Down with Emotivism! WE MUST PURGE THE EARTH!
How is the literature I cite useless? Can someone’s mind be not influenced by another? Someone can take something from their mind and produce it in some way in the objective world (literature, art, etc). Anything I cite could also be from someone else’s mind, or many. What we produce in this world comes from our mind. That’s the start of the things we create, but I’m not denying that physical objects or actions can’t influence (or alter) our mind. I don’t believe everything can be created in the objective world without the subjective.
Your example is vague. If there was a drug addict or someone who lived isolated, I’m sure the way they think, their views, and what they believe would be different than someone who wasn’t a drug addict or lived in isolation. Your mind grows just like your body, the more you take in the more it expands. When you are young your mind is not developed, you can’t “think” because you don’t know anything. Once you begin to take in ideas and learn your mind begins to grow. You’re implying that if your physical body is impaired in some way that your brain can’t function your mind can’t function either, as if the mind and body is separate, but obviously if your brain can’t physically function your mind won’t “function” since you won’t even be able to think or connect.
I didn’t “define” spirituality? I gave my interpretation of it which I tried to avoid, because you can so easily look it up on Wikipedia and find it out yourself. I was well aware of that from the start. Why you went through so much trouble is beyond me.
I wouldn’t know if I was using new-age rhetoric given that I hate the new-age spirituality literature and “philosophy” that I have read. What I do read is far from what’s considered new-age.
“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish”
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Quote
Where did ‘miraculus’ come in? Miraculus typically means either impossible or improbable. Several thousands of people is neither.
A writer above discussed reality as the perceptions of the senses. The thousands of out-of-body experiences are the perceptions of the senses. Why are these perceptions not considered of the same reality.
Anwsering Humes quote: If I said I’d never seen a tree, that would be lying. If a person who had an out-of-body experience said he had not, that would also be lying.
Thanks filc. I think I just tasted vomit.
Yes, I’ve read those. However first a supernatural deity was not mentioned nor assumed, and second, their articles described chemical changes that accompanied the experience, but no proof that the chemicals caused the experience. Every time sense perceptions occur there are also chemcial changes.
In the 16-18th centuries many, many well-known and highly reputed men had visions and dreams which they took very seriously and discussed and wrote about.
Our age is the most materialistic age in history, so far, to the extent that all we can debate is whether or not a God exists. In our age it is most common to deny the reality of anything that is not material.
It’s interesting, however, that the best neurosurgeons today state clearly and succinctly that they have no explanation for the existance of the ‘mind’ as opposed to the brain.
It is of my belief that while a separation of the mind and the body would be completely and utterly awesome, it is not a probable event. For then, you must explain why is it that injury to the brain can lead to injury of the mind. The mind is an emergent property of the brain.
Find me a contradiction of this, and I’ll change my beliefs. Otherwise, the topic has swayed away from economics completely.
It’s not that injury to the brain leads to injury of the mind, but injury to the brain leads to injury in connecting with your mind (destroying the path to your mind). I would find injury to the mind to actually not be from physical harm, but more so pyschological and mental harm. You could do more damage to your mind by reading flawed theory!
Well, I understand what you mean by spiritual now.
Care to answer a few questions?
*Do you believe in evolution?
*How old do you think the Earth is?
*Are you aware that Marx and Engels also suported anarchy?
*Are you now, after having read teh above, been turned off anarchy?
*Are you aware thet religion has killed more people than any State ever?
*Do you think that the reasoning expounded in Human Action is irrational?
