Do you understand this to mean that the Buddha told them to maintain the stance "I have no personal identity"?
Do you understand what the buddha meant? Please claim
something so i can make my point from pages back about it being an ideal to claim
something. i can assume from my limited understanding that the buddha was saying, "it is harder for a man with egoic baggage to get into heaven, than for a camel to go through a very small gate." Why is most everything you posit the extreme of any idea? Like it can't be, "get rid of attachment as is humanly possible for you in this lifetime", it has to be "have no personal identity". I actually do think we will go through a phase where we will quite possibly not get to keep even .01 % of our identity, but it won't likely be before dying.
Read again: I didn't suggest that you were talking about having to believe in God. I took issue with the idea of having to believe. Which was, apparently, your focus to begin with:
No, i am saying that what i can't believe is that God would be so totally insane as to intervene somehow in this material realm only to tell us the opposite of what is true. If i did, i could become a gnostic or kabbalist, but i don't. I can understand a lot of the message may have been lost in translation, but i don't think it makes sense to turn the whole thing upside down and say, "God sucks because he hates almost everyone, so let's worship. By the way god is love." I don't "have to" do anything other than breathe and eat etc., but i don't believe something that is evil or even half-decent, deserves to be worshipped. Feared maybe, but not worshipped. I "have to" believe what i believe until the belief changes. I don't understand where you are getting all the gritting of teeth and maintenance it takes to have a simple belief that white is white, and if the christian God is anything sensible, then it can't be something not sensible. It is actually a lot easier to believe that than in some God you "have" to call "good" when it doesn't seem good, and you don't think the word applies. I don't have to grit my teeth and try to force a cognitively dissonant idea to be used in my ideology.
That is what I find awkward.
the paragraph above is what i find NOT awkward.
It is sometimes said that a neurotic person is someone who tries to mimic the normal person, and thus develops mental and bodily behaviors that normal people don't have.
Ie. a normal person (in contradistinction with a neurotic one) would simply trust their reality, and wouldn't have to make an effort to do so.
no, a pure epistemic egoist would, not a normal, reasonable person who feels they may have something to learn. I wonder what it feels like to know you can never be wrong again? The ONLY believer i can imagine would feel that way is someone like greatestiam who can say they ARE god (and i could be wrong about even those people). Isn't there a balance between thinking for yourself, and finding people who may have some information on the subject you don't have? Sometimes you trust what someone else says, even though it seems weird, like the whole relativity thing sounds cool, but i can't say i can look at the math and accept it, that it is all just as easy to believe as the roof will stay up. So sometimes you have to trust people and sometimes you don't. In certain areas i will say "most of the time I don't". Other areas I would say "most of the time i do". It really doesn't seem that complicated to me.
Arguably, a Christian has to go through a considerable philosophical ordeal and a tour of will in order to perceive their God as good; A Christian's God's goodness seems first and foremost a construct, and one that takes a lot to maintain. (Which could be a reason why there are so many Christian denominations and so many Christian books.)
no. christianity, as generally understood, is basically a religion deeply influenced by western philosophy. So martin luther didn't sit around waiting for someone to ok his ideas - he was told by his predecessors in the west (starting with plato's cave maybe) that the group is not always more correct than the individual. Were Luther's ideas "divine inspiration, irrefutable words from God," or were they just something that made more sense than some other interpretation? I mean someone saying, "the pope isn't always right," doesn't have to be taking every bowel movement for God when he says it, for it to be the truth.
I find that in some schools of Hinduism, for example, they don't have this problem: all apparent evil of the world is explained away with karma and reincarnation; and God, even though He is the one making this horrible world ruled by karma and reincarnation possible, is good anyway, because this world is not the alpha and omega of existence, instead, it is only a virtual reality in which living entities are allowed to play out their desire for enjoyment that would be independent from God.
that's great, i just don't happen to believe in it because it doesn't make sense to me that we shouldn't respect our feelings and ideas, and instead look at it all as "false". This is real. It may not be everything that is real, or even the most important thing that is real, but it deserves some respect and honor anyway.
i was asking you to show me i am wrong about using reincarnation as "past and future", instead of "past and biological lives". I really don't claim to be an expert on buddhism, but it seems like a useful interpretation, even if it is only a metaphor. That link you posted doesn't do it for me without a better explanation.
