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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| Is the official position then that God believed that A, B, C and D should the the Axiomatic Law of the Universe up until c 50 AD when E, F, G and H should be the Axiomatic Law of the Universe? |
JC's claims to be the son of God, interpreted by the Council of Nicaea to mean he was a part of the Trinity and therefore God, does in fact mean that God repudiated those parts of the Old Testament that were no longer the 'Word'. Jews, of course, believe he wasn't God so don't have a problem changing their behaviour.
| If a God of Love has replaced the God of Justice does this mean the Ten Commandments do or do not apply? |
I don't recall them being repudiated in anything I was taught at my Catholic school.
| I ask not for myself, you understand, but on behalf of this women I've just met who is a Catholic and is wondering whether a night with me is worth an eternity of torment in the Pit. |
I imagine the experience would be essentially the same.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | However I am interested in the New Testament. I understand (dimly) that St Paul said we didn't have to have the ends of our penises chopped off (unless you were American apparently) but did he go on to say that Leviticus no longer applied? What exactly does apply? The Ten Commandments are Old Testament, aren't they?. I am thoroughly confused. At my age I'm pretty well committed to committing adultery in a technical sort of way. |
The relationship between Christianity and the Old Testament has been a long and difficult one that has never been resolved. Christians debate the proper deference owed to Mosaic law to this day and there are many well-reasoned theological positions on this. There certainly is no means by which you can say George Bush is not behaving as a Christian if he isn't calling for Theocracy and the enforcement of Jewish Dietary Law (separation of Church and State is a New Testament biblical tradition, expressed by Christ in the statement, "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's...etc.", and of course his repeated insistence that his kingdom "was not of this world", despite the persistent requests by his followers for him to lead a revolution in Judea against Rome and set himself up as ruler).
Early on, the first heretic Marcion, excised the entire Old Testament altogether, as he rightly saw the contradictions between Christian love, charity and mercy and the apparently vengeful god of justice in the Old Testament. Marcion, in fact, equated Yahweh with Lucifer and saw the Old Testament god as the ruler of the world that Christians must properly renounce.
But there are clear New Testament statements concerning the suspension in some fashion of the old Mosaic Law. In the Book of Acts, Peter has a dream in which a net is lowered above his head containing every unclean animal and a voice speaks from above saying, "Kill and eat."
Peter, and Christianity in general, takes from this dream that the old law has, in some sense and in some degree, ceased to be in effect. In what sense and to what degree remains the theological puzzle.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | But I am still baffled. Is the official position then that God believed that A, B, C and D should the the Axiomatic Law of the Universe up until c 50 AD when E, F, G and H should be the Axiomatic Law of the Universe? |
As Wireloop has been demonstrating elsewhere, the 1st century hellenized Jews of Philo's persuasion were convinced that, beneath the surface of the literal law, there was a different law altogether, allegorically hidden within the literal text. This law was obviously contained within the old and so, did not negate the old. It was instead, a higher form of the old law.
The lower form of the law was for spiritual children but the new law was placed within it as a seed so that, those who were ready (those who had been called) could find it and fufill God's higher purpose. It is precisely of this that Paul speaks when he says,
When I was a child. I spoke as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. The literal Mosaic Law is a "childish thing." The allegorical law is for grownups.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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No doubt you're right, Ishmael, but this is not at the heart of the matter for Applied Epistemology. We are interested in why people believe what they believe. Now the official line is that humans believe things rationally ie from evidence; AE says they believe things from authority. Mostly this amounts to the same thing because either authority speaks from the evidence or authority is responsible for the evidence.
Now all this changes when we come to religion since even authority makes few bones about evidence. And human beings appear enthusiastic to embrace things for which not only is there no evidence but that are prima facie fairly ridiculous.
Which brings us to the psychology of knowledge which is that human beings, once they have invested a certain amount in a given paradigm theory, will go to the stake rather than deny it. Both politics and religions exploit this fact by concentrating on the young and making sure that an entire 'system' is plonked on the paradigm theory and that therefore the believer will go to the stake rather than renounce it.
