When there is a cause, change occurs. When change occurs, it has a cause. — ucarr

Do you deny this? If so, show me a change that has no cause. In this instance, your example can be a phenomenon of change that takes time to occur.

Also, do you think the above is philosophy? I think it's common sense.

There are a few physical formula in which time does not play a role. Each of these is an example of cause without time. The resistance of a circuit and the colour of a black body are two more examples. — Banno

you cannot accept them as falsifying your hypothesis. — Banno

Hence your need to move the goalposts from change to causation. — Banno

You obviously think change & cause are two very different things.

I think they're directly connected. When there is a cause, change occurs. When change occurs, it has a cause. If this direct relationship is true, and we both know it is, then your claims about change over distance imply a cause. You should therefore have neither complaint nor critical commentary in response to being asked to supply one. Elaborating how it comes to pass that some type of change over distance is caused is a basic part of your job in supporting your claim with an argument. Your examples thus far have brought forth denials supported by commonplace, definitive evidence.

When you assert that change over distance is a timeless phenomenon within our empirical reality, you're advancing a radical claim that naturally excites calls for elaboration of scientific truth unknown to most observers.

You're obviously hunting around for qualifying examples. Thus far, you haven't found any.

resistance of a circuit > drop in current flow CAUSED by resistance of a circuit is not timeless

change in color of a black body > measurement of color temperature as based upon a theoretical black body is not timeless

The measurement problem in physics relates to Heisenberg and Schrodinger... — Edmund

Are you referring to quantum measurements of vectors when the wave function is operational?

...but in essence revolves around the possible "influence" of the observer/measurer. — Edmund

Are you asserting the presence of the observer as the main cause of Heisenberg Uncertainty? If so, I suspect this is a major proposition you should propound.

Berkeley's view that to be was to be perceived seems therefore particularly precient? — Edmund

I suppose we know that observer-observed are contemporaneous. What do you have to say about unobserved things? Do they exist?

A weight sitting on a cushion deforms the cushion. The weight cause the cushion to change over distance. — Banno

State 1: cushion without weight = shape of cushion 1
State 2: cushion with weight sitting on it = shape of cushion 2

Question - What causes shape of cushion 1 to become shape of cushion 2?

When asking about causation, we're asking about a connection or relationship between two states of being. We're asking about the before and the after.

What's at the center of our focus here is connection, or relationship. We're not looking at State 1 and then jumping to look at State 2. Such a jump, like a cut in a motion picture from one scene to another, can be conceptualized as being timeless, but, in phenomenal reality, there are no timeless cuts.

In your head, you can visualize a motion picture like cut and imagine it to be timeless, however, in phenomenal reality, as Schootz1 points out, the weight deforms the cushion via the action of gravitation upon its mass, which causes movement across an interval of time of positive value.

You can talk about juxtaposing two points of view of a material object and say they express two different forms of the same object. You can call this a juxtaposition of different forms, but change of, or change over - outside of time - don't apply.

You have not given a single example of change of state of being outside of time. Your persistence in claiming such is based on a misuse of change over distance.

Banno, I think you're saying causation is trivial. Please elaborate by giving us a trivial, mundane cause of
change in the state of a material object with time equal to zero for the change.

CAUSE, like CHANGE, refers to an alteration in the state of things, over time. The deformation of the cushion, involving motion, consumes time.

The deformed cushion, a rest state, doesn't exemplify change.

Exercise leads to (causes) big muscles. This is, clearly, change in the state of a physical body over time.

As long as you use CHANGE in your proposition, you will need to demonstrate a change of state of one thing that consumes zero time.

What causes change over distance?

In the case of everyday physics, change over time via motion is caused by a change in the inertial state of a material object.

A real-world, specific example goes thus: a boulder sits at the base of a hill. Its inertial state is rest. Another boulder, rolling down said hill strikes the first boulder, setting it in motion. It rolls for a distance of 20 feet over a time interval of 29 seconds.

This change over time via motion was caused by a change in the inertial state of the resting boulder to the inertial state of a rolling boulder.

Can you give a real-world, specific example of a cause that effects a change over distance, with elapsed time equal to zero?

I'm not sure the matter is sufficiently well-defined to answer the question definitively. It doesn't appear to be logically impossible (it doesn't appear to entail a contradiction), but whether it is nomologically/metaphysically possible is ambiguous (which is, again, itself a problem for theism's credibility). — Seppo

Question – How does an agent in the non-physical category (spirit) cause observable effects in the physical category (physics)?

Theism (theistic metaphysics) has a responsibility to propound spirit-matter transduction.

Atheism (atheistic metaphysics) has a responsibility to examine the same question, with intent to show impossibility.

Please see above post.

Do you allow that transduction between spirit-matter being possible is the premise of the atheistic seekers to whom you've been referring?

