Schopenhauer considered compassion as central to morality, but this is in contrast to pessimistic views of human nature. So, I am asking how relevant is for us to consider now? I believe that it has been thrown away, into the rubbish bin of philosophy ideas, just when we need it more than ever. — Jack Cummins

The more human "being" descends into fragmentation at the expense of wholeness, compassion becomes less relevant.

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another." Thomas Merton

Becoming enchanted with individual trees, our psych loses the conception of the value of the forest and our capacity to have compassion for the value of life itself.

The answer is the acquired need for prestige. It takes the place of recognizing universal purpose. Prestige than offers us the feeling of value
— Nikolas

Is mans inherent flaw then to add value to nothing and place that value on themselves for gratification simply because we don't want to feel useless in a world with no definite purpose? — Anopheles

I meant that Man has forgotten his objective purpose so only success in his subjective purposes offer prestige and the feeling of value. A man may be a success in business which offers prestige without any awareness of the objective value of his "being" for universal needs.

A person can decide which form of life is worth preserving and defines its value without any awareness of what respect for the wholeness of life means. A woman may decide her fetus is worthless to her so lacks value and easily aborted. Yet another woman may consider the fetus she is carrying is very important to her so now has value and it would be against the law to kill it. But the objective question is the objective value of human being itself for universal needs. What purpose does it serve?

To me this is a world where no one is justified to claim they know anything, so why has humanity torn itself apart over and over again to define what is what and who is who? And for what? — Anopheles

The answer is the acquired need for prestige. It takes the place of recognizing universal purpose. Prestige than offers us the feeling of value

"The combination of these two facts — the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality.

Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect.

This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also." ~ Simone Weil

A person who recognizes the reality of this "other world," intuitively knows the futility of fighting for prestige when we are all equal in our nothingness and that we all need help.

“Knowledge has three degrees – opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”
— Plotinus

Language is a tool limited by the dialectic. Opening to the experience of intuition or noesis requires moving beyond language and opening to the reality of experience or what is above the line in Plato's Divided Line analogy

The secular world ignores what those recognizing our source know is the source of real knowledge and Man's highest potential for reason.

The bottom line is that a person should know when to be quiet so as to get out of their own way.

‘ “Big Brother is Watching You.”’ He knows you need to be loved. Once you learn right from wrong you will be loved. It is just a matter of time and proper education and you will automatically do the right thing and deserve his love.. The need for safe spaces will be a thing of the past

I am wondering. Do intelligent women ever find average to a little bit slow men attractive? I know they say if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room. But do intelligent women always need a guy that challenges them mentally? I find intelligence and an open mind attractive, but it doesn't feel like I qualify for those women. It often feels that I am stuck amongst women that question very little in the world and don't try to figure things out. — TiredThinker

It depends on what you mean by intelligent. An intelligent woman wants to know you while a shrewd woman wants to judge you. Yet we use the same word for both.

Does the human brain create consciousness or is it a receiver of consciousness?

"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists." —Nikola Tesla

Does a conscious circle of humanity exist in the world or has it ever existed? Is the lifetime search for Simone Weil for conscious life outside of Plato's cave just a hopeless desire but in reality she was doomed to the cave life of imagination and just attached to the shadows on the wall?

Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin as she was nearing death:

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth............................

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything.
— Peter Paapaa

This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think. — Constance

If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE?

https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/

a. The One
The ‘concept’ of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, ‘the One,’ is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its ‘power’ (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a ‘foundation’ (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). The ‘power’ of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the ‘manifestation’ of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding. This ‘power,’ then, is capable of being experienced, or known, only through contemplation (theoria), or the purely intellectual ‘vision’ of the source of all things. The One transcends all beings, and is not itself a being, precisely because all beings owe their existence and subsistence to their eternal contemplation of the dynamic manifestation(s) of the One. The One can be said to be the ‘source’ of all existents only insofar as every existent naturally and (therefore) imperfectly contemplates the various aspects of the One, as they are extended throughout the cosmos, in the form of either sensible or intelligible objects or existents. The perfect contemplation of the One, however, must not be understood as a return to a primal source; for the One is not, strictly speaking, a source or a cause, but rather the eternally present possibility — or active making-possible — of all existence, of Being (V.2.1). According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the ‘generative power’ of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents — that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. These twin poles, this ‘stanchion,’ is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the ‘stanchion,’ the framework of the cosmos, is erected (VI.9.8). This ‘stanchion’ or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence.

