Crunchy Cat,
Live - Energy sustaining chemical execution.
Die - Lack of energy to sustain chemical execution.
This is way too inexact. "Chemical execution" takes very well place after death as well, or we'd never become worm food.
Looks like the reaction is trying to point out a contradiction. Let me clarify. I like fanatsy entertainment (books, RPGs, movies, thought, etc.). I don't like to eat fantasy food.
Noone was offering you fantasy food. You were telling on someone, so I offered you a payment. Don't you Americans do that?
That's the power of interpretation. Any word can be assigned any meaning.
Any sequence can be interpreted in any sequence.
This is the absurdest thing I have ever heard. And you dare speak about truth, truthfullness and being close to the truth?
So, you're in complete agreement with Cris and against Jesus then?
What is this?! Is your mind dissolving or something?
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§outh§tar,
If you look at (some) religious/spiritual people, you'll see that the essence of their spiritual convictions is not in the words or the particular rituals they perform.
What do you "see" in these people which leads you to conclude that the "essence of their spiritual convictions" is not external? Do you know?
As observation of different cultures shows, being spiritual is not limited only to one particular form of practice.
For example, people pray while kneeling, being prostrated on the ground, standing, sitting, walking; alone, in groups; in churches, their own private rooms, in the field; ... different positions of the body, different circumstances. They all pray, but from what we can observe, they look different from one another. There is no universal position for prayer that could be externally identified.
Just by looking at someone, you cannot know whether they pray or not. Only the person himself can tell you.
This leads me to hypothesize that essence of their spiritual convictions is not external.
But I think you actually had the social conditioning and such in mind.
One-way induction (the usual scientific approach) is based on working with reductionisms. Reductionisms as such are never acceptable; arguing for or against reductionisms is ultimately nothing but arguing strawmen. Hence I reject this method of reasoning.
As you remembered a while back, I argued that every axiom (and hence all logic) is self serving.
Yes.
So I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by maintaining that reductionistms are never acceptable.
Oh.
Cherries.
Science cannot but work with reductionisms. But since it works with reductionism, it is always int he process of resolving them (by using other reductionisms). And this is how science is staying in business ...
And this is probably the hardest point for me to bring across.
To address preconceptions, another set of preconceptions has to be used. But if this other set is such that it effectively annulls the first set, then we can get to being rid of preconceptions!
We are still stuck with the new set of preconceptions. But for your case, what would these be? That there must be no preconceptions?
No no no. We aren't stuck with a new set of preconceptions. We only know that preconceptions are preconceptions. This can be very relieving. The realization that something is, regardless of us and our understanding of it.
(I hate to sound esoteric, but these words are the only ones I have at the moment.)
Are you ,or anyone else on this planet, aware of a person raised outside of human company who became religious of their own accord?
What does it mean to be religious? To go to church and to pray on your knees with hands clasped? To say certain words?
Again, are you aware of any creature raised outside of human society who, with insight, discovered that "God exists and acts"?
Not to make an argument from ignorance, but I do find it possible that even those outside of human society have a knowledge of God. It is just that they cannot communicate it in a manner *we* would understand.
I think it would be premature to claim they have no knowledge of God -- we have no way of proving that, and as empiricists, we must allow for that possibility.
You seem to be insisting that man discovers God for himself over my society discovers God for man. All I need to do is point to the absence of God outside of human society and the variableness of God within different cultures, environments.
How can you prove that outside of human society, there is no God? What kind of an empiricist are you?!
As for the variableness of God within different cultures: It is not necessarily God that is variable, but their interpretations.
It is interesting that you should find your own descriptions of what is and is not reasonable. The question is, how has insight (as you have described it) helped anyone find out about God?
Think: Is everything you have ever heard or read about God, true for God? Can that be?
You could never relate to Mowgli anyway.
He was happy without God and man. That's something to strive for.
He was certainly happy as he did not have a plethora of interpretations to pick from.
