Jews are religious believers too. At least the ones who are not atheists.
Rumor has it that there are more atheist Jews in Israel than religious Jews.
And thank G-d Jews in the US aren’t allowed to vote.
“The Skeptical Zone” is decidedly anti-Christ.
Is it equally anti-Jewish?
If not, why not?
Remember it’s a way I evaluate the strength of my own presuppositions
peace
Well, Gregory, I don’t know any other group in my lifetime that has been targeted for extermination based on parentage. One could not escape simply by renouncing faith. So the question of atheism is irrelevant. I find the behavior of Israel to be understandable if not optimal. People of Jewish descent have had bulls eyes painted on their backs. It will take a few generations to disentangle reasonable fear from paranoia. It’s been 150 years since American slavery, and we still haven’t recovered.
Do you have sufficient evidential justification to justify the belief that that is what is the principle is supposed to do ? Please detail it here
peace
So why do you care about evidence? Please give me the reason
Of course you know I don’t agree with what you consider evidence and I don’t use the restrictive criteria implied in you first principle in my everyday life. I would venture to say you don’t either.
I just spent and inordinate amount of time explaining all this so I wont go through it again.
So lets just be clear before we move forward
Are you saying you have absolutely no evidence to justify your first principle and you just accept it’s validity on faith without evidence?
peace
Since when is it the usual practice here to address the OP?
What I saw was a whole slew of presuppositions coming from people who want to pretend they don’t have presuppositions. I simply pointed that out.
If you notice the presupposition thread is now about the problem of evil for a while it was about questions about Christmas.
Why were you not concerned about folks addressing the OP in that thread?
peace
Gregory:
Gregory,
I’m on the Aeon mailing list. I knew about that article long before you mentioned it here. Do you expect me to offer a HT every time you tell me something I already know?
KN,
If Orthodox Judaism were really Orthoprax Judaism, the atheist subjects of that Aeon article wouldn’t have to hide their atheism. They do hide it because they know what will happen if they don’t.
The article mentions this exact point:
Then for you, he must be a brother from another mother. The two of you share certain predictions in common, apparently. At least Keiths generally sticks to the topic at hand.
Rarely have I seen such contempt for reason as you display.
Kids, this is your brain on presuppositionalism. Just say no.
Of course you agree and of course you use it in your every day life. Constantly. And you know the principle isn’t restrictive, that it is actually entirely rational and reasonable and conforms to our own intuitions about why we should believe in something or not. As the easy to grasp, common everyday examples I already gave all aptly demonstrate.
You are now only protesting because you are thinking about this principle for the first time in the context of your own life and discovering you have used it many times, and I’m one of those terrible atheist darwinists you just can’t make consessions to because that could imply you are simultaneously being a hypocrite, and worst case: wrong about god.
Which means that you are so desperately afraid that I might be right you feel a need to object to and reject everything I say even if you know somewhere inside that you have, in fact, used the principle everywhere and every day.
Which means that you are also now lying to me about it when you claim you don’t use it. And in your desperation to not make consessions towards my position, you have elected to use my accusation against myself, by claiming I don’t use it either.
I’m sorry but when I see a person behaving like you do now, I lose interest in having a discussion with them. You are not interested in truth, understanding or honest debate. You just want to “win” the facts be damned. That’s presuppositionalism for you. Have fun with that, believe what you feel you must. I have zero respect for your position and in so far as you have taken it up, I have zero respect for you.
Well there you go.
peace
Except that it is not actually possible to evaluate the strength of one’s own presuppositions, because in order to evaluate them, one needs criteria for evaluation, and where are those criteria going to come from if not from the presuppositions themselves?
But testing presuppositions using those very presuppositions is of course no test at all.
You often seem confused as to why everyone here thinks you are making claims or assertions, when you take yourself to be merely explicating your own presuppositions. This is why: because you say that you want to evaluate those presuppositions. On this point, I think you are utterly and deeply confused.
One can either evaluate claims (based on some criteria), or one can stipulate criteria. But one cannot evaluate criteria, except in light of some other criteria that are being used. This is because we cannot step outside of all criteria and evaluate them from some supposedly criterion-less or presupposition-less point of view. For how could one evaluate without some criteria of evaluation? And how could one evaluate criteria without some criteria for the evaluation of criteria? The idea that one could evaluate criteria without using any criteria for evaluation seems hopelessly misguided, and it always has been ever since Descartes first suggested it as a way out of Agrippa’s Trilemma.
