on discussing god and religion

It’s deluded to think someone would care to.

And I do that. But as usual you speak about what ‘we need’ in this case (a universalizing or objectifization of what you want…)

Your wants are not what we need or one needs or any other of your usual objectivizing your own values.

Those are not mutually exclusive and you repeatedly ask people to demonstrate how one ought to live such that all rational people would have to agree.

Well, actually, since you consider yourself rational, you would then be convinced. Which is exactly what I said you are asking people to do.

You’re heading off on a tangent. I am describing what you are doing and have done in threads for years: asking people to show you those arguments.

Labeling them prejudices is a negative value judgment. You behave, with regularity, like an objectivist.

I said this years ago, you ass. Seriously what is wrong with you.

I made no claim that it would go away. In fact I have generally assumed it will not. What is wrong with you, you ass.

I have never seen you mount an argument that would convince all rational people that I should feel drawn and quartered. Your reaction is your reaction. As usual you are universalizing and making objective your own personal reactions to something. You seem not to notice that there is a wide set of human reactions to change, death, impermanence, sex, and…just about everything.

Well, obviously. What is wrong with your brain. You could try to show that rendition is incorrect, for example, but telling me it is my rendition is moronic.

Well, duh.

First off the fact that you are top down is shown precisely in how you have described your being F & F. You have heard the arguments of two sides of the abortion issue, for example, and cannot determine who is right. That is top down. Ideas in the head causing your values. Objective claims causing splits. EVen if you do not believe in their objectivity, they have led to splits in, as per your own descriptions.

Further, to know that there are answers one would need an example of a specific moral that could be demonstrated. Which is what you ask for. Which means you ask for specific arguments for specific morals, like around abortion, you fucking moron. So the first thing you will get if you ever get the answer of whether their are answers or not is a specific answer. And that will, should it come, immediately obligate you to agree with it. Since it would be a totally convincing to all rational people argument, in favor or against abortion, your moron.

And then it is top down from there. Regardless of how you felt, you’d have to go along with it.

Me, I don’t give a fuck about these hallucinated not present arguments. I am making my way in the world as best I can.

Which is what you are doing also, though you don’t seem to notice. And the truly funny thing is that you cling to your search for a top down process even though it makes you F &F. If you could actually read and take seriously what any other human wrote, I might feel sympathy, and even have at times, but you go back to hitting yourself in the head with your hammer and finding ways not to learn a thing from anyone else and I’ll find it funnier and funnier.

Let’s say there are two modes of secular existence. One is self-assured the other is alienated. By definition, secularity entails a loss of a transcendent source of meaning. A strictly secular person will either find a source of meaning within this life or will find this life essentially meaningless. You claim to be persistently in the latter alienated mode. Right?

No I’m trying to understand what you mean by calling yourself a moral nihilist. You recognize immanent values, e.g. good food, good music, good art, good sex, good careers, good friendships, good accomplishments. And those goods are by no means unique to you. Although there are individual differences in choice and expression in relatively free societies, those are cross-cultural values with socio-biological bases whether or not there is a God or and afterlife.

double

triple

But: For my own reasons, not for the reasons that you ascribe to me here. After that, we’re stuck.

No, actually, I am not convinced that “I” as an existential fabrication derived from dasein is able to be objectively rational regarding conflicting goods. Unlike, say, the objectivists themselves?

No, I would be an objectivist if I insisted that all others are obligated in turn to construe them as political prejudices. Instead, in my signature threads, I convey the reasons that I think as I do regarding “I” acquiring moral and political value judgments.

Note to others:

This is how he is. If you don’t agree with his frame of mind [or eventually come around to it], he resorts to name-calling.

How flustered he becomes!!

Also, in my view, he claims to acknowledge the point I am making here but he doesn’t own up to the existential implications of it. If you admit that your views on the morality of abortion could be either liberal or conservative depending on the experiences you encountered in the life you lived, then you are forced to confront them as political prejudices rooted in dasein…or you think yourself into believing that there is a way as a philosopher to derive the most rational point of view.

And sure there may well be. But the objectivists always insist that it can only be the way that they think about it. They almost never delve deeply into the part about dasein and conflicting goods. Let alone the reality of political economy out in the real world.

