Philosophy operates in an imaginary world at the boundaries of science.

Your subconscious is the undercurrent of emotions you generally are not aware of.

People disagree with one another because they don’t see the same things. We can use the same logic, but if we don’t make the same observations we don’t have to reach the same conclusion. However there are a few things that everyone can agree on (or come to agree on).

↪Yahya Al Haj Eid

Philosophy operates in an imaginary world at the boundaries of science.

Most philosophers agree about most things; that Trump is an odious incompetent, that the climate emergency is real and drastic, that Mozart is better than the Bee Gees, that coffee is a basic human right, that shit smells, and the pope is Catholic.

And all that goes without saying, so the stuff you get to hear about is the odd region where things are as yet undecided.

If religion is wrong, life is literally meaningless (unless the satisfaction of emotions becomes a job). — Yahya Al Haj Eid

Religion reminds me of the satire comedy movie The Dictator where the main protagonist Admiral-General Haffaz Aladeen passes a decree that changes both the words "positive" and "negative" to "aladeen". There's a scene there where a doctor tells a patient "you are HIV aladeen" with the expected result of utter confusion for the patient.

God, if that's what you mean is religion, falls in the same category as "aladeen". If something good happens it's God's grace and if something bad happens, God works in mysterious ways.

:rofl: :rofl:

This isn’t strictly a case for philosophers. Humans tend to disagree about several things or more.

If religion is wrong, life is literally meaningless — Yahya Al Haj Eid

If 'Christian' religion is right I'd be in Hell by now. I prefer a meaningless life.

If 'Christian' religion is right I'd be in Hell by now. I prefer a meaningless life. — ovdtogt

Why? Did you do something so "bad" as to ask for evidence?

Why? Did you do something so "bad" as to ask for evidence? — TheMadFool

Yes good one.
You'd think God has a inferiority complex with all that worshiping going on. Obviously no truck with a nihilistic Atheist then.

Yes good one.
You'd think God has a inferiority complex with all that worshiping going on. Obviously no truck with a nihilistic Atheist then. — ovdtogt

I feel sad when we badmouth God. Richard Dawkins "bested" us all in that department in The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins

I feel sad because:

1. IF he exists, he's not offering us even a small-scale miracle in his own defense. He allows his own creations to say the worst imaginable things about him and some of us rub salt into those wounds, which must already be very painful, by worshipping Satan or denying his existence outright as in atheism

2. If god doesn't exist and he's a human invention then how poor was our imagination, how pathetic was our morals and how great was our ignorance that we could do no better than a god that Richard Dawkins can describe in such disgustingly vile terms. If God doesn't exist any criticism of him is like pointing a finger at yourself and though that may be extremely satisfying it becomes awkwardly unsettling when you realize that it's you criticizing you

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins

We had created a God in our own image.

If religion is wrong, life is literally meaningless — Yahya Al Haj Eid

Religion is not right or wrong, it is based on nothing. It may be right on target, or it could be totally off. We don't know.

Religions talk about the nature of god and its will. But god is completely elusive, we got no data, no information on it. It is perfectly possible that god exists, and equally possible that it does not exist. But to claim that any human knows anything about god is charlatanism.

Sure, we got the ancient texts on god... but who were these books written by? Some humans, who purport to hear god's voice. You believe it if you want to; but you can also disbelieve it if you want to. And lo and behold, those who believe that the scriptures of a religion are authentic, are called the religious, and those who reject this notion, are the non-religious.

So... you say you can only have a meaningful life if you believe that an ancient text's words are authentically god's words. This is your perogative, but basically what you can be SURE of is that you have a meaning in your life because you believe the texts, which are not proven to be authentic, only believed to be authentic, and believed not even by everyone.

Your entire meaning is hanging on a text that describes, among other things, gods that have attributes that make the particular god impossible to be, because it has conflicting attributes.

So your meaning is hanging on something impossible.

Have a nice meaning.

Religion is not right or wrong, it is based on nothing. — god must be atheist

It is not based on nothing.It is based on the belief that you have an immortal soul that will survive the death of your body.

Religion is a lie; life is wonderful.

Religion is a lie; life is wonderful. — A Seagull

For most people life is shit and religion helps.

If god doesn't exist and he's a human invention then how poor was our imagination, how pathetic was our morals and how great was our ignorance that we could do no better than a god that Richard Dawkins can describe in such disgustingly vile terms. — TheMadFool

This is something I find myself thinking about whenever debating the Problem of Evil. Theists fall all over themselves to make excuses for why the world can be as shitty as it is and yet God can still somehow be all-knowing, all-powerful, and most of all all-loving. I see that and just find myself wondering why you would even care whether or not there exists a being that, for whatever excuse or other, still permits genocides and children being sold into sex slavery, never mind horrible diseases and parasites and predators that are not even human fault, and otherwise appears to have no noticeable effect on the world. What comfort is that? That you go get to live in some afterlife later... managed by the same "all-loving" being who lets this life be such shit for so many? Why would that life be any better than this one then?

I can easily imagine a God that's much better than that, but that better kind of a God clearly isn't real, whatever the case may be about the lackluster type theists try to prop up.

People paint atheists like me as hating the idea of God or something, but really I'm terribly disappointed that there doesn't appear to be one, at least not anything that would rightly be considered an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God. Sure maybe the universe as we know it is something like a simulation created by something like an alien that's all-knowing and all-powerful over what we think is reality and forever hidden from our ability to tell whether or not he's there... but why would I care, if he lets it be like this and otherwise makes himself irrelevant to us here?

