Sorry, PFHorrest, I'm a bit tired these days. I don't have much energy to read. I'm sort of hybernating my brain. My gf says it's the mid-winter blues. It's cold here, 28 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus three degrees Celsius, with a high wind. And that is normal for this time of the year.

right on.

How about "a four sided triangle?"

Or..."a circle with corners?" — Frank Apisa

Haha... those are not things. Name a THING.

There are many arguments why those figures can't exist... I won't go into that as there are many arguments already on this very same forum. Short-and-long of it, if you define something that violates the law of the excluded middle (a circle which has no corners which has corners) then you define something that necessarily is false, and therefore not a thing.

I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...

...so I don't. — Frank Apisa

So you don't believe in god.

You either believe or you don't. If you are not venturing a guess in either direction, then you don't. There is no middle ground. It's dictated by the law of the excluded middle.

A few Corollaries:

"I will go to Teheran. Or I won't. I don't know it yet. I won't venture a guess." So you don't go to Teheran.

ETC.

You're not responding to the argument I made. — Coben

I fully responded. You don't comprehend complex thought. That's not my fault.

Like off the top of my head Newton, say. And there are many modern examples who not only are smarter than your summation, but smarter than most of the participants in this forum, like, say, Gerhard Ertl. — Coben

Fallacy of "Appeal to authority". Go home already

This doesn't fit my argument either. I am saying that if an agnostic makes the positive claim: God is capable of existing, that is an extremely strong ontological statement. — Coben

No, it's not The reply to this, is for you to name something that is not capable of existing. You demonstrated that you can't name such a thing. You even deflected the challenge as not part of the argument. But it is a very essential part of the argument. Becasue EVERYTHING is capable of existence. God included, whether it is existing or not.

Is an incredibly convoluted belief to have. — Coben

That's why most atheists say they are also agnostic, whereas a religious person never says that. It is not possible for a religious person to comprehend anything more complex beyond "let's have a drink".

That 'agnostic' would have an extremely complicated positive belief about ontology and metaphysics. — Coben

He does not have to. He just can't both believe and not beleive in god. That's the simple version for the benefit of the religious.

Wow! How does one know that the universe or reality is such that gods are capable of existing? — Coben

Can you name something that is NOT capable of existing? I challenge you to name anything that can't exist (outside of god).

that a deity is capable of existing. On the other hand the agnostic can say 'I cannot rule it out. — Coben

I don't see any difference between the two. "I cannot rule it out" is the same as "Not impossible" which also means "potentially"

To say that they believe a deity is capable of existing means they have a positive beliet that given the ontology of deities and the make up of reality, God's are capable of existing. — Coben

...and that's what agnostics precisely state, without the italicized part. If you take out the italics (your addtition) then you get back to precisely what I said.

I said nothing of ontology of deities. god may be totally different or similar or the same as our imagination has dictated. But all of god's nature is mere conjecture. One thing is only sure: it exists or it does not exists. What it's like is yet another can of worms.

Its not arbitrary because it never changes, — DingoJones

Arbitrary can easily be permanent

If morals are part of god's essential nature, it is not arbitrary then, as long as god was not created. However, we, humans, are at a loss of using that definition as our moral guidance. What IS god's essential nature? Books and books and books have been written about it by people who never met god, and whohad never met anyone who had met god. God may or may not exist, it's true; but we, humans, are not in a position to learn about the nature of god. Heck, we don't even know for sure he exists.

So, while DCT is a good starting point at defining morals as an objective quality, it stops its ufefulness at the very inception of it, as it gives no guidance about the nature of morals beyond the fact that it's god's essential nature, who, by any theological magnifier, is inscrutable. And we have consensus on that.

one awesome person on the internet. — Michael

Jey. That's one awesome stink-bomb if I ever saw any. (-:

apathetic
anomaly
agnosticism
are
apple
Abel
anglican
aromatic
azt a leborult szivar vegit!

A- in front of a word taken from Greek negates it.

To negate a French- or Germanic origin word, stick a non- or an un- in front of it. French: uncomplicated. German: ungestraubfuhrerinzeugholmisserandkriegestufferei. Mixed: underarm deodorant (hey! de- is another Greek prefix to negate!)

Latin? in- for negation. For instance, "IN RI" or "incommunicado" or "incontinent" etc.

I am sorry. I don't mean they are the same. Happiness is pleasureable. Happiness is one of the many forms of pleasure.

I misspoke.

If DCT means Divine Command Theory, then your objection of Aleph Numbers' not answering your proposition is false. Because all one needs to do to destroy your DCT is to not believe in the divine. Then the DCT falls apart immediately.

That's A.

