I don't know the exact rationale behind it but the alternative is theft. — TheMadFool

If I understand what you're implying correctly, I would say that whoever it is that privatized the "river" (in the fishing metaphor) is the one guilty of theft, and that the solution to the problem is to correct that theft and return the "river" back to public property as it originally was.

I don't know if I will understand what you said better in the morning? I have an idiot math IQ and as important as I think math is for defining truth, I am not good at it. However, because math is essential to defining truth, I want to develop my ability to think with math and communicate with it. I get from what you said, not only must our figures agree but so must our terms agree. At this point in time, we (all of us) do not have the communication system we need to understand anything about our economic reality and homelessness. — Athena

I wouldn't quite say that, but the communication we need is nuanced and sometimes difficult to understand. There are a lot of similar but importantly different things we could be talking about, and keeping them properly differentiated is hard. Some of those things are:

What defines an economic class? Is it:
-Being in a certain percentile of incomes?
-...of wealth?
-Having sufficient income to meet certain goals?
...or sufficient wealth?
-etc

If relevant, what is an "average"?
- Mean? (Add together all the figures and divide them up evenly)
- Median? (Line all the figures up in order and pick the one halfway down the line)
- Mode? (Group all the figures into similar classes and then pick the biggest class)

And if we're averaging, what are we averaging?
- Household income?
- Personal income?
- Household wealth?
- Personal wealth?

What you usually hear people talk about is median household income. But even then, it's not consistent whether economic class is being defined by being in a certain percentile of household income (like the poverty line is usually defined), or by having sufficient household income to meet certain goals.

On top of that, I think that personal figures are more useful because household size can vary so those household figures might be divided over one person or six (on average it's about two, so household figures are usually about twice personal figures).

And I think mean and mode figures are just as important to be aware of as the median, if (as is the case) the mean is way above the median, and the mode is way below it, which means that wealth is really concentrated at the top, so the mode or "typical" person (one who falls into the biggest group) makes way less than the median, while the mean or "average" person (one who has an even-sized slice of the pie) makes way more than the median. In our case, the "typical" American makes about 30% of what the "average" American makes. That fact is lost when all we talk about is what the median two-person household makes.

And on top of all of that, I think it's way more useful to talk about wealth than income. That mode ("typical") income is about what I spent to live a quite comfortable life, and it's about what a full-time minimum-wage job would pay. But because I lack wealth (such as a home of my own) and so have to borrow (rent) it from others while also saving to buy my own so I can stop doing that some day, I'm working my ass off to bring in that mean ("average") income that's more than three times what I need to fund my comfortable level of consumption. Someone who inherited a house could be living a lifestyle better than mine on less than a third of my income, but if all we look at is income figures, I look fantastically rich compared to them, while they have already realized my lifelong goal that I'm not sure I will ever manage to realize.

What does your community look like? — Athena

Rent Per Month
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 2,200.00 $
Apartment (1 bedroom) Outside of Centre 2,000.00 $
Apartment (3 bedrooms) in City Centre 3,500.00 $
Apartment (3 bedrooms) Outside of Centre 2,800.00 $

Numbeo doesn't have figures for my town's income, but for the closest other one:
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 3,933.33 $

Preschool (or Kindergarten), Full Day, Private, Monthly for 1 Child 900.00 $

How can I copy a picture in my email and paste it here? Or send it from cell phone to the forum? — Athena

Only subscribers can upload photos to the site directly, but if you upload the picture somewhere else (like http://www.imgur.com/ or such), you can put the URL to the picture inside of img tags, like this but without the spaces:

[ img ]https://i.imgur.com/ms2mozp.jpg[ /img ]

and it will show up like this:

However, 7/10 of people below the poverty level is 70% and that is huge compared to today with the states with the highest poverty percentage just below 20%. In the past, only 20% of the people were middle class, and 10% were wealthy. About 50% of our population is middle class. Another site says our upper class is 1% to 2%. That does not work. If 20% are below the poverty level, and 50% are Middle class and only 2 % are upper class we are missing 28%. Help can anyone explain that? — Athena

