Is a person who claims to know God, humble?

Why are you caricaturing my stance like this?

What is really going on?

What do you want from me?

 

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I was summing up.

At some point, you were isolated from that cultural context, were you not?

Hopefully you are aware of the troubles inherent in malpractice lawsuits, where the lay tries to prove that the doctors have done something wrong. The doctors are everything but ready to admit any mistake.
The doctors generally do consider us, patients, to be medically inept. No, we are not deemed capable of assessing the efficacy of a medical practitioner.

This is a mean twist of my point.

My point is that the criticism we receive from professionals (such as from doctors, teachers or religious people) leaves us no room for any confidence in our own perceptions, knowledge and abilities, and instead leads us to believe that the only way we could be justified to question their judgment of us, is if we had at least the same qualifications as they do. And that if we do not have the qualifcations they do, we are obligated to accept their judgment of us.

If the "right religion" is the exclusive property of one group, then so are all the concepts.

Really, prabhu? You would grant me that I am able to assess whether your behavior here is suitable for a brahmachari?

No. The president is not claimed to have the kind of all-important role as God.

Does Catholicism steer away from hell?
Does Buddhism steer away from hell?

A system where people are not expected to make choices that cannot be made rationally; and a system where people are not expected to take actions that cannot be taken intentionally.

Says you. The Catholics, Muslims, Protestants and many others disagree.

What you are suggesting is that a person would/can/does choose
the very system of beliefs
that contextualizes all their knowing, being and acting,
including that very decision.

I do not think free will applies when it comes to the - seeming - choice of religion or basic belief system.

"I freely choose to believe that free will exists and that I have free will."
No, this does not make sense.



Your reasoning about the choice of religion applies if and only if:

1. There is no eternal damnation.
2. There is serial reincarnation, and people can make progress also in the spiritual sense from one incarnation to the next. Ie. "no mistakes are fatal."
3. Each person has a solid sense of self that they are in touch with, comfortable with, and do not doubt.

These three propositions are not a self-evident given, at least not for everyone.

 

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Show us that your religious choice was not a case of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy).

This fallacy, a combination of several formal fallacies, is committed when one uses the same information to construct and test the same hypothesis.

From the looks of it, you have learned what a veritable disciplic succession is from that same disciplic succession - the same you accept as veritable.

You have not learned about the disciplic succession from some neutral, objective, non-denominational source, and then based on that knowledge, made a choice between the various groups that claim to be a disciplic succession.

So everything you have told us so far, suggests you have committed this fallacy.

 

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Yes. I do have ideas on how I would be if I would believe in God.
It's the only way I can conceive of believing in God. (Not that it makes belief in God any less foreign to me.)

Religious choice does seem to me to be a single decision. I see no real, meaningful graduality in religious choice.

Whether I am to chant one round daily or 16 rounds - it makes no real difference to me. The religious choice behind them is the same, to me. To me, chanting one round daily requires no less faith, no less commitment than chanting 16. (I am speaking from experience here.)
Going to mass the second time requires as much faith from me as going there for a month or a year.

As Mr. Goebbels knew ...

But aren't you in a solipsistic shell then, if things must reach you like that?

Or perhaps what to me seems like a solipsistic shell (or worse: prison cell), actually is simply the fact of having a sense of self, identity?

There is actually some research that supports this:

About moral indignation and the law, with references:
http://lawreview.vermontlaw.edu/articles/3/12 Sunstein Book 3, Vol. 33.pdf

Criticism of Habermas' communication theory:

Habermas's elaboration of a procedural, discursive deliberative democracy extends from his faith in communicative action, in symmetrical communicative interactions played out in an arena of communicative rationality. Yet Habermas expects too much of his agents. His theory of communicative action, built upon the necessary possession of communicative rationality, requires individuals to have clear, unfettered access to their own reasoning, possessing clear preference rankings and defendable rationales for their goals and values. Without such understandings, agents would have no reasons to extend or defend their positions in a discursive interchange; no validity claims are redeemable between communicative participants if the agent cannot access, substantiate or understand their own rationality. The psychological and discursive preconditions that agents must manifest to meet Habermas's conditions as participants in communicative rationality are exceptionally demanding.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/955/1/Weakening_Habermas_(LSERO).pdf


In other words, the usual cognitive drive of critical thinking and philosophical and religious discussion may not be sufficient to explain our thinking, feeling, speaking and acting.

Heh.

Yes ...

So it comes down to finding an answer to "What to do, how to act when uncertain?"

So it's again about being present - in the present moment.

 

To recognize that for all your problems with establishing the "right" authority in theism you can do it off the bat with Buddhism or a host of other things using an identical knowledge theory.

 

But I am not doing that.

With the story about the Buddha's first sermon, I simply cited the source of the idea I posted.

You are the one who read into this that I am considering Buddhism or that particular story to be somehow obligatory for anyone.



And again:

Your reasoning about the choice of religion applies if and only if:

1. There is no eternal damnation.
2. There is serial reincarnation, and people can make progress also in the spiritual sense from one incarnation to the next. Ie. "no mistakes are fatal."
3. Each person has a solid sense of self that they are in touch with, comfortable with, and do not doubt.

These three propositions are not a self-evident given, at least not for everyone.

 

It's more like a shell game. You can't win (the ball is palmed) and you pay with your soul.

 

I would say the choices are not quite like that...

