Freedom for Finland

[Tony61R]

Greetings!  I have been listening to FDR for about a year daily. I learned about Stefan through his interview with the Rubin Report. Then I listened to Stefan’s podcast #3903 International Men’s Day. I thought this podcast was spot on with what is going on in society today.  I have been an avid listener since and feel and agree with him on about 90% of topics. Most importantly I like his commitment to the truth and facts. I still don’t understand how this concept is not mainstream thinking today. I grew up in the US and now live part-time in Finland.  I really enjoy introducing Stefan’s arguments to socialist Finns.  Finns are generally are mild mannered. It is fun to engage about these topics with them unlike American’s on the left who get very angry when you bring up arguments that they cannot counter effectively.  Stefan’s podcast really helps me articulate ideas that I have held for a long time but did not know how to speak about intelligently.  

Does anybody want to meet up anywhere in Helsinki? It would be great to chat with a few Nordic free thinkers every now and then. I look forward to becoming more active on this blog and learning even more about Philisophy.

[barn]

Hi @Tony61R

Welcome to the board! Good stuff!

Barnsley

[Mak1]

Hi @Tony61R

This is my first post on this forum, but I'm a long time FDR listener. I wanted to let you - and anyone else stumbling upon this post - know that I have started a meetup group in Helsinki: https://www.meetup.com/Helsinki-Freedomain-Radio-Meetup/

Join the group and let's meet up!

[MahtiSonni]

Hello, another Finn here.  I'm a nationalist and a Christian.

Listened to Stefan about 2 years, found him through Vox Day's blog.  I generally enjoy his stuff and highly admire his perception and communication skills, but have trouble trudging through his nonfiction, which has a curious tendency to start with a rant on how much he hates religion and God.

Edited September 22, 2018 by MahtiSonni
For some reason a part of the original message didn't get posted.

[Mak1]

Hi @MahtiSonni

Yeah, Stefan used to criticize religions much more in the past. If you follow reason and evidence you kind of have to. Nowadays Stefan has come to appreciate Christianity much more as have I. In the end morality is what really matters. I think it is better to derive morality rationally as Stefan has done, but if you are a moral person because of Christianity, the end result is the same.

[MahtiSonni]

5 hours ago, Mak1 said:

Yeah, Stefan used to criticize religions much more in the past. If you follow reason and evidence you kind of have to.

...and start with an a priori assumption that all of them are false.  I did that too in my day, so I understand the impulse well.

Nowadays Stefan has come to appreciate Christianity much more as have I. In the end morality is what really matters. I think it is better to derive morality rationally as Stefan has done, but if you are a moral person because of Christianity, the end result is the same.

I am hardly moral in the sense that I fail in some sense at least daily, but I try my best.  Ultimately it matters more (to me; from a secular perspective this is nonsense) that I am saved, and hopefully some others through me, but that remains to be seen.

[Mak1]

16 hours ago, MahtiSonni said:

...and start with an a priori assumption that all of them are false.

Well, he has made the arguments against religion in his books and videos. I can't agree that he makes an a priori assumption that they are false.

16 hours ago, MahtiSonni said:

I am hardly moral in the sense that I fail in some sense at least daily, but I try my best.

I bet it's more difficult to follow Christian moral rules as there are quite many of them. Not initiating aggression and not stealing are simple moral rules anybody can follow, and most do in their everyday life, but sadly most people also accept that the state should be allowed to break these rules.

[MahtiSonni]

7 hours ago, Mak1 said:

I can't agree that he makes an a priori assumption that they are false.

Why?

I bet it's more difficult to follow Christian moral rules as there are quite many of them.

Not really; the greatest commandment (the gist of it) is just something from which it is very easy to slip.

[Mak1]

12 hours ago, MahtiSonni said:

Why?

Stefan makes his arguments against Gods mainly by logic. So these can be called a priori arguments (not assumptions). If the validity of a religion depends on the existence of a God, then the religion can be stated to be false by disproving God. I would say Stefan used to see very little value in religion, but nowadays, even if he thinks gods are nonsense, he sees more positive aspects in religion (like community and moral teachings that are absent from atheist world).