Definitions of economic class vary and some are more useful than others. By some sources the poverty line is defined at the bottom quintile, so by definition 20% of people are always below it no matter what, which obviously isn’t very informative about social wealth distribution. I don’t know where your other figures, 50% middle class and 1-2% upper class, are from, so I can’t comment on them. I do know from memory that about 75% of people presently make an income below the national mean personal property income (i.e. GDP per capita, what you’d get if you added up all incomes and divided by population). The median personal income, which 50% of people are below by definition, is about half of that mean income: around $25k/yr as opposed to around $50k. The mode income, the group with the most people in it, is barely over half of that, at around $15k/yr.

As I would define them, lower class is anyone whose rent and interest expenses are higher than their income from the same, middle class is anyone where they’re equal (so their only expenses are their own consumption and all their income is earned), and the upper class is anyone whose income from rent and interest is higher than their expenses on same. By those definitions, almost everybody is lower class, and almost nobody is middle class, because it’s way easier to move from middle to upper class than it is from lower to middle.

This is a good idea (that is, as you say, probably being implemented somewhere already), but I would contest that the root cause of poverty is really inability to get a decent-paying job, because that translates to "inability to prove your worth to the people who control access to the resources you need to survive". The root cause of poverty is allowing a tiny fraction of the populace to control the resources that everybody else needs, and thus to be the judges of who is or isn't worthy of receiving them.

Translated into the fishing metaphor: the problem isn't people not knowing how to fish, the problem is people having to trade most of the fish they catch to the owners of the river in order to be allowed to fish in it. The solution is to allow people free access to the river.

I didn't say that. I don't think Trump supporters are generally amenable to being philosophized at, so to speak. But philosophers can and have been discussing how to understand the problems underlying post-truth politics, at least. Frankfurt more than Popper; On Bullshit is basically entirely about post-truth politics.

Philosophers have tackled the relationship of society to truth before. Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies is an old example, and more recent is Frankfurt's On Bullshit, which is particularly relevant to Trump and the general "post-truth" thing.

If all you've ever experienced is pleasure and you've never experienced pain then you place less value in pleasure than someone who has experienced pain too. — Devans99

That depends on how the human mind works. It doesn't have to be that way (if there were a God, he could make people to always just feel good all the time), and it doesn't seem to be that way for all people in the actual world. When I was younger I seemed to be better able to appreciate pleasures than I am now as a traumatized adult who's been through a lot of pain.

Exactly, so as 180 Proof stated, let's make a truly collective ownership our goal, rather than cede to a limited technocratic political imagination via the restrictive TINA nihilism that Capital demands. — Maw

I just don't understand this making-perfect-the-enemy-of-good attitude. It's like, I'm not exactly excited about either a Democrat or a Republican winning an election, but I definitely have a preference about which is worse, and given the odds of anyone better winning, I'm not going to complain if the less-bad of the plausible options wins. Likewise, an UBI isn't a perfect solution, but it's a much much better proposal than anything that's been seriously considered in mainstream politics for a while, so while I wouldn't just rest happy with an UBI, it's definitely at least a step in the right direction, and I don't get why people further in that direction would oppose it compared to the status quo. It makes about as much sense as opposing any other kind of welfare program on the grounds that those just prolong the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Maybe, but they're accomplishing that by alleviating some of the harm of capitalism, and alleviating harm is what really matters, and a little alleviation is better than none.

Ain't nobody got time to read this whole thread, but I'm curious if anyone has brought up the causal closure of physics yet? I.e. that a physical thing is by definition anything that has any physical effect, so whatever it is that is causing the physical effects we see definitionally is physical, and something nonphysical, by definition, has no effect on anything physical.

Where the physical is pretty much synonymous with the empirical or the phenomenal or the experiential, so by definition we cannot ever experience any supposedly nonphysical phenomenon.