The only way forward, as far as I can see, is to recognize that Wittgenstein was right when he said that the foundations of knowledge are practical, not theoretical — that the ‘bedrock’ of all our thinking and saying lies in our doing, and not in more and further thinking and saying.
There are presuppositions, if you want to call them that, but they are the practical norms and facts that are beyond the reach of intelligible doubt (which does not preclude them from changing over time). They are like the ground on which one walks — they are the background of all journeys and destinations. There is certainty, but it does not offer any inferential starting-point for knowledge.
Stop the bs. Take your personal ‘presupposition’ tirade to the other thread, where it belongs. KN will likely follow you there.
A few days ago you stated:
If this is true, how could a review of others’ presuppositions have bearing on the strength of your own?
His response is that “revelation” plays this role, and he has it, and he knows it, and he knows he knows it, and he knows he knows he knows it. Not much to discuss there.
Yet he needs criteria to distinguish revelation from gas pains or indigestion. I’ve asked him how he makes that distinction, but with no satisfactory response.
Prisons have a number of that type.
Glen Davidson
maybe you missed this response:
quote:
We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
(1Jn 4:6)
end quote:
It seems pretty satisfactory to me
peace
It was good enough for Andrea Yates.
Glen Davidson
It is merely an excuse for self-delusion.
Obviously it was not good enough for her in that she demonstrably did not use that criteria.
what criteria do you use to make that determination? How exactly do you know your criteria is valid?
peace
Experience.
What criteria did you use to make that determination?
FMM:
RB:
FMM:
A few days ago you stated:
If this is true, how could a review of others’ presuppositions have bearing on the strength of your own?
simply by comparing her stated beliefs to scripture
for example
From here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates
quote:
She told her jail psychiatrist: “It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren’t righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.”
end quote:
simply compare that belief with scripture
quote:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
(1Jn 1:9)
and
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
(Rom 10:13)
end quote:
simple is it not
peace
You make a good point I guess I should have been clearer.
It’s not exactly my presuppositions that are being evaluated but my hypothesis that the only way to obtain knowledge is through the Christian God.
What I mean by testing the strength of my presuppositions is checking to see if other folks presuppositions are consistent and comprehensive.
If they are not it lends credence to my hypothesis that knowelege is not possible with out the Christian God. like all hypothesis this one can not ever be proven only falsified.
So to recap I begin with the presupposition that knowledge is possible if the Christian God reveals something to me.
at the same time I hypothesize that knowledge is only possible if the Christian worldview is true.
hope that helps
peace
Is there a single moderator at TA/SZ that has any sense of what ‘on-topic’ vs. ‘off-topic’ means? This thread has been highjacked by FMM, encouraged by people who wish to provoke him. Send half the posts to the presupposition thread. At least his low level apologetics can be contained.
The problem with your approach is it’s circularity, at least as you are applying it. For example, I cited the scientific research and engineering that put Curiosity on Mars as an example of knowledge that is independent of Christianity. You responded by claiming that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is dependent upon the Logos (and therefore Christianity), and hence denied that Curiosity represents a counter example. This response fails because it assumes the conclusion you claim to wish to test, and uses that assumed conclusion to evaluate the evidence. Buzzt.
If you really wish to test the hypothesis that knowledge is only possible if the Christian worldview is true, you need to abandon the presupposition you are testing as a metric to evaluate others’ claimed attainment of knowledge.
1) I understand that objection and I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s the biggest beef against Presuppositionalism. There is however a difference between reasoning in a tight circle and reasoning in a broad circle. I could explain if you like.
2) It’s important to remember that the intrinsic relationships of the Christian God are a circular affair. The Father eternally loves the Logos and the Logos reflects that love back eternally.Therefore it is to be expected that our experience of reality should be similar.
3) All worldviews are circular.
You for example start by assuming that God’s existence is not self evident and low and behold you discover that you don’t know that God exists.
6) Circular argument of a kind is in fact unavoidable when we argue for an ultimate standard of truth. One who believes that human reason is the ultimate standard can argue that view only by appealing to reason.