If you reject such transduction, then you assert that spirit-matter contact is rationally impossible, and the existence of spirit is scientifically undecidable, with extreme skepticism.

When a seeker tries to find physical evidence of immaterial being interacting with matter, that's a very specific search. If the speaker is reacting to claims made to that effect, then the seeker must proceed from the premise that the immaterial being possesses a physical component that makes contact with material onjects. This premise contains another premise > that material evidence can only result from material agents acting upon it. If the seeker doesn't commit to these premises, then s/he allows that transduction between matter and spirit might be possible.

Question to change over distance advocates. What causes change over distance?

In what context are you willing to answer my question about logic being independent or invented?
Sidebars into related topics have been ok before, or am I mistaken?
My question advances a line of attack on a type of atheist argument that uses the invented abstract structures of logic.

Is it not true that before the question of God's causal relationship with the physical world can be examined via the benchmark of physical evidence, the examiner must presuppose a physical component within God's being? I pose the question this way because the object to be examined i.e., God's contact with the physical world, logically requires a common ground where the two can meet. Either spirit converts to physical, or vice versa. The acceptance of this equalization upon a common ground of physicality by the atheist examiners you postulate is suggested by their seeking after physical evidence. In the absence of a physical component within God, one can ask how atheist examiners expect to find physical evidence left behind by pure spirit.

Why would linguistic/conceptual analysis showing that certain terms or predicates are mutually exclusive... — Seppo

...imply that "grammar of logic is extant independent of human reasoning"? — Seppo

There's a perennial debate whether numbers are discovered or invented. I'm asking a parallel question about logic.

If your answer is that logic is an invention of human understanding, do you acknowledge that together, human understanding and logic form a monism?

Is it your understanding that God's being includes a physical component?


Are you saying that grammar of logic is extant independent of human reasoning? I ask because if not, then you suggest atheist logicians, in refuting God, access the physicalist-spiritual point of contact. If this is denied, then independent grammar of logic is an objective idealism.

Do you know the sign God has no referent, or do you theorize the sign God has no referent?
— ucarr

It makes no difference in this context; either way, God's existence is what is in question, and so talking of "judging a being", as if there is a being there to judge, is question-begging at worst, an extremely awkward way of speaking at best. — Seppo

With my question, I was attempting to make a distinction between knowing by (2) possible standards: a) observation of phenomena within the empirical world; b) establishing an algorithm based on axioms.

Next, I was attempting to make a distinction between such knowing and propositions arrived at following reflection upon observations held in memory. With regard to the latter, a thinker can articulate a theory that postulates a line of reasoning that justifies a conclusion.

An important action here is to separate a proposition based on empirical observation from a proposition based on pure reasoning.

The gist of my argument is that God, being immaterial and therefore not subject to empirical observation, can only be denied via pure reasoning and that, moreover, pure reasoning, as a channel to valid conclusions, necessarily entails some measure of Plato's objective idealism.

Since we're dealing with a denial, there is a reversal of application of objective idealism. Since to deny God means denying objective existence of an absolute moral sentience, such denial entails embracing objective moral truth of a different sort from theism, or wholly denying objective moral truth, which entails embracing objective truth of a sort that excludes objective moral truth.

Further complicating the picture, denial of God gives the mind a central role in shaping a conception of reality through reasoning that leads to a configuration of the world that excludes immaterial, self-willed teleology. Since the denial, no less than the affirmation, operates without scientific experimentation, it follows that for yea or nay, the route to its conclusion travels through the realm of transcendent idealism.

Whatever the particulars, denial of God entails embracing a priori mental constructions of objective-transcendent idealism.

Let's have your argument supporting the sameness of a) questioning God's existence and b) judging claims about God's attributes.

I ask this question because I can claim there are no red German Shepherds, only black & gray ones. If someone denies existence of all shepherds, they must elaborate why canines can't exist, thus eliminating black & gray Shepherds.

Such an argument is a theory, even if no canines have ever been observed.

The point is merely that this talk of "judging a being" implies that the proper name "God" has a referent, when this is, of course, precisely what atheism denies... and so its a better and more accurate analysis of atheism as the position that neither the proper name "God" nor the common noun "god" has a referent, that there is not any being or entity to which either accurately applies. — Seppo

Do you know the sign God has no referent, or do you theorize the sign God has no referent?

Neither relativistic time dilation nor planck-scale uncertainty invalidates our authoritative knowledge of today's date (let alone any of the many other things we know quite authoritatively)- our dating methods are obviously relative to our own reference frame, and the calendar is a social convention and so the date just is whatever we agree that it is. — Seppo

Inertial reference frames of relativity assert the lack of a universal time. What we know in our frame is not known empirically in someone else's frame. So authoritative knowledge of the date, speaking empirically, is local; nonetheless authority is authority, whether local or otherwise.

Claims about God, however, typically speak of God's presence as something that transgresses all perceptible boundaries. Does atheism refute extant_God across all perceptible boundaries, or only within our empirical universe?