This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning.
— Nikolas

Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.

Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions. — Constance

."Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." ~Simone Weil

I don't mean emotional attention which is animal in nature but rather conscious attention which is a quality not arising from the earth but from a higher perspective which reconciles animal duality into a triune perspective. Anyone seeking to understand the meaning and purpose of Man on earth IMO must eventually study conscious attention if for no other reason to experience why we don't have it but are attached to the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/25/william-james-attention/

Long before contemporary psychologists came to examine the self-referential base of consciousness, James writes:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning… Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until also without reason that we can discover an energy is given, something we know not what enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

[…]

The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of the attention.

The growing loss of conscious attention in the world leads to n increased obsession with fragmentation

Man on earth is a being with both a higher and a lower nature. This can only be consciously reconciled through the third force of conscious attention which the world struggles against in favor of emotionally justifying the superiority of fragmentation.

From 1984

‘ “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ’

Peace is assured

There will be no need for safe spaces. Your government and censorsip will make them unnecessary. Your government will teach you the correct words to use. In this way peace is assured.

I was thinking about the history of philosophy and how in all it's history philosophers haven't really solved a single important question. Perhaps, then, some of the key principles of the foundations that made philosophical thinking are flawed. So I flaunted about thinking this and that and one of the key principles that stood out to me most is the principle of non-contradiction. I know in Taoist philosophy there are many things that contradict each other while maintaining a solid foundation for wisdom. So, what say you on this matter? Are there any contradictory claims that have a level of truth and wisdom in them that you know of? Comment below. — Thinking

Experiencing the contradiction rather than denying it can open the door to "meaning" Simone Weil explains: “When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.”

Must we believe exclusively in the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle? Can we also know of the Law of the Included Middle and see why appreciating this apparent contradiction opens a door?

It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward. — Constance

We begin with the experience through efforts to "Know Thyself" That the human essence is in three parts or mind, appetites, and sensations. These parts are not consciously connected but are connected by imagination. As a result our inner world doesn't experience the outer world. Instead we interpret it. Our senses are weak. Our emotions are filled with negativity, and being governed by duality we do not see that the universe as a triune reality. Step one is to verify what we ARE: the human condition.

Meister Eckhart describes the seed of the Soul. Can Man become a son of God: "The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God." Meister Eckhart

The seed is rarely present. Jacob Needleman describes it in his book "Lost Christianity"

What we need to learn is that merely to look at things as they are with bare attention can be a religious act.

The principal power of the soul, which defines its real nature, is a gathered attention that is directed simultaneously toward the spirit and the body. This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. God can only speak to the soul, Father Sylvan writes, and only when the soul exists. But the soul of man only exists for a moment, as long as it takes for the question to appear and disappear.

The seed of the soul only appears when we stop imagining reality. Can we experience rather than imagine reality? Can the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE? How can it be done to allow the seed of the soul to grow?

In any case, the point was that philosophers today are not sentenced to death for their ideas. Go easy with the drama. — Olivier5

No but the ideas are: "Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? ... And once they are dead they are no more than corpses." Simone Weil

Socrates was killed because he threatened ideas based on and justified by imagination established in Plato's cave. Now laws don't allow for killing philosophers but the great perennial ideas at the source of philosophy like the essence of Christianity can be condemned and canceled out of society.

What can be more insulting then person acquiring some respect asserts that "I know Nothing"? We are intelligent and assumed to have knowledge and now Socrates asserts that he knows nothing. Residents of Plato's cave must kill such ideas. They inspire thought which is simply offensive and intolerable for educated people.

If we can't kill at least make sure these ideas have no safe spaces with no freedom other than to remain silent.

Oh really? I thought Socrates was sentenced to death because he was what we call today a pedophile. Also I am not aware of any present day philosopher forced to drink any hemlock... — Olivier5

No, Socrates was more concerned with the minds of the young rather than their bodies. Pedophilia was common practice in those days and nothing to be killed over.

Socrates was a disruptive influence and his ideas corrupted the youth of Athens so had to be killed. In these times a philosopher on the level of Socrates would have to be banned from teaching with the goal of killing him on the inside. They wouldn't understand that his death was intentional. Such a philosopher would be canceled out for the masses but a life giving influence for a minority..

Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.

"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained. — Constance

The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man.

Our personality is like a horizontal line connecting us to death. It changes over time by mimicking and hormones. We may have the same knowledge at thirty that we have at twenty but our being has changed along with opinions of ourselves.

The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth.

The young seed of the soul initially feeds off of personality experiences. It would be normal for a person to become open to what they are rather then how they appear to be so the husk of the acorn cracks open. It is quite possible that the efficiency of materialism makes it impossible for the personality to outgrow the enchantment with materialism to experience themselves, what they are. Then they can die inside.

As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees.

A real Man IMO is one who can put knowledge of the trees and its needs into the perspective of the forest as a whole and its needs along with the will to act upon it.

Personal liberty is not the same as societal liberty.
— Nikolas

That's a totally different topic. My point is you cannot be a free spirit if you keep anguishing to no end about what others will think of what you say. Of course if you want the folks on twitter to love you, you may have to give them what they expect, but what's the point of that?

You don't actually need to conform to PC in real life. — Olivier5

But sometimes a person's voluntary obligations learned by experience is hated by normal people. They will have to drink the hemlock. They can avoid these obligations and be happy or be hated by the educated. What are the obligations of a real human being aware of the human condition? Do they drink the hemlock? From Plato's Cave allegory:

[Socrates] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.

What to do?

First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps. — Constance

For me the phrase I Am doesn't exist for Man in Plato's Cave. In reality the totality of the human organism can be described as "We are Many." As I understand it, the potential for Man is inner unity where the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE or as a solution rather than as a mixture. So the real I doesn't exist as of yet. It is our potential.

Rather than a soul a human being has the seed of a soul. Jacob Needleman describes our situation as Acornology in his book "Lost Christianity. Our real rather than acquired self is like the kernel of life within the husk of the acorn. Jacob Needleman writes:

I began my lecture that morning from just this point. There is an innate element in human nature, I argued that can grow and develop only through impressions of truth received in the organism like a special nourishing energy. To this innate element I gave a name - perhaps not a very good name - the "higher unconscious." My aim was to draw an extremely sharp distinction between the unconscious that Freud had identified and the unconscious referred to (though not by that name) in the Christian tradition.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful!

The question before us, therefore, is whether or not modern psychology is only a version of acornology.

The mistake modern psychology makes is the assumption that the husk of the acorn is like our real self. Can a person be capable of distinguishing between the outer man (our personality) and the inner man (what we are born with)?

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.” – Socrates.

Can they be at one? Who is willing through efforts to "Know Thyself" to experience what they ARE rather than how they imagine themselves?

The where does one go from here? Here, being the starting point for any meaningful inquiry at all: right here, in the midst of the world when one makes the critical reductive move into the present. I am referring to Husserl's phenomenological reduction, the suspension of extraneous "naturalistic" knowledge claims in order liberate "the world" from their presuppositions, then discover the actuality that has been there, always, already, but ignored because one was too busy.

I want to know about what it means for the "present" not to be a nonsense term. I think the path to a discovery of what a self is, lies here, in a discovery of the present. I've been reading Husserl, Heidegger, post Heideggarians and then John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and others (Levinas!) and I have come to the conclusion that the self is not illusory, but my strategy is not a familiar one: the self, the genuine self "behind" the empirically constructed self, if affirmed through ethics, that is, metaethics, the very thing Mackie denies. — Constance

Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being

The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.

Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.

The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm.

Opposing free speech in schools, the media, political correctness etc. is instead rewarded.
— Nikolas

If you care so much about what others expect of you, you will never be free. Rewards from society are not necessary to live well. Your own personal freedom to say whatever you want may not agree with other people's expectations that you're going to stick to "proper language", but then, don't you also expect things from others? And do you feel like you restrict their freedom when you expect something from them? — Olivier5

Personal liberty is not the same as societal liberty. They require different qualities of obligations. I may demand the right to kill you to enhance my personal freedom. However societal liberty demands the respect for life. Personal liberty may give a woman the right to kill her fetus while societal liberty demands the attitude of respect for the life process from birth to death.

