I would say everything you do is a belief and that everything you assert requires knowledge so I would say any epistemological category is derivative of the ontological proposition (the nature or conception of God dictates the epistemological requirement one needs to know him and one's epistemological capability then is automatically categorized based on the requirement outputting belief/non-belief).

In any case, a corollary of that is that there's no passivity on either side of a position (i.e. one needs to establish evidence criteria in order to accept evidence and those can then be questioned (e.g. one can say "I lost my car keys therefore God does not exist" is certainly valid and you can say because you lost your car keys then no evidence exists that God exists, which is still valid and on a continuum is what the issue is in atheist arguments)).

It would just need a definition of "proper scrutiny". It's hard to have a conversation without any evidential standards for either side and would have one side throwing a huge net and the other side just passively rejecting all the positions which is hardly how any conversation in academia or anything should operate. The SEP defines it this way because the article's author says it facilitates philosophical discussion better.

If I'm confusing it then so is academic atheism.
A "belief" in anything is taken as granted and unanalyzable (how would anyone check?). The contents of the belief can be propositional.

It's just re-establishing the nature of the proposition. A psychological state is just saying "one believes God exists" etc. There's no truth aptness because it's not a proposition. A similar non-proposition is simply yelling "ouch!".
It says people can define any word as they want but not making atheism propositional is of little use in philosophy.

Also, of note, it seems they didn't tackle the inherent issue of defining the negation of a proposition as a proposition (as found in the "rock is an atheist by lack of belief in God" example) where a rock is vegan as it's technically not meat. Neither here nor there but it's a natural corollary that falls out from it. This may still be edited later but it's clearly an important distinction to be made and that natural corollary will fall out from it.

It says you can but don't enslave your Israeli brethren and then the verse after it says you can sell yourself into slavery if you're poor but other Israelis should help you. On top of that, Leviticus was held to Exodus' rules on not harming your abed. It seems abedness was a widespread practice then and the goal was to establish a way to not get into slavery again.

Another verse that gets used is Exodus 21:7 which says, "7 “If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do." If one reads from verse 7 to 11 it's actually trying to make life mire stable for the female and not have a huge female slavery market.

An interesting few verses from Leviticus 21:10-14, "10 When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her."

The world didn't seem perfect but it wasn't as bad as the chattel slavery of later and you weren't allowed to be abusive. It was a full market you could sell yourself into apparently for life. There were war captives but that was apparently not a big amount of slaves and you still couldn't mistreat them.

The old testament in exodus details what slavery is. One fact is you could sell yourself into slavery (leviticus 25:35/39) and the word used for slave and servant is the same (abed). So we're dealing with a slightly different entity than the economical hell-hole which was chattel slavery.

So how are abed to be treated, it applies talion (eye-for-eye etc) to the slaves in Exodus 21:26-27. Talion is used in a few other verses and it doesn't all have to be stipulated to apply it (Leviticus 24:19-21, Exodus 21:22-25, Deuteronomy 19:16-21 with some of these using just eye for eye, tooth for tooth and some related dyad then saying "no mercy" which shows the sequential dyad is poetic and not literal as a simple map to talion). The middle eastern cultures used talion since hamurrabi and even in roman code but what makes Exodus 21:26-27 special is it says the slave is to go free. Exodus 21:23-25 goes over how extensive talion is and what "no mercy" means, "23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise." So the application of talion to slaves in the succeeding two verses says to not hurt your abed or they go free.

Slavery is hardly a surprise to anyone in that it happened in history but what is surprising to some are the preceding verses in Exodus 21:20-21 where it says, "20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property." These verses without the succeeding ones sounds like it allows beating of abed but it simply says the abed owner has no consequence unless they hurt the abed a lot and I'm not entirely sure what the reason was for that but the abed is still let go. I imagine these were applied so talion didn't apply backwards (enslavement-for-enslavement). We see this "owner-does-not-receive-punishment-unless-they-went-too-far" applied to bulls in Exodus 21:28-32 where there is a punishment and line an owner of a bull can't cross otherwise he gets punished. There were also verses about not being cruel to animals as part of the noahide covenant (which influenced the ten commandments).

The basis for all this is in Leviticus 25:42 where he says, "Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves." It uses the same word abed in the original hebrew (but conjugated/declined differently to represent case and plurality) but the point of this covenant was that they were freed from Egypt by YHWH who they were enslaved to and that was the foundation of their ethics etc.

Yeah I think anything continental covers that analytic can or does but not vice versa.