AE points out that academia does likewise, but in this case the struggle is harder because a whole slew of evidence has to be undermined even before the psychological battle can be waged.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | No doubt you're right, Ishmael, but this is not at the heart of the matter for Applied Epistemology. We are interested in why people believe what they believe. Now the official line is that humans believe things rationally ie from evidence; AE says they believe things from authority. Mostly this amounts to the same thing because either authority speaks from the evidence or authority is responsible for the evidence. |
This is what you will never understand Mick. You persist in appealing to authority as your catch-all explanation for why people believe things that are clearly non-rational. And I will go on pointing out your shortcoming; what you cannot understand: That people often believe non-rational things -- especially in the realm of religion -- because they are moved to believe them by an emotional response. The heart feels the truth of it.
A rather stunted manifestation of this can be seen in minority beliefs: Alien Invaders, Crop Circles, Hollow Earth Theory; none of these have any authority figures to enforce them. Why do people believe such things?
On the level of individual psychology, people believe such things because, in some sense, those beliefs have an emotional value: They lend meaning and significance to the experience of life (which is exactly what emotions do). That too is the role of religion.
On a mass scale however, that question is even more interesting. I suspect that life has been engineered such that a certain quotent of non-rational people are maintained in any given population (or a certain quotent of everyone's psche is non-rational) as a memory bank for ideas that seem loopy today, might might just gain new value should new evidence come to light.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Which brings us to the psychology of knowledge which is that human beings, once they have invested a certain amount in a given paradigm theory, will go to the stake rather than deny it. |
Yes. I was thinking of this just today. I was watching this video from one of your Londonistan Jihadis (I've seen other videos of this guy praising violence). Listen to that hypnotic voice droning on and on and on (rising and falling in cadence and force) screaming about about self-sacrifice.
I've seen it so many times myself in evangelical churches: the sneering grimace expressing revulsion at the very idea of pleasure. How is it that these people pervert into its very opposite, the natural, "god-given" drive to seek joy and avoid pain, and do so convinced that the people who live as nature intended are the ones who need fixing. They turn each man's emotional universe upon its head and call the rest of us infidels.
Why is it that so many religions demand such enormous self sacrifice?
Experience and joy forsaken for a belief increases the value of that belief in direct proportion to the value of the pleasure forsaken. The more one gives up to the faith, the harder it becomes to renounce it. The psychological shock could be deadly to some (I speak as one who went through it). That much is obvious.
But why did these belief systems emerge in the first place, that seem to offer no inherent benefit to the individual? They would appear to contribute nothing to the world of ideas other than the means of their own eternal self-sustainment (I believe a total of 8 patent applications were made in Pakistan last year). Are these religions conceptual viruses that evolved out of mass psychology? Or were they engineered by some person or group with a specific and diabolical (or benevolent!) purpose in mind?
| Both politics and religions exploit this fact by concentrating on the young and making sure that an entire 'system' is plonked on the paradigm theory and that therefore the believer will go to the stake rather than renounce it. |
Whatever for? What is so important that these strange rituals should persist? I can't understand it.
| AE points out that academia does likewise, but in this case the struggle is harder because a whole slew of evidence has to be undermined even before the psychological battle can be waged. |
Right you are. The worse off are those who love academia for its own sake.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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Much of this, gentlemen, brings us full circle, back to the very origins of the religious impulse in shamanism. We know that this methodology is found everywhere in the world and is clearly very ancient.
For the village shaman the root of his spiritual power is found in his ability to suffer hardship. The root of sacrifice begins here. It is essentially the same process as giving up smoking or drug addiction. Initially the body is enslaved by the animal desires. The will is weak. Through the process of resistance i.e. giving-up, the individual regains mastery over his body. The spiritual power, the can do attitude achieved is thus directly proportional to the vice defeated. Shamans will undergo extreme struggles to gain spiritual power and these practices are clearly at the root of such mystical disciplines as fasting, sexual abstinence and sleep deprivation. We know from psychological research that the sensory deprivation chamber/isolation tank works in precisely the same way. The pressure to crack, to give up, is immense but the individual does not give up his focus. The net result is spiritual strength i.e. will power.
