Adler was a great teacher. he could take the most difficult ideas and present them in a way that a bright high school student could understand them. I once got–by accident–a film about Epictitus. I showed it to my calculus class–it was the Friday before a holiday, so what the heck. They loved it!. He was terrific.
Interesting. Can you forward me the link to the book? He mentioned that he wrote a book, but I was not able to find it. He’s supposed to be a reputable person in the field, so I thought you might have heard of him. If you can find more info on the priest who gave the sermon, that would be great. I’ll see if I can contact him and try to get some more info.
Rather more difficult to study human beings than bees. One can describe much of the motions of bees by differential equations. Ditto, the movements of economic markets. Human beings, you have to get down to cases. because one is dealing with persons.
Decidedly. But that’s consonant with the point I’m making – the Catholic line here appears to be that each individual must fit some rigid template, biologically. Nature discredits this idea. If gay males are produced as the result of extra-fertility and fecundity on the part of females, the homosexual males, as part of the population, are a “victory marker” for the triumph of reproduction and propagation of the species (and this ignores the other evidential aspects available, like the nurturing resources for other offspring gay males in the tribe may represent, even if they aren’t reproductive themselves, but “assist” in the success of others).
I can simplify this quite a lot.
As I said previously, these are the biases that you bring to the topic. Your understanding of God comes from this foundation. You happened to reject the teaching you were given, but that in itself is important. Your encounter with religion, at a young age, was an exposure to “a repulsive set of doctrines”.
I also wish that your bio wouldn’t be the central theme, but that was the point I was making. I have no way to know what you know or don’t know about Christianity. When I see you claiming that Catholicism is basically the same as Mormonism, and that Mormonism will “win”, then I have nothing to build a discussion on.
No, what seems implausible (without any other information) is that you have any understanding of Catholicism beyond what you know of Calvinism. Again, the point is that if I take a skeptical view, you are a liar first. Everything you assert must be questioned and you need to provide some hard evidence to prove it.
You can’t think what it is hard for me to accept an assertion, just after you praised the virtue of skepticism? Again, you provide no evidence but just various claims. This is just a very small example of how human communication works. I don’t question your various claims, but I start by considering that you’re telling the truth and that you’re a reasonable person.
These examples indicate that you’re distancing yourself from the topic and trivializing the evidence that you have to work with.
Ok, but there’s no way for me to access that information. It’s part of your own subjective world.
You’re making a sweeping claim against evidence that you use in your own daily life.
I’d expect you to explain that to me because I have to assume that you consult such evidence in order to overcome your skepticism in any discussion. But obviously, you use your own personal internal evidence to decide whether is it worth engaging in this discussion.
Exactly. People engaging in the discussion suspend whatever skepticism they claim to possess. They start by accepting that the other person is telling the truth, not that the person is lying. Skepticism would make any discussion impossible.
Hmm, well I do claim to be quite familiar with Calvinist theology, but I’m more fluent and experienced in Arminian theology, and then Catholic theology after that. Calvinism really just wasn’t interesting me after getting out to college, now more than twenty years ago.
Yes, but also a highly appealing alternative set. My own family’s Arminianism was as pleasing as Calvin was repulsive.
Yes, but I think that would be the same way you rejected the Calvinist God, or Allah, or any other “cardboard” God that you didn’t believe in.
That’s not what I said. I said that if we are going to judge solely on “internal witness”, which is what was being offered as the discriminating factor, then the Mormons own Rome. Catholics can’t compete in the witness department in my experience.
That’s an odd criticism (if it is one) to me, here. For I am here, learning. And I’m quite knowledgeable on Catholic doctrine and history, and always learning more. I have rejected Christianity, the dominant juggernaut in the cultural in which I live, so it’s important for me to be informed on what it is I’m rejecting. I wish Catholics I get to talk to in real life were so up to speed as many here – they’re not.
Yes, and that’s not news. I’m here to promote that bias, or maybe better to say I’m here to defend that bias, as that is a bias toward rational, disciplined thinking and action. I’m an ardent critic of “embracing mystical intuition for intuition’s sake”, solidly biased against that, and for good reasons, I believe.
