I thought the mythicists crap died years ago.....Its only advocator passed away some time ago.

I thought the mythicists crap died years ago.....Its only advocator passed away some time ago.

Crap! Can some one delete one of those posts!

Robert Tulip wrote:Considering your point about the dangers of artifice in psychology, there is good reason to see the dangers of climate change as a direct result of our all too human tendency to place comfort above evidence as a guide to action, creating an artificial world that is not sustainable.

That heedless attitude involves a resort to artificial subterfuge, and raises the biggest question of the relation between culture and physical requirements. If our duty is to maximise the good of the future, then this problem of climate indifference shows how undutiful our species has become, a problem traditionally explained in the categories of salvation and damnation.

On your point about the balance between carbon removal and emission reduction, I think that emission reduction is a pointless wild goose chase, a distraction from the real duty of carbon removal.

So let's see, those who refuse to engage climate change, presumably because of comfort, or at least the prospect of re-election paid for by the fossil fuel industry, are undutiful in the extreme, equivalent to the old language of damnation. But you, in your wisdom, see that emission reduction is a mere distraction and should not be bothered with.

Well, that certainly illustrates my point that it is possible to have diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive ideas about the way to the good, and yet both (e.g. yours and mine) be offered in good faith.
As always, my question is "Why not both?" I already know your answer, but you don't mind repeating your other points about the subject, so go for it if you feel so motivated.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Duty is a partial, fragmented part of the life of faith.

Fragmented? Surely that would imply that duty can be avoided with good conscience? I see it differently, that duty is fundamental.

Well, me and most mainstream economists would agree that you are avoiding your duty, and you seem to be doing it in good conscience. So where does that leave our question?

Duty is fragmented in that we have essentially unlimited duties. We have a duty to feed any person who is starving to death, as long as our own needs are met. To simply let them starve is heartless. Yet I do. Some duties are to people who matter very much to me, and so, in typical non-rational fashion, I see to it that I meet those duties. As the social distance between me and others increases, I pay less attention to them.

Duty is partial in that its potential to bring salvation is related more to the spirit in which it is met than to the act itself. If I meet every duty I can, divesting myself of every luxury to save the lives of those who need the money more than me, and when they thank me I look embarrassed and say, "Nonsense, it was simply my duty, so how could I not?" they are unlikely to perceive the opportunity of a meaningful life in helping others.

Robert Tulip wrote:So Jesus says take up your cross and follow me. That is a very hard teaching of duty to God, as the rich young man reflected. My sense is that we are on a species trajectory to extinction, and our Christian duty is to reverse this trajectory through a resolute focus on facts and values.

Harry Marks wrote: A person of faithfulness will shudder at the possibility that they have failed in meeting a duty.

Conventional faith provides ample escape hatches to avoid Christian duty, through the cheap grace of kicking Jesus upstairs from earth into heaven. The costly grace of planetary transformation implied by the incarnation can be ignored in favour of supernatural nonsense.

Or in favor of political fatalism, or whatever label explains your escape hatch. Look, that is the nature of society. People are going to perceive different paths to the good. If dialogue can occur in good faith, we have some chance of meeting our collective obligations. If not, then the chips will fall where they fall.

Harry Marks wrote: In traditional, supernaturally-explained religion, our duty to God represents to us the opportunity to participate in eternity by working for shalom, which is the harmony of all things. When face-to-face with duty, our obligation to it is inescapable.

Robert Tulip wrote:My experience of traditional religion is rather different, that it avoids discussion of shalom because this union of peace and justice implies a messianic transformation of the earth. The traditional goal is more to claim God’s blessing upon existing society and its stability, putting off all thought of shalom to the second coming. The way faith escapes obligations in this realm of social transformation is to sow confusion so duties are never encountered directly, and so that duty is conceived in a primarily individual moral way, concerning personal moral conduct rather than shared vision of the world.

Oh, it's worse than that, believe me. I recently saw a discussion at length of the way evangelical churches have taken to telling leaders that when they have sexually abused members of the flock, they have only sinned against God and they have no obligation to reconciliation with the victim (as long as they pronounce the words "I'm sorry" to her.) Not only are most churches completely unwilling to take on transformation of the earth as a moral issue, but they continue in the tradition of the last 1800 or so years of finding the sins of the powerful much less grave than those of the weak. Of course, other institutions behave similarly, but then, those don't claim to be followers of Christ.

Robert Tulip wrote: That need for change is essentially what is meant by your phrase “the great and terrible Day of Reckoning.”
My view is that such a transformation need not involve collapse. If there is clear headed strategic planning, a managed gradual transition is possible, seeing the allegorical language of the Bible as a coherent and helpful warning message.

Well, it lacks something in coherence but maybe makes up for it in drama.

Harry Marks wrote:
The entrepreneurial class sees individual (or corporate) competition for money as the ultimate source of all benefit in society, but I am sorry to say we must drop the curtain on them. They are now a distant third to social processes of empowering the excluded and integrating the costs of externalities into monetary incentives. That's not to say I am in favor of disempowering competition and enterprise. But the movement for selling governmental power to the donor class has to stop. It has gone too far already.

