Comments
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Is the harmfulness of death ante-mortem or post-mortem?"Death" is not harmful to one when one is dead. Also, insofar as life has "intrinsic value", it is manifest only in the living and only recognized by the living.
:death: :flower: -
The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?
I expect to show that theism is an irrational belief system.What does one expect or hope for from such arguments? — Fooloso4
Theism can be shown not to be true or conceptually incoherent which entails that any theistic deity is fictional.Can the existence or non-existence of God be determined by argument?
It's a matter of exposing – making explicit – the insufficient evidence or unsound arguments in reasoning "for and against believing".Or is it a matter of finding reasons for or against believing?
For me, it's a matter of the truth-value of what believers say about what they call "God".Or is it a matter of the possibility of God?
Only a conception of reality.What hangs on the existence or non-existence of God? -
The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?I never said babies are stupid.
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The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?
What are "the shallow aspects of atheism"?180 Proof
Your own development of ideas, includingpantheism[pandeism], is interesting in the sense that it goes beyond the shallow aspects of atheism. — Jack Cummins -
What a genuine word of God would look likeI have mentioned "apophatics" (re negative theology) here and on several other threads. It's a tradition I've been acquainted with since the early 1980s and have incorporated into (my own) negative ontology. So not "late to the party" by any stretch.
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Most Important Problem Facing Humanity, RevisitedI'm aware of when I gotta piss or shit, when I gotta eat or drink, when I hurt or feel sympathy for another's hurt, and whenever I daydream or I'm bored. It seems to me that any more "inner awareness" than this and I'd be too distracted to dance, drive, get laid, etc.
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The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?
Once upon a precocious youth I'd been a Catholic teen apostate, an undergraduate negative atheist and then postgraduate positive atheist. Decades on, finally I suspect, I am an antitheist in theory and practice.I pray to God to make me free of God. — Meister Eckhart
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/403860
Speculatively, however, pandeism appeals to me.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718054
Not long ago my devout Catholic mother, who turns an alarmingly youthful 80 this Friday (Sept 2nd), found a letter I'd sent her when I was 25 to reply to her nagging that without "god" or "the church" I must "believe in nothing". I wrote to her ...
More than thirty years later, though my arguments have been significantly refined, my realist position, enriched by life experience and greater understanding, remains substantially the same. Still, when I take her to Mass (most Saturdays), waiting in the car for her and before she goes into church, I remind her to "pray for me" and she nods, and sometimes squeezes my hand, with a quiet "Always". :flower:I'm a realist – whatever is shown to be real is all that matters to me, so i don't believe in much else. If anything, I believe in evidence and sound arguments. i don't believe in anything that's only subjective or imaginary; therefore, I'm neither religious nor spiritual. "God" just isn't my drug of choice. -
The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?:eyes:
As Pascal points out, (the/an actually worshipped) "God" =/= "the Idea, or Form, which precedes ... in time". Just meta-babytalk, MU. :sweat: -
What a genuine word of God would look likeThe problem is, it seems to me, worship – idol-making – not g/G per se. Theism is idolatry. The apophatics got it right, I think: anything said or imag(in)ed (e.g. "graven images", scriptures, theologies, sermons) about the infinite is necessarily finite and thereby false; even (especially) the belief that the infinite "exists" is idolatrous.
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The Concept of 'God': What Does it Mean and, Does it Matter?
Before I reply to the OP directly, I paste the link below to an old post replying to you on a related topic last year, just to add some context to a later post that illustrates those "other possibilities" you suggest.I am raising the area between theism/ atheism, but also other possibilities, including pantheism and the various constructions of reality which may be developed — Jack Cummins
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/599848 -
Is space 4 dimensional?Sounds like String theorists' "holographic principle" (derived from "black hole thermodynamics")
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle -
What a genuine word of God would look like
:up: E.g. the Democritean void (à la vacuum energy).Nothingnes[nonbeing] If he would exist I would imagine him as the pure representation of silence and emptiness. — javi2541997
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/507756As much as we tend to understand death. -
Is space 4 dimensional?IIRC, dimensionality corresponds to degrees of freedom of movement. 3-d space describes the freedom to move backward-forward, up-down and right-left in space. That we are – every 3-d thing is – moving (i.e. "arrow of time") adds a 4th-d. Thus, only (Euclidean) abstract space is 3-d; physical (relativistic) spacetime is 4-d.
