I suppose it all depends on the actual dynamic between life and its environment. If the environment can change suddenly without warning then it makes sense to have some portion of the population with the right mutatations to see them through. It might be a trade-off between some form/stage in the life of organisms that's conducive to reproduction, rearing young and being prepared for catastrophic alterations in the environment. To achieve the former, organisms may need to lose the ability to adapt in real time and in the lattter's case we have mutations occurring during reproduction. If this were the case, trial and error is the best method of ensuring a continuous, unbroken line of living things extending from the first life-forms in the past, through us in the present, and into the future yet to come.

What if God is not a thing? — Hippyhead

The question doesn't make sense. God has to be something, right? The alternative to something is nothing and if god is nothing, it's just a fancy way of saying god doesn't exist.

I have plenty of books but the vast majority of them are soft copies. I read them in fits and starts and on most occasions I lose the plot mostly due to my irritating habit of switching between them halfway through.

I was gonna say at least you can spell, e.g., grammar. But then, "puncutation." — tim wood

:rofl:

How about treating the covid pandemic as a transformative force for culture instead of a destructive one - out goes the Western handshake and in comes the Eastern namaste (India), the bow (Japan) and the palmed fist (China). A small step in greeting gestures but a giant leap in culture.

A smile and nod from e. e. cummings. You wouldn't care to punctuate, would you? — tim wood

:grin: Sorry, bad at punctuation and worse at grammar. Thanks for your comment though.

If, If, if, if, if, if if, if-if-if-if. If frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their asses on the ground. Given if, I can prove anything about anything, and quickly. Can we please, at least most of the time, try to reason from something stronger than an "if"? It has its place, but too often out of it, and nor does it require much in the way of reason - barely any. It's a substitute for thought and an excuse for not thinking, a lever of the fond for elevating the merely foolish to whatever level of insanity is being sought. Let us everyone do better! — tim wood

If if not
Everything I got
But that is not
Ergo, I if a lot

If truth you're after
Doubt you must beat
Descarte the rafter
Cogito the only truth we'll ever meet
In the ocean of ignorance thereafter
rest awhile, take a seat.

As mortals, we cannot understand the God force. If anything, seeing it as a source, is one way of seeing the divine. I find Fritjof Capra's book God and the New Physics very helpful.
As far as the 'simpleton' part, the problem may really be about how we expect God to behave, especially if we perceive God as wholly God. What about the shadow side of God? This matter is dealt with in depth in Jung's book Answer to Job. — Jack Cummins

There are two parts to this:

1. Human-level understanding, something I've tried to do in my OP

2. God-level understanding, which is, in likelihood, as you seem to be suggesting, something we won't be able to achieve

IOW one could argue that only a genius could find a simpleprocess that would lead to such diversity — Coben

:ok: It's something that hasn't escaped my notice but be mindful that you used the word "simple" and substituted "diversity" for the word most often used viz. "complexity" when people describe the universe. Are you trying to avoid a contradiction here?

I guess it depends on whether the complexity evident in the universe is part of god's plan. If it is then he truly is a being of incommensurable intelligence but if it isn't then so much for god's intelligence. A clue to decide which of these possibilities is true can be found in the many design flaws our bodies have.

And trial and error led to the creation of minds that use more than trial and error — Coben

So, you agree then that there are better ways to create universes.

By the way, a trial and error method as a survival process for life only makes sense if the environment that imposes selection pressure is not something that god has control over. God, perforce, has to make life adapt to changing milieu that can come in the form of slow climate change or sudden asteroid impacts. Either god is playing a macabre game with us, something the faithful will vehemently deny, or there are certain variables in creation that are out of his divine hands. If one runs with the latter possibility, we have a being that hasn't quite figured the nuts and bolts of creating universes capable of harboring life.

:up: :ok:

The idea of nothing seems germane to my thesis; after all, trial and error as a method seems closer to an absence of a creator than a presence of one.