I hope you see the point. If you could provide a non-circular explanation for how you know things I would be interested
Could you provide an alternative presupposition that I can use as a metric? It only needs to be capable of yielding actual knowledge.
Thanks in advance
peace
There is no ultimate standard of truth.
Said you, the (in all probability) white middle class male with plenty of free time. Get thee to a shitty part of the world where you have to kill yourself working (or worse) just to eat and ask again how beneficent and eternally loving the god that created their reality is.
How exactly do you know this?
peace
You think?
That sounds suspiciously like the charge fifth made that got people so upset.
Tread lightly.
Is that not you (too) OMagain? USAmerican & doesn’t speak another language too? While we’re on the topic of race/ethnicity, after all.
It’s exactly the opposite of your contention.
The Gospel is more readily accepted by poor desperate folks. Often the comfortable don’t see their need for God. That is the whole point of that camel saying you are so fond of.
Rich folks seem to cling to a false sense of autonomy. When you have more than enough it’s easy to get the idea that you are the one that “built that”
When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from it’s easier to understand how much your life depends on the provision of God.
quote:
Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?
(Jas 2:5)
end quote
peace
Hi Bill.
Could you add to your accounting the number of comments generated?
Pining for the old echo chamber days?
I am expressing an opinion, based on my study of human cognition.
Which is to say there is no “ultimate standard of truth” that is not in some way circular.
Are you asking for a non-circular description of how I know things, or a non-circular explanation of an “ultimate standard of truth?”
The former would be very pedestrian.
I’m not aware of any instances of the latter, and neither are you. Like you, I suspect there are none. I certainly don’t claim to possess one.
Oddly enough, the very folks who are preyed upon by shysters and charlatans of all stripes. Quack medical practitioners, fraudulent investment schemers, Lotto, drug dealers, populist politicians, and so forth.
I spent seven years working with the poor in spirit.
This is not politically correct, but the one thing I learned from this is that nearly half of all people are below average in intelligence, and the other half do not — as a class — hesitate to take advantage of this.
The one category of people that can be depended on to ignore the poor and downtrodden are members of mega-churches. They have no use for anyone who cannot tithe.
I haven’t remarked upon the number of comments, or even the number of your OPs.
I’m remarking upon your whining vis your views being attacked. You create deliberately provocative posts, then seem hurt and surprised when others are provoked. What’s up with that?
A satisfactory description of how you know things will necessarily include an ultimate standard of truth
If there is no ultimate standard by which to judge the truth of a proposition there is no way to know ultimately if a proposition is correct or not.
To say you can’t know that any proposition is true in your worldview is the same as saying that knowledge is impossible
peace
Guys. Rules. Please.
That only implies that there is no logical certainty.
Knowledge does not require logical certainty, though it might at times result in psychological certainty.
Elizabeth,
I think Mung will freely admit his martyr complex. His book even tells him to expect it!
What an evil, evil god you worship. It’s within your deity’s power to save people from (for example) enslavement for their entire lifetime but no, it’s necessary to encourage them to accept the gospel.
You are sick in the head.
It’s not like you help keep any conversation going, is it, with your drive-by comments most of the time with little to no substance. So crow all you like over the number of comments your posts generate, if you see that as a “victory”.
No it implies that it’s possible that there is no truth.
If there is no truth there is no knowledge therefore in a world where there is no certainty whatsoever it’s possible there is no knowledge at all.
I do not ask for certainty only that a presupposition can yield actual and not possible knowledge.
How exactly do you know that? What criteria did you use to come to that conclusion?
Peace
it’s with in the doctor’s power to save people from the nauseousness associated with chemotherapy but no, it’s necessary that they go through that to cure the cancer.
Those doctors must be an evil bunch
A few short years of hardship is nothing in comparison to actually being subsumed into the eternal divine rapture of the Triune God. Just a a few short weeks of nauseousness is nothing compared to the years of life the treatment engenders
peace
Those never existed. There has always been a range of opinions here. Rather it’s just your “bible posts” are tedious and boring in the main. You also don’t seem to be able to apply skepticism to your own position, which at least would be slightly interesting.
Fuck you.
You are evil fmm. People like you should be relics of history, like the Nazis, looked back on with disgust. How ever humans ever like that, we’ll wonder in the future?