Note to others:
What on earth is this supposed to mean in the context of, among other things, our exchange here:
Is he going to address this substantively or not?
In regard to gun control or a subject of his own choosing.
Note to others,
Some minds become rigid, inflexible, and calcified. At this point in their life, they cannot bend but break and shatter. Handle appropriately.
We’ll need a context of course.
You choose it.
You know, assuming you have the autonomy necessary not to choose the one that nature compels. 
Iambiguous wrote:
"But not before the existential trajectory of our lives largely determine the objectives embraced by any particular “I” out in any particular world understood in any particular way.
Then it comes down to differentiating that which one is able to demonstrate is true for all rational men and women and that which largely remains, subjectively, a “personal opinion”.
This is very fitting with simulated understanding of what it means in terms of subjective trajectories constructing objective standards within a diminishing spatiotemporal phenomenal world.
Beyond and beneath the present epoch, the distinction between them will become less distinct, and all humanity must involve in that new brave world, that will determine and reduce it’s distinctive features, until they become indistinct.
That realization proports to simulate it’s self toward constructing such objectives. The threat of a non objective world is axiomatically nil, and simulation regains it’s objective existential criterion .
That is the mode by which the ‘i’ escapes from it’s freedom.
It’s basic Abrahamic fatalism transferred into secular forms - i.e., fatalism.
We are all images of the one-god, so its order, its will, is confused as belonging to us.
It chooses. and we are its agency of choice, ro the chosen.
Simple shift in jargon.
In Christian lore, free-will is given, but prohibited to be exercised. It’s like a taunt a test of loyalty.
A method of explaining why an absolutely ‘good benevolent omnipotent, omniscient god’ would allow for ‘evil’ to exist.
It is implied that the ‘evil’ is man’s free-will, and this is what he must make amends for by surrendering it, willingly, to God’s only permissible Will.
A mind-fuck.
I apologize to Mowk the language officer.
.
From my frame of mind [and that’s all it is, my own personal opinion], this one sentence alone encompasses the gap between you and I in regard to philosophy as a tool in which to explore human interactions.
Again, unless you are only being ironic in posting here, this sort of thing is just intellectual gibberish to me. How would one embody it as use value, as exchange value, in any particular context. How do you do it?
Not that I’m not compelled to point out that you are compelled to make this point.
It’s all inherently tricky [if not surreal], isn’t it?
In other words, merely asserting this to be true makes it true. Why? Because he will assert in turn that he just [b]knows[/b] that he was able to freely choose to assert it and not something else.
Still, we need a context in which to explore it further. Abrahamic fatalism in what sense? Given what particular set of circumstances? And how would this relate to that which is of most interest to me regarding determinism: moral responsibility.
That’s not an argument countering what he wrote.
If one looks at Christianity, there are sects which strongly believe in free will and sects which are fatalistic.
I would say that the vast majority is in the free-will camp.
Don’t know who is being quoted there…but I’ll play along.
Maybe, I say maybe, the entire narrative about Adam & Eve and how God gave the ‘free-will’ was really a way of explaining how an absolute one-god, that made all in his image, would be capable of creating evil.
Read the story.
He gives a gift, called ‘free-will’ and then places a restriction upon it - so automatically it isn’t free at all, because his will usurps theirs.
A way of forcing them to sacrifice their will to his, because freely exercising it comes at a severe and absolute cost: infinity of suffering in Hell - loss of Paradise, a.k.a. Garden of Eden.
That’s would be like telling inmates in a penitentiary that they are free, to do and go anywhere…except outside the prison, and that if they ever dared to go outside that they would be sent to an eternity of isolated confinement.
Notice the prohibited fruit, representing awareness. So, remain obtuse and ignorant, and you can do anything you like.
The Christians realized the self-defeating implications of their description of God as omnipotent and omniscient and man made in his image, so they had to come up with a reason to blame man for evil.
The Serpent, Satan, is a representation of Prometheus.
Through this bullshit story, man is made the cause of his own suffering, and the root of the evils he must suffer and make amends of.
