roachboy

i came to a position of agnosticism tending toward atheism from inside the judeo-christian tradition by way of folk like kierkegaard and, especially, pascal. nominalism.

on those terms: if human understanding is finite and this god character the inverse (infinite), it follows that human understanding would have no access to or understanding of this character.

worse: the set up of that relation relies on inversions of categories and entails no knowledge. it is just as arbitrary as any other such statement.


general: our understanding of the world is limited and circumscribed by the effects of assumptions that we use to organize information.
i operate with the assumption that there is much that we do not know and that what i know is much smaller a set than what we know and i am ok with that.
i do not think that we do not and cannot know anything about the world, but we work with severe limitations that we impose on ourselves often without realizing it.
tinkering with this problem and ways to deal with it is why i like philosophy.

i don't grant any particular privilege to occam's razor, mostly for the reasons baraka guru outlined above but without the kant quote.
i'd probably have put up something from wittgenstein.
it's all the same, really.
occam's razor is an aesthetic commitment. that's all it is.

what unifies believers who are firm in their belief and atheists who are firm in theirs is anxiety in the face of radical, irreducible uncertainty.
i dont think either group can deal with it: so they each, in opposite ways, try to eliminate it.
i think that's weakness and its reverse in arrogance, but i don't particularly care about it.
i don't see this as a fundamental issue.
i see it as a consumer choice.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite