9/11 scaremongers? Sure great guys, they help to support the arms industry, keeping thousands of people in work building and developing arms either for use in our own "wars on terror" or more often than not end up in the hands of extremist governments overseas, thereby supporting a program of destabilisation of developing countries and maintaining the inequalities necessary to support a higher standard of living for those in power in western governments. Not to mention that the huge waste of resources in maintaining these wars helps to use up resources which would otherwise raise the standard of living in developed and developing countries and produce a general apathy within the populations towards governments and centralised control thereby reducing its power. Overseas instability and home soil "threats" help breed a climate of fear that the governments can use to maintain control in societies where the old systems of control through fear (religion) are fading. We already have too many systems in place in the UK which could be used by a Totalitarian government to control its population, and every year we introduce more laws under the guise of "protecting the public from terror". I have heard it argued that we only need the wrong type of people in power, and we are all screwed. I would argue we are already have those people.

Wait, that wasn't a defence, was it?

Edit: Free speech is an illusionary concept that we cart out in a vain attempt to convice ourselves that we live in a progressive and advanced society, when in fact no such thing exists.

Actually, I did, you just chose to ignore it.

As for charity work, the one thing that comes to mind is Hammas and Hezbulah. The west knows them as the terrorist organizations backed by Iran that have totalitiaran rule on thier mind. The people who support them, only think that they are charity organizations that help build houses and fund schools.

On a smaller scale, you had the mob who ran crime syndicates but were supported by people who saw them as great sources of charity.


To make an analogy of the affects of religion/philospohy vs whatever the closets to home analogy I can think of is color triggers.

Color triggers are simple things that make or break one's ability to do group combat, and other Lusternia stuff. But its not something you can look at on the "global" level. Its a very personal experience that greatly affects everything else. Having a good set of color triggers does not compare to the system you have, but if everyone has the same system, then the color triggers make a big difference.

For my analogy, I would consider Culture to be your system, and relgion/philosphy to be your color triggers. Personally I think you are all gearing the conversation in the wrong direction, because you seem to fail to compare cultures with the same religion and see how different they are.

A close look at Proestant religion in America can show you this. I imagine looking at the Church of England and looking at British society can do the same thing.

Heck, I can do it at my local synagogue. All attending the same services, all living in the same community, but also all comming from different original cultures and having very different views and responces to things.

Where?

That's a terrible analogy. You're trying to separate religion from culture, while we all know that one influences the other.

This seems a little overdramatic and inflammatory. There are a lot of things that we can say, and say loudly, that won't find censorship. That's not true in a lot of nations without some sort of free speech guarantee written into the laws.

Limits on free speech by the American federal government are not extreme. Can't protest along the path of a Presidential parade or motorcade. Expect some monitoring of electronic communications. Things like that. On a local or non-governmental level, it's a different story. The article back in the initial post describes it pretty well. Those limitations came about because people wanted them, and that's a little scary. Rather than learning to talk about their beliefs, people are trying to win ideological conflict through politics. I don't think this bodes well for our future.

How many of you know about Averroes and al-Ghazali? How about Tertullian and Augustine? The debate over the importance of free speech was had hundreds of years before the Americas were colonized by Europe. You want to see the difference? It's in the news every day. Al-Ghazali won the debate in the Islamic world, philosophy and religious dissent was pushed aside, and what was once the most prosperous region in the world became a collection of hovels and history. Augustine won the Western debate, philosophy, debate, and dissent were upheld, and Europe rose to fill the void left by the self-destructive Muslims. It's questionable how much role government played in the transformation. There's a school of thought that says popular opinion of well-born citizens was the primary catalyst; government reflected the changes after the fact.

This is why I so strongly think that this is a big deal. We have peers who're unwittingly giving rebirth to Tertullian, and they don't know any better because very few people still study philosophy and the history of ideas. People need to be able to speak freely against all sorts of social conventions. They don't need to be able to act against all sorts of social conventions without popular approval, but the dialogue has to be there so that popular opinion can be swayed.

