I'm looking at the OP and thinking to myself "which suffering"? There are so many ways to suffer, and I can't imagine many ways to suffer to which desire is related. Also, some of the ways we suffer, and to which desire is related, are self-inflicted. Can self-inflicted suffering, or for that matter suffering that is requested or demanded from other people, actually be considered suffering if suffering is the desired outcome? It seems there are far more ways a person can suffer at the hands of other people than by his own hand. Much of suffering is beyond a person's control. Much of suffering is beyond anyone's control. I guess I would say that any suffering that is within a person's capacity to avoid is related to desire, while any suffering that is not is unrelated to desire. I'm not sure what Buddhism says or how it's connected, but Buddhism is religion and therefore philosophically limited to the confines of its principles of piety.

If I wrote a book and anyone made the mistake of reading it, it would soon after find itself in a trash bin. No truer words have ever been spoken. Amen.

I'm no expert, but I would say that in the absence of anger our species would die off, but hey, we're heading for extinction either way.

It's hard to watch all the theist and spiritualist arms getting so sore from pulling invisible rabbits out of invisible hats all day.

Claiming that there's empirical data supporting the existence of anything supernatural sounds fanatical and is just plain false. There's no reasonable argument in support of a Creator of any kind, and there's no reasonable argument in support of the universe being a Creation.

The problem with arguing against gods, or other supernatural phenomena or entities or whatever else the imagination can and will produce, is that every time an argument is presented, the goal posts can and will be moved and the entity or phenomenon or any of their descriptors can and will become less and less descript, more and more vacuous, until it's impossible to argue against something so incomprehensibly vacuous.

That's the cunning of spirituality, that it can't be contested because it's a self-perpetuating nothingness and an everlasting excuse for ignorance.

It makes no difference what you call The Grand Mover, its intangibility perseveres through tradition and speculation. That's why there's religion in the first place, because it's impossible to disprove something that doesn't exist. It doesn't matter what face you put on it, the fact remains that you put a face on it, it put no face on itself. It has no face, no description, no presence, no reason, no purpose, no explanation, no motivation, no parameter whatsoever except that which we ascribe to it.

There's no inherent problem with these types of discussions. The problem is that people seem to think they can fit a square peg into a round hole, and when the world hands them a round peg, they quote antiquated intellects who swore by a square peg, they complain that science has no place in the fiction that philosophy represents.

The scientific method is clear, and the are innumerable examples of it being utilized incorrectly. There are innumerable examples of it being ignored in order to push hypotheses into a category of fact that is religious by nature. There are innumerable examples of corporate, religious or political entities pushing stupidity into the mainstream claiming science as its backbone. There are guesses, and theories, but those aren't science, they're just fictional placeholders. Science hasn't gone wrong, it's been misused.

There is no fullness of time. What we know today is factual, and while it may at some point be made more clear or more efficient, it will remain factual. What we believe is similar to what we have always believed, and that's the problem. Belief is both consistent and unreliable. Things outlive their usefulness all the time, it's nature's way.

"Respect" and "taken with a piece of salt" are a contradiction of terms.

Ancient philosophy is a mess of glaring mistakes, scientific ignorance, intellectual deficit, irrationality and devotion to mythology or popularity. Its specialists were drawn from a pool of wealthy nobles and politicians-by-birthright and leans toward controlling "lesser humans".

The reasoning is not sound, it assumes a premise before arguing it via senseless rhetoric. Adherence to these relics of stupidity is the reason the field of philosophy has stagnated and is useless to modern society. It refuses to respond to what has outmoded it. It hasn't adapted to modernity and requires a reformation or faces extinction in the face of scientific discovery.

I'll treat your dismissal and accompanying commentary as an admittance that the only aim of this thread is to request a string of short fiction entries, and that you're displeased that I didn't add a short fiction entry to it.

The dictionary doesn't define spirit substantially because there is no way to define something that is unknown except by way of perception, which results in circular and nonsensical discussion based on subjectivity.

Well then, I suppose we should seriously address "the classics" for their assertion that a drop of menstrual blood destroys a season's crops.

Why should we ignore them rather than clarify that much of their written work is demonstrably false and take it as a mistake and a lesson to address philosophy rationally and coherently?

Many of these nonsensical mentions of ancient philosophers are merely name-drops for those among us who insist on arguing based on what they perceive as "authority", or they want to pretend they're versed in primitive thought, which somehow qualifies their assertions. Ancient philosophy is outdated and out of context and involves more fantasy than rationality.

