Holiday, I am getting the feeling that you are trying to use logic as a means of proving your thoughts. Logic does not function that way. It is a means of studying reasoning, to see if reasoning is correct or not. One cannot, on the basis of logic, state that a certain conclusion is correct. I might be able to prove that you are in fact the flying spaghetti monster in logic, it doesn't make it any truer though. Truth tables are used to determine which premises need to be present to make a certain situation 'true'. Depending on what form of logic used one gets totally different situations though. The project you are now submitting 'might' be a little of your head because I think it would best be tackeld using modal logic. I am in no way good enough in that to be able to explain it properly.

Have you studied VideCorSpoon's logic symposia? In that case you might be a ble to make a (propositional) logic sentence of your 'premises'. I'll make a (propositional logical) truth table of your first 'premise', then you can do another and we'll see where we end up, okay?

spirituality is meant to be evoked through introspectI S (
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
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(crappy display, I am sorry)

Do you see the result of you 'premise' by splitting it up in premises? It might not be what you had in mind when you wrote that. Let's see what we else we can find out. You do: 'And one's spirituality is not meant to be evoked from the society for objective means, such as institutions, other people, fascism, etc.'.

Ceiling cat sees you reasoning backwards. How do you have a conclusion without the faintest clue why it is so?

hmm... because I want that conclusion, and my instincts are telling me I'm on to something.

Also I realise I have it backwards, but was wondering if the answer might be possible with multiple truth tables eventually coming to the conclusion.

I mean, if you start with a premise and devise a truth table, then you can devise a truth table from the trues of the original truth table by having half of the original and then half of a new opinion.

Then you can take the trues of the trues of the original truth table and add on a third premise, until a conclusion is reached that satisfies the opinion.

However the second and third premises have to connect in some way to the original premise. How can I do this?

I can always devise some premises from which I can derive any conclusion you like. The problem is whether I can devise true (or plausible) premises from which I can derive that conclusion.

In this case, Holiday, I think there is an easier solution to your problem. You should read two of the finest works ever written. They were written by the same author ('our Jew'): Spinoza. I think what you desire most can be gained by reading his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. This work got him excommunicated (<-- a tell-tale sign of a great work), but his Ethica (<-- that one got him to purgatory (posthumously I might add)...another tell-tale sign of a great work) is his masterpiece. It is an ethical work, written in a geometrical manner: with axioms, postulates and conclusions fashioned after Euclid's Elements.

I sincerely hope you will read these two works of 'our Jew' (He's a Dutchie. His work was once condemned at the University of Utrecht....Where I go now and again to catch some classes).

Holiday,

Arjen has a point about the function of logic and your argument. Logic functions kinda like a spell check or a mathematical problem recheck. It won't necessarily reveal your answer to you, but can check whether or not your arguments are good or not, identify logical structure, and inform you as to constructing well formed formulas. Though, if you bend logic the ways you want it, you could theoretically get what your looking for. But that is a trial and error examination.

But I am curious to develop your argument, so I hope you, Arjen, everyone else stays around to develop it.

There are two proofs that I see in your post #1.

1.Spirituality is meant to be evoked through introspect.
2.One's spirituality is not meant to be evoked from the society for objective means (etc.)
3.Therefore, religion is insane.

Or (altering the grammatical structure a little bit)

1.Sanity implies a certain condition
2.Spirituality is no exception
3.Therefore, religion does not follow

I think it's first necessary to develop (if we want to construct a logical proof) a lined argument. I am assuming that you are trying to prove the fallacy of religion. We may need to come up with clear and concise terms for the purpose of the proof.

Note: come up with any and all forms of axioms or statements that you think can lend to the argument because those can be incorporated into the proof and determined for relevancy and use.

"I mean, if you start with a premise and devise a truth table, then you can devise a truth table from the trues of the original truth table by having half of the original and then half of a new opinion."

I don't think truth tables work this way at all. T/2? T/4?

