Introducing myself ... and something else
Hello, Forum Members
This is my first post.
I am a 70-year-old business owner and grandfather. I have a degree in Philosophy, and a Graduate Degree in Professional Writing.
My posts will not be huge paragraphs, Google searches, or filled with big words that will distract from what I'm simply saying.
Oh, and I spent five years in a Catholic Monastery forty years ago, although I have never been religious for a single day. And, in saying this, I'm setting up where I will be coming from, which is not a materialistic view of the Universe (and ultimately Us) springing up autonomously and evolving unaided.
And the Metaphysical Principle that I discovered long ago (and that has never been refuted by any scientific discovery, or even known by any scientist) that is the foundation under the "necessity" for the existence of an omnipotent power in the creation and evolution of our Universe is this:
No combination of lesser things can create a greater thing without something greater than the greater thing added to the lesser things.
I look forward to our discussions
This is my first post.
I am a 70-year-old business owner and grandfather. I have a degree in Philosophy, and a Graduate Degree in Professional Writing.
My posts will not be huge paragraphs, Google searches, or filled with big words that will distract from what I'm simply saying.
Oh, and I spent five years in a Catholic Monastery forty years ago, although I have never been religious for a single day. And, in saying this, I'm setting up where I will be coming from, which is not a materialistic view of the Universe (and ultimately Us) springing up autonomously and evolving unaided.
And the Metaphysical Principle that I discovered long ago (and that has never been refuted by any scientific discovery, or even known by any scientist) that is the foundation under the "necessity" for the existence of an omnipotent power in the creation and evolution of our Universe is this:
No combination of lesser things can create a greater thing without something greater than the greater thing added to the lesser things.
I look forward to our discussions
Comments (420)
Dunno, but it seems your metaphysical principle is similar to Rousseau, 1762, or maybe Paley, 1802.
Close enough, methinks.
Quoting Joe Mello
As compared to who?
Quoting Joe Mello
Can you connect this to an example to illustrate your point in action?
So you'll be defending the Christian/Catholic idea of god from the perspective of the traditional arguments, possibly Aquinas' Five Ways?
Perhaps do a bit of a search to see how these arguments have been explored earlier.
We are glad you are here. :flower:
Quoting Joe Mello
Why does this feel like circular reasoning?
@Banno I'm lost again like a cat in a paper bag. You know the kind....
Hello Joe Mello. Welcome to the Philosophy Forum. My name is Javi and I am from Madrid. Glad to have a person with such experience as you.
Wow! Interesting indeed. I always felt so indifferent in terms of religious education/groups. I guess I would have lived the same experience as you!
Why don't you just say that any form of organized existence, or order in general, must be created by a mind or something mind-like? I think clearer terms like "order" are easier to discuss than the more ambiguous terms like "greater".
Except there is no evidence to support such an a priori necessity. Contrary to what he aimed to demonstrate, Newton's physics work without the hand of God. Evolution is a down up rather than top down order.
This is an assertion for which no evidence exists to support it. That lack of evidence has induced an awe in ignorance of an explanation. That ignorance of an explanation has led you to conclude something that is already devoid of the necessity of proof, by it's complete lack of evidence. There is nothing indicating that the universe, which is far mpore complex, majestic, and amazing than any super-celestial artist, is not of itself so. I have a better assertion for you:
No combination of ignorance, evidence, emotion, or observance has ever indicated that the universe isn't great enough to have been responsible for the creation of all lesser systems therein contained.
Now that is an assertion for which all evidence gathered to date is strengthend by.
Also the concept of such a force has been used for mass genocide too many times, meaning you need to throw it out before you become so corrupted by it as to fall into the same self-hatred, human-hatred, and fear that allows people to walk the himmelstrasse, for I will not walk it with you. Real philosophy won't fucking stand for it any longer, especially not with another global conflict incipient, conducted by the same people who share this kind of mystical view, and who will unfuckingdoubtedly claim Got Mit Uns. Join us here, on earth, friend. Where you belong, and where philosophy needs you now more than ever, as the hour grows late for us as a species.
That's an opinion. Not a principle. And since we can't prove it or disapprove it via science it will remain one. Welcome to the forum.
Thinking laterally, you were the accountant or cook?
Welcome.
Many of the posters before me on this thread have expressed their skepticism about this statement, a skepticism I share. Groups of lesser things creating a greater thing without something greater being added is one of the primary ways the world organizes itself, e.g. chemistry creating life and biology creating mind.
Seems like maybe you're itching to provoke a fight more than you are just introducing yourself.
Problem is that the something greater than the greater thing needs to be created, and the greater thing of that greater thing needs to be created, and the greater thing of that greater thing needs to be created... If a great thing doesn't require a creator then creation doesn't require a greater thing.
Sounds like knowledge – an explanatory process (e.g. historical, formal & natural sciences) – to me, Joe. It might be the worst cultural ratchet (racket?) we primates have come up with except for all the others tried in the last fifty millennia. Consider this (if you haven't already) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity ...
Btw, welcome to our sandbox! :smirk:
:rofl:
What you didn't do is ponder the simple metaphysical principle that I provided. In other words, you already have all the answers and don't expect to find any new ones when it comes to any mention of God.
Speak about the metaphysical principle after you have given it some thought.
I have no appetite to engage a Skeptic apologist riding along a rail, if that is who you are.
No scientific discovery has shown to us that, for example, a combination of the elements created the first ancient bacteria. Or that living tissue created thought.
To take the existence of life and thought as simply evolving from a primordial soup of the elements is not scientific, but just a materialist's only conclusion within the parameters that materialist has erected.
The dismissal of this principle under the auspices of what it sounds like is not a philosophical accomplishment.
Anyway ...
Sometimes the way we "feel" is our own doing and not someone else's.
Religious bible thumpers and skeptic textbook thumpers have the same problem -- they never stop reading, put down their books, and experience.
Using the example of life evolving from the elements, the metaphysical principle I provided can be thought upon like this:
Taking physical elements and adding to them a lesser thing, such as light, to create a living being would be an absurdity.
Taking physical elements and adding to them an equal thing, such as other elements, to create a living being would be an impossibility.
Taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing, such as a living being, to create a living being would be a redundancy.
But taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing than a living being, such as an omnipotent being, to create a living being would be a metaphysical possibility.
The metaphysical principle I provided you is a journey into existence.
God's omnipotent existence would be the power behind the existence of evolution within the physical universe.
God's divine mind would be the "why", not the "how"?
And every skeptic I have ever met refuses to understand the simple fact that, for example, a living being is "greater" than a rock.
When I tell a skeptic that a mother holding her dying child is a greater reality than the death of a star, that skeptic cannot for the life of him agree. It's truly dumbfounding.
You have concluded this because the parameters of science that have been drawn by philosophically inept scientists only allows you to think in this way.
The thinking of evolution as a top down order is supported by every failure of scientists to move past theory to proof where evolution is evolved.
A scientist going into a lab and creating a living being from the physical elements is and will always be an absurdity.
It is indeed a principle. But, more importantly, to understand it takes years of disciplined thinking, beginning with a line by line understanding of Aristotle's Metaphysics, then progressing from the simple metaphysical principles he discovers to greater ones.
And science does nothing but support the principle. Show me a scientific discovery where a scientist combines things and creates a totally different and greater thing. An ice cube is not it.
An omnipotent God is not finite and therefore the only thing that could exist infinitely.
Your confidence in yourself must be very popular with everyone but the ladies.
And philosophical debate is only a fight to someone looking for a comfy pillow to rest his empty head upon.
Knowledge is the adventure of a lifetime when we seek it through talent, humility, sacrifice, experience, and so much more that the gift of our humanity has provided us.
I have found that a skeptic likes to look up into outer space because he has never discovered the greatness right where he stands, within himself.
Your ignorance of your own greatness will keep you from the knowledge of who you actually are until you breathe your last breath in this body and this knowledge is revealed to you in the next instant.
Actually, no, that's not what I meant. I thought it might be useful as a newbie for you to see how these kinds of debates played out here, given the argument you raised comes up regularly, that's all.
There's always room for more cranks and dogmatists here.
And you refuse to ponder a metaphysical principle, but only speak about your time spent in this groupthink.
There are no crowds of wisdom, only a single wise person.
Greetings and welcome! Interesting you felt it necessary to include that disclaimer! I have an MA in Buddhist Studies and am a technical writer, so we have something in common.
Quoting Joe Mello
I'm generally on the idealist side of the fence and have always been opposed to materialism. Don't quite know what to make of this, though. What I do see are some primary distinctions between inorganic, living, and rational sentient beings, and that you can't get to the latter from the former. I don't necessarily endorse any form of creation theory, but I'm of the view that the nature or essence of life and mind is beyond the purview of the objective sciences.
There cannot be an infinite line of finite things.
A philosophy forum should be populated, at least, mostly with people who studied philosophy well enough to reason out basic logical problems.
How can a universe becoming another universe and another universe and so on be a logical explanation for the beginning of the first universe?
Only an omnipotent infinite being can be the logical beginning of a finite universe.
Materialists are very guilty of throwing a bunch of crap against the wall and then pointing to it as if it's something other than a bunch of crap.
Well I can see that 2 of the 3 fit pretty well. I myself am a crank, but I was a newbie.
You seem to like jumping to conclusions, I though that was a no-no in philosophy.
The only thing I have to say to you, because you're certainly heading in the right direction, is coming to know the absolute truth about our existence is absolutely knowable. Most persons believe that everyone is simply opinionated because most persons don't sacrifice enough in the pursuit of absolute truth.
And it takes great sacrifice.
For just as we cannot see two sides of a coin at the same time, we cannot see absolute truth and our opinions at the same time.
In a word, God will not interrupt us when we are speaking to ourselves.
And you don’t see any of yourself in Garrett? For Garrett, rationality itself is the godhead, and for you, an omnipotent being is the godhead of rationality. These are two sides of the same rigid doctrinaire coin.
Quoting Joe Mello
Indeed.
I suspect if you stick it out here long enough you may discover that 180’s background in modern philosophy is likely considerably more extensive than yours.
It seems to me that an omnipotent God can only express its omnipotence within a universe of finite things and a universe without finite things would be unchanging and dead.
My view is similar. Materialism only takes us so far. Not considering other possibilities seems to me to be generally unphilosophical.
So what? That makes your "principle" right?? Wtf?Show me a scientific discovery that proves what you are saying then, if that's how it goes. What kind of reasoning is that?? Don't you see the logical gap here?
Sorry but since science can't prove or disprove your hypothesis, makes it a simple opinion,despite how much you don't like it. Science set the principles not you.
This principle seems false. Lots of little things can be combined to make a greater thing. A house of cards has greater complexity than any one of the cards composing it.
I do not find cheese by itself to be particularly nice, or tomato by itself, or bread by itself, or basil leaves by themselves. But combined as a pizza they become great. That greatness is nowhere to be found in the ingredients, but only in their combination.
If the word 'greater' is being used in a moral sense, as in 'morally better' then it also seems false, as immoral behaviour can sometimes create a morally good outcome. Imagine, for instance, that Dave believes substance x will poison and kill Jennifer and so he puts it in her drink out of a sadistic desire to kill her. That was immoral. Yet substance x is in fact the cure to a disease that Jennifer has and so Jennifer's life is prolonged and improved by what Dave did to her. Well, that's good - great! Dave's immoral action produced a morally good outcome. Out of some evil, some goodness has come.
And then there's God himself. God is omnipotent and so can do anything, which means that God has the power to make himself 'not God' - that is, the power to divest himself of some of his power, or knowledge, or goodness - yet at the same time give himself the ability to become God again. Well, if he exercises that ability, then there would exist a person who is less than God, yet is able to become God. And were that person then to exercise that power, we would have a combination of lesser things - a person who is less than God combined with an ability to become God - creating a greater thing: God.
I believe in God as firmly as can be, but I would counsel against any and all attempts to show that God's existence is mandated by the universe or by some principle, for that is to think that there is something above God that dictates to him. God does not exist of necessity. Exists, yes. But not 'of necessity', for that would be no God at all, but a creature who lacks the power not to exist. The creature who authors those principles - the ones that dictate God exists - would be the real power, and yet it is a manifest contradiction to suppose that there could exist a being more powerful than an omnipotent being. Therefore, God is the author of the laws of Reason and is not subject to them.
Quoting Joe Mello
The idea that things combined cannot create something greater depends on a notion of the natural
world as material objects in motion , which is an outdated idea from the vantage of many scientists and philosophers. Of course you are right , given the assumption that reality is physical objects in causal interaction. But more recent views on the nature of the real grounds things in interactions. It is the interaction that is primary, not the object. Time is the key ingredient in all interactions, which means that something creative and novel emerges from every event. This is why you cannot unfry an egg. And novelty begets novelty. If this is a god at work, it is a god that is continually surprised by what they produce, because their product talks back to them. It would be a god constantly changed by what it creates, rather than an omniscient blueprint simply reproducing itself in the world.
This is interesting. I don't have nearly as much training or professional background as you do, but I can appreciate what you're saying here. Thank you for bringing the words together that you have.
I too am looking forward to our discussions.
Emergence is not a philosophical principle, it's a scientific one, although it is not fully accepted. It has been discussed lots of times here on the forum, although I can't remember a specific discussion. Here's a link to a well-known paper - "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson.
https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf
Quoting Joe Mello
Quoting Joe Mello
Life did not "evolve from the elements." Darwin was very clear that he did not know how life began and his theory has nothing to say about it. His theory of evolution by natural selection only applies to, oddly enough, the origins of species, i.e. changes in populations of organisms, by natural selection.
Our understanding of how life developed from non-living matter is not as well-established as Darwinian evolution, but scientists are making progress. Suggested reading - "Life's Ratchet" by Peter Hoffmann.
A better example than an ice cube is a poetic metaphor, which produces a new meaning from prior linguistic elements.
You're in need of lots of philosophical therapy. Stick around.
(1) How do you know that the universe had a "beginning"? (Define "beginning" in this context just so I'm clear what you're talking about, Joe.)
(2) How do you know that the universe is "finite"? (Define which fundamental aspects of the universe are "finite" or if you mean it's "finite" in every fundamental aspect.)
(3) The universe is physical (regardless of whatever else it may be) and, insofar as it has a "beginning", so doesn't it follow logically that that "beginning" is also physical rather than "logical"?
(4) Also, when you say "logical beginning", which system of logic (e.g. Aristotlean? classical? mathematical? paraconsistent? deviant?) are you assuming is at work in (your) cosmogeny?
(5) How do you, Joe, validly infer from a "finite universe" to "an omnipotent infinite being" when conclusions cannot contain more – especially "infinitely" more – than is contained implicitly in their premises?
(6) Laatly, how does the answering with a greater mystery (e.g. "omnipotent infinite being") not merely beg the question of a comparatively lesser great mystery (e.g. "beginning of the universe")?
:chin:
I'll begin taking statements like this seriously, Joe, if you answer at least one of my questions above in either a sufficiently scientific or coherently metaphysical manner. I'm quite confident from reading your posts that you haven't a clue as to what "a multi-universe" refers to. :roll:
:lol: It is, as you say, "mostly" ...
Quoting T Clark
Forgot to include the link I referenced -
https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf
Actually, Newton said his first law of motion requires the will of God. The fact that something existed in a specific way in the past, doesn't necessitate that it will continue to exist that way in the future. This is very similar to the problem with induction, in general.
And you have displayed just silly notions of God, not anything profound.
If God created a world equal to himself, he would have to create himself.
A doorknob is perfect if it opens a door.
And God is perfect if he created a universe that works very well for the pinnacle of it, the human being, to live and to grow and to learn and to become great and to fail and to be free and to do so much else.
And God did, so he is.
And God isn't a "mystery" to me in the least.
After 7 years as a mystic letting God do the talking, and acquiring a scholastic education at the same time, belief became knowledge, and the mystery became truth.
And (this is the best part) truth became love.
And you forgot to show me where I went wrong in placing a human being at the pinnacle of creation.
Is it a dolphin?
A star?
Please tell me your profound discovery of creation's greatest reality.
It's the human personality, by the way.
You agree, then, that God does not exist of necessity? God exists, but has the ability not to? And you agree, do you, that God can create something less great than God? That is, you agree, do you, that God can turn himself into something less great than God? And you agree, do you, that God can turn himself into something less great than God, but with the ability to become God again? And you agree, do you, that this lesser being could then turn itself into God, and thus that the lesser can create the greater, contrary to what you claimed?
God isn't necessary for the universe to exist. The universe can exist and God can exist and God can not have created the universe. And indeed, given the rather crappy nature of the universe it stands to reason that God did not create it, or us.
But God's omnipotence is seen in the manner these finite things move and have their being.
For example, the Universe is moving outward from a single point in every direction, and with an ever-increasing speed.
Dark Energy is the physical force behind this movement of the Universe. And, although it is a finite power, it is acting like an infinite power. For how can a finite power move an object without that object slowing down after a time?
