I promise to stop this and start writing again. But…this second part of the discussion addresses at a very deep level some of the points of contention that have been expressed on these pages over the years.
Opinions are all that we have. That is a statement that is obvious on the face of it, but it is not complete. Opinions evolve with information. My opinions have evolved with the opinions expressed by some of the writers on this blog.
So, please take a little time to listen to these two discuss some of the deepest most frightful thoughts that humans need to work through to progress beyond blowing each other up.
And exactly why couldn’t you answer my clarion call to discuss this topic in a rational and scholarly way on this post I made earlier. Why are you wasting the privilege Jim Quinn has bestowed on you to put up worthy dialogue on his blog that people might want to read and discuss.
Are you really that dense?
Admin… THIS type of irrational feedback.
If you at least read people’s posts you assume to be too stupid to read, you would not look quite so stupid as you do now.
I suggest if you stay you get a name change. You will be known as Barnacle Bob and will probably get left in Finnegan’s Wake very soon if Avalon has anything to say about it.
Not all twits with twats are stupid twits.
You are a particularly stupid pompous ass.
Look at the time I posted this and then started asking for your input in both of your posts regarding this message. You have wasted Admin’s precious bandwidth.
Crap, more bitching from Maggie. Could somebody please make a comment, either positive or negative, that isn’t Maggie or one of her numerous aliases. I am genuinely interested in how you all saw what these three had to offer.
I will plug in my ear buds and listen on my phone while I do some mindless chores and get back to you later. It will be much later, though, because when my husband gets home from taking care of other peoples yards for them we are going to sit on the patio, drink bloody marys and enjoy the beautiful weather.
PLEASE Maggie, give it up. You are no longer fooling anybody. You just look sad.
I thought this was going to be Maggie’s contrition composition
Ima workin’ on it. Much to digest and meditate on. I keep getting distracted by so many thought provoking posts by admin.
Meatball ,you be nice to Maggie . Many of her post interest me.Now go play with yourselve kinda like Stucky plays with himself if you know what I mean.
Wow, so now one must assume that BB is Maggie too. What fun. But it sure makes more sense than some trucker on drugs weighing in from parts unknown. And they do both tend to be quite abusive in very much the same way. Can I just say that I like the nice Maggie/Mary Christine better than the Maggie/BB lunatic. But that is just my preference.
You are the biggest moron ever given posting privileges here at TBP. Are you Avalon’s sister’s neighbors cousin’s kid who Admin promised a writing spot on TBP to keep family peace?
Thank you bb. I will let you know that my helpmeet given to me by God himself in Iceland has once again saved my life. This morning at 5 a.m. when the wound vacuum once again failed and I found myself on my knees in my bathroom floor crying out for God to help me, God poked Nick the Knife in the ass and told him to get downstairs because Maggie’s guts are falling out again. Nick stood guard over me while the actual wound nurses were here today. He let them know he’s not taking their crap any more.
Like Christ loving his church, beebs.
I’d hoped to provide TBP with a running narrative about the nightmares of this health care debacle I’m embarking upon. I thought it might be timely and could include discussion of VA entitlement health care, such as mine is due to service-connected injury and the problems we face as retired military family with Tricare insurance out here in the middle of the suburbs of the sticks.
But, BB? Even the best of us has to give in to the rest of us sometimes. It is the only way to survive to fight another day.
I really did go into the archives here and discover you are a decent sort and not a toad. Some of us live and learn. Some only live.
hoping bb catches it for this
If this conversation is to be engaged, we have to go up front with the fact it’s two atheists leading the discussion. Fundamental questions? Is there a possible objective foundation on which a meaningful morality can be built? Is the nature of human mythology evidence of such an objective foundation, given its near to utterly universal adaptation among human cultures throughout history? Are such “story based” manners of teaching being within a culture necessary, given modern advances in material comprehension, or might the behaviors being passed down through stories be more greatly abstracted through modern methods of analysis?
Harris is contending the latter, but offers little of substance regarding what such modern analysis might really look like. Peterson seems to think we’re not far enough along in our psychological development to do away with the mythology, because we still develop as individuals by watching and imitating those within our society, and the results of those behaviors. We’re need our hero stories, creation stories, the dramatizations that literature provides that allows us to wallow in suffering without the actual suffering projected upon the miserable tragic hero. These stories teach us what’s expected of us, and how to live up to the expectation; they teach us what failing to looks like. Harris’ Moral Landscape might be a starting point to better comprehension of another way of establishing a manner of learning how to be, but Peterson seems to have a better grasp on how we have always been–how we are.
Yes, thank you.
Peterson obviously believes in a storied past, the need even in modern times for a sort of faith in the foundational elements of the past, and exhibits a certain faith in the competency of Western traditions , stories and ideas toward individualism in service to a greater community. Harris seems to think we have within our modern means some ability to create some similar foundational structure out of reason…even amidst the lunacy that modern Western Civilization evinces.
It seems clear that Peterson isn’t a Christian, nor even a theist, but he “acts within the world as though he is.” He follows the norms and mores that we inherited from our theistic past, whether he believes or not. He “worships” the God of our fathers even in his non-belief. He thinks and behaves as though God IS, and Jesus lives, even as his analytical mind succumbs to doubt. The doubt he openly displays probably undermines, to some extent, his own argument that the ideal of Christ is the ideal to which we each should strive.
Harris? I swear, as much fun as it was to watch Peterson draw him out…get him to search the soul of his own argument…Harris’ seems to me to remain an unrefined argument. It might be that if he dwells for a time on his conversation with Peterson he’ll better understand and articulate his understanding, but for now he seems still to be muddling along.
Perhaps you are right, but I suspect that what Peterson is saying is that the stories have meaning even if you don’t believe in the classical sense. He explains that the stories likely come from the experiences of the societies as they developed in the purest Darwinian sense. Those who behaved one way prospered and bred on and those who behaved in a different way died out because they were assholes that nobody wanted to have sex with. I have to agree that Peterson’s stories are more developed than Harris’s concepts. Peterson asks him at one point to explain how the moral ideals could be developed without the concept of god and Harris demurs. That does not mean that he can’t work out the details, but it does tend to indicate that he hasn’t yet worked out the details.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with that last paragraph. Peterson appears to me to be seeking an answer to a different question than Harris is and they don’t seem to realize it. Peterson starts with the god stories, which he finds useful, but Harris starts without the god stories. Peterson claims that the god stories are foundational to everything because they are about basic truths. Not the truths that christians or muslims or jews hold to be true, but truths that have been washed clean by hundreds of thousands of years of human experience. He seems comfortable ignoring the question of the existence of god, and seems quite happy to build his truths on the idea of god as a thing. Not the thing, just a thing.
The thing about God is, in this context, it doesn’t matter if you believe or not so long as the value system derived from the belief system is functional for and within the culture in which it arises. I’m not exactly a faithful Christian but I don’t dismiss the faith of my fathers, either. That’s not something to trifle with. The faiths of our ancestors helped them live up to the unimaginable difficulties of pre-history, build stronger and stronger societies into the ancient times and beyond. That’s some heap big medicine. It’s so deeply wired into the human psyche that it’s universal across every culture we know of.
I’m not sure they’re after answers to different questions exactly, its just that the first question either of them asked is skipped over in the conversation: what the hell is wrong with us? Peterson looked at the atrocities of the 20th century and was horrified. What the hell is so wrong with us that we could cause, or allow, the deaths of untold millions. In his round about way, he has come to the conclusion that we lost our stories. More to the point, we lost the meaning they lent to life and the examples they provided the masses of us. Most people don’t have time to become rooted into the deepest knowledge of science and philosophy, to ponder for hours…or decades…on the intricacies of what a rational moral system might look like. Most of us are up to our ears in madness and all we really want or care about is a true enough strategy for flourishing in the experiential world, or at least less freaking misery.
Harris found his answer in religion. He has demonized the dogmatic ideologies of religious institutions as the fundamental virus in our otherwise well ordered computational brains. Harris seems to think that humans are universal across cultures and across time, and that if not infected by the meme of religion we can be instructed with a well reasoned value structure that when run upon our well ordered brain machines would output moral behavior. Listening to him, I’m not sure he’s ever examined just how malevolently his emotions might drive him to behave, under the right set of circumstance. Well, there’s seven billion of us and we each live our lives within our own different subjective worlds. He thinks humans are rational people if not corrupted by faith but really we’re irrational emotional animals and damned few of us will ever really be reasoned with.
We can (almost) all imitate the examples set by our parents, learn the stories of our cultures, and form expectations for ourselves and others that conform to the societies within which we’re reared. Well, if we can keep from corrupting the institutions we and our societies evolved with.