No, a skeptical view doesn’t start out with “liar” first. I think you may be confusing skepticism with cynicism. If I say, “I’ve been to the moon”, you’d be reasonable to react to that with doubt; it seems an outrageous claim, on its face. But “I was raised around Calvinism” isn’t a plausibility problem at all. A skeptic bears in mind at all times that people do lie and we don’t know all the motives that may be animating deception, but “liar” would seem far less plausible if you told me you were raised in a Catholic home, or a Calvinist home. Skepticism isn’t nihilism or cynicism.
I think you’ve misunderstood how skepticism and reason get applied in situations like that. Skepticism isn’t naïve doubt, but is informed by experience, data, models that work. In that case, “liar” doesn’t stand to reason as a starting point.
Well, if I followed you around, I suspect you’d be operating by the same principles I advocate above – accepting at face value claims which don’t militate against reason and experience (at least provisionally), but doubting the outrageous ones. If you read that Todd Bentley’s ministry a couple years ago raised twelve people from the dead, you’d reject that outright. It’s only the views you choose to except from this for other, non-rational reasons that you accept. But normally, you process (name removed by moderator)ut just like I do. You just allow yourself special exceptions which I don’t (anymore).
No, see above.
You’ve totally overlooked the actual content of the claims, so far as I can see, here. And that is the determining factor! We don’t “auto-believe” or “auto-deny” as a universal switch to one position or another. We measure the claims against our model, and react accordingly, if we are reasoning about those claims. The examples you’ve chosen, regarding my claims of Calvinism in my background, solidly demonstrate you do not have a basic grasp of how this works, else you’d not use that as an example.
OK, well this seems quite a contradiction to the above. If you are consistent, you’d say the same thing about the claims of Jesus’ resurrection.
No, it’s not. I don’t think you are lying at all, or being dishonest in any of those claims. I think you do nut understand the self-validating nature of the paradigm you’ve adopted, and this misunderstand and vastly overestimate the epistemic value of your “internal evidence”. It’s not a lie, as much as deep confusion over what makes the “internal evidence” evidence in any serious, reasonable way.
No, see above, “True” and “lying” do not nearly exhaust all the available options. Supposing one’s brute intuitions are weighty evidence is not dishonest, just confused.
Again, see above.
See above. You’re operating at the poles, and missing the vast middle, where are the reasonable options are.
Well, it is true that if one approaches Catholicism as an intellectual system, it will fail, because Catholicism is no more internally consistent than any other body of knowledge. And it all hinges, as Paul tells us, on accepting the Resurrection. And we can only believe truly if we accept it with the same certainty that when I go from my room here to the next room that I will end up in the kitchen. But, even this, is not as certain as the certainty of the Pythagorean theorem. It is certain to me but not to you. But beyond that, faith is the conviction that behind the veil does lie certainty about everything.Yes, but also a highly appealing alternative set. My own family’s Arminianism was as pleasing as Calvin was repulsive.
Yes, but I think that would be the same way you rejected the Calvinist God, or Allah, or any other “cardboard” God that you didn’t believe in.
That’s not what I said. I said that if we are going to judge solely on “internal witness”, which is what was being offered as the discriminating factor, then the Mormons own Rome. Catholics can’t compete in the witness department in my experience.
But that’s OK, that’s just to say that’s a bogus criterion in the first place. The Catholic Church has a history and theological legacy that One Temple Square can’t begin to offer, and rich heritage of navel gazing and intuition indulgence that the CoJCoLdS can only covet.
That’s an odd criticism (if it is one) to me, here. For I am here, learning. And I’m quite knowledgeable on Catholic doctrine and history, and always learning more. I have rejected Christianity, the dominant juggernaut in the cultural in which I live, so it’s important for me to be informed on what it is I’m rejecting. I wish Catholics I get to talk to in real life were so up to speed as many here – they’re not.
I’m not claiming to a be a PhD or a world class historian of the Church, but if you think I’m rejecting doctrine and traditions I’m just not aware of, I think you’re cutting yourself some corners here.
Yes, and that’s not news. I’m here to promote that bias, or maybe better to say I’m here to defend that bias, as that is a bias toward rational, disciplined thinking and action. I’m an ardent critic of “embracing mystical intuition for intuition’s sake”, solidly biased against that, and for good reasons, I believe.
No, a skeptical view doesn’t start out with “liar” first. I think you may be confusing skepticism with cynicism. If I say, “I’ve been to the moon”, you’d be reasonable to react to that with doubt; it seems an outrageous claim, on its face. But “I was raised around Calvinism” isn’t a plausibility problem at all. A skeptic bears in mind at all times that people do lie and we don’t know all the motives that may be animating deception, but “liar” would seem far less plausible if you told me you were raised in a Catholic home, or a Calvinist home. Skepticism isn’t nihilism or cynicism.