Also, it took Him millions of years to figure it out... He can't be that bright. — Olivier5

I simply don't have the time or skills to be a god — Mayor of Simpleton

Read above

nothing is about as simple as it gets. — Hippyhead

:ok: I wonder though, if nothing is simple, why do people have difficulty discussing it?

I'm quite skeptical of discussing God's intelligence — Hippyhead

:ok:

First, that presumes that God is a "thing" which would thus have properties, a phenomena divided from other phenomena. — Hippyhead

:ok:

Next, our understanding of intelligence is derived from an extremely small sample of reality, life on a single planet in one of billions of galaxies. — Hippyhead

:ok:

Your issue is with what can be broadly termed as anthropomorphism. Indeed, once we begin to look beyond our planet and our solar system, we must think twice before we bring our earth-centric perspective to bear on matters that are galactic in nature.

Nevertheless, we can't hold our anthropomorphism or more accurately earth-centrism against us if only for the reason that that's all we have to go on. Plus we need a very good reason to believe things could be radically different in other parts of the universe, a reason that seems hard to come up with. All the evidence seems to suggest that physics, chemistry, ergo, biology, should be the same everywhere in the universe. I say this because I heard that the most common elements in the universe are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen - the fundamental constituents of life on earth. Ergo, isn't it likely that life elsewhere in the universe will evolve in a manner similar to that on earth?

Coming to the matter of god's intelligence, notwithstanding the fact that it counts as anthropomorphism at some level, I only ask that you embrace the inherent anthroporphism, be human, be an earthling, be who you are instead of trying to view the issue from a galactic perspective, a perspective of which you haven't the slightest idea.

So, if I understand your argument, the idea is that if God created the universe, then he is simple because the method he chose for the unfolding of life forms (not the universe in general) is trial and error and this is simple. But then don't we fairly complicated creatures also use simple heuristics in all sorts of creating? And to create a universe that allows for unbelievably complex diversity (at least on earth) in forms, is no mean feat at least from our perspective. It is almost as if God should have had a more complicated set of processes, but since trial and error manages to be unbelievable creative when passed through DNA and selection, that it ends up being really quite effective. Is the universe simple because simple formulas like E=MC2 are in the background? I don't know. Elegance and simplicity can often go hand in hand. Simplicity couples with stochastic processes can create all sorts of wonders - though of course this is a subjective evaluation, but wonders to me. — Coben

You made a good point. What of the so-called laws of nature? Don't they evidence a prodigious intellect? Yet, taking into account the fact that life is the pièce de résistance of god's creation, it's reliance on a method (trial and error) that's so simple that even animals and toddlers use it doesn't jibe with a conception of god as a supreme genius capable of creating universes.

I don't follow. Care to connect the dots? — creativesoul

Maybe there's nothing there to follow.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. — Henry Adams

Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him. — Cardinal Richilieu

The man who speaks, doesn't know. The man who knows, doesn't speak — Lao Tze

what i am asking here is, should i study philosophy at school. or just learn from my self as a hooby — ramo

There's only so much you can do with philosophy as a hobby. Doing philosophy full-time means you've decided to dedicate your life to it. Methinks there'll be a difference between the two in terms of performance and results.

I have a feeling you're conflating trial and error with brute search.

Trial and error is when you randomly try out different possibilities. Brute search is when you explore each and every possibility.

It appears that what we have to keep a close watch on the law of noncontradiction. It's the cornerstone of [first order] logic. If contradictions are allowed then identity and excluded middle are no longer safe in a manner of speaking:

1. X = X and ~(X = X)
2. p v ~p and ~(p v ~p)

:ok: Thanks for the link. :up:

Thanks for your comment! Interesting thoughts! Perhaps not 100% on this topic, but still a valid analysis, I mostly agree. — philosophience wordpress com

I was simply exploring the persistence of lies and lying despite the fact that they're valued negatively.

It appears, from my drive-by of the issue, that truths and lies are deeply connected to survival. Humans, like most other life-forms I suppose, are both prey and predator and in these roles both truths and lies seem to increase the odds of either evading predators or capturing prey. Too, the conditions that need to be met for mating opportunities are such that most of us, at one point or another, are below par and lies soften the blow to our fragile but existentially vital egos.

When we find truth damaging it's when it compromises our chances of finding prey or escaping predators and when lies are met with open arms it's because we need to cushion the blow to our fragile egos as when our amorous advances are spurned by a potential mate.

It's opposite day today! :smile:

Understood. Let's not say rhetoric. Thank you, you taught me something! — dussias

Here's something you might just find interesting. There are basically three kinds arguments one can make:

1. Deductive: the conclusion is necessarily true given the premises are true

2. Inductive: the conclusion is probably true given the premises are true

3 Abductive: arguments to the best explanation


Deductive arguments, although meant to be watertight, are weakened to the point of being completely useless by the problem of the Munchaussen trilemma.

Inductive arguments are by definition probabilistic and abductive arguments too are probabilistic.

No method of argument currently available can prove a given proposition with 100% certainty - doubt is an irremovable feature of all claims to knowledge.

In short, no argument ever guarantees the truth of its conclusion in a manner that is satisfactory.

Taking the above into consideration, trying to convince people with logical arguments alone is like trying to kill someone with a toy gun. No argument is so good that it can reduce the uncertainty in the conclusion to zero.

It's at this point in the art of convincing or disabusing an audience of certain beliefs that rhetoric steps onto the stage. Convincing people that certain beliefs are correct or not as the case may be is more about touching the right chords in the hearts of people with emotionally loaded language rather than appealing to their rationality with cold, impersonal arguments.

Contrary to my initial thoughts on the matter it seems that between stirring rhetoric and cold logic, rhetoric has the upper hand.

You have presented an argument as to what constitutes good rhetoric. As I said arguments don't work. Plus it looks, walks, and quacks like an argumentum ad baculum, quite far from using words that touch the heartstrings of the audience. You have to win hearts not strike fear.

:ok: :up:

Yes, every word counts, and no extraneous effort needed to make them get your point. Same with stand up comedians -- if they need to use more words to make the audience laugh, they've already failed — Caldwell

:up:

:up:

Unless it's a haiku. — Caldwell

Excellent point! Nevertheless, word limits do impose a serious constraint on poets.

Saying “do both” in this case does not make me a two timing jerk unless you consider Eastern and Western views people. I’m a practical guy so that’s my answer — khaled

I put in a condition you're ignoring.

*can be coped with or eliminated* is what I said. Not that it is good. — khaled

In what sense do you mean "can be coped with or eliminated"? It is next to impossible to "cope" with suffering because it's bad. Ergo, to cope with it, it must, as of necessity, be good.

Thank you. It seems time is too precious to waste on reading/listening verbosity. My friends would've loved Paul Dirac (1902 - 1984). He hated poetry and poetry is about saying something that can be said in one sentence in as many a sentences as is possible.

:ok:

To be happy I must stop desire
To be happy but is itself a desire
Surely then it's impossible to stop desire
For to not desire is again itself a desire
Ergo, desire can't be what we must retire
Fire can't put out fire

I would tell the guy that posed the choice wtf he means because it’s not like Chinese people can’t conceive of scientific theories or British people can’t conceive of meditation. It’s not like these discoveries are inherent in the geographic configuration of a bunch of rocks. If I look from the opposite side the East is the West and the West is the East.

I think a better question would be “Do you think the answer to our suffering is primarily fixing the world or primarily configuring our mind?” To which I would answer “I don’t care which one is “primary” just do both as efficiently as possible” — khaled

One must consider all possibilities. Surely, you must've fallen for more than one woman/man as the case may be and decided to court one and not the other on pain of losing both by being a two-timing jerk. How did you cope with that?

Because they want to know that all their suffering has some purpose behind it, that there is someone or something that will make everything right at the end, that world is not just a bunch of floating rocks indifferent to their suffering. Heaven is a bonus. Idk about Christianity but at least in Islam it is emphasized that one shouldn’t follow Islam for the Heaven but only do so when they can have full faith in its teachings. It is said that if you’re just a Muslim because you think you have to be or else you’ll suffer that you’re not a real Muslim and that God would rather see you continue questioning the faith until you’re convinced rather than harbor doubt in your mind which you muffle because you want to get into heaven. — khaled

I suppose there's a grain of truth in what you say but what do you mean by "...all their suffering has some purpose behind it..." You seem to be trying to eat the cake and have it too. Implicit in your sentence is the claim that suffering is bad. Isn't that why you want to know the purpose? To find out if it's in the service of good/god? The get right to the point, you've contradicted yourself by both admitting that suffering is bad and that it, in some warped sense, is also good.

Both methods lead to a better life. — khaled

:up: What if you were offered a choice between Eastern thought and Western thought but not both?

People aren’t sad because they haven’t been able to find heaven in the sky. People are sad because without an omnipotent god telling them what to do exactly and why exactly they were made they can’t figure out what their purpose is and they can’t handle being in such a hostile world for no reason. — khaled

Why do they need a god? As a guarantor of paradise, no?

Meditation plays a much bigger role than you give it credit. — khaled

:ok:

The best aid to meditation for me has been cigarettes — Gregory

Me too but I'm not sure whether I'm meditating when I light one up.

Leo Tolstoy — Skeptic

I'll take a look. Thanks.

It doesn't promise salvation in an afterlife, but merely peace of mind in the midst of the world's evils and suffering. — Gnomon

This makes sense only if it's true that the suffering people have to go through is severe enough that it weighs heavily in our minds and hearts, a vindication that entropy is wreaking havoc in our lives.

the Buddha didn't present syllogistic arguments in the Greek manner of philosophy, but Wright traces the logic of his aphoristic teachings to our modern understanding of human psychology — Gnomon

This I must disagree with. At this point let's take a look at how psychology and Buddhism deal with a certain known neurosis.

Take phobias.

One technique employed in psychology is graded exposure in which a person with a phobia is made to face the object of his/her fears in slow incremental steps of intensity. The idea behind this is simply, "get used to it". No arguments are made about the nature of fear itself. Why we fear? is left unanswered.

In Buddhism, the method of overcoming fears, phobias included, is not by "getting used to it" but by coming to an understanding on why we fear anything at all. We fear, Buddhists might say, because we're clinging to existence like an infant monkey clings to its mother and this happens when we fail to recognize the truth of impermanence, the truth that nothing lasts as long as we'd have liked. Fear then is a reaction to existential threats and we wouldn't be in its grips if only we knew the truth of impermanence.

No one can put knowledge in a closed mind. — Dfpolis

:ok:

This is probably a weird way to look at the issue but it seems to make sense at some level. The goal, as per evolution, is to survive and two critical feats must be accomplished by an individual to do that:

1. Survive predators. We know that an efficient technique for predators is camouflage - I supposs being undetected until the final phase of an attack is a highly efficent modus operandi. The essence of camouflage is deception i.e. the predator lies to the prey. Ergo, potential prey like us need to, if only to live to see the next sunrise, know the truth.

Once we became predators, apex predators at that, ourselves, we needed to learn how to deceive our prey. Hence we learned to lie.

2. Find a mate. To get a partner one needs to be sexually appealing but not everyone is created equal in that department. Some, like myself, fall into that unfortunate category of people who have a difficult, almost impossible, time finding a willing member of the opposite, or in some cases the same, sex. We're the kind who love being lied to - we don't mind, in fact appreciate, being told we're attractive, handsome, beautiful, hot, cool, etc. when the truth is we're not. Perhaps it boosts confidence to a level that improves the odds of mating successfully. In any case, to my reckoning this is as good an explanation as any other as to why lies and lying still exist as ongoing phenomena.

In essence, the choices offered, truth or lie, is that between escaping a predator or finding a mate for someone like me. It depends then what the circumstances are - am I soldier trying to figure out where the enemy is or am I hoping to score a home run with a girl?

:chin:

Surely, seeking pleasure is at the core of our nature and if we became that detached we might have become robots. — Jack Cummins

It's not desire per se that's bad. It's just that it indicates you've not come to terms with a fundamental truth about reality - impermanence. I remember an analogy I made a long time ago about how deeply one would get involved in writing an essay that's going to be put through a shredder the moment you complete it. Of course one can't forget the weeks, even months, of back-breaking hard labor and intense concentration spent in creating the exquistely detailed and aesthetically mind-blowing mandala for the Kalchakra.

Stoicism — khaled

I think stoicism is missing something viz. doctrine of impermanence and thus, in a way, fails at the get go. The legendary stoic calm doesn't arise from understanding a cold hard fact of reality but is rather a policy based on the impression that emotions are destructive. I have no clue why they thought that.

East [and West] — khaled

By my reckoning, the west got it right. We can tinker around, add/delete features of our world to suit our needs. I might even go so far as to say that the first noble truth - that life is suffering - will probably become untenable at some point in the distant future considering the pace of medical and technological progress. We might find a way to defeat entropy. You never know.

That said, even if we were to eventually bend nature to our will and create paradise on earth it still feels wrong to completely indulge our senses. Perhaps this felt need to control our passions needs to be put under the microscope.

massive void — khaled

I've heard that a lot about this so-called "void" but how about looking at the whole issue a little differently. I personally feel that religions, the ones that are around, are, at their core, a business deal - you purchase a ticket to paradise with good deeds. In the future, once utopia becomes a reality, this product can be made available in the market for real. In other words, what religion offers without a guarantee can be sold as actual goods with a warranty to boot. It seems therefore that the so-called "void" left by religion's departure from our lives can actually be dealt with in a satisfactory manner without abandoning the principle therein contained.

At least I don't think it's about training people like animals anymore rather it is about explaining to them how their minds worked, and what they should do to deal with whatever issue they are having. — khaled

I'm not sure about this myself. It was just a shot in the dark but I sense that I haven't strayed too far from the truth about psychoanalytics. After all, the subject seems to isolate the mind for study, disassembling it as it were, something not that different from putting animals in a lab and learning how their minds work.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is about how the world works and making necessary adjustments to our minds so that our lives don't end up being a tale of tears [of the pointless kind].

All in all, psychoanlytics seems to be about mind manipulation but Buddhism is about understanding the world we live in.

Medidation — khaled

Meditation, to my reckoning, only serves to calm our minds to the point where it becomes possible to reflect deeply about the nature of reality, a prerequisite if one is to gain any degree of understanding on the matter. It's quite different from giving a dog a treat everytime it does what you want it to. If a dog starts meditating it would be the first step it takes to an understanding of its behavior - what role the dog-treat has in shaping its habits and so on.

I remember very vaguely touching upon this issue a while back. I seem to have forgotten what I thought of it. I think the whole notion of suffering and its link to desire in Buddhism is not as simple as it appears to be. The crucial fact to recognize as per Buddhism is the emphemeral nature of reality - impermanence. An unwillingness to come to terms with impermanence manifests most strongly and felt most acutely as desire, more accurately as a clinging or craving, an inability to let reality do what it does naturally, change. In essence, it's not that there's something wrong with desire per se but that desire is a first rank symptom of abject ignorance of reality, how it works. :chin:

I am sorry you are uneducateable. — Dfpolis

A worthy challenge for an educator worth his salt, don't you think?

So agreement does happen on this site, once in a long while. That’s good news. :-) — Olivier5

:grin:

Is this you summarizing the Buddhist argument? — Coben

More or less, yes. Pessimism, in fact it's actually being realistic, is an underlying message in Buddhism. All philosophies that recommend making changes internally, within one's self, rather than externally, in the world outside, smack of a tacit admission that we really can't control the world we live in - basically adapt or die seems to be the motto prescribed.

I'm not denying that Buddhism has features like praying, rituals, gods, views on moral matters, etc., practices, that lend it a religious character but all these are extraneous to its core doctrines and have come about through its interactions with other religions, mainly Hinduism as far as I can tell. I stressed on the existence of logical arguments in Buddhist scripture because no religion can make a similar claim. In Abrahamic religions if there's an argument in them at all it's one of appeal to the authority of a supreme being viz. god and we all know the bad rep this particular kind of argument has. Though the Buddha is revered, even worshipped as a god, Buddhism's appeal does not lie in his person as an infallible perfect being but in the strength of his arguments.

