The

It does

A poet especially tries to see the ugly under the perspective of the beautiful. I was wondering if the experience of truth when going logically from A to B is the same experience as recognizing beauty. Hume spoke of reason as an agitation in the mind, but thinking can be fun and it feels good when you find the truth. Is this "finding the truth" a form of feeling beauty? There's been a lot of proposals in this thread about that but I'm still not sure

You won't find that answer until you die

After world war 2 the ideal of a global government gained traction in the Catholic Church and Paul VI wanted the United Nations to be that government. The Popes since Paul VI also speak out for a New world Order, but it's now unclear which political body would take this role. There is a lot stuff behind the scenes of course which we don't see

This stuff effects all of us. The Catholic Church has a lot of power in this world and I don't think the world is moving in the direction of more individuality. The Catholic Church explicitly says it wants a new World Order, and all the major religions of the world would play a major, equal part. During his visit to India in February 1982, John Paul II allowed a Hindu priestess to imprint the "mark of Telak" on him. In 1995 in Australia, he had a Mass celebrating the "beatification" of Mary of the Cross, and the usual liturgical "penitential rite" was replaced by a ritual taken from aboriginal fire worship. This desire to codify and coordinate the religions of the world is very real

My own perspective is that of being brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition of Christianity. I was an extremely religious teenager and began attending Christianity Union at university, but found that I was at odds with others because I was interested in the whole panorama of comparative religion and could not believe that any one tradition had a monopoly on truth. I am currently outside of any tradition and have a certain sympathy with the deconstruction of religious beliefs, such as the critique offered by Nietzsche. — Jack Cummins

The Catholic Church at Vatican II said it respected most established religions, which means that the Church recognizes more good than bad in them now (in the past non-Christian religions were considered demonic). The Church is very negative about non-established religions however. An example of this is when John Paul II said Buddhism, although "atheist", had a lot of good in it, but then went on to say that the New Age is all bad. Gnosticism has a lot of individually about it, and it is this that the Church is against. The Church can stomach an established religion that denies the Church a divine mandate, but it has problems with individuality, andperhaps rightly.

Interestingly, John Paul II in 1986 had an inter-faith summit in Assisi, wherein he prayed along-side leaders and members of the other world religions. He repeated this in 1993 and 2002, and Pope Benedict also presided over one in 2011. "The Community of Sant’Egidio" organizes inter-faith prayer events every year, and were behind Pope Francis's own one in 2016

My point is that the relationship between two established religions is different from the dynamics involved in the conflict between established faith and individuality

I found these interesting quotes today:

"The triad is the form of the completion of all things". Nichomachus of Gerasa (c,100, Greek neo-Pythagorean philosopher and mathematician.)

"The Triad has a special beauty and fairness beyond all numbers, primarily because it is the very first to make actual the potentialities of the Monad." Iamblichus (c. 250-c. 330, Greek Neoplatonic philosopher.)

I don't think these opinions are objective though

Yes, I've read the Wikipedia article on him and Nazism. There was a book written awhile ago that said that his philosophy is inherently Nazi. I think a Nazi is necessarily Heidegarrian, but a Heidegarrian is not necessary a Nazi

That's a pretty good non-sectarian definition of Religion. So, in that case, Albert Einstein was a religious person. But I would distinguish between a personal unofficial Philosophy and a communal doctrinal Religion.

I call my "belief in an unseen order" in Nature, and my attempt to "harmoniously adjust thereto", merely a personal philosophical worldview. However, most people are not so rationally or philosophically inclined; hence their "need" for a religious community of faith & feeling, may result from the cognitive dissonance between their intuition of "Order" in the world, despite the obvious Disorders of life, and their uncertainty about the ambivalent "Unseen" organizer. Having a scriptural authority for your belief, releases you from responsibility for personally resolving the "need" for assurance that someone is in control, and that things are going to be alright.

