1000 years back no one knew that when there is night here there is day other side of the world.

Well, a few people probably knew, but not many!

Are you against marriage Mr. Soblonsky?

I am opposed to any kind of coercion. Perhaps this is a position you find difficult to comprehend. In any case, please don’t put words in my mouth. I have of course never said that “the federal government should intervene everywhere” — quite the opposite. I want the government to do nothing regarding religious belief.

Another serious contradiction on your part.

“The proposition is meaningless because it contradicts itself.”

That IS NOT TRUE. It has already been shown that contradiction does not render a proposition meaningless but MORE IMPORTANTLY I gave you an example that was syntactically a contradiction but hermeneutically so.

YOU ARE WRONG AGAIN.

Then you have the audacity to ask this question:

“What have we learned? What information do we have that we didn’t have before?”

What does your theory explain? What problem does it attempt to solve? I submit the answer is NOTHING and I’m sure can’t it so this is the last time I write about you here.

And by the way you are a TOTAL hypocrite when you say that “am opposed to any kind of coercion” because you think think the federal government should intervene EVERYWHERE. That’s COERCION dum dum.

Your theory rests on a long discredited concept from analytical philosophy.

Why do you keep repeating this? Fuck analytical philosophy. My theory rests on common sense. If you would pay attention to the common-sense part of what I’m saying, you’d have a chance of understanding it.

Just because YOU cannot understand “God is three, and one, and not three, and not one.” doesn’t make it meaningless

Did I say that it’s meaningless because I can’t understand it? Oh, I get it — this is just a gratuitous insult.

The proposition is meaningless because it contradicts itself. After we are told that God is X, and Y, and not X, and not Y, what do we know about it? What have we learned? What information do we have that we didn’t have before? Not an iota. That’s all I’m saying. It has nothing to do with positivism or analysis. It’s just plain as day.

Furthermore some of our scientific theories started as metaphysics. If you follow Democritus’s logic in his development of atomism it is expressly metaphysical and there was no technology at the time that could prove or disprove his ideas yet he was roughly correct.

To call Democritus’s atomic theory metaphysics betrays a profound misunderstanding. It was a physical theory, not metaphysical.

Was his theory meaningless until the late 18th century when its empirical consequences could be worked out and investigated?

No. The fact that until recently it could not be checked does not make it metaphysical. Untestable is not the same as incoherent. Think about this. It’s important.

And you totally glossed over my example about aliens. If people can believe in aliens from Zeta Reticuli they can believe in angels from heaven. And if they can believe in angels they can believe in gods and if they can believe in gods they can believe in God.

I have not glossed over it, I have carefully ruled it out. You ignore my arguments and repeat your own. I have shown why people cannot believe in certain things; your reply amounts to, “Of course they do!”

Ironically the less sophisticated the theology in question the less relevant your (silly) theory would be with respect to it. For it is only with the scholastic tradition that religion turns from a set of primitive beliefs about the natural world into a metaphysical system. There is nothing ‘meaningless’ in the cosmology of religious fundamentalists who believe the Bible is inerrant. It is these people I think whose politics bothers you the most. So we should I guess respect the political views of a Sarah Palin as genuine but render those of Michael Novak as meaningless. And primitive tribes that worship completely tangible objects like bears or whatever would have to be taken very seriously.

There are problems here (that the Bible is “inerrant” is incoherent, so no one can really believe it) but I broadly agree with this paragraph. We need to watch out for the tangible things that people can and do believe. Thinking “God is one, and three” cannot have the kind of effect on one’s behavior that thinking “people who don’t believe in Jesus are evil” can.

Whatever level of import political agenda plays in your ridiculous ideas I hope you recognize the disturbing shadows of totalitarianism in them. It would not be the first time the absolutism inherent in militant atheism tried to rationalize the political marginalization of religious dissenters.

My views (which you have failed to understand) are thoroughly humanistic. I am opposed to any kind of coercion, period. Your accusation is baseless, reckless and repellent. Take it back.

I’ll make a prediction about your theory: You’ll not find a single serious academic working in analytical philosophy that would agree that that part of your theory is sound.

It is logically untenable for the reasons I laid out above and yet you still resort to comparing religious statements to nonsense as when you use ‘blev’ and ‘klarn’ above. Since you don’t seem to grasp the subtleties I’ll try to use plain English.

