Taking the Possibility of an Afterlife Seriously

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
what one has done in this life.

I only know of three exceptions: two outspoken atheists, one of whom
has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need
to grow out of; and myself. I think that an afterlife is improbable,
especially one of the specific sort I described, but I take both possibilities very seriously.

I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.

The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
"If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."

The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
a difference a life after death can make for everyone.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
> one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
> what one has done in this life.
>
> I only know of three exceptions: two outspoken atheists, one of whom
> has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need
> to grow out of; and myself. I think that an afterlife is improbable,
> especially one of the specific sort I described, but I take both possibilities very seriously.
>
> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>
> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."

The book is _Grey_Eminence_, a biography of the priest Joseph Ezéchiely . The year is 1620.
The rest of what you see in this post is taken from pp. 122 -123 of the 1941 edition.


In the engagement at Pont-de-Cé, royal forces won a decisive victory. As a kind of consolation prize and to reinforce their loyalty, Marie de Medicis gave orders that her infantry should be permitte to sack the town of Angers before retiring further south. Father Joseph, who was in the neighborhood, heard of this and immediately demanded an audience of the Queen. This time the friar's "infinite dexterity with the nobility" gave place to prophethic eloquence. Standing before the Queen, he told her unequivocally that, if she suffered Angers to be sacked, the blood of its people would be upon her head, and that God would damn her everlastingly.

The doctrine of hell fire was not entirely mischievous in its effects. On occasions like the present, for example, it could do excellent service. A stupid, obstinate, heartless creature, like Marie de Medicis, would have been deaf to any appeal to the higher feelings she did not possess, or possessed only in a condition so latent that it would have taken the greatest saint a very long time to bring them into actuality.

But the Queen cared intensely for herself, and she believed without doubt or question in the physical reality of hell. Thunderously harping on that portentuous theme, Ezéchiely was able to put the fear of God in her. She recalled the order she had given; Angers was not sacked.

Thanks to a kind of intellectual "progress," the rulers of the modern world no longer believe that they will be tortured everlastingly, if they are wicked. The eschatological sanction, which was one of the principal weapons in the hands of the prophets of past times, has disappeared. This would not matter, if moral had kept pace with intellecual "progress." But it has not. Twentieth-century rulers behave just as vilely and ruthlessly as did rulers in the seventeenth or any other century. But unlike their predecessors, they do not lie awake at nights wondering whether they are damned. If Marie de Medicis had enjoyed the advantages of a modern education, Father Joseph would have thundered in vain, and Angers would have been sacked.

[John Harshman]

You seem to have wandered from your original topic. You started by
talking (or hinting at future discussions) about reasons to entertain
the possibility of an afterlife. But now you change to reasons why other
people, specifically evil leaders, should entertain that possibility.

Further, the facts don't seem to bear out the general benefits of
believing in hell. Despite one anecdote about Marie de Medici, the evil
done by Christians doesn't seem to differ much from the evil done by
atheists. Belief in hell can even spark evil, as in the Inquisition's
quest to save peple from Hell by torturing and/or killing them.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 9:01:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> > believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,

snip

> The book is _Grey_Eminence_, a biography of the priest Joseph Ezéchiely . The year is 1620.
> The rest of what you see in this post is taken from pp. 122 -123 of the 1941 edition.

snip cut and paste of run-on line length.
Synopsis: Father Joseph threatens Marie de Medicis with the eternal suffering
of hell if she allows her troops to sack the city of Angers. Out of fear, she reverses
an order to let them sack the city. See how great the fear of hell is!

Retort: How many abominations have been carried out because of a promise of
an eternal reward for killing in the name of god? Bring out the royal scales, and
see who weighs more than a duck.

[Burkhard]

It's for lots of reasons such an odd example to use, especially in
a TO context. The background of the siege of Angers are the French
religious wars. Marie's policy was one of internal tolerance - one of the
first things she did after her husband had been murdered by a catholic
fanatic had been to reconfirm his Edict of Nantes that gave Huguenots
some protection, but combined in foreign policy with alignment with
the catholic Habsburgs, advocating in particular for peace with Spain.

The opposition, which later would be joined by her former protégé
Richelieu and his ally François Leclerc du Tremblay, a.k.a Father Joseph,
a.k.a. the "Grey Eminence" , preferred war with Spain. Richelieu's motive
was to strengthen the French nation state, but Father Joseph seems to
have been motivated by his desire to lead a new crusade against the
Ottomans, and thought the Habsburg dynasty stood in its way. Sacking
of cities at the time was a standard means to prevent one's soldiers from
mutiny, and was used by him and Richelieu just as much as anyone else -
and one can imagine the carnage that a new crusade would have brought.

So you could as well argue that without religion, the conflict that put Angers
in danger might not have happened in the first place. And Joseph just
wants to save Angers to have more young men to put in uniform
and throw against the Muslims.

Which is sort of Huxley's point in the book, even if it doesn't become clear in
this passage. He contrasts "good religion" which for him is pure
mystic experience, free from any form of dogma, or theology, from "bad
religion" which is any form of systems of belief statements - T. S Eliot would
accuse him of "canned Buddhism". The Richelieu-Joseph axis are not the
heroes of the book. Rather, it shows Josephs how his initial pure mysticism
gets corrupted under the influence of the catholic mainstream Richelieu and turns
into the type of dogmatism that led not only to the thirty year's war and the French
religious war, but according to Huxley laid the foundations of all the atrocities of
the 20th century too, which he saw as a continuation of the religious wars.

By the same token, while Joseph was one of the good mystical Christians, he'd have
rejected natural theology and creationism, and embraced it only after he became one
of the bad, rational Christians.

As an aside, a bit disappointing how Huxley perpetuates the romanticists propaganda
against Marie, whose main fault was that a) she was a strong woman who did not take shit
from weak men, including the constant public affairs of her husband and b) a foreigner,
and you know you can't trust them foreign pasta-eaters and their foreign ways.

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 1:46:01 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
> one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
> what one has done in this life.

Well, there is a highly credible eyewitness account from near my place,
Eilean Chaluim Chille, with impeccable Christian
credentials who reported back:

Heaven is not waiting
for the good and pure and gentle
there's no punishment eternal
there's no hell for the ungodly
nor is god as you imagine

there's no hell to spite the sinners
there's no heaven for the blessed
nor is god as you imagine

And who'd doubt the words of an abbot and catholic saint
who had literally seen it all?

[Bozo User]

For every talk on arguments about the existence of magic/religion,
replace the Abrahamic god/afterlife/miracles with
Enki/Seth, Hades/Valhalla and Sumerian myths/Vikings' Berserk strength.

[israel sadovnik]

Does religion and science contradict one another?
Can religion and science coexist?
The collapse (death) of the Ψ-wave Schrödinger function forces physicists to use
the mathematical "renormalization method" to revive the situation. . . .
Isn't the "method of renormalization" similar to the "method of reincarnation"? . . .
Mathematicians use the "method of renormalization". . .
Religious believers use the "method of reincarnation". . .
Renormalization is scientific way to avoid infinite death
Reincarnation is believers psychological way to avoid death
Both believe . . . death is not the end of existence.
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree."
― Albert Einstein

[John Harshman]

My understanding is that the Italian cooks she brought with her were the
beginning of "French" cooking. Of course that has nothing to do with the
topic, but in my defense all this about Marie de Medici has nothing to
do with the topic from the very beginning. If you recall, the topic was
supposedly why we should take the possibility of an afterlife seriously.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 11:46:01 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 9:01:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > > Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> > > believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,

> snip

Why did you snip the specifics? They directly relate to the example I gave. I said:
"one where a person's experience depends at least in part on what one has done in this life."

I will be using this very statement below.

> > The book is _Grey_Eminence_, a biography of the priest Joseph Ezéchiely . The year is 1620.
> > The rest of what you see in this post is taken from pp. 122 -123 of the 1941 edition.
> snip cut and paste of run-on line length.

I chose this historical illustration of Voltaire's famous dictum [which you also snipped]
because it is a literary gem. Nothing I've seen in talk.origins [my own writing included, of course]
comes close to Aldous Huxley's masterly command of prose.

> Synopsis: Father Joseph threatens Marie de Medicis with the eternal suffering
> of hell if she allows her troops to sack the city of Angers. Out of fear, she reverses
> an order to let them sack the city. See how great the fear of hell is!

Your last sentence is the sound of one hand clapping,
because you left out Huxley's lesson for our times, which were his times already.
In his own words:

"Thanks to a kind of intellectual `progress,' the rulers of the modern world no longer believe that they will be tortured everlastingly, if they are wicked. The eschatological sanction, which was one of the principal weapons in the hands of the prophets of past times, has disappeared. This would not matter, if moral had kept pace with intellectual `progress.' But it has not. Twentieth-century rulers behave just as vilely and ruthlessly as did rulers in the seventeenth or any other century. But unlike their predecessors, they do not lie awake at nights wondering whether they are damned. If Marie de Medicis had enjoyed the advantages of a modern education, Father Joseph would have thundered in vain, and Angers would have been sacked."

I believe every participant of talk.origins enjoys "the advantages of a modern education,"
and I believe none of us lies "awake at nights wondering" whether they will suffer eternal hellfire.
The enormous differences between us pertain to the one you snipped:

"[An afterlife] where a person's experience depends at least in part on what one has done in this life."

It would be interesting to know: (1) how many participants disbelieve in such a thing and
(2) how many take this possibility seriously and (3) among these, what their thoughts on this are.

In re (3), I hope that any afterlife will be similar to that depicted in CS Lewis's _The_Great_Divorce_,
where there is a heaven of happiness, but to get to it, one must first get over
an attachment to any vices they may have.

> Retort:

As a retort to Voltaire's famous dictum,
"If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him," snipped by you,
it is also the sound of one hand clapping, because ... I think you can figure out why.

>How many abominations have been carried out because of a promise of
> an eternal reward for killing in the name of god? Bring out the royal scales, and
> see who weighs more than a duck.

Mao Zedong weighed a lot more than a duck, and I don't mean literally.
He is credited with responsibility for the deaths of 65 million in the following webpage:

https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder

There is no hint anywhere in the Wikipedia entry on him that he had any religion,
unless you count Marxism-Leninsm as a religion, or any belief in an afterlife.


Peter Nyikos

PS Are you enough of a leftist to put Mao in the same idealized category that
millions of leftists (and naive people influenced by their fervor) put Che Guevara?

[Burkhard]

There is a kernel of truth in what thou speakest, but only a kernel, small like a
fennel seed, which also originates in Italy but became common in France
during the reign of Charlemagne, who ordered its cultivation by law.

It is Catherine, not Marie de Medici who has been often seen as the historical
conduit that introduced Italian cuisine to France. But more recent research considers
this largely a myth.

I refer my learned friend to the authoritative study by Barbara Wheaton:
( Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789):

"“This theory is wrong on two counts: French haute cuisine did not appear
until a century later and then showed little Italian influence; and there is no
evidence that Catherine’s cooks had any impact on French cooking in the early
sixteenth century. Indeed, French sixteenth-century cooking was very conservative
and in general continued the medieval traditions.”

Now, that is where Marie de Medici comes in. Her cook was François Pierre La Varenne,
whose cook books (esp. Le Cuisinier françois) laid the foundations of the modern
haute cuisine. It is still in print today, and apart from being the first place where you
find classics such as sauce hollandaise, Mille-feuille, Roux and Béchamel. He was both
an innovator and someone who codified the massive innovation that had taken place
in French cooking. Many of the technical terms we use today also go back to his books,
such as Bouquet garni, Bisque or "bleu" (for fish)

There is some borrowing from Italia cuisine, but overall rather limited.

As for the relation to the topic, verily, did not Esau sell his birthright for a mess of pottage
(or maybe a pot of message) , which surely must have been cooked with the French recipe
(I myself use this one https://www.pardonyourfrench.com/classic-french-lentil-soup/ make
sure you use Puy lentils from the Puy region of France, otherwise it's just sparking lentil stew)

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 4:41:01 AM UTC+1, John Harshman wrote:

One part of this is the so-called "Hellfire debate", a term coined by the criminologist
Hirschi. I posted about this quite a while ago here:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/LsfxvUYQARc/m/kLR1FIoeK1IJ

There are some more recent studies, in particular the book Kim Sadique co-edited,
(Religion, Faith and Crime) and to which she contributed a chapter on
"The Effect of Religion on Crime and Deviancy: Hellfire in the Twenty-First Century"
It is a bit more positive about the correlation between crime reduction and belief in
Hell (belief in heaven seems to increase crime...) than the studies I cited back in 2012
, but only marginally so. The greatest effect is on "ascetic crimes", which then can have
trickle down effects.

That very much matches my experience - I'm in a project with
the UAE at the moment, on regulation for autonomous cars, and "driving while drunk"
is really not a problem there, and as a result also fewer vehicular manslaughter
cases etc. apart from that the effect is weakest in societies where religious
and secular norms broadly align and there is an effective state, strongest in states
in crises where religious norms and state norms differ (i.e. the Amish really
commit fewer crimes)

Most of the effects disappear when controlled for age, wealth and type of crime
(e.g. if you take away those crimes that a non-religious person will not even
perceive as a crime, like "blasphemy" where this is illegal)

There is also for TO purposes a particularly interesting study by Russil Durrant
and Zoe Poppelwell, "Religion, Crime, and Prosocial Behaviour". They do argue that
there is broadly speaking a negative correlation between religion and criminality, which
they explain through the evolutionary origins of religion.

But the Hellfire debate as you note only covers a small part of this - that is
behavior that this society officially considers criminal. "atrocities demanded
by the law - your example of the inquisition - are not covered any more than
than atrocities during intra-religious conflicts from the 30 years war to Bosnia.

Not normally covered by the studies are also behaviours that are permitted
or tolerated by the law - there is e.g. in the same book by Sadique an
interesting chapter on religion and disability discrimination, that show some
correlation between some, particularly "old fashioned" religious beliefs and
hostility to disabled people, but below the level of criminality.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 10:31:01 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 11:46:01 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 9:01:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > > Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> > > > believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
>
> > snip

> Why did you snip the specifics? They directly relate to the example I gave. I said:
> "one where a person's experience depends at least in part on what one has done in this life."
> I will be using this very statement below.

I disagree that they directly relate. They did not directly relate respective
to the comment I intended to make.

> > > The book is _Grey_Eminence_, a biography of the priest Joseph Ezéchiely . The year is 1620.
> > > The rest of what you see in this post is taken from pp. 122 -123 of the 1941 edition.
> > snip cut and paste of run-on line length.

> I chose this historical illustration of Voltaire's famous dictum [which you also snipped]
> because it is a literary gem. Nothing I've seen in talk.origins [my own writing included, of course]
> comes close to Aldous Huxley's masterly command of prose.

I disagree about how masterful it is. It's too polemical.
If underlying your praise is your sense that he better captured your thoughts
than you have been able to do with your own prose, I could see that. I didn't
consider it worth the effort to reformat the line lengths. Apparently you
didn't either.

> > Synopsis: Father Joseph threatens Marie de Medicis with the eternal suffering
> > of hell if she allows her troops to sack the city of Angers. Out of fear, she reverses
> > an order to let them sack the city. See how great the fear of hell is!

> Your last sentence is the sound of one hand clapping,
> because you left out Huxley's lesson for our times, which were his times already.
> In his own words:

Part of the problem with your prose is that you seem to become infatuated
with phrases you find clever, and then keep repeating them, apparently to
make you think you sound clever. But I commend you for not feeling the need
to remind us that "the sound of one hand clapping" has Buddhist origins, and
for not bringing more coals to Newcastle.

Now part of the reason I left out Huxley's words is they are farcical. And
cutting through it, they are farcical for the reason I gave. He presses this
one-sided notion that the enlightened abandonment of dropping the fear
of hell and eternal damnation is bad because it eliminates a mechanism
by which otherwise unethical people can be heeled. But it completely
ignored the other side of the coin where promises of heaven is used as
a goad to encourage unethical behavior, like the Crusades or myriad
religious wars.

> "Thanks to a kind of intellectual `progress,' the rulers of the modern world no longer believe that they will be tortured everlastingly, if they are wicked. The eschatological sanction, which was one of the principal weapons in the hands of the prophets of past times, has disappeared. This would not matter, if moral had kept pace with intellectual `progress.' But it has not. Twentieth-century rulers behave just as vilely and ruthlessly as did rulers in the seventeenth or any other century. But unlike their predecessors, they do not lie awake at nights wondering whether they are damned. If Marie de Medicis had enjoyed the advantages of a modern education, Father Joseph would have thundered in vain, and Angers would have been sacked."

> I believe every participant of talk.origins enjoys "the advantages of a modern education,"
> and I believe none of us lies "awake at nights wondering" whether they will suffer eternal hellfire.
> The enormous differences between us pertain to the one you snipped:
>
> "[An afterlife] where a person's experience depends at least in part on what one has done in this life."

"Today sucked. Maybe I should martyr myself killing some infidels so I can be sure
of getting to heaven?" Your praise of Huxley's one-sided propaganda is sad.

> It would be interesting to know: (1) how many participants disbelieve in such a thing and
> (2) how many take this possibility seriously and (3) among these, what their thoughts on this are.
>
> In re (3), I hope that any afterlife will be similar to that depicted in CS Lewis's _The_Great_Divorce_,
> where there is a heaven of happiness, but to get to it, one must first get over
> an attachment to any vices they may have.

You repeatedly cite your hope that Lewis imagined it well. And you have asserted
that your hoping this is a virtuous thing about you. And you can do all that in
your imagination seemingly making up for episodes of abusing people in the
here and now.

> > Retort:
>
> As a retort to Voltaire's famous dictum,
> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him," snipped by you,
> it is also the sound of one hand clapping, because ... I think you can figure out why.

I disagree, for reasons you seem to struggle to understand.

> >How many abominations have been carried out because of a promise of
> > an eternal reward for killing in the name of god? Bring out the royal scales, and
> > see who weighs more than a duck.

I'm pretty sure that what follows is meant to be a reference to 'atrocities
committed by an atheist who has no fear of consequences in an after-life'.
It avoids my point, which was pretty clear.

What about atrocities committed because of a promise of a reward in
an after-life? Who is the "blinkered coxswaine" who sees only one side?

> Mao Zedong weighed a lot more than a duck, and I don't mean literally.

But he didn't pretend to be entitled to wield supreme executive power just
because some moistened bint lobbed a simitar at him. Or because he
was Annointed by God.

> He is credited with responsibility for the deaths of 65 million in the following webpage:
>
> https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder
>
> There is no hint anywhere in the Wikipedia entry on him that he had any religion,
> unless you count Marxism-Leninsm as a religion, or any belief in an afterlife.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>
> PS Are you enough of a leftist to put Mao in the same idealized category that
> millions of leftists (and naive people influenced by their fervor) put Che Guevara?

And have you stopped beating your wife, you paragon of virtue you.
Just because you struggle to make a coherent argument is a poor excuse
for your ham-fisted attempts at poisoning the well by accusing your foil
of being a "communist".

[John Harshman]

Thank you. This is certainly more interesting than anything on-topic,
whatever that topic was intended to be.

[jillery]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 09:54:23 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:


<snip for focus>

>One part of this is the so-called "Hellfire debate", a term coined by the criminologist
>Hirschi. I posted about this quite a while ago here:
>https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/LsfxvUYQARc/m/kLR1FIoeK1IJ

The following has nothing whatever to do with topic under discussion.
Instead, I post a personal request to you. Would you please post a
Usenet message-ID along with your GG URLs? GG sometimes shows other
messages besides the one you have in mind, and sometimes doesn't even
show that message, leaving readers to guess which message you're
talking about.

GG used to have an option to "show original message", which included
the Usenet headers. But for the past several months, that option has
been greyed out/inactivated. As a registered GG user, I hope your
interface provides you with the means to conveniently extract the
relevant Usenet ID, which in any case is the appropriate medium of
exchange for Usenet messages.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Burkhard]

I'm afraid that GG option is also for me greyed out,
and I haven't found another way yet to retrieve the
Usenet ID - tried forward and reply, no dice

I'd very much prefer to use Usenet again, but after my third newsreader
stoped talking to TO pretty much gave up on it - TO is the last of my
groups still alive, and it seemed not worth the hassle.

If you can think of an easy way to find both IDs, happy to oblige...

