mererdog

From my perspective, 1 Corinthians 6 seems to contradict you. I would love it if you could explain how you integrate those passages into your understanding about the Bible and judgement.

Stop trying to trick us into doing your homework for you! Personally, I think all culture is amoral. Morality, I believe, exists only at the level of the individual, and a lot of our cultural trappings serve only to hide that fact, encouraging us to trade morals for mores...

Consider a pitcher and a batter. The pitcher does not want the batter to hit the ball. The batter does not want the pitcher to get a strike past him. Each works to oppose the will of the other, yet neither is enslaved by the other. Neither permits the other to win, but neither really forces the other to lose. A slave who runs away does not enslave his former master by refusing to permit the enslavement.

An economics professor convinced me that we focus on what we can measure because it gives us a sense of control, even though the things we can't measure are what ultimately determine our outcomes. This is a minority opinion among economists, but his arguments rang true for me. And its not too surprising that it is a minority opinion, given that most economists make a living by convincing companies to buy formulas and lists of stats...

So, have you learned anything useful, Von?

I don't use Redbox because I dont want to commit to bringing the discs back on time. Too many times, a $1.50 rental turned into $4.50 rental. I would rather commit to paying a higher fee that I know is the total fee. It keeps the budget on track, especially when renting multiple movies. My brother-in-law had to go on deployment without taking back the two Redbox discs in his glove box. It cost him more than fifty bucks. But, hey, now he owns two movies he doesn't like...

Not really. Some shepherds let their sheep die of old age, never eat their flesh, and do not wear their skin. The sheep produce both wool and milk, which are valuable enough to those shepherds. You are falling prey to The Problem of Induction I mentioned earlier- making assumptions about a group based on observations of a part of the group then using a rule based on those assumptions to judge an individual member of that group. Not all Jews are rich, you dig?

The fact that many people believe the world is flat does not, in any way, indicate that someone can successfully sue a school for teaching astronomy. The fact that anyone can file a frivolous lawsuit is not something we should be held hostage by. Philosophy classes work by raising basic questions and then examining different ways people have gone about trying to answer those questions. When discussing Plato, the focus is not really on what Plato believed, so much as the process Plato used to develop and express his beliefs. The (ideal) goal is to give students a set of tools they can use to better understand any problem- tools like logic and rhetoric that basically have universal applications, being equally useful to Christian and Satanist, doctor and farmer. I took a very basic Fundamentals of Philosophy class in 5th grade (As part of what the North Carolina Public Schools were calling the Gifted and Talented Program) . All I remember from it is that we were taught about the way logical fallacies are used by advertisers to trick us. That proved to be valuable info, even as a child.

Inferring from the specific to the general and back is problematic. When induction leads to words like "nothing" and "everything," "always" and "never," I think of Bertrand Russell... "Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

The important stuff I learned in Philosophy classes- Questions are more useful than answers. Certainty is less valuable than curiosity. Oddly, the way the classes were taught and graded suggested that the faculty never quite learned these lessons.

1st Rule of Motion: An object at rest remains at rest until acted upon by an outside force. So... Everything that happens, happens because something else happened. Every event is the result of something that was the result of something that was the result of something. I find that this can only be true if the universe exists as a closed system with no beginning or end, or if something exists as an exception to the rule. Either something can act without first being acted upon, or the concepts of before and after must be interchangeable at some scale. Neither of those answers really feels satisfactory.

We rarely make them drink poison nowadays....

Sure about that? I mean, if it did, how would we know? In other words, is that truth, or wishful thinking?

Care to prove a difference there?

I don't know. You brought it up. I thought maybe there was a reason.

Why does that matter?

Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving a cat, some poison gas, and a decaying isotope illustrates our relationship to the truth rather well. Depending on interpretation, some will say "It is absurd, therefore it cannot be true" some will say "It is both absurd and true" and some wiil say "clearly we don't really understand what is going on here". https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/msysip.htm

Maybe. I know of no way to objectively test claims that truth is subjective. Do you? Also, history is not truth. It is a mishmash of collected subjective experience. Much of it is rumor, much of it is propaganda, and much of it is lost. We can never really know that belief in a flat Earth was popular. We can simply believe it or not believe it, depending on how we react to the evidence available to us.

I often want to believe lies to be the truth, even when I know they are lies rather than truth. Life would be easier if I got to choose what I believe, rather than being stuck having beliefs that cause me discomfort. Ah, to be able to wish away my feelings of guilt, shame, and personal responsibility. To be able to seamlessly replace worry with confidence and disappointment with triumph. To shape my inner world to my liking with no regard to the shape of the outer world. Such a pretty dream.

The round Earth and Heliocentrism are more popular concepts than the alternatives you proffer. So if truth is a popularity contest, those concepts should be true, no? I believe that belief does not change truth. However, belief changes what we can accept as true, which changes how we react to the truth- and those who speak it. We may believe we want the truth, but if we believe lies to be the truth, what we really want is more lies. No?

I tend to look for confirmation and comfort.

Hypocrisy seems to be the sort of thing that requires forgiveness. It also seems like a fairly universal human trait. If I refuse to forgive those who seem hypocritical, who is left to forgive?

So it is unconditional, as long as you meet the conditions. Like something that is free, provided you pay for it.

One explanation I saw floated is that the intended audience for Luke would not understand the metaphor. It makes me wonder whether I am misunderstanding any metaphors in Luke.

Trump's opinion may be honest, but it is just an opinion.* The truth is way more complicated. Most of the time, it is like we are describing a color-filled world in terms of shades of grey. It may be how we see it, but it isn't how it is. *For the record, I have no rational reason to believe he said anything specific on this subject. Reports are contradictory and no one has provided any proof.