A more complex molecule is still a molecule, not a living being ... not a thought.
God does exist out of necessity, for nothing could exist without God.
We exist because he exists. We think because he thinks. We love because he loves. Etc.
And to see the imperfections in creation as a problem for the existence of God is to not know the value of the freedom that is the greatest gift to creation.
What good would it be for us to have been given, without any effort or growth or achievement on our part, a perfect life from birth?
We don't exist to exist, but exist to become like God, our father. And he receives his greatest glory through his children who become fully alive, just like any father does.
I wouldn't want it any other way. My joys are what they are only because of the sorrows that come and go.
Then if God exists, God is a finite thing. That’s rather disappointing. :sad:
Oh, I see, God is not physical. Stupid stupid stupid me. I suppose that if God isn’t physical then nothing God does is finite. Doesn’t that meaning that it is impossible to do anything, since nothing God does can have a beginning or end?
Oh, I've done the work. I'm the most qualified person here, I assure you.
Quoting Joe Mello
If God exists of necessity, then he can't not exist. And if he can't not exist, then he's not God, for there's something he can't do.
And you have just asserted that nothing could exist without God. You've made no case. Take you, for example. You are ignorant, are you not? Why would God create someone like you? If he created you, that'd be to his discredit. Yet you exist. So you did not need God in order to exist. Indeed, God would be insulted to have you credit yourself to him.
Quoting Joe Mello
Bollocks. Provide an argument. (Are we cruel because he's cruel? Do some of us rape because he rapes?).
Quoting Joe Mello
Is God good? If you think being perfect without effort or growth is bad, then God is bad, no? Or less than perfect - becoming increasingly apparent that you don't really believe in God, but some imperfect hobbled creature who can't not exist.
Quoting Joe Mello
The monks did a number on you, didn't they? Again, total bollocks. We exist with aseity, just as God does. Again, you think God would create you?? When you see a shitty doodle do you think 'ah, another Leonardo da vinci"? You're living in a world filled with imperfect people and you think God created them?!? Absurd and insulting to God. What have you done today God? Well, I've created some rapists and liars and murderers. And i have also created a universe and I am going to put the rapists and liars and murderers and all manner of other bungled and botched people into a world within it and furnish them with next to no knowledge of that world at all and let them flounder about it in it raping and lying and murdering each other. "Er, why?" I dunno - maybe some of them will learn love me or something.
Very silly, isn't it?
I have not seen any of this vaunted disciplined thinking so far in your posts. You just keep making smug assertions without justification and then accusing others of doing the same thing. Claiming other people's opinions are absurd, impossible, or illogical is not an argument.
Quoting Joe Mello
Nothing you have claimed so far has struck me as wise. If you are a wise person, your arguments so far have not shown it.
Quoting Joe Mello
Your argument so far has not shown any great talent for logic. You just keep repeating your assertions and calling them logical without demonstrating a chain of logical inference. Again, that's not an argument.
Quoting Joe Mello
The two current theories that speculate on the existence of a multiverse do not require that it be infinite.
Quoting Joe Mello
Here on the forum we usually expect people who make a claim to provide justification. It's not our job to show you where you went wrong. You're supposed to show why you're right. You haven't.
Quoting Joe Mello
You're saying I'm wrong without providing justification. Your just saying "Oh, yeah?" Well, yeah. There's a theme in all my comments - you don't provide justification, you just make unsupported claims.
A suggestion and request - If you will use the forums standard methods for referencing other peoples posts, it will be easier to respond. There are two methods. The simplest is to just use the "reply" button, the arrow at the bottom of each post next to the time marker. It doesn't show up unless you run the curser over it. The second, and more helpful, is to highlight the specific text you are referencing and then push the "quote" button that will show up following the highlighting.
Either method will notify the poster that you have responded and identify the text you are responding to.
@praxis has a history of making intelligent and useful posts here on the forum. You have... not.
Welcome to the forum, junior :cool: It needs more youngsters like you!
Quoting Joe Mello
The union of the sets {a,b,c} and {d,e} is the set {a,b,c,d,e} which is "greater" than the initial sets. I'll not comment on the more general statement.
How? How did you discover it? How did you know it was a Metaphysical Principle -- which is what exactly? like the law of identity, that sort of thing? -- rather than, say, a thought or an idea? Were you looking for Metaphysical Principles or did you just stumble upon it?
I have been maintaining quite simply that in our observation of the physical universe, God exists out of necessity to logically explain it.
And you fell into some idea that has probably been stuck in your head for decades that God cannot exist out of necessity as he exists in himself because then he wouldn't be capable of not existing and therefore couldn't be God.
I never even got close to saying that God, as he is in himself, exists out of necessity.
And anyone can study philosophy for many years and get many degrees. But only a scholastically trained philosopher has become philosophically advanced in learning how to think.
G.K. Chesterton admitted that becoming a scholastic academic did not teach him what to think but how to think.
Your inability to ponder the metaphysical principle I gave to you is not a small thing. You simply do not have the philosophical clarity to think profoundly and without personal prejudices in the third degree of abstraction.
Your example is greater in quantity not in quality.
Big difference.
There was this one teacher of mine, a German priest, who spoke in a half dozen languages, read in a dozen, had doctorates in Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology, refuted everything from communism to Freud, and spent his long life constantly reading and writing alone in his room.
He taught it to me, and it was he who formulated it.
All I did was spend years learning to understand it, and years seeing how every new scientific discovery only supported it and never refuted it.
Science uses metaphysical principles to function.
And only the science of Logic creates a metaphysical principle.
I asked you to ponder the principle, not hold my hand and skip away with me.
Your judgement of my contributions here so far isn't really much of a thing, now is it?
Which perhaps you might have clarified in your OP. Since this is more a religious discussion I'll bow out.
I have been quite clear that a greater thing is greater in reality, not in mathematics.
Don't accuse me of not being clear because you fell into a fog.
Note, virtually everyone accepts that the first-cause argument for God is not, actually, an argument for God at all, but rather for the existence of some uncaused things. That is, it is an argument that shows that if anything exists, some things must exist uncaused. But it does not show that there must be just one such thing and that the thing in question is God. That's a gigantic leap and one that generates problems - and thus a leap it is quite irrational to make.
:pray:
Stanley Jaki was like that, but I believe he was Hungarian.
By what? How does that occur? What causes that to occur? Why must ‘the universe’ emerging from the total chaos of the big bang result in living beings rather than heat death? There might be ways of addressing that question, but they won’t be trite,
I have said nothing about the emergence of life, I simply pointed out that one does not need to invoke God to explain the origins of the universe. Plus, as I keep saying, if one does posit God as the cause of everything, then you face the problem of evil: why on earth would God create a universe like this one and people like us? It makes no sense.
Quoting Joe Mello
What proofs of this do you have in mind? I can think of two: The Aristotelian argument of the Unmoved Mover and the Leibnizian contingency argument.
This principle was formulated by Father Marius Schneider over fifty years ago by him taking his complete understanding of Aristotle and Aquinas, mainly, and many others, such as Duns Scotus and Anselm, and contemplating on this body of philosophical thinking that was no longer scattered texts but an integral part of his own thinking.
This principle did not spring up in his mind, but was a true achievement of his life’s work and personal talent.
Google it and you get nothing … or possibly me.
Philosophy is basically dead in our world today. And philosophical genius, the type of which takes a lifetime to develop, is basically extinct.
Not in those exact words, no, but as I said....close enough. Seems to me any intelligent design argument arises from similar iterations of your personally derived metaphysical principle, and your comments subsequent to your response to me lends support.
Quoting Joe Mello
If your principe sounds like it has similar internal truth value to principles that sound just like it, but are on the record chronologically prior to it, yours can be dismissed as merely repetitious, being no more or less interesting than its predecessors. And that judgement, in the form of dismissal from repetition, while mere opinion, albeit with empirical support, is nonetheless a purely philosophical accomplishment.
You’ve got three pages of responses in a scant twenty hours, so you’ve been successful in drawing attention to yourself. But the principle, so vigorously propounded herein, cannot be said to enjoy any such success at all, having been established, at least in kind, close to 400 years ago, and that only so far as I know.
That you have been introduced is certainly true; that something else has been introduced, is not. No reflection on you, of course; you apparently weren’t aware.
Carry on, with best wishes of course.
What kind of people should God have created? Winged angels? He did. But angels watch us in awe, for we stand between eternal bliss and temporary struggle, with a personal and individual destiny to become what we ourselves achieve or do not achieve.
The skeptic ignorantly looks at a man hanging on a cross as a horror and failure when he is the most successful human being who ever lived. For he thought as God thought and lived not in service to his own temporary gain but in service to the eternal gain of himself, everyone else, and God, the author of reality.
If you cannot look around you, and within your own heart, and see humanity's spiritual need as its greatest need, and the man on the cross as humanity's perfect and beautiful Messiah, then all your learning just made you less of a human being.
To think as God thinks is to play both the long game and the deep game.
To think as man thinks is to play an ignorant and selfish superficial game.
I couldn't be more grateful to be born in this world and a "person like me".
And I couldn't be more exited to get up every morning to see what lies next, good or bad.
It was written in the first century that "The Glory of God is a human being fully alive".
The skeptic is half alive through a superficial prideful ignorance of who he is and where he is.
Your mind is not the first place to search out God and the meaning to your life. Your heart is.
Conclusion: Belive in God is irrational and it depends on each one's beliefs and emotions
You feel better now?
Your work is done. You put me and the principle tidily in a small draw in the corner of your mind.
You're free again to walk away from any argument you don't understand in the same pair of shoes you have probably been wearing since you were a teenager.
Bye bye, then.
God is the greatest being we can imagine, but our imaginations are not a perfect understanding of God's abilities, or even of what words mean.
It is God's will that dictates what he does or does not do, not his omnipotence.
When we observe our own will, we see that we ordain things to happen and allow things to happen. So does God. So, if God, for example, ordains that he will not do an evil act but allow an evil act to happen, he is free to do so, even if he is omnipotent, and no matter what Epicurus has told you.
Learn to read … and to proofread.
But, Joe, I guess when we have to debate about argumentation, "heart" or "love" have no space here. If you want to be rational you need to use the mind and knowledge. Because beliefs themselves are just pure guessworks. If I have to prove something I would use reasons not emotions
Since when? Is it a new "principle" that you discovered or your German priest taught you that also??
Anyway the interaction with you is pointless. Your desperate need to believe in God made you mix everything and make an intellectual salad out of it.You use philosophy, Logic, science, the meaning of word "great" etc with the way it fits into your abstract "principle". But that doesn't make it right. Sorry.
Your way of thinking goes like "since science can't disprove my principle then it is the right one"! So whatever science can't prove wrong, It's then right! I hope you see how ridiculous that sounds.
With that way of thinking also you could support anything at all.That there is a life after death and say "oh science can't prove it wrong, so I m right" or I don't know, even that flies were once human beings in another planet but they were "bad" and God transfered them to Earth and condemned them to stick into shit! Can science prove it wrong?
Generally I don't have a problem at all with theists but your arguments rape Logic. You could easily just say "guys this is my opinion or simply what I believe, let's discuss it" and it would be totally fine with me.
But setting principles?? Pfffff.. You sound dogmatic with no evidence at all and with dogmatic people I do have a problem indeed. Even atheists dogmatics.
Anyway this was my last response to you. I see you got many "friends" here with your fancy entrance into the forum. So I will leave you to them. Take care.
I made a specific claim - that you have made most of your assertions without justification. Do you dispute that? It makes your claims to be a qualified philosopher unsupportable.
I think the fact that you are unwilling to follow the forum's standard methods for quoting and referencing other posts shows you are not interested in collegial philosophical discussion.
I don't expect you'll be around on the forum for long. You don't seem to me to be someone who can tolerate recognition that the emperor, by which I mean your arguments, has no clothes, by which I mean reasoned justification.
Jump off, man.
Please give a definition of 'greater' that isn't quantitative. That will perhaps serve as a starting point to understanding the statement in your opening post:
Quoting Joe Mello
But you’re reaching out for support of like minds and administrators to help you deal with whatever has your panties in a bunch.
If you haven’t found anything in my posts to ponder because in your mind I haven’t justified them according to your ideas of what such a justification looks like, then you are simply riding along a rail you can’t get off.
So, again — Life is greater than the elements, and thought is greater than life, and love is greater than thought, and God is greater than us.
Who is the greater person, the unloving scientist who hates other people or the loving garbage man who doesn’t hate anyone?
This question answers what is greater — intellectual ability or a loving heart.
Life, love, god.
Just a bunch of extremely vague concepts. Also you claimed science has confirmed your opening statement, yet science deals exclusively with the quantitative and doesn't touch these vague concepts.
I am speaking to you and for myself. Nothing you have written so far rises to the level that requires moderator involvement and I didn't imply that it has.
Quoting Joe Mello
What's important is not my ideas of what adequate justification looks like, it's what reason requires that matters.
It’s an interesting progression, going from the elements to life, then to thought, to love, and finally to God. The last step seems unnecessary. In any case, all these things are interdependent so it is nonsensical to say that one is greater than the other. Thought can’t exist without elements, love can’t exist without thought, God can’t exist without elements and thought, etc.
"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.." ~Thomas Szasz
My heroes are greater.
And your premise that you couldn’t possibly know, that God isn’t anything, is poisoning any well your thinking is drawing from to the degree that your words are dead because you keep killing them.
The truth about God and love of God are intertwined in that more we come to know God the more we love him; and vice versa, as in your case.
And the failure to love God and others because of this love, which is our truest purpose, is far more important than what the thoughts rattling in our head have to say about God.
Skeptics live and die in their heads.
I'd be interested to hear a bit more about your ideas. Those are claims. They may well be true. but perhaps you could show us more about how they work. I have been interested in nondualist approaches and have read and appreciated work by Father Richard Rohr. Do you see him as useful in your system?
Your trust in your imagination is scarier. You are quite literally making the claim that a lack of an explanation for something constitutes evidence for something else entirely, even the the evidence clearly implies that just the very thing you are believing is not true. This is called an argument from ignorance, it's an invalid and unsound argument. And the kind of mentality that has left the world in such an unethical state.
No, that's why his people all throughout history are mass murderers. You've been completely duped by mysticism. Love of God is hatred of human and self, to varying degrees of intensity. Also, which god we talking here, yours? Mohammad? Your logic would imply that a singular entity could not be powerful enough to create such a complex universe, no singular entity could have created all of the facets of nature, the chemicals and their interactions, the phenomena of quanta, billions of galaxies, cognitive behaviors of all life-forms. It absolutely must be a vast team of brilliant gods all working together.
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To be honest, I get the striking feeling these have been long held beliefs of his that he has never explored the strength of his arguments against, in genuine interaction with other's. I am a philosophy student myself, I know what kind of training your recieve to cut through the fallacies that characterize everyone of these arguments. There's no way a philosophy degree holder is failing to see this. We're talking basic stuff, if you yourself don't already know.
Although his way of seeing the world is different from mine, I have no trouble with him making these assertions. My problem is that he has not justified, or even tried to justify, any of them.
Right, the idea here is, if he would say "here's my faith, let's talk faith." Cool, no problem. When you tell me there is a God, I'll be needing some evidence. That's how philosophy works.
You certainly haven't been listening to me.
Even Neil Degrasse Tyson said that Dark Energy is pretty good evidence that a God could possibly exist, and I explained to you why it's so. But you ignored it to talk to yourselves, just as you ignored every example I gave of where the evidence of God can be found.
I have never mentioned "faith" because I don't have any. But you went there because you had to, as all groupthink skeptics have to.
I have only spoken about knowledge and experience.
And I'm not telling you there is a God, but telling you where and how to find him, which you couldn't do if your life depended on it.
Your ideas about "evidence" for the existence of an omnipotent God are the same ideas for the existence of a cockroach. And that's just stupid.
You are lazy thinkers and lazy human beings. I sacrificed years to come to a knowledge and love of God. And you expect to intellectually receive God on a plate.
Why would God put himself in the only place where you want to look?
He is a divine being who could care less what a bunch of pride-filled delusional skeptics think or demand.
Enjoy your conversations with each other. No one else is listening.
I'm telling you what you have heard before -- Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
Humanists love their neighbor, but only so far.
We need to know and love God in Spirit and Truth before we can truly be giving and loving to others. That's how it works.
I could tell you that I spend money and time on others whenever the opportunity and need arises, and the opportunity and need is daily, and many times a day. But you would only see this as some intellectual decision I keep making. It isn't. I truly have an aversion to selfishness and an attraction to giving of myself. Who I was before my years in a monastery is the polar opposite of who I am today, and who I have been for the last 40 years.
I could tell you that when God gives to us something powerful from his omnipotent being, we never lose it for the rest of our lives. But how could you understand this claim unless you experienced it for yourself?
