And obviously, it (love) is not an emotion.
— unenlightened

Then you don't speak English. Or have misconnected ideals of concepts. — god must be atheist

In context, I suggest to you that the commandment "Love thy neighbour" is not a command to have an emotion, but a command to act.

In context, I suggest to you that the commandment "Love thy neighbour" is not a command to have an emotion, but a command to act. — unenlightened

How would you know how to act in that situation if the actions are not motivated by particular emotions?

How would you know how to act in that situation if the actions are not motivated by particular emotions? — Terrapin Station

I dare say that every act must be motivated by an emotion, - that is tenable. What is not tenable is that the commandment is to have an emotion and not to perform an action. So it must surely be the case that the word refers both to an emotion and to the actions that flow from it, and that this is not something I have made up on a whim, but a long tradition.

I think the method of criticism that uses rigid definitions that clearly cannot be meaningfully applied to the usages that are being criticised is rather weak. It is much more interesting and revealing to look for an interpretation that makes sense than to defeat another understanding without understanding it.

What is not tenable is that the commandment is to have an emotion and not to perform an action. — unenlightened

Yeah, I agree with that. I'd say that part of what that particular emotion entails is that you perform certain sorts of actions towards the object of the emotion, otherwise you don't really have that emotion.

In context, I suggest to you that the commandment "Love thy neighbour" is not a command to have an emotion, but a command to act. — unenlightened

You mean, fuck my neighbour. That directly bang head-on contradicts another commandment, "Do not fornicate".

Yeah, I agree with that. I'd say that part of what that particular emotion entails is that you perform certain sorts of actions towards the object of the emotion, otherwise you don't really have that emotion. — Terrapin Station

But you can act and I do act all the acts that point to an uninformed observer that I love my neighbour, while I do not love my neighbour.

The commandment is wrongly worded. In fact, the entire Roman Catholic cathecism (sp?) is replete with imperatives to have this emotion or that emotion. Or that just thinking about a sin is a sin. They don't say "thinking about a sin with the intention of sinning"... no, that would make too much sense, they realize their own stupidity, whoever wrote it, and the stupidity of their readers, so they use the simplified version, and omit the "intention" part.

The whole thing makes me puke. They, the religious, when presented with a fact, rather alter the fact than adjust their theory. I think that's sick.

---------------------------------

A typical conversation between a Christian police man and a Christian man, both of whom obey the ten commandments to the letter and to the spirit:

"Love thy neighbour."

"I'm loving him already! I am just gouging his eyes out because I do love him."

"Oh, it's okay then, I guess."

But you can act and I do act all the acts that point to an uninformed observer that I love my neighbour, while I do not love my neighbour. — god must be atheist

Someone could interpret your actions in a manner that doesn't match your motivations, sure.

I wasn't following the whole discussion by the way. I just saw the stuff about whether love is an emotion.

You said : "Atheists are simply on the opinion, or belief, that there is no god or gods."

So what is your belief or opinion based upon?

I understand you are frustrated, but this has been the point from the beginning. I am attempting to make you think about those existential questions using your logic.

Let me help you. Your response should be something like..'....based upon this, that, and the other analogy from science, psychology, philosophy, et.al., I have reasonably concluded God does not exist.'

Thus far, I have not read anything from you that provides logical justification for your belief system.

Your answers do not describe things in themselves. In other words, they do not provide any meaning to the nature of our existence.

So what is your belief or opinion based upon? — 3017amen

It's based on different things to different atheists. There's no one common justification for all of them. All that atheists have in common is the lack of a belief in the existence of any gods.

For me, my atheism is based on (a) the incoherence and absurdity of religious claims, including the notion of gods and supposed properties they'd have, primarily from an ontological perspective, and (b) the fact that there's nothing that I'd even remotely consider evidence of a god empirically.

It's not just gods that I make this judgment about. Pretty much anything where both there's zero empirical evidence for it AND where the very idea of it is incoherent I'm going to say doesn't exist.

"...primarily from an ontological perspective"



Yep, totally get that. And I feel that pain. Once again, a priori logic rears its ugly head there (not that that's always bad of course ie, mathematical truth's, and so on...). So yes, Fundamentalism in many ways gives God a bad name.

But here's where the deficiency lies. You said empirical truth's, more or less, are not persuading you or most atheist's into a belief in a Deity (I take it Taoism too, but am not sure what you think there).

Empircism, phenomenology, psychology and even physical science would suggest more evidence of a creator than no-thing at all. Right? Do we want examples?

Here's an obvious one that has perplexed philosophers: why do we have two ways to avoid falling objects?

