Be careful not to stereotype me with this. Quote me, throw my own words back into my face, and take my arguments to their logical conclusions, but don't blindly assume. You wasted a LOT of space in that post on your "hole" argument, when that wasn't even in existance in my post, or even alluded to.
And yet you go back to the essential belief in your own brilliance. Much of what you say … is absolutely true, but the essential point is "according to my analysis, this IS the truth, and therefore I'm right."
I hope you can read your own words and see how incredibly conceited they are. If you can't... you have problems man.
Essentially what you're arguing is that you have found the elusive "Meaning of Life" which just about anybody can tell you is what humanity has been searching for since we came into existance in any free moment in which we weren't trying for raw survival.
We both agree that whatever conclusions on how to live MUST be based on whatever fundamental truth exists, but saying you have found it (especialy the WAY you say it) is so incredibly conceited and shows the supreme hubris of your reason.
We "religious" types may claim to know these truths, but they came from God, and at least we don't claim to have come up with it ourselves…
Do I detect a note of envy?
You give my ego too much credit, Eriol. Most of your functional reply is either in agreement with or sympathetic toward my overall argument, and yet you complement that with such a scathing indictment of my character. Actually, it made me smile. You obviously are disgusted with me…but not for the reasons you think.
I will tell you a secret. There are people out there who can reason with me. And, just as importantly, I can reason with myself. But no one on the Compendium could do it. Maybe Daniel Krispin could, but his premises are so far off that I’m not interested in pursuing the “amicable difference of opinion” that would ultimately result. I’ve been there and done that. And so you’re left with the appearance of this hopelessly arrogant Josh fellow who thinks he knows everything and never gives an inch. I’m aware of the appearance. And I take it into consideration, too. I have something of a persona here, as a liberal polemic, to moderate that appearance. I am liberal, but I’m not a polemic. The persona suits the environment. It helps keep me from having to have discussions like this.
I do not claim to have irrefutable proof of the “Meaning of Life.” Nor do I claim to be infallible, and in fact I take pride in being just the opposite: open-minded. I know and freely admit that in any substantial argument I am certain to make mistakes. Usually they are minor, and when they are pointed out to me, I can correct them and proceed with my original line of reasoning. On occasion I make larger mistakes that force me to reconsider my position. Most of the time I catch all the big mistakes as I am writing. No one else gets the chance to see them. I’m not quoting from a book when I write; it’s all me.
But, having said that, you’re both right about the way I am and wrong about the justification of it. Yes, I am brilliant. I put a lot of work into improving upon that. Not only am I brilliant in absolute terms, but I am more brilliant than you are, by a good deal. And I think ordinary people find it very difficult to deal with someone like me…someone who is arrogant yet also uncannily correct, someone with whose ideology they disagree, but whose reasoning they simply cannot defeat. The aforementioned Daniel Krispin dismissed me as a rhetorician in the mold of Hitler or Stalin. But what he really meant is that he disagreed with me, yet envied his inability to defeat my reasoning. So it is with you. Envy. I know these kinds of things, because I get plenty of exposure to them.
Ordinary people take a lot of pride in the certainty of their beliefs, and so it greatly antagonizes them when someone like me comes along and undermines their philosophy. But it does them, and it does
you no good to assume that never in your life will someone come along whose ideology opposes yours and whose reasoning is greater than yours. Yet that’s what many people do, and many more simply abandon this false pride and become timid intellectual pushovers. It’s a shame, really. I think it’s very important for people to spend their lives trying to find better points of view and greater understanding, with the full acknowledgement that doing so may lead them to a radical change in the way they think. But that’s extremely hard for people to do. People invariably want to crystallize around their existing beliefs. They get to be ridiculous.
For as much of my previous argument as you dismissed as hubris and conceit, you would have done better to try and understand my position. It’s so much easier to learn from those who stand above you, than it is to learn from people whose minds are even weaker than your own. I’ve never met anyone who has been willing and able to argue that the search for Illumination is not the
raison d'être of human existence. Once they understand what I mean by “knowledge,” and what “Illumination” entails, they are eager to agree with me. No one, of any ideological stripe, has ever been bitter or petty enough to truly oppose that position. Instead, they take it and make it their own…and that’s wonderful.
Provided I am interested enough in the discussion at hand, I will always answer any point raised by my someone else that I perceive deserves an answer or provides for an enriching development of the topic. You can count on that, because I hate to leave a point that weakens my position unanswered. It doesn’t matter if I’m arrogant or not. It doesn’t even matter if I’m right or not. You’ll get a lot more out of this if you focus on the conversation rather than the company…and so will I. I’m not in this for my ego. The real ego trip comes when I have conversations with people who are a match for me. So take heart, and immerse your energy into the conversation itself.
Now, enough of this and let me actually reply to your post.
Secondly though, I merely compared the way people act towards their "truths" with as much faith as religious people do, not saying that faith itself is necessary in the secular model. So quite distinct from "insisting" that everyone must ultimately resort to faith, my point was the logical progression AGAINST moral relativism, which is often what progresses from a secular view, though it appears your perspective is well-founded enough to avoid that particular easy-to-attack pitfall.
Relativism of any sort should not be dismissed so easily. I’m an absolutist myself, but I know someone who has always been able to stalemate me in that argument. I know Hadriel would like to do away with it, because when the masses regurgitate it, relativism sounds very simplistic and rather dumb…but remember who you’re hearing it from. For every well-reasoned person, there are thousands who hold a similar ideology but lack the excellence of reasoning.
I recognized the point you made—that “secularists” often resort to faith in order to justify their ideology—but that is a given. It’s what I just said. Many people holding whatever point of view are easily dismounted. So I ignored that, and moved on to the more interesting point that you raised, being the implication that nonreligious folks must ultimately resort to some type of religiousness in order to justify themselves. Theists of every stripe love to use this argument to justify that the correct position requires some faith. You come out and say that you did not directly make this point, and of course you didn’t, but the insinuation was there, and let’s not pretend you didn’t know it. I put the matter to rest because it was a logical threat to my premise, and any good thinker would do.
Be careful not to stereotype me with this. Quote me, throw my own words back into my face, and take my arguments to their logical conclusions, but don't blindly assume. You wasted a LOT of space in that post on your "hole" argument, when that wasn't even in existance in my post, or even alluded to.
Stereotypes exist as an oversimplification or misinterpretation of some underlying truth. I am not stereotyping you, but you do share a lot in common in your technique with conventional Christian thinking. And I never “blindly” assume anything, but, as I noted a moment ago, sometimes it isn’t enough simply to quote what has been explicitly written. The argument exists in your mind, not in the words on the page. I use the latter to get at the former, and this helps me not to make “blind” assumptions. I do make assumptions, and they are not always perfectly founded, but you are welcome to correct me at your leisure. Just don’t try to be a revisionist, because I will see through it. I can see into people’s heads better than most, better sometimes even than they themselves can. And I do it not by making shit up, but by observing their output—which, in this case, is what you write.
So, when it comes down to the “God-shaped hole,” there was no waste. Going back to your insinuation that secular values must ultimately resort to some faith mechanism (or to some form of hedonism, which you had mentioned in an earlier post), the “God-shaped hole” is just another way of stating the former. The metaphor was eminently pertinent to the topic at hand. Furthermore, I used it to build to some very relevant points, which assures its pertinence doubly. I find it curious that you can call my reply “the best answer” you’ve gotten, yet would dismiss the road that I took to get there.
How exactly does one go about creating a sense of meaning, or of purpose? That is much easier to answer now, for we have identified the fundamentals.
And yet you go back to the essential belief in your own brilliance. Much of what you say below this about seeking knowledge is often more enlightening and enjoyable than merely knowing itself is absolutely true, but the essential point is "according to my analysis, this IS the truth, and therefore I'm right."