You (yes, you) can and should take an active role in this. First and foremost, learn to talk about your ideas. Know why you believe certain things, learn the opposing views, learn to debate, learn to present things in such a way that you can be heard in our "politically correct" society. Second, foster forums. The Internet did great things to allow relatively unhindered dissemination of information. It didn't do much for dialogue. Start the dialogue yourself if you have to. Get people involved. Third, encourage the marketplace of ideas to operate freely. Use the forums you find to kick back against limits on free speech, whether imposed by universities, "concerned parents," local governments, or media outlets. It's important.

@xavius: Agreed

@verithrax: Three points.

1. First page, where I question your equation of pornography with "disent and open debate", which Xavius just well pointed out is the main issue of free speach. (and I had thought was obvious)

2. You can not completely seperate color triggers from a system.

3. Culture and religion are seperate, they are not the same thing. The most simple way to see this is to compare two countries with the same dominant religion, and compare thier cultures. Lets take for example, Dubai, and Iran. Or perhaps, Italy and Ireland. Or compare Thailand to Vietnam. And all those comparisons can be made within the same basic geographic region. For an even greater comparision, where you can see the more dominant affects on culture, compare Christian Ethopia with Christian Sweden (I think they are both catholic based, I know one of the noregian countries is catholic based).

What I would suggest it to look at the stereotypes of those places when making the comparisons, or if you prefer compare thier folk literature, humour, and proverbs.

But to me "free speech" and "some limits" seem like contradictory things. My point was that it seems to me true freedom of speech has never existed. The freedom that we have is always within the limits of current social and political norms. As for being overdramatic and inflammatory, yes your right! However, that was mostly due to misplaced anger at the reminder of the continued existence and threat of homophobia, earlier in this thread. My actual point should have been about a growing anxiety at the reduction in the freedom that we do have.

Benjamin Franklin said it best : "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Anyway I'll stop now, as I suffer from the very afflictions that you mentioned. I have not studied Philosophy or Politics and until recently I did not spend much time exploring my own views. I'm playing catch-up after many years of apathy!

Which I responded to.
Sure you can. But anyway, this analogy has outlived its usefulness.

I didn't say they were the same thing. But religion is an important component of culture. In both Dubai and Iran, women don't normally show their hair in public; in both Ireland and Italy, most families abstain from certain types of food during Lent; and so on and so forth and such. Your argument that religion has no or little influence on society because two societies with the same majority religion can be different is flawed. Religion is a huge influence on all societies; I think anything that gets a significant portion or even a majority of people to regularly go someplace and listen to some figure of authority is a rather large influence. Governments don't get the level of voluntary attention that most religions do, for example.

If that is your argument, then the SuperBowl, World Cup and the Olympics has a greater influence on culture then any religion ever has.

Except people aren't raised from birth watching sports every sunday, and they do it for fun rather than believing it's an obligation.

Obviously you have never been to Texas.

The similarities of covering one's hair or eating food during lent (I'm not even sure if your statements are true, specially about Dubai, but anyway) those similiarties that you mentioned are superficial.

How do people celebrate when they are happy, how do they deal with crisis. What is their attutiude on authority like, what is their attitude about strangers, what do they find funny, what are thier proverbs. Somehow I feell ike I'm repeating myself. These are things that matter and define societies, not if they eat Lamb chops or Soy Bean curds.

By next post is a tangent about censorshi, unrelated to the line of thought in my previuos posts..

Here in the Sea of Red, the college football coach is such a respected persona that, when he retired, we sent him to the House of Representatives in a landslide election. So yes, in an area where a sport team is as important as religion, that argument holds up perfectly.

I'm going to make a list of statements from two people holding different opinions. With each statement I want to point out the reactions of some people to weather or not it is a statement that should be censored, or not.





As far as I know, in America, each of those statements or intents have at one point or another been censored. For example, in los angeles, certain colors were not allowed to be worn or discussed because of fear of gangs.

Do you imagine that you could take a look at attendance at sporting events vs attendance at church and know if that community holds sports to be more important than religion?


Two other points.

1. There is one official government per location, however there are hundreds of different views and versions of each particular religion. Whatever statements can be true across all the various views of the religions are minor compared to the differences in culture between them.

2. Based on the ratings of the state of the Union adress, I do not think that government gets less volentary attention than religions do.

But there are things which are common to almost all variants of a religion... which is why they're variants of the same religion.

There is one state of the union address every year. There is church service every week.

Wow, look at all the opinions.

I guess I'll just comment on the linked article, since it seems like the only virginal topic in this thread:

The author is a bit confused, if well-meaning. Her defense of free speech and uncensored information is founded on a more fundamental assumption that she can't seem to articulate. Even the quote by Mill is misplaced; it's really just a defense of human certainty.

So, what is this 'fundamental assumption' you have to deal with in order to attack the necessity of freedom of speech and information?

Simply put, what we call 'truth' is an approximation to an absolute, not the absolute itself; insofar as we assume an approximation to be absolute, we condemn ourselves to error.

As far as it goes, though, this is simply the justification for free speech and information: the question of 'For whom?' remains unanswered by it.

I've never really bought into the "truth as approximation" line. Scholasticists came up with it. Scientific progress (one of the few fields based in knowledge that has concrete standards of right and wrong) hasn't mirrored it. More common is a substantial reworking of the paradigm once flaws or shortcomings are found in the current one.

As far as the article itself, it appears to be geared towards a Western audience, where the virtue of free speech is the firmly established status quo. I don't think she intended to defend it so much as point out its degradation.

Another interesting article.

Relevant quote:
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. I wholly disagree with the argument of the Government that the First Amendment left the common law as to seditious libel in force. History seems to me against the notion. I had conceived that the United States through many years had shown its repentance for the Sedition Act of 1798, by repaying fines that it imposed. Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law expressions of opinion and exhortations, which were all that were uttered here, but I regret that I cannot put into more impressive words my belief that in their conviction upon this indictment the defendants were deprived of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Justice Holmes' opinion covers two points: why censorship will naturally creep into the system, and why we should be leery about it.

Hmm, you're right, that was an interesting article.

Forgive me if I just focus on this, though...it's hard to nudge me too far beyond metaphysics---argument is based on one's epistemology, which is in turn based on one's metaphysics. Get the metaphysics right, and everything else snaps neatly into place, so you'll forgive me if I prefer to start at the foundation and work my way up.

Anyhoo, note that reworking an existing paradigm is a process of refinement...since you are refining something toward some goal (which it has necessarily not yet reached), the exact parallel is an approximation moving toward an absolute.

The demonstration that knowledge (truth) exists only as approximation is given by the fact that that a) the sum of our accepted knowledge cannot explain all observation and b) that it contains internal contradiction, especially between fields.

It thus fails the hallmark of absolute knowledge (truth), and must be considered approximation.

You can't get to metaphysics without epistemology. How can you claim knowledge of things beyond perception without first working out how you come to the perceptions and concepts that you have to work with?

As for the rest, I think it's just a difference in terminology between us and me misreading your post. For exercise's sake (do you know how long it's been since I've found someone who'll talk philosophy?), I'll nitpick a little.

I would more readily label absolute knowledge in the context in which you're speaking as sempiternal omniscience rather than truth. I don't think any rational human claims that sort of authority or an approximation thereof. I would rather define truth as the cognitive or conceptual correlate of reality (and, for temporary purposes, steal the quote from Estarra's signature as a definition of reality--that which still exists when you stop believing in it).

Question at hand is whether or not human knowledge progresses by further refinements of our approximation of truth. I'm going to ignore arguments that run in the nihilistic vein of postmodernism; I'm assuming that reality is indepedent of perception and individuals, perception is a fairly reliable indicator of reality, and the like.

