Christians created this crazy supergroup called "pagan" that includes the vast majority of all religious traditions in history and whose only unifying factor is "not based on jewish books." But at the same time they still want to tar all those religions with the same brush and treat them all as having the same characteristics in contrast to the "true" ones.
The jewish religions just aren't that special. Most of the concepts contained in them were plagiarised from older civilisations surrounding them and mixed up with jewish narcissism and greed.
Anyone making broad claims about "pagans believe X" without being more specific should be treated like a retard.
I've had this tired old argument with my solipsist brother. You are asking the wrong question. The real question is what do you believe, and why?
I assert that we can be certain of nothing by the use of reason alone. Even Descartes, as you said, could be a fictional character.
Reason informs our faith, but in the end all reason rests on a foundation of faith. Everyone lives on a foundation of faith. Those who deny this are fools.
Light enters our eyes, pressure waves our ears, chemicals are smelled or tasted, textures are felt, but all these things are interpreted in our minds. Are they real? What is real? We can never be sure, or being sure, we could still be wrong.
There are three basic belief systems, or religions. One holds that God alone exists. One that only the universe exists. The third holds that both exist.
Buddhists and Hindus are God-alone types. Atheists, utilitarians, and materialists are universe-alone. Abrahamic religions believe in both.
In this system, if, like Descartes, I believe I exist and that is the only thing I can be sure of, then I do not believe the universe exists. Therefore I am God. It's called narcissism. This provides few behavioral restraints. It can also make things uncomfortable when interacting with the universe.
I choose to believe that truth exists. It is a rational belief founded on faith. It yields superior outcomes compared to beliefs that reject the existence of truth.
A faith in the existence of truth makes scientific inquiry possible.
I am certain truth exists while still admitting that I could be wrong. I am certain that truth exists even if I never know a single truth. The existence of truth does not need to be dependent on my ability to perceive it. If it did I would be God.
So strictly speaking you have a faith in universal truth that is reasonable but unprovable. So you can argue for your particular truth and even argue for it well. But it’s a complete oxymoron to say “the universal truth I have faith in says you’re wrong therefore you’re wrong” because that statement means precisely nothing.
"But it’s a complete oxymoron to say “the universal truth I have faith in says you’re wrong therefore you’re wrong” because that statement means precisely nothing." Well... yeah? Who said that?
I didn't say you were wrong, whoever you are. I said everyone's belief rests on a foundation of faith, and only fools deny that.
“I said everyone's belief rests on a foundation of faith, and only fools deny that.” That’s exactly what I said (admittedly in a mocking manner). So now imagine your talking to someone who has faith in a universal truth that is entirely antithetical to your own. They have reasonable evidence supported arguments for their belief but it like all faith is unprovable. If you both posit incompatible universal truths it’s impossible to communicate.
Sorry, I'm finding your argument incoherent. Perhaps you have a faith in a universal truth that is so different than mine that it is impossible to communicate.
Logic is synthetic a priory. x equals x because you have defined "x" "equals" and "x" in such a manner that it hold and it can be related to other systems of logic.
An alien species of hive insects, even ones that developed space travel via some means, would almost certainly not come up with such a thing, and creatures from another dimension if they could even comprehend it might argue that it is plainly not the case because in their dimension the definitions of all things shift after 3 charachers and this is the basis of their computations.
Logic is a ssystem of abstractions human minds use to model and maintain the relations of their own ideas, and have an eternally tenuous relationship to physical reality mediated by experience and judgement, just a bridge might collapse from faulty welds in the steel that appear nowhere in the mathematical diagrams of its architecture....
The map is not the territory, indeed to the extent any territory resembles the map at all is a meassure of the individuals judgement of import and usefulness...
My entire argument takes the english language for granted.
That does not make a blend of celtic, anglo-saxon, latin, greek, and other loan words a neccessary nor fundamental property of the universe.
Indeed my argument would NOT WORK if i assumed that like the majority of lifeforms that ever existed that logic has no effect on you, or if like the majority of people that have ever existed you do not speak english.
Logic is a relation of one's own mind and it to others... Just as language is. Not an inherent property of the universe. Indeed fundamental logical precepts "X Equals X" breaks down in quantum mechanics and does not hold except condintionally.
Your argument takes language, any language, for granted. And any language whatsoever takes logic for granted. You cannot express any thought at all without taking logic for granted.
x=x doen´t break down in quantum mechanics, but if it did, this would simply prove quantum mechanics wrong.
But you would be right if you said that I do make *one* assumption that I did not prove, strictly speaking: I assume, as a matter of course, that there is one objectively existing unambiguous reality. This assumption is really what you are disputing, I think.
My assumption is either right or wrong. Case I, my assumption is right. Then it follows that logic holds good unconditionally and universally. Because all logic really does is excluding ambiguity. Every completely logical system of thought is unambiguous and every completely unambiguous system of thought is logical.
