Form: Question

Bill Joslin, can you please help me with the questions in “>>>” below???

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By Bill Joslin

Curt’s counter signalling Abrahamic faith serves one purpose – to demonstrate via the reactions of the faithful, their desire to maintain a political monopoly via religion while also forcing the distinction of political religion from natural religion.

Further to that:

Truth or “knowing” in a religious or mystical sense has a specific definition: an experience which has the following qualities.

1) intensity – a strongly moving experience which results in altered behavior

2) centrality in which the person undergoing the experience obtains a central position (not a spectator)

3) directness in that the experience was not intermediary and was intended towards them personally – a direct relationship between the person and God .

Okay – that’s fine. But only if this remains in the domain of personal knowing.

Crossing this into the political or public domain becomes an issue. That’s to say, claiming political clout based on religious experience becomes problematic. It becomes problematic because by the above definition a means to distinguish charlatan from prophet remains impossible (it’s undecidable)

So the issue most have with Curt’s stand on religion pertains to:

1) conflating definitions of knowledge then attacking one form based on the criteria of the other (equivocation).

>> I don’t use knowledge but I can see how you might think so. I use experience open to testimony in operational language.

2) presuming how truth relates to interpersonal transactions where costs and damages are possible must be reified into some universal (big “T’) truth. In other words taking the political and legal function of truth out of context into universal presumptions

>> I think I only make the claim about the commons and commercial, financial, economic, legal, political, and pedagogical (academic) speech upon which others depend for truthful content.

>> I think many dogmas can be restated in language that satisfies the criteria of truthful speech.

3) confuse constraints upon establishing monopolies writ large as justifications for religious persecution

>>> I don’t understand this one?????

This last one is interesting because it reveals the underlying presumption and intention of political religions – the desire for and feeling of entitlement to a monopoly on: political power, truth, reality, faith, belief.

Oddly, it’s not the propertarians who can’t live productively with Abrahamic faiths (political religions) but rather the other way around (monopolies are a bitch)