Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Erik,
That’s all very interesting, but you still have questions outstanding about a claim you made. As you yourself note, playing by the rules of this site is the moral thing to do.
I look forward to your response. Please either answer the questions or retract your claim.
Erik,
Whether God Himself changes over time is an interesting question. I can see readily enough why you would quickly close the door to that option, but as you know by now I’m always ready to play the role of Heraclitus to your Parmenides.
That said, the core idea of Reform Judaism with which I was raised is that the ancient Israelites had different conceptions of God as their relation to God changed. That conception undergoes a more profound shift when the Second Temple was destroyed and the only ‘link’ between God and humanity was Torah itself, which in turn is augmented in a variety of ways as the Talmud is codified.
That seems odd to me. It’s a fairly standard (to me) thought that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same God according to different customs, as conceived through the perspectives offered by different traditions. But here you seem to suggest that Christians, Muslims, and Jews are worshiping different gods? Or would you say that one of those groups is worshiping God and the others are not? Or something else entirely? I’m honestly not sure what you’re trying to say here.
Thank you for noticing, Mung!
I believe I’ve heard it said of the Mormon God that He is perfect and nevertheless getting better every day. Dunno if that’s just a quip, though.
While I echo Mung’s ‘appreciation’ of KN’s willingness to express his interpretations of the Biblical Flood story (as most other posters here won’t do), it still does not appear that KN lives up to Erik’s expectations of making a ‘spiritual interpretation’ based on religious commitment.
Then again, something appears to have happened in recent weeks as KN now is promoting his apparent religiosity (instead of mere skepticism!), when previously he called himself an ‘atheist.’ What’s changed?
After all, calling oneself a ‘kangaroo’ doesn’t make one an actual kangaroo, now does it?
Ummm, ok jargon-ready philosophist, please be a bit clearer than that. You called yourself an atheist (accepted that label), but now you profess Reform(ed) Judaism. That implies more than ‘natural piety’. According to Reform(ed) Judaism, even according to pre-Reform or non-Reform Judaism, there is a God, a Creator; iow, we don’t live in an empty God-less universe.
From the ReformJudaism.org website: “We believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that we are God’s partners in improving the world.”
That’s obviously not what the ‘skeptics’ and ‘atheists’ here on Lizzie’s site say or believe.
And how often do you actually take that stance in your life, KN? 24/7? Whenever it pleases you from an ‘academic’ standpoint?
You realise that the ontological question remains, even beyond whichever epistemological ‘stance’ one may wish to take? But as it seems now, your ‘theism’ is as vertical as a philosophistic ‘stance’. Unless, something spiritual has changed in you the past 2 weeks…
On that we certainly agree 😉
That would clearly be a concept of God undergoing change, not God undergoing change.
The core idea in the way that e.g. Genesis is interpreted in Midrash and Zohar is that there are distinct concepts of God discernible in the text by exegesis. The distinct concepts do not show God evolving and they do not even show the concept of God evolving. Rather, the distinct concepts were put there by the authors as proof of revelation and they are under the same name(s) in scriptures so as to train the aspirants in spiritual effort in exegesis.
When you are on a certain spiritual level, then you are on that level and not on some other level – just like a dog is a dog and a cat is a cat. Similarly, it’s not a single God evolving and ending up self-contradictory, but absolute Being Itself contrasted with different spiritual beings, even though these are not explicitly distinguished in the Hebrew text. For example, Pentateuch says that it was God in the bush and on Sinai talking to Moses and leading the Israelites through the desert, but Stephan in Acts says it was an angel.
Not a simple question. There’s a good reason why they are collectively called Abrahamic religions, as if one friendly religious family, while from another point of view they are irreconcilably distinct religions, with their differences in scriptural texts and narratives (Christians have more text than Jews, while Muslims say the earlier texts were corrupted) and theology (for Jews, only Jews are chosen people, while Christians and Muslims disagree, and Christians have their specific dogma of trinity). Accordingly, I’d say that exoterically they clearly do not share the same God, while philosophically (as per the doctrine of divine simplicity) and esoterically and mystically the answer would be different.
A Mormon tenet is “God became God by obedience to Law” and by the very same example anyone can become God, literally (up to this century, Mormons only knew how to read literally) https://www.lds.org/topics/becoming-like-god?lang=eng
A rule-breaking admin is a non-entity that cannot call anyone to play by the rules. It only produces the noise of a broken record.
Erik,
I am pointing out that your behavior is not aligned with either the site goals or your own stated moral position. That’s not against any rules.