I hope you appreciate the humor here. Effectively, you are saying “Well, Josh, it’s pretty silly that you’re calling yourself smart just because you’re smart enough to be ‘absolutely true.’” Come now, surely we can share a laugh at that, yes? It strikes me as eminently
relativist of you to deride a person for pointing out in a discussion that a point he could not previously make has been provided for logically and can now be made with integrity. Furthermore, that’s how the logical reasoning process works. You make an analysis, and draw conclusions. That’s what I did. And instead of disagreeing with what I said—on the contrary, you explicitly
agreed with it—you are chiding me for certifying my own analysis. How would anyone ever get to make an argument if they couldn’t eventually reach a point where they were confident enough in their reasoning to put their piece out on the table? What a lark!
It may lie beyond the grasp of a conventional Christian intellect even to comprehend these ideas, let alone accept them. But that is beside the point. You said we needed a common definition of good and evil. Well, I have provided just that: The finest definition of good and evil the secular world shall ever need. And it stands superior to faith-based values because it is guaranteed by our very own nature.
I hope you can read your own words and see how incredibly conceited they are. If you can't... you have problems man.
Yes, given what I said, I think you’re in your rights to feel stung. =P
But you also expose the biggest flaw in your whole theory right there: "it is guaranteed by our very own nature." That is where it all falls apart: knowing what our nature is.
I went to the trouble of explaining what our nature is before I said “by our very own nature.” I devoted three whole paragraphs to this, then I repeated it in summary form in the following paragraph. To refresh your memory:
So what are we? What is our nature? There can be only one answer to this: We are the sum of our evolution to this point.
The sum of our corporeal existence, this is human nature. How could it possibly be anything else? To me, this is a reflexive statement: We are what we are. We are sentient animals on the planet Earth with a distinctive genome that guides our physical traits and animalistic behaviors, and provides for the basis of our consciousness and cognitive faculties. We are flesh and blood and over three billion years of evolution. We are the breadth of our imaginations and the depth of our ability to comprehend meaning, and the length of our capacity for logic. We are, to put it in a single word,
corporeal. That is our nature.
What we have here is not where my argument “all falls apart.” What we have is a technique you used to introduce what shall shortly prove to be the central thrust of
your argument. In truth, you used this as a rhetorical technique and didn’t give a lot of attention to the integrity of your reasoning. Why do I say this? Because of the argument that follows:
Sure we are sentient (for the most part, though considering the stupidity I see on the news everyday, sometimes I wonder about some...), and that DOES imply some things, but is the thirst for knowledge all there is? Does that define all the rest? The limits of human nature is so easily encapsulated? Essentially what you're arguing is that you have found the elusive "Meaning of Life" which just about anybody can tell you is what humanity has been searching for since we came into existance in any free moment in which we weren't trying for raw survival.
This is hardly an impeachment of my earlier premise. This is rather an appeal for greater understanding of it. I simply did not make myself clear enough for you to understand me…and I knew it at the time, because this is some pretty sophisticated stuff we’re talking about. Rather than write a book, I figured I’d trim it down and hope you got my point anyway. But I’m not surprised that you didn’t. So, to address your specific queries:
No, the thirst for knowledge is not all that there is. We are the entire sum of our animalistic nature. I emphasized the knowledge aspect because knowledge is the quantum unit of our pronounced sentience, which is what makes us distinctive on this planet and which is why we’re here at all. Moreover, it is the quality that enables us in the first place to seek out meaning and identity. Therefore, inasmuch as we desire our nature to be more than that of mere animals, knowledge is the raw material by which this would be effected. And make no mistake; by “knowledge” I mean not simply book facts or phone numbers. If you look it up in the dictionary, definitions number two and three are applicable:
2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study.
3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.
In other words, “knowledge” is a catch-all term that applies to all rational input into the cognitive process of the human intellect. And that’s what I think your mistake was. I think you presumed a much narrower definition of “knowledge” than I had intended.
Does [the thirst for knowledge] define all the rest? The limits of human nature is so easily encapsulated? Essentially what you're arguing is that you have found the elusive "Meaning of Life" which just about anybody can tell you is what humanity has been searching for since we came into existance in any free moment in which we weren't trying for raw survival.
