What you have done is provided further evidence of special pleading, of a double standard, a public conversation and a somehow distinct, evasive religious one. — Banno

It isn’t a religious conversation, it is debatably a philosophical one (but so far few people are interested in philosophy) or perhaps an anthropological one (what is religion as a human phenomenon?). In any case, what is being evaded? Why should “fact” mean the same thing in a bar as it does in this forum? What clarity of thought do we gain by impoverishing our thinking to the lowest common denominator of English speakers?

What clarity of thought do we gain by impoverishing our thinking to the lowest common denominator of English speakers? — Ennui Elucidator

Better to strive for the heights of sophistry?

...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method.

How many new words do we have since Austin wrote that? Are each of them useless because they didn’t survive the lifetime of many generations?

Facts are sort of like knowledge, Banno. I am well aware of what will satisfy someone in a conversation when they are speaking about whether George Washington was president and whether or not I know George Washington was president because I can provide that as an answer to a Jeopardy question. So is it a fact that George Washington was president and that I know that he was a president because I am able to play nice socially? Is there anything more to be said about the topic?

When discussing philosophy, I suppose there is more to be said. When playing Jeopardy I don’t. When speaking to you I am aware that invoking nihilism will result an eye roll and an accusation of incoherence, so if I want to speak to you, I am better off discussing cats on mats.

Now if you ask me what the point is of willfully maintaining multiple language communities, I could give you a variety of answers that may appeal to your sensibilities or may not. The truth is, you are studied enough to know most of what I will say and we will just retread old territory - a bit like playing a chess game where we know the opening book, most of the mid-game, and much of the end game. Sure, each game goes a little differently, but the end is the same - resignation, check-mate, a draw, or people stop playing.

So tell me what you would like me to say. The dictionary is replete with words that have multiple senses/definitions. There are words that sound the same and are spelled the same but are different words because they have unique etymologies and meanings. Even in ordinary language people found utility in what you might call equivocation. A mouse is a thing that moves a cursor and that scuttles across the floor. It would be nice if when I asked for the mouse when trying to use your computer you knew that I didn’t mean the same thing as when I asked for the mouse when feeding your snake.

“Fish fish fish fish fish.” Did we learn anything?

How is life different if we entertain the possibility that we are a brain in a vat? Does George Washington stop being the first president?

All of that is lovely, but has nothing to do with the topic - that not all religious people describe the point of their religion as being a source of accurate information about historical facts. The Romans were assholes. The Christian Romans probably no more so than the non-Christian ones, but the Christian ones burned your precious classics. Facts, to be sure, if we are in a bar. Why what religious people actually claim about their own religions is irrelevant to the “fact” of whether the goal of religion is to be factual but a scroll which has evidence of being from 1,500 years ago is evidence for the “fact” of the Christian’s destruction of the classics isn’t a case of special pleading on your part is a bit mysterious.

So make like we are in a bar and forget philosophy. Why is it a fact that Christians burned the classics but not a fact that goal of religion is not to be factual?

So, it appears that the extent to which the Christians actually burned classic literature is in dispute among scholars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age

There does appear to be a factual question as to this, using the term "factual" in the usual ordinary way.

But to them that's like burning a pile of trash. Ie., not a bad thing, not at all, but something useful.

Where you and the Christians differ is in the qualitative evaluation of some past events. — baker

This is what Banno doesn't seem to understand. He seems to think that he can make universal value statements such as 'burning books is bad', 'dishonesty from the rulers is bad', and since they are emotionally charged subjects which will elicit agreement from others, he believes these statements must be correct. However, he seems to have no capacity to support these value judgements with principles or logic.

I think we should rename Banno "Moses", and let him shout out his commandments. Thou shalt not burn books! Thou shalt not lie to the subjects! etc., as if they are facts.

And we have the hole in our literary heritage. — Banno

I can almost sympathize. I lost my copy of "Goodnight Moon". I think my evil brother left it out in the rain. Oh well, we're all grown up now, and we learn to get over such loses. As my mother used to say if I cried over such things, "it's not the end of the world". Get over it, Banno.

If there is no God, everything is permitted. — Dostoevsky

The quote above, taken as true, implies that without the facticity of God's existence, morality has no leg to stand on. In other words, religions - humanity's preliminary expeditions in the moral universe - have to be "factually correct" from beginning to end.