Free-will, properly understood, is not absolute, nor is it a method of self-absolution, because ti begins with placing the blame on one’s self, even for not correctly understanding the nature of a friend, a trusted ally, who turns on you.
The first one to blame is self, for choosing and for failing to choose.
Choice is the pragmatic expression of freedom. It isn’t some abstraction, defined in prose and poetics, nor is it non-existent, because ti is experienced - observable, testable, falsifiable.
Every choice participating in the determination of one’s own future options.
So your argument is based on your interpretation of a Bible story rather than how Christians have historically interpreted it and applied it.
Yes…Christians are brainwashed. They are told what to think.
It appears the Bible is pro-family and pro-life, and pro free-will but it is not.
Consider the other narrative from a pragmatic perspective.
A wandering preacher, wannabe Messiah, goes around taking young males away form their families, which at the time was a severe loss that risked their survival. Consider the symbolism of God - the idea - usurping the father as head of the family.
You can google anti-family quotes. I did a while ago, but I can’t be bothered in this forum.
I’m here to have fun, in this circus.
But you can research yourself.
Biblical allegories imitated ancient Oracle decrees - a form Nostradamus also adopted and many charlatans - some that come to this forum - have sued to imply insight and mystical powers and predictive powers.
The form uses allegory to appear ro be saying something when ti is saying nothing, ro to appear to be saying one thing when ti si saying the exact opposite.
Three layers:
Text
Context
Subtext
Three layers of meaning, corresponding to body/nervous system/mind and/or physis/motive/metaphysis, past/present/future.
The Bible is an anti-family text.
The males - fathers - are mere representations of the on true father. Males are not real fathers, but means for the one-father to seed his female concubines - mediators.
Consider the story of how Mary got inseminated…a rape scene, that makes Joseph a cuckolded husbund.
Christianity, therefore Abrahamism, is Absolute Tyranny, as-if there were one (Male) Ruler over humanity forever.
This is an abstraction and impossibility of course. Abrahamic ideologies ‘solve’ the Paradox by extending it beyond life, or beyond “one Ruler”. So, when any living embodiment or representation of ‘God’ may possibly exist, it doesn’t matter, because “God” is beyond life (immortal). Thus the ideology is representational. And all humans are forms of and degrees of impostors.
I interpret Abrahamism as how Jews originally viewed the Roman Caesar and imperial class, Aristocracy. It was their (per)version of it. To them, at the time, the Rulers could do pretty much anything they wanted to them, after being conquered. And so, refusing the foreign rule of the ‘earthly’ Graeco-Romans, imitated and copied the Rule, as an idea, which then could be inverted and reversed. So rather than being emasculated and accepting the foreign rule, Jews created their own Aristocratic class (the Cohens) and also inverted the Roman Imperialism and title of Caesar (God), to suit and fit themselves. They then convinced other slaves and victims of their “One-God”, as a means of subversion against the early Roman Empire, and then later as subversion against the Roman Catholic Diocese. This is a (memetic) battle that’s been waging for Centuries.
Romans were not the first people to conquer Jerusalem and enslave the Jews, too. The Egyptians were before the Romans, as were the Persians, from whence the Zoroastrian and Monotheistic elements were taken and absorbed into Judaic and then Abrahamic ideology.
Abrahamism is spiritual nihilism, using language to dominate from the inside (esoteric), out (exoteric) - from mind (ideology, dogma) to dominate body (physical).
It does so by seducing the individual who feels this dominance as pleasing, because it offers an alternate reality to escape the reality that remains indifferent, to his needs/desires, and threatens him.
