Re: Israel Suspends Ties With Vatican

In <gr3che$srk$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> micha@xxxxxxxxxxx (Micha Berger) writes:

You're using agnostiticism in a different sense despite my defining it.
You're using <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnostic>,
second part " broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either
the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god" whereas I spelled out
that I using it in the narrower sense " a person who holds the view that
any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable". Not
"I don't know" but "noone CAN know".

Yeah, I'll buy that.

You have much of that too, speaking of G-d in subjective truth terms.
A consequence of confusing what is true with what is provable (or
justifiable -- handwave over that end of things right now) is that you
end up saying (Orwellian NewSpeak style) that G-d's existence is a
subjective matter. Rather, it's an objective matter about which there
is a difference of opinion because we work from different sets of life
experiences.

It is an objective matter about which there is ONLY opinion. And in fact
regarding God's existence, all that opinion is of equal weight.

After all, what if you said "To hell with Newton" and went on with
Aristotilian physics. Would you expect anyone to respect your opinion?
The community of professionals went through a Copernican Revolution when
Kant's philosophy hit the fan. Your ignoring it is a public admission
of willfull ignorance.

Newtonian physics is an approximation. But we're not talking physics here.
I find philosophers to be intentionally opaque. If this stuff is to be
meaningful, it has to be something you can actually explain and
understand. Like Shelly I have no patience for thousands of pages of
gibberish, Latin, and invented terms.

I've read those web sites you've pointed me to, and I think I have a
general understanding of what they're trying to say, and frankly I dismiss
those arguements as nonsense. Am I claiming I'm smarter than Kant? Dunno -
maybe. Just because he wrote a book doesn't mean he's right. Thomas
Aquinas was a pretty sharp guy, from what I understand, and he wrote books
too. (haven't read any of those either) But I reject his ideas out of hand
too, because I reject his underlying premises.

I don't understand string theory in the slightest, for example. But if a
book on string theory said "First, we know that the moon is made of
cheese, therefore..." I wouldn't need to read any further - I can ignore
all the complex mathematics because it's irrelevant.

The complexity of the theory doesn't change the nature of the underlying
postulates.

--s
--

.

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