Coming from a science and not philosophy background, my first reaction is that in order to truly understand something, you must first extract yourself from within it and observe it objectively.

This is obviously very difficult, perhaps even impossible, in the case of consciousness. We can only really understand consciousness when inhibiting that consciousness, leading to my doubt that we can objectively figure out what that consciousness is.

How can we exit a casual loop of consciousness, where our understanding of consciousness is biased by requiring consciousness? — PhilosophyRunner

This is exactly the problem. Philosophy of consciousness seems stupid to me because, even if we can easily understand where the basic problem is, like you did, it still carries on by following the same wrong way. What can I think about somebody who knocked his nose against a wall, but, nonetheless, he keeps going against that wall?

in order to truly understand something, you must first extract yourself from within it and observe it objectively — PhilosophyRunner

Exactly. And, since what we are talking about is consciousness, which is intimately connected to subjectivity, I mean, our human experience of feeling a subject, an “I”, this means that philosophers persist in extracting themselves from within it and observing it objectively. But, at this point, what we are observing objectively is not subjectivity anymore. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity. Objectifying subjectivity is an oxymoron, it is like wanting to freeze fire, and nonetheless this is what philosophy persists in doing.
Even now, when I write “subjectivity”, actually, as soon as I write it, subjectivity is not there anymore, because I have objectified it by putting it in words, so, when I try to communicate the concept of subjectivity by writing here “subjectivity”, instantly I am not talking anymore about subjectivity. I just hope that the reader, instead of working with the object costituted by the word “subjectivity” and its objective meaning, will direct his attention to his own experience of feeling “I”, feeling a subject.
This is in my opinion what Pascal tried to do. As a consequence, when you start following this direction, you cannot adopt a precise language anymore: when Pascal talks about escaping ourselves, or about spirit of fineness, this is not, obviously, a precise, a scientific language: it is logical: if we want to talk consistently about subjectivity, we need to put aside objectivity, that is the language of precision, maths, science.
We all know that, once we are forced to abandon objectivity, we cannot establish anything strongly exact, determined, like science is. This, as a consequence, leads us either to give up, abandoning the research, or to force everything again into science (the stupidity of philosophy I was talking about), or to adopt a non scientific language (Pascal).
I think that it is possible to do more and better, we just need to go on in the research, but not with the stupidity of philosophy. We can notice that similar problems are met when we, for example, want to talk seriously, with degrees of exactness, about, art, literature, music. We can notice that, in order to talk seriously about a text of Shakespeare, or about a painting of Van Gogh, we don’t need to reduce it to maths, molecules, quantums. Obviously, art criticism about Van Gogh cannot reach the strength and the exactness of a math expression. But this does not mean that art criticism is a ridiculous activity. Instead, it is what in philosophy is the language of continental philosophy. Pascal’s “spirit of fineness” is continental philosophy. Continental philosophy is far from being perfect, consistent, precise, but it can be improved, we can make it stronger, better, more efficient. But this still needs work, a lot of work and research, that anyway is better than abandoning it in favour of analytic philosophy, that has driven philosophy to the stupidity of persisting in wanting to reduce conscience to maths.
It seems to me that we have no other alternative: either working in improving the non exact language of continental philosophy, art criticism, while avoiding it to fall back into maths, or falling into the stupidity of thinking that we can understand everything by reducing it to maths, that actually is far from being consistent and exact.

Then?

I think that metaphysics is the most important issue in philosophy. The problem is that, since it is closely connected with ontology, it can be interpreted and reconsidered in so many ways that it can become just a point of confusion.

The word means literally "beyond physics". This expression can be considered from two essential perspectives.

One is that adopted by, for example, some artists, where "beyond physics" means beyond the world of material things; so, these artists try to represent pure emotions, feelings, abstract ideas. This is not the perspective we are interested in here.

