aaa
23d ago
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
aaa
5mo ago
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
aaa
5mo ago
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
aaa
1yr ago
You'll have to clarify, then. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are we talking about morality of the individual (as in: the ability of an individual to know good from evil) or are we talking about the moral basis of laws? Something else?
aaa
1yr ago
I'm also not sure why you are picking on transubstantiation in particular as a flaw of Christianity in general. That is not a doctrine shared by all Christians, it's just Catholics as far as I'm aware. So at worst it's a flaw in Catholic teachings, not Christian teachings as a whole.
Narrowly defined as the aristotelian explanation for the eucharist, yes, it is only catholic (although most catholics don't even know this). But the belief that the eucharist is some real magical thing and not merely symbolic is patristic and exists in almost all christian denominations, although there are theological differences between catholic transubstantiation, orthodox transubstantiation, consubstantiation, sacramental union and whatever else protestants have come up with. I would agree with characterising all of them as nonsense, however.
aaa
9mo ago
The problem with singling out Jesus as special (or as some kind of flesh robot remotely piloted by god) is that these are heretical (the former would be a kind of Docetism the latter similar to Apollinarianism), Jesus is supposed to be real god and real man.
The problem with making "motion" have a special meaning is that the argument is generally taken to proceed from self evident, observable properties of the universe and making "motion" be some metaphysical property would take that away. I'd argue that the distinction between per se and per accidens already does that but whatever.
Predestination is a whole other can of whorms with the free will problem, the soteriology problems, etc.
aaa
9mo ago
I’m merely pointing out that the specific argument “the Prime Mover argument is wrong because even a Prime Mover would need a mover” is a bad argument
Yes, you are right about this. I've just been thinking about this for a while and latched on to your message to write it down since you also said: "You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument". The argument has other problems, though.
aaa
1yr ago
I was also thinking about quaestio 90 and following of the first part of the second part.
aaa
1yr ago
What some people thought 150 years ago isn't going to influence what a different set of people will do now as much as what that second set of people thinks.
aaa
1mo ago
The guy is probably old and doesn't want to run a landscaping business anymore. Now he takes what he can get. Because that is what the market will bear.
Oftentimes in those cases the guy running the business is the business. Once he leaves the business is essentially worthless, existing clients will re-evaluate who they are buying from: you spent a million dollars and you would be in the same position if you had started your own landscaping business in the same area.
aaa
9mo ago
The argument of @OracleOutlook is (usually) an argument by necessity, "it is logically impossible that god does not exist because..."
aaa
9mo ago
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
aaa
1yr ago
I think the problem is giving a precise and self contained definition of 'supernatural™', that anyone acting in good faith can apply objectively and determine whether a belief is supernatural or not. I think this is what you are saying, that it doesn't matter if scientologists believe that thetans are natural, if they apply your definition in good faith they will find out that they are indeed supernatural™.
You don't really give this definition of supernatural™ but you make a few examples:
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faith in something that appears absurd to others
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an absurd belief
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The supernatural is inexplicable to science
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looks crazy to the non believer
Examples (1), (2) and (4) are obviously not objective, belief in HBD appears absurd to some and vice versa and etc. Number (3) is more compelling however I have a few questions: are all unproven physical theories religion? Was relativity a religion before it was proven? In other words is the supernatural time dependent (things that were supernatural beliefs today will not be supernatural tomorrow and vice versa in light of new evidence) or is it time invariant and a lot of scientific "knowledge" is just religion?
aaa
1yr ago
I'd skip on Feser entirely and just read Logic and Theism by Sobel, which was written 15 years before Feser, presents the scholastic arguments in a modern, formalized way, and refutes Feser arguments, as well as approaching other types of arguments for and against theism.
That book is not recommended enough given how thorough it is.
aaa
1yr ago
The first one also falls under HBD. Only the last one, that diversity is necessary for race-based democratic representation, remains. Which makes affirmative action into a race based spoils system.
aaa
1yr ago
The NRSV says "But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property." I don't know which one is more correct, but from my point of view it doesn't matter either.
someone who clearly has a lot of problems with Christianity for reasons I don't know and don't want to speculate about. Pain is pain, however inflicted.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I don't really have any problems with christianity, the point I'm making is that it's silly to think the key to true morality is in a book (or in a tradition) that is so vague and varied that it has been used historically to justify both the most virtuous and the most vile of acts. I even said the same thing of utilitarianism but I guess you were to blinded by my words offending you religion to read that part.
aaa
1yr ago
I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.
Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.
aaa
4mo ago
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
aaa
4mo ago
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
aaa
5mo ago
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now
My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think
Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today.
Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days).
I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.
Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.
aaa
5mo ago
So your evidence for the pendulum swinging in direction X is evidence that it is going in the opposite direction?
aaa
9mo ago
I think the comparison with Newton, assuming you are referring to Newton's works in physics and optics, is unwarranted because him and Pseudo-dyonisius stand on opposite sides of an epistemological divide. Pre modern intellectual work was primarily about interpreting and finding truth within a canon of works of authors in the antiquity. We don't care who wrote Newton's Principia because they stand on the strength of their argument and of empirical evidence. You can't say the same thing about De Coelesti Hierarchia because it doesn't make any argument it just states some facts that have been revealed to the author through divine revelation.
When all of your arguments are appeals to authority, who the author is becomes extermely important. Are you really going to believe some anonymous guy that tells you they received divine revelation when they are also pretending to be a mythical character that lived 500 years earlier?
Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.
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