We need to think about what religions try to achieve. If we agree that religions aim to achieve converting the ordinary folks in the streets into their cults and sectors giving false promise and illusion for afterlife and reincarnation, then they have been successful, because there are many believers in the teachings. — Corvus

I don't think religion tries to achieve that; that’s a specific description a sceptic might provide. Firstly, there are religions that do not work around conversion. But in essence, most religion works to build community around a shared notion of the transcendent.

And sooner or later, the non-belivers and agnostics tend to turn to religions when they get older. — Corvus

It goes in reverse too. I worked in palliative care and watched people die, many of whom were religious, including priests, nuns, ministers, and monks. Many of them confessed that they no longer believed in God, not because they were dying, but because, as they were dying, they reviewed their beliefs and felt God lacking real traction.

No, that's Steiner in 1979. The black notebooks just put an end to any possibility of apology. — frank

Ah huh! Good line by the way.

Well, it's just that most of us would be filled with horror at the thought of lighting a golden retriever on fire. — frank

These days it seems that some people are more uncomfortable with golden retrievers on fire than people.

One of Heidegger's biographers accused him of sadism due to his easy attitude toward violence and even genocide. — frank

Is that accurate? Is that Black Notebokk stuff?

If someone is happy with the concept of humans being tortured eternally, maybe there's some sadism to it? — frank

Well if God is happy with this who are we not to share the enthusiasm?

There is certainly a power to collective belief. — Janus

Yep, there's a power in shared worldviews, motivated reasoning, and magical thinking. I can think of subcultures here (I’m sure you can too) who claim to have experienced things which are not particularly surprising, but are taken as incontrovertible evidence of magic.

My favourite was a man I knew who had been one of L. Ron Hubbard’s early assistants back in the 1960s. I asked him if L. Ron was special. He said, "Yes, very much." He once witnessed L. Ron’s hair go from grey one day to red the next.

"Hair dye?" I offered. He looked pained, thought for a while, and then said, "No. Will power."

Tribalism

Baptists are a broad church unto themselves. They allow individual churches to set interpretive values. I grew up in that tradition, and my Baptists were liberals and regarded the Bible as a collection of myths and allegories. We took a soft-core perennialist approach, like many modern Christians do. All religions are fragments of the truth, told in different ways. I generally interpreted this to mean that all religions are mistaken; they try to provide consolation and community. The Baptists up the road from my old house believe all other denominations are wrong and destined for hell.

Life as we know it is in the realm of partial truths. — frank

Is that yours? I like it. The interesting thing is that we don’t agree on those partials. Maybe if you put everyone's partials together, you get the whole truth? Sorry, dumb quip.

The US Military isn't there yet. — ssu

Let’s hope so. Would your assessment be that the President and his backers are working on complete military control so that he/they can retain power indefinitely?

So are you saying that Trump does not currently have enough key military personnel aligned with his administration to enforce his authority beyond constitutional or legislative limitations?

I haven't seen a movie in a theater in about 20 years. I really don't think they make them as well as they used to — T Clark

Me too. Not sure if they make them well or not. I think I don't watch them as well as I used to.

Yes, I kinda ran out of steam. You may also be an old coot like me. — T Clark

I think so. I was 45 when I turned 12...

What is encouraging is that the Daily Mail reports this planning is resisted by the joint chiefs of staff as an illegal order. — ssu

How long do you think some parts of the US military elite will hold out against a maverick US president? As far as I can tell, apart from them, there's really nothing to stop him.

What's absent, amongst other things, is the usual, somewhat naive view that truth is about practicality, that the utility of a sentence is what renders it true, or that there are no true sentences, only more useful ones. — Banno

That’s more my speed.

Well... we see things, and talk about them and so on - we interact with them and with each other. What place there is for private mental phenomenon in all this is at the very least questionable. — Banno

To some extent your response here also seems pragmatic.

Reading Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.

A fairly easy read, although I can’t claim to remember it all as I go along. It reads like the eccentric lecture notes of a favourite, slightly idiosyncratic philosophy lecturer.