Read below:

There is a saying in Buddhist (or zen? I don’t remember) circles “If you see the Buddha by the road, shoot him” which just basically means don’t just follow authorities blindly. — khaled

Thanks Khaled.

The closest western field to Buddhism and Co is I think psychoanalysis. Both try to describe what goes on in the mind starting from the mind, rather than to try doing it starting from how the world works. — khaled

Interesting. I beg to differ though. As I said above, the existing dynamics of mind-world interactions has one rule - adapt (to the world) or die. The mind, capable of imagining a better arrangement with the world, must eventually learn that the world isn't a person in which case we could negotiate the terms of our relationship with it. I drew some comfort initially that though we can't bargain for a good deal, reality is, all said and done, indifferent to our plight but that isn't true. Reality, entropy given due consideration, actually stacks the odds against us, making it almost a foregone conclusion that life will not be as enjoyable an experience as one would've liked or hoped. To make the long story short, Buddhism's journey begins outside - the world - and ends inside - the mind.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, seems to be about how our minds are constructed - what features it possesses, how they interact with the world and shape our attitude, mood, and behavior. There's a superficial resemblance with Buddhism given that both are about how well our minds are adapted to the world but the difference begins to show in the way the problem is dealt with.

In psychoanalytics, people are treated like animals and are trained like them using positive and negative reinforcement and other tricks of the trade. In Buddhism a person's higher faculty - reason - is engaged, arguments are presented for examination, and people are encouraged to think and decide how to behave rather than practise a particular behavior until it becomes a habit like in psychoanalytics.

Perhaps a tangent, but it depends on the order and also the degree. Chaos is a generally a pejorative term and order generally is considered a positive term, especially with no context. But spontenaity, surprises, new experiences, diversity, non-repetitiveness, variation could all be called chaos by someone who wants everything to be strictly patterned with no unexpected experiences. And most dystopias have as their central problem too much order. In fact the move from rigid societies, where one was born into both permanent class and profession, where there was a tiny range of behavioral options and tremendous pressure to conform, to modern society with much less order, more variation, wider ranges of behavioral options, is often seen as positive. That we are moving in a direction towards something more life enhancing. We wants elements of expected and repeated events and behavior AND we want variation, change, surprises. — Coben

You're probably conflating variety with chaos. The similarity is that in both cases there are more options (this you saw) but the difference is that in chaos all options are unacceptable while in variety they are (this you overlooked).

One can tie as many dead horses to a carriage as one wants, it's not going to help pull the carriage. Scientific observers need to do much better than 50/50 for repetitions to work and increase experiment power. And if you set your risk of error to a more realistic 10%, then it works. — Olivier5

That's precisely the problem. I once drew analogy between the belief that more observers increase the likelihood of an observation being real and a group of people with poor vision as witnesses. If each person with poor vision is unacceptable as a witness, how can all of them together be any better?

Ta-da! At long last! That is why your whole line of thinking is wrong. — Dfpolis

You're forgetting that there are only two options, both equally likely, viz. real or not real.

You are absolutely right. Because there is no such thing as "probability calculus" — god must be atheist

I need to look that up. I swear I read it somewhere. Thanks.

Surely that would vary with each individual. Not having experienced what others do, and having only anecdotal evidence of a vanishingly tiny fraction of humanity's experience, how could you possibly justify such a claim? — Janus

How is pessimism the only realistic attitude to adopt? — praxis

Pessimist or Realist? — Roy Davies

To the three of you: I'll attempt a simple proof of why we should be pessimists and why life is suffering.

Happiness is, by and large, associated with order and sorrow with chaos.

The entire enterprise of building a society that's conducive to happiness is centered around the notion harmony - the smooth interaction between the various parts of the social machine that ensures, if not anything else, the optimum environment for happiness to take root and thrive.

