I was going to pose a similar question to **Liberal **about why he was posting and then I realized that I was posting and, what were *my * motives for posting?
So, to answer your inquiry about motives: They are probably similar to your motives for posting. You want to get answers to questions and you want to convey information. You are curious and I am curious. What benefit do you think you will get from your post?
In any case, I’ll answer your specific questions:
Which philosophies are not self taught and not peculiar? You make it sound like that is a negative. There’s still a lot to learn here.
Yes, they will, in almost any discussion about religion, because **Liberal **explicitly addresses those points that all religions address: the nature of reality and existence, knowledge, ethics, morality, and love. I might disagree with his viewpoint but his topics are timeless. Yes, he misses some things that I think are obvious but this just leads me to examine my beliefs and identify those “obvious” things that I am missing. I am not interested in changing his beliefs.
I think that **Liberal ** formulates and articulates his thoughts and beliefs very well, better than most people. This leads to me to explore the way that I formulate my beliefs and the way that I evaluate the beliefs of others. I think that exploring will lead to greater knowledge, and better insights, and (perhaps) greater wisdom.
Yes, of course. You may say anything you wish (within the rules of the forum). All I’m saying is that, for my part, I intend to engage with people who are actually debating the proof given in the OP and have a common understanding of the terms and their meanings. You may say “I picked my nose,” for all I care. But I likely will not respond.
Well I don’t plan on reading 4 threads of your musings. I think the difference in time and effort involved is a qualitative difference. You are essentially studying Liberal.
It often is negative in a nebulous and complicated subject. And no, I wouldn’t say most people who discuss Kant and the underlying meaning of the Bible are self taught. They go to seminary school or they take courses at University, so as not to go down the rabbit hole before they even start.
I guess I figured it was something like that. A mental exercise for the sake of the practice. Just seems to me there would be more fulfilling and more widely useful ways to get that.
Unless, of course, there are tough questions posed that actually challenge the foundations of the “proof.” Because, you know, it would be silly to actually defend assertions that are made.
Interestingly, Immanuel Kant borrowed the term “synthetic” from the common vernacular, and assigned it this definition: “statements in which the terms alone are insufficient to determine the truth of the proposition”. That is nothing like the ordinary meaning of synthetic when we talk about synthetic oil or synthetic fabrics. And yet, to discuss Kant’s philosophy, we must use his terms as he defined them. We covered this sort of complaint in Part I. Thoroughly. “Force” never meant mass times acceleration until Newton decided to borrow the term and apply that meaning to it. And besides all that, most of the definitions in the first three threads were hammered out by consensus — especially the definitions in the Morality and Ethics threads. Several people made contributions, and the definitions ended up being a synthesis of everybody’s suggestions. The notion that I’m making up all these definitions out of thin air for no good reason, or am speaking Jabbewocky, is just a mite Neanderthal in its conception, and ignores both the contributions others have made along with millennia of historical precedent. Knowing what little I do of you, it would surprise me if you wanted to do that.
Astute. Regarding autodidacticism, there have been plenty of self-taught philosophers and thinkers, including “Socrates, Descartes, Avicenna, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Feodor Chaliapin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Alva Edison, and Malcolm X” (from Wiki). They also include John von Neumann (the computer god), William Blake (the artist and poet), Walter Pitts of MIT (who taught himself “mathematical logic, psychology, and neuroscience”), and many others. The list is very long.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain
And how often, then, did Kant take an older text that included the term ‘synthetic’ and pretend that the term was used in that text to carry his new meaning, without any consideration for what the text itself actually meant?
I have a feeling that the list of autodidactic nutjobs and discredited thinkers would be quite long indeed.
I also doubt Descartes didn’t get some education in logic or philosophy while at Jesuit school or while studying law. But who am I to question wikipedia?
First, let me clarify my post to Xploder that you thought was directed at you.
He said: “just because you may say that a word means something does not necessarily mean that that is what the word actually means”
Humpty Dumpty said: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
I just thought the similarity was amusing, especially given that **Xploder **was presenting “a nice knock-down argument”, or glory.
On a more serious note, I don’t accept your analogy of Newton’s force, but I do accept that you are entitled to offer new definitions of old words, so I won’t spend time presenting my objections other than to point you to this article: Force. Take from it what you will.
I’ve had some extra time over the past two days, but I won’t in the next few weeks, so I doubt that I’ll be contributing much more.
Two quick questions:
In a discussion about God and goodness, how would you define “fear”?
Lib, I’m having difficultly reconciling identity with Spirit. If you were treating “identity” as something that only applied to agents who are bound by time and physicality, I wouldn’t have a problem. Same if you were using it merely as a useful model, analogous to particles and waves in Physics (i.e., we know the particle/wave model is wrong or incomplete, but it’s very functional and the best we can come up with for now).
But you seem to be saying that there is a unique identity that is God, there is a unique identity that is other-wise, or Jesus, or Liberal, or Bob the Unicorn, etc. that is that identity in reality (reality as defined in the OP).
I cannot fathom how “We all are one, even though we have our own identities”. If we are essentially Spirit, and Spirit is one essential thing, existing everywhere at all times, I can see no way to distinguish Jesus from other-wise from Bob.
So. What you ARE saying, is that if I post something that you disagree with, or, conversely, isn’t the exact point of your OP whatever the hell that may ne iat this point, then you’re going to ignore me? Really? That’s what your saying in a forum entitled Great Debates? Do you really think that this is how a debate works? You only respond if and/or when you want to?
Whatever dude. I still think that you’re treating the SDMB as a personal blog.
