Dubious wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 12:51 amOne reason I haven't responded to you is because doing so is not unlike responding to IC, your main interlocutor who has long been infamous for his incessant distortions and lies. What you state here, I have nothing to do with, nor would I be in agreement...which is all I have to say to you.
It is actually hard not to distort, to some degree, on forums like this. Many times I have tried to encapsulate and reduce what someone seems to be saying and then been told that I did not get it right. And I admit that I have been conflating you with DontAskMe, perhaps because your adamancy in opposition to IC seems to have a similar base? I now have a set of pliers beside my laptop and will use them to disentangle
yous.
I went back seeking a post of yours that seems to express your ideas clearly and in some detail:
The existential quandaries of the modern psyche are very different from what they used to be. Beliefs that once supported it for over a thousand years no-longer suffices. A new kind of metanoia is required which in turn needs time to create since it can never be a purely conscious creation but one which must be rooted.
You are making a statement here which is assertive and declarative -- but it is just an assertion. I am not at all convinced that things have fundamentally changed. Though it does seem to me that many things are terribly confused.
And how would you describe 'the new metatonia'?
Having said that, what I find, as do others, intensely objectionable about you are not your beliefs per se, but your unceasing attempt to make yourself superior to everyone who doesn’t subscribe to a biblical mandate of morality - its so-called god prescriptions - being instead compelled to ponder existence with a question mark since a millennial belief system no-longer functions as it once did. There is also the constant perversion of what others have written, especially if it’s factual, historical, etc., in which case it either gets mutilated, ignored or responded to with totally misleading statements. You’ve done that through thousands of posts of which you’ve been constantly reminded. While on this site, I don’t expect that to ever stop.
I am not sure if with an imperious wave of your hand you can simply dismiss what have been the core concerns (here we are speaking of Christian belief and practice) for a great long while. I am inclined to see, to propose that as many like yourself assume this is so, that in fact the core questions come that much more to the surface. They do not fade away but become more strongly materialized.
In spite of being rabid, your theism amounts to nothing more than a surface theism, a take-up of Pascal’s wager. Nothing deep, mystical or profound here; no searching for truth values beyond those historically accepted. Yours is just a form of opportunism. If god is dead, it’s because what's killed is an outworn fiction once believed in, having long cradled the psyche in ways we can no-longer experience. The one item which may still yield some comfort especially in Catholicism as opposed to Protestantism are its still surviving traditions of ritual, symbols and art which I think of as the ghosts of past beliefs. I wonder how many still go to church without any belief in transubstantiation or acceptance that Jesus was the son of god except metaphorically.
What do you propose should be stated as it pertains to what is deep, mystical and profound? How would you talk about what is profound? (If you really had to do that and not merely refer to profundity?)
What 'truth values' do you propose should be brought out and sought after?
I am not convinced that what we are discussing -- which is underpinned by specific values and assertions of value -- are now no longer valid. So if something like a fiction (as in fictional story) is no longer believable, and indeed the Gospel stories are often disbelieved, I am not at all sure that the underlying meanings there have been dismissed as the *fictions* you assert they are.
In any case the more that I examine these values, the asserted values of Christian belief and doctrine, the more value they seem to have.
In many ways I agree that religious symbols are "the ghosts of past beliefs" but that is just a turn of phrase. What is referred to through a symbol is often hard to define, perhaps, but seems to remain constant and also valid. Yet you imply that those values (whatever they are and whatever you refer to) now no longer have meaning or validity? Are you sure you have such a basis to make that bold assertion?
Here you allude to something true -- that the possibility of belief has been undermined. In traditional Catholicism it is said that "modernism is the
synthesis of heresies". Seen in that way, from that perspective, it is a statement with some logic.
But it seems to me more interesting to genuinely make the comparison between what specific values are, or were, asserted prior to the *modernism* Pius X decried, and what is supplanting or replacing them. This has been my endeavor: to try to *see* what the old metaphysics attempts to present. It is an act of discernment not necessarily of asserting a dogmatic position. At the same time, as old values are being swept away, and not necessarily to good effect, the New Metaphysics can be examined critically.
The best way to articulate and summarize the obscene discrepancy in your views is your extreme assertion that whoever accepts the bible's injunctions of morality is intrinsically superior to an atheist who may believe in the same code; what makes him inferior is he has no reason to adhere, not having received or heard the mandate from on high, but merely supervised by his own conscience. In effect, no sacred attributes can be appended to someone who thinks for himself and therefore remains inferior in spite of the moral context being essentially equal. For you, it's not the result, but the conditions which create it which solely determines its validity.
It is an interesting issue or problem. But there is some contradiction in what you say here when compared to your previous assertion that
there are (new?) truth-values beyond those historically accepted.
The 'supervision by one's own conscience' is, in a definite sense, to receive from on-high. In any case these two thing definitely (in traditional thought) operate together, don't you think?
If this is true for IC: "For you, it's not the result, but the conditions which create it which solely determines its validity", in my own case I am not sure, in precise terms, what I am after. But I do (myself) adopt a strategy, and it is that many things that are dismissed so imperiously in our modern era, with such adamancy and declarative assertiveness, all of these things I have chosen, consciously, to examine on my own, one by one, to determine if indeed this is justified and if indeed it is a good thing.
I have generally determined that a great deal of what is jettisoned must be preserved. And thus I determine that I will preserve it -- if only in my own self or for myself alone.
Frankly, it's hard to think of anything more demented, whether atheist or theist! I always thought it was, at least philosophically, the other way around; the person ordered to do a good deed is inferior to him who does it spontaneously as directed by conscience. Since god supposedly gave us erring mortals an instrument of judgement, it should be used in the manner designed but that, by your logic, would make me inferior to someone such as thou who has received his marching orders from the foremost CEO imagination ever invented!
I think that if you examine IC more closely (he and I have had this conversation) you will find that his view is truly Protestant in the sense that for a choice to be really ethical (and moral) it has to be chosen consciously and not merely *obeyed*. I have a strong sense that he would refer to metanoia (in his set of definitions) that go hand in glove with ethical choices.
the foremost CEO imagination ever invented!
Your idea here reminds me of what Camille Paglia has said about
the idea of God. The supreme,
masculine, human tool.
