Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 1:37 pm
I’ve posted something that might be charitably called a blog post – it probably isn’t really structured enough to count as one. It doesn't have anything to do with my meager attempts at conworlding or conlanging. It’s just a bunch of mostly disconnected thoughts, mostly about politics. It’s here:
https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... -snippets/
Some of the thoughts do seem quite disconnected from one another, and you might get more engagement with the later points if you posted them separately from the earlier points, because that's a lot to read through and formulate replies to.
So here's only a few for now....
1. I think you misunderstand the proposed nature of cause and effect in the case of prayer.
Well, first off, when discussing religion - like any coherent ideology - we need to distinguish between what we might call the 'reasoned ideology', and the 'popular superstition'. Inevitably, a lot of people on the ground will identify their allegiances by repeating slogans derived from, but perhaps not fully representative of the nuances of, a given ideology. Sometimes, they know this - they're simplifying for the sake of concision and approachability. Other times, they don't know it yet, but when it's pointed out to them, they'll recognise that perhaps they hadn't fully understood their own position. And other times, they'll ardently defend their position, but their position will still be significantly different from those of those we might call the 'theorists' of their ideology. [Often, how they react depends on how you raise the subject, which is why a lot of harm can be done by forcefully opposing harmful ideologies - if they think their ideology is under attack, people double down and become more extreme and intransigent, whereas if they think they're being corrected from inside their own ideology, or if they think they have an opportunity to persuade someone who is open to their ideology, then their views become more fluid and moderate.]
So: yes, sure, a lot of people have silly, superstitious ideas about prayer that would not be supported by mainstream theologians.
That said: if you know 'the right prayer', that doesn't mean you 'control' God - in the same way that if you can predict the path of a hurricane and know how to get out of its way, that doesn't mean you control the hurricane. Even if prayer were indeed a scientifically valid treatment, that wouldn't mean that people controlled God, but only that they understood (a part of them) them.
More importantly, though, in answer to your question, does a publicity campaign for more prayers make a child more likely to be saved by God, we can distinguish at least three coherent views:
a) yes, if you get more people to pray for you, you're more likely to be healed. Why would God be more likely to act if you have a more popular instagram account? He wouldn't - but flip the causality. IF God is more likely to help you, THEN you will have a more popular instagram account. If millions of people pray for you, that's a sign of God's favour, and being miraculously healed is a sign of God's favour too, so it makes sense that they'd tend to go together!
This is essentially the prosperity doctrine - those whom God loves, he makes prosperous. It's a politically odious and psychologically harmful doctrine, but conceptually it's actually pretty simple and coherent.
b) no, getting more people to pray for you does not help. God responds to prayers, but does not employ an accountant. How is that possible - if he responds to a percentage of prayers, or to certain 'really good' prayers, then by definition the more prayers are submitted, the greater the chance of a succesful one! But no - that assumes that God only responds to ACTUAL prayers.
Consider two situations: a man is dying in a desert in both. In one case, he does so on one side of a hill, in sight of a truly godly hermit; in the other case, he does so on the other side of the hill, and the hermit does not see. In the first case, the hermit prays for the man; in the second case, he does not. Now, the accountancy approach says 'the hermit's prayers are really good, so in the first case the man is saved, but in the second he's not'. This requires us to think of God, as it were, collecting prayers like a man selling tickets, handing out miracles
in exchange for prayers. In this view, he acts BECAUSE of the prayer. But this is clearly ascribing to God a most unholy attitude! Instead, it's more reasonable to think that if God answers your prayer it's
because God wants to help you. The hermit's prayers are great because God really wants to help the hermit. Now, in the first case, the hermit prays because he doesn't want some guy to die in the desert - so that's the need that God is answering when he saves the man (along with, you know, the man's own needs!). But in the second case, the same hermit STILL doesn't want some guy to die in the desert - he just doesn't happen to pray that exact petition at that exact time
because he doesn't know there's a reason to. But God DOES know there's a reason to. And he still wants to help the hermit, who would be praying a certain prayer if he had all the facts, and helping the dying man is still fulfilling the hermit's desire, even if the hermit never actually finds out about it! And because God genuinely wants to help the hermit, rather than being some annoying jobsworth sitting back and saying "well, i WOULD help you only you didn't fill out the correct prayer form on the correct day!", God's help is not dependent on the hermit actually knowing about that specific dying man in the desert. God responds, as it were, not only to actual prayers, but also to hypothetical prayers, the prayers we would have offered if we'd known certain facts.
