It wasn't weird at the time, Christianity took from common tropes. Maybe it is now and that's part of the reason it doesn't work as well. — ChatteringMonkey

I think it's weirder than you're giving it credit for. John 3:16 is alluding to Abraham and Isaac, with God the Father as Abraham and Jesus as Isaac. That was not a common trope in the Roman world where Christianity took shape. There might have been knowledge of child sacrifice that took place in Carthage centuries earlier, but it would have been contemplated with dread, not devotion.

The twist is that in the Christian myth, Abraham and Isaac turn out to be the same entity. They're two aspects of one God. So at best, the story is horrifying, at worst, it just makes zero sense.

What myth is even close to that bizarre?

I asked for a reason why such a thing is right from God. John 3:16 states what I asked: Whether Jesus' Sacrifice was necessary. I also asked what the difference is between the Gods of the Old and New Testaments. — MoK

The OP is asking about the lack of logic in the core Christian doctrine. I don't think it makes sense, but it's survived for about 1800 years. How does a story that makes no sense survive that long?

Is there a reason mentioned in the scripture for this torture? — MoK

John 3:16 states the doctrine of the Propitiatory Sacrifice. The torturing part probably comes from the way the Romans executed people. Kierkegaard talks about what it was like as a child to contemplate an innocent person being executed in that way.

One common theme in religion going back as far as we know, is sacrifice to appease the Gods. It used to be human sacrifice because the blood of humans was thought to be more powerful for that purpose. Gradually that changed to animals and such, but you had to sacrifice more and more to get the same result because the blood of animals is less potent... If you sacrifice the literal son of God, well now we are talking some real sacrificial value. — ChatteringMonkey

I wonder if swallowing the cognitive dissonance could be taken as a personal sacrifice. Christianity is really gruesome and then the Holy Communion is supposed to give you some of Jesus' blood and flesh to eat, just in case the whole thing wasn't weird enough up to that point.

That there are some holes in the story matters less than the motivational boxes it ticks. — ChatteringMonkey

So this is my question: is it more that a bizarre narrative (whether Christian or Q-anon, or whatever) is a expression of something deeper in the community? Or is it something that's warping the consciousness of the community? Or both?

How does a person who expects a respectful exchange of information ask a question like this? — Fire Ologist

I just typed it in and pushed the button.

My high school Jesuit teachers had advised me to pray for the Grace to accept (without comprehending) the sacred Mysteries — 180 Proof

Did you ever try to accept it without understanding it?

Are you saying that God could not forgive our sins until Jesus' sacrifice was made!? — MoK

Apparently so.

Tzeentch finally discovered QAnon

But assumption of intent is demanded, else it would be a simple conventionalism. — Hanover

Right. As with the computer generated poem, realizing there's no intent undermines meaningfulness.

I think it's a hard argument to make that ChatGPT is just an arranging finite elements into finite sentences. It appears to compose, to concatenate. — Hanover

I agree. I think it's crunching data that's made out of intentional human content.

This ties into Davidson"s resistance to convention being the primary driver of meaning. Intent of the speaker is demanded, — Hanover

He's saying that the expectation of intent goes into calculating meaning. He's not saying the listener actually knows the speakers intent. @Pierre-Normand do you agree with that?

The way a lack of intent affects meaning can be seen by imagining that you see a handwritten note with poem written on it, stuck on a wall in a bar. You ponder the meaning of the poem, but then someone tells you it was computer generated. That's when you realize you have a reflexive tendency to assume intent when you see or hear language. You may experience cognitive dissonance because the poem had a profound meaning to it, all of which was coming from you.

The problem with using ChatGPT is that it's processing statements that were intentional. It's not just randomly putting words together.

Lewis' ideas are Quine-approved, especially the arbitrariness of conventions. I don't know how he dealt with malapropisms.

Lewis' definition of a convention is like this:

Lewis analyzes convention as an arbitrary, self-perpetuating solution to a recurring coordination problem. It is self-perpetuating because no one has reason to deviate from it, given that others conform. For example, if everyone else drives on the right, I have reason to as well, since otherwise I will cause a collision. Lewis’s analysis runs as follows (1969, p. 76):

A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P then they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if it is true that, and it is common knowledge in that, in any instance of S among members of P,

(1) everyone conforms to R;

(2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R;

(3) everyone has approximately the same preferences regarding all possible combinations of actions;

(4) everyone prefers that everyone conform to R, on condition that at least all but one conform to R;

(5) everyone would prefer that everyone conform to R′, on condition that at least all but one conform to R′,where R′ is some possible regularity in the behavior of members of P in S, such that no one in any instance of S among members of P could conform both to R′ and to R. — SEP

Is that what you had in mind? Or were you thinking of convention as being the same as a dictionary?

How could we tell the difference between being causal, and simply identifying with something causal?
— frank
Sorry. I'm not sure I understand your question, so my response might be a non sequitur. is this something along the lines of, as I said above, if you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make? — Patterner

Maybe? Is there some right answer to what you should identify with? I'm sure most people have the experience of witnessing a thunderstorm and feeling a kind of empathy with the forces swirling around above. Or watching the sunset. Maybe that isn't a kind of neurosis, but rather awareness of a deeper kinship to the universe around us. We can feel it, so why not identify with it?

I believe otherwise. I think consciousness is casual. — Patterner

How could we tell the difference between being causal, and simply identifying with something causal?

What type of action did you have in mind? I was thinking predication. The pointing of a predicate at a thing. By means of a conventional agreement that the predicate term gets pointed by the sentence at the object identified by the subject term — bongo fury

Just by way of guessing at what you're saying (I guess I'm intrigued :razz: ), language use is something humans do in space and time. Like music or the weather, there are detectable patterns.

Say we're analyzing the weather, and we notice low pressure zones. We pick that idea out, pull it out of ever evolving movements of air and water, and the next thing you know, we have fluid dynamics where we're talking about low pressure zones as if they're things separate from what's going on in space in time. Suppose we get so used to speaking about fluid dynamics, that we forget that it's all motion, and we start to wonder how a low pressure zone, the abstract object, fits into the weather (the physical thing.)

The problem here is just forgetting that we started by analyzing the weather, which means pulling it apart into objects that we lay out on a table. I don't think the answer is to insist that a low pressure zone is not an abstract object, because it is. The solution is to remember that it's the product of analysis.

In the game of language, yes. — bongo fury

You're being a little too mysterious for me to follow. I have no idea what you're saying.

Are you saying that a sentence is actually a type of action?

I don't follow. What is it that's being reified?

Oh, I guess I was asking bongo. :grin:

Should that question be directed at — Banno

Well, I was asking what you think.

That the score and a performance can't be identical is shown by the fact that we can have many performances of the same score. What's being reified?

The important point to me is that we don't treat "proposition" and "assertion" as if they have prior meanings that we discover, or that an ideal logical language would reveal as necessary. — J

I agree.

Even something like "P = P is true" starts to look bizarre once you let go of the standard accounts of P. If P is true, and is the same thing as P, doesn't that mean that P is a bit of language? — J

We could agree that "P" is an assertion from someone. The quotes indicate that? Does that work?

I assure you, my mind is completely unfurnished.
— Ludwig V
As is mine. — Banno

I have a replica of Versailles in mine. You're missing out.

Why do you refuse to defend your own position? I outlined mine clearly: can you do the same? — Bob Ross

Bob, "Neoplatonism" is a word invented by academics to categorize a specific set of ideas, typified by Plotinus. People don't debate the meaning of the term.

I directed you to the Wikipedia article on it. Read it.

Aristotle wasn't a Neoplatonist because he wasn't alive when Neoplatonism came into existence. There's nothing contentious about that. Anyone who knows the definition of Neoplatonist knows it. — frank

Why Russia will continue to stagnate economically, continue to be militarized with low tech equipment, and become more isolated from the world:

You make weird, contentious claims about neo-Platonism — Leontiskos

Aristotle wasn't a Neoplatonist because he wasn't alive when Neoplatonism came into existence. There's nothing contentious about that. Anyone who knows the definition of Neoplatonist knows it.

Frank, I've read about neoplatonism. What do you mean by it and how does Plato argue for the Trinity? I don't that happened. Just explain it briefly to me. — Bob Ross

Honestly, you're coming across as kind of clueless.

What do you mean by neoplatonism? I mean any view that adopts but sublates Plato's view. — Bob Ross

Neoplatonism

Read about Plotinus, the Enneads, and Augustine.

Also, watch this, somewhere in there he explains the Neoplatonic origin of the Trinity.

Ok. Maybe aesthetics comes from a fundamental attunement to the universe that consciousness arises from. It's the universe's awareness of itself. Where something seems afflicted aesthetically, consciousness has a bad connection.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
that is all ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know."

Your follow up that the OT God isn't God is just your assertion of Christianity as the Truth. You're telling those who accept a version of God closer to the OT than the NT, they don't believe in God — Hanover

Right.

"P" probably entails that I know P, just as it entails that I exist and I'm communicating and I'm speaking a language.

"P" is not identical to any of those, though, I don't think. Whether it's identical to "P is true." is another matter. I would say yes.

You don't think Aquinas or Aristotle were neo-platonists?!? — Bob Ross

The Trinity is Neoplatonism, so Aquinas would have accepted doctrines that emerged from Neoplatonism whether he would have accepted the vision we associate with Plotinus or not. Aristotle was not a Neoplatonist.

don’t think it is a form of monism. Aristotle definitely wasn’t a pantheist nor was Aquinas. — Bob Ross

Neoplatonism, Bob.

: If Frances Hutcheson is correct, and the appreciation of beauty is innate within humans, and described as "uniformity amidst variety", this clearly shows an evolutionary advantage. Specifically in the human ability to find patterns within the chaos they perceive of the world . — RussellA

Right, but research indicates that visible features of an organism tend to be sexually selected. So it wouldn't be about patterns in chaos, it would be about sex.

Scientists say that visible features are usually the result of sexual selection. So if that nose was a result of natural selection (as opposed to genetic drift), it exists because the opposite sex is attracted to it.

I think that indicates that aesthetics is part of evolution.

Strangely, mammals became more aesthetically pleasing over time. Why is that?

I think it would be immoral not use the fire extinguisher — Bob Ross

That's correct. So what you're really complaining about is the the OT God doesn't conform to the Neoplatonic image. Neoplatonism is a type of monism, so everything is God. That gives rise the to the older version of the problem of evil: if everything is God, what is evil? Some say Plotinus was an eliminative idealist, which means he believed evil, which is the privation of the Good, and also matter, is a type of illusion. In other words, Plotinus was the Daniel Dennett of his day.

I tried once to find that in the Enneads, and I couldn't.

There is a difference between doing evil and allowing evil. — Bob Ross

So if a child is on fire and I have a fire extinguisher, it's ok for me to withhold help? Just stand there and let her scream? That seems moral to you?

This OP isn’t an argument for a problem of evil in the sense that phrase usually refers. I am arguing that God’s nature contradicts the actions attributed to God in the OT; and so that can’t be God doing it. — Bob Ross

Well God's nature conflicts with a flood in Texas killing a bunch of teenage girls. God supposedly has the power to stop it, but he just stands around picking his nose.

2. Stop believing that God is moral, but rather the fountain of universal creativity from which both good and evil take shape.

This completely misunderstands classical theism. The catholic church, the OG church, holds classical theism to be true. — Bob Ross

It wouldn't be a misunderstanding. It would a rejection. Absolute rejection and condemnation of the Catholic Church has been a thing for about 500 years. It's fine. Nobody cares anymore.

However, God is all-just and it is unjust to murder; therefore, this "God" who flooded the earth was not truly God Himself (viz., the purely actual, perfectly good creator of the universe). — Bob Ross

The idea of an omni-benevolent, omni-potent god is logically inconsistent, leaving the believer to struggle with various philosophical bandaids for the problem of evil.

So there are two ways out:

1. Reinflate one of the solutions to the problem of evil.

2. Stop believing that God is moral, but rather the fountain of universal creativity from which both good and evil take shape.