I think the pro-abortion materialist centered culture is worse off than religious people looking for pappa in the sky. People in the West struggle to find things that stimulate them anymore. Those who embrace this instead of being Christian or finding a better way (what try to do) are nihilist by embracing pride in their modern world instead of being open to change

Buddhism doesn't promote lack of meaning. The lack of meaning in life causes a lot of suffering in the West

Nihilism has caused more problems for the West than religion I think, but I promote neither. I try to pursue philosophy and encourage others to as well

Schellings mix of mythology with philosophy in his mid career is interesting and under appreciated

In the Catholic church they usually take a more allegorical stance. And if the Flood left the Ark on a mountain, the Flood would have to have flooded the world considering that the water would keep rushing into other regions

Schopenhauer was concerned with reducing suffering because our life goals are unattainable. It is good to have goals in life but narcissism is seen as the root of our problem. Christianity usually fosters the kind of narcissism that Buddhism warns against

I think Schopenhauer saw Christianity as a holding on to life instead of a letting go towards death. Kant seemed to think that life was irrational in many ways (his antimonies) while Schelling, Fitche, and Hegel thought the world was logic (modern people now say the world is math). Schopenhauer thought the world irrational in many ways, returning to Kant, and thought preparing for death better than being attached to an idea of God and the creation one thinks God made. He was less Christian in this regard by saying we can't figure the world out because the will that governs is not rational

The sounds pretty ridiculous to me. There might be a flying monster drinking from a teapot on Venus, but it sounds ridiculous to entertain it as a possibility

1) the Flood was most intense during 40 days out of 150. That's how people read religious text

2) with the clean animals, a pair was consecrated as special while the other 6 others entered as well. Reconciling verses in this way is what religious interpretation is about

My argument is that the flood was about 30 feet high according to Genesis and the ark 600 ft long. And this ark lands on a mountain. Something doesn't add up if you want to take this literally. Unless, of course, the base of the mountain is part of the mountain. I find the Bible completely ridiculous, to be clear, and I don't believe believing in God makes someone wise

40 days of a certain activity and 110 days of a different degree of activity. I don't see your three examples as contradictions. Noah had a different ritual for the each selection of animals. It about ritual renewing of the earth

Matter is not stupid. It has laws within it

Any order we find in nature is beautiful and does not need a cause which is uncaused. Kant spoke of purpose with purposelessness in nature and this makes a lot of sense. Any object is fully actual as itself, its potentiality being its actuality which can change into something else. Potentiality is not a feature of anything. A thing is all it is in relation to its moment. Time itself may be circular, with objects in it appearing just to disappear. This is the world of samsara.

If we believe in miracles, or to be more exact, for people who believe in miracles, what are the options? — FreeEmotion

1) Jesus could have been akin to a Hindu guru, thinking he and everyone were one with God. Maybe everyone's atman (soul) is united in a sense with Brahmin (God) and anyone can do miracles with enough faith. That is one *religious* way to understand the Bible. Latter believers made Jesus into the "one" God

2) Any power, good or bad, in the universe could have given Jesus powers. I don't see performing miracles as a likely thing that could happen, but if someone did there is no way to tell where the power is coming from. The problem with Christians is there narcissism in thinking that God is always giving them signs

If we believe in miracles, or to be more exact, for people who believe in miracles, what are the options? Surely they are not unlimited. — FreeEmotion

What limits? There are miracles claims being claimed this very day across the world. It depends on what you want to believe.

It is possible to harmonize the flood account as a local even — FreeEmotion

Noah landed on the "mountains of Ararat". So the flood got very very high. How could a local one do this?

Well I would not call it a Jesus Legend. — FreeEmotion

Much of the Gospels seem to be history, except for the raising of dead people and the virgin birth and stuff. At least, it's asmuch history as any ancient texts can be assumed to be. Language has changed so much we can't be sure what miracle claims were meant to say back then. What does giving a blind man his sight mean to someone in ancient times? That why I said the study of ancient text is not very reliable for literal truth. The way we write history today may not be the same as how they wrote stuff back than. This was 2000 bloody years ago for christ sake. I think Jesus did and said much of what the Gospels say, but his followers obviously added some things that, if taken literally, make the Gospels religious texts and not history as we now understand that

The *likelihood* that we can translate the Bible with enough accuracy to really understand what was written is *far* lower than the likelihood science is wrong in saying the world is very old. Science does a much better job with clarity than texual scholars

The West has a very linear idea of time because of the influence of Genesis and Revelation in the Bible. The Jews who wrote the Old Testament had a particular culture they were keeping intact. I think the Christians ran with the Jesus legend and basically appropriated Judaism for a global religion and added tons of stuff that orthodox Jews did and do believe is inconsistent with the spirit of their religion

You can reads the text as saying God formed every beast of the field every fowl of the air in anticipation of what Adam would need. After all, it is talking about the mind of God in the second account, not the literal series of creation as to the first. The two sections have different intents theologically

Bottom line: study of ancient texts is not as reliable as the mountain of evidence science has that the world is old. The two fields of study are not *comparable* on this issue. Science is clearly more reliable

The Genesis account is consistent with itself but not with science. Christians have their ways of reading Genesis but they have to be very doubtful of science to say the universe has been around for in 7 thousand years. The world would have to be irrational in a high degree for science to be wrong on this and why do Christians think their translations of ancient texts is more reliable than science on this? It doesn't make sense

I don't think the universe is infinite except in the sense that a circle has an infinite path. Events don't last so there is no infinity in the past. Every moment is really the next moment. The number of motions that may have happened is not fully infinite because motion of something material in motion is as well blurred within time.

