That's fine to disagree, but if you don't give a specific argument, I don't know why I should believe you.

Sorry that I didn't reply before. My email notification only told me that Banno replied, and I decided that I was not going to read his post.

You say that this has been discussed before. Where have people discussed crytpo-enforced taxation? I have never heard of it before. Did you just read, "voluntary taxation" and immediately think that meant anarchy and that you've seen it before and you didn't read the rest of the post?

How is it possible that you do not pay taxes? Aren't there capital gains taxes, taxes on dividends, and also business taxes? I am not aware of any legal way to entirely dodge taxes. I have heard that landlords that bought their properties with debt can deduct the debt from their taxes.

I thought about the possibility that the government could choose to pay tax in order to give itself voting power to raise the tax rate. The math is complicated because you can get into infinite loops, but with only some of the tax revenue cycling back to a given government agency, but I think I came to some general conclusions:

If there is a unitary government (only 1 branch of government that is funded by voting tax payers), with a legal maximum tax rate that you can vote for called "max", then it will be beneficial for the government to pay tax to itself to vote for the max tax rate, and that the actual tax rate will approach this max tax rate with time. Unless the max tax rate is over 50%, then it should never be possible for the government to vote to raise the max tax rate, and possibly the voters could vote to lower the max tax rate. So, for a unitary government that chooses to pay tax and vote to raise taxes, the max allowable tax rate is basically the same as the actual tax rate.

If there are many branches of government so that most of the tax paid doesn't come back to any particular branch, then it's only beneficial for that branch to pay tax if the max allowable tax rate for its branch is at least as big as the current total tax rate (then they can give themselves a bigger raise than they pay in taxes). So, for many branches of government, a simple fix would be to set the max allowable vote for a tax rate for any given branch to be half of what the total government revenue was last year. Then it would not be profitable for any individual branch of government to choose to pay tax in order to raise its tax rate.

If there are many counties with different forms of government, then it's possible that some of the counties will have unitary government (only one branch of government for the whole county). Then, the count would be like a unitary government for his local area, and could vote for the max tax rate for himself. In this case, it might be beneficial for local areas to be allowed to vote on local max tax rates.

I just looked up the size of the military budget in the USA and the size of US GDP, and it looks like the USA spends a little under 5% of its GDP on the military. But the USA has higher military spending than basically any country ever. And the military should be the largest legitimate budget expense for a country. So, it makes sense to me that the global maximum tax rate for any branch of government should be 5% (and this is even being generous). Then if there were many branches of government, and if the total tax paid to government as at least 5%, then it would never be profitable for any individual branch to pay taxes in order to give itself a raise. Now, many branches of government could collude to raise the tax rate together (this would be hard if they were really independent), but in this case, the tax payers could treat them as a unitary government and then just vote to lower the maximum tax rate that can be voted on.

How are you going to force 100% of the population to be uninterested in power? If even 1% decided to be jerks and abuse everybody else, then there would still be problems exactly like today.

I believe that there are bureaucrats who take their job seriously, and that there have even been absolute monarchs in the past who believed that they were accountable to God. But it is a fact that being on top of the hierarchy means that there's nobody to stop you if you want to be a jerk. And I believe that a large percentage of people would be jerks if they had the chance, and that they have been jerks, are being jerks, and will be jerks.

And I was using "men" in the old way to refer to people in general. I wasn't considering the issue of female representation in politics, although it is a historical fact that usually male humans held political power. You can see an example here from the King James Version of the Bible how "man" is sometimes used to mean people in general, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." This sentence makes no sense if "man" is means only "male human". JRR Tolkien does the same things in his books; he refers to humankind as, "men", as distinct from elves and dwarves.

If you say that reality exists only when we observe it, isn't that like saying that we're living in a video game where the map is loaded only whenever we try to look at it? It seems bizarre. Everything is so consistent in nature, and it behaves as if it's much older than humanity. It would seem to be very strange if it worked that way.

Basically, the ordinary way to have political power is to organize groups of armed young men to fight for you. So, it seems entirely logical that the Founding Fathers wrote freedom of speech into the first amendment, and the right to bear arms into the second. Without at least the credible threat of violence, you can't force the government to do anything. But how will you threaten them if you're unable to organize, or if you are unarmed? And even if it doesn't get to the point of violence, how are you going to get support for an idea if you're unable to freely express arguments in favor of the idea? It is clear from this line of reasoning that freedom of speech is actually a political issue. Without freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and without arms, you have no political power.

Libertarians often criticize government because it has a monopoly on violence. I think that's kind of the whole benefit of government, however. It is true that government is compulsory, and that it's generally incompetent. But in the case of choosing between the government and protecting myself from robbers without help from the government, there would have to be a very incompetent or malicious government in order for me to prefer facing the robber alone over having to pay taxes (it is actually getting to that point for me, but I'm not opposed to government in principle). I think the main benefit of government to individuals is that it has a monopoly on violence, which very likely means less violence overall.

I think the primary job of government is to limit freedom of action in zero-sum games (such as in murder or theft). Assuming that people are self-interested, and you stop them from competing in ways that are harmful to other people, then you don't need to know any of the details to know that the net effect is positive. This is probably why it became ubiquitous for governments to punish criminals, fend off foreign invasion, and not much else.

Pluses and minuses of different forms of government

Direct Democracy: By definition, it's not possible for a direct democracy to implement a policy which 51% of the people would be opposed to.

Limited Ruling Class (Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Republic, etc): If the ruling class has higher average political wisdom than the general population (such as by having higher IQ, or better education), then the government can implement wiser policies than would be possible in a direct democracy.

Monarchy: Monarchy is a simple and natural form of government. It is simple, because what is simpler than, "Person X is in charge"? It is natural, because power struggles tend to be unstable by nature, so that power becomes concentrated. The power being in the hands of 1 person is the natural result of power concentrating with time. Monarchy also has good incentives. The power and prestige of a monarch is the same as the power and prestige of his country. He is the owner of his country, whereas a president is a temporary guardian of an estate which he has no ownership in. The monarch is above bribery (what can you bribe him with that's worth more than the whole country?). The policies of a nation also tend to be stable over the life of a monarch. The line of succession is also usually clear in a monarchy, which reduces the frequency of civil wars.

The only downsides I can think of to monarchy are that it's arbitrary (why does having a great great grand dad who was awesome mean that you should be king?), and that in the case of having a bad monarch, the only remedy is rebellion.

Given the pluses and minuses of monarchy, it seems reasonable to me that it has been by far the most common form of government historically, but that dynasties do tend to get conquered from time to time and replaced by other dynasties.

Net Tax Payer Voting System: By definition, in a net tax payer voting system, it's not possible for 51% of the taxes to be involuntary. If 51% of the tax payers thought their taxes were too high, then they would vote to lower their taxes.