For example, there's a book called The Philokalia, which is a collection of writings written between the 4th and 15th centuries by Eastern Orthodox Church mystics. Years before I read this book, I was sitting in a church and suddenly a tear fell from my eye, and then another, and another, and many more for a period of 90 minutes. I wasn't sad and was trying to stop the tears the whole time. From that day to today, I am moved to tears daily by so many things I experience when I look at others. In the Philokalia years later, I read from a monk that what I experienced was a "Baptism of Tears". The monk described my experience perfectly, and also its lasting effects. And he said that to receive this baptism is a special gift God gives to those of us he desires to be close to. And close to God is where I have been ever since.
To hear this story will matter differently to each person, but that does not make the story different, only the persons who are hearing it.
The same goes with everything I have been writing since I got here.
The skeptic wants to receive a one size fits all explanation of God's existence. There is no such thing. Our individual being is what God desires to know, not a group of people.
It is written: God delights in playing among his children.
And I know that it is absolutely true that he does.
The story above is one of very many.
Look around you at your family and friends to see if anyone else does.
A tree is known by its fruit.
You provided no examples, no evidence. no reason, no logic, no philosophy. Just insults and unsupported claims.
Quoting Joe Mello
All you've provided is bragging, pontificating, browbeating. Polishing your pride and showing it off. It's infuriating. You should be ashamed.
Interdependent means dependent upon one another: mutually dependent.
Take your relationship with God for instance, God cannot be loved by you without you, and you cannot love God without God. You're codependent, but in a good way, I hope.
Quoting Joe Mello
This confirms that all you have to offer is your love story with God, insults, and nothing of intellectual substance.
That is correct. I am the Living Man. I am he who loves his life, and his love of life is his own standard and warrant for existence. I am the Man of the same cloth the emissaries of God put to the sword to save themselves from the truth of. The Emergent Conscious Man of the world who needs no force from without of himself to provide him his value, and values no one who would seek to take it from him by force, or from any other human being. I'm the Man who loves humanity, more than God could ever dream of.
I am sorry if such disturbs you. I once loved God just like you do. But, I did not have it in me to love something of such brutal monstrosity through the age of reason. Nor, could I accept that he would leave loving people here, alone, to be slaughtered and abused by those who embodied the very evil he himself claims to have created. The very evil he tortured Job with and whose family he murdered. If the Lord wants to create a sword with all that power of his, then may he die by it. But, he will do so without me.
Your atheist talking points are all over the Internet, not in the halls of science and reason.
I told you the absolute truth about why there is suffering and evil among us while we live temporarily in this physical reality. And you didn’t understand anything I said.
Your posts are riddled with emotion and nonsense.
I feel nothing when I read them, for they are not inspiring or profound, just the thoughts bouncing off the top of your head.
My posts are only about my experiences and the knowledge derived from them.
Experience is a philosophical necessity in any claim of knowledge.
The “thing” I wrote above should have opened your mind, for it was a rare reality only experienced by a few of us, and there have been others.
But your mind is not open. So you could only pray for it to go away.
But you read it and it will be with you forever because it was the truth and not another opinion that you can forget a minute later.
In a word, your spirit heard it deeper than your head did. And since your head is your favorite place, there will be turmoil.
I know you all have put God in a safe little box. But you should understand that you’re in that box, too.
God is a concept for you also. No-one experiences God because God is necessarily beyond finite representation. You're in a box, just like the rest of us.
You must look at churches, temples, and mosques and giggle to yourself because you know every person in them is a fool.
You’re either a truly amazing fellow or just a superficial jerk. There is no middle ground for a hard atheist making such claims about God.
Hahaha..You made my thoughts visual!
How are you 70 years old and as touchy as an angst ridden teenager? I called you neither a liar, nor delusional. And I am not an atheist. Completely wrong on all accounts.
I am having 'great' difficulty understanding what you tried to tell me Joe. Isn't it true that "why?" is an inquiry as to purpose? So why do you dismiss my point as "wandering into purpose", and then say God's mind is the "why"? When wandering into purpose, "why?", is exactly what I am asking.
Quoting Joe Mello
So this is where my difficulty lies, in your use of "greater". To judge something as greater than another requires principles or criteria, a scale of some sort. Often such scales are reducible to quantitative measurements, like larger, hotter, wider, taller, etc.. But you are obviously talking about a qualitative scale.
In terms of quality, I could give you a colour word, like "green" as an example, and we might judge one thing as greener than another. Then we'd need a criterion as to what constitutes "green", to validate our judgement. Your word is "great", so I want to know the principle whereby you would judge one thing as greater than another. Giving examples like "Life is greater than the elements, and thought is greater than life, and love is greater than thought" does not help, because you haven't explained how you make such a judgement, in order that we might extrapolate and judge something like God as greater than something else.
Another qualitative term often employed is "good". But "good" turns us toward purpose, as the goodness of something is always judged in relation to a specified purpose. You claim "existence" as your term, but I do not understand how you judge existence as a quality, to assume that one thing is a higher existence than another. Can you explain how you judge things to have a higher or a lower existence and are therefore greater or lesser?
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept by which we measure our pain
I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality”
John Lennon
There were only the physical elements present in the forming of the Earth. Now there is a teeming biosphere. Science has only theories about how such an evolution came to be, and all these theories fall short to the degree that many scientists throw up their hands and admit that science will probably never discover the answer.
The principle is the answer.
And the parameters of science as subjectively drawn by philosophically inept human beings are not broad enough to include it.
But the science of Logic is a thing.
Why God does what he does in his infinite wisdom and willful choices is a fantastic question for another time that I would love to have at any time.
Joe, I can't put in a box something that is already dead. I don't want share the space of my box with such useless thing
Uh-oh, you don’t fit in his safe little box.
:rofl: :monkey:
I don't think this is true. I think lots of people experience God. That doesn't mean I agree with Joe Mello on the things he's written.
So you implied that I was either lying or delusional, and your implication came as a declarative statement, so you “called” me one of these things, or both.
And “finite representation” is revelatory of God’s existence because he is the author of our finite universe. Who created it? Another universe?
But the revelations of God that I have also claimed to have had are far more revealing than some intellectual experiences that you can’t seem to rise above.
The word is “Spirit”, if you still need to be told it because you have chosen to forget it. And “Spirit” is not finite.
The greatest person who ever lived said to a group of confused people, like many confused people here:
“God is Spirit”
I watched every minute of it and enjoyed it immensely.
But I couldn’t look at John for too long because he was so filled with drugs he was a hollow shell of a person.
Javi speaks English as a second language. Spanish is his primary tongue. We don't have any trouble understanding what he writes and he has valuable things to say. His English has improved since he's been on the forum. He's one of us. You are... well...not.
And the regulars on this forum don’t speak for the forum. The owner of this forum and the administrators do.
Groupthink is the death of every debate, not an antagonist.
You’re not posting to me out of intellectual curiosity but out of emotional needs.
I was surprised he functioned so well considering.
Not true, unless you’re intimidated by groups, which you don’t seem to be.
Interesting that you consider yourself an antagonist. Is God cool with that?
Quoting praxis
Onward Christian soliders, marching as to war…
At the sign of triumph
Satan's host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers,
on to victory!
What should I proofread? Was my phrase out of sense/context? This is the first time I ever received in this forum. Please tell me because I always want to improve.
It is no easy when you mix two languages in your mind writing about difficult aspects as philosophy.
But, anyways, it is interesting what you said to me because I passed exams in my school and university and I never been told anything related to proofread my sense or writings.
It is true that sometimes I do not know what word use because we are debating about aspects with a complex vocabulary.
Thanks friend :up: :100:
:up:
It’s quite vast.
I don’t identify with liberals or conservatives or Christians or atheists or any groups actually.
What I have identified, however, is that Donald Trump is obviously a self-loving greedy piece of shit, politicians obviously only want to stay politicians, the far-right tend to be racist bigots, the far-left tend to be worldly idiots, and people mostly tend to be mediocre faces in a crowd.
It's not off track, because your designation of "greater" might be purely subjective, and in itself off track. You might say stone is greater than water, and all you are really doing is referring to a difference between the two. But to be able to truthfully say that a thing which is different from another thing is "greater" than that other thing, you need a principle to validate your judgement. That's why I referred you to the concept of "order" in my first post.
Otherwise, all you are saying, when you say "thought is greater than life" for example, is that thought is different from life, because you have provided nothing to support your judgement of "greater". And when this is all that you mean, then obviously every different thing is different from every other thing, but it doesn't make sense to say that thing E is more different than thing D which is more different than thing C, and so on. To make a hierarchy you need a principle to build it on. And an undefined "greater" doesn't provide that principle because "greater" only make sense when it is qualified as to greater in what sense.
I do not want [to] share the space [in] my box with such [a] useless thing.
The brackets are the corrections. But since English is your second language, your mistakes are certainly not the hasty and sloppy writing I thought they were. So don’t worry about.
But you should worry that God is “useless” to you.
One day God will be the only useful one you will need. And your life today is not any richer without God.
Quoting Joe Mello
Now you’re talking my language.
If I have to “define” for you how a living being is greater than a material object, then you’re not in touch with common sense.
Skeptics all share the same nonsensical relationship with things as dictionary definitions first and foremost.
My God, man … see the nonsense you write. As a human being, you are the spokesperson for reality. Get the intellectual marbles out of your mouth.
A true skeptic is skeptical of himself, too.
What would be your critique of liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century( Kierkegaard, Buber, Niebuhr, Tillich)?
My favorite period is the middle of the 20th century, for that is when science entered the equation. Read Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, “Human Destiny”. He’s the scientist who worked out the timing of a dead body through blood coagulation. He roots his philosophy and theology in science.
Aren't you supposed to be a philosopher? How can you lead to God's blessing all your concerns?
All my concerns down here don’t go away because I can see the mountain top.
You keep mentioning your credentials and vast mystical experience and in doing so it appears as though being seen as an authority is very important to you. May I ask why that is so important?
And if you were truly intelligent, you would have determined by now that I'm a lot smarter than some fool asking me a loaded question.
You don't even know what a scholastically trained academic is, do you?
Wow, you took that personally. Sorry.
Quoting Joe Mello
I don't think that I've ever told anyone that. I don't think it's provable.
And, of course, like all forum regulars on every forum on the Internet, you cannot see the disrespect in your faceless "friends".
And where do you think you are? I wrote on this "Philosophy" forum an elegantly simple metaphysical principle that couldn't have been received with more ignorance or ad hominem.
Even you came to this thread and looked at me instead of the principle.
No. Creating a great forum on the Internet is far from a reality. It always becomes home to wannabe know-it-alls.
Let's check:
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Welcome, brother.
You won't.
Look at any thread on this forum and you will find a back and forth of personal attacks. I just did. So why are you just concerned about my thread?
Wait a minute ... you're the idiot who said I was "itching to start a fight" after my very first post because I included the metaphysical principle in it. So, you saw me as your enemy from the very beginning and never for a moment even tried to understand what I was saying, and now you're trying to justify your first impression.
What a mope ...
Bret, I forgot to respond to you. You're a rare bird to have understood and appreciated the principle.
Thanks for that.
Srap, yesterday you asked me a question about how I discovered the principle. I took the time to answer you. It was a respectful and sincere answer, right?
But what did you do? Nothing. No further communication. Just silence.
And now you come back to my thread to add some cocky quip to entertain your "friends".
Yes, Mr. Moderator, I'm the only asshole around here.
I figured it out. Thanks for your help.
praxis wrote this, and then feigned surprise when I "took that personally".
I think it would be a good practice around here to be a bit more honest with yourselves, and each other.
I've been on many forums, and this one has gathered the same stinky moss.
I hope Joe isn’t this rude to God.
You can’t even imagine not taking it personally and honestly answering the question?
praxis, it's honestly hard to understand what you write.
If you're stoned on weed, that would be quite disrespectful to anyone taking the time to read what it is you write.
I sold tons of weed and smoked it for years. But 25 years ago I put it down out of respect for myself and everyone around me. I have five grandchildren who have never seen me high because I have never been high since they were born.
And if you're not stoned I stand corrected.
Quoting Joe Mello
Joe, I was thinking the same thing after I saw your first post. But that’s not because I thought you deliberately wanted to start a fight. On the contrary, I think you are passionate about your ideas and wanted to share them, and were hoping to avoid conflict. But you clearly do not suffer fools gladly and that is implicit in your op. Given the diverse group on this site, it was predictable that that approach was going to guarantee conflict , even if it wasnt what you wanted. Many others on here also have strong points of view, so conflict was inevitable. How might you have worded your op so as not to have unintentionally courted opposition? It would not likely be your style , but some on here have a talent for reaching out in their op’s in a non-judgmental way to elicit a wide array of viewpoints on a given topic.
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with asserting a strong position and defending it against opposing views. Passionate debate can be quite stimulating. But it can also lead to wounded pride and a need to lash out, and then it crosses over from enjoyable sport to unpleasant insult. I think a number of participants here who seem to be your enemies could easily become friends. Just try reaching out to them instead of following your instinct to circle the wagons. You may surprised how quickly their tone will change in response to your overtures.
Joshs, I am actually quite a veteran of forums such as this. Sam Harris has two forums, Project Reason & Sam Harris, that I spent many years on. So, I am coming from a position of kinda knowing who's who pretty quickly. And there are posters here who truly just want to derail my posts or try to get a rise out of me, all because I'm not the "theist" they can push around with the same talking points they have compiled for years.
You and some others are not such persons and I have not treated you so.
And it's really only you and some others that I am hoping for good conversations with.
I may be wrong, but I truly believe that a vast many of forum regulars on any forum are only there to write their thoughts and then read them back to themselves.
Thanks for your help. I will try more. But keep your eye on what I often come up against.
Sounds good, Tom. Anytime you have an idea you want to hash out or see something going on here, just chime in.
It is said that the best apology is changed behavior. You seem to know that.
What are we doing here, Joe?
First off, if there's an us, folks already hanging around this corner of the internet, and a you, the newcomer -- assuming for a moment that's a reasonable way to sort the participants in this thread, which I'm not sure about at all, but it's come up repeatedly in your view of the thread -- then I'm going to remind you that you came to us.
Now, why did you do that? You had something to share with us.
Did you come for an exchange of ideas? That's plainly "no". You may not agree with me about that, but I don't know how else to look at what's happened here. You came to inform us.
Did you expect your ideas to be tested? Maybe you assumed they'd be rejected or challenged, as you seem to be used to that, and if you've been hanging around with people into Sam Harris, before coming to us, then evidence suggests you have been seeking out people you expect to disagree with you.
But then what? You offer no intellectual defense of your views -- which is odd, and I'll come back to that -- but instead distinguish between yourself, who has had particular, special experiences, and been divinely singled out for the reception of special revelation, and, on the other hand, everyone else who lacks that special experience and did not receive such revelation.
I don't have much to say about your experience. I don't know what it would make sense for me to say about it. But then what are we to talk about?
So I'm still puzzled about why you're here, and what you expected. I have had no such experience. I think it's interesting that you have, but I don't know how we're to talk about it. In particular, I don't know how we're supposed to talk philosophy about it. I can look at Rothko's paintings or read Herbert's poems and try to open myself to some inkling of their religious experience. I don't think they intend me to analyze their work as I might some argument in philosophy.
But then there's also the matter of what you came to share with us. And oddly enough, what you had to tell us has an oddly analytical ring to it. It's not the sort of thing you expect to hear from a mystic. And apparently, rather than passing right by science, it's supposed to be open to scientific scrutiny. After all, you complain that scientists -- or, not enough anyway -- don't seem to understand this principle and incorporate it into their work, and you hold out the possibility that it could be refuted by some scientific discovery, only it hasn't been.
All of which would seem to indicate that what you came to share with us is entirely effable, rational, analysable. Again, that seems a bit odd, and it leaves you in the position of defending an idea that doesn't look all that mystical by reference to your personal experience of revelation. They make an odd pair, your life story and the results of your unique experience.
It's a little like going to a math forum and explaining that you have meditated for eleven years and know for a fact that the Continuum Hypothesis is false and offering in support your life story but no mathematics, and then, on top of that, deriding everyone who questions your claim as narrow-minded nobodies who have not been granted the revelation that you have.
So what's the deal? Are we supposed to talk about what you told us or not? And how are we to do that? I won't ask what you expected in coming here, but what did you hope for?
I am skeptical of myself, very much so. But that doesn't answer the questions I have for you, concerning your "Metaphysical Principle". You seem to have no doubt that your Principle can be readily understood by anyone without any need to explain yourself. Or maybe you do not understand your own Principle, and you are just repeating what someone else told you. Perhaps you are simply lacking in will. Whatever. So much for the discussion you were looking forward to.
And, no, the last thing I expect is you to readily understand such an elegant principle. You have given me no reason to, no matter how many questions you ask and consider on point when they’re not.
To be truly philosophically adept takes talent and an openness that are both extremely rare.
Add to this the basic ego problems that stop a person from honestly expecting to learn anything.
Your questions haven’t been about the principle but about your ideas.
Be honest. You didn’t ponder it at all, but simply rushed into the first thoughts off the top of your head.
