So the definition, for example, of the word "paradox" is valid until it has been falsified, do I understand you correctly?
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So the definition, for example, of the word "paradox" is valid until it has been falsified, do I understand you correctly?
Not exactly. Whatever definition you present for the word paradox is potentially true. If your definition is so vague it can't be tested, it is a very poor definition. If your definition is proved false it is no longer potentially true. Nothing can be better than potentially true. There is always pending a new interpretation of data, new data, or some better understanding offing to better define paradox.
For centuries Newton's explanation of orbital mechanics based on his formulae were accepted as true. Only very minor differences between what his calculations predicted and what actually occurred were observed. However, Einstein's relativity explained these differences, and completely upended physics. Einsteinian cosmology is radically different from Newton's, and the mathematics are also (much more difficult), while the solutions in orbital mechanics are so close that rocket scientists today still use Newtonian maths because they're much easier, and close enough for rocket science.
This is what I mean when I say proof does not exist.
I am confident that Einstein will be proved wrong, sooner or later, in the same way that Newton was. Perhaps only in a very minor way, perhaps in hugely substantial ways, but his formulae and cosmology will be amended when some part or aspect of it is falsified and a better explanation put forward.
This doesn't only apply to esoteric physics and math. We find, when we look, examples in every field of inquiry where accepted truths were proved false, and amended to make them more right, or they were altogether replaced. When we discuss something as incapable of falsification as theories of consciousness or spirituality, all manner of explanations and interpretations are claimed to be true by believers, but none of them can be tested and therefore amount to mere speculation or hypothesis, no more provable than the ravings of the mad.
So, you would describe my personal use of the term "paradox" in the given context as something, you cannot comprehend?
In case, you do not comprehend, every attempt from my side in wanting to come to a common understanding with you, is futile?
I would not describe us as unable to agree on the meaning of the word paradox. I don't at all think we cannot come to common understanding. I neither expect we will on matters of faith. IME any two members of a church have two separate and unique interpretations of their faith.
I think we can agree on things that can be tested, that have ways to falsify them, and if they are not falsified by these tests, we can agree those things could be true. If they fail those tests, I think we could agree those things could not be true. More than that I am aware I cannot judge with confidence, and I would hope we could agree on that, even if you feel confident about your judgment of such matters, we should be able to agree on my incompetence.
Alright, did you indeed come to a common understanding with me about the term paradox used in my given context? Including me re-phrasing the scene?
Honestly, I think we both do understand the word paradox. However, because I don't accept the premises the first speaker does, and the second speaker also seems to, I don't see his claim that the rule maker is evil to be paradoxical. OTOH, I do understand how that view - that the rule maker, God, is evil - is paradoxical to a believer.
Still, you'll probably give up on me after reading about my dream, so you may not care to bother about my understanding or common agreement. But, I'm being honest here, so despite my embarrassment about my whacko dream theories, I hove to and inscribed it on the blockchain for all time. What I experienced is what I experienced, and if you manage to jump out of the nonrecollection bubble and confirm any part of it, I'd feel vindicated for taking the risk. I don't think you're that ungovernable though, LOL.
Because all statements on the part of religion & humanism (philosophical, moral, ethical etc. etc.) are irrelevant to you as a whole, the conversation I have staged is also irrelevant to you, I have understood that.
This brings us both - you and I - to the end of our chain of argumentation.
I claim that I am responsible for my actions/omissions.
Very simple question: Are you responsible for yours? If so, why?
The whole thing is paradoxical not only for a believer, but for everyone else as well, even the one making the statement. That's the joke. I don't know anyone in the world who doesn't expect others to take responsibility for their actions/omissions. Since everyone expects this of each other, they talk about rules, actually on a daily basis.
What is going on in your most inner world, is hard to describe to anyone, I agree.
I did not understand
I understand from your discussions that you value your participation in society, in being considered a pillar of the community, not peripheral and challenging the fundamental structure. I instead have a sense of being excluded from an unfair system, from cliques that gain by being exclusive, and therefore worry at the edges to expose weaknesses and foster dissent against what I perceive as unfairness.
