Freespirit, you are young in a perjoritive sense.
You are delusional in the defined sense…
Let’s look at the actual facts then:
This world is shit on a stick.
You claim the messiah came here over 2000 years ago.
That’s a logical contradiction.
That’s because the world didn’t obey His teachings.
Freespirit wrote: That’s because they didn’t obey his teachings.
Ecmandu replies: that’s not a true messiah then
According to you 
Who are some of your favorite philosophers? I used to like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer before I converted.
Socrates, because he taught Plato, plato taught Aristotle: that entire tradition is my favorite, all the way through to Plotinus…
Little did they know back then, they discovered the way to describe a secular existence that needed no god to explain anything.
True messiahs are not karma dictators (you must embody what I embody)
How do you know Socrates actually existed?
All we have is stuff that was a written down by people about him.
I see where you’re trying to go with this.
Plato is an extremely reliable source. Ancient Greece (and Rome) kept meticulous records. There’s simply more evidence for Socrates than there is for Jesus.
Why don’t I ask you this?
How can you prove that you weren’t just born 4 seconds ago?
More lol.
How do you know there’s more evidence for Socrates than there is for Jesus considering your knowledge of the time period is limited, at best?
Philosophers don’t run from the hard questions.
I have no way of proving/disproving that I wasn’t born just 4 seconds ago.
You?
You run from hard questions.
I can show you my birth certificate that shows I was born in 1983, but, I suppose we can’t prove anything with 100% certainty.
Freespirit,
I can prove I exist right now.
The issue I take with you is on several levels, but I’ll outline one:
You’re playing the name game, the miracle game instead of the logical game.
Like I stated before, Jesus may be the devil and god may be death, and you’ve been duped.
So what do you have left at your disposal ?
Logic, reason, and for other beings to sympathize with you.
That’s all you have.
Not Pascal’s wager.
His solution is not practical because it only works if there was only one religion!
Not true. It’s not logical to be an atheist. Atheists have a worse life in this world, too.
They have higher suicide rates and more depression. Being a Christian is a logical choice because of the benefits that are proven by the social sciences.
I was an atheist for a decade until I saw that it’s a terrible lifestyle. It’s empty and only leads to death.
Oblivion is your best hope.
Yes, assuming a linear progression of time we can successfully trivialise the time we are 100% certainly alive in the above way.
Perceived time is an interesting one, with time progressing more like a hyperbola - time “flying” the older you get - and if the vertex of the hyperbola were to coincide with a lifetime, 100 years or otherwise, time alive actually equals the length of an infinite afterlife geometrically. If a lifetime is further on from the vertex, it’s actually more than an eternity.
But whether or not we take this into account, your time alive is already infinite itself given that we remain in the present moment no matter how long we live. The time from when you were born up to now is all your time, it is an eternity relative to whatever else you know (which is void/nothing). In the true spirit of infinity, you didn’t even experience a discrete boundary that marked the entry of your consciousness into the world, nor even one to separate the present from the past or future: infinite = no bounds. You are just as much present consciously now as you ever will be even if you were to check back in an infinite number of years - the elapsed time/memories of anything “before” still comes together at the present moment in the same way as it always did and always will, with only the “knowledge” in the abstract that what you’re recalling took place over a longer or shorter span of time. Concretely, instead of abstractly it is the same: pleasure or pain now is no different to the same at any other point in time when it too was “now” - you’re still present experiencing it just the same. Time is a funny thing… To quote Type O Negative’s hilarious song “Christian Woman”: “Would you suffer eternally… or internally?” The profound realisation is that they are the same.
But even back to your trivilising of life by not paying attention to your assumptions about time, you’re undoing your own logic of it being important that we choose God belief during our life because relative to eternity, any time alive making any choices at all is negligible. There’s a whole world of neglected philosophy in that one life-dismissing line of yours. Is it even moral to trivilise your entire lifetime in the face of eternity?
Is it moral to take in the sheer number of people already supposedly in hell and their ongoing maximal torture still taking place right now - are you okay believing this has any chance whatsoever of being possible, regardless of the severity or otherwise of their transgressions in their “negligible” time alive? Thinking Bayesian, an infinitessimal chance of this being true multiplied by the consequence of it being false is the same as the infinite chance of it being false multiplied by the eternity of the consequences of it being true - so indifference is the same as theism just as it is to atheism. There’s nothing to choose in the first place.
FYI I am an atheist in case you hadn’t guessed, and I see theism as nihilistic - in the Nietzschean world-denying way. If you need a story to make your life more than empty, you’re better off re-thinking your life while you’re here. Denial and delusion are cop-out solutions, and they’re also subservient (hence the honest name of one of their iterations, Islam). A realisation I had a few years ago was that if you’re in search for a meaning to your life, you’re looking for someone or something other than yourself to tell it to you. However if you are interested in mastering your life, you will realise that you have potentially infinite creations of your own to provide meaning to your life at any given point.
Nietzsche is dead. Remember what happened before he died? He went insane for no discernible reason at a relatively young age and spent 11 years in diapers.
I don’t think I’ve neglected philosophy…I’ve studied Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Sartre and Cioran for years.
Now, in regards to Hell and it’s eternity, it’s indeed a terrible thought. In the Christian tradition, Jesus went to Hell to rescue people but many people didn’t want to be rescued. They are in Hell because they want to be there.
Yeah he’s dead. I get the joke, but I don’t see how they affect his points. I don’t see the insanity in his words, which I find truly astounding even to this day, even in his 40s he was a true genius, which is a term I’m so mean with I’d only definitely attribute to 2 thinkers in all history. Seems like an argumentum ad hominem fallacy to draw attention to his health and lifestyle.
Cioran! Awesome. But for all your study, you don’t seem to be applying it here is my point.
Doesn’t sound so bad if people want to be in Hell… - I guess an eternity of where I want to be seals the deal in favour of choosing atheism.
My point (and Pascal’s) is that we’re all going to die. So we may as well believe because of the potential of infinite benefits.
Nietzsche was also a pretty pathetic person and the opposite of his philosophy (read his letters, they reveal his true personality)
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Selected … _Nietzsche
I did apply my existentialist and nihilistic philosophy for about 5 years…at least. Until I had a supernatural experience that made me believe in the supernatural which led me home to the Catholic Church
Are you English? It seems like your country is infested with atheism these days.
BTW, who would you describe as the other genius? I agree NIetzsche was a genius.
I’ll give you 2 more geniuses now besides Pascal.
Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.