Regarding our calendar dates being what they are arbitrarily, the scientific method cannot ascribe its authorization to said dates via testing of reasoning or methods.

... Language can only exist and have meaning in relation to the empirical world and social/linguistic habits of communities of language-users. — Seppo

George - "Lord Alfred, the big wheel developer, intends to have the abandoned mill property razed to the ground. This in spite of public opposition."

Sidney - "A priori, it would seem that his reach, buttressed by high government connections, acts as an extension of that power."

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

Doctor - "How ever did you know the locket, sight unseen, would be inside the vase?"

Holmes - "Deduction, my dear boy. Elementary deduction."


Question - Do the products of a priori reasoning possess ontic properties independent of the empirical?

1. Compassionate emotions and actions directed toward oneself. (Doing things that reflect a caring for self (in the same way we care for, for example, our children): exercise, healthy diet, avoidance of toxic people, places, relationships, etc.) — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well said, ZzzoneiroCosm

You call it self-love part 1. I call it self-esteem. I will say this, however; I see your list of reflexive actions as prep work towards experiencing the greatest adventure available in the universe: falling in love with another person unlike yourself.

I think the word "authoritatively" is doing a lot of work there. The only way this even remotely follows is if we're supposing that one can only know something "authoritatively" if one is omniscient. But that's dubious to say the least. I know its January 29th quite authoritatively, and am most decidedly not omniscient. — Seppo

You argument holds good up until the start of the 20th century and the arrival of QM. I resort to the empirical extremis, which greatly weakens my argument, but it's all I've got for now. In the approach & departure to & from 29 Jan, time dilation, grown significant at micro time intervals, perplexes the exact now of beginnings & endings of calendar days. Not only you do not know, authoritatively, the calendar date; no one does. Instead, we must make do with a cloud of probabilities describing our calendar date.

Curiously, in this situation, a cloud of probabilities images more precision than does the old Newtonian conceptualization of time & space eternal.

The authoritative, certain knowledge long sought by science has been partially derailed by science itself.

And "ha, ha, ha" chortles the existentialist as s/he wraps arms around absurdity.

To deny omniscience authoritatively from an atheistic perspective is to deny that the claims of theism are true. It makes no direct claim to "knowing there isn't a god," but instead knowing that based off available information, we know that this specific god does not exist. — Cobra

There's some incoherence between your first sentence and your second sentence.

The first sentence presents strong atheism, an extreme epistemological position that denies objective omniscience. You cannot authoritatively deny the objectivity of something without knowing it objectively (you can theorize the objective non-existence of something, with each successive moment offering possibility of refutation, or not>theories are not authoritative, but rather speculative ), a position that automatically culminates in the embodiment of what's denied. This paradox, as I've already said, resembles Russell's Paradox, wherein a set includes itself/doesn't include itself. The problem, as Russell pointed out to Cantor, is unrestricted inclusion. The same thing applies to refutation. There's a problem when refutation is unrestricted, as with the denial of omniscience.

Seppo tried to restrict the refutation of omniscience, but in the effort, nose-dived himself into deep idealism, a position, I suspect, he abhors.

In your second sentence, you too attempt to restrict the scope of atheistic refutation, knowing or sensing Russell's Paradox for unrestricted refutation looms large in the not-too-distant background. In the effort, you too make a sharp turn into idealism, characterizing - I suppose unwittingly - restricted atheism in a way that sounds more like agnosticism. This is the incoherence between the two sentences. The turn into idealism is your implication that restricted atheism is reaffirmed on a case-by-case basis. This renders the hard atheism of the first sentence as a speculation or theory. In consequence of this, the extreme epistemology of the first sentence becomes an ideal, a mental construction you treat as an existential reality of the mind, which you reaffirm, empirically, case-by-case.

And in any case, the atheist isn't judging a being (divine or otherwise), but a concept or proposition: the concept of God/proposition that he exists. — Seppo

You imply that a proposition can be analyzed & judged apart from its referent within the empirical world.

You therefore imply that language has existence & meaning independent of the empirical world it describes.

Your implications, because they imply cognitive constructions in language that are existentially real apart from their referents, possess a strong flavor of idealism.

I'm speculating that your implications are, given your commentary upon my Atheism & Solipsism argument, for you, untenable.

Could it be, considering my main theme - that atheism is no less an idealism than theism - that you are, unwittingly, providing corroborating evidence?

Perhaps I misread your above quote. Can you show me some errors in my logic?

No, an atheist does not believe god exists. It's not an ideal, it's an opinion. I am an atheist but I cannot prove there is no god, no-one can, but I am personally convinced as near to 100% as you can get.
I am not being idealistic, I am not aiming for perfection, I just refuse to be as duped as a theist. — universeness

Do you advocate for social justice through personal empowerment? Do you believe it's achieved through universal access to personal development in the form of housing, education & employment? Do you think that, where appropriate, businesses should be owned & operated by the public? Do you advocate for pluralism with respect to a person's metaphysical commitments, or lack thereof?

