Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 19, 2022 7:57 pm
There is no objective proof and of that sort that Iambiguous demands that you can refer to.
I always find this a puzzling claim, whenever anybody advances it.
Of course there's evidence. That's not really the question: the question is whether or not the evidence available should incline one to the conclusion or not.
The natural world is evidence for God. So is the intelligibilty of reality. So is the moral realm. So is the historical record, and the literary record of the Bible itself. Further evidence is available from cosmology, from the philosophy of mind, from conceptual arguments, and from the testimony of a myriad of personal witnesses. There's plenty of evidence.
The only remaining question is, what does it add up to? For the Atheist, the answer has to be "nothing." For the agnostic, perhaps "not enough to convince me completely yet," and for the Theist, "sufficient warrant."
Who's right about that? Well, weigh the evidence, is the answer.
A spiritual epiphany is subjective.
It can be. It can also be objective -- that's the point to be contested.
One of the things I notice, and it concerns me, is when people are no longer being taught the *fundamentals*. They are no longer trained up in our paideia and, as it happens, they fall away from the capacity to even conceive of what has been referred to for so long in our Occidental cultures. What happens here? They seem to descend into what I might describe as intellectual barbarism. It involves the sacrifice of the higher for the immediacy of the lower.
Well, yes...I think it certainly does. And even a raw Atheist would have to admit that something would be seriously lost if we dropped the Christian moral tradition and just embraced the nihilism that Atheism implies. That's why so few of them are amoralists, even though that's what Atheism invites them to become.
But you cannot sustain a legacy like Judeo-Christian morality on falsehoods. If people stop believing the Judeo-Christian narrative is actually true, what incentive do they have for persisting to act
as if it's true? That's just "bad faith." Rather, honesty takest the side of nihilism, then.
And it's not simply that people don't like falsehoods, because honestly, many would rather have falsehoods than truth -- look at our current media, for example. No, the real problem is that falsehoods are themselves
not durable. People can persist for some time on the moral habits of the past; but eventually, their inclination to corruption tests the strength of their beliefs in particular ways; and absent a conviction of the deep truth of the grounding of those moral practices, they find they have no reason left to cling to them. So they don't.
Look, for example, at our concept of "woman." Even that has proved insufficiently durable once our social corruption has reached the present levels. We are now even afraid to define the term, since doing so would necessarily exclude something ... and at the cost of losing the concept completely, we have refused to think it through. Nothing could illustrate this more clearly than the ridiculous spectacle of a biological man sweeping women aside to claim a national swim title, while society celebrates it as a liberation for "women," a concept they have demonstrated they no longer believe even has an objective reality.
How can "women" triumph when there are no more "women"?
It's absurd.
I do not want to unfairly pick on Promethean
Prometheus stole fire from "the gods," it is said. But today's so-called "Prometheans" steal nothingness from what you call "paiediea." At least Prometheus is said to have done the human race some benefit...but these Prometheans bring man only to the abyss of his own vacuity. They aren't heroes...not every rebel is a hero. Some are just rebels-without-a-point.
yet this is a philosophy forum and we are duty bound to reveal what we really think about all things. The man pictured here, whoever it is, is an example of someone who had descended in the way I describe. The mind as a higher instrument becomes dulled.
Yes, he really is at least pretending to be a marvel of thoughtlessness. And if he says he's "empty," then I believe him. He must find that he is.