As I pointed out in another recent thread about this, God could have given us free will while still making it the case that one is not free to choose to do "evil." He could have made it so that evil deeds were simply not physically possible to do, just like it's not possible to simply choose/will oneself to be invisible or massless. — Terrapin Station

Luckily, God in Its omnipotence, can erase history and restart the whole thing from point zero, with some changes implemented that differ from the present model of "world", keeping your advice in mind.

You may think I'm joking, but theoretically this is conceivable. Therefore very likely, if not perfectly true.

There's always a "butt" which leads to some fancy gymnastics... — TheMadFool

Sadly, this seems to be the case every time philosophers drag the duality of gender into consideration in their discourses. (Editing of the original quote above was done by yours truly.)

The problem of Evil and FreeWill has been likened in my bicycling group (we do 2 Km of bicycling every other day) to the problem of E-Wheel and Free Wheel. Especially among the members who, like I, have immigrated from Eastern Europe, and V and W are wholly interchangeable vowels by pronunciation for us folks.

But seriously speaking, Evil is a concept which does not exist outside of religious considerations, and Free Will has been proven to be non-existent by the secular and also by the religious, so there is not much to prouduce here. Doing bad things is not evil if there is no divine judgement. The term does not exist in the psychiatry movement or in the justice system (in the Western Democracies), both of which have more than their share of looking at horrible and inhuman experiences and behaviour by humans.

On art and on beauty I can only come up with two source reasons, why they would appeal to the human viewer. We can thank our surviving partly to liking sex (much like members of all other animal species do), and to discovering the power of hygiene. Hygiene is a powerful tool, and I believe that organized structure in visual arts (ballets included) represent a projection in our affinity to high standards of hygiene.

What else is there? I don't know, but I'm eagle to hear.

It is true that the first manifestation of visual arts (the statues of the pre-historic Venuses, cave-drawings and -paintings, as well as documented and undocumented but likely decoratons such as jewellery, skin-art, body-art and hair-art) were unseparable from religious / spiritual iconism connected to early man. But so were all other human manifestations of the time, such as hunting, killing, gathering edible plants, warring, sleeping, sex, and childbirth.

So one can argue that art is an extension of spiritual belief, but I think that is a misconception, as it creates a causational link where the link does not exist. If art was an extension of spritualism / religionism, then humans would never have developed secular art. Which is, like, 100 percent of today's artistic output / throughput, with rounding.

Maritain is underrated in my book. — Noble Dust

Yeah, these days there is not much interest in the philosophy of art and not much in the philosophy of nature, outside the latter of which being quantum mechanics, which fascinates us all.

For me, "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder", and "our sense of beauty and power to perceive it or receive it fluctuates greatly over time" covers it all. I would be curious to know if there were any other findings on beauty and on art... written in a text aimed at five-year-old readers, since my absorption capacity to read has greatly declined in the last two or three decades.

@TheMadFool How do you know you're going to die at one point? It is not proven that you'll die. Theoretically speaking, all living things are not proven to die at one point. Yet we know we'll die.

If nothing else, we'll die our hair when we get old enough. (-:

Truth or something being true can be accepted as such, even if not proven, if no counter-examples are given. In the above example, no counter-example is given to your being alive. Yet you know you will not live forever. Despite the lack of proof, and despite the lack of counter-examples. (Others' deaths are not yours; they are only people or things SIMILAR to you, but not quite you, so dead people's examples are, strictly speaking, not counter examples to your immortality.)

Nice proof, by the way, of my "theorem". Haha. You finished me off in a flash. But as a mathematician, using Google, you can surely find examples of stuff on the Internet where a theorem is not proven, but true... the only reason being for accepting it as true, is the lack of counter-examples that prove it wrong.

I can't say much else about this... you insist that for truth, the only valid criteria is a proof, esp. in mathematics. Some others think differently, and that's something I can't force you to accept, to think like them... or like us, since I am with "them" (whoever "they" are). And that, for the umpteenth time, is, that lack of counter-examples constitute a reason believe that something is true, or justified in belief.

@TheMadFool, can you also please look at the thread you invoked just here?

@TheMadFool, justification may be 100%, but justification may be not perfect, either.

If no counter-examples are found, and no proof is presented, then the justification is not perfect, but accepted as true.

For instance, if you substract a positive number from a larger positive number, you get a positive number. There is no proof for this, despite it ensuing from mathematical axioms. No proof, but then again, nobody can find a counter-example for it, either.

@Bartricks

I think it is also important to point out that I reject and resent your accusation of my not understanding an argument, my not knowing how arguments work.

I think you are so involved and have so much emotional investment in your ill-ly worded "proof", that you are consumed with emotions that prevent your ability to see reason.

This is a private opinion of mine, but I am confident it resonates with many users here.

