Yes. Most religions are axiomatic, which isn’t proof (“The Bible is The Word of God, and therefore must be obeyed!” “How do you know the Bible is the Word of God?” “Because the Bible tells me so!”). It’s all based upon faith- the jump to the position that A is true just because you feel it’s true, even though B is just as valid an answer on points of fact. I see no reason as to why Christianity should be true and Islam should not, or why Buddhism should be true and The Church Of Sticking Your Extremities In A Blender should not. I may feel that the Church of Sticking Your Extremities In A Blender isn’t exactly what God wants, but that’s based upon what I hope God would want, which does not necessarily have anything to do with what God really wants.
And that’s a lot of what it comes down to in my mind. God is unknowable. It’s too big a concept for any human to wrap their mind around. To worship God in a certain way, to believe God acts in a certain way, is to have the conceit that one understands God, or at least some aspect of God. And I don’t. And I don’t see the point of involving myself in religion when it’s just one group’s claim of what the unknowable is, and when there’s just as valid a group around the corner claiming that the exact opposite is true.
So I can either spend ten years of my life running around, trying to find the answer, and eventually come to the realization that there is no knowable answer and I’ve wasted ten years of my short life; or I can live my life as a good person and hope that’s enough, but know that if it isn’t enough, I never had any way of knowing that it wasn’t.
Agreed, but you’re missing my point. The premises of an argument must be acceptable to the audience to which the argument is offered. Only then is the conclusion deemed sound by the audience.
The two of you are presenting these axioms as premises. Neither of you will present an argument deemed sound by the other if you both continue to utilize such premises to initiate an argument.
I am curious. What perception would cause one to believe in a soul?
That was my point.
Yes, but the derision which became apparent isn’t worth it. We are here to benefit each other, not instigate ill will.
Yes, I stand corrected. I tend to think of nothingness as a lack of proposition, much like “soft” atheism is a lack of a belief.
No gratitude is necessary. Isn’t civility supposed to be the norm here?
Nowadays, schools teach math this way: “A forest had a 1,000 trees. A lumberjack cut down 100 of them. Was the lumberjack socially responsible? What was the environmental impact of her actions? There are no wrong answers.”
Well, I am the former class A chess champion of my state. And I have pretty feet.
Lucky for you you’re aligned with the right camp. Otherwise, you would be assailed regarding your false memories.
The topic of definitions has not been raised. But I’m glad you raise it here. That is precisely why any axiom is true. Definitions are, by nature, tautological. The terms in the defined word each have their own definitions, which each have their own terms, which each have their own definitions, which each have their own terms, which each…
Then my efforts are futile?
Oh, come now. Belief requires faith, doesn’t it?
Well, I’m a member of TOPS (Top One Percent Society). What we do for laughs is make fun of Mensans. But so what? I probably don’t have anywhere near the formal education you have. But I’m not interested in how many AP classes you took. I took them, too. Besides, who knows what the standards are these days. All I’m interested in is whether you make sound arguments while wagging a civil tongue.
Perhaps if you weren’t so smart you wouldn’t have missed my disclaimer that I despise religion. And so does God. But then, you smart people read really fast.
I don’t know 'bout that. But I’m certain you can’t fit another ego on it.
I apologize for my uncivil remarks.
While I certainly acknowledge that I am quite intelligent, the reason I participate on these boards is that the majority of others share that quality. If I wanted to get into a pissing contest I would have mentioned my striking good looks.
Tho I think this particular discussion took a turn towards silliness, my preferred option at that point would have been to not post. Must have been feeling cranky this a.m.
Sorry again.
DavidB and Lib, not that I don’t think you’re perfectly capable of responding to each other, but allow me to put a couple cents in here, if you don’t mind.
Libertarian charged that DavidB engaged in the fallacy of equivocation based on his answer to Boogarrheal Catastrophe’s assertion that:
David quite rightly pointed out to Lib that, since BC had, in his assertion, implicitly accepted the corporeal model of existence previously submitted in this thread, then he [DavidB] was not guilty of equivocation since he had based his response on that same model of existence.
