The real face of relativism

quatona said:

Sure a subjectivist can pass judgement - knowing fully well that all judgements are subjective.

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Sure he can pass judgement. You do it all the time here.

What you can't furnish us with is any justification as to why we should entertain your judgement over the next man's opinion. They are all just opinions.

I believe morals are relative to interests. As the interests of different subjects (people, and groups, conscious animals etc) differ then ethics differ. That is because ethics are (hopefully) practices designed to serve the interests of the subject (their good). So what is good for me may not be what is good for the turkey. And what is good for the tiger may not be good for me. I think that the idea that only humans are morally relevant is itself a glimpse at moral bias aimed at serving human interests. Whose interests should we serve? I think we ought to learn the craft at home (oneself) before trying to serve other groups because one is priimarily responsible over ones own life - thats just the way things are wired. But by analogy we ought to like for others what we like for ourselves in terms of freedom from harm etc, because we are acting on the principle (rather than individual case) that these things are bad. As you can see I am particularist (it may be my interest to drink tea and yours to drive home, mine to get up and yours to sleep), as well as a more vague generalist (avoid harm)...but common denominators are fewer than individual needs.

GrowingSmaller said:

I believe morals are relative to interests. As the interests of different subjects (people, and groups, conscious animals etc) differ then ethics differ. That is because ethics are practiced designed to serve the interests of the subject (their good). So what is good for me may not be what is good for the turkey. And what is good for the tiger may not be good for me.

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But you are not a tiger or a turkey. You are a human being.

Nor do you believe that morals are merely "relative to the interests" of people.

Elioenai26, are you going to address my questions or not? How prevalent was the belief in a flat earth and for how many centuries was it popular among educated men and women?

Archaeopteryx said:

Elioenai26, are you going to address my questions or not? How prevalent was the belief in a flat earth and for how many centuries was it popular among educated men and women?

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No sir. I am not going to waste my time chasing red herrings, fighting straw men, and chasing rabbits down holes that lead to nowhere. I am not interested in participating in excercises of futility. You can argue with yourself about it all you want. I will not be indulging you.

Elioenai26 said:

No sir. I am not going to waste my time chasing red herrings, fighting straw men, and chasing rabbits down holes that lead to nowhere. I am not interested in participating in excercises of futility. You can argue with yourself about it all you want. I will not be indulging you.

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You are the one who brought up the flat earth in support of your argument, so if it is a red herring and a strawman then you are the one who introduced it. Is it to much to ask you to defend your own claims?

Archaeopteryx said:

You are the one who brought up the flat earth in support of your argument, so if it is a red herring and a strawman then you are the one who introduced it. Is it to much to ask you to defend your own claims?

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If one person held to a flat earth view of the world, the point is still made. They were wrong. Their relative, subjective view was wrong and had to be relinquished in the face of the objective reality and truth that the earth was spherical.

Elioenai26 said:

If one person held to a flat earth view of the world, the point is still made. They were wrong. Their relative, subjective view was wrong and had to be relinquished in the face of the objective reality and truth that the earth was spherical.

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But your point wasn't that one person held to a flat earth, your point was that this was a prevailing belief among scholars for centuries. Perhaps your point was wrong?

Archaeopteryx said:

But your point wasn't that one person held to a flat earth, your point was that this was a prevailing belief among scholars for centuries. Perhaps your point was wrong?

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If you are going to summarize my position, then quote me properly.

This is what I said:

"Before the advances in human knowledge made it possible for us to know the true nature of the world on which we live and move, many intelligent men and women held to a view that the earth was flat. In fact, this was the popular view held for many centuries. These people were educated for their time, had access to the latest information and technology and sincerely felt that their view that the earth was flat was true."

This is a true statement for several reasons:

1. The Flat Earth model is an archaic belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies...

2. The paradigm of a spherical Earth was developed in Greek astronomy, beginning with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model.

3. Historical development
Ancient Near East

Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BC Babylonia.


In early Egyptian[11] and Mesopotamian thought the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account of the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."[12]

The Hebrew Bible used poetic language consistent with that of the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology, such as in the Enuma Elish, which described a circular earth with a solid roof, surrounded by water above and below,[13][14] as illustrated by references to the "foundations of the earth" and the "circle of the earth" in the following examples:

• "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in."[15]
• "For the foundations of the earth are the LORD's; upon them he has set the world."[16]
• "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."[17]

In the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts it is revealed the ancient Egyptians believed Nun (the Ocean) was a circular body surrounding nbwt (a term meaning "dry lands" or "Islands") and therefore believed in a similar Ancient Near Eastern circular earth cosmography surrounded by water.[18][19][20]
Classical world