If any of the above is true for you, then you live by certain ideals you work to make realities to the best of your ability. This is a type of socialist idealism, which is not say it's tainted or fallacious thinking. Our mental constructions guide us. Empirical experience keeps forcing us to check, adjust and rethink our ideas & ideals on a daily basis. No one gets it right 24/7.

Many of us agree that deity is idealism. Well, anti-deity is also idealism. John Lennon's Imagine describes a well-defined society worth striving for in earnest.

Practical use of ideals doesn't always place a believer within the realm of fundamentalist naivete.

"Atheism" : only nature :: "solipsism" : only me.
Nothing to do with one another. — 180 Proof

↪180 Proof Right. And at least traditionally, atheism has been akin to/friendly towards materialism/realism/physicalism, whereas idealism/anti-realism has been aligned with theism, and it is idealism, not materialism, which is always in danger of slipping off into solipsism.

(after all, the core epistemological argument for idealism that calls into question the material/physical world, similarly calls into question the existence of other minds by the very same token) — Seppo

180 Proof & Seppo make useful points here. They are succinct & clarifying examples of compare & contrast pertaining to theism/atheism.

Seppo,
Regarding the atheist who knows there's no all-present, all-powerful, all-effectual & transcendent sentience, does not such an atheist exemplify an ideal?

I ask this question because: a) within the epistemological discipline, there's no consensus about the possibility of certain knowledge; b) qualification for judging a sentient being of divine status implies divine status on the part of the judge.

I always find amusement when a theistic argument is placed in an academic frame in an attempt to give it scientific credibility. Such attempts are so transparent. — universeness

Do you think I'm a theist? If so, why? I've been examining some details of atheism. Does my exam imply pro-Theism? If so, please cite examples.

Your god properties are not well-defined, as if god was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent then it would have appeared in the center of London, New York, Paris and Washington D.C, simultaneously by now. — universeness

I think you're confusing abstract conceptualization with empirical verification.

Your response is logical & clear. I think I understand you. Here goes: You're saying that a necessary being must have an antecedent condition in virtue of which it necessarily follows.

In my question, I'm not concerned with the fact that Cantor's set logic, without a limiting condition applied to its comprehension principle, leads to a paradox.

I'm not trying to ascribe any degree of the paradoxical to your statement about an antecedent condition being required for a necessary being.

Instead, I'm looking at the two instances from a broadly inclusive, wide-angle point of view.

I'm asking if they're similar in that they have something in common: limiting condition required.

What is attributed to God, of course, is an absolute and unconditioned necessity. Which is, as I noted, and as countless philosophers going back to Hume have pointed out, simply meaningless- a misuse of terminology. — Seppo

Is there any similarity between the fallacious conceptualization you describe in the above quote and the problem that Georg Cantor ( considered the founder of modern set theory) discovered within his unrestricted comprehension principle?

To be clear, I'm asking if the lack of restriction in both instances links them together as similar fallacies.

Atheism's link to solipsism & monism, as presented in my argument, is simple.

To deny omniscience authoritatively means to be omniscience. By common sense, the self, outside of direct experience & possession of omniscience, has no basis for claiming omniscience non-existent.

Thus, refutation = verification. As with the unrestricted comprehension principle examined in Russell's Paradox, wherein inclusion = exclusion, we have an interesting paradox.

Frege's mission to reduce arithmetic operations to logic was thwarted by a deformation of non-contradiction.

I'm hopeful Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - any first-order math system will generate true statements not provable within the boundaries of that system - has something to say about the limit of Divine Solipsism, to the effect that Divine Omniscience generated human because The One is inadequate. Eternal solitude won't do.

As we all know, Christian Theology has something to say about the relationship between knowing & being - In the beginning, the word was with God, and the word was God.

Now we have solipsism & monism shaking hands, with cognition & phenomenon as one. God's thoughts are the real states of being that populate the universe. But this oneness is destined, by design, to break apart. This is where human slips into the creation.

The Sartrean exam of the relationship of knowing & being has human immersed within absurdity, thereby forced to make decisions that must be treated as axiomatic in the absence of enduring logic.

My take on this is that paradoxes have to be admitted into scientific orthodoxy. Of course I'm arrogantly stealing from Bohr, Planck & Einstein.

Since the digital age rests upon the platform of QM, and QM computing takes a categorical leap upwards in info processing, thus promising to reveal cognitive constructs previously unimaginable, I suppose internal contradictions aren't always the death knell for a theory.

I say the flaw in atheism as omniscient refuter of omniscience is its failure to embrace the paradox that verifies what it denies. This is to say that atheism should recognize its support of theism by the fact of its existence. Under this construction, paradox does NOT equal invalidation. Instead, we're right back to the stalemate: God, neither provable nor refutable.

