andrel wrote:
> On 12-7-2009 8:04, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> andrel wrote:
>>> I think the difference is significant. "I don't know" implies that 
>>> you can still look for an answer, whereas "I can't know" means that 
>>> the search ended. The former means that you are open to suggestions 
>>> from others who claim that they know more, whereas the latter is a 
>>> sound basis to build your own ethics.
>>> I don't like the "I don't care".
>>
>> On the contrary, how is "I can't know" a grounds to build anything?
> 
> Easy. If you are convinced that you can not know if God exists or not 
> (which is what agnosticism is about, all your other examples are 
> irrelevant here), it means that you have to build an ethics that will 
> work in both cases. You can not assume there is someone else that knows 
> better (a god or her representative on earth), nor can you be certain 
> that you won't be judged after death on what you did in your entire 
> life. That means that you have to think about what you are doing and you 
> will have to make the right choice everytime by yourself. With 'right' 
> defined by a much broader spectrum of ethics than that of a single 
> religion. E.g. simply defining another group as non-human won't work. 
> (i.e. if your current social environment allows you to recognize this as 
> an item, but that is a whole different discussion.)
> 
> Believe me, simply being one in a crowd of atheists or believers is much 
> more simple. (BTW I am not an agnostic, in case you are wondering).

Uh.. But, in that case, you are not basing it on the "unknowability", 
your doing it the same way that you would if no one had ever presented 
the idea that one existed in the first place. You might as well claim 
that you are, "building your system of ethics on a lack of being able to 
know if there is a tea pot in orbit." Its a meaningless statement. Well, 
unless you where describing it to someone that insists that all of 
creation is defined by how many invisible tea pots are orbiting life 
bearing planets, but, then its only meaningful in context of 
"attempting" to explain it to the person making that assertion, which is 
basically the same thing as saying, it is meaningless. lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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