Metaphysical propositions CANNOT be shown to be meaningless in any system that would allow us to include universal laws (and much else we would like to accept) as genuine. Just because YOU cannot understand “God is three, and one, and not three, and not one.” doesn’t make it meaningless; there could be contexts, wordplay, metaphor, and other factors that make it meaningful. Think of Vinnie Antonelli’s clearly understandable statement in My Blue Heaven when he said to Barney “I’m not sayin I’m witch you, I’m sayin I’m witch you”

Furthermore some of our scientific theories started as metaphysics. If you follow Democritus’s logic in his development of atomism it is expressly metaphysical and there was no technology at the time that could prove or disprove his ideas yet he was roughly correct.

Was his theory meaningless until the late 18th century when its empirical consequences could be worked out and investigated?

You also cannot without any arguments make an exception for the propositions about math and logic but reject the propositions of logic that undermine your theory. This is yet another contradiction that makes your theory incoherent.

And you totally glossed over my example about aliens. If people can believe in aliens from Zeta Reticuli they can believe in angels from heaven. And if they can believe in angels they can believe in gods and if they can believe in gods they can believe in God. If you’ve ever been camping with credulous people its impossible not to accept that some people really do believe in ghosts and if they can believe in ghosts why not more powerful supernatural creatures?

Ironically the less sophisticated the theology in question the less relevant your (silly) theory would be with respect to it. For it is only with the scholastic tradition that religion turns from a set of primitive beliefs about the natural world into a metaphysical system. There is nothing ‘meaningless’ in the cosmology of religious fundamentalists who believe the Bible is inerrant. It is these people I think whose politics bothers you the most. So we should I guess respect the political views of a Sarah Palin as genuine but render those of Michael Novak as
meaningless. And primitive tribes that worship completely tangible objects like bears or whatever would have to be taken very seriously.

Whatever level of import political agenda plays in your ridiculous ideas I hope you recognize the disturbing shadows of totalitarianism in them. It would not be the first time the absolutism inherent in militant atheism tried to rationalize the political marginalization of religious dissenters.

This is the doctrine upon which all theories of the type you are using are built. For a proposition to be meaningful these three conditions must hold.

Sorry, none of that applies. As I have said, my comments are based on commonsense observation, not anyone else’s theories.

Wittgenstein said EXACTLY what I suggested above that you challenged: Prop 6.2- … The propositions of mathematics are equations and therefore pseudo-propositions.

You’re right, he did. Thanks for pointing this out. It helps clarify the concept for me. Yes, mathematical equations are pseudo-propositions, in the sense that they are empirically ungrounded; they are not about anything real. Theology is the same way.

So I guess we cannot believe them can we?

I’m thinking that mathematics is a special case where we do kind of believe things like, for example, “e to the i pi equals minus one” — even though they are pseudo-propositions. The reason for this, I reckon, is that although the propositions are not about anything real, they are embedded in a social practice that has rules that anyone who wished to can follow. If I see that you can divide both sides of an equation and still (under certain well-defined conditions) have an equation, then I can do it myself. So the manipulation of these special signs becomes its own reality — kind of like in theology. But the theologian insists that his ruminations refer to something real. The mathematician does not.

lets look at how Popper buried Wittgenstein.

I am not interested in this because my argument does not depend on Wittgenstein.

IT HAS BEEN PROVEN that no consistent theory of meaning can be based on the notion of pseudo-propositions since its been SHOWN that ALL such systems require that ANY and ALL propositions are DECIDABLE and that is known NOT TO BE TRUE.

Whatever — I am not trying to make a theory of meaning based on the notion of pseudo-propositions. That is the farthest thing from my mind.

Above you offered no FALSIFIABLE predictions of your theory and instead offered only INVAlID verifications. They are invalid since a religious person may still believe the proscriptions they flout just as the overweight dieter may genuinely believe skipping dessert is better and healthier but she caves into cravings anyway and feels bad about it and does more sit ups the next day.

No, that doesn’t address my claim. The dieter believes that dieting will make her thin. She does not believe, for example, that ‘blev’ will make her ‘klarn’, where blev and klarn are both terms that no have no conceivable referent in nature. She can be wrong or right about the dieting. She can’t be wrong or right about blev and klarn.

there do exist religious cults which are clearly devout but whose beliefs are not properly metaphysical. And here I am thinking of cults that worship aliens.

I have never claimed that my theory covers all possible behaviors. There is no “black swan” that would disprove the whole theory. It’s not that kind of theory, and I have never claimed that it was. I merely claim that most of the “beliefs” called “religious” by their promoters are incoherent (in the way I keep describing and you keep sidestepping) and therefore, given the ordinary meaning of the word ‘belief’, cannot be believed.