Military Service Prerequisite to Political Positions: This means, at least, that whoever is making decisions is not totally ignorant of military matters.

I understand that senators in Rome usually had military service. This has also been common for US presidents. Prussia, it was said, was a military with a state. Note that all these examples also performed very well militarily. It seems reasonable that governments with some connection to the military will tend to run their military better than those that don't.


It occurred to me while mulling over the net tax payer voting system, that a cryptocurrency with internal governance could be used to implement it (example are Cardano and Internet Computer Protocol). The government of a country could make a deal with some block chain (or a fork or derivative of some block chain), "If you vote to give us a 5% tax (or some other negotiated percent) on transaction fees and staking rewards, we will make your cryptocurrency the legal tender, so that all merchants have to accept it." This might be beneficial for both parties. The government would get voluntary taxes, and the government support would probably pump the bags of crypto holders. Because it's crypto, the vote could neither be rigged nor ignored. Whatever the results of the vote were would be automatically implemented, even if the government didn't like it. The government would be incentivized to try to protect the blockchain, and to convince tax payers and stake holders to increase taxes, hopefully at least partially by finding useful things to do with tax money. It seems reasonable to me that a majority of merchants might agree, "It is worth it to pay a 5% tax in exchange for having police, military, and a court system." But if there was something they didn't like, they could theoretically defund the government.

Currently, Cardano and ICP are run by stake holders. But it would make sense to tax transactions, which would be paid by merchants (such as by Walmart, if we were to transition to a crypto system). So, the block chain may want to create a special governance system just for taxes. It would seem fair to me if they hard-coded it so that the staking tax rate was always equal to the tax rate on transactions (or some fixed ratio), and gave everyone who paid taxes a vote on tax rates proportional to the amount of taxes paid. They might make the voting power decay with time, such that (perhaps) a dollar paid in taxes last year is as good as $0.50 this year. But the stake holders should retain all other voting privileges, because Walmart knows nothing about the governance of something like Cardano.

So, these thoughts lead me to the idea that it would be neat to have a government where military service was a prerequisite to having political power, but where the tax system was created bottom-up by tax payers through a crypto governance system. That way, the people with military experience would be the ones deciding what to do with the military, the people paying taxes would be the ones deciding how much they should get taxed, and the people who understood how money worked (they created a block chain and run it) get to print the money.

It seems reasonable to me that the only unique political idea I actually came up with was related to crypto. This is because crypto is new. People have been trying to run governments for a long time, and as I argue here, politics is a very difficult problem.

This LGBTQ stuff is a part of the liberal social consensus, and so I see it basically as being the same type of thing as religious dogma. It is effectively illegal to seriously investigate things like homosexuality, and also the natural differences between different demographic groups. If you don't completely agree with whatever the liberal social consensus is, they'll levy epithets at you like, "bigot" "sexist" "racist" etc, the same way people probably used the word "heretic" in the past. They'll do this even against people who agreed with everything the liberals said 10 years ago, but who haven't updated their beliefs to the current year. So, I consider ideas about these things to be at best, reasonable guesses, since it's not possible for these ideas at the present time to be discussed and tested fairly and openly in society.

One hypothesis I had was that maybe a gay gene is carried along with another gene that is beneficial. So, for instance, if a gene that makes a man understand women better also has a small chance of making him gay, then it might be carried forward in the population because it is a net evolutionary benefit for those who carry it, despite some of them turning out gay. This is just a guess on my part though; I'm not aware of any evidence at all to back it up.

Recently, I found a YouTube channel from a gay Christian called Becket Cook. I thought that what he said sounded very reasonable. There is one video where he interviews Dr. Nicolosi and they talk about the environmental causes of homosexuality. I've been mildly curious about this topic for years, but this is the first take on it I've heard that sounds like it's hitting near the mark.

I saw videos from like the 1950s telling children to stay away from gays because they like to molest children. The people back then seemed to equate homosexuality with pedophilia. I don't know if this is accurate or not. As I said in the first paragraph, it's basically illegal to seriously investigate this kind of thing. But if the people at that time believed it, then that would explain why they hated it so much.

The extreme focus that people have on homosexuality right now seems artificial to me. There is no precedent for this in history before. I believe that gays have always existed, but that the importance people are placing on sexual orientation right now makes no sense and is not organic. I even heard that zoomers are less accepting of LGBTQ now than millennials are, because it gets shoved down their throats so much at school that they rebel. I'm not surprised and it seems kind of ironic to me.

Trans and gay seem like different issues to me. If a man approaches me and says, "I'm gay. I like to have sex with other men." Then I'll probably think, "That's kind of weird." And then I'll probably go about my day, because it doesn't really affect me. If a person who looks and sounds like a man approaches me and says, "I am a woman. My pronouns are she/her," then it is the same to me as saying, "Believe what I tell you over your lying eyes." I cannot accept it. In the case of a gay guy, he's telling me something about his inner state which I can't directly observe. Or, if he acts on his homosexual impulses, I could theoretically observe that (although I don't want to). But the trans person tells me something which is directly contrary to what I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears. I cannot believe what he tells me without rejecting truth itself. I might keep to myself about it though, for the sake of not creating drama. Now, if a man told me, "I wish I were a woman," I'd think it was sad that he didn't like himself the way he was, but I wouldn't find the statement to be offensive or crazy.

I believe that reality exists independently of our observation, or else nothing makes sense.

It is common in mathematics to prove P because NOT P contains a contradiction. Likewise, you can prove NOT P if P is contradictory. So, there is truth to the statement that we don't understand something unless we understand the opposite to be false.

A cursory search for what the Big Bang is shows that it actually is the beginning of the universe. It is a separate idea from the size of the observable universe. If I understand correctly, the idea is that since the universe was expanding (space itself was getting bigger), the universe can actually be bigger than 13.8 billion light years in radius. That means that it's possible for the universe to have a beginning in time, while the observable universe is not the whole universe.

Talking about space itself getting bigger is outside our usual experience, however, so I find this topic to be confusing. I think the only people who can speak with authority about this are those who have done the math that describes this model.

I've already explained how the existence of entropy points to the universe as it currently exists having a beginning, even without evidence for a Big Bang. If the universe were infinitely old with the current laws of physics, you'd expect for the "heat death" of the universe to have already happened long ago.

I am not aware of an a priori argument that the universe must have a beginning, but it doesn't appear to be how our universe was made. I could imagine a universe similar to our own, but without friction, and with all light/matter being gravitationally bound. In this case, there would be no reason why stuff could not keep happening indefinitely. But that doesn't appear to be how our universe was made. I suppose in the case of a self-existing universe, the existence of the universe would be mysterious, since there would be no explanation for how to came to be. If there was a beginning, then the first cause is mysterious.

