Empirically, what appears to emerge is a brutal new puritanism, political correctness taken to extremes. Of course not. It already doesn't coexist wit...
I think the crucial point regarding all freedoms (of speech, religion, etc.) is that these freedoms were not instated out of some profound regard for ...
Indeed. But if this is so, how do you propose to teach it, and why?? It would be like being a successful stock broker but revealing your business secr...
Of course, but actually going through with one's personal salvation project used to be reserved for the select few, certainly it wasn't meant for ever...
Modern self-help products are a for-profit genre. So already from this perspective, what is being sold by the self-help genre has to be tailored in su...
The problem with this is is that it is your creation, a god of your creation -- and you know it. How do you respect such a god? How do you trust such ...
People want to have the upper hand, they want to have power. The ultimate power is to dictate to everyone else what they are supposed to consider real...
Notions of subjectivity and objectivity are introduced for the purpose of establishing and maintaining hierarchy between people. Those higher up have ...
It's not like people go and shoot eachother because they had nothing better to do. At the core of war is the belief, "We are more entitled to certain ...
Perhaps the most important thing to learn in such discussions is that existential topics (including the question of suicide) are mostly pointless to t...
Do people even want everyone to survive? If yes, then why the military industry (guns are for killing people, yes), why the approval of euthanasia and...
One thing that is systematically being avoided in this discussion is the topic of shame and disgrace. There are things that a person can do or which c...
A source of optimism for whom? The general public? What are you talking about?? So if a person is contemplating suicide, they should reflect that ther...
And whence is one supposed to get the optimism to believe this argument or see it as relevant? Presumably every person has a breaking point, some just...
So the question for this thread topic isn't something like "Is life worth living?" But rather, "Is life worth living for underprivileged, unlucky peop...
It's fairly common for religious people to think that non-religious people are leading meaningless, aimless, worthless lives. This belief is part of t...
According to Early Buddhism, such is impossible, because an enlightened person knows they are enlightened, they have no doubt or confusion about it. E...
While many people say such things, I doubt many people mean them. It seems to me that people are far more sure of themselves, far more certain than yo...
Have you noticed that I am not discussing Buddhism in the manner of Western secular academia? You don't say. I have to take breaks from this forum, as...
When phrased this way, it certainly sounds nihilistic. But at least in the fundamental Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon, it's not phrased that way. You'...
From the perspective of (some of) the religious, it is nihilistic, by definition so. Do you suppose you can describe and explain things in a neutral, ...
This is another vulgar attitude. No, it has not been my experience that people generally accept that life is meaningless. This is a perverse, vulgar s...
Yes? The way the suicide discussion is so often carried out in Western culture (what little there is of such discussion, that is) is that all the blam...
This supposedly adverse effect on others is so often grossly overstated. Sure, if those others have depended on the person financially or in some prac...
Spoken like a retired baby boomer. For an increasing number of people, the struggling and the striving isn't a matter of too much ambition, but a matt...
No. William Styron wrote "Darkness Visible", a short memoir of his depression. It struck me as conspicuously superficial, but with one point sticking ...
Any discussion of suicide and the meaning of life has to take into consideration the legal status of euthanasia and assisted suicide in a particular c...
Duh. Oh, please. I'm trying to explain to you why you often get the negative reactions you do and how come there is so much bad blood between you and ...
While waiting for @"Joshs" -- The way I understand it is that empathy, love, and compassion as fundamental attitudes will inform how we make sense of ...
How do you explain that religions/spiritualities that focus heavily on love and compassion also "balance" this out with extreme violence, such as Chri...
People are often prone to give socially desirable answers. What this means for discussing ethics, among other things, is that in discussions of ethics...
For the most part, ethics and the discussion of ethics are about controlling people, about getting them to do what one stakeholder wants them to do. B...
It doesn't follow. A person can be dishonest, act with evil intent. The point of contention is that it's not up to the other person to decide that. Us...
A popular projection. Frequently found in religious/spiritual aplogetics. A projection that absolves the projector from empathy and responsibilty for ...
Liberated from what? Liberated into what? Into something like, Come, destroy your economy by outsourcing all the basic industry like production of foo...
But unless one is enlightened, one cannot talk about these things with any kind of integrity, nor demand respect from others as if one in fact knew wh...
But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work? Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most ...
Relativism of the postmodern kind does not work at university level, where people are expected to live up to certain standards and produce work that c...
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