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28 votes
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Eastern philosophy says there's no "self". Science agrees
23 votes -
What is your favorite apologetic for theism?
Share your favorite argument for the existence of God below. Background: I'm an atheist (and have been for a decade) who's been interested in Christian Apologetics since I was a young Christian....
Share your favorite argument for the existence of God below.
Background: I'm an atheist (and have been for a decade) who's been interested in Christian Apologetics since I was a young Christian. As I entered adulthood, I found myself losing my faith, largely because I grew up in a fundamentalist, Young Earth Creationist household which taught that evolution and God are incompatible. While I no longer believe in this lack of compatibility, my belief in God never came back. I've tried to give it an honest effort, and there are many compelling reasons why I want Christianity to be true:
- Reunification with loved ones who've passed
- Absolute moral justice exists
- A plan for my life, and meaning in my suffering
- Access to unconditional love; to have a personal relationship with my creator
- Surviving my own death
For a variety of reasons seemingly outside my direct control, I still don't believe. It doesn't help that I've been introduced to strong arguments against the existence of God (e.g. the problem of evil and its subsets) which have rebuttals of varying quality from Christian philosophers. I don't think this lack of belief is my fault, or for lack of trying; I can't make myself believe anything. I try to be open to arguments, and this has led to an obsession with revisiting apologetics.
Now I think of apologetics as at least a fun mental exercise; combing through the arguments, atheist rebuttals, and responses to those rebuttals. That's probably strange, but it tickles the right parts of the brain to keep me engaged.
27 votes -
What is Metamodernism? The era that follows postmodernity
11 votes -
Peter Singer - Ordinary people are evil
8 votes -
Am I having a discussion with an AI? If not am I an idiot? A mean person?
4 votes -
We're all Wittgensteinians now
6 votes -
Seeing more whole
1 vote -
The rich have their own ethics: Effective altruism and the crypto crash
11 votes -
Transhumanism: "The world's most dangerous idea"
7 votes -
Thomas Carlyle - "Sign of the Times" (1829)
4 votes -
If you speak another language other than English, what are some interesting differences with English in its vocabulary?
I love languages, and one of the great things about learning other languages - or even just learning about them - is how it expands your mental horizons. One of the first things you notice is that...
I love languages, and one of the great things about learning other languages - or even just learning about them - is how it expands your mental horizons. One of the first things you notice is that many words don't correspond 1:1 with each other in distinct languages. Sometimes, what you think of as one concept gets partitioned out into one, two, three, four distinct word forms in another language. Other times it's the opposite, and distinctions are lost. What are some interesting vocabulary/lexicon differences between English and another language you're familiar with? I'll give some examples:
- Russian motion verbs are a lot more complex than English ones. There are two distinct words for "to walk", idti and xodit'. The former is used for walking in one direction, the latter for walking in multiple or unspecified directions. The former is also used for single actions while the latter is for habitual action. Russian makes this distinction in every common verb for motion. It also makes a distinction between going by foot and going by a means of transportation, like a car, a bicycle, or a train. In English, you could say "I walked to the store" to specify you went by foot, but you could also say "I went to the store" and the mode of transportation is unspecified. In Russian, there is no single verb "go" that doesn't imply either by foot or not by foot. You have to use either idti/xodit' "go by foot" or exat'/ezdit' "go by some means of transportation". (As I understand it, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, just studied it a bit.)
- Terms of kinship are a big topic. Wikipedia lists six distinct basic forms of kinship terminology, and that's just scratching the surface. Some languages distinguish between the maternal and paternal side of the family, others do not. Some do not distinguish cousins and siblings. Some make distinctions between elder and younger family members with distinct words. Unfortunately, I don't speak any languages that are markedly different from English. But even in my native Norwegian, which is closely related to English, there are some differences, such as:
- First cousin is a distinct stem (søskenbarn, lit. sibling-child, i.e. the child of your parent's sibling) from second cousins (tremenning). There are also distinct words for cousin (no gender specified) and female (kusine) and male (fetter) cousins.
- Maternal and paternal grandparents are distinguished.
- I struggled to understand what the hell a "cousin once removed" was until I realized it's a kind of family relation that has no name in Norwegian.
- Or it could just be a single word. For instance, English has one word, "suspicious", meaning both an attitude towards another person's behavior (suspicious of) and that behavior itself (behaving in a suspicious manner). In Norwegian, those are two distinct words: mistenksom (suspicious of) and mistenkelig (behaving suspiciously).
I've only studied a couple of languages seriously. But I also have an interested in constructed languages as a hobby, so I've dabbled in a lot of languages, looking to pilfer ideas for my own projects. I really think it's expanded my view of the world, by showing that categories that seem obvious, really aren't. That's a lesson I've tried to transfer to other areas of life.
I also think it leads into philosophy, because it's really a question of how to divide up semantic space. If we imagine the theoretical space of all things that could ever be spoken about, how do we divide up that space into distinct words? Which categories do we choose to represent as meaningful, and which ones are relegated to being a sub-aspect of another category, only distinguishable by context? I imagine that in a culture with large family units, it makes more sense not to distinguish "brother" from "male cousin", than a culture in which nuclear families are the norm, for instance.
Do you have any cool examples of how vocabulary works differently in other languages, whether it be a single word or a large class of words? Or examples of times when encountering a different way of describing the world by learning another language led to insights in other areas of life?
25 votes -
Counterarguments to the basic AI risk case
5 votes -
Can effective altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
7 votes -
Defective altruism - the repugnant philosophy of “Effective Altruism” offers nothing to movements for global justice
18 votes -
Capitalism as Religion (1921)
5 votes -
Saul Kripke, philosopher who found truths in semantics, dies at 81
5 votes -
The end of history (of philosophy)
1 vote -
Speaking fiction to power
4 votes -
Transparency is surveillance
4 votes -
The reluctant prophet of effective altruism: William MacAskill's movement set out to help global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway AI. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?
11 votes -
Analytic vs. continental philosophy
5 votes -
Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a computer?
9 votes -
The Harry Potter fallacy
6 votes -
The philosophical guide to software piracy
14 votes -
The Contradictory Christ
4 votes -
Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility
4 votes -
A number is not an explanation
6 votes -
Absurd Trolley Problems
27 votes -
🤔 Emojivism 😀
4 votes -
The philosophical reason you shouldn’t call people liars
4 votes -
Chasing the treasure fox
2 votes -
The problem of nationalism
5 votes -
What do revolutionary new Sudoku techniques teach us about real-world problem solving?
7 votes -
Representation and uncertainty
4 votes -
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A history, a philosophy, a warning
9 votes -
How do ancient stories of talking elephants and singing birds encourage a life of truth, nonviolence and compassion?
3 votes -
Mind uploading
9 votes -
Is immortality desirable?
4 votes -
Analytic feminism
3 votes -
Who am I?
3 votes -
Is it wrong to believe without sufficient evidence? W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”
7 votes -
How to criticize with kindness
6 votes -
No meaning without justification
6 votes -
The illogic of logical positivism
4 votes -
The hubris of big data
4 votes -
Twitter, the intimacy machine
7 votes -
Violence and protest
6 votes -
Machine learning for moral judgments
3 votes -
Against the Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Buddhists
6 votes