Well, I can go a bit further out on that particular limb. Beliefs that are concrete enough don’t sound like religion! Take “Santa will bring me presents”, for example. We don’t regard that as a religious statement. Why? It’s too clear! It can be falsified! The ones that really sound religious are the ones that don’t even begin to make sense, like “God is three, and one, and not three, and not one.”

You said to me above that ‘I am more familiar with my inner thought-processes than you are’; you are correct and I think most people are more familiar with their own inner thought processes than you are and the next time someone tells you they believe in this or that religious nonsense you should probably believe them

The two cases are different. You have accused me (repeatedly) of starting from a political agenda rather than from the facts of the matter. I know that this is not so. (And there is no evidence for it, so I guess you’re just trying to be hurtful.)

The case of “religious belief” is more intricate. Here have day-to-day observations and semantic considerations that both imply that what people are saying cannot be exactly what they mean. The question then becomes: What is the nature of the difference, and what causes people to do this?

I Don’t have time to properly attribute everyone but I rely VERY heavily on Popper along with Tarski, Godel, and Zermelo.

This is the doctrine upon which all theories of the type you are using are built. For a proposition to be meaningful these three conditions must hold.

(a)All words which occur in it have meaning.

(b)All words which occur in it fit together properly.

(c)It is a truth function of, or reducible to elementary propositions expressing observations or perceptions.

This is true of Wittgenstein, early Carnap, Schlick etc. and all those who rely of pseudo-propositional concepts of positivism. It is also implicit in (a) (from (c)) that all names that occur in a proposition must be empirically definable.

But this system cannot work for (c) would declare all universal statements like general scientific laws meaningless. Likewise the lack of genuine universal names renders (a) invalid with respect to science and (b) has been shown to be invalid in the work of Zermelo and others who proved we can ALWAYS construct a language were the formula in question is both well-formed and in some cases even a true statement.

Thus from (b) alone you are left not only with the vexing problem of proving that the believer’s proposition is meaningless in ALL consistent languages but also with proving no meaningful sentence exists in any consistent language that the believer would not recognize as an alternative formulation of what he confesses to believe. These proofs apply to “ordinary language” just as well as they do to mathematics so you cannot dodge this as you tried to above.

But it gets worse, lets take a look at the inconsistencies and indeed incoherence that arises in the system that popularized the notion of pseudo-propositions; Tractarian Wittgenstein. And by the way Wittgenstein said EXACTLY what I suggested above that you challenged:

prop 6.2- …The propositions of mathematics are equations and therefore pseudo-propositions.-So I guess we cannot believe them can we?

But I digress lets look at how Popper buried Wittgenstein.

0. In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein claims “…the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive”

1. We are then told this about science: prop 4.11- The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).

2. We are told in prop 4.112- …Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. But this can’t be a statement that belongs to the “whole of natural science” and hence it CANNOT be true.

3. But it can’t be false either since then its negation would have to be true and belong to the whole of natural sciences, and this of course would be an absurd contradiction.

4. Thus it must be a meaningless, senseless, or nonsensical statement and the same holds for MOST of Wittgenstein’s propositions.

5. Thus Wittgenstein’s whole philosophy is nonsensical and he ADMITS it.

6. But of course given the preface it follows we can in fact communicate DEFINITE TRUTHS by propounding nonsense as long as it is DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT NONSENSE.

This is the kind of absurd stupidity that arises when you substitute verbal puzzles as solutions to genuine philosophical problems. By your criterion of belief Wittgenstein of course could not believe any of it anyway. Popper takes his analysis much further, I heavily paraphrased and would refer you to The Open Society and Its Enemies vol II footnote 51 to Chapter 11.

But we can’t stop there lets say you weaken the already inconsistent conditions on meaningful propositions above by removing condition (c) and allowing genuine universals as names in condition (a). Then you can have MEANINGFUL scientific statements but you can now of course apply logical predicates to concepts like God since they can be both universal and need not be empirically definable.

Predicates like ‘the thing x occupies position y’ or Pos(x,y), and ‘the thing x can put object y into position z’ or Put(x,y,z) and so on and define the thing ‘x’ as God whenever ‘y’ and ‘z’ are everything or everywhere or whatever universal you want. You can even add predicates that make God the thing that always and only speaks the TRUTH.

And I reiterate IT HAS BEEN PROVEN that no consistent theory of meaning can be based on the notion of pseudo-propositions since its been SHOWN that ALL such systems require that ANY and ALL propositions are DECIDABLE and that is known NOT TO BE TRUE.

