Secular Intolerance

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Greta
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Greta »

Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 3:57 amYou cannot find one expression of hatred on any of my posts.
Hello?? I've been the target of a lot of your hate. It's not just one comment but an avalanche.

I remember when your target was "atheists". You could not stop deriding them. Then I said that doesn't include me as I'm an agnostic and referred to atheists and agnostics as "secularists". Ever since you've latched on to that tag so as to include me in your regular slew of bitter complaints and put-downs.
Nick_A wrote:
John Lennon said it, Nick - all you need is love. Or at least goodwill. Or at least not to feel hostile about most people and things.
There is nothing wrong with secular love. Anyone can help another. But Christian love serves a conscious purpose selective secular love remains unaware of.
The Greeks claimed there were seven types of love. No mention of "secular love" as a category. This may be because billions of people cannot be the same, although they can be reduced to two-dimensional targets by haters.
Nick_A wrote:
I admit to being prone to ham-fisted sledgehammer diplomacy, but I don't hate for long. Maybe a day or two at best. No, lasting hatred an attribute of yours, not mine, but you avoid owning it because that would involve casting your judgemental eye within rather than at everyone else.
That is your way and the way of the world. One moment we hate and then emotionally love on the next. This is the norm for cave life but is that all a human being worthy of the name is capable of or is it possible through conscious evolution to open to the experience of objective conscience which reveals the triviality of our normal emotional states?
The take home message here: You do not stoop to hatred. Rather, you cling to a deeper hatred, the clinging being a mark of character rather than those darned secular flibbertigibbets.

If you hope to evolve to higher forms, Nick, the first thing that has to go is the hatred. You know that is true but you won't give me the satisfaction :lol:
Belinda
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Belinda »

Greta, do you think it's possible that the more intractable sort of hatred is caused by hatred of oneself? And that hatred of oneself is caused by parents who did not immediately forgive their child ?
Nick_A
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Nick_A »

Greta wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 4:48 am
Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 3:57 amYou cannot find one expression of hatred on any of my posts.
Hello?? I've been the target of a lot of your hate. It's not just one comment but an avalanche.

I remember when your target was "atheists". You could not stop deriding them. Then I said that doesn't include me as I'm an agnostic and referred to atheists and agnostics as "secularists". Ever since you've latched on to that tag so as to include me in your regular slew of bitter complaints and put-downs.
Nick_A wrote:
John Lennon said it, Nick - all you need is love. Or at least goodwill. Or at least not to feel hostile about most people and things.
There is nothing wrong with secular love. Anyone can help another. But Christian love serves a conscious purpose selective secular love remains unaware of.
The Greeks claimed there were seven types of love. No mention of "secular love" as a category. This may be because billions of people cannot be the same, although they can be reduced to two-dimensional targets by haters.
Nick_A wrote:
I admit to being prone to ham-fisted sledgehammer diplomacy, but I don't hate for long. Maybe a day or two at best. No, lasting hatred an attribute of yours, not mine, but you avoid owning it because that would involve casting your judgemental eye within rather than at everyone else.
That is your way and the way of the world. One moment we hate and then emotionally love on the next. This is the norm for cave life but is that all a human being worthy of the name is capable of or is it possible through conscious evolution to open to the experience of objective conscience which reveals the triviality of our normal emotional states?
The take home message here: You do not stoop to hatred. Rather, you cling to a deeper hatred, the clinging being a mark of character rather than those darned secular flibbertigibbets.

If you hope to evolve to higher forms, Nick, the first thing that has to go is the hatred. You know that is true but you won't give me the satisfaction :lol:
The ultimate ad hom attack. Total fiction. Webster's dictionary definition of hate.
Definition of hate
1
a : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury
b : extreme dislike or disgust : antipathy, loathing had a great hate of hard work
Hate is an intense emotional reaction. I'm not the emotional type. There is no motive for me to hate as you describe it. You are the emotional one here who is capable of expressing hatred. Secular intolerance is an emotional reaction to a perceived threat to ones imagined inner supremacy. You have created a fictional character that doesn't exist. It is a characteristic which many have that is the source of bigotry. The bigot creates a character or a group in their mind worth hating.
fooloso4
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by fooloso4 »

