W 30/Th OCT 1 Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LH 15-18, FL 17-18, HWT 18-19
- What can Pope (or Leibniz) possibly mean by "whatever is, is right"? Does any reasonable and sane person really believe that nothing is ever wrong?
- Does the "Principle of Sufficient Reason" really state or imply that nothing is wrong?
- Is it possible to believe that all's for the best, or that ours is the best of all possible worlds?
- Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
- What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"? (See SoL...)
- What do you think of Deism?
- If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?
- Have you ever personally experienced the violation of a law of nature? Do we speak too casually of "miracles"?
- Was Rousseau right about freedom and "chains"? Can we break the chains of social obligation merely by coming to understand that they're in our best ("general") interest?
- Did Samuel Johnson "refute" Berkeley's Idealism?
- What do you think of Berkeley's slogan "Esse est Percipi"?
FL
- What do you think of the "slavery theme park"? 119
- What do you think of Robert Love Taylor? 120
- Are you surprised that Birth of a Nation was the first movie shown at the White House?
- Was Wilbur Cash right about "gaudy" southern fantasy-worlds? 121
- What do you think of The New Theology (123) and the modernists' reconciliation of science and scripture? (126)
- Were you taught about the Scopes Trial before coming to college? 126-
HWT
- Were Montaigne and Socrates good role-models for learning "how to die"? 203
- Is it a mistake to think of the soul or self as "uniform, indissoluble, immortal, divine"?
- Is "heart-mind" a better concept than "mind-body"? 204
- Was Aristotle's concept of soul better than Plato's and Descartes's? 204-5
- Do you ever "catch yourself without a perception"? 204
- Is it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it? 207
- Can we really author our own lives? Do Americans underrate "contingency" and show too little humility? 208
- Is there a breakdown of equilibrium between intimacy and integrity in the west? 214
- Do you "belong in your hometown"? 215
M 28/T 29 Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LH 13-14, FL 15-16, HWT 16-17 (No-self, the relational self)
LH
- Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing? 76
- Should pantheists be considered heretics or atheists? Freethinkers? (Is there anything wrong with that?)
- If god is infinite and all-inclusive, doesn't that imply that god includes many things and events that we consider ungodly (bad people, tragedies, disease, poverty...)? 78
- Is anthropomorphism (projecting human qualities onto what is not human) a mistake?
- Do you agree with Xenophanes? “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.”
- If god is impersonal and indifferent to human beings, should you still love and/or worship god? 79
- Spinoza says free will is an illusion, but freedom from bondage to the emotions is possible. Agree?
- Do you agree with Locke that life, freedom, happiness, and property are god-given rights? 82 If so, whence derive the rights of people who don't believe in god (or in Locke's god)?
- What do you think of Locke's "blank slate" idea? 82
- What establishes the continuity of your identity over a lifetime? What makes (and will make) you the same person you were at 8, 18, and 80? 83
- Are Thomas Reid's ideas about identity better than Locke's? 85
FL
- Do you share the American pastoral fantasy, the romantic ideal of sublime green open spaces and "the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy"? 99
- What do you think of Emerson and Thoreau, and their transcendentalism/naturalism? 102
- Would you have believed the New York Sun in 1835? 105
- What do you think of P.T. Barnum's "mindset"? 107
- Would you have enjoyed visiting the White City? 111
- Are we still "selling ourselves dreamy fabrications"? 113
HWT
- "The ultimate goal [of Vedic philosophies] is the dissolution of the ego." 176 What would remain of you, minus your ego?
- John Locke defined a person as the same thinking intelligent being in different times and places, with a continuity of memories, personality, desires, beliefs. The universal self of Indian philosophy, though, the atman, is depersonalized. 177 Do you think westerners misunderstand this when talking about reincarnation and "rebirth"?
- Do you understand the Buddhist "no-self" concept, that "there is something which is myself, but there is no such discrete entity as my self?" 179
- Does it surprise you that the Dalai Lama said "a person's personality is important" (181) or that Buddhists "glorify individuals"? 183
- Does David Hume's position on the self sound Buddhist? Or Lockean? 185
- Do you "not want to be 'pigeonholed with any sexual orientation'? 188
- Are Japanese conformist, or pro-social? 191
- What do you think of the Monty Python "you are all individuals" scene? 196
- Is the western relational identity "lopsided"? 200
Highly recommended (at audible.com and hoopla, via the library):
New Jerusalem
- The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656
- Narrated by: Edward Asner, Richard Easton, Andrea Gabriel, Arye Gross, Amy Pietz, James Wagner, Matthew Wolf
- Length: 1 hr and 40 mins
- Release date: 11-22-11
- Language: English
Also highly recommended, on Spinoza and everything else ("Grandfather Philosophy" is a wise and mature MTSU student):
Why Spinoza still matters
At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever
In July 1656, the 23-year-old Bento de Spinoza was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam. It was the harshest punishment of herem (ban) ever issued by that community. The extant document, a lengthy and vitriolic diatribe, refers to the young man’s ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’. The leaders of the community, having consulted with the rabbis and using Spinoza’s Hebrew name, proclaim that they hereby ‘expel, excommunicate, curse, and damn Baruch de Spinoza’. He is to be ‘cast out from all the tribes of Israel’ and his name is to be ‘blotted out from under heaven’.
Over the centuries, there have been periodic calls for the herem against Spinoza to be lifted. Even David Ben-Gurion, when he was prime minister of Israel, issued a public plea for ‘amending the injustice’ done to Spinoza by the Amsterdam Portuguese community. It was not until early 2012, however, that the Amsterdam congregation, at the insistence of one of its members, formally took up the question of whether it was time to rehabilitate Spinoza and welcome him back into the congregation that had expelled him with such prejudice. There was, though, one thing that they needed to know: should we still regard Spinoza as a heretic?
Unfortunately, the herem document fails to mention specifically what Spinoza’s offences were – at the time he had not yet written anything – and so there is a mystery surrounding this seminal event in the future philosopher’s life. And yet, for anyone who is familiar with Spinoza’s mature philosophical ideas, which he began putting in writing a few years after the excommunication, there really is no such mystery. By the standards of early modern rabbinic Judaism – and especially among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, many of whom were descendants of converso refugees from the Iberian Inquisitions and who were still struggling to build a proper Jewish community on the banks of the Amstel River – Spinoza was a heretic, and a dangerous one at that... (continues)
==
At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever
In July 1656, the 23-year-old Bento de Spinoza was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam. It was the harshest punishment of herem (ban) ever issued by that community. The extant document, a lengthy and vitriolic diatribe, refers to the young man’s ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’. The leaders of the community, having consulted with the rabbis and using Spinoza’s Hebrew name, proclaim that they hereby ‘expel, excommunicate, curse, and damn Baruch de Spinoza’. He is to be ‘cast out from all the tribes of Israel’ and his name is to be ‘blotted out from under heaven’.
Over the centuries, there have been periodic calls for the herem against Spinoza to be lifted. Even David Ben-Gurion, when he was prime minister of Israel, issued a public plea for ‘amending the injustice’ done to Spinoza by the Amsterdam Portuguese community. It was not until early 2012, however, that the Amsterdam congregation, at the insistence of one of its members, formally took up the question of whether it was time to rehabilitate Spinoza and welcome him back into the congregation that had expelled him with such prejudice. There was, though, one thing that they needed to know: should we still regard Spinoza as a heretic?
Unfortunately, the herem document fails to mention specifically what Spinoza’s offences were – at the time he had not yet written anything – and so there is a mystery surrounding this seminal event in the future philosopher’s life. And yet, for anyone who is familiar with Spinoza’s mature philosophical ideas, which he began putting in writing a few years after the excommunication, there really is no such mystery. By the standards of early modern rabbinic Judaism – and especially among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, many of whom were descendants of converso refugees from the Iberian Inquisitions and who were still struggling to build a proper Jewish community on the banks of the Amstel River – Spinoza was a heretic, and a dangerous one at that... (continues)
Betraying Spinoza (Goldstein, Damasio on Open Source radio)... Spinoza's Mind (Goldstein at Stanford)...
==
In January of 1936, a school girl named Phyllis wrote to Einstein to ask whether you could believe in science and religion. He was quick to reply.
My dear Dr. Einstein,
We have brought up the question: 'Do scientists pray?' in our Sunday school class. It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion. We are writing to scientists and other important men, to try and have our own question answered.
We will feel greatly honored if you will answer our question: Do scientists pray, and what do they pray for?
We are in the sixth grade, Miss Ellis's class.
Respectfully yours,
Phyllis
He replied a few days later:
Dear Phyllis,
I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here is my answer:
Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.
However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.
But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
With cordial greetings,
your A. Einstein
In his reply to Phyllis, Einstein hints at his pantheism; the idea that “God is everything". Several times he expressed this view explicitly, telling the Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." He went further in telling an interviewer that he was, “fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism." This pantheism would form the basis of his worldview, and even influence his ideas in physics.
Ok, but what is pantheism exactly?
Pantheism can be defined as a few similar ideas. In the simplest form, it is the belief that everything is identical to God. Holders of this view will often say that God is the universe, nature, the cosmos, or that everything is “one" with God. However, some holders of the view argue that it can also mean that the essence of the divine is in everything without everything “being part" of God... (continues)
==
A handwritten missive by Albert Einstein known as the “God letter” fetched almost $3m at auction on Tuesday.
Christie’s auction house in New York stated on Tuesday afternoon that the letter, including the buyer’s premium, fetched $2.89m under the hammer. That was almost twice the expected amount.
The one-and-a-half-page letter, written in 1954 in German and addressed to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, contains reflections on God, the Bible and Judaism.
Einstein says: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” (continues)
==
Pantheism and Spinoza's God
Einstein had explored the idea that humans could not understand the nature of God. In an interview published in George Sylvester Viereck's book Glimpses of the Great (1930), Einstein responded to a question about whether or not he defined himself as a pantheist. He explained:
Einstein stated, "My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems."[23]
On 24 April 1929, Einstein cabled Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in German: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."[24] He expanded on this in answers he gave to the Japanese magazine Kaizō in 1923:
Wiki ==
Religion and Science
By Albert Einstein
(The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.)
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events - provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events - provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." (Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955)
Arts & Letters Daily search results for “spinoza” (10)
2013-09-10 | In 1656, a dried-fruit importer named Spinoza was exiled from Amsterdam for ?evil opinions.' His response: ?All the better? more »
2015-10-19 | Philosophy and poetry. Inspired by Santayana and Spinoza, Wallace Stevens addressed poetically the search for truth more »
2016-04-29 | Why is a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, a writer of dense and opaque prose, so popular? Spinoza is a heretic for our times more »
2013-06-22 | A secret network of Spinoza-influenced scholars was responsible for spreading the Enlightenment: Jonathan Israel's 3,000-page opus makes the case more »
2014-05-09 | Steven Pinker learned early that every intellectual needs an affectation. So he's left his Spinoza-like hairdo ? long, curly ? unchanged since the 70s more »
2017-08-30 | How did religious freedom come to the West? Spinoza and Locke are often invoked, but in reality, persecution simply became too expensive more »
2011-01-01 | In the market for a new philosophy? Rebecca Goldstein has a tip: Postmodernists are out; rationalists are in; short-sell Heidegger because the smart money is on Spinoza more »
2016-06-02 | The most influential Jewish philosopher is the one Jewish philosopher to have been excommunicated. Spinoza paved the way for modern Judaism. It’s time to rethink his ban more »
2018-05-12 | “The evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza.” At the age of 23, the future philosopher was expelled from his Jewish community. What had he done? more »
2015-12-25 | Chimen Abramsky made room in his London home for 20,000 volumes, including first editions by Spinoza and Marx. Meet one of the 20th
century’s great bibliophiles more »
century’s great bibliophiles more »
W 30/Th OCT 1 Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LH 15-18, FL 17-18, HWT 18-19
- What can Pope (or Leibniz) possibly mean by "whatever is, is right"? Does any reasonable and sane person really believe that nothing is ever wrong?
- Does the "Principle of Sufficient Reason" really state or imply that nothing is wrong?
- Is it possible to believe that all's for the best, or that ours is the best of all possible worlds?
- Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
- What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"? (See SoL...)
- What do you think of Deism?
- If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?
- Have you ever personally experienced the violation of a law of nature? Do we speak too casually of "miracles"?
- Was Rousseau right about freedom and "chains"? Can we break the chains of social obligation merely by coming to understand that they're in our best ("general") interest?
- Did Samuel Johnson "refute" Berkeley's Idealism?
- What do you think of Berkeley's slogan "Esse est Percipi"?
FL
- What do you think of the "slavery theme park"? 119
- What do you think of Robert Love Taylor? 120
- Are you surprised that Birth of a Nation was the first movie shown at the White House?
- Was Wilbur Cash right about "gaudy" southern fantasy-worlds? 121
- What do you think of The New Theology (123) and the modernists' reconciliation of science and scripture? (126)
- Were you taught about the Scopes Trial before coming to college? 126-
HWT
Coming soon
George Berkeley on "In Our Time" (BBC)...
The Almanac recognizes Sam Johnson's sidekick James Boswell, who was also Voltaire's friend. A good segue for us:
As a young man, Boswell was the life of the party, and everyone who met him liked him. The French writer Voltaire invited him to stay at his house after talking to him for only half an hour. David Hume asked him to stay at his bedside when he died. He hung out with the philosopher Rousseau, and Rousseau's mistress liked him so much that she had an affair with Boswell. He was even friends with the pope. And then on May 16, 1763, he met the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson in the back room of a bookstore. Johnson was a notoriously unfriendly man, but Boswell had long admired him and tried hard to impress him. The next time they met, Johnson said to Boswell, "Give me your hand. I have taken a liking to you." Johnson was 30 years older than Boswell and he was the most renowned literary scholar in England. Boswell was undistinguished compared to Johnson's other friends, but Boswell never tried to compete with Johnson's intellect. Their relationship was like an interview that went on for years. Boswell would just ask questions and listen to Johnson talk, and then he would go home and write it all down in his journal.
==
Are you an Inductivist? Do you regularly anticipate, worry about, plan for the events of the day? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise? What is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments about what we can know, based on our experience? Do such considerations make you kinder and gentler, less judgmental, more humble and carefree? Or do they annoy you?
Do you trust the marketplace to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all? Are there some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest requires us to try and provide for one another? Is there an internal mechanism ("hand") in capitalism to insure the public interest's being met? Is capitalism inherently geared to short-term private profit, not long-term public good? Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately with climate change? (On this issue, see Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.)
Asking again: Are you happy? Would you be happier if you had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
George Berkeley on "In Our Time" (BBC)...
- Is it reasonable to expect the sun to rise tomorrow, or "to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my finger?" Is it objectionable?
- What do you think of Russell's critique of the claim that the general will is always right? 699
- By enforcing laws that compel us to pay taxes and support social services (unless we're rich enough to take advantage of tax loopholes, apparently), doesn't the modern state effectively accept Rousseau's version of the social contract?
- If "whatever is, is right," is political reform or personal growth and change ever an appropriate aspiration? Does anyone ever really act as if they believe that this is the best of all possible worlds? What would you change about the world or your life, if you could?
- Even if there's a logical explanation for everything, does it follow that there's a justification?
- What's your reaction to the claim that nature is full of design without a designer (as reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in "grandeur") or what?
- Comment, in light of Boswell's last interview with Hume (see "Supremely happy"), on the cliche that "There are no atheists in foxholes."
- Comment: [We have insufficient experience of universes, to generalize an opinion as to their probable origins.]
- Can freedom be forced? Would we be more free or less, if the law didn't compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel, as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
- Do you think we should attempt to balance personal freedom with the public interest? Are taxes and other civic obligations (including voting) examples of an attempt to do that? Can anyone ever be compelled to be free? Can an individual be truly free while others remain "chained"? Would life in a "state of nature" be a form of freedom worth having? Is anti-government libertarianism a step forward or back, progress or regress? If Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
- Have you encountered or directly experienced an event you would consider a "miracle" in Hume's sense of the term? Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Is it a miracle that you and I are alive? Do we need a better word for these events?
- If you agree that "Panglossian" (Leibnizian) optimism is ridiculous, what form of optimism isn't? Are you an optimist? Why?
- Do you like Deism? Is it more defensible, against charges of divine indifference, than mainstream theism?
- Was Voltaire's play an example of "cultivating your garden"? What other examples can you think of?
- Why do you think people who survive earthquakes, floods, tornadoes etc. so frequently praise god for sparing them, even or especially when their neighbors are not so fortunate? What does this say about human nature and religion focused on personal salvation?
It's the birthday of James Boswell (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1740). He is best known as the author of Life of Johnson (1791), a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which is considered by many people to be the greatest biography ever written in English. As a young man, Boswell's father wanted him to settle down and take care of the family's ancestral estate in rural Scotland. Boswell wanted adventure, excitement, and intrigue, so he ran away to London and became a Catholic. He began keeping a journal in London, and instead of describing his thoughts and feelings about things, he wrote down scenes from his life as though they were fiction. He described his friends as though they were characters and recorded long stretches of dialogue.
