Oh, and I’m about to leave for lunch and a doctor’s appointment, so I won’t be back around for a couple of hours. That ought to give you enough time to come up with another lame-ass retort.
Do your best now. The defeat of all of Christendom is riding on how thoroughly you squash other spiritually liberal Dopers.
Maybe that was a bad example I chose, then. Hopefully my overall point is still clear, that confrontational/insulting posts have a lesser chance of convicning people that less confrontational/less insulting posts.
I’m so sorry, 'triton, I’ve rather let you down in this thread. Would it help if I did a bit more name-calling and sneering?
Btw, I do like how no-one’s to disagree with you concerning Melville (don’t worry, I’m in no danger of doing so), and yet you’re free to dismiss any Christian’s reading and interpretation of the words of Jesus. Melville is complex and open to a variety of readings, but your selected Gospel quote admits of only one reading, thus:
If I need to clean up any shit, may I borrow a few handfuls of straw?
Yes. After reviewing posts 680, 681, 690, 691, 692, 720, 722, 725, 747, and this one (751) I have indeed realized that I am lost in trying to understand your point of view in regards to free will versus determinism.
Because I am lost, my questions were intended to elicit a more definitive picture of what you believe. I also asked for resources where I might read a clearer description of your arguments. Your website has a great deal of information on radical feminism. But a quick scan of it does not yield any nuggets pertaining to free will or determinism. Let me be more direct. Are your views on free will and determinism similar to any established philosophical line or are they wholly created by and unique to you?
I apologize for not conveying to you how lost I am in our exchanges. If you would like to start over again, I’d ask that you do so with a succinct expression of your views on free will and determinism. Here’s mine: There is no such thing as free will - it is an illusion.
There is no such thing as determinism — it is an illusion.
Succinct? 
I assume you want me to elaborate; the question is where would you like me to start?
This quote from the wiki link entails statements by both Schopenhauer and Glen Strawson (who’d I’d never heard of until just now) which encompass my own position to a tee, Strawson, in particular, expresses exactly what I’ve been trying to get across about infinite regression.
Fair enough. I suggest that determinism is the best useful way to describe reality. Here is a good description of determinism. As stated in the link, the principal consequence of determinism is that free will becomes an illusion.
Do you believe free will exists? How would you define it? What is it? Where does it come from?
This is an ambitious (if doomed) declaration of a hypothesis, but surely you know that Free Will is just as incompatible with indeterminism as it is with determinism. A random will is no more free or autonomous than a determined one.
Here’s where you go off the rails. I never had any religion that I can remember, though I had extensive exposure to the Bible as a child (I have a couple of medals for Sunday school attendance) and then in grad school I needed to understand the religious issues behind the Reformation and then Puritanism and other issues related to American studies, as I said, so my antipathy (not that you really care) is completely unrelated to any personal traumas. It’s just the outgrowth of my early disbelief that the human race was still (in the 1500s and the 1600s and today) still so primitive as to give such ludicrous and counter-logical beliefs serious credence.
And where, Malacandra, did you get the idea that no one’s to disagree with my Melville readings? Students do it all the time, and some of them earn A’s in my course nevertheless, but they do it by arguing contrary readings that withstand scrutiny. Jodi , wants to make Melville out to be some kind of Christian sympathizer which he is only in the same sense that I am. He detested organized religion, specifically Christianity, and more specifically the Dutch Reformed church that he was dragged to as a young boy by his religious zealot mother. He hated the stuff, thought it was a dreadful waste of energy and scholarship and a breeding ground for hypocrites. “Bartleby” (and its narrator in particular) quotes the Bible extensively only to pass a harsh judgment on its shortcomings, at least as far as humanity is concerned. If you’d like to argue otherwise, fine, let’s set up a thread, and go over the story there.
But I do find it interesting that you’re so quick to conclude that I propose some sort of litmus test for atheism/Chrstianity in my classroom, or that I think there’s value in indoctrinating students, of which you have zero personal knowledge, and less insight. Often my students come to the conclusion that I must be a particularly passionate Christian, because I try to convey various Christian authors’ beliefs accurately. (I once had two Christian college girls thank me after class for “teaching Blake as only a true Christian would,” which praise I had to decline. I can’t tell you how disappointed they seemed.) You’re making all sorts of erroneous assumptions here, I suppose because you can’t see how I might have come to this position through no animosity or zealotry of my own, but simply through reason and observation.
It’s fairly astonishing to me (it probably shouldn’t be) how much slack the Straight Dope in general seems to extend to religious thought. I would think that the existence of God would be one of the most extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, but seemingly the Straight Dope is willing to exempt religious thinkers from that position which most of you will demand, out of the box, for any other extraordinary claim. In this, I see myself and my fellow atheists upholding the SDMB’s standard of honest inquiry. We don’t need to mock you (sometimes it’s fun when dealing with a particularly ludicrous religious belief) but you should be able to withstand a little mockery since you’ve got an untenable thesis that you’d like others to give you a pass on. if you don’t want to discussyour position, then you’ll have to withstand a little mockery now and again. But to start a whole long Pit thread in which your position is “We don’t want you to make fun of our unsupported beliefs”? is pretty weak.
[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber]
I think it would be very interesting if you would cite the post where Jodi said anything like this.
Are we first going to discuss whether there is or is not such a thing as determinism (aside from the illusion thereof), or whether there is or is not such a thing as free will (aside from the illusion thereof), or are we going to attempt to do both simultaneously?
And, if the latter, do we need to build in some protocols or rules for the implications for determinism if an argument in favor of free will founders, and vice versa? That is, do we assume from the outset that we agree that it’s not an either/or proposition, or do we need to go into that first?