And your thesis suffers from further problems. Above you offered no FALSIFIABLE predictions of your theory and instead offered only INVAlID verifications. They are invalid since a religious person may still believe the proscriptions they flout just as the overweight dieter may genuinely believe skipping dessert is better and healthier but she caves into cravings anyway and feels bad about it and does more sit ups the next day.

You have ironically decided to hold the position that your thesis is philosophical hence by the criteria within which you have formulated it would make it meaningless and hence something that you yourself cannot possibly believe!!!-I of course accept that your theory is both meaningful and that you believe it. Sadly you cannot do the same.

But I think you are in an even worse position than that, for there do exist religious cults which are clearly devout but whose beliefs are not properly metaphysical. And here I am thinking of cults that worship aliens. Now I don’t believe we have evidence of ETs but they are at least possible and certainly meaningful and its conceivable they have vast wisdom and power worthy of admiration and awe. The Heaven’s Gate cult obviously didn’t flout perhaps the strongest commandment of all, and to claim they didn’t believe their faith is not only groundless but offensive.

You said to me above that “I am more familiar with my inner thought-processes than you are”; you are correct and I think most people are more familiar with their own inner thought processes than you are and the next time someone tells you they believe in this or that religious nonsense you should probably believe them considering you obviously believe in deeply inconsistent political nonsense.

You accept that beliefs exist.

Yes. People do believe certain propositions.

‘God doesn’t want you to eat pork’ is of an identical logical form to ‘Dad doesn’t want you to eat pork’

The form is the same, but in the former case nothing whatsoever is known about the subject of the sentence. In most cases we know what ‘Dad’ means. But we do not ever know what ‘God’ means, and therefore we don’t know what ‘God doesn’t want you to eat pork’ means.

There is nothing incoherent about belief in God or Santa Clause for that matter, therefore there is no logical difference between the two propositions or beliefs that are so derived from them.

Here you are just repeating an assertion which I have already disproved.

But even if you are correct that God is an incoherent concept (you’re not), according to Wittgenstein the propositions of mathematics are pseudo-propositions, does it follow that one cannot believe them?

I don’t think Wittgenstein says exactly that. But we are dealing with ordinary language, not mathematics. Just as you cannot lift a thing that is not a material object, you cannot believe a thing that is not a proposition. We believe (or disbelieve) propositions. That’s how that word is used. “God doesn’t want you to eat meat” is not a proposition (it only looks like one!), so it can’t be believed.

What you have done is start with a political agenda (The policies of Christian conservatives = Bad) and then generated a ridiculous theory based on a poor understanding of a long discredited philosopher (Wittgenstein) and junk science (memetics) to convince yourself that their positions should be ignored because alas they don’t really have them.

I am more familiar with my inner thought-processes than you are, and I happen to know that your description is false.

Its more parsimonious to simply believe the Jew when he says he doesn’t eat pork because of his religion because he probably does the same when his neighbors are not around. And you are also left with the question ‘Well why do his neighbors not want him to eat pork’ so your explanation is anything but parsimonious.

My explanation is perfectly simple. You are grasping at straws here.

I agree with you that belief is MORE than a disposition to act but we can observe and explain and predict better if we posit people actually believe these things. Saying ‘They simply have different practices’ is not an explanation its a description, religious beliefs explain WHY they have different practices.

Again you are merely repeating an assertion which I have already disproved.

Imagine a room filled with unidentified devout conservative Christians and devout conservative Muslims and then someone comes in and burns an effigy of Muhammad. The Muslims would react very differently than Christians and their ‘reaction’ could not be called a ‘practice.’ There would likely be physically measurable effects like heart rate and adrenal response that would make it easy to identify which was which. They are reacting differently because they are assigning different significance to the exact same event. And if that different significance is not based on their different beliefs what is it based on?

Politics. Slogans. Parochialism. Lies. Coercion. Such are the causes of so-called religious behavior.

What evidence would falsify your claim that religious beliefs do not exist?

Dude, I have written a whole book on this topic, and you have not read it. But I will address the question.

Admittedly, the philosophical observation that most religious tenets are pseudo-propositions is, you know, philosophical and does not admit of counter-examples. But, as I have mentioned, we see evidence every day that people do not believe what they say they believe. They routinely violate every single one of the Ten Commandments that they supposedly venerate. They masturbate, fornicate, swear, abort and divorce at least as much as people do, who don’t have supposedly profound and unalterable beliefs that you shouldn’t do those things. So, what do they actually mean when they say that they have those beliefs? Here is a simple theory: they mean that they belong to a special club, where one of the house rules is that you have to say certain things as if you believe them. If this is true, then their “religion” consists of lip service, not belief.