Marsha said:
Based on my understanding of Buddhist philosophy, Quantum Physics, the MoQ,
philosophical readings supporting various types of relativism, and my own
personal first-hand experience, I subscribe to, at the very least,
epistemological relativism.
dmb says:
Everyone's point of view is based on their understanding of things. What else
could it be based on? The problem is that you're constantly ignoring evidence
against your point of view. You cling to it despite the fact that you are
repeatedly shown to be using bad logic and bogus definitions. It's like talking
to a creationist about evolution. The facts simply do not matter to you and -
what's even worse - you heap scorn on anyone who disagrees with your
contradictory nonsense or anyone who presents a case against it. Nastiness
seems to be your only mode of defense. You've even attacked your own statements
just to get at me - several times! At this point I sincerely wonder if you are
even capable of having a meaningful conversation or even of expressing a
coherent thought. Give it shot. Who knows, maybe you'll even like it.
You know, when people think together - I mean really focus and co-operate
rather than compete or grandstand - it's magic. It's awesome. There will always
be those who see what you didn't see and not everyone will see what you saw.
When a whole group works together on the same thing, the comprehension level of
each and every individual will hugely improved. There could be a few rare
exceptions, but basically nobody can do as well on their own. I've seen this
process work its magic many, many times. Your spiteful and unresponsive
behavior is a monkey wrench in that process. You're doing a disservice to this
forum and to yourself. And why? What's the point? Why go to the pool if you
don't want to swim? Why go to a discussion group if you don't want to discuss?
Ah, but if a philosophical discussion depends on the use of intellectual static
patterns and if static patterns are ever-changing then the truth of a statement
has evaporated before you even get to the end of the sentence. If static
patterns are ever-changing then truth is so fleeting that it's meaningless.
See, when static is construed as dynamic, as ever-changing, you have cut off
your own legs and are otherwise intellectually paralyzed on a dead-end street.
These are very bad consequences and that's why it's such a tremendously bad
idea to construe static patterns as ever-changing. Have you ever acknowledged
this point? By confusing DQ and sq, it really makes quite a mess of things and
that's how you end up landing on relativism.
>From William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience", the chapter titled
>"Philosophy", pages 408-10:
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of
experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and
ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of
fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning
cannot give them the support they are in need of. Conceptual processes can
class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can
they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which
feeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary
function, unable to warrant faith's veracity, and so I revert to the thesis
which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.
In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate
by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct
religious experience is absolutely hopeless.
It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative
sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she can do for
religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and
induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into science of
religions, she can make herself enormously useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in
ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy
can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these
definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic
incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the
results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are
now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.
Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of
conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as hypotheses,
testing them in all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which
hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their number, as some are found more
open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks
out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the
definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent
over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally
taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between different believers, and
help to bring about consensus of opinion. She can do this the more
successfully, the better she discriminates the common and essential from the
individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she compares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not
eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical
science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on
trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics- it might appear as
foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first
instance, and continually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing
persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on
facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal
experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could never get away
from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to
confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond
it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words,
but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal
formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that
glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes
too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley
of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him
to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His
formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the
instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious
sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the
place of personal experience.
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