Case II, my assumption is wrong. In this case, nothing whatsoever can be proven and any opinion is as good as any other. Including my opinion that Case II assumption is unpractical at best and impossible at worst.
Not really. All mathmatical constructs are just models, reality isn't required to adhere to them.
It's possible to construct any number of internally consistant systems which don't match up with the universe (or at least our corner of it). It's also entirely possible our material reality is the result of someone else doing so.
I answer your post en passant in my answer to Kulak. No disrespect meant, I just don´t want to repeat myself.
As to the argument that there could be an evil Pantocrator who is just playing with us, this is entirely possible, but it does not get into the way of reality being unambiguous, noncontradictory and logical, including the reality of the Pantocrator. Even God could not escape logic.
He also modifies the Descartes thing to 'I experience therefore I am'; calls 'consciousness' the Primary Fact Of Experience.
Here's another one, also JBP. "Human existence consists of a confrontation between the bounded finite and the unbounded infinite- that fact, is why religious experience is essentially endemic to mankind."
When I was 16 i noted on Reddit, practicing my 'atheism', that Pygmy's of some sort couldn't be recorded to have any religious assortment, this blew up. Ofc. a link to the subverted Wikipedia.
Notes for Kulak from a 🇩🇰 Gen Z sperg.
I hope to simply explode the left-brain hemisphere and move through life in a kind of symbolic hyperperception, but your writings lead me astray and have me engage with these verbal forms anyway😔
"Regarding God, I think we must dispense with the idea of a personal world-spirit, a creator with thoughts and emotions and desires that could be comprehensible to humans. TON 618 is a black hole that appears to have a mass approximately 66 billion times that of the sun. There are quasars we have observed with temperatures of over 18 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. Pulsar PSR J1748−2446ad is about 30 kilometers in diameter, but due to its incredible mass and energy it rotates 716 times per second, meaning that its surface is moving at 24% of the speed of light. The galaxy Porphyrion contains cosmic jets (super-energized, violent discharges of gas and subatomic particles) which are over 23 million years long. That means that the origin of the jets (a supermassive black hole digesting objects and flinging mass and energy outwards from its accretion disc) is so awesomely powerful that it is launching matter and energy a distance which is around 1,500,000,000,000 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. So, if there is a being who created and oversees and controls all of this, such a being cannot be comprehensible to us. We might behave as if He (it) is, but He/it simply cannot be."
"Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they had discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion."
"There is not a single identifiable universal truth."
If we include that phrase in its own definition and scope we're back at an ages-old paradox. If the claim is true, the claim is untrue. And of the claim is untrue then there is a universal truth?
No, because the claim that there is no universal truth being wrong doesn't in itself prove there is a universal truth, unless said truth can be proven.
Which it can't since providing proof would require true omniscience on the part of both the one making the claim and the one testing it.
Which neither can prove to the other to be in possession of, without proving that universal truth can exist.
And round and round we go.
Things are true, to a point, under certain circumstances, if conditions are met, from a certain point of view with varying degrees of probability, uncertainty, ignorance and definitions used.
Descartes' phrase reads better as "I think I am" or "I am the sum of my thinking/my thoughts" than "I think therefore I am", really. And that is probably as close to universal truth we can come:
The thought questioning if it itself exists.
Since the question can be asked, there is someone who can ask it, perceive it being asked, and also ponder if and how it can be answered.
Truth is true by degrees. As is reality: real by degrees.
The reason for this is not anything to do with the nature of truth or reality, but because we only have our senses and our mind to work with, and they cannot (re)solve the issue: hence the need for many to invent an absolute authority they can use to rationalise their own impulses as being divinely mandated by something representing "universal truth".
Simply put, being responsible to oneself for one's own being and acting, is too much for most. And that is certainly universal, even if how true it is, is certainly up for debate.
She responded to the argument with her own beliefs, she didn't claim they're universal of all pagan (ie. non-jewish) religion.
That said it's hard to prove that change is a constant when the universe is posited to have exploded from an unchanging singularity outside of time and space.
If I were to have objected with "You say all truths are particular? Name every truth," that would have been no better an argument than this one of yours.
If I were to claim all swans are white because I found the darkest swan and he was still white, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to ask how I know he's the darkest swan.
Christians created this crazy supergroup called "pagan" that includes the vast majority of all religious traditions in history and whose only unifying factor is "not based on jewish books." But at the same time they still want to tar all those religions with the same brush and treat them all as having the same characteristics in contrast to the "true" ones.
The jewish religions just aren't that special. Most of the concepts contained in them were plagiarised from older civilisations surrounding them and mixed up with jewish narcissism and greed.
