The Agnostic’s Exit Strategy (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 19:50 (5993 days ago) @ Cary Cook

Cary: "If you want to talk about objective reality, I'm extremely competent at it. If you want to talk about what terms are to you, I'm not interested. What's it gonna be?" - Not for the first time, I find your line of thought difficult to follow. In any discussion, our only tool is language, and since that tool is defective, we frequently have to define what we ... as subjective users ... actually mean by the terms we're using. I admire your enterprise and ingenuity in trying to compile a "concept clarifier", and I've found it useful, but your definitions (e.g. of belief) only tell me what these concepts mean to you, and your terms are every bit as subjective as mine.
 
You've kindly invited me to offer my own definition of belief, but this is what I did under the ironically titled thread BELIEF is not complicated. We discussed it then, particularly in postings from 1 June to 3 June, at which point I suggested we close the thread. If you really want to reopen it, I'm game, but if your precondition is for me to accept that your definitions are "clear and philosophically stable" and mine are merely subjective and therefore of no interest, there seems to be little point. - I have another problem with this discussion, however, because although we frequently have to define what we mean, definition in itself was not the original purpose of this particular dialogue. You opened the thread with a number of potentially very productive themes: you wanted to formulate a statement of "spiritual location for agnostics", and raised issues like what makes life worthwhile, reincarnation, luck versus judgment, who is the judge, the "ass-licking" component of Christianity. I responded to these in the hope of a further exchange of ideas (with you and others), but instead we've gone off at a linguistic tangent. It's as if I told you that your house was on fire, and you criticized me for making an inaccurate statement, because it's not actually your house ... you haven't finished paying the mortgage, and therefore it belongs at least in part to the building society. So it's goodbye to the house ... or in our context, goodbye to God/no God etc. ... and hello again to definitions. Couldn't we just get back to matters of life and death?