Nick_A:
Simone Weil was …
This only emphasized the problem. I was not talking about Weil I was talking about you. Weil is not here and not making questionable and outright wrong claims about secularism.
There is no will of the people - just collective desire.
And this too illustrates the problem - your limited ability to comprehend what you read. Time and again I have pointed out how you have misunderstood the passages you cite. I am not going to repeat myself on the problem of the general will. It really is quite clear from the article. You do not have to agree with Weil on every issue but you should not misrepresent what she says so that you do not have to disagree with what you are claiming she says. Like I said,if you did not know that she was the author of the book being reviewed you would accuse her of secular intolerance.
From Dictionary.com …
[This only confirms my point. This definition is not the same as yours. It says nothing about secularism being a religion. It says nothing about Great Beasts or any of your other absurd accusations about secularism.
Your trouble is not that you don’t know what secularism is but rather that you don’t know what sacred means. You consider secularized interpretations of the sacred to be sacred when they are actually secular. You have yet to psychologically distinguish between the secular and the sacred.
I see you have ignored my friendly advice. Do not presume to tell me what I do not know, what I consider, and what I have yet to distinguish without any evidence to support your claims. I have not discussed the sacred or “secularized interpretations” which is code for interpretations you do not agree with. Since you do not cite even one example of a secularized interpretation that I have commented on, this is just more wild and reckless accusations.
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.
This may have been the reality at the time this was written but Christians are no longer persecuted in the West. The problem is not that you are a Christian and those you oppose you are not, nor is it that you are a “true Christian” and Christians who oppose you are not. The problem is that you have a skewed view of people, government, education, and whatever else you rant about. And this is why I said that if Jesus or God or Simone Weil were to say something you did not agree with you would say it was secular intolerance.
If you refuse to open to the division between the secular and the sacred, you will always exhibit secular intolerance.
That is complete nonsense. First of all, what you call the sacred is your version of the sacred and so any statements about the sacred that you do not accept you will dismiss as secularized, no matter what the source. Second, if someone rejects the division between a world of Forms or "objective consciousness" and the world of ordinary experience that does not make them intolerant. Third, a careful (which you mistake for secular) reading of Plato reveals many hints as to why his salutary public teaching is just that, a salutary public teaching, not the revelation of the Forms or higher truths or the world of the sacred. Fourth, there are those who do embrace the sacred but not Platonic Forms. But of course you will dismiss this as secularized corruption of the sacred. All of this points to the fact that the problem is not secular intolerance but your own intolerance of anyone or anything that is at odds with your imagined truths. They are, as I say below, imagined because they are not based on anything you actually know and not supported by evidence of any kind. That others who you believe do know have spoken about such things only means that you imagine what it is that they are talking about but you cannot know by their talking about it.
You call recognizing this essential division “attacking secularists”
No, I call what you say when you are attacking secularists as attacking secularists. I call your nonsense about Forms and higher realms nonsense because you have no knowledge of what you speak. You may believe that we have the potential to transcend the cave, but unless you have actually done so you know nothing of what you speak. I cannot speak for everyone but I am not intolerant of your efforts to do so, but until you have done so you are just talking about what you imagine and faulting us for not agreeing.
You don’t understand the passage from Matthew because you’ve secularized it.
I may not understand the passage but if so then show me by textual analysis what it really means and how my understanding of it is incompatible with what is said. You may dismiss adherence to the text as secularizing it, you may believe you have a magic decoder ring that gives you access to a higher esoteric meaning, but again there is a difference between where you stand and what you believe is possible. In other words, believing there is an esoteric level does not mean you have attained the ability to read at that level. You give what is a sacred practice a bad name by attempting to defend yourself by citing Bible passages. Someone who is a true practitioner would say you defiled it.
You don’t understand the passage from Matthew because you’ve secularized it.The question is if our allegiance is to attachments to the world or to the conscious potential for rebirth.
This is funny. You miss the irony. You have secularized it. You have made it about the difference between attachments to secular concerns versus rebirth.

There was at the time both Jewish and Gentile asceticism and so even if one understands Jesus to be teaching detachment from worldly things that is not sufficient for explain why a man would turn against his father or a daughter against her mother or make enemies of members of one’s own household. Rebirth through Christ is not simply about the difference between allegiance to things of this world and allegiance to Christ. You may think that an awareness of the historical situation is secularizing the sacred, but knowledge of the historical situation shows that for many what was at issue in the passage from Matthew is about competing sacred demands and claims of sacred authority.

As for textual support:
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: "Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.(Matthew 10:5-6)
This points to the schism between Paul and the Apostles. It was Paul who was sent to preach to the Gentiles because his claims about the Law were intolerable. It was not simply a matter of the “lost sheep of Israel” turning to worldly things but a) differences with regard to the Law, which in the Gospels takes two forms - Jesus objections to the interpretation and practice of Law and Paul's claim that the Law is not binding to those who are not Jews,and b) not acknowledging him as the messiah. To that extent, it was clearly a matter of the sacred not the secular. With so many false messiahs running around it is no wonder that many were not convinced Jesus was the messiah. Their adherence to the Law was a sacred not a secular matter. Their refusal to follow a false messiah was a sacred not a secular matter.