In the event of disharmony, happiness is the first casualty then. Everyone has seen on TV what happens when law and order breaks down - neither our lives nor our property are safe. Note that chaos needn't be as extreme as a riot - it can take the simpler but still painful form of breaking your favorite cup, losing your wallet, having to spend the day with a person you don't like, etc.

Entropy says that disorder is always more likely than order for the simple reason that there are more ways to be disordered than ordered - there are more ways your favorite cup can break and there's only one way it can stay whole.

Ergo, it must be that, on average, we suffer more than enjoy in life. At the very least, a great deal of energy must be expended to maintain order, our preferred state, and that's exhausting work.

Given the above, we should expect things to go wrong more often than go right. Hence, pessimism is the most realistic attitude to life.

While not claiming to speak for any Buddhist....

My take is that Buddhism is an experience which transcends philosophy and religion. The philosophy and religion parts are props people are using to try to talk themselves in to the experience.

The same might be said for Christianity for example. Jesus said, "Die to be reborn". Die is a verb which suggests an act of surrender. An act. An experience. All the other junk piled on top of that is supposed to help people make their way to the experience, though I'm guessing the piled on junk is as much obstacle as asset. — Hippyhead

It's possible that the objective of Buddhism is not just plain old comprehension of logical arguments like in math or science. From my encounters with Buddhism I sense it has cabalistic overtones.



The practice of Buddhism can find appeal only when its core tenets make sense. At least that's how Buddhism is advertised - as a completely rational philosophy/religion based on hard facts.

Do you consider other alternatives? It's still possible that religion was based on a philosophy for example. Secular Buddhism is a good argument in favor of this idea. All books were written long after Buddha's death after all. — Skeptic

I want to investigate the philosophical aspects of religions. Buddhism seems to stick out like a sore thumb on that score.

If you are able to do something that is impossible then it actually isn't impossible and rather not categorized correctly or specified. If something is impossible by definition then it CANNOT be possible if it's then clearly you do not understand your definitions enough to have changed your labeling.

If you are to abide by a non-classical logic then you can perform actions that would be consistent with the axioms of that logical structure chosen to ground the nature of such an entity. If the action is implicitly to be one that must abide by classical logic then actions which you cannot perform and would be impossible would be ones in which you aren't following classical logic. — substantivalism

It's not that there's failure in categorization of possible and impossible. You're using human logic to try and comprehend this particular aspect of divine omnipotence and it has led you to the conclusion that there's been a miscategorization. No such thing has occurred. A contradiction is impossible and this makes sense, it is also possible and this too makes sense, but only to god and not to us.

It would be impossible for a human being to understand or perform contradictory actions because by their own nature they are unable to do so — substantivalism

:ok:

Why? Why defy the law of non-contradiction and not that of the law identity or hold onto any other tens of different non-classical logic? Do you know that what you could happen to derive in one may not be derivable in another so in some cases it wouldn't be considered more powerful to hold one set of axioms over another. — substantivalism

Good question. The law of noncontradiction is the right choice if the objective is to do something impossible.

I reject this premise — substantivalism

1. If there is omnipotence then there has to be contradictions
2. If there has to be contradictions then there's only one god
3. There is omnipotence (god is defined thus)
Ergo,
4. There has to contradictions (1, 3 modus ponens)
Ergo,
5. There's only one god (2, 4 modus ponens)

Why should the fact of entropy lead us to pessimism? — Janus

There are more ways to suffer than there are ways to be happy. All things being equal, you're likely to experience more suffering than happiness.

The Buddha is considered to be all-good and all-knowing if not all-powerful. There are many deities in Tibetan Buddhism (not to mention quite a few other schools). Buddhism may not be a "true" religion (in the sense that there are no "True Scotsmen") but it undoubtedly contains religious elements that most philosophy does not. Any philosophy that does contain religious elements would probably be better characterized as theology — Janus

All I'm saying is that unlike the other three major religions, Buddhism doesn't have a god you have to pray to.