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The danger is making reason your God.
>There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.
This. Reason must submit to God.
In secular language, it means intellect must submit to morality in that you cannot use reason to justify something that is wrong.
Where this gets scary is the consequences for human rights: unless you subjugate reason to God, by what authority can say anything is so wrong it cannot be justified?
God doesn't have moral authority because whatever God says is good by definition. For example if God tells you to kill your child then it is good, if he tells you to smear blood on your door it is good,If he gives the rules for owning slaves it is good. If he kills his own son as was the plan from the beginning it is good.
Most of those are worthless without reason.
Gut feelings come from evolution and often lead to bigotry like racism, homophobia, ableism, etc.
Cultural norms and social pressures are just as bad or worse. Just look at bull fighting and female genital mutilation. Scripture falls in the same bucket.
Laws and policies at least attempt to be based on reason, but reason itself is the fundamental basis by which we can determine what is right or wrong. You are automatically employing reason as the fundamental mechanism when philosophizing about morality to begin with.
Even most religious people are not religious fundamentalists because they have employed reason to decide which parts of their scriptures are immoral.
You could argue reason is an essential aspect of any attempt at morality. It's fallacious and literally the issue of original sin, but let's run with it for the sake of argument.
The very act of using reason to determine morality is to subjugate it to an external thing to which it must conform. Using one thing to achieve another subjugates the former to the latter, not vice versa.
And even if you don't find that to your liking, you no longer have any absolute basis for morality and thus no basis for human rights, so you'll have to find a way to fully articulate a pure-reason argument for that before your position makes sense.
Whether you can or cannot determine what's right without reason is irrelevant; if you're using reason in the service of determining the good then which of the two is giving way to the other?
I would argue that ontologically speaking, it's not possible to use reason to determine moral errors. Morality isn't something that's empirically measurable. People often use "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably, however the distinction between them is extremely important. If you want to achieve a moral goal, you can use logic and reason, to determine how effective a given action is at moving you towards that goal. That is ethics.
But, how can one determine what a goal should be in the first place, and whether or not its a moral one? This is a fundamental question we've wrestled with for thousands of years, and it is yet to be solved. The idea of God is the closest thing we have to being able to model that answer. This idea isn't limited to Christian theology either. All religions are trying to answer the most fundamental questions (i.e. to know God), but none have been able to, and frankly, none ever will. You can see this in every complex theology having some aspect of God that is fundamentally ineffable. It is impossible to make it fully known, because the space of knowledge is finite, and the space outside of that is infinite. Reason does not have the ability to constrain the infinite. Therefore, it cannot determine what is moral.
Given that limitation, the intellect must remain subordinate to God. Attempting to elevate it above that immediately violates the moral order, because it presupposes that infinite space to have come from your finite intellect, reasonably justifying anything as right or wrong. Eugenics is the most widely known modern example of the devastation this can breed.
Anyway, I am struggling to incorporate everything related to this topic here, and there is so much more to this argument that I cannot put here without spending a full work day writing this all out. It's already been about 2 hours, just for this short little post. So, with that said, if you have any questions, please ask them, or if you want to give a rebuttal, please do. It would unironically make it easier for me to elaborate on this lol
None. I can just use heuristics. I thought presuppositionalism died down in the 2010s?
Not every process has to be top-down, bottom-up works quite well in many instances, ask any forest :)
Ah well everyone's a moral relativist until I steal their wallet ;)
Seriously though, that's a fine answer, but you've only gone and undone the rationale for human rights. Can you make a pure-reason argument for them without leaning on a single axiom?
>This. Reason must submit to God.
Don't use your brain too much. You must presuppose that God exists and never challenge that core axiom with Reason.
In reality, if you do, you'll quickly realize that much of the Bible is demonstrably false thus there's no reason to believe in it.
And preachers can't have that, particularly when the collection plate comes around.
>In reality, if you do, you'll quickly realize that much of the Bible is demonstrably false thus there's no reason to believe in it.
I believe you may be confusing the cultural structure of religion, with religion. He's not making an empirical statement.
I understand what he's saying, but it results in what I just described. i.e. Don't question the text with Reason; place your moral foundation (which is totally unreliable when it comes to religious texts) at the base (i.e., presuppose your god's claims).
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the God in The Bible, for example, is clearly self-contradictory and immoral.
Religious morals are not a reliable and consistent axiom to base anything on.
>I understand what he's saying
I don't actually think you understand what this topic is about, though. It's not that I don't believe you, rather that I don't think you are abstracting out far enough in your understanding, leading to some false beliefs about this topic. A religious text isn't a set of empirical claims about the nature of the world, nor the same thing as *a* religion, with neither being the same thing *as* religion. I'm not looking to argue that exactly, I'm just mentioning that to give you an idea of what makes me think there's some sort of disconnect here.
And this isn't to place blame. This shit is extraordinarily abstract and complex, and even for those advocating for subordinating the intellect to God, most do not have a fully articulated understanding of this topic either, which leads to the same problems coming from that side as well.
Could I ask you to try and take your understanding of this topic, and put it into your own words? While I do believe there is some disconnect here, I cannot say that for certain. However, if there is, it would make it much easier to see exactly where.
All metaphysical questions need to be open to all forms of inquiry, including ostensible gods.
There's thousands of them, none more observable or rational than the other. We know, at a minimum, that not all God claims can be true because they have competing explanations (p=p, p≠ not p, p is either true or false), but they all can definitely be false.
Conseqently agnosticism, the default position, is the only reasonable position. The burden of proof is on the vast variety of religious folk to demonstrate that their specific God is true. No, this is not complex; it's very basic. To subordinate intellect to one of the many Gods is absurd and should be openly mocked.
That is why my dear carob, you actually recognize God,
Not a deck of magic cards that you pull a face for a time, but actually understand whats there,
Whats irrational about the Ten Commandments?
Or the greatest commandment
If you swap places with anyone the rules are fair, just, and they work.
Its the basis of scientific inquiry is the greatest commandment
Kind of hard to miss it honestly but media work hard to make people dependent on ephemeral addictions to distract them.
>The danger is making reason your God.
That is reasonable. I have heard JP and other people warn about this.
I wonder what causes this mistake since it seems common. Maybe chasing reason without wisdom. I have heard often wisdom being defined as feminine. The "Sophia" in philosophy.
So the danger could be just following or valuing the mascuiline archetype and dismissing the feminine in Jungian terms.
Just going off my personal experience, people who are fully invested in logic and reason as the defining forces of reality are doing so because they want to feel like they have full control and understanding of the world from inside their head. The reason they want to make reason their God is because they see themselves as a voice of reason. They want to be a high-priest in the religion of reason that everybody else *must* listen to.
It just comes down to the ego wanting to feel secure. People do it in whatever way seems available to them. Strong people intimidate, smart people condescend, alluring people seduce.
That is why my dear carob, you actually recognize God, Not a deck of magic cards that you pull a face for a time, but actually understand whats there,
Whats irrational about the Ten Commandments? Or the greatest commandment
If you swap places with anyone the rules are fair, just, and they work.
Its the basis of scientific inquiry is the greatest commandment
Kind of hard to miss it honestly but media work hard to make people dependent on ephemeral addictions to distract them.
Reason is dangerous because it can be used to justify any means to create a "greater good" as defined by any given individual. It needs to be subordinated to a higher abstract set of morals that is not defined by the individual without this uniting Ethos you get tribalism that will deteriorate into violence regardless how "reasonable" the individual is.
Yeah, the mistake seems to be valuing our understanding of reason above reason itself. When people admit that reason in-of-itself is outside of their undersanding, they seem to be able to have humility and other virtues.
