If anyone is interested in commemtary, search "accidental infinite series vs essentially infinite series Aquinas" on Bing

So Aquinas contradicts himself in the first book of the Summa Theologica? I've read it. Do your research please Devan

The Muslim argument is the kalam argument

The book in English is titled on the eternity of the world. It was Bonaventure who believed in the Islam argument
Aquinas rejected that Muslim argument and side to an extent with Aristotle

I know all about Aquinas. He said the world was not eternal because the bible says so but that reason can't prove it. He says it in the sigma thelogca, the summa contra gentiles, and his book on this very subject called munda something. His arguments that there is still a prime mover needed in an eternal universe don't strictly work. It depends how you model the seried

Many think God could have made an eternal universe. Aquinas wrote a book on it

Do you have to do a greater act than the negative of the sin in order to purge it? Do you get your life merits back if you do? Can a punishment take the place of a courageous act of repentence? Is it just ridiculous that people end up in hell or is it understandable?

An eternal descending series of dominoe like effects feels intellectually unsastifying . But just because you don't like it, that don't make it false, as rationality rules says

You can never tell if the workings of the universe are based on intelligence. Science will always look for deeper laws

I see all over the internet people saying something is reduced to nothing by way of contraries, and that the universe arose by the backwards process of this. Yet 3 minus 3 equals zero but you can't get 3 out of zero. You can't just reverse equations any way you like

Isn't anti time timelessness

Imagine the prime mover as a marble that has always been sliding down a slide

All i know about are Catholics. THey are always saying the rosary, trying to force themselves to be good. Someday a "Minotaur of conscience" (to use Nietzsche's phrase) will get them and spoil the idea that they are holy/special. "Get rid of goodness and you will naturally be good" says a classic Daoist text.

I hope that's not too harsh

Bare with me.

Aquinas said things had truth, a transcendental, in them. But truth is primarily in the mind for him

Yet we can posit that there is no truth because truth has no substance and still believe in a material world. This would be a consistent materialistic relativism.

This is far different from Hegel, whom I'm strangely obsessed with. For him, within the Void there is at the center a point of Absolute Truth\truth that is really like an unending sentence of Truth

Are my thoughts at all relevant??

The Daodejing says "tranquility is returning", "return to the state of infancy", and "return to the state of the uncarved block". This is the opposite of futuristic Christianity. Laozi being born an old man is not that he was a man as a baby, but a baby as a man (throughout his life). This is non-dualism.

Where do people get this idea, though, that babies think their mothers are themselves?

Thanks for all the great comments!

Hegel believed the substantial Absolute gives birth to nothing and being, which in turn sublate each other into the universe. The universe is thus, for Hegel, becoming or shunyata. The basis of it though is substance and not void (like in Buddhism). I love the Beatles song Tomorrow Never Knows, especially the Anthology version. Anyways, some philosophers say everything is made of negations of nothing. I don't know yet how this works out mathematically

Does anyone here have a full list of Wittgenstein's currently published works?

One last paragraph:

Thomism is the exact opposite of this Sunyata stuff. I think Aquinas may have been the first to propose the contingency argument for God. In modern times Peter Kreeft has use it a lot, but I think he ultimately fails. He never proves the universe is contingent in the sense that it needs something necessary. It's just his premise. So it's a premise without an argument. The world is neither contingent nor necessary. Why can't the world have the "reason for it's existence" within itself? It all depends on how you look at it. Grateful

The use of koans is the exact opposite of what Thomism tries to accomplish. For a conservative Catholic, the goal in the beatific vision in which the intellect perceives truth itself, and the will can do nothing but love it. This is an ego theology. Hegel at least thought there was some reasoning still within mystic states. But still I think the goal is absorption into nothingness and your own nothingness.