The other perspective is that stemming from Aristotle, since his books describing the nature of things were called "metaphysics" because they were physically beyond, which means after, his books about physics. This important coincidence is the origin of the philosophical meaning of metaphysics. The basic meaning of "metaphysics" in philosophy thus depends on how we interpret the meaning and the importance of Aristotle's research. Since different philosophers have interpreted differently the other philosophies, as a result we have not a final, exact meaning of "metaphysics". However, I think that, at this point, we can ask what the best, the most productive, the most fruitful, the most useful, definition of metaphysics is. I think that this way we can obtain good results.
I think we can say that ontology is about being, while metaphysics is about how things are. This implies a specific interpretation of Aristotle's research. In this perspective, we interpret Aristotle's research as an effort to compensate the unreliability of knowledge acquired through physics. Knowledge acquired through physics is unrealiable because it relies on our senses: sight, hearing, smelling, touching and so on. Everyone can see that our senses can be easily deceived: we see an animal and after approaching it we realize that actually it was just a stone, or a plant. We interpret that Aristotle found a solution to this problem in the use of reason: reasoning, applied to the data given by our senses, is able to compensate and solve the problem of unreliability of senses. So, he elaborated all the stuff we know about form, substance, nature, essence and so on. What is important is that this way his highly systematic work gave a very strong and reassuring impression of order, domain over reality, reliable knowledge. Many philosophers after, or even before Aristotle, can be interpreted this way: they tried to find some strong interpretation able to explain how things are.
Now we can realize some points that are very useful to clarify what metaphysics is or implies. Metaphysics means:

- having been able to finally reach truth, true knowledge, absolute and objective certainty;

- that reality exists out there, it is not a dream, an illusion produced by our mind.

All of these strong points are based on the irresistible strength of logic, reasoning, whose roots are in Parmenides' principle of non contradiction. As a consequence, those who disagree must necessary be people who either don't understand, don't know, or are mad. Logic and reasoning are the roots of truth and, as such, the roots of what is good. From here, a lot of theology can be built, based on metaphysics.


Now we can better realize the difference between metaphysics and ontology: metaphysics is about the truth of being, the absolute certainty of reality; since ontology is just about being, if, for some reason, we say that "being" means actually doubt, or involvement in human time (Heidegger), or subjectivity, in that case what we say is ontology, because it is about being, but is not metaphysics, because it disagrees with the concept of objective truth, objective reality.

It is good to realize that, even when we say that the world is just a dream produced by our mind, although apparently this can be considered something non metaphysical, since it is against the idea of objective reality, actually it can still be accused of being metaphysics, because its conclusion sounds like "the real, objective, absolute truth, is that the world is a dream". Similarly, when we say that "everything is relative", this can be accused as well of being just another metaphysics, because it tries again to reach a final conclusion about "how things really are".

At this point the question is: is it possible to make a truly non-metaphisical philosophy, since, whatever we say is exposed to the criticism of being just another attempt of finally establishing how things objectively are?

One way to try to exit this cage is trying to be aware of the constraint coming from language: language is made grammatically in a way that forces us to talk by assertions, statements, that again and again make us fall into the mechanism of saying how things are. So, we can try some workarounds by specifying that what we say is not meant to be a final, objective, metaphysical statement.
Another way is to make clear that what we say is meant to be a subjective opinion, an hypothesis, an attempt. In this context, the opposite of metaphysics is the subjective perspective. Another philosophical perspective that is one of the greatest efforts to be non-metaphysic is postmodernism. There is also the "weak-thought" of the philosopher Gianni Vattimo.

I am interested in your question because I am doing some research on spirituality in my website spi.st and time is an essential part in the process of growing, self improvement, following a path.
I think that setting deadlines is essentially positive, because it makes your plans real, avoids forgetting, helps to be serious, fair, solid.
However, there are risks as well, depending on the kind of growth you want cultivate.
Deadlines contain the risk of distracting you from listening to your personality, your humanity, the specific rhythms, pace, speed of your body, your mind, your psychology, you.
For example, if you want to grow in your ability to love people, you can set deadlines, but you might loose sight of your creativity in this process: creativity can mean that your personality needs to set its own spontaneous pace and speed to develop its new and maybe even revolutionary ideas: you can consider how contradictory the following statements are: "I want to make a discovery within the next two months", "I want to create a revolutionary idea within this year": you can see how the idea of a deadline is kind of contradictory and even funny if connected to creativity.
Another problem about deadlines is frustration: it depends how you react if you fail in respecting a deadline: if you end up thinking that you are a failure, you are not good, this means that you lost sight of the importance of listening to yourself.
On the contrary, it can also happen that being successful in reaching a goal within a certain time can make you blind about the amount of work, of improvement and refinement that you still need to do: for example, you might set the deadline of learning and understanding the philosophy of Heidegger, or of Nietzsche, within the next two months. After reaching the deadline, you might think that you have been fully successful, loosing sight of the fact that most philosophies are so deep, so rich, so open to unknown consequences, that most probably we will never finish understanding them.

The whole purpose of the monastic life is to teach men to live by love. — Dermot Griffin

I would say, about the monastic therapy of love, the same I said about person: it doesn't work, there are too many objections that make it unreliable:
- if love is so powerful in changing people's heart, why people, including the monks who are most advanced in their path, find loving so hard to practice?
- The obvious Christian answer is: because they are all sinners. Well, this shows that even being in Christ's love doesn't heal at all anybody. The word "therapy" in the expression "monastic therapy" suggests some kind of healing, while actually no advanced monk, nobody, has ever been able to witness any kind of freedom from sin;
- Even Jesus himself has a lot of contradictions. Essentially he is exposed to the problem of theodicy: why doesn't he save the world, leaving instead it under the power of sin? If God, or Jesus, is love, why doesn't he do anything about the suffering that oppresses the world?
Even charity, if meant as witnessing the power of Christ's love, becomes contradictory in this context, because it seems that Jesus' disciples have the responsibility to compensate God's contradiction: when the disciple is successful in practicing some acts of love, then it is God's merit; when he is unsuccessful, then it is because he is a sinner: it is a perfect formula to always save God's face, so that the so important concept of "person" means actually, in this context, being God's victim, means slavery of a contradictory God, whose face needs continuously to be saved by the sins of the "person".

It seems to me that "subjectivity" at least opens to a humble idea of love, meant just as an attempt, a try, free from the contradictions of God, free from being idealized as a therapy that actually doesn't show any therapeutic ability. I think that love can be therapeutic only in the context of humility created by criticism and self-criticism, that includes criticism of the concept of love itself. Subjectivity means criticism and self-criticism.

If we really want to change the world then I think we need to start with a change in our own hearts first — Dermot Griffin

I essentially agree, but then we need to clarify what kind of change we should make in our hearts. Peace, hating violence, is not enough, because they are negative concepts: peace has some meaning only assuming conditions of war. What shall we do after having realized peace? If we are unable to give solid directions, unfortunately war is able to be more attractive than peace: if peace means just “not-making-war”, it is almost equivalent to “making-nothing”, that is, at the end, death: dead people are those wo are in the most perfect peace. So, if peace means being dead, then war is better. I am not supporting this opinion, I am just showing how problematic the concept of peace is. That’s why, when peace has been reached, for example by democracy, a lot of more problems come out, problems that are able to cause war again.
Let’s assume that we should change our hearts towards personalism. I disagree. Today “person” is becoming more and more poor, because more and more people realize that there is no need to be a person to deserve respect: animals deserve respect, plants as well, the environment as well. And, actually, thinking that we are “persons”, could even have a violent result, if we take the consequence that animals and a lot of other things are not persons, so that they don’t have the same dignity we have. Again, I am not supporting this thought, I want just show that such ideas like peace, non violence, person, are weak ideas, good just to move hearts in naive ways, good to make revolutions that actually prepare the conditions for new wars.
That’s the reason why I consider more effective, more able to create a clear context about where the real problems are and where the best solutions are, the concept of “subjectivity”: I think that this concept is able to include automatically peace, non-violence, person, with the advantage of making things much clearer and creating a much more solid basis to work on.