Societal obligations require voluntary obligations individuals in this day and age are likely to ignore. They require an awareness beyond selfish attitudes.

Mark 12: 17 Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

It seems that Man as a whole, living in Plato's cave, has forgotten what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar and cannot distinguish between them. If we can't, liberty by definition is only a potential for Man. As we are, we are incapable of it and some form of psychological slavery is the lawful result of ignorance for a society.

Am I to understand that your solution is to... demand that people behave themselves? BLM and Antifa are using free speech too, what do you suggest be done about it?

I suggest that whenever you hear that someone has been unfairly criticised for being politically incorrect or whatever, go write to that business or person showing your support. That's something you can do. — Judaka

NO. For a free society to sustain itself the majority must recognize and support the value of free speech and oppose a minority which would be against it. Obviously it isn't happening. Opposing free speech in schools, the media, political correctness etc. is instead rewarded. Since this is obviously true, a free society isn't wanted and willingly sacrificed for the security of imagined safety

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

Liberty is dead. The idea of liberty is for an advanced society. America i not there yet. We have proven America no longer deserves liberty nor safety and prefers a form of statist slavery..

The issue with social media is that it has empowered a very small minority to have a very large voice, it's really got not much to do with larger society. Even though your OP is fearmongering, most of the responses to you just go the other way and pretend like there's fairness in the way Twitter mobs treat people, which is silly. It's not the state that's trying to silence you, it's random people but I don't think there's anything which can be done about that. People have a right to call you a racist homophobe and demand you be fired - free speech has to allow that and if your employer sacks you because thousands of people said they'd boycott the business or because it's bad publicity otherwise then that's their decision.

Do you have an intelligent solution for us to consider or are you just going to complain generally about an exaggerated concern? Also, how often does this happen? — Judaka

What is your aim for yourself and for society in general? I believe in the rights as recorded in the Declaration of Independence and the freedoms that make these rights possible.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are universal rights and not established by Man. If people want these rights they will have the obligation to perform the voluntary obligations necessary to sustain these rights. Of course if people want the slavery of socialism or communism then all this is unnecessary. The state will decide your obligations and define your happiness. Simone Weil describes our situation:

The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights. He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

Do you and I as individuals further the right of free speech or do we believe in “might makes right” as does BLM and Antifa and get away with intimidation? If our aim is to further the ideology of statist slavery, then intimidation is the best. If our aim is a free society, then a person has the obligation to support free speech even if it opposes my beliefs. It boils down to our aim for ourselves and for society in general.

Censorship is a huge problem, and will continue to proliferate as the means of expression become more widespread. But I think there is hope. As soon as the cowardly fear of words and voices is proven to be illusory (which, given the ease with which we can communicate, is only a matter of time), the fashionable idea that articulated sounds, marks on paper, or pixelated letters can be the same as violence will become increasingly untenable, and its believers increasingly silly. — NOS4A2

Who defines ideal moral standards? Initially God did nd we killed God. Now science proves facts but is ignorant as far as moral standards. So the next possibility is Man itself.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

The movie explains how these forces that be are attempting to control the past which will be the attempt to create the future and the. supremacy of its enforced marxist one opinion through "might makes right". Are there enough people and institutions left in America to defend the value of freedom of thought and expression of ideas? My guess is that a free society must hit bottom before it can realize the error of its ways and strive to regain the value of freedom. Hitting bottom is not a pleasant perspective to look forward to.

You have the right to remain silent.
— Nikolas

Not any more. If you're not actively "anti-racist" then you're racist. Silence will not protect you from the mob. — fishfry

Mob rule has replaced Lady Liberty's ideal of blind justice under the law. My how we have sunk.