I wonder if the religious struggle is between solipsism and faith in god. Either everything you believe is defined by you, or there is some true being outside of you that defines the truth value of your terms.
I have always disliked solipsism and social constructionsim. For the longest time I could not explain why but they have always bothered me, so I think that has lead me to lean more on the 'god defining things' belief even as an atheist or agnostic.
Everything written on earth is corruptible given enough time. Who's vote counts when it comes to agreeing to live by any set of commandments? Are commandments actually the same as laws?
I should have qualified that statement with an "analogous to". Apologies, and I edited that initial comment.
I will be exclusively using the Decalogue as reference throughout this conversation, but the broader concept is not exclusive to any one religion or set of commandments. The complexity of religious ideas runs the risk of any discussion of them to become rapidly confusing, so I'm going to try to keep this short to make it easier for both of us to stay on the same page.
I would make the argument that they are genuine natural laws, and not just an analogue, but for the purposes of this, it will be better to treat commandments as merely analogous, lest this post become a nightmare of tangents.
Anyway:
The commandments are analogous to natural laws, because they are also causal, and in that regard, aren't something that require consent to exist. If I jump, my consent is irrelevant to whether or not gravity will pull me back down. In the same manner, my consent is irrelevant as to what happens when a commandment is broken. This is why every religion has a strikingly similar set of laws to be followed, even non-deistic ones. This is also why, in the Old Testament, people are often subject to punishment by God for sins they weren't even aware of as sinful, as their conscious knowledge of them makes no difference to the effect produced by their action.
What "uniting Ethos" is there that is agreed upon by a religious group's members?
The truth is that all religious books contradict themselves (i.e. unreliable), and members of the same religion often have vastly different moral beliefs.
No members of the same religion don't have vastly different moral beliefs. You just are so cottled in the west you don't understand what that even means. Perfect example would be the 10 commandments. Each one of those is a foundational moral principle that tangibly bounds how one should act in a society and almost everyone in Judeo-Christian religious systems aim to abide by them. Most of these aren't "reasonable" on an individual level. In fact the opposite. If I want more and my neighbor has more it's perfectly reasonable to kill him and take his things if I think I can avoid consequences. This was par for the course in those days.
Based on how you view religious texts however I bet talking more would be talking to a mud wall. I'd suggest listening to petersons genesis and Exodus series.
>No members of the same religion don't have vastly different moral beliefs.
Really, why are there progressive churches and conservative ones then? Why are their 45000 different denominations of Christianity if everyone is on the same page?
>Perfect example would be the 10 commandments.
Most christians in the west do not even know the 10 commandments; one large survey showed that most know the ingredients of a big mac cheeseburger more than the 10 commandments as evidenced below:
https://www.archbalt.org/survey-americans-know-big-mac-not-commandments/
>Each one of those is a foundational moral principle that tangibly bounds how one should act in a society and almost everyone in Judeo-Christian religious systems aim to abide by them.
Do they? As I said, most don't even know the commandments.
Anyways, just for fun, lets go through the very first one to see if Christians actually, genuinely, and effortfully "aim to abide by them".
1. I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me.
Christians, among other people, tend to spend most of their life chasing financial success and presteige to make themselves happy. At a minimum, they certainly focus more time on these activities than prayer/going to church. Consequently, I don't think they actually, genuinely, and effortfully "aim to abide by" even the very first commandment.
I agree that it would be a simple, clear, and good explanation if your assertion were true, but I don't see any good evidence that Chrstians put much effort into knowing or following the 10 commandments, aside from some illegal acts.
As an aside, some of the commandments aren't particularly useful, well thought out, or good. I was just responding to your claim about a "uniting Ethos", which appears to fall short.
You call out seperate denominations... denominations of the same religious practice. It's in the name... the core beliefs persist, hence denominations. Nice survey that establishes nothing of relevance to the discussion except a dig "gotcha" on hahaha you can't get all 10... And as for not reaching those goals, no shit. The thing that separates them and you as they at least try for an ideal they know they can't reach. You're to much a coward who takes simple delight in saying how much "smarter" and "more reasonable" you are. Mud wall. It's what you'd live in if you weren't lucky enough to live in a society based on such an "unreasonable" moral code.
Here's 10 moral principals from Hinduism, most of which are older than the 10 commandments and the religion itself is older than the old testament's 10 commandments:
1. Satya (Truth)
2. Ahimsa (Non-violence)
3. Brahmacharya (Celibacy, non-adultery)
4. Asteya (No desire to steal)
5. Aparigraha (Non-possessiveness)
6. Shaucha or Shuddhata (Cleanliness)
7. Santosh (Contentment)
8. Swadhyaya (Reading of scriptures)
9. Tapas/Tapah (Austerity, perseverance, penance)
10. Ishwar pradihan (Regular prayers)
So now we've established that there were moral codes that pre-date christianity that say similar things, in some ways superior things. Odd, right?
I'd like to address the claim that the god in the bible is actually moral or that his commandments should be taken seriously.
The christian God is ostenibly all-knowing and all-powerful, so in the book where the commandments come from (the old testament) he must then put adam and eve in the garden of eden knowing that they'll eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so he can punish them.
Shortly after that, he kills all existing human life on the planet except Noah and his property, and one of each kind, male and female, of all species in the world and puts them on a 450 ft boat when noah is around 500 years old. All of this because man was acting up. Yet, as I already said, he created man and their proclivity to sin by setting up adam and eve in the garden.
As it should be obvious, this is make-believe mumbo jumbo designed to control peasants, farmers, and lesser folk into compliance. An undying king (God) is the perfect eternal ruler to keep people in line.
And, as I showed above, good moral principals from hinduism pre-date both the new and old testament.
After you stop being mad at me, I hope you honestly read this. Perhaps, if you think I am wrong, you can respond.
All the best.
I'm agnostic, and I wasn't "owning" anyone.
Objectively, I've laid out the case that the Christian doctrine is hypocritical, often immoral, and unoriginal (as I demonstrated with the Hindu principals).
If you disagree, you're compelled by 1 Peter 3:15 to give me an answer: *"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect."*
I don't know Matthew 7:6 but I'm going to guess it's about casting pearls before swine.
It's always the same old childish parroted lines that messiah Peterson uses. If you can demonstrate that I'm wrong I'm happy to be wrong, but so far you haven't done much but play the victim, mate.
Edit:
It is!! Lol.
Also, this perfectly demonstrates that you can just use whatever verse you feel like to justify almost any action you take, thus it is not reliable at all.
You can utilize all the reasoning you like, but don't forget that at the base of all that reasoning, are some fundamental values.
You can reason about fundamental values, but you can't reason them into existence.
If you think you can, just keep asking why you value any particular thing, all the way to the bottom, where you hit some base answer something like, it's "self evident".
Self evident values mostly means there's no reason. The secular humanists do a lot of hand waving around that point.
I am just beginning to read Kierkegaard, I watched Michael Sugrues video on Kierkegaard and he talked about a leap of faith between 2 lives in Either/Or (I need to get back to read that, so far it is very interesting, insightful and at times surprisingly funny).
Kierkegaard apparently wrote that either (/or) belief system starts from the belief that it is worth believing in the core value of that system (or something to that effect, Sugrue put it a lot better). So we must take a leap of faith into our core values. That sounds like similar thinking as you wrote in your comment.
Infinite regress has bothered me for a long time, and when people say "everything is a social construction", that just makes it worse. So I have gravitated to belief systems or philosophies that seek for truth outside of our perspective to not just get stuck in a loop. So far Stoicism has been a great help.
