What do you think about the idea of God hearing prayers or not hearing prayers ?
If it cannot hear a prayer, that sounds maybe more logical than the idea that it can hear every prayer word for word, then react and do miracles.
I think that the deist concept is more rational … God creates the universe than then does not interfere. Therefore, He does not hear or respond to prayers.
If a prayer works, it’s because the person praying has changed himself - he has taken so action or found some understanding because the act of praying has focused and cleared his mind. He has become better tuned into God and the universe through the prayer.
The same can be said for confession. The act of confessing rids a person of negative thoughts and energy.
I think this answer already highlights the danger of defining reason/platonic ideals as God: one then easily anthropomorphises the word back to a Creator being who can have words like create/interfere/hear/respond applied. Triangles “don’t interfere or respond” in a different way to a CEO not interfering or responding - the whole concept is meaningless in the former case, while it’s a state of affairs in the latter.
Creation is either an active process (an artist creating an artwork, an engineer creating a new type of motor) or a passive unfolding of events (an undersea volcano creating a new island, apple trees creating apples). It’s not really clear to me how logic and definition creates anything… even given that all Cretans are liars and my neighbour comes from Crete, it’s not like a liar has been created next door.
The problem is that we are talking about things and processes which are beyond current human understanding and we are using references and language which are best suited for common daily interactions. The descriptions are going to be limited and inadequate.
The Zen Buddhists recognize that and they try to avoid using words to describe their ideas.
Now, philosophy and reason is all about words … So does that mean that God and creation is inaccessible to reason? Probably not entirely inaccessible but beyond a certain point, we are just babbling.
It narrows down the possibilities of what can exist from “anything” to “what actually is”. It’s like extruding a material through a series of dies to get an intricate pattern.
It narrows it down to “what can be”, it says nothing about what is.
Nothing?
If logic’s workings aren’t based on empirical data, they’re axiomatic, no?
I saw it on the news today…
A man filled with hate gunned down many…
A man filled with fear beat his wife…
a women filled with disgust turned her back on her son who came out…
a man without compassion walked away from a handicapped child. …
a women obsessed with god drowned her children…
so how does hate and disgust and obsession and fear make you a better person?
How does it make the world a better place?
I saw in the news today…
I saw the chalk outline of a man who was shot today…
A road rage incident where anger killed three including two children…
a child found his parents gun and accidentally killed his sister…
a couple trying to get a selfie killed a bear cub…
How does this make you a better person?
How does this make the world a better place?
in the darkest hour of the night and my soul is black with fear…
I stare into the night hoping for answers…
no one answers my call for aid and comfort…
empty words circle my mind…
Love… peace… hope…
How can I fight the anger and despair and hate of the world…
with only words that dissipate into thin air …
So I huddle under the covers the long night through
and in morning, the sun rises and the world looks different, is different…
is different because I didn’t give into the hate and anger and despair that exists…
the battle is to be human…
so I don’t give in to damaging emotions…
so today, today I choose love…
and I choose peace…
and I choose hope…
Today, I choose to be human…
I choose to be a better person…
I choose to make the world a better place…
Kropotkin
It has been said “life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing”. So what tale can we tell that
does signify something? It can be full of sound and fury as long
as it means something. Philosophy is a tale that tries to
signify something, tries to mean something. Philosophy can be
full of sound and fury, but in philosophy, it is the quiet moments,
that offer us the most significant moments. It is Socrates asking us,
what is justice? It is Hobbes asking, what is society?
It is Hume asking us to doubt everything! In the midst of Nietzsche
sound and fury, he asks a quiet question, what is man?
So in philosophy what tale can we tell that offer us significant moments?
St. Francis of Assisi once took off all his clothes and went about the town
naked. When asked about it, he said that he cannot clothe those who needed
clothes, but he could go naked to show solidarity with those who had no clothes.
Socrates who often wondered what justice was and was the best son
Athens ever had, died because of injustice by the city he loved.
Wittgenstein spent time during World War one as a prisoner of war
and didn’t do any philosophy for a decade afterwards.
Descartes was a soldier of war and fought in several battles.
Kierkegaard took classes with Karl Marx at the University of Berlin.
So what tale told by an idiot have you followed?
Kropotkin
While in Europe, I got to thinking about philosophy’s history,
past, present and future. I tried to envision philosophy’s future
in familiar terms, a dialogue, but a dialogue with a philosopher
and an Alien from space. How would an Alien approach philosophy?
