I think that fundamentalism is the most logical of all religious positions avaiable. If there is absolute truth, and it is given by god, then even if it contradicts our senses, it follows that our senses are wrong. God doesn’t err; we do.
Makes sense to me.
Thats funny, if God is always right, then why would He install faulty sensors in His creatures?
Well apparently God would say your logic is flawed.
From a mini-book I’m working on in my spare time:
You Control You
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
- Buddha
It is obviously true that only you control you. It is so obvious that it feels trite to say it. Nevertheless, ever-present bad ideas can undermine our conviction of its truth without realizing it. There are two corollaries to the fact that only you control you.
First, you cannot blame others for your failures and your pain, even when they are the agents of your suffering. Why does the spouse who has tragically lost a loved one to a crime of violence grieve differently than the spouse who has lost a loved one to a natural disaster? The actions of others feel personal because our brains are designed to “take it personally”. But even the most visceral feelings that others invoke in us are not completely outside of our own control. The person who chooses to think of their suffering as an act of Nature or Providence rather than the personal agency of the aggressor who is responsible has deprived the aggressor of that power over their soul, if not their body.
Second, no one else deserves credit for your accomplishments. It is common to hear people say things like, “We each have a duty to give back to society a portion of what we have earned from it.” On the surface, such statements may seem plausible but they are false. It is true that you have benefitted from the ideas and energies of others. But it is no less true that those who have benefitted you were also benefitted from the ideas and energies of yet others. Our proximate benefactors no more deserve credit for our accomplishments than their benefactors do for their accomplishments. It is simply a fact of the human condition that benefits accrue to others as the inevitable by-product of acting.
The Ultimate Starting Point
The fact that you control you can be applied to each part of the soul as I have divided it above. The consequences to every aspect of your being are far-reaching. You alone are responsible for what you believe to be true, for what you perceive to be real and what you value. As a matter of fact of the nature of reality, you cannot shrug this responsibility off onto someone else – not a priest, not a church, not a university, not a government, not a social leader.
Because you control you, the soul itself is the ultimate starting point. That is, the soul is the ultimate judge of reality, truth and value beyond which there is no higher court of appeal. Whatever its origin, every belief I may have about theology or neurology or mathematics or cosmology or quantum physics must stand judgment before the throne of my own cognition and my own perceptions. I cannot have certainty through proxy, which is the fallacy of any appeal to authority. Certainty or even confidence is a state of mind not a fact residing within a physical object or within an abstract idea or within the mind of someone else.
The soul as it relates to memory perception is ultimate. It is conceivable that I am misremembering the past and that the world has, as a matter of fact, unfolded differently than I remember it unfolding. However, even if this were the case, I have no means to perceive the mistake. Hence, I have no choice but to proceed as if my memories are, in fact, genuine.
The soul as it relates to sense perception is ultimate. The famous thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” illustrates this problem. What if you are not what you think you are but are, instead, a brain in a vat of warm saline water hooked up to some mad scientist’s supercomputer that is simulating the world around you? This is a conceivable situation. However, even if this were the case, I would have no means to perceive the mistake. Hence, I have no choice but to take my sense perceptions at face value. Descartes’ famous argument concluding “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I am) or any other argument cannot imbue me with any greater confidence because I could make such arguments even if I were a brain in a vat.
The soul as it relates to cognition is ultimate. It is conceivable that my brain is unreliable and deduces false conclusions from true premises or fails to perceive the glaring inconsistencies in the axioms with which it operates. However, even if this were the case, I could not perceive the mistake since the sole means I have to diagnose it – my reasoning – is the very thing that is compromised. Every argument by which I am convinced is cognized to be true only insofar as I comprehend it and I believe that its axioms are consistent and its deductions are valid. There is no external reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the faults in my own cognitive abilities.