The things we are familiar with in the universe cannot themselves be the cause of the universe, because we only experience that these things act after they have first been acted upon by something else. Nothing decides of its own accord to do stuff. Also, if matter, time, and/or space were created, how could the creator be made of this stuff?

I've also already discussed how we already believe that the transcendent exists in the form of mathematics. Math appears to exist independently of matter and time. The existence of math is not mysterious to people who believe in a creator god (although then I suppose the creator god himself is mysterious).

I believe that objective reality exists independently of our cognition. So, if there really is a tree outside shedding its leaves, then I believe that the proposition is true before I become cognizant of its truth. However, it's impossible for me to think that it's true without "I think it's true" being implicit in the thought. So, in principle, I think logical propositions can be written without the "I think", but I cannot actually work through the proof without the "I think" being implicit.

For instance, "if an oak tree is shedding its leaves, then the ground underneath will be covered with leaves" is a form of P -> Q. I believe that P -> Q even if I'm not aware of the tree. It's not like the leaves materialize in front of me (or at least, that's not how I impinge it to work) when I look out the window. But I'm unable to formulate this idea in my mind without thinking about it.

There are logic puzzles where you have to have knowledge of what other actors know in order to solve the puzzle. In this case, knowledge of thoughts is necessary in order to solve the puzzle, so I think the "I think" is actually sort of its own entity. I suppose in the case where I am working through an abstract proof on my own, then there really is no functional difference between "P" and "I think P", since there is nothing going on in this proof outside my own mind. But the distinction becomes important if I believe that there are true propositions that I am unaware of.

Thanks

What you said sounds reasonable.

I don't know whether my philosophy would have widespread appeal. I'd be inclined to think not, because it is too hard to understand. It works for me though. Maybe it will work for some other people too.

My child is only 10 months old, so she's a long way from being ready for this stuff. I've heard that having loving parents helps a child develop emotional stability, even if they don't remember any of the specific events that happened. So, taking care of her and comforting her when she cries seem like the limit of good parenting at this age.

I am thinking that maybe sharing fairy tales with her is the earliest thing I could do to teach her life lessons (when she's old enough to talk). Part of the goal of fairy tales would be to introduce her to the idea that sometimes people make choices and bad things happen. It seems to me that if a child is unaware that bad things can happen in life, then the worst thing the child will be able to imagine is that she is told, "no". This will make discipline a nightmare, would tend to make a child resentful of her parents (since they are the source of the only negative thing she's ever experienced), and make her totally unprepared for when life inevitably slaps her hard across the face. So, I think it is not good to shelter children too much.

Jordan Peterson gave an interpretation of sleeping beauty that I thought was interesting. He said that maleficent represents all the evil in the world, and she wasn't invited to the birthday party because the girl's parents wanted to protect her from all the evil things in the world. But she grows up weak as a result, and becomes unconscious the first time something bad happens (getting pricked by a spinning wheel in this case he said represented possibly the beginning of menstruation). The prince in the story represents consciousness, and that's why a kiss from him wakes up the princess. She had never become conscious before because she had never had to face anything that challenged her.

It seems to me that humans by default learn lessons from stories. Maybe the reason for this is that earlier in our evolutionary history, before we had the capacity for much abstract thought, people could not have understood ethics or philosophy. But they could understand, "I stood on a snake and got bit". So, it seems natural that people learned to infer abstract lessons from stories of tangible events.

I'd be inclined to think that the stories which have lasted a long time did so because they carried some message of psychological significance, even if it's hard to discern what that is. Also, I am not a big fan of Disney movies as a form of moral instruction, because the main character always gets a happy ending no matter how badly they behave (in the OG little mermaid, the little mermaid fails and turns to sea foam at the end, but Disney always changes the real endings). The naiveté of our stories and the ease of life for the boomers might be why recent generations of Americans seem so psychologically fragile. So, I'm thinking of reading her Grimm's fairy tales and Aesop's fables (maybe starting with Aesop's, because they are so short). I'm also personally a fan of LOTR and ATLA, and I've recently become interested in Hayao Miyazaki's stories.

I'm thinking that a large part of the motivation for self improvement is realizing that bad things can happen, and they are more likely if we don't prepare for them. So introducing a child to the fact that bad things can happen is a good motivator for them to try to be the best they can be. This would reasonably start with fairy stories for small children, because they are not developed enough to learn real life lessons. If a child understands that scary things exist in the world and that her parents know more about them than her, then that would tend to make her listen more carefully to what they say. It would also tend to make her want to develop her own discernment when she is older.

Here is more information about how to practice my religion:

Warning: If I were to go back in time and present this to my past self, even I would not have been able to put all of this immediately into practice. I practiced each step for several years before moving onto the next one. So, for somebody who is not me, it is certainly recommended not to attempt to do everything here all at once. For any kind of self improvement, it is recommended to practice one new thing until it becomes habit, before moving onto the next thing.


I realized after making what I might call the "active rules for life" in the original post (Think continually on what is good....), that sometimes stuff just happens, and I don't know how to fit every arbitrary experiences into a system. So, I made a system for that.

In-line with my faith that existence as a whole is good, the basic thing to do when you have an experience is to pay attention to it. What is it? How is it? Whatever you are able to perceive/understand, have faith that it is good.

Paying attention to your experiences could mean looking at what's right in front of your face. It could also mean paying attention to internal things going on, such as your emotional state.

Here are some examples:

• I'm typing on the keyboard, so I'm paying attention to how the keys feel, the sound of the keys, and the fact that my fingers know how to type from muscle memory (I don't need to consciously know how to type the keys anymore). I could, if I wished, go further into thinking about the mechanics of the movement of my fingers, and other biological systems, or I could think about how the keyboard and the computer works. I could think further about how somebody designed this keyboard, and then people made it in a factory. That would bring up perhaps the motivations that people have for working (probably to provide for a family), or how it is that human society is able to be so industrious by applying science and by working together. I don't think it's necessary to go that far into one's experiences every time, however. If I found any of these topics particularly interesting, or realized that there was a gap in my knowledge, I could go look more stuff up (I suppose there are enormous gaps in my knowledge of how computers work).
• I paid attention to putting the dishes away the other day. It was pretty much the same as what I described above, except that the physical sensations of the dishes were different, and that I was aware that doing the dishes was an act of love for my wife (because otherwise she would do them), and it was furthermore fairly directly connected to the continued health (and therefore existence) of my family, and that therefore I ought to be glad to do it.
• I drove a car recently, and what I noticed different than above is that the car is a powerful machine that I am able to control with little physical force. Like in the case of typing on the keyboard, I realized that I was able to control the car without much conscious thought. I could feel the car humming in my body. In the sense that I felt connected to the car, and was able to control it without much conscious effort, it was like an extension of my body. I thought it was kind of neat to notice that. These observations made my daily commute less dull.

Our experiences often come with an emotional charge. Emotions can essentially be either good or bad.

When I have good emotions, I apply what I call my "pride filter". Because our choices are the only thing we have the experience of being able to control (even if free will doesn't ontologically exist), the only honest ways to feel good are:

• Recognition and appreciation of having made good choices or good effort
• Gladness or gratitude for those things outside of one's control

If I experience a good feeling that doesn't fit into one of these, then I either reject the feeling, or reform it. For instance, if I feel badass for whooping someone's butt in a video game, then I remind myself that my intelligence/hand eye coordination were given to me for free, and are thus nothing to be proud of. Also, if it is impressive when I whoop somebody's butt, then it's even more impressive when somebody else whoops my butt, so, I should take note of that and appreciate it when it happens. I might also think of the fact that my desire to dominate someone in a video game is perhaps a misapplication of an evolutionary drive for dominance which is useful for males for reproduction. The video game is also perhaps a form of emotional rest (indulging in solving problems which have no connection to anything that I think is very important, so I can feel good when I win and not care too much when I lose).


In the case of bad emotions, we presumably want to stop feeling them. The options are to improve one's bad circumstances (depending on the circumstances, this can range in difficulty from easy to impossible), change one's values through introspection, or be resigned to feeling the bad emotion. In the case of introspection, you have to go back to just analyzing the situation, as described above. Telling one's self to simply be happy will not usually work. If you're upset because you don't have something you want, then you have to be able to really convince yourself that you don't want it in order to stop feeling bad. So, honestly seeking the truth is the best cure for feeling bad about unsolvable bad circumstances (the truth will set you free).


Examples Of Dealing with Bad Emotion:

• Bad Health: I've had several health issues in the last few years. Recently, when I've felt bad, I have thought, "Thank you, God, for the health that I've had the past, and what health I have remaining." I don't know if there's a God that actually listens, but I think it is good for me to do this. Also, I might pray (and do what I can to bring it about) that my health will improve, but this is independent of my gratitude for what I already have and have had.
• Society is dying: Part of my motivation for developing this philosophy in the first place was my observation that society seems determined to destroy itself, and there's next to nothing I can do about it. I desired to believe that there was still good in the world, even if the world of mankind that I lived in was failing very badly. So, that points towards finding goodness outside of myself or my circumstances, and the ultimate expression of this is to try to see goodness in existence as a whole.
• Death of child: This has not happened to me yet. But this is the worst-case I can think of in terms of the natural affections. So, I have thought about it. It seems to me that in coming from one's own genes and in being raised by you, a child is an extension of yourself. So, how can you ever convince yourself that you don't love your child without by necessity devaluing your own life? So, detaching one's self from desire in order to avoid the pain of loss does not seem to be a good or natural solution to this problem. I am reminded of the Bible passage, "Those who eat the bread of sorrow, rouse yourselves after resting." My interpretation of this passage is that there's a time for mourning, and then there's a time to pick yourself up and find something else to live for. I consider mourning to be the process of letting go of those things that you had previously depended on. So, the mourning process in this case would consist of thinking over the fact that you'll never get to hold your child again, or see him play, or see him get married. I think the pain would probably never entirely go away. It ought to be possible, I think, with time, to get to the point where you still remember that you've lost something, but you can look at the sky and still think it's beautiful, and remember other people who you are glad to know (or whatever else gives meaning to your life), and go out to live for those things.

To summarize the reactive rules for life:

• It is always good to pay attention to what is happening and try to understand what it is and how it is.
• For good emotions, constrain them to recognition of good choices, and gladness for things outside of your control. The purpose of this rule is honesty.
• For negative emotions, if improving circumstances is impossible, the best thing to do is honest introspection (which brings you back to point 1 again).

Probably my experience living at a monastery is indirectly responsible for coming up with ideas like these. The job of the monk is "inner work". That is to orient one's heart properly. That is what I'm doing, except I've tried to strip away the original religious foundation of the inner work.

I would argue that inner work is actually the main point of the Christian religion. Jesus said, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean." My interpretation is that he is telling them to do the inner work, and then their outward behavior will also be clean. He talks about this again when he says how murder consists not only of killing someone, but consists also of harboring unjust anger against them, and that adultery consists not only of unlawful sex, but also in lustful intent. This is why I believe that religion and psychology are not actually separate subjects. I could say that a lot of my philosophy consists in trying to reconcile ancient psychological wisdom with modern material knowledge.

Other References:

I like to study religious texts (particularly Christian) for moral instruction, even though I doubt the factual truth of all their supernatural claims. I explain in a post "A Secular Look at Religion" how this is possible.

I think most everything I've said in the original post is fairly objective in the sense that one can try out for one's self and see that it is true. Some of my other posts are less objective, however. I did experiment with some speculative theology in "A Functional Deism," where I argue for the plausibility of a creator god. Then in the post "A Deist Creation Myth" I pretend like I know that my speculation is true and built a creation myth for it. It seems to me that the morals of most cultures are contained in their stories/myths, so, this is basically a way to express my philosophy in story format. The main moral is supposed to be that existence is good.

I will follow this up with another post with more details about how to put my religion/life philosophy into practice.

I think the cosmological argument provides a very good proof that SOMETHING exists outside the realm of human understanding. If it's a First Mover, then by definition, we can't say much of anything a priori about him (because he is the first a priori principle, before all other principles). If it's an infinite regression of causes, then we can never get to the bottom of it, or even get meaningfully closer to the bottom of it. And of course, circular reasoning is not normally considered valid. So, I can't think of any ultimate beginning to existence that could be fully explained by human reason.

If it was a first mover, then we can make several reasonable guesses. One is that if he moves other things without himself first being moved, does that not seem similar to the idea of free will? That might give you the idea that the first mover is a willful agent. Otherwise, I suppose he is something totally unfathomable to humans. And again, it wouldn't make sense to say that he created matter if he himself is made of matter, so he probably doesn't have a material body. Many such arguments could be made that make reasonable guesses about his nature

I have tried to figure out if there is anything meaningful that could be said about an infinite regression of causes. The only thing I can think of is that each step in the chain of causality cannot get meaningfully less complex than the previous, or else the chain of causality would not be truly infinite. Supposing that the complexity of each step in the infinite regression could be expressed as an integer, clearly, each step cannot consistently get less complex than the previous step, or else you'd get to a complexity of 0 and the end of the chain of causality. Also, if the universe were truly temporally infinite, then you'd not expect there to be any irreversible processes. If there were irreversible processes in an infinitely old universe, you'd expect them all to have happened already. So, I think it's fair to say that the existence of entropy implies that the universe in its current form had a beginning.

I've heard arguments that maybe each black hole creates a new universe with somewhat different laws of physics. In this case, maybe entropy could be reset with the birth of each universe. Or if the many worlds hypothesis in quantum mechanics is correct, then there is an infinite multiverse. But at any rate, even if it's black holes all the way down in an infinite chain of causality, clearly the universe we live in with its current laws has a birthday.

