Tom Storm

I have ties older than some of my team members...

I have to I am sympathetic to this view. Love and reason do seem unconnected to me too. However to say categorically there is no reason may be pushing...

My staff are mostly very young - I call them 'the kids'.

Yes, that's kind of what I was wondering about.

I like it. Nicely expressed.

Nice answer. I appreciate it. Thanks for the reading list. :pray:

:up:

Me too. Indeed. Philosophy educator Alain de Botton wrote I nice essay on this in his early book The Consolations of Philosophy. This passage struck m...

I don't know what they all saw. I think the story, which has various parts, is a mosaic of bits remembered and bits imagined. I think it could have be...

I've always used 'confidence' as one of several definitions of faith. I think that does fine. I generally have confidence in things outside myself - r...

And when it works, it's a 'confidence trick'.

Maybe, but here in Australia we had a major UFO event in 1966 called the Westall Incident. I knew one of the teachers involved who saw the UFO flying ...

Cheers, yes. I think this is also a good point. Hmm...I studied economics back in the 1990's and what I found was a largely faith based dogma. I think...

I think that's a good point, my list of things that cause frequent harm to humanity include, nationalism, scientism, marketing, capitalism, materialis...

I was just making a mild joke that many of us are postmodernists reluctantly through the influence the ideas have had on our culture. I tend towards a...

Lot of renewed interest in UFO's and some real characters shilling crazy tales on YouTube - Jeremy Corbell, Bob Lazar, Robert Bigelow, Luis Elizondo s...

I can see that. Characters in fiction often do the same thing. Yes. I am a reluctant post-modernist. Yes. I've always held that any text is redolent w...

Welcome. Nice pellucid writing, I have no useful opinion on any of it, but I appreciate your clarity and collegial approach.

:up: Creativity is undomesticated and capricious, the artist is not always in charge.

I think you are missing the nuances. I probably can't explain it to you any clearer. I once wrote a magazine story about the art of writing sitcoms - ...

It's not that simple. I worked as a published writer for 20 years (side hustle) - mainly non-fiction but some fiction and drama. I have often encounte...

Thanks for this account. It doesn't personally resonate with me but I get it. Sort of. Much human behaviour and many beliefs make no real sense to me,...

Well, whoever's fault it is, the fact remains that many theists are literalists. In America and Saudi Arabia (Islam) that group is so huge that they d...

:up:

Yes indeed - Star Wars one one of those films that brought back the Dimitri Tiomkin-style orchestral film score - even if it sounded more like Holst's...

I think that's mostly true, but I am not certain about the 'stopping point'. But we can leave it. I'm not motivated to explore this speculative subjec...

Interesting. I largely agree. That's for sure.

I wasn't referring to your arguments. I was saying in general any argument for universal mind would be held by fallacious ideas - like the ones I alre...

I generally suspect that all our ideas exist in a web of relationships alongside other ideas, so everything is what it is by virtue of its relation to...

When I studied aesthetics briefly back in the 1980's the dominant thinker was Monroe Beardsley. It was commonly held in lectures that the writer/artis...

:lol:

:up:

That's not the point. Author's intentions are transcended. The point is we have texts which are consistently reinterpreted and subjected to new unders...

Yes, I figure universal mind is essentially a god surrogate - held in place by similar fallacious justifications and essentially by faith. Instead of ...

Would you contend that perhaps a transwoman is someone who has inborn feminine gender behaviors and perceptual affective style and this may lead to id...

Sounds good. How do you think these 8 points sit with identifying panpsychism?

Neo-Marxism is the name for this school - usually an attempt to provide a more modern, sophisticated account. But amongst the Marxists I've known gett...

The dogmatic dullard atheist cocksuckers, of course. :wink: Was it Twain who said, 'The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible?' Anyway it's ...

:up: Ture crime is fine, but as I said you are just asking what are the key indicators of consciousness. Not sure your enquiry requires much more elab...

Hmm. Is a TV crime drama a useful analogy? These are often written and directed to highlight certain things about the suspects and manipulate an audie...

No. It would be futile. Someone might have a very natural mental illness which makes them attempt this. But perhaps we are using the term natural in d...

No. I am referring to a type of apologetics that is called presuppositional apologetics. Quite sophisticated and the best of them are provided by phil...

Interesting. The challenge is how do we determine what is intrinsically worthwhile and what is not? This has to be based on a value system which is op...

Lolita taught me that pedophilia is unacceptable, especially if you are an ironist with a baroque prose style.

:cool:

Thanks. By sacrifice I meant the temporary death of Jesus, the 'blood sacrifice'. A thread on this would appeal greatly.

I think I agree. I like what you said about novelists as phenomenologists. How about spiritual truth through scriptures? The non-literal sort. What ‘t...

I guess what I’m wondering is can you name how a particular book contributed to truth or understanding? If fiction conveys truth then to me it’s ineff...

Do you have an example from your experience?

I hear this point made regularly (not least by a friend of mine who is a novelist) and I think it was Gore Vidal who used to say 'we only tell the tru...