↪VagabondSpectre There's a revealing article in the NY Times today, about how the 'conservative media'/Trump supporters are depicting Trump's problems. According to them, and him, the whole problem is the 'deep state' which is defending itself against Trump's vision for 'making America great again' by leaking and undermining at every point. Backed by the big money of liberal donors like Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and various un-named moles in the State Department and other agencies, all of Trump's problems are simply being spun into existence by the dirty liberals. — Wayfarer

There's likely some truth in that. Trump is an incompetent blunderer who probably had no idea that the Western establishment has been working for decades to marginalize Russian influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and ultimately to bring Russia under Western neoliberal control, and that Putin has been a major obstacle to this agenda from his first days in power all the way through and up to the present. Trump isn't with the program so he has to either be brought into line or forced out of office because his approach to Russian relations threatens to derail a long running project of major importance to the Western establishment. That's not to defend Putin or Trump, they're both horrid little monsters, but this does seem like the game that's being played here on the old 'grand chessboard'.

Trump had the cozy relationship with the Russians before the elections at least on some level. — ssu

What's wrong with that? Trump was upfront about his views on Russia, he said all along that he considered the Russians to be natural allies in the fight against extremism and that he would work to ease tensions with Russia and put US-Russia relations on a friendlier footing. So what if he had business dealings in Russia or brought individuals into his campaign with connections to the Russian sphere, that would only be in keeping with the explicit position he campaigned on.

The case fails because there's no evidence for the natural world (either). — The Great Whatever

Only if we take evidence to mean absolute incontrovertible proof. People like to say "no evidence" but that's really just rhetoric, there's plenty of evidence for both the natural world as well as the supernatural, it's just that the evidence is open to interpretation and can fit a variety of theories or worldviews.

The core of Jesus' teaching is metanoia.

I don't think I could ever really believe in miracles or the literal truth or infallibility of scripture, but I could maybe see myself at some point adopting a tradition that has a good deal of allegorical truth and an inspiring liturgy, something like Eastern Orthodox Christianity possibly.

I think a more interesting question is how much value would we place on our lives and the lives of others if we knew all the facts. I think if we knew for certain that there was nothing beyond the physical and that our existence ends with death or that determinism is true and we really aren't anything more than an epiphenomenon of physical processes then I think a good percentage of people would likely place less value on their own lives and the lives of others. I think what keeps most people going in this world is hope and fear and that in a purely physical and completely meaningless universe the vast majority of people do not have lives worth living. I wouldn't want to live their lives anyway.

But we have no need of providing that explanation, to reject claims of a supernatural realm in the absence of evidence. — Hugh Harris

But is there really an absence of evidence? There is some evidence for the supernatural. Granted that the evidence is open to interpretation, but doesn't weak evidence or uncertain evidence still count as evidence?

Are views like panpsychism or neutral monism compatible with naturalism?

What's your definition of natural? Is it equivalent to physicalism or is just that there is no design or purpose in nature?

And don't forget Clarke's three laws:

1)When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2)The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3)Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There's the old line that reality isn't just stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine and I have little doubt that there are still many unknown unknowns out there for us to discover. Science as a method is very powerful but science as a body of knowledge has only really just begun to develop. There are still plenty of surprises in store so it's always good to keep an open mind.

Time Travel Farmer (Youtube)

:D

but because our mind are currently too undeveloped to imagine. Eg.: they will be able to see colours that we don't see and we are not able to imagine a colour that we never sawed. — Eugen

Super advanced intelligences might inhabit virtual worlds with more than three dimensions where the virtual structures of time and space are very different. There could also be hive minds created through synthetic telepathy that are both one and many simultaneously, that's pretty hard to imagine. There may even be ways of traveling to or even engineering whole universes where the laws of physics are completely alien to what we know and can understand. Not much has really been ruled out at this point so right now as far as we know the possibilities are endless.

And that's just on a purely physicalist account of reality, if there are supernatural dimensions, I'm not saying there are, but if there are then there really is no limit to the sorts of worlds and phenomenon that are possible.

Does the GR allow for actions that nobody would ever want done to them but are necessary for some greater good?

But one of the things that we can not understand (I can't, I don't think 'we' can) is what an elapse of 1,000,000 years would be like. — Bitter Crank

'Deep time' and 'big history' are good ones. Sure, we have the concepts but we can't even begin to grasp reality at those scales. Another would be the hypercomplexity of nature or global civilization, we can only understand it by breaking it down into subsystems and not even remotely as a holistic totality.

Can you justify that? Can we suppose that I'm self sufficient, live by myself on my own island? — Kenshin

I think both truth and happiness are products of transpersonal development -- expanding and evolving beyond the limited identity of the personal self and becoming a part of something greater. So it doesn't matter whether you're in society or living a self sufficient life of seclusion and isolation, in order to be happy and know truth you still have to get over yourself all the same.

Man is a social animal in the sense that we don't want to be in perpetual war with each other(bellum omnium contra omnes)so we have to come to terms, to compromise, learn to live with each other, not be antisocial.
We're also social animals in that we depend on each other and the group for our individual survival as well as for our individual success. Obama said "you didn't build that" but that's an overstatement, he should have said you couldn't have built that without considerable social investment and cooperation. And keep in mind that the society that allowed for and contributed​ to your success only exists because of a painstaking process of social evolution that every individual existence up to the present played a part in. No man is an island and the rugged individualist up from bootstraps workmanship ideal of randroids, libertarians, and market fundamentalists is a laughable simplism.

Anything from monarchy to anarchy can be justified under natural rights. Aristotle argued for natural slavery. Concepts like natural rights and objective morality are rhetorically useful insofar as they can move the crowd, but really there's no telling if those sorts of things are actually real so they're pretty much irrelevant to public discourse. It's much easier to just state our values subjectively and negotiate from there.

The free market usually expunges such forces, because, as might be expected, immoral behavior is bad for business. — Thorongil

Before we began regulating bad behavior the robber barons made killing off immoral behavior, so the market definitely does not naturally expunge such forces.

it's the best method of raising billions out of poverty yet devised, such that one can safely ignore the empty sloganeering about "harmful inequalities" and the like.

Mixed economies do a much better job of that, in fact unregulated markets tend to produce extreme inequalities and severe negative externalities.

The way I've always understood it is that it's the denial of economic liberty(the freedom to contract, to produce and to trade, and the right to property) that's considered immoral. Other than maybe some extreme market fundamentalists, I don't think there's very many economists or philosophers who hold that all economic actors are always entirely ethical and virtuous in their dealings or that market outcomes are inherently just and fair. According to market fundamentalists the only legitimate intervention in markets is the prosecution of coercion, fraud, and theft, everything else should be left for the market to sort out. For me that seems a bit too permissive because there are plenty of more subtle and sophisticated ways of cheating and exploiting people that are just as harmful as coercion and outright theft.

In my view denying people a reasonable degree of economic liberty is deeply immoral as it's a violation of fundamental human rights, but allowing unfettered capitalism to be the driving force in our world and the ultimate power over our lives would be no less so.