He was going to be doing sexism and anti-Semitism next. He thought he was being tricky.

Even so, the structural circumstances had changed, surely they were aware of that? — Punshhh

They did a secret study in 1949 to estimate the cost of the US taking the place of the British Empire. The result was that the figure was uncountable. Someone suggested maybe the US could manage it with the threat of nuclear attack. That was the climate in Washington after the war. The US had no experience dealing with global affairs. The British always handled that, but now the British Empire is apparently gone and the British experts are saying they have no explanation for what's happening in Russia and China. Stalin is actively fostering the impression that the Soviet Union wants to take over the world. We now know that Stalin did want that, but his real motive had to do with America's win in the Pacific with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's not that Stalin thought the US would actually try to conquer the USSR, he just couldn't stand the idea of anyone having that much power at a negotiation table. So he builds his own atomic weapons, acts like he's had them for a while, and wants to put them to use in the near future. A Russian historian would comment that in this, Stalin was doing something Russian leaders had been doing for centuries: blowing smoke.

So you're right, the US bought a cold war for itself, not with a hawkish post-war stance, but with the decision to use atomic bombs on Japan. What Tobias and you are doing is looking at the position of the US today and retrojecting that back to a time when the US was actually in state of shock and panic about the threats that seemed to be looming before them.

Well I don’t know who thought America was going to be able to pull back and leave Europe to take up here previous role following the war. — Punshhh

The US government thought that, and to that end, the US gave western Europe about $13 billion, hoping that would be enough to get them back in business. The idea that the US was going to have to remain on the global stage, where it had never been before, didn't start sinking in until the early 1950s. The notion that there was ever a "deal" where the US covers Europe's military costs in exchange for what? economic alliance? is absurd.

You say we’re going our separate ways, I don’t see it, Trump is an anomaly. — Punshhh

I don't think so.

What is truth?

My own intuition is that the disagreement is not about whether worlds or intensions exist; it’s about which we take as explanatorily primary. Seen this way, the two positions, concrete and abstract, are complementary rather than contradictory: they are different “perspectives” on the same metaphysical landscape. That it's more a difference about how we say it than about what is being said. — Banno

I'll have to ponder this

Hmm. That's terrible.

So now we're talking about violence between Protestants and Catholics, which isn't really related at all to how Christianity became a global religion.

Our respective narratives aren't really lining up, but as you say, it doesn't really matter. We're going our separate ways now.

The Mongols conquered Russia, Poland, and much of Hungary by the 1240s. They were noted for their respect for indigenous religions -- many became Christians, Moslems and Buddhists — Ecurb

Kublai Khan's father had a hobby where every afternoon he would sit down with a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a Christian and listen to them argue. A Latin clergyman went out to visit him and asked at one point why he didn't become a Muslim. He reportedly said, "Just as the hand has many fingers, God gives us many paths."

These and other heresies were eventually quashed, sometimes violently, but perhaps the fact that Chrisianity was so malleable to suit tastes contributed
to its spread. — Ciceronianus

They never quashed the Nestorians in Central Asia, the Coptics in Egypt, the Byzantines in Constantinople or the Russian Orthodox Church. And I think you'll find that for the most part, when the Latin church used violence, the real reason was political.

I've read two histories of the era, one by an American historian and the other by a British historian who did research in Russia for two years.

I think I've been honest in describing what I think contributed to its success. I think there's significant evidence in support of my position. It's clear many found the new religion attractive, but I don't think that in itself accounts for its spread and dominion. — Ciceronianus

When Europeans started trading with China in the 16th Century, they were a little shocked to discover that Christianity was already there. It was the Nestorian form, and had travelled there through Central Asia. There are still churches out there that are fusions of Christianity and Buddhism. Two thousand years. All over the globe. It's not a simple story.

I'm not going back for Meta, who will double down and object to whatever is suggested. — Banno

Me neither. I'm just ignoring him at this point.

So I think we move on? — Banno

:up:

Your question wasn't in good faith to begin with, was it? You weren't asking what this religious framework has been providing such that it's been around for two millennia. You were just taking pot shots. That's what it looked like.

I asked my nurse practitioner a question and she typed it into an AI doctor. Wow.

This cannot be correct. If each possible world is separate from every other, in an absolute sense, then there would be no point to considering them, as they'd be completely irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

So, it's kind of clear that you aren't reading along. Can you remedy that?

The era of the the European colonial wars was a different one from the Vietnam er — Tobias

That was a pivot point. The US originally became involved in Vietnam to help the French. French parties came to Washington between 1950 and 1954 asking for help to reassert their power over Vietnam. They emphasized that the world's rubber supply travelled through Vietnam, so if it became Communist, rubber might become expensive.

The US was planning to disarm after WW2, but Churchill came in 1952 to try to explain that the Russians were behaving threateningly and it wasn't clear what their plans were. The notion that the US ever felt threatened by an armed Europe is a little far-fetched. An armed Germany, well, yes.

do what to get my head around the section Irreducible Modality and Intensional Entities, and I don't think the material there especially deep. But finding the right words will take time. — Banno

Looks daunting. I'll see if I can get through it.

Maybe "number of posts" is indexical. — Banno

To tell you which w you're in? That's handy.

That's an interesting narrative. The American narrative is that after WW2, the US waited for the UK and France to get back on their feet and take over global governance again. They gave them money to help with that, but neither country seemed to care much about protecting the infrastructure of global trade, so the US decided to take over that role, partly inspired by Stalin's ongoing threats. Someone asked him how much more of Europe he was planning to take and he answered, "Not much."

I imagine neither of us is overly interested in the narrative of the other though.

Just a note, I've bowed out of the above discussion, but when Banno is ready to move on, I'm all in.

Exactly!

yep

It's abnormal to be normal — magritte

Normal is a bullseye no dart ever hits.

Sometimes trolls try really hard to get you to respond to them. Toxic stuff.

You are not a good faith interlocutor and I shall now avoid you. — AmadeusD

:up:

It's probably a collision of possible worlds.

I like that. That allows the logician to add on any ontology she likes, or just be anti-metaphysical.

Is there a problem with calling them possible worlds?

When I was in Catholic grade school, we'd be shown films displaying sinners writhing in flames. The Church has grown soft, it seems. — Ciceronianus

They were just trying to scare you.

Your claim that he'll is the absence of God is contrary to Scripture and tradition. — Ciceronianus

That's the Catholic view:

By definition, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), paragraph 1033, hell is “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” — here

There is no one Christian tradition. It's all over the place.

It's normal to be abnormal.

Therefore, what is needed is another way to understand modal logic without using modal logic. — RussellA

We all use modal logic pretty regularly. This was just an effort to understand modal expressions extensionally. It seems to work pretty well. Obviously this kind of philosophy isn't for everybody. :grin:

Yes that's exactly the problem. What we know as the independent, physical world, source of empirical observations, can no longer be accepted as such. It gets barred off as a sort of unreal illusion, and what we're left with is an extreme idealism where the ideas (possible worlds) are the reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

:grimace: I didn't see that coming!

It's very neat. But yes, quite mad. — Banno

:lol:

Others find it less convincing. — Banno

I'm not sure how popular Lewis' view is. It's kind of nutty.

All ancient civilizations exhibited religious tolerance (except the Jews). If you traveled to another region of the known world, your first task was to find the local temple and pay homage to their gods. The Romans were like everyone else in this.

Isaac Asimov said that the Jews invented religious intolerance and became the world's first victims of it in the 6th Century BCE when the Babylonians invaded and specifically attempted to destroy Judaism. Christianity inherited this preoccupation with truth. You're supposed to realize that the gods you've been worshiping aren't real. And Northern Europeans did realize that. The destruction of paganism didn't happen at the end of a Roman sword. The pagans destroyed their own culture(s). They burned it all.

Kripke (Naming and Necessity):
Proper names refer rigidly to the same individual across worlds.
Necessity is primitive and tied to rigid designation.
Modality is not reduced to something non-modal; it is taken as metaphysically basic.


Lewis (Modal Realism / counterpart theory):
Worlds are concrete; individuals do not literally exist in more than one world.
Identity across worlds is determined via counterpart relations.
Modality is reduced to quantification over concrete worlds.

Shared Logic / Semantics
Possible worlds semantics: Both use worlds as the basis for evaluating modal statements.
Quantified modal logic: Both accept first-order quantification over individuals.
Transworld reference: Both presuppose a way to interpret identity or counterparts across worlds.
Truth-at-a-world: Both define modal truth in terms of what holds at particular worlds.
Accessibility relations: Both can accommodate structured relations between worlds (for temporal or metaphysical distinctions).
Formal rigour: Both agree that modal claims can be modelled systematically, independent of metaphysical interpretation. — Banno

Which do you think is closer to approximating the way we really think about modality?

Could be. It was a regular practice in the monasteries founded by the descendants of those barbarian tribes. — Ciceronianus

Benedict was Italian. :cool: