An insight, of course, perfectly consistent with Sartre's: Hell is the Other!
And that's the best result you can get from the premise of a fundamentally "morally relativistic" universe.
I actually heard on NPR radio last evening (which I almost never listen to) that Hinduism/Buddhism is "superior" to Christianity because it fundamentally acknowledges that the "universe", being purely "flux" in principle, never can settle on "law." (In so many words.)
The script reader did not give further (logical) particulars. But from that ["progressive???"] point of view, I gather that "whatever happens" is okay: If the Eastern philosophical view of the ultimate nature of Reality is truly the natural case, then nobody can ever again speak legitimately of "right or wrong," of "good or evil" in human society.
Worse, there is no foundation of Truth.
I'm sure it seems I digress. For you were (at least in part) regretting the practice of "zotting" at FR. It happens I share your feeling about this; BUT....
To get to a more practical point: There is no reason in the world why JR should have his resources consumed and depleted by people who hold him in contempt and animosity. Ultimately, FR is the private enterprise fruition of a single, passionate and patriotic imagination, who staked his all on the enterprise, and rises and falls with its fortunes. He is our host; and we are all his guests here.
Zotting wouldn't happen, if people just adhered to the basic rules of civility appertaining to this Forum.
Which to the Occupy Wall Street types is both senseless and tyrannical. But then, so are they.
Christians DO dispute with anarchists over basic principles, to be sure.
But I have very strong doubt that anarchists can possibly prevail, on the "merits" of their "non-argument": You just can't get any sense at all from a "senseless" person....
I'll stop such tiresome musings now, and point to the actual problem I have in "corresponding" with certain other members of the Forum.
Because I have felt so frustrated by the seeming sheer pointlessness of "engagements" with, e.g., materialists, atheists, "doctrinaire" Darwinists, et al — I have tried to understand why such conversations never seem to lead anywhere.
I've been feeling this especially since I realized I couldn't even "get on the same page" with A_perfect_lady. Whatever the question posed, she and I will respectively be dealing with it, not only from "different standpoints," but "from different levels."
Anyhoot, I read both your recent, wonderful posts on this subject before responding to this, the first one. In which you seem to be proposing the absolutely fundamental need for a universal criterion by which the Truth of Reality can be reliably known. In the second, it seemed you presented a small sampling of effects which naturally proceed from any distortion of Reality.
It seems Reality can be distorted by minds — in ways that actually afflict human beings personally and directly and, from there, into society at large.
The reason I say that (FWIW): Nowadays, since both truth and morality are "assumed" to be "relative" (relative to WHAT????), people no longer discern that there is any substantial difference between "rhetoric" and "reality."
I'll just leave the problem there for now.
Thank you ever so much for your wonderfully thought-provoking essay/posts, dear grey_whiskers!
I've noticed this many times: atheists and believers can't find a mutually-agreed upon starting point. Literally, we don't even agree on how to begin. I think this is why the phrase "leap of faith" is so important. One does not move logically into faith. If you did, it wouldn't be faith. I think believers would be much better off not trying to reason or argue atheists into anything. There's no path from logic to faith. It really is a leap.
Internet Forums and Social Dynamics: Part II: Snapbacks
Cheers!
"An insight, of course, perfectly consistent with Sartre's: Hell is the Other!" ~ betty boop
"....If one regards culture as a sort of boundary -- a necessary boundary, by the way -- anyone who does not stay within the lines will be regarded as an outlaw, a retrobate, a moron, or a fool, irrespective of whether they fall below or above its expectations. ......
In a certain sense, to be "normal" is to be partially dead, unless one is aware of the fact that one is only behaving normally in order to "pass." [ie]: "if you're not eccentric, you're wrong." But we do not necessarily advertise our eccentricity in the wrong circles. That's not proper madness, that's just stupidity. Why act the fool with people who'll just think you're nuts?
bttt :)
"....You know what it's like to have to be around people who cannot possibly make contact with you. Since they cannot resonate with, or conform to, reality in all its richness, in order to get along at all, you must conform to them and their little reality tunnel.....
"[This type of] person forecloses the Mystery and reduces reality to the superficial laws and regularities he is capable of comprehending with his object-mind.....
"Look at the childishly literal manner in which the radical atheist interprets revelation -- as if transcendence is a thing! Instead of going off the deep end, they have gone off the shallow end, head first. Which results in paralysis from the heart in and ego up."
EXAMPLE:
"Seems wrongheaded to deploy the tools of the tenured to try to prove or disprove the existence miracles, when the whole point of the miraculous is that it is outside or beyond the reach of these tools like trying to use physics to describe what is outside physics. The only thing your closed system of thought will have proved is that Gödel was correct, but we knew that already.
Besides, the sense of the miraculous obviously lies within the subject, not in the phenomenon (and is indeed its reason for being), the latter of which may be easily explained away by anyone with a little but not too much logic.
Our advice, which you are commanded to ignore not by us, of course! would be to stay within the confines of the empirical/rational/experiential, and testify that nothing has or will ever happen to you that is outside the system of thought you have constructed for yourself. Or, at least you won’t perceive it, which is something we can all agree on."
~ Gagdad Bob COMMENT on January 1, 2012 at this web site HERE