RE: A "meta-argument" against all future arguments for God's existence ?
March 3, 2022 at 5:56 am
(March 3, 2022 at 5:29 am)Belacqua Wrote: [...]
None of the Christians I know worry about theology at all. It's about behavior and group identity, being moral, etc. So I feel a little rude trying to pin them down on a definition of the soul. I suspect your dad is in the majority here, and I can respect that.
He's correct, I think, to distinguish spirit, soul, consciousness, and other things, as different. We fuzzy up our thinking if we start to say they're just all the same thing. Why use two different words if soul and consciousness are the same thing?
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Just to say, when I was a Christian, I equated the soul with consciousness I think, just because I didn't have any clear conception of it. So I always kind of assumed my dad thought similar, but he repeatedly corrects me that he doesn't see it as consciousness per se.
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(I joke that the form/matter distinction is most useful these days as a formula for making modern art. Choose the least appropriate material for a certain form -- say, a hacksaw made of glass or a bed made of ground beef -- and you'll be guaranteed a spot in your local art exhibition.)
Anyway, just out of curiosity, what do you think of modern art? I realised when I was talking about it before... about agreeing with you guys in principle... I realised that to the extent that I like it or try to create it, it's kind of reductionistic and symbolic... ie I like the concept of it as a useful way of representing information/ideas by visual analogy as it were. But that's very different from what I think of as modern art. So this is me being a Philistine again I guess, unless that is doing that but at a much more subtle level. I guess to me there's skillful art and there's symbolic/meaningful art, but I'm not really sure where a lot of modern art fits into that, but granted I haven't shown much interest in it.
