Somebody recently pointed me in the direction of this website.
It contains 17 propositions and some quotes and links around the theme of questioning and challenging the way we think about the world.
I'd welcome any comments on this.
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33 comments:
Thanks for the posting - where the bloody hell have you been - I'm on about my 17th returned e-mail saying you don't exist ???
hope you had a great autumn , christmas and new year btw xxx
Aha. Good to hear from you again.
Dunno why that should have happened. I'll email you so that you can get the return address again.
Well, my first thought is "philosophy undergraduate".
My second is that he would dilute the ink from a printed page in order to test for the presence of poetry.
I'm going to continue reading and see if he improves.
Proposition number 2 rather bites him in the arse.
Oh, look; logical positivism. What a surprise. I was right about the testing.
"I believe coherence needs to be driven by an integration of theories or observations acquired through a reductionist approach. I believe that I can only try to achieve satisfactory coherence of ideas though discussion or debate and by learning from others. I am primarily concerned with the utility of ideas rather than any abstract sense of truth. I contend that, it is an irrelevance that you know the truth. It is merely a question of what you decide given the evidence."
Judging from his zeal for Wikipedia perhaps I was hasty in placing this man on the heady, high plinth of the philosophy undergraduate. Somebody throw him a copy of the Tractatus.
"I neither see a questioning way of thinking as burdensome nor a psychological challenge to our sense of well-being."
There's nothing either burdensome nor psychologically challenging about clicking hyperlinks in Wikipedia. The majority of people, however, find life a little wider and more uncertain than the doubtless perilous predicament posed by a laptop in a box-room made fraught by the existential terror of the pitiless combi boiler squatting, relentless, in the ravening, impersonal void of the airing cupboard.
"[The propositions] have been written to encourage debate and reflection and stimulate the development of a questioning or skeptical outlook on the nature of belief from the perspective of the logical positivist. The reasoning behind the manifesto is that everyone should 'think for themselves', rather than passively accept received wisdom. No one should accept the propositions with unquestioning belief."
Well, doesn't that beat all. At last, something to show for 3,000 years of philosophical history. Wonder why nobody ever considered free thought before now.
"If after debating the propositions the reader were to become cynical that would be unfortunate. If the reader were to become less willing to consider new ideas that would also run contrary to the spirit of the manifesto."
Boo-bloody-hoo, or to put it another way, arf arf.
Hmmm.
I can see you are not in one of your more indulgent moods RR.
This person, the somebody who pointed you in the direction of this site, were they bored with pulling the legs from flies?
It's either this or the little plastic men and women.
Well, I will draw the author's attention to your comments. I have no knowledge of their hobbies.
Do you disagree with my position in any of its particulars?
The author of the recommendation? I believe the same person recommended your site to the author of NoBrainer.
I see no grounds for a comparison, personally, but if you feel that there are important issues here then, spleen depleted for the moment, I am happy to approach these.
Do you disagree with my position in any of its particulars?
I was going to wait until more comments were in then post a response. I'll do that soon.
The author of the recommendation? I believe the same person recommended your site to the author of NoBrainer.
Ah, sorry I should have read more carefully.
I'll be content with responding to the content I think.
"I was going to wait until more comments were in then post a response. I'll do that soon."
How many more comments do you need? I could get started right away.
dude...
Give over ???
have you actually seen what the government is up to regarding ?
"have you actually seen what the government is up to regarding ?"
Regarding?
That oath business?
There's another 3 comments, and this makes 4. Give up yet?
I could get started right away.
Feel free.
That oath business?
I think my response was to OTSOTA's portrayal of the Commons select committee that Bishop O'Donoghue is due to face soon.
All the talk of McCarthyite secularist onslaught, and "secularist torquemadas" elicited my 'give over'.
"Feel free."
Actually, I would likely descend to profanity.
"All the talk of McCarthyite secularist onslaught, and "secularist torquemadas" elicited my 'give over'."
Sounds to me like more attention-seeking from the National Secular Society,
Actually, I would likely descend to profanity.
I'll swap you this bar of soap for that fountain pen.
Sounds to me like more attention-seeking from the National Secular Society,
That might be so but I can't take the aforementioned description seriously.
"I'll swap you this bar of soap for that fountain pen."
Must we call that man with the beard and the dreadful jumpers?
"That might be so but I can't take the aforementioned description seriously."
I think that most people have difficulty taking the National Secular Society seriously.
Must we call that man with the beard and the dreadful jumpers?
Eek!
I think that most people have difficulty taking the National Secular Society seriously.