Answer the questions or retract your claim.
It does not seem KN acknowledges the difference, apparently speaking with ‘skeptical/atheist’ interpretation.
Fuck off rogue, bully Admin. We’ve had enough of your repetitive myopic bullshit. (Let’s just see if one Admin has the courage to move Patrick’s post, as Neil or Alan does with those of others.)
Gregory,
My comment violates no rules. Yours, on the other hand….
The ontological question is not as easily answered as you seem to think.
This entire topic was initiated in response to a distinction I wanted to draw, based on Charles Taylor’s philosophy of language, between “assertoric discourse” and “disclosive discourse”.
Whereas he is willing to allow that Brandom’s picture of the social game of giving and asking for reasons is sufficient for “everyday fact-establishing and practical” discourse, Taylor raises a series of challenges (all passages from his “Language Not Mysterious?” in Reading Brandom):
———————————————————-
1.) A serious attempt in prose to set out true judgments about the beauty of things (aesthetics), the virtues of life (ethics), or the nature of God (theology) has to draw on uses of language, in Cassirer’s broad sense, which are disclosive. I mean the uses of which either without asserting at all, or going beyond their assertive force, make something manifest without asserting it.
2.) A pure case of the disclosive would be where we use language, or some symbolic form to articulate and thus make accessible to us something — a feeling, a way of being, a possible meaning of things — without making any assertion at all. For me, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C Sharp Minor articulates a certain as yet indefinable longing; it draws me into it it, and make it part of my world. I dare say I am not alone in seeing this in the music, and that this is not foreign to the inspiration that Chopin had in composing it. A human possibility is articulated and disclosed here, but nothing is asserted.
3.) For an immense range of human speech and symbol, there is both assertion and disclosure. Very obviously, this is the case in poetry and novels, but it is clearly present in works of philosophy, as soon as one is attentive to their rhetorical dimension, and the range of literary reference they draw on . . . Now my claim here is that there are certain matters which can’t be properly explained without recourse to the disclosive dimension. That is, there couldn’t be an intelligent discussion of the beauty of landscapes which didn’t deploy, or draw on our familiarity with, say, certain paintings, or certain powerfully evocative descriptions.
—————————————————————————
On this basis, Taylor proceeds to raise the following question: “can we conceive of a viable form of human life in which the fruits of the articulative-disclosive dimension are clearly segregated from public reason, and relegated to the zone of differential personal experience (which, of course, wouldn’t prevent us from mutual communication and exchange about them)?” And he seems to answer this question in the negative: “the factual-practical can’t be self-sufficient. Our ability to operate with this family of language games depends on our operating in the whole range of symbolic forms The articulative/disclosive is the essential background to our most immediately ‘practical’ discourse.”
What I want to say here is that Taylor is right and Brandom is wrong: the assertoric dimension of discourse is not self-sufficient, but depends on the whole range of symbolic forms (literature, music, dance, poetry, art, ethics, and religion).
And this is correct even when we correct Brandom’s narrow focus on assertions by attending to the wider scope of rational discourse that includes norm-governed speech acts essentially indexed to the first-person voice (observatives: “look, a cat!”) and second person voice (recognitives: “hello, Franz!”). (In contrast, assertions are essentially third-personal speech acts.)
The question I now want to pose is this: does ontology range across all symbolic forms, or is ontology restricted to the assertoric, fact-stating dimension of language?
I don’t have a view on this. That is one of the hardest questions I am currently struggling with. My inclination at present is to say that ontology is restricted to the assertoric, fact-stating dimension of language, and that there are many dimensions of human symbolic activity that outstrip the limits of ontology — religion being among them.
And as soon as I encountered the assertoric and disclosive distinction, I declared it worthless. The terms seem to be trying to do the heavy work of the established distinction of empirical and rational. The whole reasoning would be much clearer in established terminology – not just to us casual readers, but clearer to Taylor and Brandom themselves.
Empirical statements are statements about objects, sense-data. Rational statements are able to make deeper claims about what sense-data is, what’s the difference between subject and object, and other things where the empirical approach has no access.
Clearly, religion would not be worth its name if it limited itself to the empirical realm. It’s a mistake to treat religion as if it were empirical (that’s most glaringly Keith’s and Patrick’s error). And it’s a mistake to treat rationality as if having no ontological basis (that’s KN’s error). Ontology cannot even be properly defined in exclusively empirical terms.
Erik,
As your previous comments show, you know full well that I am not making that error. I am asking you to explain exactly what you mean by your own words of your claim about a supposedly historical event.