Then, coupled with a caustic personal attack – I’m a “fucking moron” this time – it’s back up into the stratosphere of general description intellectual contraptions:

Okay, let’s try this…

I challenge anyone here to reconfigure this “world of words” assessment of my “top down process” in such a way that it renders my attempt to intertwine top and bottom factors re abortion in the points I raise on this thread – viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382 – at the very least actually intelligible.

As that might relate to the points I raise in regard to God and religion on this thread.

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Okay. But he has found values: “good food, good music, good art, good sex, good careers, good friendships, good accomplishments”. Goods. And those are values all rational people are obligated to believe in. If they don’t, they either die, or contradict themselves or [and this may hit close to home for the case in point] make themselves miserable. Now morality, which doesn’t have to be invented because we all are embedded in it, simply grants that to exist socially, those biologically based values be granted to all. The ends, granted behaviorally more or less by all but the sociopath, the argument then becomes about means not ends. Now all we see about old iambiguous is what he puts on the page, so we can only imagine where he falls in the ‘real world’. But, he seems to misrepresent himself and his situation, which is what I suppose Karpel alludes to when he calls the old boy a “liar”.

I only posted in order to save people from chasing their tails trying to figure out what Biggus is saying.

That one word ‘essential’ is apparently the critical word.

In regard to what, Curly?

In regard to this thread, for example, do I or don’t I often go back to the gap between that which any of us think we know about connecting the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then and all that can be known…must be known?

It’s just that any number of religious denominations speak of this connection as though the gap didn’t exist at all. On the contrary, they will tell you, if you don’t follow their path, you may well be condemned to, among other things, the agonies of Hell for all of eternity.

So, okay, I note, given that there are alleged rewards and punishments for the behaviors that one chooses here and now, how, in any particular context, do they do about making their own distinctions? And how do they go about demonstrating that all others are obligated to make the same distinctions?

The part you simply refuse to weigh in on. Or, rather, so it still seems to me.

Essential in the sense of being “absolutely necessary”.

So, on this thread, if you believe that it is essential to connect the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then in a way that is embraced by a particular religious denomination, cite some examples of this from your own life. And then note how you go about demonstrating that all other rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to do the same.

Otherwise, in my view, God and religion become this ecumenical, Ierrellian contraption where there is virtually nothing that can’t be rationalized as okay in the eyes of God.

I don’t weigh in on that because I don’t know the answer. And, I don’t think the answer is objectively knowable. With regard to ultimate reality, agnosticism is the appropriate epistemology “here and now” as Socrates recognized on his death bed. I view religion as a repository for the accumulated wisdom of the collective unconscious. [There’s a lot of foolishness in there too.]

You’re not unique in not understanding how you understand things. Given the limitation of the human mind it isn’t possible to understand something and understand how you understand it at the same time. The latter would be a meta-understanding. You don’t understand everything about anything let alone yourself. So, to suppose you could know about “there and then” when you know so little about “here and now” is foolish in itself…said Curly.

If one substitutes that into the original phrase, then one ends up with :

“absolutely necessarily essentially meaningless”

“Now I’m left only with slimmest of hopes that somehow someone in places like this might manage to rekindle a spark of promise that this is not just an absolutely necessarily essentially meaningless existence that ends in oblivion.”

What could this mean? What does explaining ‘essential’ as ‘absolutely necessary’ get you?
One has to conclude that the word ‘essential’ actually has some other meaning.

You don’t know everything about yourself. For example you don’t understand thoroughly the neuropsychological means by which you are the fragmented fractured self that you allege yourself to be. So as with religion you refuse to engage in them until you can connect the dots, since you cannot connect the dots between your neuropsychological present and your putative neuropsychological future, I recommend that you stop committing to enacting yourself until all the information is in. And of course that isn’t likely to happen in your lifetime… So like Pangloss at the end of Voltaire’s “Candide” meanwhile maybe you just need to shut up about it. (See also Wittgenstein and the Daodejing) Silence before the mystery that is life is infinitely more profound then presenting it as an impossible choice that must be made based on an objective interpretation of competing myths. Myths are patterns for living in an objectively unknowable territory. You’re playing the role of the victim of that dilemma like a beggar sitting at the gate that only a hero can enter. Yours, Curly

Okay, but here and now, given the aim of this thread, one either does or does not believe in God and/or religion. And, if they do, this belief will almost certainly impact on the behaviors they choose on this side of the grave. Morality here and now, immortality there and then.

