That’s exactly what I asked for. I was asking for a context. You said that human interactions are essentially meaningless and I am asking ‘to whom?’
[/quote]
Well, since you made the statement perhaps you can intelligently and civilly do that. Or answer my question or both.
You made a statement, an assertion. The context seemed to be blanket, as in everywhere. To whom are human interactions meaningless?
We are clearly wasting each other’s time here.
So, when you make an assertion and someone asks you to explain or back it up, you see no reason, in a philosophy forum, to support it?
Are you still here? 
Wow. Funny!
So, based on what do you make your claim the human interactions are meaningless? and to whom are they meaningless? It’s not for me to come up with a context for your assertion. Perhaps I misunderstood it. This is very basic discussion type questioning, let alone philosophical discussion type questioning.
Okay, how about this:
When you respond substantively to this post from above…
…then I’ll address your claim about my claim in turn.
My responses in red.
So, if I respond to a massive complicated post, you’ll explain what you meant by that one sentence and support it? OK. Sounds fair.
…then I’ll address your claim about my claim in turn.
[/quote]
First this is beside the point. (see the blue quote from the OP below and my response) But, what the heck, despite the fact that I’ve talked about abortion with you, years ago, I’d go over that ground again. I don’t particularly like abortions, but I support women who want them. This has happened concretely - iow specific women have actually wanted my support - though it is usually a more abstract issue. I have never, as far as I know, conceived a fetus that was then aborted (or brought to term). I can’t possibly know why you are more fractured and fragmented than me. If I take what you write hear at face value, it seems like you want some kind of proof that one side is right or the other is wrong. You seem to generally be yourself in favor of the right to abortion but cannot find a way to disprove the anti-abortionists. You seem to feel the need to have objective proof that what you prefer is universally and objectively correct. You seem to think you should have that proof. I don’t have that belief you have. It seems like an objectivist belief. I don’t have it and it seems to plague you. If you are correctly introspecting and being honest here, it sure seems like you put a huge burden on yourself to find objective morals and objective arguments to support your positions or destroy those of others. My guess is that that causes your pain or at least confusion. I do not have that belief that I should find objective morals. But that’s all a guess.
And it is weird, acutally that you think I bear some onus to justify my lack of one of your problems. It is most likely your own thinking that is causing your problem. If you were poor, it very likely it was not your thinking that was causing your problem. Possible, but most poor are poor because of sociological factors. But your thinking that you must find these kinds of objective moral arguments seems to be causing you pain. My guess.
If I don’t hit myself with a hammer and you do and you get headaches, there’s little for me to demonstrate. Physician heal thyself. My absence of a belief, your belief, which seems objectivist to me, is not something I need to justify. I get it, you think I should demand this of others and myself. I lack that urge to prove my preferences are the objectively moral ones.
And I see this as one of the cons of your approach, that you believe one should try to find those.
Another con I see is that you avoid learning by doing, which is the primary way we learn, even people with mobility issues.
I see those as cons of your approach.
What cons did you find when you looked at your behavior and approach to learning?
Sure unshackling yourself from obligations and responsibility is a pay-off for your point of view. Fuck everybody else, and don’t worry about the consequences. In your no God bubble you’re freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
So, to you being morally responsible is like being married to a bitch. Much easier to blame everything and everybody else. Like you always say this thread is about being critical of religion, God forbid that anybody make it about YOU.
Looking back, it seems those folks were in denial of the evidence for scientific determination, most particularly their own evolutionary past and their own unconscious motivations.
How nice for you.
So much easier to make broad abstract generalizations than looking at how you may have contributed to your own fate.
Did you fall short of your ideals?
How many times did you act against you own conscience, engaging in actions that you knew to be wrong?
How many times did you betray yourself, and lie?
So much easier to say it’s all meaningless and deconstruct human identity than to take a serious look at yourself and take responsibility for where you are.
But: My point here isn’t about what the pros and the cons actually are. It’s this:
Again, my point is not as you construe it. My point is that whatever I construe the pros and the cons to be regarding morality on this side of the grave, I see that as being derived existentially from dasein in a world of conflicting goods.
In other words, ever and always the manner in which I have thought myself “here and now” into believing that this…
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
…is a reasonable assessment of morality in a No God World.
Instead, from my side of the fence, you just go back to your own contextless rendition my point:
What practical context? I have noted many times what is by far the most crucial “practical context” in my own life here:
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
Then came the “thinking” part. Reading Irrational Man and Existentialism Versus Marxism and discovering the philosophy of existentialism.
And, over and again, I ask you to convey your own intertwining of thinking and experiencing so as to grasp how, in not believing in either God or objective morality, you appear to me to be considerable less “fractured and fragmented”.
My point of course is that had your life been very different you might be here noting instead that you believe abortion is immoral and that what you support is the unborn baby’s right to life. This is precisely what I mean by ‘“I” being an existential contraption rooted in dasein out in the is/ought world.’
And, that once ethicists acknowledge this, there does not appear to be a way in which, through the use of philosophical tools, to arrive at a frame of mind that makes the conflicting goods go away. And, so, sans philosophy-kings here, each community will consist of those who have the actual political power to enforce one set of behaviors rather than another.
We simply think about this in different ways. But how might philosophers arrive at the most rational way in which to think about it?
No, I am looking for an argument that this sort of proof is even within the reach of philosophers. In a No God world.
Mostly, what I do here is to think back on all the years in which, one way or another, I was a moral and political objectivist myself. I remember how deeply fulfilling and satisfying it felt to be able to think myself into believing that I was in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”. That’s no longer the case.
But it’s not like I spend my days agonizing over this. I have my own set of distractions to take me away from all that. And from the finality of death and oblivion.
And in my view – my own “guess” here – you are not as troubled by all this because the manner in which your own psychological reaction to a world battered by conflicting goods is simply different from mine. Not more or less rational, merely the embodiment of a particular “I”. But: No less an existential fabrication rooted in dasein.
More to the point though, I don’t believe that philosophers will ever come up with a way to determine which of our reactions is the “wiser”.
Unless of course they do.
Then this part:
Like me, you have no way in which to be sure, in a world brimming with contingency, chance and change, how, given new experiences, relationships or access to new information, knowledge and ideas, your thinking about all this may reconfigure down the road.
Maybe you’ll be hitting yourself with that hammer, maybe you won’t. And maybe something momentous might yank me up into embracing a more optimistic vantage point.
Then, in closing, it’s straight back up into the “general description intellectual contraption” clouds:
We’ll need a context of course. And, in my own opinion, you continue to avoid that. At least insofar as I understand what a context is here.
Okay, to all those folks who are more inclined to spirituality than religion, same thing:
What prompts you to choose one set of behaviors “here and now” in order to attain what you believe or would like believe the fate of “I” is “there and then”.
Morality and mortality.
You all know my own considerably grim take on them.
I got that, I even mentioned that. But my point was you are making a claim about your own willingness to look at things, things that might be uncomfortable. The religious person may not want to look at how dasein has affected what they believe, including how they view morals.
I am confronting you with what I see as an inability on your part to look at what might make you uncomfortable: that the set of behaviors you have chosen to solve your problems/resolve conflicting goods is
ITSELF
highly controlled by dasein and psychological issues (which you also do not face) (I get that you look at your own history and thus morals in relation dasein. I am talking about your modus, your approach to learning and dealing with, for example F&F)
The religious person (say a Catholic) has ended up with a bunch of practices and behavior which he or she may see as simply the truth and not question what they might believe if they were born Muslim or if they had been raped by their priest or if they had gone to war or if someone they loved needed an abortion. Life experiences affect what we take as certain, including what people consider moral. Catholicism gives someone an approach to making things better - you follow the rules of the religion, you confess, etc. You get an approach to improvement, making things right.
Iambiguous does not feel certain about morals, he feels F & F.
But he never questions his approach to improvement. I am drawing attention to the fact that you have an approach. This approach has pros and cons. This approach arises out of dasein. It is certainly not one arrived at via science, for example. There is absolutely nothing fact based to support your approach to resolving conflicting goods or to coming to understand other approaches. The latter especially requires participation.
So, I am asking you to do the ACTUAL equivalent of what you ask religious people to do. To look at your approach and especially the cons. Because that is the test of one’s ability to evaluate something
one
holds dear
is habituated to use
and one might even be addicted to.
Yes, you can look at your morals in terms of dasein.
But no, you cannot look at your approach/behavior in those terms and/or evaluate its pros and cons. When it is pointed out that it is a poor way to learn about Buddhism,you say you cannot do anything else. This is not the case. At times you have appealed to incredulity, as if it would be silly to think there was another way to learn.
