How priest-like indeed. I feel like I'm on the Starship Enterprise, and Data has asked me why humans laugh, or why they risk their lives when it does not appear logical to do so.

Such questions is regard to "Truth is a White Lie" appear naive in the extreme. For predatory apes like ourselves, who are clearly status-seekers, heroism and boredom are important indeed. And this is why I mock any so-called critical thinking that refuses to address motive.

Hmm. That almost sounds like a reasoned argument, although, by no means a sound one. Still, are you sure you want to make any argument at all? It would seem to undermine your position that heroics are better.

Never made the argument that "heroics were better." I'm just pointing out that persons aren't calculators, that they have their emotional reasons for what they defend and embrace. It's my theory that humans play the hero in general, and that most cultural debate is a clash of idiosyncratic conceptions of the hero. Both sides see themselves as in the right and as the bearers of virtue. They use different key-words to congratulate themselves. Perhaps you like "logical." I prefer "inventive." I see man as a tool-user with needs. I find my epistemology more realistic, more practical, wiser.

But seriously, and aside from the Dawkinsian presumptions about the idiocy of religion, atheism, as a philosophy, really can only produce nihilism and a completely fragmentary view of the nature of realilty, can't it? I mean, aside from the fact that we can all be justifiably proud of the you-beaut inventions and technology we all have, the universe currently makes no sense whatever in a large-scale sense, from the viewpoint of scientific philosophy.

It is one thing to 'believe religion' in a child-like and simplistic way, and another to 'seek the ground of reality' through religious enquiry.

People have emotional causes for what they defend? I guess so. So what? What has that to do with whether their defense is successful? People can attempt to defend an unsound argument for all kinds of reasons. Emotional and otherwise. But their defense will be unsuccessful. Just as if someone tries to prove what is false, true.

he obvious cause of religious dogma is found in the effect: To give one man having no more merit than another power over his equals...It is all about power in this moment on earth...It isn't about justice hope or charity or brotherly love...It is all about power...

This is one more belief, that is justified for you by the emotion it gives you. Doesn't it make you feel masterful? I bet its nice to hold the keys to truth and falsity in your hands... I'm sure the Pope also enjoys his infallibility.

Materialism is macho. Marx was so butch, if you ask him. The philosophers who only think about the world are sissies, he implies.

Objectivity is macho. Those who lack a sense of personal authority crouch under the shadow of objectivity. How exciting, all these hard and rigid facts.

Logic is macho. Who needs all those flowery metaphors? What's in a metaphor? These metaphors demand interpretation. It's too messy. Too continental. Too much like a woman. Hand me my gloves.

It is really not something I want to waste my time reading, and engaging in.

No one's forcing you. But I'm not going to limit myself to your conceptions of logic. Language is bigger than that, and so is thought.

No one's forcing you. But I'm not going to limit myself to your conceptions of logic. Language is bigger than that, and so is thought.

People have emotional causes for what they defend? I guess so. So what? What has that to do with whether their defense is successful? People can attempt to defend an unsound argument for all kinds of reasons. Emotional and otherwise. But their defense will be unsuccessful. Just as if someone tries to prove what is false, true.

What you are writing is a kind of philosophical pornography. Only soft core.

---------- Post added 12-15-2009 at 10:41 PM ----------



All this is a kind of huffing and puffing. Nighty-night. When you are ready to say something sensible again, I'll reply.

I think it would be cool if you would try to meet the fellow half way...We have a language for purely logical discourse, and it is mathematics...Language inevitably appeals the sense rather than reason...It is a form of art, as math, being pure abstraction, can never be...I know language has a sort of spell binding quality which we can feel with a well wrought phrase... A rhyme was once a curse, and the name Carmen comes from the Latin word for song, from which we get the word charm... To write a beautiful line has an element of magic, and even fate about it, and beauty is an argument in itself... But think of what we write... Are we telling the sort of exact truths about a verifiable, physical reality that math tells after its fashion??? I think it is enough to say something because mute we have no meaning...Next, is to approximate truth, because to be honest, that may be the best any of us can manage...Never tell a lie...The truth is all over, but it is a direction, and not a destination...

I've often presented existentialism as a heroic sort of religion. To embrace meaningless is macho, I think. One can look down on the weaklings who need the crutch of illusion.

But meaninglessness itself, inasmuch as it provides this macho heroic pleasure, is also to be doubted. For meaninglessness also offers the comfort of certainty (one is done with the search for meaning, having abandoned it as futile). This also gives man a chance to play the Byronic hero. He is free in the void, to drink screw and joke his meaningless life away.

Let me ask again: How can one value life as meaningless, or meaningful if life is all meaning...

I think finding life meaningful or meaningless happens on a level much more intimate and much deeper than the so-called 'intellectual'. By the time such an awareness bubbles up into consciousness it has already been distilling in an underground vault for some time. More connected with feeeling than thinking, although we may think it is about thinking.

I deny this, as I think you may be making a bit of a sweeping generalization. As for myself, I've never gazed into a mirror and seen a hero looking back, Byronic or otherwise, although I am often given to moodiness. Perhaps I am not practicing Existentialism correctly, or perhaps my actual beliefs are not Existentialist at all, but some sort of weird hybrid freak belief developed over 47 years of trial and error.

Let me ask again: How can one value life as meaningless, or meaningful if life is all meaning...It is because we live that the smallest thing has meaning, what ever being it may have... What meaning will anything have when we are dead...Not one thing can give meaning to the dead...Meaning, even, is a meaning we have with life...We have no objective measure for life, and life is the measure of all things.... So; what you say is: I find no subjective value in life so that people like me can ask what do you find value in???By such statements the young prove themselves immature to the old...It is only too bad that those finding little to value in life cannot give some portion to those who have little of life and value it highly...If only words could express my ennui, so much of life and so little of me...

The hero has a thousand masks. . . .

I find meaning in the moments of living, rather than as an expectation of a sum total of meaning after I am past even being scattered dust.

I am thinking of the story of Buddha holding up a single flower . . .

. . . by which he makes the transcendent visible, if we're to continue Campbell.

"Let go and let God." It's a good phrase, despite its associations with superstition.

How about we simply say, "just let go . . . " and leave it at that?

I know. I was razzin you a little with the God-thing. It's just that I've met people who I think had that sort of conception of God. As if the structure of things or life were inherently good or wise.

Don Juan shook his head as if in amazement, if not revulsion. "When you're facing that inconceivable unknown out there," he said, pointing all around him, you don't fool around with petty lies. Petty lies are only for people who have never witnessed what's out there, waiting for them."

"What's out there waiting for us, don Juan?"

His answer, a seemingly innocuous phrase, was more terrifying to me than if he had described the most horrendous thing.

"Something utterly impersonal," he said.