Nope, for me it still revolves more around this…
Figuring out the extent to which any particular investigation is or is not an actual autonomous undertaking. Until we can know for certain that this very exchange that we are having is not only as it ever could have been, it might just be.
Then what?
To my mind, a “general description” of this sort can precipitate a frame of mind that seems “anchored”. But anchored to what when the beam is focused instead on particular human interactions that come into conflict? That part of most interest to me with respect to God and religion. And with respect to the moral narratives of mere mortals who, instead, embrace deontological reason or political ideology or narratives regarding nature.
I disagree, because the enquiring mind isn’t so much “anchored” as limited to past experience in his ability to compare data.
Yes, but how is that limitation embodied in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein pertinent to conflicting goods/value judgments? How do we ascertain when the data that we accumulate encompasses all of the data that would need to be accumlated in order to transend the existential parameters of “I” out in the is/ought world? The world that generates the overwhelming preponderance of human conflicts.
It was quite tragic that the Christians that conquered other peoples, especially those who worshiped nature in some form, called those people antediluvian (an image from their own tradition). It was just a variation of imagery that they encountered, and probably in some ways a more experiential imagery than the imagery of Christianity at that time.
Here we have the historical data, the cultural data and the experiential data that any particular individuals back then accumulted in the course of living his or her personal life. How then is this integrated into the most reasonable point of view? Either with respect to a God or a No God world?
It is one thing for God to demand that we “struggle” with this, another thing altogether when, however much we do struggle, there is seemingly no definitive way in which to measure our success. I suspect that is why folks like Ierrellus take a leap instead to a God that, in the end, welcomes all into His Kingdom. Otherwise how “on earth” are we to continue that seemingly futile struggle given a belief in Judgment Day.
Yes, the leap is in the end all a believer has and it would be helpful to have more explicit instructions, but that is why I see the Bible, for example, as an anthology of religious experience put into stories, rather than historical record. We have to accept that we are story-tellers. It is far easier for us to wrap experience in a story in order to pass that experience on, than to explain it. Judgement Day is in some ways the wish that justice will rule and people will get their dues. However, how that will be ascertained and what “sin” actually would be is as yet only a human projection – and to some degrees a projection of people who lived experientially in another world.
Imagine for example the “struggle” being endured right now by Christians in Puerto Rico. They may read the Bible from cover to cover, but who among them are saved and who among them will perish. Or, perhaps, wish that they had. To actual flesh and blood human beings this sort of “general description” of “projection” only takes them so far. But most Scriptures won’t really take them much further. So they take their own particular “leap of faith” to a narrative most likely to comfort and console them. While at the same time convincing themselves that their faith is not just about comfort and consolation.
“Common agreement” and “intuition” are basically no less existential contraptions to me. They are no less embodied in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. The tricky part here though is that “intuition” is often a complex intertwining of what we can know objectively and how we react subjunctively in particular contexts. The part where reason and emotion and psychology and instinct become entangled in genes/memes; and then a clear demarcation between “true for all of us” and “true for me” is hard to come by. The part where “I” become entangled in my dilemma above. And with no God to comfort and console me.
But this is what I have pointed to above. In your search for objectivity, you can’t put the responsibility on the test persons. You have to create an environment that favours objectivity and lead people with your questions to objectivity. This thread has been going on for so long that I believe that we will never get to where you want to go.
My aim on this thread is to reconfigure “general description” conjectures of this sort into accounts of particular behaviors chosen in particular contexts in which God and religion figured into the calculations.
In other words, to what extent can we grapple with these individual experiences so as to intertwine them into a more measured, a more sophisticated conjecture regarding “what really happens”.
And [in my way of thinking] this always revolves around knowledge/beliefs that we either are or are not able to take “out of our heads” and convince others to share in turn. And then the extent to which together we can demonstrate substantively to more still that it is a reasonable way in which to assess “reality”.
After all, what else is there with respect to these particular relationships?