I've often regarded the prayers and rituals of the religious with a comparison to a secular practice of meditation. While I think the comparison is valid, I'd done so glibly; for I didn't really care to wonder what was happening to the person physiologically as they practiced their stuff. So I have to wonder: does what they do find an equivalent in something I do? It would be difficult for me to indulge the mythologies, however metaphoric they may or may not be, and I would be resistant to the idea. But I have to wonder if, in spite of what the silliness of of the symbolism does to impede my utilization of it, they are able to use it to some actual effect. Being how I am, I view abstract concepts simply as abstractions; facts and ideas, dynamics and functions, and not things in their own right. But what would happen if I did give them a character and presence in my mind? What if I allowed them to have weight and dimension, personality; would doing this alter the way I think?

I have to wonder if there could be some potential in embracing ideas in a more concrete way; if this would skip some translative step in the thought process. An analogy that springs to mind is driving. At first you're preoccupied with the mechanics of the car, the radius the angle of the steering wheel produces; the curve to the drop in speed as the brake pedal is pressed. Eventually, much of that becomes transparent, and the functions of the car disappear beneath the desires of the driver.

Being a programmer of sorts, I am an exceptionally lazy person. In a way. I can spend two hours researching a script that'll do work that would have taken a half hour manually. So whenever something can be done without breaking a sweat, and preferably without jostling my beer, all the better. Here comes the tangent.

We've got these asshole cyclists here in L.A.: a couple self-righteous bike groups that routinely mob busy city streets, slowing traffic to a crawl, drinking, howling, kicking cars, and patting themselves on their hipster backs for not driving that night. Technically speaking, cyclists have the same right to the paved surface streets that cars and motorcycles do; and the ostensible purpose of these groups is to spread awareness of this fact. But, the flip side to this is that those same cyclists are obliged to obey the same traffic laws as their fuel-burning counterparts; which would exclude their regular habits of running stop lights, going against traffic, weaving between parked cars, and all that. My impression of these people first is that they're idiots, second that they're the new jocks, and third that their "awareness" campaign of inconveniencing motorists is equivalent to throwing red paint on old ladies in furs.

each of us has principles, and justification of them

these concepts are valuations and prescriptions combined indiscriminately

sets of these concepts form a moral theory

to regard a valuation or justification is to regard the prescription

to question the former is to question the latter

justifications can be reified and made into myths

to regard the reified justification is to regard the valuation and prescription

to question the former is to question the latter

prescriptions can exist without justification, simply assumed

to regard justification and valuation is not to regard prescription

 Where a lack of certainty in one field distracts from the lack of any evidence whatsoever in another.

Premise: There is a deliberate agency managing an elaborate reward/punishment system according to its own standards for behavior.

When the travel of news through a community is slow, and its travel across communities nonexistent, a mystic class could maintain this story in the context of empirical reality without conflict. Did your neighbor lose a few head of cattle? It's because he upset the gods somehow. It's not even necessary that the subject of the story exist, since the flow of information is congested, and standards of plausibility indeterminate.

But as information begins to flow more readily, and natural and scientific precedents sculpt a culture's perception of reality, ideas that no longer appear to describe reality are more likely to be recognized as such. The dilemma then becomes how a mystic can reconcile his notions about the world -- of divine justice, etc. -- with a growing probabalistic model that is casting his view under suspicion.

Take the conflicting conceptual space the idea occupies, and posit it as an actual space. Better yet, make it a place from which you don't generally expect to hear reports back from.

 I found stool before the old Remington at the hipster coffee shop to start creating the ultimate artwork. The prose was purple, and not illustrative; so I took to it with a fountain pen, massaging the words into shapes, but the words were no longer legible. Someone cried out that my movement was stilted and unexpressive, so I leapt up from the paper, and flung it at them in anger. The chords, another said, were repetitious; but, I said, "There are no chords, at all!"

If a proposition is undemonstrated, as things requiring faith are by definition, then the position requiring fewest assumptions is rejection of it.

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." -- Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great

There is an infinite number of undemonstrable propositions, each of which would be untenable from a view based on evidence, but most are never articulated. Most that are described, are rejected without fanfare even by those that believe other undemonstrated things. Faith is not applied uniformly, generally favoring the assumptions of one's native culture.

Bruce Bain is going to respond to every review of The End of Faith at Amazon, with his bizarre straw-man arguments, until he up and dies of acute tedium. Todd Friel isn't as old or as fat as he sounds. We all know a historical Jesus wouldn't look like a white dude from the Southern United States, and yet... Alister McGrath and Lee Strobel both have doll eyes. Christopher Hitchens needs an intervention.

I consider myself a person with a reasonably standard range of emotions. One my society deems good, like empathy, love, and occasional courage; and ones considered harmful and selfish, like anger, spite and cowardice. I don't rule out the possibility of dualism, though I don't think it adds anything to the natural explanation of emotions: their reasons, their sources, their development, their physiology. Many Christians take it for granted that certain emotions, if powerful enough, must certainly transcend the corporeal human experience. I recall reading once that the sensation of "itching" is actually two kinds of pain sensation to encourage scratching to stimulate circulation in the affected area; but in a dualistic view, there must be an ultimate source of itchiness. It seems as fair as saying there's an ultimate source of love. Hopefully, they're not one in the same.

My policy of repeating myself once, then writing off the debate as futile, is working out well so far; at least as a time-saving measure. If someone doesn't get it the second time around, they're not going to the ninth.

[mod edit: "I like it" in stumbleupon, posted to del.ic.ious, posted to reddit]