Posts by slimboyfat

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

SBF - I suspect you are not even sure that the Watchtower are wrong in any meaningful sense. You simply find their narrative to be less useful to you than you once did. Is this a fair characterisation?

Actually I would argue that I believe JWs are wrong in a more profound way than simply being factually wrong. It's your approach that leaves people theoretically vulnerable to return. The logic of your approach is that if evidence emerges that JW doctrines were in fact "true" then we should all go back and take part again. That's why I think ethical and aesthetic grounds for rejecting JW beliefs are often more compelling and satisfying than merely disagreements over scientific facts.

Since my rejection of JW ideology does not at its heart rely upon a refutation of its truth value, I am not vulnerable to counter-evidence as you are.

There was an excellent thread on the forum many years ago with a subject along the lines: "who else left JWs while still believing it was true?" Many people on the thread described the amazing process of rejecting the prospect of future paradise on earth, while believing it in full to be true, because they found life as a JW unbareable in the here and now.

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

I love this passage from Foucault. Beautiful and hardly obscurantist.

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

The question is only fatuous if you take the assumption that human reason is the ultimate measure of truth to be inviolable and unquestionable.

Society in general once held similar views in relation to God as the arbiter of truth, during which period questioning God as the source of ultimate truth was similarly "utterly fatuous".

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

How can you be sure the worm's view is ignorant and ours is faithful to reality? Or put it another way. What if there are beings that are as much more intelligent than humans than humans are compared with the worm. They need not be supernatural, they could have evolved. Would they necessarily view and describe the nature of the earth the same as we do? If our view of the earth is to be preferred to the worm's because we are more intelligent, how can you rule out the possibility that a superior intelligence may view it differently still?

20

JWs aren't stupid

by cognisonance in

the title is a bit of click bait.

but here's the alternative title: what stupid beliefs/ideas did you have while an active jw.. i think the majority of jws that don't have obvious mental health issues are not stupid, just un/under-educated.

for example, i now accept evolution as a thing, not a controversy or conjecture.

slimboyfat

I may act stupid and talk stupid, but don't let that fool you. I really am stupid.

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

Stripped of context no description makes any sense. All utterances are dependent on context. The statement that "the earth is round" makes sense and is useful to humans living in the 21 century. It may be less useful to a worm or to an angel or to a human living 200 years from now. The grounds on which they may object to the utterance may not even be intelligible to us. We are so throughly immersed in the world as we construct it that the possibility of seeing it otherwise can be difficult. And yet history teaches us this happens all the time.

Please see the video above and substitute "bottle" for "banana". I can see you genuinely want an answer to this question and there is a very good explanation of the concepts of constructionism in the video that addresses the point you are making. "Banana" is indeed a socially constructed concept.

To bring this discussion right to focus and demonstrate its relevance, the point of insisting on the distinction between language as a useful tool and language as corresponding to reality, consider the situation which prompts most of these discussions here: acceptance of evolutionary theory.

For many people leaving JWs, acceptance of evolutionary theory is a positive move for all sorts of reasons. It signals a new openness to views of the world that are forbidden by JW ideology. It marks closer alignment with mainstream thinking in modern society. It can free us up from worry and anxiety that may result from a literal reading of the Bible. All those things are excellent. But Cofty won't leave it there. Even if someone has left the JWs and is comfortable still believing in creationism, Cofty finds this unacceptable on the grounds that, while they may be happy, and it may be working for them, it is nevertheless not "true". As if what is "true" is the real point here. Cofty finds satisfaction in the idea that he has finally discovered how the world "really" is and insists that others must accept this as "true" or else be labelled ignorant. What is truly ignorant is the idea that the world is such that particular descriptions of it are what is important in life, rather than how useful those descriptions are for us getting on with things.

32

what sort of reactions have you gotten when talking to other jw when telling them the "truth about the truth"?

by AmIright in

its funny ive read some stories on here about how they have become so infuriated by what logic dictates as being true and their own denying of it because it completely screws up their belief and shows how hypocritical it is xd some look like a nuclear reactor about to blow xd.

share you experiences here :) .

slimboyfat

Bad ones. I gave up pretty quick. JWs accepted that I simply didn't challenge them for a few years, but after a while even that wasn't enough. They wanted me to positively affirm their beliefs to stay "good association". What insecurity!

19

Is it Okay for a JW to be a Storm Chaser?

by Iamallcool in

jw
friends

i am thinking about chasing storms for fun.

i know it is very dangerous.

i just think it will be very cool to have a new exciting hobby.

slimboyfat

Is participating on the forum beneficial?

19

Is it Okay for a JW to be a Storm Chaser?

by Iamallcool in

jw
friends

i am thinking about chasing storms for fun.

i know it is very dangerous.

i just think it will be very cool to have a new exciting hobby.

slimboyfat

Floods too. I saw the Rhine and Danube flooded, amazing.

99

The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty in

sbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.

charlatanism of the highest order.

.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.

slimboyfat

In my opinion this misses the very simple observation that language easily allows us to communicate complex ideas with high fidelity and this type of common-sense view of language has been and remains important to understand the world -- both if you are a 6 year old or a scientist.

Constructionists accept the ordinary use of language and respect its usefulness. What we object to is the idea that this usefulness equates to identity with reality. This distinction is what we are getting at. It is important because if you view descriptions of the world as useful/useless rather than true/untrue then it enables you to adapt to new circumstances, reject intolerance, and avoid dogmatism. Please see page 231 of this book available on Amazon's look inside.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invitation-Social-Construction-Kenneth-Gergen/dp/1446296482/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Your further comments misunderstand my view of ordinary language. I accept it, use it, and find it helpful. Constructionism in no way demands that we give up using words in their everyday sense. What it means instead is a recognition that the everyday sense of words can be overturned at any time.

It's an approach to language a bit like wishing for a sterile operating theatre. We would want the theatre to be completely sterile for our operation. In the real world a 100% sterile theatre cannot be achieved. That doesn't mean we give up and say what's the point of attempting a sterile environment if it's not 100% possible.

With language, the aim to understand and to be understood is a worthwhile goal. That we realise this will never be acheived 100% and that all utterances are subject to revision is no reason to give up communicating.