P1 If it isn't necessary to believe God exists, God will not prove he exists.
P2 God has not proven he exists
P3 It is not necessary to believe God exists
P4 If God exists it would be necessary to believe God exists
P5 It is not necessary to believe god exists
C God does not exist

Seems ironic theres over 60 pages of statements about the truth of statements and the truth about them is still in question.

I agree with the second statement. Intelligence is a an ideal that trumps faith, whereas faith is an ideal or supposed virtue that shuns intelligence. Intelligence trumps faith because of the critical realization through analysis that faith is part of a set of virtues (+hope and charity) that are meant to supplant intelligent critical thought. Faith shuns skepticism, hope places expectation over reality, and charity denies tough treatment of a poor position. To say that someone fails for not doing any one of these things relies on a transvaluation of what it means to fail.

I'm feeling kind of sorry for wading into this one. All I know about this topic is that I know nothing.

Jesus is known through his apostles. This is well known. When I say people follow Jesus as leader I refer to this well known and accepted fact. Degrees of separation are Jesus-Paul-scribe-translator-king james version- local church pastor - worshipper. It's accepted by all they are getting someone else's version of Jesus.

Jesus, by degrees of separation, is the moral leader of about a billion adherents worldwide. Degrees of separation are to be expected from someone who died thousands of years ago.

What Jesus claimed and didn't claim I have no idea about, I'm just responding to the quote.

There is probably something simulation-like about creation. I don't prescribe to the computer simulation hypothesis, or that we are ideas in gods mind or anything like that. However I think of simulation like 'copy', that we live in a copy that keeps being re-simulated since it first occurred. I can't help but think the cyclical nature of life is a cosmological fractal of many smaller copies of itself throughout its creation. Each a simulation of the simulation. My own life will be simulation of the death of the universe, which is a simulation of something so catastrophic my own death is only a beautiful metaphor for it.

Interesting discussion of rationality/free will. I'm not sure rationality is really an important mechanism in regards to free will. I get the point that rationality is a limitation on choice, but even given a situation that extreme rationality prevails over humankind, that is merely a deterministic element to daily life, that really doesn't have any bearing on 'free will'. Sure determinism is the opposite of free will, but if we didn't have the choice to choose determinism and deterministic possibilities we wouldn't really have complete free will. If there is in fact free will in the universe, rationality will not have any effect on it.

He is a fourth more reasonable option: leader. A religious prophet doesn't necessarily have to be a liar, or lunatic or a lord (whatever that is). He seemed to be the leader of a group of men that all believed the same sort of thing. He continues to be the leader of a billion or so people. The quote tries to deny something like this possibility, but this is closest to the truth. Claiming to be god is not like claiming to be a poached egg: it is a honor for the taking of men, and numerous men have taken the honor in their mortal forms throughout history. Unlike a poached egg it is not a real thing, it is an ideal that is worshipped above all worldly things. Claiming to be an ideal and actualizing it to a great degree is not lying either. I wont address this third notion of lord which is something that rules over something like a landlord or lords and vassals. That seems like a stupid thing to call god.

If I nap during the day it is very likely I get lucid dreams. In those dreams I can manifest what I want usually, but there does seem to be a degree of drunkenness to my decision making as things do get quite bizarre. I find when my dreams reach a point of lucidity when I sleep at night that I realize I'm dreaming and wake up. So becoming lucid at night seems to be a problem where I basically have rested enough that I gain a level of consciousness while asleep but I exit REM sleep and wake up. During the day if I take a nap I'm not really tired just usually extremely bored, so I guess I have a greater level of consciousness in the dream by default.

I agree with your sentiment. That is a fundamental irony that even purely objective truths are subjective. It is an irony that becomes more pronounced as one's objective knowledge produces results opposite of what one expects. In light of that, I nevertheless believe that there are objective truths, even though the whole truth escapes us leaving us inevitably surprised.

Not a bump, but just wanted to apologize to anyone who may have read what I had written that is now deleted.

Techno society and shamanistic society worship such diametrically opposed things that it would be almost impossible to get a mass movement of people to become willfully deluded by shamanistic principles. The diametrically opposed things are rationalism of science and the irrationalism of the supernatural. Getting people to hold two adverse beliefs is extremely unstable, so likely your movement would be limited to already extremely unstable people.