In rebuttal, Lib reworked David’s statement that “Before you were born you didn’t exist” into the remarkably dissimilar “Before your body was born, your spirit didn’t exist” which is not only a misrepresentation of the original remark (because it introduces a brand new element -“the spirit”- into the argument) but is totally irrelevant to the charge of “equivocation.”
Lib continues by explaining to us that David’s conclusion that he even exists at all is mere tautology, since this is only based on the axiom that he exists. Unfortunately, this is also irrelevant to the discussion, as David’s existence was never a conclusion, but is included in the premise of the OP, which poses the question “what happens when it’s all over?”
So, while Dinsdale’s analysis of Lib’s argument ("-what a load of crap!") is a bit more terse and less polite than I might’ve phrased it (I would say “obfuscation” rather than “crap”), I have to agree with the substance of his rebuke.
I’m wrong. I see that I completely decontextualized David’s remark. Thank you for pointing that out.
Actually, I reworked David’s statement, not as a rebuttal, but as a response to his request that I do so. But you’re right that the charge of equivocation is baseless.
Well, that’s all moot now anyway. But “it” might be an antecedent for the physical “it”, rather than the spiritual “it”.
“Sorry I spoiled your Black Panther party.” — Forrest Gump
David
Sorry for the interruption, my friend. But my advice stands.
That’s how I interpreted it. If the spiritual “it” was intended, I suppose the OP would be asking about death of the animus, rather than the entire corpus. (Synikal? Care to comment?) In any case, that’s an interesting observation.
BTW, Lib, I love the Gump quote!
I was assuming, particularly given Synikal’s sig, that he was asking something along the line’s of “what do atheists believe happens to the real you (i.e., the spiritual you) once the cells have died?” A naive question in that context, granted, but legitimate nontheless if an atheist is willing to accept the axiomatic spirit for the sake of the argument. Similar questions were asked in the old Atheist Religion threads, wherein (some) atheists and theists alike attempted to assume the mindset of the other and see things in new ways.
Thanks. After my gaffe, I felt about as dimwitted as he.
Which discussion quickly becomes problematic. For instance, speaking as a “weak” (or “soft”) atheist, I can certainly agree to postulate the existence of my own spirit, but by that very act I preclude any logical argument I might make to support what I believe would happen to that spirit after death (I would be begging the question, would I not?).
Speaking on a purely personal level, I can say that if I possess a “spirit”, I believe it is the manifestation of my influence on reality. Consequently, although my spirit may be at its stongest while I live, it can continue after I die through the legacy of my progeny, through the systems and structures I put in place while I live, and through the various records of my words and deeds that I will leave when I die.
Obviously then, I cannot be fully aware of my spirit, and in any case I believe my awareness will cease to exist when I die.
You’ve certainly brought the discussion around to something interesting, or at least more interesting than where I was taking it. Your definition of spirit caught me off guard. You define Him as though He were not alive, and speak of Him in the royal person (conjugated: we, it, it - we, they, they).
Kindly elucidate, if you please.
Also, you speak of awareness as though it were merely synaptic discharge. Can it be that we view things so very fundamentally differently? If I spoke of “your heart”, would the picture that comes to your mind by any chance be that of a pumping muscle?
FWIW, IMO there is no animus greater than or distinct from the corpus. My entirety is the result of physical processes. When those processes stop, I stop. I wouldn’t mind if it were different, but see no reason to believe it is.
Well here I am, confused again! I’m unsure exactly where it is that I employed the “royal” person, and also at what point the discussion changed from “an individual’s spirit” to “the Holy Spirit” (unless you see them as one and the same). —I think it would be helpful to know how exactly you are using the term “spirit” in the context of this discussion, and then to see if we can agree on a common definition (which may be unlikely).
The image I would get for “heart” would depend upon your usage of the word. If you said “Consider your heart,” then I would picture the muscle, whereas if you told me “That kid really has heart!”, a much less tangible set of thoughts would spring to mind. (And if you described a bumper sticker as reading “I-heart-Libertaria” I would picture the comic Valentine heart.)
As far as awareness goes, I’m not prepared to believe any notion that my awareness of things is separate from my physical being without experiencing such awareness directly. Since any such experience would most likely necessitate the destruction of my physical being, I’m absolutely unwilling to experiment!
(BTW, I look forward to your response, but won’t reciprocate promptly, as I have to leave happy cyberland for the rest of the day, and won’t be visiting again until some time tomorrow.)
I’m also curious about this, Lib. Do you believe that humans have individual and distinct “souls” that carry on after death of the corpus? Or snippets of the Holy Spirit, portions of a whole?
Welcome back! Hopefully, my response to Xenophon41 will clarify things for you.
Xeno
May I call you that? Please call me Lib. Excellent format! The italics in the quote block looks great.
[/quote] Well here I am, confused again! I’m unsure exactly where it is that I employed the “royal” person…
[/quote]
Right here:
[Emphasis mine.]
Regarding that point, per se, it is quite often the case that a person’s legacy (what you seem to mean by spirit) is greatly magnified after his “death”, and was diminished when he “lived”.
Well, I certainly do. How can spirit be divided and quantified? While there might be more than one manifestation of magnetism, for example, there is only one magnetism. Everything that is magnetic has the attributes of magnetism. Whatever is not magnetism is something else.
God bless you. I have been in discussions (including on this board) where I have practically begged that we define our terms and state our axioms up front, only to be rebuffed as being too tedious.
I define spirit in the same way that Jesus does.
Kindly allow me to offer (at least at first) an informal definition, since, I’m sure you will agree, language (practically any language) has always proved to be weak in metaphysics. How do you define something to someone who has never known or experienced what you’re defining. I don’t mean this offensively by any stretch, but please understand that defining spirit to you would be like defining ice to a tropical aboriginal. Consider the difficulty: “It’s frozen? What the heck does frozen mean?” Or “Solid water? [incredulous glare…] How can water be solid?”
What I’m saying is that it is problematic to define spirit for you without using terms that will themselves need definition and clarification. So, why don’t we just head it off at the pass, and start there? None of this is to assume that you’re ignorant, but simply to avoid making any assumptions of any kind. If you already know all this, feel free to skip it.
Greek, a much more metaphysical language than English, has several words for “love”. The two most familiar are “eros” and “philos”, the former meaning a romantic love, and the latter meaning a brotherly love. But you might be unfamiliar with the lesser known “agape” (closest English phonemic: ah-GAH-pay). It also means love, but is the kind of love that David, say, has for his son, or that I have for my daughter. It is a kind of love that is, in the strictest sense, unreasonable, i.e. there is no accounting for it by nature.
It is a love that goes beyond David merely protecting his son, the way a wild animal protects its offspring. There simply isn’t anything in nature that emulates agape. David doesn’t just dote on his son, the way a mother gorilla dotes on her baby. David doesn’t reason, “I will protect my son because it will be good for my gene pool.” Rather, he loves his son because his son is wonderful and he (David) is good.
You might say that David, then, loves his son instinctively.
But, no! It isn’t simply that. Because if that were true, then every father would love his son (assuming for that argument instinct as a global human attribute), but if you have ever seen the Jerry Springer Show, you know that that is not the case! The instinct of plenty of men, men who reproduce (at alarming rates, some say) and saturate the planet with their genetic off-spring couldn’t care less if their sons lived or died.
No, David loves his son, not because he is wired to love him (i.e., he is forced to love him). David loves his son because David is a good man, and because he believes his son is wonderful.
This Love that David has for his son is God. This Love lives in David, and in his son, whom he loves. This Love is alive, independent of atoms. That is, it is supernatural. It is the spirit, whether manifested in God or in us. The love between David and his son transcends nature. Time is an attribute of the natural universe, which, by definition, is not a subset of the supernatural universe (i.e., the intersection of their sets is {}); therefore, the spirit is eternal.
It is, after all, a gestalt.