This really just comes back to the Problem of Evil. If there was a truly good, omnipotent and omniscient God, then he would have already given us world peace and a cure for cancer -- or rather, there never would have been war or cancer to begin with as he would have prevented them in the first place. And yeah, everyone would have everything they want individually, too... because what makes cancer and war bad is that individual people suffer from them.

The kind of UBI I've heard proposed, and favor (as a palliative measure, as you say, a step in the right direction but not a panacea), is one that gradually displaces many other social safety nets, without just eliminating them right away. A better world would be one where more people just had the kind of money that they didn't need to rely on those safety nets, so I support just giving people enough money that they can get off of relying on them. I would leave the other programs in place, but their costs would shrink as fewer and fewer people used them (and those saved costs could then further increase the amount of money we're able to give people, in a positive feedback loop).

I also think that a high enough UBI is not just palliative but also partially curative for the underlying problem that necessitates that in the first place. If people have more money, they are more able to get out of debt, get out of rent, own the things they need to live instead of borrowing them from those who are wealthier than them; and if they have stable income regardless of work, they are also more free to try things other than take a job working for someone wealthier than them, like to start their own small business, or to band together to start a coop, and so on. An UBI can be a stepping stone toward helping people own more of the capital they need to live and work themselves, and so reduce capitalism. (There are still, of course, the underlying systemic factors that give rise to capitalism in the first place, but an UBI at least partially counteracts them).

Others, like Andrew Yang, lacking political imagination because they've drank the nihilistic kool-aid of neoliberalism, instead argue not for collective ownership but UBI (general at the expense of a welfare state and social services), further formalizing economic power in fewer hands, producing greater wealth inequality, and placing people in greater economic precarity. — Maw

I've seen this kind of criticism of UBI from the left before, and I don't understand it unless it's just accelerationism. An UBI is not as good as truly distributed ownership, but it's certainly better than the status quo, explicitly decreasing wealth inequality (it's a wealth redistribution program after all), improving the efficiency of the welfare state (cash welfare is still welfare, and no means testing reduces barriers to getting that welfare), and providing people with greater economic stability. All compared to the status quo. So where does this objection come from, other than just "it's not good enough, no compromise, all or nothing!"?

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is anarchism, which doesn't mean no government, but no state. The anarchic government I envision is modeled after the educational system I previously described, with "law books" being compiled through a process of what is effectively peer review: primary sources publishing not their observations but their appetitive experiences, pains and pleasures and so on, in various circumstances, for others to stand on those circumstances too and replicate those findings; then secondary sources commenting on the notability and quality of that primary research; and finally tertiary sources assessing and documenting the current consensus of secondary sources. Those "legislators" would be separate from both judges and police, and in addition to reactive police patrols analogous to public educators, there would be more proactive life coaches / personal lawyers advising people on how to avoid doing things that will get them in trouble with someone else. People would hire judges directly as a kind of "conflict insurance" so to speak, someone standing by to step in an adjudicate disputes, hiring police/lawyers to help defend their clients as necessary, and tertiary legislators to compile the law books they use to do that job. If parties to a conflict appeal to different judges, and those judges cannot work out an agreement themselves, they in turn can appeal to their own higher authorities of the same structure, and so on until at some level the dispute is resolved.

For this to work requires a generally egalitarian economic structure, so anarchism requires socialism, which doesn't mean state redistribution of wealth, just somehow or another avoiding a class division into non-working owners and not-owning workers. My deontological principles encourage this through the invalidation of certain kinds of contracts most notably those of rent and interest, which I believe are the mechanism by which the egalitarian consequences one would naively expect of a free market get subverted giving rise to capitalism.