In my mind, the biggest issue here is one of primacy. Is the concept more important than the resulting hypotheses drawn from the concept, or vice versa? If you see the concept as primary, then I would argue that we are not refining an approximation. There is no smooth transition from the hypothesis of spontaneous generation of life to our current model, which teaches that life comes from life (barring, again, the obvious extremes). There is no smooth transition from Newton to Einstein. Geocentric to heliocentric universe models. The list goes on.

The hypotheses are a little more ambiguous. They're based on one paradigm or another out of necessity, but they present an iterative approach. Cannon balls fall faster than paper. Heavy cannon balls fall at about the same speed as light cannon balls. Books fall faster than sheets of paper. A sheet of paper falls at the same speed as a book if laid flat on top. Combine the results and you come up with intelligible tidbits of knowledge that accurately predict tangible events. In this case, we get a numeric equation for gravity and the concept of air resistance. Einstein's insights impacted the paradigm that these experiments were based on, but acceleration by gravity on Earth is still known to be 9.8 m/s^2.

So, which one embodies truth? I'm going to argue in favor of the paradigms. I think of the hypotheses as more of a collection of observations made intelligible. They don't actually tell us much about what's underlying it all. The paradigms, however, explain the mechanics underlying the observations. Furthermore, the paradigms give rise to the hypotheses and provide a frame by which to interpret observations. I'm having trouble picturing how a hypothesis can exist without some sort of basic assumptions on which to build.

I understand your assertion that knowledge moves from epistemology to metaphysics; that the accepted order is from the perceiver to the perceived. This order is incorrect, though; you have made a metaphysical assumption in separating the perceiver from the perceived in order to form it, just as you would be making a metaphysical assumption if you did not (in which case epistemology and metaphysics would arise simultaneously).

In order to form an epistemology, you must lay down some a priori statement of reality from which to frame it. I think, though, that the greatest failing of philosophy is its tendency to artificially divide concepts: metaphysics dictates the base on which epistemology is built, which epistemology then alters our understanding of metaphysics.

-----

Hmm...I see what you mean with the difference perhaps lying in the terminology. The connotations of 'omniscient' bother me a bit, but sempiternal omniscience otherwise seems the same as how I would use objective or absolute reality. My use of approximate is as something modeled after, with the sense of being as close as possible, but not the same as...which does seem interchangeable with a conceptual correlation to something.

Anyway, ever onward...to me, the concept is primary to the hypothesis, but I don't see a difference in kind between the notions of 'concept' and 'paradigm'. We are essentially repeating the argument of the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics.

The paradigm seems a function of metaphysics to me, and the hypothesis one of epistemology. It seems, though, that this is the reverse of how you paired them...does that seem right to you as well?

Concept and paradigm are the same in that post. You're not misreading.

I would disagree that metaphysics has any bearing at all on epistemology. Speaking of astrophysics, a professor said to my better half, we know that dark matter and dark energy exist and are important, but they have no bearing on what we already know. I think it's an apt analogy. It doesn't matter if we live in a strictly material universe or a universe created and promptly abandoned by a diety. It will be perceived identically from our end, and any philosophy independent of perception is fiction with big words. Until we devise some sort of litmus test for divine interaction, we can't really talk about divine interaction except in baseless speculation. Same thing goes for a world lacking a divinity. We really have no authority on which to speak of the presence or absence of a diety at all, except that, if said diety exists, he/she/it/they either leaves reality alone or behaves in an impersonal, mechanical way in manipulating reality. So, in short, it might be important, but it has no bearing on what we already know. We can figure that out later.

I still object to your definitions of truth and reality. Reality is that which has being independent of perception. Truth is proper comprehension of reality. You assigned understanding to reality. That's problematic. If reality is defined as sempiternal omniscience, you're screwed, because you aren't real unless there's an omniscient diety who exists inside time.

In regards to your last point, I don't think it would be entirely wrong to think of paradigms as analogous to metaphysics, but it's still a step removed. Paradigms would be framed by metaphysics, should one insist on having it established a priori. For example, science works on a hodgepodge metaphysics of strict materialism. Any paradigm that suggests otherwise is going to have a substantial burden of proof.