Have the “others” you’re talking to explained it to you?
Nope, that’s just a silly gambit I use here.
Sort of like the one you use in not actually responding to points being raised.
Hell, even KT has been engaging in actual substantive exchanges with me of late.
Which, I’m afraid, makes you Curly again, my friend. 
Sorry not to be the straw-man you need to knock down to make your day. 
I’ve always made substantive responses to him. What he actually means is I answered his questions, exactly as he wants. To him anything else is not substantive, including posts directly responding to his assertions and/or behavior. IOW focusing on concrete events in real life that are vastly better documentable that his abortion examples are, for example. Nor are posts that have to do with the subject substantive, unless they solve is pet issues, like conflicting goods, or at least attempt to solve them. IOW he objectifies he values. If a post does what he wants, it gets the objective label ‘substantive’. He functions as an objectivist, while assertion a non-objectivist position.
It should also be noted that, I have made what he calls substantive posts before,which he with regularity forgets. When I make these ‘substantive’ posts, he often does not respond to them, or makes unsupported assertions about them, picking tiny portions of my responses, but ignoring how my examples do not, in any way, confirm his conclusions.
Any response that has substance, according to his criteria, is used as an excuse to repeat things he has said thousands of times. Any post he considers lacking in substance is used as an excuse to do the same.
No one should be fooled into thinking that meeting his criteria leads to suddenly having a respectful conversatoin partner who responds to points made. And he will soon forget that you did this before, and will chastize you for not ever doing it, likely adding in a psychological analysis of this behavior on your part.
I think we have stronger Turing programs than this.
It seems to me that Iambiguous presents a game of “heads I win tails you lose”. I refuse to play.
I’m no authority on Buddhism or the doctrines he wishes to discuss: enlightenment, karma, reincarnation, Nirvana. Whatever my impressions of them, they are uncertain and agnostic and I recognize, subjective.
I don’t call myself a Buddhist. Yet, I practice Buddhist meditation and find it beneficial.
I think it’s a mistake to regard religious symbols as objective in the sense that science is. Religions insofar as they are true are true in a different way: that is, values that have been baked into us by 3.5 billion years of evolution.
Now, it seems to me, that Iambiguous, because his need for certainty is denied by reality, denies that there can be any meaning at all. However he got to this point, his mind is in a state of foreclosure.
Buddhism, I find, has much to offer anyone who is moderately open to it. It has fueled the philosophies of philosophers like Hume, Schopenhauer, the American transcendentalists, the European existentialists, and so many more.
Has Iambiguous checked them out and taken their views into consideration? If so, there’s no evidence of it in his fundamentalist model of religion. So, again, I say Iambiguous’ approach to Buddhism like his approach to others he calls " denominations" is stupid.
For that alone you’re your coming back as a dung beetle.
You know, if whatever makes reincarnation an actual thing for Buddhists is…real? [-o<
Quite the contrary. To the extent that Buddhists are able to think themselves into believing that enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana are actually real things, they clearly win and “i” clearly lose.
Think about it…
They are able to sustain the comfort and the consolation of eschewing the self. No self, no fractured and fragmented pieces. At the same time, this No Self entity is still able to sustain the comfort and the consolation of thinking and feeling in an enlightened manner such that through karma they will not just tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion, but will be reincarnated…with the possibility even of reaching Nirvana.
Just don’t ask them to note examples of this…or to describe in some detail how it all actually unfolds.
Then the part where, as a Buddhist, someone walks me through their day. They note why they choose particular behaviors which “in their head” they link to what “in their head” they imagine their fate to be on the other side.
Wouldn’t that seem to be reasonable given all that is at stake?
And, again, given my own grim and ghastly conclusions here, how on earth do I win?!
If you’re telling the truth, it doesn’t prove that you’re not playing “heads I win tails you lose”. It just shows that you’re not conscious of the game you’re playing.
