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wolfhnd wrote:Since I thought Dennett whipped Harris pretty badly and it didn't sway many people the whole public intellectual thing seems pretty useless.
wolfhnd wrote: He does do a good job of taking apart the post modernist and the neo marxists but those ideas seem old school in serious intellectual circles anyway.
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BadgerJelly » February 17th, 2018, 9:34 am wrote:In some ways I do think the world is too "safe" right now. China seems to be the only country capable of shifting the whole of humanity in the right direction.
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Forest_Dump » Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:52 am wrote:wolfhnd wrote:Since I thought Dennett whipped Harris pretty badly and it didn't sway many people the whole public intellectual thing seems pretty useless.wolfhnd wrote: He does do a good job of taking apart the post modernist and the neo marxists but those ideas seem old school in serious intellectual circles anyway.
I suppose possibly a bit of a tangent but I am always interested in how people balance and rationalize their thinking with politics, religion, etc. So while I was recently (re)reading Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and specifically critiquing Gould, I was interested to note that Dennett described himseld as an ACLU liberal (as opposed to Gould and Maynard Smith being Marxist). But then politics, religion and broader philosophies almost always make strange bed fellows. Christianity began as a pretty radical, revolutionary almost communist political movement before morphing more to the right. So it goes.
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Forest_Dump » Tue Feb 20, 2018 2:08 pm wrote:To be honest, Dennett annoys the he'll out of me more than Dawkins some times. The two are a matched set in many ways. Very many ways. But this was Dennett's big contribution and it was all about evolutionary theory so if you are interested in that and haven't read it yet then I would say it is a must read. But I never really like recommending either.
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BadgerJelly » February 20th, 2018, 9:20 am wrote:Lomax -
Maybe, maybe not. I think we could argue cases for and against. At the moment China is leading the way in various areas of research, and they are capable of radical change due to the structure of government
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wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote:Christianity is a Jewish eschatological cult with anti imperialist overtones.
wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote: After the Jewish law enforcer Paul came to dominate the Christian cult it became an almost unrecognizable version of it's former self.
wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote:In many ways Buddhism suffered a similar fate morphing from a version of Hindu mysticism minus the somewhat pantheistic trappings and focused on a type of internal moral philosophy into a distinct religion.
wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote: What is interesting is that stripping the more outrageous elements of the foundational religion in both cases was not sustainable. Ancestor worship and the old testament that was supposed to have been stripped returned in Christianity and the strange worship practices that were supposed to be replaced by a more secular enlightenment in Buddhism. This validates Peterson's idea that you cannot simply do away with the foundational myths.
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mitchellmckain » Wed Feb 21, 2018 3:06 am wrote:wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote:Christianity is a Jewish eschatological cult with anti imperialist overtones.
The only anti-imperialism I see in the NT is found in the zealots which Jesus opposed and Paul did not support either.wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote: After the Jewish law enforcer Paul came to dominate the Christian cult it became an almost unrecognizable version of it's former self.
Hardly... Paul is complex largely because some of what is attributed to him probably wasn't really his at all (some of the later epistles). The biggest change we see in going from Jesus to Paul is his inclination (perhaps due to education) to present things as an intellectual argument rather than by anecdotal stories (parables).
Frankly, the biggest harm I see being done in the development of Christianity is the influence of the Gnostics and thus by Neo-Platonism. It is one thing to make an intellectual argument for a theological position and quite another to make knowledge/belief of such dogma the basis of salvation itself.wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote:In many ways Buddhism suffered a similar fate morphing from a version of Hindu mysticism minus the somewhat pantheistic trappings and focused on a type of internal moral philosophy into a distinct religion.
I see no such parallel. The only commonality I see between Buddhism and Christianity are the anti-religious elements. For Christianity (at least in Jesus and Paul) it was a rejection of the legalistic religiosity of the Pharisees (or Judaizers in case of Paul) and for Buddhism (at least in Siddhartha Gautama) it was a rejection of theism altogether.wolfhnd » February 17th, 2018, 2:02 pm wrote: What is interesting is that stripping the more outrageous elements of the foundational religion in both cases was not sustainable. Ancestor worship and the old testament that was supposed to have been stripped returned in Christianity and the strange worship practices that were supposed to be replaced by a more secular enlightenment in Buddhism. This validates Peterson's idea that you cannot simply do away with the foundational myths.
Well in this you have point. While both have sought to discard the elements of divine appeasement from religion, we see this same idea creeping back into both religions to some degree. And yet the record of that rejection remains for those of later generations to find so they might champion this cause once again.
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BadgerJelly » February 16th, 2018, 8:11 am wrote:Been waiting for this for a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL61yQgdWeM
Interesting chat. I kind of understand why Brand is so obsessed with the idea of "power" now.
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