My advice to you, unsolicited but maybe worth to use, is for you to sleep on it and look at the counter arguments that claim that your premise is invalid, tomorrow after a good night's sleep.

@Bartricks

To continue the thought from my immediately preceding post:

To wit, I corrected your saying to "... being morally valued", which you quaffed at, but I think it needed that correction in order to make the premise hold. But you decried that improvement, and therefore you, yourself, denied the truth of your own statement (after the implementation of the improvement, without which improvement your statement in the premise was clearly wrong.)

Your premiss is false. It contradicts with the way things are. Need I spell it all out for you? — creativesoul

Yes. You. Do. Which premise? Spell it out. But in my words, not yours. Paste the premise and then tell me how anything I've said contradicts it. — Bartricks

This premis is wrong, @Bartricks

1. For something to be morally valuable is for it to be being valued — Bartricks

In reality anyone can value anything withoiut making it morally valuable. This is the reason we keep telling your that your premise is false.

I can say that a particular house is worth two hundred thousand dollars. Is this valuation? Yes, it is, I state the value of something. So it satisfies your statement of "being valued". Is this moral valuation? No it is not, a simple monetary worth has nothing to do with moral behaviour. Therefore your premise is false, because it names a process that is not true in every instance that it entails in its wording.

I'm not providing references - this is the internet!! Just look them up if you don't believe me. I mean, Nietzsche is probably the most famous atheist in the world - and he was writing his works precisely in order to prepare people for the realization that as 'God is dead' there are no moral values, just our own - and Hobbes, well, Hobbes was a thoroughgoing materialist who, though he could never say explicitly that he did not believe in any gods (that would literally have cost him his life), was known as the 'beast of Malmesbury' precisely because everyone nevertheless thought (no doubt correctly) that he was an atheist. — Bartricks

These: Hobbes and Nietzsche are far from being far as a representative sample of atheists viewing morality.

I think moral values are demonstrably subjective. Here is my simple argument:

1. For something to be morally valuable is for it to be being valued.
2. Only a subject can value something
3. Therefore, for something to be morally valuable is for it to be being valued by a subject. — Bartricks

To present your argument, this argument needs to be reworded, as it is rather sloppy as presented.

1. For something to be morally valuable, that something needs to be morally valued.
2. Only a subject can value something.
3. Therefore, for something to be morally valuable, that something must be morally valued by a subject.

(Reason for improvement in wording: A spoon can be valued at 44 cents, so valuing in and by itself is not sufficient. It needs to be valued MORALLY.)

You say the premise and the logic are infallible, so your argument is infallible.

But they are not. Placing a moral value on something by a subject could be universal, that is, absolute or else the placing could be subjective. The stipulation in 1 and 2 do not exclude the possibility that the moral value the subject places on something is universal. NOT every subject must place a moral value on a universal moral value; it is sufficient if only some subjects place a moral value on a universally valuable morality.

Think of it this way: Two blind chickens are pecking at the ground, picking up small pebbles, hoping that one of the pebbles will be an edible piece of grain. One will find grain pieces repeatedly, the other will never find the grain. (Say, within a time period of an hour.) Do the grain exist, and its nutritional value exist? Yes. Does the one chicken that finds it see it justified to believe that the grain and its nutritional value exist? Yes. Does the second one find that? No. Yet the grain exists.

Two people valuate their actions for morals. Neither of them is on the opinion that universal morals exist. They just blindly, haphazardly keep changing behaviour, trying to find the ultimately absolute moral behaviour. One repeatedly finds this behaviour; he will feel good, he will feel that he acted morally. The other never finds this behaviour. He will not have the experience of feeling good due to moral behaviour. But absolute morality, despite not having been found by the second subject, exists.

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

P.s. I don't believe in absolute morals. But I am also on the opinion that your argument is not fool proof or irrefutable, as I have shown it above.

RICHARD DAWKINS: I very much hope that we don't revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It's undoubtedly the reason why we're here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live. It would be a sort of Thatcherite society and we want to - I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

I think he missed the point by a long shot. Societies survive which are fit to survive, and humans survive which are fit to survive. "Fittest" is not a pinnacle at which one and only one specimen exists; "fittest" could be a group in which there are varying degrees of "fit".

Humans survive in human societies because they attain a level of fitness that is needed for survival.

Uncanni, how old are you?

How old is everybody?

Or how old is nobody here?

I wonder what Elie Wiesel would tell us the opposite of hate is. — JosephS

Submission. To the will of an other.

Hatred gets borne from the lack of control. Submission gets borne from the willing giving up of control.

That's what Elie Wiesel would say.

And a lot of stupidity. For example, I once encountered someone who suggested that it would be true that our planet is hexagonal — S

Give the guy some credit, S. He wasn't too far off the mark -- after all, the planet's practically all gone hexadecimal.