Alright. What is it that we're saying exists, then? Let's define terms. It's obviously not Santa Claus we're discussing. So then, what is it?

Again, a rope and a snake are each something. Somewhere in the analogy there needs to be a nothing that is treated as if it was a something.

From your "eyes" analogy--what is the analogous physical object in the discussion of "spirit"?

The existence of horses and narwhals proves the existence of unicorns.

You could apply this principle to anything really. It's a simple formula, "because there's this, there must also be that".

This is what makes ancient philosophy so lasting, so impossible to defeat, so impressive and amazing. It's reverse psychology, if you say something so profoundly and incomprehensibly stupid that no one can argue against it, then you win while the world scratches its head.

No one here is a philosopher, but at least some people contribute to coherent or even rational discourse.

If God is invisible, intangible, impossible to detect under any circumstances, will never involve itself directly or indirectly in human affairs--then why not "philosophize" about something that matters?

There is zero evidence and zero reason to provide evidence. While we're at it, I'm sure we can find a few more paranoid ramblings from ancient times and go around telling people they can't be disproved either.

If what you're claiming is that the mind is personal domain, under direct or indirect personal control, then how can you explain that a thought is dependant on chemical and energetic processes which happen prior to its conception?

Saying that something doesn't exist for which there has never been an iota of evidence doesn't incur a burden of substantiation. By its very definition, substantiation is a demonstration of substance. Every assertion of a god or gods is inseparable from its inability to ascribe verifiable substance to god or gods.

An assertion that there is no such thing as a god or gods is unconditionally accompanied by literally all of the evidence in the observable universe. The only "evidence" ever provided for the existence of any supernatural thing is imagination, heightened emotion, some unverifiable personal experience.

I understand that you want to avoid straying from the specific notion of "spirit", but it's important to consider that it falls into a category with numerous other fantasies and delusions in that all of it is unknown, based on emotions such as fear and anxiety, assigned characteristics cherry-picked from natural occurrences, based on concepts and principles subscribed to by primitive humans who thought that the brain was in the chest where we now know the heart is.

There's never been any reason, outside of heightened emotion, to assert that anything invisible or intangible can be described with elaborate detail.

There's nothing wrong with assertion, and I don't see a problem with the assertion that something has never been demonstrated. If you want to argue the existence of something, it might be best to begin with some evidence of a replicable qualitative occurrence of it in reality. Otherwise we're talking about nothing as though it's something.

It's important to consider all fairy tales, not just one specifically, because they're all derived from similar heightened emotions and states of mind, such as fear of predators, fear of death itself, or fear of not having lived fully, etc.

Any assertion of the existence of any of these preternatural things humans have irrationally feared for millennia is baseless. None has been evidenced reliably. All are based on personal experiences, typically of unbalanced individuals seeking attention, experiences no one has ever been able to demonstrate or duplicate under any controlled conditions. Even in this, the information age, when everyone has a smart phone equipped with a video camera, no paranormal activity has ever been recorded, and no "spirit" has ever been detected. It might be time to start thinking about where to bury all of this nonsense.

Life is a duration of time within which a self-replicating container of energized tissue can support "microorganisms", as far as I can tell.

Until very recently, philosophy was exclusively fat lazy males rubbing their chins and scratching their heads and pretending idle talk sprinkled with fancy made-up words was somehow productive. What we're experiencing now is a transitional phase between that and something else.

There's no such thing as "making the impact of the supernatural intelligible". All impact is natural, and delusion is the only reason to assume otherwise. Everything that "detects the supernatural" is imaginary. The mind is how the brain is perceived by consciousness, it's not an entity external to the brain but an explanation for an imaginary manifestation of the brain, which happens in the brain.

There is no reliable evidence of any "psychic experience", and I'm not sure how that connects to the conversation, maybe you could elaborate.

There is evidence that each thought exists as a series of chemical and energetic processes before it becomes consciousness. Consciousness can't influence processes that are required in order for it to become consciousness. This leads me to believe, and this is an opinion, that all living and non-living things are interconnected in such ways as to "trick" our minds into perceiving experiences the way we perceive them, as organized in any way, as opposed to experiencing a mere energetic mess. It is an illusion, that anything we perceive is "organized" in any way.

It also leads me to believe that there is no free will and that anything perceived as supernatural is merely a misunderstood natural phenomenon. There is reliable, replicable evidence for this and no reliable, replicable evidence against it.

