EPTedit: also, lol at people who think I'm a philosophy major. Philosophy majors don't sound like sam, philosophy majors sound like frogrubdown
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 139
| Forum Index > Closed |
Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: also, lol at people who think I'm a philosophy major. Philosophy majors don't sound like sam, philosophy majors sound like frogrubdown | ||
|
Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On March 03 2013 15:04 sam!zdat wrote: No, I went to a private high school and all our everything was different. what is that? Heart of the Swarm? It's this expansion to blizzard's game called SC2, you might've heard of it.  | ||
|
ZeaL.
United States5955 Posts
| ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
A functional democratic society is only possible if the voting population is sufficiently educated. This education is not training, and has nothing to do with the expectation of future earning potential. This education will require that all members of society be forced to encounter ideas which they may find frightening, unpleasant, or objectionable, and will require that they present their views and argue for their positions in a way which conforms to some normative standard of acceptable academic discourse. People should not be allowed to opt out of this social institution (unless, maybe, they want to forfeit their enfranchisement). (edit: which means, I think christians should have to learn about sex and evolution and global warming and I think atheists should have to learn about christianity - and while we're at it, christians might wanna fucking learn something about christianity, too) edit: @above: margaritas ante porcos edit: @below: love it or leave it, baby | ||
|
ZeaL.
United States5955 Posts
On March 03 2013 15:31 sam!zdat wrote: Anyway, just perhaps a final thought: A functional democratic society is only possible if the voting population is sufficiently educated. This education is not training, and has nothing to do with the expectation of future earning potential. This education will require that all members of society be forced to encounter ideas which they may find frightening, unpleasant, or objectionable, and will require that they present their views and argue for their positions in a way which conforms to some normative standard of acceptable academic discourse. People should not be allowed to opt out of this social institution (unless, maybe, they want to forfeit their enfranchisement). See that's actually something I would read and be like "I hadn't thought much about this topic before but yeah, I think it would be stupid to just teach STEM topics. I might want to think about it a bit more." edit: @above: margaritas ante porcos And then you just give off an aura of "I'm a gift to you uneducated heathens" that makes you so insufferable. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 14:39 sam!zdat wrote: Sure, that's why the human condition eventually ends up leading to critical thought... But you have to posit some beliefs before you can critique them, obviously. You can't start being critical right from the get-go. You people need to stop imagining that pre-historical people are just modern subjects wearing some stinky fur clothes. They thought very differently than we do. "Fire is scary and bad" is a belief "A rock is a rock and a stick is a stick" is a belief. "Man can never kill a mammoth" is a belief. I won't presume to say what our prehistoric ancestors ever believed in, but I can still come up with multiple subjects with no relation to religion (organized or otherwise) where someone, at some point, might have questioned the common knowledge and tried to prove otherwise. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: please note: "asking questions about the world" | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 15:59 sam!zdat wrote: Why is fire scary and bad? Why isn't fire scary and bad? | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
(might as well ask: "Why isn't the sky blue?") edit: idk if we really want to play this game. The point is that early mankind thinks in religious terms. pretty much all of them. it's only very recently that people didn't. This "critical thought" stuff is not some innate capability of mankind that just got repressed by big, bad religion. It developed out of religion in the course of history. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:04 sam!zdat wrote: Fire is clearly scary and bad. It burned me. Yes, and that belief lasted far and long until the age of enlightenment, because everyone knew that fire is scary and bad and burns people, and no one considered alternative possibilities. As I said, I won't presume to know what early man believed in, or how things developed as they did. I can simply suggest several subjects or possible beliefs that could have been questioned by an individual at some point in time. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: As I said, I won't presume to know what early man believed in, or how things developed as they did. I can simply suggest several subjects or possible beliefs that could have been questioned by an individual at some point in time. The point is, what is the basic framework within which you conceptualize the world? People don't really have fundamentally atheistic conceptions of the world until modernity! Atheism isn't a primitive condition of man that big bad religion suppressed. Atheism comes from religion. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:11 sam!zdat wrote: The point is, what is the basic framework within which you conceptualize the world? People don't really have fundamentally atheistic conceptions of the world until modernity! Atheism isn't a primitive condition of man that big bad religion suppressed. Atheism comes from religion. Atheism by definition is the rejection of religion, and the rejection of deities. However, that does not mean there was never an absence of theism. By not presuming to know what my oldest ancestors thought, that also means I do not know when man first started using a deity, or multiple deities, to explain the world. It could have been one of the first thoughts of a sentient being, or it could have occurred a million years after man first evolved with a high enough intelligence to be considered man. What I don't believe is that theism is the automatic default belief for anything that achieves sentience. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: maybe you can think of the distinction as that between "what happens" and "why what happens, happens" if that makes any kind of sense  | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:24 sam!zdat wrote: no, theism comes later. First, you would just have a sort of enchanted-world worldview where there wasn't really any conceptual separation between "god" and "the world" edit: maybe you can think of the distinction as that between "what happens" and "why what happens, happens" if that makes any kind of sense ...wait, did the argument seriously just reach "nothing created the belief in God, the belief in God simply existed"? ...yeah, I'm out. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
| ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:30 sam!zdat wrote: No, the belief in God would come later! after you separated it out, conceptually! But you wouldn't be an ATHEIST, or anything even remotely like it! But what you are saying is that, at the very default state of human knowledge, there is something that can be separated out and be considered "God"? Or magic, or spirituality, or any explanation of the world that requires the belief in some 3rd party outside of the range of observation. | ||
|
sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
| ||
|
Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:37 sam!zdat wrote: Yes. For early man, the world is totally and completely magical. No it's not. | ||
|
oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
the faculty of seeing human meaning in natural events is developed before the anthropologist's story takes place. religion is deeply social and its figures are pretty much always anthropomorphized. magic is a bit different but i don't think it's relevant to the discussion. after all, having a spectacular magical theory of, say, astrology, does not make a religion. a religion explains the totality of one's world, so it's probably a good idea to focus on that totality of its meaning giving power, rather than on something as general as irrational but appealing explanation of causal events, which covers magic. edit: oh wow you guys went from texas education to critical thinking to magic&religion. it doesn't have to be that hard. sam's definition of the critical in critical thinking is probably very similar to the critical in critical theory. since i see critical theory as the proper descendant of the enlightenment and so on, it's not even ideological to say that, yes, we need more marxist indoctrination in dem kids. a lot of the basic criticisms of society and the economy in so called leftist thought should be seen as universal and human concerns. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 03 2013 16:37 sam!zdat wrote: Yes. For early man, the world is totally and completely magical. Only if he's seeking an explanation. Take a robot for example. It has its variables, it has their values and definitions, and does not have the capacity to see beyond what is defined. Going slightly higher, an animal. I can't get into the mind of an animal, but considering that the requirement for philosophical thought is a certain level intellect, I think it's fair to say that an animal's mind interprets observations exactly as they are. This object is food, food is eaten. That object is soft and warm, it's good to sleep on. So on, so forth. The world is not "magical", there is not God, they simply observe the world and interpret it based on their instinct and mental capacity. So if things below our level of intelligence have no fundamental framework of "God" within their knowledge base, why does it become automatically inserted into ours once we evolved to that threshold of brain power? | ||
| ||
