I believe we can see space, so since space is such an integral part of our consciousness maybe through meditation or self-hynosis we can find ourselves in another world, really somewhere else (another space). Certain drugs (like salvia) will make you feel like you are somewhere else but I don't think your consciousness leaves.

Many neurobiologists conclude from premises X, Y, Z to the conclusion that our will is unfree. But that means that their very argument is based on unfree reasoning, i.e. having no alternatives, undermining any confidence or justification in that process and therefore in the conclusion. — Pippen

I don't find this a sound argument at all. I incline to believe in free will though. Those who disbelieve in it don't seem to realize that free will is a type of multi-tasking

Im in the same boat as the OP. I'm almost 35 and life just feels dryer and more routine at this age. On the afterlife though, I think consciousness is attached to all the molecules in the body. Maybe at death the consciousness attaches to one atom (maybe in the brain or heart) and you die as you go into the quantum realm. I know this sounds like Antman, but it really might not be bad down in there

You are a really good writer

Film noir is a kind of art. An old scene in black and white of an alley long ago is a type of art the Renassaince painters didnt dabble in. They were too busy trying to prove Platonism

But the Jesuits knew that you need to grab a child young, indoctrinate the desired thought habits, the automatisms, before they become too capable of instead thinking for themselves. — apokrisis

I've been there. Nonetheless, I wanted to quote some Bible verses that I thought were relevant to this thread, even for atheists like myself.

Proverbs 28:26
Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.

Jeremiah 17:9
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?

James 3:2
For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.

I don't know if Heidegger knew much about biology, but biology wars against our minds. The mind wars against biology too though. What Heidegger wrote in Being and Time about how thinking about death is really desiring a conscience caught my attention. We often kick ourselves for things that aren't our fault as a kind of catharsis. Even with something like exercise, the mind can tell you "you can do it" when the body clearly can't do another rep. There is definitely a divide with in the human psyche. Thanks for the responses

I read in a book once that art started our ancestors started making art about their ancestors. Primitave religion more generally looks to the past for perfection. There is something about the past that captures us. Art about our ancestors is more dear to us than art about our descendants (if that even exists)

I just grammar edited my last post. We might not be able to disprove that there is a supernatural order, but that doesn't mean we might not find a proof for it someday

Just because something can't be disproven, that doesn't mean it can't be proven

Interesting aside imho: I had an older friend a few years a back. Named Glen. He had dementia. He said it was very frustrating because (as he related) many people with dementia feel that are responsible for the changes in their brains. I've found that true of the mentally ill community. It can be so tricky and the mind can be so conniving that knowing for sure where your free will lies at times seems impossible

We need to each have, I think, some definition of free will in our minds to keep our own inner harmony

I think a good definition of free will is that it is it's own cause or its own casaulity, the capacity to do something that wouldn't have happened otherwise

"It is true that Newton expressedly warned physics to beware of metaphysics, but to his honour, let it be said that he did not conduct himself in accordance with the warning at all" Hegel

Whether completely amoral people were born that way or not is debatable. Some psychologists believe toddlers have free will, and the corollary to this is that toddlers form the personality they will latter have. I wish this issue was clearer but it's not

Youre not a careful thinker. Whether the Eucharist is in accord with natural law or whether atonement is moral is not a fake topic. Not all Christians are bad but their system is objectively evil. Or should I say... Satanic.

Also, if you think my case is weak, then you think it IS moral to take someone's state of soul out of them and put someone else's in. In which case you don't know the basics of morality and is possibly a bad person trying to deal in black magic, which the very idea of atonement is. Christopher Hitchens pointed this out years ago. Get up to date. You're not a Neanderthal

You're not good at debating. If Christianity has its inversion within itself, then it is a false religion. I'm making the case (successfully) that, as usually understood, Christianity is wrong and also dangerous. I have more of a problem with Islam, but have realized as the scales fell from my eyes that Christianity is not much better. Islam has a universal mandate in their religion to murder. Christians wait for their God to give specific instructions. Did you know that John Paul II brought the canon of Eastern Orthodox saints into the western Roman church? Well many of those "saints" were killers of "sinners". We are talking about a belief system. In the Christian system its "legal" so to kill anyone whosoever if the deity says to. In fact, its not only legal but obligatory. You can go to the eternal torture chamber if you refuse. The system is not family friendly, just like Islam

I was simply saying above that we don't fully know what matter is. You say it's energy. But do you know what energy is? How close is the relationship between energy and matter? When energy becomes matter, is there true change or simply a rearrangement or condensation or something? This is what I'm interested in. I am not sure philosophy really has an answer