"If the problem with trust is that it leaves us epistemically insecure, given that many people are untrustworthy, why should I be any more secure if I rely upon myself? I do not have evidence that I am more trustworthy than all other people. For one thing, *it is impossible for me to obtain evidence of my trustworthiness as a whole since I have to use my faculties and previous beliefs in order to gather and evaluate the evidence, so it is in principle impossible for me to have evidence that as a whole I am more trustworthy than all other people. By relying upon my powers, I do have evidence that many other people are untrustworthy, but why should that lead me to fall back on my own powers? Using those same powers, I also have evidence that I am sometimes untrustworthy, and I have evidence that in some domains some other people are more trustworthy than I am."
i don't care about that, because i already know you can't go around arguing with the judge about the law, or with the structural engineer about the posts that hold your house onto the hill. Or with the astronomer about which stars are more than x million light years away, or with someone who says, "i feel x, don't tell me what i feel".
Nevertheless, epistemic autonomy is, on principle, a much desired state, as evidenced by bits of popular wisdom such as "Don't let anyone tell you what to do," "Be yourself," "Be your own person," "Find out the truth for yourself," etc.But actually working out the details of this autonomy - what it would consist of - is another matter.
like i said earlier in this post, it doesn't seem that complicated to me.
I think Descartes is an extremely poor example. Note that all along, he had full conviction in the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
He did not arrive at this conviction by following the steps he worked out in his philosophy! so you are
Relying on Descartes (and, arguably, most theologians of most religions) is backwards.
Descartes started with the idea that a demon was tricking him, so he can't start with "god is true", or any other catholic idea, otherwise his "proofs" would be invalidated.
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/descartes/section2.rhtml
Most of meditation II is devoted to discovering whether there is anything about which Descartes can be absolutely certain. First he decides he can be certain that he exists, because if he doubts, there must be a thinking mind to do the doubting. He does not yet accept that he is a thinking mind inside a body. After all, the demon could have convinced him that his body and the physical world exist. He moves to another question: what is the �I� that is doing the thinking?
i am not relying on descartes philosophy anyway, i am just saying that he understood epistemic independence and epistemic interdependence are good to use together, not to pick one or the other as a pure position. First you accept that you are thinking, that you can't but do otherwise and nobody else is going to do it for you, then you accept that you may not think everything correctly, then you try to make sense of what you think along with what other people may think. It isn't that difficult.
And it's not clear what a "reasonable epistemic position" would be.
yes it is.
This can be well seen in the phenomenon of
psychological reactance: It occurs in a person who feels reluctant or refuses to do something, even if it is something they desire to do, if the same thing is advised to them by another person; this is because they default to thinking that they would do it because the other person suggested it, which they would experience as a lessening of their personal freedom.
unintelligent to act that way. If someone says, "do this" and doesn't provide a way for you to do that, perhaps you just can't do it, but if you can do it and want to do it, and you are just too unintelligent to realize you can kill two birds with one stone that is too bad. I think this has more to do with manipulative communication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication than anything else. People want to teach the other person that they can't be told what to do, and since they can't communicate well, they do it by hurting themselves, instead of just saying, "i'm not doing this because you told me to, i wanted to anyway."
Another example is the way people sometimes evaluate principles depending on who mentions them - as if a principle is only as good as the person who suggests it. For example, a smoker who is reluctant to seriously consider the advice to stop smoking, if they are advised so by a doctor who himself smokes.
this is a perfect example of someone who doesn't understand what a doctor is. the doctor is not a role model, but rather an information and healthcare provider. Assuming the doctor is not lying about the dangers of smoking, the only reasonable idea is that doctors also do stupid crap. Since it has been shown historically that people of all professions do stupid crap (even presidents,kings, and religious leaders), it is quite reasonable to infer that this doctor is telling the truth since it is his job to do so about your treatment, and that the doctor just doesn't care or is terribly addicted to smoking.
Again, it's not clear what a reasonable epistemic position would be.
Obviously, it is inevitable that we learn and take from others. But it's not clear what role the self vs. other dichotomy plays in all this, or how to helpfully conceive of it.
it is to me. Run everything through the only filter i have. Things that pass through with no indicators don't need to be studied further. Things that pass through and set off the "that is cool" light, should get more attention when possible. Things that set off the "that is wrong" light need to be studied to find out why, perhaps i am wrong, perhaps they are wrong. They can't think my thoughts for me though. What is so difficult about trusting yourself enough to know what you need to do? I am not even saying it is easy
doing it, but
knowing it shouldn't be that hard. And sometimes you know that you don't know and maybe nobody knows. Sometimes you can even know that what you are thinking is incorrect, not because someone is saying something else, but just because lack of sleep has pushed you into a temporary negative place or whatever.
But ok, if you're slightly autistic and lack the common knowledge about the world you can still be extrememly mathematically gifted, if that's what you meant, or variations on the theme. 