Those who are philosophically opposed to any form of Supernaturalism or Religion though, may either deny the inherent order of Nature (emphasizing randomness instead), or place their trust in Science (to reveal the self-ordering powers of evolution). :smile:

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
____Albert Einstein

"there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought."
___Albert Einstein, Religion and Science

"We're hand-wired to avoid uncertainty, because it makes us feel lots of negative emotions,"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/coronavirus-psychology-of-uncertainty-not-knowing-whats-next.html — Gnomon

Spinoza didn't believe in free will. When I was reading his Ethics at first I thought he was a compatibilist until he directly denied that any free will was real. I would guess Einstein was of the same frame of mind. This is indicated by his desire to fully understand God by finding a scientific "theory of everything". I see this as just Gnosticism

Yeah, unless you're an Orwellian. As the song says

"When you believe in things
That you don't understand,
Then you suffer ..." — 180 Proof

There needs to be a healthy relationship between knowledge and faith. Gnostic hopes of finding the secret concept that explains all life and makes the future perfect is a desire we unconscious have, but it doesn't seem to be to be consistent with faith being primary in life. Knowledge of faith is important and faith in knowledge can be misleading. There is a lot of moving parts in all of us, and the desire to find the concept that completely and permanently "settles the boat" is probably a pipe dream

Free will is very paradoxical in that we impose morality on ourselves. Morality is our own law yet it comes with the feeling of necessity to it. Fitche (1) wrote a lot about this in the 1790's, after Kant originally came up with ideas years before. People were encouraged by religious leaders before this to accept morality as coming from God and thus to stop asking "why" to everything. The religious folk think "asking why" about God doesn't make sense.

(1) Nazis after World War 1 were really into Fitche, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but those thinkers weren't Nazi. Nazism tarnished itself right from the start with cruelty and strange sexual practices and ended in serious drug abuse and mass murder.. Fitche and Heidgger had anti-Semitic moments and this is sad, but their philosophies have no necessary relation to hate and murder. I see much of Fitche's works as proto-Husserlian phenomenology

I'm not aware of a lot of philosophers even talking about Camus anymore. It's more about science, post modernism, ethics, New age, ect. nowadays



to have free will only makes sense if you can abuse it to the point you go to Hell. Freedom without the potential of self damnation doesn't make logical sense. I can't put it into a mathematical theorem though. Nothing in philosophy can it seems

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Actually i think most powerful people are nihilists

I subscribe to Hegelianism, which I see as a German romantic system that is like a unity of Daoism and Confucianism (e.g. yin and yang as a dialetic). I notice how Islam has remnants of the moon religions of the deserts. There is a source of each religious thought in history, a first person to have developed the religion. Reading ancient religions accurately is difficult though.

I remember you saying you are a recovering Catholic. I use to be Catholic too. Anyhow, when someone is having religious thoughts they are not in the best place to interpret history and the same applies when writing a gospel while filled with religious fervor. That was the point I was after. You can't open the Bible and start with assuming it's history. Would you agree that works of such religious fervor like the NT should not be accepted as detailed history because of the motives behind those books?

Vatican II changed Catholicism

"In the beginning was the Logos"

It's just a matter of trying to grasp what an ancient person MIGHT have meant by a saying. All religions evolve from the times they were started until modern times. The soldiers of Rome took religion from Persia and Greece. Christianity took Greek religion and maybe from the other faiths as well. The first Popes under the Holy Roman Empire considered themselves "rulers under the Sun", which came directly from Roman emporers' self portrayals. Catholicism from them until the Renaissance was a religion of physical light (Consider how many times Aquinas speaks of physical light). Adapt, absord, change. That is what religion does

I argue that this is an example of why the Bible is not a trustworthy source to govern one's life. It's seems painfully obvious to me that tradition Buddhism believes subjective consciousness is all that is and that objectivity and substance is an illusion. Nirvana is knowing that nothing is, a thought without a thinker. The thought itself has no substance they say. If there are alternative readings of this, it reveals of that Christianity too is open to so many interpretations that you can never know what is of "the Lord". Religions of those times have passed through the filter of thousands of years