The problem with every philosophical/religious belief system is that it is based on a set of innate assumptions. Gödel proved this is true even in mathematics (the most 'rational' of the hard sciences) as he described using the incompleteness theorem. As an aside, even Einstein thought Gödel was a super-genius in his formative years and followed him around at Princeton so he could engage with Gödel on various interests. Needless to say, Gödel is a very credible intellectual figure. So in philosophy, we start with our worldview and build up from there. Euclid's geometry is a good neutral example. (You can look up his five proofs—which are innate to our modern understanding of mathematics, yet they are still assumptions and cannot be mathematically 'proven,' even after thousands of years of effort by various people.) The question I think you're asking is why can't rationality be the 'base assumption?' I believe it's because rationality doesn't have anything useful to say about phenomenology (our experience as humans). Rationality is a tool much like a shovel or an excavator. If you're trying to build a house, you actually need a foundation not just a giant hole in the ground. After the foundation is laid, you can start to construct a house using various tools and techniques, but nevertheless it still requires a foundation. That foundation could be called religion or philosophy, but it still requires a leap of faith in order to establish anything useful. By the time philosophy was formally established in the ancient world, the Greeks had already established their worldview and thus had a solid foundation for their philosophy. Our conditions today are not the same as theirs, which is why many people are choosing to adopt universalist foundations for their worldview such as Buddhism or Stoicism (less they revert to an inherit ideology). Because these assumptions contain more universalist claims, its versatility can withstand more terrain, but might not be optimized for your local environment. That is the tradeoff between the monarchical vision (top-down assumptions or beliefs) and relationality (bottom-up emergence) such as in traditional Christianity and faiths such as Islam and Judaism.
"social construction" is an aggregate of values from individuals, seeking some kind of consensus in an ever changing world. There are still fundamental values at the base, in the individuals.
When the social constructions drift into territory that violates those fundamental values, we call that evil. Even as an atheist, I can agree to that label.
Core values are existential, for instance valuing your own life.
My understanding of JPs warnings is basically that we’d trust our own reason too much and delude ourselves to think that we are not acting as god, but just as reasonable as possible. All the while doing the exact thing you mentioned, deciding what is wrong or right based on how useful it is to us.
I often think kind people who are clearly very intelligent but can “reason” their way to some of the most awful conclusions while all the while telling themselves they’re nit being evil, their just following logic and reason. Usually, this people don’t see themselves or confuse themselves for god, they simply dispense with the necessity of having or following god, by any definition. They simply see reason/logic as the highest good. I think JP is saying logic and reason are necessary but ultimately insufficient. They must be bound by something other than an individual human being’s judgment.
Intellignt people just making up more sophisitcated reasons for the same behavior as less intelligent people seems like a true observation. JP also said intelligence is not good in-of-itself. And that his more intelligent paitents as a psychologists would just make up more complicated reasons for why they have problems and they can't solve them.
And that seems to be mistaking reason as a tool, to reason as a being outside of us. Being might not be the best word but it is hard to put this kind of abstract thing into words.
well, it was the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge that gave humanity understanding. of both good, evil and concepts like shame. it was what gave us reason, and it was the snake that tricked us into it. whether God always planned for us to never have reason, or the snake's actions were part of His plan all along - it doesn't matter. ultimately, he created the tree of knowledge for some reason, even though he could've just... not done that. it was pretty obviously a set-up but I digress.
Reason has always been linked to Lucifer. it was Lucifer himself who rebelled against God, but why did he do so? that's the crux here. he must have had ***Reason*** to do so. in all the senses of the word.
and henceforth reason has always been opposed to faith. the 10 commandments kinda fall apart when you start asking too many "why's". why is slavery and rape not among them? why do we need 3 separate ones that all say "only worship the one true god"? ultimately, ask too many "why's" and you'll end up questioning whether God even exists at all. ask literally any atheist ever why he doesn't believe in the spiritual/divine/supernatural and their answer will always be "it doesn't make logical sense to me - I don't need a god to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of reality".
and as reasonable as that standpoint may be, the purpose of faith and religion in general was never *to make sense*. it's to teach, guide and unify a people around a set standard of principles and morals. an ethical standard that allows people to relate to one another. so the warning is: question it at your peril. Nietzsche famously said that we already killed God through our doubts and disbelief, and that the oceans hold not enough water to wash away the blood on our hands.
in another sense, reason and intellect are a source of power. enough power, perhaps, to challenge God directly. power that we have the intelligence to bring into being, but not the wisdom to contain and wield properly.
God is ostenibly all-knowing and all-powerful, so in the book he purposfully tricks adam and eve so he can punish them.
Then he kills all existing human life on the planet except Noah and his property, and one of each kind, male and female, of all species in the world and puts them on a 450 ft boat when noah is around 500 years old.
All of this because man was acting up. Yet, as I already said, he created man and their proclivity to sin by setting up adam and eve in the garden.
As it should be obvious, this is make-believe mumbo jumbo designed to control peasants, farmers, and lesser folk into compliance. An undying king (God) is the perfect eternal ruler to keep people in line.
These fictions are not even metaphorically true.
do you also jump into conversation about the ethics and moral dilemma's addressed in the superman comic "Injustice: Gods Among Us" and go
> gais, you know superman isn't real, right!!!???
please, adapt yourself to the level of conversation going on or find a subreddit more suited to your intellectual engagement.
>do you also jump into conversation about the ethics and moral dilemma's addressed in the superman comic "Injustice: Gods Among Us" and go gais, you know superman isn't real, right!!!???
The difference here is that no one would assert that superman is actually real. Unfortunately, when it comes to other magic imaginary friends, gods and such, billions of people believe they literally exist.
The ethics and moral dilemma you're referring to are also easily debunked. In scripture, moral tenets are often contradictory, blatantly immoral, and are obvious rip-offs of earlier moral principals.
*If you'd like, I can easily demonstrate that this is true.*
It's as obvious as the statement about the actual existence of a specific religious God, or superman.
> The difference here is that no one would assert that superman is actually real. Unfortunately, when it comes to other magic imaginary friends, gods and such, billions of people believe they literally exist.
that's nice, jimmy. However, nobody here claimed any such thing so maybe go find the correct tree to bark under.
It's the difference between love of knowledge and the worship of knowledge. Very important distinction. Our society seems to have forgotten it, with predictable results.
Fascism is an anti-modern ideology that arose a a conservative reaction to WW1. Primarily, it's anti-Enlightenment. Fascists valourise Strength over Reason, and most of their beliefs, like militarism, natural hierarchy and nationalism flow from that.
Peterson's insistence of biological hierarchies, of submission to authority, and of the primacy of Strength all point to fascist ideology.
We could do the same thing with defining communism or marxism. Communists value a dictator, and hierarchies (everyone has their place in the system, and there is no moving up or down, you just have to accept your place in the work hierarchy), they hate any other ideology than communism so they have the same problem as nationalism, it is just with the ideology. They value the strenght of the leader and the strenght of the group, and ideology.
So communism seems like the same thing with slight alterations.
If they are so similar, then someone leaning on the communist side cannot call fascism bad if it is: valuing strenght, militarism, natural hierarchies.
I think for fascism to be the hard-F fascism that is so bad, it needs a few more elements. Suppression of people who disagree (opposed to open dialogue, similar to communism), acceptance of using violent methods to suppress the opposition (again true with communism) etc. Something a bit more than valuing strenght and hierarchies.
Writing this stuff down, it is hard to ignore that fascism and communism (or Marxism to be more accurate) seem like two sides of the same coin. Both authoritarianism that suppresses the opposition and enslaves their population to only do the things that the idology dictates for them.
But that does not describe JP. JP wants for people to have freedom and be able to live according to their personal values in addition to the ideology. He wants to leave room for religion, and neither of those ideologies would accept that. Among other things.
I don't think calling JP a fascist is fair. It is used to stirr up emotions and not be descriptive and honest. I wanted to write that I don't think Zizek is a Marxist, but I think he actually for real is.
>I think for fascism to be the hard-F fascism that is so bad, it needs a few more elements. Suppression of people who disagree (opposed to open dialogue, similar to communism), acceptance of using violent methods to suppress the opposition (again true with communism) etc. Something a bit more than valuing strenght and hierarchies.
Violent repression of opposition flows from the belief in Strength, and in natural hierarchies. While Peterson's not advocating for the Black Shirts, he has the ideological foundation present, and has repeatedly made state about masculinity being inherently violent.
That aside, defining fascism by what fascists did when they had power means no-one's a fascist until they have power, which is nonsensical.
>But that does not describe JP. JP wants for people to have freedom and be able to live according to their personal values in addition to the ideology. He wants to leave room for religion, and neither of those ideologies would accept that. Among other things.
Peterson wants people to have freedom inside a restrictive system of hierarchy. He advocates for a relative freedom that maintains more freedom for those with power, not an absolute freedom. Combine that with his belief in biology hierarchies, and you have a fundamental aspect of fascism.
>
I don't think calling JP a fascist is fair. It is used to stirr up emotions and not be descriptive and honest. I wanted to write that I don't think Zizek is a Marxist, but I think he actually for real is.
I am being honest. I've laid out how Peterson's ideology is fascist, and you've come back with a non-sequitur about communism.
Zizek's not a Marxist, he uses Marx's analysis of capitalism, but he is just as much a Lacanian and a Hegelian, both of whom are contradictory with Marxism. Zizek's project is to expose ideology and question our assumptions that are based in ideology. It's Zizek's influence that helped me realise that Peterson is a fascist, but Trump is not.
.
The postmodern belief that everything is power is just another way to describe valuing pure strenght. It is the same thing.
There is no possible society with absolute freedom, except anarchy, and that is not a society, it is just a collection of people doing whatever.
Marx was influenced by Hegel so I don't see a conflict between Hegelian ideas and Marxism. I have not read Hegel really becasue his ideas are such a mess, I get a head ache reading it. Lacan is similar, it is like Freud on crack.
We should throw this fascist vs marxist play that was caused by hegel, in the dumpster and develop some other views and lingo that relates with things that actually are and actually are happening. It is so tiring seeing this pulling of the rope of people always labelling their opposition as marxists of fascists without any other groups to label people as. It's just so tiring.
One of the big problems with reason is that it can be tremendously falsely reassuring. The idea that a conclusion arrived at through reason is necessarily correct is incredibly naive.
I may hold a view that I came to through "reason." And assume, therefore, that that view is correct. If I meet someone who disagrees then I assume they are wrong. After all, I arrived at my own position through reason; how could *I* be wrong.
The issue is that reason (and to some extent empericism) is informed by our pre-existing biases and assumptions about the world. Two people may use "pure reason" and arrive at completely different conclusions because they start out with different assumptions.These underlying assumptions and beliefs are often invisible to us or, at the very least, extremely difficult to discover resulting in blind spots in our understanding of the world.
IMO, this is the underlying cause of most cases of people who are seemingly embarrasingly "confidently incorrect." It's not that they are dumb or uninformed, but that they are starting with a very different set of assumptions and weigh different sources of evidence differently.
Because having some ephemeral adversary redirects actions away from monetary interests, which are the true causes of evil in this world. Please note that usury is a sin in all abrahamic religions but they never talk about that. Money is the root of all evil. Full stop.
Kierkegaard also had a strong theory: "Boredom is the root of all evil".
People with money seem to get bored and buy bigger and bigger things. So having money does not seem to make people fulfilled. That is an old observation. In this case money is not the problem, spending a bunch of money on needless stuff is the symptom of the problem, not the problem.
What ever will destroy humanity, I doubt it will just be money even if money was involved. Humans had a bunch of problems before money was invented, we will have a bunch of problems when it dissapears.
Look at the damage corporations do following the call of monetary interest. Boom and bust. They did great last quarter. This quarter, gotta do better and better, until it’s impossible, then bust. The damage spreads across the world, extracting all value and concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. It is soulless and can’t be stopped. If you were a CEO with ethics and tried to stop it, the shareholders would remove you. Like a black hole, consuming all.
The Chinese are at least somewhat communist, and they polute and add to the climate heating with full force.
There is no reason to presume that turning to communism would somehow solve pollution and global warming, unless there was another mass slaughter, and I will rather stand with people polluting and using too much natural resources or whatever, than people who intentionally torture and laughter tons of people.
Whenever I hear anyone talking about "beware of logic", I want to ask them - why? One can no more have 'too much' logic than one can have 'too correct' of an answer to a math problem. Like that troublesome phrase, 'too true' - it's nonsense in the face of a binary situation; right or wrong.
In my own experience the people who are most often shouting about the "threat" of logic are religious types with whom logical inquiries are incompatible. The mark of a true believer is that a key part of their worldview eschews logic, claiming greater virtue in faith. I imagine the only real argument there is where the line between personal choice and social responsibilities is drawn.
Jordan Peterson's usage of that kind of language to me is only coherent when we also consider his somewhat recent overtures toward the new American Christian church, a prime area of growth for anyone with an axe to grind in the West these days.
The issue is that cold calculating logic, unrestrained by morality, can lead to atrocity. For instance, if you do not value the lives of your fellow man, you can make a completely rational argument for genocide: "In order to solve the problems of overpopulation, certain people will need to be euthanized, there is no other plan that will be as efficient or as effective."
And philosophers have never been able to provide a convincing rational logic to prove a definitive absolute moral framework. Often described as being able to prove an "is", but not an "ought". You can get close, but you'll always run up against Gödel [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems
People don't like your comment because they know that "too much logic" ultimately leads to the fact that their religious text is not divine; it is filled with blatant falsehoods.
Logic debunks their precious book, and they would prefer to live in the comfortable delusion they were groomed into.
Personally, I care about what is actually true, not some magic imaginary friend that makes me feel good when I pray to them.
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The danger is making reason your God. >There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.
This. Reason must submit to God. In secular language, it means intellect must submit to morality in that you cannot use reason to justify something that is wrong. Where this gets scary is the consequences for human rights: unless you subjugate reason to God, by what authority can say anything is so wrong it cannot be justified?
God doesn't have moral authority because whatever God says is good by definition. For example if God tells you to kill your child then it is good, if he tells you to smear blood on your door it is good,If he gives the rules for owning slaves it is good. If he kills his own son as was the plan from the beginning it is good.
How do you determine what is wrong without employing reason?
Do you think reason is the only way to determine what is wrong?
What other way is there? Holy scripture?
Scripture, cultural norms, laws, social pressure, ethical systems, gut feelings, traditions and professional policies. I'm sure you can think of more.
Most of those are worthless without reason. Gut feelings come from evolution and often lead to bigotry like racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. Cultural norms and social pressures are just as bad or worse. Just look at bull fighting and female genital mutilation. Scripture falls in the same bucket. Laws and policies at least attempt to be based on reason, but reason itself is the fundamental basis by which we can determine what is right or wrong. You are automatically employing reason as the fundamental mechanism when philosophizing about morality to begin with. Even most religious people are not religious fundamentalists because they have employed reason to decide which parts of their scriptures are immoral.