Duplicate
Once again that gap between the points I make here in response to KT’s accusation…
…and your reaction to it.
What does one have to do with the other?
You don’t even know whose accusation it was. And you don’t understand that it’s a matter of process and not content. Errors which would be understandably human, if not for your hubris.
Yeah, you say that and you always sound resentful … like someone is cheating in a game.
What would be the use of that to someone who is thinking at every step that "this Buddhist is imagining a fantasy world ‘on the other side’?
It seems like a desire for a distraction … an entertaining story while waiting. With a preference for morality and afterlife rather than unicorns and dragons.
To get something more out of it, you have to empty your teacup first.
Nope, same thing.
Note to others:
Does that surprise you? 
Well, sure, a part of me resents the fact that others are able to think themselves into believing in their very own objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side, while I’m not.
But that certainly doesn’t make them any less the winners, right?
Again, think of what is at stake here when the bottom line is one’s peace of mind!!
It’s no fucking game, that’s for sure.
There you go again, explaining to others what is really behind my motivation and intention here. Still, the bottom line [mine] stays the same: Where’s the beef?
With regard to that crucial gap between what they claim about Buddhism and what they are able to demonstrate is in fact true about it.
Then the part where different Buddhists embrace value judgments at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Both championing enlightenment, and both thinking their own political prejudices will afford them a better reincarnation.
If only in their heads.
Unless of course they can demonstrate to me that it’s not just in their heads. That there really is something to it all. Something substantive and substantial for example.
Quite the contrary. Unicorns and dragons have nothing to do with the terrible pain and suffering the human race inflicts on itself over conflicting goods. Nor do they count in regard to whether “I” is obliterated for all time to come or goes on to embody immortality and salvation in Heaven or Nirvana.
On the other hand, God and/or the Buddhist equivalent of Him have everything to do with them. But how does someone like me go about making that leap of faith without demonstrable arguments from those who already have?
Unless, of course, God and/or the Buddhist equivalent makes direct contact with me.
I would not call them winners. It’s not a contest with winners and losers.
What did I say that is problematic?
You have said hundreds of times that gods are imagined, the afterlife is imagined and religions are invented.
You said so here : " able to think themselves into believing that enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana are actually real things"
And here: “Both championing enlightenment, and both thinking their own political prejudices will afford them a better reincarnation. If only in their heads.”
And here : “Unless of course they can demonstrate to me that it’s not just in their heads.”
That undercurrent is everywhere in your posts.
You don’t think it’s at the back of your mind when talking to a Buddhist? You manage to suspend your disbelief?
By engaging in practices instead of looking for arguments. That’s what people keep suggesting to you.
You say something like : “I’m going to do this practice for 30 minutes (or X times) each day even though I think it’s complete nonsense. I will reevaluate after 1 month”
Then here we will just have to agree to disagree. If you think your moral and political values reflect the real me in sync with the right thing to do…and that in embodying them you will attain immortality and salvation on the other side…then, from my point of view, you are beyond doubt holding a winning hand next to the hand that someone like me is holding.
At least when the criteria is peace of mind.
Even if it is all only in your head. With things like this it doesn’t matter what is in fact true. That’s the beauty of it.
In fact, from my vantage point, to think otherwise is nothing short of ludicrous.
Anyone else here not see a religious commitment as the equivalent of a winning hand given the stakes involved? Please explain why.
That I would be "thinking at every step that ‘this Buddhist is imagining a fantasy world ‘on the other side’’?
How on earth could I psossibly know that? All I am basically interested in exploring on this thread is how Buddhists connect the dots between morality and immortality. And the extent to which what they believe here, they are able to demonstrate.
That beef.
No, I noted only that I do not believe in religion or in God or in the afterlife. Here and now. And others that do are either able to take what they imagine is true here “in their head” and reconfigure it into an argument able to be tested and verified as demonstrable or they are not.