Everywhere it is said that Buddha held we have no soul. To understand this as not eradicating the ego seems like a strained Western attempt to claim Buddha for themselves

Sure

"You are not" is the same as "you have no soul" . The very first philosophy of Buddha is anatman

Soul=identity

That much is obvious

Saying you don't have a soul is the core of what Buddha, like it or not

The mythos of Mythras started in Persia and had the sacred bull sacrifice for sins. There are similarities in most of the religions of that area with the upcoming Christianity. Egyptians had communion, lots had baptism, and a number of other similarities can be pointed out. I don't take religious texts as pure history for the simple reason that the religious impulse is not in accord with historical accuracy. All religions make up myths. Syncretism is the heartbeat of religion

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Nihilists take the assertion "life is good" as a 100% true position and respond with the 100% objective response "life is meaningless". I like your "fake it till you make it" comment

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Nihilism is a dogmatic response to dogmatism. That's what I am getting at

In response to the idea that their religion is purely negative, Buddhist often speak as if annata is denying you have Atman in order to open the Brahmin within. But traditional Buddhism says that experience is real instead of substance. They deny you are Brahmin because Brahmin is not nothing. You are nothing, said the Buddha

Hinduism says we are God, so there is no damnation. Such a safeguard is not in Buddhism

The "law of explosion" is the problem with nihilism (recent posts on my thread on truth\beauty are talking about this). You can't really understand anything from a "God perspective" . Many people get so depressed that they can't feel anything and then think they are God. This leads too or comes from drug abuse in many cases. "Beware of wisdom that is not earned" said Jung because drugs are illness, an attempt to control reality. Is nihilism any different from this? Isn't nihilism simply a putting of reality into one basket and saying "fuh you" to it? Go ahead and point of the if nihilism is true than nihilism doesn't matter. The problem isn't with infinite regress though. It's with the law of explosion. Nihilism is objective realism in disguise. I've never been a nihilist so maybe my approach is flawed, yet I don't see traditional logical approaches to it as helpful

Sometimes nihilism needs to choose to be less objective and straightforward, maybe even to choose a lie, in order to be set free. We have the right to obey laws external and internal and the duty to be free. To see things the backwards way can lead to nihilism

Walt Whitmann and Nietzsche both said "if contradict myself, then so be it". If they had to fit into a religious structure, they probably would have been home in ancient Mongolian worship of animals. There is something human about being at home in "contradiction" because it's better to trust oneself than to listen to "the They" (Heidegger).

Your trinity seems very Kantian. Good is practical intention, beauty is in rest's attention. Truth is in movement and translation between states. So truth is purely negative in the Hegelian sense. Only the whole, as combining the trinity in movement with stability, is reality

On the contrary, to be free means the possibility of help is real. I'm an atheist. I don't know if there is a heaven and if good would necessitate it. I do know there is a hell

Augustine argued that because we can (so he says) know eternal truth, we must have an immortal soul

Heidegger allegedly responded to this by saying because we know we are mortal we know we cannot know eternal truth

However, the latter thinker did not simply stay in the playground of epistemology but instead reached for the shore of ontology. Kinda like Gulliver's Travels, he stayed on the shore and longed for home. That too is beautiful

Everyone has an Ego so when we say "nothing matters" that is a claim to objectivity and can only be emotionally held on to as a meaning in life. The fundamentals of karma work. Do evil and evil comes to you. Do good and you won't go to hell (maybe you'll just be annihilated). But justice and fairness are not the same thing. The universe allows itself to be just to us but our lives might not be fair in themselves, or in comparisons between us

Just throwing this out there: even if God exists, maybe he doesn't want us to believe or pray to him. Maybe God created us wanting us to be atheists.