On the other side of the paradox, theists should accept their Godly utterances as a spotlight throwing human as God-defier into relief, to everyone's advantage, a testified to in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Oh, yes. There's a cosmically mandated deformation of the monism of cognition & phenomenon. Human, Jesus included, drags problematical materialism into the mix.

The deformation of God's monist, Let there be light, echoed down here on earth by Descartes as, I think, therefore I am, let's in our monetized world of commodities, which QM has perplexed back towards the ying-yangish paradox of refutation equals verification.

Much of the above is gibberish. It does contain a few bits of what I want to say. I'm working on it. I need brutal excoriation from harsh critics. That's why I doing this in public.

01-25-22

Atheism & Solipsism – Final

My work entails establishing a connection between atheism & solipsism, plus their two modes: monism & idealism.

My core arguments are simple and familiar.

Here’s the connection between atheism & solipsism

Simple counter-argument to knowing, authoritatively, with certain knowledge, God doesn’t exist.

If I say I am a swimmer, then I can prove what I am, by taking a dip in the pool.

Grammatically speaking, I am a swimmer is a verbal equation. I (subject) + (linking verb) am + (subject complement) a swimmer condenses down to I = a swimmer.

God, by definition, comprehends all existence. This is a well-defined property of God.

According to the unrestricted comprehension principle of set theory, for any sufficiently well-defined property, there is a set of all and only the objects that have that property.

If I say, God is not, then I can prove what I know by revealing to you all existence.

This is the unrestricted comprehension principle in application.

Grammatically speaking, God is not is a verbal equation. God (subject) + (linking verb) is + (subject complement) extant not condenses down to God = extant not or
God ≠ extant.

If I know all existence, a power unique to God, then knowing there is no God means I am God.

If two things comprehend all existence, how can they be different?

Atheistic Idealism – Conceptualization of God as a being who can be denied & refuted.

This is a deep dive into Logos, which is ancient Idealism.

It shouldn’t be surprising to discover that attempts to mark boundaries of the absolute land you in paradox.

Denial of God is marking a boundary of the absolute.

{If you deny God, you become God>Monist}
{If you don’t deny God, you coexist with God>Binary}

Either way, comprehensive God exists & subsumes.

This resembles Russell’s Paradox (a cornerstone of set theory).

Let R = {x | X ∉ X }, then R ∈ R <> R ∉ R

{If it doesn’t belong to the set, then it belongs to the set}
{If it does belong to the set, then it doesn’t belong to the set}

Either way, comprehensive Set exists & subsumes

The switch is between monist/binary.

The switch tells us human cannot catch God in the act of being God. Considering this, of the three positions: theism/atheism/agnosticism, agnosticism becomes previleged.

Not simple are some ramifications of the atheism_solipsism connection.

The upshot of my conclusion is a profile of a distinctly human Deity manifesting as the logical, transcendent sentience of a dynamical world of time_motion, which entails an erratic, sometimes paradoxical morality, always subject to debate & revision.

The existence of God as undecidable*, neither provable nor refutable, continues as a long established stalemate accepted by many on both sides.

*Like infinity, undecidablility covers a spectrum of degrees. I believe atheism is more undecidable than theism.

Strict atheism, however, expresses an extreme position within epistemology.

My simple counter-argument against this position raises few hackles.

My argument has no conflict with atheism as an article of faith.

Even strict atheism is not really my target. Instead, I’m focused on how the counter-argument to strict atheism leads to some useful modifications to establishmentarian theism.

Does atheism belong to a set of ideologies that can be labeled monism?

If so, does the monism of atheism presuppose cosmic solitude, as enforced by its exclusion of a transcendent, teleological sentience i.e., deity?

These two questions follow from an assumption that deity is fundamental otherness, and that otherness is essential to a universe of time & motion.

The exclusion of deity as an article of faith may belong to agnosticism.

The exclusion of deity as a logical conclusion assumes perfected knowledge sufficient to pass judgment on transcendent power.

Perfection is static. It leaves no room for evolution because the highest attainment is accomplished. It leaves nor room for decline because that would negate perfection.

The absolute self, all-knowing & perfected in knowledge eternal suggests a universe without time or motion. Any dynamic process would negate the absolutism of perfection because nothing in a state of change is perfected.

Can such a static universe, the universe of atheism, exist?

If so, then perfection, being static and indivisible, rubs shoulders with Neoplatonism.

If atheism dovetails with Neoplatonism, then we see that atheism replaces The One with The Database (of Perfect Knowledge).

This leads us to surmising that the corrupted world of everyday human experience, our universe of degradation, a devolution down from Plato’s realm of Eternal Things, proliferating with imperfect copies of Eternal Things, harbors a villain.

This villain of the everyday world of human experience is time and its concomitant, motion.

