To cut to the chase, LogicWings: Your last comes somewhat as a shock to me; I gather you are (evidently) not "a serious person."
You know, I am truly mystified here. What did I say? I have to laugh because I am so often accused of being a ‘too serious’ person and here you accuse me of being the opposite. At this point you probably won’t believe me but I had absolutely no intention of shocking you, have no idea what exactly I said that did shock you. Don’t have a clue what you are talking about. I really don’t know what being a ’serious person’ really is, but I am every bit as sincere about what I am saying here as you are. There isn’t anything more than that. For the most part I don’t go and look at what everybody posts, I just react to what gets sent to me, so if what I have said is in opposition to some post that I overlooked I can’t help that. I don’t have time to do more than that. I don’t think I found this thread, I think it was sent to me. I am on the record here. So if anybody wants to buy a clue as to what I might think about the present question, it's either already posted; or people probably (hopefully!) understand they are free to just ask me.
Ok. The fact is, I don't understand your game. And so do not feel up to playing it.
I’m not playing a game. I don’t really appreciate you insinuating I am, but I’m a big boy with a thick skin so that’s ok. That you don’t understand though, that I can understand. That this threatens you, that too I can understand. But don’t think for one instant that I don’t mean everything I say, that I am just playing with your head and don’t mean any of this. What I understand about reality has come from years of searching and hard cost to me personally. If you don’t understand, fine. If you don’t want to play, that‘s fine too. But before you go away mad, do me one favor. Tell me what so offended you so I apologize.
Otherwise, you are the one who is playing the game.
The meaning of experience? When did that get on the table? That is a whole other subject.
You put “the meaning of experience” on the table when you brought up the issue of “my worldview.” A worldview is primarily concerned with the meaning of experience, of existence. On the other hand, a person could say experience, existence is meaningless. But that would constitute a worldview, too. The two are so intimately related that, although they can be individually distinguished, one does not have the one without the other. This isn’t a change of subject.
When I asked whether you thought valid evidence cannot include oral testimony from the lived experience of actual human beings, you replied: “Only to the degree that that 'evidence' can be verified by our own experience today.”
The “evidence” we seem to be speaking of here seems to be of intangible (I’ll hold off on using the “S” word) experience. Although we are contemporaries, you cannot “verify” my experience of this kind. And I can’t “verify” yours. But because I am conscious that I have an “inner life,” I assume that you do, also. This is not an operation in logic, it is simple common sense. Although common sense doesn’t gives us absolute certainty about anything, many times it’s all we’ve got to go on.
Moreover, do you suggest that because you cannot personally verify that a particular event took place in the past that it certainly didn’t happen? Notwithstanding the testimony of witnesses, and the fact that the event powerfully affected -- one could reasonably say transformed -- the course of human history down to our own time?
Socrates apparently didn’t write anything – he “left no evidence” that we might consult in deciding whether this was a real person or a fictional character. But Plato and Xenophon and Aristophanes seem to have believed Socrates existed. Still, these men are presently unavailable for “cross-examination” on this point. How do you “verify” the facticity of Socrates – or that of Plato et al. for that matter? (Maybe somebody else wrote their stuff after all….)
In regard to my observation that choices we human beings make in our most personal, intimate life may well have public consequences, you accused me of “selective reasoning…[of] only choosing those factors that conform to [my own] view and ignoring those that don’t.”
Leaving aside an objection that you perhaps infer too much with respect to the choices that get loaded into my “selective reasoning,” I have merely to mention that our present little “dust-up” perfectly illustrates my point. (E.g., people writing to me via private mail wondering why I’m being so “mean” to you! :^) )
Seriously, I can’t think of too many decisions (large or small) that I have ever made – or not made as the case may be -- that did not affect other people within the circle of my “influence” – family, friends, coworkers, etc., etc., for good or ill in some degree or other.