A Star is the symbol of the Female while a black hole is the male symbo — Andreas

True.

But I always thought the Big Bang was the male and the Black Hole, the female.

As a child, I was convinced that buses were male, and streetcars, female. When I saw a collision between two buses, I figured they were gay.

Also, I was convinced that dogs were male, cats female, without an exception. Imagine my surprise the first time I was called an a..hole! I mean, a s of a b. (I often confuse the two terms.)

Are meals female, and chairs male? Or the other way around? One you eat, the other, you sit on.

Balloons are absolutely male.

Air pumps are AC / DC.

Kitchen floors are male. That's why they resemble husbands. You lay them properly the first time around, and you can walk all over them for the rest of your life.

Hydroelectric power dams are male. They just hadn't had female company for waaaay too long.

Just take a PSYCH class. — Swan

True.

Or take an English Lit class. Or just simply listen to what people say.

"I hate it when the streetcar cuts off my left leg."

"I hate it when the ambulance driver sounds the siren more than s/he should."

"I hate it when people don't pull over when they hear an ambulance."

"I hate it when I have to pull over for an ambulance."

"I hate it when they put celery in my stew."

"I hate celery."

"I hate it when people put a space after a word before an immediately following dot, semi-colon, period, or other marks."

I hate it when people don't listen to and ignore the nuances of the language.

Or cofused minded people. We make mistakes. — Coben

True.

I learned a long time ago, and taught many people this (at least two people internalized it):

"Never attribute to malice what you can explain away with stupidity."

Or cofused minded people. We make mistakes. — Coben

I guess I had slipped into a pre-post modernist stance. Yikes.

↪A Gnostic Agnostic sin is defined as disobedience toward god, or gods. — hachit

This is a hard-and-fast definition, but those who are not convinced of any god's or gods' existence, are they able to behave sinfully?

Guilt rides on the sinful, on the criminal, and on the unconscienable. The presence of guilt alone does not establish a sure measure of sinfulness.

Some scriptures are clear what god(s) want(s) from its believers, but not all scriptures are, and some are self-contradictory. So the scriptures would be an obvious starting point and ending point in learning precisely what sinful behaviour is, but they are not.

If my grandson and granddaughter asked me, "Grampa, what is sin?" I would be stuck for an answer. "Why, my little darlings, sin is when you pee in Grampa's soup and you don't tell anyone. Sin is when you play house. Sin is not taking your puppy out for a walk for two days in a row. Sin is pulling your cat's tail. Sin is telling a blind man bent on crossing the street that there is nothing coming when there isn't."

I agree with the spirit of this, but I don't consider hate evil. — Coben

SOMEthing must be evil. Or else it's a word coined by evil-minded people who wanted to release the evil of meaningless concepts on mankind.

"In order to truly hate others, you must first learn to hate thy own self."

you cannot control what isn't real — PhilCF

I can't control what is not real, or what is real.

Can you?

Can you control the situation in the Middle East, which is real?

Can you control climate change, which is real?

Can you control the problems borne by the population explosion?

You can control to realize where you are and to feel the ground under you. That is a control everyone should admire? Or aim at? It is precious little control. If everyone had the same control, can you envision what the world would be like? Or let's say, the good guys had no more control than what you advise, but the bad guys had guns, control lives, drive us (good guys) into slavery, rape our children, etc. etc. Take our food, our clothes, our shelters... but hey, you have the ground under you, which gives your life meaning.

If it does, good for you. I don't have any problems with that. If that's all you need to get a meaning of life, then I'm all for you to pursue that lifestyle.

Peace is eternal. — PhilCF

So is hell.

Therefore eternality is not an argument for meaning of life.

Plus life ends at one point. What do I do with the eternal peace that is left over after my life ends?

Every single major religious text that is not interpreted by man confirms it. — PhilCF

1. So whom are those major religious texts interpreted by? If not by men and / or women, children. Those parts of religious texts that are interpreted by Godzilla, The Loc Ness Monster, and Bigfoot confirm your claim. I like that.

2. Or you mean the parts that do not need interpretation? Then are you talking about the entire text, or about select parts of it?

3. I have a strong suspicion your argument falls in the category of fallacies called "appeal to authority". Plus you refer to an alleged text without the support of actual quotes.

4. If I accepted your argument on the basis of 3, then you'd necessarily need to accept my argument that peace is not happiness, or it does not lead to happiness, and every major religious text that is not interpreted by man confirms it.

5. Your argument (as per 3.) and mine, expressed in four, share the simple force of referring to nothing in particular, while claiming it exists.

6. You can win this argument (i.e. that my reference is not as valid as yours) easily if you show the particular texts you have had in mind when you said what I quoted by you while at the same time I can't show you my references of my claim.

"Someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to" — TWI

Some things came easy to him, some harder. "Someone to love", well, he was popular.

Something to do... yes, he had he means and the motivation.

Something to look forward to... what brand new, novel experience do you give to a man who has everything?

I think to live in peace, or with peace, is a life where you have no debts, where your income is greater than your expenses, where you can eat as much as you want or need, where you know your future is secure.

But does that make you happy? Eating, counting your money, and relaxing?

I think you need diversions that keep your interest. Peace alone is very, very boring. It is a prerequisite to happiness, but alone, peace is boring. You need some spice: drama, if not in your life, then watching it on tv, reading it in a book, or gossipping about it with the neighbours (in a good sense); you need to dance and sing when elated, and curse smash thing around when frustrated, and make furious love (even just to yourself, if no partner) when aroused.

And most importantly you need to make sense of all this; ponder the little and big things in life, have some "alone time" to think, and sort and analyze and organize your thoughts. Some call it meditation, (it's not the transcendental kind, but the everyman's kind), some call it introspection, some call it philosophy.

It is good to have the solid ground felt under your feet, and it is good to feel the pain and hear the floor creak and the cricket crick; but if that's all you do day in and day out, it's gonna get pretty mundane, and you'll yearn for an escape.

I expect the MODs to shut down this thread in short order. I am pulling out, because I don't want to waste my time on posts that will be deleted.

I already said my peace. If you disagree, fine, state your reasons, but I shan't respond here and now.

The unthinking behavior of humanity does not belong on a philosophy forum; — Janus

the description of it does, though.

The forum is a community of which I am a member. It's not ownership, it's membership. — T Clark

I am a member and my opinion is different. This is strictly a value based opinion. I reject the validity that some members' idea what constitutes "ruining" should be accepted by all members. This is my right as a member, much like you think you all members must assume your position. The difference is you take ownership of all members' opinion ("our forum") whereas I allow differences to be coexisting, and to thrive. You deny that right form others, "becaus they ruin OUR forum". This is not a direct quote, but a quote to denote this is what I think you are saying and are expressing with your words.

I don't hate you or your beliefs. I don't hate anyone or anything. — T Clark

You said this earlier many times. Your religion dictates you to say this. Your other expressions bely your honest efforts to obey this tenet. You are failing at it. (As per your other expressions. I am not inside your head, I can only go by what I read. "I calls them as I sees them.")

So, the "bread and butter" of unthinking humanity should be valued? Or? — Janus

You missed the point. This is part of humanity, thinking or unthinking. It is part of humanity that can't be divorced from humanity. You may want to disagree, fair enough. Put your reasons down, this is a philosophy forum.

our forum. — T Clark

You claim ownership of this forum. This is rich.

even your warped view of it. — T Clark

stop the assholes — T Clark

You can't even separate your personal hatred from your world view. You can't not introduce your personal bias into any argument, claim or statement. You are one of the strongest examples of the tribal behaviour I described, along with my own persona.

As per my previous post, no reason or logic is needed in support of one's effort in trying to proselytise his or her position and ideology.

But there are practical reasons. The religious claim that the lack of fear of god will release a flood of unethical, immoral behaviour. The atheists claim that the religious suppress the dissemination of knowledge due to their fear of the masses turning away from the scriptures, which teach nonsense in today's scientific realism.

These are logical reasons, but in reality have nothing to do with the issue. They are just rationalizations, in the continuing fight of tribalism.

Simply put, it's tribalism.

A member of a different tribe gets integrated fully if and only if s/he not only accepts the societal and personal institutions and morals, but also accepts the religion of the tribe adopting him or her.

This is a primal and indelible instinct in humans.

I am an atheist, and as such, try to destroy religionism and recruit more members to my ideology.

The religious do the same thing. Recruit members for their ideology, and destroy other ideologies.

This is so much human nature. Nobody can override this. Not the MODs, nobody. This is the bread and butter of humanity.

Thanks for highlighting what I wrote previously - I find that atheists are primarily responsible for whatever conflict there is. — T Clark

You're putting the carriage in front of the horse. According to you, as I understand, it is not the fault of stupid, outdated, unsubstantiated and improbable beliefs and their ensuing dogma that is the cause of stirfe and conflict, but the people who point out that the dogmas are borne from improbable beliefs, from stupid, outdated, and unsubstantiated claims.

You realize that you have made a brilliant argument on the side of religion, the aim of which is to stop, stifle and squelch any progress, any creative and logical thought, to silence all those whose thinking can carry the world ahead, instead of keeping the masses steeped deep in ignorant dogma.

If you don't start behaving yourself, you'll find out what the belly-aching is about. — Bitter Crank

Excuse me. Is this a threat?