Good, I have no wish to. But, it is specifically idea in your head that you are talking about, nothing more. The absolute truth you told me is going to need support, not merely assertion. My posts are a response to emotion and nonsense. Your feelins were not required, it was a statement. I know your posts are about experience, that's why they're not presented as arguments, they are simply stated. And of the 320 million or so people in this country, you literally share the exact same experiences with 240 million of them. Run of the mill beliefs with no reason for holding them.
It’s obvious to me that why I came here isn’t really important when compared to where here is.
Your view of this philosophy forum is more like it’s a treehouse and I’m a new kid from another neighborhood who hasn’t taken the secret vow yet.
I provided you a metaphysical principle and claimed it is extremely important in understanding the evolution we know took place on our planet. And you, a moderator, focused on the single sentence where I said I discovered it. But I also said I spent years learning to understand it. And I also asked your treehouse friends to ponder it and see what they think.
And I ended with that I was looking forward to further discussions.
But now you’re telling me I needed to first earn the right to take your secret vow.
Change the name of the forum. You don’t deserve it.
See, Joshs?
Or else create poetry or some form of art work which so powerfully evokes your realization that it might have a chance to bring about the kind of experience and realization you claim to have enjoyed. So you need to convince by either argument or by becoming a prophet, a revelator.
But you should remember that perhaps there are not many these days who have the ears and eyes or disposition to be moved by revelation, or even to recognize its existence.
In the OP you mention being in a monastery for five years 40 years ago. God didn’t teach you to respect yourself or those around you?
Yes I have. Your accusation is false.
Quoting Joe Mello
On the contrary, both you and your principle are right there in the thread title. And I have addressed both.
Are you backing off from your claim that love is the greatest? You do not engage, sir. You do not respond. I ask again, where in all this long thread is your love? It appears from your posting that your god is miserable self-obsessed bully incapable of a friendly engagement. If the God that is love has been with you and speaking to you, why are we not feeling it but only your arrogance and contempt?
I think that all God-related experiences are fingers pointing at the moon. Not the moon itself. Just enough to get a fragrance of the thing.
Quoting Joe Mello
So what were your God experiences then? Your thoughts? Sensations? Émotions?
Janus, a critical examination of my posts would reveal that I came here writing about a metaphysical principle and not about revelation, and that my subsequent posts about revelation were in response to questions that demanded such a response.
To claim to have critical thinking skills is the first claim of every skeptic, not a proven reality from simply dismissing everything that can’t be mathematically or visually confirmed.
Qanon’s mantra is “do the research”.
You have gravitated towards revelation in my posts for personal reasons, not because your critical thinking skills demanded it.
A basic metaphysical principle would be that “No two contradictory statements in the same sentence can both be true”.
Scientists couldn’t function without it.
But there are many more logical principles of ever-increasing elegance. A truly disciplined and talented intellect would be on the search for them, and would step by step from the most basic to the most elegant discover them.
When G. K. Chesterton became a scholastically trained academic, he said that doing so did not teach him what to think but how to think.
Today’s thinkers don’t even know the difference.
And until a person firstly does a line by line disciplined and talented walkthrough of Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”, that person will not have taken even the first step towards a true ability to think from the most basic to the most high levels.
Today’s “critical thinkers” don’t even talk a good game.
emancipate, to ask a question that has already been answered is kinda dumb.
Did you not read my long post about a “Baptism of Tears”?
If you’re truly interested in the quality of my experiences of God, starting there would be a better place than spurting out questions off the top of your head.
unenlightened, “love” is not the greatest thing when there is a chance to disarm someone pointing a gun at your head.
Singing kumbaya all day is not what a great lover does.
Laying down her life for another is.
praxis, when I went into the monastery I threw in the garbage years of drawings and writings that I had done stoned.
But after stopping every passion for seven years, I left the monastery when I experienced what John of the Cross called “The Dark Night of the Soul”, came home, and began a normal life again.
Over time, my spirit rejuvenated and God drew close again. And then I realized that my time in the monastery was focused on me, not God and others.
Today I am successfully becoming more and more fully alive from the journey away from self-love and towards love of God and others.
And this journey is not a simple and easy one, or everyone would take it and get nothing from it.
Our life becomes as great as our experiences, not as we think it to be.
And it is the balancing of Yin and Yang that improves us, not the experience of one of them.
I'll try a different approach.
You propose a hierarchy of existence: light is lesser than material elements; material elements are lesser than living things; living things are lesser than God.
Quoting Joe Mello
Your principle relates the levels of this hierarchy:
Quoting Joe Mello
It is possible to create a thing of level [math]n[/math] out of things of level [math]n-1[/math], but only by adding something of level [math]n+1[/math]. The canonical example of this is God creating living things out of non-living matter.
Are there any other possibilities? Can living things create matter out of light? If there were something less than light, could matter create light out of it? Could there be a higher level of divinity that could create God (or gods) out of living things?
I'm asking in all seriousness, because your principle is explicitly stated in these hierarchical terms, "greater" and "lesser". Are there any other examples of how the levels are related?
One more question. I assume the hierarchy goes something like this:
1. impossible that it be living (light);
2. possible that it be living but not necessary (matter);
3. necessary that it be living (god).
And then we can subdivide (2):
2a. capable of living but not living (objects, let's say);
2b. living.
Have I understood you correctly?
You did not explain yourself. You just kept insisting that this is "greater" than that, without stating your criteria for greatness, and when I asked for it, to justify your statement, you acted as if it is somehow self-evident that this is greater than that, implying that I'm an imbecile for asking.
Quoting Joe Mello
Elegance is an aesthetic principle, beauty, appealing to the senses rather than to the intellect. That your principle is elegant does not make it intelligible. This is a philosophy forum, and in philosophy we try to judge principles by their intelligibility. You have presented what you believe to be an elegant piece of art. However, you want to pass it off as a Metaphysical Principle. To move from the former category to latter requires justification. Beauty does not require justification, principles do.
Quoting Joe Mello
Joe! Where is your head at? I looked at your "elegant principle", and realized instantaneously that I have no idea what you mean by "greater". One could spend an eternity pondering 'what does Joe mean by greater', approaching an infinity of possibilities. I chose a more appropriate action, ask Joe what he means by "greater". Your replies indicate Joe does not know what he means by "greater", and he reacts to my questioning in a defensive way, trying to make me feel like the uneducated one.
Quoting Joe Mello
You did not provide a metaphysical principle Joe. By your own admittance you have given us something elegant, something you believe to be a beautiful piece of art. A metaphysical principle requires justification, something you appear to be unable to give us. Therefore you have not provided a metaphysical principle.
Quoting Joe Mello
The "further discussions" you requested, could have been your justification of your principle. However, you seem to think that the statement is self-justifying without any indication as to what "greater" means.
If it makes you happy Joe, as you seem to be truly miserable and I would be delighted to cheer you up, I'll provide an analysis of your "principle" for you:
Quoting Joe Mello
Look, it's obvious that a combination of lesser things does produce a greater thing, always without fail. That's how "lesser" and "greater" are commonly defined, such that a complexity is greater than a simplicity. The more lesser things you add, the greater the complexity becomes. The idea that a "greater thing" needs to be added to the lesser things is unwarranted because the act of "adding" itself, is what creates the greater thing from the lesser things. And you cannot say that the act of "adding" is the greater thing because it is already categorically separated from "greater and lesser".
The only thing you have done so far in this thread is reply with petty remarks and a bad attitude. This is not philosophy and neither does it make anyone want to engage with you seriously. Do not assume that I (and others here) have not spent many years thinking about such topics; and by that I wish to suggest to you that the questions asked were not "off the top of my head". You are not the first to think deeply, so get off your high horse old man.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There were multiple posters in the thread who wanted clarification on what exactly Joe means by 'greater'. It is apparently something so vague and vacuous as to be meaningless.
I don't think experiencing God is any different from any other experience, keeping in mind, of course, that I never have had that experience.
Light is a wave phenomenon and light is a particle phenomenon.
First, one must have in his or her mind an integral understanding of what makes up a thing -- its elements. And I don't mean its atomic number.
A living thing and a material object both have matter and take up space. But a living thing has an extra element, and not simply a quantitatively extra element but a qualitatively extra element. A living thing is alive. So, when we place a living thing and a material object before us, and as the only spokespersons for reality, we can proclaim with absolute certitude that a living thing is greater than a material object.
Light and matter both emit electromagnetic waves. But matter has the extra element of mass. So, we can also proclaim with absolute certitude that matter is greater than light.
And so on ...
And ...
When something is "more complex" than another thing, but actually the same thing with no extra element to it, it is not a "greater" thing than its simpler counterpart.
I apologize for being "vague" about lesser and greater things. But I was so because I took for granted that people on a philosophy forum had learned and incorporated into his or her thinking this basic tenet of philosophy.
You know, today's thinkers are very unclever when they throw out the past and endorse modern skepticism without the firm foundation under their thinking that great thinkers before them have erected.
Ignorance of our past is just that -- ignorance.
Defining terms is one of the first things that should happen in philosophical discourse. You're trying to claim that there is a generally accepted definition of 'greater' used amongst philosophers. That is obviously false.
Quoting Joe Mello
Yeah we are ignorant of whatever meaning you have in your mind. Aka not mind readers.
Quoting Joe Mello
Isn't mass quantitative?
Light has zero mass.
Matter has mass.
How much mass matter has doesn't matter when judging it to be greater than light.
That matter has mass and light doesn't is a "qualitative" difference.
So for you 'greater' is something in subjective experience? Mass is quantitatively measured.
As Einstein told us; mass and energy, e.g. electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light; are equivalent. Light doesn't have mass, but it has momentum.
For only me?
Who is the spokesperson for reality?
My dog Luna?
Hello Joe, and welcome to the forums!
Quoting Joe Mello
This is a conclusion, but where are your premises? I don't think you have to write a massively long text, but how can we conclude this ourselves? What are lesser things? What is a greater thing?
Off the top of my head, I have a few counters to that counters to that conclusion. Isn't a molecule made up of atoms? But molecules do not make up atoms. Isn't a society made up of people? But a society does not create people.
relativistic mass -- mass when an object is in motion, as opposed to at rest
This is what light has. Has no rest mass, but has energy which has mass, and a consequential impact on both matter and space. So, still open to quantitative measurement and such. Little bit of both, in other words, Mr. Clark.
Evil defined. The sacrifice of the Human Consciousness for the sake of another's. Humanity must be a ceremonial animal for you. Loving someone is fighting to protect the consciousness that is constituted in that someone, not ending your own in some paroxysm of absurd emotion. Protection and preservation require the active implementation of the abilities of consciousness, not their negation. This is primitive, tribal, witchdoctor ethics.
Your post demands a lot of thought.
See if some of my recent answers answered some of your questions.
I’ll get back to you when I can do it well enough.
Brilliantly asserted, my astude friend. And most true, indeed. To claim an immaterial reality, is to claim a contradictory assertion. One must have evidence, and not just logical validity, to assert a claim of correspondence.
Can I say that a thing's elements are its parts? If so, then we have to consider that there is more to a thing than just its element, there is whatever it is that produces the unity of parts. In my mind, this is what makes a thing greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever it is which unifies the thing's parts is something other than the thing itself, as a cause of the thing, and is also something other than all its parts.
So when we come to the distinction between a living thing, and an inanimate thing, they are, each one of them, a composition of parts. Therefore both have this facet which is the cause of their unity, and so they each have something "greater" than each one's individual and separate parts.
Your claim is that a living thing is greater than an inanimate thing, but I don't see your principle. To me, the earth looks greater than any living thing, the sun looks greater than the earth, a galaxy looks greater than the sun, and a black hole might be even greater than a galaxy.
You seem to think that it is obvious that a living thing is greater than an inanimate thing, but I don't see why you think this. Living things have an extremely short life span, after which they decay and the parts are no longer unified. But some inanimate things exist in unity for millions or even billions of years. Doesn't a longer period of existence, therefore unity of its parts, constitute a greater being to you?
Thanks for the welcome.
The answers to your questions are right on this last page.
And atoms and molecules are made of the same stuff. There is nothing in a molecule that is an extra element from an atom, like ice cubes are not greater than water, just frozen water.
But the first ancient bacteria was greater than the dead primordial soup it was swimming in because it possessed the quality of being a living being, which is not simply a more complex dead object.
So "Human Consciousness" is equal to the physical brain that dies at our death?
A thought is simply a chemical reaction?
The love we feel for our family is just a physical phenomenon?
A person born with a brain injury and never understands themselves or anything else is just a shit-out-of-luck person?
A human being at his or her death is the same thing as the snuffing out of a candle?
All the people throughout the history of humanity who have claimed to know and love God were absolutely delusional?
And you know all this because you are a truly amazing fellow who is highly respected and who inspires everyone by his example to become another amazing human being like yourself?
Or are you just an opinionated bigmouth in love with the thoughts bouncing off the top of his own head?
As far as what all of the current data suggests, which is a vast payload, yes. Not a single scrap of evidence exists to suggest otherwise, and no number of gaps in knowledge are an argument for something else.
Quoting Joe Mello
Reductionism: the belief that any complex set of phenomena can be defined or explained in terms of a relatively few simple or primitive ones.
No, I'm saying thought is the computation of the most complex system of interconnected structures, pathways, functions, chemicals, electromagnetic forces, and evolutionary adaptations contained within a single system that the human being has ever attempted to analyze.
Quoting Joe Mello
Just? There is no "just" physical phenomenon. You live in a reality of complexity beyond comprehension. And love is an aspect of that complexity the same as everything else.
Quoting Joe Mello
Delusional, or confused? Ignorance breeds a great deal of elaborate explanations, and always has. Delusion is when no amount evidence that is presented to you that contradicts such explanations, has any effect upon your views. That is delusion.
Quoting Joe Mello
Reductionism is the belief that any complex set of phenomena can be defined or explained in terms of a relatively few simple or primitive ones.
No.
Quoting Joe Mello
Yes.
Quoting Joe Mello
Non sequitur: a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
I know only what the evidence tells me, not what I imagine it doesn't. Respect and inspiration have no relavence.
Quoting Joe Mello
Ad hominem: This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person.
It's looking like you're the big mouth, with a head swimming in numerous fallacies, that I know as a philosophy student that you were trained specifically not employ. So, stop it.
You have held up quantitative as equal to or better than qualitative. I don't think it can be.
We have different notions of what it is to have being, which is one of Philosophy's oldest debates.
Plato said that being is the quality and shape of a thing.
I have always held that the quality of a thing is the best way to judge a thing.
Using your example, for a thing to exist for a long time and not experience that it is existing for a long time is far less of an existence than for a thing to live for a moment and experience that it is living for only a moment.
The equaling of quantitative with qualitative seems to be a modern phenomenon.
We live on a beautiful blue and green planet teeming with an amazing biosphere. Earth is a living miracle set within a lifeless and uninhabitable universe.
But so many of today's "thinkers" are more in awe of the vast size of our universe, even calling Earth a small insignificant planet that is probably one of many living planets.
I don't see how the quantity of a thing is anything else than more of the same thing.
Aren't these two statements contradictory? Living things are made out of atoms and molecules. We are made up out of a complex interaction of "dead" objects. Atoms, molecules, cells, etc. Quoting Joe Mello
All you've provided for the definition of elements is a descriptor. Elements are often thought to be fundamentals. But according to your original statement:
Quoting Joe Mello
So my guess is that life is the greater thing, but needs to be added to the lesser elements to create itself? I'm not stating that life is not greater than non-life, but how do you know this? This is important, because this will, I assume, take the premise that God is greater than life, and life needs God to exist. But how do we know God is greater? And is there something that is greater than God that is needed to create God?
Quoting Joe Mello
I would work to avoid such language. It is tempting to believe we are intellectually superior to others for our own satisfaction. But that is all it is for, our own satisfaction. If that becomes the goal instead of a conversation about truth and discovery, truth and discovery will always take a back seat.
You have to put yourself in people's shoes. There are hundreds of people who post ideas monthly. Each has their own background and meaning for words. We need you to define what you personally mean before we can properly assess. In your case, you're going for a "classical" sense of greatness, but in many other posts, it could mean many different things.
People here will not rag on you if you keep an open mind, listen to their thoughts, and address them politely. Well, some people still will, but they aren't worth spending any time on. :D
Debates are okay.
You know what I like better?
Running into an amazing person who has spent a lifetime becoming skilled in something.
And I have met and appreciated many such persons.
I have been a professional painter for over 40 years and painted my first house 55 years ago. This summer, I painted a cape by myself in 6 hours. My business is more than half commercial, and I painted a long hallway in Titleist last month surrounded by people, and I organized the whole thing like a ballet, so no one got in each other's way. So, I really can't learn much from other painters. Maybe something, but not much.
I do not think that it is different at all when we meet a person who has become very experienced intellectually or spiritually.
It's not insignificant that no person here so far has been curious about monastic life after meeting a person who lived in a monastery.