I’m sorry, did I just imagine your lack of reading comprehension? My mind does that sometimes. Or was it your mind that did that? Maybe this whole conversation is in our minds, and this concept is in our mind… or the mind of door which is just how I perceive reality. Or maybe you’re a pesky little immaterial yet non existing idea in my mind which is a subjective concept of Obama’s mind who is knowingly pulling the strings of this fictitious discussion which a point of view. Is the mind a figment of my imagination which is my mind because I perceive reality subjectively through my mind and adbewobdowbduobwbdsakwdfsdCBSJ*@(#&@)(2973928a&@(@#@ oh was that you or me just now? Your mind only perceived it just now, but it must have been determined earlier, seeing that reality is a product of subjective consciousness, which really is just how you perceive how I perceive which the door perceives things. Could you stop imagining that I debunked Praxeology wait why am I talking this WAY and STUCK SO!!! Does that mean there’s something beyond space and time, or it just our mind reality which for some reason is bound to the natural laws of science, but not uncertainty because god err I mean the mind reigns supreme. Hahahaha you just pulled a Freudian slip because I imagined it by writing on this keyboard… oh wait there is no keyboard. It’s all in your mind. Wait, shouldn’t this keyboard disappear when you jump off a cliff, resulting in your death, or was that just my subjective perception of reality… or alternate reality which is intertwined with other realities which are such concepts of the mind which is a concept of the mind which is mind which is mind mind mind mind mind mind. Otto is spelt otto backwards… or is it? Ottomobile. HEY STOP THAT! Am I the god of my reality or is the mind meow your mind you all imagine mind. Why am I so powerless? Is that just a point of view which Bert’s mind is making the assumption about not who, which is a concept is a concept, is a fiction of mind? Argh! How did just solve the secrets of cosmology and decipher the mysteries of the universe through excessive…grrrr… mental masturbation from my mom’s basement, yet I’m overwhelmed by the physical neuroscience position? Why don’t I know any of it??? Why am I limited to what I touch!!! Damn it! My mind of your mind must be playing a trick on me, but then again all knowledge is questionable and subjective but that can’t be true because it’s assumption of a subjective perception for your presumption which will go away when you’re dead, but dead is really alive. It sure is dark in this basement. No he has it all wrong. It isn’t the limitation of my optical metal detectors. My mind made everything disappear. THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!
I’m out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB8Kvk0M0w&feature=related
No Yes No 42 you see, that’s an assumption you make based on your subjective perception of your reality which is occurring within your mind… because I said so. It would be arbitrary of you to say it’s arbitrary. How many lights am I holding up, Winston?
This statement presumes the impossibility of separating faith from reason.
Faith is hope in that which is unseen or unknowable.
Reason confirms what is knowable.
Mises said something like ‘conceiving is reason, believing is beholding.’ I did not take his context to be a disparaging remark towards believing. He simply implies separation of the two.
Christ also emphasized that faith ought rightly to be distinguished from reason - ‘render unto Ceasar’, etc… and ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’, etc…
I have no difficulty in distinguishing and admitting 1) that faith and reason ought to be separated 2) that I subjectively value each according to what may be demonstrated as knowable, 3) that subjective value may not be perfect as it relates to either faith or reason, 4) it is impossible to know the relative perfection of either faith or reason.
See my previous post.
It is rational to conceive that those who have faith in God and those who do not are both capable of having and using both faith and reason rationally which implies the ability to separate the two.
I would add that I think that those who kill people - that is, to murder, not to kill in defense of one’s life and property - make a grave error in separating faith from reason.
I know this is boring but please bear with me, two more questions:
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- would you than hold than “do not commit adultery” and “do not kill” are in the same moral category, as Moseic law seems to put them in?
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- do you believe God was being evil, wrong, or was jut kidding when he promised Abraham that his race would produce the kings of the earth, explicitly saying that God approves of the existence of States?
Again, your argument is circular.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your questions. I don’t know that they add anything to the discussion at hand, but, in the interests of Christian charity, I will attempt a short answer. I fully expect you will disagree with my answers, and I would ask that, if you desire, we can take up these matters perhaps on another forum
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No.
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Between 6 & 10,000 years old.
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No. They were not anarchists. You will have to provide something more than the Revolution to justify that assumption, unless you believe that their position was of perpetual revolution, which it was not.
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I have never been an anarchist. There’s a difference between Christian economics & anarchism, as readily understood.
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Let’s say I grant you your governing assumption, my answer would be ‘So what?’ Ridiculous, huh? But let’s see: from the perspective of biological evolution, the position which says that such mass genocide is evil is irrational, as readily understood. What one bunch of bags of biological stuff do to another bunch of bags of biological stuff is really irrelevant in terms of the evolution of the species. As I had one evolutionist apologist say once, “It’s just evolution, it just happens!”
Now, from my perspective, which is the historical perspective coming down thru’ Augustine, Calvin, and then into the Theonomic ethics of guys like Rushdoony and Gary North, 2 guys that should be well-known among fans of Austrian economics, what Christians have done in the past should be judged by what their creed is. If people don’t live up to their ideals, does that invalidate those ideals, or does it rather call into question the commitment of those same Christians to their ideals? Now, I want you to be honest here, becoz I don’t know anybody who lives up to their ideals! I mean, how shocked were we all when Tiger Woods was exposed last year as a fraud? Now Tiger Woods has never claimed to be a Christian, but he seemed to uphold decent Christian, conservative values, for the most part (chucking clubs and swearing at cameramen aside!), but when he was exposed, his commitment to those same Christian, conservative values was very definitely called into question, and rightly so. And so it should also be for people that use the name ‘Christian’, myself included.