Consider another thought experiment: your daughter has gone on holiday to America. Some time later, you get a letter from America, in English, telling you that your daughter has been in a terrible accident and is likely to die within three days without a miracle. You immediately fall to your knees in devout and earnest prayer; God hears your prayers, and your daughter is miraculously saved. Now consider a slightly different scenario: everything happens as before, only this time, you don't speak any English. It takes you four days before you can find someone to translate the letter for you - by this time, your daughter has either died or been saved by a miracle. But because you couldn't speak English, and didn't know what the letter said, you didn't pray! So does that mean God will have refused to save her?
Obviously not (in this theology). One of the fundamental Catholic doctrines is that God never punishes people simply for being ignorant - only for being malicious. If you don't pray for your daughter simply because you're ignorant of English - or, indeed, because you're ignorant of the concept of prayer! - God won't punish you for that ignorance by withholding a miracle that he would otherwise have provided. The content of your heart is what matters to them, not what you know or don't know.
In this view, God does respond to prayers - but the distinction they make is not between 'praying' and 'not praying'. Instead, it's the distinction between 'choosing to pray' and 'choosing not to pray'. And in some way, that choice, in either direction, is already made in your heart before you have the specific facts at hand that trigger your actual prayer. By your works shall ye be known, but only because works are the fruit of faith - what matters is not your works (the prayer), but your faith, of which that prayer is simply an external and contingent manifestation and fruit. If you know that your daughter is gravely ill, and refuse to pray for her, that may or may not be something God takes account of, but the fact that you didn't pray for her because you didn't even know she was ill is not something that makes a difference. Similarly, a publicity campaign has no effect, because God knows the sincere prayers that would have been offered had the pray-er known of the need for them.
c) no, getting more people to pray for you doesn't help. God does not respond to prayers - even though he responds to
prayer. Sure, God says he gives you what you ask for. But if God tells you that dogs have four legs, would you become an atheist on discovering one dog that had had an amputation? The idea that God responds to prayer is a general truth - God in general gives humanity the things that humanity asks for - but should not be taken to entail that God specifically responds in writing to every single petition, or even to a specific fraction or subset of them. Thinking that sending more prayers will make the difference is, in this theology, like thinking that if a teacher gives their pupils ice cream on Fridays, but for some reason isn't doing so today, then if you twice as many children to run into his classroom and ask for icecream, he's twice as likely to give everyone ice-cream. Well no - he generally gives kids ice-cream on Fridays, but on this Friday he clearly has some reason not to, even though he knows the kids want the ice-cream. Having MORE kids ask him for ice-cream doesn't change his calculation! In this view, God does what's best for us, which is indeed generally what people pray for, but he doesn't specifically send THIS miracle in response to THAT prayer.
Instead, you have to flip the causality again - holy people pray for things BECAUSE they're things God wants them to have, and holy people praying sincerely are led by faith to pray for good things, not bad things. Lots of people praying for something can therefore be EVIDENCE that God wants it, but it doesn't MAKE God want it. And conversely, if people don't pray for something because they haven't heard about it, that doesn't stop God wanting to do it.
Why, then, would people following this theology encourage people to pray at all, if it has no causal control over God? Well, because although they say we should ask God for things, they DON'T say we should do so IN ORDER to get those things.
Instead, they see prayer as an act of devotion. The act of petition recognises that a) we have needs we cannot ourselves meet, b) God exists, and c) God can do anything, including things we cannot do. These are all seen as essential elements of religious faith. They also believe that prayer is a form of reflection - in truly, intently praying for something (with selflessness, love, humility, and the desire to be pleasing to God), we focus our attention on that thing, and achieve greater clarity about what it is that we want, and why we want it, and whether it's a good thing to pray for or not. In particular, prayers on behalf of another focus our minds on the suffering of that other person, and our desire to heal that suffering.
So, God wants to help the suffering. And if we are good people, we will pray for the suffering. So God will in general end up helping people we pray for. But not necessarily
because we prayed for them - rather, we prayed as we did
because as good people the things we pray for are the things God wants to do...
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2. Of course multiple people can be responsible for the same thing. Who disagrees?