You mentioned the question of homosexuality in a natural ethic like the one I'm proposing. In my philosophy, existence is good. So, homosexuality in this mindset is not terribly interesting, because it is not useful for the continued existence of the species. I suppose it is interesting to investigate how it is possible that such an evolutionarily unadaptive trait can continue to exist.

I think most of the pro-LGBTQXYZ community base their philosophy basically on hedonism. Something like, "Being gay makes me feel good, so it is good, and you ought to accept it." I think the Christian objection usually comes straight from the claimed word of God that homosexuality is an abomination. I don't think either argument works in the deist worldview that I have described, because my worldview doesn't accept that human happiness is the ultimate arbiter of goodness, but it also doesn't accept that we have received special revelation.

I admitted when I originally wrote the post that I was working off speculation.

According to cosmological arguments, a first cause is one of the options for explaining existence, which implies something like a creator god. So, this part is at least plausible. Alternatives are an infinite regression of causes, or circular causality.

Some very basic assumptions about the nature of a creator god would say that he would create a world similar to ours. These arguments are time consuming and I've done them already.

Also, prior to the scientific revolution, pretty much all people were religious almost without exception. However, it is the people who believed in a creator god who came up with the scientific method. Also, the existence of mathematics was not considered strange by theists/deists, but it is sometimes considered strange by atheists. So, among all the previously existing religious beliefs, belief in a creator god appears to be the most adaptive.

According to the is-ought dilemma, it's technically not possible to infer an ought from an is. However, if we assume something like, "We care why God made existence," then we can continue trying to infer morality from existence. There is no obvious utilitarian purpose to existence (it doesn't appear to serve some other purpose). So, the options appear to be, "there is no purpose", "we don't know the purpose" or "existence is its own purpose." There don't appear to be any psychologically useful implications from the first two options, but believing that existence is good for its own sake would point one towards believing that one can find goodness and meaning in absolutely all circumstances. It would also say that working towards survival is a good thing, which one would presumably want for a moral system for living creatures.

As I have said before, I believe my psychological motive for creating this system was that I wanted to be able to see the good in situations where things were not going my way. It seems suitable for this purpose for me. It is a scaffold for founding morality which requires relatively few unfalsifiable assumptions.

I am not aware that deism ever "failed" in the intellectual sense. Has anyone ever proven that it's impossible? It is merely not popular. I think the reason is probably that most people would rather believe in a god who is interested in their personal happiness.

I worked through all this myself, with reference to previous arguments (such as cosmological arguments). However, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that somebody else had previously come up with very similar arguments.

I am not a very big fan of universalism in general, because it's not possible for two contradictory statements to both be true at the same time.

I don't believe that the problem of evil is really a problem for a deist. The Christian God asserts that death is bad and that he is actually interested in human flourishing, so the existence of things that seem bad to us is a problem for Christianity. But the existence of things that seem bad to humans is not terribly mysterious if the creator god is not especially interested in our happiness.

I have actually already explained why a creator god would create a temporal world and then take a day off. As I've explained before, it seems reasonable to believe that mathematics is somehow closely related to God (or else why is math-based science so successful?). But mathematics can describe many situations that don't physically exist. So, if god likes himself, and if he contains an infinity of abstract potential, then it would make sense that he'd want to create a big universe (or possibly an infinite multiverse) in order to tangibly instantiate many different forms that already exist in him in the abstract. Also, if you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient creator god, then you have to believe that he got it right his first try, so it's not mysterious that he didn't need to continue to meddle with creation.

I've made an argument in a different post that if god is infinite, then it might be the case that he has a limited ability to add to himself. Something like infinity + 1 still equals infinity. If this is the case, then it would make sense that he can only create things which are finite and imperfect. If we were perfect and complete, it might be the case then that we would become identical to god, and would cease to exist separately from him. So, no matter what the circumstances of our lives are, it is likely that it's just not possible for contingent beings like us to exist in a state of perfection. If this is the case, then it might be that god is more pleased by a creation that spontaneously comes into being and approaches perfection (like through the evolutionary process) than one which came into being in its final form (no matter how highly developed that final form might be).

The most obvious answer is that for some reason or another, biology makes women less interested in the subject. This answer is unpopular, because most people today practice the religion of egalitarianism, so they will call you a bigot for saying so (their word for heretic), but it is the truth.

The evidence shows that sociological reasons are false. For example, I studied physics at university and it was almost all men. There were scholarships available allowing women in physics to basically go for free, but they still didn't want to. There was also ubiquitous pro-female propaganda, and that still wasn't enough. The sociological explanations (not enough female role models, etc) show a lack of understanding of male motivation. When men want to do something, they go do it, with or without role models. The fact that they were pushing for role models, scholarships, and other support is an admission that women as a group are not intrinsically motivated to study physics, because if they were, then these other things would not have mattered.

An explanation for this from evolutionary psychology is that men by nature have to work harder to provide for themselves and to get sex. Men are bigger and stronger (more able to put their will into practice) and women are picker with regards to sex (men have to work hard to impress them). So, men are by nature more interested in understanding how things work and they are competitive and want to prove themselves. The survival of women, in contrast is more dependent on their relationships, since they are less able to get their material needs met by their own hands. This also makes women more malleable under social pressure, since they are more materially dependent. Feminists project the degree to which they are socially malleable onto men, which is why they think that social pressure (like shaming) can turn men into women. When the men don't change much because they aren't wired to respond to this kind of propaganda, the feminists call them sexist and propagandize even harder. But close to 100% of the media has been feminist for decades, which is good evidence that it is not possible to say anything to make men and women behave the same.

I'm used to thinking of God as being holy. So, if the universe is God, then it would follow that the universe is holy. I guess if he died to create the universe, then nothing would be holy. This is the first time I've tried to think about this idea, so pardon me if I didn't get all the details right on my first try.

I have thought about this before. Assuming that we are talking about an omnipotent creator God, then if he DID have the power to kill himself, he must have chosen not to, or else nothing would exist. If he chose not to, then he must have decided that he likes/loves himself. So, if this kind of God exists and if it's possible for him to kill himself, then God's self-love is a necessary prerequisite to existence.

This then provides a motive for creation. If God contains the potential for all else, and if he loves himself, then it makes sense that he'd want to create everything that could possibly exist out of his self-love. If every existing thing is a partial manifestation of the infinite God trying to manifest himself, then you would predict a very big and very old universe (or possibly infinite multiverses).

If it were possible for God to add to himself, I would think he would probably do that. But if he's infinite, that might not be possible. It might be the case that infinity + 1 = infinity. According to Christian theology, there is no difference at all between the Father and the Son except that the Son is "begotten". If it's possible for God to "beget" a son, then it might not be possible for God to "beget" two sons, because they would actually be identical (the same being). And then they also teach that the Holy Spirit "proceeds", but I'm not sure what the difference is. Anyway, if God loved himself, and if it were possible for him to make more Gods like himself, then you'd expect something like the Trinity. Then all the rest of creation is necessarily finite and imperfect, because otherwise it would be literally impossible for God to create it.