If we consider the implications of this for religious behaviour then things start to make sense. The idea of renouncing pleasure in the here and now in favour of a greater good or higher goal is right in the centre of this tradition. As Max Weber pointed out it is also the Protestant Ethic at the root of Capitalism.
Jihadists will be convinced that their personal martyrdom will take them straight to the gates of paradise, just like Viking warriors of old went to Valhalla as long as they died in battle. With beliefs like this a man can suffer terrible pain.
| Which brings us to the psychology of knowledge which is that human beings, once they have invested a certain amount in a given paradigm theory, will go to the stake rather than deny it. |
Of course, in the history of religion we also have the conversion experience. Paul of Tarsus, the bounty-hunter, becomes the most vocal exponent of the very religion that he is trying to destroy. Much of the psychology of 'brand loyalty' can explain why people are prepared to die for crazy ideas and why people continue to hold these beliefs in the face of all the evidence. Yet it is also apparent that the clear light of truth can reach the most blinkered of individuals.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| For the village shaman the root of his spiritual power is found in his ability to suffer hardship |
Surely it is the other way round. Shamans can suffer hardship because they have spiritual power. Once you have access to the 'interior world of the mind' you tend to give few monkeys for the pleasures of temporal materialism. The ability to suffer pain is just a conjuring trick to impress the laity.
Though looked at more widely and more cynically, the village shaman is just a job like any other. Would you prefer to do a forty-hour week or sit around taking drugs?
I take this point about the psychology of belief but I reiterate that (apart perhaps from the truly talented shaman) nobody achieves this psychological state other than via authority. I agree that there is little difference between the psychological content of the various religions but nevertheless no individual would arrive at such a state unaided. And this is true whether the route is that of being born again to a familiar creed or by sudden conversion to an alien one.
We can all (here) see that the behaviour of people in the grip of orthodox academic belief is very similar to the behaviour of people in the grip of religious belief but I am not persuaded (yet) that their treatment is therefore the same. Our own dear Duncan is a clear example of somebody who lurches between being in and out of the dead-hand-of-orthodoxy. Though of course to him it feels like a personal choice made on the basis of evidence. In fact everyone can be 'turned' on some things, but on others they will go to the stake. Look at Ishmael's politics!
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I take this point about the psychology of belief but I reiterate that (apart perhaps from the truly talented shaman) nobody achieves this psychological state other than via authority. |
On whose authority do people adhere to Hollow Earth Theory?
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| Surely it is the other way round. Shamans can suffer hardship because they have spiritual power. |
No, the suffering of the hardship is what gives them the spiritual power.
| Though looked at more widely and more cynically, the village shaman is just a job like any other. Would you prefer to do a forty-hour week or sit around taking drugs? |
Way too cynically. The vast majority of shamans enter altered states through dancing and drumming NOT drugs. If they can't perform their function they will quickly be replaced.
| Our own dear Duncan is a clear example of somebody who lurches between being in and out of the dead-hand-of-orthodoxy. Though of course to him it feels like a personal choice made on the basis of evidence. |
Nonsense old boy. Like you, just like you, I listen to the competing theories and arrive at a judgement based on the evidence. If I am a machine, so then are you. If I experience free will, so then do you. Ishmael's point about the Hollow Earth Theory is valid. In many ways it's rather like the theory that English was spoken in pre-Roman Britain, or that the Indo-Europeans came from America. The world only has Mick Harper's 'authority' for this, nonetheless the evidence speaks to some of them directly.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Seems like he agrees with you, Mick. Religion is the root of all evil. |
This is not at all my position. For most of human history religion has been an essential (or at least a cheap) method of achieving societal cohesion. Even in the present age, when we have other methods for getting people to pull in roughly the same direction, I fully approve of people "getting religion" since it normally leads them to being peaceable, law-abiding citizens (and, as far as I can tell, rather happier than they otherwise would be).