However, the appearance of a paradox may be removed if we choose by being more precise with our words. Normally we would say that each person is
responsible for their actions, and that if their actions are bad, then they are
culpable (sans exculpatory mitigations) for the consequences of their actions. In your example, the arsonist is responsible for setting the fire, and the negligent fire chief is responsible for failing to put it out. They are both culpable for the deaths that result. However, even if the fire chief is, as you put it, "fully" responsible for his mistakes, that doesn't mean he is "fully" culpable for the consequences - he shares culpability with the arsonist.
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3. As AL says, the idea that we can divide up texts (and it's not just the Bible) into parts written by different authors is not solely based on the use of different names, but on a range of stylistic differences. It's always controversial in practice, because while the theory is sound, inevitably some analysts will fall victim to over-analysis, seeing things that aren't there, particular when they use their own intuition rather than mathematical models.
To take your example, though: yes, if books 1-5 and book 7 consistently refer to "Harry" and "The Dark Lord", but book 6 only ever refers to "Potter" and "Lord Voldemort", that would certainly make hermeneuticists raise their eyebrows! It would at least plant the idea that book 6 was by a different author, or perhaps the same author at a different time. Of course, if there were no other significant differences, the idea might be dropped - but if other differences were found that matched the same division, then people might well conclude that it wasn't written by one author, or at least not all at once.
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4. I think it's strange to think of maximum evil in all ways as being the natural state of the universe, but ultimately it's a sophistical argument anyway - it doesn't matter if we define evil as natural and require every good to have a 'cause', or if we define good as natural and require every evil to have a 'cause', or indeed if we define neither as natural and require both to have causes, because these descriptions are just mirror images of one another, changing nothing substantive.
As for why people try to address the causes of problems, it's because many problems are ongoing. If you don't address the cause of the problem, it'll continue generating the problem. Of course, you're right - again, who would disagree with you!? - that some problems continue even after the initiating cause has been dealt with, and so require remedial solutions. But if you don't remove the initiating cause, then the remedial solutions will achieve nothing.
[that said, again I think greater precision would be helpful. When you talk about 'removing' the cause... causes are now usually thought to be events, not objects, so the cause of everything has, as it were, already been removed by time (the main alternative is to say that causes are facts, or fact-like things, which are transcendent, and hence not, as it were, ever 'here' to be removed in the first place). The important distinction is therefore between repeated events, which have repeated consequences - in which case the repeated cause ought to be prevented - and singular events, which, having occurred once, can no longer be prevented, but only remedied.]
(((FWIW, the impression I've always had of you is that you're a moderate conservative, who doesn't like to think of himself that way due to some incidental dislike of the Republican Party)))
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5. Yes, mass action is exhilerating and sometimes necessary, but often dangerous to both society and to the reason, and easily subverted.
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6. Well, it's perhaps a little more nuanced than you give it credit. Sure, everyone has someone to the left of them and someone to the right - but if you find that the only people attacking you from the left are a crazed fringe of half-sane radicals, then you yourself may be too far to the left, whereas if you're often criticised by seemingly moderate people on both sides, you're likely to be somewhere in the centre (whether that's good or bad). Or, of course, extreme in a different dimension.
Regarding 'sides' - well, every issue only has four sides: yes, no, yes and no, and neither yes nor no. For most political issues, the first two cover the vast majority of the spectrum and are fairly closely balanced (which is why they are political issues). Of course, one issue is that many issues are not issues, but bundles of related issues - but good interviewing tries to address one question at a time (while still doing justice to the truth).
What you present as the other side of course depends on what message you want to convey. But if you are a fair interviewer, you try to pick voices that are broadly representative of the debate as it stands on the ground. If most people, or the most powerful people, on the right on a given issue are on the far right, you have a person who is from the far right (if that's not otherwise morally disallowed); if most people, or the most powerful people, on the right on a given issue are moderates, you have an interviewee who is moderate. When the question is a political question, the intention of the honest reporter is to accurately report and explain the views driving the actual political question.
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7. You're confusing two different political dimensions. Being left or right is not directly related to support for hierarchical structures - Stalin, for instance, was very left-wing, but also very keen on hierarchy. Milton Friedman was very right-wing, but also very against hierarchy.
The rest here seems like a religious position rather than a political one - the inadequacy of any possible test can only be an article of faith (many tests have not been tested). But it's hard to know what you mean exactly. You adopt the - certainly rather conservative! - position that some people are inferior, but you don't explain why or in what way I'm inferior to you - in what way are you 'great' and I just 'suck'? These are not very precise ethical terms!
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I'll come back to this later.