[jillery]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 12:30:31 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

>On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 8:01:02?PM UTC+1, jillery wrote:
>> On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 09:54:23 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> <snip for focus>
>> >One part of this is the so-called "Hellfire debate", a term coined by the criminologist
>> >Hirschi. I posted about this quite a while ago here:
>> >https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/LsfxvUYQARc/m/kLR1FIoeK1IJ
>> The following has nothing whatever to do with topic under discussion.
>> Instead, I post a personal request to you. Would you please post a
>> Usenet message-ID along with your GG URLs? GG sometimes shows other
>> messages besides the one you have in mind, and sometimes doesn't even
>> show that message, leaving readers to guess which message you're
>> talking about.
>>
>> GG used to have an option to "show original message", which included
>> the Usenet headers. But for the past several months, that option has
>> been greyed out/inactivated. As a registered GG user, I hope your
>> interface provides you with the means to conveniently extract the
>> relevant Usenet ID, which in any case is the appropriate medium of
>> exchange for Usenet messages.
>>
>

>I'm afraid that GG option is also for me greyed out,
>and I haven't found another way yet to retrieve the
> Usenet ID - tried forward and reply, no dice
>
>I'd very much prefer to use Usenet again, but after my third newsreader
>stoped talking to TO pretty much gave up on it - TO is the last of my
>groups still alive, and it seemed not worth the hassle.
>
>If you can think of an easy way to find both IDs, happy to oblige...

I understand. Like evolution, progress doesn't always follow a
straight line. One can only hope GG will start fixing things that are
broke and stop fixing things that aren't.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Looks like I, who use GG exclusively to access t.o., need to step in here
despite the way it dilutes this thread even further than it has
already been diluted in sundry ways.

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 3:51:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 12:30:31 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> >On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 8:01:02?PM UTC+1, jillery wrote:
> >> On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 09:54:23 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> <snip for focus>
> >> >One part of this is the so-called "Hellfire debate", a term coined by the criminologist
> >> >Hirschi. I posted about this quite a while ago here:
> >> >https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/LsfxvUYQARc/m/kLR1FIoeK1IJ

> >> The following has nothing whatever to do with topic under discussion.
> >> Instead, I post a personal request to you. Would you please post a
> >> Usenet message-ID along with your GG URLs? GG sometimes shows other
> >> messages besides the one you have in mind, and sometimes doesn't even
> >> show that message, leaving readers to guess which message you're
> >> talking about.
> >>
> >> GG used to have an option to "show original message", which included
> >> the Usenet headers. But for the past several months, that option has
> >> been greyed out/inactivated.

Actually, that happened several years ago, when GG gave us the "New New Google groups."
In the outrageously false piece of advertising before they foisted it on us,
they claimed they were "keeping all your favorite features." Of course,
by "your" they meant "our".

They might have thought they were safeguarding people's privacy.
Instead, they made it impossible to track down where spam (and worse) was coming from,
and who was actually posting under an unfamiliar new nym.

> > > As a registered GG user, I hope your
> >> interface provides you with the means to conveniently extract the
> >> relevant Usenet ID, which in any case is the appropriate medium of
> >> exchange for Usenet messages.

Is Burkhard referring to the Message-ID? Loss of access to that
forces me to add to every use of an url the date and time,
and Subject line. That's because of what the folks in charge of Wikipedia
call "url rot." A horrible example: when netscape got picked up by another company,
almost all Netscape urls became instantly worthless.

And to think that, once, I thought "Netscape" was synonymous with the part of the internet
that was accessible to the public!

> >>
> >
> >I'm afraid that GG option is also for me greyed out,
> >and I haven't found another way yet to retrieve the
> > Usenet ID - tried forward and reply, no dice
> >
> >I'd very much prefer to use Usenet again, but after my third newsreader
> >stoped talking to TO pretty much gave up on it - TO is the last of my
> >groups still alive, and it seemed not worth the hassle.
> >
> >If you can think of an easy way to find both IDs, happy to oblige...

> I understand. Like evolution, progress doesn't always follow a
> straight line. One can only hope GG will start fixing things that are
> broke and stop fixing things that aren't.

A forlorn hope, I fear. I shudder to think what unbroke things they will fix in
the New New New Google Groups. To paraphrase a toast in "Fiddler on the Roof":
may the good Lord keep it far, far from the present time!

One question, though: why don't you tell how to access TO on the newsreader/netserver you use?
You keep providing us with Message-IDs that you can apparently access but which
are useless to us GG users.


Peter Nyikos

PS Today, instead of a small window when I clicked on "Link' to get the url of a post,
I got a whole new tab for this. After a few moments of worry, I tested the url
on a new tab having nothing to do with that one, and it did take me to the right post.

[André G. Isaak]

On 2023-08-03 18:13, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> One question, though: why don't you tell how to access TO on the newsreader/netserver you use?
> You keep providing us with Message-IDs that you can apparently access but which
> are useless to us GG users.

You can lookup messages by message ID at:

http://al.howardknight.net

(make sure you include the angle brackets)

André

--
To email remove 'invalid' & replace 'gm' with well known Google mail
service.

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[snip]

>
> Is Burkhard referring to the Message-ID? Loss of access to that
> forces me to add to every use of an url the date and time,
> and Subject line. That's because of what the folks in charge of Wikipedia
> call "url rot." A horrible example: when netscape got picked up by another company,
> almost all Netscape urls became instantly worthless.
>
> And to think that, once, I thought "Netscape" was synonymous with the part of the internet
> that was accessible to the public!
>

Those were the good ole days before Internet Exploder.

Marc Andreessen seems to have gone batshit a bit:

https://apnews.com/article/742805510402

[jillery]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 17:13:04 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Looks like I, who use GG exclusively to access t.o., need to step in here
>despite the way it dilutes this thread even further than it has
>already been diluted in sundry ways.

Yes, some posters just don't appreciate the pearls you cast before
them.

No, jillery is.

>Loss of access to that
>forces me to add to every use of an url the date and time,
>and Subject line. That's because of what the folks in charge of Wikipedia
>call "url rot." A horrible example: when netscape got picked up by another company,
>almost all Netscape urls became instantly worthless.
>
>And to think that, once, I thought "Netscape" was synonymous with the part of the internet
>that was accessible to the public!
>> >>
>> >
>> >I'm afraid that GG option is also for me greyed out,
>> >and I haven't found another way yet to retrieve the
>> > Usenet ID - tried forward and reply, no dice
>> >
>> >I'd very much prefer to use Usenet again, but after my third newsreader
>> >stoped talking to TO pretty much gave up on it - TO is the last of my
>> >groups still alive, and it seemed not worth the hassle.
>> >
>> >If you can think of an easy way to find both IDs, happy to oblige...
>
>> I understand. Like evolution, progress doesn't always follow a
>> straight line. One can only hope GG will start fixing things that are
>> broke and stop fixing things that aren't.
>
>A forlorn hope, I fear. I shudder to think what unbroke things they will fix in
>the New New New Google Groups. To paraphrase a toast in "Fiddler on the Roof":
>may the good Lord keep it far, far from the present time!
>
>One question, though: why don't you tell how to access TO on the newsreader/netserver you use?

Since you asked, jillery and others have done so many times in the
past. You ignored them. You're welcome.

>You keep providing us with Message-IDs that you can apparently access but which
>are useless to us GG users.

Usenet message-ids used to be useful to GG users. Currently they are
not. Perhaps someday the GG gods will smile upon you again.

>Peter Nyikos
>
>PS Today, instead of a small window when I clicked on "Link' to get the url of a post,
>I got a whole new tab for this. After a few moments of worry, I tested the url
>on a new tab having nothing to do with that one, and it did take me to the right post.

[jillery]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 19:58:28 -0600, André G. Isaak <agi...@gm.invalid>
wrote:

>On 2023-08-03 18:13, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> One question, though: why don't you tell how to access TO on the newsreader/netserver you use?
>> You keep providing us with Message-IDs that you can apparently access but which
>> are useless to us GG users.
>
>You can lookup messages by message ID at:
>
>http://al.howardknight.net
>
>(make sure you include the angle brackets)
>
>André

The above is a useful tool indeed for the case described above.
However and to no surprise, the thread involved the reverse case,
where the Usenet message-id is unknown.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:

> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>
> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
>
> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.

The url for it:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/
Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:

Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.

Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

...

At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.

Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because we are all flawed and have all messed up. The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.

Of course these are huge claims and demand evidence. I have tried to put some of that evidence together in Gunning for God. published by Kregel. Also see my website johnlennox.org.


>
> Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 8/4/23 4:33 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
> so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:
>
>> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
>> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>>
>> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
>> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
>> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
>>
>> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
>> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
>> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
>
> The url for it:
> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/
> Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
>
> Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.

Boy, Scientific American sure has gone downhill since the last time I
saw it. I remember that it used to have all these cool articles about
science. And now it features jejune philosophy that, bonus, is only
slightly relevant to the supposed topic, which if I recall was "taking
the possibility of an afterlife seriously". Perhaps I misunderstood. I
thought it was supposed to be about a serious consideration of its
plausibility, but all it seems to be, surprisingly, is about whether it
would feel good to believe in it, or whether believing it would have a
salutary effect on otherwise nasty people.

As for the claims above, I respond "Euthyphro", which is all that should
be necessary.

> Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

So the argument for an afterlife is that it would be nice if there were
one? That's taking it seriously? Seriously?

> At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.

Doesn't that just put the responsibility on us to provide as much
justice as we can right here rather than in the secure believe that it
all works out in the end? That, in fact, sounds like a better impetus to
proper behavior than pie in the sky by and by.

> Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because we are all flawed and have all messed up. The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.

And you're sure this comes from Scientific American?

> Of course these are huge claims and demand evidence. I have tried to put some of that evidence together in Gunning for God. published by Kregel. Also see my website johnlennox.org.

Does any of that seem credible to you? Are you not in fact at last count
90% atheist? Is wanting to believe something really a good reason to
suppose that it's true?

[Burkhard]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
> so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:
> > I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> > I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
> >
> > The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> > a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> > "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
> >
> > The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> > places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> > a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
> The url for it:
> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/

Started to read it and found the re-warmed and utterly awful Plantinga argument
against the ToE. (what do you think is the chances of reproductive
success of someone who believes gravity is optional?)
I did mot give me much hope for the rest.

> Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
>
> Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.
>
> Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

Well, yes and no. First, as an argument for the afterlife it is, well, not
much of an argument at all. It says essentially: it would be ever so nice
to have an afterlife where the wicked can be punished and their victims
rewarded.

But unless there is a hidden mayor premise of the form: "if something is nice it is
also true" this really does not fly.

Second, one can make the argument the other way round: as long as the promise
of justice in an afterlife is dangled in front of people's noses, their motivation to change
things in this life are diminished. This is particularly true for crimes that are so big they
don't count as crimes: SO your employer works you to death in dangerous conditions for a
hunger wage? How wicked of him, rest assured he'll suffer for his greed once he is death,
while you'll have a whale of a time then. So really no need to unionise in this life, is there?
Seeing how short it will be, what with all the coal dust you've been inhaling ever since you
first went down the pit age 10....

Or as someone else has put it (slightly updated)
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and
a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the Aspirin of the people

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call
on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,
in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

>
> ...
>
> At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.

Maybe - but then better an imperfect justice in the hand than an "ultimate" justice
in the bush.

And is it even true? There are a number of "secular" theories of ultimate justice, going back
to Epicurus or Plato: there the evildoer "with necessity" harms himself, by failing to be
the person they could have been, and at. cost to his happiness.

There is also psychological basis for this - the "warm feeling": we get when doing good, the anxiety
when doing bad etc. It is at least not impossible to think of a world where the cost
of evil actions are intrinsically higher than any gain they can give to the perpetrator

>
> Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because we are all flawed and have all messed up.

I'll find this extremely implausible - and before I get accused of having an overly cynical view of
human nature, I think I have the evidence from psychology and anthropology to back me up.

Humans just LOVE the idea of punishment for the wicked. They just divide immediately in their mind
the world in "the wicked" and "me, my friends, and the more agreeable members of my family".
Punishment happens in this view (mostly) to others, and we enjoy inflicting it, do we not just,
sometimes personally mostly in modernity vicariously, , sometimes consensually , mostly of
course not so.

That's why penal populism works, even in times when the objective data shows that crime is decreasing
and incarceration makes things worse. Sure, on one level people realise that "we are all poor
sinners" - which is why concepts such as purgatory play such an important role THEIR evil ways
require eternal hot pokers up the backsy, MY regrettable lack of judgement should get me probation,
or maybe 20 lashes at max. This way we "pay" for the satisfaction of inflicting pain on others with the risk
of a little pain for ourselves, AND can feel good and humble in the process too (...of course I too
am a sinner...) Hell, to misquote Sartre, is full of other people. And nobody thinks of
him/herself seriously as a baddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

We see this in the penal institutions we create in this world: if people realised that the prison they
want to build, or the judicial torture, could one day be inflicted on them our prisons etc through
history would have looked very different. It's typically only the handful of penal abolitionists whose
empathetic reasoning makes them see themselves on the receiving end too.

This us vs them logic of punishment is well studied in the research on penal populism cf e.g.
classically Bottoms, A. (1995). The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing, If one
believes in evolutionary psychology, this may have evolutionary roots - I think the term is
"altruistic punishment" - opting for a system in which meeting out punishment even harms
the punisher
(I myself found Flesch: Comeuppance: Costly signaling, altruistic punishment,
and other biological components quite interesting )

That the "us vs them" logic is also central to divine punishment is particularly obvious when
we consider that more often than not, the most serious punishment is reserved for non-believers
for no other reason that they are non-believers. Indeed, for sola-fide Christians, any harm inflicted
on others during our lifetime is largely irrelevant, determinative for punishment is merely a state of
mind.

>The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity >competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.

Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.

But also an interesting point on the substance. Is this really a vision
of justice that is plausible? Imagine being the victim of a terrible
crime - someone murdering one's family. now it comes to the trial,
and the judge says to the accused: "well, you did it, obviously, but you also
really love me, so that's OK then, off you go."

I'd say most of us would be pissed off by that. Now, when complaining that
the forgiveness stuff should have been our to give (cf e.g. the introduction
of victim impact statements in US criminal law precisely to increase punishment) ,
the judge says "ahh, but in return I forgive YOU that from 1973-1975 you seriously
doubted me, AND in 1984 you fancied your neighbour even though they were
married/of the wrong sex/of the wrong religion.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think the idea of universal reconciliation is a great theological
concept - just not one that one can ground in our desire for justice

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 9:21:03 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/4/23 4:33 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
> > so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:
> >
> >> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> >> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
> >>
> >> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> >> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> >> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
> >>
> >> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> >> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> >> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.

I don't know whether everyone has figured out whom I was referring to when I wrote in my OP,

"two outspoken atheists, one of whom has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need to grow out of;"

But I don't think I am giving away any big secrets when I say the one in the second claus was you, John.

> > The url for it:
> > https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/
> > Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
> >
> > Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.

You make no explicit response to what is written above, but your spiel
does suggest that you do agree with Dawkins.

> Boy, Scientific American sure has gone downhill since the last time I
> saw it. I remember that it used to have all these cool articles about
> science. And now it features jejune philosophy

What's jejune about it? are you being smart-alecky again?

> that, bonus, is only
> slightly relevant to the supposed topic, which if I recall was "taking
> the possibility of an afterlife seriously".

Since you are seldom really serious, you have some excuse for
that illogical-seeming comment, but I still need to see you
try to explain it before I take it seriously.

> Perhaps I misunderstood. I
> thought it was supposed to be about a serious consideration of its
> plausibility,

Moving of goalposts from "possibility" to "plausibility," noted.

> but all it seems to be, surprisingly, is about whether it
> would feel good to believe in it, or whether believing it would have a
> salutary effect on otherwise nasty people.

"seems to be" is consistent with your dismissal of the very
possibility of an afterlife as a fairy tale. You seem to be so steeped in that
dismissal that you come up with "surprisingly" for a very strained
take on what John Lennox wrote.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, believe it or not.
Would you like to see what my first impression of your last bit was?

>
> As for the claims above, I respond "Euthyphro", which is all that should
> be necessary.

Sorry, it's neither necessary nor sufficient. I did an essay for a philosophy class on Euthyphro,
and part of it went about like this:


Euthypro is commonly dismissed as a "blue-nose" and such in the commentaries I've read, but this ignores the significance of his action in punishing his father for his atrocious treatment of a slave.

Euthyphro has shown his compassion for a downtrodden victim, one of the "wretched of the earth",
as Franz Fanon put it.

If one of his disciples happens to browse through an anthology of Plato's dialogues (perhaps to look up some utopian passages in "The Republic"), we may yet live to see the ultimate vindication of poor Euthyphro.

[Ever since New New Google Groups subjected every line to left bias, with only
attribution marks as barriers, I use run-on lines to set quoted material apart,
where before I had indented it.]

> > Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

> So the argument for an afterlife is that it would be nice if there were
> one? That's taking it seriously? Seriously?

Thanks for setting my mind at ease for what some might call "blowing your cover" -- otherwise,
some readers might be puzzled as to where you are coming from.

I have been appalled since pre-adolescence about the indescribable suffering of untold billions.
In early adolescence, I read what in some ways was the most searing account,
_A_World_Apart_, by Gustav Herling. Another day I might quote a fine preface
by Bertrand Russell, but I have a lot on my plate today, so I will just make a little
excerpt the Quote of the Day. The book is about the Soviet slave labor camps,
and it far outdoes Sozhenitsyn's _Archipelag_Gulag_ in the intimate detail of one of them.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to today, or Monday at the latest, after
my usual weekend break from Usenet posting.


Peter Nyikos

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a book as this one,
to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realize that
it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not say that to understand
is to pardon; there are things which for my part I cannot pardon. But I do say that
to understand is necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented.

-- from the preface by Bertrand Russell, O.M. to _A_World_Apart_.

[John Harshman]

On 8/4/23 10:07 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 9:21:03 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/4/23 4:33 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
>>> so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:
>>>
>>>> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
>>>> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>>>>
>>>> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
>>>> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
>>>> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
>>>>
>>>> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
>>>> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
>>>> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
>
> I don't know whether everyone has figured out whom I was referring to when I wrote in my OP,
>
> "two outspoken atheists, one of whom has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need to grow out of;"
>
> But I don't think I am giving away any big secrets when I say the one in the second claus was you, John.

Why should anyone care who?

>>> The url for it:
>>> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/
>>> Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
>>>
>>> Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.
>
> You make no explicit response to what is written above, but your spiel
> does suggest that you do agree with Dawkins.

I don't actually know what Dawkins is trying to say there, so I can't
tell if I agree with it. Possibly it's a quote mine.

>> Boy, Scientific American sure has gone downhill since the last time I
>> saw it. I remember that it used to have all these cool articles about
>> science. And now it features jejune philosophy
>
> What's jejune about it? are you being smart-alecky again?

Patience.

>> that, bonus, is only
>> slightly relevant to the supposed topic, which if I recall was "taking
>> the possibility of an afterlife seriously".
>
> Since you are seldom really serious, you have some excuse for
> that illogical-seeming comment, but I still need to see you
> try to explain it before I take it seriously.

Again, patience.

>> Perhaps I misunderstood. I
>> thought it was supposed to be about a serious consideration of its
>> plausibility,
>
> Moving of goalposts from "possibility" to "plausibility," noted.

Isn't that what serious consideration of possibility involves? Both of
your initial posts are not about the possibility of an afterlife.
They're about the supposed attractions of believing in one, rather than
reasons to suppose there is one. If that's what you were trying to talk
about, the thread is mistitled.

>> but all it seems to be, surprisingly, is about whether it
>> would feel good to believe in it, or whether believing it would have a
>> salutary effect on otherwise nasty people.
>
> "seems to be" is consistent with your dismissal of the very
> possibility of an afterlife as a fairy tale. You seem to be so steeped in that
> dismissal that you come up with "surprisingly" for a very strained
> take on what John Lennox wrote.

???

> I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, believe it or not.
> Would you like to see what my first impression of your last bit was?

Again, you hint at some kind of response rather than actually
responding. That's one of your most annoying habits.

>> As for the claims above, I respond "Euthyphro", which is all that should
>> be necessary.
>
> Sorry, it's neither necessary nor sufficient. I did an essay for a philosophy class on Euthyphro,
> and part of it went about like this:
>
>
> Euthypro is commonly dismissed as a "blue-nose" and such in the commentaries I've read, but this ignores the significance of his action in punishing his father for his atrocious treatment of a slave.
>
> Euthyphro has shown his compassion for a downtrodden victim, one of the "wretched of the earth",
> as Franz Fanon put it.
>
> If one of his disciples happens to browse through an anthology of Plato's dialogues (perhaps to look up some utopian passages in "The Republic"), we may yet live to see the ultimate vindication of poor Euthyphro.
>
> [Ever since New New Google Groups subjected every line to left bias, with only
> attribution marks as barriers, I use run-on lines to set quoted material apart,
> where before I had indented it.]