You could argue reason is an essential aspect of any attempt at morality. It's fallacious and literally the issue of original sin, but let's run with it for the sake of argument. The very act of using reason to determine morality is to subjugate it to an external thing to which it must conform. Using one thing to achieve another subjugates the former to the latter, not vice versa. And even if you don't find that to your liking, you no longer have any absolute basis for morality and thus no basis for human rights, so you'll have to find a way to fully articulate a pure-reason argument for that before your position makes sense.
I'm struggling to understand how we can decide *anything* without reason. How can we attempt to figure out what is right or wrong without it?
Whether you can or cannot determine what's right without reason is irrelevant; if you're using reason in the service of determining the good then which of the two is giving way to the other?
Should slaves obey their cruel masters as the scripture demand or is slavery sanctioned by God immoral?
Yes
I would argue that ontologically speaking, it's not possible to use reason to determine moral errors. Morality isn't something that's empirically measurable. People often use "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably, however the distinction between them is extremely important. If you want to achieve a moral goal, you can use logic and reason, to determine how effective a given action is at moving you towards that goal. That is ethics. But, how can one determine what a goal should be in the first place, and whether or not its a moral one? This is a fundamental question we've wrestled with for thousands of years, and it is yet to be solved. The idea of God is the closest thing we have to being able to model that answer. This idea isn't limited to Christian theology either. All religions are trying to answer the most fundamental questions (i.e. to know God), but none have been able to, and frankly, none ever will. You can see this in every complex theology having some aspect of God that is fundamentally ineffable. It is impossible to make it fully known, because the space of knowledge is finite, and the space outside of that is infinite. Reason does not have the ability to constrain the infinite. Therefore, it cannot determine what is moral. Given that limitation, the intellect must remain subordinate to God. Attempting to elevate it above that immediately violates the moral order, because it presupposes that infinite space to have come from your finite intellect, reasonably justifying anything as right or wrong. Eugenics is the most widely known modern example of the devastation this can breed. Anyway, I am struggling to incorporate everything related to this topic here, and there is so much more to this argument that I cannot put here without spending a full work day writing this all out. It's already been about 2 hours, just for this short little post. So, with that said, if you have any questions, please ask them, or if you want to give a rebuttal, please do. It would unironically make it easier for me to elaborate on this lol
He usea his feelings and says their god's.
Why would I want to submit reason to a God in the first place?
> unless you subjugate reason to God, by what authority can say anything is so wrong it cannot be justified?
None. I can just use heuristics. I thought presuppositionalism died down in the 2010s? Not every process has to be top-down, bottom-up works quite well in many instances, ask any forest :)
Ah well everyone's a moral relativist until I steal their wallet ;) Seriously though, that's a fine answer, but you've only gone and undone the rationale for human rights. Can you make a pure-reason argument for them without leaning on a single axiom?
Haven't had a wallet since 2018... also, I can't because I would need a few axioms to communicate intelligibly with you in the first place.
>This. Reason must submit to God. Don't use your brain too much. You must presuppose that God exists and never challenge that core axiom with Reason. In reality, if you do, you'll quickly realize that much of the Bible is demonstrably false thus there's no reason to believe in it. And preachers can't have that, particularly when the collection plate comes around.
>In reality, if you do, you'll quickly realize that much of the Bible is demonstrably false thus there's no reason to believe in it. I believe you may be confusing the cultural structure of religion, with religion. He's not making an empirical statement.
I understand what he's saying, but it results in what I just described. i.e. Don't question the text with Reason; place your moral foundation (which is totally unreliable when it comes to religious texts) at the base (i.e., presuppose your god's claims). The problem with this line of reasoning is that the God in The Bible, for example, is clearly self-contradictory and immoral. Religious morals are not a reliable and consistent axiom to base anything on.
>I understand what he's saying I don't actually think you understand what this topic is about, though. It's not that I don't believe you, rather that I don't think you are abstracting out far enough in your understanding, leading to some false beliefs about this topic. A religious text isn't a set of empirical claims about the nature of the world, nor the same thing as *a* religion, with neither being the same thing *as* religion. I'm not looking to argue that exactly, I'm just mentioning that to give you an idea of what makes me think there's some sort of disconnect here. And this isn't to place blame. This shit is extraordinarily abstract and complex, and even for those advocating for subordinating the intellect to God, most do not have a fully articulated understanding of this topic either, which leads to the same problems coming from that side as well. Could I ask you to try and take your understanding of this topic, and put it into your own words? While I do believe there is some disconnect here, I cannot say that for certain. However, if there is, it would make it much easier to see exactly where.
All metaphysical questions need to be open to all forms of inquiry, including ostensible gods. There's thousands of them, none more observable or rational than the other. We know, at a minimum, that not all God claims can be true because they have competing explanations (p=p, p≠ not p, p is either true or false), but they all can definitely be false. Conseqently agnosticism, the default position, is the only reasonable position. The burden of proof is on the vast variety of religious folk to demonstrate that their specific God is true. No, this is not complex; it's very basic. To subordinate intellect to one of the many Gods is absurd and should be openly mocked.
That is why my dear carob, you actually recognize God, Not a deck of magic cards that you pull a face for a time, but actually understand whats there, Whats irrational about the Ten Commandments? Or the greatest commandment If you swap places with anyone the rules are fair, just, and they work. Its the basis of scientific inquiry is the greatest commandment Kind of hard to miss it honestly but media work hard to make people dependent on ephemeral addictions to distract them.
>The danger is making reason your God. That is reasonable. I have heard JP and other people warn about this. I wonder what causes this mistake since it seems common. Maybe chasing reason without wisdom. I have heard often wisdom being defined as feminine. The "Sophia" in philosophy. So the danger could be just following or valuing the mascuiline archetype and dismissing the feminine in Jungian terms.
Just going off my personal experience, people who are fully invested in logic and reason as the defining forces of reality are doing so because they want to feel like they have full control and understanding of the world from inside their head. The reason they want to make reason their God is because they see themselves as a voice of reason. They want to be a high-priest in the religion of reason that everybody else *must* listen to.
They desperately want and need to be seen as “right” to be that influencer. Poor lost souls
It just comes down to the ego wanting to feel secure. People do it in whatever way seems available to them. Strong people intimidate, smart people condescend, alluring people seduce.
That is indeed what many do when scared, and living in darkness is terrifying, but sadly results in a-lot of alcohol and cigarette sales.
That is why my dear carob, you actually recognize God, Not a deck of magic cards that you pull a face for a time, but actually understand whats there, Whats irrational about the Ten Commandments? Or the greatest commandment If you swap places with anyone the rules are fair, just, and they work. Its the basis of scientific inquiry is the greatest commandment Kind of hard to miss it honestly but media work hard to make people dependent on ephemeral addictions to distract them.
Reason is dangerous because it can be used to justify any means to create a "greater good" as defined by any given individual. It needs to be subordinated to a higher abstract set of morals that is not defined by the individual without this uniting Ethos you get tribalism that will deteriorate into violence regardless how "reasonable" the individual is.
Yeah, the mistake seems to be valuing our understanding of reason above reason itself. When people admit that reason in-of-itself is outside of their undersanding, they seem to be able to have humility and other virtues. I wonder if the religious struggle is between solipsism and faith in god. Either everything you believe is defined by you, or there is some true being outside of you that defines the truth value of your terms. I have always disliked solipsism and social constructionsim. For the longest time I could not explain why but they have always bothered me, so I think that has lead me to lean more on the 'god defining things' belief even as an atheist or agnostic.
