Exploring the colossal

            K2 or Chogori: Second highest mountain in the world.

Some humans are not satisfied only by contemplating a mountain view; they must also climb the mountain. Some of those are not satisfied only by climbing the mountain; they must –step by step– reach the summit of the mountain.

Each person has preferred levels of satisfaction in relation to the mountain.

Likewise, in relation to my own ignorance, I am not satisfied only by a general awareness of the colossal magnitude of my ignorance; I must also find out detailed accounts of it. Besides, as I don’t hold any hope to cover all of my ignorance, I am thrilled by the endless fun ahead exploring it, step by step.

Jesus, the so-called Christ, and mythologies

If Jesus, the so-called Christ, was a lower-class peasant Jew at ancient Palestine, then the textual traditions of the Bible come to us from Judeo-Christian cultures.

Jesus, the historical human being, most likely, was semi-illiterate: he did not know how to write. So, we actually don’t know which his ideas and actions were. His purpose, his goals, his views, his teachings, his actions, were written down by others, decades and centuries later of his time, outside ancient Palestine and by upper-class Greek-Roman authors.

And yet, the Bible and those Judeo-Christian cultures, are very important in order to better understand the mix of cultures around today.

For example, how Judeo-Christian myths work (in the anthropological sense). The tales by which there are many messianic attitudes all around today with parallels to the prophecies of the Messiah and other elements of such tales. Like the concept of gospel, and salvation, and the plot between forces of evil against god, and elements of that sort.

It is a very complex and fascinating set of topics from historical and anthropological scholarship.

Deep fake

I just read: Tech trends 2019: 'The end of truth as we know it?'.

Near the end of the first video at the ‘Fake news?’ section, it catches my attention the tense used:

«…people won’t be able to trust the truth. They won’t be able to tell what is real, what is not real…».

It seems like this is something that will occur in the future, near or otherwise, to ‘people’. As if we ‘people’ –the general public– were able to do it now.

Of course, my wonder is philosophical in kind; that is, it tries to problematize the topic, to open questions, not to close them.

The cultivation of questions about truth and reality have built colossal schools of thought about ontology (reality) and epistemology (knowing truths about reality) since millennia. So, these “news” revolve around those same old questions about truth and reality. I simply see more imminent reasons to go back to the very basics of philosophical thought in the many traditions of intellectually adult human culture.

Toward intellectual maturity

A suggestion:

At some point in your own thinking journey you may choose to scrutinize instances of actual critical thinking done by actual critical thinkers at work in a given context. Allow me, please, to suggest, as an example, the following author (among many): Theodor W. Adorno

The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction – by Bart D. Ehrman

From chapter one:

«The Bible is the most commonly purchased, widely read, and deeply cherished book in the history of Western Civilization. It is also the most widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused. These reasons alone make it worth our time to study it. We can begin by considering the importance of the Bible in greater depth.

Why Study the Bible?

People study the Bible, and should study the Bible, for lots of reasons – religious reasons, historical reasons, and literary reasons.

Religious Reasons

Most people who study the Bible do so, of course, for religious reasons. Many people revere the Bible as the word of God, and want to know what it can teach them about what to believe and how to live. In this book our study of the Bible will not be in order to promote any particular religious point of view or theology – Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran, agnostic, or anything else. We will instead be approaching the Bible from a historical and literary point of view. But even from these alternative points of view, there are solid religious reasons for studying the Bible -- even for those people who are not themselves religious or interested in becoming religious. That is because in order to understand our world – and the religious people in it – we need to have a firmer grasp on the book that stands at the heart of the Jewish and Christian religions.

Historical Reasons

Arguably the most important reason for studying the Bible – especially from a historical point of view -- is because of its importance for the history of Western Civilization. The dominant religion of Europe and the New World for the past 2000 years has been Christianity; and Christianity, as we will see, grew out of, and alongside of, Judaism. Both religions continue to assert an enormous influence on our form of culture. This is true not only on the individual level, as people are guided in their thoughts, beliefs, and actions by what they learn in these religions. It is true on the broadest imaginable historical scale. Christianity has had the single greatest impact on Western civilization of any religion, ideology, or world view, whether looked at culturally, socially, politically, or economically. There is no institution that can even come close to the organized Christian church for its wide-ranging impact on the West. And at the foundation of Christianity –at its heart, one could argue – stands the Bible. If one does not understand the Bible, one cannot fully understand the course of the history of the world we inhabit.

And more than that, there can be no doubt that the Bible has influenced, and continues to influence, millions and millions of people’s lives. It is widely known that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, without any serious competitor. What is not always appreciated is that the Bible is the best-selling book every year, year in and year out. So many copies of the Bible are sold every year that no one has been able to add them all up. One estimate from the year 2005 indicated that just in the United States, some twenty-five million copies of the Bible were sold. But what is most astounding is that the vast majority of those Bibles were sold to people who already had Bibles: over nine out of ten American households own at least one copy of the Bible, and the average household has four. As an article in the New Yorker magazine of December 18, 2006 put it, this “means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.”

Americans not only like owning and buying Bibles. They like reading them. A Gallup poll...»

This moment

This moment, the moment of being, is all there is.

Dogmatic positions

Michael Shermer vs Douglas Jacoby: A debate on evolution and God.

For me, one of the most interesting moments in this debate between Michael Shermer and Douglas Jacoby occurred at the beginning of the Q&A section, when a young gentleman from the audience asked the first question: «What sort of new evidence would it take to get you to change your mind?»

That is a question that helps us to ponder how different or how similar are the positions held by the debaters. The debaters held opposing positions, but this opposition is superficial. Actually, based on each response to the question, both of them share a dogmatic* position. Both of them could encourage the use of reason, evidence, and questioning before accepting any truth claim, yet none of them have exerted self-questioning to their own opinions.

I see very little value in such a “debate” between apparently opposing positions which are deeply similar.

* Dogmatism is the tendency to express strongly held opinions in a way that suggests they should be accepted without question; and dogma is a forcibly asserted opinion expressed as incorrigible, immutable, and unchallengeable.