Can you think of an institution that, globally speaking, most people take seriously?
"Can you think of an institution that, globally speaking, most people take seriously?"
The United States of America, but you knew what I meant.
Good answer.
"Good answer."
Always.
I read the site - dude seriously -the man has no idea regarding human nature - whenever we attempt to construct a morality devoid of moral absolutes we fail - we inevitably create categorical imperatives even when they become contradictory and verge upon insanity - English Common Law is like catholic morality - moral absolutes with mitigations....Situationism has no place within the human spirit.
Pragmatism is self-deluding, relativism is mere self-denial...
look at any child and you'll discover they are compelled towards ritual ; if they are deprived of it they invent their own set of special rules to accommodate their lives and create meaning where none has been supplied - every human reaches towards purpose and meaning.
Dawkins speaks of child abuse in teaching a four year old theism , what is more utterly more abusive is formulating no ethical guidelines , no structural cohesion, to deny wonder, to crush possibility that we are more....
To instill this new atheism which is draconially positivist and arrogantly ideological [i.e. it denies any possibility of alternatives -any aspect of reality which refutes their dogma is denied or decreed as illusionary or defunct by not conforming to their absolute schema] that is child abuse !
To suggest that anything 'noble,altruistic or beautiful' within the human being is merely an evolutionary 'sub-routine' to promote survival of the collective species is to crush wonder and the imagination and any hope for purpose and meaning beyond the three score years and ten - the universe becomes the cruellest nightmare revelling in mockery and deceit - all our perceptions of goodness, beauty, happiness become mere aspects of evolutionary utility to ensure the genetic code is sustained and passed on...the chicken becomes nothing more than an egg carrier - and the universe becomes nothing more than a whole succession of eggs because eggs promote entropy and entropy hastens the thermodynamic homogenisation of the great frozen nothingness of the future....
Atheism decrees we are solely here because the universe wishes to commit suicide more quickly than it can without us - in other words it takes a few limited aspects of scientific theory [combined with a few corroborative phenomena] and turns it into a superstitious religion - we are mere pawns towards a suicidal endgame - that there is a purpose - and the purpose is to die ; and to make children so that they too might die, to invent and create and to toil - so that the universe's death hastens ever more quickly - and there is nothing we can do to prevent it - every hope, dream and aspiration ? even they conspire with the nightmare for they compel us all forward to that omega point of absolute annihilation where there is nothing but bitterly cold silence....
For the atheist there is no meaning except one : The universe has created us and abuses us and violates us by instilling all manner of things within us to ensure everything dies all the sooner...so what can we do about it ?
Nothing - so either we drink or sing or make love and make merry and have all manner of fun while we can....or we go out of our way to ensure that everyone knows what the real score is -that we are merely re-arranging the deckchairs on the titanic - that beauty and wonder and love are all neurochemical delusions - they are not real - the universe lies and lies because there is only one moral absolute the universe clings to - the desire for its own death.
There is no need for conspiracy theory - it's fact - the universe is not objectively indifferent - it has evolved a cruelty beyond imagining - something a human may perceive as a malevolence far beyond our limited resources and ponderings - the universe creates its diammetrically antagonistic enemy - an entity [the human ] who hopes - it compels them to promote entropy and expend energy all so it can be crushed into nothingness. Like watching a child spend hours making a snowman - then destroying it with a flamethrower before their eyes.
This concept of the universe is worse than any nightmare to come from the warped mind of H.P. Lovecraft...
But guess what ?
It isn't true !
And how was your week?
OTSOTA,
Passionate purple prose aside, your position seems to me to be based on philosophical error.
The first is bound up with your flawed theist conception of what atheist morality entails. I think morality is a very difficult subject to think about effectively yet you talk as if the theist position solves the problems we encounter instead of what it actually does which is tie up all the loose ends in an anthropomorphic narrative bundle with the label: " god: the buck stops here (although it is really all your fault), don't attempt to untie this bundle you couldn't possibly understand the contents."
The second is your habit of thinking about the universe as if it owes it to us to make ultimate sense in our terms, which is absurd. In short, my response to your:
"This concept of the universe is worse than any nightmare to come from the warped mind of H.P. Lovecraft..."
is this: It's nothing personal.
"The second is your habit of thinking about the universe as if it owes it to us to make ultimate sense in our terms, which is absurd. In short, my response to your:
"This concept of the universe is worse than any nightmare to come from the warped mind of H.P. Lovecraft..."
is this: It's nothing personal."
That was HPL's position, also.
That was HPL's position, also.
Perhaps that is a 'warp' we share then.
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