daddyholes posted:
fukken home run daddyholes.
tpaine posted:kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard. kierkegaard.
settle down beavis
Makeshift_Swahili posted:eric andre show is pretty cool imo.
oh does he podcast???
roseweird posted:this just all seems so superficial. no matter how you try to purify your attitudes, you are faced with difficult basic questions like, "why am i me, and not someone else?" "what are the genuine boundaries between my interior and exterior, this and that?" "by virtue of what do things gain meaning and distinguish themselves from noise?" you're just throwing "mystical" around as a bad word to cover the fact that being human means cultivating a consciousness that shifts through multiple states of belief, not one that perpetually insists on the constant truth of one
atheism is natural and good and approved by a majority of gods throughout the manifest cosmos, i frequently indulge in it but i wonder why one would make it one's default and constant attitude for very long
These questions are only superficially difficult; they don't have meaningful answers because the questions are nonsensical. For example, "I am not me" is the negation of "I am me", but what does "I am me" mean? What would have to change in the world for "I am me" to go from being true to false ("I am not me")? I don't see any way to answer that, no way to verify that "I am me" is true or false at any time or place or way. And the same goes for the other questions, unless we take them to be totally ordinary contingent statements, like if this doorway is the boundary between the exterior and the interior, then we could have an answer.
Mystical traditions often make use of these confusing non-sense sentences, claiming to have uncovered deeper Truths about the world through the manipulation of language alone, Truths that conveniently elevate the status and privilege of their mystic interpreters. Atheism, however, is powerfully democratic, it can banish illusions and fetishes, and thereby help tear down the real inequalities and injustices that protect the ruling minority.
roseweird posted:my point is that these unresolvable questions structure our experience, making things like you and i having this conversation possible. i'm sorry if it disturbs you that most atheists are incapable of dispensing with the idea of consciousness, or the self/soul, but the reason for this is that these ideas describe real artifacts of experience that are impossible not to observe and name and use in communication with others
Structures my experience? I don't know what that means here...
I'm not against use of the term 'consciousness', if it's medical consciousness or political consciousness we're talking about, because it's possible to understand what it is to be or have these two things, and what it is to not have these things. And, I have fewer problems with the idea of a soul if it's more like Aristotle's conception than a theological one. But I don't think this is what you want to say.
babyfinland posted:for the love of god read talal asad
if i wanted to read the musings of a jew with an identity crisis i could just stay here and read roseweird's posts tho
roseweird posted:swirls i find debating with you boring and unrewarding, you proceed through minutiae in a way that suggests a mercilessly dull lack of awareness of your own body and existence in the world. you probably step on people's toes without realizing it like basically all the time
have you ever read wittgenstein ffs
roseweird posted:swirlsofhistory posted:
roseweird posted:
you are doing the same thing by identifying atheism as an ahistorical intellectual posture with an ideal set of principles rather than as a reaction to theism
So? If atheism is a reaction to theism, then I can criticize atheists past and present for not being critical enough of their own mystical baggage inherited from religious tradition, i.e. not as atheist as they could be.
this just all seems so superficial. no matter how you try to purify your attitudes, you are faced with difficult basic questions like, "why am i me, and not someone else?" "what are the genuine boundaries between my interior and exterior, this and that?" "by virtue of what do things gain meaning and distinguish themselves from noise?"
i just judge 'em as they come, no biggie, it's certainly not something one needs to spend their whole life coming to terms with. Not everyone has a constant, crippling series of arguments and counter-arguments paralyzing their mind 24/7. 'git-r-done' is a great example of the backlash to this sort of neurosis; sometimes things just need to get done and one can't let all this intellectual/spiritual nonsense get in the way.
roseweird posted:well not forever no but as ways to pass the time go religion has long been a favorite and i don't see why that should stop now
my issue is with you branding such matters as 'difficult basic questions' when i don't think they are basic questions, i've largely managed to elude asking myself such things because it just leads to stasis and anxiety for me, i think a lot of other people are the same.
roseweird posted:well not forever no but as ways to pass the time go religion has long been a favorite and i don't see why that should stop now
i'm pretty sure sports, alcohol, and hanging out with your peoples have been and still are more popular than reading the talmud or listening to some robed hucksters in their gilded palaces
roseweird posted:jools posted:
roseweird: how can something be a question in the usually understood sense of the word if its unresolvable
by reflexively questioning its own terms in such a way that a paradox or dialectic is generated. a question is unresolveable if it re-poses itself endlessly as a result of its having once been asked. it seems silly to reduce questions to "requests for information," since questions can be designed to produce a variety of effects in listeners. many questions take the form "consider this." see for example, you've just asked me a question with the intention of motivating me to consider the terms of my attitude toward the meaning of questions.
it seems silly to ponder such things in the first place
roseweird posted:jools posted:roseweird: how can something be a question in the usually understood sense of the word if its unresolvable
by reflexively questioning its own terms in such a way that a paradox or dialectic is generated. a question is unresolveable if it re-poses itself endlessly as a result of its having once been asked. it seems silly to reduce questions to "requests for information," since questions can be designed to produce a variety of effects in listeners. many questions take the form "consider this." see for example, you've just asked me a question with the intention of motivating me to consider the terms of my attitude toward the meaning of questions.
have you considered learning something about really existing religion instead of trying to find the tiny copy of kierkegaard you lost in your navel
roseweird posted:jools posted:roseweird: how can something be a question in the usually understood sense of the word if its unresolvable
by reflexively questioning its own terms in such a way that a paradox or dialectic is generated. a question is unresolveable if it re-poses itself endlessly as a result of its having once been asked. it seems silly to reduce questions to "requests for information," since questions can be designed to produce a variety of effects in listeners. many questions take the form "consider this." see for example, you've just asked me a question with the intention of motivating me to consider the terms of my attitude toward the meaning of questions.
no, i think it's safe to say a question is nonsensical if it "re-poses itself endlessly as a result of having once been asked", and honestly i'd like an example of a question that does this. if a question generates a paradox, it is necessarily logically invalid. a "dialectic" is much the same - these are really antinomies i think. plus, i did literally just request information, in this case what an unresolvable question is, and i did in fact grant that there are other sensible and commonly understood meanings for the term "question". your dancing around here is exactly the kind of shellgame swirlsofhistory mentioned above.