As a young man, Boswell was the life of the party, and everyone who met him liked him. The French writer Voltaire invited him to stay at his house after talking to him for only half an hour. David Hume asked him to stay at his bedside when he died. He hung out with the philosopher Rousseau, and Rousseau's mistress liked him so much that she had an affair with Boswell. He was even friends with the pope. And then on May 16, 1763, he met the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson in the back room of a bookstore. Johnson was a notoriously unfriendly man, but Boswell had long admired him and tried hard to impress him. The next time they met, Johnson said to Boswell, "Give me your hand. I have taken a liking to you." Johnson was 30 years older than Boswell and he was the most renowned literary scholar in England. Boswell was undistinguished compared to Johnson's other friends, but Boswell never tried to compete with Johnson's intellect. Their relationship was like an interview that went on for years. Boswell would just ask questions and listen to Johnson talk, and then he would go home and write it all down in his journal. The two men eventually became great friends. They talked about everything from philosophy and religion to trees and turnips. Boswell knew early on that he would write Johnson's biography, but he didn't start until after Johnson's death. The work was slow going. He watched as several others published books about Johnson, and he worried that no one would care about his book when he finished it. He had to fight with his editor to keep the odd details, like the things Johnson had said to his cat and what kind of underwear he thought women should wear. He felt that these were the details that revealed who Johnson really was. When the book finally came out, it was a huge best-seller. No one had ever written such a personal biography that so completely captured a life, and no one has done so since.==
It's possible that he, like Yogi Berra, didn't say everything he said. Abe Lincoln warned us not to believe everything we read on the Internet. But these lines attributed to Voltaire are good:
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716)
...La Monadologie (Monadology) (1714) is a highly condensed outline of Leibniz's metaphsics. Complete individual substances, or monads, are dimensionless points which contain all of their properties—past, present, and future—and, indeed, the entire world. The true propositions that express their natures follow inexorably from the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.
The same themes are presented more popularly in the Discours de Metaphysique (Discourse on Metaphysics) (1686). There Leibniz emphasized the role of a benevolent deity in creating this, the best of all possible worlds, where everything exists in a perfect, pre-established harmony with everything else. Since space and time are merely relations, all of science is a study of phenomenal objects. According to Leibniz, human knowledge involves the discovery within our own minds of all that is a part of our world, and although we cannot make it otherwise, we ought to be grateful for our own inclusion in it.
And the meliorist just wants to make it better.
William James, in Pragmatism:
An old post-
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Voltaire & Leibniz
Brains, John Campbell was saying in his Berkeley interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss).
Russell raises the basic objection to Leibniz's "fantastical" scheme of windowless monads: if they (we) never really interact, how do they (we) know about each other? It might just be a bizarre collective dream, after all. And the "best possible world" claim is just not persuasive, though many will want to believe it.
People wish to think the universe good, and will be lenient to bad arguments proving that it is so, while bad arguments proving that it is bad are closely scanned. In fact, of course, the world is partly good and partly bad, and no ' problem of evil' Voltaire’s countryman Diderot offered a sharp rejoinder to those who said nonbelievers couldn’t be trusted. “An honest person is honest without threats…” [Voltaire @dawn...Leibniz@dawn... Spinoza Leibniz slides... Voltaire_Leibniz_ James]
"Whatever is, is right." I don't care which Pope* said that, it's crazy. No way to think and live.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
*An Essay on Man
Everything happens from a cause, sure, but not "for a reason" if that's code for "for the best."
Irremediably, irredeemably bad things happen. Regret is an appropriate first response. Of course we should try to prevent recurrences of the worst (by our lights) that happens.
Voltaire's Candide may be the most devastating parody ever penned. A "logical explanation for everything" leaves the world much as it found it, less than perfect and easy to improve. Feeding the hungry, curing the sick, educating the ignorant, saving the earth, etc., are obvious improvements to begin with. "All is well," Miss Blue? (An obscure reference to a sweet-hearted cleaning lady I used to hear on the radio when I was young, who ruined that phrase for me.) I don't think so.
But the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did nothing to block Voltaire's "Pangloss" from continuing to insist that everything is the result of a pre-established harmony. What must it be like, to live in a bubble of denial so insulated from reality as to permit a learned person to believe that?
After tornadoes, earthquakes, and other fatal natural disasters, people interviewed on television frequently thank god for sparing them. Hardly a reasonable response, even if a lifetime of indoctrination and insulation makes it "understandable." But to say it in the hearing of survivors whose loved ones weren't spared? Unspeakably insensitive. If "acts of god" (as the insurance companies put it) take life randomly, and you happened to be one of the random survivors, is gratitude really the humane response?
Candide's statement that "we must cultivate our garden" is a metaphor for not just talking about abstract philosophical questions but instead doing something for our species while we have the opportunity. It's a plea for applied philosophy. I'm fresh from a philosophy conference where, I'm sorry to report, the old bias in favor of Grand Theory still has its champions. Spectators, not ameliorators, more concerned to polish their conceptual palaces than rebuild the crumbling human abode. (Thinking in particular of an environmental ethics session, where activists were slighted for being less than rigorous.)
Voltaire, as noted, was a deist, a freethinker, and a pre-Darwinian. He was not an atheist. But is that just an accident of history? If he'd come along a century later, might he have embraced godlessness?
Hard to know. He marveled at nature's universe, wondered at (didn't shrink from) the stars, and burned with a passion to make a better world. The highest powers are those aligned with that quest, not the complacent and wildly premature contention that this is the best of all possible worlds. His god, in any age, would not have been an excuse for passivity or indifference to the fate of the earth and its riders.
It's possible that he, like Yogi Berra, didn't say everything he said. Abe Lincoln warned us not to believe everything we read on the Internet. But these lines attributed to Voltaire are good:
- “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
- “Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
- “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
- “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
- “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
- “The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
- “I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health.”
- “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
- “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
- “What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.”
- “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”
- “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion”
- “The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks.”
- “Let us cultivate our garden.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716)
...La Monadologie (Monadology) (1714) is a highly condensed outline of Leibniz's metaphsics. Complete individual substances, or monads, are dimensionless points which contain all of their properties—past, present, and future—and, indeed, the entire world. The true propositions that express their natures follow inexorably from the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.
The same themes are presented more popularly in the Discours de Metaphysique (Discourse on Metaphysics) (1686). There Leibniz emphasized the role of a benevolent deity in creating this, the best of all possible worlds, where everything exists in a perfect, pre-established harmony with everything else. Since space and time are merely relations, all of science is a study of phenomenal objects. According to Leibniz, human knowledge involves the discovery within our own minds of all that is a part of our world, and although we cannot make it otherwise, we ought to be grateful for our own inclusion in it.
And the meliorist just wants to make it better.
William James, in Pragmatism:
Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds... (continues)And,
...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
==Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism... (continues)
An old post-
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Voltaire & Leibniz
Brains, John Campbell was saying in his Berkeley interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss).
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses… Candide“There is a lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed.” [slides here]William James called Leibniz's theodicy "superficiality incarnate": "Leibniz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind..." And James's comments continue, in a similarly scathing vein. He was particularly incensed by the disconnect between Leibniz's philosophy and the suffering of a distraught Clevelander whose plight and ultimate suicide stands for the despair of so many through the ages. But if you like Leibniz's defense of the ways of god, maybe you'd love his monadology. Maybe not. But if one substance is good, how good is a practical infinity of them?
Russell raises the basic objection to Leibniz's "fantastical" scheme of windowless monads: if they (we) never really interact, how do they (we) know about each other? It might just be a bizarre collective dream, after all. And the "best possible world" claim is just not persuasive, though many will want to believe it.
People wish to think the universe good, and will be lenient to bad arguments proving that it is so, while bad arguments proving that it is bad are closely scanned. In fact, of course, the world is partly good and partly bad, and no ' problem of evil' Voltaire’s countryman Diderot offered a sharp rejoinder to those who said nonbelievers couldn’t be trusted. “An honest person is honest without threats…” [Voltaire @dawn...Leibniz@dawn... Spinoza Leibniz slides... Voltaire_Leibniz_ James]
"Whatever is, is right." I don't care which Pope* said that, it's crazy. No way to think and live.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
*An Essay on Man
Everything happens from a cause, sure, but not "for a reason" if that's code for "for the best."
Irremediably, irredeemably bad things happen. Regret is an appropriate first response. Of course we should try to prevent recurrences of the worst (by our lights) that happens.
Voltaire's Candide may be the most devastating parody ever penned. A "logical explanation for everything" leaves the world much as it found it, less than perfect and easy to improve. Feeding the hungry, curing the sick, educating the ignorant, saving the earth, etc., are obvious improvements to begin with. "All is well," Miss Blue? (An obscure reference to a sweet-hearted cleaning lady I used to hear on the radio when I was young, who ruined that phrase for me.) I don't think so.
But the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did nothing to block Voltaire's "Pangloss" from continuing to insist that everything is the result of a pre-established harmony. What must it be like, to live in a bubble of denial so insulated from reality as to permit a learned person to believe that?
After tornadoes, earthquakes, and other fatal natural disasters, people interviewed on television frequently thank god for sparing them. Hardly a reasonable response, even if a lifetime of indoctrination and insulation makes it "understandable." But to say it in the hearing of survivors whose loved ones weren't spared? Unspeakably insensitive. If "acts of god" (as the insurance companies put it) take life randomly, and you happened to be one of the random survivors, is gratitude really the humane response?
Candide's statement that "we must cultivate our garden" is a metaphor for not just talking about abstract philosophical questions but instead doing something for our species while we have the opportunity. It's a plea for applied philosophy. I'm fresh from a philosophy conference where, I'm sorry to report, the old bias in favor of Grand Theory still has its champions. Spectators, not ameliorators, more concerned to polish their conceptual palaces than rebuild the crumbling human abode. (Thinking in particular of an environmental ethics session, where activists were slighted for being less than rigorous.)
Voltaire, as noted, was a deist, a freethinker, and a pre-Darwinian. He was not an atheist. But is that just an accident of history? If he'd come along a century later, might he have embraced godlessness?
Hard to know. He marveled at nature's universe, wondered at (didn't shrink from) the stars, and burned with a passion to make a better world. The highest powers are those aligned with that quest, not the complacent and wildly premature contention that this is the best of all possible worlds. His god, in any age, would not have been an excuse for passivity or indifference to the fate of the earth and its riders.
==
BONUS: Whose ex-boyfriend said the eye was proof of intelligent design?
BONUS: Melissa Lane says it was a paradox of civilization for Rousseau that we're in a society of plenty, but are less _____ than when we wandered naked in the glades of some barbaric past.
BONUS+: Who has a "walk" in Edinburgh? Who had a dog?
BONUS++: Bertrand Russell says Hume cannot refute the lunatic who thinks he's a what?
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish…. Whoever is moved by Faith to assent to [miracles] is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. David Hume
Are you an Inductivist? Do you regularly anticipate, worry about, plan for the events of the day? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise? What is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments about what we can know, based on our experience? Do such considerations make you kinder and gentler, less judgmental, more humble and carefree? Or do they annoy you?
Do you trust the marketplace to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all? Are there some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest requires us to try and provide for one another? Is there an internal mechanism ("hand") in capitalism to insure the public interest's being met? Is capitalism inherently geared to short-term private profit, not long-term public good? Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately with climate change? (On this issue, see Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.)
Asking again: Are you happy? Would you be happier if you had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
Also note: not assigned but highly recommended, Alison Gopnik's recent PB discussion of theHume-Buddhist connection.
==
David Hume (follow his little finger) has a public "walk" in Edinburgh.
In 1724 the town council bought Calton Hill, making it one of the first public parks in the country. The famous philosopher David Hume lobbied the council to build a walk ‘for the health and amusement of the inhabitants’, and you can still stroll along ‘Hume Walk’ to this day.He agreed with Diderot that good and honest people don't need threats to make them so, they just need to be well nurtured and postively reinforced in the customs and habits of a good and honest society. Divine justice, he thought, is an oxymoron. “Epicurus’ old questions are still unanswered… (continues)”
Everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality… religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place… JMH
Hume was an interestingly-birfurcated empiricist/skeptic, doubting metaphysics and causal demonstrations but still sure that “we can know the world of daily life.” That’s because the life-world is full of people collaboratively correcting one another’s errors. Hume and friends “believed morality was available to anyone through reason,” though not moral “knowledge” in the absolute and indubitable Cartesian sense. Custom is fallible but (fortunately) fixable. [Hume at 300… in 3 minutes... Belief in miracles subverts understanding]
On the question of Design, intelligent or otherwise, Hume would definitely join in the February celebration of Darwin Day. Scientific thinking is a natural human instinct, for him, for "clever animals" like ourselves, providing "the only basis we have for learning from experience." (Millican) [Hume vs. design (PB)... Hume on religion (SEP)]
“Open your eyes,” Richard Dawkins likes to say. They really are an incredible evolutionary design. Not “perfect” or previsioned, but naturally astounding.
==
David Hume (follow his little finger) has a public "walk" in Edinburgh.
In 1724 the town council bought Calton Hill, making it one of the first public parks in the country. The famous philosopher David Hume lobbied the council to build a walk ‘for the health and amusement of the inhabitants’, and you can still stroll along ‘Hume Walk’ to this day.He agreed with Diderot that good and honest people don't need threats to make them so, they just need to be well nurtured and postively reinforced in the customs and habits of a good and honest society. Divine justice, he thought, is an oxymoron. “Epicurus’ old questions are still unanswered… (continues)”
Everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality… religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place… JMHHume was an interestingly-birfurcated empiricist/skeptic, doubting metaphysics and causal demonstrations but still sure that “we can know the world of daily life.” That’s because the life-world is full of people collaboratively correcting one another’s errors. Hume and friends “believed morality was available to anyone through reason,” though not moral “knowledge” in the absolute and indubitable Cartesian sense. Custom is fallible but (fortunately) fixable. [Hume at 300… in 3 minutes... Belief in miracles subverts understanding]
On the question of Design, intelligent or otherwise, Hume would definitely join in the February celebration of Darwin Day. Scientific thinking is a natural human instinct, for him, for "clever animals" like ourselves, providing "the only basis we have for learning from experience." (Millican) [Hume vs. design (PB)... Hume on religion (SEP)]
“Open your eyes,” Richard Dawkins likes to say. They really are an incredible evolutionary design. Not “perfect” or previsioned, but naturally astounding.
==
An early episode of the new Cosmos takes a good look at the eye as well.
Julia Sweeney's ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, an evolving eye is quite a useful adaptation at every stage.
Hume, open-eyed but possibly blind to the worst implications of his skeptical brand of empiricism, is on Team Aristotle. Russell, though, says we must look hard for an escape from the "dead-end" conclusion that real knowledge must always elude us, that (for instance) we cannot refute "the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg." Russell says this is a "desperate" result. I say it would be more desperate to feel compelled to refute Mr. Egg in the first place. Remember the old Groucho line? "My brother thinks he's a chicken - we don't talk him out of it because we need the eggs."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Team Plato along with other celebrants (like the other Marx) of "a communitarian ideal based on men's dreams," was an emotional thinker with a romantically-inflated opinion of human nature and the “noble savages” who would have embodied it in a hypothetical state of nature.
What’s most interesting to me about Rousseau is that his Emile so arrested the attention ofImmanuel Kant that he allowed it to disrupt his daily walking routine “for a few days.” Nothing short of seriously-incapacitating illness would do that to me. Apparently Kant was typically the same way, except for just that once.
Kant could get very upset if well-meaning acquaintances disturbed his routines. Accepting on one occasion an invitation to an outing into the country, Kant got very nervous when he realised that he would be home later than his usual bedtime, and when he was finally delivered to his doorstep just a few minutes after ten, he was shaken with worry and disgruntlement, making it at once one of his principles never to go on such a tour again.
So what’s in Emile that could so dis-comport a creature of such deeply ingrained habit? A generally-favorable evaluation of human nature, and a prescription for education reflective of that evaluation. Kant thought highly enough of Rousseau’s point of view to hold us all to a high standard of reasoned conduct. We should always treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means to our own ends. We have a duty to regard one another with mutual respect.
The character of Emile begins learning important moral lessons from his infancy, through childhood, and into early adulthood. His education relies on the tutor’s constant supervision. The tutor must even manipulate the environment in order to teach sometimes difficult moral lessons about humility, chastity, and honesty. IEP
Yes, fine. But what precisely in Emile kept Kant off the streets, until he was finished with it?
Could have something to do with other characters in the story. “Rousseau discusses in great detail how the young pupil is to be brought up to regard women and sexuality.” Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.
Or not. Rousseau’s observations regarding women sound pretty sexist and ill-informed, nothing Kant (as a relatively un-Enlightenend male) wouldn’t already have shared.
Maybe it’s what Emile says about freedom that so arrested Kant? “The will is known to me in its action, not in its nature.”
Or religion? “It is categorically opposed to orthodox Christian views, specifically the claim that Christianity is the one true religion.” Maybe.
The Vicar claims that the correct view of the universe is to see oneself not at the center of things, but rather on the circumference, with all people realizing that we have a common center. This same notion is expressed in Rousseau’s political theory, particularly in the concept of the general will.
That’s very promising. Kant’s Copernican Revolution etc.
I wonder if the mystery of Kant’s lost walks could be related, too, to another of fellow-pedestrian Rousseau’s books, Reveries of the Solitary Walker?
The work is divided into ten “walks” in which Rousseau reflects on his life, what he sees as his contribution to the public good, and how he and his work have been misunderstood. It is interesting that Rousseau returns to nature, which he had always praised throughout his career… The Reveries, like many of Rousseau’s other works, is part story and part philosophical treatise. The reader sees in it, not only philosophy, but also the reflections of the philosopher himself.
That may not be a clue but it’s a definite inspiration for my own Philosophy Walks project, still seeking its legs.
Melissa Lane, like me, is very interested in Rousseau's walking.
BTW: we know Rousseau had a dog. Did Kant? If so, wasn’t he neglecting his duty to walk her?
Is nature full of design without a designer (as possibly reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in the "grandeur" of nature, in Darwin's view) or what? Most designers sign their work unambiguously, even ostentatiously.
We talked miracles earlier in the semester, so this may be redundant. But so many of us were so sure that we'd encountered or directly experienced suspensions of natural law that it seems worth a second pass. Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Isn't it a miracle that you and I are alive? Or that your friend or loved one, who'd received the very bad prognosis, is? Well, not exactly. All of those are plenty improbable, given certain assumptions. But none of them is an obvious law-breaker. We need a better word for these events, a word that conveys astonished and grateful surprise but does not court woo. Or I do, anyway.