All religions, no matter how hard they try not to, ground their moral code in something beyond this world. The Abrahamic triad does that with God. The buddha too, despite how reluctant he was when it came to metaphysics, had to resort to moral causality, the law of karma, that applied to worlds and lives beyond this world and this life. It seems morality is utterly untenable if we limit it to one world and one life.

Why?

One simple reason is that claimed benefits/costs don't correlate all that well with good/bad respectively in this world and this life. Despite the belief that you reap what you sow and what goes around comes around, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. These are valid reasons to reject morality outright - facts, the reality on the ground, do not, I repeat, do not support the claims of morality. Hence, God and karma become a necessity.

Secular ethics, intriguingly, aren't about rewards/punishments - they tend to emphasize the nature of thoughts/speech/acts themselves. Neither deontological ethics nor consequential entice or threaten good and bad people with happiness and suffering. I just found out. Good for the sake of good.

To sum up, secular ethics, all things considered, is a much better deal than religious ethics. The matter of factual correctness of religions is then moot, pointless.

:up: The fact that we are indeed able to concieve of wrong and right provides all the justification for moral behavior necessary. A true justification, ungrounded in superstition, for acting morally is that every time a person violates his own moral understanding, and we have all done so at one time or another, he makes subsequent violations easier to rationalize. That is to say, every time we give free reign to our Id, we weaken the ability of our Superego to influence our behavior, corrupting ourselves even further. To repair the psychological damage done to ourselves thusly is extremely difficult. In part, the (false) promise of an easy "new beginning", a clean psychological slate, is part of the promise and attraction of Christianity to many. In reality, repairing the damage we do to ourselves by acting immorally is much more difficult than Christan churches posit. The avoidance of such self corruption seems justification enough to strive to behave morally.

The fact that we are indeed able to concieve of wrong and right provides all the justification for moral behavior necessary. A true justification, ungrounded in superstition, for acting morally is that every time a person violates his own moral understanding, and we have all done so at one time or another, he makes subsequent violations easier to rationalize. That is to say, every time we give free reign to our Id, we weaken the ability of our Superego to influence our behavior, corrupting ourselves even further. The avoidance of such self corruption seems justification enough to strive to behave morally. — Michael Zwingli

I don't quite like where you're taking this. Morality is, at the end of the day, transcendence of the self and that's why, my hunch is, it's so hard to grasp - it's like asking a chimp not to be a chimp. Haaard!

secular ethics, all things considered, is a much better deal than religious ethics. The matter of factual correctness of religions is then moot, pointless. — TheMadFool

Religion, though, serves other purposes than provision of a moral code...communal purposes, ritual purposes, ontological purposes...

Morality is, at the end of the day, transcendence of the self and that's why, my hunch is, it's so hard to grasp... — TheMadFool

On that we can agree. Which aspect of my psychologically based take on ethics do you disfavor?

Which aspect of my psychologically based take on ethics do you disfavor? — Michael Zwingli

I'm more gut instincts than clear, logical analysis. So, I may not be able to pinpoint the problem I intuit in your statements but if I have to say something, morality isn't about Id, Ego, or Super Ego; it's something beyond all three and thus, to reiterate, neither of these 3 parts of our personality can get a handle on what morality is. Evidence? Check the morality section of philosophy - confusion of the highest order. Too, I recently discovered that deontology contradicts consequentialism but, interestingly, both make complete sense.

...if I have to say something, morality isn't about Id, Ego, or Super Ego; it's something beyond all three and thus, to reiterate, neither of these 3 parts of our personality can get a handle on what morality is... — TheMadFool

Yes, I absolutely agree. I did not mean to suggest that these aspects of the mind produce morality, or that ethics depends thereupon. I only I donate that it is the "higher mind" from which the individual sense of ethical behavior, subsequent to moral instruction of course, proceeds, and that the wanton violation of that sense weakens it, and strengthens the primal mind in comparison.

This is my offer of a psychologically-based justification for ethical behavior, but amounts to nothing more than that.

Yes, I absolutely agree. I did not mean to suggest that these aspects of the mind produce morality, or that ethics depends thereupon. I only I donate that it is the "higher mind" from which the individual sense of ethical behavior, subsequent to moral instruction of course, proceeds, and that the wanton violation of that sense weakens it, and strengthens the primal mind in comparison. — Michael Zwingli

I fear you're as lost as I am. No point in either of us asking for directions from each other. Do carry on. One of us will stumble onto the truth, the other, probably me, will walk right into an elaborate trap. Good luck!