The best I can hope for is that eventually enough of us will get similarly disappointed enough that there isn't such a God that we'll collectively decide to make or become one.


ETA: I'm disappointed that this thread isn't about the progress (or lack thereof) in philosophy, as the title would suggest.

Theists fall all over themselves to make excuses for why the world can be as shitty as it is and yet God can still somehow be all-knowing, all-powerful, and most of all all-loving. — Pfhorrest

Whatever exists that seems evil to us must be good from the point of view of an all powerful being, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No comfort there for us, but it's consistent. This entails that the theist must embrace the fact that from God's point of view, any kind of suffering is good. It's hard to love God, if loving God is even a coherent concept.

On the subject of philosophers disagreeing, I guess there is no method that forces agreement, except perhaps the 'logical method' but that's a bit patchy, as you need clear premises that everyone agrees on. In science, agreement is eventually forced by a consistent build up of more and more evidence, and the success of technology based on scientific theory, and even then some people still hold out.

Whatever exists that seems evil to us must be good from the point of view of an all powerful being, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No comfort there for us, but it's consistent. This entails that the theist must embrace the fact that from God's point of view, any kind of suffering is good. It's hard to love God, if loving God is even a coherent concept. — bert1

Yeah, a possible solution to the Problem of Evil, an answer to the question of "How can the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God be reconciled with the existence of evil?", has always been "What evil? I don't see any evil. Evil can't be possible, there's an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God, and he wouldn't let there be any evil so there must not be."

I think all but the most fortunate and either self-centered or ignorant people would find that pretty absurd though.

I think all but the most fortunate and either self-centered or ignorant people would find that pretty absurd though. — Pfhorrest

No contradiction follows from people having different values though, even if one of those people is God. Evil is always evil-from-a-point-of-view.

Evil is always evil-from-a-point-of-view. — bert1

That is not an uncontroversial claim, and typically it is people leaning more toward theism who are most likely to object to it. People who think there's a God usually also think there's an objective moral standard, and that that standard is God's standard, so on their account if God approves of toddlers getting gang-banged and the toddlers disagree, well the toddlers are just wrong.

For most people life is shit and religion helps. — ovdtogt

Maybe religion is the problem, not the cure.

It is hard to interact effectively with the world if one believes lies about the world.

Why do you think most philosophers disagree with each other?

They don't, I think. I think you'll find far more agreement among philosophers than among the public at large. It is just that philosophers focus on what they disagree about. So they don't disagree about more, they disagree about less. It is just that they are clever and reasonable and so they recognise - virtually all of them recognise - that on those matters where they disagree they need to spend more time. Hence the focus on areas of disagreement.

It is the public that disagree about things, but unlike philosophers they either conclude (stupidly) that 'it's all a matter of opinion' or 'subjective' or they punch each other.

We had created a God in our own image. — ovdtogt

Yup. If by "we" we mean those whose writings survived all those years and canonical revisions...

It is the public that disagree about things, but unlike philosophers they either conclude (stupidly) that 'it's all a matter of opinion' or 'subjective' or they punch each other. — Bartricks

Or stab, shoot, and kill... often in the name of their chosen God...

It is the public that disagree about things, but unlike philosophers they either conclude (stupidly) that 'it's all a matter of opinion' or 'subjective' or they punch each other. — Bartricks

Well that is just your subjective opinion.

ETA: I'm disappointed that this thread isn't about the progress (or lack thereof) in philosophy, as the title would suggest. — Pfhorrest

Me too! Although I suppose that question has been debated to death on some forums, if not this one. But the OP raised a different question for me : Is the implied babble of rational philosophers a fact, or an unsupported attribution by those who prefer "infallible" divine Revelation to "fallible" human Reason?

As I see it, the relatively "easy" questions have already been pinned-down like butterflies by speculative philosophers like Aristotle, and theoretical physicists like Einstein. After the basics are settled, pragmatic scientists fill-in the gaps with more details & data & decimal points, and engineers turn that knowledge into useful stuff. But the remaining elusive butterflies, like the "hard" question of consciousness, are still being debated, because the available evidence remains ambiguous. How many philosophers still debate the notion of Phlogiston?

I'm guessing that most philosophers would prefer handed-down Truth over the hard work of reasoning, if they could find any reliable revelations among the babble of world religions. :cool:

Maybe religion is the problem, not the cure. — A Seagull

Maybe life is the problem and not religion.

That is not an uncontroversial claim, and typically it is people leaning more toward theism who are most likely to object to it. People who think there's a God usually also think there's an objective moral standard, and that that standard is God's standard, so on their account if God approves of toddlers getting gang-banged and the toddlers disagree, well the toddlers are just wrong. — Pfhorrest

That's true

Whatever exists that seems evil to us must be good from the point of view of an all powerful being, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No comfort there for us, but it's consistent. This entails that the theist must embrace the fact that from God's point of view, any kind of suffering is good. It's hard to love God, if loving God is even a coherent concept. — bert1

Or maybe there is a loving God who isn’t all powerful, because there is an evil God competing with him...

Evil is always evil-from-a-point-of-view. — bert1

Not quite. When all things move towards unity, from any point of view all things are seen to move towards us. When all things move towards separation, from any point of view all things are seen to move away from us.

Now if you agree that unity is correlated with feelings associated with good (love, happiness) and separation is correlated with feelings associated with evil (hate, suffering), then good and evil aren’t relative, they are absolute. In many situations one can be mistaken for the other, but there are situations in which the two cannot be mistaken because they appear the same from all points of view.