There's no way to sensibly articulate this, so it's understandable that you were unable to. The "mind" is physical and requires certain physical parameters to be met in order to maintain consciousness. It requires physical stimuli and chemical and energetic processes, all dependent on living tissue, in order to be experienced.

You're not talking about evidence, you're talking about personal experiences that haven't been demonstrated or replicated. This isn't about denying something even though you see evidence of it. This isn't about what someone wants or doesn't want.

Are you saying that your pastor and his "mantra" are proof of the existence of gods?

There is no sense in "logic" that attempts to lead from nothing to something.

To say that I'm "blindly guessing" is to suggest that there's some visible evidence I'm not seeing, which is absurd. By your logic, if I'm driving a car and see no obstruction in front of me, I should assume I'm going to crash into whatever it is that I can't see.

It is both logical and reasonable to require evidence for something that has never been demonstrated. It is illogical to assert that a primitive fable is factual until conditions exist by which its allegations can be demonstrated as facts.

Your analogy about sentient life doesn't parallel religious claims and has no bearing on the conversation. Sentient life can be, and has been, demonstrated. Gods have not been demonstrated, neither have the tooth fairy or the boogey man.

Then you cut and paste 3-7 word portions of a sentence and place them out of context as a stand-alone phrase in order to inject your irrelevant and unrelated comments into the thread.

If I was uninformed then you wouldn't be "reminding" me, you'd be "informing" me. I guess this is what you do, you go look on the internet for obscure religious cults very few people know or care about, create a contradiction-of-terms-troll-nickname and "remind" us all of the existence one of likely six thousand forgotten renditions of a forgotten pagan sun god religion, which were all of course based on forgotten religions that predate them. Interesting.

Are you ever going to participate in a discussion?

So what you're effectively saying is that it isn't Christianity and fits nowhere within or alongside Christianity. So then I'm left wondering why you'd label yourself with a blatant contradiction of terms other than to troll people or to self-deprecate.

That's a matter of people having an impact on other people and has no bearing on whether or not gods have been evidenced. That modern humans repeat or act out the insane and oppressive ramblings of iron age misogynists has nothing to do with whether or not the ideology originated with messages from gods.

I'm unable to take it for anything if it's vague and has no bearing on the conversation. That's why I asked you to elaborate, but if you're unwilling to speak with clarity, there's nothing I can do about it.

You're going to have to elaborate, your response is vague and has no bearing on the conversation.

I've read both positive and negative sentiments by Nietzsche concerning Jews, as well as women, musicians, philosophers, Germans, Europeans in general, etc. The worst sentiments he expressed were about other philosophers. He would certainly be considered a racist by today's standards for merely mentioning Jews, or any other category of human beings, in any stereotypical context. As far as I know, Hitler was neither a well-educated nor an accomplished human being before he engaged in political action just prior to his first attempted overthrow of Germany, but I could be mistaken.

What was "perverted" about Nietzsche, specifically, and why would you place him in a category with Nazis, who were not philosophers.

Yes, as a result of Karl Marx, approximately 120 million innocent people have died, several economies have failed or are failing, several bitter revolutionary uprisings have caused social and political unrest and needless human suffering, that's quite some society shaping.

In my opinion, philosophy as a field of study is regressive and fundamentally useless to society, but discussion, debate and "philosophizing" can be useful or entertaining, possibly even enlightening, as a pastime for individuals or groups of people.

I'm not sure where "content people" fit in here. If you're content, then you're likely not using enough of a given substance to have a significant impact on your consciousness.

As far as the OP, I have two things to say. The first is that your opening statement is inaccurate. Philosophy, for thousands of years, has been a mental gymnastics domain for the wealthy, the educated intellectual, the sane, for the most part. The second thing I wanted to say ties into the first, and it is that philosophy is available to more common people and has far different utility than it did 3,000 years ago. It isn't for everyone, and it's never been for everyone. It isn't even for everyone who exhibits a strong desire to attempt to exercise some form of it.

These days, philosophy is more of a flippant pastime. Those who pay for an education in philosophy gain little more than a false sense of superiority and a trolling platform on social media, unless they're motivated enough to write a book or become a teacher and achieve some measure of success by passing on the useless 700 year old obsolete information on which they've been instructed. It's all just flowery words and broken logic, name dropping and religious fervor for ideas most of which weren't even good when they were first written centuries ago.