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Gratitude, Compulsion, Idiocy or Nobility?
- Thread starter Kumar
- Start date
Yes, you could not take. Neither could give nor can get but could just criticise chronically.
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jond
Illuminator
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2006
- Messages
- 3,440
You could learn, if only you were open minded enough to accept that you could be wrong. But you aren’t and therefore you don’t.
It is tough question, who can be the supreme court judge for it to give A&F judgement. Wait till A&F. Many tried to reach at Everest. Shoud had reached to even 95%. But credit only gone to Hillary and Tenzing being ist reached to A&F peak there. Acc to you, all who could reach 25%to 95% should had been given credit. WHY NOT? Claim.
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jond
Illuminator
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2006
- Messages
- 3,440
You already are A&F in your beliefs, and that is your problem. No facts will ever sway you from them.
Porpoise of Life
Illuminator
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- Oct 5, 2014
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See, this is why people call your debating style dishonest. Every time your preconceptions are challenged, you say 'sorry, not a&f, I don't need to give it any thought', and every time you make a claim you say 'thats a&f, so I don't need to support my claim'.
Its intellectual laziness.
Peregrinus
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2015
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- 1,213
"Laziness" isn't the term I would have chosen.
Then, why we give credit to those people who have reached peak of mountain and not to those who could reach 25 to 95%?Acc to you people they should also be given full credit who could reach 25 to 95%.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
Your metaphor here is not very apt but to go with it, I'd say if nobody has reached the peak, it's appropriate to give credit to those who have approached it, and to withhold credit from those who have not. In the present case, we seem to have a person who stands at the base of the mountain proclaiming that he has been to the top, and seen things that those higher up the mountain do not see.
Credit is given to credibility, not to claim.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
All right, let's run with this.
First, you're not at the peak. You're simply reading the anecdotes of people thousands of years ago who claim to have reached the peak. To put it concretely, anyone can read the account of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first westerner to summit Mt Everest. That reading doesn't endow them with the skill, wisdom, and courage of Sir Edmund. It may be inspiring reading, but it's not the same as having actually accomplished the task.
And no, science certainly does not expect that people who have gone only partially up the mountain should be given credit for reaching the summit. Expressly the opposite, in fact. One of our best known scientists, Karl Popper, even urged caution. He wrote that scientific conclusions must be considered "forever tentative." That means that even when a scientist thinks he's at the peak, he probably isn't.
I live in mountainous country. I climb a lot of mountains. Even from 25% up, the view is dramatically more informative about the lay of the land than you get from standing on the ground. Equitably, science holds that people who go 25% up the mountain should be given credit for the knowledge they can see from there. It may be incomplete, but it's better than standing at the base of the mountain and guessing. As Bruto points out above, your philosophy is "summit or nothing." That's fundamentally unfair to people who have expended at least the effort to go partway up. People who try to climb Mt Everest but fail still get more credit than people who merely read Hillary's account. Thus it's hypocritical when that criticism comes from people who don't take a single step up the mountain and thump their fists on centuries-old travelogues. The higher one goes, the more effort is required. And that effort is rewarded with progressively greater knowledge.
It's not about egotistical credit. I could make the argument that I've spent my entire adult life climbing the mountains of knowledge and that your disrespect of that is offensive. But I'd rather make the practical argument, because it's stronger. Let's say your centuries-old, orally-transmitted account of the trip up the mountain says there's a desert north of the mountain. But when you climb 25% of the way up the mountain, you see instead a shining lake. And the higher you climb, the more you can see that the lake covers all the land to the north. What do you do then? That partial climb up the mountain is already more valuable than the handed-down writings. That the book was written by someone held to be illustrious doesn't make the fact of the lake go away. Nor does the lake disappear simply because all the people at the bottom of the mountain have constantly reinforced with each other the belief in the infallibility of the ancient writing. They have so fully embraced the mystique of the book that they don't even consider questioning it.
You're being invited to come up the mountain and see for yourself what the land around it really looks like. You don't do any good by simply laughing at the mountain-climbers and hammering your fist on the book.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You never answered a key question I asked several days ago. You urge us to wait for "absolute and final" proof. It should be obvious to you by now that in the scientific paradigm that can never occur. But you didn't respond when I asked you to reconcile your advice with the Jain doctrine that there can be no more kevalin in this cycle. The last of the kevalin died many centuries ago, and there will be no others. And only the kevalin have "absolute and final" knowledge. Since you didn't answer the question, I have to assume the truthful answer would be the one most damaging to your claim, and that would be that "A&F" is impossible for you under any paradigm. It's wholly irrational to insist on inactivity while waiting for something that can never happen.
Yes, they get credit for being the first to summit. But others get credit for trying, as your ability to remember their names makes evidence. Especially they get credit over and above someone who merely sits at the base camp and brags about how good a mountaineer he is. You say some of your "tellings" are "A&F," but you have no basis to make that claim. It's equivalent to you quoting a book you once read on mountaineering and pontificating that propositional knowledge in the face of people who actually try to climb mountains.
