dragonprawn wrote:Since I am a secular liberal humanist I might as well argue the reverse - that if you label yourself anything else it would leave just as much room, if not more, for variation.
That was exactly my point -- IMO labeling people's worldviews is pointless.
So my worldview - that there is no God, we should have equal rights for all, and treat one another with respect - is an invalid one. It is saying nothing. Hmmm....
How you FEEL and view the world is not (cannot be) invalid, that's ludicrous. It doesn't "say nothing" -- it's just that IMO what it says is incomplete and imprecise because of the very nature of this subject, as I tried to explain in previous posts... E.g. "treat one another with respect" will mean VERY different things to different people. So different that some could probably get into fights over those definitions, much like the fights over, say, the definitions of "qi" which we've seen take place far too much over the years, on this very forum.
you can't tolerate hearing "secular liberal humanist" once
That's another strange conclusion... I can tolerate a LOT of things, and hearing these "definitions" or "labels" is really near the very bottom of my "annoyance scale".
I was trying to point out that humans are too complex to be able to be squeezed into narrow and vague (again, IMO) labels, esp. when it comes to such complex and subjective topics like someone's worldview.
what do you call yourself?
Exactly.
Is it superior to the shorthand labels I use so people kinda sorta know where I'm at?
It's far superior, because it's like Dao itself. I'm one with the Dao, how's that, is it helpful?
For "kinda sorta knowledge" these "labels" are fine, which is I suppose why we have them. I just don't like them for their vagueness; they leave too much "wiggle room", because one can always go endlessly-philosophical if you tell them, using your example, "there is no God" -- they could come back with, "define 'God'?", and then you're off to the philosophical neverland.
Maybe I'm just jealous because I can't find a label that defines my worldview -- I dunno...
I can answer particular fairly specific questions to the best of my ability, as part of some discussion, but I'd take those one at a time and with caution -- not lump them into ultra-broad things like "liberal", "humanist", "religious", etc.
HTH