J-J Rousseau seems to have been a self-indulgent paranoiac scoundrel, but he wasn't wrong to say we need to balance personal freedom with the public interest. Minimally, we need to tax ourselves enough to provide good public education, reliable infrastructure, and a secure peace. And we need to vote. (I'll ask in class how many are registered and how many will actually cast a ballot tomorrow, then I'll ask what would J-J say.)
Maybe he was just phrase-making, but "compelled to be free" has a chillier aspect from our end of the twentieth century. Whenever we act to pad our own nest wile neglecting the well-being of others, we reinforce the "chains" of oppression. Yet life is a chain. We should remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
Whenever I hear libertarians rail against government activism, I wonder: if a Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
Last Fall I tried to buoy the spirits of my friend from Kansas City, after his upstart Royals fell to the Giants. I pointed out that teams more often rally when down 3-2 than not. His pessimistic reply: I'm a skeptic about induction. It was a joke, and maybe Hume was joking too. Aren't we all Inductivists, regularly anticipating, worring about, planning for the events of our days? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise?
Of course we could do with less worry, but that's because experience has taught the truism that most of our worries are unfounded. So what, really, is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments? It's not to urge us over the Pyrrhonic cliff, but to redouble our curiosity and our humility: to make us kinder, gentler, less neurotic friends and fellow citizens. As Hume said, "Be a philosopher; but amidst your philosophy, be still a man."
Melissa Lane's interview on Rousseau raises important questions for our time, when the marketplace so clearly has faile to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all. Michael Sandel rightly says there are some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest and common decency nonetheless require us to try and provide for one another.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" seems more invisible than ever, short-term private profiteering more prevalent. Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately, for instance, with climate change? Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate says no.
More Rousseau-inspired challenges: Are we happy? Would we be happier if we had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
But let's be real, Jean-Jacques: most of that was never on offer in any realistic state of nature.
Julia Sweeney's ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, an evolving eye is quite a useful adaptation at every stage.
Hume, open-eyed but possibly blind to the worst implications of his skeptical brand of empiricism, is on Team Aristotle. Russell, though, says we must look hard for an escape from the "dead-end" conclusion that real knowledge must always elude us, that (for instance) we cannot refute "the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg." Russell says this is a "desperate" result. I say it would be more desperate to feel compelled to refute Mr. Egg in the first place. Remember the old Groucho line? "My brother thinks he's a chicken - we don't talk him out of it because we need the eggs."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Team Plato along with other celebrants (like the other Marx) of "a communitarian ideal based on men's dreams," was an emotional thinker with a romantically-inflated opinion of human nature and the “noble savages” who would have embodied it in a hypothetical state of nature.
What’s most interesting to me about Rousseau is that his Emile so arrested the attention ofImmanuel Kant that he allowed it to disrupt his daily walking routine “for a few days.” Nothing short of seriously-incapacitating illness would do that to me. Apparently Kant was typically the same way, except for just that once.
Kant could get very upset if well-meaning acquaintances disturbed his routines. Accepting on one occasion an invitation to an outing into the country, Kant got very nervous when he realised that he would be home later than his usual bedtime, and when he was finally delivered to his doorstep just a few minutes after ten, he was shaken with worry and disgruntlement, making it at once one of his principles never to go on such a tour again.
So what’s in Emile that could so dis-comport a creature of such deeply ingrained habit? A generally-favorable evaluation of human nature, and a prescription for education reflective of that evaluation. Kant thought highly enough of Rousseau’s point of view to hold us all to a high standard of reasoned conduct. We should always treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means to our own ends. We have a duty to regard one another with mutual respect.
The character of Emile begins learning important moral lessons from his infancy, through childhood, and into early adulthood. His education relies on the tutor’s constant supervision. The tutor must even manipulate the environment in order to teach sometimes difficult moral lessons about humility, chastity, and honesty. IEP
Yes, fine. But what precisely in Emile kept Kant off the streets, until he was finished with it?
Could have something to do with other characters in the story. “Rousseau discusses in great detail how the young pupil is to be brought up to regard women and sexuality.” Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.
Or not. Rousseau’s observations regarding women sound pretty sexist and ill-informed, nothing Kant (as a relatively un-Enlightenend male) wouldn’t already have shared.
Maybe it’s what Emile says about freedom that so arrested Kant? “The will is known to me in its action, not in its nature.”
Or religion? “It is categorically opposed to orthodox Christian views, specifically the claim that Christianity is the one true religion.” Maybe.
The Vicar claims that the correct view of the universe is to see oneself not at the center of things, but rather on the circumference, with all people realizing that we have a common center. This same notion is expressed in Rousseau’s political theory, particularly in the concept of the general will.
That’s very promising. Kant’s Copernican Revolution etc.
I wonder if the mystery of Kant’s lost walks could be related, too, to another of fellow-pedestrian Rousseau’s books, Reveries of the Solitary Walker?
The work is divided into ten “walks” in which Rousseau reflects on his life, what he sees as his contribution to the public good, and how he and his work have been misunderstood. It is interesting that Rousseau returns to nature, which he had always praised throughout his career… The Reveries, like many of Rousseau’s other works, is part story and part philosophical treatise. The reader sees in it, not only philosophy, but also the reflections of the philosopher himself.
That may not be a clue but it’s a definite inspiration for my own Philosophy Walks project, still seeking its legs.
Melissa Lane, like me, is very interested in Rousseau's walking.
BTW: we know Rousseau had a dog. Did Kant? If so, wasn’t he neglecting his duty to walk her?
Is nature full of design without a designer (as possibly reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in the "grandeur" of nature, in Darwin's view) or what? Most designers sign their work unambiguously, even ostentatiously.
We talked miracles earlier in the semester, so this may be redundant. But so many of us were so sure that we'd encountered or directly experienced suspensions of natural law that it seems worth a second pass. Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Isn't it a miracle that you and I are alive? Or that your friend or loved one, who'd received the very bad prognosis, is? Well, not exactly. All of those are plenty improbable, given certain assumptions. But none of them is an obvious law-breaker. We need a better word for these events, a word that conveys astonished and grateful surprise but does not court woo. Or I do, anyway.
J-J Rousseau seems to have been a self-indulgent paranoiac scoundrel, but he wasn't wrong to say we need to balance personal freedom with the public interest. Minimally, we need to tax ourselves enough to provide good public education, reliable infrastructure, and a secure peace. And we need to vote. (I'll ask in class how many are registered and how many will actually cast a ballot tomorrow, then I'll ask what would J-J say.)
Maybe he was just phrase-making, but "compelled to be free" has a chillier aspect from our end of the twentieth century. Whenever we act to pad our own nest wile neglecting the well-being of others, we reinforce the "chains" of oppression. Yet life is a chain. We should remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
Whenever I hear libertarians rail against government activism, I wonder: if a Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
Last Fall I tried to buoy the spirits of my friend from Kansas City, after his upstart Royals fell to the Giants. I pointed out that teams more often rally when down 3-2 than not. His pessimistic reply: I'm a skeptic about induction. It was a joke, and maybe Hume was joking too. Aren't we all Inductivists, regularly anticipating, worring about, planning for the events of our days? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise?
Of course we could do with less worry, but that's because experience has taught the truism that most of our worries are unfounded. So what, really, is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments? It's not to urge us over the Pyrrhonic cliff, but to redouble our curiosity and our humility: to make us kinder, gentler, less neurotic friends and fellow citizens. As Hume said, "Be a philosopher; but amidst your philosophy, be still a man."
Melissa Lane's interview on Rousseau raises important questions for our time, when the marketplace so clearly has faile to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all. Michael Sandel rightly says there are some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest and common decency nonetheless require us to try and provide for one another.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" seems more invisible than ever, short-term private profiteering more prevalent. Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately, for instance, with climate change? Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate says no.
More Rousseau-inspired challenges: Are we happy? Would we be happier if we had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
But let's be real, Jean-Jacques: most of that was never on offer in any realistic state of nature.
I do share the American pastoral fantasy. I like the romantic ideal of sublime green open spaces and "the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy.” I have no desire to be part of any wild frontier, but a “Christmas cabin” in the woods sounds like a nice, snowy vacation. For me, the suburbs I lived in all my life is too urban. Sure, I lived on an acre of land where my shady backyard became a place for my brothers and sisters to play frontier (we would make “soup,” build forts, and dig holes). But Knoxville is a huge ripple of suburbs radiating from downtown, making the mountains a 45-minute drive. Though I can see the mountains easily in the distance from pretty much anywhere in town, urbanization and consumerism take front and center to overtake the far-off views. This is a me-problem is that has been shaped through the fabrication of a dreamy small town, like in Hallmark movies, that is accepting of outsiders and is ethnically diverse. I know the reality is that these people are the “forgotten” or “left-behind” people, and thus are not the richer, educated people (I read ahead a little in HWT). So, in reality, these towns are full of less educated, poorer people than you would find in a city. Ideally, I would not like to be in that situation to raise kids, but I would have the opportunity to help bring the town up at bit which would be good.
ReplyDeleteI also want to comment on P.T. Barnum's "mindset." From a business standpoint, its genius and is still used many times today: prey on gullible people by feeding them fantasies and making them spend more money. I find it truly disgusting that I live in a country where companies, media, and politics are encouraged to use this strategy to get ahead. I’ve often entertained the idea of moving to another country after college for this exact reason, though I don’t think I ever will because I am just like most of the Western world in that I want to stay close to home. While I believe America as a country has a good idea for a government, as it looks right now, it does not seem to be willing to make the necessary changes for it to work. At the end of HWT chapter 19, it describes these changes. This is why I am a big supporter of the #eattherich idea, but to put it more nicely: tax the rich because they are taking advantage of the poor; that way, the poor can be raised and re-equalize life’s playing field.
I agree, I don't see our current government as it is abiding to any real changes to help all people and not just one set. It's so gross knowing that poorer people are preyed on simply due to circumstances largely out of their control - I mean, come on, half the people I know would rather Uber to the hospital than take an ambulance because it'll cost them an arm and a leg. Our own health care system, which is disgusting as is, shows how American government and business desperately needs to better evolve.
DeleteSection 11
DeletePosted essay Sunday (3)
Commented on Nate Carley, Mason Schoonover, and Molly Belk’s essays Wednesday (3)
30/30
A system in power will do anything that it can to stay in power, no matter the cost. This concept is discussed considering the topic of social media in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma and I highly recommend watching it if for no other reason than to see an example of what kind of human right's violations and systematic social failures can be found when scrutinizing a system of power.
DeleteI understand what you are saying about "the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy." I also see what you are saying about "people who "prey on gullible people by feeding them fantasies and making them spend money." Maybe people should not trust so easily and use their judgment to not be gullible. I am not sure leaving here will stop people from taking advantage. I am not sure this happens only in America.
DeleteI agree with your thoughts on Barnum's mindset being harmful and disdainful. I also am disappointed at how common this mindset is currently in the country/world. With the internet we were supposed to be able to progress with better access to information. Now it's apparent that it's also a powerful tool for the spread of propaganda and conspiracy theories. I'm interested to see how people will adapt, but Im concerned things will get uglier before they get better.
DeleteThis makes me think of the ways that human beings have separated themselves from nature and hold dominion over the materials this planet has to offer. With these materials humans construct large towns and skyscraper cities while feeling the hopelessness within as the beauty of nature is replaced by the world of business; Seeing the mountains in the distance as we only dream of escaping the very thing that we built.
ReplyDeleteSpinoza says free will is an illusion, but freedom from bondage to the emotions is possible. Agree?
ReplyDeleteTouching on the first part of this question, I believe that free will is possible, but i dont believe it is often obtained. Many people go through their own lives with little to no consideration of the universe around them and no sense for right and wrong. They wake, go to work at 5am, get off at 7pm, eat, sleep, and they repeat this process with very little difference in their own personal life. This is the entrapment that freedom sometimes offers and the reason that freedom is always freeing. However, I do believe that it is possible to make informed choices and decisions if you are able to breach out and expore that very world you once felt trapped in.
I would like to also mention that freedom from emotions can, in my own opinion, be done easily. Many allow themselves to be trapped in emotion and they never leave that feeling. Take for example anxiety, it may start very small but as you allow it to take strong hold of you, you begin to let that emotion control you and even alter who you are. It is always possible to do better though and seek help. I think this is truly a large problem with my generation today. Many of us (inlcuding myself up until recently) have allowed these emotions to come in and take hold on us. It doesn't have to be that way though, you can take medications, change your mindset, talk to a therpist, seek happiness, and just making friends can help this end.
This is something that I agree with 100%. I feel like the mind can hold a sort of trap on a person. Slipping in mental health can cause a person to feel behind and in bondage to their own thoughts. This can be something that improves not only with help and support, but through guidance to help a person gain more control of themselves.
DeleteOne perspective that I just recently thought of while thinking of this is that we ourselves entrap ourselves when in the presence of strong emotion. I am hesitant to over-generalize (please forgive me if this offends you or someone you know) but one of the common problems of an individual struggling with emotion is not allowing that emotion to simply flow out like a river. I know of many friends who were very depressed because of their looks, their talents, comparing themselves infinitely to those around when instead they should embrace the self. It was not until they accepted these emotions for what they were and thought of themselves in a completely different light that they were able to obtain freedom, free will. This is where I disagree with Spinoza in that free will is an illusion. I think that free will is evident by our ability to free ourselves from emotion.
DeleteYou seem to have thought about this long before now and I appreciate the second paragraph.
DeleteWeekly essay: Tuesday (3 points)
DeleteCommented on Molly Belk's post (1 point)
Commented on Mai-Thi Kieu (1 point)
I don't necessarily agree with the first part of the statement, I think human beings always have free will, what we do with that will is up to us. According to circumstances we might want to act differently, like for example I dont have to do my assignments, I dont have to go to college, I can get wasted on the weekends or study or do literally anything, I think what you do is up to you and no one else, there are just guidelines you can choose to follow.
Deletethis is a very well written response to a not so easy question to answer. I very much so agree with your statement of free will can be obtained but it is very hard to do so. Great post!
DeleteI absolutely agree with you that people often fall into the trap of repeating the process. I think that this is because people forget to question things and more importantly forget to take a step back to see the big picture. I think that once this is done, the world is in your hands and it is a product of your free will to make a change.
ReplyDeleteDo you agree with Locke that life, freedom, happiness, and property are god-given rights? 82 If so, whence derive the rights of people who don't believe in god (or in Locke's god)?
ReplyDeleteI do agree with Locke’s words that God has given people the rights of life, freedom, happiness, and property. For people who don’t believe in God, thankfully they still have those same rights. The God I believe Locke was referring to is the God of the Bible. In the Bible, in 1 John 4 as well as John 3, it talks about how God is love, and how He showed his love for everyone by sending His Son to take the punishment for everyone’s sins. So regardless of whether or not people believe in God, He loves them. So if God loves everyone regardless of if they love Him back, He has provided everyone with the same rights as well as laws. The Ten Commandments are still used as guidelines for laws or morality in general. I believe that regardless of whether you believe in God or not, people’s moral compasses tell them lying is wrong, adultery is wrong, or coveting others’ belongings is wrong. Where do people think that inner moral compass comes from?
As someone who isn't religious, I'm glad to see that you haven't condemned myself and others for not being believers. In my views, I think we all have a moral compass that forms as we grow up, though. Still, it's interesting to see that supposedly your God would share his love with non-believers.
DeleteComing form a religious background I understand the point you are stating about God loving and giving everyone their own rights which is something I truly agree with. Having said the privilege God provides to any believer and non believer in opinion is true, but he also provide us with free judgement and decision making which gives us the right to believe anything we want. Therefor asking that question to non believers, is a question I would also ask myself.
DeleteThis is interesting. I'm also a Christian, but I don't think God promises all these things in this life, so the idea of god-given rights is wrong to me. In fact the Bible promises that in this life you will have trials, not always happiness. If god-given rights were true, what did slaves do to be denied their rights? Ephesians 6 tells slaves to obey their masters, but it doesn't say that they will be free or own property in this life. You brought up people's moral compass, but across cultures everyone is taught what is right and what is wrong. I've never considered the idea that these could come from God, but that makes sense to me. In the case of slavery, you could argue that it is awful humans who deny slaves their "god-given rights." I guess you could look at it like God does give the rights to slaves, but evil people take them away. Also, through Exodus, we know that in ancient Egypt, God's people, the Israelites, were enslaved. Why would he deny god-given rights to the people specially labeled as God's.
DeleteFrom my blogpost, I talked about God and Nature being the same, and I mentioned that God created a domain for all life to live in. It is up to creatures or people in the domain to shape the world. He gave us power,freedom,happiness, but it is how we utilize it is what matters I agree with Barbara with her talking about the slaves that they didn't necessarily have rights because it was taken away, but they slowly had the power to gain it back.God has created us in unique ways, from our appearance, personality or skills, and where we live. So I would assume that God understands that there will be different believers or non-believers.A powerful entity must be open minded to all sorts of things if they are watching over everything. God gave us everything, but it's up to us and our moral compass to decide our life and as well as others and our world.
DeleteInteresting thoughts, some questions whether they be science or religion based i truly believe can never be answered and this could be one of them.
DeleteI don't believe in God but I do appreciate the people who don't try to make it seem like people should be seen any differently in terms of freedoms whether they believe in him or not.
DeleteDo you not want to be 'pigeonholed with any sexual orientation'?