Let us assume your argument is this: "sanity implies a certain condition and that spirituality is no exception, and religion as such, is not following that condition," and that the conclusion you want to reach is that religion is not sane. Does it go something like this?

All Sane statements are statements following a Certain condition.
No statements following a Certain condition are religious statements.
Therefore, No religious statements are Sane statements.

I believe that religion no longer has sane motives and is therefore not sane. We do not need it.

And I'm trying to devise how sanity works within the spiritual sense which is the benevolent point of religion. And sanity must have conditions and perhaps it varies with different forms of cognition. I've always considered it to be this constant crap within the entire frame of thought, applying it to just consciousness, never assuming that maybe there are many kinds of insanity.

And I don't want to get into the disorders in which there are dozens of, they aren't really axiomatic definitions of sanity here. They imply sanity as irrelevant.:nonooo:

As for truth tables, I believe they work that way jgweed. Not in halves obviously, it depends on the outcomes, the ratio of true to false. It could be 3/8. And then you'd have to branch off and think of the circular premises for getting right back to the conclusion and original premise at the same time.

I believe you could do it in 5 premises (including the original, and conclusion). That is, we would have a star shape-like pentagon framework:lol:. Each point has two lines coming out of it, joining up to two other dots, and in relation to the single point, the other two dots act as its conclusion and original premise counterparts. Thats how I see it possible.

So you could say that the conclusion of any proof you would make is that religion is not relevant

Definitely need more ammunition to work with.

One thing I can advise is that if you are attacking the relevancy of religion, you need to underline the factors of relevancy. What is relevancy ? Insert your thoughts here. If what is relevant is the way you figure it (insert your thoughts here), how can religion (thoughts on religion here) fit in that framework? etc. etc. etc.

Case in point, if you want to attack the relevancy of religion, strike at the finer points of relevancy. In doing so, you approach the issue from a relative perspective which does not come off too harsh when positing it to others who have a directly opposite view. The subject and context of religion is the sweetener to the argument, so there need not be the blunt subject in the argument.

Also, in a completely random and irrelevant deviation from the subject. :slap:
(this emoticon isn't meant towards you or anything like that, I just think it's utterly hilarious. Who thinks up these things? LOL!)

Yeah my favourite emoticon is the :knight:.

I do want to be careful with how religion is irrelevant because spirituality in itself is just fine, evoked in other ways.

Relevant is sane, in this case, not that I want to prove that, I'd rather just stick to the word sane here.

Sane is hard to define. I want to make it an axiomatic statement related to cognition and so I'd say something like sane spirituality is logic fulfilling emotion, not emotion fulfilling logic. However that appears to contradict what...

I've always thought, that in order to classify an action as sane, one must listen to logic over emotion, or rather, logic is majority influence whereas emotion is minority influence. And there are other cognitive processes too which I don't want to get into right now.

So I must see the 'action' in a different stance. An action I believe can be related to intrinsic stimulation in the brain, and 'new' stimulation in the brain. The new is what is conscious, and the intrinsic is unconscious. Sanity can be dealt with genetically, or pathogenically, right? The environment causes insane actions and ....

Genetically, is intrinsic; pathogenic is conscious, but becomes intrinsic. And genetic has conscious effects, so sanity at both levels must be true.

So back to; ~ logic fulfilling emotion, And yet logic is dominant. (Ideal sane action, spiritually)

Ok, when I say logic fulfilling emotion, I mean that it is emotion providing beliefs. Ok wait.. I see it now. :brickwall:

Emotion is a means to have subjective beliefs and are to stay that way in order to be sane of action. And logical beliefs are objective and must stay that way in order to be sane of action. So logic is always the dominant figure in that an expression given form a belief into an action must be a conversion from a cognitive process of any kind to some sort of logical stimulated scenario in the brain, however intuitive it may be.

So religion, is not that conversion from emotion to logic when giving the potential of a belief the objective basis (the action). Emotion is kept subjective to be sane, logic is the objective alternative.