Perhaps you don't understand what the philosophy boards are about, which is fine. We're here to discuss claims beyond the general, beyond our every day experience. We ask each other to examine our assumptions and logic closely, trying to find flaws as well as new insights.
The person who has figured everything out, cannot do philosophy. No one can grant them greater insight, and no one can learn from them. That is because to communicate with another person, you must be willing to learn how another person thinks and see the world. It is letting a window into another aspect of the world, something only that person can provide. Sometimes seeing into that window provides nothing, but many times, in places you wouldn't expect, you find something new you've never seen before. Only a mind that realizes they have not figured everything out can do that.
If you want praise for your accomplishments as a painter, I will grant it! It is wonderful that you have worked hard on something your entire life and mastered it. But painting in itself is not philosophy. Many of the people you are reading from have accomplished great things elsewhere in their lives. It is irrelevant. Their background does not matter, only their logic and arguments.
If you would like to start a thread commenting on your life in a monastery, feel free. People here would not ask about you in your thread about your philosophical claim, because that would be considered rude. We are not here to talk about your background, we are here to talk about your philosophical claims.
There are a few masters on here who have devoted their lives to philosophy and discussion. Surely you as a painter understand that the mastery of one painting technique does not make you a master at one you've never done before? Your background with a religious view of philosophy might be well learned, but there are many aspects you have not likely encountered.
Come with humbleness, and listen as well as contribute. There is much to learn from others, as well as I'm sure much to learn from you.
I imagine there’s no other way for you to think of it, that great experiences, such as those involving God, make a great person.
I believe that transcendent experiences dissolve dualities like greater/lesser and that religion requires them.
All your answers are dependent upon measurements and physical phenomenon.
You can't measure that two contradictory statements in the same sentence can both be true, but they can't.
I asked you about "powers" we possess, and you equated each power with the "seat" for that power.
A "seat" of a power is not equal to the power. No one says I brained of you today. I heart you very much.
You do not ponder a divine God, the greatest being we can comprehend. But only such a being could be responsible for the powers we possess. And he seats these divine powers in our physical bodies. And there is no evidence that our physical bodies could be capable of evolving into creators of these powers.
The physical universe, no matter how complex it can get in our heads, cannot be the author of thought itself, only the seat for thoughts to be part of a mindless physical universe.
You do not know the difference between the nature of a thing and a thing in action.
And you look for "evidence" in the second degree of abstraction when there is a higher third degree of abstraction.
You are a materialist. And materialists have always been around.
You have no real answers to human existence or even existence itself, only to physical realities that are already up and running.
As a philosopher, you have created a world for yourself tethered to mathematics and machinery, and you feel it was brilliant on your part to do so. It wasn't, and never has been.
And if there was an atheist charity coalition, it would consist of three guys in a basement passing out a dozen turkey dinners on Thanksgiving.
So you stop it.
You're doing that Internet trolling thing.
Seeking to get praise by faceless people on the Internet would be pathological and stupid.
Figuring "everything out" is not the same thing as figuring "something out".
Is there a difference between a skeptic with a philosophy hobby and an academic with a Philosophy degree? And would the academic find it very difficult to read the thoughts of the skeptic because he overcame the errors in the skeptic's thinking long ago?
And can there not be threads on this forum where only persons interested in learning something should go and learn something?
I was never a fan of everyone getting a trophy, because that would not help us as a human community put each person in their proper places.
The great philosophers distinguished between opinion and knowledge.
Today's thinkers mostly don't.
I can't read this. Clear this up for me?
Quoting Joe Mello
No, I equated it with the source, the generator. Not the seat. Seats are inanimate objects, not systems of literal astronomical complexity. Again, reduction. Stop it.
Quoting Joe Mello
People don't say "brained" of you, because we have a word for the perception of thought, a computation of that brain. But, yes, people quite literally say "I heart you." But, the heart doesn't produce thought. We associated love and hearts out of ignorance and linguistic frameworks that predate knowledge that are still in use.
Quoting Joe Mello
Again, I'm a former Christian, and not your Sunday kind, either. I was a deep believer, even felt as though things had happened to me that I would never be able to convince people of, and thought of it as a point of pride, like I was walking the same outcast path as Christ because I meant it. It was fantasy. If there is no evidence that can be shown to me by him, then such is fine. I will walk this Earth without him, and when he meets me in heaven I'll say "You gonna explain that shit?" And if he doesn't, then he's immoral, not I. I wouldn't have generated this kind of place with his power. Again, if it's a sword he wishes to fashion for the world to live by, then may he die by it.
Quoting Joe Mello
That could very well be true, and there could very well be more to all of this than what consciousness has let on, or could ever. But, that is not the path I walk. HereI am, friend, and here I remain. And I love my life, and I love yours. And consciousness is everything to me, because it allows me to be good in an evil world. And I wouldn't trade that to any god, for any reason. If there is one, friend, I promise you, he will meet my terms to gain my love, just as I will meet his in return for showing me such an honor.
Quoting Joe Mello
Sure, I do. I'm an artist and a composer. I make things just because I love to. Just as I interact with all of you, even though I find some our people here to be hopelessly clueless, or their ideas to be evil. That doesn't mean I cannot tell difference between role and nature. I incorporate all elements of reality into my zeitgeist, because reality is the only place from whence my brain can retreive data to inform my actions for greater results for me and those I value. That's all.
Quoting Joe Mello
I would love to know what that level is, but it is hard for me to hear you remark upon it in one sentence, after have stated that we have no access to it in another. Such is not within my purview of understandability.
Quoting Joe Mello
I'm open to the possibility of truth in such a statement. But, when I look at what my people have achieved in this world, the things my tradition has discovered in the blueprint of the Universe, I am breathtaken, and proud beyond reckoning. And among those things discovered, nowhere has there been any sign of the presence of an author.
Quoting Joe Mello
Yes, I actually agree with you here. Every atheist I have met in person has been a heathen. Period. I find it very strange that atheists for some strange reason almost invariably concluded that everything is permitted. I have always held the opposite view.
Quoting Joe Mello
Now, let's not be silly here.
I honestly didn’t think I could enjoy anything you wrote, but I actually enjoyed the whole thing.
If you ever want to hear about what happens when we challenge Jesus’ promises through real sacrifice, instead of giving up on him, I have a story to tell you.
For now, I’ll just say … holy shit, the stories are all true!
Oh, and I'm a vocalist. Sang Zeppelin in the 70s with a rock band called Mordor, and Prince in the 80s with a funk band called Chill Factor. And I love singing Frank Sinatra and Teddy Pendergrass today.
It's undeniable that God is the ultimate reason we are fooling around in the muddy waters of the Earthly realms, be it here or somewhere in Andromeda. Does this realization of Him being indirectly present in everything give life a heaviness or lightness?
Where do you draw the line though?
I think it's rather curious that you were welcomed with egards and the egards changed.
I haven't read the thread, so if something here is repeated, apologies. Let me take a stab at it.
When speaking of things like "lesser", do you have in mind something like "less complex"? Otherwise I'm left with "inferior", and I don't think it's quite right for us to say that something in the world is superior to another inherently. We add that additional value ourselves, but not the world - the world doesn't care.
Essentially when we get a new phenomena in nature, say, experience or water or something that is quite rare, we must assume that in the stuff out of which experience and water is made of, there is the potential for these more sophisticated developments already found in the "lesser thing".
So it's not so much that something "greater" is added, its that a specific combination ignited, so to speak, what was already there unrealized, as it were.
Honestly, I may take you up on that sometime, because I've had a recent resurgence of oppositional emotion toward religion, to the point of hostility even. And, I know better than to do that. You see, I recently discovered the history of Epicurus, and what the newly powerful Christian Roman power did to his people, what they did to these peaceful, loving people. People who brought us the values that founded the U.S., for what it's still worth. They slaughtered them, man. Oppressed them into non-existence, and left their memory in darkness for a thousand years. Traded free communities of thinkers for Children's Crusades and Indulgences. It hurt. For the first time this past week I was genuinely disturbed by history again; not something to happen in a very, very long time. The last time was when I discovered Treblinka. It's left me a bit bitter to religion. So maybe I'll take you up on that.
Frank, although not a music writer, is king of that list, by the way.
Haven't you realized yet that metaphysical principles do not find justification in logic or empirical investigation, and that they therefore have to appeal to revelation, that is they rely on rhetorical power to persuade?
It has nothing to do with "proven reality". Metaphysical principles have to do with faith and groundless presupposition. If your critical thinking skills were up to par you would know that.
Yes but it should be "do the "research"".
You know nothing about me and yet you impute "personal reasons". Again poor thinking skills are on display.
No that's a basic logical principle; you're getting your categories mixed up.
You give no examples, so this is merely empty rhetoric.
The irony! Here you are trying to tell us what to think. It seems you have not learned GK's lesson.
You are probably not going to convince anyone here of any metaphysical principles by argument. You would be better served to hone your poetical skills if you want to win converts. That's what really does the job in the metaphysical arena.
How convincing do you think G K Chesterton's works would be if he were not such a wonderful colourful wordsmith?
I believe the OP is trying to open a discussion on holism (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) and antireductionism.
I don't see why you had to bring up infinity? Is it because with infinities a part (odd/even numbers) can be equal to the whole (natural numbers)?
You’re trolling me.
The relationship between Metaphysics and Epistemology is a fine distinction.
Equating Metaphysics with Revelation is idiotic.
And any logical principle is a metaphysical principle.
Metaphysics is a particular science.
To be metaphysical means to be outside the realms of the senses.
You don’t have to read back too far to get answers to most of your questions.
I'm not trolling you. I gave you an argument and you return to me with an ad hominem and an unjustified rhetorical assertion, I assume because you cannot find a counterargument.
By the way, when I say "revelation" I am not referring specifically to biblical revelation, but to the kind of allusive revelation found in great poetry (of which the Bible is a sterling example).
Great poetry reveals ideas in ways that appeal to the aesthetic sensibility and the intuitive imagination, not to the discursive propositional intellect. That's what I'm talking about.
I agree with your words very much, this is a sound logical argument. Perhaps we may add it with the idea that Nothing can lead to something greater than itself. Consider that a finite object can only lead to the equivalent of itself or something lower. A finite object A may be transmuted into another finite object B using some change of arrangements, but if it has finite power, then it can only be transmuted into another finite object the equivalent of itself. The Absolutely Infinite Being which some or many or we call God cannot lead to something greater, for the Absolutely Infinite is the upper limit of all things. However, God can lead to something lesser, that is the realm of the finite.
The original meaning was "after physics" as that was Aristotle's book after his book Physics. Since then metaphysics as traditionally understood has been the "science" inquiring into the nature of reality, as opposed to the appearances studied by science. Logic is the study of valid thinking; so the two should not be conflated.
How do you know that is true? It's possible that life and then consciousness emerged from nothing more than physical complexity. We just don't know, and probably never will. Logic cannot tell you it is impossible because there is no logical contradiction in the idea. On the other hand think of quantum physics; logic might seem to tell us that light cannot be both a wave and particle, and this does appear to be a contradiction, and yet it appears that light is both wave and particle. Logic cannot tell you what the nature of things is; it cannot tell you anything about the actual world.
I like your idea and honestly I am happy more than ever that someone has responded to me, especially someone who seems like a veteran to me.
My emotions aside, then what tells us all about the actual world?
The arts and religion show us how we can transform ourselves and our imaginative understanding of our experience. For what it's worth that's a very rough and ready guide to how I see things. Anyway welcome to the forum.
Thanks for your welcome. I have been here for some time, but the tension of philosophical debate always messes up with my heart and mind. Only now I find some strength to face the fear of criticisms and perhaps even worse, accusations. So, if science tells us about the world "as it appears to us", is there any way to get to know the world as it actually is, that is beyond the appearance, or is there only the appearance?
Kant said we can only know the world as it appears to us. But how it appears to us may tell us something about how the world is. There is no certainty there, In any case learning about how the world appears to be is a large enough task for many lifetimes; no one individual could grasp more than a fraction of modern scientific knowledge.
And then there are the other worlds of logic, phenomenology, religion and the arts; if you have an inquiring mind you won't be bored, and if you can reconcile yourself to inevitable uncertainty and not always being able to get what you want in general, then you won't be miserable.
Again that's just the way I ('ve come to) see things; I understand the yearning for certainty (and security, lack of suffering and eternal life). Things we all have to face one way or another and humans are very adept at devising different strategies.
This, it seems to me, is the question most philosophical discussions eventually come down to. Can we gain access to ultimate reality (God/idealism/consciousness) and/or is the notion of an ultimate reality just a mirage, a legacy of Greek philosophy?
That is a very nice way of life and thinking. I had an ethical thought back then based on "acceptance", making peace with all of reality, even the worst of all, is a good way to have some joy even in the darkest of times. Honestly I've given up on true certainty, the foundational block of my entire mind, God, is no more than an object of faith, in multiple senses of that expression. It is by no means blasphemy, for God knows this Himself, that He cannot be grasped by human reason, only by faith.
Good post.
I believe access here means even fundamental knowledge of the existence of an ultimate reality. To me, knowing what the ultimate reality is "like", and whether it exists barely or not, is the best bet we can have. Then again, it depends on the definition of existence, or the perspective on what constitutes as existence. It is most likely, in my view, that one cannot access ultimate reality in a full way on this mortal life. Because the brain and body and this universe is not designed to contain ultimate reality, it will kill us.
I believe we have different conceptions of what is an ultimate reality. If ultimate reality is just a human construct, then for sure it has no absolute power against us apart from that power which we grant that construct over us. The other alternative, is a bit more deadly, and I admit I am basing this line of thought from biblical thought, that human contact with God leads to the death of the man, in one way or another. If ultimate reality is something which exists outside of the human mind, with a true parallel on the outside world, then well again it does depend on what definitions are you using to define this ultimate reality. I have no idea what your views are, so I cannot say about it, but I know my own so I can say it. My view is that ultimate reality is for the very least, the union of all reality. If a man is to witness this kind of radical union directly with their own soul or body, would it not kill them, in a sense or two of the word "kill"? Though you are right, there is no real certainty as of to whether encounters with the divine, that is the ultimate, are deadly or not.
That's not true Joe, we were talking about "greater", not "better". I've held "greater" to be something which can be measured quantitatively. I suggested that bigger is greater. Don't switch from "greater" to "better" at this point in the discussion, just because it suits you better now. I asked you earlier in the thread if you wouldn't prefer a more qualitative term like "better", but apparently this doesn't work for your principle. Your principle doesn't make any sense if you switch "better" for "greater".
So, by what principle do you say that "greater" in the qualitative sense is greater than "greater" in the quantitative sense?
:ok: I don't quite get why you think the OP is about knowledge.
I already posted that a greater thing has an extra element, a qualitatively extra element.
You posted an example of more of the same element, which is simply quantitative.
So your example failed to see the importance of quality, and replaced quality with quantity, making quantity equal to or better than quality.
Look at your example and mine for what I’m saying, not a word I chose to use.
Why is that? Who else than God could have made the heavens and life in it. Or at least the stuff giving rise to it? There is no physical explanation for the universe.
Knowledge in no way resembles pearls. One can have knowledge of the fundamental workings of the universe, the holistic laws thriving on them, and the connecting links between them, but how devoid this knowledge would be without a profound understanding of the innards, sparked and sprinkled with divine spirit?
How can that be? How can it be both at the same time?
Ok, We'll have to back up a bit. What do you think the OP wants to discuss? As far as I can tell, the OP is about holism and antireductionism, for the OP mentions, quite specifically, that the whole, some of its properties, are inexplicable as a mere sum of its parts, and such properties are added onto the whole from "above" in a manner of speaking.
Quoting Janus
:up:
No, I'm not, I'm trying to be kind and invite you to discuss.
Since you are not accepting the invitation today, we'll leave it for another time.
:lol: dart meet bullseye.
Why, no one, of course. The heavens and life have not asserted themselves as needing such a creator. And who are we to conclude any creator could craft a domain of such complexity? It's beyond any reckoning. There are plenty of physical explanations for a great deal of things. But, there are more explanations for physical phenomena, than there are for God. A gap in knowledge regarding material reality, does not imply knowledge of something else. That too requires evidence as an assertion.
Nice! :up:
I don't read prayer books. I just look around me. What's your thing with values of variables and knowledge?
This is simply the divine spark that's been added to the universe. The fire breath into the equations. That which makes them work.
Yes. A particle is a particle. A wave is a wave. You can have waves of particles. All being one. But that's still a wave in which particles move. Or one particle.
If the final gap is closed, what remains?
I explained this already. A whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because there is something "extra" which is the cause of the unity of the parts. Are you in agreement with this common philosophical principle? What makes a whole greater than the sum of the parts, is this "extra" thing which is the reason why the parts exist in unity as a whole, or a single thing.
Quoting Joe Mello
The reason why I moved to a quantitative example, is that the unity of a bigger thing appears to be greater than the unity of a smaller thing. Do you agree, that the cause of unity (the extra thing) of a bigger thing, ought to be considered as greater than the cause of unity of a smaller thing? Or do you propose some other principle whereby we could judge one instance of greatness (cause of unity) as greater than another instance of greatness?