For the life of me, I'm not really sure what you guys are going on about with this "what is a fact" conversation. If the terms have different meanings in different contexts, can we not create two words for the purposes of this conversation so that we don't have to accuse one another of misusing a term?

The statement "fiction is true" is paradoxical, and honestly, when that claim was first presented to me it provided a bit of an "aha!" moment. It made room for religion in a scientific world, where everything was either considered true or false in a lab experiment sort of way, but this paradoxical statement allows that meaning could be known though entirely fictional means.

How the statement "the false can be true" can only make sense if we're using two different epistemologies when we say "false" and another when we say "true" in that sentence. In that sentence, the term "false" means false in the scientific sense, as in there was not really a talking fox in the fox and grapes parable. But "true" means true in the metaphorical sense in that parable, as in it explains how humans find meaning in the world.

When I say "the Bible is false, but it is true," that statement makes sense and is not contradictory because that sentence does not use "false" as a negation of true within the specific confines of that sentence. So, Christianity can be false and true at the same time, if false references literalism and true the metaphorical.

On another note, I took for granted the validity of your claim that the Christians destroyed much of Classic literature, but upon looking it up, I see that claim is disputed somewhat:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age I truly don't have a dog in that fight and am no more or less concerned if the ancient Christians did or didn't do as alleged, but it does seem to be an issue of scholarly debate.

And finally, I do generally have an objection to punishing someone for the sins of his ancestors, and I'd apply that also to organizations, like religion. That is, if ancient Christianity (or any religion) did all sorts of brutal and evil acts, that doesn't mean that the modern day form of the religion must inherit that guilt.

So, it appears that the extent to which the Christians actually burned classic literature is in dispute among scholars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age — Hanover

Beware the fury of academic historians when an outsider presumes to write of history!

Nobody knows the true extent of the destruction caused by Christian zealots. But it's not doubted that they destroyed writings, temples and statutes, and defaced them, and that laws were adopted by the Christian Roman Empire outlawing pagan worship, the banning of pagans from high office, the closing of the schools of philosophy and rhetoric and imposing other restrictions. So it becomes a question of how much destruction of pagan culture was caused by those who undoubtedly destroyed aspects of pagan culture and were inclined and exhorted to destroy it. One can claim the only destruction which occurred was not that bad, of course.

One can claim the only destruction which occurred was not that bad, of course. — Ciceronianus

:gasp:

I took for granted the validity of your claim that the Christians destroyed much of Classic literature, but upon looking it up, I see that claim is disputed somewhat: — Hanover

Historians disagree with each other? Extraordinary.

That Christianit persecuted paganism is not in doubt. Have a look at Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire What disagreement there is, is to the extend and timing of this persecution.

False stories can be inspirational, enlightening, motivating. But calling false stories true is no more than rhetorical flourish.

What is at issue is not inherited guilt. It is an inherited denial of historical fact. It is an attitude that permits the churches to entrench the disenfranchising of women and to hide paedophilic predation. Should the destruction of indigenous lives and culture by Canadian residential schools also be whitewashed as saving souls?

Pretending that religion is not factual leads to the denial of the results of religious belief.

I've pointed to the discussion of Confirmable and influential Metaphysics previously. Religious beliefs can be assessed by their outcomes. Christianity resulted in charities, hospitals, schools, persecution and oppression.

We've previously agreed that it behaves much as any other human institution.

And that is the answer to the OP.

It is an inherited denial of historical fact. — Banno

I really don't see any sort of systematic "denial of historical fact" which you are so bent on. We do not need to go back, 1500, or more years to find abhorrent misdeeds carried out by those in the higher levels of Christian religious organizations, as you say right here. But I really don't see the denial of fact. They tend to rationalize the incidents or refuse to speak about them, which is still not quite denial.

I see The Inquisition as probably the worst institution established by The Church, but at the same time, I see the terribleness of it as having the reverse affect of that intended, as propelling the downfall rather than sustaining The Church. But where is the denial of fact in all this?

Pretending that religion is not factual leads to the denial of the results of religious belief.

I've pointed to the discussion of Confirmable and influential Metaphysics previously. Religious beliefs can be assessed by their outcomes. Christianity resulted in charities, hospitals, schools, persecution and oppression.

We've previously agreed that it behaves much as any other human institution. — Banno

I really cannot even imagine what you mean when you say "pretending that religion is not factual". How do you propose that an institution, a set of laws, or a code of ethics (which are all things similar to a religion), is something factual? How do you step across the ought/is divide as if it didn't even exist?