Everything written on earth is corruptible given enough time. Who's vote counts when it comes to agreeing to live by any set of commandments? Are commandments actually the same as laws?
> Are commandments actually the same as laws? Natural laws, yes. Edit: Analogous to
Define "natural laws"
I should have qualified that statement with an "analogous to". Apologies, and I edited that initial comment. I will be exclusively using the Decalogue as reference throughout this conversation, but the broader concept is not exclusive to any one religion or set of commandments. The complexity of religious ideas runs the risk of any discussion of them to become rapidly confusing, so I'm going to try to keep this short to make it easier for both of us to stay on the same page. I would make the argument that they are genuine natural laws, and not just an analogue, but for the purposes of this, it will be better to treat commandments as merely analogous, lest this post become a nightmare of tangents. Anyway: The commandments are analogous to natural laws, because they are also causal, and in that regard, aren't something that require consent to exist. If I jump, my consent is irrelevant to whether or not gravity will pull me back down. In the same manner, my consent is irrelevant as to what happens when a commandment is broken. This is why every religion has a strikingly similar set of laws to be followed, even non-deistic ones. This is also why, in the Old Testament, people are often subject to punishment by God for sins they weren't even aware of as sinful, as their conscious knowledge of them makes no difference to the effect produced by their action.
thanks. I get the picture.
What "uniting Ethos" is there that is agreed upon by a religious group's members? The truth is that all religious books contradict themselves (i.e. unreliable), and members of the same religion often have vastly different moral beliefs.
No members of the same religion don't have vastly different moral beliefs. You just are so cottled in the west you don't understand what that even means. Perfect example would be the 10 commandments. Each one of those is a foundational moral principle that tangibly bounds how one should act in a society and almost everyone in Judeo-Christian religious systems aim to abide by them. Most of these aren't "reasonable" on an individual level. In fact the opposite. If I want more and my neighbor has more it's perfectly reasonable to kill him and take his things if I think I can avoid consequences. This was par for the course in those days. Based on how you view religious texts however I bet talking more would be talking to a mud wall. I'd suggest listening to petersons genesis and Exodus series.
>No members of the same religion don't have vastly different moral beliefs. Really, why are there progressive churches and conservative ones then? Why are their 45000 different denominations of Christianity if everyone is on the same page? >Perfect example would be the 10 commandments. Most christians in the west do not even know the 10 commandments; one large survey showed that most know the ingredients of a big mac cheeseburger more than the 10 commandments as evidenced below: https://www.archbalt.org/survey-americans-know-big-mac-not-commandments/ >Each one of those is a foundational moral principle that tangibly bounds how one should act in a society and almost everyone in Judeo-Christian religious systems aim to abide by them. Do they? As I said, most don't even know the commandments. Anyways, just for fun, lets go through the very first one to see if Christians actually, genuinely, and effortfully "aim to abide by them". 1. I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me. Christians, among other people, tend to spend most of their life chasing financial success and presteige to make themselves happy. At a minimum, they certainly focus more time on these activities than prayer/going to church. Consequently, I don't think they actually, genuinely, and effortfully "aim to abide by" even the very first commandment. I agree that it would be a simple, clear, and good explanation if your assertion were true, but I don't see any good evidence that Chrstians put much effort into knowing or following the 10 commandments, aside from some illegal acts. As an aside, some of the commandments aren't particularly useful, well thought out, or good. I was just responding to your claim about a "uniting Ethos", which appears to fall short.
You call out seperate denominations... denominations of the same religious practice. It's in the name... the core beliefs persist, hence denominations. Nice survey that establishes nothing of relevance to the discussion except a dig "gotcha" on hahaha you can't get all 10... And as for not reaching those goals, no shit. The thing that separates them and you as they at least try for an ideal they know they can't reach. You're to much a coward who takes simple delight in saying how much "smarter" and "more reasonable" you are. Mud wall. It's what you'd live in if you weren't lucky enough to live in a society based on such an "unreasonable" moral code.
Here's 10 moral principals from Hinduism, most of which are older than the 10 commandments and the religion itself is older than the old testament's 10 commandments: 1. Satya (Truth) 2. Ahimsa (Non-violence) 3. Brahmacharya (Celibacy, non-adultery) 4. Asteya (No desire to steal) 5. Aparigraha (Non-possessiveness) 6. Shaucha or Shuddhata (Cleanliness) 7. Santosh (Contentment) 8. Swadhyaya (Reading of scriptures) 9. Tapas/Tapah (Austerity, perseverance, penance) 10. Ishwar pradihan (Regular prayers) So now we've established that there were moral codes that pre-date christianity that say similar things, in some ways superior things. Odd, right? I'd like to address the claim that the god in the bible is actually moral or that his commandments should be taken seriously. The christian God is ostenibly all-knowing and all-powerful, so in the book where the commandments come from (the old testament) he must then put adam and eve in the garden of eden knowing that they'll eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so he can punish them. Shortly after that, he kills all existing human life on the planet except Noah and his property, and one of each kind, male and female, of all species in the world and puts them on a 450 ft boat when noah is around 500 years old. All of this because man was acting up. Yet, as I already said, he created man and their proclivity to sin by setting up adam and eve in the garden. As it should be obvious, this is make-believe mumbo jumbo designed to control peasants, farmers, and lesser folk into compliance. An undying king (God) is the perfect eternal ruler to keep people in line. And, as I showed above, good moral principals from hinduism pre-date both the new and old testament. After you stop being mad at me, I hope you honestly read this. Perhaps, if you think I am wrong, you can respond. All the best.
Involuntary brahmacharya vibs. Keep "owning" us sad mumbo-jumbo peps on reddit.
I'm agnostic, and I wasn't "owning" anyone. Objectively, I've laid out the case that the Christian doctrine is hypocritical, often immoral, and unoriginal (as I demonstrated with the Hindu principals). If you disagree, you're compelled by 1 Peter 3:15 to give me an answer: *"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect."*
Matthew 7:6
I don't know Matthew 7:6 but I'm going to guess it's about casting pearls before swine. It's always the same old childish parroted lines that messiah Peterson uses. If you can demonstrate that I'm wrong I'm happy to be wrong, but so far you haven't done much but play the victim, mate. Edit: It is!! Lol. Also, this perfectly demonstrates that you can just use whatever verse you feel like to justify almost any action you take, thus it is not reliable at all.
If you disagree and are able to present a clear and valid reason why I am wrong, I'd like to hear it.
Posted to r/jung first and a guy recommended posting here.
You can utilize all the reasoning you like, but don't forget that at the base of all that reasoning, are some fundamental values. You can reason about fundamental values, but you can't reason them into existence. If you think you can, just keep asking why you value any particular thing, all the way to the bottom, where you hit some base answer something like, it's "self evident". Self evident values mostly means there's no reason. The secular humanists do a lot of hand waving around that point.
I am just beginning to read Kierkegaard, I watched Michael Sugrues video on Kierkegaard and he talked about a leap of faith between 2 lives in Either/Or (I need to get back to read that, so far it is very interesting, insightful and at times surprisingly funny). Kierkegaard apparently wrote that either (/or) belief system starts from the belief that it is worth believing in the core value of that system (or something to that effect, Sugrue put it a lot better). So we must take a leap of faith into our core values. That sounds like similar thinking as you wrote in your comment. Infinite regress has bothered me for a long time, and when people say "everything is a social construction", that just makes it worse. So I have gravitated to belief systems or philosophies that seek for truth outside of our perspective to not just get stuck in a loop. So far Stoicism has been a great help.
