Well, as far as I know, what is said must stand on its own, who said it is irrelevant. — TheMadFool

It is relevant who said what and being able to source it properly, already so that we can avoid fighting strawmen and people's drunk musings.

Perhaps one of these days, though, everybody will work for themselves. — synthesis

When people "work for themselves" and when there is minimum government, when people are left to themselves, they are also vulnerable to those more powerful than themselves.

So what is your solution to the problem of power differentials between people (and everything they entail, from hostile takeovers of business to abuse of power)?

I know of no country in the world which is moving towards more freedom. Freedom is apparently too oppressive for some these days. — synthesis

Esp. the freedom to be oppressed by a rich and powerful neighbor!

I'm trying to reconstruct the Buddha's logic. Sorry, nothing explicit to go on except his conspicuous coyness on the matter of God and other metaphysical issues. — TheMadFool

*hrmph*

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN49.html is not coy. I can think of several others that are not coy.

To call the Buddha flamboyant in these matters is not an understatement.

What I'm slowly getting at is that the narrative of the struggle between good and evil might not be universal, might not be a given, and that it might be possible to conceive of life and morality in very different terms than in the terms of said narrative.

Most of my kitchen gadgets are self timing. When I say no sense of time, its pretty close to that. — frank

:( The perils of technology.

Therefore I really don't know why atheists are so often criticized and thought to have a baseless set of beliefs — BBQueue

How about asking those critics why they criticize atheists?

I have next to no sense of time. I was blown away when I found out that other people do. — frank

Do you cook? I discovered that cooking turned out to be a very good practice for gauging time.
Although mostly in a practical sense, not in terms of testing myself with a timer.

For example, when I make pancakes or crepes, it's not necessary to stand by the stove all the time, so I often do small chores, such as fold laundry. I developed a sense of whether I have enough time to fold another shirt or other item before needing to flip the pancake or crepe.
And then, of course, cooking a multicourse meal and serving it at the exact time. This is primarily about good organization, even more so when cooking dishes that must be served within some 10 minutes or less after being cooked.

I think it must be really hard to teach oneself to gauge time just sitting there and trying to gauge how much time has passed.

When I started trying to teach myself to guage time, like just starting with 10 minutes, I felt an overwhelming aversion to doing it.

I can link that up with other aspects of my personality where I cant handle being pigeon holed or caged in any way. I wonder if personality can influence the skills you have access to.

A love of learning is something to be learned. :)

How about getting rid of corporations and 90% of the government. That might be a good start! — synthesis

I live in a country where there is less government than there was up to some 20 years ago.
Take, for example, the laws and regulations concerning the building of family houses. They are looser now than they were back then, and people are much more left to themselves. Which is good if one is rich, and very bad if one isn't.

I'm second-guessing the Buddha's rationale behind his "no comment" attitude towards God — TheMadFool

A Buddhist canonical reference for this, please.

Free from suffering.

Meh, when people post about their existential problems online, often, someone will chime in with a reference to Camus, which can then come across as, "See, Camus figured it out! So why are you still going on and on about this, when the problem's already solved!"

I know only one guy who thinks Camus solved the problem of nihilism, but this guy also happens to be miserable as hell. So I'm discinclined to believe he actually believes Camus solved any problem, other than perhaps the one with taxes (by dying early enough).

Beyond that, I haven't seen anyone actually claim that Camus solved the problem of nihilism. I do think that Camus' work can be useful for reflection on existential issues.

What solutions to this problem do you think would be the most effective, even if they might not be morally ‘good’? — Schrödinger's cat

Popularize Buddhism, so that more and more people ordain, living simple and celibate lives.
And become enlightened, at that!

And now for a lyrical intermezzo:

Well, I don't think fear alone, as you seem to be suggesting, — TheMadFool

I said:

Inertia, fear of conflict, minding one's own business, physical exhaustion due to overwork and stress. — baker

However, there are two sides to this coin. As I mentioned earlier, the opportunities to engage in criminal activity and then being able to, in your words, "...get away with it..." are aplenty given the citizen to police ratio is huge in most places around the world and yet peace and calm are more the norm than the exception.

I said:

The prospective conflict isn't just with the police, but primarily with owners who are willing to protect their property and their lives. — baker

"Getting away with it" does not refer only to not being prosecuted for one's crime by the official legal system. More than that: it refers also to the people one has harmed not taking any action of vigilante justice against one on their own.

I concede that fear does play a role, probably a huge one, in morality but I don't agree that it's the only reason that we're, society is, good.

In my original list, fear of conflict was just one of the items listed.

We are all ONE, always changing form. That's about the extent of it. — synthesis

Really? You are, for example, Blondie Orange?

It seems to me you look for something, perhaps a kind of solidity that you would like morality to have, that it doesn't - and most people know it doesn't. But you then deny the possibility of a different kind of solidity which it does have. Let's call it here the imperative of the well-grounded ought. — tim wood

No, that's one and the same solidity.

You don't care about animals and plants??

Some people's existential problems really are ... such that a touch of room fragrance can put their noisy mind to ease:


It must be great to be like that.