Can we agree that "a religion" might be defined as "an ideology"? How can an ideology be something factual?

I've pointed to the discussion of Confirmable and influential Metaphysics previously. Religious beliefs can be assessed by their outcomes. Christianity resulted in charities, hospitals, schools, persecution and oppression. — Banno

And the enlightenment resulted in hospitals, schools, general enfranchisement and Hitler. Lots of ideas lead to lots of places, so judging by the results seems a selective exercise.

Science, for instance, lead to the mustard gas, the atom bomb, flame throwers, paper shredders, tnt, LRAD, and the electric chair. Or maybe science led to the whole scale destruction of most of the “natural” world. What candle does Christian destruction hold to the destruction wrought by science?

What candle does Christian destruction hold to the destruction wrought by science? — Ennui Elucidator

...what if the goal of a science isn't to be factually correct?

Religions - and ideologies - can be confirmable and influential; hence they may be judged.

too, for what it's worth.

And the enlightenment resulted in hospitals, schools, general enfranchisement and Hitler. — Ennui Elucidator

"Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"

...what if the goal of a science isn't to be factually correct? — Banno

The goal of science? Science (as a whole) is not a goal driven enterprise. Science is about making discoveries.

Science, for instance, lead to the mustard gas, the atom bomb, flame throwers, paper shredders, tnt, LRAD, and the electric chair. — Ennui Elucidator

...what if the goal of a science isn't to be factually correct? — Banno

Funny thing is, I don’t think the goal is to be factually correct, I think it is to get funding and/or make money, but call me a cynic (not that we know if I would qualify since the Christians burned all their writings).

My issue isn’t with your judgment, Banno, it is with the scope of your judgment. When a starving man finds a barrel of rotten apples he might eat a few or spend sometime looking for one that isn’t rotten. A well fed man is likely to walk by and wait for a more obviously enticing selection. You aren’t wrong for calling it a rotten barrel and my finding a good apple or two is more a quibble than a convincing reason for you to have lingered longer before passing judgment. But again, if we care about an accurate description of the barrel (rather than our culinary preferences), my quibble may save the starving man from food poisoning or you a trip to a far off restaurant.

In the end this is political and probably not philosophical. Or maybe it is about a difference in approach to efficacy. Facts, to me, are uninteresting. What is interesting is what matters and whether we can accomplish our goals. To you, perhaps lingering on a fact is pleasing and observation and truth is inherently a worthy goal. I see all of philosophy in service to a purpose with no reason to invest in an idea beyond its utility. Is there a tea cup circling the sun? If it might hit our rocket ship it is something worth considering, if it is just a thought experiment meant to satisfy our need for there to be an out there there, I won’t linger.

So if a group of people get together and engage in meaning making via a story that flies in the face of what makes for good predictions about where to find more oil (geology is probably more sensible when you think of it as being the result of a process more than a few thousand years old), pointing out that the story won’t help them find oil is a distraction. Insisting that there is value in both positions - the story and the systematized observations and theories (“science”) - and using language intended to convey that value (like “truth”) is utterly unproblematic for me. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, they say. I think I once heard of a mind that observes everything at once so that when people look away those things don’t stop existing and so facts are merely the collection of things that the great mind observes. Good story to some. How is it functionally different than your world of unobserved facts? And yet, conflating the god story fact with your realist fact misses the point of the god story and why its explanatory functions are important in ways that your realist descriptions are not.

You see, religious communities are what people find important in ways that your types of “fact” fall short. And the people in those communities, whether they invoke the language of “fact” in a way that seems to smash face first into your “facts” or not, are not there to establish your facts as the point of being in those communities. Their use of fact language is in service to something else. And for people starved of meaning outside of community, chewing on the corpse of god may be enough even if they have to talk in ways that would make them sound like an idiot if they walked into a conference of geologists. (That was a call back to the rotten apple - I happen to think there are religions that have pushed the necrotic god bits out of the way and found some perfectly edible apples underneath.)

It isn’t that you have to agree with them (or me), Banno, but in your fullness of meaning in the absence of community (especially those communities feasting on putrifying deity), you can’t pretend as if your judgment (your aesthetic preference) is the necessary judgment.

"Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!" ~Wolfgang Paul — 180 Proof

So you think he would agree that statements are not truth apt, that historical facts don’t exist to make statements true, or that in the absence of a potential observer, we can’t figure it out?

