Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:I'm trying to understand this thread. SPG, what is it that you're driving at? You seem to be posting contradicting statements.
- Doc
One major strand of SPG's thought is that critics dismiss belief to their own peril. He maintains that belief can conquer the world, just like the prog death band Arch Enemy says in that song The World is Yours. Since they are Swedish, they have the roots Euro metal bands do reacting against in part against Christianity as a totalizing power structure, but yet maintain a pre-Christian religious and supernatural worldview, one that is tribal and strong, forged in harsh winters, and celebrates personal power and ambition with little regard for those outside the tribe. Lyrics and real life are too different things (perhaps not to SPG), but it's well known that these bands with roots in Black Metal take their messages seriously, and are known to be critical of American metal bands that are all show and don't live the message. So imagine the Gods of yore fighting alongside with those who believe in them to progress the believer even unto the ends of conquering the world.
Well, I think we'd all agree that belief can be a powerful thing. Belief + ignorance is perhaps the greatest weapon human beings have ever devised, but SPG won't go the obvious route, and insists that victory in battle is real -- the result of supernatural forces that are real helping the believer, but perhaps that world is incommensurable with our way of understand the world. We have to say that both worlds are true relative to our understanding.
There's some major equivocation going on here. A lot of the debate has been over belief as a mental representation of reality, but that has nothing to do with belief as in the will-to-power. Believing you can climb a big mountain and believing the mountain is made out of Swiss cheese aren't the same thing. And so SPG needs to disentangle those two ideas and decide upon what he's actually saying. If he's saying will-to-power, then we can take the next step of analyzing the mechanisms of how that power is instantiated, but steer clear of confusing that with talk about belief as representation. So others in this thread are rightfully calling BS on his absurd theory of representation, because SPG keeps confusing himself and bringing up examples of it, but it's obvious to me that SPG isn't really interested in that per se but he can't dig himself out of the hole to get to the proper conversation of belief as will-to-power.