Yes, but you don’t really believe that argument, since anyone who truly accepts Cartesian doubt (without accepting his circular resolution), wouldn’t act. Praxeology doesn’t apply to those who don’t believe in reality. Why act if you cannot differentiate between illusion and reality, or if you believe that the whole universe is controlled by an evil demon? Truly accepting Cartesian doubt is to accept pure nihilism. Every act is essentially futile, under such conditions.
I think you could still act to make the simulation as pleasurable as possible.
But I agree that global scepticism is pointless … but it is rational and logically valid.
My point was only to illustrate that you can make a non-religious claim in favour of the state.
Maybe the point can be illustrated simpler by saying: claiming that Plato and Aristotle defended the state on religious grounds would be absurd.
They made a whole bunch of errors (especially Plato), cause they didn’t know any better and unrest in Athens clouded there judgement. But they tried to the best of there knowledge and ability to solve the problem of social order in a rational way. It was not religion (there ides where used by religion later on but is besides the point).
True. You could know that you’re essentially doing nothing, but somehow still find it pleasurable (wouldn’t violate praxeology). Though it’s hard to imagine such a condition.
Now we are way of topic, but is it really hard to imagine? When I am dead nothing I did will have any meaning to me. Nothing I can do have any noticeable meaning to the universe and in a million years it won’t have any meaning to the tiniest parts of the universe either.
So does it really make a difference in this regard if the world exists? From an external perspective I am still doing nothing, I am only trying achieve an internal state of happiness and fulfilment either way…
I think my methods would be radically different if I actually didn’t believe the world existed but I would still act towards the same goal.
Well, we understand that one day it will all be over, and this also affects our actions as a factor in our daily subjective valuations. But to deny reality (as is commonly understood), and to believe that you’re entirely a passive agent who is, at every given moment, deceived by some all powerful demon, and who cannot distinguish between reality and hallucination, would render such subjective valuations superfluous. Basically what I’m trying to say is that acknowledging our mortality is very different from accepting Cartesian doubt. There has to be some sort of constancy in the world (or perceived constancy) for action to be in anyway fruitful/purposeful.
And then there is always, “leaving your legacy.” I could be saying nothing meaningful right now, which is what tends to happen when I talk about Cartesian doubt.
Ahh, yeah it would be pretty pointless to act in chaos. But the simulation appears to be fairly constant this far, so until the evil demon wakes up and start messing up my perception I can at least try. [:D]
Not to clog up this thread with philosophy but I wanted to throw myself into this discussion of skepticism.
Your commenting here so that implies an entity exists. To act requires you to exist. to think requires you to exist.To argue implies you exist.Global skepticism makes no sense logically.It’s refuted by everything.Global skepticism also requires the belief that you don’t know if we can know anything BUT
That itself is a claim to knowledge thus you refute your own position by holding it.The fact we can know something (at very least) is a logical axiom.
on the simulation point: you would have to prove we do exist in a simulation(since you claim we cannot know then you cannot even say we do not live in reality and do live in a simulation since that is a claim to knowledge and again refutes your position) and that reality is not as we commonly accept it to be.The burden of proof rests on the skeptic of knowledge and reality.To accept we live in a simulation could imply that it’s possible that the laws of reality,action,logic etc are not fixed.Thus to be consistent you would have to live with uncertainty and could never claim oh this is true but it might not always be true it might not even be true tomorrow.This creates problems for someone claiming to believe in libertarianism,austrian economics and praxeology among other things.
You said " you can make a non religious claim in favour of the state".If your a global skeptic how can you know this? Also hidden in your position is the assumption we can know what words mean(which is true we can) but since your a global skeptic you would need to deny this but since you do not and by acting assume others and yourself can know what words do mean you refute yourself again.As you can see a Global skeptic is constantly refuting their own position that is why it is untenable.
I would like to hear this non religious claim in favour of the state.
Richard Wagner once said “the great evil of the Christian centuries is hypocrisy”. It’s evident you do not live in a Catholic country where you live through this each and every day.
