If free will is synonymous with individuality, why not just call it individuality rather than free will?
dunno, I really don’t like using the word free will for anything, as it is a rather odd phrase and concept, my point was the man may actually have given a definition. Also you could simply invert your question “if individuality is synonymous with free will, why not just call it free will…individuality must have some other property not yet mentioned”.
I agree, he did give a definition. The question is whether it was meaningful or coherent.
I disagree that you can invert the sentence in that manner. The point is that the meaning of individuality is not in dispute, if I use the word on this forum I have an extremely high expectation that my reader will comprehend me, and we will be able to accurately communicate. Whereas the term free will is at this moment in dispute, communication is not possible via that idiom. The question then becomes, if a term that IS in dispute is precisely synonymous with a term that IS NOT in dispute, it is quite plain that we should simply use the term that allows us all the most accurate communication and all agree to use the term individuality. The two possibilities now are:
We forget about using the term free will, it is redundant
The definition of free will as given is not sufficient, or incoherent.
If Mr Roemer is unwilling to swap to the term individuality then it must mean that number 2) is the truth of the situation.
FDR wasn’t the first liberal to think in those terms. George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were members of the National Liberal Club long before that. Of course they were both Fabian socialists and founders of the London School of Economics.
Being a liberal certainly does have to do with believing in God. A liberal is someone who thinks believing in God is irrational. The question is whether or not this theory about liberalism is true. Saying the theory is simplistic does not shed any light on the matter. What will shed light on the matter is naming a liberal who is not against religion. What will also shed light on the matter is showing that it is not irrational to think religion is irrational.
You make a very good point there. But don’t deists believe in God? Weren’t a lot of liberals also deists? Deism isn’t necessarily anti-religion, it just does not find it to be necessary in order to believe in God.
You’re like the Marxists who called “bourgeois” anything they didn’t like. Perhaps you’ve been mired in mainstream conservatism all your life, so you’ve come to inchoately think of “liberal” as a synonym for “bad”, and thus you identify the essence of “liberalism” with the thing you consider “most bad”: atheism.
There are two usages of the term “liberal” that are conducive to any kind of clear communication. There is the presently most widespread one, which refers to a complex of opinions that include, among other things, economic interventionism and a certain strain of multiculturalism. And there is the classic laissez-faire one. Neither is in anyway essentially atheistic. There are plenty of economic interventionist/multiculturalist theists, and there are plenty of laissez-faire theists.
If you have a beef with atheism, challenge atheism, and call it by its least confusing name. Stop sowing confusion by trying to impose your awkward and idiosyncratic definition of “liberalism” on the conversation.
To be fair, in his essay, he calls it atheistic humanism, whether it comes from Herbert Spencer or Karl Marx.
(By the way, the Marxists also label as “liberal” whatever they don’t like, no?)
Mr. Roemer, there is something on my mind, which I think you’ll be well equipped to answer. On the internet, one unfortunately finds many “white supremacists”. Sometimes, they do not like being called so and they say they are not racist, but they admittedly claim an adherence to racialist and materialist views. They will say that the “European gene” produced Mozart and Bach and that Mozart and Bach could only have been European. On the other hand, we sometimes hear from pious Christians that human talent is a manifestation of God’s all encompassing power, whether it comes as Mozart’s music or da Vinci’s paintings. And pious Christians also say that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, so they cite Nebuchaddarezzar, who believed his kingdom was the most powerful in the world and could challenge anything else, until he became ill and virtually animalistic, thus hurting his people’s belief in their racial supremacy.
So what I wanted to ask was this: Could racialist materialists (who claim to be Christian) really be considered Christians or are they ultimately another kind of “atheistic humanist”?
So the term “free will” refers to something to do with making choices. That’s still not a definition.
No one but you has any way of knowing what is in your mind when you type the characters [f], [r], [e], [e], [space], [w], [i], [l], [l]. A lot of people have typed that string of characters in the past, and they have meant many different things by it. What do you mean by it?
JohnnyFive’s reply is basically what I would have replied.
But also, what’s this “law of identity,” “A = A,” “a thing can’t not be what it is” stuff? It sounds like it has to do with diction, but is it an attempt to elucidate verbal statements or is it just wordplay?
I am really at a loss on this. My mind is a bit boggled at the moment (the ouzo isn’t helping), but I never really “bought” or understood the Wittgenstein argument on this in Tractus, which I think has always caused a little dissonance in me, and the proposition seems self evident to me.
I think the best way I can phrase it is two fold:
That what claims itself is itself (so we are talking about subjective reality), that which it defines is what it defines. It isn’t so much word play to me as it is stating the fact of ontological egoism. Which is important when we talk about how things come about
If I say “this is red” and show something red, and you “get it” could I also not say “this is itself” and keep pointing to something ad infinitum with infinite divisions and it be understood?
I wouldn’t say that the ‘progressive’ usage of the term liberal is more widespread. It is only used in some parts of the United States, for less than a century and only in some narrow uses. Everywhere else in the world liberal still means laissez-faire, and even in the United States the term is still used in that meaning in most uses. For example in expressions like social liberalism or when saying that “fascism was anti-liberal”.
I tried, but I can’t seem to understand any single one of the sentences in 1 or 2. Just not sure how to parse the grammar / what the words are referring to. (Maybe it’s the ouzo? )
“A = A” makes sense, but it seems to be a trivial tautology. Actually I can phrase that better; see here.
Here Liberal Vichy / Vichy Army defines ontological egoism as the view that “value subjectivism is a necessary fact.” If I take that to mean that all value is subjective, I would agree, but I still don’t know what you’re saying (as in, I have utterly no clue at this point).
Deists admit that God exists, however, they don’t believe in revealed religion. They don’t believe in life after death. Many deists keep their lack of faith to themselves and give religion to their children. A liberal is someone who thinks they are more “enlightened” than people who believe in the Bible and the Koran. Such people want their children to think the same way, so they deceive their children about God’s existence and the persuasiveness of the reasons to believe.
Of course A=A does not apply to our use of language, where A does not equal A can be perfectly correct. So for example if you say grass=grass, you may be saying either:
The green stuff that grows on lawns = the green stuff that grows on lawns
The green stuff that grows on lawns = cannabis
Cannabis = cannabis
Does A=A imply ontological individualism? Tautologies are capable of imparting knowledge about the external world, only if they are complex enough that their implications cannot be readily seen. Many of the laws of mathematics come under this category. However as A=A is quite obviously simply enough that even young children know it (implicitly/tacitly) then I do not see how it could be capable of saying anything worthwhile.