Humility and love can be corrupted just as much as faith and hope. In fact it seems that all virtues can be turned to evil

Those who do the infinite never become cadavers. Some fail and end up trapped in a dead body for eternity, never being free. You never are going to get this until you realize annihilation is hell. Annihilation as absolute philosophical nothing can't be conceived of. But people fool themselves

Salvation is impossible because it's impossible for a consciousness to cease to exist. To cease to exist is equivalent to going to hell for a consciousness. Then consider that you must save yourself from death and the possible impossible comes into view

The material is only a limited way of seeing reality. What we think of as material doesn't act as we usually think material does. You can literally move a mountain if you had "faith the size of a mustard seed". Infinite potential is like a seed within reality that gives our will its infinity. We experience life as limited but faith is a form of reason and with faith one can realize that anything is possible to us. There is no escaping death as a tiny piece of matter but accepting the paradox of will allows one a way out and if it takes moving a mountain so be it

The thing for me about faith is that rationality is a paradox. We are, on one hand, bundles of matter and energy, while on the other hand, infinite potential. There are limits to what we can do and there aren't. "Whatever a man can conceive and believe he can achieve". "By faith a man can move mountains". The idea of purely mechanical materialism is only true in its limitation. There is more to the story. To quote Hegel,

"'You can, because you ought'- this expression, which is supposed to mean a great deal, is implied in the notion of ought. For ought implies that one is superior to the limitation; in it the limit is sublated and the in itself of the ought is thus identical to itself, and is hence a 'can'. But conversely, it is equally correct that 'you cannot, just because you ought.' For in the ought, the limitation as limitation is equally itself asserted, and the concept of possibility has, in the limitation, a reality, a qualitative otherness opposed to it and the relation of each to the other is a contradiction, and thus a 'cannot', or rather an impossibility."

Paradox is necessary to reason and to find one's salvation one literally has to do the impossible. That's a secret to life, while in the materialistic paradigm there are no secrets to life

Hoffman treds on the grounds of philosophy with his "conscious realism". He uses prior concepts of real and unreal to form his posterior argument that we only know the unreal and ultimately he has Kant's view of noumena

Karma is one of the essential points of Buddhism while metaphysical questions are not

Hegel didn't say that being and nothing unite in time to form the universe, as if that was the big bang. They are united inseparably, forming the material world that is objective but comes from the thoughts of God. For Hegel we are inseparable from God and think with his thoughts, however there is positive and negative in God. He is not static, but movement (negative) while being the union of being with nothing (positive). Nothing and being are inseparable as we are from God and God from becoming. Pure being can't do anything without the potential of nothing, just as you cant fill a cup without a nothing

If space is nothing, then it forms the world with substance. When Heidegger says "nothing nothings" he means, I think, the flux within us finds itself with its pure nothing. Buddhist find emptiness in themselves too. It's like yin and yang

On the contrary, I think the OP was correct to say we must be nature view death as a great evil. The truth with this though is that we can unlearn this and find trasendence. Nature is one order of being, while true reality is transcendent. It seems to me we can doubt who we are, doubt what we've done, and if possible change our ways. There are many choices left up to us in life. The worst position is to be stuck saying "this is unfair"

But how do you know you haven't in a previous life made this current one with everything happening as it does

Humans have a longer developmental time than other animals. They are ready for the world while we spend our first years creating an image of what life must be. Our expectations are not always met however. You mention Sartre, who I was reading today, and he talks of bad faith and the paradox of conscience. We know that we are conscious but do we know we are conscientious? Someone shouldn't complain that life is unfair unless they have full knowledge of their innocence. Job thought he was perfect but in the trial proved not to be

Of course. What do you think of Kant's time as intuition?

I don't think you can prove time is real from motion and matter alone. Heidegger's philosophy does a lot in the way of bringing the mind to time and it's manifestation

I think time is the world acting spiritually

Ok, I thought you were arguing for B time. Einstein thought time was an illusion because of his understanding of general relativity. Time is a very difficult subject because you understand it until you have to explain it. The romantics I referred to were the German idealists after Kant. Fetchner was one but argued for much of the same thing from science itself. So, I think that the world is spiritual but 1) science can't say anything about spirituality, and 2) a materialist viewpoint is self consistent but incomplete. All that exists is this world, matter is real, and matter and the spirit are identical. Are you open to these ideas? I see the world and know it's just as I see it (objectively), but paradoxically I don't know what it is yet. Not until I complete my life on earth will I know full reality. Maybe a materialistic spirituality is possible!

Thanks for the clrifications as to energy and existence. It seems to me you've adopted the method of Fetcher over that of the romantics by arguing from science to philosophy. Also, aren't you arguing from time and what is done in time to an eternalism that is foreign to our senses?

