Does that mean gaining a connection and understanding with the corresponding god of that religion rather then just go to church and pray?

Can you use or quote the actual anti-social language for those not familiar? I don't think calling people sheep implies no respect in every regard, do they explicitly say to not treat them respectfully? I think it's okay to lack a little respect for those who are quick to fall-in-line, but still treat those people respectfully.

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Woah, just noticed this as I’m not getting any notifications from Reddit. I agree that it’s still unclear. Originally, (1) was just: people have the right to life, but later I was trying to change it to a conditional and yeah got into some trouble. I’ll give a better response with full clarifications in a couple of weeks time for my next blogpost. Thanks!

> You say this as if people don't lie to each other all the time.

You say this as though Special K didn't assume the burden of explaining why his faith stuff was special. But he did. By pointing out that self-deception can play the same role in his secret sauce as it does in the stuff he's declaring inferior, a relevant challenge is made.

>Faith in your subjective experience has been this way.

And so then Special K is faced with explaining why the subjective experience of someone who's concluded that faith isn't special, and is actually rather stupid and toxic, is somehow wrong and invalid.

He doesn't do that, though. Instead, he runs away from the argument and retreats to the safety of the choir he wants to preach to.

Well, yeah, he's definitely using his modern context; it's a work of modern philosophy, in response to other modern philosophy (like Hegel). Again, it's not a work of biblical exegesis. It's certainly worth turning to some secondary literature to understand what he's doing there rather than getting hung up by treating it like a bad piece of Old Testament scholarship. You can pretty much bracket any scholarship on the sacrifice of Isaac because it's just beside the point.

Thank you Wayne

That is not what faith is, that's you massively twisting concepts through metaphor to appear profound.

He's so prolific and genius he wrote sermons and essays under multiple pseudonyms. I love Dostoevsky so much, but Kierkegaard is the True Existentialist. Lol.

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He uses his modern context to draw his conclusions. It’s misplaced. I can’t get past it to find a greater meaningful understanding of ethics. Shame on me.

In its canonical form, the testing of Abraham is just that, a testing of Abraham. The narrative tension is built on Isaac being the child of the promise who is now being demanded to be offered back to God. To say that it's simply to make the point that child sacrifice is no longer necessary is a very shallow reading that might make sense divorced from canonical context but makes no sense when read canonically as Scripture.

Kierkegaard does read the story incorrectly, but his error is in treating the narrative tension as an ethical one--Abraham being asked to do that which violates the ethical, the killing of Isaac--rather than one that calls into question the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham. Abraham wasn't wrestling with the ethics of sacrificing his son, but he would have wrestled with the fact that the same God who had miraculously given him this child through whom he was to become the father of nations was now asking for that child back.

That said, focusing on whether Kierkegaard gets the biblical narrative correct is to completely miss the whole point of what he's doing, and his philosophical reflection on the story demands analysis on its own merits. the purpose isn't biblical exegesis.

Kierkegaard acknowledges this. He states that faith is simultaneously absurd but also absolutely necessary, kind of a “damned if you, damned if you don’t” situation. It doesn’t make sense to rely on faith but you need to do so, and somehow having faith is the greatest aim one can have even while it seems so irrational and even scary at times. He says the best path is to submit to faith, and embrace its absurdity as part of life. It’s really worth reading his works on this. Very poignant and interesting perspective from a very pained man even if you don’t agree, that’s helped me a lot at several points in my own life.

Yeah, Augustine's most famous treatment of sin is literally a confession of his own captivity to sin. Not clear how Kierkegaard was original in that regard.

Thank you, you've increased my hope metric.

Agree...this, and many other things. It is a complete shitshow. But, I think there's hope... This shitshow has so many holes in it, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep the story straight, and a lot of young people seem to find the whole thing hilarious. Maybe some day a big meme war will break out!

How is this different from many earlier theologians and philosophers? You’re also already doing philosophy/theology by arguing one is already in sin and therefore can’t analyze it well, and then referencing Kierkegaard’s analysis to do so.

Moreover, the standard isn't whether there is "sufficient evidence" for a belief but whether we can validly conclude a belief, which in philosophy, for inductive knowledge, we cannot. Yet we can be reasonably certain, where exercising skepticism would be unreasonable.

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>if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified, period. This isn't interesting or controversial.

Yet this goes at the problem of induction and skepticism in general, which argues that we should be mindful of our lack of certainty outside of a priori knowledge. It's also the view of many philosophers that we can never know things as their appearance, but who nevertheless fall back on only practicality as their reason for acting like everyone else.

The article argues that this level of skepticism is unreasonable and shouldn't even be kept in mind.

Although the main purpose of the piece is to show that the problem of other minds isn't a morality loophole, that we have certain duties to people in the future (rather than hypothetical people), and as an aside, a justification for athiesm.

It's often attributed to Kierkegaard but he never said it.

Meh... existentialism is over rated. Especially theologic existentialism. They are hyperfixated on some external sources for their myriad hypothesis of understanding and wisdom. Eastern philosophy is far superior in understanding the nature of "self".

> but Kierkegaard is delusional if he doesn't acknowledge faith is the most speculative reason there is.

The term "leap of faith" is usually attributed to him, and he wrote extensively on the topic.

Many years ago was a typical materialist, science and debate bro (half of Reddit lol) who went down the regular path of existential anguish that is pretty normalized in todays youth, failing to deal with the problem of the absurd. Various philosophers grapple with this (Sartre, Camus, nietzsche). I found them to be pretty lackluster and I always much favored epistemology as the real meat-and-bones of philosophy.

I was so opposed to dogmatic thought I was enforcing my own kind of dogma of scientism and materialism that I wasn’t self-aware enough to realize. After my epistemology graduated to a slightly less amateur understanding I started to really appreciate other philosophers such as kierkegaard or William James as truly quite genius. James proposed an epistemology compatible with religion, kierkegaard was the only philosopher so far that made sense of the absurd and I found his subjective method of communication to be extremely captivating.

Tuning in to, and not dismissing my subjective experiences, along with plenty of advice from kierkegaard lead to me developing a relationship with god.

I eventually took that one step further and dismissed the Bible being the necessary word of god as being another speculative notion which kierkegaard also discussed. Kierkegaard always took Christianity as a given, but I never did, so Christianity was less permanent to me. Ultimately I just try to have a lasting relationship with god, and generally consider the dominant features spanning religion without particular attention to detail, I think kierkegaard would condone if not approve.

Anyways, TLDR: the pragmatic dialectic weakened me from arrogant debate bro, kierkegaard (properly) introduced me to Christianity and religion, eventually just became religious over speicifically Christian.

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