I would say anti-subjectivity, which is almost the same, but guides towards a clearer direction. About civilization, it doesn't work because it is just a popular, social, unrefined version of progress of subjectivity. For example, art is subjectivity and it is not by chance that dictatorships and violence are against art and viceversa. I would say the same thing with another more explicit word: spirituality.

Isn't this what Heidegger exactly meant by saying that we are beings towards death?

There is no shift, it is not a jump, a next level. Rather, you can always try to be better, to think better, to behave better, assuming, while nobody is able to prove it, that we can improve, that we can perform some kind of freedom, of active and intelligent contribution. If you do this, which means, you are working on it, then you are already in the next level: the arrival point is the way, the path, the becoming.

Making depression as a tool is one the best ability of humanity. I think you have just practiced one of the best capabilities you have: transforming anithing in a resource for growth.

I think that the experience of suffering confirms what I said:

perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love... — Angelo Cannata

Emotions, choices, answers and so on are not always joyful things. Even love includes experiences of suffering.
I didn’t say that life is all joy and beauty. Rather, I wanted to say that framing life in the concept of “perception” can make us blind about the whole universe that is in life and in perception.

I have deep perplexity on the value of John Paul II as a philosopher or theologian. Before him, the fact that only men where admitted to priesthood was just a tradition in the Catholic Church; this means that there was some possibility to admit women to priesthood in the future: traditions can be changed. John Paul II changed this tradition into a dogma (see Ordinatio sacerdotalis), which means that it can never be changed in the future, because it must be considered an essential part of the infallible faith, infallible revelation. In other words, John Paul II closed, destroyed any possibility for women to be priests in the future.
The theological reasons for this decision are out of any human understanding: it is so just because it is so. They refer to the fact that Jesus was a man and his apostles were men; this way this theology decides to ignore the historical context, that instead is considered relevant in other cases. For example, the fact that Jesus had no properties was considered something historically limited to his person and not relevant to become a rule for the priests.
How can be considered valuable John Paul II as a theologian, considering that, by creating this dogma about the priesthood denied to women, he followed a theology lacking humanly understandable explanations?

In 1992 John Paul II promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In canon 2358 of the Catechism, homosexual tendencies are officially declared “objectively disordered”. This way homosexual people are publicly exposed to be treated differently from other people: it is said explicitly in the same canon: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity”. What is wrong in homosexual people so that they deserve particular compassion, particular acceptance? What are the theological basis to explain these declarations? Who establishes what is objectively ordered and objectively disordered in nature? What are the criteria to establish it?

Enrique — Enrique

I don’t get what you wrote: what does it mean “how brain chemistry is a percept, not merely correlated with it”? Besides, you cannot give for granted that any kind of foundation is philosophical: you have a responsibility to explain how they are philosophical. Otherwise we can talk here about anything, like how to cook potatoes, leaving to the readers the task to guess how deeply philosophical it is.
But there is something even more important: it is obvious that today nobody has an exact, detailed, coherent, clear, definition or idea of what consciousness is. How can you explain the phisical roots of something that nobody is able to define clearly? This way is too easy to find the phisical root of a lot of things, like, for example, ghosts, telepathy, magics, beauty, love, art, miracles, freedom, will... Nobody will be able to disagree with you, since there are no clear elements to be based on. It looks like just fishing in troubled water.

We already know that our brain works by cells, neurons, electromagnetic interactions and so on. So, we already know a lot about how all brain activities are produced by its structures and mechanisms. From this perspective, we can say that we already know that consciousness is just a product of our brain components and activities.
We also know that everything in science can always be explained in more detail, endlessly. From this perspective, we will never complete the explanation of anything, because there will be always more to discover and to explain.
In this context, being in the middle between already reached explanations and never ending research, you have just added some details.
So, we can say that you have not explained consciousness for two reasons: 1) because we already know where it comes from (brain components, activity, mechanisms); 2) we will never finish explaining consciousness, because nothing in science is ever finished, ever explained in its entirety.
You have just added your details that can be interesting to biologists. What is the philosophical value of the details you added?

