What is your philosophy's kryptonite?

Piggybacking on an earlier thread I posted, regarding what you like in the works of other religions/philosophies, I thought I'd start another "olive branch" thread.

What, in your opinion, is the weakest point/strongest argument against your philosophy or religion? You can be as specific or general as you wish. If you are a Christian, you could mention a challenge you see to Christianity or to theism in general or even to just a general belief in the supernatural. If you are one of the "New Atheists", you might mention a challenge you see to atheism* in general or naturalism/materialism/physicalism specifically. How do you address this challenge?

Personally, I think the greatest challenge to my naturalist beliefs is the hard problem of consciousness. Even I have to admit that dualism is inherently tempting. I address this challenge by looking at things like the split brain experiments, which IMO unequivocally show that consciousness comes from the brain. When the brain is split, consciousness splits. We still can't explain exactly how the brain produces consciousness, but I think we can show that it does. Still, I don't really hold much against dualists and I can still see why the hard problem of consciousness tempts people toward dualist/supernaturalist answers.


*I don't really care to get into definition debates in this thread. They are incredibly boring and go nowhere. There is no such thing as the definition of atheism. There is more than one definition of atheism. Use whatever one you want and expect other people to use whatever definition they want.

 

The involvement of humans who are emotional, egotistical and generally imperfect is every religion/philosophy's kryptonite.

 

My atheism is based on not having evidence of a god. I do not view it as a religion against God. My disdain for many theist is their irrational/unfounded belief of the absurd. As a Christian, I believed atheist were devil worshippers. I now know that is absurd.

 

It would be nice to be able to point to a country and an era as "The Golden Age of Atheism", where the government was founded on enlightened secular ideals, all religions had equal standing, and the country grew so prosperous and powerful it had no rivals.

Sort of like the USA.

 

I think these are good points, but they don't really address the topic. The topic has to do with any philosophical shortcomings or serious philosophical challenges that you see within your philosophy or religious tradition, and how you go about answering this challenges.

 

I do not see any weakness in my philosophies as they are relative to me and are subjective outside myself... which I guess can be considered a weakness. The strength of my philosophy is that my views are not based upon popular opinion, group think, or a desire to win the approval of others.

 

As an agnostic/atheist pragmatist?

A lack of solid grounding maybe. Something appearing to work can lead a pragmatist down lots of false paths if the appearance is a distortion.

 

As a Christian, what bothers me most is that while I have no trouble saying that I believe in one holy, universal and apostolic church, it's a bit disappointing to recognize the fragmentation of that church. The updated World Christian Encyclopedia (Barrett, Kurian, Johnson; Oxford Univ Press, 2nd edition, 2001) estimated at least 33,000 denominations in existence (“denomination” being defined as “an organised christian group within a country”). The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimated 34,000 denominations in 2000, rising to an estimated 43,000 in 2012.

I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons for things like the Great Schism or Luther's protest, but the fragmentation of the Church, and the "club" mentality held by many of the people within these organizations, seems at some level to run counter to the teachings of Christ.

 

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Is there a philosophy of love or is that the domain of religion?

 

I am sure there is, like altruism. Many a philosopher has written on the topic of love.

 

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Poets I can believe.....

 

I wouldn't consider that the domain of religion solely. As far as thorough "philosophy of love," the closest I can think of would be the ethics of Joseph Fletcher. He started as a Christian, but I think he became a secular humanist.

 

IMO there could be a conflict between the behavioral teachings of Jesus and and the human actions necessary to keep aligned with healty genetics under Darwinian selection. Over generations, IMO this could possibly lead to genetic decline in populations that fully followed them.

 

The main challenge agnostics and atheists have is uniformity and continuity. By this I mean the alternative to organized religion's lock on people's minds via a doctrine, a book, Sunday meetings, sermons and repeated messaging throughout the years generation by generation. When you have such a system, it is hard to compete without creating a competing system. Agnostics and atheists do not have a set of rules or stories or parables or commandments or anything close to a religion. In that it becomes very hard to organize and teach something common across all agnostics and atheists. So the main problem is that we skeptics have not yet created our version of a Bible. Until we do, we will form small groups or discuss things online or in book clubs and philosophy classes but not as an organized body.

 

I tend to be critical of things, so the drawback of this is I often end up not getting anything done at all. My opinions can lead to maintaining the status quo (even if they themselves don't advocate it).

 

I hate being philosophical, which I guess might be a real problem if I had a philosophy.

 

Since the sixties pop culture experience has replaced biblical stories as a point of common reference. The bible is almost phased out of public conversation.