"Before the beginning" is not actually an arbitrary phrase. The matter we are familiar with only acts after it's first acted upon. So, it follows that if there was a first cause, it can't be anything at all like the matter we are familiar with. So, that leads to the idea that the first cause does not exist within time and space like matter does. It is a very traditional Christian idea that God exists outside of time. The Nicene Creed even says that the Son was begotten from the Father before all ages. So, the idea of God existing before time is an old one that has made sense to people in the past. Also, math appears to be true regardless of what time it is, so, it sounds reasonable to say that math might still have been true before the Big Bang. So, there is at least one thing we are already familiar with that has its existence independently of time.

I read the essay from Gnomon about a deistic God. I guess I don't have much to say, because most of it sounds plausible. The main thing I noticed that I might disagree with is the analogy of creation being like an egg or a fetus. Based on what I discussed immediately above, we have good reason to think that a creator god must be utterly unlike anything that we've ever experienced. So, it makes more sense as an analogy to think of existence as a creation than as a birth, because if it were a birth, that would seem to imply that we were the same type of thing as God. So, I like the traditional Jewish/Christian analogy for existence as creation better.

I haven't spent much time thinking about pandeism before. Here's what I thought of in a couple minutes. Part of the point of this post was to imbed a moral foundation within the creation myth. Your creation myth (180 Proof) was very short, so I don't think it did that much. I suppose if everything is God, then that means that everything is holy. I suppose that's pointing in a similar direction to what I was trying to point at in my story, that everything is good for its own sake. I think the main difference would be that in the deist world-view, God is eternal and still exists separately from his creation after it has been created, whereas in the pandeist view, there is nothing outside of "creation". It seems to me that since math is eternal and abstract and seems to exist independently of matter, that the deist creator god fits together more nicely with mathematics than the pandeist god. The creator god also points more towards the existence of a supernatural or otherworldliness, whereas pandeism would not seem to do this. Since it's all speculative, I suppose the most that could be said of one conception rather than another is that it's more or less plausible or has different moral implications.

Again, it makes more sense – cogently, parsimoniously, naturalistically – to substitute existence (or laws of nature (à la Laozi or Epicurus, Spinoza or Einstein)) for "God". — 180 Proof

I briefly discussed in one of my earlier replies that I can't imagine a difference between an unconscious creator god and the laws of physics. They would seem to me to basically be the same thing. So, I wonder if you're taking more offense at the word, "god" than with the idea itself.

I think that is a better version of Christianity, where human beings are able to exist without any repercussions regarding the choices they make in their life and being able to choose whether to acknowledge such a God or not as you say he does not require any covenants.

Your view of God in this respect is similar to mine, but with the added bonus of immortality granted to beings who express his will the best and who are as morally good as it is possible.

However I do not subscribe to the creation myth or garden idea because I cannot infer purpose from god nor any motivation behind his reason for creating this world. It could be that initially god rolled the dice and created the universe where life may emerge due to intrinsic inevitability of the properties of physics, maths and matter such that life’s emergence was inevitable not just on this planet.

This leads to many questions such as his relationship to his creation and creatures within it, as god himself is immortal does is this property also inherited by human beings who wish to attain immortality as well or is it just an exclusive property belonging to god only? If so then we are but the flicker of a candle in the wind compared to god’s eternal existence. If we have no intrinsic purpose to our existence but to enjoy it (and some don’t) then if we die never to be reborn then our creation was meaningless. — kindred

I didn't imagine that people become immortal in the Christian sense. The particulars of our minds and bodies do not become immortal (so far as I know). My idea was that abstract ideas (such as perhaps the virtues of patience, perseverance, or temperance) are immortal, so that in-so-far as we practice these virtues, we are participating in the life of immortal virtues. So, it is not that individual humans actually live forever, but that while they are alive, they become like things that are immortal. I think of this less like hope in some unverifiable paradise, than as another way of seeing the world as it actually exists right now. I think in the case of virtues, one man's charity does not interfere with another man's charity, and one man's temperance does not interfere with another man's temperance. But one man's greed would interfere with another man's greed. So it seems to me that the virtues are virtually the same for everyone, but the vices are all individual. So, the virtue I practice is in principle the same as the virtues that were practices thousands of years ago, and are also the same as the virtues that might be practiced thousands of years in the future. That is the sense in which I participate in the life of the immortal. I think in a definitional sense, I define virtues as any positive habit that builds one's life up (the easiest to think of could be diet and exercise), whereas a vice is something that tears your life down (like smoking, because it hurts your health and your wallet).

The idea in this creation myth is that since we can't infer a utilitarian purpose for things, perhaps those things exist for their own sake. That is the story behind this creation myth. And in the story, the laws of physics are set up precisely so that stars, life, and the rest, will spontaneously arise. The whole point of the story is to let you interpret meaning in the world as it actually exists right now.


Now to address your last paragraph. I don't think humans are immortal, because it appears that our existence is dependent on the arrangement of matter in our bodies, so that there is no reason to believe that we continue to exist after the matter takes a different form. So then, yes, I think it is likely that we are a flicker of a candle in the wind compared to God's existence. It is normal, I think, to imagine that our lives are meaningless if they are temporary, since we come from a culturally Christian background that teaches an afterlife. As I discussed after the creation myth, however, whatever you are genuinely able to believe with respect to values becomes true, at least to you. I have often thought in my life before whether it's possible for me to do anything that's not in vain, and eventually I came up with the answer, "If there's a moment in which I wouldn't wish anything to be different, or even for the moment to last longer, then it is worth it, at least to me in that moment" That seems to be true, by definition, isn't it? Whatever I find to be worth it and meaningful, IS worth it and meaningful to me. If I imagine that simply existing as I am for a time is meaningful, then I am content. And the point of this creation myth is not that we exist for our own pleasure, but that we exist for God's pleasure (I suppose this retains that element of Christian mythology that meaning is derived from God). As it said, we are like flowers. "It is not necessary that the flower understands its purpose." I do think there is an argument to be made that a creator God's opinion about the purpose of existence is more valid than anyone else's. If some random Joe makes a widget, that Joe has more authority than anyone else to say what he made it for, even if somebody uses it for a different purpose. That doesn't mean that we have to respect God's wishes for the purpose of creation, but I can't think of anyone else who can more convincingly come up with a different purpose. This God is truly omnipotent and immovable in the sense that his purpose is for things to exist for their own sake, so that it's literally impossible for humans to thwart his purpose no matter what they do. His will IS done. There is no conflict to God.

My idea of the creator God comes from cosmological arguments. That means by definition, whatever exists without being caused is God. So, if the laws of physics are eternal and simply exist without cause, then they are God. Even if that were the case, that still leaves the unanswered question of how all the matter got instantiated (because Mathematical laws can exist without material instantiation). I heard Carl Jung talk once about the likelihood that God is unconscious. I didn't like that idea, but if it were true, I can see no difference between an unconscious creator God and the laws of physics.

I've heard arguments that I think are convincing that the scientific method was developed in the first place because people believed there was an intelligent creator God, and that therefore nature was rational. Math is a kind of language, and Genesis says that God created by speaking, so at the highest abstract level, Genesis appears to be true in this sense. Even if none of the rest of it is true, this points towards the idea of a creator God as being the best model of reality that people had yet come up with, because it bore fruit.

I realize that this is speculative, but I'm not aware that anyone could prove that this story did not happen. It is a convenient scaffold for a philosophical viewpoint.

One of these is false:

1. Particles cannot influence one another faster than the speed of light (locality)
2. Particles have well defined properties before being measured (realism)

As examples, the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations reject realism, and the de Broglie–Bohm theory rejects locality. — Michael

I only skimmed the first page of replies, and this seems to be the only answer that succinctly answers the question.

I studied physics at university, but only ever really felt fully comfortable with classical physics. I got the top score in the class on the last quantum mechanics test I took, but it just felt so weird and I never really felt like I mastered it (I never worked past a bachelor's degree).

My understanding of some of the weirdness in quantum mechanics is that quantum particles do not appear to have defined momentum or position prior to being measured. This is not a limitation of our measurements, but a property of the particles themselves.

So, when I hear, "anti-realism", I think of some kind of interpretation like the particle has no real defined traits until observed by a consciousness(or possibly, until interacting with any macroscopic object). At the macroscopic scale, things only appear to be determined because the average behavior of a huge number of random objects is fairly well determined.

I don't really have a dog in the fight, because as I said, I don't feel like an expert. The only thing I can think of is that maybe position and momentum aren't really the fundamental building blocks of existence, but maybe the wave function itself (which describes a probability distribution of position or momentum) is the true existence of the particle. As I understand it, the wave function ought to be well defined at all times.

I have had a similar thought about relativity. It seems so bizarre to me that lengths and mass change due to velocity, and that velocities cannot be added by simple arithmetic (if you throw a ball with V1 on a train at V2, the final velocity is NOT V1 + V2 according to relativity). I would think that if a thing were truly "real", then it would be observed to be the same for all observers. It made me wonder if things like mass, and position are not truly the fundamental building blocks of existence, but are only derived phenomena from something even more fundamental. I couldn't begin to tell you what that is though.

My background in biology has me taking the side that says all is random. In nature, there is no such thing as a closed system. There are always random events that impinge upon and influence the outcome of any "cause" in producing its "effect." — Questioner

In this case, it is effectively random because we don't know the information. But if we knew all the information and if quantum mechanics didn't make a difference, then in theory, it would all be determined. This is the same way that a die is technically determined if you do the physics equations to predict how it will fall.

I am not going to address any of your lies

I googled for "Four Degrees of Love Bernard of Clairvaux", and I agree that it is remarkably similar to what Kohlberg said. It is interesting to me that they came to such similar conclusions when they lived so far apart in time and had such different perspectives on the world.

I personally have a hard time with believing that Jesus/The Holy Spirit is actively guiding the church, largely due to the confusion in the church. If the same voice is talking to everyone, why doesn't everyone agree? But I can test the psychological or moral wisdom of Jesus, proverbs, or other Christian doctrines in my own life, and I find very consistently that they are good. I believe at the very minimum, that the Bible is phenomenologically true, meaning that it is true about what it feels like to be a human and to struggle with making the right choices.

I read your post on my lunch break. Your reply was interesting and referenced a lot of sources that I am unfamiliar with. I think I might order that book on Genesis. I think I would have to do research on more of your sources in order to be able to make an intelligent reply.

I believe that you wrote a sincere reply, but it's very long and I'm at work right now, so I won't read it right now. I might read it later.

You can also find statistics that say the exact opposite. I googled for, "most domestic violence initiated by women" and found several sources corroborating this. You can do the google search yourself. You can also find lots of statistics showing that most serial killers are raised by single mothers, and that children raised without a father in general are poorer and have more behavioral issues. I am not going to get into it here because I know that you will just argue and deny that anything that doesn't support feminism is biased. I also just did a search for, "life expectancy of married vs unmarried women", and Google's AI says that on average, married women live longer. This is not consistent with the view that men are a net negative for women. As I understand it, when a woman is murdered, the murderer is statistically most-likely to be the husband, but this is for the same reason that murderers of children are most likely to be the mother; these are just the people that you spend the most time with. But I suspect that this nuance might be lost on you. Also, you did not even accurately represent my argument, so I'm not going to argue with you anymore.

The issue addressed at the top of the OP is that if we are composed of entirely naturalistic particles, then we are a product of the laws that govern those particles. This is relevant to the discussion of free will.

Since then, I've come to realize that causality, materialism, and objective reality are metaphysical concepts, by which I mean they are neither true nor false. They have no truth value — T Clark

It sounds absurd to me that those things have no truth value at all. If that were the case, then why does science work? Either the efficacy of science and technology are one big coincidence and we are all deceived, or causality, materialism, and objective reality are accurate descriptions of how most things work.

Proofs of freewill and proofs of determinism are as reliable as proofs for and against the existence of God. One may be sure that that they are unreliable without even reading them, because of unenlightened's famous principle: "No arrangement of words, howsoever cunning, can oblige the world to be thus and not so."
Thought experiments can only be useful when one already knows precisely what one is talking about. They are therefore of little value to philosophers, who are only called in when folk discover that they don't quite know what they are talking about after all.
To reject unenlightened's principle is to believe in the efficacy of magic spells. — unenlightened

Based on the argument you made, math and science are magic spells, because they predict how things work by the use of logic symbols. I would be angry that you have written such ignorant nonsense without even bothering to read the OP, but I am used to it by now.

The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal. — Banno

"Patriarchy" literally means rule by the father. I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father. However, I don't think I said anything in my original post relating to who should be in charge. So, it seems to me that if you think what I said is patriarchal, even though I said nothing about rule by the father in the post, then it probably means that what I said sounds like what a loving father would tell his children.

According to my own understanding, Paul's justification for marriage is that it's the only healthy outlet for lust. "...for it is better to marry than to burn with passion"

Jesus talked about how love of God and neighbor are the principles behind the 10 commandments. Not committing adultery and not coveting are two of the 10 commandments. It seems reasonable for me to conclude then that at least part of the reason for these commandments is love of neighbor. I think if I can discover by my own experience and reason good justifications for why premarital sex is harmful, then I have understood (at least in part) the purpose behind these commandments.