Ok, he says "Nothing can create something" but "something" is really nothing, even though "we live in a universe full of stuff". This is because:

"Gravity allows positive energy and negative energy, and out of nothing you can create positive energy particles, and as long as a gravitational attraction produces enough negative energy, the sum of their energy can be zero. And in fact when we look out at the universe and try and measure its total energy, we come up with zero."

Also:

"But, you know, it's more than that because some people would say, and I've had this discussion with theologians and others, well, you know, just empty space isn't nothing."

https://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/145175263/lawrence-krauss-on-a-universe-from-nothing

So something is nothing and nothing is something. I am picking up Hegel's Logic right now to try and figure this out better

The Wikipedia article on "zero-energy universe" says that Krauss believes that the net energy of the universe is zero. It's not antimatter that is negative but gravity. Does this not ring a bell? I've seen many of his interviews but I don't have his book. My point was that it doesn't make much sense to say gravity and matter together is nothing unless you bring in some kind of idealism (like Hegel's). (Ideas can cancel out) Latter today I'll look more into this because it's so interesting. But does the zero energy universe ring a bell for you?

Lawrence Krauss believe nothing comes from nothing. The first nothing is the world, divided between positive reality and negative reality wherein each cancels the others, and the second nothing is spacetime. Having parts of reality canceling energy almost sounds like idealism however. If objects and ideas are not different in essence, then maybe you really can see a chair as existing even though it's energy is canceled by something else which is negative. I don't see how his thesis makes sense from a purely material perspective, but it's interesting

Can information go through wormholes in space?

I reread your op. There are many possibilities as to how the world is actual. Kantian idealism can be seen as stating positing a pure Platonic world who's shadows are this world. For Kant, the mind alone finds these universals. So your "nothing" would be *this world*.

It seems to me we have to see causality as linear although this is a habit of mind. Linear causality seems like a masculine, almost phallic, concept of power over potentiality. Notice how religious people talk of god as "he". But god creates himself in the scheme of theism so we all fall for the same paradoxes in our ponderings over origins. Perhaps there is something about the "absolute first" that always will allude us as long as we long for it. (Notice the strange fascination over Adam and Eve)

So if you go back in times and find no end, that is eternity. But going back in time reverses which you encounter first: cause or effect. Therefore a cyclical understanding of time affects how we see causality and makes time prior causality. But can time create itself?

Modern physics says that spacetime is mostly flat but not completely. Aristotle didn't know about modern mathematics

A ball on a cushion causes the cushion to debt instantaneously but there is one thing causing another. You are not generous in your explanations of how this proves self causation. They are *similar* but not identical

I think you were saying that you don't consider your life different because of race or gender?

Religion can make good people believe bad things, like that God can order slayings of any person at anytime.

Atheists often have a strong sense of morality. Such cannot be said for typical Christian doctrine. How can the act of one person transfer its merit to another person. In Christianity you owe an infinite debt to God for sins which means you owe infinite repentance. In Christianity Jesus does most of the repenting for you so that his soul becomes your soul and you can enter where only the clean can enter. So we have unworthy people living with someone's soul in them. That's really how it is for Christians. Isn't it more reasonable to say a person can change his ways by his own through karmic purging?

The ball precedes the cushion ontologically.

This is a very hard subject for everyone

What has simultaneous causality to do with self creation? You say their analogous but they are not the same thing. The ball causes the dent, not itself

If an iron ball had always rested on a cushion it would eternally be the cause. Each minute can be seen as a member of the infinite series. But this has nothing to do with the effect being before the cause. It's still linear

We don't know enough about the universe to verify much of what they write. I've been enjoying the books of Michio Kaku lately. To a medieval thinker those books would certainly be philosophy in large part

Physicists are often undercover philosophers and they are free to express alternate pictures of reality as long as each thesis is self consistent. Some might seem outlandish but reality might be outlandish

I find the philosophical musings of physicists about time and material causality to be interesting. Who's to say for sure what parts are BS

Contra Gentiles chapter 16-20

Aristotle: a Prime Mover or maybe many of them, as the final cause of the world. As finality he or they move the formal and material in eternal time. Everything is one with the finality

Aquinas: one God in three persons, as final and efficient creator out of nothing. Although he does say reason can't disprove an eternal universe he holds to creation from faith and has many new arguments based on Aristotle attempting to prove the existence of God.

The problem with their arguments is that everything has potential through their actuality and it can't be proven that matter is inferior to simplicity

Maybe he forgot, while trying to see time as merely a concept of the mind, that time is like space: it's not a thing or an object. It's the measure which the universe must impose on itself in order to be measurable

I think time is the universe as a whole. We can only think in parts, but have an understanding of time, which although vague, represents the unity and movement of the universe in eternal time. You seem to make the universe necessary, instead of a continuous revolution with no member first and no necessity to its existence