Most pop culture references phase out after a generation or two, but the underlying story structure and lessons they teach are essential for storytelling. They repeat in different forms IOW. So, people who have never read Homer might still find his stories strangely familiar.

Stories that have powerful beings in control of the fate of humans can also be written as fickle random chance exposing human frailty and inadequacy. The lessons derived from either one are essentially identical.

What may be missing in pop culture is the awareness of connection to the past.

 

People almost always instinctually flinch away from the real shortcomings of their religion and philosophy, in favor of 'safe', easily beaten strawmen. I will, however, give it a go; the main failing of my religion (my unique brand of eclectic paganism, in specific) is that I have only anecdotal evidence for it, even if it does wrap up metaphysics in a neat little bow, and that it likely doesn't narrow the hypothesis space enough; it can be used to explain too many possible outcomes in many cases. Those are the two main failings of Christianity as well (in greater portions), though they add in Self-Contradiction and Circular Reasoning (God is merciful/God is vengeful/God is good/It is not good to kill babies/God killed all of the Egyptians first born babies on Passover/The bible is true because Jesus says so/Jesus says so in the bible, etc.), which I thankfully avoid.

 

How does the split brain experiment prove that the brain produces consciousness instead of being a transceiver of consciousness? Also, we already have evidence that consciousness extends outside of the brain, which if it produced it, it would be confined to the physical brain.

I think consciousness is fundamental, instead of matter. I see no weak points in this. I think that what preceded the Big Bang, which was the creation or manifestation of time, space, matter, was Consciousness. Not what we sense as ego consciousness, but the medium upon which ego consciousness manifests itself. Ego consciousness is just memory of the past, of what the physical organism has experienced through the senses.

So I think the brain receives basic, non ego consciousness. It does not create it, and it can extend outside of the physical transceiver. If damage is done to the transceiver, it affects ego consciousness, and if the damage is great, it can affect the reception of the big C consciousness.

So, instead of the universe being strictly, time, space, matter, it is time, space, matter, Consciousness. The universe manifested from Consciousness, and it is expanding into Consciousness. Alpha, Omega. I like this view, because it adds purpose to reality. And how we got here is not simply randomness and chance without a purpose. Which means there is some Intelligence involved, in the evolution of life and in the ongoing evolution of the universe. I find Tom Campbell, the physicist, views quite acceptable. That the universe is a kind of virtual reality, created by something like a computer which exists outside of space, time, matter, but which matter is imbued with a bit of it, a taste, a fragrance. With sentient beings capable of receiving it.

I see nothing to date that would make such a view null and void.

 

I heard a Ted talk about how religion is fine tuned to teach the same things over and over again, generation by generation. It was a very interesting talk because the speaker mentioned my point as the central weakness of agnosticism or atheism as a movement. I still remember that every single Sunday mass had a name in the Catholic Church. Every Sunday was about something linked to that name that was in the Bible. It was repeated year after year as it has been done for over a thousand years. It is quite effective.

 

Existentialism.

There are other theories that I do use from time to time: but, the primary core is existentialism.

 

Interesting question. I think some of Feyerabend's criticisms of the notion of the scientific method are sound (I've been reading his stuff lately; I think I'm on a bit of a German-speaking-country kick), which could prove a problem for people like myself who try to have "scientific" beliefs when it comes to ontology, theology, political philosophy or whatever else.

 

I don't consider it my philosophy so much as a position on god belief, but if you really want the biggest challenge for atheism, it would be evidence of the existence of God or gods. That would obliterate it for me at least.

 

Christianity....and Judaism...... that is unaware of the powerful case that can be presented for eventual universal salvation.......
can seem cold........ selfish......... lacking in compassion.........
proud......... fearful of all others who differ somewhat........ paranoid...... lacking in real empathy for other view points.....


http://www.politicalforum.com/relig...eventually-led-back-heaven-paradise-love.html
Universal Salvation, is everybody eventually led back to heaven/paradise/love?
Mr. Christian Andreason, when attempting to put his astonishing near death experience into terms that all of us can relate to presented a powerful case...that yes....we will eventually all be "saved" and brought back into a state of mind of light and love!

For the time being it seems that differences in opinion over various doctrines is one of the greatest tests that we religious people face?!

Christian Andreason, Chapter 3:
"Who goes to Heaven?

http://www.allaboutchristian.com/spirituality/index.html

 

I'm going to take that back now. I just finished Against Method because I finally had some free time today (when I wrote that post I was like two chapters in) and have decided the whole thing was codswallop. The initial attractiveness of his criticisms is betrayed by how confused his reasoning and a priori conceptualisation of science are. Kind of like how I felt about Wittgenstein and language (ordinary or otherwise) except, I would say, with less clarity, structure and overall merit.