• The essence of religion
    ↪ENOAH
    What I understand the OP question about "the essence of religion" to mean pertains to the (speculative) cultural-anthropological origin of religion and not how contemporary people use religious practice in their daily lives. For some, perhaps religion functions as "seeking truth" as you say, ENOAH; I suspect, however, that several hundreds of generations ago primeval humans were in the thrall of profound ignorance of, and helplessness before, the fact of imminent decay dying & death (i.e. mortality) and told themselves self-consoling fairytales and made propitiating sacrifices to 'good fairies for "protection" from evil fairies' as ritualized anti-anxiety terror management (i.e. religion).
  • The essence of religion
    Death is only an issue if one first cares about dying. — Constance
    I.e. if one is a sentient, self-aware mortal.
  • The essence of religion
    I think it started as pure philosophy, then wandered into superstition and lost its way in organized religion. — Vera Mont
    What do you mean by "pure philosophy" and how does "superstition" follow from it?

    Religion, to me, is about, and rises out of, [ ... ] questions arise that cannot be answered leading to suffering. Many religions thus aim to reconcile this difference by denying it. Thus, ”all is one”, ”experience of self is an illusion” etc. — Jussi Tennilä
    :up:

    Fear of death is downstream from the realisation of this distinction between ”I” and ”other”.
    I differ with this only in the order of experience/realization: developmentally humans experience death¹, therefore instinctively fear it, long before realizing – those who do explicitly – that the 'I-world duality is irreconcible (or even irreparable)', which compounds the fear (i.e. suffering) that requires relief and succor in degrees of self-consoling reality-denial (e.g. dreams of / quests for symbolic / magical immortality) aka "religion".


    ¹After all, death was far more ubiquitious and impactful thousands of generations ago, long before language & culture took hold, and we have always consumed dead things in order to survive.
  • Imagining a world without the concept of ownership
    ↪Vera Mont
    :100:

    Folks might like to read 'The Dispossessed', by Ursula K LeGuin, for a plausible imagining of a cooperative anarchy. — unenlightened
    Terrific story. :up:

    In a similar vein, Iain M. Bank's Culture series of an AI-managed post-scarcity, interstellar civilization-wide anarchy...

    The background of the question is a kind of genealogy of ownership. — frank
    I think property, not "ownership" (mine-ness), is optional – a venn diagram from the least artificial and essential social arrangement to the most artificial and inessential: personal property (one's own mindbody (re: responsibilities), clothes, tools / labor, leisure), communal property (commons), public property ('republic', city / town, roads / waterways), and private property ('codified' scarcity-re/production, ergo class-caste conflicts) – [personal [communal [public [ private ]]]].
  • Is atheism illogical?
    hope is more of a religious thing.
    — Fire Ologist

    Wrong way around. Hope is a human thing and therefore religion.     — Vera Mont
    :fire:
  • The essence of religion
    ↪Tom Storm
    :up:

    The warning was "If ye eat from the Tree, ye will surely die", as opposed to "instantly die". — Outlander
    ... or as opposed to the truth: "I, the Lord thy God, shall condemn thee to suffer and die. :roll:
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    [T]he corresponding UN Security Council resolutions make exactly this argument - that Israel was making any peace deal impossible by creating facts on the ground that are basically irreversible. That was exactly the goal of the settlement policy. — Tzeentch
    :100: :up:
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    And that's why Netanyahu supported so eagerly Hamas, those Palestinians that are against a negotiated two state solution. — ssu
    :100:
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    ↪Mikie
    :up: :up:
  • The essence of religion
    We start off with freedom. [ ... ] What do you want with knowing? — ENOAH
    There is no "freedom" without "knowing" (e.g. the difference between being free and not being free). To be free from ignorance is the capacity to be free for learning, knowing, understanding and then freeing others. I read the biblical creation myth this way: "Adam and Eve" were slaves punished with mortality by The Master for learning that they do not have to be slaves by learning to disobey (i.e. how to free themselves). :fire:
  • The essence of religion
    ↪Hanover
    I did not anwhere claim or imply your "religion in opposition to science" strawman. Also, read the OP and thread title: "essence" is @Constance's term and not mine. :roll:
  • The essence of religion
    religion deals explicitly with metaphysics — Astrophel
    Yes, death – ritually denying, or wishing away, its finality (i.e. anti-anxiety terror management (E. Becker)).
  • The essence of religion
    Isn't everything a magical quest for immortality ...? — Outlander
    Nope.

    ↪Moses
    Go away troll.

    ↪ENOAH
    :up:
  • The essence of religion
    ↪ENOAH
    I'm not "frustrated" with anything, least of all religion. Stick to what I've actually written as I don't have a hidden, or sublimated, agenda. The history of religious practices (e.g. oracles / prophesies, scaoegoating, heresies, martyrs, persecutions, schisms, missionaries, holy wars, etc) speaks loudly for itself – quests for magical/miraculous "immortality" (i.e. escape from (denial of) mortality). Maybe some religious folk "seek truth" as you say, ENOAH, but they are outliers and do not constitute, as several millennia of history shows, the essence, or raison d'etre, of religion as such.
  • The essence of religion
    The essence of religion is seek truth; and it holds true in its authentic practice. — ENOAH
    If so, then why are religions not founded on public impersonal objective truths and are not daily practices (celebrations) of rigorous public error-correction?