I feel like my case is strong. I've been very careful in my arguments against Christianity. Christianity has those four elements I've described that in another religion would be described as "from the devil". Other parts of Christianity are so appealing that Christians are willing to forgive these four mortal sins and try to justify them. Again, I've been very clear by what I mean when I say Christianity is Satanic. I don't see where I've strayed from the topic

Let me clarify this a little further. The Old Testament relates how the Jewish nation mass killed children and pregnant women of other nations because a super-being whom believed in told them that these humans were evil and that "He" desired their death. These were acts that were carried out. Can't anyone see that believing in a super-being who can call the shots for us with regard to the death penalty is a threat to society? And why should this be surprising? Islam is a threat to society. Christianity is just a sister religion. Again, the three monotheistic religions of the West are a threat to society. Atheism is not

If it's false, then demonstrate that Catholics are 'Christ-like', or any one Catholic, or any Christian for that matter, or any person. I'm still talking about a book and the stories it contains, you're still talking about some people who didn't read it, and a lot of speculation, and a lot of stuff that exists nowhere in the text. — whollyrolling

Is this supposed to mean something?

What I see as a problem is irrelevant to the topics you've introduced, and now you've jumped from "God is Satanic" to whether or not I personally endorse certain religions. — whollyrolling

No. I was asking if you have a problem with God telling people to try to kill innocent people, even their own families. I didn't ask what your religion is

That the killing was stopped is the whole point of the story, and I would argue that the whole point of the story matters to the story. — whollyrolling

That's not true. God supposedly can't tell someone to think, believe, or will something evil. So it wasn't evil for Abraham to walk up the mountain to kill his innocent son! That's what the Bible teaches literally. It does matter that this is in the text. The Eastern religions are in general about non-violence. This is not the way it is with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Old Testament has God commanding the Jews to hamstring horses and let them die in the sun. What is the typical Christian response? "God let the horses appear to suffer but really took the suffering away while they died". So we have a religion where you are bound to follow what you believe God is telling you do under pain of hell fire, up to and including killing innocent people and animals.

what you're attempting to address is independent of Catholicism. — whollyrolling

False

The story in which God commands Abraham to kill his son is a poor example, and you're making it obvious that you don't understand the literal text or the metaphor it implies. You were talking previously about it as though Abraham actually killed his son and God commended him for doing so. Now you're talking about God's intentions, and it was made clear in the text that God never intended Isaac to be harmed. Also, he's God, so he can just bring the kid back to life or give Abraham 20 replacement sons while Isaac lives in heaven, or whatever. It's the bible. — whollyrolling

It doesn't matter if an angel stopped it. God commanded Abraham to form the intention to kill, and he went up a mountain to do it. If God commands a Christian president to push the nuke button, the Bible says he has to do it regardless if God might stop the bomb in mid flight. Christianity and Judaism are like Islam: they are based on violent ancient texts. You don't see that as a problem?

Christians usually put God's nature as the most prior within God. Nietzsche rightly asked where are God's victories then. We humans work and try to be good. How can God's nature be the essence of all
those things? How can he just sit there and be it?? That would be a substance view of God and you shouldn't hide behind the fact that these topics take some thought and then refuse to recognize this as idolatry. A substance can never be better by itself than action. I know you are going to counter that God DOES will. Imagine, however, a soldier deciding to charge the enemy. Are we to say God's nature has this without having to do it? Without having to feel the fear and doing that good? Again, this is just absurd.

If you want to have an alternate non-Platonic view of God, that's fine. If you want to reject Catholicism and also say Protestantism now doesn't pretend it's cannibalizing someone, ok. I agree some Christians say that the Old Testament is mostly just stories to teach a lesson. Yet that is creating a New Christianity. What I was refuting was typical Christianity. And good luck having Christianity without scapegoating.

And do you have any idea how many completely different kinds of Catholics there are worldwide?

Also, the original post in this thread covers like a hundred different complex topics, about none of which a sound or rational thing was posited. — whollyrolling

I provided four examples of things which Christians, if they saw them in another religion, would consider Satanic. Since they are so close to their own, they can't see the forest for the tree. I don't considering worshiping Pure Form (idolatry), eating Jesus (cannibalism), God commanding Abraham to form the intention and attempt to kill his son (murder), and Christians asking another being to take their sins out of them because of an innocent man (scapegoating) to be all that complex.