You're not entitled to harass me when I asked you to stop replying to me. I get emails specifically saying you replied. Please desist.

Please stop replying to me.

I have no interest in conversing with you.

I haven't studied his theology. I'm not a transcendentalist but I imagine it's unique.

Yeah kierk threw me off because he seems way more protestant than your other picks (in fact he could be an extremist protestant) so I was wondering how you reconciled them.

Yes but it's rousseau's general will which underlines romanticism and the wars like naziism, marxism etc

I've never heard of Kant's philosophy of religion, do you know why it didn't have as much of an impact as Hegel's did?
How does kierk fit in there?

You don't have any interest in being charitable and not being disingenuous so I have no interest in talking to you.

If you have no interest in talking about it then don't message me. There's absolutely no reason to be disingenuous and uncharitable.

From the wiktionary: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/truth



You are using an aberrant definition and so all this work and effort should be on you. There is no definition which says anything other than truth being the root word true with a -th suffix and no definition of belief parsable without truth. Belief is a (personal) proposition which necessitates truth and falsity.

It's here
Truth is literally rooted in the word true.

Edit: one needs a definition of true to parse truth or belief.

I already provided the definitions here of belief, true and truth all from google and defined a relationship narrative which would exclude equivalency and allow asymmetricity to support my original statement about belief being derived from truth.

The only way to parse the word belief is by a definition of truth. The only distinction between truth and belief is "acceptance of" which, being epistemic, has little effect on "truth", by being tangential anyways, but the only way to make it parse differently would be to say one can accept things that are false and I'd argue it's impossible to do so meaningfully and can at best be done by accepting the "false statement" conditionally.

Truth has a root in true.

the quality or state of being true.

The caveat would be interesting to see if we need belief to accept truth which are arguments I've had thrown at me where it works differently epistemically because we are an agent way under the domain of these terms like truth. If you believe that then I'd be interested in that counterproposal but I feel like entailment places belief as derived from true/truth.

They're not equivalent in my estimation but asymmetric. Meaning one entails the other but the other does not entail the one. I would just use the definitions provided under any general dictionary.

Belief

an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.

True

in accordance with fact or reality.

Both on Google. Belief entails true (or existence but I see truth in any non social construction to literally entail existence) where true entails accordance with reality. Ontologically I see no issue ordering them like that although epistemologically I'm interested in finding a caveat.

Edit: recursively the definition of belief becomes, "an acceptance that a statement is in accordance with reality".

That sounds childish. Dualisms have issues and I don't know a dualism which posits end game vs beginning game and nothing formally is derived from that I'm aware of.
You have an insight but you're using imprecise language.

I mean it's your thread and what you said and it's on-topic so I don't really see how that's an out-of-the-ordinary question for someone to ask. It's not on me if that's the topic.

I would say as a self-evident truth but I'd re-word my point to ask whether it's a self-evident truth that living is limiting compared to suicide or whatever manner you compare it to as greater or even necessary.

If there's nothing prior then how can you justify the state of living as negative?

So you would classify living as limiting then?

What are y'all's views on how to best review? Do y'all think debating an issue helps y'all work through it better? I understand in a classroom it's not as easy to implement what works for oneself.

I think it depends on your metaphysical structure etc.
So for me, I always look for the larger narratives which underlie the issue (how the enlightenment was a development of 4 nations against the catholic church with france going metaphysical and political and england going poetic and political and italy going into plastic arts, the cause of all domestic issues in usa is based off lockean liberalism vs rousseauian, etc) so the more universal the narrative is the higher value it necessarily has.
With that being said, I feel like the Great Books, of the high value still that they have, are too discrete and the point of a teacher is to help/teach kids how to connect the dots on their own and see/prove which dots connected have more value and which less.

I don't personally see the nature of consciousness being emergent. If it's meant to be that the material brain makes consciousness emergent then I've seen studies which imply the opposite like the point of no return which shows a limit to material vetoing power. Some experiments from the wiki here.

Sure but causation usually necessitates strong emergence imo, wdyt?

So it says objects have no intrinsic traits just relational ones? So a carbon atom isn't a carbon atom per se but the rearrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons? I have some reservations but if that's correct then I'm on board.

Completely unfamiliar, if you need me to do some light reading I can.

Transcendentalists were around from the late 1820's - 1830's per the wikipedia which was after the second great revival started. The christian abolitionist movement had currency from the late 17th century with the quakers and the other mainstream branches like methodism were against slavery by the mid 18th century. There doesn't really seem to be a lot of secular positions against slavery and in fact slavery became a lot larger around 1700 when the economics for slave-trading and useage became better so a lot of formerly anti slavery states like georgia and rhode island became slave states. So an economic argument was made.