Same sex marriage and other lgtbq issues are about how people make moral decisions. A big topic obviously, but I simplify it as two different common sense approaches. The first appeals to instinct and structure, which resists lgtbq and the second appeals to health: to not remain dissonant and maladaptive to popular social movement and government mandate, which supports lgtbq. Obviously in the first case people make decisions based on their sexuality: if they are not gay they generally are against gay marriage and defend the structure of marriage between a man and a woman as it has always been. On the flip side a gay person follows their instinct and wants to become married to the same sex because of the same appeal to instinct and structure. With sufficient lgbtq people wanting to marry there becomes a social issue arising from the same moral appeal. Most people originally opposed gay marriage when it first became an issue, but over time a strong amount of support has emerged. I believe this is because in liberal western society the legal challenges were found to have constitutional merit and basically became law. After that people are given the choice to live in distress and anger or to adapt and simply become a supporter and live healthily with a good attitude about the world as it is.

I suppose I do agree with that statement, as reality is not one or the other of the world or the mind. The extreme of reality being the mind is solipsism and i guess the extreme of reality being the world is something completely egoless, unlike solipsism, where consciousness is just the world experiencing itself. In solipsism ones mind is the originator of reality which is extreme indirect realism, so I suppose the world experiencing itself through a biological organism that merely has an ego for self-preservation would possibly be a direct realist belief as the worlds experience of itself is as the world is, for the somewhat circular reason that it is the world itself. But both of those musings are nonsense as I hold that reality is only moderately indirect realist: there is a world and we live in it but we are separate from it and require advanced nervous system to comprehend it, but alas, it is not good enough so we exist in an absurd-ironic state in a sufficiently detached reality to claim, as I have, that we are immersed in an ironic subjective phenomenon.

There would be no irony if we could see every possible detail and outcome of everything and anything at any time. This inability to expect is basically due to not having a full and accurate picture of the world, we can't see what is masked, or behind the illusions we create, we have self-deceptions. When an expectation is too subjective some objective fact opposes our expectations, or too objective then a subjective interpretation reveals an irony that might be humorous, but also could be tragic.

I think opaque is an apt word to use. Irony is the state of human consciousness for the very reason that what is expected is not the ironic thing. But we must wallow in opaque ironies that our minds dont comprehend. They are endless and I am already exhausted before I make the following list: the technologies we count on for our survival ultimately are destroying us, food we eat to keep us healthy and alive makes us fat and slowly kills us, you put on a shoe to protect your feet from the stones on the ground, but it traps a stone under your foot as you walk. The agony! I can't go on.

I passionately disagree with the belief irony is a property of language. It certainly has been interpreted that way especially in 19th? century german philosophy, but I definitely think irony is a subjective phenomenon and not something symbolic. Literary irony is a simulacrum of irony and I believe Hegel and his ilk pushed a literary turn in irony because of his bias against it that "irony (socratic) is subjective that annihilates the objective". To use Hegel's terms, I stand my ground that irony is a phenomenon of indirect reality, subjective, that flies in the face of expectations that are established through objectivity.

This seems to be a sticking point: relationship between ideas and reality. I seem to think reality is the relational nature of the world, epitomized by the analogy between thoughts and their relationship to stuff in the world. So reality is not ideal or so real. Reality as I see it can change as the relationship between ideas and world change. Relationships change in the world all the time and the analogous ideas we get of those relationships also change, but the analogy doesnt have to be so direct, it can by degrees abstracted from the original object. Look to the relationship between man and woman. Woman(was to)man::slave:master; now, feminist:patriarchy::freedom fighter : tyranny. Nothing has changed in these analogies but relationship AND reality!

I think feminism is a fine topic to discuss, but if you have hang-ups about it I would suggest reconciling it. Feminism of all stripes posit the existence of patriarchy. It is anti-patriarchal. Against the rule of men, especially over women. There is marxist feminism that might look at things the way you have pigeonholed all feminism, but feminism doesn't necessarily mean class upheaval. If a woman simply demands or achieves agency, equality and fairness etc. in her relationships with men she has achieved the ends of feminism.

Ok, let me try to explain this a little better. I work a day job as a mechanic, so if it seems I am letting my topics lapse, I apologize.

Basically, I enjoy this method of reasoning. Using the analogical formula to make connections and associations between things, to reach interesting conclusions and make arguments has been a pastime of mine and has used up many notebook pages. I simply wanted to share the joy of using analogies as a method of reasoning with others who share a fondness for philosophy.