Robert Tulip wrote:So encouraging entrepreneurs will lead to more money that can then trickle down for inclusion and externalities

Addressing externalities is not a process of confiscation or any other form of redistribution. It can be accomplished, for example, by permits given out to the former polluters who can then make money by selling them to other polluters who are less able to figure out how to reduce pollution. It can also be accomplished by a revenue-neutral carbon tax, (which even Charlie Koch as accepted in principle,) so that other taxes are reduced as money from a carbon tax becomes available. Neither is a matter of burdening the creative powers of the market, and in fact both empower the more dynamic sectors which emerge in response to appropriate incentives.

Empowerment of the excluded is also very different from the money-grubbing image of freeloaders. Public school, probably the first large-scale example of such empowerment, was and remains a triumph for investment through the public sector. It began when resources were much less than today's and the transformations achieved by it are unimaginable in a society leaving all such investment to entrepreneurs. One need only look at the backward sectors which remain in India and South America due to social exclusion to see that economic capacity does not spread by itself, and tremendous potential is wasted by acting as if it does.

Robert Tulip wrote:While the impetus for care may emerge more from constructed values than from described facts, care is also usually most effective when it is grounded in fact rather than fantasy, meaning our relationships are honest and open.
Exceptions to the primacy of fact include the placebo effect in medicine, or the healing power of faith and prayer. A comforting constructed fantasy can have more healing power than cold descriptive facts delivered with no bedside manner, although the best healing and care comes from the combination of faith and evidence.

Leadership is mostly a matter of bedside manner and placebo effects. I am all for grounding the decisions of care in fact, and opposed to giving any place to fantasy in the process, but there is a larger dialogue which constructs the setting for policy-making in a democracy, and that one needs plenty of mastery of the yin and yang of people's willingness to place their trust.

Robert Tulip wrote:It is not right to say that search for objective evidence “sabotages” care, although it is important to note care cannot be held hostage to evidence.

I only said the latter. Insisting on the methods of objectivity as absolutes in the process is one way of holding care hostage to evidence.

Robert Tulip wrote:Someone recently said to me that we should only care about the possible extinction of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef when we can prove it is definitely happening.

Good example.

Robert Tulip wrote:facts are often not adequate to overcome the power of money.

Ya think?

Robert Tulip wrote:Restorative justice, finding unity through forgiveness and dialogue, sees an intimate connection between truth and reconciliation, with shared acceptance of objective facts seen as having an important spiritual power for peace with justice.

That's an interesting example. I think it puts the dynamic on display - facts in a context which does not allow the requirements of caring to be blocked.

Robert Tulip wrote:I have heard that frogs are actually smart enough to jump out of a pot when it starts to warm up, putting that popular illusion story into the class of myth.

Smarter than Americans, then.

Robert Tulip wrote:illustrating the urgency of removing dangerous carbon from the air and sea as a global security priority. The problem is that the climate lobby claims the writing on the wall says we have to shut down fossil fuels, whereas the better science is saying we should remove carbon, and this is generating a debate about moral hazard, while the climate burns.

The logical answer is that both can be used. Not shutting down fossil fuels, but recognizing their full costs so as to shift the mix of energy sources. Which would, at the same time, recognize the full benefits of removing carbon. The climate lobby should not be opposed to geo-engineering, but can legitimately complain about relying on it alone, without giving markets any incentive to respond to diffuse costs and benefits.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:you are in denial about externalities

No, I am not in denial about externalities. The debate is whether carbon should be removed before or after it is added to the air. The IPCC say before, and the climate removal geoengineers say after, on the model of sanitation.

That's a false dichotomy, and both sides need to recognize it.

Robert Tulip wrote:The externalities of random shitting are obvious, but no one says that the cure is to induce mass constipation instead of sewered toilets, which is what emission reduction equates to.

Not at all. We have used incentives to combat acid rain and have used command and control methods to block CFC manufacture, neither of which amounts to imposing undue costs to prevent externalities. Emission reduction happens quite naturally when you simply recognize the costs imposed on others and charge for them. Or, if you prefer a law saying only shit in the toilet, that works too.

Robert Tulip wrote:You are saying that government regulation of air pollution at point of source provides the model to address climate change.

Only an engineer would say such a thing. I am saying that costs and benefits need to be properly compared to each other, and leaving externalities unregulated means we will go right on ignoring the cost. That is all. If you want to get the IPCC fixed, use the simple approach of staffing it with economists. Even Geoffrey Heal would not be so dense as to cast the whole subject of addressing external costs as "favoring point of source regulation as a model."

Robert Tulip wrote:It requires that we physically remove the dangerous carbon, and find profitable ways to do so, preferably in cooperation with major industries such as insurance and energy.

Look, no one insists that removing toxic chemicals, e.g. from the Love Canal dump sites, be profitable. Fine if they are, but the problem is bigger than any one solution, and failing to provide market incentives is the one most likely way to make sure the problem does not get solved.

