Religious Typology Quiz

BidenPresident said:
Wrong. Plato never said people are afraid to leave the cave. He said they do not know they are in the cave.
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Now we're getting somewhere. Not knowing you're in a cave is slave instinct. Our military sends our youth abroad in search of monsters by telling them it's their patriotic duty. Big business tells our youth to go to university to end up working in a gig economy. They don't know they are slaves. An 18-year-old kid is not ready for war or higher learning.
 
goat said:
Now we're getting somewhere. Not knowing you're in a cave is slave instinct. Our military sends our youth abroad in search of monsters by telling them it's their patriotic duty. Big business tells our youth to go to university to end up working in a gig economy. They don't know they are slaves. An 18-year-old kid is not ready for war or higher learning.
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You seem like you flunked high school.
 
NovoJank said:
And hopefully you understand why I find it difficult to not see you as a fierce defender of your Christian faith. You said you were an "agnostic" but your posting style belies someone who gets worked up very quickly when atheists speak. It seems to bother you in the extreme that anyone would speak out against God.

Why not be open about your deeply held faith? It kinda feels like it might be evangelical. Given how quickly you decreed me to be a "violent atheist" just because I mentioned atheism in a larger context.
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I found that after growing up in an extreme Christian environment (we went to church twice every Sunday and every Thursday evening, I was forced to participate in "ministries" that had me at church 7 days a week) that it became difficult to get rid of the idea that Christians in the US are persecuted. It is very prevalent in sermons and among the congregation. Even after it was clear I did not believe in the religion (I actually told my mother when I was around 10, it didn't help... that's why I was forced to participate in Art Ministry, work as an ASL translator on Thursday evenings, work with the Prison Ministry (also as a translator)...)

Anyway, getting too much into my personal past... it was difficult to get past some parts that were pervasive. It took a long time to get to a point where I wouldn't automatically resist when someone smack talked Christianity.
 
Damocles said:
I found that after growing up in an extreme Christian environment (we went to church twice every Sunday and every Thursday evening, I was forced to participate in "ministries" that had me at church 7 days a week) that it became difficult to get rid of the idea that Christians in the US are persecuted. It is very prevalent in sermons and among the congregation. Even after it was clear I did not believe in the religion (I actually told my mother when I was around 10, it didn't help... that's why I was forced to participate in Art Ministry, work as an ASL translator on Thursday evenings, work with the Prison Ministry (also as a translator)...)

Anyway, getting too much into my personal past... it was difficult to get past some parts that were pervasive. It took a long time to get to a point where I wouldn't automatically resist when someone smack talked Christianity.
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I get that. I spent the majority of my life as a believer, but I was raised in a pretty middle-of-the-road midwestern Methodist church so there wasn't as much push on the religion. But I had difficulties with it and when I finally did de-convert and became an atheist I still found that it was hard to push God out of the conversation.

Obviously now I'm more comfortable with dispassionately talking about religion, but I totally get where Doc Dutch and Cypress are coming from.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Lack of constraint is a simple way of looking at it. In the context of religion and/or politics, freedom needs a more complex definition.

As such, in a civilized world, freedom can be defined as the ability to maximize one’s abilities with the only rule being “don’t hurt anyone”. A simple mind might whine that the sentence hurts them, but that’s because they are simple minded and unable to comprehend the more complex nature of a moral civilization.
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^^ John Stuart Mill's conception of freedom is a good one.

I was looking at some notes I have from a class, and Jean Jacques Rousseau contended that moral freedom demands social equality and the socialization of private property. Moral freedom itself meant knowing ourselves and being in control of our desires and passions.

Malcolm X thought spiritual freedom was the basis of political freedom.
 
Cypress said:
Moral freedom itself meant knowing ourselves and being in control of our desires and passions.
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I'm curious how this is "freedom". Knowledge of one's self is certainly a virtue, as is control of one's desires and passions. Does it create "freedom" by eliminating something that holds one back? Or is it freedom per se? Because that sounds more like an aphorism than an actual philosophical position. You know, like "God is love". Does that mean that God literally is the feeling of Love? Or does it mean that God embodies all the features of "love", but that doesn't DEFINE love.
 
NiftyNiblick said:
I like the Kris Kristofferson / Janis Joplin definition of freedom.

It seems to be the most realistic.
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That essentially devolves down to "lack of constraints", but that has been deemed to be a very bad definition on this thread. It is the only definition of Freedom that comports with what the word actually means, but apparently there's some philosophical je ne sais quoi that cannot be uttered or written out. It can only be defined as listing philosophers who have written about it.
 
NovoJank said:
I get that. I spent the majority of my life as a believer, but I was raised in a pretty middle-of-the-road midwestern Methodist church so there wasn't as much push on the religion. But I had difficulties with it and when I finally did de-convert and became an atheist I still found that it was hard to push God out of the conversation.

Obviously now I'm more comfortable with dispassionately talking about religion, but I totally get where Doc Dutch and Cypress are coming from.
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I spent way too many years as an antitheist. For some strange reason, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu women found that attractive. White women try to rule me.
 
BidenPresident said:
How long have you been in the psych ward?
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