Kenosha Kid

That said, "cancel culture" is overstated. No one is obliged to give you a platform for your opinions, and every employer is free to fire someone who represents them ill. This has always been the case. You would have struggled to keep a media job in the west throughout most of the 20th century if you were openly a Nazi. It's just now society has moved on to not being pro-racist, pro-sexist, pro-homophobic.

Does maintaining a free society require indoctrination or is rule by blind justice sufficient? Is their another way? If I want to open a men's only tavern do I have to allow women? It is a platform for my opinions — "

Raul

There is a dark side as it has always been in history, unfortunately we have to deal with our human condition, that has not changed at all, our brains are always as dangerous as in the past. But today is better in any sense to the past.

Remember many scientists, too many, have died because of their discoveries going against mainstream thinking and their theories were right ... so we owe them a lot.

Plato described the human condition as like living in Plato’s cave attached to the shadows on the wall. If true, it must include the continual struggle between an objective universal perspective and fragmentation. (wholeness vs parts) Religion has the ideal of freedom from the delusions of cave mentality and fragmentation or the domain of science is concerned with establishing partial truths. The human condition prevents the natural unification of universalism and fragmentation since cave life keeps humanity living in imagination. As a result society as a whole cannot see the forest for the trees. The movie suggests that for those caught up in this Marxist agenda there is only one tree worth looking at and rest should be eliminated.

I see this obsession with fragmentation as opposed to a universal perspective as a loss.

http://esoteric.msu.edu/Reviews/NicolescuReview.htm

After reading Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the twenty-first century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole.

Nicolescu’s raison d’être is to help develop people’s consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls “transdisciplinarity.” He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric—body, plus mind, plus spirit—that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called “value-free” material.

I agree with you that the way to objective meaning or the attraction of philosophy is made impossible in Plato’s Cave but I suggest it doesn’t have to be. A human being can leave the cave. Do you agree?

Conscious faith is freedom while emotional faith is slavery. Does anyone here agree?

I was wondering what people thought of Matthew 20:1-16 and what it means to them

(Use the translation most comfortable to you) — Gregory

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
20 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.

“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. 6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

When person works in the world, value is determined by results. However in pursuit of the Kingdom, One man worked the whole day while another works for an hour and received the same reward we will call "grace". The idea here is that in pursuit of the kingdom, value is determined by conscious effort. If a person produces the necessary effort for an hour or day it doesn't matter. these efforts are worth the same.

Say a person has a revelation to understand the meaning he was searching for. Another works for a year to receive the same revelation. Their reward is the same and made possible by grace rather than secular society

I suggest you immediately give up and refrain forever from trying to read Greek meaning from English translation. You will never be correct and you may be very, very wrong. If you wish to understand the Bible, or really any other book, you have to first find out what it says - not as straightforward as it sounds. In translation you can get reasonably close, but not as close as you would like to get. Wasting perspiration on deconstructing English prepositions is a ultimately a foolish game. Certainly the authors/editors weren't planting mysteries there. — tim wood

I agree that details can be misunderstood but the New Testament has an essential message that a person can grow to understand by pondering it. The essential message is re-birth: becoming the New Man. It isn't about morality but re-birth. Acquiring the ability to sustain conscious attention which makes conscious faith possible is a beginning.

When read word for word in the OP there really is no IN and OF Christ mentioned. Paul merely juxtaposes justification by faith as opposed to law announcing it a dead end. The irony is that this so-called justification by faith became law later on. Can't quite catch on to what Justification is supposed to mean in either case. What justifies man if not the fact that he's here. What would justify his disappearance if not another act of god or himself being the cause. For anything to be justified requires an overt reason and not just a single word abstraction which denotes nothing but can connote anything. — Tliusin

But explain to me why if all a person needs to be a Christian is to have faith in Christ yet the Apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith. Obviously faith is a profound concept the truth of which is beyond superficial understanding

The Bible isn't a historic document but a psychological one. We have to open to the psychology of faith and the difference between emotional and conscious faith

Do you see IN and BY as the same?
— Nikolas
What does "in" and "by" have to do with anything? These are English words that do not occur in the original. (And in English, obviously, they are not the same.)