    After all, the Abrahamic tradition begins with a woman disobeying "the Lord" who forbade her from eating fruit from a "Tree of Knowledge" (truth): Hebrew (JCI) scriptures depict "the original sin" as a woman thinking for herself by "seeking truth". :naughty:

    Obeying "the Lord" (and his anointed/appointed pimps) in order to avoid punishment (fear), not "seeking truth", seems to me religion's historically manifest "essence".

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/904100
  • Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism'
    TN is the natural and common state of most [hep]cats. — tim wood
    :smirk: :up:
  • Wittgenstein the Socratic
    There is mental floss and there is philosophy. Mental floss can be part of philosophy, but in the way that doing math exercises helps strengthen your math abilities.. You aren't really a mathematician unless you use some of those skills for constructing proofs, etc. — schopenhauer1
    :up: :up:

    Questioning takes priority over answers. — Fooloso4
    a matter of inquiry not solving problems with definitive answers — Fooloso4
    ... these hypotheses do not put an end to questioning. They lead to and guide further questioning. — Fooloso4
    ↪Fooloso4
    :fire:
  • Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism'
    ↪Tom Storm
    :up:
  • Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism'
    I can make no sense of "Transcendent Naturalism." Does anyone here have the ambition to try make some sense of the term in a sentence or two, or three? — tim wood
    :wink: FWIW, here's a sentence:

    Plebian philosophical naturalist that I am, the only sense I can make of the term "transcendent naturalism" (pace @Wayfarer) is as a conception of beings-in-nature (e.g. embodied subjects) that is both (A) "beyond" subjective – neither anthropocentric nor egocentric (i.e. impersonal) – and (B) "beyond" super-natural – encompassed by unbounded immanence insofar as nature transcends whatever happens in nature because nature (and its constituents (e.g. embodied subjects)) cannot transcend nature (à la (e.g.) Epicureanism, Spinozism, Zapffe-Camus' absurdism & other anti-cartesianisms / anti-platonisms) – which is (C) epistemically consistent with (corroborated by?) human facticity, everyday ordinary experience, historicity-historiography and modern natural sciences ("Thus, we have art [make believe, magical thinking, woo-woo] in order not to perish from the truth" ~Nietzsche). :fire:
  • Hobbies
    If you are planning to visit Madrid one day, I am your trustworthy Local Guide user! — javi2541997
    :cool: :up:
  • Quantifier Variance, Ontological Pluralism, and Other Fun Stuff
    If there is something left for philosophy to do, I haven't been able to figure out what that is, and god knows I've tried. — Srap Tasmaner
    Idling semantic quibbles aside, do you mean "academic philosophy" or "amateur philosophy" or "way of life philosophy"?

    Consider this: these variations of philosophy each "do" different things with, at minimum, the same praxis: reflective inquiry – problematizing aporias, or what we do not / cannot know or understand about what we think we know or what we misunderstand – that reasons towards more probative questions we still do not know how to answer (i.e. philosophical truthes (?)). So, IMO, it does not make sense to apply the notion of "something left to do" to philosophy any more than it does to apply it to other interminable practices (which resemble J. Carse's "infinite games") like martial arts, public health & sanitation, natural sciences, history & politics, personal hygiene, logic & mathematics, fine arts, etc.
  • Wittgenstein and How it Elicits Asshole Tendencies.
    ↪schopenhauer1
    Idk, I've only taken "the blue pill" and suspect that "the red pill" only shows that all pills are "blue".
  • In any objective morality existence is inherently good
    What does 'rodeo clowning bulls' mean? — bert1
    The opposite of "trolling".
  • Wittgenstein and How it Elicits Asshole Tendencies.
    ↪schopenhauer1
    So it's the "blue pill" for you. :cool:

    ↪Tom Storm
    :smirk:
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    ↪BitconnectCarlos
    :lol: stfu & gfy.
  • Wittgenstein and How it Elicits Asshole Tendencies.
    [Wittgenstein] is not talking about language, as Rorty and Wayfarer’s Kenneth Taylor take it, he is looking at how we talk, in certain examples (calling out, rule following, pointing, continuing a series, seeing, understanding, and, even, “meaning”/language, but only as another example), because it is a window, a method, in order to see how different things do what they do differently (our criteria for judging can be seen in the ways we talk).