Another point I have learned from Heidegger is that a thing's potentiality *is* it's actuality. If a chair can be burned it is because it is actually a chair. Heidegger puts the brakes on this encountering of beings by saying we don't know what Being means (at least not fully) however

I don’t see Heidegger as an agnostic. It seems to me that God is only a coherent concept if it implies the good, and the good is only coherent if it can be located as a a stably self-identical sense. But I don’t see that the good is any particular sense, feeling, meaning that continues to be itself over time for Heidegger. The basis of Being is difference , difference destroys the ability to locate the ‘good’ as a coherent notion whose meaning we can locate, and this makes the notion of god , whether as a person or force or energy or inner self , incoherent. — Joshs

Sartre says something like this near the beginning of Being and Nothingness. I think we all, however, struggle with some sense of someone else telling us what to do with our conscience, something foreign to us in our own consciousness. So I don't think we should numb this out but instead be open to all possibilities about what the truth of reality might be

I don't see pantheism, panentheism, and theism as contradictory. They are aspects of the same thing. However, Hegel thought an Absolute Idea logically uses syllogisms to "make" (or rather, is) phenomena and our consciousness. Hegel agreed we have will, but thought logic was the ground of everything. I don't think Hegel thought God was a person. Heidegger seems to share this agnosticism. But what bothered all these German thinkers was that they couldn't figure themselves out. It's as if they felt someone else was behind the scenes in their private noumena with them, but knew not who it was

I'm going to have to analyze that latter, since I'm going to lunch and that quotation doesn't make sense to me

I will read those and start a thread about them sometime. Thanks.

Heidegger ends Being and Time with Hegel, and he was also influenced by Schelling. The latter wrote "If one understands (by intellectual intuition) an intuition that corresponds to the content of the subject-object, one can speak of an intellectual intuition, not of the subject, but of reason itself... Reason is there the intuiting and the intuited." Heidegger knows that there is something preconceptual (transcendent) which Dasein has a dialectic with in reasoning that is always mysterious but allows us to reason. Schelling says, "What is the beginning of all thinking is not thinking and what comes before all power also comes before all thought! And certainly, Being, which anticipates all power, we must also call being that is un-thinkable-in-advance as preceding all thinking." Schelling and Rosmini (who wrote in Italy in that time) said God was the ground of Being, Thought, and Time in man, as Hegel seemed to agree with (panentheism?), although Heidegger didn't think this a necessary conclusion (as far as I can see)

I think humans each have a dominant soul out of our many internal parts that is either male or female. People might say I'm being to philosophically Platonic in that respect, but I have to draw the line somewhere

I agree with your points. Philosophy is messy. Trying to fix everything with a nail to a wall is false compartamentalism. I think Heidegger addresses aspects of life that interested him, but they are not the end and all of the subject. I also like Schelling, Fitche, and Hegel and they had a lot to say about ethics. Mr Heidegger was reformulating those philosophies into a modern idiom to bring phenomenology to new generations. Although he doesn't get into specific "do's and dont's" he tries to make alive philosophical thinking such that thinking in those ways becomes normal for us. He was a great teacher

Also, it's interesting that you mention Emerson. He is not much talked about on this forum

And you can't read. I said rewritten not reread

So you see design and contingency in the world. You say a mind must be behind it. But why say it's all powerful. You already said you don't know what an infinite God is. But your God has infinite contradictions it can create. So it's infinite contra what you say. But wait, why does this mind have to be infinite in your view?

Your opinions are contingent

The point was that you don't know what infinite being means, so you have not gone through the Plato stage, let alone beyond it

Philosophy and spirituality deal with infinite things. Its odd that you don't understand infinite things, but you don't seem like a true philosophy person to me. God can be finite or infinite. They kind of cancel out logically but they are great ideas, good for growth beyond Ego

Why is the idea of god so powerful if she is infinite? Why not finite? Why not be awed by a finite god?

The world is either:

1) necessary

2) contingent

3) neither

4) or something else

3 and 4 are correct.

I can disprove arguments for God.

Psychoanalysis would simply view your arguments as a confidence in yourself. Are you Islamic or subscribe to no religion?

But it is an interesting idea that can inspire people to think and do good things. — Apollodorus

There is a pitfall in the middle of religion just as there is in atheism. Religion I think does more good than harm in the West in this time, but that is because there is a balance with people who don't agree with religion.

Plus, what else is there? — Apollodorus

Philosophy!

The whole point of having a mind is to create and contemplate ideas and to manifest our freedom of thought. — Apollodorus

A lot of atheists' ideas involve mathematics in some ways. "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry." B. Russell, Study of Mathematics

Have you read Jung's short piece on Job? Your God sounds like that God. Your God demands complete non-freedom in submission because your are islamic in your understanding and want a unbeatable super-figure to justify and restrain yourself