Yes and no. The thirst for knowledge
does define the rest, but not directly. You have to go one step further. I mentioned a word earlier, and I gave it a capital letter, and that word is
Illumination, and by that, and by the capital I am reaching for your attention as to the significance of the concept. In Illumination I am talking about the combined product of knowledge. But that’s a very coarse way of putting it. Think of Illumination as a way of looking at the entire universe at once, considering every part of it simultaneously, and saying “This all makes sense.” To achieve some part of that is to achieve a greater Illumination. It is something not to be ingested, like a fact would be, nor understood, like knowledge would be, but something to be
consumed by. It is the objective reality of the universe, in conscious form. It can only be held in the minds of sentient creatures, like us. It is the difference between a universe that simply exists and a universe whose existence is fathomed. It is one of the highest words in the Joshalonian vocabulary, and one for whose capitalization I make no apology. It is this Illumination which defines “all the rest” about us.
In your world, Eriol, there is a God who gives this universe its meaning. In my world, meaning is not something to be discovered, but created. The universe exists, but what it
means is our destiny to pursue. Illumination is our progress in that regard. And, yes, this gives definition to our entire nature, and necessitates the continued search for knowledge, because of course only knowledge will enable this grand ambition.
So, no, I haven’t found the “Meaning of Life” (although Monty Python has) any more than I have found supreme Illumination. But I know how to get there. And, though the quest to become more than we are is one that shall outlast my own lifetime, death is no obstacle to my love for and ambition to pursue this strange and wonderful thing I have called Illumination…existing beyond knowledge, beyond wisdom, beyond enlightenment.
Human history is replete with great figures who must have really understood a thing or two about the meaning of it all. Just because you might not be able to see it, and generations of ordinary humans have similarly failed, do not assume that it is beyond us all to glimpse this very thing.
We both agree that whatever conclusions on how to live MUST be based on whatever fundamental truth exists, but saying you have found it (especialy the WAY you say it) is so incredibly conceited and shows the supreme hubris of your reason.
This wisdom of mine is unstoppable…and irrefutable. Close your eyes at your own peril.
We "religious" types may claim to know these truths, but they came from God, and at least we don't claim to have come up with it ourselves, and especially from such a questionable explanation.
Eriol, my good friend Eriol, to someone who is not religious, it is the epitome of
unjustified arrogance for a religious fellow such as yourself to claim to have possession of these truths because your religion tells them to you. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Your implication is that your God gives you these truths, but I am unable to possess them. Well, horse-spit. You can deride me to perdition’s flames for having found truth beyond your God, but I look back at you and see a person who has subscribed to a delusion. My strength owes itself in great part to my unwillingness to base my logic on faith. My equations work because I can’t mess up without getting gibberish, and so I must refine them based on the physical truths of the world, whereas you can erect the most bizarre equations imaginable, and God will always make up the difference. I know your intentions are good…but the delusion is pitiable. Like I said before, I don’t claim to possess the Meaning of Life that you mention, but I do hold the deeds to a great many fascinating ideas. They are my riches.
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That is a bold assumption to make, that everyone is looking for these truths. I for one, have never been looking for reasons. I have more important things to do.
I know exactly what you mean. Here I have been talking about knowledge and the pursuit of supreme meaning, and you’re telling me that this is not what you are about. Believe me, I understand exactly where you are coming from. A great deal of the world shares your opinion.
What I have done here is try to extract this essential human purpose from the flesh of human nature, and paste it onto a clean page for people to read. Naturally, it does not apply in the abstract. You kind of have to swallow it, and look at it in terms of your own life, your own world. To put it another way, everything you do in life that is not predicated on apathy, is your own, unique dedication to the pursuit of Illumination. It’s like the human heart…in medical terms most people don’t know how theirs works, but they still use it in the way it has evolved to be used.
Apathy is the waste of one’s humanity. Ignorance is the enemy of human nature. To the extent you do not seek these out willfully, then by default you are on the right path.
And before you get all I hate the world or whatever…
I couldn’t imagine saying that of you and meaning it. I think you’re one of the more interesting people here. Hopefully I’m right.
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You've seen the Castle Keep replica of the Master Sword, right? According to the guy who commissioned it, it was "irresponsibly sharp." It cost him about $3,000.
“Irresponsibly sharp.” I like that. =)
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