I don't really see a contradiction between Paul and Jesus here. If marriage is the only healthy outlet for lust, then marriage is also the only way to have sex while loving yourself and your neighbor.

I believe that marriage is healthy because lust is a savage desire in that it treats another person as an object. The sexual desire itself treats another person as an object to use for pleasure (similar to how one might treat ice cream or a hamburger). Women also typically use male lust as a means of getting other things that they want, such as money, vacations, or power. So, in the absence of commitment, men tell whatever lies they have to in order to get as much sex for as little as possible (thus using women as sex objects), and the women tell whatever lies they have to to get the men to fork over as much as possible in exchange for sex (thus using men like ATMs). It seems to me that the only respectful way to treat another human as an object like this (which seems to be innate in lust itself) is to offer your whole self as compensation. So, I see a healthy marriage as two selfish people freely giving the other what he/she can't help but selfishly desire.

Note the passive voice: everything in nature is determined. Determined by what? If human behavior is determined then it needs to be determined by something other than ourselves, or else it is determined by us, which entails free will. — NOS4A2

Speaking as someone who has studied physics, when I first saw the argument, I thought it was obvious that nature was "determined" by the laws of physics. All natural laws described by physics prior to the discovery of quantum mechanics are deterministic laws. You can take the equations of parabolic motion taught in high school as an example. If you know the initial conditions of the ball, then you know when and where it will end up.

You have claimed that Item 1 is true without justification. Perhaps you think it is self evident, but I disagree. — T Clark

If you spent a lot of time studying natural sciences, you would probably realize that all the models we use are either deterministic (almost all of them) or random (quantum mechanics, or statistics when the underlying fundamentals are too complicated to calculate).


Also, the "free" in free will means that it's not forced by anything (or that's what I imagine it means)

I always just imagined that everything we experience is a model. For example, I can't experience the true essence of water directly (otherwise I'd know that it's composed of H2O molecules upon visual inspection); I only experience its coolness and wetness and the way it distorts light.

Likewise, I cannot experience the true essence of myself, but only have a model for myself. I think of consciousness as my model for myself. Or perhaps, the model of my model.

Thus, I conceive of consciousness not as existing or not existing in a binary, but as a continuum of less or more sophisticated self-models. So, a bird grooming itself must have at least a very rudimentary model of self, and anyone practicing psychology must have a very advanced model of the self.

I do not see why having self-models has to be more mysterious than models of external objects. I suppose a necessary component of self-models is that they are recursive/reflexive, whereas models of external things point in only one direction (outwards).

Thanks for your replies, guys.

It is true that from a purely naturalistic perspective, objective morals cannot be proven. In this vein, I was more interested in describing how religions came to be and how they work, than I was interested in trying to morally justify their existence.

It is true that I look at things from the perspective of Abrahamic religions, but I don't think the main idea that religions can evolve is wrong if there are some religions that don't originate in the idea of sky father.

It sounds like that Dunbar Number is consistent with my guess about the role of religion in forming larger societies. I don't think I had heard of him before, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that other smart people thought of ideas before I did.

I guess the social cost of cannibalism is less if it takes place in very specific circumstances. I don't think the sacrifice of Jesus is like regular cannibalism in social cost because it is a unique circumstance that is not at all transferable to other people. Although, I have heard that the ancient Romans were grossed out by the practice.

As for human sacrifice, we don't have it anymore, do we? One might consider this circumstantial evidence that the practice is not as adaptive as more modern cultural practices.

I meant "beneficial" in the evolutionary sense, in that it aids with survival and reproduction. That's why I followed up with, " ...or else people would either quit believing in it, or the believers would die out." It was not a moral argument.

(re: "common" therefore "beneficial"? like e.g. poor hygiene, bigotry, sex/child abuse, theft/fraud, bullshit/lies, ignorance, superstitions, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, war, poverty, etc) — 180 Proof

I have opinions about why all those things happen, but fully addressing all of them would take a very long time. I will mention a couple things, however. "Ignorance" is the default state, so, it isn't something that needs to be actively maintained. Same for "poverty". "Bigotry" could be beneficial in the evolutionary sense if it harms rival groups more than the in-group. Theft and lies are beneficial for the individual for short-term material benefit, but these behaviors are contrary to the health of the social body, which is why we see the behavior in individuals, but the behaviors tends to be discouraged publicly. In short, one way or another, all these behaviors are good at existing, which is why we see them. Or, in the case of sexual or child abuse, perhaps these behaviors are unhealthy expressions of desires that can at other times be healthy (such as the desire to reproduce, or for social dominance).

The general consensus among Christians is that the resurrection is the good news. If that's not it, then most Christians are mistaken.

If you want to use words the way that other people use them, then I think you have to believe that Jesus rose from the dead to be a Christian, because that's what other Christians believe.

I personally love the teachings of Jesus and find them to be applicable in life, and this does not directly depend on what happened 2000 years ago. So, I could say that I try to follow Jesus, even if I don't have strong faith about the supernatural aspects.

"Christ" has a specific religious meaning. I think it means something like "savior". So, if you don't believe that Jesus saved you from something, then it makes no sense to call one's self a "Christian".

That is an interesting post. I've never thought about it that way before. But is there necessarily a contradiction in existence being evil? I usually think of "is" and "ought" as being separate, so there wouldn't seem to be a contradiction in this case for existence to be evil. However, if "objective" as you're talking about it means that there is an "ought" which is necessarily also an "is", then I suppose there can be an inherent contradiction. If I'm understanding it right, then maybe you have to more clearly define what "objective" means for the proof to hold.

Like if there were a mathematical proof "A" that proof "A" does not exist, then I agree that would be a contradiction. But if there isn't necessarily any correlation between existence and goodness, then I don't think it follows that if a mathematical proof of goodness could exist, that that proof would necessarily be good.

I have a hard time understanding what you mean because you throw out all these terms and I don't know what the terms mean. I had to look up, "Res ipsa loquitur", for instance. And throwing out those terms isn't really an argument unless the person you're speaking to already understands exactly what you mean by those terms, and they understand how you mean to apply them.

wow it sounds like you had almost the exact same idea as me years ago

You asked me to reply to comments that you had previously made.

I don't think I entirely understood the comment about pandeism. It looks like you were arguing that we are all a dream in the mind of God, and it was somehow connected to physics. I suppose I already liked to imagine that God was something like a programmer and that we are the programmed world. I suppose that's very similar to being in the mind of God.

If you define God as the unmoved mover, however, then it does not make sense to say that "everything" is God, in the same way that it would be wrong to say that the world of Minecraft "is" the developer(s) who made it.

I've looked into Spinoza briefly before and it seemed to me that his ideas on God were similar to mine. But it made more sense to me to think using my own brain than to copy what someone else thought.