Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
GaryLouisSmith
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Tamminen wrote: October 17th, 2019, 7:56 am
GaryLouisSmith wrote: October 17th, 2019, 5:46 am

Your therefore conclusion does not follow from what went before.
If there is an object that nobody has ever seen, and then somebody sees it, does it thereby get new properties? I mean the looker's private qualia.
No, the qualities that somebody sees were there all along.
Tamminen
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Tamminen »

GaryLouisSmith wrote: October 17th, 2019, 8:18 am
Tamminen wrote: October 17th, 2019, 7:56 am
If there is an object that nobody has ever seen, and then somebody sees it, does it thereby get new properties? I mean the looker's private qualia.
No, the qualities that somebody sees were there all along.
Only as physical properties. Not as the 100 trillion versions of something we call red when we look at a ball for instance. There is nothing in common between them, except in language where they come under the same concept. In themselves they are private and separate. They do not belong to our language games as qualia that we immediately experience. Our boxes are not empty, but others cannot see what is inside until we tell them. And when I tell people what I see, they know that the ball is red, i.e. it has a physical property that the word 'red' denotes. They have no way of knowing what my private red looks like. My box is transparent for myself but black for others. Only when our boxes are similar enough to enable communication can we "see" into each others' boxes by understanding what others say when they tell us that the ball is red, for instance. The redness we immediately experience is not a universal, it cannot be shared. It always refers to physical properties. Only physical properties and concepts like 'red' that describe them can be shared. Our private reds and other qualia are the invisible instruments by means of which we can see what objects are like. For a person who cannot tell the difference between red and green those instruments are less adequate than for someone else.

So I cannot see how colors, for instance, could be regarded as universals in any sense: as external to minds, external to objects, or properties of objects. They belong to the mysteries of the subject's existence along with beauty and all the other things that we just experience and try to speak about but succeed only imperfectly in poetry and art. They are beyond language.
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Felix
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Felix »

GaryLouisSmith: So now the question is how something can have more than one specific yellow. If it is one shade of yellow doesn’t that exclude it having any other shade? ... It can be many many different shades of yellow.
Or it may not be yellow at all, that's the problem with your idea. Many animals and some human beings cannot see the color yellow at all, it will appear white or pale grey to them.

I think you're just dumbing down reality with your Universals. Reality is much greater than the conceptual boxes you want to confine it in. The fact is, the sensory and mental apparatus of the perceiver defines their perceptions and how they interpret them. Horses, bees, and some human beings cannot see your "universal" color red, and hummingbirds can see ultraviolet light - colors we can't see.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
GaryLouisSmith
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Tamminen wrote: October 17th, 2019, 11:14 am
GaryLouisSmith wrote: October 17th, 2019, 8:18 am

No, the qualities that somebody sees were there all along.
Only as physical properties. Not as the 100 trillion versions of something we call red when we look at a ball for instance. There is nothing in common between them, except in language where they come under the same concept. In themselves they are private and separate. They do not belong to our language games as qualia that we immediately experience. Our boxes are not empty, but others cannot see what is inside until we tell them. And when I tell people what I see, they know that the ball is red, i.e. it has a physical property that the word 'red' denotes. They have no way of knowing what my private red looks like. My box is transparent for myself but black for others. Only when our boxes are similar enough to enable communication can we "see" into each others' boxes by understanding what others say when they tell us that the ball is red, for instance. The redness we immediately experience is not a universal, it cannot be shared. It always refers to physical properties. Only physical properties and concepts like 'red' that describe them can be shared. Our private reds and other qualia are the invisible instruments by means of which we can see what objects are like. For a person who cannot tell the difference between red and green those instruments are less adequate than for someone else.

So I cannot see how colors, for instance, could be regarded as universals in any sense: as external to minds, external to objects, or properties of objects. They belong to the mysteries of the subject's existence along with beauty and all the other things that we just experience and try to speak about but succeed only imperfectly in poetry and art. They are beyond language.
Your philosophy seems to divide along the lines of what is outward and public, the physical, and what is inward and private, the subjective experience. That which is out in the open for all to see and that which is hidden. Here is an excerpt from Camille Paglia, a radical lesbian feminist. She’s one of my favorite writers, though I do disagree with her on many fundamental issues.

“Apollonian form was derived from Egypt but perfected in Greece. Coleridge says, “The Greeks idolized the finite,” while Northern Europeans have “a tendency to the infinite.” Spengler similarly identifies the modern “Faustian soul” with “pure and limitless space.” Following Nietzsche, he calls the Apollonian “the principle of visible limits” and applies it to the Greek city-state: “All that lay beyond the visual range of this political atom was alien.” The Greek statue, “the empirical visible body,” symbolizes classical reality: “the material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present.” The Greeks were, in my phrase, visionary materialists. They saw things and persons hard and glittery, radiant with Apollonian glamour. We know the Maenadic Dionysus mainly through the impressionistic medium of Archaic vase painting. He appears in statue form only when he loses his beard and female garb and turns ephebic Olympian, in the fifth century and after. High classic Athenian culture is based on Apollonian definitiveness and externality. “The whole tendency of Greek philosophy after Plato,” remarks Gilbert Murray, “was away from the outer world towards the world of the soul.” The shift of Greek thought from outer to inner parallels the shift in art from the male to the female nude, from homosexual to heterosexual taste. Spengler says of Greek society, “What was far away, invisible, was ipso facto ‘not there’.” I cited Karen Horney’s observation that a woman cannot see her own genitals. The Greek world-view was predicated on the model of absolute outwardness of male sex organs. Athenian culture flourished in externalities, the open air of the agora and the nudity of the palestra. There are no female nudes in major fifth-century art because female sexuality was imaginatively “not there,” buried like the Furies turned Eumenides. To the old complaint that the Greeks gave their statues the genitals of little boys, one could reply that the male nude offers the whole body as a projected genital. The modestly stooping Knidian Aphrodite marks the turn toward spiritual and sexual internality. It is the end of Apollo.”
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Felix wrote: October 17th, 2019, 3:33 pm
GaryLouisSmith: So now the question is how something can have more than one specific yellow. If it is one shade of yellow doesn’t that exclude it having any other shade? ... It can be many many different shades of yellow.
Or it may not be yellow at all, that's the problem with your idea. Many animals and some human beings cannot see the color yellow at all, it will appear white or pale grey to them.