None of this seems relevant to the point. Let me be clear: the central
point of mentioning Euthyphro is that it shows that, if there is an
objective basis of morality, it can't be God. If God commands it because
it's just, there is a standard by which to judge God's commands; if it's
just because God commands it, then morality is based on whim. And this
does indeed show Lennox's musings to be jejune.

>>> Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.
>
>> So the argument for an afterlife is that it would be nice if there were
>> one? That's taking it seriously? Seriously?
>
> Thanks for setting my mind at ease for what some might call "blowing your cover" -- otherwise,
> some readers might be puzzled as to where you are coming from.
>
> I have been appalled since pre-adolescence about the indescribable suffering of untold billions.
> In early adolescence, I read what in some ways was the most searing account,
> _A_World_Apart_, by Gustav Herling. Another day I might quote a fine preface
> by Bertrand Russell, but I have a lot on my plate today, so I will just make a little
> excerpt the Quote of the Day. The book is about the Soviet slave labor camps,
> and it far outdoes Sozhenitsyn's _Archipelag_Gulag_ in the intimate detail of one of them.

Again, you merely hint obscurely at whatever point you may have. Is it
too much to ask for you to actually say what you mean? If your argument
is not as I have claimed, please clarify what it actually is.

Would you say that giving people hope by providing them with a delusion
is a good thing? Would you say that this is a good reason why we should
take that delusion seriously? We could of course argue about whether it
is indeed a delusion, which would at last be on-topic for the thread
title. But we should first settle why we aren't already talking about that.

> Remainder deleted, to be replied to today, or Monday at the latest, after
> my usual weekend break from Usenet posting.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>
> QUOTE OF THE DAY
>
> Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a book as this one,
> to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realize that
> it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not say that to understand
> is to pardon; there are things which for my part I cannot pardon. But I do say that
> to understand is necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented.
>
> -- from the preface by Bertrand Russell, O.M. to _A_World_Apart_.

Is that intended somehow to be relevant to the topic? If so, how?

[John Harshman]

Peter more or less ignored everything I said that repeated most of what
you say here. It will be interesting to see how/if he responds to you.

Regarding justice: How can eternal damnation be considered justice for
any finite crime? How can eternal paradise be considered justice for
repentance of past crimes, and how are future crimes precluded?
Especially so since our tendency to commit crimes is ostensibly the
result of our creator's actions, i.e. "free will". The whole idea just
doesn't hold together, and Peter's customary appeal to C.S. Lewis will
not help.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

focusing
>> [quoted, I think]
> >, Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because
> >. we are all flawed and have all messed up.

I isolated this part because of a particular interest in the whole "punishment"
aspect. I'm especially interested in it relative to the "nurture v. nature" question.

You are up on some of the modern analysis around this question, so what,
briefly (I don't wish to distract you too much), do you think? And feel free
to drop a __few__ starter refs if they are handy.

My own anecdotal experiences with others, and some haphazard reading,
is that children who were raised with more stick than carrot retain a far
greater "need" for punishment within their internal sense of justice. There's
a horrible correlate about child-beaters begetting child-beaters. That
would fit my biases about childhood development from a perspective
of neurophysiology and the equivalent of imprinting.

The simplistic psychological experiments have looked at how upset people
get when somebody gets away with something unpunished, and then have
looked for associations/correlations to the level of upset. Of course, many
get very upset by the idea that theirs is not some Platonic Ideal of justice
and was somehow imprinted upon them.

Perhaps this even feeds back into warping people's perceptions of 'virtues'
associated with beliefs in eternal damnation.

And somehow I have to leave with
https://youtu.be/MxYsi5Y-xOQ?t=28

[Burkhard]

There is an interesting (well, for people who are into history of ideas :o) ) connection to
TO here William "The Watchmaker" Paley gives a rather interesting answer to this that
also implicates the afterlife.. For him, there is both an objective basis for morality that
does not need god, AND a role for God to play.

Runs like this: (rule) utilitarianism gives an objective foundation for ethics. Every ethical
problem can be solved on purely secular terms using it. Indeed, he says explicitly there is
nothing in the Bible that is of any use for political or legal theory and practice. BUT humans
are also weak willed, and recognising what they ought to do, contra Plato, is not enough to
make them do it. That's where God is needed, not as source or morality but merely
as its enforcer. By altering the decision matrix in such a way that the negative utilities
(hell) become abundantly clear, people will fall in line.

And boy is our man punitive... England had seen in the decades when he was writing a
massive increase in the use of the death penalty - More and more crimes, especially
crimes against property , attracted it (and judges were less and less willing to use their
discretionary power of mercy) . This led to a whole host of people, across religious and
political divides, write against it and arguing either for abolition altogether, or limiting it
to murder. (William Blackstone, William Eden, or Samuel Romilly e.g. bringing the
argument of of the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria to the UK)

Paley was having none of this and wrote passionately in defence of the death penalty for
property crimes - and his influence was enough to help delay any reform for several decades.

In your reply to me in another post, you make the argument that infinite punishment
can't be fair for finite crimes - but that assumes that "just deserts" and "punishment must
fit the crime" are requirements of justice. How very Montesquieu of you, whatever next,
eating frogs and storming the Bastille? (Ah Ca ira, ca ira, ca ira) ;o) At the time, this
was quite a radical idea - the predominant view saw punishment as deterrence only, and
there it made sense to be particularly severe on low level property crime: a murderer killing
in range or passion does not engage in rational deliberation, a thief might...

There is an interesting comparison to be made, which speaks a bit to the issue of afterlife
and punishment, ultimately a question of philosophical temperament. The Christian
clergyman Paley build his secular utilitarianism on fear and punishment (or indeed terror)
80 years later, the agnostic Mill would use Bible quotes to propose a utilitarianism build
on an inherent human instinct for benevolence:

"The happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not
the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness
and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a
disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we
read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to
love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian
morality."

[Burkhard]

You are US based, aren't you? In that case arguably Murray Strauss and Denise Donnelly
Beating the Devil Out of Them Corporal Punishment in American Children, if you
haven't read it already - it is a bit aged now (2001) but still very good.

A somewhat later and more focussed paper is Dominique A. Simons, Sandy K. Wurtele,
Relationships between parents’ use of corporal punishment and their children's
endorsement of spanking and hitting other children, Child Abuse & Neglect,
Volume 34, Issue 9,2010,

and an even more recent and comprehensive update for the empirical side is
Gershoff, and Grogan-Kaylor, (2016). Spanking and child outcomes:
Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of family psychology, 30(4), 453.

is that the sort of thing you have in mind? I'll get this stuff mainly from my
next door colleagues from the Youth in transition crime study

>
> My own anecdotal experiences with others, and some haphazard reading,
> is that children who were raised with more stick than carrot retain a far
> greater "need" for punishment within their internal sense of justice. There's
> a horrible correlate about child-beaters begetting child-beaters. That
> would fit my biases about childhood development from a perspective
> of neurophysiology and the equivalent of imprinting.

There's definitely an element of that I'd say, but also probably more complicated.
Attitudes to punishment seem also to come in "fashions" or circles - the
antiauthoritarian approach to education of my parents a rejection of their
parents and education under Nazism, which in turn was a rejection of the
more laissez faire attitude of the interwar years. And now my students are
on the whole more punitive than me or their parents. But that is a personal
impression tbh, nothing I could back with hard data. Though the Paley post
I put in reply to John had the same pattern - a period of liberalisation of the law
was followed by a more punitive generation, which was then replaced by the
reforms of Bentham etc

>
> The simplistic psychological experiments have looked at how upset people
> get when somebody gets away with something unpunished, and then have
> looked for associations/correlations to the level of upset. Of course, many
> get very upset by the idea that theirs is not some Platonic Ideal of justice
> and was somehow imprinted upon them.
>
> Perhaps this even feeds back into warping people's perceptions of 'virtues'
> associated with beliefs in eternal damnation.
>
> And somehow I have to leave with
> https://youtu.be/MxYsi5Y-xOQ?t=28

gets to you, doesn't she? I' On a more cheerful note, I once had a bet with a colleague
who of us would get more Benatar references into discussion at a pretty high
powered Nato meeting on armed autonomous robots. I won! :o)

[Burkhard]

Following from my earlier reply: when one has a theory other than "just deserts" which,
while intuitively plausible, is not the only game in town,

Apart from that, probably not - which is why there have always been attempts to deal with it
in different ways. Even within Christianity, some positions always denied it, argued it
has no biblical basis, and instead there is only a temporal "purification" as in Judaism.
Diodorus of Tarsus e.g.
another position is that the "eternal" punishment is based on a mistranslation of greek
"aion" which is a fixed period of time, often "a lifetime", into Latin aeternam. And from
there it's all Augustine's fault.

Then there are all sorts of forms of universal reconciliation positions - there is a hell, but it is empty.

Finally, and that's the position Peter misattributes to Lewis, there is the "voluntary
continuation" argument in various forms. What they have in common is that it is ultimately
down to the person in hell how long they want to stay there In some forms, that means
their "crime", rejection/rebellion against God out of pride, simply continues. So the punishment
is only infinite if the crime is too. In other forms, it is a desire for punishment by the souls in
hell - that is beautifully done in the Sandman comics, where people create their own hells

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 5:06:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 9:31:03 PM UTC+1, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

thx, and ...

> > And somehow I have to leave with
> > https://youtu.be/MxYsi5Y-xOQ?t=28

.

> gets to you, doesn't she? I' On a more cheerful note, I once had a bet with a colleague
> who of us would get more Benatar references into discussion at a pretty high
> powered Nato meeting on armed autonomous robots. I won! :o)

.
I trust you hit them with your best shot.

[John Harshman]

I think my argument still works. Hell and death are not symmetrical.
Death in the absence of Hell deprives the malefactor of a finite number
of years of life, so there is some possibility of proportionality. But
Hell is eternal and thus infinite. No scale of punishment could
conceivably be matched. Of course, deterrence, as per Marie de Medici,
doesn't seem to work all that well, even for crimes of calculation. And
"anecdote" is not the singular of data.

[Ernest Major]

On 03/08/2023 11:47, Burkhard wrote:

> On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 1:46:01 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
>> believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
>> one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
>> what one has done in this life.
>

> Well, there is a highly credible eyewitness account from near my place,
> Eilean Chaluim Chille, with impeccable Christian
> credentials who reported back:
>
> Heaven is not waiting
> for the good and pure and gentle
> there's no punishment eternal
> there's no hell for the ungodly
> nor is god as you imagine
>
> there's no hell to spite the sinners
> there's no heaven for the blessed
> nor is god as you imagine
>
> And who'd doubt the words of an abbot and catholic saint
> who had literally seen it all?
>
>>
>> I only know of three exceptions: two outspoken atheists, one of whom

>> has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need

>> to grow out of; and myself. I think that an afterlife is improbable,
>> especially one of the specific sort I described, but I take both possibilities very seriously.
>>

>> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
>> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>>
>> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
>> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
>> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
>>
>> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
>> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
>> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
>>
>>

>> Peter Nyikos
>

The thought crosses my mind that if Peter is looking for a utilitarian
justification for promoting belief in an afterlife as a deterrent to
immoral actions in this life he would be better promoting Hinduism and
karma-driven reincarnation than Christianity - Christian doctrine is not
big on Hell as a proportional punishment for deeds. Though I note that
it doesn't seem to be any more effective in India than it is in America.

--
alias Ernest Major

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 6:46:03 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
>[...]

> > On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 1:46:01 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> >> believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
> >> one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
> >> what one has done in this life.

Did you pay much attention to how general that "specific" is?
It covers at least four of the five religions that most Americans have
learned of equally well: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Buddhism is the ambiguous one: it depends on how much the concept
of "rebirth" differs from the Hindu concept of reincarnation.
[Of course, its founder was agnostic about the supernatural.]

[...]

> >>
> >> I only know of three exceptions: two outspoken atheists, one of whom
> >> has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need
> >> to grow out of; and myself. I think that an afterlife is improbable,
> >> especially one of the specific sort I described, but I take both possibilities very seriously.
> >>
> >> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> >> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
> >>
> >> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> >> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> >> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
> >>
> >> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> >> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> >> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
> >>
> >>
> >> Peter Nyikos
> >
>
> The thought crosses my mind that if Peter is looking for a utilitarian
> justification for promoting belief in an afterlife as a deterrent to
> immoral actions in this life

That's only part of it, of course: John Lennox puts very little emphasis on it
in the part I quoted, and he isn't specific about its nature.

I lean towards the concept of heaven and hell in C.S. Lewis's _The Great Divorce_,
where hell is not so bad that it will deter everyone who is having too much fun being evil.
Still, the picture it paints of hell, and the big obstacles to getting out of it,
would deter perhaps the majority of people who believe in such an afterlife.

> he would be better promoting Hinduism and
> karma-driven reincarnation than Christianity

Both are implicit in what I wrote, and I take that part of Hinduism seriously.
I get the impression that most people at this time [1] in the USA
would take that kind of afterlife more seriously than the traditional Christian,
Jewish, or Mohammedan forms.

[1] Our society is more secularized now than any time in our history,
and the trend gives every sign of continuing. The Catholic Church is especially
in a bad way: the attendance at Mass by young single adult men is vanishingly small,
because the emphasis on "vocations" has only shifted in the last two or three decades
from the word being synonymous with "religious and priestly vocations"
to spottily including "the married life." Too little, too late for the demographic free fall
to secularism to be arrested any time in the next decade or two.

> - Christian doctrine is not
> big on Hell as a proportional punishment for deeds.

_The Great Divorce_ is heterodox, but not heretical, and is
very much proportional, although Lewis plays down that
fact for dramatic reasons.

>Though I note that
> it doesn't seem to be any more effective in India than it is in America.

Unless you've lived in India [I haven't even visited there], I don't think
"seem" carries much weight.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

Why do you lean toward that concept? Is it just because you find it more
pleasant to contemplate? Or do you have any sort of evidence for one
position or another? If the former, is that a valid reason for belief,
or even for inclination?

>> he would be better promoting Hinduism and
>> karma-driven reincarnation than Christianity
>
> Both are implicit in what I wrote, and I take that part of Hinduism seriously.
> I get the impression that most people at this time [1] in the USA
> would take that kind of afterlife more seriously than the traditional Christian,
> Jewish, or Mohammedan forms.

Why do you take it seriously?

> [1] Our society is more secularized now than any time in our history,
> and the trend gives every sign of continuing. The Catholic Church is especially
> in a bad way: the attendance at Mass by young single adult men is vanishingly small,
> because the emphasis on "vocations" has only shifted in the last two or three decades
> from the word being synonymous with "religious and priestly vocations"
> to spottily including "the married life." Too little, too late for the demographic free fall
> to secularism to be arrested any time in the next decade or two.

Do you consider that a bad thing?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It's incredible -- simply incredible -- how Harshman and Burkhard have been
acting as though my emphasis were on arguing for the existence of an afterlife
that is primitive evangelical Christian. Perhaps my reply to Ernest Major this evening
will start to part the clouds of that misconception.

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
> > so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:

> > > I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> > > I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
> > >
> > > The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> > > a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> > > "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
> > >
> > > The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> > > places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> > > a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
> > The url for it:
> > https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/

> Started to read it and found the re-warmed and utterly awful Plantinga argument
> against the ToE. (what do you think is the chances of reproductive
> success of someone who believes gravity is optional?)

You are too inchoate here for me to follow you. It reads like you
are channeling Hemidactylus doing his thing in the midst of another context.

> I did mot give me much hope for the rest.

> > Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
> >
> > Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.
> >
> > Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

> Well, yes and no. First, as an argument for the afterlife it is, well, not
> much of an argument at all. It says essentially: it would be ever so nice
> to have an afterlife where the wicked can be punished and their victims
> rewarded.

The only problem is that you are dealing with child-level ideas about
what the way these things would play out. Have you ever read _The Great Divorce_?
It's far from perfect, just as Plato's "Gorgias" is far from perfect, yet
both can awaken some slumbering virtues in someone who does not have
"a soul so dead, who never to himself has said..." [Do you know the rest?
a minister once gave a very different sequel after substituting "herself" for "himself".]

>
> But unless there is a hidden mayor premise of the form: "if something is nice it is
> also true" this really does not fly.

Now you know what I meant up in the preamble.

>
> Second, one can make the argument the other way round: as long as the promise
> of justice in an afterlife is dangled in front of people's noses, their motivation to change
> things in this life are diminished.

That depends on whether one is isolated from a milieu that teaches
about altruism and love of others. Such people will care much more about injustice
than the majority of the regulars who remain in talk.origins after most decent
and halfway decent people have left. I miss them all, and am glad a remnant
still remains.

I wonder whether you understand what I mean by justice. The way you answered
with a narrow legal-system treatise when I asked whether "giving the other guy
the benefit of the doubt" is a well known concept among Germans, makes me wonder
whether you can apply "justice" to everyday behavior, like some of what goes on in talk.origins
and, alas, in sci.bio.paleontology as well.

> This is particularly true for crimes that are so big they
> don't count as crimes: SO your employer works you to death in dangerous conditions for a
> hunger wage? How wicked of him, rest assured he'll suffer for his greed once he is death,

Unless he truly repents, like Ebenezer Scrooge, and mends his ways as much
as possible. For a real-life example, take the person who gave us the film,
"Amazing Grace." He really meant it when he wrote, "saved a wretch like me."

The phony "spirit of Vatican II" caused innumerable Catholic hymnals
to substitute the wishy-washy "saved a-and set me free", leaving it up
in the air what " I on-once wa-as lost, but no-ow a-am found" is all about.

> while you'll have a whale of a time then.

Not I. It really irritates me when evangelicals ask would-be volunteers for
some of their charitable causes whether they know they will go to heaven
when they die. Much more generally, I am irritated by them asking
random people they meet, "Are you saved?"

Joan of Arc had the real Christian attitude. When asked whether she
was in a state of grace, she answered:
"If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there."

>
>So really no need to unionise in this life, is there?
> Seeing how short it will be, what with all the coal dust you've been inhaling ever since you
> first went down the pit age 10....

You posted this before I answered Harshman for the first time, so you
are excused for having made these silly assumptions about me.

Your cynicism reminds me of the reporter in "Inherit the Wind." The actor who
played him in the movie starring Spencer Tracy and Frederick March was poorly
cast for the role. When I was an undergraduate, my college had a drama
club that had just the right kind of person for the role when they were putting on the play.
He was just as unflappable and cocky as you and Harshman are in your roles here in talk.origins.


Sorry to quit on you so early in your spiel, but duty calls.

See you Monday.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 8/4/23 7:14 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> It's incredible -- simply incredible -- how Harshman and Burkhard have been
> acting as though my emphasis were on arguing for the existence of an afterlife
> that is primitive evangelical Christian. Perhaps my reply to Ernest Major this evening
> will start to part the clouds of that misconception.

Are you in fact arguing for any sort of afterlife at all? So far you
only seem to be arguing, at second hand, for the emotional and/or
political advantages of having someone believe in it. And here, once
more, you indulge in your habit of hinting at the existence of an answer
without actually stating it.

I doubt he does. I certainly don't. Another little hint dispensed, no
real response made.

Another hint at a potential answer somewhere else, another absence of
anything here. Don't you see that this approach is counterproductive?

[DB Cates]

On 2023-08-04 12:46 PM, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/4/23 10:07 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 9:21:03 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>> On 8/4/23 4:33 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4,
>>>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

[snip] -

>>>>> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
>>>>> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
>>>>> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
>>

No it didn't It appeared as a guest response (John Lennox) to a blog
post (opinion piece by John Horgan - a regular contributor to SciAm)
hosted by Scientific American at their website. Not a SciAm article in
the magazine, not editorial oversight.

[snip]

>>>> The url for it:
>>>> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/

[snip]

>>> Boy, Scientific American sure has gone downhill since the last time I
>>> saw it. I remember that it used to have all these cool articles about
>>> science. And now it features jejune philosophy

[big snip]
IMHO still nearly full of good science articles.
--
--
Don Cates ("he's a cunning rascal" PN)

[Burkhard]

Sure, but I was addressing only the Euthyphro dilemma here, not your other criticism.
I think Paley's answer is quite original, and not just radical (for theologians, for his
time) but radical in the way one would not expect from the Darwin debate: he
essentially makes an almost Darwin type argument: Darwin: God is not needed for
the day-to-day running of the biological world , or for the explanation of individual features
of a an organism or species, order comes through an optimisation process bottom up, in
small, individual interactions. God may however have set the general laws that make this
possible at the very beginning. Paley: God is not needed for running society on a day to
day business, or for the explanation of individual moral precepts. Social order comes
through an optimisation process of small individual interactions. God was needed
however for putting an enforcement/encouragement matrix in place at the very end
when Hell was created.