Quoting Joe Mello
Judging by this statement, you would propose that one unity could be judged as greater than another through reference to a quality. Let me remind you, that bigger is a quality. Most qualities we are capable of representing as a quantity, that is how we measure the various qualities. So I do not think you are offering a productive approach by driving a wedge between quality and quantity. You yourself said that we, human beings are the ones who speak for reality. So if reality appears to us as qualities, and we measure these qualities in quantitative terms, then that is simply our way of speaking about reality. Therefore we ought not look for principles to separate these two, but look to understand how they are unified, if we want to understand reality.
Quoting Joe Mello
As I said, I am asking you to explain your principle. Merely asserting this is better than that, repeating yourself over and over, and deriding the other person because they cannot understand why you assert that this is better than that, does not help me to understand your principle. Look at what I said for example. I explained the something "extra", which makes a whole greater than the sum of its parts, then I explained why I think that a bigger whole is greater than a smaller whole. It appears to me like you are thinking of a principle whereby you would say that one unity is "better" than another unity, a principle which is other than size, and perhaps could not even be measured as a quantity. If so, could you explain this?
What is the greater ingredient then?
I’m only taking about one principle, and you keep talking about your definition of what is “greater”, and I am correcting your definition because I provided the principle not you.
I’m repeating myself because you’re repeatedly holding up quantity for me to look at as a greater thing when quantity is not part of the principle, other than calling the extra element of superior quality an added element.
Get your own logical metaphysical principle.
The one I gave to you is elegant, logical, and real, not some intellectual rambling that may or may not provide the answer to how life and thought came to be on a pile of rocks.
What you should be doing is looking to science to see if it supports the principle, not trying to make it your own.
Science supports it everywhere, but scientists refuse to broaden their parameters beyond the second degree of abstraction, mathematics (like you are doing postulating quantity instead of quality), to include the philosophical science of Logic.
You and most of the posters here have a failure of imagination.
180 just called the principle “woo”, the go to skeptic talking point of Internet trolls.
Einstein said that it was his imagination that moved him to his theories more than his mathematics did.
That’s why he became “Einstein” and not just a face in a crowd of other scientists.
There are a couple of posters here who readily appreciated the principle and welcomed it into their thinking like they were waiting for it.
These posters have not destroyed their imaginations from a bombardment of superficial opinionated thoughts shot out of ego and the worship of mathematics.
It doesn’t seem you’re ever going to appreciate anything other than what you have thought up yourself, even if another Einstein showed up.
Too bad.
Quoting Joe Mello
Someone needs to look up Messiah Complex. You seem easily angered for one so enlightened.
Well, I could certainly come up with a better name than you did. And I love cats. But if it’s from the hippie days I enjoyed, that’s cool.
And every merely opinionated person on the Internet cannot accept knowledge and understanding as actual realities, only opinions. So, projecting their face in a crowd onto every face they see, these confused persons only welcome others who are confused.
And no truly wonderful person would use “Messiah” in a derogatory way, for he or she would see the need for one everywhere, and fully appreciate the spiritual Messiah that we already have.
And I have felt little emotion reading the posts here, and certainly never anger, which is probably because I have a Graduate degree in Professional Writing and only appreciate or react to good writing.
Joe Mello.
Quoting EugeneW
As @Janus noted, reality does not always follow what we think of as common sense. You can't overthrow more than100 years of physics just because it doesn't make sense to you. This is not some new highfalutin idea.
I suggest a little reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality
I don't understand. How can a particle be a wave at the same time? Is it a quantum particle? Is the particle wave -shaped? Does it move around in a wave? What is the wave made of? Other particles?
As I said, the fact that you can't understand it doesn't mean it isn't true. To be fair, it's a hard idea to get ahold of. Did you read the Wikipedia article I linked.
God only knows. He has put it in. Love maybe. Or hate. It's not particle-like.
Yes, but it's confusing. It's not both at same time. Sometimes particle, sometimes wave. They seem complementary. What does that mean? I know what is complementary. Like ying and yang. Are particles and waves one whole? Is a particle moving in a wave? What
Is the wave made of?
Agreed. That's why quantum mechanics gives people fits, even 117 years after it started out. It is anti-intuitive. As for "Sometimes particle, sometimes wave"... it's always both. It's just the way we observe it that changes. Don't ask me to explain further.
"Wave–particle duality is the concept in quantum mechanics that every particle or quantum entity may be described as **either** a particle or a wave."
So not both at the same time. Which seems the most logical. When you describe the wave, you don't see the particle and vice versa.
In the same article:
"Although the use of the wave–particle duality has worked well in physics, the meaning or interpretation has not been satisfactorily resolved;"
God is defined as the greatest being we can imagine.
So of course “something greater than the greater thing” is God’s omnipotent power.
You keep looking for another “ingredient” because of your failure of imagination.
A metaphysical principle that discovers the logical explanation of how the greater things in our reality, such as life and thought and emotion, came to be in such a lesser reality, as our physical universe is, is like the discovery of a once in many lifetimes new super nova overhead.
And you dig holes in the ground to see it, and then whine when you can’t see it and become confused.
The greatest person who ever lived said that we must become like children to see the kingdom of God.
You gave away your sense of awe and excitement to egotistical opinions you frame as math problems.
You haven't yet told me what quality you are talking about. That's what I keep asking of you. Greater in what quality? "Greater" itself does not refer to a quality.
Quoting Joe Mello
I thought that is what you were asking, for me to understand your principle, accept it, and make it my own. How can I look to see if science supports it when I can't even understand it, because you haven't made clear what you mean by "greater"? All you've done is stated examples which are useless because you do not identify the quality which one of the things in the example is greater in. You could say a chair is greater than a table, or a table is greater than a chair. And when I ask you why you class one thing as greater than another thing, you simply say it's obvious.
Quoting Joe Mello
So use your imagination then Joe. When you say that it's obvious that one thing is greater than another, use your imagination, and dream up some criteria to justify your claim. Otherwise all you are saying is that X is greater than Y because I say so. And what kind of principle is that?
Quoting Joe Mello
I sincerely want to welcome your principle into my thinking, as you even said above, I'm trying to make it my own. Why else would I spend my time asking you to clarify it for me to understand. But if you do not clarify, then I will not understand, and I cannot welcome it into my thinking.
You can’t possibly be willing to understand the principle.
I’ve told you plenty about what is and isn’t a qualitatively greater thing.
How can you not understand that a myriad of dead material things collected together in any combination cannot create a qualitatively greater thing but only a quantitatively greater thing?
Putting ice cubes in a drink to make the drink cold does not make ice qualitatively greater than water, but just water with less energy and molecules stuck together.
All physical matter changed into different physical matter follows this same lack of qualitative change.
A qualitatively greater thing than physical matter would be living tissue, life, a living being.
A qualitatively greater thing than life would be a thought, an emotion, a human personality.
The principle is logically stating that only something (qualitatively) greater than life and thought and emotion and us, and everything else that has evolved in our physical universe, had to be present for evolution to have taken place.
And the “something (qualitatively) greater than” is God’s omnipotent power.
The elegance of the principle leaves out mentioning quality because any philosophically trained mind would readily understand what a greater thing is.
It really isn’t a principle for people who use the Google machine.
So, do the work to understand it, or just leave me alone with the thought that I don’t understand it, as you accused me of before.
If it makes you feel better to tell yourself that, knock yourself out.
This is a good example of why I do not understand you. First you say that a living being is greater than a dead thing. Then you say that a thought is greater than a living being. How can a thought be greater than a living being, when a living being is the cause of a thought? I do not understand how an effect can be greater than its cause. What is "greater" supposed to mean in your usage?
Quoting Joe Mello
So this doesn't make any sense at all. Your examples show the posterior thing to be greater than the prior thing; physical matter is first, than the greater thing, living tissue, then an even greater thing, a living being, then an even greater thing, a thought. So your examples display that for you, greater things come from lesser things. The lesser things are prior to the greater things. Then you claim that there must be something even greater, which is prior to all these things. But that's completely inconsistent. You ought to conclude that there is something lesser which is prior to all these things. The thing which had to be present in the first place would be the least thing, not the greatest thing.
Isn't this simply putting things in their order of significance - a rock is less than a mouse; a mouse is less than a human?
No, it’s not me you don’t understand.
It’s common sense and your own experiences.
You have screwed your mind up royally somehow.
I really don’t want to keep witnessing it.
Maybe better: the particle moves in the wave. So a particle remains a particle, tough not an ordinary one. Surrounded by a mysterious wave. So particle and wave together! Strange stuff, that quantum stuff...
:grin:
Yeah, many people's minds are screwed up. Already at young age it starts. At school. The institute of so-called enlightenment. I reality it are dark rooms with very refined slave drivers filling the mind with bad stuff and taking good stuff out. And children looking outside of the window to the butterfly on the flower is diagnosed with ADD.
I agree. It's the only final explanation when all gaps are closed. You could ask who then created gods but then the answer would be the same. It doesn't take gods to create gods. It takes them though to create a universe and only they can breath life into the equations.
God is the greatest being we can imagine.
When you pluralize “God” you violate everything from his definition to the human history you have been a witness to.
And there can’t logically be two gods.
And to even entertain the question of who created God is to not be intelligent enough to know your own mind.
If it makes you feel better to tell yourself that, knock yourself out.
And God must be everything, or God couldn't have created everything.
I think there is more to evolution along similar lines.
Somehow the dinosaur must be aware of the sky to become a bird, and that, to me, suggests mind over matter. I don't buy the pretext that, oh, a dinosaur randomly sprouted a feather. I think there is a yearning within the imagination, that perhaps no material mechanism can be found for, that aids in things like dinosawyers becoming birds.
God is not everything because God’s omnipotent power does not engulf the uniqueness in every created thing.
What is the greatest thing in the physical universe?
Is it not a human being?
And what is the greatest thing about a human being?
Is it not his or her personality?
Therefore, it logically follows that the greatest thing about God is his personality, not his power.
And God’s personality doesn’t identify with everything or everyone, but with himself.
In a word, God is first and foremost a personality.
And he created everything and everyone out of perfect love, not out of self-love.
Says you. But if God was not the only resource from which to create, even if God has the power to make imagination tangible, then technically God did not create everything; he created everything out of an arbitrary "something."
Furthermore, if we possess power God does not, this disqualifies God from being all-powerful.
Yeah, you guys keep trying to tell me God is a person. I just don't believe as such. A universal mind, perhaps, but that's as far as I'll go.
I do not seek to know the mind of God. That's waaay too deep and too powerful.
That said, I am a pantheist, sorta of the classical variety, and believe God is as personal as we subjectively are to ourselves, which is very personal.
But yeah, I don't go there. Beware, cause God is dangerous.
Yes, says me.
Maybe you should be talking about television shows.
I experience more than one god. They can't logically be alone as the creation of love and hate takes two at least. Only when you have knowledge of another mind, you will understand that. Monotheism lacks love.
Why should I listen to you and not me?
Television shows? I don't get it.
That's a possibility, too, and a good one. Though I would imagine some kind of primeval collision of worlds.
And when you think about it, there is a disjunct symmetry to many things, including the human brain. Maybe we evolve to resemble nature.
Better than what?
I've been following this forum for 6 or 7 years and before that, the old PF. You now have 273 posts on your first thread. You have said that you have been on other forums. I was wondering how you would evaluate your first experience on this forum? How do you think this first thread is going? Are you getting anything out of this? Do you think others are?
@Joe Mello, sorry dude, but I tried reading your posts, but the more I read the more I get confused as to your point. And 10 pages later, no one has got a clue on what is being discussed. I don't mean any disrespect, but 10 pages of back and forth attempts at clarification went nowhere in the end.
Could you summarize for me the philosophical view you're trying to articulate? Please be concise. I just really need to know because there's a lot of "god" and finite and intangibles being thrown around here. They are, to me, conflicting ideas.
That's a good one too! So we evolved in the image of some eternal divine nature. As gods made us in their image, then that's very well possible. And it includes all creatures. I mean, it's kind of miraculous that everything exists. So maybe an eternal divine nature made us appear. Along with everything in the universe.
No matter how much study these people do and regardless of their background, they remain the scared little children they will always be. Those who hope a superhero god of the gaps will save them from oblivion are just deluded fools who will never appreciate the true wonders of the natural Universe. Meantime the intelligent humans will continue to look to science for life extension and future transhuman options. This thread is an utter waste of time.
Yep you are firmly rooted in the realm of imagination. If you were not holding onto your idea of God it would drift away with the wind. God is an idea that you sustain and keep alive. Let it go and find what is unchanging.
So, you’re confused because I have written words you do not understand, and not because you do not understand the words I have written?
Sorry, dude, that’s idiotic.
You’re on a philosophy forum and don’t know that all metaphysical discussions are in the realm of our imaginations?
Stupid people don’t know they’re stupid, you know.
Perhaps it's an order of "significance", but Joe would not even identify it as such. If Joe said it was an order of significance, then I would say that is completely subjective. To him, one is more significant than the other. Joe seems to have a strong feeling about that, and thinks it ought to be obvious to me. But of course in philosophy we don't make our judgements based on strong feelings, we proceed with rational arguments and logic. That's why I asked Joe to justify his claims, because are not in any way obvious to me.
Quoting Joe Mello
Clearly it's not any part of my experience. It's some principle you dreamed up, so it's part of your experience. And it makes no sense to me, for a person to be using "greater" in the way that you do, to refer to a quality which cannot be measured in terms of quantity. Obviously, "great" in any normal usage is a quantitative term. That's why I requested you switch to a principle like "better and worse", which is more consistent with my experience of a quality which is not measurable as a quantity. You refuse to switch, because if we remove the ambiguity brought by the word "greater", your principle makes no sense at all, and therefore completely loses its emotional appeal.
When I was 24, I was a painter with a high paying job, 5 girlfriends, a sports car, and a bodybuilder running 10 miles 3 times a week.
Then one morning, without any effort or pleading on my part, God gave to me such a revelation of himself that I gave up the life I had and went into a monastery at 25 and left at 30.
It was the most difficult thing that I have ever done. But the constant revelations of himself God gave to me kept me sacrificing my pleasures for his revelations.
It’s amazing how lazy selfish humans in love with themselves don’t see how the love of God alludes them.
I do not see any proof of God's love in myself. How can I find out one?
Did I write properly this time or should I proofread something?
It’s not part of your experience that your dog is greater than your kitchen counter?
Go away now and be a thinker only you wants to understand.
No, your second sentence is wrong.
And knowledge of the truth leads us to love of the truth and becoming fully alive.
Truth and love share a relationship that we as human beings become failures for our whole life when we do not share in it.
Your life will only be as great as your knowledge and love is.
God is our greatest adventure, and only great adventurers go in search for God.
Enjoy your coffee.
Gee, it’s like an omnipotent spiritual power, a Dark Energy, is behind my posts pushing them outward with ever-increasing speed.
I spent a decade on Sam Harris’ atheist forum and had only one personal thread that I was allowed to go on. The Administrator kept closing it down and starting a new one with derogatory titles, like The Dump and The Jar. All these threads became the most popular by hundreds and hundreds of pages. Then he shut down the forum and moved it to the old forum where it all began, and didn’t invite me, despite me having the most popular thread on that forum too. And now only about a half dozen posters go there once in a great while.
I’m not here for myself or for intellectual reasons.
Each one of us, no matter how much the thoughts off the top of our heads won’t shut up, has the spirit of God trying to give to us truth and love.
I’m here in service to that spirit.
Why? Excuse me, with all my purest respect, are you an English professor or linguist?
I do have a Graduate degree in English and taught high school, but you should have written:
“How can I find [it]?
If you were having such a nice wee life, it's hardly surprising that you found the empty darkness scary.
Your money, girlfriends, car, strength mean absolutely nothing when you were alone in your room at night and the wee unexplained noises happened.
When your mind screamed at you that religious doctrines such as catholicism threatened you with eternal damnation in hell, if you continued with what they would consider ungodly behavior and an ungodly life. Your brain decided that 5 years of penance in a monastery would be your Pascals wager. You heard the voice of god in your head but it was just your own self-doubt. You created your own revelation.
You should read Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and pay attention to his chapter on the great demotions.
I have said this many times and challenged your superhero non-existent god many times, in the pitch dark, by myself. From when I was 14. I have called it every bad name I can think of and asked it to show me its power.
I do that rarely now as I am cursing at non-existing fables and I am wasting my time.
Your god has no power! It doesn't exist or it is a coward which cannot even silence this little weak atheist. I can only be killed by a human who is messed up enough to claim to be working in the name of your god fable or just because they don't like me and want to. I will most likely die, as most do, due to a natural or accidental act.
I have had and continue to have a wonderful life. I accept death as a harbinger of change. I leave the development of having more options, to the scientific attempts to increase longevity and develop transhumanism.