When speaking of something that exists, the phrase "potential parts" is an oxymoron. Aristotle was in a bind over what Zeno had said years before him and so tricked his readers by saying objects are infinitely divisible only potentially. Yet he was wrong. Objects have parts and the only way "potential parts" can mean anything as an expression is to have it refer to conscious awareness of those parts, something people are unwilling to do. They would rather deny that material objects are truly spatial, deny they know what space means, and host of other tricks to avoid what I've been addressing in this thread. Pyrhonnians throughout history have used the "infinitely divided finite" as proof that we can't know anything truthfully. I for one want to make as much sense of it as I can and it doesn't bother in itself. It does bother me when some says "sure" and then repeats the "only potentially has those parts" thing when I thought we had just settled that. I guess I finally have gotten it into my head that people are truly truly bothered by the question "how many parts does a table actually have" so maybe I just won't bring this stuff up anymore on this forum. But thanks especially to fishfry for sharing his wide knowledge

Objects don't potentially have parts. The parts are actual, and also spatial. To be spatial is to be infinitely divisible and all things in the world are spatial. But most people have an Aristotle archetype or something that they follow, so I'll let it go

nit interval [0,1] contains infinitely many points. Is that correct? If so, how many points do you think it should have? — fishfry

Something discrete. Yet "discrete space" is impossible if it is to remain space.

And modern physics does not posit infinite divisibility. In fact in physics, space is divisible down to the Planck length, equal to around 1.616255...×10−351.616255...×10−35 meters. Below this distance, our physics breaks down and we cannot sensibly speak of what goes on or how space is. There's a Planck time as well, a minimum time interval below which our physics breaks down and can't be applied. — fishfry

This is a commonly held sophistry. As i demonstrated on this thread, everything in this world is made of infinite parts and I BELIEVE the conclusion is that everything is finite and infinite in the exact same respect. That last part is what I was trying to explore

Oh darn, I sandbagged myself again. People always bring up Banach-Tarski, and I say, "B-T is at heart a simply syntactic phenomenon that I could describe in a page of exposition if anyone was interested," and they invariably have no interest. One of these days someone's going to say, "I'd like to see that" and I'll do it. But I see once again that you name-checked B-T but don't actually have an interest in it. And I got hopeful, only to be disappointed again. I am telling you that the heart of B-T is simple and surprising and perfectly clear, but nobody wants to hear about it. I pointed you at the references but you had no questions. One of these days ... — fishfry

I don't see how anyone with a brain wouldn't want to know how to get two objects out of one without referring to infinities. Such a theorem is incredible and I hope you do codify it into a thesis that others will read and appreciate. I for one am having trouble with it because it's of such a nature which I do not think I will understand it by READING it, as opposed to having it explained in person where I can cross examine every step. Reading it is just to much for me

In math, given a line, you can pick any two points, label one point 0 and the other point 1, and that length is your basic unit. — fishfry

That is arbitrary, as is the Plank length

That falls directly out of calculus. And as andrewk noted in the Gabriel's horn thread, it's analogous to the fact that the infinite series 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 ... sums to infinity, yet the series 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + 1/25 + ... has a finite sum. Just a mathematical fact that takes a bit of getting used to, but is undeniably true. — fishfry

Something I need to consider more, thanks.

Well Euclid's axioms are a fine set of basic axioms. And if you drop the parallel postulate and replace it with either zero or many parallels through a point parallel to a given line, you get various flavors of non-Euclidean geometry. In modern times, Tarski's axiomitization of Euclidean geometry is of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms — fishfry

"Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of proportion. It is now known that these are almost the only points in which Euclid is free from blemish. Countless errors are involved in his first eight propositions. That is to say, not only is it doubtful whether his axioms are true, which is a comparatively trivial matter, but it is certain that his propositions do not follow from the axioms which he enunciates."
Bertrand Russell

It becomes very confusing, which is why I was trying to find something basic about space that I could use as "first principles" in a Cartesian fashion