Anyone making broad claims about "pagans believe X" without being more specific should be treated like a retard.
I've had this tired old argument with my solipsist brother. You are asking the wrong question. The real question is what do you believe, and why?
I assert that we can be certain of nothing by the use of reason alone. Even Descartes, as you said, could be a fictional character.
Reason informs our faith, but in the end all reason rests on a foundation of faith. Everyone lives on a foundation of faith. Those who deny this are fools.
Light enters our eyes, pressure waves our ears, chemicals are smelled or tasted, textures are felt, but all these things are interpreted in our minds. Are they real? What is real? We can never be sure, or being sure, we could still be wrong.
There are three basic belief systems, or religions. One holds that God alone exists. One that only the universe exists. The third holds that both exist.
Buddhists and Hindus are God-alone types. Atheists, utilitarians, and materialists are universe-alone. Abrahamic religions believe in both.
In this system, if, like Descartes, I believe I exist and that is the only thing I can be sure of, then I do not believe the universe exists. Therefore I am God. It's called narcissism. This provides few behavioral restraints. It can also make things uncomfortable when interacting with the universe.
I choose to believe that truth exists. It is a rational belief founded on faith. It yields superior outcomes compared to beliefs that reject the existence of truth.
A faith in the existence of truth makes scientific inquiry possible.
I am certain truth exists while still admitting that I could be wrong. I am certain that truth exists even if I never know a single truth. The existence of truth does not need to be dependent on my ability to perceive it. If it did I would be God.
So strictly speaking you have a faith in universal truth that is reasonable but unprovable. So you can argue for your particular truth and even argue for it well. But it’s a complete oxymoron to say “the universal truth I have faith in says you’re wrong therefore you’re wrong” because that statement means precisely nothing.
"But it’s a complete oxymoron to say “the universal truth I have faith in says you’re wrong therefore you’re wrong” because that statement means precisely nothing." Well... yeah? Who said that?
I didn't say you were wrong, whoever you are. I said everyone's belief rests on a foundation of faith, and only fools deny that.
“I said everyone's belief rests on a foundation of faith, and only fools deny that.” That’s exactly what I said (admittedly in a mocking manner). So now imagine your talking to someone who has faith in a universal truth that is entirely antithetical to your own. They have reasonable evidence supported arguments for their belief but it like all faith is unprovable. If you both posit incompatible universal truths it’s impossible to communicate.
Sorry, I'm finding your argument incoherent. Perhaps you have a faith in a universal truth that is so different than mine that it is impossible to communicate.
I have no Gods, but x = x.
Logic is universally and eternally true.
Logic is synthetic a priory. x equals x because you have defined "x" "equals" and "x" in such a manner that it hold and it can be related to other systems of logic.
An alien species of hive insects, even ones that developed space travel via some means, would almost certainly not come up with such a thing, and creatures from another dimension if they could even comprehend it might argue that it is plainly not the case because in their dimension the definitions of all things shift after 3 charachers and this is the basis of their computations.
Logic is a ssystem of abstractions human minds use to model and maintain the relations of their own ideas, and have an eternally tenuous relationship to physical reality mediated by experience and judgement, just a bridge might collapse from faulty welds in the steel that appear nowhere in the mathematical diagrams of its architecture....
The map is not the territory, indeed to the extent any territory resembles the map at all is a meassure of the individuals judgement of import and usefulness...
Your entire comment takes logic for granted.
Otherwise, every single statement would be at the same time true and not true and therefore all statements meaningless.
Hegel was right when he (indirectly) said that logic is God.
My entire argument takes the english language for granted.
That does not make a blend of celtic, anglo-saxon, latin, greek, and other loan words a neccessary nor fundamental property of the universe.
Indeed my argument would NOT WORK if i assumed that like the majority of lifeforms that ever existed that logic has no effect on you, or if like the majority of people that have ever existed you do not speak english.
Logic is a relation of one's own mind and it to others... Just as language is. Not an inherent property of the universe. Indeed fundamental logical precepts "X Equals X" breaks down in quantum mechanics and does not hold except condintionally.
Your argument takes language, any language, for granted. And any language whatsoever takes logic for granted. You cannot express any thought at all without taking logic for granted.
x=x doen´t break down in quantum mechanics, but if it did, this would simply prove quantum mechanics wrong.
But you would be right if you said that I do make *one* assumption that I did not prove, strictly speaking: I assume, as a matter of course, that there is one objectively existing unambiguous reality. This assumption is really what you are disputing, I think.
My assumption is either right or wrong. Case I, my assumption is right. Then it follows that logic holds good unconditionally and universally. Because all logic really does is excluding ambiguity. Every completely logical system of thought is unambiguous and every completely unambiguous system of thought is logical.
Case II, my assumption is wrong. In this case, nothing whatsoever can be proven and any opinion is as good as any other. Including my opinion that Case II assumption is unpractical at best and impossible at worst.