All of this is the ideal, but I also support the intermediate use of less-anarchic forms of governance to step in in case this form fails, to keep it from failing immediately to the absolute worst. So there should be a bare-bones democratic-socialist state standing by ready to keep society together and re-establish this anarchic state as need be, and possibly further layers or still-more-authoritarian government standing by in between that and the absolutism that would arise from the power vacuum should all government fail completely. From those, or from our present less-anarchic forms of governance, we should progress toward this anarchic ideal conservatively, that is to say making cautious change, but change nevertheless.

What is the effective difference between prayer, meditation, and therapeutic journaling? All of them seem in practice a kind of internal dialogue trying to sort out your mind.

Classical theology would say that God is ‘super-real’ - the real in reality, the being of being. Whereas what you and I take to be concretely real, is actually ephemeral and only existing because of the being that has been lent to it. Don't agree with it, by all means, but at least understand what it is you don't agree with. — Wayfarer

I understand that model, I'm just trying to get clear if that's what you endorse yourself, because the things you've said and quotes you've agreed with haven't made that at all clear. It seems clear to me now that you are talking about the abstract-concrete / transcendental-empirical / noumenal-phenomenal spectrum, and taking the position that things on the abstract/transcendental/noumenal side of it are more real than things on the other side. It's still not clear why you make a distinction between being real and existing, but it looks like you conversely say that things on the concrete/empirical/phenomenal side exist more than things on the other side.

Because you have this weird divide in the way you use the words "real" and "existing", and your apparent misunderstanding of Kant (addressed further below), it's less clear to me whether you think "reality" or "existence" as you use them is more "objective", but I have the impression so far that you take it to be "reality", i.e. the abstract/transcendental/noumenal, and that you take "existence", the concrete/empirical/phenomenal world, to be a "subjective" ephemeral shadow or interpretation of that "reality".

This conveys a misinterpretation of Kant. When you say that the noumenal are 'just ideas that we have', it's because you, as a modern, understand 'ideas' as being 'subjective' or something in your mind or my mind. So in other words, they're a product of mind — Wayfarer

That is exactly what Kant means. The etymology of "noumenon" even comes from the Greek word for "mind". The view you seem to espouse is what Kant would call "transcendental realism", or equivalently "empirical idealism": that the transcendent/noumenal world is objectively real, and the pheomenal/empirical world is just our subjective impression of it. Kant explicitly rejected that in the so-called "Copernican shift" of which he is perhaps most famous, instead saying that it is the phenomenal/empirical that is real, and the transcendent/noumenal world is just the ideas we have about it: "empirical realism", or "transcendental idealism". He explicitly says that noumena are forever beyond our direct knowledge, that basically all we can do is speculate about them, and try to find the boundaries of what they might possibly be through reason.

which in turn is a product of (material) evolution, which in turn is a product of chance. (Everything is skewed in modern thought by the notion of biological evolution. Darwin was not a philosopher, and evolutionary theory is not a philosophical framework. And this shows up in many different ways — Wayfarer

You keep bringing things back to Darwin as though I (or everyone you think I'm like) start with evolution as a premise and then build the rest of things from there. Evolution is entirely a contingent theory as far as my philosophy is concerned; it could in principle turn out to be false and nothing about my philosophy would change, just some contingent questions would turn out to have different answers. Much the same as with the existence of God, really, as I think we discussed at length in my "How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?" thread. For the entirety of my philosophy book I don't weigh in one way or another about whether or not God exists, until the very last chapter when I raise the question merely as an aside to answering another question and, using the rest of my philosophy which had thus far been agnostic to the existence of God, determine that there's almost certainly nothing anyone would want to call God in existence. The relationship of evolution to my philosophy is the same, except I never even have reason to pose the question of whether or not it's true, because it has no bearing on anything else I ever discuss.