Well, the heart, as I use the term in these metaphysical discussions, is the essence of a person. “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” — Jesus
I think that’s eminently fair. But then, what to do? If I say that I have experienced such awareness, you might be too civil to call me crazy outright, but you might be shrewd enough to avoid any discussion, which would be too bad. I think you and I hold interesting discussions.
Tell you what, though. I’m willing to meet you half-way. I will be mindful of where you’re coming from if you will be mindful of where I’m coming from. Let’s neither one of us assume that the other is inferior either in intellect or in character. I have discovered some of the Godliest people I know among the atheists at this site (David and Gaudere among them). But please, I request of you, continue the discussions. Perhaps if we share with each other our life-philosophies, we can come to better understand one another.
I am a Libertarian Objectivist Christian. The ethic of libertarianism is non-coercion; the ethic of objectivism is self-interest; the ethic of Christianity is, of course, agape (love). The metaphysic of libertarianism is politics; of objectivism, objective reality; of Christianity, ego eimi (I am). The epistemology of libertarianism is nature; of objectivism, reason; and of Christianity, logos (the word).
What’s yours?
I hope it will have been worth the wait. I look forward to your return.
So Libertarian, if I’ve correctly understood your axioms, they are these:
There is more than one kind of love, e.g., eros, philia (philos actually means “friend” or “dear”) and agape.
Agape is not a natural but rather a supernatural form of love; it is not accounted for by anything in nature. It is also not subject to the influence of aspects of nature, e.g. time.
Agape is divine love, and also spirit, both divine spirit and human spirit.
Spirit is indivisible and not separately existent for different individuals.
My guess is that xenophon’s axioms will be so different from these that it will be hard to hold a discussion that doesn’t involve just disagreeing about the axioms themselves. Still, I’ll be an interested spectator, as always.
Your argument assumes that, in order for behavior or emotions to be instinctive, that they must be universal to all members of the same species.
But this is not the case. Many people are afraid of heights. In fact, I would guess that the vast majority of people with good vision would react with immediate, gut-level fear if they looked down a long precipice. But not all people will react this way. Some people can come right up to the edge of a cliff, look straight down, and not think anything of it – some of these because they’ve trained themselves not to be afraid of heights, others because they were never afraid of heights to begin with. This does not mean that the fear of heights is not instinctive in those people who are afraid of heights.
Furthermore, an “instinct to love ones son” might exist, but may require certain events to trigger it. If a man has a one-night stand with a woman, and she comes back a year later with a baby and says, “This is your son,” this might not be enough to trigger a love-for-your-son instinct. If on the other hand the man was living with a woman, and she became pregnant, and he stayed together with her through the pregnancy and birth, and participated in taking care of his son, this might be the trigger necessary to bring up an instinctive love for his son.
Mmm, no, I think you’re misunderstanding the nature of instinct. Just becuase it is instinctual to care for offspring doesn’t mean every individual will have that instinct, in the same degree. I take it you assume an animal mother’s caring for her young is instinctual, not agape, right? And you would say that if it were instinctual, every mother, animal or human, would care for her young, since you argue that it cannot be instinct if some parents neglect their young. But all animal mothers don’t care for their young; some neglect them, some attack them, some favor one offspring so much the others suffer and/or die. On farms it is not uncommon to have to take young animals away from lousy mothers. So if you are assuming for the argument that all instincts are global and uniform, you are making instinct into something it is not, and you have not disproved instinct as a motivation at all.
Just out of curiosity, I have a question about your conception of the human spirit. Now, I’m assuming you believe in evolution, which means humans were once much more ape-like, and before that a smaller sort of mammal, and so on, etc. When did we get a human spirit? Homo habilis? Homo erectus? Were we spirit-filled unicellular creatures once? If our spirit did not suddenly appear, did we start out with a tiny bit of spirit, and then get more and more as we evolved? Yet, it seems odd that us and the chimpanzees would have a common slightly spirit-filled ancestor, but only the human decendents would have spirit (since you seem to use the animal kingdom as examples of wholly non-spirited creatures). If our common ancestor had two offspring, one of which whose line would eventually evolve into humans, and the other whose line would evolve into chimps, did only the ancestor of the humans have a spirit?