That does not deal with any issues of justice in terms of "matching punishment". Paley
discusses this too (and here tbh I have to rely a bit on memory) . The first thing to note
is as I said elsethread, he simply does not frame it as a "just desert" issue, the question
is general efficiency. He is a very consistent in his utilitarianism.

Having extreme punishment for a small number of offenders, or maybe even just the
threat of such punishment, saves millions of others (both potential
perpetrators and their victims) . That makes it maybe not "just", but justifiable. He was
a contemporary of the 1. Duke of Wellington who would later justify his particularly
harsch punishment of his soldiers, lashing for even the most minor transgression,
by pointing out to his interlocutor that Wellington's division had the lowest number of
hangings. That is very much the Paley mindset.

You can criticise this on empirical grounds, and my guess is that he'd have accepted this,
if you have the data
He (again IIRC) did not particularly like the idea of an eternal hell, and while not explicitly giving
up on that notion gets as close as he could risk - he was Latitudinarian or at least Latitudinarian
sympathiser - as conservative he was on social and political issues, he was as liberal on
theological ones (big on religious tolerance e.g.)

> >>> <snip>

[Burkhard]

On Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 3:16:03 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> It's incredible -- simply incredible -- how Harshman and Burkhard have been
> acting as though my emphasis were on arguing for the existence of an afterlife
> that is primitive evangelical Christian.

That's because both of the texts you posted are doing this. We addressed the texts,
not what you may or may not believe in addition or apart from them.

Perhaps my reply to Ernest Major this evening
> will start to part the clouds of that misconception.
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > I had planned to post this late last evening, but I had too much trouble finding it,
> > > so I'm posting it early in the morning. First, some context:
>
> > > > I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> > > > I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
> > > >
> > > > The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> > > > a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> > > > "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
> > > >
> > > > The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
> > > > places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
> > > > a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
> > > The url for it:
> > > https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/
>
> > Started to read it and found the re-warmed and utterly awful Plantinga argument
> > against the ToE. (what do you think is the chances of reproductive
> > success of someone who believes gravity is optional?)
> You are too inchoate here for me to follow you. It reads like you
> are channeling Hemidactylus doing his thing in the midst of another context.

I did not want to derail the discussion by picking up on a point that had nothing to do
with the afterlife. As Plantinga's argument comes up frequently on TO, and has been
addressed at length over the years by PZ, John Wilkins, me and others, I thought nothing
but a quick reminder was needed. But as these were discussion others were having, you
might not have paid attention. In a nutshell, Plantinga assumes that natural selection is not
or rarely truth tracking, (holding true beliefs is on average increasing an organisms
reproductive success)

Simple counterexamples show this to be false. If A realises that objects always
accelerate towards the ground, and B thinks gravity is optional and may or may
not work, in entirely random ways, then A is more likely to survive in the long run than
B, especially if both live near a cliff. Same if A correctly sees a sable tooth tiger as a big
ferocious and dangerous thing, whereas a genetic defect that affects B's size
perception makes him see sabre tooth tigers as really small and cuddly.

There were a lot of high profile responses to Plantinga along these lines, e.g. by
Sober. That Lennox cites Plantinga but seems entirely unaware of the discussion
that followed shows that he really should not dabble with philosophy and stick to math.

> > I did mot give me much hope for the rest.
>
> > > Due to the length of the article, I'm only posting two excerpts:
> > >
> > > Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.
> > >
> > > Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.
>
> > Well, yes and no. First, as an argument for the afterlife it is, well, not
> > much of an argument at all. It says essentially: it would be ever so nice
> > to have an afterlife where the wicked can be punished and their victims
> > rewarded.
> The only problem is that you are dealing with child-level ideas about
> what the way these things would play out.

Blame the author you cite for this

>Have you ever read _The Great Divorce_?

Now I'm really worried about your memory, (again). We discussed it not that
long ago. I argued, and showed from the text, that your interpretation of it
renders it incoherent. You explained this by Lewis just not being a very good
writer and using bad illustrations for the point he wanted to make. I then showed
that your interpretation also contradicts the last chapter directly, and things
Lewis said in his explicitly theological writing.

With other words, you totally misread the Great Divorce, your vision of Hell is not Lewis'

> It's far from perfect, just as Plato's "Gorgias" is far from perfect, yet
> both can awaken some slumbering virtues in someone who does not have
> "a soul so dead, who never to himself has said..." [Do you know the rest?
> a minister once gave a very different sequel after substituting "herself" for "himself".]

Just to get this right, you are asking me if I know a poem by one of the greatest
Scottish writers, praised for its accurate depiction of 16th century Borders culture,
that every school child here has to learn by heart and which is a pean to
Scottish nationalism (O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!) ? Just to
make sure you are not joking....

> > But unless there is a hidden mayor premise of the form: "if something is nice it is
> > also true" this really does not fly.
> Now you know what I meant up in the preamble.
> >
> > Second, one can make the argument the other way round: as long as the promise
> > of justice in an afterlife is dangled in front of people's noses, their motivation to change
> > things in this life are diminished.
> That depends on whether one is isolated from a milieu that teaches
> about altruism and love of others.

Well, this is the point. Your 2 authors seems to fall in just that category, and their
argument for the afterlife is entirely based on it

Such people will care much more about injustice
> than the majority of the regulars who remain in talk.origins after most decent
> and halfway decent people have left. I miss them all, and am glad a remnant
> still remains.



>
> I wonder whether you understand what I mean by justice.

apparently something different form what the texts you cited say. Would it then
not have been better to give your views, than that of people you now seem
to disagree with?

The way you answered
> with a narrow legal-system treatise when I asked whether "giving the other guy
> the benefit of the doubt" is a well known concept among Germans,

You mean I chose to interpret your ad hominem in a way that turned it into something
that can be rationally answered with actual data and facts, rather than appeals at
based stereotypes for which there could not possibly be any evidence?
My bad I guess for giving you the benefit of the doubt there, but hey, it's a German thing,
it's what we do.

John and I answered the arguments from the authors you cited, as you did not
state anything else. If you think they aren't any good, well, i'd agree, but
why post them then?

[Burkhard]

Well, Peter has on a number of occasions expressed his admiration for William
James (I always found this a bit incongruous, but there you are) . James
is of course founding father of philosophical pragmatism, and advocated
a pragmatist definition of truth that equates it with usefulness for a speaker in
a given context. (that sounds a bit worse than it is, there are a couple of
constraints). And on God, he said ""On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of
God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, then it is 'true'."

I don't think James would have meant it in quite the way as Peter's two sources,
but it could be extended in that direction. Or do you remember the discussion about
"ancestor fossils" where Peter wanted to call a given species "ancestor" or at least
"ancestor candidate" because that would make it easier to convince
creationists? And you (and I) argued that there was just not enough evidence for such claims,
and they are hence misleading or outright lies? James called that sort of
belief "Overbelief", beliefs that may have an experiental dimension, but require (much)
more evidence than the holder presently has, or can hope to acquire. Spiritual beliefs
are the archetype for James (he introduced the term in a lecture series on religion
and spiritual experience he gave in Edinburgh - this place obvs. always allows great
thinkers to be at theory absolute best ;o)). But it can also be applied to more mundane beliefs.

[John Harshman]

I would certainly be interested in Peter's reaction to all that. And I
don't think James's definition would work well in science, in the widest
sense of the word.

[Burkhard]

Unfortunately, as with most philosophers, there are multiple ways they can have have been read -
Rorty's James is a very different animal from Haack's James, for instance. My reading is probably
through the lens of later philosophers that I like, especially Quine (even though he
claimed to disagree with James) And somewhat confusingly, many contemporaries and
subsequent philosophers read James that way, but in reply to his critics he defended
both the pragmatist definition of truth, AND claimed to be epistemological realist.

The way I read him, he is congenial to science, and tries to rid it from vestigial philosophical
ideas more than anything else. He began his career after all in the empirical sciences -
teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard - and contributed to some highly influential
theories on the relation between physiological change and emotions (The James - Lang
theory is named after him) . His epistemology is shaped a lot bu his earlier work on cognition,
and how subjects contribute to the creation of what they (report to ) perceive.

That means (again in my reading) "useful" should not be understood as "useful to get
money/fame/laid". At worst, it would be " useful to pass peer review". That is it is useful
for a community of practice (hence pragmatism) to solve the research questions they have
set themselves to the level of granularity that it requires - a concept "has cash value" (another
term he created to the extend it helps them to structure the data. He also promoted a "radical
empiricism" where everyday practice and scientific practice are seen as
overlapping.

Take an old example from TO discussions with John Wilkins, the species concept.
A strong realist would say that there is one and only one structure out there in the worlds
that carves out "species". That means (at most) one of our species conceptions is true,
the others are false. For a Popperian, thy are all probably false but in varying degree approaching
what "the one true conception" would look like. For pluralists and pragmatists like James,
these two are "overbeliefs", over-ambitious philosophical claims that can't be cashed in with evidence.
Instead, a more cautious: they work well for a research field/tradition in solving practical problems
(tells researchers what to do), so that these can have a more fulfilling research practice.
So an environmental scientists may use a different concept from a systematists etc, and as
long it works for them, that's all we can meaningful say, they are true wrt to the various research
traditions and interests, asking for "the TRUE"conception is a bad philosophical relict.

Where you might be the most skeptical about James, he does indeed treat spiritual experience on
a par with any other reported experience. So ultimately there is little difference for him between
reporting "I saw the measurement instrument report a 6", "I had the sense impression of red
in my lower visual field", "I experience hunger, pain, anger" and " I experience being grasped and
held by a superior power in ways that human language is insufficient to describe, but which
is a bit like <being held by a father or mother/unified with the universe/any other religious concept).
We observe that over time and space communities develop a language which enables them to
communicate about this experience, and as a result live lives that they experience as for them
fuller and better. Asking if these are "real", or which one is TRUE, from an external observer perspective
is as futile as asking which species conception , if any, is the TRUE one.

As above, this is my reading of James. Peter's might well differ. The only time we discussed James, I
found his interpretation difficult to reconcile with the text.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I agree with your reading of James. Your post made me go back and browse through "Pragmatism" and "The Meaning of Truth," and one thing I'd forgotten is that James offers the same argument about the equivalence of materialist naturalism and theism/ID that I've been trying to make (in different ways) to Ron and Martin. That is, if you stick with evidence, which is necessarily in the past, then you either say natural laws produced all this or God/ID produced all this, and the only thing you can know about natural laws or God/ID is that they are just such a set of laws or just such a God as to have produced all this. Not much difference, except one of aesthetics and the connotations of words. Actually, I think this argument is a bit unfair to materialist naturalism in the sense that science actually allows you to make predictions about future observations whereas an ID theory that is resolutely agnostic about the designer except to say that the designer is responsible for "all this" really cannot justify making any predictions at all. James does see a difference in the viewpoints in their attitude towards what's coming in the future, ie heat death of the universe versus some kind of spiritual renewal or survival, but no difference if you stick to the past running up to the present instant, which is where all the evidence is.

[John Harshman]

Clearly, I don't have any real understanding of what James meant.
Perhaps nobody does, and perhaps we can take any meaning we find useful.
"Useful", unfortunately, has a host of potential interpretations and all
manner of criteria.

> That means (again in my reading) "useful" should not be understood as "useful to get
> money/fame/laid". At worst, it would be " useful to pass peer review". That is it is useful
> for a community of practice (hence pragmatism) to solve the research questions they have
> set themselves to the level of granularity that it requires - a concept "has cash value" (another
> term he created to the extend it helps them to structure the data. He also promoted a "radical
> empiricism" where everyday practice and scientific practice are seen as
> overlapping.
>
> Take an old example from TO discussions with John Wilkins, the species concept.
> A strong realist would say that there is one and only one structure out there in the worlds
> that carves out "species".

Let me stop you there. I don't think a species realist has to think
there's a single meaning of the word. Bacterial species could be real in
a wholly different way from mammalian species. Some varieties of species
could be real and others unreal, i.e. some taxa could have species and
others could not.

> That means (at most) one of our species conceptions is true,

Or it could mean that at most one could be true in any given case.

> the others are false. For a Popperian, thy are all probably false but in varying degree approaching
> what "the one true conception" would look like. For pluralists and pragmatists like James,
> these two are "overbeliefs", over-ambitious philosophical claims that can't be cashed in with evidence.
> Instead, a more cautious: they work well for a research field/tradition in solving practical problems
> (tells researchers what to do), so that these can have a more fulfilling research practice.
> So an environmental scientists may use a different concept from a systematists etc, and as
> long it works for them, that's all we can meaningful say, they are true wrt to the various research
> traditions and interests, asking for "the TRUE"conception is a bad philosophical relict.

To me, this stretches the idea of truth beyond...usefulness. And it
also, to get back in the general direction of the topic, seems a quite
different idea of what "useful" means than Peter may be applying. (Or
may not; who knows what he actually means by his various coy hints?)

[Mark Isaak]

To Peter, an idea is useful if he can use it to make himself look better
(in his estimation) than someone else.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
> one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
> what one has done in this life.
>

> I only know of three exceptions: two outspoken atheists, one of whom
> has even dismissed an afterlife as a fairy tale that mature adults need
> to grow out of; and myself. I think that an afterlife is improbable,
> especially one of the specific sort I described, but I take both possibilities very seriously.
>
> I will talk more about how I take them seriously later on in this thread.
> I want to introduce two different perspectives on this topic.
>
> The first, from a classic biography by Aldous Huxley, shows
> a historical example illustrating Voltaire's famous dictum,
> "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."

Perhaps this is best seen in the world of proxy wars conducted
in the World Cup.

* * * *
. “The 'shocking and totally unexpected' loss by the U.S. Women's Soccer Team
. to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation
. under Crooked Joe Biden. Many of our players were openly hostile to America
. – No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE.
. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA”
* * * *
Quoting 45**†††

One can clearly understand the necessity of inventing God, and of course
the corollary of an afterlife that includes eternal damnation in Hell for
countries that permit WOKENESS in the females conscripted to wage
war against people who don't even speak American. Hell is for losers.

PS. Harran 39', 52', Morgan 89'.
PPS Make them make a save, never shoot wide or high in penalties. Biden
should have told them.