The paragraphs I have written above are basically my way of justifying the method by using the method. I am a firm adherent of indirect realism to the extent that not only do I believe the world is not necessarily as we perceive it, but that the exact relational nature of the world has to be uncovered through thought and without using the analogical method, for instance, the relationships between many things in the world would not be perceptible to us. Furthermore, the relationships we uncover can situate us in another reality from those who see none.

Well that is my contention, even though I require charity, that the ideas of a shoe and foot are only a relationship to shoe and foot. They are not, in fact, the shoe and the foot in any way except that they are analogous. This I guess could be represented by- idea of shoe: idea of foot:: shoe : foot. This seems trivial, but the reason for this is some things, a lot of things, are not to be taken for granted like a shoe or a foot. For example if I say some abstraction of shoe like fashion, and some abstraction of foot like body then I could say- fashion:body::shoe:foot in this case I am saying the same thing as idea of shoe and idea of foot, but it more clearly exemplifies the relational nature of idea and perception to the world. Regarding the point that I erred in saying analogy defines a relationship between things, I was merely referring to the relationship mirrored in our minds of the relationships between things in the world.

Adept interpretation. When I say reality I take an indirect realist position. What I'm saying is irony is a proof of it, not making a circular. If direct realism was true our perceptions and thoughts (including expectations) should align perfectly with the world. However we fail to see every detail in any situation and the result are ironic surprises. I just make this point because irony is generally not connected to indirect realism but I strongly believe it is a phenomenon and proof of it.

My standard for considering something ironic is pretty low. The standard dictionary definition of the opposite of what a certain set of circumstances would have you expect, especially if it is humorous or paradoxical.

I suppose the point of the statement you refer to is to justify analogy and the method I describe (which I make no claim of originating or ownership to) as an acceptable means of drawing conclusions given that our experience of reality is limited to mere ideas that just have a relationship to the world. This at the very least is a way of justifying the weaknesses in the method.

Yes it's one of those ironies that is ironically unironic. Just about any irony is to a "know-it-all", not to imply anyone here is, but take the irony that Pres. Reagan's bulletproof car deflected a bullet that had missed him into his lung. Ironic, yes, but not to someone with 20/20hindsight, of course that is one of the predictable and expected things that any sufficiently hard bulletproof surface will deflect a bullet! Not ironic at all!

I don't deny that conceptions of god are easy to implode with carefully placed critiques. I simply acknowledge that there is conceptual room for god, especially given my low wattage beam on reality. I simply chose order as the essence of god as it encompasses most of the conventional understandings in social, symbolic, and moral systems.

The burden of proof to prove god as a concept is lower than to prove god as a being. There's different ways to establish truth of a concept, but pragmatically, I could show that the concept of god is true because it is good it does good things. Do beliefs in god also do bad things, yes, but perhaps only those particular beliefs are false. Likewise for proving concepts if the concept of god is general enough, such as the underlying cause of all order in the universe then one can freely refer to god when discussing the laws of physics, or why some sentences make sense while others do not, or why numbers reflect material properties. God in this case is used as a concept to explain the unexplainable, and perhaps even once those things become explainable god will still exist beyond the infinite horizon of mystery that new knowledge creates.

God is likely in everything even in the absurd aspects of religions that make seemingly false claims. I tend to think god is found in anything that exhibits order, as that is the essence we ascribe to god. I don't necessarily have a firm belief in god as an entity exactly, I just find proof of god in the essence attributed to god. God is merely a concept, concepts are central to philosophy, and to simply prove a concept it must accurately reflect what it represents in reality. The things that religions claim about god might not be fact but there is order, whether moral, linguistic or social etc. that is governed by something beyond our power and we must adapt and comply with.

I think purpose and questions of purpose are actually part of the human mind's obsession with meaning and interpretation. Other animals with complex nervous systems (eg mammals etc) don't seem to be preoccupied with this question, although they do have limited capacity for identifying things. Humans however look at everything, not just communications, and interpret it. That results in an evaluation that is usually positive or negative. When looking a plant we see it as good or a weed, medicinal or poisonous etc. This cerebral capacity we have can turn against us when we look at our own meaning, purpose, use, value and all. I think context has a lot to do with interpretations, as the way we interpret things contemporarily is for its use or purpose and if it has none it is useless or garbage. If people were more about the aesthetic nature of things, and saw things with just purpose like cars and machinery as ugly and undesirable maybe we would look for the beauty in life instead, which is rather abundant.