Hello again Mitchel. I've prefaced your words with two colons (::).
::Why do you change what I say from "no direct access to reality" to "no access to reality"? Why not carry out your little tirade against these people that believe that there is no access to reality and stop pretending that I am one of them.
Where are they? I'm in the midst of a tirade
, so speak up people!
In fact, Mitch, you're the only one I see right now, and I'm not pretending. There's a very real problem with your philosophy, and I thought I put it rather nicely. Let me try again, in a slightly different way.
You exist from a first person perspective. From this first person perspective you claim you have "no direct contact with reality." Or, put positivley, everything you do come into direct contact with
is not objective reality, it is, instead,
subjective reality. Therefore, by definition, you, who exist in the first person, have, in so far as you do exist in the first person, no access to objective reality, only to subjective reality. What you must now claim is to somehow infer, from what you do have direct contact with, which is your own subjective reality, that objective reality exists. Again, there's nothing from which you can draw the inference that objective reality exists except your own subjective reality. But that's not the worst of it, for where have you derived this notion of objective reality from in the first place? If it's not from reflecting upon yourself coming into contact with objective reality, but from reflecting upon yourself coming into contact with yourself, then the notion is denuded of any meaning other than what occurred in that latter process. Otherwise, you're claiming, like I said before, to perform the logic defying feat of jumping into the third person perspective, viewing objective reality, and then smuggling it's meaning from that perspective into your purely private world where you then work out how the two interact. In short, you must assume what your starting definition denies you.
::Do you require more explanation about what is the difference between these two phrases? Shall I hunt up definitions of the word "direct"? Or shall I simply reiterate what I have repeatedly explained stands between us and direct access to reality and how we get around it so that we do have access to reality in spite of this?
I know how you get around it; as I said, you implicitly claim to jump into a third person perspective which assumes direct contact with reality, and then smuggle the concept of objective reality back to your first person perspective, which you've defined as purely subjective, where you then proceed to work out a theory which pretends to ignore that it seeks coherence only with reference to what it, by definition, denies.
::Wikipedia has 25 different types of realism under the philosophy category. You seem to be describing "Platonic realism" which is also called Platonic idealism.
Another type of realism in that list is "critical realism". I got the term from John Polkinghorne, who explains and uses it in his book "Exploring Reality". I never claimed to be a realist and I would utterly reject being a "Platonic realist = Platonic idealist". I am a critical realist. Get over it, already.
Yes, and if you click on
critical realism in Wiki's philosophy category of realism you'll find that it is a form of
representative realism. Scroll down to the section called
Locke and Descartes, at the end it reads, "If critical realism is correct, then representationalism would have to be a correct theory of perception." Now, click on
representationalism and you'll find it is also known as
representative realism as well as
indirect realism. INDIRECT REALISM; that sounds like a realism that says "no direct access to reality", right? And it's directly tied to critical realism according to your own link, right? Yet when I attempted to demonstrate why representative realism it is no realism at all, you said you were just using the term
representation because someone else introduced it, implying that you are in fact not a representative realist. Fine, then you're NOT a critical realist according to your link. So again I ask, why are you using a term the way no one else uses it, and in what sense are you even using it? It's either direct or indirect; if it's indirect then it's representative, but you seemed to deny that earlier.
::Well that part is worth quoting and commenting on.
::You see if Christ is the only mediator between man and God and we have a personal relationship with God Himself as our one and only savior then there is no room for someone to say that you have to do what they tell you to do and believe what they tell you to believe in order to be saved. Thus they cannot tell you to send your sons against the Moslems on Crusades or extort money out of you to buy indulgences... you know... that sort of thing. It pays to learn from history.
Mitch, last I checked Christ said we are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves; in fact, loving God is inseperable from loving our neighbors. Furthermore, Christ established a Church, a community of believers, a family of God. Why do I state the obvious? Because the implications perhaps need explicating. To be clear: we don't have a personal relationship with God apart from the body of Christ, and apart from personal relationships with our neighbors, even the worst of them. This means, quite clearly, that our relationship with God invloves imperfection, experience, growth, development ... you know... a history to learn from. As Pope John Paul II put it, "the Church, embracing sinners in her bosom, 'is at once holy and always in need of being purified'.
So, Mitch, why stop there? If you reject the Catholic Church because people were abused in her name, why not reject the basis upon which she was built? In other words, if you reject the Catholic Church merely because she was able to be used as a tool for abuse, then why not reject the body of Christ, i.e., the followers of Christ, who built her foundations and paved the way for such potential abuse; why not reject the Church which formed immediately after Christ on the strength of his promise; in fact, why arbitrarily violate your standard, why not reject the apparently amibigous and careless words of Christ himself, which were so evidently subject to abuse?