Here is more reading on this general topic: http://catholicencyclopedia.newadvent.com/cathen/08082b.htm

Wikipedia says Pyrrho went to India and that there was probably a certain influence between Greek skepticism and Indian thought via the empire of Alexander

People have trouble thinking of something coming from nothing because they think of this materially, instead of like Buddhism, in which nothingness is higher than the universe, instead of parallel. People try to think of this as nothing "causing" something, but that's a material way of thinking. I like Buddhism because nothingness is spiritual for them. It is higher than all "humans and gods". One way to get there in thought is to mull about the reality that the only thing "potentially infinite" about an object is that it's infinity of parts can potentially be pointed out. Aristotle basically said that things have parts only potentially. That has no meaning. "Epoche" is the Greek form of meditation. "Ataraxia" is the Greek form of nirvana I think.

I'm grateful for life this morning, and grateful to be here on the internet!

Nāgārjuna:
All is possible when emptiness is possible.
Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible.

Depersonalization can be an illness, like the kind psychiatry does (anesthetics like ketamine surprisingly help). There is also the Buddhist method of it, which is healthy and normal

The only thing "potentially infinite" about an object is that it's infinity of parts can potentially be pointed out.

Hegel says there are only partial moving truths within a part of the whole of reality

Sometimes I think things can disappear

Indian art is primarily about dear of nofhing, but fear can be santified. And this is my final point. Buddhists i think are Hindu. They say there is no soul because they believe the soul is the void. That is, God. There is no soul of Aristotle for them. They emphasize the nothingness of being. The truth of psychedelia is that God created the world thru the dying of God's subconscious.

"The attitude of regarding God as one's child sounds somewhat foreign to Western ears, yet much of the magic of Christmas derives from this being the one time in the year when God enters the heart as a child, eliciting thereby tenderness of the parental instinct."

Hinduism is much about all the parts of life being for the Divine. In a forum discussion many years ago this guy was saying the people should only receive the Eucharist on the tongue. I responded that one can cradle Jesus for a second if received on the hand, Jesus being then in the form of the Infant of Prague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_Jesus_of_Prague). He didn't like that idea

That guru says that God is not distinct in quality from our Atman. Just in quantity. This traditionalist young Catholic guy who recently stole Amazonian statues from a church and threw them in a river doesn't understand religion. He does even understand his own faith. Vatican II said "Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flightto God with love and trust".

The guru however seems to have hit the nail on the head, philosphically. Huston Smith says in his book The World's Religions, "As a Hindu devotional classic puts the point, 'I want to taste sugar; I don't want to be sugar.'" The next page says, "Even village priests will frequently open their temple ceremonies with the following beloved invocation:"O Lord, forgive three sins that are sue to my human limitations. Thus art everywhere, but I worship you only here. Thou art without form, but I worship you in these forms. Thou needest no praise, yet I offer you these prayers and salutations. Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations".

Hinduism understands monism in a duality it seems. And maybe that is truth. Greg

That which is not may be what it was. Adios!

"The linear series that in its movement marks the retrogressive steps in it by knots, but thence went forward again in one linear stretch, is now, as it were, broken at these knots, these universal moments, and fall asunder into many lines, which, being bound together into a single bundle, combine at the same time symetrically, so that the similar distinctions, in which each separately took shape within a sphere, meet again." Hegel

Pfhorrest seems to have proven that something can come from nothing

Hume denied that the self and material substance make ncessary sense. He called the connection to the world "a species of instinct or mechanical power. He started a Buddhist type of psychological introspection. For him, no theory of reality is possible

Notice the first quote from nagarjuna. He was the easts parmenides. I see Hume as the forerunner to Schopenhauer's emptiness. Didn't they both like Buddhism?

https://aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-budd hist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth

Hume said he disagreed with Zeno but he therefore seemed to know about that school of thought

I think Hume thought motion was mysterious because of Parmenides

Wittgenstein seemed to refute the idea that there are words that can't be translated between languages. We can't get into each others heads and know how it feels to use a certain idea. However, we can get a general sense of what something means, and this would apply to all languages.

I think that if consciousness is the brain (identical), than we have to say that consciousness is a null set. The highest realities are the inversion, contradiction, or maybe just the negation of material being. Being seems to apply only to the material anyway