* impeached
† indicted

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 23:21:56 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

~~~~~~~~~~

OY, nothing to do with me!

[Burkhard]

As it was about football, I assume that he's talking about
Eugene Harran-Morgan, who in the memorable season of 2017-2018
played for Dorking Wanderers, and scored in their 3-1 win in the
Velocity Cup competition against the then much higher rated
Carshalton Athletic. For both clubs this marked a parting of ways,
Carshalton remaining in the Isthmian League (lowest level of the
semi-professional national league system) whereas Dorking would
eventually reach the dizzying lights of the National League 1.

Alas, without Harran-Morgan whose career prematurely ended due to injury.
In above cited came, Carshalton also fielded Raheem-Sterling Parker, which
may have been the reason for Dagget's confusion, as he is not the famous and
quite woke Premier League player Raheem Sterling MBE, the English and
Chelsea midfilder, but only someone was only named after him.

That or a typo for (Lyndesy) Horan, who knows :o)

[Lawyer Daggett]

.
Indeed, it's actually Horan, Lindsey #10. My bad. To hell with me.
.

[Ernest Major]

On 06/08/2023 14:13, John Harshman wrote:
>> Take an old example from TO discussions with John Wilkins, the species
>> concept.
>> A strong realist would  say that there is one and only one structure
>> out there in the worlds
>>   that carves out "species".
>
> Let me stop you there. I don't think a species realist has to think
> there's a single meaning of the word. Bacterial species could be real in
> a wholly different way from mammalian species. Some varieties of species
> could be real and others unreal, i.e. some taxa could have species and
> others could not.

The way I put that is "Every species is real, in its own way, except for
those that aren't".

But Burkhard wrote "strong realist", and in this context I think this
has to mean strong species realist, which would mean the position that
the reality of species is universal and unitary.

>
>> That means (at most) one of our species conceptions is true,
>
> Or it could mean that at most one could be true in any given case.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2023 01:06:31 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

No problem, I'm actually quite relieved to see that I'm not the only
one here who is prone to brain farts :)

[broger...@gmail.com]

Another thing about species and William James is that how to classify microbes was a field in taxonomy that was just getting started during James' lifetime. He might have been less inclined to see the tension between species definitions for large multicellular organisms and bacteria since bacterial classification was still a field in flux.

[Burkhard]

I don't think in the case at hand that would work, the US
uncharacteristically struggled in the offence, but Jesus
plays in goal, or so I understand from the people who shove
leaflets in under my door.

[John Harshman]

On 8/7/23 3:47 AM, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 06/08/2023 14:13, John Harshman wrote:
>>> Take an old example from TO discussions with John Wilkins, the
>>> species concept.
>>> A strong realist would  say that there is one and only one structure
>>> out there in the worlds
>>>   that carves out "species".
>>
>> Let me stop you there. I don't think a species realist has to think
>> there's a single meaning of the word. Bacterial species could be real
>> in a wholly different way from mammalian species. Some varieties of
>> species could be real and others unreal, i.e. some taxa could have
>> species and others could not.
>
> The way I put that is "Every species is real, in its own way, except for
> those that aren't".
>
> But Burkhard wrote "strong realist", and in this context I think this
> has to mean strong species realist, which would mean the position that
> the reality of species is universal and unitary.

I'll grant you "universal". But why "unitary"?

[Burkhard]

This was really just my example for illustration purposes, to the best of my knowledge
he never wrote anything about biology. I just wanted to illustrate it by something that
was discussed on TO before And I was probably also not as clear as I should have been.
What I had in mind was something like the position Brent Mishler takes - this type of
pluralism I'd say should be something James found attractive. That is again under the
caveat that that's how I read both James and Mishler - and I'd be more confident in
defending my James interpretation than my Mishler. The aim as I said was merely
to show that James' pragmatism is not incompatible with positions scientists can
also take.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I need to correct a serious misconception of yours, Burkhard. Fortunately,
nobody got seriously sidetracked by it.

On Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 3:41:04 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

> Well, Peter has on a number of occasions expressed his admiration for William
> James (I always found this a bit incongruous, but there you are) . James
> is of course founding father of philosophical pragmatism, and advocated
> a pragmatist definition of truth that equates it with usefulness for a speaker in
> a given context.
(that sounds a bit worse than it is, there are a couple of
> constraints).

That is not a concept of truth that I would use, although many if not most
regular participants act as though they subscribed to it.

It reminds me of Polonius's comment at the end of his soliloquy in "Hamlet"
"This above all: to thine own self be true, and then thou canst not be false to any man."
[quoted from memory; I don't want to take the time to look it up]

>And on God, he said ""On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of
> God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, then it is 'true'."

What you've written above has NOTHING to do with my assessment of William James
as one of the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century. William Barrett got
a lot closer to my reasons when he wrote:

Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James’s genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem in conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to _Varieties of Religious Experience_ puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done.
[...]
And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle, that places James among the Existentialists: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a "block” universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system.
from pp. 18-19 of _Irrational Man_, Anchor Books Edition, 1962.

The last two sentences sum up a lot of what I like about James. The one before the deletion
touches on something I have to constantly fight against in t.o.: generalities that give no hint
of what really goes on, while a single well chosen example would illustrate it in the spirit
of the old proverb, "one picture is worth a thousand words."

Incidentally, I haven't read deeply of either book in over a decade, but IIRC there is
as little pragmatism in _Varieties of Religious Experience_ as there is in Aldous Huxley's
_Heaven and Hell_.


You quickly shifted to an issue that is on topic for the reasons for which [talk.origins
was established. I will set up a whole new thread for it today.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

Well, since I don't understand James's position, I can't be sure. But I
don't think Mishler is talking about "truth" here. My position is that
species are a convenient abstraction and approximation. But that's not
saying that species are "true".

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, August 6, 2023 at 10:36:04 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:

> To Peter, an idea is useful if he can use it to make himself look better
> (in his estimation) than someone else.

SMILE when you say that, Podner, or be guilty of egregious hypocrisy.


NOTE: I said almost the same thing to Harshman on the "parent" thread,
about a very different but derogatory comment of his.

Bottom line: I give him and you the benefit of the doubt if I see no reply by either
of you, and I have seen none from him. That is, I assume that you both follow
the "silence gives consent" rule to the *first* clause and would put a smiley
to the next time (if any) that you post similar derogatory comment.


Peter Nyikos

PS Martin Harran was clueless as to what my reply to Harshman referred to,
and he made a fool of himself with his reaction to our exchange. I believe you
can figure out what's behind my closing clause, if you think hard enough about it.

[John Harshman]

That was an impenetrable series of coy hints regarding I know not what,
but as far as I can make out, all of it was off-topic, merely some kind
of veiled attack on three people.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

All you need to know is that you wrote "Jeez, what an aßhat."
in reference to something I wrote, and I wrote
"SMILE when you say that, podner, or be guilty of sinking
ever deeper into hypocrisy."

Since you didn't reply, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt,
and, to add to what I wrote to Mark, I want readers to
treat what you wrote as though you HAD put a smiley to what
you had written. That goes for Mark, too.

If either of you objects to that, I will respond, but things could
get very ugly, very fast. Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I say.


Peter Nyikos

PS If anyone reading this requests it, I can give a link to John's
comment above, but please look at my last sentence before
my electronic signature before making it.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:16:06 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

I was preparing a response but now see he has responded with veiled threats
of what I guess is more veiled hints of consequences of repercussions. So
veiled accusations and veiled threats. I'm hoping his dance doesn't increase
the count of veils to 7.

[erik simpson]

I expect there is an infinite regress of veils.

[Lawyer Daggett]

.
Maybe there's a god after all.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 7:21:06 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:26:06 PM UTC-7, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:16:06 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> > > On 8/7/23 11:34 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, August 6, 2023 at 10:36:04 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> To Peter, an idea is useful if he can use it to make himself look better
> > > >> (in his estimation) than someone else.
> > > >
> > > > SMILE when you say that, Podner, or be guilty of egregious hypocrisy.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > NOTE: I said almost the same thing to Harshman on the "parent" thread,
> > > > about a very different but derogatory comment of his.
> > > >
> > > > Bottom line: I give him and you the benefit of the doubt if I see no reply by either
> > > > of you, and I have seen none from him. That is, I assume that you both follow
> > > > the "silence gives consent" rule to the *first* clause and would put a smiley
> > > > to the next time (if any) that you post similar derogatory comment.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Peter Nyikos
> > > >
> > > > PS Martin Harran was clueless as to what my reply to Harshman referred to,
> > > > and he made a fool of himself with his reaction to our exchange. I believe you
> > > > can figure out what's behind my closing clause, if you think hard enough about it.
> > > >
> > > That was an impenetrable series of coy hints regarding I know not what,
> > > but as far as I can make out, all of it was off-topic, merely some kind
> > > of veiled attack on three people.

A two-man peanut gallery sounded off as follows:

> > I was preparing a response but now see he has responded with veiled threats
> > of what I guess is more veiled hints of consequences of repercussions.

Daggett is referring to the following response by me, ten minutes before he wrote the above:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zz-sXdHqagQ/m/iXqbp22pAQAJ

> > So veiled accusations and veiled threats. I'm hoping his dance doesn't increase
> > the count of veils to 7.

If Daggett is an ethical nihilist, it won't matter to him how hypocritical
Mark or Harshman are. I'm content to assume that both are OK
with being seen as having kidded with the comments at issue.

> I expect there is an infinite regress of veils.

Unless one of them objects to my assumption, there will be no more veils,
and you know it, but you couldn't resist being smart-alecky.

Neither could Daggett.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

So what you mean is that you aren't German?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 10:21:06 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> You quickly shifted to an issue that is on topic for the reasons for which talk.origins
> was established. I will set up a whole new thread for it today.

Make that tomorrow morning. Family duties intervened,
and so the groundwork didn't get done until a few minutes ago.


Peter Nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

No worries.
From long experience readers know that you are unlikely to deliver on your claims
regarding future posts. But you will keep making claims.

[Burkhard]

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:21:06 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I need to correct a serious misconception of yours, Burkhard. Fortunately,
> nobody got seriously sidetracked by it.
> On Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 3:41:04 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>
> > Well, Peter has on a number of occasions expressed his admiration for William
> > James (I always found this a bit incongruous, but there you are) . James
> > is of course founding father of philosophical pragmatism, and advocated
> > a pragmatist definition of truth that equates it with usefulness for a speaker in
> > a given context.
> (that sounds a bit worse than it is, there are a couple of
> > constraints).
> That is not a concept of truth that I would use, although many if not most
> regular participants act as though they subscribed to it.

It's pretty much at the centre of all of Jame's philosophising,
so you may have a problem there.

>
> It reminds me of Polonius's comment at the end of his soliloquy in "Hamlet"
> "This above all: to thine own self be true, and then thou canst not be false to any man."

"This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Not sure how you interpret this. One could argue that this is indeed
a way to formulate a pragmatist position: as long as everybody
is true to themselves and their own visions of the good life, from an
internal perspective, than this will also lead to beneficial behaviour
towards everybody else. But this centres the individual and mutually
incompatible visions of their respective selves, the good life "for them"
and exactly not any "objective truth" or external evaluation.

So I'd say in this way Polonius can be understood as a Jamesian
pragmatist, but I'm not sure that this is your reading of either.

My own take would be different, and relate to your claim about generalities.
I don't think Shakespeare meant to make a general or generalisable point
here at all. This is a father speaking to his son, i.e. someone he knows
intimately. So he really says "Because I know the type of person that
you are, my best advice is stay true to that person, he is really good"
(you can read that as either descriptive, or encouragement, or both)

It is not meant as a general rule: "If people in general are true to themselves
they are true to others". That would be barmy. The last thing I want is
an evil, brutal etc person to be true to themselves. There is a more general
issue here - I just hate it when a politician proposes something terribly
hurtful, bigoted, mean etc, and the media and public reacts "oh, but
at least s/he really and honestly means it". That is not an excuse, on
the contrary. And I prefer politicians that promote benign policies
even if they don't believe in them themselves over those that "follow
they heart" and crew it up for everybody. The accusation of hypocrisy
is just something lazy people use who don't want to do the hard research to
judge the merit of a position.

[quoted from memory; I don't want to take the time to look it up]
> >And on God, he said ""On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of
> > God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, then it is 'true'."
> What you've written above has NOTHING to do with my assessment of William James
> as one of the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century.

Well, it would have made sense of you posting two authors that argue that the belief in
an afterlife has pragmatic value and therefore should be promoted even if untrue. A Jamesian
approach gives a somewhat less cynical view along similar lines. But if that's not what
you intended it remains baffling why you chose these 2.

I'd have said e.g. that James' Ingersoll Lecture would have been a much more palatable
and interesting account of the belief in an afterlife, also on the basis of its "utility", but
in a less manipulative way than your sources.

>William Barrett got
> a lot closer to my reasons when he wrote:

> Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James’s genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem in conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to _Varieties of Religious Experience_ puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done.
> [...]
> And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle, that places James among the Existentialists: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a "block” universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system.
> from pp. 18-19 of _Irrational Man_, Anchor Books Edition, 1962.

Barret is not alone in this assessment, Jean Wahl also sees James as an
existentialism precursor. And to stay with the Shakespeare theme, also Hamlet
himself. But he also throws in Plato, Kant and Descartes, so I'm not sure
if that does not extend the label beyond usefulness. There is a similarity
in philosophical temperament, especially if contrasted to analytic philosophers,
and a similarity in the type of question they want to answer, but the answers are
very different indeed I'd say.

>
> The last two sentences sum up a lot of what I like about James. The one before the deletion
> touches on something I have to constantly fight against in t.o.: generalities that give no hint
> of what really goes on, while a single well chosen example would illustrate it in the spirit
> of the old proverb, "one picture is worth a thousand words."
>
> Incidentally, I haven't read deeply of either book in over a decade, but IIRC there is
> as little pragmatism in _Varieties of Religious Experience_ as there is in Aldous Huxley's
> _Heaven and Hell_.

Interesting. I'd have said the exact opposite,

As far as James is concerned, the "Varieties" precede his "Pragmatism"by
five years, and I would read the latter as an extension and generalisation of his
ideas on religion - and one that only works to a degree.

When writing about science, he tends to hedge his pragmatism a lot, and in his
"reply to my critics" almost abandons it altogether in favour of epistemological
realism tempered by nothing more than sound methodological advice. The famous
"squirrel" example e.g. would probably most scientists shrug their shoulders,
accept it at face value but say "so what", this is the type of observer relativity
has been know since Galileo the latest - and that does not mean that all or even
most scientific disagreements are like this, or can be resolved this easily.
Which is why I struggled to come up with a good and realistic example from science,
the species concept debate seemed one of the better candidates

In the Gifford Lecture (the "Varieties") and the Ingersoll Lectures on Death and
immortality, his pragmatism takes centre stage, and they don't make much sense
without the "will to belief" and a pluralist conception of truth.

In Varieties after all, he gives a highly general and abstract classification of
spiritual experiences that is designed to capture them across time and space.
I'd say they are wide enough to cover also "secular" religions - on another threat
Dagget evoked Pratchett, Pratchett's description of the "shove" in Unseen
Academicals fits quite neatly in James' scheme, and that one s about football
allegiances.

All spiritual experiences in this sense are Ineffable, passive and transient. Because
they are ineffable, they cannot be properly described but must be experienced to be
understood. That means also the law of contradiction - which pertains to descriptive
sentences only - does not apply, allowing a lot of mutually contradictory accounts by
different people, leading to different religions which are then all "true relative to..." the
practical usefulness they have in systematising and making sense of that experience
to that person. Makes a lot of sense to me, though I would agree with Nicholas Lash who
argued that James is to much beholden to a methodological individualism here and
takes these experiences too much out of their social context. Simone Weil would
give in my view a much better account of the notion in "The need for roots" that is
much more sociable.

Because they are transient, they cannot be fixed, documented and
reported like scientific observations without distorting them - that is an additional
reason why they require "will to believe", a leap of faith is needed as they cannot
be "shown" in evidence - and this means they are inextricably linked to praxis rather
than reasoning

And they require a passive attitude- they overcome you, but you cannot force them.
(That creates interesting tensions with James' own concept of "attention"
Simone Weil, again, would later describe this rather beautifully in her work on education) That
is the opposite of the ductus of the empirical scientists who forces nature into giving answers
to his/her timetable - time for X experiments before the grant finishes.

Taken together, they build his case against evidentialism - there is never enough evidential
reason to accept any of these beliefs, but their lived praxis enables people to experience them
in a way that leads to better lives for them - and that is his pragmatic theory of truth. Same in the
Ingersoll Lectures, He says explicitly that he does not feel the need to belief in an afterlife, or
that he has any personal stake in this, but that for some people the only way to live well is to
"heroically challenge death" - and entirely pragmatic approach to the concept.

Now for me that is a crucial difference between the Huxley text that you cite and James.
Yes there are continuities - James' "Varieties" does not get referenced in Brave New
World by co-incidence, they both experimented heavily with drugs and other mind altering
substances to make different types of experiences - James famously quipping that he only
ever understood Hegel when under the influence of laughing gas. But Huxely in Heaven
and Hell really tries to explain religious experience as the result of drugs or similar interference
with the brain - the (late developed) Christian vision of heaven and hell e.g. as winter-induced
nutrient deficiency. Heaven and Hell then become stand ins for his own LSD experiments,
bad trips and good trips.

He then gives these experiences a purely instrumental justification, as in the text you quoted.
in essence it says: while we sophisticated people know of course there is no hell and it is
all just bad drugs, the concept is extremely helpful to keep dangerous people who are not
as sophisticated as we are in line, so we should behave as if it is real.

That for me is very different, ethically, from James. Huxely says we should instrumentalise
the belief in hell to dupe others to do things we consider as beneficial. James
said we should respect other people's belief in an afterlife if it helps them to
live better lives by their own experience/standards

[Mark Isaak]

On 8/7/23 11:34 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Obviously, the closing clause was an excuse for you to write the PS, in
which you (attempt to) make yourself look smarter by giving coy hints,
so you can gloat to yourself about how stupid people are at not
understanding you, and so you can (attempt to) look better by attacking
other people who were not involved in this subthread.

[erik simpson]

I'll bite: I object to your assumptions. Now, what are the additional veils?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 8, 2023 at 8:21:08 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:21:06 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > I need to correct a serious misconception of yours, Burkhard. Fortunately,
> > nobody got seriously sidetracked by it.

> > On Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 3:41:04 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> >
> > > Well, Peter has on a number of occasions expressed his admiration for William
> > > James (I always found this a bit incongruous, but there you are) . James
> > > is of course founding father of philosophical pragmatism, and advocated
> > > a pragmatist definition of truth that equates it with usefulness for a speaker in
> > > a given context.
> > (that sounds a bit worse than it is, there are a couple of
> > > constraints).

> > That is not a concept of truth that I would use, although many if not most
> > regular participants act as though they subscribed to it.

> It's pretty much at the centre of all of Jame's philosophising,
> so you may have a problem there.

I beg to differ on your "at the centre," and I think that if either of us has
a problem, it is you. But maybe you clarify your restricted use of it below.

> > It reminds me of Polonius's comment at the end of his soliloquy in "Hamlet"
> > "This above all: to thine own self be true, and then thou canst not be false to any man."
>
> "This above all: to thine own self be true,
> And it must follow, as the night the day,
> Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

> Not sure how you interpret this.

It's a bunch of hooey, and Polonius is looked down upon for his whole role in "Hamlet".
Many participants in talk.origins are very true to their
inner natures while posting grotesque falsehoods. One extreme case is
someone on whom we are largely in agreement: the miscreant who tried
to get me banned from talk.origins earlier this year.

He posted one torrent after another of falsehoods about what I had done
on the same thread (and on other threads years before) in "justification".
He is what one psychologist called "a pseudologue" in a book, defining it as
a special kind of pathological liar who weaves elaborate stories in his mind
and comes to believe them due to sheer repetition.

> One could argue that this is indeed
> a way to formulate a pragmatist position: as long as everybody
> is true to themselves and their own visions of the good life, from an
> internal perspective, than this will also lead to beneficial behaviour
> towards everybody else.

The irony, in view of what I wrote just now, is priceless.
The line "And it must follow, as the night the day,"
adds to it: the behavior I described ushered in a night
of deep darkness. Fortunately, that night is far enough in the past.


A bit of on-topic trivia: if Polonius had reversed the order,
writing "And it must follow, as the day the night,"
then there was probably a big exception following
the ca. 20km asteroid that smashed into the earth.
The tremendous cloud of dust that resulted probably
plunged much of the earth into darkness for perhaps a whole week,
and the virtual nights ushered in the archetype for "nuclear winter."

[That may have gone by too fast. The discovery of a clay
layer by the Alvarez's, the conclusion that it was due to
such an asteroid, and the working out how catastrophic such an asteroid
would be for the environment, then got some people showing
that the same effects could result from an all-out nuclear war.]

So great was the damage done by the asteroid that it
marked the end of the Mesozoic Era and ushered in the ongoing,
Cenozoic Era. The words are very appropriate, and I think you
know enough about Greek to see that.

> But this centres the individual and mutually
> incompatible visions of their respective selves, the good life "for them"
> and exactly not any "objective truth" or external evaluation.

Is this as far as your understanding of William James's concept of "truth" goes?
It's much more benign than what a superficial reading would suggest,
but the seeds of its downfall are evident in the way you put it.

> So I'd say in this way Polonius can be understood as a Jamesian
> pragmatist, but I'm not sure that this is your reading of either.

The problem with this understanding is in your words, " individual and mutually
incompatible visions," crudely expressed by the saying, "One man's meat is another man's poison."
James was a robust optimist, but I doubt that he would have claimed.
