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The Perils of Pop Philosophy

Posted by kdawson on from the bloggers-beware dept.

ThousandStars tips a new piece by Julian Sanchez, the guy who, in case you missed it, brought us a succinct definition of the one-way hash argument (of the type often employed in the US culture wars). This one is about the dangers of a certain kind of oversimplifying, as practiced routinely by journalists and bloggers. "This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it's probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: 'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."

4 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ignorance more freely begets confidence... by Fizzl · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Theology is useless. There is nothing to discus about religious matters. There's no magical zombie jesus, allah or whatever. It would be better to stop talking about religion all together.
    No one should educate themselves about any religion. There is nothing of value to learn. You can learn about ethics without the mindfuck that religion is.

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  2. Re:Ignorance more freely begets confidence... by stjobe · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    You can learn about ethics without the mindfuck that religion is.

    Quoted For Truth.

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  3. Re:Ignorance more freely begets confidence... by domatic · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Theology is not religion and is certainly not about any specific deity like Zombie Jesus(TM) or Allah.
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    By the way all world religions offer answers to these questions, but are by no means the only answers one can give. One could be scientific about it, and try to answer these question from that perspective, but that kind of analysis usually leaves us cold, feeling small, and somewhat unfulfilled.

    Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more about this version of Jesus who casts about the landscape on a quest for succulent brains whilst preaching the love of his father.

  4. kdawson is a troll by superwiz · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    The conclusion of the article is that every argument must inevitably come down to ad hominems:

    The message is not (to coin a phrase) "we report, you decide" but "we report on why you're not actually competent to decide, unless you're prepared to devote a hell of a lot more time, energy, and thought to it.

    This type of inflammatory nonsense pervades through all kdawson posts. I suspect slashdot keeps him around for the very reason that he is able to rose people up (more commenting=more ad revenue).

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