Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

Perhaps because I was an atheist then a deist before I was a theist then Christian; I have experienced from-the-inside quite a wide range of philosophies - spiritual, theological and otherwise. 
Because I am who I am, I nearly always took these seriously while I held them. I tried to make them work for me. 
I pushed them until they failed - and sometimes even-then, I kept-on pushing.  

Indeed, the same applies since I became a Christian - since I could not easily find a church to which I could whole-heartedly commit. 
For me, with my kind of mind, this meant that I needed to develop some level of primary and insider understanding of the various possibilities. 
In doing so, I became aware of the gulf between secondarily knowing-about some-thing - and primarily knowing it from the inside. 

Knowing about something is normal, mainstream, official 'knowing' - but I have little respect for it; no matter how much stuff a person 'knows' in this fashion, or how adept they have become at arranging this knowing-about in impressive patterns. 
For me, all this is ultimately just a form of 'parroting'. 
An example is the mediocre college student who assembles an essay by copying, pasting and arranging paragraphs taken from other-people - other-people who have themselves probably done exactly the same. 
Mediocre, lazy students leave the cut-and-pasted paragraphs as they find them and add their own names - and get flagged up for plagiarism. Smarter and more diligent students re-phrase the paragraphs, add references - and get top marks... 

(These are the Head Girl types - the middle-managers of life, who pretty much run things nowadays - helped by a smattering of psychopaths and hysterics.) 
But both the plagiarist and the Head Girl amount to the same in the end. 
And this parroting-process generates a whole vast world of discourse - from gossip and journalism to medicine, academia and science - yet with nobody at any point having any insider-comprehension of what is at issue. 
Just parrots quoting parrots. 



I say this to explain why I am indifferent to the fact that vast quantities of high-status critique can be brought-against my fundamental convictions in relation to Christianity! (Or, indeed, science and medicine.) 
It doesn't matter how much, or what names are attached to this deluge of critical commentary - all I see and hear is parroting! 
Maybe; way, way-back before the generations of parrots began quoting parrots - there was a real thinker, who experienced what he advocated primarily and from-within - but after so many cycles of parroting, this has become lost among the noise and distortions of uncomprehending repetition. 

This is why there is a bottom-line to thinking: 
We cannot know more than we our-selves can think; and if we have-not thought, then we do not know. 

Note added: Understanding the great mass of public discourse as merely parrots quoting parrots, shows a valid path towards dealing-with the 'information'-overload combined with knowledge-deficit that characterizes contemporary life.