So what is your belief or opinion based upon? — 3017amen

Same as god worshippers' belief in god. Go away already, nincompoopsie. You are so stupid in my opinion, that it is of no use to tell you anything enlightening. You are incapable of understanding logic, reason, and connected reasoning. You have shown it in many, many posts. You have also shown that you don't read responses to the questions you ask, and you don't apply them to your thinking. People who respond to you can get a better (and certainly less irritating) response from a brick wall than from you. You are stupoid and you are malevolent. I don't want to talk to you. You are way below the level of the minimum acceptable standard of intelligent discourse, in my opinion, of this forum. Furthermore, because of your stupidoity and ignorance and bad manners you behave like a troll. I don't talk to trolls. Sorry.

I WILL NEVER AGAIN RESPOND TO YOUR QUESTIONS, INQUIRIES, CLAIMS AND STATEMENTS, AS IF I HAVE PUT YOU IN IGNORE, @3017amen. YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF RESPONDING TO IN MY OPINION, AND IF THIS SITE HAD AN "IGNORE" FUNCTION, YOU'D BE THE FIRST ONE I WOULD PUT ON IT FOR MYSELF.

Well sorry you feel that way. Your choice.

In fairness, if you could answer at least one of those existential questions, we might could learn something.

I've tried to help you, but I see you are frustrated.

Be well.

You said empirical truth's, more or less, are not persuading you or most atheist's into a belief in a Deity (I take it Taoism too, but am not sure what you think there).

Empircism, phenomenology, psychology and even physical science would suggest more evidence of a creator than no-thing at all. Right? Do we want examples? — 3017amen

Re "or most atheists," I wasn't speaking for anyone else.

Re my second point, "there's nothing that I'd even remotely consider evidence of a god empirically," obviously then, there are no facts of physical science, psychology, etc. that I'd consider to be anything even remotely in the vicinity of evidence of a god.

It's probably important to keep in mind that it's not as if I think that the notion of a god is at all plausible and thus worth considering, where I then go, "hmmm . . . well, such and such sways me this way rather than that way." Rather, the notion of a god strikes me as incoherent gobbledygook that insane people came up with. That's exacerbated by the fact that I knew very little of the idea of gods, religion, etc. until I was in my mid-teens. So at the point where I finally learned something about what people believed, I couldn't believe that they weren't putting me on, because it just seemed to ridiculous to me, and it still does.

But sure, if you want to list a couple things that you take to be good evidence, go ahead.

Here's an obvious one that has perplexed philosophers: why do we have to ways to avoid falling objects? — 3017amen

What's perplexing me is that you're saying that that has ever perplexed anyone. What sorts of big falling object threats are you even thinking of, first off?

At any rate, I certainly don't take the fact that things can and do move to be good evidence of a god. That seems like an insane idea to me instead.

I'd say that part of what that particular emotion entails is that you perform certain sorts of actions towards the object of the emotion, otherwise you don't really have that emotion. — Terrapin Station

So if I love to walk and I break my leg or become tired, I must not love walking any more? I cannot love to be out in the hills when confined to bed?

But you can act and I do act all the acts that point to an uninformed observer that I love my neighbour, while I do not love my neighbour. — god must be atheist

Indeed! Fake it 'til you make it is a thing too, and there is a famous C15th book, "The Imitation of Christ" that gives this some pedigree.

There are loving feelings and there are loving acts and neither entails the other inevitably; this much is inescapable without doing violence to the language. Not much follows from this except that the criticisms based on a rigid definition fail. But I can invite you to consider with a slightly more open mind what I might have meant by this:

One of the deficiencies of atheism is the notion that the existence of God is of great importance.

There is no love. God is love.

Perhaps it is not too controversial to say that perfection is usually unobtainable. Engineers have the notion of tolerance, which they measure. Parts of a machine are made to an imperfect fit and even the measure of imperfection is imperfect. And you will be familiar at least with the formal, or ideal realm of Plato. In his dualism, the ideal and the material are opposed, and the ideal is real and the material illusory. And I hope you have enough sense not to just dismiss Plato as not worth considering.

So I say, to the materialist in his engineer's world, that love is an ideal, and does not exist in his world except as an unrealised unrealisable idea. And just as the engineer strives for an exactitude he knows is unobtainable, so one can strive for a love that is unobtainable and that is the 'heart' of the Christian tradition. And very very crap they are in most cases at reaching anywhere near it.

What's perplexing me is that you're saying that that has ever perplexed anyone. What sorts of big falling object threats are you even thinking of, first off?"



Well first off, thank you for taking the time to respond in a reasonable fashion.

Secondly, I'm not here to prove the existence of God. I'm a Christian Existentialist. ( I am obviously participating in this thread to offer my observations on the deficiencies of atheism.)

