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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31919 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.

As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.

I think that was his point, we must believe there is order to the universe otherwise we should just do random shit for no reason, and religion was mankind's first attempt to discern that order, facilitating the advent of science when we discovered religion's limitations.

I agree with this angle. I think the stance of moral relativism is a performative contradiction -as soon as we have an 'other' we have to reckon with a non-relativist morality. I think morality gets mixed in with the locus of care where we apply it. Humans are very good at shifting this boundary and there are different solutions to scaling morality across different groups. Some cultures favour family, tribe over all else, but this is different from moral relativity.

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