I agree. I would even say: the objective in philosophers’ mind was not “to discover how to live the good life”, but “to live the good life”. I mean, the aim was not to understand or to discover something, but, first of all, to immediately experience it. They, more or less consciously, realized, or felt, that making philosophy produced immediately, automatically, an inner experience that can be called “good life”. Let’s say a spiritual experience, considering Pierre Hadot’s research.

If you think that perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love...yes, perception is something very limited, but great enough to fill our life with the whole infinite universe of inner life.
Since perception is human, involves our human condition and happens over human time, we can even connect the idea “to be is to be perceived” to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time.

mysticism being impossible for an evolutionary realist or to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical — Sapien1

It seems to me that this assumption of yours is what makes you impossible to understand Wittgestein’s mysticism: why should mysticism be impossible for an evolutionary realist?
I think your answer is already in the second part you wrote:
“to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical”:
I think you should realize that by saying “everything is the real and non mystical”, you are automatically saying: “what I cannot understand does not exist, cannot exist” which is a kind of faith far from being evolutionary. If evolutionary means that reality is just what is material, like our material origin from fish, by saying that “everything is real”, your are not being connected to reality, because you are just closing yourself inside your idea of what “real” means. So, instead of connecting yourself to reality, that is external to you, you close yourself inside your idea of reality, that is internal to you.
Wittgestein didn’t close himself inside his comprehension of what reality is: he understood that, if reality is to be thought as something external to us, then we need to keep ourselves always open to something that will be always different from how we imagine it. As soon as you think that the only existing world is material reality, you are automatically closing yourself inside your mental comprehension of what reality is, closing your connection to the world external to your mind.
Saying “I don’t know” is one way to keep connection, openness, to external reality. But this kind of connection can be refined. For sure not by saying that reality is the only thing that exists in the world.

This is my understanding of Heidegger’s position about it, but I am not 100% sure I am correct.

Considering that the alternative is between

- logic depending just on unrealiable states of mind and
- logic depending on how things actually work in reality

we cannot think that Heidegger would ever criticize psychologism by choosing the second chance. Choosing the second chance would mean considering reality as objectively independent, which Heidegger didn’t think: for Heidegger being is not being, for Heidegger being is being there, which is, being somewhere, in some time context, which makes reality not stable and independent.
I think that Heidegger criticized psychologism because he perceived it as equivalent to the realistic option: thinking that everything depends on our mind appeared to him just like another realism, which is, the realism of our mind.
In order to escape from the trap of 1) realism of reality and 2) realism of our mind, he refused both, psychologism and realism, choosing instead a unified idea of being conceived as relative not mechanically to our mind, but relative in itself, which is, being depending from its relationship to time, being conceived as something that is relative even if we as subjects do not exist.

It's well known now that human beings have evolved from primitive fish — Sapien1

If I understood correctly your thoughts, it seems that you mean "we come from fishes and that's it", in the sense that reality is limited to what we can scientifically understand about it; if something cannot be grasped or at list imagined by science, then it doesn't exist. Wittgenstein thought the opposite, but not in a methaphysical way. Being mentally open to the existence of things outside the horizon of science does not mean being open to believe in the existence of supernatural things like spirits, angels, energies, telepathy, reincarnation and so on. Wittgenstein's mysticism does not mean this. Believing in the existence of supernatural things is again metaphysics, but Wittgenstein's mysticism is not metaphysical. The problem of metaphysical mysticism is that it frames the idea of things beyond science still in the frame of existence, things that exist objectively. It is not necessary to believe in the objective existence of supernatural things to be mystical. You can be open to the idea of things beyond science without framing these things into the mental scheme of objective existence. Actually this is the true mental openness towards mysticism, because thinking of supernatural things as framed in the concept of objective existence is actually not really beyond science. This is the real openness to something different, otherwise we are actually still in the mental frame of science, let's say pseudo-science. Wittgenstein was intelligent enough to understand that mysticism practiced as pseudo-science is not a real jump to another level: pseudo-science is in the same mental frame of science, because pseudo-science and science are both based on metaphysics, which is, framing things in the field of objective existence.