Kant would say that the categories of the understanding, and the various rational powers of the mind, are what makes coherent experience possible in the first place. They are in that sense ontologically prior to any naturalistic theory of the nature of mind (for instance) because it is only by virtue of those faculties that we can have theories of any kind. — Wayfarer

Yes, but that's different from saying noumena, or abstract, transcendent things, are ontologically prior. The whole "Copernican shift" that Kant is famous for is saying that rather than something abstract and transcendent, external to us, being primary or central to reality, but shielded from our view by a veil of concrete, empirical particulars, as we circle around it trying to peer in... instead we are in the center, the world circling around our minds so to speak, the empirical and concrete world of phenomena forming the true reality in which we are embedded, and transcendent, abstract, noumenal things being what we imagine to be "out there" beyond that. (That is not only the root of the logical-empirical tradition of the Analytic branch of contemporary philosophy but also, perhaps even more so, the phenomenological tradition of the Continental branch.) In that model of the world, the categories of understanding are a part of us there in the center, conditioning how the empirical, concrete phenomena appear to us, but they're not identical with our ideas of transcendental, abstract noumena, which are even further out in the periphery, metaphorically speaking, beyond the pheonomena.

I agree with that Kantian model, and before you ask how a physicalist philosophy of mind can fit into that, I'll just explain preemptively: each of us is at the center of such a model, and finds other people to be objects out there in our own sphere of empirical phenomena. So you're a physical object from my perspective, and it stands to reason that I'm also a physical object from your perspective, even though I'm the subject at the center of all phenomenal experience of all physical things from my perspective, just like you are from yours. So if I can devise a physical explanation for your behavior, it stands to reason that you can do the same to me, and the difference between being a physical object and a mental subject is a matter of perspective: my mental subjectivity is just what it's like to be this thing that is a physical object to you. (This is, incidentally, also where my panpsychism comes in: the only difference between physical and mental is a perspective shift, so all things that are objects in the third person perspective are subjects from their own first person perspective, not that that really means a whole lot for something that's not as interestingly complex in reflexive function as a human brain).

I'm saying nothing like that but again it's inevitable that you will see it that way. But it is interesting, that all the ID types think that the philosophical theology of a David Bentley Hart is also 'like atheism' - which just goes to prove my original point, that nearly all atheists are criticizing a straw god. — Wayfarer

This still just leaves me wondering what the heck you actually believe that is actually different from what an atheist believes, not just nominally. It reminds me of when I used to call myself a pantheist, holding that the universe itself is God, but that didn't hold any kind of import about different expectations for how the world did or should work or anything like that, it was just a kind of reverence of the universe. In time I realized that plenty of atheists revered the universe and nature and held basically the exact same views and feelings and everything that I did, they just thought it was silly to apply the word "God" to the universe, and made it sound like I believed something different from them when I really didn't. I've been trying to figure out for a while now what exactly you think differently about the world than me, in more than just nominal terms, although now that you're saying "God doesn't exist" (or agreeing with a quote to that effect at least) it's not even clear that there's a nominal disagreement.

I can safely walk through areas that are more dangerous to atheists than the core of a nuclear reactor. — alcontali

What about angry mobs of people of a different religion, who hate people of whichever religion you are?

You see the connection between ID and teleology at least right? If the world were intelligently designed then whatever it was designed for would be its purpose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book)

What makes your pissed off religious mob any better than a government? Both are groups who’ll threaten to kill you if you don’t do what they say.

It is not possible to tell either way whether the universe is amenable to science or not. All we can do is try to do science to it or not, and if we do try, see if that’s making any progress yet or not. To assume it is not amenable is to not try, and to try is to at least tacitly assume it is amenable. Seeing progress made never tells us that progress can indefinitely continue to be made, but conversely failing to make progress can never tell us that making progress is impossible, only that it’s difficult. When we hit such a roadblock, the choice is ours whether to continue trying or to give up. The world itself can’t tell us in unambiguous language whether we should keep at it or not, only how well we’re doing so far. Whether to keep at it, to assume that further progress either is or isn’t possible, is up to us to decide.

not a phenomenal existent, but a noetic or noumenal existent — Wayfarer

This makes it extra clear that you're talking about the same thing I am talking about as "concrete vs abstract". Concrete things are phenomenal, abstract things are noumenal. Your early comment about the tree being "partially real" fits into there as well, as I say that the most concrete things are the local, present, actual occasions of experience that oneself is having, and ordinary things like trees are abstractions out of patterns in patterns in patterns in those occasions of experience, and things like electrons are abstractions out of patterns in those ordinary objects, and eventually things like numbers become completely abstracted away from any concrete instances of them, but can still be further abstracted into things like sets.