Really, fear? Fear of what? — TheMadFool

Like I said:

fear of conflict — baker

The prospective conflict isn't just with the police, but primarily with owners who are willing to protect their property and their lives.

I don't think you're giving good people due credit. — TheMadFool

But who are the good people? You want to argue that, say, Blondie Orange is not a good person?

Do you "buy" the rule of non-contradiction in logic, that 2+2=4, that down is down and up is up? Now prove any of them. And of course you cannot. So why are they true? I leave that to you. But EM is the same. — tim wood

It's not up to me to decide how much 2 and 2 is.
If there is objective morality, it cannot be up to me to decide what it is.

It you aspire to the ethics and morals of a squirrel or a lizard, you can do that, or try. But it's not human. So what is being human? That to you as well. And you get to choose, but your choice is yours and no one else's. Until you make it, you're not a man; and when you make it, then you're either a good or a bad man. The verdict of history is that good is substantive and it is better to be the good man.

*tempted to do a feminist pun*

By your logic above, can a good man do bad things?

How exactly do you think the world runs its cities? How is the peace maintained in towns, cities, megacities? The police force is, by my reckoning, just too small, in some cases poorly trained, ill-equipped, evn corrupt - surely some other factor is in play here? What, in your view, is that? — TheMadFool

Inertia, fear of conflict, minding one's own business, physical exhaustion due to overwork and stress.

I'm not convinced that people set out to try to "maintain peace". For that, they would actually have to know what brings about peace. Rather, I think peace is one of those states that are essentially byproducts of other things.

How exactly, may I ask? — TheMadFool

"Greed is good."

The asymmetry in the exchange between the buyer and seller has to be considered good and moral, trivially so, for both sides to engage in it deliberately and in good faith, and for people in general to promote said asymmetry.

The assumption here is that people don't deliberately do that which they believe to be evil.

But if you want to get more Machiavellian about it, by all means, let's wade into that quicksand! We might even find firm ground in the middle of it.

Seems like cherry-picking to me - you've got few instances in which being moral would likely be a fatal error but you're ignoring what must be instances where the only sensible choice is to be moral. — TheMadFool

If you have a group of people who behave morally (what is, in some traditional sense considered "moral"), and then comes one who doesn't behave morally, chances are he'll get away with it, because the "good guys", being the "good guys" that they are, won't be able to do anything against him. That is, unless they give up on their goodness.

Human goodness is weak and easy to exploit.

Too, if you haven't noticed (I have), morality makes so much sense that some, if not all, people have come to believe in "good for the sake of good". It is/has become a reason unto itself - it needs no argument to hold it in place, it's self-justifiying.

I'd like to believe that, very much so.

But then Blondie Orange wins the elections, and one has to wonder what it is that really counts in life.

I can't quite put a finger on it but there must exist an asymmetry in the exchange between, say, buyer and seller, for such a thing as profit to be real. — TheMadFool

Yes, and this asymmetry has to somehow be considered good and moral, good.

People can do whatever they like. There are some who are incredible generous, but what's this have to do with my assertion that the main thing going on in this world (especially collectively) is scamming to steal other folks labor value? — synthesis

So you have no trouble with asserting such, but you have trouble with considering that man can do damage to the planet?

The arrogance of man, thinking that he can be a threat to the planet. — synthesis

The arrogance of man, thinking that he can't be a threat to the planet.

So I went to these texts and after I waded through the sheer bulk, I conclude that all is for one thing and only one thing, all of the nuanced emotional, tendentious descriptions of unwholesome and wholesome experiences, serve to encourage the purification of Citta. The rest, impressive in its bulk, is contingent, could have been accounted for, listed, enumerated, categorized, differently, or really, not at all. The irony strikes me: this that I read through is a reduced form of the Abhidhamma, the Abhidhammatha Sangaha, so, such massive bulk belies the simplicity of the Buddhist essence. I have to wonder what the need is for all this analysis if the point is NOT complexity but simplicity. — Constance

Purifying the citta is not an easy task; or at least some think it's not an easy task.
The basic principles are easy enough, but putting them into action, every hour of every day, is quite another matter.

Sure, some of this is useful, but passages like the one that says animals are reborn due to evil kamma. or the teaching that one should associate putrid thoughts with desires to be rid of the desire, these are the products of ancient thinking, and can produce terrible neuroses, I imagine.

If one superimposes one's own stances on Buddhism, that can surely lead to neuroses ...

I have also read that much of this not to be part of the original teaching. I suspect that extraordinary person 2500 years or so ago was certainly NOT the overwrought anal retentive type that would commit this to the "canon".

You wanted a meta-level text, and I suggested a standard one.

The Abhidhamma has replies to the questions you were asking. But its sheer size can be overwhelming, to say the least.

I tried to be objective, but in the final estimation, all that is essential to Buddhism is what happened when that man experienced the purity of Citta and the liberation from the "becoming" of psycho-physical existence.