Go back to enjoying your strength, female fans, cars and bodybuilding and perhaps do more to help poor people as you go. Enjoy your life, as it's the only one you have. Don't be afraid of oblivion. You were not afraid of it before you were born. There is nothing in the darkness except what we bring ourselves.
If your age means you are more comforted against your fear of non-existence by your belief that you have had 'special communications' with your superhero, then that's fine. continue with your delusion but please don't try to infect others with your fairy story viewpoints.
Use your special relationship with your superhero to call upon it to show me its power.
I have asked priests, ministers, Jehovah witnesses, Mormons, evanhellicals, Satanists, theosophers, mystics, pagans, etc, etc, to do the same
Their gods are all as powerless as yours.
I was not referring to God. I was speaking about the entity itself. This is why I guess it is better formulated as: "How can I find out one?" in the sense of finding "something" or "someone".
I was not referring to God as the "one"
By the way from 16 to 20, I served my apprenticeship as a painter and decorator. I also gained the UK qualifications of City & Guilds, Advanced craft and FTC (Furthest trade certificate). I can do sign writing, graining, marbling, etc. I can hang specialist wallpapers from Japanese hand-painted ones to Lyncrusta Waltons. I became a journeyman and still hone my skills in these areas but I decided to go to Uni when I was 22 and study computing instead of becoming an interior designer, so in a small way, we are brothers of the brush. I retired after teaching computing science for 30 years.
Being a skilled person does not prevent you from falling for god fables due to being afraid of eternity.
Being a rational thinker does!
Without qualification as to greater in what sense, that question doesn't even make sense to me. Are you talking magnanimous? If so, I can't even begin to class a dog, let alone a kitchen counter. I have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry Joe, but your continued gibberish, and refusal to explain yourself, makes discussion rather pointless.
:rofl: The boing old christ complex! another non-existent character. I think these threads are popular because all intelligent people enjoy throwing stuff at religion, that all. Look at the size of the thread on Trump, similar reasons. This is not due to the veracity of your point of view, it's more due to incredulity at your level of personal delusion.
10 years at Sam Harris’ forum.
[quote= Narcotics Anonymous]Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.[/quote]
No there is also the realm of sense experience and the realm of concepts (among other things). You don't know the basics son. God is beyond your metaphysical understanding. Your attempt at deriving a metaphysical principal is rooted in a dualistic understanding of reality. Come back when you get past the mirage kiddo.
Martin Hagglund , among others, makes what I consider to be the best argument for atheism. Rather than disbelieving in a god because there is no proof, one should disbelieve because the concept itself is repugnant.
“…a vast number of religious people do not regard their faith as competing with knowledge. While accepting the freedom of scientific inquiry and democratic pluralism, they hold that religious faith is crucial for the spiritual shape and profound meaning of life. An atheism that does not engage this sense of religion will fail to transform deep-seated notions about faith. Even many people who themselves do not have religious faith believe that it would be great and beneficial to have such faith. The latter attitude is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as believing in belief in God. “Such a person doesn't believe in God but nevertheless thinks that believing in God would be a wonderful state of mind to be in, if only that could be arranged.”16 This belief in the existential value of religious faith (rather than in the truth of religious claims) is the main line of defense for religion in a secular age, after its authority to organize society or legislate over science has been conceded.”
I still don't see from this why it's repugnant. Why should science legislate and organize society? That's just the same as god doing that.
Every point you make here is reasonable, fair and accurate within the framework you suggest.
But it does not matter how much individual humans are comforted by the idea of a supernatural superhero, who cares about them and will offer them life after death if they do this or that, if it turns out that it's complete bullshit. How much more could this species achieve, if such speculation was no longer, ever, ever delivered to the less educated as undeniable fact!
Heroin can make you feel really good (so I've heard anyway) but the cost to you and to society can be extreme. Religion as an opiate of the masses is well described.
I do have a real problem saying to a person with a personal faith that comforts them and they don't preach about, "Your god is fake."
I mostly won't do it. But if they start to threaten me and everyone else with damnation or any punitive consequences of not having a faith in their god, then for me, they have crossed the line.
Quoting Joshs
My approach to such people would be different than my approach on this thread. My approach would be much more gentle and I would stop if I thought I was doing damage to the psyche of an individual believer who was of the type you describe but individuals like the few religious scientists that exist make for a much more interesting and good-natured debate, compared to those who claim personal religious revelation, through mental/physical contact with what they perceive as god.
I will shout right back at pulpit bullies!
Quoting Joshs
I don't think the number of rational theists is 'vast' amongst the number that currently exist.
Quoting Joshs
People are always attracted to what makes them feel good but do you not agree that truth is more important than what makes you feel good?
Quoting Joshs
I agree but I see this as more like its last defense. A benevolent, benign faith that does not threaten punitive consequences for non-acceptance. A commune you can join if you wish but you can leave whenever you like with no negative consequences, almost Epicurean in concept. Some individuals with a personal faith may demonstrate this but I see no evidence of such a doctrine in any organised faith group or theosophist group such as the moronic Scientologists.
Btw, I am a Daniel Dennet fan and a Sam Harris fan.
Dennet, Harris, Dawkins, Pinker, Hofstadter, Hitchens, they all propagte atheism and science. It's the same as propagating theism, with god replaced by science.
Quoting Joe Mello
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Do you really believe that God is so easily replaced?
No it's not. Science makes no claim of supernatural agency and god is a fable, based on the human tendency to make up stories about that which they don't yet understand. God is merely of the gaps in our knowledge. Science is simply the most reliable method we have, to search for, identify, constantly review, scrutinise and establish new knowledge. Scientists will also turn to storytelling or at best, educated guesswork, when they 'thought project' hypotheses about the meaning of life the universe and everything or at least a T.O.E.
I know you probably won't welcome this from me but your post above, listing Joe's skills was hilarious.
I tried not to laugh but "I couldn't help myself." :rofl:
It doesn't, you are thinking of politics, not science.
Nor, technically, can there be.
It strikes me that God and the concept of eternity are every bit as frightening as death. And maybe you guys are such reactionaries to the notion because you are afraid.
Repugnant is a strong term. I perhaps should have used ‘limited’ with respect to post-religious perspectives. My point is that when someone newly embraces a religious idea or faith, it is because they see it as an improvement over their previous stance on the world. It clarifies, unifies and harmonizes aspects of their engagement with others and with themselves. So it’s not something you want to take away from someone without replacing it with a faith or thinking that incorporates all that is advantageous and clarifying about it relative to what it superseded for them. Form my vantage, post-religious thinking keeps what is precious and valuable about belief in god, what about it clarifies our moral dealings with others, and enriches it by transcending it’s limitations. So, for instance , the co cost of omnipotence is ‘repugnant’ for me because it is a form of nostalgia. It is backward looking. To strive to connect with moral
perfection is to look behind one at some perfect Cause and perfect beginning. It presupposes a separation between mortals and the perfect God, between creator and created. postmodern post-religious views, in contrast, are future and creativity oriented. We are brought intimately in touch with the sources of moral good, because they are right in front of us as our being with others in time.
Most people in the world believe God exists. But like God once ruled the day, so is science nowadays. It's what you are obliged to learn at school and Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, etc. try to get rid of that idea altogether. I don't think science will replace it, but the powers that rule have abandoned it. Well, of course there are political parties and partisan vwith religious flavors, but that's all it is. A flavor. The world and is managed on the basis of science. But what's so important about it that gives it that right?
This is certainly true for many people today, but the historical development of worship of science ( called scientism) replacing worship of god is already an old trope, having been thoroughly analyzed and critiqued by Nietzsche in the 19th century, and in the 20th by Heidegger , Foucault and others. Science as it is treated by Dennett, Dawkins and Harris is. it an alternative to faith , but merely another incarnation of it.
They present an atheism that rejects science worship. There are also those within science studies itself that take this view ( Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi).
You claimed that science replaced God, and now say that is not the case. If it’s not the case then what’s the problem?
That sounds good. I agree. I don't think God is the source of moral. I don't care for nature or fellow men because God created them. That doesn't mean though that I don't think they created them. I can't see no other source from where it came. Laws of nature just don't have the intelligence to create themselves. Nor does the basic stuff in nature.
Science replaced the role that God once played. In politics. God plays a minor role, though most people believe in God.
What matters is that the person who discovers it is bullshit is disappointed and mourns the loss of this faith.
If so, then they have not completely extricated themselves from religious faith. Existentialists like Sartre and Schopenhauer belong within this category of mourning. One needs to understand Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauerian pessimism, why he celebrates a godless world , rather that simply arguing that God is not empirically verifiable. One needs to understand why for Nietzsche the ways of thinking that ground empirical proof are themselves a remnant of religious faith.
Quoting universeness
This what I believe:
“It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed?”
Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?”(Nietzsche, Will to Power )
Worship is maybe too big a word. But science has to be learned obligatory at schools. From young age our children are trained in analytical problem solving of which abstract math problems are the ultimate example, like is our appreciation for IQ. The higher IQ, the more intelligent one is. But that's a value, an opinion only.
When did you start believing in God? I used to ask my mum where God was, looking outside the airplane window. I learned science, shouted against God, and now I see there is nothing but to see they exist.
Now you’re back to claiming that science replaced God. Okay, whatever. Again, I’m rather surprised to hear from a believer that God plays such a minor role as to be replaced by some scientific discoveries.
One can be a singing and writing painting counselor, visiting college in between running around from girl to girl, teach in the evenings, and build body in the weekends. While experiencing God.
The existence of god cannot yet be disproved but what's wrong with looking at it the other way. If it exists then it needs to manifest in every town square of the world. If it can't even do that then I am not impressed and I certainly have no fear of it.
Only a fool would claim to have no fear of how you will die, especially when existence seems so imperative to us but this fear comes from a lack of knowledge.
I do not fear oblivion as the term suggests no awareness and therefore is the same state as before birth.
I fear the way I will die and I mourn the fact that I will no longer exist by way of entropy rather than my will, but it also excites me as all trips into the unknown do, even though I believe it to be a very short trip to oblivion.
As I have said before, science may be able to aid future humans with this death problem.
We might be the first intelligent species anywhere in the Universe. Someone has to be first.
If we don't go extinct then it seems to me that we will obviously move off this planet and towards the vastness of space.
8 billion humans could each have a thousand planets and that would be nothing. A cosmic splash.
A million years from now, each human family might live on their own separate Mclass planet, who knows.
See, I can do storytelling as well and what I suggest is no less valid than your god fable.
All the life after death scenarios offered by religions are so obviously creations of the human imagination. The paradisical versus the hellish. To me, they are obviously false and mere manifestations of the human ID as described by Freud, so I am not afraid of their threat.
Quoting theRiddler
What would I have to do to convince you that I am not afraid of any god story or the threat of oblivion?
How can anyone prove such to anyone other than how they ultimately face their own death?
I offer my life as a sacrifice to destruction and eternal suffering, if your god will manifest to all humans or at least to all scientists and submit itself to scientific scrutiny.
After enough suffering, I will be a 'creature' anyway, perhaps a Gollum type character from Lord of the Rings. "Fascinating" as Spock would say, do you think I will scream for eternity or do you think I might get used to it and perhaps even come to enjoy it. After long enough, I would have no memory of pleasure after say a thousand years or more of suffering in hell (or listening to bands like Take That on eternal repeat) so no comparator so would I still even recognise that I was suffering? Again fascinating! But the hell story is as bullshit as the heaven story.
I hope I have made myself clear that I fear only the 'loss of my current existence and how it will happen,' I do not fear oblivion(non-awareness) or the threat of being judged by a non-existent supernatural F***wit and the threat of suffering forever in hell.
It's what I said every time. I'm not sure what you're surprised about. That God doesn't play a role in scientific discoveries?
Not every religion threatens with hell.
What if all gaps are closed? Why should God be about gaps. I might know everything to the fundamental level. And where does that fundament come from? It hasn't the intelligence to create itself. No physical theory is self-explanatory.
I'm sure that's true, but I wonder if you can experience God while bragging about how wonderful you are and gloating about how much better you are than other people.
But anyway, there's nothing wrong with everyone exploring completely diverse arenas of belief, so long as they aren't a hindrance to human dignity.
For me, God is synonymous with the simple idea that there may be vastly higher orders of intelligence. I wouldn't expect It to reveal itself everywhere or subjugate people to its power, either. Nor to erase pain and suffering from existence.
I wonder too, but as the saying goes, God moves...
Perhaps I should try to rephrase. Let’s say we have God’s role in one hand, and in the other hand we have the scientific method and its results (earth is a sphere that revolves around the sun, evolution, etc.). The role that science plays is useful, needless to say, and the roll that religion plays is also useful, however they are not useful in the same way, right? Do you agree?
That's nice, though I don't see what God has got to do with intelligence. Maybe they know nothing in the way we do, have no power at all like we do, and are they mean in our metrics (just because they created the universe).
Your words after that got too 'esoteric' for me. I am a complete novice at philosophy rhetoric but I will offer the following on the above quote.
Well, that would be a matter for them to struggle with. I would experience no such nostalgia. I would celebrate and continue in my excitement towards the questions that remain unanswered. If all the questions get answered then and only then might it become valid to talk about the Omni's.
If all lifeforms at that moment can intercommunicate and affect every part of known space then we might envisage the birth of a self-aware universe, a pan or cosmo psychism. If at that time you wish to label such 'God' then fine. The idea that god will eventually be all of us or all lifeforms united then ok. I will subscribe to that. This would be a natural god not a supernatural one and it would not be ineffable and would be in full view of everyone. But I don't think all the questions will ever be answered, which is good news for us as we would still have a purpose.
If our Universe does become self-aware then what would it do? Create a copy of itself from scratch? repeat the process all over again? until we have a multiverse of gods? has this all already happened?
Are we all components of an emerging god?
Sounds like fun to me!
Let's get started on technologies that will mean we can survive off-planet!
Time is a wastin! This god needs birthing before the big rip!
Yes. Science can't explain that the universe and all in it is there. It only says how stuff inside it behaves without knowing its nature or its origin. You can close all gaps, but that doesn't explain that of which you close the gap.
So? Even more reason to not be afraid!
Quoting EugeneW
If we answer all questions and fill all gaps then feel free to declare all of those involved as components of a label you want to call God. Fred would be just as acceptable. I will believe in Fred because I will then be a component of Fred.
Omniscience would be fairly intelligent. Though I think it would be picking straws if it even just had something along the lines of super intelligence.
Afraid of what?
Quoting universeness
Haha! Why not? I'm gonna call them Stephen. If we know everything, will we all be Stephen?
Do you see the universe as a superbeing of which we are tiny parts?
You say yes but then go on as though they play the same role, the role of explaining the universe. Do you believe that God’s only role and only power is explanatory?
Thinking is the most benign addiction.
This non-existent god, religious threats, oblivion!
My advice was and is more general than personal.
Quoting EugeneW
Is it really freaky that my name is actually Stephen! No kidding!
Ah! wait a minute I think I may know you.
Expect a PM.
Yes. It's their only role. They created the universe. They don't tell us how to handle it. They clapped their hands or whatever and let it go. Without knowing what came to be. Providing the raw material. Which therefore is divine material.
I'm not afraid of god. I love them! Gave us the gift of live.
Does that mean you are too scared not to love them?
Your parents created you, gave you life, does that mean you must always love them no matter what they do to you or others?
Isn't that more a case of refusing to accept a god on the grounds of personal taste? Would that not be analogous to saying I don't believe in the laws of my country because they are repugnant and limit my individual freedoms?
Yeah, but I don't dwell too hard on it. Something like that, even if it's Star Wars' mystical Force binding all things.
Good one! Well I don't love them because they make me. Tomorrow I might hate them. Just look at all pain in the world.
As a matter of fact, I don't involve them in my daily life. I just don't have another explanation why it's all there. And who cares actually. I just say science doesn't have all the answers. What's the nature of consciousness or matter? Where it all comes from? I love creation and think we should be careful with it. Not because God made it, but just... well... because... it's a nice creation.
Martin Hagglund’s argument is that essential
to faith in God is a belief in , and desire for, the eternal.
He argues instead that finitude is preferable to eternity.
“To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. I am finite because I cannot maintain my life on my own and because I will die. Likewise, the projects to which I am devoted are finite because they live only through the efforts of those who are committed to them and will cease to be if they are abandoned. The thought of my own death, and the death of everything I love, is utterly painful. I do not want to die, since I want to sustain my life and the life of what I love. At the same time, I do not want my life to be eternal. An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life.
This problem can be traced even within religious traditions that espouse faith in eternal life. An article in U.S. Catholic asks: “Heaven: Will It be Boring?” The article answers no, for in heaven souls are called “not to eternal rest but to eternal activity—eternal social concern.”1 Yet this answer only underlines the problem, since there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity—just as much as an eternal rest—is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone.