Relgious beliefs are often deeply held and to evaluate them can be scary.
Our choices of approach to learning and improving things are also deeply held (patterns) and it is often scary to look at them and what makes them seem obvious and true, despite them lacking any scientific support, and even, like in this case, when it is clearly not working.
I am not an ethicist. So please shut up. I understand all this. Of course I might have other preferences if I had another life. I prefer what I prefer, now in this life, at this time, and so I work with that. We’ve been over this before. I have never made the claim that my preferences have nothing to do with dasein (since I believe they do) or that even if I had other experiences they would be the same (I don’t believe that). You’re trying to push a square peg in a round hole, and found a way to repeat yourself.
They can’t prove the guy hitting his head with the hammer is wiser or less wise either. It depends on what one wants.
You say you are not agonizing because you can distract yourself. Read that a few times and think about what that means. You’ve given yourself a burden to find objective morals and possibly find a way to be convinced there is an afterlife, should someone manage to convince you. But you are not agonizing, because you have found ways to distract yourself from these issues. That doesn’t mean that you believe one should do those things and use the approach you are using is not causing you pain, it just means you have some ways to avoid noticing the pain it creates (and the pain of the situation).
In our fairly long interaction you should know I know this. It ends up being condescending that you find yourself in the position of needing to remind me of things I probably knew longer than you have, given how much of your life you have been an objectivist by your own story.
Sure, though I don’t think I am an optimist compared to you. As I said, I think you gave yourself an extra burden.
I note once again you cannot respond to the core argument which is that you give yourself a task that I do not give myself. I am not seeking to find resolutions to conflicting goods objectively or unviersally. I am not trying to find objective morals. You are. This goes back to your How ought one live threads and continues today.
I do not give myself that burden and one we both think it likely to be never relieved as you say above.
Regardless of the amount of times I present you with the possibilty that you may be giving yourself an extra burden and an extremely hard one and one directly related to F & F, you cannot manage to actually respond to that possibility. Other people might have extra contraptions, but you do not have EXTRA ones. Yes, I have noticed over and over that you admit you have contraptions, but never that you have extra ones. That when you encounter someone who is suffering less than you, you assume they have extra contraptions or some contraption that gives them optimism. Never once have I ever seen you capable of facing the possibility that your suffering may be caused by
extra contraptions that you have. Such as this specific one about how one much seek out objective morals and resolutions to conflicting goods (and at a universal, objective level)
Never.
Which is closely related to never actually being able to question your approach to finding solutions and information about other approaches. The only way for you to do with is via a thread like this.
And to me this means you are precisely like objectivists who cannot look at their approaches and behaviors - in terms of dasein or anything else that might make them question their objectivity. So you come up with the same excuse that it is the only way to do this because of health issues. Even though it has been pointed out that this does nto limit you from participating and checking off things on that list.
Your modus shall not be questioned. That you might have extra contraptions shall not be considered. And if you think now saying ‘perhaps I have extra contraptions’ you are showing no interest. Saying occasionally that you might be wrong and other similar disclaimers shows no interest in actually exploring. And it never actually happens that you can see this in a specific case.
Then, in closing, it’s straight back up into the “general description intellectual contraption” clouds:
Sure, that paragraph is fairly abstract. But I could not possibly have been clearer, in the post as a whole, about what the extremely specific context is.
You have a modus for understanding other approaches finding out how one ought to live and that does not include direct participation. It is words on a screen. It isn’t working. But you cannot question it. You cannot see the pros and cons. And you refuse to do what you ask of others: to see if dasein has led you to this modus, not because it is remotely effective, since it obviously is not, but because of personal fears (perhaps).
You cannot take seriously any criticism of your modus. You cannot evaluate yourself when it comes to the very criteria you expect others to meet. You can when it comes to morals.
You can evaluate yourself when it comes to the moral positions you have. There you can say that they likely come out of dasein. And here you happily compare yourself to moral objectivists. You can look at your beliefs - which tend to be liberal these days - and explore where they came from and notice your own lack of certainty.
But when it comes to your modus, posting here, exploring other approaches just through words on the screen,
you cannot look at the pros and cons, you cannot question around what might be the real motives for having an up in the clouds approach to learning about other approaches.