So if you're saying that God something completely abstract like numbers, then you're saying he is not (as I would phrase it) concretely real, which I take to be the ordinary sense of reality we're usually talking about: abstract reality is a weird, well... abstraction, of ordinary concrete reality, projected behind the concrete phenomenal reality we're directly in touch with. But the thing is, all kinds of fictional objects like unicorns are also abstractly real in that sense: that's why we can say things like "unicorns have three horns and scales" are false, in the same way that "triangles are concave" is false: fictional objects are defined into (abstract) being like mathematical ones are, and a three-horned scaly unicorn contradicts the definition of a unicorn. There can be a (concrete) universe with no (concrete) triangles, and a universe with no unicorns, and a universe with no God, even though we can say things that are necessarily true of all those things; just like if humans went extinct, there would be no (concrete) bachelors, but it would still be necessarily true that all bachelors are unmarried.

Basically, by putting God into that category, you're saying he's just an idea (in the colloquial sense) that might not actually exist (in the colloquial sense). Which... doesn't sound like anything contrary to what any atheists think, and so makes that a pretty vacuous form of theism.

I'm also wondering if you're aware of Kant's equation of empirical realism with transcendental idealism, and likewise transcendental realism with empirical idealism. In saying that the abstract, noumenal, or transcendental is more real, you're saying that the concrete, phenomenal, or empirical is all just ideal, i.e. just ideas, images, fallible impressions of true reality. Kant conversely endorsed transcendental idealism (abstract noumenal are just ideas that we have) and equivalently endorsed empirical realism (reality is made of concrete phenomena), as do I: where what we directly experience is the most real, and abstractions from that are ideas that we project behind it in a fallible attempt to understand and explain it.

Solipsism is trivial if true.

Even if everything you experience and interact with is in some way some other part of yourself, it is still in some way distinct from the part of yourself that you experience and interact through -- you're not all-knowing and all-powerful over the "dream world", there are parts of it beyond your awareness and control even if they are in some way technically parts of you -- so in the end all you've done is relabeled what someone would normally call "yourself" as some special part of yourself, and relabeled "the world" as "yourself". All practical matters continue to be the same as everyone else (or "those other parts of you") always acts like they are, you just find yourself using different words to talk about it and so causing needless confusion.

I get the "degrees of reality" thing. I have a similar concept in my own philosophy, though I don't call either direction of the spectrum more or less real, but more abstract or more concrete. It sounds like you're calling "reality" (in the adjectival sense of "real-ness") what I'd call "abstractness", and that's fine for our purposes here. What's still not clear is how "reality" or "being" (in the adjectival sense of "is-ness") are different from "existence" in that regard. Concrete things like, for example, trees, exist, are real, and are beings, right? And your conception of God is of something that is on the far opposite end of what I'm calling the concrete-abstract spectrum, out there with numbers and such, and those are "more real" in your view, no? So how are they not also "more existent"? Or if "real" = abstract and "existent" = concrete on your account, are trees not real on your account? (And not beings either? Or is it God that's not a being, because to be is to exist which is the opposite of to be real?)

Yeah, that sounds accurate. I'm not sure if you're just confirming you understand the discussion so far correctly, or trying to highlight a problem with it, or something?

"If I punch my laptop screen, it might break" doesn't have to mean "There is another possible world in which my laptop screen is broken as a result of my punching it" surely? It could equally mean that it is something which might happen in this one. — fdrake

That bolded "another" is the problem here. It doesn't have to be another possible world, just some possible world. It can be this one, or another, and still be some one.

Also since that's a conditional sentence, it's not even saying that there is some possible world where you do punch your laptop screen, it's saying that in some subset of the possible worlds where you punch your laptop screen (which could be a set of zero possible worlds, if you would never do that) it breaks.

Whalon is paraphrasing an idea which has been central to philosophical theology but which modern culture has generally lost sight of. — Wayfarer

Yeah you explained that already, a difference between "existence" and "being" or "reality". But I'm saying that the same argument given against "existence" works equally well against "being" or "reality": we have this big body of real existing beings that we're familiar with, and if you point at it and say "all of that is composite and temporal, God isn't, so God doesn't exist" you'd have to equally say he's not real and not a being. Showing that God doesn't exist but is a real being is supposed to be the demonstration that existence is different from reality or being, but this argument to show that God doesn't exist also shows that he's not real or a being, so that difference has not been demonstrated. Everything we're ordinarily familiar with exists, is real, is a being, and so on, so if something that's supposed to be unlike all of that stuff is thereby shown to not fit in one of those categories, it's also shown to not fit in the others.

Yeah sure. All manifest things, all existing things, all real things, all beings. Everything. So if God by definition is not like that, then he’s none of the above, or else he’s some weird kind of thing that’s unlike all of the other things we’re familiar with. But if that means he doesn’t exist, like all the things we’re familiar with do, then he’s also not real, manifest, a being, etc, like all of those other things either. You’re applying an argument against existence that applies equally well against reality, being, etc, but for no apparent reason declining to actually apply it to those.

I just realized that in my reply to csalisbury’s reply to you, which was also meant to address your reply to me, I forgot to emphasize something important I meant to clarify: that ontophilia does not feel like a distraction from the obsessions of ontophobia, when feeling ontophilic I’m not merely not-thinking about death etc and filling time with something you else, but rather I can think about death etc without falling into a pit of crippling despair, and dispassionately think “ok, I don’t want that, I’ll do what I can to avoid it whenever opportunity to make a decision comes up and otherwise not worry about it when there’s nothing else to be done at the moment”, and I don’t feel like I need to fill time, I feel comfortable just existing in the moment and not like I need some kind of distraction. Ontophilia is not just avoiding the problems ontophobia fixates on, it’s dissolving them, and in doing so attaining a clearer calmer and more functional state of mind wherein you are more capable of solving real problems (including those that factor into avoiding death etc) because you’re not frozen in despair gazing into the infinite void of the future, but instead just content to be here now and do what you can to continue doing so and accepting of whatever you can’t do anything about.

Those “marks of all things that exist” are also all equally marks of all beings, and everything real, unless you beg the question of saying there is a real being called God who’s different from all the other things you’re taking as paradigmatic examples of real existing beings, in which case you may as well beg the question of God’d existence too. But if you want to look around at all the ordinary stuff like rocks and trees and so on and say that God isn’t like that stuff and so doesn’t exist, you can also say he isn’t real and isn’t a being and isn’t anything else you might want to say about all that ordinary stuff. If you don’t, then you’ve just made “real” and “being” mysterious terms, since apparently real beings don’t have to have anything in common with all this stuff we’re familiar with; and there’s no reason not to also deprive “existence” of it’s meaning just as much.

It means there is some possible world where that happens.

In my philosophy book where I coined those terms ontophilia and ontophobia, I do say that I think ontophilia is the referent of theologically noncognitivist conceptions of God. Also nirvana, eudaimonia, ataraxia, etc.

The latter terms are less problematic because they are explicitly about a state of mind, while “God” sounds like you’re talking about something outside your mind, which is causing those feelings, rather than just talking about the feelings.

I’m not contesting that humans are having a negative impact on nature or advocating that we just destroy nature to build hones willy-nilly. I love my hometown because it’s so close to nature. I’m just pointing out the human-caused problems that are independent of that. There are lots of empty homes up for sale in my town, but you have to be rich to be allowed to live in them, and the homeless or underhoused locals are obviously not rich. And nationally, there are more unoccupied houses than homeless people. Without doing any further development, we could house (and feed etc) everyone. But we don’t. So there being too many people isn’t the cause of poverty. We could fix poverty just with what we have built already.