ReplyDelete-
For me, sexual orientation is something that can be discovered as young as a child, to when you're in your senior years. Each day we might have a realization of preference, or even the absence of preference. Of course I understand that the LGBTQ+ community is a label in some people's eyes, but I believe it's much more than that. It's a sign of loving who you love outside of our "norm." You can label yourself as gay, bi, lesbian, pan, etc. However, I feel that more and more people are choosing not to put a label on their orientation in the case of pigeonholing themselves; take into account this could apply to someone who is, for example, bicurious and doesn't know if they are bi, gay, or straight. I personally feel this way as well - I don't think I know if I only prefer men, because I do find women stunning; but deep down I just don't know if I would settle with a woman in the long run. I don't pigeonhole myself to a certain sexual orientation simply because I'm not too sure, and the same goes for many people out there still discovering their preferences. We know we are not bound to being straight like how society has been drilling into our heads since the day we were born, but we are still curious if we could consider ourselves queer. Still, if someone has put a label on their sexuality, that doesn't mean it can't be open to change, because as our own selves we are still learning and growing according to how we feel each day.
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section 011
I see where you coming from with this opinion, I feel like sexual orientation is something a person figures out throughout self-discovery and that it something that happens differently for any and every person. Everybody is different and realizing where you are with yourself and finding what you prefer is something that helps guide a person throughout their journey of realizing their sexual orientation.
DeleteI agree with your viewpoint. I feel the exact same way with my own sexuality as you do with yours, and have felt very pressured in the past to label it. However, I like the push that you mentioned to not have to pick, and just enjoy whoever we meet that we find ourselves attracted to.
DeleteI agree in some ways and disagree in others. I think that once a person places a lable on themselves the society around them treat that person in a specific way. This makes it more likely that a person will adobt characteristics assigned to that lable. Before they know it they are doing things out of habit as a direct result of the lable. lables are powerful things and should be treated as such.
DeleteI'm glad that someone else posted about this question, too. I love that you mentioned how the labels exist as titles against the norm. They aren't set in stone, they are just identifiers to other non-heterosexuals. I have to address Nate's comment though and yes, labels are powerful even in the LGBT+ community. I get a lot of hate from other non-heterosexuals about my label. The behaviors that are adopted by claiming a label are sometimes nowhere near as dangerous as the prejudices held against certain labels.
DeleteI believe that sexual orientation is a discovery of one's self as well. Heteronormality is instilled in most children in a young age: family, television, books, movies, etc. Because of this; self discovery is still necessary and sometimes can be a long and arduous path. For some it hits like a lightning bolt, others a slow burn, winding path. Labels is the language of humans, we love our adjectives and adverbs so I've never been against their usage. They are an imperfect science when it comes to expressing emotions and ideas but they are with their benefits.
DeleteI would challenge Nate's comment and ask it is really the acceptance of the label that leads people to adopt those stereotypical traits of a sexuality or could it also be you broke one norm, why not find yourself in other ways? Or as in the way of the animal kingdom, how can one of the community peacock itself to a potential mate?
Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing?
ReplyDeleteI can see how it can viewed that way, I never really thought about this perspective, but in someways I do agree with God and Nature being as one. God created a domain filled with life and eventually you have different creatures and different humans to thrive and live to build within the domain. People learn to make weapons,grow food, and create shelter for their companions or family. Like stated in the zoom meeting conversation, we don't have the ability to manipulate weather or disasters, but whenever there's a drought or wildfire,or if we are dying to have a snow day and we listen to superstitions, some people pray to God for assistance to help them. Doesn't that give an example of God being in the form of nature or if a misdeed or bad luck happened upon an individual or group, and a storm appears does that mean punishment?
Scientifically, we know how natural disasters are created, but with the state of Earth has been going through, climate change,pollution,wildfires,deforestation,and endangered animal species.Does it give an idea that we are punished with potential danger in the future because of our mistreatment towards nature.If God is Nature, if god revolves around us, is god also dying from this infestation of undegradable material or is God giving us a sign by withering to say something like,"I gave you a gift and you mistreated it, it's your responsibility to fix it." Because there's some philosophies that question,"If God is all powerful, why doesn't he stop the evil? or how powerful is he?" It's a lot to talk to about and something I would like to think about more in my free time.
I agree with this mostly. I think God and nature are relatively the same thing because we cannot see either one or control it. Mother Nature is what we like to call Gods form of nature which is really just God controlling the natural things going on on Earth.
DeleteI never thought about this certain topic either and it definitely makes you have to think about it and process it. I agree with you in God created a domain filled with life. I enjoyed reading how you thought about this.
DeleteVery interesting! I agree that God can be viewed as Nature and with most of your thoughts, however I do not think that natural disasters are punishments. I think they are a result of tangible things. We have evidence of how storms are created.
DeleteI am very intrigued by your questions! This is such a small bit of your essay but I wanted to share my thoughts. As someone coming from a Catholic background and attempting to step pass the bounds of my principles, I think that God allows for such evils being all powerful because he understood that Good could not be measured without something of which is against it. It is difficult to measure whether a fork or spoon is better. How do we judge this? We test this with other variables; noodles, soup, etc... It is then where we know which one is bad, and which one is good and we learn from it. God wanted to create something which was good, but fully understood (I think) that evil was a "necessary evil" for his creation. It is almost like the unstoppable force" and the "immovable object". its difficult to imagine one as superior without considering the other.
DeleteI hope that made sense lol
Essay= 3+
DeleteMolly Belk= +1
Kimmie Steakley= +1
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Section 10
Forgive me for not knowing the author of a quote, but I once heard this following statement; "Religion and science compliment each other." I think this is why over 80% of scientists classify themselves as being religious because they have seen what the universe and nature has to offer and they know the number don't add up. I guess in conclusion, i would say it depends on your outlook. If God is nature and is nature then he also has to bring about catastrophe which i don't believe so i would said no, nature and God are not the same.
DeleteDear Mai,
DeleteThank you for your post. The challenge for me has always been the vast space in which we live. The universe is estimated to be about 14 billion light years across, a number that is incomprehensible to me and we live on a tiny planet that people believed for a long time and maybe even today was the center of the universe with a sun rotating around it. It wasn't until 1543 that Copernicus gave a measure of mathematical and astronomical proof that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
Are there other planets in this vast universe that are peopled by individuals who have a different conception of how the universe began. In my limited mind, we will never know for sure, but we see nature all around us and we see how incredibly cruel it appears to us, but it is for an animal's survival. I have seen dogs kill rabbits, birds attack a bird nest and kill baby birds, and I have seen the aftermath of a stray tomcat killing kittens that I had put under a basket with a rock on top trying to protect them. Maybe in an ideal world everything would exist in perfect harmony and nothing or no one would kill another, but humans sometime behave worse than animals which are just trying to survive.
As you mentioned about natural disasters, I have seen two houses side by side after a tornado struck. One untouched, the other had a large tree crash into its roof killing an infant in his crib. When interviewed the neighbor of the undamaged house thanked God that their house was spares. Who does the other neighbor thank for taking their infant son? The answer was "a greater plan." I do not see a greater plan to justify the loss of life in California from the wild fires as well as the loss of property. I cannot imagine standing in front of the home of my memories burned to the ground and think there is a greater plan. I think this could happen on any planet with conditions similar to what we have here right now.
If we accept that natural laws apply across the universe, then we can accept that things and events will happen because they are part of nature and not through any divine intervention. But we are each entitled to our own beliefs and we must respect those of others, listen to what they have to say, and help us understand them better and ourselves as well.
Do you agree with Xenophanes? “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.”
ReplyDeleteThis is actually something I do agree with, this makes me reflect on the Ideals of The Holy Bible when it says that God created us in his image. I feel like this is something that we as humans would do ourselves. We want someone that looks like the image we hold ourselves because it could allow a connection to be made due to the thinking that someone that looks alike, could hold a bit of understanding. For example, many scholars at HBCU's state that a reason for going there is to be surrounded by people who look like themselves, racially. Being an African-American this is said because at times in the society we live in today, it's hard to share a connection or understanding with someone who is not a POC because they may not share the same struggle as myself and other people apart of the minority. So the idea that regardless of who you are, if you could sculpt the God or being above you believe in, then you may make them in a way that reflects the image you hold yourself.
Main Essay= +3 points
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DeleteReplied to Cole Walker= +1 point
DeleteReplied to Brittney Sherrell= +1 point
DeleteI like your take on this. It is definitely true that people like to relate to things that they can see themselves in. Even with the example of Jesus, as he would have been middle-eastern but has long since been depicted as white. I also agree with you that even in all of us being humans, we tend to be able to identify most with those who have the most similarities with us.
DeleteI agree. We as humans, I believe in order to be identify as something or want to be identify as something we tend to lean more towards what has more similarities to us.
DeleteI agree with that very much. People like to compare their life with others all of the time. It is something most people do many times a day. It is a good and bad thing but I think it in is our nature to do it.
DeleteI like this alot it ties it so well with how certain Americans put out their 'European' version of people. From Jesus to Santa Claus. They have put it in people's minds that lighter skin lighter eyes and etc is the way to go because thats what made them more comfortable because its more similar to the way they look.
DeleteI like your outlook on this. I agree that it is so important to remember we are made in God's image. It is such a good reminder and truth. You have some good thoughts!
DeleteWeekly Essay - Section 012
ReplyDeleteDo natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
This is an interesting question. As someone who grew up religious but am no longer so, I like to think back and acknowledge how my viewpoints have changed. In the case of many innocent lives being taken, I believe that a religious person's first reaction is often to ask their god "why?". The justification is usually along the lines of it being part of a divine plan, and those people are in a better place now. The latter statement helped add some comfort in my mind, but it always troubled me why God, who was the creator in my religion, would make certain people to seemingly only be lessons for others. However, Christians acknowledge that they do not understand all of God's ways, and that everything is, again, all part of a larger plan. I think that in some ways, being religious does help give people a sense of peace in such times of innocent people being killed by natural events, as at the end of it all they are believed to go to a better place. In all, nobody knows what really happens at the end of life, and some of the various religions could have truth to them. However, this question is one of many that made me question my own faith in religion, which I eventually turned away from.
Weekly Essay +
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Commented on Brittney Sherrell's Post
I kinda touched upon it in my blog, talking about Spinoza how he thinks God and Nature are one of the same.In the name of science, we know how tsunamis and typhons are created and we know how devastating they create among different country and creating so much causalities. I do agree in some retrospects that having a religion is like laying a foundation in the ways to live your life. How are things created and function. It is unclear what exactly God or a powerful entity that alters reality wants, we assume they are giving a sign or warning for our action, a consequence, but for people who are good-natured or innocent, it's not clear except like you mentioned moving to a better place.I wonder if their God has this distaste for their ancestors or a previous incarnation of them during their life time. Many questionable thing, but beyond death is the unknown so who knows, only religion or science can give their definition of death and beyond.
DeleteI see where you are coming from in this comment. I personally don't believe in any "divine plan" in the common Christian sense. I am a Christian and I see death as a beautiful thing just like the rest of Gods creation. Anyway, I say that because I empathise with you when saying that the usual Christain explanations werent enough in comforting you.
DeleteI touched upon this on my blog as well. I think people just like to tell themselves that things happen for a reason so they wont give up or realize how bad the world actually is or can be.
DeleteI feel the same way, I was grown up practically forcef to think in a Christian mindset but as soon as I grew older and took these things into account I turned away from all that.
DeleteThis is a great post that provides a great non biased opinion. Showing both a religious and non religious aspect allows for greater understanding and responses.
DeleteI too believe religion is a way to find peace, not only peace but stability, purpose, morality, wisdom and many other non-materialistic things.
DeleteI agree with someone that might ask why when something bad happens to them. They believe that God is watching over for them and that they are protected but then when something bad happens they start to question their faith in God.
DeleteI have had this line of thinking occured in my own question of faith and it had always been both relieving and frustrated. While we don't have all the answers on why all bad things happen to good people, we do know that when we look back on certain events, we hope to believe that these sort of thing where meant to occur for the better. While I may not be religious, what I do know is that God's job isn't to take all the bad things in the world but to rather help people move forward and provide hope in times of fear and anger.
DeleteCommented on Barbara Frizzell post (+1 point)
ReplyDeleteCommented on Cole Walker post (+1 point)
Weekly Essay (+3 points)
Total points in semester so far: 6 weeks with 5 points each week = 30 points
Weekly Essay-
Question: Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing?
Personally I do believe that it is the case that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing. When looking at Genesis and the creation of life, as a non-religious person I choose to interpret this as an explanation of our existence by choosing to attribute the unknown to a higher being. This can be related to the process of Nature as well as it is to God because I think that people use these terms in a similar fashion. When people wonder about the universe and all that exists, they may often attribute these unknowns to the process of nature or "mother nature" as often said. There are other perspectives that God and Nature can be explored as however. To me, religious texts generally speaking seem to put forth a blueprint for the construction and maintenance of a society. Religious principles affect the structure of society and shape our perceptions of the world regardless of whether we believe in the entity described in a particular text. I think that nature similarly describes the natural state, behaviors, and functions of populations in similar ways. Evolutionary theories certainly have greatly influenced my perspective on life and I attempt to formulate my positions along those lines. Perhaps the concepts of God and Nature are attempts at making sense of a world that often does not seem to make much sense at all. On the other hand, being a great believer in the scientific process, it does seem to be the case that we have found answers to many questions that in the past we would think impossible to find. Before Watson and Crick, the world hardly understood genetics and could only hypothesize about its implications. Despite the differences in views, I do essentially believe that the concepts of God and Nature are both tools that shape perspective and therefore provide structure to begin to answers questions about the universe.
I think that God and Nature and two things that are very difficult to talk about because they are both things that we see everywhere but do not actually see. To answer the question specifically, I think God and Nature are both relatively the same thing and go hand in hand. God created the universe and everything that we as humans see every day. He created all of us and the way things move and act. God basically creates everything and controls along with having a destiny for everything that exists. I think that nature has to do with the things that we as humans do not have control over. We call it Mother Nature lots of times. It is the things that we see on our earth that we cannot control. For example, a hurricane comes storming into the Gulf of Mexico. We as humans do not have control over that but Mother Nature which is also God working as the hands of nature.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I think is very hard to comprehend is that we are told that God has a plan for us. I think it is very difficult to comprehend that all the decisions I make are already known by God. Also, referring to the question, all of the things that happen that I can’t control are also pre-determined by God. It is something that most people do not like and have a hard time understanding is that you still have to make the decisions to seal your own destiny, but God already has a plan for you.
30/30 points 6 essays and 13 comments
I agree with you in its a hard concept to understand if God and nature are the same thing. I believe they go hand in hand as well. I think God created nature so all together they are the same thing to me.
DeleteI think that just because God has a plan for us, does not mean that our actions are predetermined. This is why we have free will. Though He has a plan for us, it is up to us to follow or abandon it.
DeleteI said this in another comment, but I feel that God and nature are two different things. I think God made nature like God made humans. Creating is not becoming creation. For me, I don't believe the idea that God is nature. I think, like you said, what we think of as Mother Nature is what controls nature and weather. Nature is a natural force that creates natural disasters and includes animals' innate biological functions. If we are considering that God is infinite, and is thus also nature, then God must also be humans. This question then must also consider this aspect of Spinoza's argument. In this case, God must also be animals. But animals hunt each other and humans start wars. These are just more contradictions to the idea that God is everything. All this is contingent on the belief that God is all-good. If God was infinite (everything) and was this sort of force behind life, then it naturally follows that this God would be responsible for bad or evil things in life. Because after all, life includes the good and bad.
Delete• If god is infinite and all-inclusive, doesn't that imply that god includes many things and events that we consider ungodly (bad people, tragedies, disease, poverty...)? 78
ReplyDeleteIf God is truly infinite and all-inclusive, logic dictates that all events and things are of this nature. Meaning that God, in a sense, is responsible for all things including what we consider to be “ungodly.” The word “ungodly” usually stems from a Christian definition of God that involves the characteristic of being perfectly righteous. If we assign this characteristic to God than we can no longer define it as we would a normal definition. The words are now synonymous with God and there is no way to separate the two. God is perfectly righteous and perfectly righteous is God. As a Christian the way I reconcile this is by removing humanity from God. Humans can’t be righteous because it is an ever-changing thing manifesting in God. The logic is pretty straightforward. If God is infinite and all-inclusive while at the same time being perfectly righteous than logic dictates, we are wrong about what righteousness is. If God is always righteous than that means all actions committed by God are always righteous. If God created the nature that created the disaster where people died than that action was righteous. My point is that if we assign God the characteristic of “all-inclusive” to say that something is “ungodly” is a break in logic. In conclusion, in my option if you assign God the characteristics of infinite and all-inclusive its best to leave the descriptions of God at that. I think Baruch Spinoza had more right than I think we gave him credit for.
Your point of view here is very interesting. This question looks at if God is infinite, and I think that in itself is a very interesting concept. Personally, my view is that you can see God's "hands" or mark in things like nature, but I do not think God is nature. To me, the original question is a good contradiction to the idea that God is everything. I think the version where God is everything is how I think of Mother Nature. She is not a real thing to praise, but you admire "her" and her strength is clear through natural disasters. Mother Nature isn't a personal god or a humanlike thing, she is just the natural weather and forces in this world.
DeleteCommented on Britteny Sherrell's post created Sep 29th at 7:33pm (1 point)
ReplyDeleteCommented on Kimmie Steakley's post created Sep 30 at 9:35am (1 point)
Created a mini essay on Sep 30th at 1:12pm (3 points)
I picked two questions to write about. The first question I picked is,If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?
ReplyDeleteThe human eye is definitely amazing but not everyone has the same eye sight and not every baby is born with the same eyesight as everyone. It all starts in utero and how the baby develops. Some parents notice their child has bad eyesight when they are very young and some find out when they are older. For example if a 6 month old turns their head when they are trying to look at something versus a baby that would just look with their eye, that one baby may have a problem with their eyes. It's much easier to diagnose a child versus a baby with bad eyesight because a child can tell you and a baby can't. So many people need glasses because most times with age your eyesight gets worse and not better. A Lot of people in this world just need readers. That doesn't mean they have bad eyesight they are just helping their eyes with glasses and not damaging them more.