I think you're just dumbing down reality with your Universals. Reality is much greater than the conceptual boxes you want to confine it in. The fact is, the sensory and mental apparatus of the perceiver defines their perceptions and how they interpret them. Horses, bees, and some human beings cannot see your "universal" color red, and hummingbirds can see ultraviolet light - colors we can't see.
I have long been a big fan of abstract art, which is a "dumbing down" of reality. Such art erases all the accidental qualities and goes for the essential. I reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Belindi »

GaryLouisSmith wrote:
I reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic.
I hope you don't take this impulsive approach to a religious cult, and worse, to a political affiliation.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Belindi wrote: October 18th, 2019, 8:30 am GaryLouisSmith wrote:
I reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic.
I hope you don't take this impulsive approach to a religious cult, and worse, to a political affiliation.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what you mean. BTW, that sentence should read -It reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic. Please be Saint Belindi and intercede for me that I be allowed to correct my typos.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Belindi »

You need to be a moderator to edit after posting. I think.Your typo did not matter to me.

I mean if you launch your heart and mind into some grand scheme without considering the details of it you will sooner or later get into trouble. Reaching for the scheme without the detains is not simple it's simplistic.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Belindi wrote: October 18th, 2019, 9:50 am You need to be a moderator to edit after posting. I think.Your typo did not matter to me.

I mean if you launch your heart and mind into some grand scheme without considering the details of it you will sooner or later get into trouble. Reaching for the scheme without the detains is not simple it's simplistic.
Politically I belong to the Lumpenproletatiat. We are that classless group of worthless bastards that Marx hated most of all. I support any political party that will benefit our group the most. That is, of course, mainly the Democrats in America.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Belindi »

Gary, You had written "I reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic.". I replied to that with "Reaching for the scheme without the detains is not simple it's simplistic."

It's not only about which political party it's about adopting any ideology. If you are not rich it makes sense to support the political party that will support the rights of the poor man so do I.

My typo I meant of course 'details'.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Belindi wrote: October 19th, 2019, 4:36 am Gary, You had written "I reaches for the schematic, away from the detailed. It is minimalistic.". I replied to that with "Reaching for the scheme without the detains is not simple it's simplistic."

It's not only about which political party it's about adopting any ideology. If you are not rich it makes sense to support the political party that will support the rights of the poor man so do I.

My typo I meant of course 'details'.
In Hinduism there is the idea of the sanyasi, sanyasini, a person who abandons family, property and religious ritual and moves on. I can imagine such a person setting out as a wanderer and ending up in Berlin, living in a cold water flat while he just thinks. That person is useless to society. He is a ragged nobody. Maybe a poet or a metaphysician. There is no ideology there.

My home town is Iowa City, Iowa, USA. It's a place where those who just sit and drink coffee and think all end up. They read and write and together discuss all manner of things. Some on this forum might be that. They contribute nothing to society. They make just enough money to keep body and soul together. I know many people just like that. Maybe you do too. There is no ideology there.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Belindi »

I'm not like that. I try to decide what is best what I ought to do even though I have no power to influence anyone else. I've been warned not to become attached to any ideology but to consider the practical application.
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Belindi wrote: October 19th, 2019, 8:06 am I'm not like that. I try to decide what is best what I ought to do even though I have no power to influence anyone else. I've been warned not to become attached to any ideology but to consider the practical application.
Yes, you obviously are not like that. I wonder is anyone, other than I, on this forum is. Maybe not. Scientific rationalism is now fashionable and de rigueur for today's well-dressed intellectual.
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Felix
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by Felix »

GaryLouisSmith: In Hinduism there is the idea of the sanyasi, sanyasini, a person who abandons family, property and religious ritual and moves on.
Sanyasis are wandering ascetics or priests who have renounced worldly life to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of enlightenment. It's not true they have renounced religious rituals, have no ideology, or contribute nothing to society. They beg for their food (alms) and sleep in temples or outdoors. They used to be accepted and supported in India when the society was more spiritually oriented but I don't know if that's still true in modern India. At any rate, it's absurd to equate them with bohemian intellectuals who would rather not work for a living, which is also an ideology.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
GaryLouisSmith
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Re: Do you think a theist can understand atheist?

Post by GaryLouisSmith »

Felix wrote: October 20th, 2019, 1:43 am
GaryLouisSmith: In Hinduism there is the idea of the sanyasi, sanyasini, a person who abandons family, property and religious ritual and moves on.
Sanyasis are wandering ascetics or priests who have renounced worldly life to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of enlightenment. It's not true they have renounced religious rituals, have no ideology, or contribute nothing to society. They beg for their food (alms) and sleep in temples or outdoors. They used to be accepted and supported in India when the society was more spiritually oriented but I don't know if that's still true in modern India. At any rate, it's absurd to equate them with bohemian intellectuals who would rather not work for a living, which is also an ideology.
You seem to share the prejudice of so many, Marxists and ordinary people alike, that bohemian intellectuals who would rather not work for a living, are a worthless drag on society.
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