Greetings old friends

[Amergin]

Sorry for butchering your name, Baruch. I blame it on my smaller Keyboard.

Amergin

[Baruch]

My figners are dyslexic too

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

I miss you blokes and blokettes, especially EH, Rofessor Paruch, and Lovey Mirage.

I have trouble getting overextended. I'll try to post this time.

Amergin

Well, I can understand getting over-extended. And this forum can be deliberately worse than some others, because we're trying to keep the focus positive and philosophical -- which is usually harder work! That's probably why we get so few contributors -- too much thinking involved!

Hope to hear more from you, Amergin. We miss you, too!

[Kurt]

Mirage,
You're so right. People afflicted with the neuroses of masochism and sadism have lost the ability to appreciate the meaning of pain (physical or otherwise). The rest of us should go on "sleething" in the manner you suggest.
Kurt

[Baruch]

EH - How do words get defined? Particularly abstract words that are not attached to a concrete object, say a horse, vs beauty. Now a horse can be beautiful in several ways. I can name a particular horse ... say Black Beauty ... but what horseness makes it possible for me to define two different individuals as belonging to the same class ... doesn't that require imagination, doesn't that require assumptions? Where do adjectives come from? I would think that the selection of adjectives and their relative value between different individuals, is the very tool we use to categorize.

And yes, Linneas the Swede was a great classifier, but we know from subsequent genetic knowledge that he got some things wrong, because of the necessary superficiality of his observations, and because of convergent evolutions. The human eye and the beautiful blue eye of the scallop (all 32 of them) as well as the octopus are quite similar, but one wouldn't likely state that the human and the scallop are closely related, but the octopus and the scallop more so. But some characteristics are chosen, and some are considered more important than others, so that by assumption, we believe that the scallop is more closely related to the clam, than to us.

So yes, let us sleeth about G-d, or shut up about horses and scallops.

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

How do words get defined? By the writers of dictionaries, that’s how! But where do they look for clues? In words' uses – in discourse, in written language, in changes through time and space, in their relations to other words. A wondrous task, really, as I’ve discovered through one of my favourite books (still sitting on my dining room table, as it has been for about 30 years), “Dictionary of Word Origins” by Joseph T. Shipley.

Do you know why we must "sleeth" about God? Because we can’t talk about Him, that’s why. Talking about requires a common understanding of. It’s why a Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens can’t talk about God in a debate – they have a “concept” of God in mind that either is foreign to their interlocutor (if their opponent is a truly spiritual individual), or very like, if he’s a fundie. In the former case, there’s no basis for debate, and in the latter, the fundie loses automatically because his definition is a failure.

Can you imagine, for even half a moment, what a conversation between Dawkins and Spinoza would be like? I think the fact that they don’t share a language would be the very least of their difficulties! But you see, I suffer from the same problem. I do not understand any notion of God that does not include some element of “personal,” and some element of “intentional.” Without those, then “god” is just “nature,” and one may as well have the conversation by simply changing the name every second use. But such a god has nothing much to say about the real questions that plague religions, or so I’d imagine. But with those (intentional and personal) then I am – because I’m “rational” as you so often point out – immediately and completely entangled in a web of contradictions with no means of sorting them out. Dawkins and Harris would simply dismiss it all as nonsense. I don’t get it, but I’m trying to see.

And before you say it, I know you will accuse me of using the wrong sort of viewing equipment to see. But it is – at least for now – all the equipment I have.

[Baruch]

To see G-d as indefinable ... that is Zen. Ever consider visiting a Zendo? In classic theology of both East and West that is called "via negativa" ... which is used for un-seeing the transcendent aspect of G-d (aka the Father). But you also have the "via positiva" ... which is used for seeing the immanent aspect of G-d (aka the Son). Of course in Zen you would learn it is not necessary to personalize those two aspects of the Absolute/Relative. It is all Impersonal/Personal in fact. But as a West Asian person I prefer to use the Relative-Personal language rather than the Absolute-Impersonal like yourself. But then you probably don't think Zen is a religion ;-0

And no, oh dry academic ... words are not defined by lexicographers, but by poets. Lexicographers are like paleontologists, they only examine the bones of words. Poets speak, and fantastic creatures walk, fly and swim. No two people define a word exactly the same anyway, not in a living language, defined by its current usage. So how can communication be possible at all? You and I are. Drop Aquinas and embrace Galileo ... be empirical instead of rational in your epistemology ... or admit you really are dogmatist, but are unconscious of the fact.

Spinoza was quite powerful in secular thought, the very basis for modern thinking some claim. He would wipe the floor with Dawkins, who is a biologist anyway, not a philosopher. Spinoza was ultra-rational (he reduced G-d to geometry), and Dawkins is ultra-empirical (produce G-d in front of me same as my right shoe, and then I will believe) ... their difference in epistemology would be the blockage ... which is funny since you would play rationalist Spinoza to my Dawkins ... I have a different standard of empiricism, broader than Dawkins. You are very mistaken I think in who is who in our conversations. Though I will admit you don't fit Spinoza either, since he was im=personalist.

Shalom

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

And no, oh dry academic ... words are not defined by lexicographers, but by poets. Lexicographers are like paleontologists, they only examine the bones of words. Poets speak, and fantastic creatures walk, fly and swim. No two people define a word exactly the same anyway, not in a living language, defined by its current usage. So how can communication be possible at all? You and I are. Drop Aquinas and embrace Galileo ... be empirical instead of rational in your epistemology ... or admit you really are dogmatist, but are unconscious of the fact.

I think, if you read again, that really was my point. Of course, the way I phrased it (badly) may make that hard to see, but what I was suggested is that words are "defined" in their usage, and that "definition" is merely extracted and recorded -- for a time -- by the lexicographers, by examining current and prior usage.