In response to Francis Berger's comment on Word Spells in Christian theology
If someone becomes convinced by the usual-mainstream-modern assumption that truth is objectively located in the external world ("truth is out-there"), and our job is just to perceive and recognize this external truth...
Then such a person never has to convince himself of truth.
He feels more confident of some proposition only secondarily, not inwardly; e.g. by re-reading and reciting it, by propagating and defending it in public discourse.
This way of thinking may explain how arguments that cannot really convince, become perpetuated over centuries.
It happens because, when truth is out-there, reasoning does not even need to convince.
Indeed, nobody ever needs personally to be convinced!
So we get a world (and this is our actual world, and the world of historical past) where everybody claims/ argues and acts-like they believe some-thing... some-thing that - inwardly - literally nobody believes!
4 comments:
There does seem to be a strong psychological reward for convincing others with word spells, (nice phrasing) even if the spells are borrowed from another. This reward reinforces the confidence in spells, right up until it doesn't and one starts to feel that there's nothing eternal or nothing worth being eternal in the spell. Then it's time to seek out distractions so that you don't have to think about the why, and can go on enjoying the rewards of being convincing.
-Lucas
@Luke - I was pretty adept at word wizardry in my early adult life (I published quite a lot of journalism, and did some punditry on radio and tv). But at some point, very belatedly, I realized that persuading other people of this or that surely wasn't the point of life. When I eventually asked myself what I really believed, what I would stake my life on (as it were) - what I really considered to be true - then I got some very different answers.
Correspondingly, I've noticed a strong propensity among certain men to a reliance on (oft external) authority.
Members of certain denominations (like Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholicism) enthusiastically embrace the idea that someone else is exerting authority for them. It's not that the denominational Word Spells have convinced them, rather, it is that they want to believe them and perpetuate those Spells. In fact, it is considered highly disordered (i.e. "Protestant") to decide for yourself: to be internally convinced.
This isn't to say that Protestants don't have their own Word Spells, for they obviously do. Even among Protestants you have a strong desire towards blind and thoughtless faith. The explicitly acknowledged mystery of the Trinity is one such example.
It is exceedingly rare to find men who engage in public discourse for the purpose of convincing themselves rather than others. But it is easy to distinguish who these men are because they don't engage in activism.
IMO, Word Spells and activism are the same coin.
@Derek - I agree with your first point.
But I think analogous Word Spelling is also be seen among Protestants - to the same degree but with different objects.
Especially, with respect to how to read the Bible, and the nature of its authority (i.e. how the Bible - as a whole, and in its parts, must be "used"). And the basic idea that the Bible should be the supreme and final (and, often, complete) Christian authority is a common Word Spell.
In other words, my point includes all the denominations and churches, including the CJCLDS - but each has its distinctive Achilles heels.
At the deepest level, this issue relates to the business raised by Alasdair MacIntyre in his trio of books: After Virtue; Whose Justice, Which Rationality; and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry - the matter of if/how it is possible to have a *rational* public consensus. (His conclusion is that we "ought to" choose the most comprehensive and coherent description = Thomism... Although Mac himself didn't actually adhere to this in later writings!)
But the matter goes beyond MacIntyre's focus on morality and rationality - because it rests on metaphysics - our ultimate understanding of the nature of reality.
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