He's basically saying "All these Christians around me are such fake fucking assholes. They go to church once a week and spend the rest of the week being hypocritical assholes who think because they are Christian they are just automatically right and proper and better than anyone who isn't. If you want to actually be Christian, take your faith and your life seriously. Just stop and think about things, and be honest with yourself." I'm not even Christian, but I mean. He's 100% correct. He would have had a lot to say about the American Christian Right of the 21st century. He's not toxic. If more Christians were like him, the world would be a better place.

>If there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief, so much so that one can act intuitively as if it is true, then demanding impossible evidence is unreasonable skepticism.

Well, sure. But this is basically just a tautology; if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified, period. This isn't interesting or controversial.

The more interesting case is a belief for which sufficient evidence (evidence to sufficiently justify/warrant belief) is impossible to obtain- for instance, arguably, the existence of other minds.

But if sufficient evidence is impossible to obtain, then it is impossible for that belief to be epistemically justified/warranted- and if sufficient counter-evidence is also absent/impossible, then it seems only suspension of judgment is justified.

If there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief, so much so that one can act intuitively as if it is true, then demanding impossible evidence is unreasonable skepticism. Only without this intuitively satisfying evidence can we reasonably warrant suspending disbelief.

That doesn't really address much. How is the will somehow outside the realm of causality? Why do you think that is the case?

It seems to me that if the evidence required to properly justify belief in a given proposition is impossible to obtain, then the only epistemically justified position wrt that proposition is suspension of judgment, not belief (or disbelief either, assuming there isn't sufficient counter-evidence against the proposition to warrant disbelief/rejection).

On the other hand, belief in the existence of other minds strikes me as a pretty good candidate for foundationalist or hinge epistemologies, so it may well be that certain propositions (such as the existence of other minds) which cannot themselves be epistemically justified are nevertheless necessary for rational/epistemic activity in general (either as foundational beliefs at the bottom or origin of a sequence of inference/justification, or as something like Witt's hinge propositions).

Was it Kierkegaard or Dick van Patten who said, "if you label me, you negate me"?

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"Something something Kierkegard." -Dennis Miller

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>"Don't be like all the rest! Be exceptional!" Like every Instagram influencer ever.

Nah, Kierkegaard isn't about that at all.

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A lot of known cognitive distortions can converge. It's well known that for most people what they think of as truth comes essentially from who they trust. When a sufficient number of friends firmly believe something, it's fairly automatic to think it must be true. We evolved in a village and that's still how our minds work.

I think social media is essentially a vast psychological experiment. I wish there was more oversight and transparency there. I have some knowledge in both computer science and psychology and the power to influence in computer algorithms is quite frankly scary. One experiment showed a huge change in opinion created by just slightly lowering rankings of search results. It's only relatively few people that understand that their search results are tailored for them and other people may get completely different results - including in youtube.

I think it was close to criminal that the Great Barrington Declaration was shadow banned (removed from search results), and so not many people know that 60,000 scientists and health care professionals signed it. They thought there was scientific consensus based on their media feeds. On the other side, it was also easy for those disagreeing with general policies to find imbalanced "conspiracy" ideas like 5g harms or that Covid doesn't exist according to their own search results. We completely lacked good faith public discussion by disagreeing experts - most people had their information silos and so "othered" disagreeing views.

It's made me more cynical about the future and that good faith dialogue is possible. I hope I'm wrong.

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Cringe

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>There ARE problems with your statement- for one it assumes an objective reality outside of ourselves

thats not a problem.

frankly onus is on you to demonstrate that universe is mind-dependent. assuming the universe exists is a perfectly fine assumption, more so then fucking solipsism anyway.

>no, knowledge is based on your own experience too unless you are claiming

Please repeat... you faded.

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>next people lie to themselves via faith routinely in the millions, just look at how 80%+ of religious believers have faith in things they themselves injected into their holy texts.

People lie - to themselves, to each other, constantly. This is not specific to those of faith, it also applies in science.

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>faith in no way excludes lying and knowledge can be based on subjective experience.

We define 'knowledge' as what one is told; in that context, if what you're told is a lie then it's no more "real" than any article of faith.

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>certainty is the enemy of growth.

We find your certainty in this conversation so far a bit surprising.

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i mean there is no meaning to 'life' other then reproduction (its on you to choose a meaning), evolution by definition has no purpose (if it doesnt stop you having kids its considered 'good' in evolution) and free will exists (the definitions used by philosophers are useless. libertarian free will is patently absurd, as is the idea that just because the universe is determined that all choices are magically not choices).

half the 'debates' here are far more moronic that half the shit the edgy atheists spew out.

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