"The Iron Dream" by Norman Spinrad. A book within a book. Adolf Hitler's putsch fails so he escapes and comes to the US and becomes a science fiction writer. In the inner book--"Lord of the Swastika"--he puts all his crazed racial fantasies into words instead of death. Clever but sort of a one-joke routine. — T Clark

There was a film a few years ago called Max that seemed to argue that Hitler might have remained a harmless artist, but after being rejected by art school, he did not abandon art so much as transform it into performance art through politics, with Nazism, and ultimately the Holocaust, conceived as a perverse aesthetic project enacted on society itself. Disturbing stuff.

But as I wrote, it doesn’t matter if you are part of an intersubjective community.

Perennialism doesn’t avoid this either - the work of finding the One Truth generates a multiplicity of responses, as noted above.

Why do religions fail? I am not sure that they do. Much depends on what “failure” is taken to mean. Does it matter, for example, that within Christianity there are multiple interpretations of any given doctrine or dogma? Not really, because each Christian group sustains its own intersubjective agreement. Consistency across groups is not required.

Religions are inconsistent precisely because they are human artefacts: they manage fear, create meaning, and develop codes of conduct. It would be surprising if they were otherwise.

The idea that there is One Truth is itself part of the reason religions diverge. The attempt to codify doctrine pushes each group or sect to develop what it takes to be the correct path.

This is also how we arrive at perennial philosophy: yet another attempt to identify the truth that supposedly underlies them all. Perennialists themselves are divided into schisms in this same, ultimately vain, search for a single truth.

Perennial philosophy is itself neither unified nor internally consistent. Once one attempts to isolate a supposed “single truth” underlying religious and philosophical traditions, one is forced into acts of selection and curation that vary from thinker to thinker. Huxley’s experiential and psychologised perennialism stands in clear tension with Plotinus’ rigorously metaphysical hierarchy of being, while both diverge sharply from traditionalist accounts that insist on fixed metaphysical and social orders. In some cases, most notable in the work of Julius Evola, appeals to a perennial truth are tied up with explicitly reactionary, hierarchical, and fascist-adjacent politics.

Rather than revealing deep unity, perennial philosophy itself generates a family of competing constructions, unified more by aspiration than by substance. In this they are just like religions.

But at any rate, noumena in the Kantian sense is not a compromise of any kind, but rather an example of understanding coloring outside its own rule-bound lines. — Mww

That's a nice way of framing it.

You say I think Kant is dogmatic, and I do because Kant, having said we can say nothing about the in itself, inconsistently and illegitimately denies that the in itself is temporal, spatial or differentiated in any way, which is the same as to say it is either nothing at all or amorphous. He would be right to say that we cannot be sure as to what the spatiotemporal status of the in itself else, and that by very definition. — Janus

Yes, this tension could label Kant as dogmatic on noumena: he is meant to remain entirely agnostic, yet he slips into asserting what the noumenon cannot be, which, in effect, are claims about the thing-in-itself. Is this just one those performative contradictions many theories seem to generate?

I screwed up the sentence. I meant that phenomena are the product or our sense and cognitive apparatus. I fixed my syntax.

That's a lot to get one's head around, thank you.

Noumenon and thing-in-itself are both objects of thought, neither are appearances to sensibility, therefore neither are knowable through discursive cognition (A260/B315);
Noumena are not knowable because they have no intuition, they have no intuition because, as an object of thought, there is nothing to give to sensibility to intuit in any time;
The thing in itself is unknowable because it has no intuition, it has no intuition because as an object of thought, the thing-in-itself is not given to sensibility to intuit at any time, but there is a change of state through one time, wherein the thing-in-itself as conception becomes the thing of existence, and that is what appears;
That thing-in-self, upon being subjected to sensibility as an appearance hence no longer in itself, then becomes experience, its representation resides in consciousness, therefore does not revert back to being in itself when not perceived, but we can still think of it as it was when it was a thing-in-itself, only now it is thought as a thing in general. Discursive thought from conception becomes transcendental thought from an idea. — Mww

This may be a naive question, but it sometimes seems to me that noumena represent a compromise between direct realism and idealism. It’s as if Kant doesn’t want to be a full-blown idealist and therefore argues that there must be things-in-themselves which are unknowable, and what we recognise is the product of our senses and cognitive apparatus.