that everyone acting out their own true selves would lead to a beneficial future.
He was well acquainted with the perversity of human nature.

> My own take would be different, and relate to your claim about generalities.
> I don't think Shakespeare meant to make a general or generalisable point
> here at all. This is a father speaking to his son, i.e. someone he knows
> intimately. So he really says "Because I know the type of person that
> you are, my best advice is stay true to that person, he is really good"
> (you can read that as either descriptive, or encouragement, or both)

Was Laertes acting out his own true nature when he joined with the king
in plotting Hamlet's death?

Perhaps, later, he was true to his deeper nature when he said,
"Why, I am justly killed by mine own treachery." But the damage
had been done, and the final outcome, at least in the short run,
was a worsening of the overall situation.

> It is not meant as a general rule: "If people in general are true to themselves
> they are true to others". That would be barmy. The last thing I want is
> an evil, brutal etc person to be true to themselves. There is a more general
> issue here - I just hate it when a politician proposes something terribly
> hurtful, bigoted, mean etc, and the media and public reacts "oh, but
> at least s/he really and honestly means it". That is not an excuse, on
> the contrary. And I prefer politicians that promote benign policies
> even if they don't believe in them themselves over those that "follow
> they heart" and crew it up for everybody.

I agree, and this shows that we are not too far apart on this whole issue.

>The accusation of hypocrisy
> is just something lazy people use who don't want to do the hard research to
> judge the merit of a position.

That isn't the half of it. The accusation of hypocrisy is at the bottom of why
abusers of underage minors [1] in the public school system and in cases
like Roman Polanski are either winked at or supported outright,
while Roman Catholic priests are vilified to the high heavens.

The reason for this double standard is that priests are supposed to be
above such behavior, and are hypocritical in a way that betrays the
public trust accorded to them.

[1] The term "pedophile" is a misnomer: it involves prepubescent children.
Only a small minority of "pedophile priests" are that in the literal sense of the word.
But that is a minor point; the major point for traditional Christians is
that this evil is described by Jesus's words, "It were better if a millstone were
hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea."


This post has already gotten very long, so I will leave the rest for later.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[DB Cates]

On 2023-08-04 12:46 PM, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/4/23 10:07 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 9:21:03 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

>>> On 8/4/23 4:33 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4,
>>>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

[snip] -

>>>>> The second is an article that appeared in Scientific American, of all
>>>>> places. It talks in greater generality than the first, about what
>>>>> a difference a life after death can make for everyone.
>>
No it didn't It appeared as a guest response (John Lennox) to a blog
post (opinion piece by John Horgan - a regular contributor to SciAm)
hosted by Scientific American at their website. Not a SciAm article in
the magazine, not editorial oversight.

[snip]

>>>> The url for it:
>>>> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-faith-and-science-coexist-mathematician-and-christian-john-lennox-responds/

[snip]

>>> Boy, Scientific American sure has gone downhill since the last time I
>>> saw it. I remember that it used to have all these cool articles about
>>> science. And now it features jejune philosophy
>>
>> What's jejune about it? are you being smart-alecky again?
>
> Patience.
>
>>> that, bonus, is only
>>> slightly relevant to the supposed topic, which if I recall was "taking
>>> the possibility of an afterlife seriously".
>>
>> Since you are seldom really serious, you have some excuse for
>> that illogical-seeming comment, but I still need to see you
>> try to explain it before I take it seriously.
>
> Again, patience.
>
>>> Perhaps I misunderstood. I
>>> thought it was supposed to be about a serious consideration of its
>>> plausibility,
>>
>> Moving of goalposts from "possibility" to "plausibility," noted.
>
> Isn't that what serious consideration of possibility involves? Both of
> your initial posts are not about the possibility of an afterlife.
> They're about the supposed attractions of believing in one, rather than
> reasons to suppose there is one. If that's what you were trying to talk
> about, the thread is mistitled.
>
>>> but all it seems to be, surprisingly, is about whether it
>>> would feel good to believe in it, or whether believing it would have a
>>> salutary effect on otherwise nasty people.
>>
>> "seems to be" is consistent with your dismissal of the very
>> possibility of an afterlife as a fairy tale. You seem to be so steeped
>> in that
>> dismissal that you come up with "surprisingly" for a very strained
>> take on what John Lennox wrote.
>
> ???
>
>> I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, believe it or not.
>> Would you like to see what my first impression of your last bit was?
>
> Again, you hint at some kind of response rather than actually
> responding. That's one of your most annoying habits.
>
>>> As for the claims above, I respond "Euthyphro", which is all that should
>>> be necessary.
>>
>> Sorry, it's neither necessary nor sufficient. I did an essay for a
>> philosophy class on Euthyphro,
>> and part of it went  about like this:
>>
>>
>> Euthypro is commonly dismissed as a "blue-nose" and such in the
>> commentaries I've read, but this ignores the significance of his
>> action in punishing his father for his atrocious treatment of a slave.
>>
>> Euthyphro has shown his compassion for a downtrodden victim, one of
>> the "wretched of the earth",
>> as Franz Fanon put it.
>>
>> If one of his disciples happens to browse through an anthology of
>> Plato's dialogues (perhaps to look up some utopian passages in "The
>> Republic"), we may yet live to see the ultimate vindication of poor
>> Euthyphro.
>>
>> [Ever since New New Google Groups subjected every line to left bias,
>> with only
>> attribution marks as barriers, I use run-on lines to set quoted
>> material apart,
>> where before I had indented it.]
>
> None of this seems relevant to the point. Let me be clear: the central
> point of mentioning Euthyphro is that it shows that, if there is an
> objective basis of morality, it can't be God. If God commands it because
> it's just, there is a standard by which to judge God's commands; if it's
> just because God commands it, then morality is based on whim. And this
> does indeed show Lennox's musings to be jejune.
>
>>>> Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In
>>>> fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate
>>>> hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I
>>>> still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone,
>>>> including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived
>>>> have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since,
>>>> according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never
>>>> receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s
>>>> positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease,
>>>> poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in
>>>> the slightest.
>>
>>> So the argument for an afterlife is that it would be nice if there were
>>> one? That's taking it seriously? Seriously?
>>
>> Thanks for setting my mind at ease for what some might call "blowing
>> your cover" -- otherwise,
>> some readers might be puzzled as to where you are coming from.
>>
>> I have been appalled since pre-adolescence about the indescribable
>> suffering of untold billions.
>> In early adolescence, I read what in some ways was the most searing
>> account,
>> _A_World_Apart_, by Gustav Herling. Another day I might quote a fine
>> preface
>> by Bertrand Russell, but I have a lot on my plate today, so I will
>> just make a little
>> excerpt the Quote of the Day. The book is about the Soviet slave labor
>> camps,
>> and it far outdoes Sozhenitsyn's _Archipelag_Gulag_ in the intimate
>> detail of one of them.
>
> Again, you merely hint obscurely at whatever point you may have. Is it
> too much to ask for you to actually say what you mean? If your argument
> is not as I have claimed, please clarify what it actually is.
>
> Would you say that giving people hope by providing them with a delusion
> is a good thing? Would you say that this is a good reason why we should
> take that delusion seriously? We could of course argue about whether it
> is indeed a delusion, which would at last be on-topic for the thread
> title. But we should first settle why we aren't already talking about that.
>
>> Remainder deleted, to be replied to today, or Monday at the latest, after
>> my usual weekend break from Usenet posting.
>>
>>
>> Peter Nyikos
>>
>>                       QUOTE OF THE DAY
>>
>> Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a
>> book as this one,
>> to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to
>> realize that
>> it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not
>> say that to understand
>> is to pardon; there are  things which for my part I cannot pardon. But
>> I do say that
>> to understand is necessary if the spread of similar evils over the
>> whole world is to be prevented.
>>
>> -- from the preface by Bertrand Russell, O.M. to _A_World_Apart_.
>
> Is that intended somehow to be relevant to the topic? If so, how?
>

--
--
Don Cates ("he's a cunning rascal" PN)

[Mark Isaak]

On 8/8/23 5:20 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:21:06 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> I need to correct a serious misconception of yours, Burkhard. Fortunately,
>> nobody got seriously sidetracked by it.
>> On Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 3:41:04 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>>
>>> Well, Peter has on a number of occasions expressed his admiration for William
>>> James (I always found this a bit incongruous, but there you are) . James
>>> is of course founding father of philosophical pragmatism, and advocated
>>> a pragmatist definition of truth that equates it with usefulness for a speaker in
>>> a given context.
>> (that sounds a bit worse than it is, there are a couple of
>>> constraints).
>> That is not a concept of truth that I would use, although many if not most
>> regular participants act as though they subscribed to it.
>
> It's pretty much at the centre of all of Jame's philosophising,
> so you may have a problem there.
>
>>
>> It reminds me of Polonius's comment at the end of his soliloquy in "Hamlet"
>> "This above all: to thine own self be true, and then thou canst not be false to any man."
>
> "This above all: to thine own self be true,
> And it must follow, as the night the day,
> Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Or if you want to sing it to a Bizet tune,

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
Do not forget,
Stay out of debt;
Think twice, and take this good advice from me:
Guard that old solvency.
There's just one other thing
You ought to do.
To thine own self be true."

[Burkhard]

OK, so that gets us to more important, but also more difficult
questions: Ginger, Mary Ann or Roy?

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2023 11:34:16 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Sunday, August 6, 2023 at 10:36:04?AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>
>> To Peter, an idea is useful if he can use it to make himself look better
>> (in his estimation) than someone else.
>
>SMILE when you say that, Podner, or be guilty of egregious hypocrisy.
>
>
>NOTE: I said almost the same thing to Harshman on the "parent" thread,
>about a very different but derogatory comment of his.
>
>Bottom line: I give him and you the benefit of the doubt if I see no reply by either
>of you, and I have seen none from him. That is, I assume that you both follow
>the "silence gives consent" rule to the *first* clause and would put a smiley
>to the next time (if any) that you post similar derogatory comment.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos
>
>PS Martin Harran was clueless as to what my reply to Harshman r

Unprovoked attack, anyone?

[Ernest Major]

On 07/08/2023 14:04, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/7/23 3:47 AM, Ernest Major wrote:
>> On 06/08/2023 14:13, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> Take an old example from TO discussions with John Wilkins, the
>>>> species concept.
>>>> A strong realist would  say that there is one and only one structure
>>>> out there in the worlds
>>>>   that carves out "species".
>>>
>>> Let me stop you there. I don't think a species realist has to think
>>> there's a single meaning of the word. Bacterial species could be real
>>> in a wholly different way from mammalian species. Some varieties of
>>> species could be real and others unreal, i.e. some taxa could have
>>> species and others could not.
>>
>> The way I put that is "Every species is real, in its own way, except
>> for those that aren't".
>>
>> But Burkhard wrote "strong realist", and in this context I think this
>> has to mean strong species realist, which would mean the position that
>> the reality of species is universal and unitary.
>
> I'll grant you "universal". But why "unitary"?

I was thinking of species realism as species is a "real" category rather
than that species are "real". If there are multiple categories
incorporated under the term species (such as sexual species and
apomictic species) then species is a collection of categories rather
than a category. But I overlooked the possibility of it being a
non-arbitrary collection (for an analogy both triangles and
quadrilaterals are polygons), which would make unitary not required,
depending on how detailed and well-defined you require the concept to be.

>
>>>> That means (at most) one of our species conceptions is true,
>>>
>>> Or it could mean that at most one could be true in any given case.
>>
>

--
alias Ernest Major

[jillery]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2023 02:47:27 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

>On Wednesday, August 9, 2023 at 5:56:08?AM UTC+1, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 8/8/23 5:20 AM, Burkhard wrote:

>> > On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:21:06?PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >> I need to correct a serious misconception of yours, Burkhard. Fortunately,
>> >> nobody got seriously sidetracked by it.

I had no idea you were a Gilligan's Island fan.
Or is the above a segue to discussing group sex?

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Burkhard]

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-4, Bozo User wrote:

Sorry about taking so long to reply. I usually try to acknowledge people
I have never encountered before in a timely fashion. Have you posted to t.o. before?

> On 2023-08-03, peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they
> > believe about the possibility of a life after death;

<snip for focus>

> For every talk on arguments about the existence of magic/religion,
> replace the Abrahamic god/afterlife/miracles with
> Enki/Seth, Hades/Valhalla and Sumerian myths/Vikings' Berserk strength.

These speak to different people with different worldviews. The part I quote below
from Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy speaks to everyone, everywhere,
about taking the possibility of an afterlife seriously.


To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;


Here begins a decisive shift:


To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,


And here it climaxes:


But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

-- "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,"
by William Shakespeare; Act III, Scene 1.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Picking up where I left off in my first reply to you:

> Or as someone else has put it (slightly updated)
> Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and
> a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
> of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the Aspirin of the people

What's this about Aspirin? Job didn't expect any from God. On the contrary, he indicted God Himself
for the worst of real suffering. See Job 9:22-24, or Job 24:2-12, with its shattering climax,

From the towns come the groans of the dying
and the gasp of wounded men crying for help.
Yet God remains deaf to their appeal!
[The Jerusalem Bible ]


> The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
> real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call
> on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,
> in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

What halo, Job might well ask. He takes the possibility of a life after death seriously --
but he has no such "illusion":

I tell the tomb, "You are my father,"
and call the worm my mother and my sister.
Where then is my hope?
Who can see any happiness for me?
Will these come down to me in Sheol,
or sink with me into the dust? [ibid., Job 17:14-16]

The image of Sheol, where there may still be a ghostly
existence, makes Epicurus's confidence that death
is the end of everything for an individual look like wishful thinking,
no less wishful than "pie in the sky". Hamlet's own "to sleep,
perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub" puts paid to Epicurus's confidence.
[See my post to this thread a little while ago for the sequel.]

> > ...
[Quoting from Lennox's piece:]
> > At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.

> Maybe - but then better an imperfect justice in the hand than an "ultimate" justice
> in the bush.

You say that because you dismiss the possibility of any justice after death, don't you?


> And is it even true? There are a number of "secular" theories of ultimate justice, going back
> to Epicurus or Plato: there the evildoer "with necessity" harms himself, by failing to be
> the person they could have been, and at. cost to his happiness.

Socrates's argument in Plato's "Gorgias" for that kind of solution is irremediably flawed,
and neither Polus nor Callicles noticed that. But, while I did notice it back in college,
Plato did open my eyes to the fact that he and Socrates had arrived at a vision
of goodness and evil that is independent of reward/retribution, divine or otherwise.
That vision has stayed with me all my life and keeps growing stronger each year.

By the way, the "Last Judgment" story of Radamanthus at the end of "Gorgias" is
a sort of *deus* *ex* *machina* ending which did not distract me
from having my eyes opened in this way.


Again duty calls me to end here, but I hope to finish replying to this thought-provoking
post of yours tomorrow, by starting earlier in the evening than in these first two replies.
If not, then certainly on Friday.


Peter Nyikos

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 3:11:09 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Picking up where I left off in my first reply to you:
>
> > Or as someone else has put it (slightly updated)
> > Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and
> > a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
> > of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the Aspirin of the people
>
> What's this about Aspirin?

Err, just to double check, you did recognise the quote, right? I only updated it slightly
for 21th century readers to avoid a common misunderstanding of the text

> Job didn't expect any from God. On the contrary, he indicted God Himself
> for the worst of real suffering. See Job 9:22-24, or Job 24:2-12, with its shattering climax,
>
> From the towns come the groans of the dying
> and the gasp of wounded men crying for help.
> Yet God remains deaf to their appeal!
> [The Jerusalem Bible ]

I'd say you are mixing here the internal perspective of Job and the external perspective
of the reader. The reader knows the backstory - the bet of God with Satan that
makes God's actions not just, but at least intelligible. And the reader also eventually
learns about all the "rewards" or restitution Job gets.

So for the reader, it works exactly like aspirin: bad things happen to you and you
don't know why? Lucky you, it means you might have been chosen to be a
stormtrooper in God's fight against the adversary, and chosen precisely because
you are such a marvellous human being - and fear not eventually there will be
massive rewards, possibly already in this life (after all that's what Job got too)
or in the next.

That's I'd say very much the way the Job story works out at least in the Christian
and Islamic tradition - that's in essence how the Epistle of James sees him:
as someone to be emulated and eventually rewarded because of their
unquestionable acceptance of God . And with Christianity essentially being a
jewish apocalyptic sect, the earthly rewards in the original Job story get replaced
by the promise of rewards in the afterlife.

In the background of all of this is a different question I find quite interesting, of
what we actually mean with "justice". The type of justice Job asks for is at least
also "procedural" - this includes the right to state one's case and challenge the
accuser, hence the confrontation clause in the US constitution e.g. Now one
way to understand such procedural rules is purely instrumental: given all the
limitations we have to work with in real life, this is the best way to get the result
right. Hence God's (non) answer to Job: I know everything anyway, so I have no
need for due process (God in full sarcasm mode for a few pages: "Where were
you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off
its dimensions? Surely you know!).

So justice is just giving everybody their just deserts, rewards for the good, punishment for
the wicked - how this is determined is none of our business. Max Weber would call the
underlying conception of justice "Kadi justice " and contrast it with the "formal rational
justice" of modernity. I would say a strong case can be made that the due process rules
are not purely incidental and instrumental to justice, more than "getting it more often
right than wrong in establishing the facts" but are of intrinsic value. Justice must be seen
to be done, and all parties, victim, accused, judge, observers have to play a part. (cf.
e.g. Antony Duff's conception of the trial as a communicative action) Few if any of the
"justice in the afterlife" conceptions offer that as far as I'm aware.

And as far as justice is concerned, things are even worse in the Job story - on
another thread we had a short discussion of the 2. series of Good Omens, which
starts with the story (and the best episodes in my view were about this):

Two of the subordinate angles of Satan and God find the behavior of the masters so
atrocious that they refuse to carry out their orders, and hide Job's children. Because
they die (in the original, that is) for the 2 powerful protagonist to have their little
wager, they are offered even less that Job, and nobody finds this offensive. And
God's restitutive justice gives Job twice the number of new kids - which shows that
the Old Testament deity sees humans as fungible. Not sure if most (sane) humans
would agree with that deal - Sure, I killed your kids, but then I paid for the fertility
treatment of your wife, and you got twice the number of new ones! That's like,
stealing £10 from you but giving you £20 back - so you and up well ahead! (oh
and your elderly wife will have to bear them, and no, epidurals won't be invented
for another few thousand years, as will sterilised medical equipment) . There is
a more serious theological point behind that quip - in one way to understand
the incarnation, God had to become human to understand that we are indeed not
fungible and quantifiable, and that every single one matters.

Be this as it may, as a case for justice and the afterlife, I don't think Job works at all

>
> > The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
> > real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call
> > on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,
> > in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
>
> What halo, Job might well ask. He takes the possibility of a life after death seriously --
> but he has no such "illusion":
>
> I tell the tomb, "You are my father,"
> and call the worm my mother and my sister.
> Where then is my hope?
> Who can see any happiness for me?
> Will these come down to me in Sheol,
> or sink with me into the dust? [ibid., Job 17:14-16]
>
> The image of Sheol, where there may still be a ghostly
> existence, makes Epicurus's confidence that death
> is the end of everything for an individual look like wishful thinking,
> no less wishful than "pie in the sky". Hamlet's own "to sleep,
> perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub" puts paid to Epicurus's confidence.
> [See my post to this thread a little while ago for the sequel.]

Not sure where you are going with any of this, of why you think Job takes
that afterlife serious. Ins't job making the exact opposite case here? "If
I have to give up on justice in this world, I definitely won't get it in the next"
This is after all to justify himself against the accusation of his friends
that demanding justice from God now is blasphemous.

>
> > > ...
> [Quoting from Lennox's piece:]
> > > At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.
>
> > Maybe - but then better an imperfect justice in the hand than an "ultimate" justice
> > in the bush.
>
> You say that because you dismiss the possibility of any justice after death, don't you?

No, what I believe is irrelevant for the analysis of Lennox , and neither the "because"
nor the "possibility" part are needed for this argument.
- this is still the "aspirin" theme. Lennox argues that the Christian afterlife is necessary
for a hope of justice. The counter-argument is that as long as there is nothing more
than a doubt that such justice will happen, the net effect of such a "overbelief" (
In James' terminology) risks to undermine the one chance for justice that there is
- an inverted Pascal's wager if you like.

>
>
> > And is it even true? There are a number of "secular" theories of ultimate justice, going back
> > to Epicurus or Plato: there the evildoer "with necessity" harms himself, by failing to be
> > the person they could have been, and at. cost to his happiness.
>
> Socrates's argument in Plato's "Gorgias" for that kind of solution is irremediably flawed,
> and neither Polus nor Callicles noticed that.

That is just an "argument by adjective" -and even more surprising because the
Job story is premised on this type of solution being true, so I'm even less sure
why you bring it up above.Now I'd say if it is read overly naturalistically - i.e. interview
lots of good and bad people in a longitudinal study about their happiness perception
and see if there is a correlation - then yes, the account is not very plausible But for
a more substantive and normative vision of "the good life", e.g. as Epicurean Ataraxia
or Vedic "freedom from desire" then I'd say that while on one level it is a "pious hope",
on another it requires less of an overbelief , and has fewer internal contradictions,
than divine justice in an afterlife,

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

[quoting from an essay by Oxford philosopher John Lennox:]

> > > At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.

Picking up where I left off in my second reply:

> There is also psychological basis for this - the "warm feeling": we get when doing good, the anxiety
> when doing bad etc. It is at least not impossible to think of a world where the cost
> of evil actions are intrinsically higher than any gain they can give to the perpetrator

But that is not our world. I purposely talked to Harshman about conditions under Stalin, where the
perpetrators inflicted untold suffering on the prisoners in the slave labor camps, yet there
was no retribution to them at all, except in one solitary case of a perpetrator who fell from grace
and had to share the worst conditions of the people he had once sent to their hell on earth.


[Lennox again:]
> > > Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because we are all flawed and have all messed up.

> I'll find this extremely implausible - and before I get accused of having an overly cynical view of
> human nature, I think I have the evidence from psychology and anthropology to back me up.
>
> Humans just LOVE the idea of punishment for the wicked. They just divide immediately in their mind
> the world in "the wicked" and "me, my friends, and the more agreeable members of my family".
> Punishment happens in this view (mostly) to others, and we enjoy inflicting it, do we not just,
> sometimes personally mostly in modernity vicariously, , sometimes consensually , mostly of
> course not so.

With a primitive bow and arrow, you have taken a shot in the direction of what I call
The Achilles Heel of Christianity: the doctrine of a hell of everlasting fire, along with
the way apologists have defended it.

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, illogically argued for it by saying that since sin is
an offense against an infinite God, it deserves an infinite punishment.

Some two millennia earlier, Job had some choice words for this kind of thinking,
in Job 7: 17-20, where he turns Psalm 8 on its head with the words,

"What is man that you should make so much of him,
subjecting him to your scrutiny,
that morning after morning you should examine him,
and every moment test him?
Will you never take your eyes off me
long enough for me to swallow my spittle?
Suppose I have sinned, what have I done to you,
you tireless watcher of mankind?
Why do you choose me as your target?
Why should I be a burden to you?"
-- The Jerusalem Bible
>
> That's why penal populism works, even in times when the objective data shows that crime is decreasing
> and incarceration makes things worse.

Than what? letting violent criminals loose and able to wreak revenge on their victims for
daring to testify against them?


> Sure, on one level people realise that "we are all poor
> sinners" - which is why concepts such as purgatory play such an important role THEIR evil ways
> require eternal hot pokers up the backsy, MY regrettable lack of judgement should get me probation,
> or maybe 20 lashes at max. This way we "pay" for the satisfaction of inflicting pain on others with the risk
> of a little pain for ourselves, AND can feel good and humble in the process too (...of course I too
> am a sinner...)

IIRC it was St. Augustine who perversely claimed that one of the joys of those in heaven
was to witness the unending suffering of people condemned to everlasting torture.

I rebelled against such callousness well before my final break with the Catholicism
I had been taught in primary and secondary school. I comforted myself with the widespread
sentiment that "Hell exists, but it is empty." It was when I felt I could no longer believe this
and still cling to Catholic doctrine that the irrevocable break came.

Now, over half a century later, I have a better perspective on what Catholic doctrine
is, but the break is still there, and I remain an agnostic. However, I do have a couple of things
to say to your one-dimensional picture.

First: there is a way to read the Biblical account of Jesus's teachings to the effect that,
although hell is everlasting, any one person remains there for only a finite period
of time, and then is granted Epicurus's hope: annihilation. Many Jews of today
believe in this kind of punishment, but based on Daniel 12: 2-3 rather than anything in the NT.

Second: there is an amazing footnote in the New American Bible (NAB) on Matthew 10:41-42 which
has to do with "these least ones" of the famous Last Judgment scene (Mt. 25: 31-46 at 40, 45).

"*A prophet*: one who speaks in the name of God; here, the Christian prophets who speak in the name of God. *Righteous man*: since righteousness is demanded of all the disciples, it is difficult to take the *righteous man* of [v.41] and *one of these little ones* (42) as indicating different groups within the followers of Jesus. Probably all three designations are used here of Christian missionaries as such."

The "least/little ones" are traditionally believed to refer to all the poor, hungry, etc. people of earth,
and yet, if the footnote is correct, that scene from the Last Judgment is a self-serving depiction
of Jesus's favoritism towards his own disciples! And make no mistake: Mt 25:40 has a footnote
cross-referencing Mt. 10:42, and the NAB is the official translation for the Roman Catholic Mass.

All of the above notwithstanding, I believe these footnotes are in error, and it was an oversight
of the people vetting the NAB to have them included. But either way, the Achilles' Heel of
Christianity is in a bad way.


> Hell, to misquote Sartre, is full of other people. And nobody thinks of
> him/herself seriously as a baddy
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

"nobody" certainly ignores the author of "Amazing Grace," who went from being part of
the slave trade to working tirelessly to have it abolished. And I believe there are millions
like him on a smaller scale at any one time. I see myself as having been a baddy from the age of 9 through
the age of 14, and I cringe when I think back at many of the things I did back then.

And you seem to speak of such people yourself below.

> We see this in the penal institutions we create in this world: if people realised that the prison they
> want to build, or the judicial torture, could one day be inflicted on them our prisons etc through
> history would have looked very different. It's typically only the handful of penal abolitionists whose
> empathetic reasoning makes them see themselves on the receiving end too.


> This us vs them logic of punishment is well studied in the research on penal populism cf e.g.
> classically Bottoms, A. (1995). The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing, If one
> believes in evolutionary psychology, this may have evolutionary roots - I think the term is
> "altruistic punishment" - opting for a system in which meeting out punishment even harms
> the punisher
> (I myself found Flesch: Comeuppance: Costly signaling, altruistic punishment,
> and other biological components quite interesting )

Sounds quite specialized, though.

>
> That the "us vs them" logic is also central to divine punishment is particularly obvious when
> we consider that more often than not, the most serious punishment is reserved for non-believers
> for no other reason that they are non-believers.

This is a really serious misunderstanding -- confusing mere belief with the many-faceted concept
of faith. I believe the Epistle of James was written to correct people who had this
false idea of what "faith" entails. The Roman Catholic Church sides with James on this issue.
Even the Lutheran Church seems to have turned its back on Luther, who removed that Epistle
from his Bible, calling it an "epistle of straw."

> Indeed, for sola-fide Christians, any harm inflicted
> on others during our lifetime is largely irrelevant, determinative for punishment is merely a state of
> mind.

There was such a person, proclaiming this travesty with a stentorian voice, on the University of Illinois
campus back in 1975 or 1976. I'd give some details, but this post has gotten quite long as it is.

[quoting Lennox again:]
> > >The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.

> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.

Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.


> But also an interesting point on the substance. Is this really a vision
> of justice that is plausible? Imagine being the victim of a terrible
> crime - someone murdering one's family. now it comes to the trial,
> and the judge says to the accused: "well, you did it, obviously, but you also
> really love me,

"AND your neighbor as yourself, AND even your enemies."

Surely you know the NT better than to leave this out.


>so that's OK then, off you go."

The vision of heaven does not stop there for C.S. Lewis and many other
Christian leaders. They include tearful confessions by the wrongers to the wronged,
followed by reconciliation.

> I'd say most of us would be pissed off by that. Now, when complaining that
> the forgiveness stuff should have been our to give (cf e.g. the introduction
> of victim impact statements in US criminal law precisely to increase punishment) ,
> the judge says "ahh, but in return I forgive YOU that from 1973-1975 you seriously
> doubted me, AND in 1984 you fancied your neighbour even though they were
> married/of the wrong sex/of the wrong religion.
>
> Now, don't get me wrong, I think the idea of universal reconciliation is a great theological
> concept - just not one that one can ground in our desire for justice

Justice never stands alone, and neither does mercy, in Christian doctrine.
They are inextricably bound with one another.

Unfortunately for me, my realism keeps me from believing in the existence of a God that
corresponds to these doctrines, but they are high on a "wish list." Lennox has the right
idea of what true believers are like, and I would probably be happier if I could be one of them,
but my integrity won't let me go back to my old beliefs before the decisive break.

We both give Lennox the last word:

> > > Of course these are huge claims and demand evidence. I have tried to put some of that evidence together in Gunning for God. published by Kregel. Also see my website johnlennox.org.
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 8/11/23 5:58 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
> But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.
>
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> [quoting from an essay by Oxford philosopher John Lennox:]
>>>> At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.
>
> Picking up where I left off in my second reply:
>
>> There is also psychological basis for this - the "warm feeling": we get when doing good, the anxiety
>> when doing bad etc. It is at least not impossible to think of a world where the cost
>> of evil actions are intrinsically higher than any gain they can give to the perpetrator
>
> But that is not our world. I purposely talked to Harshman about conditions under Stalin, where the
> perpetrators inflicted untold suffering on the prisoners in the slave labor camps, yet there
> was no retribution to them at all, except in one solitary case of a perpetrator who fell from grace
> and had to share the worst conditions of the people he had once sent to their hell on earth.

Well, it's good that you didn't accidentally talk to me or, more
precisely, talk at me. But you never explained until now what your point
was. And you still haven't explained why it's relevant to the topic.

Bad people sometimes go unpunished. So?

Interesting, but I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic. Is
there a reason we should take the possibility of an afterlife seriously?
Is unpalatability of an idea of the afterlife a reason to reject it? Is
it a reason to reject the religion it's attached to?

Perhaps, if internal inconsistency makes religious claims less credible.
But what are you saying?

As is unfortunately often the case, you don't explain the nature of the
misunderstanding. What is the difference between mere believe and faith?
So you're saying that "whosoever believeth in me shall not die" is
wrong, and that gift is limited to those who have faith, not belief? And
doesn't that make the punishment of unbelievers even less morally
justifiable by increasing the pool of sufferers?

>> Indeed, for sola-fide Christians, any harm inflicted
>> on others during our lifetime is largely irrelevant, determinative for punishment is merely a state of
>> mind.
>
> There was such a person, proclaiming this travesty with a stentorian voice, on the University of Illinois
> campus back in 1975 or 1976. I'd give some details, but this post has gotten quite long as it is.
>
> [quoting Lennox again:]
>>>> The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
>
>> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
>
> Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
> And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
> thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
> on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.

Islam would seem to be the major candidate here. Why would you reject it?

>> But also an interesting point on the substance. Is this really a vision
>> of justice that is plausible? Imagine being the victim of a terrible
>> crime - someone murdering one's family. now it comes to the trial,
>> and the judge says to the accused: "well, you did it, obviously, but you also
>> really love me,
>
> "AND your neighbor as yourself, AND even your enemies."
>
> Surely you know the NT better than to leave this out.

I don't think that's one of the expressed criteria. (Not faith and
works: faith alone.) It's more aspirational.

>> so that's OK then, off you go."
>
> The vision of heaven does not stop there for C.S. Lewis and many other
> Christian leaders. They include tearful confessions by the wrongers to the wronged,
> followed by reconciliation.

That sounds good; restorative justice. Still, returning to the topic, is
there any reason we should take the possibility of an afterlife
seriously? Is there any reason to take one view of it more seriously
than another?

>> I'd say most of us would be pissed off by that. Now, when complaining that
>> the forgiveness stuff should have been our to give (cf e.g. the introduction
>> of victim impact statements in US criminal law precisely to increase punishment) ,
>> the judge says "ahh, but in return I forgive YOU that from 1973-1975 you seriously
>> doubted me, AND in 1984 you fancied your neighbour even though they were
>> married/of the wrong sex/of the wrong religion.
>>
>> Now, don't get me wrong, I think the idea of universal reconciliation is a great theological
>> concept - just not one that one can ground in our desire for justice
>
> Justice never stands alone, and neither does mercy, in Christian doctrine.
> They are inextricably bound with one another.
>
> Unfortunately for me, my realism keeps me from believing in the existence of a God that
> corresponds to these doctrines, but they are high on a "wish list." Lennox has the right
> idea of what true believers are like, and I would probably be happier if I could be one of them,
> but my integrity won't let me go back to my old beliefs before the decisive break.
>
> We both give Lennox the last word:
>
>>>> Of course these are huge claims and demand evidence. I have tried to put some of that evidence together in Gunning for God. published by Kregel. Also see my website johnlennox.org.
>>>

I'm moderately curious about what that evidence might be. Have you read
that book?

[Burkhard]

On Saturday, August 12, 2023 at 2:01:11 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
> But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.
> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> [quoting from an essay by Oxford philosopher John Lennox:]
> > > > At the very least that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore, Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope, because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate justice is an illusion.
> Picking up where I left off in my second reply:
>
> > There is also psychological basis for this - the "warm feeling": we get when doing good, the anxiety
> > when doing bad etc. It is at least not impossible to think of a world where the cost
> > of evil actions are intrinsically higher than any gain they can give to the perpetrator
>
> But that is not our world. I purposely talked to Harshman about conditions under Stalin, where the
> perpetrators inflicted untold suffering on the prisoners in the slave labor camps, yet there
> was no retribution to them at all, except in one solitary case of a perpetrator who fell from grace
> and had to share the worst conditions of the people he had once sent to their hell on earth.

Well, 3 possible answers, one theistic spiritual, one naturalised spiritual and one
theistic, all without afterlife:

1) the spiritual answer Epicurus, Plato or Seneca might have given: "
There is no greater punishment of wickedness than that it is dissatisfied with itself
and its deeds."

Why did the prison guards act as they did? Out of a range of emotions such as fear (of their
superiors, and also of the prisoners, not qua prisoners, but of
the groups they belonged to) Are fear and hate healthy emotions that lead to
happiness? No. So by remaining captives to these emotions, the guards
harm themselves and prevent themselves from achieving true happiness.

2) Now, as there is a danger that this is based on something resembling a circular definition,
as "happiness" as understood by them is less a descriptive and more a normative state.
The naturalised version treats this as a statement of psychology or anthropology - "as
a matter of fact" people who live brutal lives suffer mentally for it

3) finally, there is the answer Job's God gives: “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn Do you count the months till they bear?

So it might look to YOU as if the prison guards got unpunished, and the prisoners treated unjustly,
but this is just b/c you are not in full possession of the facts. From the divine perspective, guard
A might get a particularly bad colon cancer at 80, prisoner B's daughter will have twins which for
B is the greatest thing possible, and prisoner C had it coming for other misdeeds you don't know,
possibly insufficient belief in the divine judgement.

Now to be sure I'm not arguing for any of these, especially I don't claim anyone has evidence that they are
factually correct. and doing an empirical longitudinal might be pointless in 1) and dangerous in 2)
(after all you are testing here someone who made the Behemoth AND can control him - can can you do
that? So better just take his word for it)

But I am arguing that as far as "overbeliefs" go, they do not require more, and possible a lot less, leap
pf faith than the afterlife based accounts of justice.

That would be an entirely different discussion. For the purpose of the one here, I'd
happy say I don't know either, and yes, that makes it extremely frustrating which gives
additional psychological support for punitive approaches - but that does not
make the facts go away. So we should at least be honest to ourselves and admit that
this is a response to emotions rather than a strategy to reduce crime.

There was a case last week here that struck me in this regard: criminal trial of a death
by dangerous driving case. Young man, newly qualified for driving, takes his father's
high powered BMW, races it across the streets and takes a selfie of himself. Runs of the
road and kills a young girl.

He gets 12 years, in my view a substantial sentence. The parents consider it unduly
lenient (which I understand on the emotional level) but also argue that by
asking for a higher punishment, they don't want it for revenge, but "to have
a proper deterrent for others, who now might do the same". Rationally, that makes
no sense of course. Nobody says: I'll take this care for a spin - what's the worst
that can happen, a mere 12 years in prison (and then having a previous conviction
that pretty much determines the rest of your life). That's not how humans work.
Instead, they think "nothing will happen", making the punishment more or less
irrelevant

That it is an emotional response doesn't make the parent's demand for stiffer
sentences necessarily illegitimate (as I said, that would be a different discussion) but here
it is for a an argument against Lennox' claim that we find punishment unattractive because
we fear that it would apply to us too. That is exactly not the way we think. The parent's
position got a lot of public support - and I bet that all the supporters discounted all
the "moral luck" that they have had in their lives - when they took silly risks, but nothing
bad happened - had it happened, they'd now sit in the dock.

Very few people really think like John Bradford (allegedly, the authorship is contested)
did when he said when looking at convicted criminals: "There but for the grace of God,
goes John Bradford"

OK fair enough, "nobody" is too strong. People can be guilt ridden - and an even
better example for me would be things like survivor guilt where people blame
themselves for no wrongdoing whatsoever.

Still a couple of things on that: First there is a difference between evaluating one's past actions,
and how they see themselves at any given point in time. Newton had his conversion, and then
reevaluated his past deeds. But that means he thought of himself as a goodie (or at least
not a baddie) when trading in slaves, and after that too thought of himself as a goodie (...
and now am found" if one who has a debt to pay. For Lennox argument to work, we'd have to
think of ourselves as baddies who intend to remain baddies and therefore are against
strict punishment.

Related, there is a difference between evaluating one's actions and one's "character" or identity.
What I meant above was the latter more than the former, and is not any more demanding than
what we observe in everyday life: When people watch crime dramas, westerns, historical dramas
and identify with one of the characters, almost always they'll chose a goodie because that's how
we like to think about ourselves,

>
> And you seem to speak of such people yourself below.
>
> > We see this in the penal institutions we create in this world: if people realised that the prison they
> > want to build, or the judicial torture, could one day be inflicted on them our prisons etc through
> > history would have looked very different. It's typically only the handful of penal abolitionists whose
> > empathetic reasoning makes them see themselves on the receiving end too.
>
>
> > This us vs them logic of punishment is well studied in the research on penal populism cf e.g.
> > classically Bottoms, A. (1995). The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing, If one
> > believes in evolutionary psychology, this may have evolutionary roots - I think the term is
> > "altruistic punishment" - opting for a system in which meeting out punishment even harms
> > the punisher
> > (I myself found Flesch: Comeuppance: Costly signaling, altruistic punishment,
> > and other biological components quite interesting )
>
> Sounds quite specialized, though.

True, but also universal, which indicates some evolutionary and biological roots. And other aspects
of punitiveness can similarly be traced across time and space)

>
> >
> > That the "us vs them" logic is also central to divine punishment is particularly obvious when
> > we consider that more often than not, the most serious punishment is reserved for non-believers
> > for no other reason that they are non-believers.
>
> This is a really serious misunderstanding -- confusing mere belief with the many-faceted concept
> of faith.

I'm still addressing here Lennox anthropological argument, so I'm not making a theological
claim about which interpretation of the Christian bible is best supported by the text, but
a much more general one that over time and across religions, membership in the religion
is deemed as a necessary (though not always sufficient) condition for a pleasant afterlife
(if of course the religion in question has a "punishment/reward model of the afterlife at all)

> I believe the Epistle of James was written to correct people who had this
> false idea of what "faith" entails. The Roman Catholic Church sides with James on this issue.

Not for the purpose of this issue I'd say, or at least "It's complicated". True, the CC is not "sola fides"
so belief is not sufficient - the issue here however is if it is necessary.

The old problem of the "justified heathen". And yes, the CC has softened its stance on this -
slowly and painfully.

I dug up an interview Benedict gave on this, back in 2016. In German, will try to find
an English version. But in essence he accounts for the prevailing doctrine after the council of
Trent that baptism was absolutely necessary to avoid hell, and how abandoning this idea
let to a "double crisis in faith".

A rare acknowledgement - by a conservative to boot - of the need of evolving dogma
My quick google assisted translation:

"While it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were still convinced
that those who are not baptized are forever lost [...] the Catholic Church abandoned this view
after the Second Vatican Council. This caused a deep double crisis [...]

He then discusses Carl Rahner and his idea of the "anonymous Christian" but rejects it. Merely
living a life by Christian ethical rules, even when motivated by a belief in a transcendental
being (atheists need not apply anyway) is not sufficient:

"This theory is fascinating, but reduces Christianity to a pure mental presentation of what a human being is
and therefore overlooks the drama of change and renewal central to Christianity"

And next he rejects even more strongly Jamesian pluralism:
"Even less acceptable is the pluralistic theory of religion , for which all faiths, each in their own way, would
be ways of salvation and in this sense, must be considered equivalent as far as their effects are concerned"

So the only compromise he offers is the Catechism: “Those who, through no fault of their own,
do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere
heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through t
he dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.”

So has to be "no fault of their own" which is a clear-cut case only for people who never
heard of the church (some wiggle room there) , they have to be "god seekers" (again,
atheists need not apply) and it is a "may" - so translated into cynical: We can't
prevent God from letting Plato into his heaven, but we draw the line at anyone
who decided the Catholic Church is not for them".

> Even the Lutheran Church seems to have turned its back on Luther, who removed that Epistle
> from his Bible, calling it an "epistle of straw."

Not quite... Yes, he doubted the authenticity, but not enough to remove it from the Bible -
it is in his German Bible translation, but moved "further to the back" in comparison to the
Catholic version. And he refers to it in the Great Catechism (Petition 7, the Lords Prayer)
which implies authenticity.

> > Indeed, for sola-fide Christians, any harm inflicted
> > on others during our lifetime is largely irrelevant, determinative for punishment is merely a state of
> > mind.
>
> There was such a person, proclaiming this travesty with a stentorian voice, on the University of Illinois
> campus back in 1975 or 1976. I'd give some details, but this post has gotten quite long as it is.
>
> [quoting Lennox again:]
> > > >The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
>
> > Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
>
> Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?

That is question begging I'd say. It assumes that Christianity's focus on
forgiveness is the radical solution to the human problem.

> And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
> thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
> on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.
>
>
> > But also an interesting point on the substance. Is this really a vision
> > of justice that is plausible? Imagine being the victim of a terrible
> > crime - someone murdering one's family. now it comes to the trial,
> > and the judge says to the accused: "well, you did it, obviously, but you also
> > really love me,
>
> "AND your neighbor as yourself, AND even your enemies."
>
> Surely you know the NT better than to leave this out.

Love you neighbour is OT, people always forget this - what changes
is the NT is the definition of neighbour. But in any case, I left it out
because it is irrelevant for the point. "Love your enemy" is a rule
(maybe aspirational) for while you are alive, but here we are talking about
the point of judgement.

More generally, the neighbour and the enemies have no standing when it
comes to the final judgement - the transgression that is forgiven (or not)
is the one against God for not following his rules (which include the "love..."
rule) He is the injured party that therefore forgives the trespass.

The converse also holds - 5.Mose 32:35. "Forgive your enemy" does not
mean the enemy gets off Scot free - you just refrain from actions against them
in the hope/knowledge that God will punish them. There is a humorous take
in this in Weird Al' Yankovic's "Amish paradise"

A local boy kicked me in the butt last week
I just smiled at him and I turned the other cheek
I really don't care, in fact I wish him well
'Cause I'll be laughing my head off when he's burning in Hell

In fact, if you were to read the "love your enemy" any stronger, your own
argument would become self-defeating: Saying that the belief in an afterlife
with hell is needed to fulfil our desire for justice would then mean that the belief in
hell is in itself a sinful deviation from God's demand to love your enemy: you should
what the hell to be empty, not for your sake but that of your enemy

>
> >so that's OK then, off you go."
>
> The vision of heaven does not stop there for C.S. Lewis and many other
> Christian leaders. They include tearful confessions by the wrongers to the wronged,
> followed by reconciliation.

Where do you see that in Christian doctrine or theology?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 11, 2023 at 9:51:11 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/11/23 5:58 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
> > But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.
> >
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> >> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > [quoting Lennox again:]
> >>>> The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
> >
> >> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
> >
> > Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
