Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
I prefer Popper's "first principle" to BroJoeK's, in part for the reasons you cite, dearest sister in Christ.
BroJoeK's "first principle" — "natural explanations for natural processes" — rather stacks the deck in favor of finding "natural explanations" only. We tend to find what we are looking for, and screen out anything irrelevant to that purpose.
Thank you so very much for your astute observations, dearest sister in Christ!
Thanks so much, dear sister in Christ, for clearing that up! I didn't get the context of your statement, and so read it wrongly.
Hermes Trismegistus is a real puzzle for me — there is still some doubt that such a figure ever really existed. If he didn't, then who wrote his stuff???
Further, at the period in which he allegedly existed, "esoteric material" like his was generally conveyed by oral tradition. The Pythagorean school, for instance — which evidently taught that the very basis of the cosmos could be found in number and geometry — absolutely forbade putting the teachings into written form. Violators were subject to capitol punishment — as at least one poor soul found out the hard way. He said he was only "taking notes" to help his subsequent meditations on the teachings of the school. Whereupon he was sewn into a calf skin and thrown into a raging river, and promptly drowned.
Most esoteric schools were very alert to the "casting pearls before swine" problem. Thus their reliance on oral transmission only, and then only to those "adepts" who had qualified themselves as worthy of receiving the teachings, largely based on the soundness of their moral character and the quality of their reasoning abilities.
So if Hermes Trismegistus wrote stuff down, he must have been trying to reach the masses, for whatever reason. Certainly if he wrote, he was not terribly concerned about the "pearls before swine" problem....
I love Orwell. He really nails it....
Thank you so very much, dear spirited, for your fine essay/post!
Thank you so much for your kind words, dearest sister in Christ!
Are we really looking to "unstack" the deck, or just struggling for control over who gets to stack it? Is "not allowing a divine foot in the door" any less stacked than allowing only one specific "divine foot" while disallowing any others?
Which word didn’t you understand?
What lead you to that misbegotten notion? Which word didn’t you understand?
What lead you to that misbegotten notion? Which word didn’t you understand?
What lead you to that misbegotten notion? Which word didn’t you understand?
What “we” is this, Pilgrim? Are you “looking to unstack the deck,” or “or just struggling for control over who gets to stack it?”
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear YHAOS!
That hit a nerve, didn’t it?
Get over yourself.
You figure if you put me on the defensive, nobody will notice that question never gets answered?
Projection. Do not assume everyone's thought processes are identical to your own. Standing off at a distance and peppering the assembly with spitwads is a miserable existence. Give it up.
I bet you'd like that. You get to sit there and declare your own religous beliefs the one true faith, and everyone else has to agree with you or STFU.
To boop: “if you fantasize that natural-science somehow can include super-natural explanations, or even explanations of the super-natural, then I would challenge you to find some official dictionary which says that explicitly.”
Spirited: To paraphrase Kierkegaard, natural science (as opposed to science in search of truth and reality) is the ‘science’ of Tolkien’s Gollum. Gollum is the quintessential ‘blood and soil’ being in search of power here below. His soul is materialized, or as the prophet Jeremiah put it, his soul/spirit is a cistern without living water. To spiritually-dark Gollum, the supernatural is nonsense.
Interesting way to approach this ... in times past, the Jews who practiced their religion while traveling would carry a plumb-bob, to determine if the water they wanted to use in ritual washing was moving or not (alive or sedentary).
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