What? Who?

Religions - and ideologies - can be confirmable and influential; hence they may be judged.

↪Metaphysician Undercover too, for what it's worth. — Banno

I'm sure that religions can be influential, and that they can be judged, but I'm not sure as to what you would mean by "confirmable". The point I was alluding to is that the process for judgement of religious ideology is completely different from the process for judging something like a scientific theory. That's why I asked you to prove your expressed principles, that books ought not be burned, and that rulers ought not lie to the subjects. We know that scientific theories are judged according to the scientific method, but did you know that religious ideologies are judged according to metaphysical principles? We don't judge religions according to our emotional feelings, we establish rational moral principles based in solid metaphysics, and this is how we judge them.

We are lucky to live in a society where we can choose our religions, or ideologies. So we are allowed to make our own judgements, and we are not necessarily born into a religion. But still our governments impose boundaries, preventing us from crossing the borderline into hate, for example. That would be a case where judgement is based in emotion. So the governing forces always must have the power to prevent transgressions which they apprehend as substantial. And, what constitutes a substantial transgression is not consistent through time, due to changing historical conditions, changing ideologies, and the relationship between the ideology and the historical conditions.

However, it is very clear that the ideology of an oppressed people, which leads them in revolution is not in the same relationship with the historical conditions as the ideology of a ruling class is. And "facts" will mislead us if they are related to ideologies in an unreal way. This misunderstanding is the result of the inaccessibility of intention, to the observer. What you do not seem to be recognizing is that early Christianity is an ideology of an oppressed people, not a governing class, Therefore the actions promoted by the ideology were revolutionary in nature. Early Christianity is very intensely revolutionary, (that's why Jesus was crucified), and this 'fact' must be respected when judging the actions of these people. The intent of a revolutionary is on the flip side in relation to the intent of a ruler.

Consider now, later Christianity after factions have been consolidated and central ruling power has been established. Here we find the Inquisition. This is a case of a ruling class enforcing ideological boundaries on the members of its society. Notice though, that the rulers only have the capacity to enforce these boundaries inward, as punishment, against their own members. So they have no real means for dealing with competing ideologies, as they stand alone, only the means for preventing the competing ideologies from intruding or infiltrating into their own ideological system. This ideology of exclusion is contrary to fundamental Christian principles of compassion, forgiveness, and accepting the differences of others, it has now become us against them.

It was a joke as you accused me of nonsense.

Thanks for that more considered post.

Facts, to me, are uninteresting. What is interesting is what matters and whether we can accomplish our goals. — Ennui Elucidator

You may have noticed that you can't always have what you want. The world is at times uncooperative in that way. It has it's own ideas about how things are.

Now we can express how things are in many different ways and in many different languages. Little of this changes how things are. In the end these amount to different ways of saying the same thing. There is a way that the world is, and we are able to express it. We can tell the truth.

The world inflicts itself upon us, allowing some actions and disallowing others. This of course impacts on what we can and cannot do, upon our goals.

This applies as much to politics as to physics.

There are those who seek their own gain by telling stories that are not true. It may be that they will succeed by doing so. It seems more likely that eventually there lies will stand exposed as the world shows that they were wrong. So it seems with the previous 'merican president. So it seems with those who deny climate change, or insist that vaccines are unnecessary, or that Covid19 is a conspiracy.

But that's not the point I would make here. The point I would make concerns the sort of person who routinely and deliberately lies.

You see, honesty is a virtue. It is worthy both in it's own right, and because of the implied trust one might be able to place in an honest person. An honest person can be relied upon. Further, an honest person has integrity, they seek consistency.

A person who would tell one story in a public space and another while with their confidants is not reliable. A person who engages in special pleading is not honest.

To be clear, this is a moral judgement. It is about the place of those who lack integrity, of the dishonest, of the liar, in a community. And community is where meaning happens.

Without going around the tree again, yes - we like virtue. But we (you and I) don’t agree about truth or that grunts (or other symbols) convey meaning (which seems necessary for their to be true statements). Our symbols are assessed by whether they do our bidding, not whether their meaning comports with “out there.” Scientific and religious language are held to precisely the same standard on my account rather than having separate standards for each.

But what if the goal of a religion is not to be factually correct, but to give people moral guidance, thumos and social cohesion? — stoicHoneyBadger

That's science, too. Social science. Moral guidance and social cohesion are good survival tactics for societies. That's why people at universities conduct leading-edge, unbiassed research into these things.