Category: Thinking
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Don’t argue about abstractions.
It isn’t that abstractions don’t matter or aren’t real – they are. It’s rather that abstraction does not offer, in real time, as the argument develops, any feedback loop. So as the conversation proceeds the two thinkers become more and more abstract. So their disagreement grows as they talk, because the layers of abstraction are…
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Do Better People See More?
Do good people perceive anything at all that evil people do not? Anything? Once this line is crossed, we must allow for the existence of persons, castles, dragons, and unicorns that the good can see and the bad cannot. If there is any moral dimension at all to percipience, and if we allow that everyone is…
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The Ethic of Happiness Kills the Conscience
In Romans 3: 12-16, the function of the conscience is to hold us accountable to the ethic of fidelity. But in its dark opposite, the ethic of happiness, the conscience has no purpose. The evangelists of the happiness ethic like to tell themselves, in the quiet of the night, that their pursuit of happiness is…
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The Two Operations Of The Intellect
‘There ’s a traditional distinction between the synthetic and analytic operations of the intellect: the synthetic operation builds parts into wholes, while the analytic operation breaks wholes into parts. The distinction seems to have lost its usefulness among moderns, as thought becomes an unclarified mess of mush. And reductionism results from this amnesia, as we…
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Ontological rank is the limit on knowing.
There never was a nothing. First there was God, then there was a something. Since the effect cannot be greater than the cause, the some-thing is less than the God thing. Because it is second and therefore less, and since comprehension is just a form of circumscription. logically the second thing cannot comprehend the first…
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Occam’s Razor: the data set decides the game
That explanation of the universe which best explains all the DATA using the least number of entities is the one to be preferred. Most atheists simply do not believe an extra entity, called “god”, is necessary to explain the DATA. What changes for some of them as they near death is not that they perceive…
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Athens, Jerusalem, and Mecca
There was an Aristotelian thread and a Platonist thread in Christian thought from early on. Aristotle himself was lost to the West for a while — not because of some mythical “stranglehold” the church had on larger society, but because of the cultural disaster called the fall of Rome, which took centuries to recover from.…
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Challenge the Premise
If you answer the question, you endorse the premise. The truth is, every question, in every conversation, places the two in the space the questioner has decided is important. There is no logical or moral compulsion to buy that prior decision. Often, to do so wastes time. Jesus seldom answered the question. His reluctance to…
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The Mind Puzzles, The Feelings Feel, The Heart Wants
Consider the perpetual arguments, the ones that have been going on long enough that everyone should have figured out the debate is not actually progressing in either of the two antagonistic directions. Here is the short list, you could add your versions of these: By now you are ready to say “nominalism vs. realism, in…
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You’ll slide off, either up or down.
Supernaturalism: Nothing is just itself, it is part of something else. Naturalism: Nothing is itself, it is made up of something else.