Bad faith of the agnostic

Cypress said:
Plato envisioned a three tiered society based on heirachy and a program of eugenics. Plato and Aristotle were aristocrats who probably never saw a leper or talked to a poor person. Social justice for the poor, sick, and oppressed was not an abiding part of their intellectual program. Social justice is what makes the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament unique among ancient literature.

Plato and Aristotle had different strengths.
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Justice is justice. Your distinction is not true in Plato or Aristotle. And Aristotle was a teacher, not an aristocrat.
 
Cypress said:
We are not going to start making the argument that Plato, Jesus, the Hebrew prophets, Bhudda, Aristotle were basically all exactly the same. It's just not true, and it's intellectually lazy to hang one's hat on that argument
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I never said such a thing.
 
Hume said:
I have. What about it addresses my question?
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You haven't. If you had, you would already know what is taught. What is taught is that there is no separate self. That is not only a philosophical position, it is also a biological position. Nowhere in our body is there a self.
 
ZenMode said:
You haven't. If you had, you would already know what is taught. What is taught is that there is no separate self. That is not only a philosophical position, it is also a biological position. Nowhere in our body is there a self.
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ok, there is no self. Now what?
 
Hume said:
ok, there is no self. Now what?
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Without a self, as I referenced earlier, there's no thing deciding what we believe or don't believe. People who are religious aren't choosing to believe. They just haven't been exposed to anything that has changed their mind.
 
ZenMode said:
I haven't either. I was making a biological/neurological statement, not a philosophical one.

Buddhist teachings, which are somewhat philosophical in nature, have been teaching that concept, whether they really know it or not, for a long time. They do not believe in a separate self so, they are indirectly acknowledging the fact that we don't have control over our beliefs because there is no separate self to control them.
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Ok, I think we might be on the same page.

People get PhDs in religious studies precisely because it is not true to state that the world's religious and ethical traditions are basically the same, and that Jesus, Plato, and the Bhudda basically had the same program and priorities
 
Hume said:
Justice is justice. Your distinction is not true in Plato or Aristotle. And Aristotle was a teacher, not an aristocrat.
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No, justice is not justice.
That statement has no context or meaing.

Socrates spent several chapters in the Republic with his interlocutors trying to define justice.

Social justice has a very specific context.

Aristotle's father was a doctor in the court of the King of Macedon. Plato was from an aristocratic family. I seriously doubt that either Aristotle or Plato ever met any lepers, ever talked to poor people, ever hung out with fishermen.

The historical context of Jesus, Plato, Aristotle were totally different. And you cannot understand someone's moral, religious, or intellectual program apart from their life experience and historical context.

Plato and Aristotle were writing for other aristocrats and patricians with their programs of self-improvement, wisdom, self-cultivation, self-realization. Nonetheless, they have been wildly influential in the centuries that followed.

Jesus was a rabbi in Galilee, a backwater province that has been ravaged by war, starvation, oppression, and the theft of land from the small family farmers by the program of the Herodian Kings to turn Galilee into an agricultural feudal estate run by large landlords and farmed by indenture servants. Into this economic and historical context, Jesus was inspired to teach his message of social justice and the kingdom of God within us, which was largely intended for the poor, the sick, the oppressed.
 
Cypress said:
Ok, I think we might be on the same page.

People get PhDs in religious studies precisely because it is not true to state that the world's religious and ethical traditions are basically the same, and that Jesus, Plato, and the Bhudda basically had the same program and priorities
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But the commonalities tell us the most about the nature of religion and why humans have a penchant for it.

The differences tell us about the human hand in creating and developing religions.
 
Cypress said:
Plato and Aristotle were writing for other aristocrats and patricians with their programs of self-improvement, wisdom, self-cultivation, self-realization.
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Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is taught in intro philosophy classes across the world.
Are you saying college freshmen are all aristocrats?
 
Commander Dutch said:
Generally, yes. It depends.
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Thanks for the confirmation.

Like I said, I'm A-OK with people being agnostic about God, but generally I find that people apply agnosticism very SPECIFICALLY and ONLY to God. When in reality they consistently in their lives wouldn't consider themselves agnostic about OTHER unevidenced claims.

I think an "ideal" would be to have a philosophy which is consistently applied across all cases. But that's not easy to do.
 
Hume said:
A man and woman sit in a cafe and the man reaches over and places his hand on the woman's hand. She neither embraces his hand nor pulls away. Sartre calls this bad faith because she refuses to make a decision.

The agnostic has bad faith in same sense by refusing to decide if god is there or not.
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Commonsense dictates that religion is an invention of men.
 
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