Nonetheless, I enjoy exploring the mysteries associated with our human existence. Accordingly, to give that example you asked, of a mysterious or perplexing question:

1. Abstract mathematical laws of gravity allow us to calculate falling objects.

2. Our consciousness (perception, sensorial/spacial knowledge) allows us to avoid falling objects.

The mystery is, why do we have this dual capacity to know the world? What evolutionary advantages are there to such intellectual, abstract knowledge like mathematics/the laws of gravity? (How does one spring from the other.)

So if I love to walk — unenlightened

Different sense of the term. So we'd be equivocating a la "If I value freedom, then I can't charge anything for the hot dogs I'm selling??"

Let's talk about Love.

Is love a subjective or objective truth?

The mystery is, why do we have this dual capacity to know the world? What evolutionary advantages are there to such intellectual, abstract knowledge like mathematics/the laws of gravity? — 3017amen

First, something doesn't have to be an evolutionary advantage to persist. It only has to not be enough of an evolutionary disadvantage that it gets "bred out" of a species.

Consciousness, reasoning have survival advantages to us, because we evolved into the sorts of creatures that can't easily survive to reproduce purely by autonomic functions. Our consciousness and reasoning enables us to live long enough to reproduce. (Mathematics, by the way, is just a way of reasoning, mostly via extrapolation, about relations that we observe.)

Let's talk about Love.

Is love a subjective or objective truth? — 3017amen

Propositions are what are true or false. "Love" isn't a proposition. (A proposition is a statement about something.)

On my view truth is subjective, but to explain why, I have to get into the standard view of what truth is in analytic philosophy. It's not a norm in analytic philosophy to consider truth to be subjective, but the standard view of what truth is in analytic philosophy has the upshot, on my view, of making truth something that only obtains subjectively.

First, something doesn't have to be an evolutionary advantage to persist. It only has to not be enough of an evolutionary disadvantage that it gets "bred out" of a species.


Are you saying it devolved out of consciousness and/or is somehow just an unexplained extra feature of existence?

I'm not following you there...

Propositions are what are true or false. "Love" isn't a proposition. (A proposition is a statement about something.)


Gotcha, let me then try it in propositional terms:

1. Love is a subjective truth.

Is that statement sound?

Are you saying it devolved out of consciousness and/or is somehow just an unexplained extra feature of existence? — 3017amen

Say what?

You asked what the evolutionary advantage of x is. (It could be anything, hence why I'm using a variable.)

It's a misconception that only things that are evolutionary advantages can persist.

Mutations do not need to be advantageous to survival to persist. They can be neutral, or even slightly disadvantageous to survival. All that's required for a mutation to persist in a population (well, aside from being a mutation that will be passed on genetically), is for it to not negatively affect survival to a point where individuals of that species with that mutation can not make it to reproduction stage.

Gotcha, let me then try it in propositional terms:

1. Love is a subjective truth.

Is that statement sound? — 3017amen

'Sound" is a term that applies to arguments. That's not an argument.

At any rate, yes, that's true in my view.

Actually, wait, "Love is a subjective truth" isn't true in my view.

"Love" isn't a proposition. It would need to be a proposition for that sentence to make sense. I didn't think about it much when I first answered. But then I went back and read it and realized that it's a nonsense sentence because it's framing something as a proposition when it's not.

Mutations do not need to be advantageous to survival to persist"


Ok, so if I could restate your theory, are you saying it's an accidental feature of existence? In other words, since we don't need it to survive ("advantageous to survival" as you say), it's just an extra intellectual feature of human conscious existence?

"Actually, wait, "Love is a subjective truth" isn't true in my view."

What is love then, an objective phenomena ( of sorts ) that most all humans aspire to do?

Ok, so if I could restate your theory, are you saying it's an accidental feature of existence? — 3017amen

No. I don't at all buy the "accidental"/"essential" distinction.

Further, I didn't at all say that consciousness or reasoning weren't advantageous for survival for humans. I explicitly wrote the opposite: "Consciousness, reasoning have survival advantages to us."

You're conflating a general comment about evolution and advantage, where I was clearing up a misconception (with respect to a background assumption you were making in asking the question the way you asked it), with a specific comment about consciousness and reasoning.

What is love then, an objective phenomena ( of sorts ) that most all humans aspire to do? — 3017amen

The phenomena are subjective.

It's just not "true" because only propositions are true.

You're conflating a general comment about evolution and advantage, where I was clearing up a misconception with a specific comment about consciousness and reasoning. "

Okay, let's try one at a time: How does mathematical knowledge evolve out/into a species? It has to spring from one to another in any case, to fit into the theory of Darwinism.

The phenomena are subjective"


If love is subjective, why then do all human's aspire to it (with minor exceptions)? And if all humans aspire to it, would that not make it objective ( love being an objective truth)?