The second question I picked is,Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing? As described on page 76 in the book it explains this question perfectly. According to the book "God and nature and nature is God." I believe that God created everything including nature. Nature is birds, trees, beautiful landscapes and more. I believe we wouldn't have anything if it wasn't for God.
I totally agree with the response of your question. Some people argue that the human eye is flawed, proving that it was not intelligently designed but evolved by unguided process. I do believe that our eyesight get worse by ages just like our bones.
DeleteI believe I have 5 points :)
ReplyDeleteIs it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it?
ReplyDeleteYes, I believe it is wrong to adopt the religion of your community or any community without first questioning it. I was born into a Catholic household and raised that way. I attended a private catholic school up until high school. I know what it is like to go along believing something without questioning it. For the longest time that's exactly what I did, but when you get to a certain age, you start to wonder if it's true. The best way to find out is to ask questions. Luckily, the church in my experience was very open with questions and understanding about doubt. They told me that it's ok to ask questions and to be critical at times. It takes both faith and knowledge. Our God is understanding. He doesn't just expect us to know and follow blindly. He expects us to believe and have faith in what He has said and done. I found that after being critical of my own religion, I came to better understand it and grow stronger in it. No one should follow a religion, or anything for that matter, blindly, without first questioning it and trying to understand it.
weekly essay= 3 points
Deletecomment (Mason Schoonover)= 1 point
comment (Mai-Thi Kieu)= 1 point
total= 5 points
I agree with you that asking questions is the best way to learn and construct your own opinions on certain matters, which is so important. Believing everything you are told and not asking "why" can lead down a difficult road. Good post and you have some good insights!
DeleteI agree with this I believe they should wait to teach kids about religion so we are not just blindly following what were taught as kids when we eventually grow up. Some people end up questioning whether or we believe that one religion.
Deletevery well said Gavin, I don't know if it's necessarily wrong to be a certain religion if you never knew of anything else. If no one taught you anything different. but I agree with your points.
DeleteA question that I used to ponder in my younger mind was mentioned in class on Thursday, one that I had frankly given very little hope seeing as I have never awoken from this alleged slumber. “how can you tell that you are not dreaming?” I think it would be fair to say that this notion’s popularity rose considerably with the release of The Matrix and has not died down since. The idea that reality is not reality and only a figment of our imagination is an interesting one…but one that is ultimately inconsequential. Let us argue that life, as we know it, is not reality, what would we do differently? Take more risks? Spend more money? Have a more pleasurable life? Why of course we would! In fact, why wouldn’t we do whatever it is we wanted? If it’s just a dream after all than who are we to halt our own sense of desire? If we can only achieve these goals in a dream? While it is possible that one could be dreaming, I do want to ask: what if you are not dreaming? What exactly is stopping you from living a better life? To use the logic of pascal’s wager for this line of thinking—whether we are in a dream, or not in a dream: shouldn’t we use our finite amount of consciousness in the time that we have? Should we not take every moment as if it’s our last? Regardless of our reality. If life Is but a dream should we not strive for the best nights sleep?
ReplyDeleteVery nice entry. Id say my dreams are often very random. I do however like this life much more than the one in my dreams. I really do try to live my life to it's full extent and like it's my lat day to live.
DeleteI really appreciate what you say here. If we are dreaming after all, what does the knowledge of that change? We would still be stuck in this world of ours. I agree that people should do what they can to live the best life possible.
DeleteThis is very interesting. This is a concept that seems to continuously twist our minds and make us ask lots of questions. I really like the questions you have in your essay, they definitely make me think a lot harder. I have always said we should live life to the fullest and do what makes us happiest
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This is a great perception of this topic! I wrote about this a week, or two, ago, and found myself in the same shoes you're in. More questions, after more questions, lol. Such an interesting topic about, that we simply don't have all of the answers for.
DeleteDo natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providence?
ReplyDeleteWhen any devasting event natural or not does affect my divine providence. I have always struggled to believe in higher beings or ‘God’ just because I have a lot of concerns and unanswered questions. When mayhem strikes people usually say it happens for a reason or that it is in fact God’s plan, but part of me disagrees with this. When situations like hurricanes or any other natural disaster happens that kills people, makes them loose their homes, families, and jobs. Makes me think what possible reason could this divine providence have to ‘cause’ these events? What big plan went into effect? Because frankly I do not see it. There are still poverty and famine and all of these third world countries. What plan is that for? Then I think maybe we should just have some patience with this divine being. I think people like to think that there is a overall plan so that they may view life better. So, they can continue to tell themselves that their ‘God’ is testing them. That if we just keep going and move past this and still believe in said ‘God’ that we will be accepted in paradise. That all of this happened for us to be “rewarded” in the end. Overall though I try not to focus on the negatives because at the end of the day no one truly knows if there is a divine being(s) or, why they do the things they do.
Weekly Essay- (3)
Commented on Kimmie Steakley’s blogpost- (1)
Commented on Corey Robert’s blogpost- (1)
Total Points- (5)
Total Points This Semester- (25) (missed week of 09/21)
very intresting post. i feel that the great divide between theist and atheist is the very question that you have posed. while it would be very cold of myself to try and offer any explanation for the world's suffering, i can offer a hypothesis. if God is Good, and wholly apart from evil-- then he cannot cause evil, but perhaps he can manipulate its effects? by using a tragedy to mend a broken relationship, or using the loss of a job as an opportunity for a new one? hopefully this has at least caused some food for thought-- anyway great post!
Delete• What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"? (See SoL...)
ReplyDeleteI personally love this perspective simply because it allows us to be selfish but for a good reason. Our “garden”, our private space as I perceive it is one of the many aspects that separate us from society and this space is to which we grow as individuals. Although the Turkish man referenced a garden, I think the garden can be compared to our own personal goals and passions as an individual. For me, I truly enjoy music many other aspects of it. This passion is not the full knowledge of the world, but rather “20 acres” of the vast fields of knowledge and experience in the world. For the selfish aspect of this, I love this phrase because it allows me to personally tend to my own passions without the concern of the outside world. I fully understand that being selfish is in most cases bad, but I think that it is important to establish ourselves separate from the whole otherwise we begin to think lesser of ourselves. I remember my theology teacher (I think) who said something along the lines that you should always consider yourself as a unique individual, separate from the grand picture, but should acknowledge the fact that your part is still instrumental in forming the creation of the whole. We should still acknowledge our selfish desires simply because it is what makes us human and still continue to serve with or for society. I also think that this phrase allows me to become somewhat selfish as a humble human being in practice with and without friends.
I remember hearing this way back and this phrase brought back a lot of good memories of the past! Love it!
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Replied Mai-Thi Kieu’s (+1)
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very interesting post. its very rare that you hear someone use "selfishness" as a virtue, but i feel in this case it is warranted. i cant say that this is a universal ideal that we all use but when it comes to the mind, i feel this is largely acceptable. great post!
DeleteWere you taught about the Scopes Trial before coming to college?
ReplyDeleteI was not taught about the trial in a classroom, but we did go see a play about the trial in my Junior year of high school. It truly fascinated me how a group of people could be so ignorant. I later watched a video going into further detail as to some of the points made in the case. Disregarding the details of the case for a moment, I think it is fascinating to stop and think about the impact that the trial had on society. In the early twentieth century, education in America was beginning to grow. I think it is worth noting that a lot of people who supported the law that Scopes was accused of breaking probably did not even know what evolution was, or if they did they only had a vague notion of it. A lot of people took the trial as a joke, which is probably the right way to look at it. We look at it today and we laugh and say that it is crazy that someone could be taken to court over teaching a specific subject, but we disregard the fact that it was a different time period, and public opinion was very different. It is also worth noting that the trial took place in the bible belt of the country, over evolution, of all things. Tell people they are wrong about their fundamental belief in life and they will fight you tooth and nail to prove that you are wrong.
#12
Wednesday- Weekly essay
DeleteThursday- Comment on Nicolas Smith's post
Thursday- Comment on Eli Ownby's post
Total points: 30/30
Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
ReplyDeleteNatural events that kill or maim innocent victims and families have always been a very had concept for me to grasp. If our God is truly a loving and “all good” being, then why would he let things like this happen? If there is a God, wouldn’t he be able to stop these things from happening? I was always taught that everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan for everyone, but as I get older, it starts to become more challenging to put my faith into God’s plan. I believe faith is extremely important in a world where we hardly know anything, so I always find myself circling back to my dependence on faith. The line, “I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health,” attributed to Voltaire, is a quote that relates directly to the question above for me. I feel like faith is necessary for my overall health because without it, I’m constantly worrying and overthinking about the smallest things.
weekly essay (+3)
We are already born into a sinful world. I believe that God does not create these tragedies but uses them after the fact to change people's lives. I encourage you to read in the book of Isaiah. It talks heavily on trusting the Lord.
DeleteDidn't god flood the world and kill everybody on earth but one family. Natural disasters could just be a test of faith and a way to claim the innocent and cleanse the wicked maybe.
DeleteI think how describe cycling back to you faith is something many spiritual people do. They see this world were everything is uncertain so they put their faith into something that doesn't really change. In terms of natural disasters, I always think of something Stephen King wrote. In one his books he continuously cycled back to one point: if there is a God, then it is certainly a cruel God.
DeleteI think that a lot of people use their faith as a comforting thing like you are describing. You did a good job of bringing up a point that a lot of people struggle with in trusting God's intentions. I liked the quote you used as well. Nice post.
DeleteWhen Locke formulated his idea that the mind of a newborn is like a "blank slate," he was unaware structure of the brain and the influence of genetics on the child's personality. Studies on the newborn's early development had not been completed by Freud, Piaget, Erickson and others. Many people view newborns as an empty reservoir waiting to be filled. But a newborn is totally dependent on help from generally the mother, younger siblings, and the father. Her/his first focus is on the total dependence on the breast. During the first few months, the child passes through an oral phase where they place almost everything in their mouths. This is their "id" phase and as they progress to the "anal" phase where they begin to gain control of certain body functions and achieve the "ego" phase where they learn to delay the desire for instant gratification. Early parts of a child's personality may have already been partially form depending on whether their parents were authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive. We now know that certain genes determine an individual’s gender preference. This would have been unknown to Locke. Locke also says, "What you can't remember isn't part of you as a person." We now know that memories are stored in the unconscious part of one's brain. Locke was a brilliant student of history, government, and philosophy. His understanding of human thinking, feeling, and behaving would have been enhanced with the knowledge of biology, biochemistry, and electro transmitters within the brain and nervous system. I believe that if he had possessed this knowledge he would not have perceived a newborn’s mind.
ReplyDeletevery interesting and informative post! while i do agree that it is not a single factor that informs a persons personality, i cannot believe that it can always be traced so easily. if we look at certain individuals who have completely y rejected the expectations of their surroundings in both good and bad examples. in a macob turn, the example that comes to mind is certain serial killers-- those who come from very stable surroundings to cause unrepairable damage great post!
DeleteDo natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providence?
ReplyDeleteAs a surviving cancer patient and current amputee, I have had my fair share in struggling to see what God's plan and what good has came out of my situation. I also struggled greatly with dealing with the loss of such young friends also battling cancer. For years I felt guilty and frustrated with God. I saw no good in taking the lives of such young children when he has the ability to heal them. It took me awhile to realize God did not give me cancer. We are born into a sinful and corrupt world. God did not create cancer, but he used it to turn me into the person I am today. Not only can I shared my testimony but I look for oppurtunities to share my friends' as well. I truly believe everything happens for a reason and God has a plan for us all if we are willing to follow him. It is a tragedy when any innocent person is taken from this world untimely or timely, but if they followed Christ then they would be in a much more amazing place than this world anyway. I can not wait to be there.
weekly essay and commented on eli ownby and nicolas smith
DeleteWhat a powerful story! I can't imagine all that you have experienced on your journey. Nothing good ever comes from death and I also wanna believe if that god does exist somewhere pulling on our strings I hope that he does not cause death or sickness.
DeleteZalen Ingram, Sec-10
DeleteSeeing you find faith in those tough times is really inspiring, and I am glad that you are a better person because of it.
Excellent, what an amazing first-hand account you have! That's awesome and I could not agree more. God has not promised skies always to be blue, and days to be easy and joyful, because free will and choice to do evil have caused this world to fall, but even if the world is fallen it won't scare you if you have faith in God's plan. Great Job.
DeleteThank you for sharing your story. I think you did a good job of highlighting the difference between how "people of faith" would answer this question versus how others would answer it. Good post and things to think about.
DeleteI really do not know what to say but that is an amazing way and truthful way to summarized it all. There is light and dark in the world. I hope that everyone in world would have peace and love.
DeleteYour story is truly inspiring, seeing how faith helped you get through unimaginable circumstances. I couldn’t imagine being put in that situation, and I would like to thank you for sharing your story.
Deleteweekly essay
ReplyDeletecomments: isaiah bryanton, jared quilosa, don enss
Zalen Ingram, Sec-10
ReplyDeleteHaving thoroughly discussed Voltaire and his book Candide in high school, having the opportunity to talk about him again is great. One of the messages we talked much about had to deal with the ending, 'Cultivating your own garden.' The meaning behind this philosophy is quite simple, to mind your own business, with critics interpreting it as to remain ignorant. This view makes more sense knowing that Voltaire was a major pessimist, with the major theme of Candide being suffering and despair. However, the context at the end of Candide, everyone in the book more or less have been ravaged by everything the world could throw at them, but they all settle down at a farmstead, outside of civilization where they live the rest of their days in peace and quiet. With everything that is happening in our country and the world right now, I think Voltaire's philosophy on this sounds quite good. However, when I think about his message and apply it to modern times and myself, it sounds almost impossible. Unless you live off the grid or a third-world country, the amount of information we obtain from even simply looking at our phones to check the time is crazy. I also think that humans just crave social interaction of any kind, and with this interaction comes discussion on the outside world and all it's happenings. In the end, I admire Voltaire's modest philosophy to live on your own to escape cruel reality, but I think it's virtually impossible due to our own instincts and need for others.
-Commented on Tyler Jones
Delete-Commented on Andrew Kroger
Weekly essay (section 12):
ReplyDeleteI couldn't choose one or two out of these 4 questions so I'm going to just write smaller-than-my-average-size paragraphs.
Are you surprised that Birth of a Nation was the first movie shown at the White House?
Literally, no I'm not surprised or even disappointed honestly. It fits my understanding of the history of America so perfectly that I would've been more shocked if the first movie shown was the Wizard of Oz or something to that effect. To keep this extremely brief, because I could go on for a year about the racist history (and present) of America, we have only ever been great at racism. The full Trump slogan should be "Make America Great (at being openly racist) Again".
Should pantheists be considered heretics or atheists? Freethinkers? (Is there anything wrong with that?)
There's nothing wrong with any of those titles, for one. For two, I've been called a heretic more times than I can count and I take it as a compliment. I feel like the term atheist invalidates the true nature of pantheism because it's not like pantheists believe in nothing - they believe in everything. I call myself an omnitheist but Freethinker is cool too.
"The ultimate goal [of Vedic philosophies] is the dissolution of the ego." 176 What would remain of you, minus your ego?
I incorporate the goal of ego death in my spiritual practice and I have many friends that have experienced ego death before and they describe it as an extremely intense, hard, and painful experience. I can say from knowing them outwardly that they are the kindest, most wholly loving people I've ever met. I think that without our egos we are free of the prejudices that prevent us from reaching out and being kind to everyone - we're free to better serve ourselves and our communities. I think that if I were completely without my ego, I would be more fearless and less hesitant in my actions.
Do you "not want to be 'pigeonholed with any sexual orientation'?
My short answer is no, I do not want to be pigeonholed with any sexual orientation. Mostly I call myself by my chosen label for dating purposes but I think that we (as a species) are so capable of falling in love with others regardless of gender and we can rob ourselves of finding truly loving relationships and experiences by being close minded and protecting our egos.
points:
Deleteweekly essay above, comment on Brittney Sherrell's post, comment on Barbara Frizzell's post.
Total points: 30
I agree with your thoughts on the 4th question. I think everyone should have the freedom to choose their sexual orientation, rather than be pigeonholed as the question says.
DeleteIf god is infinite and all-inclusive, doesn't that imply that god includes many things and events that we consider ungodly (bad people, tragedies, disease, poverty...) If god is impersonal and indifferent to human beings, should you still love and/or worship god
ReplyDeleteIn Christianity, the idea of bad things happening to good people is often a never ending dispute among believers. Because God is timeless, all- inclusive, and all knowing, he is in control of everything and everyone. He must know and make “bad things” according to our judgement happen in this world. In my opinion, although things from this world are dark, terrible, and horrifying, I believe God uses it for good and to change people’s lives. We are limited as humans, only being able to comprehend things of this world. God understands the different boundaries and dimensions of this life and beyond us. Time is not a construct to him and his thinking and will is boundless. I think because of this, the hard questions in life are difficult to not only comprehend, but construct an opinion for. These questions can anger humans and leave them with doubt and confusion. I believe to still love and worship God because he is indifferent. I think it is important to realize we may never know many answers to the world and our place in it, but still have comfort knowing there is something/someone in control of it all.
This in interesting. I personally don't believe in God, but i respect Christianity. I just have to ask what you think about kids that live their whole lives in Sex trafficking, or children who die of starvation before they can even say their first word? To be blunt, what is their purpose here? It's hard for me to connect senseless tragedies to any religion or spirituality. Also, for people who grow up surrounded by a different religion that christianity, and are never taught anything about it- do they automatically go to hell because they were never introduced to "God"? That seems like a good bit of people going to hell through no fault of their own.