My dad and mom spoke about blue laws and they're in their 60's from Texas. I think a lot is to be gained by taking an ontological approach that isn't secular as that founds better ethics which can create better economic decisions etc.

Sure so the "logical configurations of energy" reminds me of statistical mechanics and the argument that temperature emerges from an individual state of atoms but to me that seems epistemological. I was wondering if you had a means to describe the examples you gave in an ontological manner.

The emanationism not accounting for entropy is interesting. I hadn't heard that and I'm not sure how to overcome that but I think it can be solved. I think emanationism, in a foundationalist structure, allows hierarchical time which can speak for convergent evolution more easily than linear time/evolution can.
I think a way to show entropy in emanationism is how objects interact after they've been created and creation is away from a foundation and we can seek the foundation more but it's always drifting away and in conjunction with many objects that are instantiated. Conceptually that may work but I don't have examples or strong arguments for it.

If anyone is an atheist and is against slavery then you need to find another a priori argument/justification against slavery besides we are all created in God's image and are saved by christ or you will end up with slavery again once power changes and keep in mind that christians have not had institutional power in usa, we have always had it chipped away and we did this with our a priori argument.

Because that's a valid expression of self-evident truths. Another example that's unrelated are analytic truths like "all bachelors are unmarried men". It was a big issue between rousseau and locke in terms of property rights and was what marx and even the nazis inherited and justified as a means of taking property from the bourgeoisie/Jews. It justified slavery as was said. Lockean liberalism has issues too such as in the Dawes act disenfranchising native Americans so natural or self-evident rights still needs to be defined.

Enough to free anybody and you're conflating general will with natural rights here. Self-evident means prior to man or men like a priori. The distinction is between natural rights (or before man) and general will (or after man). There's nothing self evident in the borders of a state or what basketball team I'll support unless you make the general will in natural law terms which would be appealed to instead.
The question is then what is natural law and we've seen the distinction between the liberal constitution and christianity. Rights coming from God, and not man, puts christianity in that former category of natural or self-evident rights.

Edit: Also christianity has hardly been a violent source otherwise christianity wouldn't ever meaningfully spawn pacifists which it regularly does even as Jehovah's witnesses today. There are other factors in those responses. Pagans were much more violent than christians have ever been.

And yet they weren't enough. Anyways self-evident truths requires not a general will but something prior to the established polity be it nature or God or something else valid. The prior being nature clearly wasn't enough, even though it has some actionable ethics/ontology, where God and christianity clearly showed what the best of self-evident truths means.

What reckoning did mlk speak about? He used christianity as a basis where malcolm x used politics and divisiveness hidden in Islam (because you need a strong religious basis) but this was well after.

It didn't free women or anybody really. I'm not sure what it did except get rid of the crown. It was noted that for all men to be created equal does not imply revolution but the opposite on the other side of the pond.

In any case the idea seems to be christianity is what had the sole ability to fight for slave freedom from an ethical position that had any decent strength. If that's divine authority then you haven't been able to explain away this purely christian movement.

I see the split but I was wondering where other sources came from. Transcendentalism came several decades after the heat of the abolitionist movement and transcendentalists grew out of the unitarian movement and some quaker and puritan sensibilities. The only slightly secular sorts of abolitionism that I can see were done by politicians who were raised puritan like John Adams but it seems the push against abolitionism was done by secularists.

In terms of the second question, I wonder if abolitionism got co-opted into the "american secular" side of history simply due to it becoming political in terms of the long split between the north and south on mostly lockean and rousseauian lines. Once it became a war it was deemed a part of secular state's history and the christian basis seems to be completely skipped over. I'm wondering if there's justification for that and, even more, I'm wondering if christianity succeeded before it became a war whether we would have sundays closed and a successful prohibition.

Because the abolition movement started with the christians. The enlightenment ideals freed literally nobody by the adoption of the constitution. The distinction were christian puritans/quakers etc who were against slavery and the secular institutions which allowed it for individualism and capitalism.

Also it's not hard to say that people who fought for the south fought for states rights even if they abhorred slavery and even if there was a section of christians who were pro-slavery, that still doesn't imply there was a section of secularists who were anti-slavery even though there were. The logic doesn't imply that and all the early histories of abolitionism, and even later up until near the war when it became political, are completely christian dominated in theology, ethics etc.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that saying "one group vs another group" has zero explanatory power of why it is that one group (which were christians).