The Great Whatever

How can a religion become increasingly liberal without ending up like UU? But UU is contentless. Q.E.D. What does it mean to be liberal?

I literally cited an instance of the liberalization of Christianity resulting in it becoming contentless. UU is a contentless religion and it admits a...

This is the logical endpoint of the liberalizing of Christianity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism There is no content to UU that ...

Christianity in the western world is dying off, and liberal Christianity is basically atheism. Does it? People may have differing opinions on the matt...

1) A religion can't succeed with no members, or few enough that it has no cultural capital. 2) Liberalization in itself makes the religion less intere...

It doesn't seem like any particular ontological position is true just from looking at the world. In order for it to look a certain way, presumably vis...

This may be true, but the assimilation of Christianity into modernity has to a large extent destroyed it. Hence the worry that the same would happen t...

Really jogs my noggin...

No it doesn't. It doesn't appear to be any particular way ontologically.

To be an element of the domain of discourse and to be spoken of are not the same.

It doesn't matter what term you use, but that's not what's being discussed.

There are no reasons so far as I know to think that the nature of the mundane world is physical to begin with, in any substantive ontological sense (t...

It is possible, in theory, to have reasons for assumptions. I doubt there are any reasons for the assumptions behind physicalist worldviews.

Again, the idea that nothing can be said about Islamic culture is simply not compelling.

Whether it's more useful to think of distinct Islamic cultures or Islamic culture as a whole depends on which one is asking questions about. The topic...

I don't really have a stake in this, but I just want to note some fallacies SX has committed: First, 'there are multiple Muslim cultures' does not imp...

Physicalism is not more parsimonious than idealism or any infinite number of other hypotheses.

It depends on your prior assumptions. Nothing qualifies as evidence simpliciter – but if you look at the priors, there's no evidence for them either, ...

That's a one-sided description of what the Bible is. No. Generally scripture has made secular philosophy look weak by comparison. I'd been losing inte...

The scriptures are revelatory. No outside decision as to their reliability needs to be made – reading them ingenuously on their own terms inclines one...

The case fails because there's no evidence for the natural world (either).

A number of things, but the foremost was reading the scriptures.

I've been drifting that way for a while.

Lifelong apostate of various sorts, sympathies with Gnosticism. Now a reforming Catholic.

Looking to start these next: The Sign of the Unicorn – Roger Zelazny The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis – C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

Nine Princes in Amber – Roger Zelazny The Guns of Avalon – Roger Zelazny

The classic example is in free will debates. If you use the word ordinarily, there seems to be no room for an argument to even get in the door that pe...

Professional disciplines can have their own language games, but the problem is taking words from ordinary vocabulary and using them only quasi-technic...

I think language stabilizes around a core set of uses for which it's well-suited, which are extremely narrow. Most everything in the world, and even i...

Wittgenstein had a lifelong obsession with solipsism that appears never to have left him before his death. There's some speculation that his worries o...

I've read the OP a couple times, but I don't understand what it's asking.

Color realism seems plausible. Mary doesn't learn any new facts, but gains a new ability, which in turn might help her learn certain facts about indiv...

It seems to me the more visual the imagining is, the more I must commit to certain qualities. So the the extent I commit to no such quality, to that e...

So the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 has no influence on whether we believe that 2 + 2 = 4? Is it a complete accident that we believe it truly? Or do we sometim...

I think you're reading 'is' inappropriately, as some sort of modal equivalence. All I mean is that, relative to a world, there may be no other thing t...

So, I think that the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 causes us to believe that 2 + 2 = 4, given that we're creatures that can realize mathematical truths. We don'...

So the idea is that thinking you ought to do something has practical relevance, but that you ought to do something doesn't. But suppose whether you ou...

I should revise and say, I can make sense of this if I'm obligated according to some law or standard – but then, I would say the reason I don't take t...

I can't make sense of this. How can you claim you're obligated to do it but that there's not sufficient reason to? To claim the latter seems to me jus...

I'm not sure I follow what the significance of this is supposed to be. I agree that "X is immoral and I want to do X" isn't a contradiction. Are you w...

Sorry, I think I've lost the thread. No it's not a contradiction, but I don't see how that's related to your question. Is it now about wants? Can you ...

I think it's not possible both to do something you think is wrong and not be committed to the claim that you ought not to have done it. And I can't se...

So you are assuming that obligations are something extra added to the world, and then puzzling over what the difference between a world with obligatio...

Yes. "Why ought I to do what I ought to do?" is a confused question.

The question is confused, since it assumes that things being wrong is something extra on top of the rest of the world and what happens in it. Such an ...

No.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asPDvjUYFy4

I was just using it as an example in the literature of philosophers assuming a certain capacity for visualization on the part of their readers.

Yeah, a vague image. In the same way I don't need to decide on how many stripes the zebra has, I don't need to decide exactly on the triangle's shape....

Yes. I think Berkeley was wrong about this. He was either misdescribing his own powers of imagination to make a rhetorical point, or, like Grandon, la...