[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
I’d say post #745, which reduces Bartleby as MAYBE touching on Christian hypocrisy as a possible reading for some Melvillians is a great example. It is impossible to read this story, with its numerous Biblical references, as having little to do with Christian hypocrisy, and you’d have to be a fool or zealot to think that this story (which contains several themes) is unconcerned with putting Christian hypocrisy on display.
What, you’d like Melville to entitle the story “Christ is a Cunt” so his theme is unmistakable to you and** Jodi**? Even then, I’m not sure you’d accept the title’s meaning. But then you seem to have a hard time understanding simple Aramaic. The guy tells you to love your neighbor, and Lord Ashtar says, “Okay, Lord, but I can still call him an asshole while loving him, right? Thanks.” If **Lord Ashtar ** can practice true Christianity while calling me an asshole (you haven’t rebuked him for that yet, have you?), then I wouldn’t think you’d have much problem with badchad calling christ a cunt.
Let’s see now. Lord Ashtar is to **pseudotriton **as **badchad **is to Christ.
It’s all clear now. You have a Christ complex, and it’s tearing you up inside. You’re a self-hating Christian!
Is there a twelve step for that?
Regarding what I said earlier:
pseudotriton ruber ruber, you’re being an asshole in this thread. You’re taking people’s quotes out of context, belittling people for fun, and just generally being a jerk. I think the most loving act I can perform for you right now is to point your behavior out to you so you can change it and become the better person that I know you can be. I’m sure you don’t mean to come across so angry and hate-filled. These negative emotions hurt you a lot more than they hurt anyone else. It would be to your benefit to do some self-reflection and attempt to improve this aspect of your personality.
I’ll stipulate that determism can exist without free will but I still hold that free will cannot coexist with determinism (or with indeterminsm).
Is this going to involve quantum physics?
Oooookay. That’s a LITTLE different from calling him a “Christian sympathizer,” isn’t it? Please explain how reading more than one meaning into Melville means that she thinks he is a “Christian sympathizer.” For someone who teaches literature, I am a little surprised at your level of reading comprehension. You claim that you teach about these other possible themes in your course. Does that mean that YOU think that Melville is a Christian sympathizer? After all, Jodi never said that the theme you mention of Christian hypocracy cannot be validly read into this work, does she? In fact, she confirms that it is often read this way. She simply says that there are other possible themes, as well (which, incidentally, you never mentioned in your first post on the subject, which is what led her to remind you of these alternate possibilities in the first place.)
Whether or not you are an asshole really has nothing to do with Lord Ashtar’s practice of true Christianity.
I suggest that free will and determinism are best discussed in relationship to each other. So I vote for simultaneously. There is an established line of thinking where the two explanations can coexist compatibly. I do not mind if you argue as such or not. If you do, my response will be to continue to argue against the existence of free will. If hold that neither free will nor determinism are valid, I would find that interesting too. Assuming this answers your concerns, I’d ask that you continue by stating your position on free will.
I never mentioned a lot of things in my first post ( I omitted my recipe for Swiss Cheese, for example), which doesn’t allow Jodi (on this planet) to conclude that none of them exist. I think it’s pretty funny that she and you hold out “there are many many many ways to interpret literature” as some kind of huge shock to me–the one author we’re discussing hated Christian hypocrisy, tore it to shreds in “Bartleby” and you and Jodi can’t decide whether to denounce Melville as an asshole, too, or just to insist that there are as many ways of interpreting texts as there are assholes, that any text can yield any meaning, that you could be reading Melville and Jesus correctly and I could be reading them incorrectly, so yahhh! LMK what strategy you come up with when you decide on one.
What, Melville? No, I don’t know a durn thing about him and I’m not fit to debate the subject with the least of your students, let alone you. But I got the impression above that you were going off the deep end because Jodi dared to question your interpretation of Melville - which jibbed oddly with your insistence that your reading of a particular set of verses from Matthew was the only true one, and that any argument to the contrary was sophistry or, indeed, hypocrisy pure and simple. 'Cos, y’know, whatever scholarship you’ve devoted to Melville, well, the same and more has been devoted to the Bible - not unoften by people reading for doctorates.
Perhaps I can offer a few morsels for thought, then. Christians hold that there is evidence for the existence of God, but it’s hardly news that there’s no proof - so twitting believers with it, especially in offensive terms that imply you’re the only ones to have grasped this truth, is something less than mannerly. I personally don’t find it at all hard to envisage that God is something the existence of which by nature cannot be proved. And to be honest, “Christ is a cunt” is mockery the way “your mother is a whore” is - in other words, putting all ten toes over the line between mockery and something a good deal worse. I had a bellyful of the latter at school from people trying to provoke a reaction out of me - it certainly served no other purpose - and it’s for sure I don’t need it now; so under the circumstances you’ll perhaps give me a few props for keeping a civil tongue in my head.
If you want to discuss theology then fine, let’s do it - which is the only worthwhile discussion of our position that’s going to be possible. But you know very well that you can’t get logically from “You can’t prove God exists” to “God doesn’t exist”, so suppose you stop labouring the former?
Well, you know, I doubt swiss cheese is relevant to the themes found in Melville, now, is it? So I wouldn’t really expect you to mention it. As far as the other themes, I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to list them one by one, but you can understand that someone might be under the (obviously mistaken) impression that you weren’t aware of them, since you said…
Personally, I couldn’t care less what the themes in Bartleby are, or whether or not you know them well enough to write a book about them. My problem with you was your ascribing statements to Jodi that she simply did not make. A bad habit you really, really should try to break.