Moliere

I look forward to reading your contribution :)

True! That's pretty much what I suspect -- I don't know if I believe it yet or not because I remain uncertain about how one justifies metaphysical bel...

:D

Makes sense. I think what animals are doing is offer a contrast to what we're doing in order to understand language. The way I'm thinking about langua...

I see attraction to deflationary theories because I don't like to decide metaphysical questions on the epistemic side -- there's going to be implicati...

Mostly to help us make sense of the Dog, I think. We are so accustomed to thinking in terms of belief that we have to interpret the dog as having them...

Pretty much. We desire to know the truth for -- what reason? Some people desire to know the truth so that they might be able to predict the future. So...

I think it's determined by the individual's whim more than even usefulness. The thing is, we like truth. It's something we seek for its own sake. But ...

Heh, yes -- Kind of asking if "Sky Father" is a pejorative in the same sense. I don't think it is, and will keep it in mind for the future.

Fair enough. I've been pinned to the matt on that one. How do you feel about 's term?

Well, when you say "Pejorative" I agree. It's pejorative, though I didn't think of it as a slur -- not in the way people use racial terms, for instanc...

What's the better way to refer to God when speaking about people who believe that God is above us, in a literal sense, and male, and providing us guid...

Between two atheists who walked into the bar? It's a public board, but he was responding to me -- I get the slogan. "Sky Daddy" need not be the word, ...

I want to say -- while "sky daddy" is something which any philosophically inclined person would think of as false, it's not hard to see that people re...

I agree with you here. I often struggle in making a distinction between human beings and our close cousins, but it really still seems to me that langu...

I'll show you! (EDIT: Silly joke that popped to mind immediately and I had to say it)

To come clean: I was speaking nonsensically. And it was blasphemy because it was philosophy in The Shoutbox. Sorry to everyone involved. Punning neces...

I agree with that distinction. That makes sense to me.

"Natural" as in "understandable" -- and I do tend to think of human beings as animals, and that insofar that a human being can conceive of something m...

Sometimes I feel like I do know what other people mean and feel, though -- it takes a long-term relationship of care, and we'll never be one another, ...

Heh. I would call some of my experiences mystical, at least -- reveries or communions or a dissolution of the self. Much of life is not explicable in ...

At the level of function they're not -- but conscious experience has no function, as far as I can tell. There is no point to it. But mostly I'm meanin...

First thing that pops to mind is the problem of consciousness and the problem of other minds: brains all by themselves are as dumb as a pile of guts. ...

I'm less certain of ineffability (at least, in principle ineffability), though I can see how inscrutability could dove-tail into that. I think of beco...

If it's possible to go back, it's certainly not possible to express that going-back in language.

No reason, exactly. Just a cause. To differentiate the two -- I'd give you a reason if I thought maybe it'd be important to your thinking, but I'm say...

The "how" I'm not sure on. It's part of why I'm uncertain about all the other things we've been talking about :D They claim something that's meaningfu...

Definitely. So I ought tone down my assertion that science says they're all false -- the sciences which have true things to say about religion are soc...

Yup! I feel the need to say that one of the distinctions I keep coming back to is the difference between science and history, even at the academic lev...

the essential way to essentially essentialize the essences of the essences which essentially essence the essence of essence essences the essences of e...

Though it occurs to me -- if anyone who is lukewarm on participation because they want more guidelines then please say something. We can come up with ...

I don't think that's true. Though the meaning would not be the same kind of meaning. I care about these arguments because of my history, so they have ...

I don't want people to worry about the rules too, too much. I'm mostly hoping to hear from many contributors who are stretching their creative sides a...

Less cryptically -- I believe that the Atheist and the Christian and the Muslim and the other various persuasions can believe in the Big Bang (even if...

Heh, fair. I gave an irreverent example of influence -- there are influences which helped people through intellectual difficulties which we don't have...

:) It wasn't always the case, and our ideas have come from these influences. Newton stayed up late doing math to prevent himself from masturbating whe...

By "the science" I do not mean the broad definition -- which even carries over into my favorites like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx -- but whatever...

Got it. At least in terms of the ontological argument it seems to me that "God" says very, very little. God exists because God is perfect, and to exis...

Cool. What about the claim that "the concept of God is empty"?

In terms of the formalization I can see what @"Arcane Sandwich" is saying. For any set of sentences P and Q -- https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/i...

I wouldn't count it.

Three atheists walk into a bar. I'm more tempted to say that God, as a concept, is empty than inconsistent -- it's like the empty set. There's just no...

Is the notion of Jesus inconsistent?

I agree! And with Bunge -- I prefer to go back to Kant for my real reasons because that's who persuaded me of the slogan, but it's also anachronistic ...

I'm always willing to try. And Let's add in any third religion: (FTButDifferent1) If God exists, then God is not identical to Jesus. (FTBD2) God exist...

I'm kind of uncertain about properties just as I'm uncertain about objects, but that'll take us pretty far astray :D -- a lot of my skepticism is base...

I'd probably fall closest to Quine in that I can see a parallel between using the quantifier and treating existence like it's not some property added ...

Not averse, but I wouldn't infer things between John Doe's existence and who John Doe is -- it's not something I'd infer because of some logical relat...

O I flip around the values all the time because I don't usually bother to use the symbology unless I'm doing mathematics. What I did before was repres...

Mkay, I agree. The conjunct of FTI1 and ATI1 yields a contradiction, but... If so then I'd have to find some way to deny both mostly because I don't t...