Religion, is simply missing that logical process, because a person`s experience is the opposite of one`s action (lets say).

An action or experience; action is conditional process(logically), and experience an unconditional process(logically), that is, what comes in doesn't have the potential to just change all of a sudden, one doesn't have total control over their state of mind.

Religion is the experience of others, spirituality is one's inner choices.

And therefore, the experience of the environment, seeking religion, will have a constant trail of emotion in that the experience coming in will have instant emotional responses without much thought given to the action during or preceding it.

For people, it is much harder to think when responding to the environment than to respond to an inner idea or belief. People are ignorant; they take little care into thought from environment/society attacking them with bias and beliefs to have to inhale. People don't spend enough time just thinking. Thats my conclusion. Thats why people allow themselves to act insanely. There is an inbalance between thought and emotion, which is the premise I had started with.

And spirituality is not exception. In order to have sane spiritual thought, there has to be a stage in which there is logical thinking, however light it may be, intuitive doesn't really grasp the picture, it is moreso providing a conclusion without a premise to at least indirectly follow.

Sorry for the long post. Plz correct my many mistakes, because I just know this is filled with those unacceptable:Not-Impressed: 'generalizations' and opinions that have no concise or valid proofs.

On the other hand, religion need not be illogical. It is quite possible to accept certain premises on faith, and then to deduce from these valid conclusions. One finds this, for example, in the works of Aquinas.

Secondly, "insanity" is a legal term by which responsibility and culpability for an action is decided in a court of law; using the term in an argument seems to restrict it to psychological-medical positions. Given this, the statement that "...people allow themselves to act insanely," is not accurate, because insanity is not a act of the will, and is just the opposite. Here, I would suggest using a different word would strengthen the argument, and certainly clarify the warrants you would want to present.

I take it that your argument asserts 1) that there is a difference between thought and emotion, and then 2) wishes to devalue the latter, and then 3) attaches religion to emotion. Care must be taken, if so, to use "emotion" in very similar meanings throughout the argument, or to precisely define it.

I believe Aquinas was doing the right thing at the time when it was needed, to rationalize christianity, but I think it is wrong to hold sanity as a legal term.

We just cannot continue to hold a problem as a legal matter. Every action, idea, thought; it is all wrong to hold them in regards to the restrictions of legal accounts. There are no axioms or rules that can bring about the right way to handle thousands of similar situations. No situation is the same. A situation should not be categorized. It should be given thought as to the effects it will have on the future and why it happened; so why do people act so, and should something be done about it.

The court of law, why do they use law? Why not simply rationalize the situation. Learn all the facts and by staying away from 'legalities' determine who is been doing wrong and who has been doing right.

Look at how the word 'genocide' was used as a legal term and realize it was just for the sake of avoiding truth to many issues.

Edit: Also having read the rest of your post I want to make this clear that I value emotion and logic, just that when acting logic has to take some form of control. Yes, emotion should define the path of your decision, but logic the length and strength of choice.

thought-objects.

I hope this poits you in the right direction.

This advice should come with the suggestion to read BG&E's 200 page footnote, On the Genealogy of Morals, as well.

Sanity is normative. Religion is the norm. Thus atheism is insane. See the problem here? There is no such thing as true sanity, just as there is no such thing as universal good, it is all relative. Knowing this, claiming that religion is insane is misleading. You are relly trying to show that it does not follow along the lines of a chosen goal, but for this to be the case, a goal must be chosen. Take ensuring human survival for instance, a goal which many people tend to hold to some degree of esteem. If you can conclusively show that religion is present in a significant way if and only if the world will end as a result is tautology, you might have somthing assuming that religion is present in a significant way is true.

Somebody is not sane just because they correspond to the social norm. Thats a misconception with the definition

Corresponding to the norm (the aesthetical ideal) is just the confusion of the workings in the mind for the workings in the world. That is exactly where psychosis starts and the more serious forms of mental illnesses find their basis.