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To: hosepipe; Alamo-Girl; tacticalogic; Agamemnon; Paradox; TXnMA; metmom; GodGunsGuts; MrB; Fichori
It reminds me of the well known academic bromide, “I have my truth you have yours”.... Which obviously makes any truth an opinion.

Exactly so, dear brother in Christ!

If there is no Truth, then every man's opinion is just as good as any other man's: There is no universal criterion that can be invoked to discriminate between them as to their adequacy in making trustworthy descriptions of the world of men and of nature....

As Ivan Karamazov put it, "If there is no God, then everything is possible."

Or as Chesterton recognized, If one does not believe in God, that doesn't mean that one believes in nothing. It means that one can believe in anything.

But where does science itself find any purchase under such conditions? Its most basic assumption is that the world is intelligible, because in some way it reflects a truthful order — described by what philosophers call Natural Law.

Long before the advent of Christianity, great thinkers recognized that God — as Plato put it, the Unknown God Beyond the Cosmos — is not only pure Being, but Truth itself. Human beings are "participations" in both.

Some of the greatest thinkers in all of human history recognized — long before Christianity — that absent the idea of universal Truth (Logos) — always understood by mankind as being of divine origin — there is only doxa, or "opinion."

In situations involving disputed opinions, it is always the guy who commands the most "power" (personal and/or social) who wins the debate. If anybody needs an illustration of this, he need only review President Clinton's speech at the DNC last night.

Clinton is the finest example of a "sophist" available to our inspection these days. He seeks to win debates through the power of emotional appeals. It doesn't matter that his discourse is riddled with logical fallacies throughout. He persuades without any recourse to Truth or reason itself....

If God "dies" in human consciousness, Truth and reason die with Him.

But of course, man cannot "kill God," no matter how hard he tries.

Thank you so very much for writing, dear brother in Christ!

128 posted on 09/06/2012 12:08:35 PM PDT by betty boop (We are led to believe a lie when we see with, and not through the eye. — William Blake)
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To: betty boop

My favorite humanist argument is when they try to tell me my morality is wrong or inferior to their morality. (They call it “ethics”).

“So, you, a random collection of stardust, are going to try to tell me, another random collection of stardust, that I’m somehow morally “wrong” in my belief system?”


131 posted on 09/06/2012 12:39:21 PM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter knows whom he's working fors)
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To: betty boop
If there is no Truth, then every man's opinion is just as good as any other man's: There is no universal criterion that can be invoked to discriminate between them as to their adequacy in making trustworthy descriptions of the world of men and of nature....

And how about the converse?

ToE was dismissed as "just Darwin's opinion".

If there is no Truth then everything is just an opinion.

If everything is just an opinion, can there be any Truth?

136 posted on 09/06/2012 1:08:02 PM PDT by tacticalogic ("Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as he chambered his last round.)
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