the word is pre­cise). You can admit no room for error. Your rhetoric is so extreme that it invites com­par­i­son to the worst fanat­ics and ene­mies of mankind. What will God have to say to you? What will you say to Him?
The humil­ity your LORD demands of you is nowhere in sight. Nei­ther is kind­ness. Do you really fool your­self into believ­ing that you are being just towards gay peo­ple? Will you weep and gnash your teeth?
As for me, the mat­ter is point­less, for I believe in noth­ing at all (with the pos­si­bil­ity of naked self-interest).

HI Seeker:
KEITH WROTE: Any­way, I’ll get back to cel­e­brat­ing my state’s most recent repeal of civil mar­riage dis­crim­i­na­tion.
And I will get back to mourn­ing the fur­ther col­lapse of truth and health in my nation, and wipe the vomit off of my chin after watch­ing men kiss on TV[empha­sis mine] Soon, we may be like Canada, fin­ing and impris­on­ing peo­ple who declare homo­sex­u­al­ity to be a dys­func­tion and a sin.
While I dis­agree with all of your para­graph above, the bolded part betrays a big­otry, it ver­i­fies some­thing Louis once said (I think): a big part of your objec­tion to homo­sex­u­al­ity seems based on the fact that you find it icky.
your friend
Keith

ACtu­ally, i really don’t think that it is big­otry. There is such a thing as nat­ural dis­gust when nature is per­verted, abused, or destroyed.
I feel the same way when I see forests clear-cut, oil spills, ter­ror­ist mur­ders, or other sins against nature, God, and man.
Even Christ uses vomit, though in a lit­tle dif­fer­ent way:
Rev­e­la­tion 3:16
So then, because you are luke­warm, and nei­ther cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.
Or per­haps:
Psalm 119:158
I see the treach­er­ous, and am dis­gusted,
Because they do not keep Your word.
I believe I have a nat­ural, healthy revul­sion to abuses of nature. While dis­gust can be learned or unlearned, I think it is nat­u­rally healthy to be dis­gusted at things that are unhealthy and unnat­ural.
What makes me actu­ally nau­seous when I see men kiss­ing is that, for a moment, as any observer would, I expe­ri­ence the act through watch­ing it, and in this sec­ondary par­tic­i­pa­tion, I am repulsed. That’s not big­otry, that’s nature, and hon­esty.
Many peo­ple are dis­gusted by same-sex inti­macy, just as they might be by inces­tu­ous inti­macy, and rightly so. If I am a bigot for being repulsed by such things, then so are peo­ple who are repulsed by incest, bes­tial­ity, or other perversions.

closet-case gets sick when his repres­sion is threat­ened. “gay panic” I think it’s called.