Here's a pretty good literal translation of Gal. 2:16

Knowing and that not is righteous a man out of working of law if not through belief Jesus Christ, and we into Christ Jesus believed, in order that we be righteous out of belief Christ and not out of working of law, that out of working of law not will be righteous all flesh. — tim wood

I'm a little unusual. My great great grand uncle was an archbishop in the Armenian church and as I understand it, was friendly with Madam Blavtsky so is easy for me to gravitate towards Platonic Christianity. It ansers my questions. I am not the only one as seen in this link.

http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/cp.htm.

Rebirth or being born again is only possible from being born from above. Jesus said he brings a sword. Obviously the great struggle of the human condition is being born from below and born from above. Instead of the lower ruling the higher normal for fallen Man, a person must allow the higher to rule the lower and not be a slave to appetites. This is very difficult since the habits of the lower are very strong.

Even when I read the literal translation it is unclear.

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/galatians/2-16.htm

Through faith Christ or by faith. How can we understand what through means?

John 14:6 - Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

A superficial understanding believes through refers to blind belief the body of Jesus. Yet Jesus is referring to the great chain of being in which the level of the being of Man is below the level of the Christ which is between the Christ and the Father. The Christ is the conscious quality between God and Man. The way to the Father is through the level of the Son.

↪Nikolas Well, you do read your Bible. But in reading your Bible so closely you collide with the fact that you are not reading the Bible at all. You're reading a translation. And that is the problem.

And If you're going to read the Bible so closely, you shall have to learn to read in Greek. (And that is actually surprisingly doable!) The phrase in Galatians reads, "διὰ πίστεωσ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ" (dia pisteoos Jesus Christ). Literally, then, "through faith Jesus Christ."

The "dia" is a preposition that here means "through." It means through in this instance because of the the genitive endings "ou," and which in English is translated "of." (With different endings it means something else.) In short, then, the Greek does not have your problem; your problem is an artifact of translation into English.

And there are a lot of such problems because the square peg of Greek often does not fit the English round hole. In addition, there are just plain wrong translations, those some of translators/editors apparently feeling the Bible benefits from tweaking here and there.

Two lessons. First, trouble to obtain a good translation. Second, read for sense, letting your own sense absorb the shock and ride over small issues that may likely just be matters of translation. Third, learn Greek, PM me if you want to discuss that more. — tim wood

IYO what does the excerpt from Galatians I posted mean to you? Do you see IN and BY as the same?

Faith IN Christ as I understand it is emotional faith. However the faith OF Christ is conscious faith leading to freedom. When we create something to have blind faith in emotionally. It can be anything and that is why it is slavery. There is no reason to it. It is partial truths governed by imagination

I'm more of a Christian Platonist so the ideas I've learned from Plato and Plotinus also permeate Christianity. Rather than man made Christianity or what Kierkegaard described as Christendom, its origin is top down so must be remembered.

Plato described the human organism as a tripartite soul made up of three distinct parts: appetites or animal needs, spirit, and reason. When they are in balance, a person becomes capable of balanced understanding which my lead to noesis or intuition.

The faith OF Christ is our conscious potential to balance these three parts of ourselves rather than living in opposition where these parts oppose one another and we turn in circles. Plato's chariot describes the efforts of the balanced Man. Of course we don't have this quality of consciousness that can sustain balance. We may have it for a moment and a person gives us a nasty look and we lose it to automatic reactions. Ye human conscious evolution requires a person to become capable of conscious faith. The apostles asked Jesus to increase our faith. Even thou they had faith in Jesus they lacked the quality of consciousness necessary for conscious faith

The faith of the Centurion was considered so high because he was master of himself. His appetites were slave to reason giving their power to act by spiritual energy. The lower parts of his tripartite soul were sick. Jesus gave him the quality of energy necessary to heal and retain balance. Efforts towards Conscious faith provides the means to awaken from being captive to the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave or the darkness of the World in Christianity.

I find it not so hard to understand the difference between in and of. There is the faith OF Christ as possessed and revealed by him culminating in his Resurrection and the faith IN Christ which Paul internalized and carried forth as his mission to proclaim the means by which man is justified compared to the external world of Law devoid of any such justification. Note what it states in your quote...even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ.

Paul couldn't have proceeded without that prior incarnation of faith manifested in Christ.