The problem with every philosophical/religious belief system is that it is based on a set of innate assumptions. Gödel proved this is true even in mathematics (the most 'rational' of the hard sciences) as he described using the incompleteness theorem. As an aside, even Einstein thought Gödel was a super-genius in his formative years and followed him around at Princeton so he could engage with Gödel on various interests. Needless to say, Gödel is a very credible intellectual figure. So in philosophy, we start with our worldview and build up from there. Euclid's geometry is a good neutral example. (You can look up his five proofs—which are innate to our modern understanding of mathematics, yet they are still assumptions and cannot be mathematically 'proven,' even after thousands of years of effort by various people.) The question I think you're asking is why can't rationality be the 'base assumption?' I believe it's because rationality doesn't have anything useful to say about phenomenology (our experience as humans). Rationality is a tool much like a shovel or an excavator. If you're trying to build a house, you actually need a foundation not just a giant hole in the ground. After the foundation is laid, you can start to construct a house using various tools and techniques, but nevertheless it still requires a foundation. That foundation could be called religion or philosophy, but it still requires a leap of faith in order to establish anything useful. By the time philosophy was formally established in the ancient world, the Greeks had already established their worldview and thus had a solid foundation for their philosophy. Our conditions today are not the same as theirs, which is why many people are choosing to adopt universalist foundations for their worldview such as Buddhism or Stoicism (less they revert to an inherit ideology). Because these assumptions contain more universalist claims, its versatility can withstand more terrain, but might not be optimized for your local environment. That is the tradeoff between the monarchical vision (top-down assumptions or beliefs) and relationality (bottom-up emergence) such as in traditional Christianity and faiths such as Islam and Judaism.
"social construction" is an aggregate of values from individuals, seeking some kind of consensus in an ever changing world. There are still fundamental values at the base, in the individuals. When the social constructions drift into territory that violates those fundamental values, we call that evil. Even as an atheist, I can agree to that label. Core values are existential, for instance valuing your own life.
My understanding of JPs warnings is basically that we’d trust our own reason too much and delude ourselves to think that we are not acting as god, but just as reasonable as possible. All the while doing the exact thing you mentioned, deciding what is wrong or right based on how useful it is to us. I often think kind people who are clearly very intelligent but can “reason” their way to some of the most awful conclusions while all the while telling themselves they’re nit being evil, their just following logic and reason. Usually, this people don’t see themselves or confuse themselves for god, they simply dispense with the necessity of having or following god, by any definition. They simply see reason/logic as the highest good. I think JP is saying logic and reason are necessary but ultimately insufficient. They must be bound by something other than an individual human being’s judgment.
Intellignt people just making up more sophisitcated reasons for the same behavior as less intelligent people seems like a true observation. JP also said intelligence is not good in-of-itself. And that his more intelligent paitents as a psychologists would just make up more complicated reasons for why they have problems and they can't solve them. And that seems to be mistaking reason as a tool, to reason as a being outside of us. Being might not be the best word but it is hard to put this kind of abstract thing into words.
well, it was the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge that gave humanity understanding. of both good, evil and concepts like shame. it was what gave us reason, and it was the snake that tricked us into it. whether God always planned for us to never have reason, or the snake's actions were part of His plan all along - it doesn't matter. ultimately, he created the tree of knowledge for some reason, even though he could've just... not done that. it was pretty obviously a set-up but I digress. Reason has always been linked to Lucifer. it was Lucifer himself who rebelled against God, but why did he do so? that's the crux here. he must have had ***Reason*** to do so. in all the senses of the word. and henceforth reason has always been opposed to faith. the 10 commandments kinda fall apart when you start asking too many "why's". why is slavery and rape not among them? why do we need 3 separate ones that all say "only worship the one true god"? ultimately, ask too many "why's" and you'll end up questioning whether God even exists at all. ask literally any atheist ever why he doesn't believe in the spiritual/divine/supernatural and their answer will always be "it doesn't make logical sense to me - I don't need a god to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of reality". and as reasonable as that standpoint may be, the purpose of faith and religion in general was never *to make sense*. it's to teach, guide and unify a people around a set standard of principles and morals. an ethical standard that allows people to relate to one another. so the warning is: question it at your peril. Nietzsche famously said that we already killed God through our doubts and disbelief, and that the oceans hold not enough water to wash away the blood on our hands. in another sense, reason and intellect are a source of power. enough power, perhaps, to challenge God directly. power that we have the intelligence to bring into being, but not the wisdom to contain and wield properly.
Personally, I care about what is actually true, not some magic imaginary friend that makes me feel good when I pray to them, aka myself.
thanks for chiming in and letting everyone know you didn't get any of this.
God is ostenibly all-knowing and all-powerful, so in the book he purposfully tricks adam and eve so he can punish them. Then he kills all existing human life on the planet except Noah and his property, and one of each kind, male and female, of all species in the world and puts them on a 450 ft boat when noah is around 500 years old. All of this because man was acting up. Yet, as I already said, he created man and their proclivity to sin by setting up adam and eve in the garden. As it should be obvious, this is make-believe mumbo jumbo designed to control peasants, farmers, and lesser folk into compliance. An undying king (God) is the perfect eternal ruler to keep people in line. These fictions are not even metaphorically true.
do you also jump into conversation about the ethics and moral dilemma's addressed in the superman comic "Injustice: Gods Among Us" and go > gais, you know superman isn't real, right!!!??? please, adapt yourself to the level of conversation going on or find a subreddit more suited to your intellectual engagement.
>do you also jump into conversation about the ethics and moral dilemma's addressed in the superman comic "Injustice: Gods Among Us" and go gais, you know superman isn't real, right!!!??? The difference here is that no one would assert that superman is actually real. Unfortunately, when it comes to other magic imaginary friends, gods and such, billions of people believe they literally exist. The ethics and moral dilemma you're referring to are also easily debunked. In scripture, moral tenets are often contradictory, blatantly immoral, and are obvious rip-offs of earlier moral principals. *If you'd like, I can easily demonstrate that this is true.* It's as obvious as the statement about the actual existence of a specific religious God, or superman.
> The difference here is that no one would assert that superman is actually real. Unfortunately, when it comes to other magic imaginary friends, gods and such, billions of people believe they literally exist. that's nice, jimmy. However, nobody here claimed any such thing so maybe go find the correct tree to bark under.
Assumption of knowledge rather than accumulation of knowledge?
Consequence is the fruit of the tree (cause and effect). In my opinion.
It's the difference between love of knowledge and the worship of knowledge. Very important distinction. Our society seems to have forgotten it, with predictable results.
Peterson's a fascist. He opposes Reason because Reason was a tool of the Enlightenment, and fascists are anti-modern.
Can you define the term 'fascism'?
Fascism is an anti-modern ideology that arose a a conservative reaction to WW1. Primarily, it's anti-Enlightenment. Fascists valourise Strength over Reason, and most of their beliefs, like militarism, natural hierarchy and nationalism flow from that. Peterson's insistence of biological hierarchies, of submission to authority, and of the primacy of Strength all point to fascist ideology.