Their ends have religious and political components. I’m talking about using political action to further the religious components of their ends. And not saying anything either way about any other combinations of those things just now.

For me, when feeling ontophobic, trying not to does feel like some kind of cowardly retreat from rationally confronting the only meaningful problem in existence. But when feeling ontophilic, such concerns seem like obviously irrational obsession with an entirely illusory non-problem. For people stuck indefinitely in absurd despair and deprived from periods of awe and serenity, I can understand why they would see trying to break out of that as cowardly even though being like that hurts themselves. It’s like an addiction to something you hate: doing it brings you no pleasure, it may even bring you pain, but you just feel like you have to and it would be wrong of you not to. But once you’re out of it, it seems completely different, and looking back on yourself when you were in that space, or at others still stuck it it, it just seems pitiably irrational and self-destructive to be in that space.

I am genuinely confused what you and Whalon mean by “believe” in if not “agree assertions of the existence of”, whether that agreement is based on faith or reason or whatever. In the English that I know, to believe in something is to think, for whatever reason and with whatever certainty, that something exists. The only alternative I can come up with is some sort of theological noncognititivism.

More or less correct.

Real.

To recap, pfhorrest claimed that the religious right (henceforth RR) uses charity to psychologically pressure the needy to support conservative causes — praxis

You got that backwards. I’m not saying they use religion to further their political ends, but that they use politics to further their religious ends. That they oppose government doing what they see as religion’s job because if it does then fewer people will turn to religion.

If I may chime in, I believe that Stoic philosophy has a lot in common with a popular prayer asking for “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”. Stoicism doesn’t emphasize the courage part so much, but it doesn’t just preach the serenity part, it also emphasizes the wisdom part. That is, Stoicism doesn’t say to just lay down and accept everything. If you do have some control over things, if you have a chance to fight back against injustices, Stoicism doesn’t say to forego that opportunity. It just says to be wise about whether or not there actually is anything you can do, and that if you really cannot do anything, then have the serenity to accept that. But if you can do something, then by all means always try. And you might not know whether you can or can’t until you try, so trying is a big part of wisdom.

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend? — Pfhorrest

As with mind, I think there are two different things to consider when it comes to the will. One of them has to do with determinism or lack thereof, and like with phenomenal consciousness, I don't think this is a philosophically important topic, but technically everything has "free will" in this sense, because at least according to contemporary models of physics, everything is at the fundamental level nondeterministic. So an electron has "free will" in this sense, just as much as a human does, and none of that really matters for any other purposes.

What actually matters is the functional ability a person has to control their own behavior: to make judgements about themselves, and for those judgements to be causally effective on their future behavior. It is, basically, self-control. I sketch out the necessary features of such a function analogously to how I sketch out access conscioueness: the system must first differentiate aspects of its experience into their relevance either for a model of the world as it is (a model made to fit the world), which I call sensations, and for a model of the world as it ought to be (a model made for the world to fit), which I call appetites; a function that I call sentience. It must then interpret those experiences into such models, forming what I call feelings, divided into perceptions on the one hand, and desires on the other hand; a function that I call intelligence. It must then reflexively form both perceptions and desires about those feelings, which reflexive states I call thoughts, divided into beliefs and intentions; a function that I call sapience. The prescriptive (world-to-fit-mind) side of that sapience function is what I deem rightly deserves to be called "will", and the causal efficacy of such will upon a person's behavior constitutes their freedom of will.

In short, your will is free in the important sense when reflectively thinking that something is the best course of action for you to do causes you to do it. Which might be an entirely predictable process and could in principle be a fully deterministic one, but as it so happens, indeterminism does seem to be a fact of reality, not that it matters for these purposes.