Apanthropinist wrote: ↑Wed May 05, 2021 8:36 am
It's not my statement Simon, I was using a quote. I don't want to get into an argument about whose experts are best and should be used, ie Poisoning The Wells (Discrediting the sources used by your opponent.).
Fair enough, and I’m not one to often appeal to “mainstream consensus” (Kuhn and all that), but Gibbon was accepted as a “poisoned well” 30 years ago.
....but then this:
Simon Adams wrote: ↑Tue May 04, 2021 11:01 pm
The idea that there were previously peaceful societies everywhere, that didn’t invade each other and impose their ways, until christians came along, is nonsense.
Yes, it would be an unreasonable and unsupportable claim to make, '
everywhere', and is why I didn't make it. It would also be a fallacious attack if a person said, "A bad thing happened here." and you then turn it into "Oh, so you're saying good things happened everywhere else until xxxx came along." It's a form of Argument Of The Beard.
I think you should look at the data. Whilst it’s difficult to get balanced data the further you go back, and some details are controversial, the overwhelming evidence from
nearly all digs from the Palaeolithic through to early historical times across the world shows a high proportion of deaths being due to violence. It ranges from 5% - 60% of deaths, and is consistent across sites. Bashed in skulls, arrow heads in various places, cave paintings of battles etc. This is not “a bad thing happened here”, it’s ‘bad shit happened everywhere’.
Jordan Peterson makes this same argument and does so very well. You could argue that Magna Cart in 1215, though mainly about the Barons having a tantrum, contained implicit reference to this, ie, trial by jury of peers, habeus corpus etc. Unfortunately we must also remember the killing of pagans who refused to convert....and the crusades etc....otherwise we're 'putting lipstick on a pig' so to speak.
I think I addressed your “ Argument Of The Beard” on pagan killings, yes it did happen at times but we have very different views on these things now. Julius Caesar once ordered his troops to cut down people in the crowd who were interrupting his triumph march by standing in the wrong place, and that’s a small footnote in history because people just had a different view of these things then.
With the crusades, you do realise they were a response to an invasion, at the request of the people who lived there at the time and the Byzantines? In the end they got out of control and terrible things were done on both sides, but ultimately it was a response to a violent invasion by expansionist tribes that had never lived there.
See what I said above. I think the point is not so much that this happens when we remove religion, although it can and does, it happens when we remove any meta-narrative and then try to fill the void with our unacknowledged murderous shadow arising out of ideology, which is what Nietzsche was warning us about. So meta-narrative may be a better way of looking at it and strangely enough, that is what analytical idealism is....a meta-narrative.
Yes and I’m a supporter of analytic idealism. I certainly don’t agree with Bernardo on everything, but what I like about it is that he generally doesn’t go further than what he needs to make sense of things. I have my own reason to have trust in revelation, which from my perspective adds ‘downwards’ ‘knowledge’ to what we can establish ‘upwards’ through reason, science and meditation. In terms of this upward side, analytic idealism is a clear and consistent framework. There are risks in analytic idealism (it’s kind of upside down from a theological perspective), but it’s a vast improvement on empty materialism and the damage that does.
....and he, for certain sure, knew what he was talking about. I'd also add the related following, from Jung:
"Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society itself is composed of de-individualised persons, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organisations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman."
“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.”
Now I really do have to start this programming course but I'll keep checking in and thanks for your comments Simon. If I ever fancied having a stab at a PhD, and I don't, it would be discussions of philosophical and metaphysical issues around a meta-view of the arc of human development, social/political/historical/psychological etc
Yes and this is key. Humans have the ability to be vengeful, cruel, selfish, as well as forgiving, kind and willing to sacrifice their own good for others. What makes a person choose the latter, not in a ‘give in to the world’ sense, but as a positive choice? There needs to be a certain detachment from things, which can come from practices like meditation, contemplation etc. But there is also a need to navigate that shadow within, and I think Dante described that as well as anyone. A kind of self awareness, of discernment. None of it is easy work though, so how do you motivate people to ‘cut out that part of their own heart’ as Solzhenitsyn put it? Ignatius created the “Spiritual Exercises” for this purpose, but even just spending 20 mins each evening examining your conscience from the day can more difficult to keep up than going for a run!