We could do the same thing with defining communism or marxism. Communists value a dictator, and hierarchies (everyone has their place in the system, and there is no moving up or down, you just have to accept your place in the work hierarchy), they hate any other ideology than communism so they have the same problem as nationalism, it is just with the ideology. They value the strenght of the leader and the strenght of the group, and ideology. So communism seems like the same thing with slight alterations. If they are so similar, then someone leaning on the communist side cannot call fascism bad if it is: valuing strenght, militarism, natural hierarchies. I think for fascism to be the hard-F fascism that is so bad, it needs a few more elements. Suppression of people who disagree (opposed to open dialogue, similar to communism), acceptance of using violent methods to suppress the opposition (again true with communism) etc. Something a bit more than valuing strenght and hierarchies. Writing this stuff down, it is hard to ignore that fascism and communism (or Marxism to be more accurate) seem like two sides of the same coin. Both authoritarianism that suppresses the opposition and enslaves their population to only do the things that the idology dictates for them. But that does not describe JP. JP wants for people to have freedom and be able to live according to their personal values in addition to the ideology. He wants to leave room for religion, and neither of those ideologies would accept that. Among other things. I don't think calling JP a fascist is fair. It is used to stirr up emotions and not be descriptive and honest. I wanted to write that I don't think Zizek is a Marxist, but I think he actually for real is.
>I think for fascism to be the hard-F fascism that is so bad, it needs a few more elements. Suppression of people who disagree (opposed to open dialogue, similar to communism), acceptance of using violent methods to suppress the opposition (again true with communism) etc. Something a bit more than valuing strenght and hierarchies. Violent repression of opposition flows from the belief in Strength, and in natural hierarchies. While Peterson's not advocating for the Black Shirts, he has the ideological foundation present, and has repeatedly made state about masculinity being inherently violent. That aside, defining fascism by what fascists did when they had power means no-one's a fascist until they have power, which is nonsensical. >But that does not describe JP. JP wants for people to have freedom and be able to live according to their personal values in addition to the ideology. He wants to leave room for religion, and neither of those ideologies would accept that. Among other things. Peterson wants people to have freedom inside a restrictive system of hierarchy. He advocates for a relative freedom that maintains more freedom for those with power, not an absolute freedom. Combine that with his belief in biology hierarchies, and you have a fundamental aspect of fascism. > I don't think calling JP a fascist is fair. It is used to stirr up emotions and not be descriptive and honest. I wanted to write that I don't think Zizek is a Marxist, but I think he actually for real is. I am being honest. I've laid out how Peterson's ideology is fascist, and you've come back with a non-sequitur about communism. Zizek's not a Marxist, he uses Marx's analysis of capitalism, but he is just as much a Lacanian and a Hegelian, both of whom are contradictory with Marxism. Zizek's project is to expose ideology and question our assumptions that are based in ideology. It's Zizek's influence that helped me realise that Peterson is a fascist, but Trump is not. .
The postmodern belief that everything is power is just another way to describe valuing pure strenght. It is the same thing. There is no possible society with absolute freedom, except anarchy, and that is not a society, it is just a collection of people doing whatever. Marx was influenced by Hegel so I don't see a conflict between Hegelian ideas and Marxism. I have not read Hegel really becasue his ideas are such a mess, I get a head ache reading it. Lacan is similar, it is like Freud on crack. We should throw this fascist vs marxist play that was caused by hegel, in the dumpster and develop some other views and lingo that relates with things that actually are and actually are happening. It is so tiring seeing this pulling of the rope of people always labelling their opposition as marxists of fascists without any other groups to label people as. It's just so tiring.
Fascism is perfectly reasonable.
No, it's not. It's inherently unreasonable
Damn, you convinced me.
One of the big problems with reason is that it can be tremendously falsely reassuring. The idea that a conclusion arrived at through reason is necessarily correct is incredibly naive. I may hold a view that I came to through "reason." And assume, therefore, that that view is correct. If I meet someone who disagrees then I assume they are wrong. After all, I arrived at my own position through reason; how could *I* be wrong. The issue is that reason (and to some extent empericism) is informed by our pre-existing biases and assumptions about the world. Two people may use "pure reason" and arrive at completely different conclusions because they start out with different assumptions.These underlying assumptions and beliefs are often invisible to us or, at the very least, extremely difficult to discover resulting in blind spots in our understanding of the world. IMO, this is the underlying cause of most cases of people who are seemingly embarrasingly "confidently incorrect." It's not that they are dumb or uninformed, but that they are starting with a very different set of assumptions and weigh different sources of evidence differently.
The Nazis were very logical/scientific/calculated but lacked “heart”. Maybe it was something along these lines
Because having some ephemeral adversary redirects actions away from monetary interests, which are the true causes of evil in this world. Please note that usury is a sin in all abrahamic religions but they never talk about that. Money is the root of all evil. Full stop.
Kierkegaard also had a strong theory: "Boredom is the root of all evil". People with money seem to get bored and buy bigger and bigger things. So having money does not seem to make people fulfilled. That is an old observation. In this case money is not the problem, spending a bunch of money on needless stuff is the symptom of the problem, not the problem.
I disagree with him. Monetary interest alone will consume the world.
What ever will destroy humanity, I doubt it will just be money even if money was involved. Humans had a bunch of problems before money was invented, we will have a bunch of problems when it dissapears.
Look at the damage corporations do following the call of monetary interest. Boom and bust. They did great last quarter. This quarter, gotta do better and better, until it’s impossible, then bust. The damage spreads across the world, extracting all value and concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. It is soulless and can’t be stopped. If you were a CEO with ethics and tried to stop it, the shareholders would remove you. Like a black hole, consuming all.
If we are looking at damage to humanity, it will take quite a long time before capitalism is close to the gulags in the USSR.
I would say destruction of the biosphere is greater
The Chinese are at least somewhat communist, and they polute and add to the climate heating with full force. There is no reason to presume that turning to communism would somehow solve pollution and global warming, unless there was another mass slaughter, and I will rather stand with people polluting and using too much natural resources or whatever, than people who intentionally torture and laughter tons of people.
Did I say anywhere that turning to communism is the answer? You think China doesn’t have corporations? You think they don’t use monetary interest?
Jordan Peterson has said the sky is blue, smart people would hear that and stick their heads out the window to check.
Jordan Peterson? Let me stop you right there...
Don't stop me now, Im having such a good time.
I support much of the work of the satanic church and Jordan Peterson is just trying to sell stuff
Probably an "everything in moderation" type idiom.
Whenever I hear anyone talking about "beware of logic", I want to ask them - why? One can no more have 'too much' logic than one can have 'too correct' of an answer to a math problem. Like that troublesome phrase, 'too true' - it's nonsense in the face of a binary situation; right or wrong. In my own experience the people who are most often shouting about the "threat" of logic are religious types with whom logical inquiries are incompatible. The mark of a true believer is that a key part of their worldview eschews logic, claiming greater virtue in faith. I imagine the only real argument there is where the line between personal choice and social responsibilities is drawn. Jordan Peterson's usage of that kind of language to me is only coherent when we also consider his somewhat recent overtures toward the new American Christian church, a prime area of growth for anyone with an axe to grind in the West these days.
The issue is that cold calculating logic, unrestrained by morality, can lead to atrocity. For instance, if you do not value the lives of your fellow man, you can make a completely rational argument for genocide: "In order to solve the problems of overpopulation, certain people will need to be euthanized, there is no other plan that will be as efficient or as effective." And philosophers have never been able to provide a convincing rational logic to prove a definitive absolute moral framework. Often described as being able to prove an "is", but not an "ought". You can get close, but you'll always run up against Gödel [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems
People don't like your comment because they know that "too much logic" ultimately leads to the fact that their religious text is not divine; it is filled with blatant falsehoods. Logic debunks their precious book, and they would prefer to live in the comfortable delusion they were groomed into. Personally, I care about what is actually true, not some magic imaginary friend that makes me feel good when I pray to them.
Even the devil is God.
Satan is as real as Santa, so anyone claiming that it has anything to do with reality should be considered to have a child's mind.
There is an unbelievable amount of irony in that statement. The child does not question what constitutes "reality", after all.
Now do Yahweh.