As to your own internet crusade to vanquish the Great Beast and save the world, your citing of the passage from Matthew in order to defend yourself misses the mark:
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. (10:14)
As to intolerance:

Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues.(10-17)

No one here is turning you over to the local authorities to be flogged (although some might not object).You may fancy yourself a crusader and persecuted martyr but that is a fantasy of your own making. Others have suggested hatred as a motive but I think we should not overlook resentment and pathological need for love, attention, and affirmation. Secular sensibilities may have you protesting that this is a personal attack, but the philosophy of Plato makes it clear the various ways in which the personal is fundamental to philosophy. Socrates in his role as physician of the soul could have been of great benefit to you, but you would have dismissed him for secular intolerance and instead of looking at yourself you would look beyond, or rather away from yourself, to Weil and an imagined other world.
Nick_A
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Nick_A »

Fooloso4

First things first. If you don’t appreciate the difference between the secular (sustaining the status quo of cave life) and the sacred (the means of escape from the human condition creating cave life into the potential for human being) you will never understand Simone or Christianity.

From Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace:
The Great Beast [society, the collective] is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatzof God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.

It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence, my fellow man as an end, since he is my fellow. Nor can I take a material thing, because matter is still less capable of having finality conferred upon it than human beings are.

Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective.

The collective (The Great Beast) is a fallen imitation of the sacred.
Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoriing nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.
- Simone Weil, Prelude to Politics, completed shortly before her death in 1943
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 393
She is not saying that the Romans and the Jews are bad. She is saying that over time the human condition has devolved their essence into the Great Beast. Secular influences are what glorify the egoism of the Beast and the sacred influences lead to conscious freedom from the psychological slavery of cave life and the conscious connection between above and below.

If you don’t distinguish the sacred from the secular, Christianity as opposed to Christendom will never make sense to you. Dominant secular intolerance through intimidation will also serve to deprive the young whose minds are opening, the chance for becoming more than just a conditioned atom of the Great Beast.
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Harbal
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Harbal »

Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 7:09 pm
From Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace:
I just can't get enough of this stuff. Keep it coming, Nick.
davidm
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by davidm »

Oh, more quotes from Weil! Let me offer some quotes of my own:

Richard Rorty:
We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by these describing activities of human beings—cannot.

The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks.

… For reasons already given, I do not think there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language, nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other.
So much for Weil! :lol:
Nick_A
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Nick_A »

davidm wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 8:48 pm Oh, more quotes from Weil! Let me offer some quotes of my own:

Richard Rorty:
We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by these describing activities of human beings—cannot.

The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks.

… For reasons already given, I do not think there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language, nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other.
So much for Weil! :lol:
So if an asteroid strikes and destroys the earth killing all life upon it, the truth of universal existence existing only as a creation of Man's mind will also be destroyed. The end of the Milky Way and all other galaxies. Since we are no longer alive to argue about it, the universe doesn't exist. I didn't know I was that important.
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Harbal
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Harbal »

Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:24 pm Since we are no longer alive to argue about it, the universe doesn't exist. I didn't know I was that important.
When you die the World/Universe as you perceive it will cease to exist, yes.
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by davidm »

Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:24 pm . Since we are no longer alive to argue about it, the universe doesn't exist. I didn't know I was that important.
That is precisely NOT what Rorty said. Are you being deliberately obtuse, or are you just this ignorant?
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by davidm »

He said the WORLD is out there, independent of us, whether we are dead or alive; just not any kind of truth about the world, contra Weil's mystical mumbo-jnumbo.
Nick_A
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Nick_A »

Harbal wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:33 pm
Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:24 pm Since we are no longer alive to argue about it, the universe doesn't exist. I didn't know I was that important.
When you die the World/Universe as you perceive it will cease to exist, yes.
Rorty states:
"Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by these describing activities of human beings—cannot."
There is my subjective truth and objective truth. Rorty claims objective truth doesn't exist so truth must die with me as you will also since you are a figment of my imagination.
Nick_A
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Nick_A »

davidm wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:39 pm He said the WORLD is out there, independent of us, whether we are dead or alive; just not any kind of truth about the world, contra Weil's mystical mumbo-jnumbo.
What is the world without the truth of the world which enables its existence? it doesn't make sense. He is denying universal laws which are the cause of creation.
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Harbal
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by Harbal »

Nick_A wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:43 pm Rorty states:
Forget Rorty, Nick, listen to me. There is stuff out there, some of which your senses give you direct access to. There is stuff out there that science has deduced. You / I / everybody takes these two categories of stuff and paints a picture with it, this is our subjective view of existence.
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Re: Secular Intolerance

Post by davidm »

What does it mean, that “universal laws are the cause of creation”? What “laws?” How do “laws” create anything?

The so-called “laws of nature” are not laws at all. They are not prescriptions of how the world must behave. They are merely descptions of how the world does behave.

Rorty’s stance is Tarskian, the correspondence theory of truth, that truth inheres in descriptive statements or propositions about the external world, uttered by humans. Remove humans or any other kind of sentients and truth and morality vanish. There is no truth or morality in grains of sand, in Saturn, in the sun, in the Milky Way, in eternity.

Weil’s absolute good rooted in something external not only to us but to space and time (!) is nothing but a mirage. She did utter a truth-valued proposition about the world. Unfortunately the value returned for her utterance is “false.”
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