B. is that even the DCT is not objective. It was designed by someone, or thought up, or invented, to the faithful, by god. So it does not rest on some general, a priori unassailable logic or truth, it is arbitrary. Arbitrary, by god, for sure, (to the religious), but still arbitrary.

I define myself as the ultimate moral arbiter and everything I command is objective because I say so. Now kneel. — Aleph Numbers

Read my latest post and tell me what's wrong with it. Please. — Aleph Numbers

The only thing wrong with it is that not all others are going to buy your definition. If they bought it, they would kneel.

Directly the same applies to religions and their god's arbitrary moral authority. If you believe in that god, it's gospel to you. If not, then it's completely ignorable.

don't think either hedonism or the satisfaction of appetite provides that. — Wayfarer

Why not? You have to show that.

Pleasure can be attained by helping others. By satisfying one's sense of empathy.

Pleasure can be attained by self-sacrifice for the greater good.

I don't know why you insist that hedonic motivation is "below the level" of the topic.

many of the items on your list are not emblematic of pleasure so much as of happiness, — Wayfarer

Happiness is pleasure. You can't say happiness is neutral or suffering.

You are still incapable of divorcing the concept of pleasure from phyisical pleasure. That is a limitation I wish you to overcome.

Compare Freud: to him, this principle was libido. That too has a narrow meaning - sexual appetite - but also a broader one, which manifests in all kinds of ways, as it is something like 'the will to live'. But the main reason Jung broke from Freud was exactly because he felt Freud's 'libido' was too narrow to account for human drives generally. — Wayfarer

Precisely. You are stuck on pleasure = libido; I am trying to make you see that pleasure = anything that feels good. (Including intellecutal, moral, and sacrificial pleasures.)

Oh, shawn, you're wallows.

If my memory serves me right, you asked a whole bunch of unanswerable existential quesitons relating to psychiatric diseases, that somewhat resembled the following:

"Why not suicide?"
"Who else around here is depressed?"
"What to do with ennui?"
"I can't exist. Solution?"

And the like.

I don't think they are questions a philosopher can answer, be they amateur or professional. They need to be heard by a psychiatrist.

Or in other words, there doesn't seem to be some hard limit imposed on the field of philosophy in regards to question asking of a nonsensical order, or not? — Shawn

There are several SEMANTIC errors here; it is not that you ask an unanswerable question, it is that you use English words that don't together make any sense, and that is not something what we call "sensible question". No, it is not in Swahili. But no table a turn hibernates congratulationally, either.

You seem to want to equate nonsensical questions with questions that are hard or impossible to answer.

There is a big difference. A hard or impossible question still can have sense, and it can convey meaning and insight. A nonsensical question, such as yours, is void of insight and has no sense.

This may be ONE thing the moderators are squashing.

I haven't seen a sample of your questions already banned, but if they are equally as nonsensical, then I am not surprized they are banned, and you ought not to be, either.

I do not know how rabbits would view that application. -- Russell. — CeleRate

The implication is that the design is faulty. It can be shown that that proposition is false.

Rabbits had several utility functions in the design; guns did, too.

This is where they intersect.

The happiness of rabbits has nothing to do, or has limited application, with the design.

That's A. B. is, that we have NO PROOF whether the rabbits think it's not a good thing to be shot so humans can have their fun. Rabits revelling in being sport targets or food for humans and predators is not impossible, and if the design is well done, then it is a valid assumption to imbue on the design.

(For the record, I am a rabid anti-designist. I just abhor counter-logical arguments, even if on the surface they help my cause or support what I believe in. The bigger the man or woman who utters them, the more pleasure for me to debunk their stupidity.)

Well done, A Seagull; explaining concepts at the level that ought to be obvious to a ten-year-old is too tedious for me.

Much like in math, it is easy to prove the sinus theorem (Sin(alpha))^ + (Cos(alpha))^2 = 1, but it is almost impossible to prove that 2 + 2 = 4. The simpler the terms and the more in-your-face, the harder to explain they are to someone who can't get them. I give up on that sort of exercise.

I have to admire the fact, however, that you chewed your way through that wall of text. PFHorrest indeed has a tendency to prolixity. It is the one thing that stops me from reading his posts. The only thing.

Wayfarer I am afraid you understand the word "pleasure" in a very restricted sense. To you it may only mean base, or not base, physical pleasure.

Reading the text, to me what PFHorrest means by "pleasure" or more specificially, "hedonism" or "hedonistic reward" is the good feelings accompanying any of the following (not an exhaustive list) independent of each other:

accomplishment
physical pleasing
emotional well being and rapture
happiness
satisfaction with life
peace with the world and with oneself
knowing to have paid one's own dues properly
lack of contention other than in entertaining activities not intended to hurt someone (sports, games, card games, games of skills and / or chance)
loving and being loved
seeing your young flourish
etc.

