About Mike

18th century solutions to 21st century problems

Recent posts

• Comment on unclevinny's answer…

  0 0 Thanks! I'll get in touch with him. Mike commented 5 months ago

• Follow Following 1 Can you recommend a good technical recruiter? Mike asked in Job Hunting 6 months ago by unclevinny

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  Who makes the best hot chocolate drink in Seattle

  0 0 I'll second the nominations for Chocolati for hot chocolate (they do different flavors - I like the dark raspberry flavor - and they have a location in Wallingford as well as Greenlake), and Cafe Presse for drinking chocolate. Yum. Mike answered in Coffee & Tea about 1 year ago Answer, comment & read 14 more answers »

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  Well. So a friend was diagnosed with cancer yesterday. God damn it. Questionland, help me out.

  5 0 I'm sorry, Irena. I think the best thing you can offer this guy might be honesty. It's sometimes in astonishingly short supply when people have a grave medical problem. My uncle, who was a very rational, realistic person who tended to eschew sentimental ideas, was often frustrated by the sugar-coating that a lot of his friends gave him once he was diagnosed with lung cancer. More to the point, I think you can be honest about how you feel while still giving him what he needs. I think if you can communicate to him what you've communicated to us, he will be touched and able to help you help him. "I'm sad, I'm scared, I feel so much love and I just want to hug you. But mostly I'm here for you. What can I do to help you that you're not getting?" I'd think anybody would appreciate hearing that, and that way you can find out what he needs straight from him while also letting him know how you feel. Mike answered in Health & Fitness about 1 year ago Answer, comment & read 10 more answers »

• Comment on SCStroup's answer…

  0 0 Thanks for the translation and explanation! That sort of depth of understanding of Greek is just beyond me. "And yet it is good to remember that references to the gods are not tantamount to what we would consider *belief* in the *existence* of gods." That's what I was getting at with my first comment. Socrates saw no apparent contradiction in finding explanations for things that didn't rely on the divine and yet invoking the divine on a casual basis amidst the search for those explanations. To me that says that it's not an issue of belief or non-belief, but rather something that's not really considered at all. As you said, it's just what people do. "Meletos' charge was trumped up and ridiculous anyway." Oh, no doubt. But when looking back you can still learn something from a trumped up charge, the same way that Suetonius' faithful reproductions of tabloid-style sensationalism tells us something about ideas that were at least in commerce, if not necessarily widely accepted or even plausible. Just because a statement isn't true doesn't mean it can't teach us about the people who discuss it. Or, looked at another way, if Jowett's translation had jived better with yours, it would've been a challenge to your "praxis over doxis" explanation regardless of whether Meletos was arguing in good faith or not. For what little it's worth, I find your explanation compelling, but once I ran across that passage I couldn't resist throwing it at you - I was bound to learn something interesting one way or the other. Thanks again for busting out the Plato! ;-) Mike commented about 1 year ago

• Comment on SCStroup's answer…

  0 0 The Socratic dialogues, in particular, I remember as being scattered with casual references to the gods. Euthyphro, not surprisingly, has plenty, but perhaps not so casual, since it's explicitly about piety. But while skimming after seeing your question, I chanced upon the Apologia and remembered that one of the charges against Socrates was atheism: "But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such inquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods." The translation is by Benjamin Jowett. I don't have any Attic Greek, so I can't speak to the quality of the translation, but it seems that Jowett presents this as a modern-style question about the existence or non-existence of the gods, or at least Socrates' opinion of the question. Then again, Meletos' feeble prosecution of his accusation of atheism is perhaps evidence that what was meant by atheism in that context is a long shot from what we mean in today's discussions. Mike commented about 1 year ago

• Comment on SCStroup's answer…

  0 0 It's instructive that when the philosophers started reaching for explanations that didn't rely on the gods, they still peppered their conversation with references to the gods, with no apparent cognitive dissonance. Their conclusion never seems to be "And therefore, the gods don't exist!" so much as "So now we have an explanation that seems more complete and doesn't rely on things we can't know. May the gods smile on our efforts." Mike commented about 1 year ago

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  Did the Greeks think their Gods were real?

  1 0 The ancients believed in their gods the same way you and I believe in gravity. "But we see gravity every day," you might say to me. But we don't, not really. We see behavior that is adequately explained by our understanding of gravity, as taught to us by people who know more about it than we do. And like most people, we don't understand gravity fully and are content to know that there are specialists out there who do, and they have a good handle on it. If you replace "gravity" with "the gods," I think that's a pretty good explanation of how the ancients interacted with their notion of the divine. It was a different form of understanding the world, of building a rough-and-ready framework for understanding how the world works. Was it totally accurate? Certainly not. But is the understanding of science that you and I have totally accurate? Just as certainly not, and yet we can recognize that and still not reject it and still get along fine every day. What's more, I think if you managed to convey to an ancient Hellene that you "don't believe in the gods," their reaction might be very similar to if I told you that I don't believe in gravity: puzzlement, perhaps a response that, well, something makes the grain grow every year, and maybe bemused curiosity or dismissive indifference. Mike answered in Questionland University about 1 year ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

• Comment on BasementDweller3's answer…

  0 0 Thanks, ozchick, for your kind words. And thanks to BD3 (long one of my favorite questionland residents) for challenging me and forcing me to articulate my position about this. I learned a lot about my thoughts while I formed the answer. Mike commented about 1 year ago

• Comment on "Cagey"'s answer…

  0 0 I'd like to know why, too, but I suspect it's because she has seen me stick up for her to her parents before, because she has seen me keep her small secrets before, and because she thinks I'm cool. She told me that a guy asked if I would buy a dildo for him. She was instant messaging me from school, and one of her classmates was being a clown. She told me that I think as a way of getting him off her back and of rolling her eyes at him with me simultaneously. Or that was how it was presented, anyway. I agree that I need to have a talk with her soon about this stuff. I plan to let her know that I will respect her privacy until the point where doing that risks harm to her, then I will let her know and give her the option of disclosing herself or being there while I do it. Thanks for your answer, Cagey! Mike commented about 1 year ago

• See all of my 6 Questions , 66 Answers and 79 Comments