How can ANYone make an argument of substance against your own ethereal 'ghost within' assertions?
You assert, but do not demonstrate.
Pot - Kettle. -- As I wrote at #120, and you typically failed to reply.
I flat-out reject your notion that your brain and your consciousness are one and the same thing, and have attempted to show why I have reached that conclusion. Beyond that, what can I do?
How bout admitting that your mystical/unprovable theories, -- ones that men like Pinker are showing to be flawed, -- are not a valid basis for constitutional government?
I'm not taking a shot at you here. Just making an observation about how our conversations usually go. I don't know what to say to you -- what would you like me to say?
If you disagree with my question above, tell me why it is important to you that all citizens of the USA honor your God as the creator of our rights.
First of all, tpaine, God is not my God. There is only one God and He is the God of everybody, whether they choose to acknowledge Him or not. Different traditions may speak of Him differently; but still there is but One God.
Second He is the very "Creator" cited by our great "secular saint," Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, as the Source of our inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty, and Happiness" ("happiness" being TJ's translation of John Locke's "property" in the Lockean context of unalienable human rights).
In that document, Jefferson states that our unalienable rights are the GIFTs of the Creator to the human person. Because they are God's gifts to man, they are sacrosanct, meaning that no man or political state can ever have any legitimate right to violate these rights except potentially in punishment of a crime for which an individual has been convicted by a jury of his peers in open court. Whereupon the convicted individual is understood to have "forfeited" his natural rights as the just price to be paid for his criminal behavior.
Knowing the history of our country as you do, I know you are aware that the Founders of our nation, the Framers of our Constitution, received their ideas about the sanctity and inviolability of the rights of the human person, and their ideas of justice, from the Judeo-Christian tradition which formed their characters and intellects.
America is a secular nation, and I do believe she ought to remain that way. I believe in the separation of church and state, the separation of the secular (the "profane") from the "sacred"; that one should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's."
But our historic values, or national philosophy if you will, at bottom is rooted in the Judeo-Christian (and classical) philosophy that deals with God, man, nature, and society. That philosophy justifies us in resisting collectivist, totalitarian sociopolitical forms. Indeed, these days it is not only the best protection against such anti-human developments; it may be the last protection we have that is still standing (though somewhat wobbily these days, unfortunately).
I'm not here to proselytize or indoctrinate you or anybody else. All I want to do is to point to certain facts about our culture, our society, and our political order -- and then invite you to go look, if you want to.
I'm not here to "tell you what to think" or to "tell you what to believe" -- merely to show you where to look. Then -- you have to look for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
This is not the deal you get from Professor Pinker. He literally wants to "indoctrinate you" into his theory, to have you accept it as the one and only valid truth about mankind. Or so it seems to me. I explained why I have come to that conclusion in a recent post that you (apparently) had no use for....
The "truth" he wants you to accept is that all a man is, is the neural activity of his brain. There is no "self," no soul, no spirit in man; just chemical and physical reactions. But where have you ever heard our Framers say that unalienble rights inhere in "brains" or in physicochemical reactions?
Thanks for writing, tpaine.