Note - fixed syntax

Best wishes, Joshs.

Fair enough. My instinct is that separation of powers only work by agreement. They are not magic spells and in the end what the military chooses will probably be the decisive factor.

Do you think America has become an autocracy (with more to come) and that Trump and/or his cronies are here to stay? Either ignoring future elections or suspending them? Or do you think much of the US has a desire for autocracy and will happily vote for it? Or something else?

I haven’t done a carful analysis of the economy of down under though. — Mikie

Nor me. But what we do have is free medical and hospital treatment and a guaranteed welfare payments and pensions. I work in the area of addiction and mental health so I’ve seen my fair share of disadvantage.

How about this: if you don't stand against the immoral, you are immoral. — Hanover

This interested me although we may have moved past it. Is Trump immoral, should we take a stand against him and his cronies? I ask because it seems to me people don’t share views about what makes immorality.

We can talk about rape or killing being immoral but when we seek specific examples. we often fail to agree. Any thoughts?

. We know what governance under Buckley conservatives is like, because it is played out history now. — BenMcLean

I understand that Buckley took a very principled position on antisemitism in the Right and was instrumental in reforming American conservatism.

Whatever the issues may be, it seems pretty clear that left and right don’t see the same world or understand each other’s views very well. The only conservative people I know in Australia would probably count as borderline socialists in the US, which always seems further right than we are. I like the idea of doing something about corporate power and monopolies. Even Friedrich Hayek, Thatcher’s hero, was opposed to them.

Vidal was just a Communist bemoaning the fact that neither American political party was explicitly Communist because both of them preferred living over dying. — BenMcLean

Interesting. I would place him as a right-centrist, certainly not a communist. It’s amazing how McCarthyism continues to define American politics!

As I see it, we need to protect private individual property from corporate overreach, not abolish private property! — BenMcLean

Who wants to abolish private property? No point answering this since it certainly isn’t me or Vidal.

That is, I think, my main point. The Right needs to go anti-corporate in a big way. Wall Street abandoned us in 2008, then actively persecuted us from 2014-2024. It is time they got what's coming to them: a massive regulayory backlash — BenMcLean

Some people would call this Communism too. But I would agree with you on this point.

Can you see seriously any elements of the US right going agaisnt the corporations?

Or are they just a showbiz distraction?
— Tom Storm
Like Gore Vidal was? He was clearly part of the show if anyone ever was, not above it. — BenMcLean

Yes, I think Vidal is a Kirk forerunner, just a difference in performance.

Interesting well written OP I'm Australian so forgive my somewhat tangential response, but your OP does suggest some questions to me.

Is there really a right wing and a left wing in the US, or was Gore Vidal right when he said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”?

It certainly seems to an outsider that the current government has less competence and seems much cruder than previous administrations. But in the end it's mostly neo-liberalism, what varies is the capability.

I’m interested in how the Right is best understood. Is the word really that meaningful? There used to be reactionaries, libertarians, and conservatives, but do any of these distinctions really mean anything anymore? Trump doesn't seem to be a conservative, he's more of a radical.

Don’t attack the debate guys as if they’re the threat because, in reality, they’re your allies. — BenMcLean

Or are they just a showbiz distraction? Aren't some of the debate guys also canaries in the coalmine? Testing sometimes appalling positions to see if the public has an appetite for them?

1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board.
5. Stay home from foreign wars. — BenMcLean

You sound like an old fashioned conservative with an isolationist bent.

What is your potion on corporate power in general?