Poets

Both Homer[21] and Hesiod[22] described a flat disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles.[23][24] This poetic tradition of an earth-encircling (gaiaokhos) sea (Oceanus) and a flat disc also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus,[25] Mimnermus,[26] Aristophanes,[27] and Apollonius Rhodius.[28]
Homer's description of the flat disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles with the encircling ocean is also found repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica (4th century AD) which continues the narration of the Trojan War.[29]
Philosophers

Possible rendering of Anaximander's world map[30]


Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed the world to be flat: Thales (c. 550 BC) according to several sources,[31] and Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) according to Aristotle.[32][33][34]
Thales thought the flat earth floated in water like a log.[35] Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it is the same distance from all things.[36][37] Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the earth is flat and rides on air; in the same way the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness."[38] Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC) thought that the Earth was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.[39]
Belief in a flat Earth continued into the 5th-century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was flat,[40] and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.[41]

Historians

Hecataeus of Miletus believed the earth was flat and surrounded by water.[42] Herodotus in his Histories ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world,[43] yet most classicists agree he still believed the earth to be flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of the earth.[44]
Ancient India

Further information: Indian astronomy
In antiquity, a cosmological view prevailed in India that held the Earth is a disc that consists of four continents grouped around the central mountain Meru like the petals of a flower. An outer ocean surrounds these continents.[45] This view was elaborated in traditional Jain cosmology and Buddhist cosmology, which depicts the cosmos as a vast, flat oceanic disk (of the magnitude of a small planetary system), bounded by mountains, in which the continents are set as small islands.[45] The belief in a disk remained the dominant one in Indian cosmology until the early centuries AD, such as in the Puranas:
Norse and Germanic

The ancient Norse and Germanic peoples believed in a flat earth cosmography of the earth surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi (a world-tree: Yggdrasil, or pillar: Irminsul) in the centre.[46][47] The Norse believed that in the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr.[48] In the Norse creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) it is stated that during the creation of the earth, an impassable sea was placed around the earth like a ring:
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All of the above is courtesy of wikipedia Archaeopteryx and you even used a portion of it to try and refute my assertion. Why would you do that? Why waste such time effort and energy on this? What do you gain by pursuing this red herring ?

The flat earth concept was held by people for thousands of years. People still hold to it today. So what exactly is your point?

Archaeopteryx said:

But your point wasn't that one person held to a flat earth, your point was that this was a prevailing belief among scholars for centuries. Perhaps your point was wrong?

Click to expand...

If you are going to summarize my position, then quote me properly.

This is what I said:

"Before the advances in human knowledge made it possible for us to know the true nature of the world on which we live and move, many intelligent men and women held to a view that the earth was flat. In fact, this was the popular view held for many centuries. These people were educated for their time, had access to the latest information and technology and sincerely felt that their view that the earth was flat was true."

This is a true statement for several reasons:

1. The Flat Earth model is an archaic belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies...

2. The paradigm of a spherical Earth was developed in Greek astronomy, beginning with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model.

3. Historical development
Ancient Near East

Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BC Babylonia.


In early Egyptian[11] and Mesopotamian thought the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account of the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."[12]


The Hebrew Bible used poetic language consistent with that of the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology, such as in the Enuma Elish, which described a circular earth with a solid roof, surrounded by water above and below,[13][14] as illustrated by references to the "foundations of the earth" and the "circle of the earth" in the following examples:

• "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in."[15]
• "For the foundations of the earth are the LORD's; upon them he has set the world."[16]
• "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."[17]

In the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts it is revealed the ancient Egyptians believed Nun (the Ocean) was a circular body surrounding nbwt (a term meaning "dry lands" or "Islands") and therefore believed in a similar Ancient Near Eastern circular earth cosmography surrounded by water.[18][19][20]
Classical world

Poets

Both Homer[21] and Hesiod[22] described a flat disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles.[23][24] This poetic tradition of an earth-encircling (gaiaokhos) sea (Oceanus) and a flat disc also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus,[25] Mimnermus,[26] Aristophanes,[27] and Apollonius Rhodius.[28]
Homer's description of the flat disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles with the encircling ocean is also found repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica (4th century AD) which continues the narration of the Trojan War.[29]
Philosophers

Possible rendering of Anaximander's world map[30]


Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed the world to be flat: Thales (c. 550 BC) according to several sources,[31] and Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) according to Aristotle.[32][33][34]
Thales thought the flat earth floated in water like a log.[35] Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it is the same distance from all things.[36][37] Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the earth is flat and rides on air; in the same way the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness."[38] Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC) thought that the Earth was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.[39]
Belief in a flat Earth continued into the 5th-century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was flat,[40] and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.[41]

Historians

Hecataeus of Miletus believed the earth was flat and surrounded by water.[42] Herodotus in his Histories ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world,[43] yet most classicists agree he still believed the earth to be flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of the earth.[44]
Ancient India