I’m not an atheist, of course, but I do read the modern atheist philosophers, like Daniel Dennett. And he said something that stuck to me like glue, and I know that it will do the same to you: “There is nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.” Without you, there is going to be one less good argument for the opposition.
It depends. There is, for example, a fear of God’s wrath, which I interpret to mean a fear of retribution or punishment. But then there is a fear of letting go, which I interpret to mean a fear of losing the familiar and comfortable (e.g., a fear of letting go of sin, because goodness is less familiar). And finally, there is a fear of God Himself, which I interpret to mean a reverence and a deference.
That’s because you’re thinking like Kant! You’re thinking that existence is not a predicate.
In order to answer your question properly, I’m going to have to introduce you to a concept conceived by Barry Miller, a modern author and philosopher who wrote a Trilogy: (1) *From Existence to God *(1992); (2) *Most Unlikely God *(1996); and (3) *The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence *(2002). That last book is the first real challenge to Kant’s point of view. And boy is it a doozy, because it is so very simple and elegant.
You see, Kant maintained that existence is not a property. In other words, to say that Socrates exists is to say nothing about Socrates that *individuates *him from anyone else. After all, we all exist. (You can, and really should, read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and his follow-up, *Critique of Practical Reason * — the former deals mainly with metaphysics and ontology, and the latter with ethics.) But boiling it down to a nutshell, Immanuel Kant said that existence is not a predicate. And his declaration went for centuries without a serious challenge. (He was an 18th century philosopher.)
And so, like Kant, you’re thinking that spirit cannot be individuated simply because it is one essential thing. Like existence. Socrates exists, and so does other-wise. How can the existence of Socrates be individuated from the existence of other-wise? Kant said that it cannot.
Then along came Miller. He introduced the concept of “bounds”, and declared that a person’s existence can be individuated by his bound. Just as Einstein was heavily influenced by Albert Michelson, Miller was heavily influenced by Zalta. I say this only so that detractors won’t need to point out that Miller did not pull an original idea out of a hat. “No man has ever had an original thought.” Edgar A;lan Poe.
Anyway, the existence of Socrates, Miller maintains, differs from the existence of other-wise by virtue of *how *you two have existed — i.e., your life experiences. This is a gross simplification, but it will do for our discussion. It gets into Fregean navel gazing about nonexistence, but there is really no reason for us to go there. Your existence, in other words, *differs *from the existence of Socrates because the bound of your existence differs from the bound of his.
Miller uses bound as a metaphor to describe the individuation of two seemingly identical things. In chapter five, he talks about two identical lumps of butter. Although they do not differ in appearance, they differ by merely existing. You might melt one for cooking, and leave the other alone. Even though they were the same in every way, you identified one of them as the one you would melt. (These are my very loose paraphrases of Miller’s book, so that we don’t take forever with this.)
Spirit is much the same way. You may be one with God, and yet still retain your identity as other-wise, because your bound differs from the bound of God. I know this all sounds like a complicated approach, but look at it another way. Now that you are one with God (let us say the one-ness happens), then you are omnipotent like Him. As such you are able to individuate yourself. (If you could not, then you would not be omnipotent.)
So, to use Miller’s metaphor, God is butter, and you have become butter, but you are a different “lump” than He. You both are the same essential thing, but you are individuated by your bound versus His. As I said before, to become one with God is simply a matter of trusting Him, relying on Him, and clinging to Him. You will then be — not when you die, and not at some future date — but right then and there, ENE. You will have always existed. (And even “always” is an inaccurate term because it implies an amount of time.) You were. You will be. You simply are.
You can, in fact, create your own universe, with your own free moral agents, just as God has done. And because you value goodness above all else (continuing our sake of argument clause) you will produce even more spirits who are one with you and who create universes themselves. God seeks to grow; and by that, I mean that He seeks an increase in goodness — eventually (from a temporal view) even infinite goodness, with infinitely many free moral agents being one with him, but individuated by their bounds.
You can be other-wise, who is one with God, and still be other-wise because of the fact that existence IS a predicate. And by corollary,we can apply the same princple to essence. Therefore, your essence is individuated despite that spirit is essentially one thing.
I am not unaware that this was a very heavy and thick answer to your question. But it is the only way that I know to answer it. Don’t feel ashamed if you have to read it several times. God knows I did proofread it aplenty.
I will simply repeat myself: You may say anything you wish (within the rules of the forum). All I’m saying is that, for my part, I intend to engage with people who are actually debating the proof given in the OP and have a common understanding of the terms and their meanings. You may say “I picked my nose,” for all I care. But I likely will not respond.
I am under no obligation to respond to you, just as you are under no obligation to respond to me. And you don’t get to declare what I am saying. I have said what I have said. It is plain, and clear in its meaning. If you debate the proof, I will respond. If you just make irrelevant noise, I will not. It would be unfair to those who actually DO want to debate the topic — which I have stated, by the way, at least three times, proving you have not read the thread because you don’t know what the topic will be. I do not discern any sincerity in your posts. Only hostility and anger. (That may account for your bizarre typos, since anger tends to speed the pecking up so fast that the brain can’t keep up.)
If all you want to do is jab at me and call me names and make fun of my posts and put words in my mouth, why don’t you just open a Pit thread. That’s what it is for — it is where angry people express their anger.
It is you, not me, who chooses what you type. Other people are typing out sincere questions and comments. You are typing out ridiculous accusations and muddled paraphrases and general blather about a topic with which you are completely unfamiliar. Choose instead to type out a sincere question, comment, or rebutal, and I will respond to it.
Come to think of it, Xploder — what exactly have you contributed to the topic of this thread? You have, as of this writing, posted 10 times. And not once have you commented on the topic, and in fact have admitted that you don’t even know what the topic is. Why exactly are you posting?
