BrianBlackwell wrote: ↑Tue May 23, 2017 8:17 pmI have my spiritual beliefs, but I know that I do not know them to be true with objective certainty, so how could I assert them to another, no less kill them over it?
You kill over them every day when you put meat on your plate and justify that with your subjective beliefs.
This also applies to twisting my statement about "not killing another" over my subjective beliefs. This implies murder, not killing for food, and it implies people, not animals. Within the context of the statement, you know this, and you're just breaking balls by pivoting to a cheap shot.
You made an appeal to a harmonious peacefulness that exists when two people acknowledge that they're operating on the level of ideology and shouldn't kill one another over it. It is not a twisting of your words to explain how that isn't satisfactory when one party is still engaged in killing. I would add it's killing for taste not food, as food is plentiful, and drawing an arbitrary distinction between species when both have the capacity to suffer, and both are unnecessary.
You could get yourself to start relating to pigs or chickens the same way you do to dogs just by spending enough time around them, there is bad faith involved when you block that out of your mind, and refuse to care about it on the level you would treat another dog or human of the same intelligence or sentience.
the man is more intelligent, eloquent, curious, respectable, passionate . . .I think it would be hard to get a foothold for debunking him.
So unfalsifiable... That's a problem. We should at the very least be able to determine whether the actions it affected in it's subscribers to take were good effective ones. Look I fully understand what you're saying with this humans operate on a base subjectivist level with an absurdly chaotic relative universe, we all do. There are existentialists who say the person who channels their inner beast and wills it to power will out compete the rest and that will be the dominant ideology of the day, so to only eat plants is a cop out and you're only hurting yourself and no hope of changing the world, yada yada, it's all macho crap to me, people should be able to decide whatever community they want to live in and find joy in it, and their behavior will be shaped by what actions they take to facilitate that coming about. Then there are liberationist existentialists, no gods no masters mentality, where you take all the universal principles of loving your neighbor not just how you would want to be treated but how they would too (radical ay?), all practical provisions aside, and you subscribe to those objectives together, you just say on a tiny scale we might have this rhyzomatic, informal decentralized knowing what is best for one another thing worked out, we'll come up with an experimental ethics on top of the basics, and we'll all have a pow wow every month and ask each other how it's going, what we might need from each other, and thus spoke Zarathustra, or was it the Quakers, no maybe the Paris commune. There you go was that McKenna speak enough for you? Aha, universal ethics are simply universal standards people collectively agree to sign up to bring about good consequences. I hope you'll get your head out your solipsist ass (no offense!) and start participating. To the degree that it's not practical to act as if the world is always going to end tomorrow, and we're interacting with objective facts, we can come to an objective consensus about what is mathematically the best means of achieving good ends for everyone.