Turning that around, when I’m scrupulously skeptical, I have no problem accepting the claim that a Jewish rabbi with apocalyptic views named was killed by the Romans for sedition in 1C Palestine. That’s eminently plausible. It may not be true, but I don’t need to reject that upfront, based on what I know of the world.
If the claim is added that this man rose from the dead after three days being dead, all the reasoning alarms are sounding off in my head. That’s an outrageous, fantastic claim, something that I reasonably can’t accept without correspondingly fantastic levels of evidence and substantiation of that claim.
I think you’ve misunderstood how skepticism and reason get applied in situations like that. Skepticism isn’t naïve doubt, but is informed by experience, data, models that work. In that case, “liar” doesn’t stand to reason as a starting point.
Well, if I followed you around, I suspect you’d be operating by the same principles I advocate above – accepting at face value claims which don’t militate against reason and experience (at least provisionally), but doubting the outrageous ones. If you read that Todd Bentley’s ministry a couple years ago raised twelve people from the dead, you’d reject that outright. It’s only the views you choose to except from this for other, non-rational reasons that you accept. But normally, you process (name removed by moderator)ut just like I do. You just allow yourself special exceptions which I don’t (anymore).
-TS
My assumption is that the book contains information on Gomez, but as I said I can’t read Spanish. The link is simply amazon.com, and all you have to do is enter Ricardo Calderan under author and the book comes up. I guess you’d have to buy it and getsomeone to go through it for you.Interesting. Can you forward me the link to the book? He mentioned that he wrote a book, but I was not able to find it. He’s supposed to be a reputable person in the field, so I thought you might have heard of him. If you can find more info on the priest who gave the sermon, that would be great. I’ll see if I can contact him and try to get some more info.
I guess I must have missed Jen comments. I’ll search through my post history right now…
EDIT: Just found the book. Odd. The author isn’t Gomez.
OK, understand and that’s an answer I can respect. I want to object about the ‘certainty of the Pythagorean theorem’ as an equivocation on belief and knowledege there, but I get your drift (and nothing is as certainly true as the trivial truth of a tautology!).
What is your objection to the Pythagorean theorem?
The Spanish custom is to have two apellidos (surnames), the first being more important, so Ricardo Castañon Gòmez would usually be shortened to Castañon (pronounced cast-AN-yon) rather than Gòmez.
Can you explain in what respects Catholicism is not internally consistent?
Accepting the Resurrection presupposes accepting the existence of God for which there rational evidence.
There is no certainty that you will end up in the kitchen! But there is certainty in the fact that you are thinking!
Which is less significant…
That is true because faith is the conviction that everything has a **rational **basis…
Computers are designed and programmed by human intellect.
Assuming we’re not making an assumption.
Here you’re changing the topic to what my beliefs are and how I arrived at them. But that, to me just confirms the bias that I’m looking at. You don’t know how I arrived at the Catholic belief or how I view other religious claims. Again, I’m just pointing to your own pre-suppositions (if you will) and how that bias affects your view of the data.
I’ll try again. “Internal witness” was not offered as the “sole discriminating factor”. I was not even engaging in an argument to try to convince you. I was observing that there is evidence from internal conviction and noticing how that evidence is treated by the atheists we encounter on CAF.
That’s important to know and I appreciate the insight. I have little idea about what you know, what aspects of Catholicism you reject or why you reject them. Most atheists come here and demand that Catholics must “speak the language of atheism” to them and they reject anything that’s written in our language. How are we supposed to know which of the many languages of atheism you speak? Some embrace scientism fully. Many will not accept that there is “any evidence at all supporting Christianity”. Some do not accept historical evidence (documentary evidence) as valid (how do you know that Julius Caesar existed?). Others accept that various “gods” exist, but they are non-theist. Others accept that there are immaterial essences.
Ok, that was the point I was getting at. You approach the data with some bias and accept or reject various statements before investigating them because your bias drives your conclusions.
This seems good. I’d react with doubt, not because I tested the empirical data, but through an intuition. I’d trust your claim on Calvinism through an intuition. I look at the probability. Why would I accept that you were raised around Calvinism without evaluating or testing any data?