Not really. All mathmatical constructs are just models, reality isn't required to adhere to them.
It's possible to construct any number of internally consistant systems which don't match up with the universe (or at least our corner of it). It's also entirely possible our material reality is the result of someone else doing so.
I answer your post en passant in my answer to Kulak. No disrespect meant, I just don´t want to repeat myself.
As to the argument that there could be an evil Pantocrator who is just playing with us, this is entirely possible, but it does not get into the way of reality being unambiguous, noncontradictory and logical, including the reality of the Pantocrator. Even God could not escape logic.
"I can not doubt the existence of pain."
- Jordan B Peterson
He also modifies the Descartes thing to 'I experience therefore I am'; calls 'consciousness' the Primary Fact Of Experience.
Here's another one, also JBP. "Human existence consists of a confrontation between the bounded finite and the unbounded infinite- that fact, is why religious experience is essentially endemic to mankind."
When I was 16 i noted on Reddit, practicing my 'atheism', that Pygmy's of some sort couldn't be recorded to have any religious assortment, this blew up. Ofc. a link to the subverted Wikipedia.
Notes for Kulak from a 🇩🇰 Gen Z sperg.
I hope to simply explode the left-brain hemisphere and move through life in a kind of symbolic hyperperception, but your writings lead me astray and have me engage with these verbal forms anyway😔
>Name a single universal truth.
1+1=2
There’s just nothing very insightful here. You’re better than this.
How about, “This too will pass”?
"Regarding God, I think we must dispense with the idea of a personal world-spirit, a creator with thoughts and emotions and desires that could be comprehensible to humans. TON 618 is a black hole that appears to have a mass approximately 66 billion times that of the sun. There are quasars we have observed with temperatures of over 18 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. Pulsar PSR J1748−2446ad is about 30 kilometers in diameter, but due to its incredible mass and energy it rotates 716 times per second, meaning that its surface is moving at 24% of the speed of light. The galaxy Porphyrion contains cosmic jets (super-energized, violent discharges of gas and subatomic particles) which are over 23 million years long. That means that the origin of the jets (a supermassive black hole digesting objects and flinging mass and energy outwards from its accretion disc) is so awesomely powerful that it is launching matter and energy a distance which is around 1,500,000,000,000 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. So, if there is a being who created and oversees and controls all of this, such a being cannot be comprehensible to us. We might behave as if He (it) is, but He/it simply cannot be."
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/ad-astra
"Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they had discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion."
Who are the pagans, I wonder?
"There is not a single identifiable universal truth."
If we include that phrase in its own definition and scope we're back at an ages-old paradox. If the claim is true, the claim is untrue. And of the claim is untrue then there is a universal truth?
No, because the claim that there is no universal truth being wrong doesn't in itself prove there is a universal truth, unless said truth can be proven.
Which it can't since providing proof would require true omniscience on the part of both the one making the claim and the one testing it.
Which neither can prove to the other to be in possession of, without proving that universal truth can exist.
And round and round we go.
Things are true, to a point, under certain circumstances, if conditions are met, from a certain point of view with varying degrees of probability, uncertainty, ignorance and definitions used.
Descartes' phrase reads better as "I think I am" or "I am the sum of my thinking/my thoughts" than "I think therefore I am", really. And that is probably as close to universal truth we can come:
The thought questioning if it itself exists.
Since the question can be asked, there is someone who can ask it, perceive it being asked, and also ponder if and how it can be answered.
Truth is true by degrees. As is reality: real by degrees.
The reason for this is not anything to do with the nature of truth or reality, but because we only have our senses and our mind to work with, and they cannot (re)solve the issue: hence the need for many to invent an absolute authority they can use to rationalise their own impulses as being divinely mandated by something representing "universal truth".
Simply put, being responsible to oneself for one's own being and acting, is too much for most. And that is certainly universal, even if how true it is, is certainly up for debate.
Happy New Year, Kulak!
Come now, even the least perseverant of pagans, Heraclitus, asserted the universal of change.
She responded to the argument with her own beliefs, she didn't claim they're universal of all pagan (ie. non-jewish) religion.
That said it's hard to prove that change is a constant when the universe is posited to have exploded from an unchanging singularity outside of time and space.
My point is that even the most particularist of philosophers still posits a universal, thus, a fortiori, total contingency is suspect.
So you conducted an exhaustive search of all non-jewish philosophers (including OP) and none of them claimed there are no universal truths?
If I were to have objected with "You say all truths are particular? Name every truth," that would have been no better an argument than this one of yours.
If I were to claim all swans are white because I found the darkest swan and he was still white, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to ask how I know he's the darkest swan.
UT only comes when enough people believe the lies.
Ever hear of God?