One of the cons of this approach is you look like a moron when you make statements about approaches you know little about. And so strongly are you addicted to your modus, which so far you cannot question, that it doesn’t even bother how moronic you look when you talk about Buddhism for example. How very Christian at root you seem when you do this, not even having the humility to think that perhaps you see Buddhism through a Christian lens (and not a very good Christian lens for that matter) and have no need to participate in something to understand it. There are other cons, of course, to your approach, like the assumption of the burden I mentioned which leads precisely to F & F.
But while you might change before you die, I would bet heavily that you are done with change. Because words on a screen rarely lead to change and I would guess, though I can’t know, that that is part of the appeal.
You did try to respond to me more than you have for a long time. I appreciate that. Makes it easier to see what you simply cannot entertain and do not respond to, ever.
I’ll take a break again. Because there is little I can do if you literally cannot see what I am writing. Of course, these are complicated issues, and even if I consider myself at explaining, none of this is easy. But over and over you, it seems to me, read things that make you think what you have written hundreds of times before applies. Applies to me. Applies to what I wrote. And this leads you to, in the main, not respond to my core points, over and over. It is in fact rather remarkable.
Exactly. My frame of mind here is rooted in “I” as an existential contraption rooted in dasein. Just like yours.
At least in regard to discussing the relationship between morality and mortality. The whole point of this thread.
How then would/could my “modus” be any less so?
What makes me grimly uncomfortable on this thread is the fact that, unlike the religious and the secular objectivists, I have no capacity to distinguish between right and wrong behaviors other than as “I”. And, in turn, “I” have no capacity to imagine life after death…let alone salvation and paradise.
And what makes me uncomfortable is precisely that which I have thought myself into believing “here and now”.
Yes, that’s how “for all practical purposes” it works out in the world that we live in. So, what becomes particularly crucial is how individual men and women come to deal with it. I see this as another manifestation of dasein rooted in the unique combination of life experiences and thinking them through. I merely suggest that philosophers, using the tools at their disposal, have not as of yet come up with a demonstrable argument that allows us to distinguish between a reasonable and an unreasonable assessment of the relationship between morality and mortality.
Yes, but how is my approach – like your approach – not embedded in the psychological
“I” rooted in dasein? How would philosophers, among others, come up with the optimal approach to understanding why “I” thinks, feels, says, and does these things instead of those things?
Wasn’t that my whole point of coming here? Of creating this thread? To see how – existentially – others encompass their own approach?
In a particular context, relating to particular behaviors in conflict as this impacts the relationship between morality and mortality?
I think I do that here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
In regard to my own existential trajectory involving the relationship between my experiences and then my thinking them through. With and than without an objectivist font.
And around and around and around we go.
Note to others: If you know what I mean.
We are all ethicists. To interact socially, politically and economically with others is to constantly be confronted with the question “is this the right thing to do?”. Sometimes in the either/or world where there are objective answers…and sometimes in the is/ought world where there are often only subjective/subjunctive personal opinions rooted in dasein. You say…
“Of course I might have other preferences if I had another life. I prefer what I prefer, now in this life, at this time, and so I work with that.”
And, here and now, you are able to “work” with this such that you are less fractured and fragmented in interacting with others [re conflicting goods] than “I” am. But that’s is precisely what I wish to explore in with you in depth given our reaction to a particular set of behaviors in a particular context.
Here you transport yourself inside my head and attempt to challenge my own assessment of myself with a better one: yours.
I am not burdened here as you put it. I have simply thought myself into believing that I live in an essentially meaningless world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods grappled with intersubjectively by daseins and now am “waiting for godot” in whatever manner I have convinced myself is the least onerous.
But, who knows, maybe a God, the God does in fact exist. Or maybe in a No God world, mere mortals – philosophers or otherwise – are able come up with an objective morality such that all of the terrible pain and suffering inflicted on a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods will be greatly mitigated.
I have everything to gain here.
Let’s just say you clearly do not know “this” as I do. After all, given the past, the present and the future, knowing it as “I” do is precisely what makes me “fractured and fragmented”.
Then back up into the stratosphere of what I construe to be “serious philosophy” here:
Again, and again and again: note a particular context in which you and I can explore our respective reactions to behaviors in conflict over moral narratives and political agendas at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political economy. [i]As the discussion unfolds you can point in particular to things that confirm your assessment of me and the accusations you make about me above.[/i]
Instead:
I’m willing to leave that for others to decide if you are.