Of course I don't approve of me "getting religion" or anyone else I actually have to spend time with.
| Nonsense old boy. Like you, just like you, I listen to the competing theories and arrive at a judgement based on the evidence. |
Surely you can see there is a vast difference between the things we believe because we learned them at school/university/off the telly, i.e. from authority, and that which we discover for ourselves (under our own steam, as it were, we do not need to literally discover it for ourselves). The difference certainly comes across in your arguments. I do not of course claim that the one is necessarily truer than the other.
| On whose authority do people adhere to Hollow Earth Theory? |
An interesting question. The basic AE position is that the only the geezer who came up with the theory originally counts as operating rationally (there is no guarantee that rational thought leads to rational outcomes). People who believe in the theory, on the other hand, do so because of authority (ie the book what the geezer wrote). We get into a lot of arguments because of our definition of "orthodoxy" -- which is anything believed by two or more people gathered together. Most people angrily claim, "I'm not orthodox... I'm a Marxist (or whatever)."
But of course there is a difference between what you learn at school and what you learn from a book which is obviously at variance with what you were taught in school. But I'm still not sure what it is. It may be that Ishmael is right, and that we all have a capacity for religious wonderment and that is satisfied, in the absence of religion, by believing in these theories....but I am not happy with such an explanation. Sounds too much like original sin.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | On whose authority do people adhere to Hollow Earth Theory? |
An interesting question. The basic AE position is that only the geezer who came up with the theory originally counts as operating rationally (there is no guarantee that rational thought leads to rational outcomes). People who believe in the theory, on the other hand, do so because of authority (ie the book what the geezer wrote). |
Mick. That may be your position (though I doubt it) but there's no way the value of that statement is sufficent for it's cannonization as an AE principle. This is just another example of your reducing countless problems to a single solution, to the point of absurdity.
Remember your recent statement, "Mine is not the voice of authority." It isn't. But if you can convince someone of the value of an idea absent the backing of the establishment, your convert cannot be credited to authority. It must be something else that convinced them.
Now it may not have been reason that led them to adopt your conclusion -- but deference to authority is not the only alternative to rational thought (as I keep on saying and will keep on saying).
Authority is the exclusive domain of those who speak from a pre-supposition of respect. I have to tell you, when I first started corresponding with you, you spoke to me from a pre-supposition of madness. I was pretty well convinced you were just the wrong side of eccentric.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Well, yes, this is true in the sense that I outlined above. If you read some book by an obvious 'crank' (ie somebody without any authority) and adopt his argument then you are acting from rationality not from authority. But clearly, even so, the person reading it is different from the person writing it. (We need a word to descibe this status.) But remember Duncan's remarks about my opposition to John Michell. It is imperative -- if you wish to stay on the right side of AE -- that adopting a belief in a Hollow Earth must not tempt you into believing anything else the Hollow Earth 'crank' wrote.
However I often have the reverse experience (most notably just this afternoon). Whenever I am talking to people who are admirers of THOBR they always ask what I am doing now. As soon as I tell them (in this case the thing about the Solar System) they immediately switch into, "I am talking to a crank" mode. People do not do the rational thing and say to themselves, "Well, anybody who is acceptably revisionist about one subject is likely to be acceptably revisionist in another." What happens is that they hear a 'crank' argument and immediately go into crank-avoidance mode.
This is a very powerful mechanism. All of you familiar with the recent Time Team brouhaha will know the feeling. None of us could get past it.
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TelMiles
In: London
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| This is the bit I find bewildering. To be religious at all you have to be a fundamentalist. |
Couldn't agree more Mick.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Although pace Duncan's comment, I was talking only about received religion. But I'm with you -- I could not follow either Duncan or Ishmael's views since they were merely describing people who weren't religious at all, just rather attached to a set of societal principles. And not, it seems to me, societal principles of any great fundamentalness either. To me, the only 'received' position is that you stone adulterers to death. The New Testament (maybe) says you should forgive them if they show sufficient contrition (since ol' Jesus died for all our sins past, present and future...cheers, matey). Apparently George Bush says, "No, just wag your finger at them." The Church of England, now that it allows divorcees to marry in Church, doesn't even go that far. I confidently expect some near future synod to advocate adultery as a sovereign cure for middle age.
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