r/rationalphilosophy

In general, the Atheist is too stupid to comprehend that it was the form of philosophy that empowered (and still empowers) the apologetic of religion. This is a problem.

I tend to despise philosophy more than religion because it’s able to pass itself off as secular, when its form is dealing with the same kind of irrelevant abstractions as religion. Its very subtle, smuggled reification is its supernaturalism.

For example, the concept of “Being.” This is a vague concept that carries no explanatory power. But it consumes men’s lives. Being is not a question we ask or need to ask if we’re trying to comprehend reality. To comprehend something we must observe it and learn the specific identities which make it what it is. Being is not found anywhere in this process.

But this hasn’t stopped philosophers from creating entire theologies of Being, as well as other vain abstractions.

I despise philosophy, because exactly like religion, it presupposes its own supremacy. But when a Reasoner looks more closely, this assumption is found to be wanting.

I despise philosophy because it’s irrational, though it claims to be the God of Reason. Philosophy assumes that anything that goes by the name of philosophy is automatically rational.

I despise philosophy because it teaches men how not to think. In place of thought they are taught all kinds of sophist techniques. Name dropping is common, narrative orthodoxy is common, philosophical platitudes are common— the arrogant and derogatory dismissal of valid objections that contradict their orthodoxy, is probably the most common, next to abstract proliferation.

I despise philosophy, because when one deals with a philosopher one is dealing with a manipulator, usually a person trying to prey on ignorance. One is dealing with an authoritarian that pretends to be rational because they hide behind the name of “philosophy.”

I despise philosophy, not because it “poisons the minds of youth,” but because it takes them out of commission and distracts them from the real world. It pulls men into abstract labyrinths that negate their value as thinking men. It turns them into innovators of nonsense.

I despise philosophy because it uses reality to deny and attack reality to get men to reject reality.

I despise it because it gives the intellectually weak a platform from which to posture, so that they can confound knowledge and wisdom in the world— in the name of knowledge and wisdom.

The idealism of Christianity is separate from its function. How it actually functions is how it really is in the world.

I suspect the experience of most people who grow up in Christian homes is the experience of an unforgiving and rigid moralism. I suspect what they learn from their parents is that Christianity, so far from being forgiving, is brutally judgmental, and exceedingly petty. They learn that Christianity really functions as a justification for hypocrites to treat others with scorn and contempt; to lord over people in judgement, as though they were speaking for God.

Once the child crosses a line, that mighty love of Jesus’s forgiveness vanishes.

Some might be aware, but more likely, philosophy readers become defensive, clinging to the orthodoxy that “philosophy taught science everything it knows,” and that science had better turn back to, and pay attention to the metaphysical abstractions of philosophy, or else science will fail and become a mechanism of deception.

This hasn’t panned out.

There are ignorant Scientific Skeptics who are under the impression that philosophy is somehow helping them in the process of their science. Then where exactly is this philosophy located in biology, chemistry and physics? What part does it play? (It’s not good enough to reference it generally, we need specifics, that’s what science demands).

Many Scientific Skeptics don’t comprehend that the philosophy of science is the enemy of scientific truth. It attempts to pull us away from science and cast us back into the metaphysical speculations of philosophy. That is, not observation and verification, but mere word games.

I had a philosophical zealot— he spent 50 plus years reading philosophy— say to me, “you don’t know what you’re talking about, here’s a 600 page book on the philosophy of science.”

Wtf? What kind of philosophical argument is this?

So I asked, ‘and what exactly are you referring to in that book, you should at least be able to give me one substantive argument?’

What do you think the response was? Silence, then evasion, red herrings, dismissal and personal attacks.

Don’t fall for the philosopher’s abstract bullsh;t. For example, the so-called “problem of induction,” doesn’t matter. When a virologist works in the lab to make a vaccine, he doesn’t engage with this sophistical argument at all. He simply observes reality and looks for regularity and tests hypotheses. At no point does he need to stop doing what he’s doing and consider the “problem of induction.” This is what the (still superstitious) philosopher wants him to do, this is not what science demands.

Scientific Skeptics had better start realizing that philosophy, like religion, is trying to psychologically undermine science (though it claims to be proceeding in the name of truth).

Beware of philosophical abstraction, because its form is very close to that of theology. It isn’t striving to enhance science or make it more accurate (though this is what it claims) it’s striving to undermine its legitimate and hard-earned authority.

The real tragedy is that we need legitimate criticism of science, not a sophistical form that calls itself a criticism of science, but only attempts to negate science in exchange for word games.

This legitimate form of criticism cannot be accomplished by a motivated reasoning, that is desperate to undermine the authority of science, so it can once again declare its word games to be superior to science.

But it is also the genius of science that it criticizes itself, by demanding that its claims be measured against reality.

If philosophy is rational, if it’s logical, then it should be able to manifest the inferences by which it arrived at its conclusions.

But this is not how philosophers or philosophy readers proceed. They proceed (mainly) by making authoritarian assertions and then attacking and belittling anyone who challenges the authority of those assertions.

