baker

Opiates can give you a calm mind, too. Or alcohol, or junkfood, or a number of other things, depending on your conditions.

Sure. And religion/spirituality has paved the way for this already. Quite ironically, religions/spiritualities themselves sometimes criticize such an ...

Some people have great trust in technology, they trust it more than they trust people. So it's no wonder that the admiration of and reliance on techno...

Bah.

At least for those who still have to work and are at the mercy of employers and clients, the past very much exists.

And the flaw is in taking a concept (in this case, reincarnation) out of its native context. The Hindus have no problem with any of that. They explain...

And with this view, how do you account for persons? In what relation are persons to right and wrong?

It doesn't negate the possibility or existence of moral facts, but disagreement brings up problems of talking about moral facts, or anything else for ...

I asked you what the purpose of health and happiness was, since you advocate for health and happiness.

You talk about freedom and redemption. I often ask people who talk about freedom to explain what they mean by it. One isn't just somehow "free" per se...

That's a creative mix of two popular images!

I'm challenging the widely held conviction that health and happiness are somehow worthy goals in and of themselves. Bummer.

I'm not disagreeing. But my worry is that such an outlook makes a person unfit for living in the world where people typically take for granted that th...

Not at all, unless we wish to suggest that we come from some other place than the universe. Answering where we came from we can answer what and who we...

Reading your OP, I immediately recognized notions of impersonalism. But free from what, and free to do what?

Disagreement is fine, as long as it is about trivial things. It's not fine once your job or your freedom is on the line.

And what would such "wiser actions" be? Submitting to the Romans?

The problem with such "preparation" is that the very same people "preparing" others that way are probably also themselves the perpetrators of "horror ...

Small children are not yet obsessed with political correctness and denial the way adults tend to be. It depends on one's agenda, I suppose.

Living -- doing what? This is supposed to be a philosophy forum. You should be able to offer more than your moral indignation.

It seems to me that the technology aspect in this is actually incidental, and a symptom of a common phenomenon in religion/spirituality. This phenomen...

What is that? What does that mean?

I brought this up because in my experience religious people and especially the spiritual-but-not-religious types are like zombies, talking to them is ...

Open to change in what way? In that Christianity is one of the fastest growing new religions in Asian countries?

People who say they don't value money are naive, or just lying. You didn't answer my question. So what do people in those "more equal" societies do wi...

Probaly because she understands she is much too weak to be successful against him. Not because she had no sense of vengeance. I've seen cats revenge t...

Most people seem to learn that by kindergarden. People are far more resilient than official media are giving them credit for. What we're seeing on the...

Here we need to bear in mind that people who are born and raised into a religion have their sense of self shaped by the religion. They have no sense o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Samurai

And in a fascist environment, this means ...

Those who are repeatedly outcompeted for jobs, eventually die homeless. The point of competition (in real-life settings) is that not everyone gets to ...

Sorry, I can't edit posts from my smartphone, so please dismiss the above post due to wrong tags. It seems that in popular parlance the concept of "su...

*edited wrong tags/double post*

They are God's chosen people. Everything else pertaining to them follows from that.

The examples listed in your linkt appear to be a combination of several formal and informal fallacies. Some candidates come to mind: https://en.wikipe...

The only problem is that your teeth rot and you're not okay with it! In other words, universal impersonalist determinism is fine as long as one isn't ...

Is it your experience that religious or spiritual people are open to communication, good listeners, willing to cooperate, fair, goodwilled, acting in ...

(Not from a Kurosawa film) Katsumoto : The way of the Samurai is not necessary anymore. Algren : Necessary? What could be more necessary?

The distinction between the high and the low. The distinction between the classy and the plebeian. The distinction between art proper and kitch. The d...

I imagine the aim of such discussions is to get peace of mind through understanding. All the more reason to contemplate issues of morality. Every phil...

Like I've been saying all along: It is my understanding that passages like the one quoted from Smith are meant to be taken as instructions, in an ideo...

So what do people in those "more equal" societies do with all that social trust, health, wellbeing, etc.? What do they use them for? There has to be s...

Religious/spiritual people seem to be "free" to you? Free of what? Free to do what? Sure.

We seem to be talking past eachother. I'm saying that I don't think religious narratives are meant for us to "understand" ourselves, but to become a p...

You kid, right?

But religions an spiritualities are already zombifying people anyway. If anything, I see a convergence between what you call "techno-optimistic religi...

@"Vera Mont" Do you want to be rich or do you want "social justice"?

Like I've been saying, it seems to be about the difference between an instruction and a description. Not all poor or otherwise disadvantaged people ha...

It seems to me that people are generally smarter than they seem, and that what might look like ignorance is actually an act.

The US is still the Wild West in its mentality. Of course any restrictions of rights, esp. the rights to self-defense will seem oppressive in such a W...