DeleteYou made a good point about how God is so powerful, which may not give us the answers we are looking for, but it does tell us that God does understand thing beyond our limits. I think that the problem of evil and pain in the world will always be an understandably prominent question in the investigation of Christianity. I always attribute this to human free will, much like Augustine, but I know I will further my answer as I research the answer to the Pain/Evil problem.
DeleteI completely agree. Evil isn't the work of God, but the work of Satan. However, God isn't necessarily all good, the way many try to paint Him as. Instead, he is just.
DeleteI think my main question is in regards to the fact that if he's the father of all, why make anything evil to begin with. There's the argument that Satan is evil, but why didn't he just make it so Satan wasn't evil, or make no evil in the first place. For me something just doesn't add up when thinking that god is all powerful.
DeleteI love your response, and 100% agree. <3 all religion can be so difficult to explain, and understand, including so many factors. My Mom and I were just talking about all of this, as well. Great post!
Deleteweekly essay: 3+
ReplyDeletecommented on Cory Robert's and Gavin Brown's: 2+
total: 5+
Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providence?
ReplyDeleteThis question caught my attention, though I haven’t been religious since I was a kid. The reason this caught my attention was due to the story of the great flood. If God brought on a flood to cleanse the earth of sin and start over, could natural disasters be a way of claiming the souls of the innocent and cleansing the souls of the guilty? Growing up, I was always told religion was about making a choice and faith. If this is true, it feels as if natural disasters that claim life would be counter intuitive to the choice necessary for faith develop. So, if I was still religious, this thought makes it hard to believe in a just god that is supposed to be good. If God loves us, why does he want us to die? This is a question I previously would ask myself, and it seemed the only answer I was ever given was that we would go to a better place. If this is true, then once again would death that is caused by natural disaster not take precious time away from the people who lack faith? The only answer I could find is that there wasn’t an answer. That applies to almost any religious question, which led me to stop caring about whether there is a god. So, to answer the question, yes, natural events that steal lives from people are one of the many reasons I don’t have faith.
points (25/30)
+5 for Essay
+2 for comments on post by Eli Ownby and Cole Walker
I think you have some great points on the challenge of faith in reaction of natural events. It would not surprise me that it could be a reason some people don't have faith, it surely is part of why I don't.
DeleteZalen Ingram, Sec-10
DeleteAfter seeing and commenting on another's post with the same question yet opposite answer, it is very interesting to see some one else's extended opinion. Although that the other's viewpoint is 100% valid, I personally believe in your view. I found it very difficult to believe when such terrible things have happened in order to 'test our faith,' I think it is cruel way of thinking.
I really like the way you looked at this question. I haven't been religious since I was a kid either and this is something I have always thought about. I agree that the answer we come to is there is no answer and that's the answer to a lot of religious questions.
Deletesection 11
I think too much weight is placed on faith. Faith was ever so strong back when it first began. It was used as a way to control people in my opinion. It made them do as they were told and fear a certain retribution if they did not. Natural disasters happen because of tectonic plates, or however else they are started. While i do not necessarily have a faith, i do not believe that this should waiver yours at all. If it does, then does that mean that all the other bad that happens in this world is lumped in there with it or are natural disasters on their own?
DeleteI think you did a good job of articulating a challenge that a lot of people have when it comes to whether or not they believe in God. As for my personal opinions they don't quite line up with yours but all in all I think you had a good post.
DeleteI am not sure that I totally believe Gottfried Leibniz’s theory that all’s for the best and “it’s all god’s work and god is good and all-powerful” (pg. 93), but sometimes things happen and it sure seems like it could be true. A “funny” story that I have might seem like a proof of this theory. On the way to school one morning last fall I was having a deep conversation with my mom and we ended up getting a speeding ticket one intersection away from school because I was distracting her. I was so embarrassed and my mom was super annoyed. The next day when she drove me to school she drove very slow, a little annoyingly slow, The rest of the story happens when she is driving to pick me up from practice that night. She is driving extra slow again because she is still a little mad. If she had been driving normally, she would be sitting waiting at that intersection to turn, but she is not quite there yet. Two cars, both vehicles carrying several of my friends from my marching band, crash in the intersection at a high rate of speed and spin through where she should have been stopped. If she didn’t get the speeding ticket she would have been involved in the accident and the accident could have been deadly. My mom thinks that the speeding ticket was part of “the larger picture” and the “bigger plan” (pg. 93). I think that this story would have been a good example for Gottfried to use to try prove his Principle of Sufficient Reason. He believed that there must be a logical reason for everything (pg. 94). God knows best. Leibniz said “God must have made the best of all possible worlds, the one with the least amount of evil needed to achieve that result” (pg. 94). I am still not sure if I believe it or not but for me that ticket was a pretty convincing example.
ReplyDeletecommented on Tyler Jones October 1 11:28am
Deletecommented on Barbra Frizzell October 1 12:27
and weekly Essay
Grand Total: 31 points
Matt Kolzow : Sect 011
ReplyDelete.Can freedom be forced? Would we be more free or less, if the law didn't compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel, as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
This really boils down to one's definition of "freedom". Is it really freedom to not have to pay taxes or behave lawfully? One would argue there's reasons for both even if you don't like them. If we didn't have to behave lawfully, what's stopping someone from stealing or destroying someone's property, or even worse murder. I don't really feel as if we could be more free just because we can do those things. In fact I would argue you are less free, as you'll have to worry about so many things. While in theory we aren't entirely free, we honestly have a lot of freedom in most things. Now can freedom even be forced? I don't know how you would do that in all honesty haha.
.Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
As someone who isn't very religious, this question always interested me. When people question someone's faith, I feel this is usually the question they ask them. Why follow some higher force if that force is killing innocent people? My argument would be that just because someone follows god doesn't mean they have to always understand why he does something. I'm sure many are angry when something terrible like a hurricane occurs and innocents are hurt, but I'd guess there is a reason and god does truly care. You don't have to be happy about a natural disaster occurring, but I believe most Christians would tell you that these events don't sway their faith.
This Essay : +3
DeleteComment on Andrew Kroger : +1
Comment on Zoe Hovinga : +1
I agree with you 100% on both the question. People need to know that we are still not free. I am not free to this day. What I look at is that you think you are free but your not. Its funny that people like to change people religions, but you can't that what they believe in or raise as a religion faith
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIf god is impersonal and indifferent to human beings, should you still love and/or worship god?
ReplyDeleteI personally do not believe on God, but I have respect for all other religions. I have thought deeply about this question and if God is indifferent about humans I don't see the purpose of worshiping him. I wouldn't want to love and devote my life to someone that doesn't give me love back. I feel like God should have love and sympathy for humans. Some people devote their whole entire existence to God, I feel like since people do this God should love them back. I always thought God should love everyone and be accepting of people. When I was younger I was taught God loved me, so hearing someone say God is indifferent is a bit shocking.
Do you agree with Locke that life, freedom, happiness, and property are god-given rights? 82 If so, whence derive the rights of people who don't believe in god (or in Locke's god)?
I don't think these rights are God given rights. I think they're just basic human rights everyone has, regardless of religion. I feel like everyone deserves happiness, no matter what they choose to believe in as long as they're good people at the end of the day. Life itself doesn't seem like a God given right either because there's so many theories as to where we all came from, whether it be things like God or evolution. Our life isn't something given from God because we have no real way of knowing where we actually came from. Freedom is just a basic human right. People don't like having their choices (freedom) restricted and if we had these choices taken away I feel like there would be total chaos.
section 11
Thursday
Deleteweekly essay +3
reply to Andrew Kroger +1
reply to Nicolas Smith +1
grand total 30
section 11
Thursday
Deleteweekly essay +3
reply to Andrew Kroger +1
reply to Nicolas Smith +1
grand total 30
section 11
PHIL 1030-010
ReplyDeleteAutumn Daniel
Weekly Essay
Question: Is it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it?
In my opinion, it is wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it. In today’s society, we’re constantly receiving information through social media, our community, schools, in our family, etc... The majority of things we accept as facts on social media are just other people’s interpretation of the situation. For example, with all the politics right now, people will post/say pretty much anything they read off facebook and claim it as a fact. We're taught to just believe things when it comes from someone of authority. We are also all just heavily influenced by our community and where we live globally. None of us will ever be able to fully understand a religion we didn’t explicitly grow up surrounded by. Society as a whole should learn to be accepting and look outside of their religion and political beliefs when it comes to human’s rights. You should always try to do your own research and form your own opinions. I personally grew up in a semi-christian home, but after years of questioning and looking into other religions- i don't identify as chcristian.I have respect for it, but it’s just not my belief. As kids, we just believed everything our parents told us without a second thought. As you grow and mature, you should always seek out your own beliefs and knowledge. I believed my parents at 6 when they told me the Tooth Fairy was real, but after my own research and growing up- i can confidently say the tooth fairy isn’t real. Religion is not the same as the ToothFairy, but the concept of just believing something because you’re told it’s true seems ignorant.
I believe this whole heartedly. small things like Santa Clause for the kids is harmless. While i do not necessarily have a faith, it is wrong to push ideas on someone especially at a young age. Let them grow up and learn and decide for themselves what they believe. Religion and politics are pushed upon kids, among other things, by their parents and flows through generations. While i think the people who want to let their kids decide their own name and gender when they get older are a little crazy, they should not have to believe what you believe just because your parents made you believe it. If we break this chain we can also maybe break the number of Boston Red Sox fans so that the Yankees reign supreme!
DeleteI very much so agree! It's a tough transition for the adolescent mind to venture off from just believing what your parents told you to forming your own ideas and beliefs. Although it's difficult, it's very necessary. An individualist mindset in a world of community centered thinking is crucial in order to not just fall in line with beliefs that others around you posses.
DeleteI agree with this! I do believe parents should expose their children to the religion they practice- if any, but once that child gets old enough to decide for themselves, they should be encouraged to research for themselves. Same goes with anything like that.
DeleteI have to agree with your statement on how we shouldn't automatically adopt the religion to where they were born into. Beliefs and ideas change overtime as one is exposed to other religions who may or may not have the same principles and ideals you may inhibit. Overall, parents should be able to expose their children to their own beliefs but not force or limit their choices and have the freedom to explore other choices.
DeleteI definitely understand the allure of going along with the religion that's popular in one's community. In many cases, churches are a hub for socializing and fostering a sense of community with people. That being said, I don't believe it's healthy to simply go along with it without questioning. I think society will be better off if we can improve nonsecular communal spaces. This would better allow people to question the religion they are surrounded by without having to sacrifice their social life.
DeleteThis Essay +3
ReplyDeleteCommented on Anna Collins +1
There are tons of religious beliefs or faiths in the world nowadays. Belief in one god, many gods, or no god. Deism is the belief that there is some sort of higher power or creator,one whom does not intervene. It is believed that the only evidence that is necessary is what we see in the natural world. I was raised catholic. I received communion and confirmation and went to religion classes every wednesday after school for a very long time. I never paid it much mind and went only because i was told to do so. Having that thrust upon my young mind and having grown up to believe that the only thing in life that holds any weight on facts makes me not believe in god so much. Saying that out loud since i have moved to the south is not something i do often. I believe that science provides us with facts and the fact is that we evolved, we did not just show up one day, created, as some would like to believe. Forgive my lack of knowledge of how religious faith believes this all truly happened. I believe there could have been a real life Jesus, as a human being. All that he is in the bible not so much. Especially when it comes to creationism by an all knowing, all good creator. I believe in facts and science and the fact that the bible was not written for as long as it was until after Jesus' death irks me. i have played the game of telephone in a classroom. It goes south after only 5 minutes. Centuries seems far fetched to me. On the other hand, life and the universe did what it did and happened one day according to science. With such beauty in the world, i would not be at all upset if some day i am proven wrong about my lack of belief in god.
ReplyDelete+3 essay
+1 commented on Andrew Kroger
+1 commented on Autumn Daniel
I was also raised Catholic and went through the sacraments. As I got older I started to feel a disconnect from this faith I had been born into. It's very hard to remain faithful to something with so little proof, but that's what faith is I suppose. It's a real battle to go out and find what really resonates with you and your own personal beliefs.
DeleteI identify with your sentiment about the bible. Length of time between recording his words, the multitude of translations from language/dialect to another language. In most cases there really wasn't a good translation from one language to the next; resulting in a best guess/estimation. Through in a sprinkle of blatant alterations and it becomes something I can't believe as the end all be all ultimate truth.
DeleteIf we are talking about the bible, I always struggled with idea that the bible was written by men. Plus, there are a lot of things that contradicting.
Delete-What do you think of Locke's blank slate idea?
ReplyDeleteAs interesting and easy to believe as this idea is, I do not fully agree with it. It may be very easy to think of a baby as a complete blank skate, because it may appear that they do not actually have personality traits like we may think of them. But this I do not believe to be true. Babies and infants may not have complex personalities as compared to adults, but they certainly do have basic temperaments that are different from other infants, even the ones who are related to them. While it is true that one sibling will be dealing with arguably different parents (in term of time experience and time that has passed) so they may have different nurture than their siblings, they will still have different temperance than their siblings and peers due to genetics. It has been shown that things like ADHD, cancer and Schizophrenia show evidence of being partially caused by genetics. I personally have ADHD, and I can see evidence of it in both my parents and my uncle as well, and I do not believe that is a coincidence. Nurture and environment still have a tremendous impact on the development of a personality throughout life, a natural temperance is not the end-all be-all of who a person will become in life.
-If God is indifferent towards human beings, should you still love/worship God?
-If God was impersonal, not loving and did not care about humans, then I do not suppose that he would care if we loved Him or not, and He would not care how we live or don't live. There would be no Bible, no atonement, no evidence of His goodness or communication with Him. You could love Him intellectually like Spinoza did, but I don't think many people would love God if they thought that He did not love and care for them.
Weekly essay (3 pt)
Delete-Reply to Tylerjones and Anna Collins (2 pt)
5 pts
Locke’s connection between self-identity and memory is a bit dramatic, but the belief at the root I believe holds some truth to it. Whenever I think of a description of self it’s more directly related to beliefs and characteristics. A person is much more than their memories and there are certain traits that are threaded through a person their whole life. This does, however, then raise the question if you evolve as a person, changing beliefs or outgrowing certain behavior, what’s keeping you connected to who you were five, ten, thirteen years ago? My memories personally hold a lot of value to me, and those experiences shaped me into who I am today. Memories of experiences leave you with a lasting impression, they teach you lessons that you carry with you. So even when the memories fade, the lessons you learned from them stay put. The boy who got hit for stealing apples learned not to steal and get caught. I know looking back at my life I’m not the same person I was two months ago, let alone years ago. I don’t feel any kind of disconnect from my own self-identity. I just feel it has evolved with me, and you can still be the same person just upgraded. The truth behind it is that part of who we are is our memories. Identity isn’t solely based on what we remember from our past, but it does play a part.
ReplyDeleteSection 010
Deleteweekly essay (3)
replied to:
Autumn Daniel (1)
Tom P (1)
Can freedom be forced? Would we be more or free or less, if the law didn’t compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
ReplyDeleteFreedom is something that many Americans seem to have an obsession with as they mindlessly regurgitate the same “this is a free country” line any time someone criticizes their thoughts or actions, when in actuality they have a very juvenile understanding of exactly what it means to live in a “free country”. America is a free country and its citizens free people in the sense that they are not subjugated to another power such as Great Britain, it doesn’t mean that we as citizens in a free country have the right to do whatever we please. There are certain acts that should simply be natural for humans in a civilized first world country to understand are prohibited, and one should not feel less free for being unallowed to commit acts such as robbery or murder. Why is it that criminals wear masks, or gloves, or flee to another country, or lie in court? They are all afraid of the consequences of their actions, and if those consequences are done away with by refusing to enforce lawfulness then this will bring about an entirely different form of lacking freedom. By not providing any deterrent for potential criminals, law-abiding citizens will become forced into a life of lawfulness just to stay alive. They will be forced to steal or be stolen from, kill or be killed, and in the end this sick perversion of the idea of “freedom” will only drive those who wish to uphold the self-evident aspects of human decency to become just like those that they supposed inhibitors of freedom such as laws are trying to suppress.
Weekly essay + 3
Replied to Kimmie Steakly +1
Replied to Holly Belk +1
Section 011
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of Locke's "blank slate" idea?
Are Thomas Reid's ideas about identity better than Locke's?
I like the general idea of Locke's idea about the "blank slate". I think of babies and young children as highly impressionable and looking for "who" they are and how to fit in. I agree with the with the thought that our knowledge comes from what we experience in life. As an infant you start to experience things that will shape who you become and shape your personality from the moment right after you are born. In that initial moment that you are born you have no experiences (outside of the womb) to shape you. In that first moment I really do think that a person is a blank slate waiting to be molded. Between Reid's and Locke's ideas about identity I agree with Reid. Reid's ideas make more sense to me because the young boy shaped who the young officer was and how he viewed life. Likewise the officer shaped who the old soldier would become. The experiences we go through shape who we will become and who we are even after the memory of that experience is gone.
This essay 10-1-20 (+3)
Replied to Andrew Kroger 10-1-20 (+1)
Replied to Tyler Jones 10-1-20 (+1)
Replied to Eli Ownby 10-1-20
Total: 23/30
While I do agree that we're essentially a "blank slate" at birth in terms of our understanding of the world and our place within it, I do feel that there are other factors at play which are outside of our control. The fact that things such as genetic predisposition to mental or physical illness exist regardless of social or environmental exposure does mean that those affected by such conditions will develop and experience life differently than someone else even if they are given identical opportunity. There are some things which are simply out of our control yet can heavily influence a person towards one path or another, which I believe is largely why there is still inequality and malice in the world, despite humanity essentially beginning with a blank slate in its earliest development.
