Olivier5

You've been very kind, thank you.

It is of course a modern interpretation of the saying. His parables have a way of being timeless, maybe due to their simple, real-life setting. They l...

It's a biological fact that pain evolved as a warning system for animals. The system is universal and complex. It exists for a reason: because it is b...

Indeed, the context is that of the crisis of the third century, during which the empire almost exploded. In this context, the smartest emperors kept t...

That is precisely your mistake: you consider human death and sufferings as problems in need of a solution. But from God's (or nature's, same idea) POV...

The absence of a religious police implies that the state is leaving people make their own religious choices. The UK is not a theocracy today because i...

Personally, I don't buy messianism. There will never be a perfect kingdom of god on this earth. I follow the Talmud on this: aspirant messiahs can wai...

Good luck with that.

Politics are inherently dirty. Power forces you to do horrible things. E.g. Obama was a butcher and a criminal too: he killed many innocents with his ...

By this token, all the pharaohs ought to be historically suspect... I think the reason why this kind of negationist argument tends to focus on Jesus i...

Or more precisely and tragically: thousands of local cults and religious traditions ended, and only one cult and tradition was allowed. I guess that w...

Let me advocate, then, for indifference to religion in political matters and vice versa for religious institutions and theologians to leave politics a...

Why of course. And that is a more interesting question about history, than the existence of Jesus. The question being (among others), how do you make ...

The point of bringing in Stalin and Attila was to show that man never needed a theological excuse to kill man. Atheist regimes such as China are not l...

Okay so you've been addressing the paucity of evidence in favour of Moses' historicity on some other thread. Understood. Really? How do you know that ...

What is regarded as hateful, rightly so in my atheist opinion, is the Jesus myth theory -- or absence of theory to be precise, see below. It is a set ...

Why then focus on Jesus only? You might as well deconstruct Jeremy, Moses or Abraham... Way to go! :-) To me, the guy Jesus seems one of the best to c...

Beyond doubt, Genesis borrows heavily from Summerian myths. The books of the OT are human inventions mixed with plagiarism. The whole monotheist thing...

Wasn't Judaism entirely made up by the Babylonians anyway? :-)

Good. I wouldn't want sweet baby Jesus to feel all alone in this....

What is your take on Judaism? I note that you don't mention it here. Is that an oversight or do you make an exception for Yahweh? BTW, I'm one of your...

Come to think of it, there are a few similar cases, such as Descartes. It always amazed me how much some philosophers bad-mouth Descartes, as if it wa...

I take it as a tribute to Jesus, to his genius, power and influence, that some folks still have to figuratively whack him off 2000 years after his dea...

What would be the point of talking about it? Haters wanna hate.

That's not what real, professional historians say. It is instead what rabid, irrational haters of christianity say.

I will chalk that up under "freaky things that Jesus entices folks to do": rewrite history so as to erase his name.

Both, I would think. The two are not mutually exclusive.

There's truth to that. The Jesus character has had enormous plasticity. Over two millennia, he has been pretty much what people wanted him to be. Port...

I was evidently kidding, but indeed you are right: my forms are Aristotelian. No matter without form, no form without matter. Your questions about "wh...

I regret to inform that the Eiffel Tower does not exist, although on the left bank in Paris there's a bunch of iron atoms shaped in the form of the Ei...

As its name indicate, the CIA believes in the power of intelligence, in the importance of theory. The FBI has had a different pedigree and culture, mo...

I saw this offer, didn't know what to take. I ended up picking a pair of neutrinos... They're nice but a bit small. :-/

They probly keep an eye on Reddit and Facebook and co. TPF i don't know, seems a bit small. But yeah, some keywords may raise flags. All in all, I fou...

It's in the form of the table, I suppose. This form is objective. That's a different issue from the reality of tables, though. And if neurons do not e...

Well, maybe, but I see no reason to believe that my table does not exist, nor any reason to attribute any protopsychism to it.

The reasoning works with any table not just mine. As long as we can depend on certain objects to perdure and maintain certain properties over time, th...

And this kind of musing is leading you where, exactly?

You don't. You can come to my place and check the reality of my table.

My table would appear as objectively real to anyone seeing or touching it, yes. Evidently, someone on Mars could not touch my table, too far, but mayb...

Le Monde commented on Rockhill's article at the time, and added the following ironic twist: The report explains in detail the reasons for the "ideolog...

I regret to mention that these are not my points. The whole post is an article written by Gabriel Rockhill, a philosophy professor, for the Los Angele...

You're most welcome. I suggest Google. It's a good search engine.

Butting in, as @"Ignoredreddituser" has shown a limited capacity for clarification. Steven French's eliminativism is about material objects. They can'...

Well then, Bradley must be wrong. Because it would be a miracle if the human mind had relations and nothing else did.

If relations exist in the mind and not the external world, is the mind a miracle?

"10. Every solution of a problem raises new unsolved problems; the more so the deeper the original problem and the bolder its solution. The more we le...

That'd be the last nail in the coffin of eliminativism, a most bizarre fancy... :-) Well done!

And yet it can be mechanically reproduced and even read by a computer and translated by it into the French 'si'. Information technology is all about w...

Hey, you mentioned them first. If relations do not exist, how could books exist? Books are in first analysis physical objects like tables. If tables d...

They sell tables too.