I also know far more about Catholicism than you'll ever know, I'd bet

see my new thread on this

That is, philosophy can argue that the foundation is fundamental, or it can argue that the result is instead. Philosophy has a lot of perspectives. Relativism is kinda true. Take a segment. It may be finite on the "top" (say 1 foot for example), but it is infinite on the "bottom" (endless, infinite points). So something as basic as a segment is finite and infinite in exactly the same respect. What is Aristotle's response to this? "Uh du du parts don't exist". What a cop-out!

How do you know the result is not more real than the process?

Infinity merges with finitude, from which potency flows into actuality. The world is contingent but not such that you need a Aristotelian ontology. There are lots of ways of looking at this, depending on your spiritual vantage point. So what is necessary? Maybe nothingness itself. That has made sense to me in the past. Something can be true, but where is its truth? Does it reside in nothing?

Yes. Thanks for the video

"Figure is nothing else but determination, and determination is negation." Spinoza , Epistle 50

So maybe there is the fundamental necessity, and then contingency is a miracle (defined as pure spontaneity). If contingency flowed directly from a necessary condition, it would not be contingent but necessary. Spinoza knew this and liked it, but he was of the Age of Laws. I think the modern situation has nothing to learn from hylomorphism but much to learn about spontaneity, chance, and chaos theories

Augustine and that tradition say suffering is a privation of reality. Von Balthazar was a traditionalist who thought that all evil was substantial, but it's usually the Gnostics who say such. If we avoid that terrain, the topic of this OP is sticky, as I think Judaka pointed out best above

Yes, the object is all "one thing" - the substantial actuality. My (Aristotelean) point was about the causes of this "one thing".

Concrete actuality is the product of top-down formal cause in interaction with bottom-up material cause. That is the standard systems or structuralist ontology. — apokrisis

It's the standard position that has never been proved, and has been questioned since William of Ockham and Descartes primarily. Nowadays we might say something has extension, energy, and force. Maybe those are all one thing. Aristotle goes into many areas where there is no leverage where you can make a real argument. So I think he's a waste of time unless you have nostalgia for Greek life. I don't. You tried to argue for hylomorphism by saying there is yin and yang. Well there is a Trinity in Hinduism and Christianity. Therefore does it prove my modern position is correct?

You didn't provide a single argument in your post. This is because you can't prove a division in objects between "structure, purpose, organisation" and "fluctuation, accident, possibility". It's all one thing, it's all a thousand things. Who care's. "There is no end to dreams, millions of them" (John Lennon)

Reading the book "The Secret", talking to Satan though you don't believe in him, and being sexually perfect seem me like the right road to me. That's my life goal. I don't like how Christianity is such a gang (literally) of people using ancient texts which they can't prove they can translate to troll the world. They believe in a God that can command murder and genocide at any time. Christians are not normal people. They can think that this is because their religion is special, but a special aura can also such. They are about narcissism thru self-hatred in front of a mirror of the Platonic form of Justice

Matter is secondary because it is contingent or caused. The cause of matter is beyond matter. — EnPassant

Prove it. Demonstrate what matter even is

They believe that only material causes are real. Formal causes are useful fictions that stand outside the physical world they describe. — apokrisis

The philosophy you are quoting says objects are formed from pure matter and form. My question is, why only one form? Why only one matter? Why only two principles? Why not five? Materialism says there is one principle per object. It's simpler and doesn't waste people's time

That's cleared that up. — Punshhh

Youre just being an asshole because you think everyone should believe in Super-Daddy so you feel better about your karma. There are many angles of looking at matter and what it really is. There is no need to bring in consciousnesses higher than ours

If God is just and loving — Bird-Up

The Christian God isn't. Being Satan, he told Abraham to murder his innocent son. Satan also (allegedly) sacrificed his son Jesus in order to save a whole bunch of evil people.

And it's not crazy to say "it is its own causality"? — Punshhh

What causes God? He explains himself? Why not the world? Why can't the world have all the reality it needs to exist? God's existence is easily disproven. Kick a kitten in the face and you'll see the proof (actually, don't do that)

Heidegger spoke of death as a "possibility of being". So it's better to exist objectively, and it's subjectively better to exist if you have good karma. If we have a cauldron of evil people, to them the world is evil but the real world smiles at their predicament. Fixing karma is a B

The mental form we have when we think of nothingness is adequate for understanding the singularity, pure potentiality. It is its own causality and yes it's crazy to think it's a person with a higher nature

Judaism started as a violent religion but was subdued by greater cultural forces. It was Jesus's apostles who turned the religion Satanic. The New Testament is about soul swapping. Jesus buys your soul from the devil and implants his soul in you by destroying the old soul on the cross. Their leader was killed so they invented truly demonic doctrines like actually swallowing Jesus entire and gulping him down with more Jesus and God blood. These are the roots of our civilization