or rather he believed there is something mystical about the world — Sapien1

I think you are expressing your hypothesis about Wittgenstein's mysticism in a way that is not helpful to make things clear. Wittgenstein was not a metaphysical philosopher, which means, he didn't think of reality as something having an established, autonomous, external existence, distinct from our ideas. Nor he thought that reality is just a product of our mind. So, your hypothesis I quoted doesn't makes much sense in his thought, because you wrote "he believed there is...". Rather that believing in the metaphysical existence of thing, he approached experience in terms of dynamics where language has an essential role. This is my understanding of him and of your question.

Why should life have a meaning?

Carlikoff — Carlikoff

I think that the basic problem is in what I said at the end of my preceding message:

We talk about knowledge just because we have taken this concept from everyday language, which is a completely inaccurate language. — Angelo Cannata

This is a general radical problem of philosophy, that causes unproductive reflections in all fields and topics. One consequence of deriving philosophy from everyday language is that we treat concepts and logic as static things, things that “are”, while instead a deep analysis of everything makes us realize that nothing is static (Heraclitus). So, in philosophy we talk about reality as something that “is”, while Heidegger showed us that we must take time into account (“Being and time”, that, from this point of view, reconnects with Heraclitus). The same happens about knowledge: after what Heraclitus and Heidegger reminded us, we need to talk about it differently.
In this context, I think that the basic problem of the concept of knowledge is that it assumes the existence of reality in a metaphysical, which is objective, sense: if you have knowledge of something, linguistically the use of the word “knowledge” excludes that it is an opinion. Linguistically you cannot have knowledge of something that is not sure. For example, it is a nonsense saying “I have knowledge that perhaps God exists”. The fact that linguistically the word “knowledge” excludes the word “perhaps” creates a basic problem, because it means that talking about knowledge, whatever we say about knowledge, means assuming automatically the existence of something beyond doubt. Assuming the existence of something beyond doubt means putting the entire discussion in a metaphysical context, which means assuming automatically the idea of reality as something that for sure exists outside our mind.
The idea of reality as something outside our mind is highly questionable for me, so, this is for me the basic problem of talking about knowledge: we should first discuss what we think about metaphysics, which is the existence of reality as something independent from us.

Where did I say this?

It is an opinion based on research, studies, archaelogy, criticism, done by scholars all over the world.. As such, it helps for further research. What historical elements is your hypothesis based on?

Here, for example: https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/21944/

You can just put on Google something like "from politheism to monotheism" and you will find hundreds of studies that show the complexity of the transition, according to the specific context of each single religion.

Your premise is wrong: monotheism was not born after reasoning that one God is able to do everything. Monotheism was born because one God prevailed over the other Gods because of cultural and historical processes that happened over time.
Once we realize this, we understand that working based on a wrong premise would be a waste of time.

You are confusing knowledge with possibility of knowledge. For example, you can get knowledge of how to play the piano, but the existence of this possibility is very different from your actual having that knowledge.
Moreover, you are not considering that any concept about what knowledge is is conditioned by our human mentality. This means that actually it is impossible to know if knowledge exists: knowledge means possession of some contact with reality, but any contact with reality is filtered by our mind, so we can never know if any knowledge has a real contact with reality. We actually don’t even know if reality exists and what reality means; as consequence, we cannot have any fundamental idea about what knowledge is. We talk about knowledge just because we have taken this concept from everyday language, which is a completely inaccurate language.