Just to make sure you don't think I am ignoring your point, let me connect the dots: the amount of carbon which needs to be removed is inversely related to the urgency with which we begin charging for the externality costs of the carbon. As a result, the chances of finding profitable methods capable of removing the necessary amounts of carbon are directly related to the urgency with which we begin charging for the externality costs of the carbon.

Robert Tulip wrote: the goal should be a win-win answer, forgetting about emission reduction and focussing on carbon removal.

It is to find a win-win answer, which is why incentive methods are a priority to get both approaches focused on by massive industrial-scale processes.

Under_Taker wrote:I thought the mythicists crap died years ago.....Its only advocator passed away some time ago.

No, there are many vocal and highly educated advocates of mythicism. There are entire websites devoted to Christ-myth material. Robert knows way more about it than me since he is an actual mythicist of sorts, but I have seen lots of their stuff and it is far from worthless.

Harry Marks wrote:

Under_Taker wrote:I thought the mythicists crap died years ago.....Its only advocator passed away some time ago.

No, there are many vocal and highly educated advocates of mythicism. There are entire websites devoted to Christ-myth material. Robert knows way more about it than me since he is an actual mythicist of sorts, but I have seen lots of their stuff and it is far from worthless.

Good to know....I use to be on the Christ Myth train but fell off some years ago when the educated ***holes began claiming layman had no voice in the matter...That they knew nothing..I quite frankly look back at it now and realize its really a useless argument...I don't guess it really matters weather he lived or not its not going to change things either way.

When you get a 2000 year head start the way christianity has you have plenty of time to cover your lies....

Under_Taker wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:

Under_Taker wrote:I thought the mythicists crap died years ago.....Its only advocator passed away some time ago.

No, there are many vocal and highly educated advocates of mythicism. There are entire websites devoted to Christ-myth material. Robert knows way more about it than me since he is an actual mythicist of sorts, but I have seen lots of their stuff and it is far from worthless.

Good to know....I use to be on the Christ Myth train but fell off some years ago when the educated ***holes began claiming layman had no voice in the matter...That they knew nothing..I quite frankly look back at it now and realize its really a useless argument...I don't guess it really matters weather he lived or not its not going to change things either way. When you get a 2000 year head start the way christianity has you have plenty of time to cover your lies....

Hello Undertaker, welcome to Booktalk and thank you for engaging on this thread.

What you rather indelicately term “crap” is easily the most credible scholarly explanation of Christian origins, that Jesus Christ was entirely fictional. This is not yet accepted widely, which may account for your dismissive attitude. On mythicist scholars, further to the work of the heavily marginalised Acharya S, who died far too young in 2015, you may care to read the work of Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty and Kenneth Humphries, all of whom are readily accessible, although not all will share their atheist goals.

Mythicism has not yet provided a fully coherent alternative explanation of how and why Christianity emerged, although its critique of orthodoxy shows that the traditional “Christ Existence Hypothesis” is lamentably weak, and far better explained by political deception by the church than by originating from an actual single person called Jesus Christ.

On your comment about lay voice, the charge of rejecting other voices is exactly what mythicism says about the guild of theology, which assumes Jesus existed and casts any discussion of this into the outer darkness as rank heresy. As someone somewhere said, the stone the builder refused will become the head of the corner.

It matters immensely whether Jesus Christ actually lived or died. If he was made up, that tells us an immense amount about human credulity, gullibility, willingness to believe comforting fantasy, and inability to engage in rigorous analysis of facts. What John Calvin called “total depravity” in his TULIP theology is exemplified by the ability of the early Christian church to invent a historical backstory for the Son of God and have this belief foisted upon the world with such spectacular impact.

Hi ya Robert..Thanks for the welcome..I am actually a big fan of Ken's.....I ran a forum for Ken some years ago. Carrier I don't care much for because he's one of the people that belittled layman in this issue. Earl Doherty I like his work on the issue as well. I am well aware that Acharya S passed away, she was the one I was speaking of in my first post...To me she was the leading voice in this christ myth issue.

Under_Taker wrote:Hi ya Robert..Thanks for the welcome..I am actually a big fan of Ken's.....I ran a forum for Ken some years ago. Carrier I don't care much for because he's one of the people that belittled layman in this issue. Earl Doherty I like his work on the issue as well. I am well aware that Acharya S passed away, she was the one I was speaking of in my first post...To me she was the leading voice in this christ myth issue.

We had a member called Starburst/Azrael a few years ago who your comments remind me of. Maybe just the avatar.

I broadly agree with your comments here. I worked closely with Acharya S and miss her. Carrier is very smart, but also very arrogant, lacking emotional understanding of the psychology of religion. But that is a common problem for atheists, a failure to recognise the symbolic meaning of mythology. Even so, Carrier's On The Historicity of Jesus is a brilliant book that deserves wide readership.

The belittling of laypeople is more often a charge directed at theologians who reject mythicists as uninformed.

I don't get why you are now saying you like Kenneth Humphries when in your earlier comment you described "the mythicist stuff" as "crap".

Well I was a member here years ago and went by the name Starburst...I just re-registered because I could not recall my user name....Thanks for reminding me of it.