[FRIAM] Joe Rogan interviewing Bernie Sanders.
Russell Standish
lists at hpcoders.com.au
Fri Jun 27 02:19:54 EDT 2025
On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 07:31:53AM +0200, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>
> Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If we’re all chipping in tax money for
> public education, then yes — I’m 100% on board with keeping religion out of
> public schools. That’s not only a fair deal, I would be horrified if any
> religion were included.
>
I have a dissenting opinion on this. I believe all students should
learn about all the major religions, including having a passing
knowledge of the contents of the Bible, the Koran, and a notion of the
special traditions etc of each one - eg the importance of confession
to Catholics, the importance of Shabat to Jews and Muslims, etc. In
todays world, you come across all these sorts of people, and having an
understanding of where they come from helps a lot.
After all, the Bible is probably the most important work of fiction in
the English language, followed closely by the complete works of
Shakespeare.
When my son went to school here in Australia, there was a smorgasbord
of about 3-4 varieties of Christianity and Judaism (no Islam, from
what I recall), and Non-religion, where you just got to read books in
the library. We sent him to the latter of course, but if there'd been
a proper comparitive religion course, that would have been my choice.
> But if my neighbour is still paying her taxes like the rest of us, and on top
> of that has to fork out again to send her kids to a private Christian school —
> that's also just not right. A voucher system, to me, seems like a fair
> compromise. It respects both freedom of choice and fairness of contribution.
> Maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it does stop us from double-charging
> parents for believing something different.
>
> For me, diversity of opinions and freedom to choose your religion is a very
> good and positive thing.
>
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2025 at 02:33, Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jun 27, 2025, at 7:31, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> Dave writes:
>
> < My 'mysticism', like my hallucinogenic experience, is nothing more
> than a source of what I consider to be "real" data and a supply of
> fascinating questions—never answers. >
>
> Not clear why something that supposedly cannot be captured by mere
> language keeps getting pitched as a real and intersubjective thing via
> language.
>
>
> I am much less bothered by this _in principle_, since I generally hold the
> two premises:
>
> 1. Language is a collection of signals _within_ a system, that are part of
> coordinating states among people; it doesn’t follow that language should
> “contain” or “capture” anything that works as a model “of” the system, in
> the way I would want formalism to have a mappability to phenomena in
> anything I consider science. Often language-in-general will have some
> mutual information with something closer to a model, but that is partly
> luck and not uniform. Languages that do have those mappable qualities tend
> to be more bespoke, because they were under heavy pressure to do that job,
> which is somewhat different from the background social/material criteria
> for the great majority of language (though scientific language and sense
> can both, I would argue, be seen to grow out of their counterparts that
> have some presence in the broader bulk of language and commonsense); and
>
> 2. The term “reality” is a problem in general. It is still too close to
> its origins in the hand-me-down umbrella term from common usage, which gets
> it accepted and used with a fluency that belies its evasive and indefinite
> character. I would put it, in most instances of usage, in the category I
> call “placeholder terms”. They enable the rest of discourse to proceed,
> because something is needed in those slots, but that doesn’t mean they
> necessarily carry very good meanings on their own. To the extent that
> “reality” has a central tendency of meaning, it seems (to me) to be around
> the notion of “since we are always trying to economize on attention, which
> things are safest to turn your back on, in the expectation that they will
> still be there and not bite you in the meantime?”
>
> So for a language-term to be suggesting that it is trying to coordinate a
> state, with some somewhat reflexive situation-statement acknowleding that
> it does not have a model of the state, together with the state itself’s
> being so loosely handled that it is not clear when the people really are
> coordinated or how they would decide on that, I can certainly see this kind
> of pattern as an ordinary occurrence. Even if some intersubjectivity would
> be reasonable to expect, in view of our vast overlapping constitution
> shared by all being people, primates, mammals, and so on.
>
> I do like the idea that this is just a version of the normal confusion, for
> things not understood very well (like, quite badly), and that one could
> find ways to do better.
>
> Eric
>
>
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