This doesn’t hold for science, but in the domain of philosophy it would seem to be absolute.

Why doesn’t it hold within the domain of science? Because a virologist doesn’t need to philosophically ground logic to isolate a virus; their conclusions stand on empirical evidence, predictive power, and experimental replication.

Not so in the case of philosophy. A philosopher must be able, not merely to define logic and reason, but to defend their definitions. If this fails, their philosophy collapses into subjectivity, culminating in a performative contradiction, where they must use the very logic they reject in order to argue against it.

Indeed, this structural vulnerability is precisely why modern philosophy (including formal logic) embraces epistemological relativism— because the poverty of philosophy has cast them into it.

They’re really just trying to be consistent with the relativism they find at the base of their thinking. When they attempt to define reason and logic all they see are human constructions, because they don’t understand the objective nature of reason and logic, which rises up in our thought because it first exists in the universe.

Simply asking a philosopher to define and defend his definitions of reason and logic before the discourse begins, is a good way to shut down and expose a sophist.

Finding a clear definition of Reason is harder than you might think. Why? Because humans use the word vaguely, few think about it because most don’t know how to think about it. 

Merriam Webster says, “a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense.”

But this drives us back further to the definition of what makes something sufficient? (And what is it that makes a logical defense defensible?)

Can something be “sufficient” if it’s contradictory or vague? Can it be sufficient and not sufficient at the same time? Can anything be “sufficient” if we can’t first clearly define what we mean by it, or what we mean by sufficient? 

Who decides or what determines sufficiency? What are the standards used? Where did these standards come from? What is it that gives these standards their authority? Can reason be defined without accuracy, without standards of accuracy? Does its demarcation require truth, or can men simply construct any definition they want?

When you say you “use reason,” what exactly do you use, how exactly does it work?

Philosophy has left you impoverished, and these questions are proof, because you don’t know the answers, because your ideas of reason are narratives about reason, they are not reason itself.

When a modern thinker attempts to answer these questions he ends in subjectivity, confusion and despair.

The question is not, what does it mean to teach humans formal logic? The question is, what does it mean to teach humans Logic, as in the foundational principles of all knowledge?

We take this for granted.

Try to imagine the world without the awareness of the laws of logic. (It’s not that logic would cease to exist, but man wouldn’t be conscious of its reality).

What would this mean? How would man emancipate himself from the impulse of his emotion? How could he recognize or refute error?

So what does it mean to bring this truth into the context of a primitive species? What does it mean to comprehend Logic in such a way that one can begin to use it to judge thoughts, feelings, claims, beliefs?

To teach Logic to a primitive species is not merely to give them a technique for arranging propositions, but to awaken them to the structure of reality that was there before they knew to look for it. Logic becomes the means by which man can step outside himself (outside impulse, emotion, habit, and inherited belief) and ask whether what he thinks is actually true (thus wielding reality itself against the mindless production of belief).

To become conscious of Logic is therefore to acquire a new kind of freedom: the ability to subject one’s own mind to judgment, the ability to escape the prison of subjectivity. What may seem to us elementary is, from the perspective of a species that has not yet fully recognized it, nothing less than the discovery of universal facts of reality by which thought can begin to govern itself, by which knowledge can be produced.

To an advanced observer looking down upon this developing civilization, handing humans the conscious mastery of Logic is not merely introducing an academic subject; it is bestowing the ultimate evolutionary lever (through it we became conscious of evolution itself). It is the precise moment a species discovers a standard by which to judge the products of its own mind, stepping out of the mindless instincts of its biological automaton and raw emotion to finally inspect the machinery of its own reality, turning the blind laws of the universe into the deliberate architecture of thought.

It is incredibly strange how an ignorant Christian approaches the Bible. It is approached as truth, but also literature, but though it is approached as literature it isn’t approached as a kind of historical or fictional literature. In fact, the way in which the Bible is approached as literature, is idiosyncratic.

A Christian reads the Bible and finds comfort and hope in it. The reading he does is a literary reading of the text (because the actual historical study of the text would destroy the Christian’s reading of the text, if he was honest about the evidence he encountered).

Interestingly enough, I still read the Bible the way these ignorant Christians read it, except I do not share in their willful ignorance, or supernatural presuppositions.

As literature, the Bible is an astounding book, but as a historical document, it’s a compilation of deception and confusion— the ignorant reader assumes all kinds of premises that have nothing to do with its actual context or content. (This is perfectly acceptable if we’re reading it as literary fiction, or philosophically, but it’s not acceptable if we’re trying to comprehend its cultural context and meaning).

I find the topic of the Bible as literature utterly fascinating— because I find the Bible as literature entertaining and thought-provoking (in an idiosyncratic way). Just like one can innovate all kinds of insight through the interpretation of Greek myths, I find the Bible as literature to function exactly the same way.

It’s strange to realize that Christianity is entirely founded on humans reading the Bible as true literature (both of which are biased presuppositions). What this means is that all this exegesis that has exploded on the scene, isn’t actually what captivated the masses, what captivated the masses was and is the Bible as “true literature” (that it has been read as one uniform book with one theology— which is a false assumption on the part of the reader).

[This motions to the immanent destruction of Christianity (from within), something Luther never could have realized when he hyper-focused Christianity on a kind of rational approach to “the Word.” Because, you see, this leads Christians to rationally scrutinizing what they read. You will ask, “how is it rational?” The answer is because they use the law of non-contradiction (within the presuppositions of their theology) to stand as judge over their theological interpretations. They use one scripture to correct another scripture, not realizing they’re practicing reason’s exacting form. And, they believe that because “the Bible is absolutely true,” any scrutiny of it will only further affirm this. Thus they have primed themselves to fall right into the trap of Rational Critical Scholarship, which shatters their folk assumptions about the Bible, they very thing that Christianity as a religion is based on.]

Reading the Bible as literature is a very different experience from studying it historically. Christianity cannot survive the latter, and this new reformation of rational critical scholarship has now entered Christianity’s consciousness. Apologists have starting responding to it, which winds them ever deeper into the destruction of the authority of religious content, and the shattering of its folk form.

I think their only hope is to pivot back to the Bible as literature, and to embrace the epistemological relativism of modern philosophy, which thereby allows them to make their case pragmatically against a world collapsing into nihilistic despair. (Though this approach already surrenders the truth of Christianity from the outset).

But this nihilistic collapse is ideological, it’s not substantive, it’s created by philosophy and sustained by philosophy. Science knows nothing of this nihilistic despair, and shatters it at every turn.

Christianity, above all else, needs men to read the Bible as true literature. If this falters, which is now presently happening due to rational critical scholarship, then Christianity will collapse from within. Men will no longer be able to read the Bible as true literature, holding a set of folk presuppositions, but only as another form of mythology. This is great for the secular world, but it is a death sentence for Christianity.

Human consciousness is now at the last stage of Christianity, where it becomes just another myth in a pile of myths. Those myths represent this same process of sublated consciousness playing out in other civilizations. We are now at this stage in our civilization process— we are transcending the mindlessness of our own myths.

Does this mean new false Gods will be born? I suspect they are already born! But one thing that can save us from repeating this process, at least in the minds of a few, is not just to transcend the myth (content) of Christianity, but to identify and transcend the psychological, authoritarian form on which Christianity and all other myths have been based.

All thinking Christians should comprehend the poverty of philosophy.

Modern philosophy is entirely relativistic (even formal logic is epistemologically relativistic).

But where does this leave us?

It leaves us in a place where subjective preference is the arbiter of meaning. One is simply supposed to choose to focus on the things that amuse them or that they desire.

But this leaves the door wide open for Christianity. Christianity finds more than ample pragmatic justification. Modern secular philosophy doesn’t like this, they want to have it both ways: all truth is constructed by humans, and yet Christianity is primitive and false.

But Christians can immediately see the contradiction. (This is not how reason works).

The Christian can simply say, “I choose to embrace the construction of Christianity, and, I reap many existential benefits for doing this.”

So I find myself in a strange place: I agree with Christians (really it’s Christian apologists) because their reasoning is absolutely sound. They have turned the relativistic standards of modern philosophy against itself, which automatically justifies their own subjective leap to Christianity.

I agree because I’m an honest Reasoner, not a philosopher.

[It should be noted that science doesn’t have this problem of epistemological poverty.]

argues that naturalism cannot explain how we know subjective experience exists.

The farce of all this is that theology used the objectivity that philosophy gave up to fallaciously propagate itself, while philosophy abolished the only authority by which it could legitimately propagate itself, or make a single, objective refutation. Philosophy reduced itself to mere compliant, while theology elevated itself to the level of reason that philosophy used to embrace.

Suppose Job was inflicted by a man instead of God. Is it rational to say, “well, my boss gave me some sh;t, but then he took it all away and let psychopaths murder my family, blessed be the name of my boss” ?

Does this sh;t make any sense? Is this an intelligent response? (This is the vital question: not what the authors of Job want us to think, but what does reason tell us the rational response should be?)

But the story is loaded from the outset with a magical Genie named God, which is nothing more than the ultimate rhetorical device of man.

We can still read this literature intelligently, as long as we don’t read it as duped believers, having fallen prey to this rhetorical device.

So the story is absolute nonsense, because God, in reality, is just a human construct. So if bad sh;t happens to us, we learn from this story that it’s dumb as f;ck to bring any notion of God into it.

Isn’t the moral of the story that we should strive to created social conditions where sh;t like this doesn’t happen in the first place, so mtherfkrs don’t have to lean on imaginary human constructs? And, when sh;t like this does happen, we have created societies of compassion that people can fall back on and find comfort in?

Isn’t this the concrete, non-idealistic reading of the book of Job?

This man tells everyone that he is the greatest in the room, and that everyone is stealing from him, though he denies the objectivity of any of these things.

The real question is how much damage philosophy has done to human intelligence?

People fallaciously associate it with reason, though they admit the world is full of false philosophies.

Men cannot yet see how they have been duped and led astray by the false abstractness of this form. Indeed, once upon a time this was also the case with religion!