:up: My, I didn't realize that I had so many typos in my post...partly the fault of a bothersomely autocorrective AI, and partly my fat fingers on a t...
I feel the same. To my mind, the Dawkinsian/Hitchensian imperative reflects the difference between atheism and antitheism. The atheist arrives at his ...
I quite agree with you, save that I would rather a 'high degree' of, though not necessarily absolute, factual correctness in religion. I feel thusly b...
not that it has anything to do with the topic of this thread, but yes, yes, it was Saul/Paul, he of Tarsus, dogmatist par excellence, who put this all...
That is part of the truth, but not the full picture, for there are different "realities" which attend an "observation", one which is utterly independe...
I have already decided that "truth", especially ultimate truth and truth pertaining to remote phenomena, will ever elude me. For one thing, my percept...
If you can get past the pap about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle being one of bucolic wonder, and the development of agriculture being one of the worst...
Yes...with some relish, but a long time ago. Maybe "speculative historian" is a more apt description. Haha, just read it. Reb Eliezer would have made ...
I am utterly unfamiliar with that, but upon consideration, can imagine it, and can only imagine the difficulty of that situation. Such a "defining awa...
The incorporeality of God and the eternity of God, which combined sound like omnipresence to me, are two of Maimonides principles. Look, I do not clai...
As somebody noted above, the "Bible", a collection of diverse writings, contains many diverging conceptions of God. Even the pentateuch, which is reda...
do you suggest that the God of the Yahwist, who wrote well before Hellenization among the Jews, which God created the world (the universe?) in "six (a...
Yes, there was a certain corrupting influence from that quarter. A lot of said corruption, though, was first fed to the Greeks by Saul/Paul and his fe...
The very concept of a solitary, omnipresent, omnipotent and onmiscient God developed first among the Israelites of old. Christianity, largely thanks t...
Quite right. Nor do the Jews proselytize to this day. Judaism is not a religion which seeks converts to it, and proselyzation is universally considere...
Yes, quite...that and the Jesus bit, but you are right, the foundational premise of all monotheistic religions, especially those based upon the Israel...
That phrase is going straight into my "bag of tricks", thank you very much... ...and of the claim that there is a "big man in the sky" (or existing an...
Of course, this is the old mythological "hero's journey" studied by Joseph Campbell and other mythologists. It is a theme as old, perhaps, as homo sap...
That reflects and feeds the attitude towards our electoral system of which I spoke above. If the electorate believes that only the two parties are via...
The fault is ours, the electorate's. There ARE third party candidates, but nobody supports them at the polls. The reason for this is that American pol...
Emperor Julian lives! And, in the person of Banno (who ever knew?) Actually, I rather wish he had lived, and driven Christianity back into the Levant....
I agree...I doubt very much that our societies shall return to belief in "knowledge by divine revelation". Such appears to be warranted, but I can dis...
Here we have the old notion of all cultural phenomena being "cyclical", as if they were resurgent beings. My opinion is that this represents a fallacy...
Not having thought much about "adultery" in the past, I find myself wondering if our definition thereof is not dependent upon the concept of monogamy....
I rather liken Nero to Agamemnon: vain, selfish and ruthless in his pursuit of power. Let us not forget that Nero had his own mother killed, upon view...
Well, you are not wrong about that, and it is a valid and important point that you make. It is true that these two are, indeed, concepts...particularl...
Oh, absolutely. Anybody who considers questions of human sociology without including the facts of biology by giving primacy to the sociobiological asp...
It is good that you brought this up, shifting the focus a bit from justifiability to the impetus behind a suicidal action. You seem to indicate a beli...
No, that's not what I am claiming at all. Certainly, clearly these "torot" were present in Judaism in the 1st century CE, and had been since the Babyl...
I mean that the ethic of life as an imperative in the NW Semitic, "Canaanite", religious sensibility seems to me, to predate any of the biblical writi...
These religious directives came later, though, and were overlayed upon a religious sensibility which placed life abouve all other virtues. No human un...
Despite my having fairly strong feelings about it, I won't comment much about this matter, save to indicate that no person has authority over an indiv...
Well, kinda. Both the dim social view and the legal proscription against suicide have their origin in Jewish foundational ethics, wherein the divine c...
Yes, and certainly women can be equally as domineering as men, when they are in a position of authority. Moreover, this thing appears to be had by mal...
Words of truth and beauty, to be sure. We need the language, though, for without language, philosophy is bound within the individual experience. After...
This is a truism which requires a bit of clarification. The English adjective "eternal" is semantically problematic...semantically ambiguous in the ab...
All surely true, but the sex drive is much easier to understand than this thing that Augustine called "libido dominandi", and (though he viewed and va...
No, of course not. As to the nature of the ownership of land, see my previous post, in which I seem to have preconcieved your question. As to nation s...
Eminent domain cannot be rendered illegal under our system of land tenure, precisely because the state is the only entity to hold allodial title to la...
Yessuh...c'mon! That's right, Reverend, that's right.... Lay it down, brotha...preach! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! As you can probably tell, you are ...
Haha, yes, our naturally-selected characteristics do stand in the way of "progress", don't they? An additional benefit of your suggestion would be tha...
The language of your post suggests the dichotomy of sense in the definition of the English noun "death": death as the cessation of life ("Transfixed b...
And, I would add, evolutionary adaptedness, which is perhaps the most important of all. Men, for instance, are simply not adapted for child rearing, a...
I refer to the various abstracted ideals: ethicality/morality, individual liberty, equity, justice, and the like, which provide us with a framework fo...
Yes, that is the fact which underlies my point. While I agree that patriarchy tends to perpetuate brutality, I do not think it causes brutality "ab in...
Comments