Banno

Again, your wealth is only yours within the state. Tell us, what is your view on climate change?

How did you drag that out of my post?

You are the exception, of course, and I hope you enjoy living in a hut in the hills. The rest of us are able to work together for common goals, and ta...

Sure. But not only. Ever noticed that folk who trot out the enlightened self-interest argument tend not to be nurses, teachers, paramedics, firemen......

You own nothing unless others agree. Property is a convention within your social system, which also creates the money you claim to own. Taxation is yo...

Oh for fuck's sake. No, Australia could do better, too. As far as we are in the thrall of the "Merican cultural hegemony, it is a constant battle to k...

Think on that question.

For the sake of others.

And 'Merica is allergic to the very word. Hence their present predicament, where their failure to build a common wealth has led to the break down of t...

Again, yes, America and Christianity both did great, good things. But not always. And again, the counter to my posts amounts to little more than "Bann...

Yes, repeatedly. A generalisation that exists only in a parochial misreading of the article.

There's your problem: self-interest. Civilised societies realise that looking after other folk is sometimes worthwhile even if it does not serve one's...

Laughed at this. Perhaps 'Merca was founded on a lie, and continues to believe its own myths in the face of its grossly immoral actions towards its ow...

A succinct summation.

There would be, if the notion of literalism could be made coherent. I don't see that you addressed my reply. There is no fixed, immutable thing that y...

Cool. I'll delete the contents of the hard drive and then my mortgage is gone.

Sure. But ignoring those who do read it literally is. What are we to make of their moral character? Yes, on this we are in agreement. And than there i...

But also, I offered the Leeuwen article as a contribution towards working with the sort of non-literal meaning you espouse, in addition to the usual r...

You keep saying this, others including myself keep pointing out that there are folk who do take it literally, that ignoring them is special pleading. ...

"There are things we don't know" seems to imply that "there is at least one truth that we do not know is true", or "there are unknown truths".

Yes. Philosophers, myself included, have not talked much about differing beliefs so much as differing justifications. The alteration might be producti...

No. See my post above or flick through the article.

Hanover, restricting the discussion to "the Western tradition" is special pleading. It remains that stoning adulterers is accepted in places because i...

So I believe I have almonds in the cupboard. I can imagine that these almonds are chocolate coated, but that does not change the almonds, nor my belie...

Special pleading. Stoning is on the statutes of more than a dozen countries, and horrifyingly it is occasionally still used. https://news.trust.org/it...

What? Is there a purpose to this digression?

Exposure within his community, removal of any privileges granted him as a priest, and prosecution under the law. What does he deserve? No punishment w...

Notice that "p is an unknown truth" uses a proper name - p - for the unknown truth. It is quite different to the everyday "there are things we do not ...

Taking that back to the OP, the upshot is that religious belief is categorically distinct from factual belief. The result is that belief in eternal da...

Take a look at Religious Credence is not Factual Belief The argument here is that religious belief is more make-believe than factual belief. This theo...

Am I supposed to conclude something from that? As I said,

You can check it out for yourself. Yes, there is debate, but only one god is mentioned in the Gathas, the wise lord, "The very first and the last". Th...

Yep. The mentality of good and evil were incarnated in later versions. The original was, so far as we can tell, monotheistic.

If there were then Christianity is a polytheistic religion, too, Satan being the creation of the Lord.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ahriman

My understanding is that Zoroaster was a monotheist; that his religion died with him but was revved centuries later by a group of priests who improved...

IF you like. It does appear to be the link between Akhenaten, Zoroaster and modern monotheism.

Here's Mental Events.

:wink: :up:

My turn. Sime, you're wrong about the arrow example." How an arrow is understood is not private; the arrow has a use only because we (not "I") agree a...

There's a prominent line of scholarship that differentiates between Yahweh and Elohim (El), making sense of the inconsistencies in the OT by describin...

There's this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267638339_Wittgenstein%27s_Tractatus_logico-philosophicus_glossary_of_mathematical_and_logical_...

Anyway, the better reply might be something like: That'd be more interesting.

Yay! I win! Twice!

If I did, it was facetious. But you didn't get the joke. Your answer involved reintroducing an anachronistic definition of energy, while denying that ...

Here it is again: You want a description of one in terms of the other. The confusion is your own.

Life has whatever meaning you give it. That's the case whether dualism is true or not. Meaning is not something that is found in the world but that is...

Interesting.

You can use whatever definition of "physical" that you need. If that is "dragging all of these debates into the realm of the banal", then that's down ...