on discussing god and religion

Unless, of course, it ain’t as simple as you try to make it.

Note to others:

Would you construe his reaction here to the points I raised in my post above adequate?

Me, I’m of the opinion he did not really address them at all.

I just explained why I used the quotes. You misunderstood my post and now you ignore my explanation. :confused:

Of course I didn’t address the points … they seem to be entirely based on misunderstanding my use of quotation marks. #-o

Do you notice anything interesting about your post? It consists entirely of questions. No argument, just questions.

For some reason you seem to think that questions are points and that I’m obligated to answer all your questions.

And when/if I do answer your questions, you will make another post with more questions. :imp:

From my vantage point [whatever that means], it really all comes back to whether or not you could ever have freely chosen to be a friend of determinism in a world that is ever and always determined to be only what it ever and always can be, must be, will be.

Some folks seem able to wrap their minds around it and embrace what is said to be a “compatibility” between autonomy and determinism.

And, as I have noted a number of times, maybe they are on to something that I am just not able to grasp. Here and now. But then I go back to the extent to which in a wholly determined world I was ever able to grasp it if grasping it [up until now] was never meant to be.

Then I go back to imagining how some folks might be comforted [psychologically] in embracing autonomy, while others might by appalled.

Comforted by determinism because whatever happens to you is only as it ever could have been. And, if your life is in the toilet, “it is beyond my control”.

Appalled by determinism because you are convinced that what has in fact happened to you is only because you were able to achieve it. Thus, if you are an uberman, it is something that you were able to freely accomplish. Just as those who are in the toilet have no one to blame but themselves.

Really, though, where does “I” begin and “we” end? Where does “we” end and “they” begin? And, for the religious, where does “I” begin and “Thou” end?

Can the “bigger picture” ever really be fully grasped by any one particular individual in any one particular historical and cultural and experiential context? My own understanding of human interactions here revolves instead around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

But, again, that is no less an existential fabrication/contraption embedded in my own extant “lived life”.

Here though I always note the inevitable gap between understanding this as a “general description” of human interaction and the manner in which, once the words come to be reconfigured into actual behaviors out in particular worlds, folks are either more or less entangled in my dilemma.

And those the least entangled – in fact many not entangled at all – are the moral and political objectivists. For them, the “general descriptions” are ever and always in sync with behaviors deemed appropriate only for those who have proven to be “one of us”.

Sometimes with God, sometimes without.

Indeed. Somehow [or other] it is all intertwined in turn in “dark matter” and “dark energy” intertwined all the more [given the precise relationship between very, very small and the very, very large] in what may well be an infinite number of additional universes with, perhaps, an infinite number of additional Gods.

And here we all are as individual reacting to things like, say, the Las Vegas shootings:

What does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?

Again, with or without a God, the God, my God?

Where are we on the continuum between what our ancestors knew a few thousand years ago, what we know now and what must still be known in order that we acquire any degree of certainty about Reality/Existence itself.

In fact, what makes the discussions on this thread all the more surreal is that the focus is not on what may or may not be, but on what, given our enormously complex social, political and economic interactions, conflicting renditions of what ought to be.

In order that we acquire the necessary attributes to be judged eligible by one or another conflicting renditions of God to attain immortality, salvation and access to an understanding of divine justice.

We simply do not know yet just how more or less our “basic ideas” really are.

We have this tendency instead to look back thousands of years and marvel at how much more we know today, rather than looking forward thousands of years and imaging how much more our descendants will know instead.

Well, I don’t agree.

My answers are contained in what many here derisively call zinnat’s “groots”.

So, the complaint [ironically] is often not that I don’t give answers but that my answers [here and now] are merely copied and pasted over and over again.

Again, guilty as charged. With respect to that which I deem to be the most important question philosophically – how ought one to live? – my thinking has come to settle over the years on the manner in which I encompass “I” in those groots.

And all I can then do is to seek out reactions to them. How is that not your own reaction when discussing [on this thread] the behaviors you choose here and now as they are embedded in your assessment of “I” there and then?

On this thread, my answers revolve around my reaction to the manner in which I construe individuals approaching and embracing particular religious narratives and particular Gods.