DeleteAll of this isn't to say that either Locke or Reid's ideas were wrong or flawed, simply that it is a mixture of those things which we can and cannot control that shape us as individuals.
• Can freedom be forced? Would we be more or less free, if the law didn't compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel, as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
ReplyDeleteOn a technicality, we are always as free as we are willing to let ourselves be. Yes, laws are in place and there are consequences for our actions, but we still make the choice to follow the law. In some cases, we choose that some laws are more negligible than others, be that as small as speeding or as large as arson, in the case of some of the recent riots. We could be completely free if we stopped fearing consequences. However, I suppose the semantics isn’t the point of the question. I would say that it would depend on the individual person however free they would be. For myself, I can’t say it would change much how I lived if there were no laws because a majority of laws, I have no desire to break. Yes, I would buy liquor myself and speed with less fear, but I can’t say I would be willing to commit murder or theft. For some others, however, a world without laws would inspire them to recreate the purge movies. It really depends more on who you are as a person than whether laws are in place or not. As for how I would feel if my neighbor got away with lawlessness, it depends on the kind of person they are. However, think about the cases with the riots. Whether or not you agree with the point the rioters are trying to make is neither here nor there and I will not make an argument for or against that part of it (side note: rioters and protestors are different), but what I will say is there are plenty of people within those riots getting away with what is essentially lawlessness amongst the chaos. Honestly, that that frustrates me because often times the lawlessness is at someone else’s expense. If what someone is doing doesn’t affect others, then I’m not too concerned with it. However, once it does, morally I cannot understand it.
Section 10
Reply to Autumn Daniel +1
Weekly essay +3
Reply to Anna Collins +1
Total 25/30
I agree i wrote something almost identical because you are free but you control your freedom and how free you want to be. The law is there for multiple reason, but they eventually come down to the people's safety
DeleteDo you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing?
ReplyDeleteShort answer, I don’t really know. Long-ish answer, I mean I think this is a reasonable assumption. As a child I was always told that God could hear and see everything, and if he was existence himself, and it rather than a he, that would definitely be a reasoning. But on the other hand, if everything is God is everything and everything is God, doesn’t that mean that god doesn’t exist. By all means, enlighten me on the topic, but here’s a more reasonable example, if everyone here took a test, and EVERYONE got a 100, then getting a one hundred isn’t impressive anymore, it is just what is, average if you will. So, by that same logic, if everything here was a part of God, and essentially meaning that everything is God, then doesn’t that mean that God isn’t an existence that should be revered, but rather is just the norm, a day to day existence.
Should pantheists be considered heretics or atheists? Freethinkers? (Is there anything wrong with that?)
Absolutely no, personally I feel in the modern day, we should be past the thinking of forcing out beliefs on others. Every single one of us in this class, in this university, in this state, country, continent, planet, etc. are all unique existences. No matter what anyone says there is no one else that is me, my experiences, knowledge, dreams, ideas, are all mine. Someone can share my experiences, but we’re not truly sharing them because they had it from a different perspective, at a different time, with different ideas. Every human being is undeniably different and what I don’t understand is that if every human being has different experiences, why is it right to dictate what they spiritually believe in as right or wrong. If someone feels as if the world has done more for them than any being could, who am I to argue that no, you should believe in this being over the world.
Prompt Done (+3)
DeleteReplied to Cole Walker (+1)
Replied to Anna Collins (+1)
Points earned this week 5/5
Points earned in total 30/30
I agree you are the only person in the world that has experienced the experiences you have and knowledge. You can have a brothers sisters or even a person that looks and acts just like you, but he will never be you because its more than just character and appearance.
DeleteI totally agree with both of your responses. God and nature are two different things. I do agree that god created this beautiful nature, but that doesn't mean we are always surrounded by holly spirit or god. The one is physical reality, the other is a product of the human Mindscape.
DeleteI think that even though we might all come from the universe(for some people that might mean all coming from God)doesn't make you any less special. There's a lot of free floating space dust out their that came from God too, but it cant do advanced calculus like Moustafa.
DeleteWeekly productivity
ReplyDelete9/30/20 Essay on Locke's view of the newborn's mind - 3pts
10/01/20 Comment on Voltaire's "Candide" 1 pt
10/01/20 Comment on Mai-Thi Kieu essay on Nature and God 1 pt
Weekly total 5 pts
Cumulative total 40 pts
Can freedom be forced? Would we be more or free or less, if the law didn’t compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
ReplyDeleteI believe freedom can not be forced upon an individual if he or she wishes not to be free. Freedom is-to some degree a choice although there have been expectations such as slavery. For example, in the U.S freedom of speech is a right given to all people. However, if one chooses to speak a certain way, you are limiting your freedom to that of what you have chosen. You would be less free if it was forced upon you because essentially you never made that choice for yourself; but since you are forced to be free you can still choose to not be free because you would only be effecting yourself and therefore no one can say you are or are not free. The law is there to assist us in protecting our rights and freedom if it was not enforced there would be chaos; and people would confuse freedom and evil. If my neighbor could get away with lawlessness, I would feel betrayed and a sense of inequality by the government. Furthermore, if I was a law-abiding citizen, I would report such acts to the police. If he was still able to get off the hook, then I would reconsider my own beliefs and morals because there would not be justice in the world.
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Deleteessay 3p
reply to Moustafa Shamdeen and Shelby Pittman 2p
What do you think of Deism?
ReplyDeleteIn today's culture we are often flooded with all kinds of beliefs and opinions when it comes to religion or the overall existence and meaning of why we are here. Deism is the belief of one supernatural being/creator that is responsible for the world we live in but does not intervene in the aftermath. The thought of deism began in between the 17th and 18th century with a man named Edward Herbert. He described it as an unorthodox religious attitude that was expressed among a group of english writers. I strongly believe in a supernatural being having complete reason for us being here. Weather that be God or any other type of being that you believe in. I have always thought that there was a greater being or reason that we are all here for. For me growing up Christian that almighty being was always God, but in the grand scheme of everything that being could be anything. I think that we are all out here for a reason or a greater purpose by a superior being. On a smaller scale I think their is also someone or something that nobody knows of that controls all of the decisions and outcomes of every event that happens.
I hope that there is a bigger purpose, because being an Atheist sucks haha. Its scary to think that we are gonna die and after a couple hundred years, our stories will die with us.
DeleteEssay +3
ReplyDeleteResponse to Cole Walker +1
Response to Kimmie Steakly +1
Total 25/30
I do agree with the Xenophanes’ stance that all peoples of the world build/built the images of their gods/goddesses/deities around their own image. They may depict these images with fantastical additions and/or subtractions from the overall form, but in some way, they are all human-like. Examples from a few cultures would be the Egyptian depiction of human bodies with animal heads such as the case for their gods Bastet, Thoth, Horis, and Anubis. Turn to Hindu for Durga, beautiful woman with eight arms. Closer to the view of many of the people reading this and less fantastical; the depiction of Jesus Christ. Where Caucasian people are the majority of influencers/practitioners you’ll see the depiction of Jesus with olive skin, brown hair and blue eyes. In Korea, the depictions would have more classical Korean features so on and so forth. In each case, there is something that....humanizes these gods/goddess/prophets/delivers. I’m not sure how many religions the idea of “God created mankind in his own image” is repeated throughout the world, or that the supernatural beings look a little like us but I’m sure it is an overwhelming number. All this calls to mind Austin Kleon’s assertion that, “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.” Is it the supernatural beings that created the world, perhaps manipulate its avatars of humanity, loathe the creation they have wrought upon the world like Dr. Frankenstein, and so on the one(s) who lack imagination in their creations? Or more likely, is it the creators of these divine beings the ones that did not have the capacity to come up with the true image of the divine? Or even still, unable to come up with anything truly unique to explain the world around them/seek meaning in the lives that they live day after day?
ReplyDeleteWeekly Essay +3
DeleteComments: Tom P. and Brittany Sherrell +2
34/35
Betsy Akpotu
ReplyDeletePHIL – 1030
Weekly Essay #7
10/01.2020
If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses? Well we need glasses to see small object through a far. Some people need glasses including old people. When your body change and when you grow older we need glasses to see things, while reading a book, driving a car when you go to work, and to let people know that you are smart. Have you ever personally experienced the violation of a law of nature? Do we speak too casually of "miracles"? I never experienced the violation of a law of nature, but if I had people are just playing God. Yes and No because people have that experience of having good luck or bad luck or people having superstation of miracles. Long time go people in Jerusalem said angles talk to them about what is going to happen in the world. Were you taught about the Scopes Trial before coming to college?
No, I was not taught about the Scopes Trial before coming to college. I heard that the Scopes Trial was a former teacher, who got accused of doing something wrong and his name was John T. Scopes. He was violated accused for the Tennessee Butler’s Act which made unlawful to teach human evolution. What do you think of Locke's "blank slate" idea? First, I think that Locke’s “blank state” idea was solid and littler bit crazy. For example, if you watched Inside Out, we as people cannot recall what we look like as babies or who do we want to become as adult plus what is your future. Do you want to become an artist, police, or astronaut? We do not know these things when we are born. Its how we make our memories, what we see the good before the bad.
Section 11
ReplyDeleteDo natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providene?
Growing up I was raised in church with my baptist grandparents, or on occasion, in Presbyterian church with my parents. My grandparents always tried to teach us to be good christians. They took my sister and I to Sunday school, made us say prayers, and often had a bible study with us when we spent time at their house. Growing up I would participate in summer camp for the church and even became a volunteer counselor when I was old enough. But as I became older and experienced more things, I think I got jaded. I hear of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and wars with staggering death tolls and I didn't understand why this would happen. After all, God shouldn't put his creation through these things right? As a teenager these things went through my head a lot. Last Christmas break, I lost two good friends of mine in downtown Nashville. Long story short, they stood up to a guy at a bar who was harassing a female friends of theirs. He got kicked out, waited with his friends outside, and when my friends left they stabbed my friends. Clay and Paul were stabbed and later died at the hospital. Both Clay and Paul were stand-up guys. They could cheer anyone up and I have countless funny memories with them on the football team in high school. That event really shifted my perspective for a while. I didn't, and still really don't have good coping mechanisms with death. I was always questioning why that they were taken, and why, if there is a God, he let it happen. But over time I started to recognize that mankind has free will, and things like natural disasters, which aren't man made, mostly, are just the circumstances we live in. While I consider myself to be agnostic, I wouldn't say death as a result of mankind or natural events has really shifted my viewpoint in the end.
I'm so sorry to hear about your friends. Tragic, senseless events like that also make me question the existence of divine providence. If there is a God, I think it must be a Deist one, who wouldn't interfere in the universe.
DeleteDeism is an interesting concept to me. I think that the fact that we are just doing are own thing while God is just watching is what he is usually doing. I think that because most the time I have experienced that I am the one usually making my own decisions without any influence or God talking to me. I think that if we want something, we should have the ability to get ourselves without the help of some absolute being, I’d rather do that then pray and just expect it to happen for me just because I asked and then the possibility that it does not happen. That would be disappointing for me to pray and then nothing changes I’d ask myself if there really was a God so, I think that he does watch over us to see what decision we made he just does not intervene.
ReplyDeleteI do not think that everything that happens is right; to me that just makes no sense at all. Just think about the times we are in right now I honestly believe that what is happening right now is “right”. Some of these things are out of our hands like the pandemic or natural disasters but that still doesn’t make it right. Look at war some of us think that it is justified because we have to fight and that is true but there is a lot of bad things that happen in war and that is not right at all.
Weekly Response
DeleteReplied to Kimmie Steakley & Gavin Brown
If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?
ReplyDeleteThere are many reasons why many of us need glasses. New born might need glasses too. It might be because the baby is suffering from Myopia(nearsightedness), or he/she is preemies(early born).
As organisms age, all their biological systems should be expected to break down and fail with increasing regularity, and eyes are no exception. Crucially, all these systems should be expected to break down, more-or-less, at the time.
Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing?
I don't believe that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing. The one is physical reality, and the other is a product of the human Mindscape. If the subject and object are one and the same, there is no existence of the object at all.
essay (+3)
replied to Miranda (+1)
replied to Moustafa Shamdeen (+1)
My Myopia never went away. I know one thing is for sure. My eyes were most certainly not intelligently designed haha.
DeleteI think your right, just because something might have been designed intelligently doesn't mean it isn't prone to breaking down, even the best built cars break down eventually. And design accidents happen all the time, someone has to get bad eyes.
DeleteJames Robinson
ReplyDeleteSection 010
Semester points 18/50
“Kimmy steakly”
“Gavin Brown”
Do natural events that kill or maim innocent victims challenge your faith in divine providence?
My answer would be no. The way God works is beyond comprehension. Everything was specifically designed to happen exactly as it is going to happen. Free will only goes so far, in a sense your life has already been fully completed. You’re only consciously experiencing it now. Every decision you’ll ever make has already been made. Every hurricane, volcanic eruption, earthquake and treefall has already happened and will happen. It's all part of a larger design in which we have little control. On the opposite side of the story millions of sick children have been cured of diseases that 100 years ago would be a death sentence. It is an intricate web of creation, with the creation of technology we are able to record and distribute information like never before. Some might say technology is a distraction from faith and I would agree. Looping back, natural disasters are terrible and there’s nothing we can do about them. We can only pray for divine providence. But for every disaster there is a miracle right behind it. I don’t believe anyone other than God is truly innocent, we are inherently sinners. The only person who can seek salvation is you, as you draw nearer to it, it draws nearer to you. To conclude, the scope of what’s to come is beyond us, but whatever happens it was meant to happen. All we can do is follow the commandments and grow as a unified people. As the pledge of allegiance states “One nation under God.”
I have always struggled with faith and understanding God. I still do not really know where i am at when it comes to religion but I do agree that if God is real then there is no way, as human beings, we could comprehend his doings.
DeleteWhat do you think of Emerson and Thoreau, and their transcendentalism/naturalism?
ReplyDelete(I only discussed transcendentalism)
When it comes to transcendentalism, I quite like this philosophy . We live in a world where society, if you let it, will push you around. Whereas, transcendentalism embraces the unique individuals. However, I do believe society has its benefits and I would personally be very lonely living in solitude, because it is good to socialize and meet new people.
When it comes to being independent or self-reliant I believe that to be something everyone should learn to do and not have to depend on others. No one else can make you happy, only you can. However, it is important to have a group of people to support you when you need it because relying on yourself can become draining and as a human, it is only natural to want people by your side.
I also like the idea of living simply or “living deliberately.” Our world is very materialistic and it would be nice to not care about the latest trends and or if you were “cool” or not. There is nothing wrong with following trends but the world we live in has a materialistic mindset and tends to drown out the important things in life. I do think living a simple life would be nice for me, but I would find the lifestyle especially hard to achieve nowadays. Also, we live in a generation of people who spend a lot of time watching tv, playing video games, and scrolling through their phones. I know I can get lost in my phone and not even realize how much time has gone by and how much time I have wasted. So, “living deliberately”It is important to find a balance in your life and do something that is worth your time and you enjoy.
section 12
essay +3
Deletecomment (tom p.) +1
comment (james III) +1
30/30 overall
What do you think of Deism?
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has grown up in south and in the bible belt, I have had quite a bit of exposure to organized religion, more specifically, Christianity. I have been to several different types of churches and as a matter of fact been forced to go to church even when I did not want to go. I have always struggled with religion since I was younger, I never felt apart of that community. I never really truly practiced my religion, I kind of just believed god was there and I was supposed to be a good person. So I guess you could say I kind of was a Deist. I believed in god, but I did not actively believe or practice most of the things talked about in the Bible. I believe Deism is something good for our society, there are too many things proven that contradict stories told in the Bible. Instead of being ignorant to the facts because you cant stray away from the teachings in an outdated book, maybe people should practice more forms of Deism. There most certainly would not be as much social issues as there are going on in today's day and age. If I had to identify my beliefs spiritually, I would most likely be considered an Atheist. However, I do have respect for organized religion even knowing how toxic it can really be. I do think Deism is a good way to get away from the toxic nature of organized religion. If someone is struggling with their religious beliefs, then I would strongly suggest taking a Deist's point of view.
I agree that religion is hard to cope with at a young age and it is not for everyone but others say otherwise which I totally understand. I believe in God but I barley have time to attend church or any sermons even online because I am always busy. I am trying to get some bible reading time in when I can though. I liked how your response added up with your main question Henry.
DeleteI agree with with everything you said. I also grew up in the Bible Belt, and have had a lot of exposure to organized religion. My mom is catholic, and i never really felt a part of the community either. I am agnostic for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, and when I first read about deism it sounded extremely reasonable. I really enjoyed reading your post.
DeleteDo you "belong in your hometown"? 215
ReplyDeleteI believe I do "belong in my hometown" it is not just being raised in Illinois for 22 years but I have grown mentally and physically and learned from being there. I am from a small town and everybody knows everyone basically. I am used to the streets to get to point A to point B, where grocery shops are, the best hangout spots, the restaurants and many more. Even though, I have lived in Illinois my entire life does not mean that I am an expert on all of Illinois. Being raised as a female in a small town is not very looked upon compared to being raised in bigger states like Texas and California.
When I travel the United States, most people I come across ask "Where are you from"? I tell them I am from Illinois and they automatically think of Chicago. I them tell them "I am from the capital state of Illinois which is Springfield. Where Abraham Lincoln lived with his wife and family. Also, where Barack Obama worked at the capital building." Then the person, would be like "That is so nice and sounds wonderful." I know that it is somewhat wonderful because I have lived there for a good portion of my life but I wanted the change of scenery and thats why I tried my best to travel outside of Illinois as much as possible to get a glimpse on what other states have to offer. I enjoy traveling and seeing new things because I know back home we do not have that particular shop, restaurant, etc.