Further information: Indian astronomy
In antiquity, a cosmological view prevailed in India that held the Earth is a disc that consists of four continents grouped around the central mountain Meru like the petals of a flower. An outer ocean surrounds these continents.[45] This view was elaborated in traditional Jain cosmology and Buddhist cosmology, which depicts the cosmos as a vast, flat oceanic disk (of the magnitude of a small planetary system), bounded by mountains, in which the continents are set as small islands.[45] The belief in a disk remained the dominant one in Indian cosmology until the early centuries AD, such as in the Puranas:
Norse and Germanic

The ancient Norse and Germanic peoples believed in a flat earth cosmography of the earth surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi (a world-tree: Yggdrasil, or pillar: Irminsul) in the centre.[46][47] The Norse believed that in the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr.[48] In the Norse creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) it is stated that during the creation of the earth, an impassable sea was placed around the earth like a ring:

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All of the above is courtesy of wikipedia Archaeopteryx and you even used a portion of it to try and refute my assertion. Why would you do that? Why waste such time effort and energy on this? What do you gain by pursuing this red herring ?

The flat earth concept was held by people for thousands of years. People still hold to it today. So what exactly is your point?

Elioenai26 said:

If you are going to summarize my position, then quote me properly.

This is what I said:

"Before the advances in human knowledge made it possible for us to know the true nature of the world on which we live and move, many intelligent men and women held to a view that the earth was flat. In fact, this was the popular view held for many centuries. These people were educated for their time, had access to the latest information and technology and sincerely felt that their view that the earth was flat was true."

This is a true statement for several reasons:

1. The Flat Earth model is an archaic belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies...

2. The paradigm of a spherical Earth was developed in Greek astronomy, beginning with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model.

3. Historical development
Ancient Near East

Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BC Babylonia.


In early Egyptian[11] and Mesopotamian thought the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account of the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."[12]

The Hebrew Bible used poetic language consistent with that of the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology, such as in the Enuma Elish, which described a circular earth with a solid roof, surrounded by water above and below,[13][14] as illustrated by references to the "foundations of the earth" and the "circle of the earth" in the following examples:

• "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in."[15]
• "For the foundations of the earth are the LORD's; upon them he has set the world."[16]
• "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."[17]

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• 
  
  Progress, finally! So the authors of the Bible apparently believed that the Earth was flat. How do you reconcile this with your claim that the Bible is a historically accurate text? It certainly was not cosmologically accurate, by your own admission.
  
  Earlier you used the flat earth as an example for why "Sincerity can never be the measure for truth." That applies to the authors of Scripture as well.

Archaeopteryx said:

Progress, finally! So the authors of the Bible apparently believed that the Earth was flat. How do you reconcile this with your claim that the Bible is a historically accurate text? It certainly was not cosmologically accurate, by your own admission.

Earlier you used the flat earth as an example for why "Sincerity can never be the measure for truth." That applies to the authors of Scripture as well.

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I already know where you are going and I wish to spare you the embarrassment.

If you wish to make a case that the biblical authors made statements of a scientific nature and import regarding the physical structure and shape of the earth which were later shown to be false, then by all means, do so.

It will be a waste of time and effort for you though. But by all means proceed. I shall have a rebuttal waiting.

Elioenai26 said:

I already know where you are going and I wish to spare you the embarrassment.

If you wish to make a case that the biblical authors made statements of a scientific nature and import regarding the physical structure and shape of the earth which were later shown to be false, then by all means, do so.

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I don't wish to make the case at all, you have already made it for me:

It will be a waste of time and effort for you though. But by all means proceed. I shall have a rebuttal waiting.

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You intend to rebut yourself?

Elioenai26 said:

But you are not a tiger or a turkey. You are a human being.

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yes we know that.

Nor do you believe that morals are merely "relative to the interests" of people.

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How is that? Morality promotes the "good life" and the good life is what is in the interests of the subject, or subject population.

Elioenai26 said:

If you wish to make a case that the biblical authors made statements of a scientific nature and import regarding the physical structure and shape of the earth which were later shown to be false, then by all means, do so.

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The evidence you presented demonstrates that the flat earth was the 'cosmology' that was prevalent throughout the Ancient Near Eastern cultures, including the ancient Hebrews. The OT references are entirely consistent with that cosmology. There is zero evidence for any alternative cosmology.

It is entirely reasonable to conclude that all the educated people in the OT, just like all the educated people throughout the ANE, were flat earthers.

Now, as is obvious, the Bible is not a scientific text, so the Biblical authors did not exactly make any 'statements of a scientific nature'. But they did write in a manner that took a flat earth for granted.

Greek thought eventually displaced the flat earth, but the flat earth cosmology lasted (as a minority position no doubt) among scholars at least as late as Cosmas Indicopleustes' Christian Topography of the 6th century.

Elioenai26 said:

I don't have to demonstrate to you or anyone else here that moral absolutes exist,

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You do not have to, but it will be seen as a retraction of your claim.

Elioenai26 said:

we all affirm they exist everyday.

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No, "we" do not. Watch the news recently?

Support your claim, or retract.

Elioenai26 said:

You must enjoy my "preaching" as you label it.

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It would appear to be a more appropriate label than 'learning" or "discussing".

Elioenai26 said:

You out of all the people in this forum engage me and interact with me the most.

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I am here to learn, and I find it interesting, as a n00b at all of this, to make points and ask questions, particularly of theists that, on the surface, appear so confident in their beliefs, of a nature that they evade and even delete sections from my posts in their response, as you just did in your response.

Seeing that you have abandoned those threads that you started, what brings you back here?

Archaeopteryx said:

I don't wish to make the case at all, you have already made it for me:


You intend to rebut yourself?

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I will wait for you to explain to me how I made a case for the assertion that:

"the biblical authors made statements of a scientific nature and import regarding the physical structure and shape of the earth which were later shown to be false."

from my post which you quoted.

And I too shall have a rebuttal for this also. I do not think it will be necessary however, because the post I wrote which you quoted has no bearing whatsoever with the statement I made about the writings of biblical authors regarding the structure of the earth.

I will be waiting.

GrowingSmaller said:

How is that? Morality promotes the "good life" and the good life is what is in the interests of the subject, or subject population.

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Morality promotes nothing. Morality is not a person, but a concept that exists in the minds of persons. People promote the "good life", whatever you may mean by that, it is quite ambiguous at best.

Since you seem to be balking at my assertions and position that there are moral absolutes, then tell me, the Sandy Hook massacre.... what was it?

We're talking about moral absolutes are we Elioenai?

Elioenai: Is torture wrong?

essentialsaltes said:

The evidence you presented demonstrates that the flat earth was the 'cosmology' that was prevalent throughout the Ancient Near Eastern cultures, including the ancient Hebrews.

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What evidence? I have presented no such evidence which demonstrates that the Hebrews believed the earth was flat.

essentialsaltes said:

The OT references are entirely consistent with that cosmology. There is zero evidence for any alternative cosmology.

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What OT references? I am not aware of any that are consistent with a flat earth cosmology.

essentialsaltes said:

It is entirely reasonable to conclude that all the educated people in the OT, just like all the educated people throughout the ANE, were flat earthers.

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Since the above statement is based on unsubstantiated assertions, it is entirely unreasonable to conclude that all educated people in the OT were flat earthers.

essentialsaltes said:

But they did write in a manner that took a flat earth for granted.

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Waiting for you to substantiate this assertion.

essentialsaltes said:

Greek thought eventually displaced the flat earth, but the flat earth cosmology lasted (as a minority position no doubt) among scholars at least as late as Cosmas Indicopleustes' Christian Topography of the 6th century.

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Christian topography of the 6th century??? This would be laughable if it were not so elementary in nature, and so clearly non-correspondant to the facts. Not only this essentialsaltes, but it is a complete misrepresentation of Christian topography. I do not know if you gleaned your information from a website via copying and pasting it or whether you compiled it from sundry anti-christian sources, but the truth of the matter is that it is a deliberate, deceptive, and dare I say perverted misconstrual of the facts. Why would you even insinuate that Cosmas Idicopleustes' works were representative of Christianity? It is a lie, at best sir.

For those who are interested in the truth, the following taken from wikipedia should dispel and relegate such tripe and drivel to the wastebin where it belongs:

"A major feature of his Topographia is Cosmas' worldview that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid. He was scornfull of Ptolemy and others who held that the world was spherical. Cosmas aimed to prove that pre-Christian geographers had been wrong in asserting that the earth was spherical and that it was in fact modelled on the tabernacle, the house of worship described to Moses by God during the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. However, his idea that the earth is flat has been a small minority view in educated Western opinion since the 3rd century BC.[7] Cosmas's view has never been influential even in religious circles; a near-contemporary Christian, John Philoponus, disagreed with him as did most Christian philosophers of the era.[2]
David C. Lindberg asserts:

"Cosmas was not particularly influential in Byzantium, but he is important for us because he has been commonly used to buttress the claim that all (or most) medieval people believed they lived on a flat earth. This claim...is totally false. Cosmas is, in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology, whereas it is safe to assume that all educated Western Europeans (and almost one hundred percent of educated Byzantines), as well as sailors and travelers, believed in the earth's sphericity.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, bold mine*