I guess, all of this, religion, war is simply a reflection of how corrupt humans are and while we may have been gifted with rationality, our animal nature still reigns supreme sometime. — StarsFromMemory

This suggests that animals are corrupt. Are they? (Wars happen when humans become corrupt and wars happen when the animal nature of humans reigns supreme.)

You and I read and studied and believe the teachings of completely different textbooks on history.

The WWI was started over the squeezing out of the countries that formed the Axis powers of the possession of colonies and thus out of the riches the colonies offered to their European owners.

Germany had two measly colonies in Africa; Austria-Hungary had no colonies other than "Franz Jozef Land" in the Arctic north of Russia. Turkey had mainly barren, desert land, and the crude oil in its possessions in the middle east was not an issue then.

In contrast, the rest of Africa was owned by Britain, Portugal and France; Canada and Australia were quasi-colonies of England the Glorious; India was fully an English colony.

"The sun never sets over the British empire". It rose and set over the German-Austrian empires within a few hours of each other.

Great response, ! I learned from you more about the nature of the Ubermensch than from anyone else before, including Nietzsche himself. I ain't joking and I am truly grateful.

Metaphorical expressions always present some difficulty via some unavoidable ambiguity. This is what saved the Christian faith and churches. The Bible was converted from factual to metaphorical, thus saved because it became a book up for interpretation and arguable ambiguity, instead of the original intention of getting written, which was to recount straight facts.

There are still some churches and Christian sects which consider the Bible to be believed on face value of its claims, such as by the Baptists; this explains one of the highest rates of apostatism among all Christian churches (up to 20% of followers per lifetime, by some estimates.)

No sweat. (-:

This is a common folk or cultural myth, and a rather naïve and superstitious one at that; in reality, however, it's highly debatable that whatever the inherent traits which manifested themselves in "religious" wars are, that they exist solely within a "religious" contest, often simply using a simplistic, superstitious, or nonsense definition of "religion" to begin with and reinforced via circular reasoning.

It's arguable that there was a strong profit motive in every war, whether marketed as "religious" otherwise, much, as how most wars in civilized, 1st world nations are motivated by national pride or ideology (e.x. nationalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, etc), rather than "resources" as ignorant and false childish myths about war tell people or insinuate (it's "resources" for the war, not "war for resources) - there isn't arguably any practical difference between a war in the name of a "religion", and won in the name of any other type of ideology or political stance.

Given that scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology, as well as most of the philosophies of major law and legal systems or institutions (e.x. Common Law theory; Zimbardo's Standford Prison Experiment) more or less confirm that warfare and violence among men and women is an innate part of who we are (not a good one to devolve into, but a part of one nonetheless), such as having roots in biology, I would like to think that silly and archaic notions such as the above would be extinct rather than continuing to be blindly repeated. — IvoryBlackBishop

I so totally agree with this post.

Although some wars are ideology based (such as the recent wars in Nicaragua, in Viet Nam, in Cuba), most wars are economics-based. Scarce resources or the control over them are fought for.

Also, one might argue for saying that wars over ideology reflect on the longer term a war over economics, too.

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

It is interesting to note, however, that the argument you, IvorbyBlackBishop, made was not against something one of the atheists said on this board, but was against what 3017Amen said. This I believe is noteworthy.

Probably more accurate to say that religious belief and education are inversely correlated. — Pinprick

Also, probably very accurate to say that religious belief and innate intelligence are inveresely proportional. (I.e. the more religious, the less likely to be intelligent, and the more intelligent, the less likely to be religious. --- explanation given here for the benefit of our more relgious brothers on these forums.)

Exceptions exist. Coben is smart.

(There is no inverse correlation... only negative, positive, or none. (-: )

Good idea, TheMadFool. And like all good ideas (and like all bad ideas) it has been done. One such example is this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Introduction-Comparative-Philosophy-Travel-Philosophical/dp/0333930681
An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy: A Travel Guide to Philosophical Space Paperback – Oct 24 2007 by Walter Benesch (Author)
I simply googled "books on comparative philosophy for beginners". It may not refect perfectly what you propose is a fulfilment to a need currently felt, but it may be close.

It's hard to say what free will is. It's hard to even get people to think seriously about the question: they would rather argue endlessly about "free will" than think about the question that ought to be addressed before anything else. — SophistiCat

And yet you, yourself, proposet that we clarify what free will is, before answering the question; and then you blast everyone for not answering the question; which is actually "Has anyone done this before", yet you very elegantly also don't answer the question.