Both Neoplatonism and atheism ask us to assume as fact a static and peerless universe of knowledge that causes our everyday world of phenomena while yet standing apart from its vicissitudes.

The big question raised by The One and also by The Database is point of contact. How do these perfected realms, these ultimate causes, reach humanity within the physical universe of the senses?

The answer is that the conduit connecting the two states of being, static and ultimate causality vis-à-vis the physical universe, is time_motion.

Now we come right up to a pair of germinal concepts: a) the physicalization of morality; b) the moral turpitude of God.

Motion is the limit of epistemology. In a physical universe, motion is essential.

Any static universe of incorruptible causation, such as The One and The Database, by excluding time_motion, forestalls germination of the living.

Dynamical physics and its chief epiphenomenon, sentient life, operate within the womb of time_motion.

These assumptions necessitate the characterization of The One and The Database as extreme versions of both Monism and Idealism. They are paradigmatic constructs of causation, always mirrored imperfectly by the dynamical physics of the world of the living. Within the topsy-turvy world of time_motion and the living, the theist is imperfectly divine, and the atheist is imperfectly secular. Wrong is sometimes, conditionally, good.

If incorruptible causation, an idealism, and time_motion, a realism, always stand apart, then the physicalization of morality and the moral turpitude of God are necessary compromises for the living.

These compromises are the two pillars supporting God-Consciousness, as distinguished from Divine God.

The two spiritual pillars of a universe of time_motion, such as our own physical universe, are Otherness and Transcendence, with the latter being the channel through which the self and the other make contact and communicate.

The One and The Database, in their idealism of incorruptible causation, exclude Otherness and Transcendence, and thus, by the transitive property, also exclude time_motion.

Otherness and Transcendence, innate attributes of the design of a time_motion universe, make time_motion possible.
Motion is the physical manifestation of morality. In a time_motion universe, things can move out of place and become wrong. On the other hand, they can move upward, out of an accustomed place to a higher and better place.

To know there is no focused, teleological, transcendent sentience is to evolve The Database to perfection, wherein motion and morality cease, replaced by the stillness of eternal solitude.

The higher attainment, above eternal solitude, is temporal, evolving sentience that, being animate, can become transcendent.

Yes. Perfection can be topped by imperfection since the former is static whereas the latter is animate.

The Deity of a dynamical, time_motion universe is good because it allows time, motion and evolution to flourish, albeit rife with the imperfections to which Otherness is caretaker.

The universe that bears Deity is thus a topsy-turvy realm wherein being wrong is sometimes, conditionally, good.

Being imperfect, and thus sometimes wrong, allows the presence of love, which, in its essence, means not being alone.

Theism has atheism to thank for pointing the way to perfection of knowledge, an absolute solitude that highlights the value of a morally unstable universe wherein the fellowship of self-and-other i.e., love, thrives upon the morass of its gravitational tendency toward moral failure, all the way down to evil.

Now we have an approach to addressing theism’s hard problem of the presence of evil.

Deity allows the presence of evil because the cosmic richness of the dialogue of self-and-other, love, sometimes gives rise to evil and Deity, looking upon the wealth of sentient beings inhabiting a time_motion universe, allows it as an act of divine love.

Monist excludes Love. Binary includes Love.

God presents a binary contract to human, for the sake of Love.

God-As-Human, binary, seeks Love.

God-As-God, monist, distances Love.

Atheism →→ Solipsism →→ Theism — Agent Smith

Hello fellow traveler, Agent Smith. Looks like we're on the same page re: the atheism_solipsism connection.

Atheism →→ Solipsism →→ Theism — Agent Smith

universeness re: Agent Smith's above quote,

So your logic goes something like:

I do not believe in the existence of any god(s)............> I have no evidence that anything outside of me, exists..............> I do believe in the existence of god(s) — universeness

Where is the paradox? This is merely a 'belief' challenged by solipsism that you posit is strong enough evidence for flipping 'belief in god' from no to yes. That is not a description of a paradox. — universeness

I will post, just below this post, my (lengthy) conclusion derived from the points I've posted here so far.

So, universeness, it being your job to demolish my conclusion, proceed. - ucarr

Bravo, Ciceronianus! When it comes to interpretation of this scene, your arguments are top flight. I now see it's the dilemma that foils Mary Kane's attempt to give Charlie the best life possible. My choice is to risk the threat posed to Charlie by dad, who Mary dominates. I think navigating the hazards of an ill-tempered dad is a better bet than packing a young child off to an utterly foreign world of material wealth without love. Mary thought otherwise and I think in doing so, she undervalued her abilities as a mother (I want to say loving mother, but I don't see it in her.)

This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN — Tom Storm

Great poem. Big chunk of my life in a nutshell. My parents made some colossal goofs raising me, but I love 'em anyway.