My answers here revolve around certain assumptions:

1] that there is no God
2] that, if there is no God, it seems reasonable [to me] to be entangled in my dilemma
3] that, if there is no God, there is no teleology
4] that, if there is no teleology “behind” existence, we can reasonably argue that we live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world

And that is predicated in turn on the extent to which any of this is even within my reach autonomously, freely, willfully.

And the answer to that can only be embedded [finally] in the extent to which the human mind is even capable of grasping the answers to these questions.

Okay, then let’s bring this confusion [and your explanation] down to earth:

Did Hitler “choose” to pursue the Holocaust?

Explore this in the manner in which you understand the meaning of “choose” here.

And, if he did choose to pursue it, given some measure of autonomy, how is that autonomy itself to be understood given the manner in which I construe the is/ought world as more reflective of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?

Which is how I pursue an understanding of the behaviors we choose given that “I” here is largely an “existential contraption”.

Perhaps I oppose determinism out of a purely intuitive position. I oppose the thought that everything is determined because so many trivial things happen out of coincidence. If you assume that even chaos follows a deterministic pattern, then I would have to perhaps concede. However, there are so many things that happen despite the best heads getting together to give a reliable prognosis of coming events. It seems to be the non-conventional individual that confounds such attempts.

For me, it isn’t the question whether I could “freely” have chosen, but whether the choice could be foreseen. Instead the future seems to be a blackbox out which comes choices I would never have dreamt would be mine to make. I can’t determine a course that leads any distance into the future, and so it seems is the situation of most people. There are only negative constants, it seems, like “anything that can go wrong will go wrong!”

It is enough to make the scope of awareness as big as we can. Many people have such a narrow scope that a bigger picture would be noticing who the neighbours are, or in extreme cases, who their children have become. In many cases, employing an outside agent is laziness and an excuse not to become active. God blesses, answers prayers and cares for those I have no time for and feel guilty about.

On the other hand, I may have described a kind of determinism in the constant interaction between individuals, groups and nations. Perhaps there is a collective knowledge that we pass on to each other, earlier in local conversation, today more over the internet. Both are prone to manipulation, and just as we see in the history of migration, the “others” often have the problem of getting in tune with local conversation. Until that happens, they are not part of that collective. The same is with every area of conversation. You are either in or out.

On the subliminal plane, we communicate without noticing it and I’m sure that there is much that we transmit that becomes common knowledge and the “given” at any one time. Like I said, it is here where we need others to reflect their perceptions of what we represent, which is one of the responsibilities of sages, priests and clergy in religion. Contemplation of spiritual texts, recitation and meditation can have a similar effect. In this way, we may come to the realisation of truths about ourselves that we feel “only God” could know.

Dark is of course esoteric and the opposite to transparent. It represents that which we have reason to know exists, but of which we cannot be sure. We hypothesize and use example out of the past to give it language, but we don’t know.

In my mind, the LA shootings are a case of Murphy’s law: It is that gone wrong which could go wrong. If someone collects that many weapons, some day they will be used and it isn’t going to be tin cans that are going to be targets.

The only thing we can say “ought” to be is that which we work on to produce. Otherwise “ought to be” is a projection of our childish hopes and wishes. Salvation (whatever that is) and immortality may be just that. In my mind, the only way we can approach something that could pass as “divine justice” is having a clear conscience based on what we know is good for life on earth. If we constructively contribute to leaving the world behind in a better state than it was, we may be said to be “just”.

We may know more than or ancestors, but they experienced more and could cope with the challenge of survival. They knew that we can’t sit back and watch television whilst the neighbourhood goes to pot. They knew that who rests rusts, and finally contributes to the continual entropy of the world.

“Leaving the world behind in a better state”-- Bob.
I mentioned ecological morality a while back; but Iamb considered it as just another idea in the head.
You can’t win an argument with someone who demands that the subjective be objectified. The closest I could come to doing so was to report some direct God experiences; but these were also sloughed off as well as the ideas on ecosystems.