You want respect for having mastered a body of propositional knowledge you were told is perfect and unassailable. And consequently you think your ability to regurgitate it at will makes you perfect and unassailable. But you demand that respect from people who have empirical and observational knowledge, and who according to that knowledge can see the obvious errors in your recitation. To make matters worse, you disrespect their efforts in their house. If you want credit for the ability to recite Jain teachings, then find a Jain forum where no one will question you. If you're going to insist on eking praise from skeptics for your religious acumen, you're going to be met with attempts to hold you accountable to fact. Whining that you think that's unfair or mean just makes you look like a child.
Credit was given to Hillary and Tenzing who could IST reach to Mt. Everest peak not to those who could even reached to 95%. It suggest, real value/credit is of A&F not before it.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You didn't address any of the points he raised. You just restated your position unchanged. In western-style debate, this is considered disrespectful.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Truth is a word, it is an abstract symbol that derives meaning only in context of communication, in short it does not exist nor is it basic.
As an exercise I shall ask you "Please point to truth for me"
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, it really is needed and it has been suggested by nearly everyone you've tried to talk to here. This isn't meant as an insult, but it will be hard for you to hear anyway: you are in no way equipped to discuss religion with skeptics. That is, you don't display the insight needed to see how non-religious people view religion -- yours or anyone else's. Thus you are ill-equipped to judge whether they are being rational. This won't hobble you if you stick to talking about Jainism with other Jains. But it is an absolutely fatal error if you insist on talking to skeptics.
The zen of skepticism is knowing how you know something, and why you believe it. You don't seem to know why you believe in Jainism. We infer from your purely dogmatic approach that you haven't seriously recalled or considered the path that led you to such a staunch belief. It simply seems to be all you've ever accepted as true, for no reason other than that it exists.
Skepticism seeks to shine a bright light on purely propositional knowledge, prejudices, beliefs engendered out of fear or suspicion, and beliefs foisted according to ulterior motives or mere tradition. You must do this for your religion if you wish to converse with skeptics about it. Sometimes, but not always, that inspection leads us to shrug off beliefs that are no longer consistent with what we observe, even if they were pleasant beliefs. Those who decide to persist rationally in their faith must rationally reconcile the faith with fact, and denying the fact doesn't count as rational.
You clearly have an emotional attachment to your religion. Attachment leads to suffering. And we can see the effects of your suffering as you lash out against critics for no worse a sin that failing to revere your religion as you do. The zen of skepticism includes not being attached to beliefs for their own sake, but instead being willing to accommodate new observations and data continually, revising beliefs as needed. It isn't required to climb the whole mountain. It's required only to keep climbing and honestly report what you see. Something you saw at 25% may have caused you to believe a thing that turned out not to be true when you got to 95%. Skepticism requires us to modify our beliefs to accommodate new information. It doesn't matter that the skeptic may have been wrong before the new information was known; it matters only that he was consistent with available knowledge at all times.
You have claimed Jainism is self-evidently true. However, one of the hallmarks of self-evident truthfulness is a scrupulous fidelity to any observations that may follow -- indeed, usually that the tenets so lauded may be directly observed as true. When your critics can point out observations that contravene your beliefs, you can no longer honestly claim Jainism is self-evidently true. It then becomes apparent that you have not been honest with yourself about how you came by that belief and why you believe it. When you embrace and cultivate an environment that discourages asking those kinds of questions, you're not into any system of knowledge but rather into a system of maintaining authority and power. Things are believed to be true "because I say so," not because they have passed any sort of test. Thus if you insist that a discussion with you must accept as a premise the truthfulness of your religion, that's a non-starter in a skeptics' forum. It will never happen. And so you'll be better off -- and much happier -- finding a forum where it will.
But since you're determined to remain here, for whatever reason, several people including myself have attempted to equip you with the understanding and skills you will need to have productive and enlightening conversations with skeptics. Your behavior toward those people has been most disrespectful. I assume you live in Southern Asia. If I were to come visit you there, would you not expect me to obey the social and cultural norms where you live, even if they differ from my own? If you are going to insist on being a guest in the house of skeptics, you would do well to at least learn what is expected of you there.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Essentially, it's Plato's cave. Kumar is telling us that we don't see things properly, and only the special people of his religion do, so we just have to take his word of what they said as truth.
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bruto
Penultimate Amazing
A point perhaps, and almost in his favor even, except that his version is that his vision is correct from within the cave, which I believe a proper Platonist would not say of anyone who has not, in fact, gotten out. Until one gets out of the cave, the only tool at one's disposal is reason, which Kumar openly denigrates. We are told only by a long chain of hand-me-down testimony that some other practitioners of his religion have been out of the cave and seen reality, but none have seen them do it. All we see is a different interpretation of the shadows in the cave based on another brand of faith. We are left with the choice of faith in our senses and faith in the incompatible senses of others we have never met.
I can now attend ONLY harmonious and contribution posts.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You did attend it. Please explain why you didn't attend to it properly.
Sorry, irrelevant ignored. I preferred to give a break to mend oddness in our mind and to get and give from/to others.
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