It may be a different situation with Husserl than Edith Stein or Max Scheler. For him a beyond of experience is not impossible but meaningless. There is no coherent sense to be attached to a reality that is not even in principle accessible to intentionality, because “accessibility in principle” is built into what it means for something to be something. The world always exceeds what is currently given, but it never exceeds the structure of givenness as such. Husserl isnt just declining to speculate; he is showing that certain speculative questions rest on a confused picture of meaning and existence. — Joshs

Interesting and an important point.

I’m not sure that’s my experience but maybe Australia is somewhat kinder. There are certainly neoliberal trends along those lines but also opportunities not to participate. But maybe I’m experiencing a wave of optimism.

Cool. I think what I needed from films was achieved in the 1980's and 1990's and now I just don't crave them or find them engaging. It's like a stage I went though. My idea of hell these days would be a trip to the cinema. Favourite films today include Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Angel Heart, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Citizen Kane, The Trial, Walkabout, Once Upon A Time In The West, Blade Runner, Sorcerer, The Long Goodbye. I tend not to care much for plots or stories and prefer mood, character and formalist excess.

Also, I’ll never fully understand why Blade Runner is so praised. I liked it to a degree, but not even in my top 100. I guess I had to have been there. — Mikie

Fair enough. It would be odd if we all agreed on art. If BR came out today it wouldn't really interest me. When it came out it was a revelation and I don't like science fiction. What are your top 3 or 4 movies?

Fair enough.

That said, if the academic life is attractive to you, then I would say 'go for it'. As for the practice, the more I attend to my experience without falling into trying to analyze the fuck out of it, the richer my life becomes. What more can we realistically hope for than an enriched life? — Janus

Sure. I am neither inclined to practice nor to theorise, but I am interested in understanding the range of perspectives out there. I find embodied cognition and its implications fairly compelling, and I tend toward a constructivist view of reality, with sympathies for anti‑foundationalist thought. I am also interested in any conceptual framing that seeks to potentially dissolve old problems and dichotomies.

The theory; trying to make sense of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty is very difficult, especially if, like me, you don’t particularly enjoy theory and have no background in philosophy. But I recognize in myself that the things I resist are often the things I would benefit from understanding better.

In that sense, phenomenology neither asserts nor rules out a “beyond”; it simply declines to turn what exceeds experience into a theoretical object. There’s something quite Buddhist about this also: a refusal to indulge metaphysical speculation, paired with an insistence on attending carefully to the nature of existence/experience moment-by-moment. — Wayfarer

This is one reason why it attracts me. If only it wasn't so fucking difficult. :wink:

Nice quote.

To get rid of the remnants of physicalism, we need to stop talking about the mind, body and world in terms of objects which interact , even objects that exist only very briefly. The bits I have been describing here aren’t tiny objects, they are actions, differences, events, creations, values, vectors. To make this our starting point rather than the concept of neutral , affectless ‘object’ allows us to avoid the hard problem’s dilemma of explaining the relation between value, quantity, affect, feeling, creation, meaning on the one hand and object, fact, identity, thing on the other. It also means that we have to start treating the concept of time seriously, radically, primordially. — Joshs

Thanks for your detailed response. It all alludes to a broader perspective and reading than my own on this, so in reading you, it’s a bit like listening to a cell phone call with reception which fades in and out. Bits are recognisable, bits are missing. I’ll sit with it.

Seems reasonable. Thanks.

It gets a bit tricky to sort out where anti-vacc-ers and other rejecters of scientific consensus are coming from. Much of the rejection of covid recommendations coming from the CDC and Fauci in the U.S. emanated from the same groups who reject climate change models. I wouldn’t characterize this group as anti-science. On the contrary, they are science idealists. They would tell you that they very much believe in science as a method. But they have a traditional, romanticized view of how science method works, and the actual ambiguities and complexities of scientific practice don’t fit their idealized view of it. Their worshipful, dogmatic view of science is about as non-relativized as can be. — Joshs

Interesting. This analysis surprises me. I hadn't thought about science-idealists who reject models when they are uncertain. It does make sense.