On the contrary, in regards to “ecological morality”, I react to it in much the same manner in which I noted to Mannequin [on another thread] my reaction to “paganism”:

[b] [I think of it] pretty much what I think of every other frame of mind that speculates about human interactions in the is/ought world. The world of conflicting goods, of conflicting value judgments, of conflicting Gods and religious values. The world in which [with respect to a particular context] one either is or is not able to enforce a particular set of behaviors

Clearly, there is what any particular individuals believe about it “here and now” “in their heads”, and there is what they are able to demonstrate [logically, empirically, scientifically etc.] to others that all reasonable/rational men and women are obligated to believe in turn.

In other words, the extent to which what someone believes subjectively/subjunctively about ecological morality can in fact be shown to be true for all of us.

Now, my own existential prejudice regarding it [rooted in dasein] is no less an existential contraption than yours.

Unless, of course, you can demonstrate that what you think about it reflects the optimal [or the only] way in which all reasonable/rational men and women are obligated to think about it.[/b]

Now, basically, what you do here is to shrug this part all off by insisting that you have had direct experiences with God that prove to you He does exist. And these subjective experiences make God exist – objectively? – for you.

Then you come in here and argue – what? – that this ought to be good enough for folks like me?

And yet folks like me generally want to believe that we do not live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends for all eternity in oblivion. We would like to be comforted and consoled in the same manner in which you are.

But we can’t just believe what we want to believe. We can’t just “will” God into existence. We need arguments and empirical evidence and experiences that would propel [or even compel] us to go in that direction.

Your own have not accomplished that. For me. So, you can either try again or insist that I am the problem here and move on to others willing to accept that your arguments and your “evidence” have convinced them.

Really, unless God manifest Himself to me such that I could not possibly doubt His existence, what else is there?

You are comforted and consoled here and now, I am not. You believe in one or another manifestation of “I” beyond the grave, I do not.

That thumps me hands down.

At least from my point of view.

Intuitions [like dreams] are always going to be tricky. At least from my vantage point. After all, what are they but a murky [and ultimately mysterious] amalgamation of the ego, the super-ego and the id.

Genes and memes compacted down into a particular “hunch”, a “feeling”, a “sense”.

For example, I have a “hunch”, a “feeling”, a “sense” that this exchange is not only as it ever could have been. Why? Because, if it is, right and wrong, true and false, good and bad etc., would all get reduced down to a mere complex “mechanistic” rendition of, say, an internal combustion engine. An agglomeration of matter/energy “designed” by us to propel a car. Only “nature” too has actually “designed” us in turn. In other words, such that, “for all practical purposes”, it’s all just cosmological dominoes toppling over in accordance with the immutable laws of physics.

Or, sure, a God, the God, my God designed nature in turn.

For me, it’s the extent to which what is foreseen is only as it was ever going to be foreseen.

To the extent I do have some measure of autonomous control over the behaviors I choose, the future is embedded in yet more existential contraptions. I then go back to the past. To, for example, the “I” that I was before my experiences in Vietnam and the “I” that I became after. Lots and lots of choices I would never have dreamed I was capable of.

This is the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in the is/ought world.

Yes, as a “general description” of human interactions, this seems an entirely reasonable point of view. But, when it’s crunch time, and this “frame of mind” needs to be fleshed out in choosing particular behaviors in particular contexts, I [as an existential contraption] become entangled [sometimes numbingly] in my dilemma above. Sure, I can choose to be active but only to the extent I am willing in turn to be pulled in many different directions with respect to all of the many “conflicting goods”. And it is this grating ambivalence that [in my view] the objectivists [with or without God] choose – “choose?” – to vanquish in one or another rendition of “one of us”.

In other words:

Yes, perhaps.

But only to the extent one is willing to apply this to an issue we might come into contact with in the course of living our lives from day to day. Say, for example, the issue of gun control given the shootings in Las Vegas. Folks like me become entangled in my dilemma. What is the most reasonable political agenda that the collective should embrace…and then enact in the form of actual prescriptive and proscriptive laws?

I see this as a conflicting good derived from dasein embedded in a particular political contraption [out in a particular world] where ultimately those with the most power are able to enact what they construe to be in their own best interests.

Subliminal, yes. But, from my frame of mind, this is relevant not only pertaining to communication between people but to communication we have with ourselves. Thus Sartre’s, “hell is other people” is no less applicable to the hell that we endure in considering only our own frame of mind. We not only objectify others but “I” as well. That is the whole point of objectivism in my view. It is far more a psychological contraption than a moral, political or philosophical agenda.

But again: What truth? Whose truth? And in what context seen from what point of view? That [at times] gnawing gap between the “general description” and the “agony of choice in the face of uncertainty”.

Again, this seems reasonable. But [for me] only up to the point – the crucial point – where the words here become intertwined in a particular world — a world in which there are very, very different moral and political and religious and philosophical and narcissistic agendas regarding what constitutes “having a clear conscience based on what we know is good for life on earth.”

And then there are folks like Ierrellus who seem to argue that, from his God’s perspective, whatever we choose “here and now” we all become at one with His Kingdom.

But: why should others believe that? Other than to sustain a psychological font assuring them of comfort and consolation until the day they die.

And then, if they are wrong, well, so what?

So much more to the point though: Who can prove that the above pairs of words do point to the same reality?

A reality that is true for all of them. The reality. The reality that binds them all together in the same teleological narrative. The reality that provides them with a succinct frame of mind intertwining Birth School Work Death coherently, symbiotically.

That all-encompassing explanation providing them with the answer to the question, “how ought one to live?”

How is an assertion such as this not entirely encompassed in a world of words? And how are we to understand this particular world of words other than in the manner in which it is asserted [in turn] that we must grasp and then accept the definition [and therefore the meaning] of the words?

Suppose, for example, someone were to challenge such an assertion by demanding empirical proof that would clearly “illustrate the text”.

How many assumptions qua loops would one be expected to jump through?

And then the part that most interest me: How would a perfect God judge the behaviors of considerably less than perfect mere mortals — given that mere mortals can never hope to transcend “I” as an “existential contraption” in the context of conflicting values?

What would it mean to judge perfectly here?

How would one even begin to suggest an example of this?

My dad can beat up your dad.

nuh-uh! my dad has bigger muscles!

Yeah, but can your God beat up all the other Gods described here?

And, if so, prove it!

Here the difficulty always revolves around the irresistible force and the immovable object:

1] that those who believe in God have no capacity [empirically] to demonstrate that those who do not believe in God are wrong
2] that those who do not believe in God have no capacity [empirically] to demonstrate that those who do believe in God are wrong

That both sides often refuse to budge an inch merely exposes the extent to which human minds [most of them] refuse to acknowledge that, “there are things we don’t know we don’t know”.

We will go to the grave grappling with that staggering chasm between what we think we know about Existence [human or otherwise] and all that would need to be known in order to understand it.

The rest seems hopelessly entangled in the mystery that is human psychology.

In other words, whatever that means.

Okay, he means this derisively.

But then so do I.

You have any number of theists here trying to reconfigure any critique of religion into just another religion.

Thus:

And this is often asserted with nary a hint of irony. As though they are not insisting themselves that their own frame of mind isn’t that which all rational men and women are obligated to embrace.

Here the bottom line has always seemed rather obvious to me.

If you are the one arguing for the existence of God, then you are the one obligated to demonstrate that a God, the God, my God does in fact exist.

And not merely defined into existence, or created out of a world of words, or “proven” to exist because science has yet to encompass an explanation for the existence of, among other things, DNA and the human brain.

And that’s before we get to theodical quandaries; or in reconciling “free will” with an omniscient Creator.

Your challenge:

To encompass the human soul in language even more vague.

And only then to intertwine that general description into a general description of the relationship between the behaviors that you choose on this side of the grave and that which you imagine your fate to be on the other side of the grave.

An argument that is so entirely indefinite there is not a single possibility that anyone might actually falsify or refute it.

[attachment=0]calvin-hobbes-god-chicken.gif[/attachment]

No, you are probably right.

But then it’s straight back to the gap between professing to believe what we do about God “in our head”, and demonstrating to others that all rational men and women are obligated to believe the same.

Beyond that there is only a leap of faith.

Later though there’s the part about immortality, salvation and divine justice. And yet here too, beyond a leap of faith, what do we really know about them?

In other words, even cartoon characters grasp that crucial relationship between choosing behaviors on this side of the grave, and the consequences of making those choices on the other side.

Religion? When push comes to shove it’s always about Judgment Day.

Whether God is chicken or not seems beside the point. [-o<