- In so far as it believes that all facts are determined by chance, and logic is a timeless, impersonal principle, then yes. If, from the evolutionary perspective again, logic, as a part of the evolutionary process, is always evolving, then, even if what Mises said was true then, there’s no reason to believe it now. Perhaps, as I said, logic is a part of the evolving universe, so what Mises wrote at the time was outdated as soon as he wrote it!
The alternative is, of course, that logic is not evolving at all, so that what Mises wrote remains true today as it did then. But the only perspective, among the multitude of wack-job ideas in the world that would even consider the problem of logic, that stands up under that criteria is the Christian one. There is nothing else that stands up to scrutiny. This is what Francis Schaeffer and Rushdoony spent most oftheir working lives saying. People didn’t like it then, and I think we can see they still don’t.
But that’s a far cry from answering it.
But let’s go further…
May I ask you a few questions in reply?
Do you believe in evolution, and why?
How old do you think the earth is, and why?
Are you aware that Marx & Engels were morons?
Are you, having read the above, now turned off Marxism?
Are you aware that your queston about religion killing people is self-refuting?
Do you think that the reasoning in Gary North’s ‘Moses & Pharaoh’ is irrational?
Regards
craigy
I’d be delighted.
I certainly do. Mostly because there are a few fossils around, that show that creatures that existed before no longer do, yet have spawned what appear to be other species. Because species have risen and died out before the very eyes of humanity, and because we ourselves practice artificial selection with dogs, horses and the like, so genetic mutation happens.
Round six billion (hate this American numeral system, it should be milliard, billion is something else!) years, as proven form geological data.
Indeed they where.
?! Yes, i now see the light..
.
No, I’m not. So, taking you “judge me by me creed, not deed” instance, we should all convert to Marxism, as Marxist are really the greatest humanitarians, and would never condone a totalitarian system. Well, speaking only for myself, I don’t give a damn about what people illude themselves about what their “creed” is: action speaks clear, and organized religion has already killed enough for such a farce to creep into anarchism.
As a side note, here in Albania we have a saying commemorating the typical priest attitude ‘As the priest says: Do as I say, not as I do”.
I’m terribly sorry, but I’m not familiar with that book.
Hope I’ve been helpful, as your answers surely where to me.
I’m scratching my head here… you’re rejecting biological evolution? Do you have a better theory of biology than biologists have?
That biological complexity and order emerged from a decentralized process is hardly a win for central planning. I really don’t care what Marx or Engels thought… Marx was a patent quack and Engels wasn’t even a scholar.
Actually, placing God in precedence to self is the perfect recipe for statist pre-emption of self-interest in favor of what the State’s kept priests say is the divinely sanctioned “common interest”. This is why God is always on “our side” - to die because that is God’s will is much easier to accept, psychologically, than to die because the king is a self-aggrandizing piece of shit who has no qualms sending you out to die in the battles he starts to enrich himself.
Please support this assertion.
I think Cornelius Van Til confused knowing and persuading. Knowing is a purely individualistic activity. Persuading is interpersonal and requires shared assumptions (presuppositions). All that is available to me are my sense perceptions, memory and reasoning capacity. Every proposition I hold, in my mind, to be true I hold as a result of having processed by my reasoning capacity as informed by my sense perceptions. The books of Cornelius Van Til come to the attention of my mind through my sense perception. Whether I agree or disagree with his assertions is a result of the application of my reasoning capacity to the contents of his books.
If there is some “sixth sense” by which I “simply know” the truth (that God exists, and is this particular God, etc.), I am unaware of it - perhaps I am handicapped. If you possess and are aware of this “sixth sense”, then you are fortunate and all I can say is good for you… it must be nice to be one of the elect. But your extrasensory capacity does me absolutely no good.
Clayton -
So, let me guess, you disbelieve that the theory of plate tectonics in any way adequately describes how, for example, mountains and continents develop?
Why do you hold that belief?
I really have no idea what you are trying to say, there.
The theory of evolution seeks to explain the origin of morality, purpose, et cetera. But that does not, in any way, diminish the importance or the “meaning” of them. We developed the concept of “friendship” only because to divide labor is more effective than to not. But I doubt that you or any other person truly, consciously considers that fact when you or they seek to establish friendships with other people.
I think that Mises alludes to that very illuminatingly:
[quote=“Ludwig von Mises, “Human Action”, Section 8.1, “Human Cooperation””]
Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man’s most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.
[/quote]
It does not.
It does not.
