BC

This IS a very complicated thread -- some people burying corpses, some not, people running, philosophizing, and texting all the same time -- amazing -...

Yes it is part of an overall mindset. A democratic government will perform poorly with people who don't think and live in a democratic style, whose cu...

Not sure which part of the country you live in, but a couple of points: The price the farmer receives for a crop (wheat, corn, potatoes, vegetables, f...

Keep working on your metaphysical position. Sometimes it's a lifetime occupation.

"Of course there are people dying in the middle east. As well there should be; it's over populated, like much of the world." Oh, you know, like Dicken...

Both of these observations are apt. For instance, if one is an ardent socialist, one may not see evidence of the goodness of unfettered capitalism. It...

Your "evidence of better quality lives" was on another planet. Better quality lives can be created on this planet.

Not possible. Totally hopeless. Or, maybe not. It depends. Can you be more specific? Like, what?

Having seen what even ordinary people can do to their children, let alone what screwed up people do, I am all in favor of raising the standards for pa...

For me, this is warmed over anti-natalism. Threads have been running along these lines for years on the old Philosophy Forum and the current The Philo...

Oops, word is out. Psychopathic. So, what I was getting at was that there are not, to quote you, who would not die in the normal course of events. The...

Yes, that would be a good thing.

Well, be my guest.

Being slightly drunk may be one of the reasons you're fitting in so well. There used to be more beer drinkers than there are now -- or the beer drinke...

Humans are part of the natural world, and we are doing what we can to make it a better place for us. Over all, the proportion of people who die by hum...

You know, some people have done observational studies of faith and no-faith with respect to coping, and they show that people with faith seem to have ...

I don't believe capitalism can be made into what it is not. "bad infinity"? The best that can be expected in a capitalist economy with democratic poli...

One of the variety of religious experiences... https://68.media.tumblr.com/e82ade93fd856cf52eb187725da045bf/tumblr_oomyd58CKP1s4quuao1_540.png

There are enough atheists, certainly, to gather a large sample, and more than enough religious people. I would hope whoever has done, is doing, or wil...

So Mongrel hasn't provided decent evidence that religion helps. Maybe her standards for evidence are low, but what kind of evidence would you accept? ...

Yes, I think that's true. The problem that the ir-a-anti-non-un-religious have is composing a narrative without the gods to account for, and provide m...

Research has been done into the relative success that the religious and non-religious people have in coping with adversity, prolonged stress, serious ...

I thought every school boy learned that the Indo-European language root of salvation was sol (whole).

Oh, come now. Take a laxative and calm down.

How many "excess deaths" do you think there are? The world death rate is 100% -- and has been for a long time. Of course there are people dying in the...

You've stepped into rather deep water, there.

"You" learned how to walk; the learning was largely accomplished in the motor cortex (which is part of "you"). "You" were never 'conscious' of the det...

The market alone doesn't breed wants faster than slums breed rats. What happened to the market to cause it to generate an infinity of wants was capita...

Welcome to the forum, by the way. Your maiden trip out is doing well. When it comes to decadence, the Soviets were in no position to accuse the kettle...

It's always a good idea to go back to the original text from which Marx's "opiate of the masses" came:

What more than live in paradise could they do?

Is this sort of sarcastic, erudite, insightful answer what you were looking for?

That's a good term, certainly for the recipients of GLCC. We grew up in the bosom of global, 'liberal' capitalist culture, whether we knew what that w...

Western culture is the culture of contemporary Europeans (since 1400, + or - a couple of weeks) and parts of Asia (i.e., Australians, parts of Russia)...

Does America have a gun problem? Yes, absolutely. A severe problem. I am only disagreeing on the details 1,617,000 deaths? Probably not, but even 500,...

Learning how to walk when you were transitioning from crawling around on the floor to standing up to taking steps was DIFFICULT. If you had to learn h...

This is very true.

Or won't cut you.

I ditched fiber optic, avoided Dish and Direct TV, and just junked the TV and do without. I get my sort of slow - but fast enough - internet service f...

Why, in a service economy, is it so difficult to get service?

In a previous post (neglected) I pointed out that important decisions are often made irrationally, or I'll add now, "apparently irrationally". The bod...

I am in favor of rigorous gun control, suppression of ammunition manufacture, gun seizures, and a bunch of other repressive measures that could be dir...

So, this is one issue. I agree with this view. There is a real world (the cosmos on down to your room) which has real properties. We are immersed in t...

Here's the word and the image: https://68.media.tumblr.com/da572aba2f7560c38b84a73f9c9f5dcf/tumblr_ooj03yCkLE1s4quuao1_250.jpg Sacks writes about lang...

As The Onion reported recently, the death rate in America remains at the all-time high of 100%. All 320 million of us are going to die, and 1/3 of the...

Don't believe everything people tell you.

You are quite right that we can not actually experience other people's mental states. One might debate whether we can even "experience" our own mental...

Sometime you need to grab the bull by the tail and face the situation.

Let me clarify: The motor cortex, which operates the motion of the body, is fully aware of what your body is doing--otherwise it couldn't successfully...