Finally, the soul as it relates to valuation is ultimate. This is a sub-species of the brain-in-a-vat problem. It is conceivable that I am the subject of a grand hoax and that my values and desires come from a source external to myself or are really aligned against my own true interests. Nevertheless, I could never perceive the mistake since I only come to know my desires and appetites through their immediate effect on my state of mind. There is no external reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the mistakes in my valuations.
It is conceivable that I am expected or required by a deity or the Universe to act according to the desires and wishes of all mankind or all living things or the Universe or the deity himself, instead of acting according to my own desires. However, no matter how fervently I try to shrug off my appetites and adopt the desires and wishes of something or someone outside myself, I can only do so as a fulfillment of my desire or appetite of acting according to the wishes of that thing outside myself. That is, when I act on behalf of others, I act by virtue of my desire to fulfill the desires of others. Even if I obey God’s command to stop desiring some sinful experience, it is only because I more strongly desire the peace of mind that comes from being in good standing with God than I desire the forbidden pleasures of the sinful experience.
Fear
The vast majority of philosophy gives way to fear; fear of being incorrect, fear of having an incomplete understanding of life and the world, fear that we may be inadvertently doing wrong, and so on. Fear is one of the greatest impediments to the soul’s happiness. The burden does not rest on me to persuade you that your soul is its own highest court of appeal. Recognizing the fact that your own mind, your own senses and your own appetites are their own ultimate criterion whose judgments are not contingent upon any higher court of appeal is nothing but the abolition of fear from one’s mind and soul. Facing this fact is a matter of self-improvement not a question of logical debate.
Protagoras famously said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Slightly re-stated (to capture his meaning in modern language), no proposition can be more certain than that Self is the measure of all things. The truth of any other proposition can only be judged by virtue of the fact that this proposition is true. The compromise of conviction of belief in the truth of this proposition in your own mind cripples your ability to think about yourself, about your peers and about the natural world; it is always the result of fear.
Relativism is another form of fear. The relativist asserts that all truth is relative to each individual. Since you do not control what others believe, your soul cannot be the final arbiter of truth. The fallacy in this argument is that it confuses apprehension with persuasion. Your soul is the final court of appeal in apprehending that something is true. But your soul is not the final court of appeal in persuading others that something is true. Each individual must be persuaded of the truth within himself.
(end quote)
It is conceivable that God is right despite my reason. If so, then I am surely damned because I cannot hope to comprehend the truth. Even a leap of faith is merely a roll of the dice since if I leap to the wrong deity, I have damned myself by whichever other deity(ies) I ought to have had faith in, instead.
Clayton -
I’m struggling with this paragraph, can you expand on it?
As usual I quite like the essence of what you are saying but I believe the way you’re addressing it might leave something to be desired. For instance the last paragraph, in which you attack relativism I believe you might actually be arguing in favor of the relativist argument and addressing a strawman.
On a sidenote I think that both of us might benefit from a PM conversation, we seem to have a lot of similar opinions surrounding indiviual morality that are somewhat unorthodox even around here.
@OP
Fundamentalism is an exceedingly logical position if the following conditions are given:
-
God exists
-
One knows the exact will of god
Or
- One knows enough of the will of god to act with impunity
That’s why I find it totally disingenuous that modern christians who are bible truthers don’t argue in favor of a strictly theocratic state and demand the scrapping of the constitution, violently so. If you believe that the bible is truth then anything that you do in accordance with this is justified. The fact is that they are authoritative conservatives, rather than good god fearing christians
With this said your simple aphorism doesn’t prove either of those premises, which are indeed practically unprovable to one with intellectual rigor, condemning one to at most agnosticism.
samr, fundamentalist position of what religion? You assume a monotheistic path and a certain archetype of a god that must fit the Christian description. Also, you may want to look into traditionalism, not fundamentalism.
While this is definitely true of some Christians, you’re illictly moving from moral principles to legal rules. It may be true that everyone should remain chaste outside of marriage, for instance, but it does not follow that we think it right to forcefully impose it on others. The same does not go for other things, of course, like murder. Some sort of rule is needed to traverse the gap from morality to law. In this case, the Christian could easily opt for a libertarian conception of morality->law by rooting out the former in one’s philosophy of law (chastity), while keeping the latter (prohibitions against murder). Now the Christians you have in mind do, in fact, attempt to read universally applicable legal rules out of the text, but it should be clear that being a fundamentalist does not at all necessitate theocracy. The fundamentalist position doesn’t come ‘pre-stocked’, as it were, with legal rules ready to unwrap and implement. One needs to go a little further as a Christian theocrat and make the textually implausible argument: “God says X is immoral, AND X ought to be strictly prohibited at all times in all places.”
MrSchnapps, It depends on what notion of morality is used.
If the basic notion of morality is what one ‘ought to do’, and ‘ought’ is an absolute concept, i.e. if one can’t murder, one can never murder, then it seems to me there is no reason why a state cannot impose that.
If one “ought” to keep chastity, then it is imposable by law.
As far as I understand, this is what the concept of “ought” implies.
See, you’re confusing the difference between theories of morality and theories of justice. The argument I offered is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. If justice is simply an exact mirror of morality, there in principle should be nothing wrong with having vigorous anti-defamation laws, or much more absurdly, laws against common vices like lying or any other relatively innocous (insofar as it affects others) immoral action.
As another example of this divide, Block wrote an entry on Lew Rockwell’s site, stating that while he felt it was morally wrong for his colleagues to defame him, he nevertheles declined to sue on pain of consistency to the non-aggression principle, which doesn’t seem to afford much slack to so-called ‘anti-defamation laws’.
I presented an argument that they are the same actually - theories of morality, and of justice. At least if you use “ought” as a moral criteria.
I don’t know what religious criteria of morality you can offer that doesn’t imply that justice is the same as morality.
Not quite. What is required is a transcendental argument which allows the possibility of the accuracy of our sense perceptions otherwise skepticism is a real threat.
Can you offer a positive transcendental argument in favor of sense perception?
Maybe the distinction is clearer if you call “justice” punishment?
Some things are arguably wrong, but not worthy of a coercive response or retaliation, e.g adultery, which is a kind of betrayed confidence.
But then wouldn’t God punish people for that, in theory? Is morality like “God’s justice”?
Our senses were designed to be truth seeking. This then begs the question by whom which I’d argue by God (trad monotheism- I hold that but with some substantial qualifications). When it comes to design of the man there’s pretty much two options- evolution or God. As argued extensively here evolution cannot account fro truth seeking senses.
Physiocrat,
I disagree quite strongly with you on these issues.
Our senses have evolved to give us a map of the world that aims for truth, this is explained by the fact that an organism that can better orient itself to its environment has advantages over organisms which struggle between determining ‘food’ from 'violent predator
The very fact that we have senses with designs such that optical illusions are well documented seems to indicate that they were not designed by a beneficient creator with the idea of imbuing us with perfect knowledge of what physical objects surround us, but rather that the designs that evolution has favoured to align us with more effective-truthiness tends to be a weak strategy for determining sense-to-reality in obscure artificial conditions that dont tend to come up much in the lives of the struggling organisms being tooled for truth at the cost of expending energy.
But which fundamentalism? Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish?
Unlike logic or ethics or metaphysics, the word ‘fundamentalist’ doesn’t actually describe anything. One could very well be a fundamentalist of anything.
Even within the religions there is no agreement on what are the fundamentals. For some Christians it means cherrypicking things mostly out of the Old Testament and following theological arguments made afterward. While for others, it means following the spirit of law which is love. It is not as if there are any Christians who say… okay I will follow Christ on Wednesday only, but be a heathen the rest of the time. All of them are fundamentalists in what they themselves believe to be the truth of the text. Some have only created a false distinction in order to elevate themselves.