I cannot read the above paragraph probably because I evolved (in the style of the pokemon, apparently) between when you “wrote” it and now.
Hey Ryan.
This is gonna get really hard to follow, what with me quoting someone else as part of my answer, then you quoting me as part of yours to me, and now, me quoting you quoting me quoting someone else, ad nauseum. So I won’t bother with that. I’ll just go to what you’ve written, and hopefully, if we can’t agree, we can at least better understand each other. Howzat?
Do I disbelieve the theory of plate tectonics? I, along with everyone else in the world, have a worldview into which such things have their place, so when you ask a question like that, I have to say that I’m not personally interested in geology. But I take it as a given that people that share my worldview, including geologists, would have reason to either hold or disbelieve that theory. I don’t pretend to understand geology becoz I have no interest in it.
What I would say is that, beginning from different presuppositions, it should be obvious that different conclusions are drawn, in the same way that Keynes & Mises started from different presuppositions and therefore drew different conclusions. But just quickly, and this’ll have you shaking your head, in so far as this plate tectonics disagrees with the Biblical record, I see no reason to believe it.
Why do I hold the belief that the universe is only pretty young? Once again, we come back to that whole ‘worldview’ bizness…I take the Biblical record as ultimately authoritative. I see no reason to change that belief. You believe differently. You hold that anything is possible in the evolutionary framework if you give it enuf billions of years. You disagree with that statement. You are amazed that anyone could be that stoopid. Yet when pushed, this is what evolutionary theory, whether modern or ancient, presupposes at the outset. I know this becoz once upon a time I held to the same thing.
In answer to the quote you gave from Mises, I disagree (gee, go figure, huh?). I do not see that ethical problems/concerns can be reduced to pure emotionalism. Saying things like “These feelings are the source of man’s most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence.” do not exactly fill me with confidence. To reduce the domain of the ethical to what amounts to basically a ‘If it feels good, do it’ mentality does not hold the same force as ‘This do and live!’. Aside from that, there is nothing in Mises’ statement that can draw the ethical line in the sand. There would be no concrete universal reason why a homocidal maniac like ‘Jason Voorhees’ from the Friday the 13th movie series, in the interests of his own happiness, should not be free to do what Jason Voorhees does. Like I said before, it’s just evolution, it just happens!
And this is where both out-&-out Marxists and Anarcho-Capitalists, who are supposed to hate each other with a passion, are in fact blood-brothers. Neither can concieve of an ethics that is at the same time both universal and eternal, holding true for all times and in all places. It always amazes me when non-Christians throw this problem of ethics at us when the ground upon which they sit is so unstable!
Now we get to the problem of logic, and why evolutionary theory fails at the outset. In answer to my point that non-Christian philosophy presupposes a universe of chance where logic is an impersonal principle, you answer that it isn’t so. What? That’s it? Surely you jest! Neil Peart said ‘To deny is to presuppose an alternative.’ I take it you have one…just one you choose not to share, perhaps. I dunno, dude? What’s doing?
Perhaps you might wanna have a look at the history of western philosophy. (I bet I’m treading on some toes here!) From Descartes to Hume, we see empiricism fall flat on its face. Kant comes along and says, “It appears science has been killed off, but I’m gonna save science!” Yeah good. What he really did was divorce the noumenal (ideas) from the phenomenal (matter). Hegel comes along & says, “The rational (which is the noumenal, the world of ideas) is the real”. Marx comes along next and says, “Great! We can remake the world of matter with our ideas! The goal of philosophy, therefore, in the past has been to understand the world. That was stoopid. The goal of philosophy is not to understand the world, but to change it.” Hence, the Revolution, and Statism until we’ve evolved to such a degree we won’t need a ‘state’ at all. Like I said, Yeah good.
(Not that it adds anything to the argument, but it’s funny to me, and I’m sure the irony won’t be lost on you, that, on a website dedicated to individual freedom, there’s the evolutionary atheists, all of one mind, almost like they share the same braincell, all beating up on the token Christian, all one of them, all on his individual lonesome. The funnier thing is that on such places as the Amazon.com forums, the same thing takes place - forums started by well-meaning Christians on such topics as prayer, or different views on the Millenium, etc, end up getting hijacked by atheists, all of one mind, almost like, again, they share the same braincell. Go figure, huh?)
Your final point, in closing, is kinda cute. I love Poke…well I did when I was a kid. Since then, I grew up (a bit). Perhaps you haven’t. Are you sure you evolved, and not devolved instead? (ok, that was mean & unChristian. I repent in dust & ashes. Still, it’s been fun…[Y])
That says it all.