Self-criticism. This is my way. If a person practices self-criticism, that person cannot be so destructive, because that person will continuously ask to herself: “What am I doing? Is it good? Is it intelligent? Will it help progress?”. If Hitler had a habit of self-criticism, he would have thought, every second of his life: “What am I doing?”.
Now you can realize that this practice is quite difficult because, at first, you will feel unsecure, uncomfortable, not knowing what to do, uncertain, unable to make a definite choice. But this happens just because you are not familiar with this practice, you are starting doing it while still having in your mind your traditional background.
This has a lot to do with philosophy. You can see that even by just writing a message here you can feel uncomfortable if you ask yourself too much “What am I doing?”.
In my opinion violence has its basic, elementary, roots on the belief in some established truth, some objective reality. This becomes automatically your truth, your reality, and nothing will be able to defeat it: it becomes fanaticism. If you believe in some truth, you are not like Putin just because you don’t apply the extreme consequences of your belief, or you mix it with other thoughts. Violent people are those who apply to their extreme consequences their belief in (their) truth.

I have heard a lot of people saying that, without an objective morality, humanity would be in a disaster, because anybody would feel able to do whatever they want, for example killing whoever they don’t like.
But actually it is the opposite: objective morality makes the world violent, because it becomes automatically your morality, that you feel authorized to impose to everybody, because it is the objective morality. If you believe in any objective morality, you won’t ask “What am I doing?”, because you think that it is right, because this is what (your) objective morality says.
This is Putin, this was Hitler: they believed, in their closed mind, that they were right, they didn’t question their thoughts, their morality, they just thought “What I am doing is right, simply because it is, there is no need of any discussion”.

lish — lish

Every religion has different ideas about God, and even inside the same religion there are commonly different and even opposite ideas about God. To what religion are you referring the God you are talking about?
Besides, it seems that you want to imprison the behaviour of God inside strict human logic criterions, while instead God is beyond humans, beyond logic, beyond criterions.
Another problem: what does it mean “God loves some people more than others”: how can you measure God’s love for people? Any criterion would be highly exposed to a lot of criticism.
Another one: it is humanly impossible to get any precise idea about how worthy somebody is to be loved by God: nobody is able to discern the deepest and most complex elements that are behind human behaviours.
You wrote that “God is a purely perfect being”: where does this idea of perfection come from? Does it come from human concepts? If it is a human concept, this mean that the very concept of “perfect” is far from being perfect. So, how do you think to evaluate the “perfection” of God by applying to him such an imperfect concept of perfection?
In general, it seems that you are talking about maths and theoretical logics, rather than God. Is God maths or theoretical logic? Does he need to obey to human criterions of logic?

you lose any meaning to connect or speak about anything except yourself at all — Shwah

This objection works if we consider relativism in a static way, as it was something conclusive, like a system of ideas, an ideology. I think a lot of relativists make this error. Instead, relativism is not a system, it is part of an ongoing process.
Your objection is similar to those who say that the statement “everything is relative” is self contradictory, because it claims a universal truth and also because it needs to be applied to itself, so that the statement is to be considered relative as well, and this way it looses its universality.
This last objection as well works if we consider relativism like a static system of ideas.
Instead, as I said, it should be conceived as a process. As a process, it needs to make use of a language that contains a lot of words and expressions that assume static and universal meanings. So, relativism is in a very difficult situation, having to use the language as an instrument that was shaped by non relativist mentalities.
This makes me think that relativism, since it is not a system, is not solipsism, is not closed and cannot be 100% independent from objectivist words, language, mentality, concepts. It is a work in progress, an exploration, a work of never ending criticism and self-criticism.
This makes it weak and strong at the same time.

Both positions are subjective and both are relative: they are both relative to your evaluation and you are in both cases the subject who evaluates things. When you try to evaluate something in relation to other people, it is anyway you evaluating, so you can’t make it independent from you as a subject.

We cannot analyze our brain without using it at the same time. So, how can we consider it as an object, since, as soon as we try to do this, we are automatically using it, we are automatically inside it, we are it?