Answer the questions or retract your claim.
Boring. Bully. Admin.
The ad nauseam repetitiveness shows how silly atheist demands are without understanding.
Growl away, Gregory. Grrr! It’s cute when you so immediately leap to the defense of Erik’s indefensible behavior.
In the interest of minimizing the volume, though, I’m afraid I’ll no longer be responding to your little displays. Unless, of course, you come up with a rational reason why Erik should not comport himself according to the goals of this site, the rules of rational discussion, and his own stated morality. We both know that’s not going to happen.
So yap away like a vicious purse dog and I’ll give your words all the consideration they deserve.
I’ll continue to remind you of what an ass you’re being, such that you couldn’t even take site founder Lizzie’s gentle hint and cease your interrogation of Erik. You instead defy her counsel.
It is glaringly obvious that you are not capable of understanding the answers you’ve been given, Patrick, for the simple reason that *you are an atheist* who cannot countenance ‘spiritual interpretation’ of Scripture (in which you don’t believe). This marks a severe handicap on your ability to understand. And it is a point you cannot allow yourself based on your empty, ultimately despairing worldview to concede.
But no, you won’t stop, not even while being an admin on this site. It lowers the level of the site that you remain an admin with your desire to ‘reform’ the site rules, of course. That hasn’t stop your boring, ad nauseam repetitiveness combined with an astonishing sense of entitlement so far 😉
That Patrick is an admin is not relevant to what you consider bullying or boring. He is participating in those discussions in the same way as everybody else.
Neil Rickert,
Better than some, I’d say! 😉
Actually, it is relevant. Some regular (ab)user would be systematically guanoed, commanded to shut up and then eventually banned, but that broken thing is not doing these things to itself, not even after its malfunction has been identified by Lizzie. So, shape up and do your duty.
Right now you encouraged it and I consider it an act of bullying on your own part against me, Neil. Not to mention that you are adding Noyau/moderation material to a main thread. You just lost your last shred of admin credibility.
No they wouldn’t. Asking for a clarification of an objective claim of fact is not against the rules here, nor should it be.
Can you read the rules? Do you understand them?
Take this discussion to Moderation Issues thread if you have complaints/questions.
Otherwise, it’s your comments which deserve to be Guano’d for slandering Patrick personally.
You don’t want to commit slander, do you?
Not as if anyone should be convinced by what you find “credible” or not … as when you find find it “credible” that fossils on Everest might somehow support your wackadoodle ideas about the Flood.
Erik,
If you think I’m violating a rule, please point out which one.
I am directly addressing the content of your comments here, as documented in my summary comment. I am challenging you to abide by the goals of this site and your own moral position on playing by the rules.
You’ve made a claim about a supposedly historical event. You have refused to answer questions about that claim. By your standards and those of this site you should either answer those questions or retract your claim.
To refresh your short memory, this was what Lizzie said, “I suggest that if people do not get a straight answer to what they think is a straight question, and cannot continue with the assumption of good faith that they simply terminate the discussion.” and “such posts [concerning bad faith] would probably be moved to guano, if they were posted on a main-page thread.”
But now we have two admins here piling non-main-page material.
Guano, Erik, Guano.
You’re accusing both Patrick and Neil of commenting here in bad faith – instead of them having legitimate questions which have been asked of you in good faith.
If you can’t stick to the rules, maybe you should leave the discussion.
Again.
Erik,
I respect Lizzie a great deal and took her suggestion into consideration. I’ve decided to continue to attempt to have a rational discussion with you. In order to do that, I need to understand the details of your claim, as I’ve explained.
I am not accusing you of bad faith in this thread. I am pointing out the objective facts that you have made a claim about a supposedly historical event and that you have thus far failed to either clarify what exactly you are claiming or to retract your claim. If other people draw inferences about your character from those facts, that’s not against the rules.
Please answer the questions or retract your claim.
Actually, there is no rule that states that complaints about moderation/moderators must be (or even that they ought to be) posted in the Moderation Issues thread.
This is quite badly mistaken. The assertoric/disclosive distinction has nothing at all to do with the empirical/rational distinction. The assertoric/disclosive distinction — or more precisely, assertoric/disclosive continuum — is a distinction about the pragmatic uses of public language; it has nothing to do with any specific theories about our cognitive capacities. One can reject the empirical/rational distinction — as Brandom and Taylor both do — without rejecting (or embracing) the assertoric/disclosive continuum.
There’s something right about this, insofar as there is a real distinction between cognitive awareness of objects and cognitive awareness of concepts. But one can do that without accepting either the existence of sense-data as the immediate objects of sense-perception (as the empiricists do) or the existence of abstract ideas as the intentional objects of intellectual activity (as the rationalists do).
If one were (as I am) a direct realist about perceptible objects and an inferentialist about concepts, then both empiricism and rationalism are side-stepped without giving up on the underlying distinction between our cognitive awareness of objects and our cognitive awareness of concepts.
I know that Taylor is a direct realist about perceptible objects, and I think he is strongly tempted by inferentialism about concepts. (Brandom is the arch-inferentialist about concepts; he is less clear about whether he is a direct realist about perceptible objects.) The debate there is whether the assertoric dimension of public language — where we use language to make claims about what is the case and keep track of what both we and others are committed to claiming and entitled to claim — has conceptual priority over other uses of language. Brandom insists that it does; Taylor argues that it doesn’t. Rather, Taylor argues that the assertoric dimension of language is one pole of a continuum that runs through poetry, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and religion all the way to music as pure disclosure at the other end.
If keiths and Patrick have erred, you certainly opened the door to that error by insisting that the Flood was a historical event, since historical events are empirically knowable.
As for “my error”: did I say that rationality has no ontological basis? I don’t really know what that means, so I can’t say whether I agree or disagree.
I know that the assertoric/disclosive distinction was supposed to do the work of distinguishing different kinds of statements, but the problem is that it fails. Can you show me a statement that doesn’t disclose? Can you show me a statement that doesn’t assert? The examples in your previous post are not at all explanatory.
For example, “A pure case of the disclosive would be where we use language, or some symbolic form to articulate and thus make accessible to us something — a feeling, a way of being, a possible meaning of things — without making any assertion at all. For me, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C Sharp Minor articulates a certain as yet indefinable longing;…” What does this “pure case of the disclosive” actually disclose? Nothing, looks like. It’s meaningless postmodernist babble. At the same time, does it assert? Well, it seems to assert that there is such a thing as the disclosive and that we are dealing with its “pure case”…
The distinction makes no sense. The only way for something like this to make sense is to fall back to established terminology.
In my case, I didn’t use empirical and rational as (only) referring to different schools of epistemology, but as referring to statements that the adherents of the different schools of epistemology would logically produce. You may dislike being called an empiricist, but as long as you act and talk like one, I will call you such. The latest piece of evidence I have in mind is this:
Disregarding that “assertoric” has no meaning (if it had, it would be distinguishable from “disclosive”, but as we saw “disclosive” has no meaning either), you are saying here that “ontology is restricted to … fact-stating dimension of language” and then you exclude religion from having any claims to ontology. This being so, what could “fact-stating” mean? Only empirical claims. This is the only way this quote could make any sense at all.
Maybe so, if it were possible to be coherently “direct realist” about perceptible objects. But it isn’t. Senses and their functions and malfunctions require distinction, definition and explanation.
But don’t we know the limits of our empirical knowledge? If keiths and Patrick don’t know these limits or don’t care about them, then they are in error.
You said that your “present inclination” is to say as follows:
1. Ontology is restricted to fact-stating dimension of language
2. There are many dimensions of human symbolic activity that outstrip the limits of ontology – religion among them
My restatement of the same:
1. Ontology = fact-stating dimension of language.
2. Other dimensions, specifically “symbolic activity” ≠ ontology.
Your “present inclination” seems to be to say that going beyond empiricism means going beyond ontology. Thus religious/spiritual cosmology is not ontology for you, even though it may have a perfectly rational basis. For example, isn’t it rational to say that creation logically has Creator and that material is distinct from immaterial, and that these are ontological statements?
Religion has never restricted itself to empiricism, but it surely aims to get to the bottom of ontology. The presupposition that religion has here is that ontology is not restricted to empiricism (to sense-perception and to claims exclusively derived from that).
Care to explain? Or are your views so tentative that you already reconsidered?
Erik,
The issue is not the limits of our empirical knowledge, it is about what you meant by your claim about a supposedly historical event. By the standards set by the goals of this site and your own claimed morality you should address that issue.
Answer the questions or retract your claim.
That one sentence was probably the least important, certainly the least interesting in my post. I hesitated whether to include it or not, knowing KN’s penchant for esotericism (and inclination for naturalistic ideas, like Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’). Now I regret not having removed it. The more important and interesting features, as usual, KN left out.
The key point in this thread is that KN *appears* to have discarded his formerly declared atheism in the past couple of weeks. At least, now he says “I’m a Jewish religious existentialist, and I still identify as a Reform Jew”. Yet if that’s actually the case, if he was clear with his writing, then why does KN fail to meet the standard of ‘spiritual interpretation’ and ‘spiritual commitment’ to Scripture? Does KN wish to define ‘Reform Jew’ as an atheist worldview or is that simply what he means by “a Jewish religious existentialist;” i.e. that one can be an atheist at the same time?
ReformJudaism.org states: “We believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that we are God’s partners in improving the world.” Is this not what KN believes too? Or is he going to try to relativise and naturalise ‘Reform Judaism’ too?
You may have ‘wanted to say’ and ‘no longer wanted to identify’ because of wanting to ‘stress an idea,’ KN, but that’s not how it reads simply in favouring a ‘continuum’ between two rather unusual and jargonistic terms. (If that’s the best you and keiths can do re: “Varieties of Religious Language”, it says quite a lot.) Yes, it’s closely tied with ‘the kinds of philosophers you prefer to read,’ e.g. McDowell, Sellars, Churchlands, Davidson, et al. In this case, I find Taylor rather silly to enjoin his writings with Brandom and other atheist naturalisers. But I digress and don’t care to follow-up on it. (That’s KN’s philosophistic esoterism, dragging him into isolation.)
Saying that “the Flood was a historical event” is one way to interpret the text is not the same as saying it is ‘empirically knowable,’ KN. You should understand the difference, but somehow don’t. And you’re not going to pin ‘insistence’ on Erik instead of Patrick, seriously, are you? ;P
The key question it seems you must face with your assertoric/disclosive fetish, is: What then do *you* assert about Scripture’s multiple levels and transcendence or lack thereof? It seems that your lack of ‘spiritual commitment’ (unlike say, Saul Kripke or perhapsTamar Szabó Gendler) to Theistic Judaism is a major part of the story here, though you delve instead into philosophistic tangents for whatever unknown reason.
Theistic Judaism gives a different answer than ‘atheist Judaism,’ the latter which to me is a ‘historical’ contradiction in terms; affirming that Judaists were created by the Creator, but declaring that that historical belief should be denied in public, for the sake of a largely incoherent package of philosophist, ecosocialist, empiricist, environmentalist, feminist, quasi-naturalist ideologies aside.
If you actually wish to go deeper, texts such as this one may help: https://books.google.lt/books?id=YA0L2yzkc0QC&
Gregory,
If Erik doesn’t want to clarify and support his claim then according to the site goals and his own
moral stance on playing by the rules he should retract it.
Actually, Erik could end this at any time simply by saying he believes it to be an historical event whose details cannot be known. All he really has to do to satisfy the question is say what he personally believes about the history.
But that’s what religion is. It’s a perfect description of revealed religion.
ROFL! You’ve just called KN ‘religious’ as he now apparently wants to be called. 😉
It may help you to learn something about how ‘ideology’ differs from ‘religion,’ petrushka. But at your age and with the atheistic attitude you’ve constantly displayed here at TAMSZ, I’m not going to hold my breath that you’re interested in learning much that could be important in nearing or at the end of life anymore. 🙁 Just laugh at it, and it will eventually go away!
Gregory,
He needs a backwards high-jump, Gregory!
I share that belief. The question is whether the content of that belief is a claim or assertion about the nature of reality.
What I’ve been urging here is that there’s a difference between making assertions and uttering disclosures. Assertions are speech acts that are candidates for acceptance or rejection by any rational person. By contrast,. uttering disclosive statements express some particular perspective, certainly shareable with others in some religious community, embedded in historically transmitted traditions, and mediated by a variety of symbolic activities (music, poetry, art, dance, ritual, prayer). Seen that way, disclosures are not, just as such, available for anyone to take up, commit oneself to, be entitled to re-assert, and so on.
In other words — and here I might disagree with Taylor, though it’s hard to be sure — the assertoric/disclosive distinction is doing the work of the universal/particular in the pragmatics of speech acts. An assertion is implicitly universal, in that anyone can put him or herself in the position to evaluate it. A disclosure is not implicitly universal but necessarily particular. I find myself emotionally involved and moved by a Friday night shabbat service; I don’t expect that a Christian would be. But I do expect that any rational person would acknowledge the truths of logic, mathematics and science.