[barn]

1 hour ago, Mak1 said:

Stefan makes his arguments against Gods mainly by logic. So these can be called a priori arguments (not assumptions). If the validity of a religion depends on the existence of a God, then the religion can be stated to be false by disproving God. I would say Stefan used to see very little value in religion, but nowadays, even if he thinks gods are nonsense, he sees more positive aspects in religion (like community and moral teachings that are absent from atheist world).

I think this is a really good approximation! (It's largely what I've concluded over time too... doesn't mean it's 'the truth' or anything else than 'resonating at a matching frequency'. )

[MahtiSonni]

13 hours ago, Mak1 said:

Stefan makes his arguments against Gods mainly by logic.

I don't know about that, but I do know he has made absolutely baseless assertions, like "to take another example, it is illegal to sell bogus cures for real illnesses - however, not only is Christianity's "cure” utterly unproven, but even the "illness” itself - sin - is completely invented." (Against the Gods: Agnosticism and Consistency).  He has himself made loads of videos about the empirical results of biblical sin, such as avarice, lust, sloth et alia, and correctly criticized them for destroying lives.  That is not an application of logic - that is self contradiction - and the claim in the book flies in the face of even cursory interest in the Bible or how it and the truth it transmits has changed people's lives.  Sure, there's no proof, as there is seldom of any cure - but the evidence is massive.

The other type of argument I remember from the book are definitional self contradiction loops formed through, again, baseless assumptions.  An example of these would be the definition of God Stefan attacks as selfcontradictory:  He claims "a god is defined as an eternal being which exists independent of material form and detectable energy, and which usually possesses the rather enviable attributes of omniscience and omnipotence" (Against the Gods: Why are gods selfcontradictory?).  The problem with that is that he does not even try to define omniscience, instead he simply assumes it a form of knowledge that destroys the possibility of choice.  He doesn't stop to ask "what if omniscience means knowing all that can be known?" (after all, having all power doesn't mean being able to make contradictions real), leaving open the possibility that decisions can't be known prior to them being made and thus are not included in "having all knowledge", as said knowledge simply does not exist.  Another thing is that myself and several others subscribe to the concept of voliscience - knowing what one wants to know (possibly in the future as well - as I stated, there's absolutely no way of knowing whether omniscience should the future or not to qualify; being able to imagine the existence of knowledge that simply does not exist isn't an argument).  In what comes to being "eternal", it's descriptive of the physical universe we inhabit, the game God made, and as He is outside of it much like the programmers of Skyrim are outside it (which is why he sends angels to communicate instead of coming himself), and thus the concept really doesn't make a whole lot of sense - it serves simply to give the correct impression that no matter how much time flies past, God isn't going anywhere.

Then there are, IIRC some irrelevant inconsistencies in the Bible that he has also attacked in the same vein as someone would attack a cooking recipe for having a spelling error in it.  So while I acknowledge there are inconsistencies, they're hardly anywhere they'd matter.

I appreciate the fact that since he has come to see the value religion (actually Christianity) has provided to the West, but his pilgrimage is far from over in that sense.

I regard Stefan very highly in pretty much everything that doesn't concern Christianity or Jordan Peterson, so I hope you don't take this criticism of his writings of yore as an attempt to smear the man.  In my view the man is about as close to a saint one can be without having an actual halo.

 

Tl;dr: MahtiSonni uses a Wall of Text!  But is it Super Effective?

[MahtiSonni]

I opened a separate topic on the omniscience thing to the philosophy subforum.

[Mak1]

8 hours ago, MahtiSonni said:

I opened a separate topic on the omniscience thing to the philosophy subforum.

Good, as this thread is not best suited for this discussion. I also don't agree with everything else you said above, but I don't want to get bogged down in an endless debate. I'll mull over the omniscience argument for a while before responding to it...