There's an old word for this "self-love": pride. But it's out of favor by now, it's not politically correct (although things seem to be looking up for it lately.) — baker

I'm inclined to think self-esteem is the foundation out of which pride arises. Individuals afflicted with low self-esteem are not often perceived as being proud.

While pride is a natural and good thing, it's reflective. Love, on the other hand, is transformative. I say it's the jump start of mother's love that seeds the germ of self-esteem that sprouts pride.

If we have robust self-esteem (meaning someone loved us), then we deem ourselves worthy of being loved, by someone else.

I don't think we can get beyond ourselves by means of an internal, reflexive action. Make no mistake about it, love tears you beyond yourself big time.

It's the seminal element of otherness that makes love transformative, but only if the self surrenders to the beyond-self. Theism is surrender to the beyond-self, writ large.

The link I see between solipsism and atheism is this:

In theism, knowledge of "how things really are" is received from others, and, presumably, originates with God. It's a top-down process. Someone else tells you "how things really are", you don't figure it out by yourself.

In atheism, no such higher authority is envisioned or made room for, man is left alone with his senses and his mind and whatever he can achieve with those. He believes it's up to him and him alone to figure things out. This way, atheism implies at least epistemic solipsism. — baker

Excellent exam! Shrewd and instructive explanation. Members of both camps can make good use of this.

With your statement about theism, you make it clear how we little humans are always connected to the world around us. Joni Mitchell informed us about being stardust.

With regards to loving oneself, I've heard it said a newborn dies if another person doesn't pick it up and rock and cuddle and coo away its fear and pain and sudden shock of consciousness. I don't think this hard-wired human interdependence diminishes with age.

It's up to human and human alone to figure things out? I have a theory that says after just a short time in a sensory deprivation tank, human loses all identity, including knowledge of being human. It's the looking glass of other people in society that keeps me on track about who I am and what I'm about.

Didn't Sartre say human is condemned to freedom, thereby suggesting that outside
the social matrix, human is practically nothing at all, thus free. Well, the bold existentialist might reject local norms as inauthentic, declaring the self free to choose otherwise, but that tome he wrote detailing the experience wasn't intended for use as a paperweight.

Charlie pushes Thatcher into the snow, using Rosebud. Father takes a swing at Charlie, but misses. Then--
Father: "Sorry, Mr. Thatcher. What that kid needs is a good thrashing!"
Mother: "Is that what you think, Jim?"
Father: "Yes"
Mother: "That's why he's going to be brought up where you can't get at him." — Ciceronianus

You have shown me how my exam of Mary Kane is flawed, perhaps seriously. I do, however, maintain doubt as to the soundness of her judgment in handing over Charlie to a total stranger whose interest in the affair is that of a banker, not a father.

We don't get the whole story on dad's poke at Charlie. Could be the kid is an insufferable brat who, indeed, needs a thrashing.

Charlie doesn't seem to fear dad; nor does he seem eager to leave his home. Maybe Mank wants to show that before she abandoned him, she spoiled Charlie, whereas dad would have brought him right if not for mother's protection.

I can't preclude the possibility Mary Kane is internally pressurized to relinquish custody of Charlie due to a greedy desire for great wealth.

She towers over dad in power, so that raises a question about him being able to abuse Charlie.

If we deem dad a serious abuser, then I do recognize the dilemma she faces in trying to choose between the two options.

There's no indication the mother is insane in the film. Also, she already had money, and clearly wasn't trading him in to obtain more. Thatcher was a hired man. I thought the scene made it apparent that Charles was being sent away because the mother feared what the father (or step-father, perhaps) would do to him. — Ciceronianus

What do we actually see in the movie?

The boy is happy in childhood. In my view, his frolics in the snow don't bespeak the onslaughts of a pedophillic father, if that's what you're implying.

Suddenly, his mother sends him away, apparently forever, without visitation rights. Such cold mother's milk doesn't put me in mind of mental fitness on the part of Mary Kane.

I see nothing from the father to indicate future trouble for the boy, save the father's anemic defense of the boy's right to remain where he is, comfortably situated within a happy home. It's clear to me this is what the father wants, even as he trembles before the dictatorial mother.

The young man wants to be happy, so he starts spending his large fund of money.

For the rest of the journey, it's just one failure after another to connect humanly, lastingly. Kane's last hope for the warmth of love breaks with the defections of Jedediah and then, finally, Susan Alexander.

The domineering mother is the catalyst and abiding force driving this devastating transformation.

Possessing a handsome sum of money does not imply total lack of greed and lust for more.

think the problem here starts with that love label. It's such an umbrella term. — universeness

One of my incidental goals is the honing down of our emotive umbrella word. Love, love, love. What is this immersive experience that's pulling me out of my normal self with such force?

Does it have some basic, universal properties? Part of our job here is tackling such an imposing totem as love and making it concrete and universal in balance.