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What a genuine word of God would look likeIMO, to date, the best candiddate (via-à-vis natural theology) that believers have for "God revealed" is
Previously, the next best and oldest candidate, I suspect, has always been
Either way, "revelation" without dogma or commandments, without chosen people or the damned, without martyrs or magical thinking. Just – what Plato metaphorically called "the Form of the Good" – universal, ancient light. :fire: -
The End of the Mechanistic WorldviewI'm pointing out that you have not persuaded me that Desmet is saying anything new and insightful, just rehashing others who are far less derivative. I'm also suggesting that you read more widely and deeply than what have exhibited here.
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Why are people so afraid to admit they are wrong here?As I've said to a number incorrigibles, dogmatists or bullshitters here on TPF
It's either pride or insecurity that blocks one from admitting one is wrong when one has been shown to be wrong.I'm here to expose poor thinking and not to persuade you of anything. -
The End of the Mechanistic Worldview
In other words, derivative dumbing down for "ease of use" by middle-brow consumers. (or maybe undergrad litcrit / humanities courses). The works I've cited have philosophical import and should be studied in order to make explicit what is implicit yet still operative in "contemporary issues".Synthesize works from different writers and turn them intosomething[shits]that sheds lighton contemporary issues? — Tzeentch -
The Fine-Tuning Argument as (Bad) an Argument for GodBy an overwhelmingly astronomical prepondance of the evidence in the Hubble volume, this universe is apparently "fine-tuned" for lifelessness. — 180 Proof
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Authenticity and Identity: What Does it Mean to Find One's 'True' Self?Okay, sort of like Freddy teaching "how to become who you are" ...
I believe philosophy's central project has always been to optimize agency by helping one to unlearn 'self-immiserating habits' (i.e. foolery/stupidity) through various daily reflective practices (e.g. pythagorean, epicurean, stoic, pyrrhonian, cynical, neoplatonic, peripatetic ... pragmaticist, absurdist, etc). This is how I make sense of "true self" in the (western) philosophical tradition. -
The Fine-Tuning Argument as (Bad) an Argument for God
:100: :up:The fine tuning argument amounts to saying that if things were different they would not be as they are. It does not preclude the existence of a very different universe, a universe without us and our attempts to prove the existence of a god who has created a just so world for us. — Fooloso4 -
Poltics isn't common Good
:fire:“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.”
- Noam Chomsky — Tom Storm -
The End of the Mechanistic WorldviewWhether in politics or among the mid-brow masses, why does their "worldview" matter in philossophy? What's the alternative to an unreflective, or thoughtless, "common sense" by which the vast majority of people "get by"? You & Desmet seem fixated on a pseudo-problem; I don't see the point, and am not persuaded by your presentation to bother with Desmet's apparent rehash of e.g. Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) or
Horkheimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) or Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) or Ellul's The Technological Society (1964) or Marcuse's One Domensional Man (1964) or Guattari & Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus (1972) or Feyerabend's Against Method (1975) ... etc. -
Science answers to "how?", we need another system to answer the "why?" questions.There's no "confusion" ...
How A involuntarily happens (i.e. changes).
Why B voluntarily decided and/or acted. -
Poltics isn't common GoodI find conceptual shorthands can be a clarifying as they are (overly) simplifying at the start of discussing a complex topic like this one. Perhaps in descending order of antiquity:
It seems that religion has always justified politics (i.e. war preparations / reparations) and war has always been a policy of failed politics (and therefore, of failed religion) by other means.Religion is organized submission.
Politics is organized dissension.
War is organized aggression.
NB: [Religion [ Politics [War ]]] -
How exactly does Schopenhauer come to the conclusion that the noumenal world is Will?:fire:
:100: :up:What I recommend, and I think most of us actually do, is to start somewhere and then move back and forth, expanding the picture, filling in gaps, and correcting the picture. — Fooloso4
:yikes: WTF?A second rate philosopher [Schopenhauer] as compared to first rates such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger — Janus
No doubt.I think he pinched the idea [Will] from Spinoza's "conatus" in any case. — Janus -
The End of the Mechanistic Worldview
This is a caricature of what most scientists and scientifically literate laypersons actually believe. For instance, a cake recipe cannot "be reduced" to the wavefunction of the cake's quantum constituents. Desmet is strawmanning modern science. :roll:The idea that through science everything can be reduced to a mathematical equation ... — Tzeentch -
Currently ReadingAugust-October readings:
• Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad
• Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, Andrew Collier
• The Origin of Phenomena, D. B. Kelley
• Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, Peter Lewis
• Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory, Penelope Maddy
• Giving Beyond The Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania, Elliot Wolfson -
A Simple Primer for American Politics
:100:Race is also taboo, but in terms of explanatory power I think class is higher. — Xtrix
Discrimination is used by Exploitation to police the exploited. :mask: -
Origin of the Universe UpdatedLook at a donut hole. Think about what you can't remember. :smirk:
180 Proof
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