I am always a bit reluctant to weigh-in on the topic of religion. I consider it a very personal thing and I don’t ever want to make anyone uneasy about their own or antagonistic about anyone else’s. Who am I to do that? I’ll debate and even argue politics, but religion not so much…
There are hundreds if not thousands of religions and sub-sects, each of them claiming to be the only one true religion. Only one of them can be, but that doesn’t mean that any of them are.
I have mentioned in past comments that by my own choice I am a Deist, but I think that everyone should be free to believe whatever it is that gives them comfort spiritually.
Having said that, I also think that if more people actually practiced those things that they claim to believe and spent less time trying to make everyone else accept as absolute truth what they say they believe, but don’t actually practice this would be a better world…
I’m enjoying the thread HR and I’ve watched most, but not all of the videos, but I don’t feel comfortable getting into the fray on this one.
Keep it going though. I am reading it and perhaps there are others like me that will read, but not feel comfortable commenting.
Jordan Peterson an intellectual? Clean your room!
https://survivalblog.com/toward-federal-decentralization-long-term-plan-gop/
Decentralist Objectives
The objectives of decentralization would include, but not be limited to:
Vastly reducing taxation and regulation.
Restoring fiscal balance and sound money.
Repealing 17th Amendment (direct election of senators), restoring the Senate’s traditional role of representing the States.
Restoring the traditional role of government employees as public servants rather than our masters.
Moving most regulation from the Federal level to the State and Local levels.
De-elevating most of the cabinet-level Federal agencies.
Gradually privatizing Social Security.
Moving all welfare and relief functions to the State and local level.
Moving Federal student loan functions to the State level.
Disbanding the BATF and repealing both NFA-’34 and GCA-’68.
Zeroing the Federal budget for supporting the arts.
Eliminating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Eliminating FEMA.
Eliminating the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Eliminating the Commerce Department, just as Newt Gingrich suggested, twice.
Eliminating the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Eliminating the Labor Department.
Eliminating the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS).
Eliminating the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Eliminating the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Eliminating the Agriculture Department, pushing any crucial functions down to the State level.
Greatly reducing the size of the FBI and restoring its jurisdictional role strictly to interstate crimes.
Moving EPA regulations to the state level, and the eliminating the USEPA.
Moving Department of Education function to the state level, and then completely eliminating the Federal Department of Education.
Moving Department of Transportation regulations to the state level, and then de-ranking the Federal Department of Transportation into a mere commission.
Eliminating Amtrak. (Railroads should have never become a public works project.)
Moving most FDA regulations to the state level, and then de-ranking the FDA into a mere commission.
Ending corporate welfare. (In much the same way that the Democrat Party became too close to the trade unions, the Republican Party became too close to mega corporations and the bankers.)
Re-organizing the military, putting the majority of the current Active Army Divisions and Air Force Air Wings under the National Guard bureaus. Eventually the Army would have 24 Divisions, 26 Independent Brigades, and 10 Independent Regiments, but with majority under the National Guard.
Privatizing the current airport security functions of the TSA, and then completely disbanding the TSA.
Folding most the U.S. Naval Reserve, Air Force Reserve, and Army Reserve into National Guard force structures.
Turning the majority of the current Federal active military military members into National Guard training cadre.
We are clearly now living in the age of 4th Generation warfare. Therefore, it is apropos to expand the U.S. Special Forces to 10 full Groups, but with eight of those manned by National Guard troops. The USSF’s primary mission would be domestic resistance warfare training for the citizenry, as a deterrent to invasion. In parallel, the role of the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) would be expanded, and the majority of small arms now kept in war reserves would be sold to civilian shooters.
Putting all of the Brown Water (littoral) Navy and Army transport vessels under the National Guard bureaus.
Gradually converting the U.S. Navy to more stealthy surface ships and to a higher ratio of submersibles. Nearly half of these ships would be operated by National Guard bureaus.
Gradually converting the U.S. Air Force to more stealthy aircraft with a higher ratio of remotely-piloted aircraft. More than half of these planes and drones would be operated by National Guard bureaus. Nearly all of the remote UAV pilots would be part-time National Guard officers.
Abolishing the Federal Reserve, making printing currency a function of state chartered banks.
Gradually increasing the gold and silver backing of our currency, to the point where by 2050, our currency would again be redeemable on demand in specie by any citizens living in the States and U.S. territories.
Physically decentralizing the Federal government away from the District of Columbia. This could be accomplished by dispersing federal agency headquarters throughout the States and through extensive use of secure (encrypted) teleconferencing. Thus, the District of Columbia would become more of a symbolic seat of government, and better known for its museums and memorials.
Eventually eliminating the Federal personal income tax.