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Wayfarer

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HuffPost reported that one of his recent tweets ended 'impeach the Pres.' It didn't seem sarcastic or rhetorical, just a bald statement. And I'm start...
October 16, 2019 at 05:33
Sure. But the point is to illustrate the kinds of existential questions that might provoke a religious sense (as distinct from simply accepting what y...
October 16, 2019 at 01:02
Thanks. :up:
October 16, 2019 at 00:38
Interesting. So are you developing your paper in a philosophy department?
October 16, 2019 at 00:09
So why do you think David Hume rates as a philosopher? Why do you think Emmanuel Kant regarded it as such a serious challenge?
October 15, 2019 at 23:28
'What if, at the point of death, I were to discover that in some sense I am still conscious?' 'What if the way I have lived my life is subjected to ju...
October 15, 2019 at 22:58
'Some particular God' sounds very much like something an ancient Sumerian or Roman might ask. In any case, what I mean is that the types for whom reli...
October 15, 2019 at 22:32
That is a popular internet meme, supposed to convey the idea that ‘belief in God is an end to all questioning’. However if you really did come to beli...
October 15, 2019 at 08:38
That's because Trumpism is a cuit.
October 14, 2019 at 22:38
Actually the Renaissance humanists - Ficino, Pico Della Mirandolla in particular - were mainly Platonist and Neo-platonist. Their emphasis on Plato wa...
October 14, 2019 at 05:09
The transcendent nature of deity is not something I devised. I wonder if logical and arithmetical principles are temporally defined?
October 14, 2019 at 04:47
Social psychology, history of ideas, cultural dynamics. I didn't say 'scriptures'. Western culture incorporated Greek philosophy, Muslim philosophy an...
October 14, 2019 at 04:33
No, not a subset of Christian dogma. But many of the fundamental terms of early modern science, which laid the foundations for later science, such as ...
October 14, 2019 at 03:41
Does this allow for the status of 'God' as 'transcendent of time'? i.e. outside of or not bound by time? As I've noted to you previously, strictly spe...
October 14, 2019 at 00:45
I think that's mistaken. Modern scientific atheism, of the kind advocated by popular science commentators, is constructed from the hollowed-out shell ...
October 13, 2019 at 22:09
Trump’s defence against the impeachment enquiry basically boils down to ‘lese majesty’:
October 13, 2019 at 06:42
From some perspectives I might be considered atheist - I don't believe in the kind of God figure that a lot of atheists doubt and believers pray to. B...
October 13, 2019 at 05:59
I don’t think he gets it.
October 13, 2019 at 01:48
Just a minute, I want to run that past my dog. .....
October 13, 2019 at 01:48
It would take a book, although one thing I could say is that it provides no account of meaning. As one theistic philosopher puts it: This also came up...
October 13, 2019 at 01:38
If you realise that philosophical/scientific materialism is fallacious, then what are the alternatives? In my view, philosophical/scientific materiali...
October 13, 2019 at 01:14
A tendentious interpretation.
October 13, 2019 at 00:03
From Defragmenting Modernity, Dr Paul Tyson p51ff
October 12, 2019 at 22:56
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ours-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-1483053873 https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/a-fortunate-universe-life-in-a-finely-tuned-c...
October 12, 2019 at 21:42
:up: incidentally, I found a blog post years ago, long since vanished, which argued that the scholastic 'proofs of God' were in no way intended as rhe...
October 12, 2019 at 21:26
Design in nature Nature seems to act without a blueprint. But then it has the luxury of an extravagance which human designers do not.
October 12, 2019 at 10:43
Agree! Well, they might still be atheists but not on the basis of such facile arguments. Dawkins' book The God Delusion begins with a chapter on Einst...
October 12, 2019 at 08:47
It simply explains a lot of the blatant nonsense he goes on with, and also the obvious fact that he's consistently sabotaging himself. Like - if he'd ...
October 12, 2019 at 06:41
Which is attributable to social psychology and philosophy. Suicide is a leading cause of non-natural death in contemporary culture, and I’m sure it’s ...
October 12, 2019 at 05:14
No, the old 'why bother?' thing.
October 12, 2019 at 03:49
This 'so called God' is also not God. The arithmetical allusion is, I think, a reference to the Platonist intuition that mathematical necessity is a c...
October 12, 2019 at 02:31
They're not guesses. From here. That's from someone who has seen him up close, and I think it's spot on.
October 12, 2019 at 01:39
Although, understanding spirituality in terms of experience and/or realisation is already a step ahead of (un)belief in Sky Father.
October 12, 2019 at 01:34
But it's grounded in a belief system, is it not? And that is what the whole thread (and many such threads) are about, right?
October 12, 2019 at 00:20
The specific belief in question was 'treat others as self', as an example of Christian principles. Janus then said: So I replied by referring to your ...
October 12, 2019 at 00:18
But if such ideas are Then there's no reason to believe them, they are not grounded in anything other than contingent facts. Some people just happen t...
October 12, 2019 at 00:10
I think, through practice, you 'understand' it in your bones. You might not be able to spell it out, say what it is, but you understand it by exemplif...
October 11, 2019 at 22:05
I thought it went without saying that God is not a physical entity but spirit. Of course, that then raises the question of the nature of spirit - whic...
October 11, 2019 at 21:49
I take it that point of your example is that, as different religions all claim some privileged relationship with an absolute truth, and yet they all d...
October 11, 2019 at 09:48
you’re not addressing the question.
October 11, 2019 at 09:41
It’s a philosophical question: what, in experience, is not composed of parts and or has a beginning and end in time? Name something. I’m betting that ...
October 11, 2019 at 09:36
Can you name any such thing? I mean, here I am, typing my response to you on an iPad on the kitchen bench: there’s nothing I can sense here which is n...
October 11, 2019 at 09:33
there’s such a thing as the religious left. And not all evangelicals support Trump, either.
October 11, 2019 at 09:03
Surely any intelligent observer, without any commitment to political ideology left or right, can see that mendacity is a threat to the integrity of an...
October 11, 2019 at 08:47
The thing we need to know about Trump’s psyche is that in his world, it’s impossible for him to be wrong or anything less than great. So whatever stre...
October 11, 2019 at 08:35
until they realise where they really are.... :naughty:
October 11, 2019 at 08:28
What I'm trying to explain is that the 'God' that atheism says doesn't exist, really doesn't exist, but that this doesn't validate atheism. Mainly it’...
October 11, 2019 at 08:15
Yeah well it’s the Trump thread. The worst case scenario coming out of the impeachment inquiry is that Congress moves the Articles of Impeachment, but...
October 11, 2019 at 07:50
that is true. My background is more as the proverbial ‘truth-seeker’ - corny-sounding word but can’t think of another. My seeking started off with som...
October 11, 2019 at 07:47
folks are often driven to their faith by terrible necessity. It's not always a frolic.
October 11, 2019 at 05:56