Section 1030
DeleteReplied to Henry Moseley (+1)
Replied to Alexandra Jasso (+1)
1 - (+5)
2 - (+5)
3 - (+5)
4 - (+5 and +0 on the two comments of my classmates but I did post the entry, so I still have +5 points for that)
5 - (+5)
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I totally agree i believe anyone can belong anywhere because each place you live you have atatched your own experiences and unique relationships to that specific location and community. I think this relates to even somewhere you have just been to because everyone secretly plays their own role in each community weather you directly effect it or not.
DeleteDaniel Lopez, section 1030-011
ReplyDeleteIs anthropomorphism (projecting human qualities onto what is not human) a mistake?
I believe that, while anthropomorphism is an understandable propensity of mankind, it is only justifiable to an extent. When it comes to imposing our traits onto a fictional character, then it is appropriate as that character is simply a figment of our imagination. When it comes to more serious intellectual inquiries such as the existence of, say, extraterrestrials or God, then it is inappropriate given that if these beings were to exist, we have no logical justification for assuming they would be anything remotely similar to us.
From a physical perspective, assuming we are talking about most traditional ideas of an all-powerful and all-creating God, then of all the shapes and forms and objects that said God could create, what justification have we for assuming he would take on anything similar to the shapes he creates? This is also assuming God has a form to begin with, as many descriptions of him seem to suggest he would exist on a completely different plane than all creation.
In terms of characteristics, this, I believe, has mildly more justification than what his physical traits would be. After all, in our experience as creators, we tend to create things in our image. Why not God as well? However, with only us human beings to go off of to come to that conclusion (who is to say that all creative beings necessarily desire to or in fact do create things in their image?), the justification is limited.
I believe it's fair to assume that one can only create from that which resides in their own being, for how can one create from that which is not a part of their own experience or understanding? However, because God would be assumed to have all understanding and create realities from nothing, the scope would not be nearly as limited.
Weekly essay 8/27/20 (3 pts)
Weekly essay 9/3/20 (3 pts)
Weekly essay 9/10/20 (3 pts)
Weekly essay 9/17/20 (3 pts)
Weekly essay 9/24/20 (3 pts)
Weekly essay 10/01/20 (3pts)
Total: 18 pts
I'm inclined to agree with you here. Our tendency to engage in such anthropocentric or humanocentric beliefs, I'd say, comes largely from our desire to ascribe importance or relevance to ourselves in a world that (for most of human history) has no regard for our well-being or success as a species. We seek to make sense of that which is around us, whether it be something small and harmless or collossal and devastating, and, to make sense of such things or attempt to empower ourselves to overcome them, I believe we paint them in ways we are familiar with.
DeleteTemperature and pressure differences in the atmosphere are causing a typhoon? The sea is a cruel mistress. Our village narrowly avoided starvation last winter? The gods have spared us. Et cetera. It has always been much simpler to equate relatable human emotions, ideals, and likenesses to the chaos of the natural world to better cope with our helplessness in it. Only since the introduction of science and philosophers have we begun to ponder and map out the world for what else it could be.
Section 11
ReplyDeleteDo you "belong in your hometown"?
I believe that while my hometown is part of my identity as this is the only home I've known all my life, I've always had the sense of wanting to see beyond the limits of Nashville. When I got into my teens, I began to feel like an outsider in my own community. In my case, I was raised in the Bible Belt and despite my extended family from within and outside Tennessee being Catholic, I was never fully able to commit myself to be a Christian or even an Atheist as I had always expressed doubt and had many questions. As for a minority, I live in an area where there aren't a lot of Latinos and I was always one of the only people of color. However, even in the small community of Latinos where there are in Nashville, I felt too much of an outsider as I was deemed by others as "too American". It was basically a lose-lose situation where I was trapped between two worlds but belonged to nether. But despite racial, religious and even political differences with my hometown, I still love it and I would only wish I could see it evolve and prosper for everyone espically in times like these. However, I had never fully-connected to it as I felt it won't do the same for me and a part of since I was ten did want to travel and see beyond the South. It was only due to financial issues and circumstances that resulted me into staying here and while I am okay with my home, I need to see and find my community that could be beyond from where I am right now. People were always scared for me because of the fact that I don't know anyone and terrified of what would happened if go. The only thing that concerns me is on what would happened if I only stay?
I totally agree with what you said about beginning to feel like an outsider in your own hometown. That's why I try my best to travel as much as possible to get out and explore what the world has to offer. Have you ever thought about just taking a few days away from Nashville and just explore another state to see what the culture brings and etc? I know you said your are a Latina, but I know there must be more states that have more Latinos that you can relate to so you wont feel left alone. I really enjoyed reading your response Alexandra.
DeleteSection 11
DeletePost Weekly Essay (3 points)
Commented on Autumn Daniel (1 point)
Commented on Kimmie Steakley (1 point)
Weekly Point: 5 points
Overall Total: 30 points
I don’t believe that it is rationally possible to believe that our world is the best possible world, because to truly believe that statement you must disregard all pain and suffering. To me this belief is extremely dangerous, because it could lead to people becoming complacent with the problems in the world.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who is agnostic, I have been contemplating religion for a while now. One of my biggest reasons that I can not say for certain that I believe in a god is because “Of natural events that kill or maim innocent people.” I don’t reject the notion that there is a god, but it does seem weird that a loving god would allow the pain and suffering of innocent people. (With the exception of a Deistic god)
Henry Moseley +1
DeleteSo are you saying you think a version of our world could exist without pain and suffering. it seems like everything anyone ever does causes pain and suffering to someone else. every action has an equal and opposite reaction... bottom line i don't believe a world can exist where everyone is happy.
DeleteTylerjones +1
DeleteWhat did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"
ReplyDeleteI think the video explains the meaning of this quote very well. Explaining how this means we should live in our own little "garden" or space instead of trying to dominate others. Also stating how we should have tasks and responsibilities in which to keep us productive and busy so that we can rest easy and feel accomplished at the end of the day. However when i think of the quote i also think it means we only really have control over what goes on in our minds. Throughout life humans constantly try to bicker and argue, trying to control the actions and beliefs of others; I believe this quote is saying you can only truly find satisfaction by cultivating your own ideas instead of forcing them upon others. Just like a garden your time is much better spent sewing your own crop so you may reap the benefits later. You can really only tend to your own fruits and veggies making sure they are ripe and healthy, and obsessing over the status of others gardens is coming at the risk of your own. All in all the world would just be a better place if everyone worked on their own problems before worrying about anyone else. Make sure your own garden is healthy and thriving before you even try to help or offer advice to others. The world would be a much better and more peaceful place.
Do I believe that Nature and God are one in the same? Well yeah, they kind of have to be one in the same, there can’t be one without the other. There is a reason why so many of the first religions were based in Nature, or why you seem so happy an at peace on a nice brisk stroll through the local Trailhead (just came back from a walk). I think something in our human brains feel a sense of connection to nature and all the other life out in the world and even in inanimate objects as well, its sort of like the spiritual connection people get from prayer or church attendance. I think we get that because we are actually connected to all life on this planet, and for now, all life in the known Universe. Now, do I think anthropomorphism is wrong, not wrong just more of something that shouldn’t really be done. A person is a person and an animal is an animal, not that we shouldn’t compare ourselves to animals or learn about their behavior by reflecting on ours. The reason I would say that assigning human behaviors on animals is because we simply are on a different level of brain processing then them. Its kind of like when parents dress up their kids in Halloween costumes they obviously didn’t want (usually a small version of themselves). To me, it just isn’t something I like to do, I love my pet cat but I know that she’s just a cat and that she can’t relate to me in anyway really.
ReplyDeletePost +3
DeleteReply to Moustafa and Khushi +2
“Do you "not want to be 'pigeonholed with any sexual orientation'? HWT 188
ReplyDeleteSexual orientation, as with nearly every other part of a person’s individual identity, is something which I believe can, in fact, be considered variable or fluid. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that often times the things we think may be certain or set in stone aren’t necessarily as simple or definitive as initially assumed. Further, it’s been my observation that, through fostering environments of friendly acceptance and encouraging each other to support and embrace new ideas or concepts, modern society has largely endeavored to broaden the horizons of those within it and really make us wonder what more could be out there that we had been missing out on.
As far as the book’s note about youth straying away from strict labels, I don’t find it surprising at all. To many, (especially the farther back in history you go) their sexualities were seen as a fixed trait of oneself given their biological sex and anything breaking from that norm was considered perverse, unnatural, or a mental illness. Now, however, the social stigmas and rarity long associated with such alternative lifestyles are disappearing en masse, leading to much more wide-spread exploration with significantly less fear of repercussion. In the same way someone wouldn’t want to limit themselves with other experiences in life by applying set labels or narrowing their scope, more and more of us are similarly hesitant to close ourselves off to new, unknown experiences by applying just such a label to a sexuality which we may not have truly explored or sought to expand.
The human experience is deeply complex and no two people are ever truly the same. As we mature, our tastes and preferences become more established and (assuming we took the time to try new things and occasionally dismiss our initial assumptions) largely refine over time. While I don’t think anyone ever *truly*discovers themselves 100% within their lifetimes, doing the best we can to figure out what makes us happy is what life is all about. So really, (barring any severely negative experiences, of course) why take the risk of needlessly limiting your potential happiness and self-discovery with a label right from the start?
Adam Chambers M01459626
Section 12
Essay – 3
Comments - 2
DeleteReplied to William (Vince) Murphy and Daniel Lopez
Section 10
ReplyDeleteI do not share the American pastoral fantasy. I’ve always lived in cities and I’ve always appreciated the benefits of bigger cities rather than smaller ones. However I do see that it’s a convenient cultural fantasy in a country like this, seeing as we have such a vast amount of land which fits the description. While I don’t believe in astrology and supernatural phenomenon, I did particularly appreciate the quote from the text, “All creation exists in a magnificent web of interconnection.” I think this perspective is productive for society. I associate this type of thought with Eastern thinking, the concept that we are all one. I think it’s a productive sentiment for society because if people feel that they are related in a system with their neighbors they will more likely be better to one another.
As much as I hate to admit it to myself, I do think I would have believed in the New York Sun if I had lived in 1835. I think many people believed it back then because the stories captured their imaginations and made them hopeful. They wanted to believe the stories so they did. Along with this, it was the first of its kind in the media, so people weren’t accustomed to being skeptical of printed word. I think Barnum’s mindset is a dangerous one. It was his attempt at justification to lie to people as a means of taking advantage of them and lining his pockets. When thinking of Barnum’s work I am reminded of the National Enquirer tabloid. This tabloid also blends fact with fiction and takes advantage of their reader’s desire for the information to be true.
Section 10
DeleteMain post 10/1= 3 points
Commented on Harris Calvin’s post 10/1= 1 point
Commented on Autumn Daniel’s post 10/1= 1 point
Commented on Barbara Frizzell’s post 10/1= Bonus
Grand Semester Total (excluding bonuses)= 30 points
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBlake Hughes
ReplyDeleteSection 010
My Essay (+3)
Comments (+2): Nicolas Smith & Anna Collins
Overall Points: 30
Weekly Question #6:
“What establishes the continuity of your identity over a lifetime? What makes (and will make) you the same person you were at 8, 18, and 80?”
This question is so complex, because I feel like my answer has the possibility to be something that someone wouldn’t even begin to consider as a possibility. There are many ways I would view this question, and feel confident with my response. What my mind immediately went to, was your personality, and how you express yourself.
At age 8, I was a huge fan of Scooby-Doo, Superheroes, Star Wars, and so much more. I had tons of toys that I would carry around with me, and loved to watch and read about my favorite franchises. I would go around, wearing clothing items that represented the specific characters, and would dress up as them, for Halloween.
At age 18, I was still a huge fan of Scooby-Doo, Superheroes, Star Wars, and even more than I had been. I collected tons of toys and collectibles of the many, many franchises I loved, and would go to the premieres of all the new movies, and know exactly when my local Comic Book Store would get their weekly shipment of comics, novels, and collectibles. I have even more graphic t-shirts and clothing apparel that represents all of those fandoms, and still wear most of it, quite frequently. (except making it fashionable, lol.) On the day of Halloween, I would show up to work and school, in full cosplay of whatever character I was cosplaying that year, and still have just as much fun, as I did at Age 8.
Now, years later, and what I would imagine to be like when I’m 80, I still do the same exact things. Maybe slightly different, like reading all of the latest Comic Books, since I just don’t have the time to do so, while still in school. However, if it weren’t for the commitment I have as a student, I know I would be just as into everything I listed, like I was, from day one. Regardless of what goes on in my life, and how busy I may be, I feel like all of this will always be a part of me. Whether that be my clothing, or the conversations I have with friends, peers, and professors. I feel like I will be able to look around at 80, and see myself with grandchildren, talking to them about all of the same things I love, and playing with all of the nerdy toys they may have.
I enjoyed this very much it actually made me want to use the same question and write about what I thought. It wasn’t as great as yours. I liked how you interpreted the bright sides of your childhood and how meaningful scooby doo and Star Wars where to you. Keep up the good work!
DeleteQuestion: (3 points)
ReplyDelete1. Do you agree that God and Nature are two ways of describing a single thing? 76
(LH p.76)
Question: (1 point)
2. "The ultimate goal [of Vedic philosophies] is the dissolution of the ego." 176 What would remain of you, minus your ego? (HWT p.176)
Question: (1 point)
3. Would you have believed the New York Sun in 1835? (FL p.105)
1. To articulate on my own beliefs; to include morals, values, beliefs, etc. I don’t agree with Baruch Spinoza ideals on stating ‘That god is nature and nature is god’, because it’s two separate entities. Meaning, neither are connected, your beliefs don’t dictate how and when things happen out of your of realm and control. Religion is misused by a great percentage of the world in this regard. Question, how does praying eliminate the natural disasters and untimely deaths that occur daily? They don’t! Therefore, religion is great in calming people’s emotions and giving and or to increase morality, hope to individuals daily. So, in short, it’s used more inline of a cognitive mental support tool, but at the end of the day it’s mainly used to control people(s) in the masses. I’m not saying that being or having a religion is wrong, I’m just saying that in the regards to Spinoza statement it’s not correct. Mainly, because we as people can’t control accidents, natural disasters, or even war involving deaths; just to name a few examples.
Lastly, if his statements were true, people wouldn’t be suffering, and the world would be a better place for all people regardless of ethnicity, structure status, and, complexion. We would all be happy because a lot of time collectively for most is praying and giving to whatever church or religion that we hold dearly to our hearts!
2. If I took my ego out of everything I did daily I wouldn’t be the same person. Beginning with, if I didn’t believe in myself first and foremost then how could I lead; I’m a 20 retired military member. I would have always second guessed myself nor have the confidence to make a sound and just decision. Lastly, if I took my ego out of the equation then I wouldn’t be who I am today. Meaning, I wouldn’t had strived to be the best person that I could be nor would I care if I failed, so not having an ego would had been detrimental to my life if I philosophized in this manner.
3. This was a pretty interesting question, because technology has increased tenfold since then, I would initially say no, but I had to rethink that and say yes! Reason being, I wouldn’t had been knowledgeable enough and or have the tools or resources to find out on my own if this was a true statement. So, like most individuals around this time, they had no choice but to believe an outrageous lie like this being delegated informationally from one of the biggest ‘New Companies’ around during 1835. Also, there was no TV, Internet, and I would had been like most being illiterate, so somebody would have been reading to me. So again, I would had been hoaxed to believe something untrue.
***Summary Posts 1Oct20***
Reading summary on Spinoza (LH) and answered two additional questions for FL & HWT.
“What establishes the continuity of your identity over a lifetime? What makes (and will make) you the same person you were at 8, 18, and 80?”
ReplyDelete- I picked this question because I believe I could express myself easier and actually make this a little more meaningful. I personally believe there’s some parts of you that will stick around for plenty of years throughout your life even to your grave because it’s just that special to you. I’ve always been a fan of anime since Probably the start of my childhood. I’d read the Mangas which aid basically the book versions of the show just to know what’s going happen before they air the episodes. Anime has always been a huge part of my life, and even though I believe I’ll be watching it all through out my lifespan. I do know that once I start a family I won’t have the same amount of time like I do now. So, I believe there’s hobby’s that will stick with you, but life lessons , struggles, and hard work will always stick around. I say that because no matter how hard you try you won’t ever forget where you come from. I know I won’t the things I had to live through is what shaped me into who I am now. I come from a low income family running a little family restaurant, and from a young age that was the start of my journey. I’d help my mother in the restaurant with little things or I’d help my uncle with some landscaping jobs. It was always willingly because I knew I had to help my mom and my sisters so I could bring food to the table. With no father figure around I had to take the role since I was the only male in the house and I did not have any issues with the struggles I had to go through because I knew it was for my family. That’s when I learned the world we live in is cruel and envious and you will fall, but if you don’t get up and make a change you will stay down. That’s when I knew no matter what I have to keep going or else whose gonna make sure my love ones are doing good. Besides that I know I’ll have the same mindset to strive for better even when I’m 80.
KAG | Section 10
ReplyDeleteThursday: posted my Weekly Essay (3 points)
Total points this week: 3 points
Overall points this semester: 22
From day three of our Zoom meetings when I finally got a hold of our books, I noticed one theme from not only our readings but from our discussion as well and it has been stuck on my mind like an irritating rash. This theme is the idea of his or that. I mentioned it before but didn’t elaborate on its importance. I thoroughly HATE the This or That philosophy. This philosophy closes off opportunities for further understanding and the entire purpose for philosophy is to achieve a greater UNDERSTANDING of the world's great mysteries and the world’s frequently debated topics. With that said, I am pleased that some philosophers such as Pascal understand the importance of not adhering to the This or That philosophy. Pascal formed a bridge of understanding between the pro-faith and anti-faith cultures.