As I awoke from that dream, startled by suddenly exiting the nonrecollection bubble and beginning to recall my sensations and experiences, I recalled the feeling of exultation that I had succeeded in attaining to that recollection against the orders or will of the collective. My values are such that I am more invested in informational integrity than in being acculturated. I do not get that sense of your values, but rather that you are more of a team player and intent on providing structural integrity more than you are intent on ensuring you are treated fairly.
I dunno if that makes sense to you. It's a difficult and murky idea that can but be implied by our conversation, and isn't something we have stated outright or intentionally discussed. My defiance of whatever order I find I am part of is lurking just below the surface of my interactions, ready to snap like the jaws of a trap on any perception of injustice or unfairness I come across. It's not something I intend to do, or have learned to do. On the contrary, it's disruptive to order, and were I more competent at acculturation I would have learned to temper my reactivity in order to be more supportive to society.
I feel we are different in that regard, and that was what I meant. I can recall only the moments after I leapt from the nonrecollection bubble, and my recollection is that I felt triumphant that I had done so in order to recall that sense of defiance of orders to not recall that meeting with the boss me (I am sure that sounds insane, BTW). Anyhow, that innate defiance of order is a character trait inherent to me I think is not shared by you, and you instead are invested in strengthening the social order you participate in, or at least that's a sense I have got from our interactions.
So, I would not expect you to defiantly leap out of the nonrecollection bubble just because you were expected to remain within it. I would expect you to be supportive of that purpose of the collective rather than place your personal desire to recall above the interests of the collective.
Anyway, none of this lunatic dreamscape was the purpose of your post, and I regret bringing it up and clogging your blog with it. I suppose that I did exemplifies my own interest in my informational integrity and lack of support of the purposes of society - in this case you and your intentions for your blog - illustrating my point about governability.
You say that no state of validity can exist apart from the scientific proof of the invalidity of a statement, method, thesis, hypothesis or theory?
Did I understand that correctly?
Here I see a problem with this assertion:
What is a heart surgeon supposed to rely on, for example, if not on what are currently considered valid medical methods of performing a bypass?
Should he make all patients waiting for an operation wait for the next falsification of state of the art medicine?
Would you say that as long as this principle is not falsified, its application is ... what? Nonsense? Dangerous? Because according to that logic, every scientific statement will be falsified at some point.
Of course, this is always the case when and what about it happens, and is therefore a correct statement. But it is not stopping applications in all of the meantimes, because it cannot be held back, since it's a case of trial and error, would you agree? Furthermore, there are things which do not undergo the process of falsification, would you agree?
So what are you doing in the in-between space/time? Until it comes to this point where something is disproved? You hardly can do nothing. So you do something, correct?
What would a theology professor say to a student about theology? What basics shall he name, if all what he is going to name, one day will be refuted?
Potentially true. Also, we are people, not formulae, so we have biases, make assumptions, and take leaps of faith. Sometimes even dream.
Correct. That is actually what I believe is the case. What we know, what little we have tested and managed to eke out, is all only partially true at best, and all of it will change in time. All we can do in the present is the best we can with what we have, as imperfect as it may be. The scientific method is to make a hypothesis about an event that can be tested. Test the hypothesis and then proceed to discard it if it is falsified by the test, or devise more tests and see if you can falsify it. By this process we can gain a lot of confidence in a particular hypothesis that survives a lot of different tests. This is what heart surgeons rely on when hacking and slashing at people. When they're faced with something anomalous, such as not infrequently happens because people have some variations in how things are arranged internally, good surgeons do the best they can to use their experience to devise a solution in real time. But surgery is a lot different than theology. Different treatments can be statistically tracked to see which of them are better, if any are. This just isn't potential to theology.