My efforts in this goal, so far, tell me that a crux of the experience is rooted in the self/other dynamic.

I've been thinking in terms of a dynamic relationship between two sentient beings. I've been overlooking a relationship between a sentient being and knowledge. I don't know if the latter can erode personal boundaries in the same manner as sentience to sentience.

For example, I can read a book over time and evolve my perception and understanding of what I read. This can be gratifying, but the book doesn't change; only I change.

In the case of sentience-to-sentience, the situation is much more dynamical and knarly. Furthermore, my gut tells me knowledge is a bulwark against the transformations of love; such usage is a selfism favored by intellectuals. We laugh at Georg von Trapp in The Sound of Music as his fortress of knowledge crumbles before the onslaughts of love.

In parallel to the above, the solipsistic narcissist blockades the transformations of love with self-knowledge deified.

How about this formulation:

So solipsism can be seen as a mother or father of atheism. Atheism, consequently, is then the child. — Raymond

Solipsism is the existential framework, the universe that houses the narcissist.

Only by killing the pagan father and the solipsist brother the theist son can, happily undisturbed, rape his pagan solipsist mother to make her truly realize he and God actually exist. — Raymond

You have enlightened me with your reference to Sophocles' Oedipus. Love is our inner savage writ large and insuperable. It's the thing that makes God consciousness necessary for someone like me.

I like to think the God of the Pentateuch forgave King David his murders for being a lusty, loving man, husband and father.

And that's love. Giving away everything your inner rational egotist has acquired. — ucarr

But this view is controverted by experience. The love amongst family and friends is not a zero-sum game. My child will not benefit from demonstrations of sacrifice. The freely given benefits me as well as him. — Paine

Family doesn't appear to me as a zero-sum game. My speculation is that parents don't break even in the bargain, especially not mothers.

A woman marries, agrees to birth a child, gets pregnant and brings forth. (Modern anesthesia obscures the precarious adventure birthing a child formerly entailed across millennia.) She nurtures the child, ultimately releasing it into adulthood. If this isn't self-sacrifice, then I scarcely know the meaning of the word.

My child will not benefit from demonstrations of sacrifice. — Paine

What's the look of parenting without self-sacrifice?

Consider Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane, a happy boy playing outside in the snow with Rosebud, his sled, learns that his completely insane mother, trading him in for money, has packed him off to New York under proprietorship of Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker.

This is "parenting" without self-sacrifice.

The central purpose of the story is arguably an examination of what happens to a good, innocent lad when the warmth of nurturing is overthrown by the money concern.

Kane's relatability to other humans, if not his humanity, is destroyed.

Mary Kane is no-sacrifice parenting writ large.

I should perhaps accept resounding defeat and keep silent, but I'm too self-important to shut up just now.

God has a weakness. God doesn't want to be alone. On the flip side, the atheist wants to be alone, revels in cosmic solitude. This is the upshot of knowing, which God is in retreat from, with God's project for the grand mess of humanity.

We're blighting sinners we humans, destined for hellfire by our own merits, but God wants company, so there's an escape clause that lets us stick around for eternity. Now, on that score, we're busily a day working to shred and defy the contract, but this has always been known.

The above is, of course, a feeble narrative attempting to explain why God created human and, while being a feel-good story, doesn't fool many for long. Just so, some of us like to read John Milton, one of the most God-defiant men of the past millennium.

Back to essentials. The trick of my argument is thus: While it's true that the proof of God's existence is forever beyond reach, it's equally true that the not-existence of God is also forever beyond reach, unless one claims to know.

Claiming to know God entails claiming to know the all-powerful, a stretch for human. By the same coin, claiming to know God-not entails claiming to know what is not-all powerful, which entails claiming to know the all-powerful. It's an easy argument to claim both sides are full-of-themselves with their claims.

The trick of execution of theism is knowing, at some level of awareness, that social engagement means throwing oneself into the incomprehensibilities of societies and cultures. The mystery of otherness is a looming presence to the socially engaged. We're on our knees hoping the presence won't erupt into the neighborhood, disrupting norms and making demands. We know it's bound to happen eventually as these eruptions are the big turns of history.

Enter the atheist. This human has a bulwark against the disruptions of God's near approach, with its bush-burning, halo-endowing difficulties: knowledge. Science, with its accurate predictions of things to come, wards off the nasty surprises of creation.

There's a problem. Knowledge is a looking glass by another name. I generate knowledge by asking questions. Well, the source of a given knowledge is a given question, and the source of that question is human. This leads me to asserting that in my quest to know the all powerful, and thus to qualify for denying existence of the all-powerful being, God, I must become the source of all questions.

The upshot of becoming the source of all-questions and thus qualified to deconstruct God, with questions understood to be the looking glass of the mind, says I land myself within the universe of my (solitary) self. And that's no fun.

Living within a binary universe, with a sometimes loving, sometimes menacing God, that's fun.