The problem is not that an eternal activity would be “boring” but that it would not be intelligible as my activity. Any activity of mine (including a boring activity) requires that I sustain it. In an eternal activity, there cannot be a person who is bored—or involved in any other way—since an eternal activity does not depend on being sustained by anyone. Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. The understanding of myself as mortal does not have to be explicit and theoretical but is implicit in all my practical commitments and priorities.”
I don't disagree, but isn't that the act of choosing not to believe based on preferences, aesthetic or otherwise?
Quoting Joshs
These sorts of discussions were huge decades ago in circles I mixed in. A significant question we used to hear a lot was - Will there be penises in heaven?
The notion of eternity has never captured my imagination and I can't imagine how one would even conceptualize it.
Quoting Joshs
Certainly, but I'm assuming that in the logic of superphysical thinking, entering the realm of eternity with god would bring with it an entirely different perspective and value system, which would generate a different outlook on such matters.
Quoting Tom Storm
Exactly. The temporal bias of experience guarantees that there will always be an entirely different perspective and value system, generating a different outlook on the world. But there can never be a true or correct or original or final value system. Hagglund's argument goes deeper than simply critiquing the idea of heaven. He uses a Derridean deconstructive approach to show that any value that is assumed to be beyond cultural contingency, such as universal notions of the good , the moral , the just or the generous , are incoherent. It is not just that we should prefer finitude over the eternal, the unconditional or the universal, but that all such assumptions fall prey to their own deconstruction. All valuation is contingent and relative. This is just as true of our imagining of a timeless deity, value structure, notion of the good or the true as it is of scientific and aesthetic endeavor.
Of course.
And so the alternative he suggests is ...?
Quoting baker
Play it by ear
Millennia of philosophy down the drain!
They threw a lot of pies at me but only hit themselves in the face.
What a mess …
Nope. That's your interpretation of my post. I can't blame you. You're gung ho about your view. Suit yourself.
You are good at constructing feel-good narratives. I’ll give you that.
Who's to say what's lesser or greater? What would an example be, to make it concrete?
What are you driving at with this principle? God? Isn't Anselm's argument a better formulation?
Good reply :up: :100:
I don't think your god cares very much about you. You and it are visiting the circus in your head instead of trying to defend your viewpoints. You would think that with all the power and knowledge it is supposed to have, it could 'reveal' or maybe just whisper in your head, some words or scientific facts that you could then tell to all us 'clowns' that would turn us all into followers of its new prophet on Earth, Joe Mello. Don't get angry Joe, stay 'mello.'
What's the something greater? I think it's the divine spark. Hawking asked himself what bred life into his equations that actually made them work in reality. I think only God has the answer, but we can feel what he spoke or blew into his creation. The fact that stuff follows equations is just a contingency. You gotta move somehow.
I’ve written that it is God’s omnipotent power a dozen times, not his electricity.
You’re not really reading and pondering, just getting to the thoughts off the top of your head.
And God’s answers are given to us, not put away in secret.
No one has seen God, but plenty of human beings have known and loved him, and in doing so learn the truth and become more and more like him through the gift of his Spirit.
Skeptics deny God’s Spirit and become trapped in their senses, only learning and loving what they can experience through them.
And they claim to be geniuses for it.
Call it power, electricity, a spark, a magic essence, soul, divine stuff, or whatever. We don't know what it is. We only can feel it.
Who's God? .
Go find out.
His existence is not a sentence that you can read, but an adventure that you go on.
The dry and rattling thoughts in your head aren’t as real as your experiences are.
The greatest person who ever lived said:
“God seeks out those who seek him in Spirit and Truth.”
You’re thinking thoughts and looking for him on the Internet.
He deserves much more of the time and commitment you squander on yourself.
Your judgment of Clowns being powerful and meaningful is funny too.
Since I’m such a failure, why don’t you go start a successful thread so I can see what one looks like.
You make a lot of declarations about God when you admit that you don’t know anything about him and are confused.
The face you see in the mirror is your face not my face, or everyone’s face.
Go to school.
Jesus Joe! What is the matter with you? I've done too much school already. I don't need school to know what the world is made of. Nor to know what gods are made of. I can feel it.
Here's a link to one of my favorite threads in my time on the forum. Take a look and you'll be able to see how real, amateur, collegial philosophy is done.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You’re not even nice to your followers. If finding God turns you in to such a sourpuss I don’t see why anyone would want to find it.
I wasn’t saying that God can’t be known from reason, but to ask someone to provide some sentences to show God is lazy and not how God is known.
From reason alone we can come to a knowledge of God.
Catholicism teaches this, and has many apologists who have written extensively on it.
The discovery of Dark Energy acting unlike a mere physical force is our newest rational possibility for the existence of God.
That would be more proof of dark demons driving all apart. But it makes room for follow up. And probably we are a follow up too.
You don’t write cogently.
Dark energy is no proof of gods. It's just as electricity. Of which you said it's no sign of God. It's the existence of the whole universe that is proof. Who else could have blown it in existence? Dark energy is not God blowing us apart.
Seems another moderator has decided what’s best for a forum is groups of confused people acting like experts by Googling their asses off.
I’m gonna guess Srap is involved.
Just checked. No, The Lounge is not where stupid topics go.
Your feelings are hurt, I get it.
I was being euphemistic, sure, but don't take my word for it, or trust your ability to assess it objectively, I guess, just do a search for 'moved to the lounge' and you’ll soon see how the lounge is a small step from total topic annihilation. My hurt feelings do not change this fact, Joe. I'm no God and my feelings don't alter reality, nor do I require your love in order to be fulfilled. You might argue that my feelings about people and things do actually alter them to an extent and I would not disagree, in my perception of them. But the fact of the matter is that your good topic ended up in the lounge. Nothing can change that fact. Nothing can change the fact that the lounge is historically used as a dumping ground for topics that are low quality but not quite bad enough to delete entirely.
Try to look on the bright side, your topic was popular and attracted participation from a rather large swath of the membership. Your interests were taken seriously and closely examined. You've received both valuable criticism and lavish praise ("You’ve been brilliant" I've recently observed). Not too shabby for your first topic, no, not too shabby at all, so take some pride in what you've accomplished here, learn from your mistakes, if indeed any mistakes were made, and resolve to do better in the future. That's the best any of us can do, my friend.
Just the portion of it that maintains the status quo, and good riddance.
i am also new to this forum and its really impressive how "hardcore" philosophical discussions are.
In some way also understandable as philosophical people should be very self reflected.
great forum
This thread was getting a lot of traffic when it got moved to The Lounge.
As I have already outlined, I get on a forum and start a very popular thread because I am a different poster than the groupthink regulars, and then a Moderator steps in to stop it for purely personal reasons.
So, your judgment that this thread was at its end and I had a good run is bogus, and kinda self-serving if you have never been able to start a thread that lasted.
Some moderator arbitrarily moved this thread. There was no critical thinking involved, just panties in a bunch.
I’ve read every moderator here. They are some weird dudes who actually live in books and their intellects.
They must smell musty like books, too.
Irrelevant.
Quoting Joe Mello
If identifying yourself as a non-group-thinker means that you're not afraid to say things that are not in sync with a group then I say good for you Joe! But honestly, rebelliousness for the sake of attention isn't all that impressive.
Regarding the move, as I've pointed out, it was done because of low quality. You've pointed out the low-quality posts in this topic more than anyone else. Were you lying about that and actually think that the responses to the OP were generally high-quality?
Quoting Joe Mello
I was trying to be nice and the niceness was genuine, well, somewhat genuine.
Quoting Joe Mello
I don't follow your reasoning here. No matter.
Quoting Joe Mello
A moment ago you said it was moved for personal reasons. Purely personal reasons are not arbitrary. They're reasons motivated by resentment or satisfaction rather than whimsy, but whatever the case, again I point out that you appear to judge the topic low-quality yourself, with the exception of your own posts, of course.
If you believe that this topic has value, can you explain its value?
Quoting Joe Mello
Oh yes. I knew that we could agree on something.
Taking a line by line approach to answering someone’s posts is what every skeptic does, by the way.
Skeptics have this idea in their heads that they become the best thinkers by going point by point when attempting to write a good post that can be classified as critical thinking.
It’s not, and they’re not.
The best thinker is talented and experienced, not detailed.
In your post above you say many things that are not motivated by your intelligence but by your desire to correct me.
When a moderator moves a thread because he personally does not like it, he has moved the thread for an arbitrary reason, for arbitrary means a personal whim. You make a distinction between “purely personal” and “personal whim” when there is none.
To ask me to explain what value is in a logical metaphysical principle, which scientists refuse to consider when it is a principle that gives to us an understanding for the unanswered question how the evolution on our planet happened, is to ask a stupid question, and a question I have answered numerous times already.
And you can’t possibly know that this thread was moved because of low quality posts unless you spoke to the moderator who moved it.
Talent and experience, praxis, and a great big dose of love for the Truth.
I have no feelings about or interest in what anyone here says and does towards me after reading the principle I have given to them.
That most persons here didn’t understand it and mostly looked at me instead, like you did, is exactly what I expected to happen.
But I also knew that the hearing of a Truth is worth the telling of it, no matter how it’s received off the top of a person’s head.
If you’re suggesting that the smart thing would be to ignore you that’s fair.
Quoting Joe Mello
It’s true that personal reasons may be whimsical, though you mentioned whimsy and “panties in a bunch”, did you not? It’s a challenge to be whimsical when one’s panties are in a bunch, I imagine. I think you know that, and that you deliberately misconstrued my distinction in order to avoid looking foolish. Well, the ship has sailed on that score and no amount of ever-so-tricky word games can steer it back to shore.
Quoting Joe Mello
Obviously, my ever-so-evasive friend, that was not the question that I presented for your consideration. I was clearly asking you to explain the value of the topic as a whole, assuming that you judge it to have any value at all, and that includes all posts and not just the so called metaphysical principal. Different discussions containing the same principle can vary in quality, I should not have to point out. Judging from your posts in this topic, you appear to consider the majority, if not the entirety, of posts in this topic to be low-quality. I assume that you assign high value to your own words and the esteemed metaphysical principle, but they comprise only a small portion of the topic.
But fear not, I withdraw the question.
Quoting Joe Mello
Capital T truth is based in faith (in authority), that’s why it requires capitalization, and that’s exactly why you appear so desperate to be regarded as some kind of authority.
A True authority on a subject is not only educated in the subject but experienced in the subject.
You fancy yourself a critical thinker, as all skeptics today do first and foremost, yet you can’t understand the simple notion that someone who has only read about God could not possibly know more about him than someone who has both read about and experienced him.
How do you know the stories you here about knowing and loving God, mine and so many others throughout human history, aren’t simply True? And if they are simply True, then I am an authority and you are not, but just someone who reads?
You accuse me of being “desperate” because you are projecting yourself upon me.
Your posts are like so much sand. They have no lasting effect on another person’s life.
A tree is known by its fruit.
And I have a rich harvest of helping others, which I still reap every day.
I am the only possible authority on God and the Truth because I didn’t just study it.
And you could not possibly be.
You’re missing the point. The point is that the essential building blocks of religion are a unique metaphysics that require special access from someone like yourself, someone with hard won experience, and someone that can therefore be seen as an authority. The faith is in the authority, not in God. There are other signs of your religious inclinations, such as the way you stress the division between skeptics and believers, your rather extreme arrogance, and even the way you write with isolated sentences for dramatic effect. The curious thing is how openly blatant you are about all this, practically undressing yourself without any assistance from skeptics like myself. That makes it hard for me to believe that you’re for real, because you’re obviously not a complete idiot, and this is all just a simple game you’ve designed for amusement.
It has been amusing.
So now you’re an expert on religion.
Religious people don’t think metaphysically when they become religious or stay in a religion the rest of their lives.
They become religious because something far more profound than their intellectual thoughts takes hold of them, i.e., the Spirit of God already within them.
You don’t even understand yourself, and how you have limited your vocabulary by excluding “spirit” and “God” when you pontificate what motivates religious people.
Your dry and rattling thoughts are leading you towards ignorance and nonsensical ramblings you make up on the fly,
And your adolescent jabs at me are because you actually think you’re the one with knowledge and experience, so you lash out at me, who is obviously pummeling your intellectual delusions.
Read your last post again with an eye on what proof you have to support any of your regurgitations of other skeptics who taught you that becoming religious is merely an intellectual decision of fearful and dumb people.
No one taught me that.
Quoting Joe Mello
Do you know of any religion that relies on empirical validity and therefore doesn't require faith in any authority figures? I don't, but I'm no expert.
“empirical validity”
You do not know or understand what it means.
If I have experienced the existence of God through both direct special revelations and general revelations, then I have experienced God “empirically”, not merely theoretically. I didn’t have to look up the definition of “empirical” to know this, but you need to.
And I don’t have to empirically verify the existence of God to you for my experiences of God to be empirical. Verification of our experiences to others is not a mandatory requirement for our experiences to be empirical. Again, look it up.
And philosophical empiricism is logical empiricism, to which my principle is an elegant and profound example.
Today’s skeptics are in an intellectual cult populated by untrained intellects redefining words and concepts to fit their ignorance and inexperience.
Why don’t you test your theory about religion and do some empirical research?
Go to church this weekend to see for yourself the joy and love present, and not the blind loyalty to religious authority you ignorantly project onto religious people gathering together to celebrate the spiritual joy and love that renews them.
And, while you’re at it, if that church has a group of selfless volunteers giving of their time and monies to help those of us less fortunate, see for yourself how your intellectual ramblings don’t give to you the inspiration or power to join them.
So yeah, I took your advice this morning and drove around the neighborhood until I found a church that was open for business. The Church of The Lady From Guadaloupe was having a bake sale for South American refugees. Dia Del Pastel they called it, which means 'Day of the Cake'. My Spanish is not so bueno, but from what I could make out their motto was something like "Baking towards a better future, one cake at a time." I thought it was really sweet and selfless of them to work for the benefit of others in this way.
They were selling cupcakes under a big tent on the lawn in front of the church. It was very windy this morning and as I walked past the tent on the way to the church one of the tent support pegs popped out of the ground and the tent partially collapsed. The collapsed part of the tent caught the wind like a sail and knocked people, tables, and cakes tumbling to the grass. It was a mess. I watched a kid get up from the ground who had two chocolate cupcakes stuck to his head. They were positioned like horns and he looked kinda like Hellboy. I tried my best not to laugh at the whole spectical but it was impossible so I ran the rest of the way up to the church in order to not offend those covered in buttercream frosting and lemonade.
The church was magnificent with huge marble columns on the inside and countless giant stained glass windows. I took a seat and opened myself to whatever love and joy could find me. The sunlight, multi-colored beams of it cascading down from the colorful windows, danced around my head as I stared at a depiction of the Virgin Mary in one of the windows. I kept staring. After a while she seemed to move. At first I thought it was the light moving and reflecting through the glass, but it eventually became clear that she was moving. She turned slightly and looked directly at me. She then began to speak.
"Are you ready?"
More than a little freaked out I managed to meekly ask, "Ready for what?"
"Love."
"What kind of love?"
"There is only one kind of love you fool."
Not sure what to say, after an uncomfortable pause I finally said, "I guess I don't know."
"Come back when you know."
"Okay," I agreed.
I hesitantly got up, saying "Okay, see ya later," and walked out.
I have a Graduate degree in Professional Writing.
I write screenplays, short stories, nonfiction quotes, etc.
And I was a journalist at my city’s paper for two years.
So what do you think I think of your writing?
That my little story is empirically verifiable, of course.
Spare me the literary criticism, please. :pray: :lol:
If your story actually happened, it would be empirical to you, not empirical to someone who wasn’t there.
You really can’t understand even simple philosophical language.
And your writing doesn’t qualify for literary criticism. But you qualify for all sorts of criticism.
I forgot to mention that as I was exiting the church yesterday a nun suddenly appeared from behind one of the marble pillars to confront me as I walked down the aisle. Dressed in a habit, she was quite old and frail looking, though her gaze was intense. Those intense eyes that flanked a large hooked nose could stop a buffalo in its tracks, and indeed I paused as if not by my own volition.
She looked me up and down and with a sweet voice said, “We welcome you to commune with our Lord whenever you wish, however, we have a strict policy of no cell phones and no phone conversations in this sacred sanctuary.”
Still deeply flustered by what had occurred only moments ago, I quickly replied, “I don’t have a phone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were speaking to someone a moment ago.”
Curious, I asked, “Did you hear anyone else speaking?”
“Why no, I thought you were using one of those ear gadgets.”
“Did you happen to notice that I was looking at the Virgin Mary in the window?”
“Yes.”
“Did you noticed anything unusual?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Oh no, it was nothing. I’ll remember what you said about no phones. Thank you.” I said while heading back towards the door.
Tell us what you think of his writing.
If God is actually playing hand puppets, Praxis on one hand and Joe Mello on the other, I'm stoked for this gladiatorial theater. One hand is feigning outrage. One hand is arrogant. Both hands like to write fiction. One hand paints. The hands do so many things.
I’ll be the first to admit that Mr. Mello is far better at writing fiction than I.