WRT your joke that you are a “corrupt old logician,” you said I “seemed to take it seriously!” I can laugh at a joke, yet at the same time see its serious side. Jokes wouldn’t be funny if they lacked one. I took you up on your self-description because it offered the perfect foil for a point that I was making in regard to your comment that I ought to be a Sunday school teacher. (That’s pretty funny, too – and also has a “serious” side.) The point being, mainly, that little children have the great gift of curiosity – before it has been “educated out of them,” before they have been “indoctrinated” into whatever reigning ideologies are currently in fashion. Materialism and atheism have become very popular today, as I’m sure you may have noticed.
You wrote: “Gee, you sure seem to be a Christian and it is my understanding that according to that worldview, one is either ‘Redeemed’ by believing that Jesus died on the cross as a sacrificial payment for all sin or one is not Redeemed and, therefore, still corrupt. Am I wrong on either of these counts?”
You are correct that I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who was incarnated as a man, who suffered as a man, and willingly sacrificed Himself that mankind would be redeemed and the “lost” restored to the Father. That redemption is intended for all men, though a man may refuse it. As for such a refusal, that, to me, is up to God to judge. I could say that living in such a refusal is a corrupt way to live, in the sense that it is a deliberate falling away from truth, and so disorders the personality. (Sorry I have no proof of the kind you require to help my argument here.) But that’s not to say that I think it is my place to have much of an opinion of what transpires between you and God, let alone to consider myself in a position to judge it.
You continue: “You raise two points, first you say ‘between which human conscious experience normally takes place and unfolds’ which implies that it isn’t ‘out there’ but is part of my ‘human conscious experience’ which is here-now. This isn’t what you said before and this creates the dichotomy, not me. It was your assertion that the ’source’ was ’out there’ but now you seem to be saying it is also part of the normal human consciousness, so it isn’t ’out there’ after all. Which is it?”
You seem to want to treat this issue as if I were speaking of some spatially-located site where the process of conscious reflection takes place. There is no such spatially located site! But that doesn’t mean that Eric Voegelin was wrong when he observed that the psyche (soul) is both the site and sensorium of the consciousness of divine things.
I hate to infer too much, but I gather that, for you, lack of spatial location would plainly constitute evidence of the absence of any real thing. That in order for things to be “real,” they must have position in space-time. For if they do not, then there’s no way they can be “tested,” falsified, proven, disproven, in the manner you require.
But what do you do with a conscious experience that has the character of “not-me” speaking, of a kind of “incoming!” from a source sensed as being outside one’s self – in that no conscious will or desire or anything else other than pure receptivity is all one had to do with it?
Prescribe Thorazine?
I must close pretty soon. Much good stuff remains, but I have to go make dinner.
But first, one last point. You said, “I was thinking about how the Chinese Communists complain about the ‘spiritual pollution’ from our culture as we come into increasing contact. What is ‘spiritual pollution’ to an atheistic communist? What could they possibly be thinking of? The precise meaning of words is so very important. This is such a glaring example. It certainly doesn’t mean what we think it means, of that I can be sure.”
Not that I want to establish any “moral equivalency” between you and the Chicoms here; but I think it may be safe to say that, like you, they think matters “spiritual” are wholly bogus cultural artifacts left over from times when men were “primitive” (i.e., “lesser evolved” and thus inferior to what we are today). And now men aren’t primitive anymore, because they have logic, and reason, and science; so having all those good, solid things, these superstitions should just die away….
However, these “superstitions” do not just die away. It may be that, somehow, such “superstitions” are part of the nature and substance of the human condition. In any case, they not only do not die away; they keep on getting “rearticulated” in different forms over time. The “divine symbol” is always there; interpretations of it vary in times and places….
So the Chicoms have apparently made a “utilitarian” decision to appropriate the symbol and try to harness it for their own purposes: If you can’t “make it go away,” well then, try to “make it serve."
Chinese communist "doxology" is made to stand in for “legitimate” (you’ll doubtless quibble about that usage) expressions of the spirit, which are then absolutely “forbidden” (and criminalized). Even “home-gown” spiritualists such as Falun-Gong, not to mention assorted American and European priests and pastors, and American “values” more generally, are all anathema….