As for being happy without man: If all man is to you is danger, if you are threatened by the mere existence of another -- what does this say about your identity?
They have reviewed all the major arguments for the existence of God (the verifiable ones) and found them to be without merit. Such as Biblical tales of miracles and also miracles which happen in the hospital and in nature. (I use 'miracles' loosely). Scientists find no ties between these happenings and the claims made in connection to them, such as 'my Christian God made this happen'. Claimants are also unable to justify their claims.
Uh. The problem begins at God's characteristics. "Creator" is English through Latin, and implies 'making something out of nothing'. The German word used here is "Schöpfer", which literally means 'he who scoops out something out of something else'. The original Hebrew word means something along the lines of 'protector, the way a hen collects her chicken under her wings'.
So. Which is it? Which language to take?
Unless you first devise a biblical theology that is the same regardless of language, the Bible is not advisable to use just like that.
What is needed is a logico-philosophical tractate after the Bible, a text in non-metaphorical language that retains its meaning regardless of language, a text that is translatable 1:1.
I am sure this can be done.
Maybe they can say 'my God was responsible' and leave it at that cop-out. But they say, 'my Jesus was responsible'. And I see this and I know in my heart that they only say this because of circumstance, because they happen to be Christians, and not because they know Jesus was responsible. And I see too that the feral child does not bleet in unison with them.
That depends on what or whom you mean by "Jesus".
More like "pause" thinking individually. In this context, we may more accurately describe it to mean "stop thinking for yourself and partake rather in groupthink". Not like 'you' were thinking for yourself beforehand anyway.
Yeah, I understand you and I sympathize.
I'm dreadfully depressing.
Like, cheer up, no?
If it can be shown that feral children do not react to all other beings the same way, ie. that they shun ones but are attracted to others, then this is, for me, enough proof that they can distinguish between good and evil.
How can it be shown? Any examples? This ought to be good.
If they react to seeing a pack of bananas differently than to seeing a tiger, and of they are consistent in this, you can be sure that they distinguish between beings. Some are good for them, and some are not.
Or, translated into our speech, "Some are good for us, some are evil for us."
I am not sure of any point in time during which society has not mystified evil or murkied it to be the sum of all fears.
This is worth a thread.
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cole grey,
The problem with this statement is that the person in question must have their innermost feelings re-explained and translated for them, if WE are to know anything about those feelings/ideas. So, while you are probably right that nobody spontaneously fits into a religion, complete with agreements in terminology, this proves nothing about the feral child. Perhaps the child thought lightning was God. Or only that it was the voice of God. Or that the lightning was LIKE the voice of God. We won't know that the child's ideology wasn't corrupted by us turning them into a bleating follower of society.
EDIT - why is this child's possible unformed feeling about an "other" being any less meaningful than a religious master-teacher's idea about a God they think is beyond human understanding? The teacher would probably say that it was just as meaningful.
P.S. don't pretend the sheep are just in church, they are also at the basketball game wearing the same shoes as their favorite players.
Beautifully put.
What would I do without you?
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Crunchy Cat,
The one thing I love about your 'why' post is that you're asking. In Genesis,
man was 'immortalized'... and nothing else. Put an 'undying' and 'multiplying'
factor into a balanced ecosystem of life and death and there's a big problem.
No immortal species has ever been and seen nobody can say for certain what
things would be like if one popped up; however, based on how reality works,
some very realistic predictions can be made.
How we understand reality works has a lot to do with mortality, in one form or another. We tend to see balance when something is taken away, but something else added.
Who knows how Paradise was -- whether it was a balanced ecosystem of life and death as we know them.
Consider that pre-Fall earth was not finite, for example. But that finiteness came with the fall -- death, separation came with the fall. Maybe pre-Fall, life was infinite.
This is what I love about you SouthStar. Put some data out there and you
start connecting the dots and finding truth.
And you know what aboslute truth is, right?
) would be enough thanks.