I’ve heard it said that ‘fundamentalist’ means that all things are false if they do not come from the bible. And that which doesn’t come from the bible is ‘occult’. This is why they reject other religions or modern science or something else (ironically because of hast-y rationalizations not in the Bible). This is very funny. Because it is like saying that microwave instructions on a pizza box are occult. This view ironically is less tenable, because it views the pizza box and the bible as equals. But chooses one over the other based on no other reason than whim. This is the logical outcome of saying that truth is impossible, if not for religion. In fact whether religion is true or not is dependent on measuring truth.
A sensible Christian would reject that, because they know they must use reason to discern the meaning of the Bible. Like they must understand other things, practical, philosophical, or otherwise. Jesus also said that one must have a firm foundation – a rock, instead of sand – but that the foundation is for the building. It seems that fundamentalists think the foundation is something unto itself; the finished project. They are afraid to build something on top of it, for fear that it will collapse. Which means it is crap to begin with, from a religious or philosophical perspective.
John Ess, that’s what I’m thinking. The term is being loosely applied, the assumption (or at least on the OP’s part) that it must be some form of Christian fundamentalism, but if that’s the case I can easily say the Christian god is not part of my “inner circle” and doesn’t pertain to my set of gods, and if we can’t agree on something like gods I must say it’s no absolute, only to those who believe it or follow that particular path.
I’m a Heathen reconstructionist, essentially a “fundamentalist” to some in a way, but I feel that term is too objective, as if there is this die hard and rigid metaphysical system that pours out into a physical reality. Ironically enough, I’m sure to some Christian fundamentalists the writings of traditionalists like Guenon and Schoun would probably be considered heresy and occult.
@Scrooge
It is simply the case in fact that my mind is the measure of truth, beauty (morality), reality and history. Because everything which comprises my capacity to evaluate truth, beauty, reality and history is part of me, I am the ultimate judge of these things. If I discover some higher court of appeal, that court must be enfolded into the definition of me. For example, we might posit that the Law of Non-Contradiction stands higher than the individual because the individual may not deny LNC. But I think we’re looking at it backwards, the Law of Non-Contradiction is not something that exists outside of any human brain… it is a concept that, once absorbed, becomes a part of the self and just another tool, useful in the evaluation of truth claims.
I believe this is just a statement of subjectivism.
If I am not my own highest court of appeal in the evaluation of truth, beauty, etc. then what does it even mean for me to “believe” something to be true or to “know” something, or to act “morally”… such words speak of a completely internal process that occurs within the subjective experience of the individual.
One of the things you must sacrifice in order to understand this is the false belief that we have access to or potentially have access to Absolute Truth. We do not. Not even in principle, not even given an arbitrarily large amount of time and space. Since at least 1931 (Godel, incompleteness), we have known this. It is not conjecture. If we can be sure of anything, we can be sure that we do not have access to Absolute Truth. If we could somehow magically “know we know we know…” a transcendental truth (some truth which is too difficult for the human brain to work out on its own), then we could have access to Absolute Truth. But the fact is that hubris is no substitute for knowing something and to confuse the two is a malady, not some kind of highly privileged knowledge.
People act like they know things that they don’t actually know. To give up what you know to be true in the face of contrary claims by people who act confident is to be intimidated. It is no more significant than losing a staring contest.
Let’s pick on Young Earth Creationism because it’s an easy target. Those who assert the “literal truth” (whatever that means) of the Bible are implicitly making a large number of truth claims. The problem is that they don’t know these claims are true in the same sense that they know, for example, that a rock falls downward when dropped or that 2+2=4, even if they act like they do.
Acting confident is just posturing. I know that rocks fall downward. I know that 2+2=4. I don’t have to accept these truths on somebody’s say-so. Even complicated facts about the physical world that I don’t understand, such as the physics of aerodynamics, I can understand in principle how they were derived and are derivable by a human mind. If I can’t, even in principle, retrace your steps (in ascertaining the truth of something), then the knowledge you claim to have is inaccessible to me and, I believe, to you as well - no matter much of a show you put on to the contrary.
Clayton -