Then just more of the same:
And then [of course] this part:
Serious philosophy and name calling. Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between looking like an “asshole” and looking like a “moron”. 
What’s New About The New Atheism?
Victor Stenger answers the question.
For me of course calling atheism old or new is basically moot…it’s all subsumed in what either perspective has to tell me about the existential relationship between morality and mortality.
Whatever you believe or do not believe about God and religion, you either choose to interact with others in a human community or you don’t. And, if you do, you are going to have to deal with contexts in which different people with different beliefs – different value judgments, moral narratives, political agendas – will find it necessary to broach, enact, sustain and then enforce “rules of behaviors”.
Historically and culturally, these necessary assessments of rewards and punishments are the font for both morality and the gods. Or so it still seems to me.
It never really changes. And embodying this conjecture regarding the “human condition” either with or without having faith in God makes all the different in the world to me.
In other words, even if any particular atheist chooses to be more aggressive in confronting religion, it doesn’t change the fact that only through religion is it possible to attain and then sustain objective morality on this side of the grave and to attain and then sustain immortality on the other side.
Thus, for the atheists [old or new] in regard to what might be construed as the most important components of human interaction, it’s heads they win, tails you lose.
At best the atheists [old or new] can pat themselves on the back for having the intellectual honesty, integrity and courage to reject the existence of something that is not able to be demonstrated as in fact existing at all.
As though that makes all the benefits of believing in God just go away.
From my frame of mind, it’s no contest: believing is better.
I’m just not able to.
Over and again, this continues to boggle my mind.
Given the existence a God, the God – an omniscient and omnipotent being – it is at least possible for me to imagine that entity creating everything that eventually leads up to “I”. And then beyond.
But the universe and everything in it – including “me” – “springing from the Tao”!!!
What could that possibly mean?
Any Taoist here willing to take a crack at it?
Edit:
Here is an attempt to encompass it from the BBC:
bbc.co.uk/religion/religion … /tao.shtml
And…
Okay, if it cannot be described in words, how did it first come into the minds of those who discovered it? A vision? A dream?
Tao then becomes even more obscure to me. But I suspect that’s the point. It’s in our head and it’s out in the world. Somehow.
Period.
You’re contemplating the Tao. Awesome!
On the other hand, my whole point was to note that in contemplating the Tao, I have no understanding of it at all.
In particular how Taoists make a distinction between ontology and teleology as the embodiment of a God, the God, my God, and how they encompass them instead.
Did it all just “pop” into the head of the first Taoists? Were they just fortunate in not having to actually demonstrate the existence of Why and How existence itself came to be as it is, in the manner in which No God folks in the West, will confront the religionists here?
Or is it all just what they believe it is and, as luck would have it, what they believe it is brings them a considerable amount of mental, emotional and psychological comfort and consolation?
Would it surprise you if everything that you understand is encompassed by that which you don’t?
Unbelievable.
That’s precisely my point. There is what we think we know about Taoism here and now. Then there is all that we don’t know about it. Then there is all that can be known about it.
How on earth is this not the embodiment of “I” derived from a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge. And all the way from the cradle to the grave?
Applicable to you no less than applicable to me.
But then this part:
What’s your take on this?
And obviously both ways of arriving at values may change over time. It would seem reading this that the first one is going to be stable and a problem with the second one is that it might change (which could be anxiety causing, sure) but in fact both can lead to changes in values over time. In fact the first pretty much demands it, while many in traditional societies and religions (thus in the second group) often have stayed, for example, in their church, and not changed over time.
Further they are more than two ways…
I’d like to come at it differently. Many religions present a top down set of values. Here are the values, from God, that you need to live up to. To me this splits you against yourself and also presumes that what one needs is an external authority that tells you (generally) what portions of your desires and emotions are bad and that you need to jail.
There can be bottom up approaches, where the idea is that problems arise when you ASSUME you have to have this split: one part jails the other. Contain the beast within and so on.
The interesting thing is modern secular intellectuals and technocrats believe this also.
On the surface they seem like opponents of the traditionally religious. But to me this is only about
WHERE
and
HOW
one gets the top down, split yourself, values.
And both, actually, take side, in the brain against the limbic system.
One could also ask: what if one had a deity (or secular presumptions) who did not think you were made wrong and needed to hate portions of yourself?