Religious discussion (continued from “Christianity and Chastity”)

Essentially I agree with you - reality testing involves triangulating one’s perceptions within the context of interpersonal interaction and of course there being coherence between the special senses. But we never “merely” perceive,

That wasn’t the case with me at all. Time and again I’d tell myself “remember, no matter how weird things get, it’s a trip”. And every time, 30 minutes later space, time and personal identity completely vanish or distort and I “realise” the tab was a portal INTO something far more real than the regular existence I had hitherto believed in. And no use whatsoever in saying “oh it only lasts 12 hours” if, subjectively, linear time has absolutely evaporated.

 

I pretty much agree with your assessment, except you don’t give sufficient attention to the way our intersubjective judgements are partly structured by our common faculties of perception and preconscious cultural assumptions (also known as mental schema in cognitive science). Much of our thought is structured by language, and language works by means of hidden metaphors. So it’s possible for us to err collectively, and for the apparently objective information gained through scientific measurement to be distorted by how we interpret it.

 

Again, true to an extent. But… the nature of modern science and technology is such that very, VERY few people can truly understand it. Even within that tiny intellectual elite, specialisation carries a huge opportunity cost, so that to master one’s own area one simply can’t understand other specialisations nor maintain a broad overview.

 

…so you end up with tiny subcultures using specialised languages, and everyone (including geniuses) taking most “facts” on faith.
In the field of physics it’s particularly acute. The people who truly understand modern physics to the point of actually being able to see the raw data and infer theoretical models from them can ONLY make themselves understood to lay audiences by resort to metaphor - and this really is a problem because the metaphors are drawn from the very same everyday world of experience (the world of medium sized things where the Newtonian model holds) that differs so radically from the microcosm and macrocosm that the specialised mathematical languages had to be developed in the first place.

 

Same in human sciences. People constantly talk as if group behaviour is the aggregate of individual behaviours. It isn’t. It’s qualitatively different.

 

Populations behave probabalistically in a way which is predictable and can be correlated with other variables, therefore scientifically testable. But the behaviour of individuals who comprise the population are motivated by other factors, and their behaviour is not predicable in the same way. Also it’s clear that one of the factors influencing the behaviour of an individual is the behaviour of the population of which they are part. Individuals generally claim to be free rational actors, but this is unsupported by evidence. At the same time, reductive causal explanations of individuals do not generally factor in population dynamics.
I am not saying that no one will ever be able to explain individual and population behaviour within a unitary framework, but I am asserting that the causal relationship is not unidirectional and certainly not in the direction of individual actions causing population behaviour.

If you want “evidence” as in me citing specific research articles I can’t do that in a message thread. It would take a substantial dissertation. But my views are based on wide multidisciplinary study over many years.

 

Think of it by analogy with ants, or individual cells of a body. It would be crazy to suggest that the behaviour of a person (or bat, horse, caterpillar) is the aggregate of cell activity. Cell activity is triggered by the functioning of the organic system of which they are part. Ants individually have little agency yet the swarm can be extremely sophisticated as I’m sure you know.

 

Yes yes very droll but how is this related to sola scriptura?

 

Oh and while we’re calling bullshit, what about the above? You trash translated scripture because it’s not the original, but you haven’t studied the originals either. You have read a minority report critical of mainstream scholarship and have invested faith in its veracity. It’s all “modern editors”. Ffs, when I reread yesterday’s shopping list I’m changing the meaning because it’s no longer being interpreted as instructions on what to buy, it’s a record of what I bought.

 

Next you’ll be telling us there is no evidence that Rumplestiltskin was a real historical figure. Is there no end to your cynicism?

 

I think that the bible has little worth outside of its liturgical use in the Church - except as a literary artefact of course. You certainly can’t obtain religious insight just from a book - you get it through membership of the Church and participation in communal worship. The bible is a resource that helps with that and can only be understood in that context.

 

Loads of stuff: for a start, the bible is not read sequentially, it’s read in selected chunks as set out in a lectionary which follows more than one cycle so that each day there are certain Old Testament, Gospel and Epistle readings placed together, interspersed with psalms, so that the juxtapositions are only repeated every three years. Then there are the Feasts of the Church which also have their own appointed readings. This means that we follow a Scriptural narrative over time which constantly reveals new associations. But Scripture is only one aspect of Tradition: there are many oral teachings passed down across generations that hugely supplement what is in the bible. Also there are icons which depict revealed truths through images rather than words, liturgical music, and the lived experience of the faithful through history. We also have the witness of the Saints whose oral and written teachings in life are later recognised as having prophetic significance. Most importantly of all there are the sacraments, chief of which is the Holy Eucharist (AKA Communion) which directly connects the faithful with God in a physical and spiritual union of which the erotic union between human beings is a sort of echo (for want of a better word). Certainly metaphor is involved, but to a Christian, our lives are a metaphor for revelations of the higher reality of the World To Come, not the other way around.

 

Are you suggesting that circularity is a problem? If so, why?

 

What made you decide that you did it?