The point of Buddhist practice is to bring about this "purity of citta". Having that purity and getting to it are two quite different things.
There would be little use in offering up a brief account of the Buddha's enlightenment, if this wouldn't be accompanied by an outline of a course of practice acting in accordance with which other people could attain enlightenment as well. Without such an outline, the Buddha would be yet another fancy religious/spiritual figure who supposedly attained some high religious/spiritual goal, but the narrative would leave us forever wondering how he got there, or if, maybe, he ws just born this way.

I think this nibbana was a deeply profound event, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the point of it all the fuss of being human.

The idea that the purpose of human life is to become free from suffering / to become enlightened is not a given in Early Buddhism, nor in some other schools of Buddhism.
These schools don't operate with notions like "everyone should become enlightened", "everyone can become enlightened".

I am sort with George Carlin on this one whereas I don't really believe that man can cause much harm to the planet. — synthesis

Then maybe you should go and live in a landfill.

You don't think that a free lunch can only be found in mouse traps?

If your labor is creating value for somebody else, you paid for it. Value cannot be created out of thin air. — synthesis

But he is indebting other people for future favors back to him.
He may have fixed someone's computer for no monetary charge this time, but he's also set up the option for the other person doing him a favor, as the opportunity presents itself.

So much in life depends on favors which are difficult to put a price tag on, yet they can be enormously valuable.

Well, the time of the elves is over.

https://i.imgur.com/SLAlB.jpg

If God exists, everyone should go to heaven and there should be no atonement involved. — Gregory

As in some Hindu (mono)theisms. Of course, in those systems, too, a person has to jump through some hoops, including risking a series of rebirths/reincarnations, but there is no threat of eternal damnation for making the wrong religious choice.

So - God is like The Manager, and if everyone doesn’t have a good outcome, then he’s responsible. Is that it? — Wayfarer

This would apply for a demigod, ie. one who doesn't create the universe and of whom living beings are not part of.

But given that 1. it's God who created everyone, 2. nothing happens without God's will, 3. God knows the future, one has to wonder why some will burn in hell for all eternity with no chance of salvation, and moreover, how is that some could so completely stray from God's will to begin with so as to earn themselves eternal punishment.

The simplest explanation is that Christianity is a mix of monotheism and demigod worship, mixed together in such a way that it supports group supremacism of one particular group.

Christianity is monotheism in some aspects of creation and judgment. And it's demigod worship when it comes to allowing for the possibility that humans can, on their own, act against God's will, and that this can have eternal, irredeemable, irrepairable consequences.

If we start from the premises that God creates everything and that everything belongs to God, and that God is always happy/content, then isn't it strange to suppose that God would set aside a part of his universe where or about which he will be unhappy/suffering? That's one masochistic god, to say the least. Or, oddly familiarily man-like.

Do you know how to play chess? Some people do not. Do you conclude from that, that you are allowed to - or that it is good to - move your rook diagonally? And if you do, what happens to the game of chess? And what happens to people who make illegal moves on a chessboard? — tim wood

The assumption that there is such a thing as objective morality (which would have the same type of function as the rules in chess) tends to lurk in the back of discussions about morality.

Because of confusion and ignorance on what "success" means and is.

You're going to argue that, say, becoming the president of the most powerful country in the world is not success?

My heavens! You're expecting the world itself to be an EM place?

No, I'm expecting to deduce what EM is, based on known facts about the world.

There is a system of words: good, better, best, bad, worse, worst. What do you imagine they mean or refer to? At the moment, it appears you're arguing that whether a mugging is good or bad depends on whether you're the mugger or the muggee. And that's not how the world works.

The world generally sides with whoever is better off, and this can be either the mugger or the muggee.

If a rich and powerful person beats up a poor person, the rich and powerful person is deemed as having done nothing wrong.
If it's the poor person who beats up the rich one, it's the poor person who is the criminal.

Don't forget that the police was invented to protect the upper class from the lower class.

I get ya. Rather I was thinking of his descriptive imagery of the landscapes. — schopenhauer1

Sure, but there are dragons lurking there, literally! And orcs!

The beauty of the Shire, for example, is not safe, not a given. How can you enjoy it when you know there is evil not far from it?

Like that financial guru said -- "Never tell people what you know, keep them poor".

No, it hasn't. Are you thinking maybe you need to be dishonest, unfair, inconsiderate, law-breaking? — tim wood

How can something that leads to success in the world be morally wrong?

Next. They don't obey the rules. Immediately two possibilities: they really are not obeying the rules, or they actually are and you just don't yourself understand the rules. First step, do you actually know the rules? Now by cases. 1) They are actually not obeying the rules. If so, they have conferred on you a good bit of power. You have access to your own voice and being in the right, your community, your church, the law, the police, your local government. And sometimes that's what you have to do, because there are bad and stupid people out there and proximity to them can be bad for one's health. That is, EM is shoulds and oughts but themselves without force until and unless enforced - and sometimes you the engine that gets them enforced.

That's assuming that rules apply equally to all people, regardless of their status and power.
That's not how the world works.

I would be horrified to have it confirmed that this is the only planet with life, that no where out there is someone doing it better. Just depressing as hell. — Book273

Thank heavens it's not possible to prove an absolute negative, heh.