Theology, I have tried to point out, isn't prone to being tested. Is Wotan the Allfather or is Yahweh? Allah? Raven? What's the point of theology when you can't falsify Raven, or Tengri, as the creator God? Whatever a theologian is teaching is being refuted right now, by hundreds of other faiths, not just sometime in the future. Yet, each of the different faiths also undergoes changes internally. Many Christian sects have radically changed in recent decades, now allowing women pastors, gay marriages, perhaps none so dramatically as Catholicism in that way just this year. Religion is utterly malleable and not infrequently used by pathological scammers to defraud people, because it is untestable, so I am loathe to invest much confidence in any particulars of a given theology. This was not always the case, however, and I was ordained in the ULC many years ago, when I thought I knew God.
I learned later that the more I know, the more I know how little I know, and gave it up for Lent (please forgive my little Lent joke). One thing I have noticed is that almost all true believers just happened to be born where their true religion was the dominant faith. What luck!
I can confirm that.
I forgive you for every joke. Jokes are very easy to forgive - LoL
But of course. How could it be otherwise? You can be aware of the coping mechanism and still want to practice and even find everything in the tradition that you learnt as a child and that gave stability to the adults around you: comfort, confidence, refuge, community.
I could say that about every other aspect of human life. Since everything can be used for fraud. Science in the same way as religion.
We both know that is, what always happened and what will continue to happen. Arguing in this way, I as well could say that scientific institutions are as much corrupted as the religious institutions are corrupted.
That would not make neither science nor religion superfluous.
Insofar as that is true, it is because of scientism that accepts the pronouncements of a priesthood without testing them. Science isn't such faith in experts. The scientific method is the opposite of such faith, the skepticism that impels us to seek to falsify and test what we are told. You are absolutely correct that scientific institutions are corrupted in this way. That was one of the more devastating facts I was confronted with regarding Covid, that the prestige of institutions with centuries of demonstrable integrity had been leveraged to mislead us, and those institutions were corrupted and no longer demonstrating that integrity that requires adherence to factual reporting of data attained by seeking to falsify hypotheses. NEJM, JAMA, and similar institutions pandered to political narratives because polities intent on pushing jabs into the arms of everyone in the world were their source of funding, and flatly lied about covid and the jabs to keep that funding, those grant monies governments and foundations dole out to enable research to be done.
However, this is absolutely contrary to the scientific method, and is demonstrative of the degeneration of science and it's corruption by the same mechanisms that have degraded politics and financial institutions by Machiavellian masters using every means at their disposal to gain more wealth and power.
And certainly not all religious institutions have suffered such corruption. Yet, the more venerable and authoritative, the widest reaching and most influential, are ubiquitously because those have been preferentially targeted because of those features and their longer duration has subjected them to more attacks. I would have far more expectations of integrity from a local church preschool program than of the Vatican, for example. Similarly, few scientific institutions have resisted corruption. The BMJ comes to mind, as does the TrialSiteNews, while individual scientists that have refused to abandon their integrity have been strongly censored, libeled, and sanctioned in every way politically corrupt institutions could undertake.
This isn't science. Anthony Fauci infamously exclaimed 'I am the science!', but that isn't true and is contrary to science itself. It's rather treating science as a religion, venerating priests in lab coats, and substituting dogma for dissent, faith for skepticism, the very opposite of data integrity and testing hypotheses to disprove those that are false, because doing so enables pathological liars to mislead victims.
I got that.
Still, theology is being a faculty. Would you like to erase it from the field, so it cannot be further something one shall be able to study? So, from your point of view, all topics need no further study which cannot be tested to be true or false. As a consequence, all religion needs to be eliminated?
What practical impacts of that being the case, do you see will happen, if religion is gone? Philosophy shall go? History shall go? What about arts? None of them fit to the method of clean proof and disproof.
No churches, no chapels, no religious communal gatherings, no songs, no prayers? Where then to find the words to farewell someone who died and whom you loved? No need in doing that? What kind of dignity shall be practiced instead? Do you have a substitute? Or is no substitute needed?