How does that not make their convictions here any less “in their head”. How does that prevent them from making the attempt to demonstrate that what they do believe is in fact demonstrable?
Where’s the part that demonstrates that what I think they do believe can only be imaginary?
And around and around we go. My “situation” precludes any number of options open to others. And, trust me: If someone here is able to convince me that Buddhism is the real deal in regard to the morality/immortality nexus, well, that’s a whole other level of reality.
And, again, as I point out time and again, given what is on the line here, how can you not be out there yourself trying different religious practices…to be sure that one other than your own isn’t the one true path instead.
You’re clutching so tightly on to certain ideas.
Don’t hang on to the one true path. Don’t hang on to immortality or salvation.
Buddhist practice could help loosen the grip.
It might feel good.
I’m not clutching tightly to any ideas – mine, yours or theirs. Instead, I’m clutching to the possibility [however slim it seems to me now] that one of us will be able to demonstrate something – anything – truly substantive about the relationship between morality here and now and immortality there and then.
And though you may scoff, no one is more committed to the hope that my own ideas will be shown [by anyone] to be wrong. That there is in fact “one true path” able to obviate conflicting goods and deliver us instead to something analogous to the promised land on the other side.
Maybe even the possibility that in a No God world, the arguments of the sociopaths and the “show me the money” nihilists who run the planet, can be subsumed in an actual deontological political agenda rooted not in dasein but in categorical and imperative moral dictums.
Moral mandates actually able to be enforced.
Besides, lots and lots and lots of things are out there for us if the whole point is just to “feel good”.
Nope, for me the search here is basically for a demonstrable assessment able to convince me that those who argue, “in the absence of God, all things are permitted” are full of shit.
That and something – anything – that might reasonably be construed as the antidote to oblivion.
That makes sense.
I think one interesting thing about Iamb’s positions/experiences is how well they fits Buddhism. His sense of self. He puts ‘I’ often in citation marks. He talks about experiencing himself as fractured and fragmented. In some way he has experienced things that people do in fact experience in Buddhist meditation. That the self is a batching of fragmentary conglomerates. He also mentions impermanence a lot - though not using that word. That what he believes today he might not believe tomorrow. This also relates closely to what many Buddhists experience and belief, that the self is not a thing, is not permanent (even within a lifetime) and is very contingent.
In all his reading and slapdab posting he does not seem to notice that he has reached at the very least many of the experiences categorized in Buddhism and shares Buddhism’s sense of their importance.
Now I am not a buddhist, and while I have done the practices and still do things that bear some resemblance to Buddhist practices, there are difference and I am not an advocate for the system. But it seems to me what we have is someone who has found out a layer of experience that Buddhists necessarily experience and have spent thousands of years trying to reduce the suffering of them. One major difference is Iamb is seeking to reform his Self and Buddhists are not. In fact they consider this part of the cause of suffering, though certainly not the only one. It seems odd to me in the extreme that he wouldn’t want to be in the presence of people who have a system addressing the exact pain he is describing and which they note in ways very similarly to how he does and differently from how, say, Abrahamic religions do.
He’d prefer to discussion reincarnation and Karma with non-Buddhists who happen to know more about Buddhism than he does, rather than actually learn by doing with people who have spent decades on process they think have helped them precisely with his pet issues.
Any simple read of an idiot’s guide to Buddhism or a fairly short book on Buddhism would have shown him is kinship with some of the core ideas of Buddhism. But after posting random stuff off the internet for months he still can’t recognize this. And I pointed out some of this earlier in this thread.
But there is nothing wrong with his approach to learning, according to him. It is either the only method (since he has limited mobility) or the best one or he just ignores others.
Well, it’s not working well or he would have noticed a connection between his thought and Buddhism.
And it should be noted that scientists also, like the Abrahamic religions and many other religious and secular approaches, to not have the focus that Buddhism share. Generally speaking they do not focus on such intra-self and temporal self inconsistancies and the suffering this causes.