> > And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
> > thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
> > on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.

> Islam would seem to be the major candidate here. Why would you reject it?

I can't figure out what you are getting at here. I couldn't find anything about
forgiveness in anything I've read about The Five Pillars of Islam. Also, there is no forgiveness
for those who insult "Allah's greatest prophet, upon whom be peace."
Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

I suggest you read my reply to Bozo User on Aug 9, 2023, 8:41:08 PM
on this thread, to try and get some focus on the other things you
wrote in this same reply to me [deleted].


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 8/17/23 9:52 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, August 11, 2023 at 9:51:11 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/11/23 5:58 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
>>> But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.
>>>
>>> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>>>> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>>> [quoting Lennox again:]
>>>>>> The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
>>>
>>>> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
>>>
>>> Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
>>> And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
>>> thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
>>> on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.
>
>> Islam would seem to be the major candidate here. Why would you reject it?
>
> I can't figure out what you are getting at here. I couldn't find anything about
> forgiveness in anything I've read about The Five Pillars of Islam. Also, there is no forgiveness
> for those who insult "Allah's greatest prophet, upon whom be peace."
> Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.

I don't actually know that much about Islam, though it's claimed to be
"a religion of peace", so I would think forgiveness might have something
to do with that. One thing I do know is that you can't use the things
its followers actually do to determine what a religion's tenets are. For
every Ayatollah there's a corresponding Torquemada, and plenty of
killings in the name of Jesus.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
>
> I suggest you read my reply to Bozo User on Aug 9, 2023, 8:41:08 PM
> on this thread, to try and get some focus on the other things you
> wrote in this same reply to me [deleted].

Rude. I'm going to doubt in advance that there's much relevance. If you
don't want to reply to me, just say so.

[broger...@gmail.com]

It's easy enough to find bits of the Koran talking about forgiveness and God's mercy. Took me less time to find on-line than it's taken to type this two sentence post.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Before I tackle the first of two long, fascinating replies from you, Burkhard,
I wish to call attention to a reply I did to you on a highly scientific, on-topic theme
earlier today, on OOL (abiogenesis) on another thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zLkSPbLfklc/m/sR8yaogsBgAJ
Re: Szostak on abiogenesis
4:30 PM EDT

On Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 5:41:10 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 3:11:09 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Picking up where I left off in my first reply to you:
> >
> > > Or as someone else has put it (slightly updated)
> > > Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and
> > > a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
> > > of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the Aspirin of the people
> >
> > What's this about Aspirin?

> Err, just to double check, you did recognise the quote, right? I only updated it slightly
> for 21th century readers to avoid a common misunderstanding of the text

I know the original English translation was "religion is the opiate of the people,"
but I don't recall anything like the rest.

[Trivia: yesterday I saw the film "Oppenheimer," and at one point an American "corrects" a
quote by another person, only to get the response that "I read it in the original German."]

> > Job didn't expect any from God. On the contrary, he indicted God Himself
> > for the worst of real suffering. See Job 9:22-24, or Job 24:2-12, with its shattering climax,
> >
> > From the towns come the groans of the dying
> > and the gasp of wounded men crying for help.
> > Yet God remains deaf to their appeal!
> > [The Jerusalem Bible ]

> I'd say you are mixing here the internal perspective of Job and the external perspective
> of the reader.

You are probably right about 95% of the people who know something about the story of Job,
but they are not the knowledgeable ones. I wasn't one for about a decade and a half.

> The reader knows the backstory - the bet of God with Satan that
> makes God's actions not just, but at least intelligible. And the reader also eventually
> learns about all the "rewards" or restitution Job gets.

The backstory is all I knew from the age of 8 to the age of 22,
consisting of the first, second, and last chapters of Job.
In between, Job rails about the misfortunes of all kinds of people,
and it strains credulity that all of them eventually got "restituted."
Certainly Job didn't think so before it happened to him. [To the passages above, add Chapter 21.]

My education about the rest began from an unexpected source: William Barrett's
_Irrational Man_, from which I have quoted earlier. The book takes for granted that we live in a secular era
(which Barrett seems to have embraced himself) but it also tells us how much
richness we have lost. He only says a little about the Book of Job, but
what he does say gave me hope that it is acceptable to rail against God
as I had without being condemned for it. I should add that I considered
myself to be an agnostic at the time [as I am now], but this opened up
the possibility of returning to a Christian faith.

>
> So for the reader, it works exactly like aspirin: bad things happen to you and you
> don't know why? Lucky you, it means you might have been chosen to be a
> stormtrooper in God's fight against the adversary, and chosen precisely because
> you are such a marvellous human being - and fear not eventually there will be
> massive rewards, possibly already in this life (after all that's what Job got too)
> or in the next.

My beliefs went through a lot of ups and downs until about the age of 40,
but what has stayed with me is a hope that it isn't like this at all, BUT, rather,
something like the afterlife depicted by C.S. Lewis in _The Great Divorce_.
Outlined below.

> That's I'd say very much the way the Job story works out at least in the Christian
> and Islamic tradition - that's in essence how the Epistle of James sees him:
> as someone to be emulated and eventually rewarded because of their
> unquestionable acceptance of God . And with Christianity essentially being a
> jewish apocalyptic sect, the earthly rewards in the original Job story get replaced
> by the promise of rewards in the afterlife.
>
> In the background of all of this is a different question I find quite interesting, of
> what we actually mean with "justice". The type of justice Job asks for is at least
> also "procedural" - this includes the right to state one's case and challenge the
> accuser, hence the confrontation clause in the US constitution e.g.

See above about "acceptable to rail" -- something lacking from the "backstory".

> Now one way to understand such procedural rules is purely instrumental: given all the
> limitations we have to work with in real life, this is the best way to get the result
> right. Hence God's (non) answer to Job: I know everything anyway, so I have no
> need for due process (God in full sarcasm mode for a few pages: "Where were
> you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off
> its dimensions? Surely you know!).

I believe that IF there is a designer of our universe, it is a naturally evolved Being
in an unimaginably far older and grander universe than ours. This Being is
implying something very different to Job, something like this, in a more
modern and scientifically informed idiom:

"You seriously underestimate the difficulties with which I have to contend.
Making the earth and keeping it intact for untold eons in a state where life
can flourish [Job 38: 1-30], keeping the very stars in an arrangement that
preserves earth intact [38: 31-33], and steering life on earth and conditions
on earth to make the biosphere so orderly in minute detail
[38: 34 - 41 and Chapter 39], are child's play compared to giving humans
free will and keeping human society from going completely haywire."
[40: 7-14 in some translations, 40: 2-9 in others.]

>
> So justice is just giving everybody their just deserts, rewards for the good, punishment for
> the wicked - how this is determined is none of our business. Max Weber would call the
> underlying conception of justice "Kadi justice " and contrast it with the "formal rational
> justice" of modernity. I would say a strong case can be made that the due process rules
> are not purely incidental and instrumental to justice, more than "getting it more often
> right than wrong in establishing the facts" but are of intrinsic value. Justice must be seen
> to be done, and all parties, victim, accused, judge, observers have to play a part. (cf.
> e.g. Antony Duff's conception of the trial as a communicative action) Few if any of the
> "justice in the afterlife" conceptions offer that as far as I'm aware.

In _The Great Divorce_, everyone gets as many chances to get to heaven as they want,
but first they have to let go of all their vices. This is so hard for most people that
there is only one success in the book along with many failures. The narrator
himself has barely started trying when the storyline ends.

As for "all parties" -yes, those who try usually get to be confronted by close friends
who have succeeded some time in the past, but these really have their work cut out for them
to try and convince the others just what their vices consist of and what needs to be done
to be rid of them.

> And as far as justice is concerned, things are even worse in the Job story - on
> another thread we had a short discussion of the 2. series of Good Omens, which
> starts with the story (and the best episodes in my view were about this):
>
> Two of the subordinate angles of Satan and God find the behavior of the masters so
> atrocious that they refuse to carry out their orders, and hide Job's children. Because
> they die (in the original, that is) for the 2 powerful protagonist to have their little
> wager, they are offered even less that Job, and nobody finds this offensive. And
> God's restitutive justice gives Job twice the number of new kids - which shows that
> the Old Testament deity sees humans as fungible. Not sure if most (sane) humans
> would agree with that deal - Sure, I killed your kids, but then I paid for the fertility
> treatment of your wife, and you got twice the number of new ones! That's like,
> stealing £10 from you but giving you £20 back - so you and up well ahead! (oh
> and your elderly wife will have to bear them, and no, epidurals won't be invented
> for another few thousand years, as will sterilised medical equipment) . There is
> a more serious theological point behind that quip - in one way to understand
> the incarnation, God had to become human to understand that we are indeed not
> fungible and quantifiable, and that every single one matters.

I like that last sentence. I've long left behind most of the traditional reasons for
God becoming human, in preference to seeing firsthand what a human's life is like,
and to show his solidarity with us. It would be very fitting if Job's rebuke
in Job 10 :4-5 had something to do with this:

"Have you got human eyes?
do you see as mankind sees?
Is your life mortal like a man's?
do your years pass as men's days pass?"

>
> Be this as it may, as a case for justice and the afterlife, I don't think Job works at all
> >
> > > The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
> > > real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call
> > > on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,
> > > in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
> >
> > What halo, Job might well ask. He takes the possibility of a life after death seriously --
> > but he has no such "illusion":
> >
> > I tell the tomb, "You are my father,"
> > and call the worm my mother and my sister.
> > Where then is my hope?
> > Who can see any happiness for me?
> > Will these come down to me in Sheol,
> > or sink with me into the dust? [ibid., Job 17:14-16]
> >
> > The image of Sheol, where there may still be a ghostly
> > existence, makes Epicurus's confidence that death
> > is the end of everything for an individual look like wishful thinking,
> > no less wishful than "pie in the sky". Hamlet's own "to sleep,
> > perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub" puts paid to Epicurus's confidence.
> > [See my post to this thread a little while ago for the sequel.]

That's my reply to Bozo User, which I suggested to John Harshman that he read
to get some focus, but he couldn't resist trying to get the polemical upper hand.

> Not sure where you are going with any of this, of why you think Job takes
> that afterlife serious. Ins't job making the exact opposite case here? "If
> I have to give up on justice in this world, I definitely won't get it in the next"

I wasn't thinking about justice at this point, but about the possible range of actual conditions,
some inkling of which keeps both Hamlet and Job from suicide.

> This is after all to justify himself against the accusation of his friends
> that demanding justice from God now is blasphemous.

See again about "acceptable to rail."


Duty calls again, so I stop here for now, to finish tomorrow.


Peter Nyikos

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, August 17, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, August 11, 2023 at 9:51:11 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> > On 8/11/23 5:58 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > I didn't post at all to Usenet yesterday because a family celebration lasted till after 9pm.
> > > But now I finally have time to finish the series of three replies to this thought-provoking post of yours.
> > >
> > > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > >> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > >>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > [quoting Lennox again:]
> > >>>> The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
> > >
> > >> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
> > >
> > > Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
> > > And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
> > > thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
> > > on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.
>
> > Islam would seem to be the major candidate here. Why would you reject it?
> I can't figure out what you are getting at here. I couldn't find anything about
> forgiveness in anything I've read about The Five Pillars of Islam.

Well, 5 of the 99 names of Allah are variants of "the forgiver", including
Ar-Raḥeem, which is evoked at the beginning of 113 of th 114 Surahs. Then
there is "al-Ghaffaar", (the repeatedly forgiving) , al-Ghafour, al-ʿAfou (the
pardoner)

And as rules of conduct for followers, there would be :
“And the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation –
his reward is [due] from Allah." (Quran 42:40)

and

"And whoever is patient and forgives – indeed, that is of the matters [worthy] of resolve.” (Quran 42:43)

or

“. . . and let them pardon and overlook. Would you not like that Allah should forgive you?
And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (Quran 24:22)

which mirrors the Lord's prayer's And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Also, there is no forgiveness
> for those who insult "Allah's greatest prophet, upon whom be peace."

Matthew 12:30-32:] "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.
Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the
Spirit will not be forgiven.

> Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

As an argument, that would be akin to saying Christianity does not have a concept
of forgiveness because of the IRA, no?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 18, 2023 at 6:10:10 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Thursday, August 17, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, August 11, 2023 at 9:51:11 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> > > On 8/11/23 5:58 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1:11:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > > >> On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > >>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:46:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > > > [quoting Lennox again:]
> > > >>>> The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a radical solution to my human problem.
> > > >
> > > >> Yes, and every member of every other religion will feel the same about theirs.
> > > >
> > > > Stop and think: what ARE the other religions which talk so radically about forgiveness?
> > > > And how do they do it? I know of no examples, and I know of one that has no such
> > > > thing: the Zoroastrians are so diffident about their religion that it can only be passed
> > > > on by inheritance. The Jews aren't big on proselytizing either.
> >
> > > Islam would seem to be the major candidate here. Why would you reject it?

> > I can't figure out what you are getting at here. I couldn't find anything about
> > forgiveness in anything I've read about The Five Pillars of Islam.

I am obviously largely ignorant of the religion of Islam, as opposed to its history.
Thank you for all the information you give below, Burkhard.

> Well, 5 of the 99 names of Allah are variants of "the forgiver", including
> Ar-Raḥeem, which is evoked at the beginning of 113 of th 114 Surahs. Then
> there is "al-Ghaffaar", (the repeatedly forgiving) , al-Ghafour, al-ʿAfou (the
> pardoner)
>
> And as rules of conduct for followers, there would be :
> “And the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation –
> his reward is [due] from Allah." (Quran 42:40)
>
> and
>
> "And whoever is patient and forgives – indeed, that is of the matters [worthy] of resolve.” (Quran 42:43)
>
> or
>
> “. . . and let them pardon and overlook. Would you not like that Allah should forgive you?
> And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (Quran 24:22)

Excellent. It's too bad Lennox's blog seems to be defunct, otherwise I would post this there.

>
> which mirrors the Lord's prayer's And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

> > Also, there is no forgiveness
> > for those who insult "Allah's greatest prophet, upon whom be peace."


> Matthew 12:30-32:] "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.
> Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the
> Spirit will not be forgiven.

This verse has caused untold harm to millions of scrupulous Christians who
fear that they have committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit [whatever that means].
It is one of many reasons why my confidence that there is a God who rewards
and punishes justly is so low.

There, I've returned to one of my themes in the OP-- the closing clause of my first paragraph there:

"Very few regulars of talk.origins are forthcoming about what they

believe about the possibility of a life after death; and, specifically,
one where a person's experience depends at least in part on
what one has done in this life."

> > Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

> As an argument, that would be akin to saying Christianity does not have a concept
> of forgiveness because of the IRA, no?

Not quite: no counterpart of an Ayatollah put out a *fatwa* on any IRA member
involved in misbehavior in the "time of troubles" -- which, fortunately, are over.

And I hope you don't mind my adding: one of the best friends of our family
[also a wonderful colleague in the Math Department before she retired]
did her modest part in helping them to end. She was one of the leaders
of the Irish Children Program, which brought children from both
"the Green and the Orange" together here in Columbia, enabling them
to see each other for the decent children they are, and finding
good host families for them during their stay here.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God."
[Matthew 5:9]

[Ernest Major]

On 18/08/2023 14:33, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
>> As an argument, that would be akin to saying Christianity does not have a concept
>> of forgiveness because of the IRA, no?

> Not quite: no counterpart of an Ayatollah put out a*fatwa* on any IRA member

> involved in misbehavior in the "time of troubles" -- which, fortunately, are over.

I see two problems with your counterargument.

Firstly you're not comparing like with like - you're drawing your
counterexample too narrowly. Stochastic terrorism is alive and well in
the USA.

Secondly just because you don't know that it happened doesn't mean that
it didn't - absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence. The spirit
of your counterexample is unclear, but the IRA did order the killing of
Catholics. Fide Wikipedia ("informers were usually killed") the IRA
killed also some IRA members suspected of being police or army
informers. In the other direction I don't find a Protestant clergyman
involved in a Protestant paramilitary ordering the death of an IRA
member an implausible event.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

I don't know enough to argue, but I think you're probably right. The
Rev. Ian Paisley (doctorate from Bob Jones University, that great seat
of learning) was pretty nasty, but I don't think he ever openly called
for Roman Catholics to be killed.

--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

[Ernest Major]

I did a bit more digging and found mention of one Billy Wright,
fundamentalist preacher and paramilitary leader, who is alleged to have
done so.

--
alias Ernest Major

[broger...@gmail.com]

I think you did not parse Ernest Major's last sentence correctly.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 18, 2023 at 1:15:04 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 18/08/2023 14:33, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> Salman Rushdie and the "Charlie Hebdo" publishers found out about that the hard way.
> >>>
> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
> >>>
> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

> >> As an argument, that would be akin to saying Christianity does not have a concept
> >> of forgiveness because of the IRA, no?

> > Not quite: no counterpart of an Ayatollah put out a*fatwa* on any IRA member
> > involved in misbehavior in the "time of troubles" -- which, fortunately, are over.

> I see two problems with your counterargument.
>
> Firstly you're not comparing like with like - you're drawing your
> counterexample too narrowly. Stochastic terrorism is alive and well in
> the USA.

What do you call "Stochastic terrorism" and why is it relevant?

My counterexample involves an Islamic religious leader, in line with
the use of the word "Christianity" by Burkhard.

> Secondly just because you don't know that it happened doesn't mean that
> it didn't - absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence. The spirit
> of your counterexample is unclear, but the IRA did order the killing of
> Catholics. Fide Wikipedia ("informers were usually killed") the IRA
> killed also some IRA members suspected of being police or army
> informers.

The IRA are not to be confused with bishops or others with authority
to issue religious edicts.

There is room for disagreement as to who can be considered
to be speaking for Christianity or Islam, but it stands to reason
that there should be some hierarchy to repudiate individual abuses
by rogue clergy.

An Ayatollah IS very high in the Islamic hierarchy,
and I would like to know whether there is a higher authority
capable of over-ruling one. A Caliph might have such authority,
but there is no recognized Caliph any more, and the recent attempts by
various groups of Islamic terrorists to re-establish a Caliphate were laughable.

> In the other direction I don't find a Protestant clergyman
> involved in a Protestant paramilitary ordering the death of an IRA
> member an implausible event.

Speculation is not evidence. Neither are rumors, such as the
one you mentioned about "one Billy Wright, fundamentalist preacher."


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 8, 2023 at 11:01:08 AM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 5:06:06 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 7:21:06 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> > > On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:26:06 PM UTC-7, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > > > On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 3:16:06 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> > > > > On 8/7/23 11:34 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > > > > > On Sunday, August 6, 2023 at 10:36:04 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >> To Peter, an idea is useful if he can use it to make himself look better
> > > > > >> (in his estimation) than someone else.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > SMILE when you say that, Podner, or be guilty of egregious hypocrisy.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > NOTE: I said almost the same thing to Harshman on the "parent" thread,
> > > > > > about a very different but derogatory comment of his.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Bottom line: I give him and you the benefit of the doubt if I see no reply by either
> > > > > > of you, and I have seen none from him. That is, I assume that you both follow
> > > > > > the "silence gives consent" rule to the *first* clause and would put a smiley
> > > > > > to the next time (if any) that you post similar derogatory comment.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Peter Nyikos

> > > > > > PS Martin Harran was clueless as to what my reply to Harshman referred to,
> > > > > > and he made a fool of himself with his reaction to our exchange. I believe you

> > > > > > can figure out what's behind my closing clause, if you think hard enough about it.
> > > > > >

> > > > > That was an impenetrable series of coy hints regarding I know not what,
> > > > > but as far as I can make out, all of it was off-topic, merely some kind
> > > > > of veiled attack on three people.

> > A two-man peanut gallery sounded off as follows:

> > > > I was preparing a response but now see he has responded with veiled threats
> > > > of what I guess is more veiled hints of consequences of repercussions.

> > Daggett is referring to the following response by me, ten minutes before he wrote the above:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zz-sXdHqagQ/m/iXqbp22pAQAJ

> > > > So veiled accusations and veiled threats. I'm hoping his dance doesn't increase
> > > > the count of veils to 7.

> > If Daggett is an ethical nihilist, it won't matter to him how hypocritical
> > Mark or Harshman are. I'm content to assume that both are OK
> > with being seen as having kidded with the comments at issue.

> > > I expect there is an infinite regress of veils.

> > Unless one of them objects to my assumption, there will be no more veils,
> > and you know it, but you couldn't resist being smart-alecky.
> >
> > Neither could Daggett.
> >
> >
> > Peter Nyikos

> I'll bite: I object to your assumptions.

Object all you want, I won't be swayed by *you*.


> Now, what are the additional veils?

I'm not aiming for mystery; I am aiming for peaceful coexistence,
and it is good to see that you have done nothing further
to disturb it in the ten days that have elapsed.


Peter Nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

You don't get to defend a religion by pointing to another religion
(especially an outlier member of it) and saying, "See? It's worse!"

I was thinking of mentioning Pat Roberson as a counterexample, but he
doesn't really count. What counts is the 30% of the country who
approves of his messages of hate. (He even approved of attacking other
denominations of Protestantism, not to mention Islam, Hinduism, LGBQ,
and women.) I wonder what Khomeini's actual approval rating, in *all*
of Afghanistan, was. My suspicion is that it would also be about 30%,
though I doubt it could have been accurately measured even during
Khomeini's lifetime.

>> In the other direction I don't find a Protestant clergyman
>> involved in a Protestant paramilitary ordering the death of an IRA
>> member an implausible event.
>
> Speculation is not evidence. Neither are rumors, such as the
> one you mentioned about "one Billy Wright, fundamentalist preacher."

It's not rumor that Billy Wright called for someone to be murdered and
almost certainly murdered other people himself.