It does not coerce, it seduces, by exploiting the existential anxieties of the individual.
i’m going to have to disagree, gentlemen, and propose the contrary. all religious belief - whether in the form of animism, paganism, deism, polytheism, henotheism, or monotheism - is instead an intellectual attempt to escape nihilism rather then an expression of nihilism. each and all of these people are trying to give a purpose and meaning to life that transcends their mortality. the details of each form of religion are arbitrary and of little importance when this common feature is recognized. and the extent of the reach of a religion depends solely on its usefulness as a tool for controlling larger or smaller numbers of people. you either have great big mind fucks like the abrahamic religions that are more useful for regulating vast numbers of people, or you have little mind fucks like the pagan religions used to regulate smaller societies. the reasons why the monotheisms won is because those kinds of models resolve logical problems with the omnipotence and omniscience of dueling gods. and when you have a billion people to control, you can’t afford to have any uncertainty or disagreement among them about the nature of god. this is why the roman ruling classes adopted a monotheism as the official religion.
but this equivocation of abrahamism with nihilism couldn’t be more erroneous. that’s the very shit that saved half the world from nihilism, to be sure.
i think here we have a couple of fellas who like pagan nonsense more than monotheistic nonsense… and you know what we do when we find people who don’t agree with our nonsense. we call them nihilists. and that’s not fair because they’re only doing the same thing your doing; trying to escape nihilism by believing in some brand of baloney.
Master of nil, Abrahamism offered a relief from the absence of absolutes, what is called ‘negative’ about the real world, as though it owes man meaning, purpose, and immortality, or an eternal absolute being that watches over them.
Your mind is seeped in nil.
The absence of god is not a negative; the absence of universal morality is not a negation of morality. Filling this absence with mental projections - using words - is exactly why you declare philosophy at an end.
As usual, you are clueless.
Best stick to the cynical patronizing jokes, and the noise you enjoy and call ‘music’.
It’s interesting how some minds show a selectively skeptical mind.
They comprehend a kindred spirits allusion to ‘contraptions’ - (imagbiguous) - and yet do not recognize them in the Abrahamic narrative projecting them as absolutes that negate reality as it is experienced.
Quick to doubt, and show skeptical vigour, with any use of prose or metaphor, and yet show no such rigour when reading Nietzsche.
Well, not quite “interesting”, more like predictable, and identifying.
Self-Deceit…to protect the ego.
Identifying, yes. Picking a team, then not criticizing that team, even if the team is the supposed anti-team. And then you don’t even really have to even know your own team or guru well. You can just aim their critiques at the other teams. They will notice when the other teams do this, but not when members of their own team do. You’ll notice, for example, that people who mock the religious on the issue of evolution or the Big Bang or whatever often know only the vague outlines of the science, since it is more about being on the right team. Obviously the Abrahamic do this kind of thing, but so do most, regardless of team.
Yes, and?
In all movements there are the laymen, who only understand the bare minimum and how it feels, and the more aware.
Abrahamism feels good because it projects, as an alternate reality, what the experienced reality lacks and the majority need, i.e. absolutes, by any name: certainty, god, oneness, wholeness, universe, completeness, perfection, immortality, universal morality or purpose, freedom, or unfreedom.
They need final indivisible, immutable answers, and they find them in the words of charlatans and peddlers of nil: even if the ‘positive’ variety.
Is the belief in unicorns and centaurs only about picking a team?
If centaurs and unicorns actually existed, would this not negate our experience and understanding of the real world?
To believe in centaurs and unicorns as representations of an imagined construct, and to believe in their literal existence, declaring the cosmos ‘negative’ if it fails to provide evidence of them, is not about picking teams, unless the teams are rationality and superstition, or realism and nihilism.
Now, I can justify a belief in the existence of centaurs and unicorns using obscurantism and occultism, but that would only expose my motives, not their existence.
The ‘and’ was the teamness. Not just the psychological need for absolutes, but the need for the team. I chose the right team, so I am right. I attack from my team. I don’t attack my team. Then the layman, as you put it, identifies with not just the team, but rides on the back of whoever actually does understand the team’s positions and insights, if any. And then also, in addition to the psychological need, and the need for a team, there is the need to be against. To distinguish oneself as not X. This saves actually doing any work yourself. I am not the heathen, the theist, the communist, the capitalist, whatever…and this is enough. Never creating nor extending anything. Never mastering anything.