Where am I, and why am I here? This is not a deep philosophical question here that I asked, but a practical one.

My question is this:

If I have a good basic understanding of Nietzsche; does this mean that Nietzsche saw everything as bleak, meaningless and harsh? Another question is: Would his overman would end up being an iconoclastic narcissistic brute who carves out his own meaning for himself on his own terms? — Agathob

The better Nietzscheans here can answer your questions better. Until they do:

One thing I can say confidentally: Nietzsche wasn't looking to supplant one (Apollonian) with the other Dionysian). He thought both were necessary.

He also, definitely, didn't think we should create new values from scratch. He didn't want us to repeat old values, sure, but the process of creating new values isn't sketching on a blank canvas. — csalisbury

I fail to see how this answer answers the two questions asked.

And the difference being? — TheMadFool

More than semantic.

If you ask what's the difference between use and purpose, then please refer to a dictionary. I speak and write in English. Describing plain, commonly understood concepts, with words that are plain and commonly understood. If you are unable to tell the difference between use and purpose on your own, then it's no use to tell you.

Body parts can be viewed as serving a purpose, I can't deny that. But it also can't be denied that body parts do NOT serve a purpose, they just haphazardly formed to be useful. And what's the use? To make the individual survive and bring forth more individuals like himself or herself. This is a USE, not a PURPOSE.

So... if you view your body parts as made and created for a purpose, then the theory stands. If the body parts are not viewed as made for a purpose -- which is an equally as valid view as the other -- then the theory in the OP is meaningless.

Take your pick, it's a free world.

I seem to be arguing against defining morals as science, but there is another approach that makes that possible. I can't describe it here, as it merits publication, which I can't expedite, since I don't have a doctorate or masters in philosophy, so editors of scientific and professional / academic journals will outright reject my manuscript.

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others — Chomsky

Ah. Noam Chompsky.

The minimal moral level as stated by him can be argued against, too.

Take the persona of a state executioner. A person who kills people who have been condemned to death by the court systems.

Does he or she practice what he preaches against? Is he or she immoral?

Or take the case of a collaborator against Nazi oppression. Does his or her lying make him or her amoral?

Chompsky ought to have known better. But he does not.

He's one of my pet idiots, like Immanuel Kant.

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? How do you jump the is-ought gap? — SophistiCat

No system of morality owns morality. Of course the followers and advocates of theists systems believe and advocate that moral truths come from gods, which can be shot down in a few good arguments, as easily as the morality as viewd to be such by secular schools of thoughts.

What I am trying to say is that you CAN'T ask yourself, nobody can, what any of anything has to do with being moral. Once you ask that question, you're lost. So why blame the builders of optimized utilitarianism, when the same question can't be answered with a satisfactorily delimiting definition by anyone else, either?

Are we saying that Nietzsche (**N) was a mysogynist? I don't know if we are saying that. It is not a claim. It is a question.

But if we indeed are saying that, then please consider that his sister ALLEGEDLY did a lot of editing of N's writings, after his death and before the first publication of his work(s).

Is it possible that his own sister was a woman-hater?

Malice, you must have heard the joke about the two religious dudes who got so happy that they ate each other's shit.

alcontali, you are an Islamic fundamentalist and I stop arguing with you at this point out of fear. Fear for my physical well-being, for my life. You are one person who belongs to the sect that kills the French editorial staff, who hunts down the guy who wrote that book and is in secretive exile. I have no interest in running for my life from the likes of you.

You settle philosophical matters by killing your opponents.

So far I am still alive because I battle only Christians on their beliefs. I shalt never battle Muslims. For fear of being hurt or killed for it.

Religious people are not envious of atheists. — alcontali

It's your word against mine. We both have reasons to support our opinions, but they are opinions verifiable only by empirical means and both of us lack the statistical verification required.

You did not convince me. I still am on the opinion, and you can't deny that it's as valid as yours.

Religious people are not angry at atheists. — alcontali

Again, you are one religious person. Do you dwell in the minds of all religious people? No. Your argument is as valid or invalid as mine.

"to err is human" is an English proverb. Formed by thousands of years of folk wisdom. Ask them why they made such a ridiculous proverb.

Anger is anger. — 3017amen

Incredibly bright and astute insight.

The question becomes what should one do with that anger. — 3017amen

You don't do anything with anger. (Obviously you've never been angry, otherwise you'd know.) Anger is the resolution of an untenable situation. It is the final result, it is not something that you do something with. It makes you do things, it does not let you do things to it. You are getting farther and farther away from your clear insight, which you expressed as "Anger is anger".