Around here the Catholic church is rich. And I do mean filthy rich. And they do not pay taxes on top of that by law. Yet every other other day you get a well fed cardinal spouting the usual collectivist garbage. But they do not move a finger themselves, not even to help out the priests and the nuns who go to the ground and put their money where their mouth is. They do not sell their empty palaces to feed the poor, they do not give jobs to the unemployed in their tax-free enterprises. They ask others to do it. They ask the State to use force to accomplish what they deem right. In the end they just don’t care, as long as they are above the law. How can good, decent and caring Catholics still follow such colossal hypocrites is well beyond me. Christ himself thundered against such fellows, even in the amended and watered down Gospels we have now.
The most consistent association of Christianity as a whole with any particular social system is with socialism. Albert S. Lindemann has written a thorough examination of [the] history of European socialism in a book of that title, and his insights on the parallels seem well-considered to me:
The communistic association is observed among the apostles’ practices in Acts 2 and 4, in which it is respectively noted that, “Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need,” and “Nor was there anyone among them who lacked; for all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and they distributed to each as anyone had need.” The commune is at the heart of libertarian communism, and while communistic association among a small Christian sect cannot be said to be an implementation of “communism” any more than the existence of a handful of collectives constitutes an implementation of “socialism,” this was interpreted by Christian groups such as the Diggers to provide endorsement for a more widespread framework.
Now, the Roman Catholic church specifically has taken a more hostile stance as of late. While Catholics were effectively the only Christians in existence for centuries prior to the Protestant split, the Vatican officially opposes liberation theology and has long been known as a hierarchical and wealth-hoarding institution, which was the basis for expropriation of its assets, church burning, and priest killing (not something I condone) during the anarchist social revolution of 1936.
Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion - FTW
whoa, what country is that? (if you don’t mind saying…)
What?
Well, Marko, if we wanted to play Leviathan’s game, we could attribute his neglecting the historical existence of the entire Orthodox East to some base cultural bias (western imperialism?). But that’s his game, not ours. So I’ll just assume it was a simple mistake.
I am not a global sceptic. But the argument that “I should be the head of state. Cause it seems fun from how things appear to me now and all you lot probably don’t exist anyway” was the first one that popped into my mind that I think would be very difficult to declare logically invalid.
Some very good and convincing points can surely be made against it just like global scepticism but no one has yet managed to prove global scepticism as logically false. Unlikely, counter-intuative and pointless … but not false.
In the later post I dropped the notion that stuff have to be logically true not to religious, being in error is still scientific as long as you have rational approach.
I am a bit confused by this statement (among others) as well. Catholics were not even half of the MAJOr sects of Xtianity at the time.
‘Sects’? Unless you count some Arianist heretics, the only other ‘sects’ are the Orthodox Churches, which split from Rome in 1054. But the notion of ‘sects’ as we know it today are fruits of the protestant rebellion.
There were many heretical and mystical sects of Christianity that emerged before the great schism. Along with the Arianists, there was the Gnostics, Ebionites, and various Assyrian church’s (all groups were extremely heterogeneous). Some of these groups denied heaven and hell, claimed that Jesus believed in reincarnation, claimed Jesus traveled to India, and pushed for the inclusion of gospel’s which were banned/excluded by the church (Books of Thomas, Mary, Judas, and the Book of Enoch, for example). All kinds of stuff.
The Nesotarian Churches (Coptic, etc) are legit Apostolic Christain churches by almost anyones measures. After that we would be nitpicking the definiton of Christianity I think when it comes to things like Arianism, etc; but, I think at least some argument could be made that they were Christain (though I won’t debate it here).
I’ve only read the first few posts of this thread, so forgive me if this has already been stated.
As a Catholic (culturally anyway, belief-wise I am an atheist), I think the reason there are many libertarians in Catholicism is pretty simple: Catholics emphasize free will, conscience, responsibility. No excuses. You reap what you sow. Whether you are good or bad is your choice.
This does not, in and of itself, equal libertarianism, but I can easily see how children who were raised with this foundation would be overrepresented in the group of people who eventually became libertarians.
Yeah, I was talking about Christianity in the “broader sense” (for lack of a better term).