Math problems and logic are thought by our minds, then we attribute them to the world and we think that they are universal, as the world is shaped according to them. This way we forget that it is still us thinking all of these things.
When we see that, if we add two apples to two more apples, we have 4 apples as a final result, a lot of people think that this is an objective phenomenon of nature, not dependent on us, because it works the same to everybody, everytime, everywhere. This way we forget that the very ideas of “2”, “4”, “apple”, “adding”, “result”, every idea, scheme and frame involved in all of this, they are all built by our brain. The final result of “4” looks like a proof, an evidence that the operation happened outside our brain, but we again forget that the final perception, evaluation, idea, of “4” comes from our brain, our mind.
From a relativistic point of view we can realize that, in any operation, it is impossible to do it without our brain interfering in it, at least in the last stage, when we receive the final information. So, if it is impossible to understand anything without using our brain, how can we trust our understanding, since any check, any verification needs our brain again to be introduced in the process?
This means that we can accept a rough idea of objectivity in everyday life, but, if we want to be fundamentally exact, precise, like philosophy wants to be, we are forced not to trust any of our knowledge, because any knowledge cannot escape receiving interference of our mind.

In philosophy there is not more or less universal. If something is universal it means that it is able to prove itself the same to everybody, everywhere, everytime. If there is one single person to which that thing is different from what it is to all other people, then that thing is not less universal; that thing is just not universal. If A is true for 10 people and B is true for those 10 people plus 100 more, B is not more universal. They are just both particular, none of them is universal.

Yes, I consider relativism equivalent to subjectivism, because relativism means that we, as subjects, cannot think of anything without automatically making it dependent on our subjectivity.

Talking about particular domains does not imply the assumption that there is a universal domain. Nothing is universal for relativists. Rather, reference to particular domains is better understood, referred to relativism, that anything we talk about is a particular domain; even the largest perspective we can imagine is a particular perspective. It is like saying “everything is particular, everything refers to a particular domain” the same way we say “everything is relative, everything refers to something relative”.
As a further step, we can then criticize these statements, but, as a starting point, in relativism everything is particular, everything is relative.

Objectivity does not deny relation, dependence, which is different from relativism. For example, objectivity admits that a fruit is related to the tree that produced it and is related to us who think of it, besides existing on its own. Relativism makes a step that brings us to a different level: relativism says that that fruit can be conceived by us only inside its dependence from us who are thinking of it. According to relativism it is humanly impossible to imagine the existence of that fruit on its own, independently from us, because, in the same moment we think of it, we are automatically putting it inside the frame of our ideas, making it dependent from our ideas.

For relativism the idea of “external” is an illusion, because, as soon as we think of it, it is automatically an idea internal to our mind, our brain, our mental schemes and frames.

It is just because I had read Wikipedia that I made my question: the quoted entry of Wikipedia

- doesn’t say “Relativism doesn't deny "objectivity"
- doesn’t make reference to a “more universal domain”.

Relativism doesn't deny "objectivity", it just says the particular domain is distinct in some manner from the more universal domain. — Shwah

Can you mention any source saying exactly what you said?

If I say that “flying horses” do not exist, this does not mean that for me “flying horses” means something different; on the contrary, exactly by saying that “flying horses” do not exist, I confirm that I have no intention to give the expression “flying horses” any different meaning.

You are confusing criticism towards objectivist philosophies with the meaning of the word “objective”. Of course relativism is a philosophy that thinks that everything is relative and, as consequence, objectivity, conceived as independent from a subject, does not exist. But this does not mean that relativism gives a different meaning to the word “objective”. It is the opposite: relativism refuses to refer the word “objective” to things that we perceive, exactly because relativism maintains the meaning of “objective” as something independent from the subject. When relativism says that nothing is objective, this way relativism is just confirming that “objective” means “independent from the subject”. So, the philosophy of relativism, that you mentioned, actually confirms the meaning of the word “objective”, exactly because it refuses it. Relativism does not refuse the meaning of the word; relativism refuses the philosophies that think that the meaning of the word tells us how things really are, how reality is, how reality exists.

Can you mention at least one philosophy or one dictionary, apart from your exclusive one, that means the word “objective” as “dependent on the subject”, like you do?