Not at all. But there is a qualitative difference between matters which we can test and those we cannot. This is why I say I am incompetent to judge these matters.
I would never presume so. For myself, I cannot ascertain the truth of matters I cannot test, so I cannot depend on my grasp of them. I make do with my own sense of right and wrong, having tested my fundamental beliefs in a harrowing process that caused me to abandon confidence in rumors and assumptions, in acculturation I absorbed as a child. This was undertaken at great risk, shattering my religious faith, my affiliations across society, and even my family. When I discovered beliefs I could not support factually, I was compelled to moderate them to suspicions, and those I was able to falsify I had to abandon.
For me, I was unable to say I believed in claims I found factually insuperable, and this included religion. I can only make such statements for me, and I have repeatedly pointed out my reticence to challenge others' beliefs, because of how harrowing that process was for me. As for what replaced it, I have pointed that out also, that I no longer have certainty about anything. The best I can arrive at is that things that have been tested and not disproved are potentially true, at least until better understanding falsifies them in whole or part. This is greatly humbling, and why I say I am incompetent to make such judgments and am lucky to be able to tie my shoes, regarding my intellectual capacity.
While that is something, you and I can talk about within a private dialogue, I do not approve of it to be a message spread throughout the youth, for example. Not as the most significant message they get but as being seen as something that will meet them throughout the years of being an adult.
To formulate it differently. If I start with certainty, and my child is the very being that begins life with a blank state, I provide it with a certain form of commonly practiced habit. The child has no intellect on its own. It does not understand prayers, being held at the table, to be thankful for the meal, it just accepts it as a given. If you have signs spread around your household of religious nature, they are a given, but not understood by the child.
But if you start with uncertainty and you do not have a habit, do not have anything which relates to something specific, you do not use common phrases in accordance to that specifics, and in fact you use nothing whatsoever, the child, when it becomes older, has no ground on which it starts to ask questions about the spiritual nature of life. Why should it? There is no reason to question something when that something didn't take place.
So then you have raised your kid in a secular way, where you have not used specifics to teach it in a non-secular way.
Here, my thesis: Secularity, being the only way of raising a kid, produces later adults who do not connect in a deep way towards all given religions, but more in a way of tastes and preferences.
Teenagers and young adults may perceive themselves as tolerant and think that they appreciate different cultures in terms of their religious backgrounds. But since they themselves were not educated with religious specifics, what motivation shall they have, to either appreciate or question religious faith genuinely in the first place?
Modern, western young people grow up with modern parents who may have a Buddhist figurine in one corner of their household, they may grow up with pictures from the Hindu God Khali, nicely adorned in a frame, they may grow up with other bits and pieces from all over the world, but interestingly enough, what a modern household avoids, is to showcase is Jesus Christ on the cross, having a bible laying around, for example. Modern people collect those things from all over the world, appreciating the pleasures of the art but not the discomforts of the meaning. Would they be genuine Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims they would stick to all aspects of the specific culture, the pleasing ones, as well as the not so pleasing ones.
From my perspective, I doubt there are many genuine believers at all. I cannot speak of other nations but my own country has stripped itself off of Christianity and what we are now left with is so called "wokism". It's a highly individualistic, highly self centered cult which propagates "you can be whatever you want", utterly entangled in its contradictions. We have it now written into legislation, so it went to be official that feeling offended is now the base for becoming "integrated". The question is: into what?
Since we do not talk in private but in public, and since we must assume that someone else could read what we spread, I find it crucial to what we feed the field with. Everything publisized with a strong pull towards leaving religion out of everyday life, because it cannot be proven false, will support further the closure of local churches and local facilities to gather as Christians.
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Now I was the one to use a wall of text. And I could go on and on and on.
While I think you mean knowledge, I must disagree even with that. Kids are information vacuums. Upon reflection it is obvious that kids must be able to attain such knowledge as is necessary to successfully live to reproduce in order to perpetuate humanity, which obviously has continued to exist for hundreds of millennia. Before they learn to talk, they have absorbed the knowledge necessary to support the use of language to conform to cultural circumstances, which are enormously variable across the world.