So, as close as you are able configure this into your own embodied frame of mind “here and now” how, in a particular context, do you go about choosing one set of behaviors rather than another?

In other words, to the best of your ability, explain how being an “agnostic” may or may not be the equivalent of my feeling “fractured and fragmented”? How could agnosticsim – again, given what is at stake – not precipitate that sense of feeling drawn and quartered when “I” is confronted with “doing the right thing”?

In other words…

But, again, the whole point of this thread is to focus the beam in on those who sustain their own meta-understanding of themselves in the world around them through one or another religious denomination.

How, for all practical purposes, does that “work” for them when confronted with conflicting goods? And how do they see their “self” here in a way that is not construed as being “derived from an existential contraption rooted in the lives [experiences, relationships, ideas etc. ] they have lived rooted in dasein”.

They – you – will either go there or not. And, sure, your own explanation above is perfectly exceptable to me. But then this thread wasn’t created for agnostics, but for believers.

Okay, let’s focus in on a particular context relating to human morality here and now and human immortality there and then and explore how the words absolute and necessary might or might not be related in this context to things deemed either to be meaningful or meaningless.

You choose the situation.

Well, from my perspective, in a No God/No religion world, necessary and essential meaning applied to human interactions in the is/ought world is different from necessary and essential meaning relating to interactions in the either/or world.

That’s why we need to take these “general description intellectual contraptions” out into the world of flesh and blood human interactions.

Although, sure, I may well be completely misunderstanding what your own general description intellectual contraption means on/in that post.

The obvious answer is that a religious person, a spiritual person, a believer, sees dasein [experiences, relationships, ideas etc. ] as something that comes intentionally from God. It’s not just some random shit.

It means simply that your explanation of the word ‘essential’ doesn’t explain anything. If anything, it makes your meaning more obscure.

And this latest post obscures it even more.

But who cares at this point.

But that then brings this quandary into play…

If “I” revolves around only that which an omniscient/omnipotent God intends, then how on Earth can it be said that “I” have any actual free will at all?

But: my point is that the obscurity here is derived all the more from the fact that you go on making a distinction between these words up in the clouds of abstraction.

Necessary or contingent, absolute or relative, essential or existential meaning in regard to what set of circumstances? As those circumstance relate to morality here and now and immortality there and then?

Over and again, I note that even in regard to “I” in the either/or world, there is that gap between what we seem able to know about ourselves objectively – biology, demographics, empirical facts etc. – and an objective understaning of how that all fits into a thorough understanding of existence itself.

We don’t even know beyond any and all doubt if we embody actual free will in this exchange!

Or, okay, “I” don’t.

Let alone the part where we are able to encompass a complete understanding of “I” grappling with morality here and now and immortality there and then…through God and/or religion.

On a thread like this.

Unless, of course, that’s just me. Maybe others have encompassed this understanding. Maybe I will come upon one here at ILP.

And how on earth would one – I, you, anyone – know that?!! We’re all in the same boat here: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”…“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.

So, sure, some find their own antidote here in God and religion. Either in being brainwashed by others as children or in groping with questions of this sort on their own as philosophers in places like this.

So, okay, to them I say, “tell me about it”. How do others connect the dots between here and now and there and then given their own understanding of God and religion. In all earnestness, polemics aside.

Look, I set aside a few hours a day groping with and then grappling to understand questions of this sort. Why? Because the stakes couldn’t be higher. But I’m running out of time. So I also set aside many more hours a day for things – distractions – that take me away from these things and bring me enormous amounts of existential fulfillment and satisfaction. That part doesn’t go away just because I construe life as being essentially meaningless in a No God world.

But there it is – oblivion – getting closer and closer. No more “fulfillment and satisfaction” of any kind ever again. Unless someone in a place like this is in fact actually able to link their arguments to demonstrable proof that practicing objective morality on their path here and now can bring about immortality [and even salvation] there and then.

Sorry, I can’t explain it better than not. Not even to myself.

On the other hand, let me say that posts like this from you are actually a pleasure to read. You note what I construe to be important points that actually prompt me to think through my own. And I truly do appreciate that. Above you are not only not Curly, you’re not even a stooge.

Thank you. You say the stakes are high. So you still hold onto the possibility of an afterlife AND the possibility that you can know what to do today with respect to it?
It may interest you to know that according to American New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman :