This may well revolve around my own inadequate/incompetent understanding of determinism, but: if, in fact, we do interact in a wholly determined universe, stopping or not stopping would be beyond my control. Why? Because human autonomy would essentially be an illusion. If everything I think, feel and do is – mechanistically, as immutable matter – only as I ever could have thought, felt and did, then my Reality/Existence itself [like yours] is just part and parcel of one big gigantic either/or “thing”.
I’m really just another domino here. I think that I am freely choosing to topple over onto your domino in this philosophical exchange, but actually – “naturally” – it is beyond my control.
But who then can grapple with this – grasp this – such that all rational men and women are obligated to think as they do?
And this takes us back to a world created either by God [an actual teleological component that mere mortals crave], or to that legendary “brute facticity” embedded in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that for all “living” components of it ends in oblivion.
So, you tell me: which one is it?
I have no idea what the benefit is for you or others to assume there are only two options, but that might be something useful to mull. Perhaps it allows you or one to easily batch people, or to frame the issue simpler. Or to keep the focus on the what appears to be the epistemological errors of the enemy, rather than exploring one’s own assumptions. Further, there is something wrong with the whole enterprise. I think it is the assumption that you are not certain.I can’t really relate to you, because you seem outside of reality and outside of yourself. Not noticing yourself. I wish I could give you a perspective on that, but texts seem impoverished at least when it is just text. Once you notice that you are in situ, like you used to notice that, and that in situ you are always choosing actions and ontology based on intuition, and because of this have real, not quasi, not I may be wrong qualifications, but real actions in the world, they you know you are already a defacto objectivist, even you Iambiguous. Yes, you can write at the end of a post what you believe and then tag on a ‘but maybe I am wrong’, but even that just becomes a complicated objectivism. And it is a single action, and the selling of a specific point of view, and has not quasi effects, but effects, just like any other objectivist does. You impinge on the lives of others. You present things as binary, uncertain which is true (sort of), but you are sure it is binary not trinary. You ahve real effects and everyday with can openers and posts act like an objectivist and are one. So then it becomes something else. Maybe you think you shouldn’t be an objectivist and therefore try not to be one and not to notice that you still are.
You claim implicitly to be like a particle in superposition. And I am afraid it is harder than that, because you are not. Certainly not for us or anyone or anything you come in contact with, however fuzzy you may feel to yourself while mulling alone. Though I wonder if, even then, you confuse the words in your mind with who you are, what you believe and what you are doing.
This is all just one more example of “intellectual gibberish” to me. Words defining and defending other words that really make no substantive connection to actual human behaviors in conflict.
Let me ask you this:
How on earth is this wall of words relevant to the aim of this thread: connecting the dots between the behaviors you choose on this side of the grave and that which you imagine your fate to be on the other side of it? Given the manner in which you have come to understand God and religion “here and now”?
Note to others:
In this respect, what do you think he is trying to convey about human interactions here? Interactions that do come into conflict over value judgments? In either a God or a No God world?
Maybe you are old enough to have watched Soap. Remember the guy who kept making himself invisible, but in fact everyone could still see him?
This thread was created for folks who believe in what many construe to be an invisible God. Invisible because the assumption is made that He does not exist.
And, if this true, how are mere mortals to distinguish between “good” and “evil” behavior?
Sans God, how could the meaning and the values that we give to human interactions not be just existential contraptions? All I do is to start from that assumption. Then note the manner in which “I” evaluate human interactions as a moral nihilist. Nihilism here revolving around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
In a No God world.