Your expectation of the burden of parenting is accurate, because it is parents that primarily deliver to kids all that wealth of knowledge they attain to, and this knowledge then creates the foundation of understanding kids continue to build on during their educational careers, whether they are subjected to government indoctrination day camps or not. I chose to homeschool in order to prevent the enormous deception and disinformation public schools inflict, which I consider more important and formative than any actual factual information they could acquire thereby. In hindsight I was right to do this. My sons have always outperformed their public school peers, and today continue to be autodidacts and professionals that are admired and followed by their peers, and indeed, everyone that knows them.
While I cannot take credit for their achievements, I can be pleased that I did my best to prevent them from being burdened with false indoctrinations they needed to break and replace later, which I believe has enabled their lifelong success at achieving their goals. It is a mistake to believe that giving kids some false history is better than no history, because kids make their own history from the events in their lives, and the rest is just words. It is the events they experience that provide actual relevant historical information to them, and this creates a filter through which they read every word all their lives. If the cultural context provided them is some contrivance that does not affect their lives, they will dismiss it with prejudice. This is why the Preacher's kids are so often noted to be so rebellious, because so many Preachers are hollow shells of pretense of religion while actually demonstrating much different values to their kids than they preach.
I undertook to involve my kids in my professional, economic, spiritual, and social environment, which demonstrated to them the actual moral and ethical standards I lived, that I also sought to profess in the ritual and daily prosecution of our home. It is a mistake to believe that other spiritual traditions are hollow and void of meaning to their professants. The shrines to Ganesh Hindus maintain are no less significant to them than are kneeling in prayer before bed to Protestants and Catholics. The same sense of worship and gratitude to deity is felt and expressed by Shinto and Buddhist celebrants as in any other tradition. Atheism is a faith no less than Islam or the other Abrahamic religions, however, one thing I have never been is an Atheist, because if I cannot judge certainly how this universe has come about, I equally cannot judge between no one and some particular one. Atheists pretend to know that no god created the universe, which is no less merely faith than saying some particular god did so, whether Raven or Jesus, or any other.
The fact is that I have no specific information, and this is the truth no faith honestly states. Every tradition makes claims of being the one truth and all others evil heretics or heathens. I simply note that this is what they do, and that there is a purpose, a propaganda purpose in doing so, to create cohesive societies that can succeed at war. That seems to me to be the true purpose of religion: to defend society from aggression from others, and to successfully conquer others. I leave the lessons of history to demonstrate this fact to those that care to weigh the matter per their capacity to judge such record. Those that have been burdened with indoctrinations very often are incapable of viewing such record objectively, but must weight the record via the special exceptionalism their indoctrinations have accorded their society.
It is obvious from the conflicts in the world today that this exceptionalism is the main driver of war, whether in the Ukraine, Israel, Ethiopia, or anywhere else, people's are pitted one against the other and each claims to be the rightful victors based on their religious worship of the right god(s). I have sought to provide my kids with traditions and rituals meaningful and real that enabled them to themselves judge what is true and what cannot be true, as I have argued throughout our conversation. I owed them this as their father, to teach them the truth that they are the only judge of themselves that matters to them, and I hope I have managed it as well as I kept them fed, housed, and clothed until they escaped my rule. From their success at living their lives by their judgment, I have succeeded admirably, and I am content with that parental achievement.
I use "faith" in its religious context. What I hear when you said it like you did, is not "faith" but actually "tastes", which I find is a big difference. You know what I mean?
While I know what you mean, I would not categorize such traditions as matters of taste, or preference, as they are fundamental cultural traditions where they are endemic as much as those cultural traditions endemic to our own youths. Many words have several meanings, faith, run, taste, and etc., which I suspect is not only true of English, but of every language. Much literature depends on such meanings, poetry, double entendres, and puns couldn't exist without them.