Since you proclaim it as an essential distinction, you must already have some idea as to what that is and not merely proclaim as some mystery one must ponder. Actually the biblical quote is quite clear in its meaning. If there is a mystery, it is the mystery of faith itself. — Tliusin

Why did Jesus say the faith of the centurion was such great faith? Many people have faith in Christ but why is the faith of the Centurion so exceptional? If no one explains it, I'll explain what I believe to be the the difference tomorrow.

Matthew 8:5-13

The Faith of the Centurion
5 When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6 “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”

7 Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”

8 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

10 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11 I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

13 Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.

Faith?

I understand (religious) "faith" as follows:

n. A dogma consisting in mysteries, magic or fairytales (i.e. just-so Woo-of-the-Gaps stories) the questioning of which triggers cognitive dissonance & increased anxiety usually in its adherents (i.e. 'true believers').
.
v. To trust - hope for - mysteries or magic or fairytales (e.g. exposing conspiracies) in spite of, or without any, doubts, and usually to the degree trusting is (psychologically) easier than distrusting mysteries, etc.

@OP -

"Faith of" suggests having trust like another, or, as in the NT context, 'like Jesus'. "Faith in" denotes trusting some 'entity' itself (e.g. Jesus). Just my two shekels. — 180 Proof

You are describing faith IN Christ. But what of the faith OF Christ or the quality the Apostles didn't have but wanted to become capable of.

Faith is the belief in the unbelievable and reconciler of contradictions based on the best arguments that can be made to justify it. But ultimately it rests on absurdity as the main doctrine for its existence. The doctrine being that its very lack of logic is precisely that which gives it power. An idea which in a unique kind of way is eminently logical as a methodology of overcoming all objections to that which is inherently nonsensical but not without meaning. — Tliusin

I'm not being critical but obviously you are unaware of the difference between faith IN Christ and the Faith OF Christ. Yet people attack Christianity and faith unaware of this essential distinction.

Are you familiar with the concept of a conscious universe? The universe is analogous to a living organism structured on levels of reality. It is an ancient idea. Plotinus referred to it as the emanations of ONE as the source of creation and the Great Chain of Being.. But obviously this is difficult to explain in a post. Someone copied an excerpt from Jacob Needleman's book "A Sense of the Cosmos"

http://www.tree-of-souls.com/spirituality/5157-conscious_universe_-_jacob_needleman.html

If you re open to the idea that the universe is a hierarchy of intentions, then Man has the potential for conscious evolution. We exist as the man animal and a creature of reaction. Conscious evolution leads in the direction of a higher level of being within which the man animal can evolve towards becoming a conscious being. If this excerpt makes sense perhaps we could explore what creates a conscious human perspective as opposed to our more usual conditioned indoctrinated perspective. The idea is that as we are, we serve a mechanical necessity. Organic life on earth serves a mechanical purpose of transforming substances. However we have the potential of serving a conscious purpose that we can awaken to.. Some are drawn to this purpose much like a moth is drawn to the light. If life in Plato's cave offers sufficient meaning then why contemplate these things? But as Plato said: "man is a being in search of meaning." Those drawn to this quality of meaning beyond what the world provides are drawn to the ability to experience and reflect conscious universal purpose as opposed to the habits acquired during cave life.

Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin when she was already very sick:

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth..............................

Simone was attracted to what the world could not offer. Your question asks if it was worth pursing a life dedicated to the experience of truth at the expense losing oneself in the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave. Only a person with a similar hunger in the heart for the experience of truth as opposed to imagination will understand. Most will just consider it foolish. Albert Camus called Simone the "only great mind of the times." Does it mean anything if it interferes with our smart phones?

It's a good question K but IMO you are approaching it wrongly. For example the meaning of a car or a house is defined by its service to us. It is easy to assume that since life isn't serving us it has no meaning. But what if our purpose is to serve universal purpose? The essential question becomes what is the meaning of humanity in relation to objective universal purpose?

As I understand it, objective morality as opposed to conditioned morality is apriori knowledge we experience as conscience. Plato referred to it as anamnesis and it exists as dharma in the East. Where conditioned morality is taught, objective conscience is remembered