With the "apple, pear or banana" you can see them - they are there in front of you.
The additional option of the car, however, is more like "the promise of a car"... you can't see it. You ask to see it and they say "well, it's parked outside, but if you choose it you'll eventually get it".
So you ask to go outside and have a look - but you're told it's actually quite a distance away... but if you follow this certain path you should be able to find it. And they don't give you a detailed map, they give you general hints that need a specific person to help you interpret it. And throughout your journey to see the car you need to "believe" that there is a car at the end of the path.

And they will try to convince you that you will see the car only when you truly believe you can see the car: if you get to the destination and there is no car, it's not because there is no car, it's because you are not yet ready to see the car, you do not yet truly believe there is a car there.

And when you finally believe you can see the car... the car that you have convinced yourself truly exists... and the car that you are now convinced you can see... at that point you are no longer in a position to make the judgement of whether the car exists in reality or not, or is just in your mind. To you it will exist, even if people walking beside you can't see anything.


And all the while that you are on your journey looking for the car, convincing yourself that it exists, the apple, the pear and the banana that were on the desk in front of you have gone rotten.

 

What i read into it is what you typed - namely the request for theists to take this (authoritative) lesson from Buddha

YOU :
In fact, the Buddha's first sermon after he attained Awakening was "I am the rightfully self-enlightend one" to the first person he met on the road. The person looked at him in confusion and walked away.
After that, the Buddha (with some encouragement from the Devas) decided that proclaiming his qualifications put people off and was counterproductive to his efforts to enlighten others, and after that, he didn't do it anymore, but changed his approach to teaching others.

I wonder if theists would be willing to take this lesson from the Buddha ...

So what gives?

How on earth did you navigate Buddhism to even begin to hope to cite something authoritative about it (as a directive for others?)?
:shrug:

 

I didn't have to "navigate Buddhism."

I wasn't giving a directive to others.

I expressed a personal wish.
Something that I, as an individual, can.
The Buddhist story was just an illustration to that wish.

Yes, I wish theists would be more caring, more understanding toward non-theists.
I wish theists would not expect people to do things that cannot be done intentionally.
I wish theists wouldn't threaten us with eternal damnation or that we will offend God if we don't do as they say.
I wish theists would realize that there are all kinds of theisms around and each of them demands that people do something else.
I wish theists would realize how confusing theistic pluralism is for non-theists.
I wish theists would get off of their high horse.
I wish.


It's merely a personal wish.

Surely you as a theist will feel free to ignore it.

 

:bugeye:

I can't fathom how you can bring up a didactic pastime of buddha, express its relevance to a certain class of people and then come back several posts later saying you didn't navigate the subject matter and it wasn't a directive.

:shrug:

 

I suppose I don't consider myself a god; nor do I consider myself connected to a god or God.

So I have mere human hopes and wishes.
Hopes and wishes that will likely be trampled on by others.
But I have them anyway.


Perhaps if you were more like me, you could fathom that.

 

Even in states of abject misery its unavoidable to speak authoritatively and provide directives to others ....

 

Even in your super-enlightened state, you are still prone to meanness ...

 

Its mean to point out that one is speaking authoritatively and giving a directive?

(BTW you just spoke authoritatively and gave another directive ...)

 

What do you want from me, LG?

 

To recognize that for all your problems with establishing the "right" authority in theism you can do it off the bat with Buddhism or a host of other things using an identical knowledge theory.

 

I still think you are trivializing religious choice, and you have so far said nothing to make me think otherwise.


Secondly, why does it matter to you if I "recognize that for all /my/ problems with establishing the "right" authority in theism /I/ can do it off the bat with Buddhism or a host of other things using an identical knowledge theory"?
What is in it for you if I recognize this?


Moreover, I have noticed that you have become so mean and prone to caricaturing my stances only after I formally released you from being my instructor.
It could be that some unacknowledged negative emotions toward me are influencing how you talk to me.


There are also several replies here that I have made to you, which you have not replied to.

Specifically, I would like you to
1. show that religious choice is not a case of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,
and
2. reply to this from post 62:

 

I don't see how pointing out the myriad of ways people, yourself included, speak authoritatively and give directives on all sorts of things in all sorts of ways trivializes your claim that it is a weak knowledge theory endemic to theism.

I see it as putting your claim in a proper context.

 

You're either mean, playing with sophistry for fun, paranoid, or you have some very good reason for saying this, but which you have not revealed so far.

I did not make the claim that your theory of religious choice is a "weak knowledge theory endemic to theism."
This is what you claim that I claimed.

Sure.
Except that my context here is my personal context.

Unlike some, including yourself, I do not see myself as part of any institution, organization, or group.

If anything, I am "part of" modern multireligious, multicultural society, for which a postmodernist relativism-to-nihilism is typical - so it is difficult to talk about actually belonging or being part of this society.
And yet this is precisely the society where many people, including myself, are born into and have to function in.

We cannot take a stance or hold a position the way those who are members of some other organizations, societies or cultures (such as the Catholic Church etc.) can.
We are born into a society in which we are not actually members.


One of the things I find problematic is precisely this act of taking a stance, choosing a context.
Also in traditional Western discussion and debate, not just in Hindu, it would be normal to take a stance, choose a context.
But modern times have relativized this act of taking a stance as well. We are left with our own personal situations, but which we also (have to) doubt.


You can mock me and ridicule me all you want. But if you really believe that I, too, am part and parcel of God, and if you want me to realize this, then you will just have to try harder to make yourself understandable to me.