    His goal is not to tell us the way the world works, e.g., by way of rules, or that this is how rules work. Initially he is trying to figure out why he got stuck on one solution (in the Tract[atus]), when the world works in so many different ways. What he learns first is that our desire for certainty narrows our vision (dictates the form of answer), and so, yes, it is a book about self-knowledge. It aims to show us how our interests affect our thinking.     — Antony Nickles
    :clap: :up: More or less this summarizes how I also read Witty's later thinking (re: recursively generated plurality of non-discrete discourses) which I interpret as contextualizing, not refuting or discarding, his early thinking (re: implicit nonsense of meta-discourses). In other words, implied by the PI, Witty's TLP exemplifies just one language-game (i.e. discursive way of making sense/meanings) among countless others; however, IMHO, this is also 'meta-discursive nonsense' too (i.e. a language-game of 'examples of language-games') and therefore (PI) internally critiques, or refutes, itself implicitly in the manner of the more explicit proposition 7 of the TLP. Witty doesn't propose a 'theory of language' so there aren't any 'claims' to argue against, only this reflective activity to perform ("red pill" ~ how to stop philosophizing) or not to perform ("blue pill" ~ to never stop philosophizing), and this groundless 'choice' is what, I suspect, aggravates many (scientistic or analytical or dogmatic) philosophers with its ordinariness ...

    e.g. one hand clapping :fire:

    @schopenhauer1
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    ↪Benkei
    ↪BitconnectCarlos
    :shade: You're a fatuous liar, BitCunt! Here's some more "antisemitic propaganda" ...

    The Jerusalem Post
    26March23

    "32% of all racist incidents in 2022 were directed at Arab Israelis - Justice Ministry"

    https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/article-735422
  • Canada ought cap lottery jackpots to $9 million CAD, like Japan.
    ↪javi2541997
    It happens occasionally with the current lottery setups.
  • What do you reckon of Philosophy Stack Exchange ?
    No. TPF suffices. When that's no longer the case, who knows – maybe.
  • If existence is good, what is the morality of non-life?
    ↪schopenhauer1
    In other words, @Philosophim wants you to pretend, along with him, that the OP's argument presented on his other thread (link to it in this OP) has not been refuted (e.g.
    ↪180 Proof
    ) and thereby for you to carry on with the refuted premise of this thread. :smirk:
  • Polyamory vs monogamy
    Male sexuality is limited only by permission. — Hanover
    AFAIK, that's the "official line" only in many (not most or all) contemporary, developed nations.
  • Polyamory vs monogamy
    Are humans naturally polyamorous or naturally monogamous? — Benj96
    I suspect that, especially duuring peak childbearing life-stages, human males are "naturally polygamous" and human females are "naturally monogamous", yet (modern, more gender-fluid) culture somewhat modifies, or moderates, our "hardwired tendencies".
  • If existence is good, what is the morality of non-life?
    ↪schopenhauer1
    :up:

    A corollary to my Ligotti post above from @Philosophim's other "existence should be" thread...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/904196
  • The Self-Negating Cosmos: Rational Genesis, and The Logical Foundations of the Quantum Vacuum
    Thank you Proof! — punos
    Yw. :cool:
    I'm curious to know if you agree with or subscribe to Spinoza's concept of natura naturans?
    Yes (and as a conceptual analogue for Democritus-Epicurus' void), though I interpret the concept as temporal only and not, like Spinoza, also as eternal (i.e. unchanging, static).
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    War criminals Bibi & Hamas together at last:

    https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/reactions-icc-decision-israeli-hamas-leaders-2024-05-20/
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Wayfarer
    :up:
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    ↪Moses The same aim as it has always been: remove all Palestinians from Palestine and create a greater Israel from the river to the sea with Apartheid in its borders; where non-Jews will have less rights than Jews and Mizrahi, Sephardic and Ethiopian Jews will be discriminated against by their right wing supremacist AshkeNazi "brothers". — Benkei
    :100: :zip:
  • Canada ought cap lottery jackpots to $9 million CAD, like Japan.
    ↪scherz0
    An alternative that would be easier to implement, it seems to me (here in the US), is to generate more than 1 set of numbers for each drawing so that it is more likely there are (e.g.) 2-6 possible winners to share the jackpot. Maybe add 1 extra set of numbers per $50m so that (e.g.) a $300m jackpot would consist of generating 6 sets of numbers, potentially sharing the jackpot 6 ways (besides duplicate winners) for that drawing. No other changes to the lottery would be necessary to accomplish a more egalitarian (distributed) outcome. All non-jackpot winner prizes are not shared (except for duplicates).
  • The Self-Negating Cosmos: Rational Genesis, and The Logical Foundations of the Quantum Vacuum
    A quasi-scientistic interpretation of the Spinozist natura naturans (substance). Interesting (despite the physics-mystical gloss) but, IMO, philosophically redundant.
  • The philosopher and the person?
    Do you agree that the philosopher must uphold, almost, a fiduciary duty towards the public, in terms of living a certain life? — Shawn
    No. Except where a philosopher proposes, in the e.g. Hellenic sense, 'philosophy as a way of life' (P. Hadot), I think a philosophy ought to be judged on the basis of its own merits/demerits like any other textual, formal or scientific artifact. How a philosopher lives may or may not be exemplary to us independent of – though there may be evident biographical influences on – her philosophy.
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