As I’ve said a few times now, I read the Hebrew Bible as a mosaic of many different texts, written at different times and by different people, serving many different functions. Some parts are ancient New Eastern mythology appropriated and reworked (such as much of Genesis); other parts are ideologically-skewed narratives of the politics of ancient Israel and Judea (such as I Samuel and II Samuel); other parts are attempts to express the experience of the divine through the conceptual framework of the people of that time and place (such as Job).
That looks very interesting — thank you!
You are welcome, KN. May it help you to rise and re-encounter some of your pre-_______ ancestors.
It’s strangely comforting to be able to come over to this thread occasionally and find that nothing has changed for the last 1400 posts or so. It’s like deja vu only in quaduplicate spades!
Ahh, congratulations, Gregory. Your self-restraint in not posting a creepy-stalkerish comment to KN is noted, thanks!
But, ah, Gregory’s self-restraint can only last so long …
“atheist and anti-theist, thinly human”. FFS. What kind of shit is that.
Well, it’s certainly not a living advertisement for whatever “elevated” state Gregory thinks his brand of theism gives rise to.
FWIW, I strongly disagree with this “distinction” which I take to be largely obfuscatory.
It is my view that “I believe that p” entails that “I believe that p is true”. I don’t go quite so far as to call “is true” a redundancy, but I think it’s close to that. “An expletive,” Reid might have said.
I get that you don’t want to pick, KN. IMO, the solution to that quandary is just to say “I’m torn” or “I’m not sure” and leave it at that. The desire to hold contradictory propositions and insist that both are right seems almost neurotic to me. (My source here is Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts, a great book, IMHO.)
ETA: I don’t mean to be insulting here, and I hope you won’t take it in that spirit.
walto,
I think that the pragmatics of the term “belief” are pretty murky, actually, and very much context-sensitive. We use the same word in saying “I believe that there’s mustard in the refrigerator” and saying, “As a Jew, I believe that we are called upon to further the work of justice in the world.” The first sentence is an assertion about an everyday practical fact, easily confirmed by anyone in the appropriate situation. The second sentence is a disclosure about one’s existential orientation, not empirically confirmable and not easily communicated to those outside of that religious tradition.
I certainly grant that the redundancy theory of truth captures something nice about the semantics of assertions, but I don’t think that it works for all cases of belief avowal, because not all cases of belief avowal are assertions.
Well, truth be told, sociologically, it’s what most people think.
Creepy atheists are outliers. Pretty much everywhere in the world. I.e. not in darling ‘hotshoe’s’ little isolated individualistic atheist paradise.
Reality pout. 🙁
Of course. The majority of atheists are awesome!
*high five*
I believe I’ve been having a difficult time explaining my views to the satisfaction of both theists and atheists, and no doubt much of that falls on me. I’ll give it another go here.
Central to my view is a rejection of both theism and atheism, because both theism and atheism are positions within religious metaphysics. But what I aim to reject is religious metaphysics. By that, I mean I aim to reject the entanglement of religion and metaphysics that defines the whole arc of Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel.
Instead, I think that Carnap was right (following Nietzsche) to insist on demarcating science from poetry — with the anti-Carnapian proviso that we should put metaphysics on the side of science (rather than reject it entirely) and put religion on the side of art (rather than reject it entirely).
I really am both a heterodox Sellarsian (about science and metaphysics) and a heterodox Buberian (about religion and poetry). I understand that everyone here thinks this is inconsistent. I do not think it is because I am not even trying to unify these two strands. I don’t feel a need for some meta-narrative or meta-theory that unifies them.
(I’m a heterodox Sellarsian because I don’t think that the scientific image can or should replace the manifest image, and I’m a heterodox Buberian because the I-Thou relation becomes a version of the ascetic ideal if it neglects embodiment.)
So while I do believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that we are God’s partners in improving the world, that is not in the same kind of discourse as my belief that all human beings evolved from earlier species of hominids through various evolutionary processes, including (but not limited to) natural selection.
If I really had to unify these two strands of my thinking, perhaps some version of religious naturalism is where I’d ultimately want to come down.
Moved some egregiously rule-violating posts to guano, I hope reasonably even-handedly. Some remain. Please try to stick to the rules.
I’d like to see those please Gregory.
Oooooh, so close. But very creepy-stalker!
<*CLASP*>
I reiterate my last post on this. The way to distinguish your “I believe X” and “Jews believe Y” is simply to explain what you mean when you say the latter in terms of the former use of “belief.” I.e., does it mean each Jew believes X? Most? A bunch of early Jewish scholars? Etc. But if it can’t be unpacked in terms of belief (in the first use), that word probably shouldn’t be used at all. That’s why I said it was obfuscatory.