Would we even be able to discuss philosophy with someone whose
background was so different? To make a philosophy discussion even
work, the two parties must on some level, have something in common.
the only commonality I can see with an alien might be mathematics and
even that may be like a PHD candidate in math talking math to a
a first grader. The Alien might have to really dumb down his math discussion
for us to even understand. For the discussion between Alien and us to happen,
we must have a commonality, a point of reference. I can communicate with people
all around the world even if we don’t speak the same language, because
we have the same point of reference. We have many points of commonality,
eating, sleeping, the bodily functions provide us with many points of
commonality with human beings. But an alien from space may not have
the commonality/reference point with us as they may have different
body functions or possible even no body functions that we can identify.
How do you communicate with aliens when you have no
point of reference? No commonality with them?
If the aliens had philosophy, what sort of philosophy would they have?
I would guess it wouldn’t be as isolated as our philosophy and by that,
I mean that our philosophy is separated out, we have ethics over here
and political philosophy over there and aesthetics over here and metaphysics
way over there and epistemology hanging around, but our philosophy
is not unified into one cohesive theory. In physics, the holy grail is
the grand unified theory of everything, but we don’t have such a thing
in philosophy and perhaps we should. We should have a grand unified theory
of philosophy. I suspect the aliens have a grand unified theory of everything and
that includes philosophy in which they may use mathematical theories to express
these grand unified theories. It is also quite possible that these beings are so
advance they have no need for philosophy and they don’t even understand
what we mean by philosophy. It is possible that conversation is not even possible
with these beings because we have no point of reference, no commonality.
So the question becomes how would philosophy/philosophers react to
these aliens? try to imagine philosophy after an meeting with aliens.
What would philosophy look like?
Kropotkin
“How does this make the world a better place?”
well, some people argue that all kinds of bad things are natural, therefor they are ok
I disagree.
If people stopped reproducing I think it would be for the best.
And they need to have a understanding of language on top off mutual experiences.
No english.
Peter Kropotkin: I saw it on the news today…
A man filled with hate gunned down many…
A man filled with fear beat his wife…
a women filled with disgust turned her back on her son who came out…
a man without compassion walked away from a handicapped child. …
a women obsessed with god drowned her children…
so how does hate and disgust and obsession and fear make you a better person?
How does it make the world a better place?
I saw in the news today…
I saw the chalk outline of a man who was shot today…
A road rage incident where anger killed three including two children…
a child found his parents gun and accidentally killed his sister…
a couple trying to get a selfie killed a bear cub…
How does this make you a better person?
How does this make the world a better place?
in the darkest hour of the night and my soul is black with fear…
I stare into the night hoping for answers…
no one answers my call for aid and comfort…
empty words circle my mind…
Love… peace… hope…
How can I fight the anger and despair and hate of the world…
with only words that dissipate into thin air …
So I huddle under the covers the long night through
and in morning, the sun rises and the world looks different, is different…
is different because I didn’t give into the hate and anger and despair that exists…
the battle is to be human…
so I don’t give in to damaging emotions…
so today, today I choose love…
and I choose peace…
and I choose hope…
Today, I choose to be human…
I choose to be a better person…
I choose to make the world a better place…
D: “How does this make the world a better place?”
well, some people argue that all kinds of bad things are natural, therefor they are ok
I disagree.
If people stopped reproducing I think it would be for the best.
K: Ok, how would choosing love, peace and hope make the world a better place
then choosing hate, violence, anger?
Kropotkin
Then there would be no new human life.
So your statement indicated that you don’t value human life.
don’t judge lest you be judge…
We judge. We all judge people among other things. He’s smart, she is pretty,
he is rather stupid, she’s vain, what a terrible movie, man, what a terrible father…
The list can go on practically forever on how we judge people and things.
People shouldn’t throw rocks from glass houses…
I have been judge all my life and you have been judge all your life
and conversely we have judged others all our life.
but to judge, you have to think of yourself as on a higher ground then
the one you’re judging. You can’t say he is an idiot if you yourself aren’t that
smart…
To judge, you must imagine yourself as being better than the person you are
judging.
Because of my hearing loss, I quite often mishear what people say and because
of that, I often give people the wrong and often strange answer to their questions
or statements. In return, people have called me stupid or retarded or brain damaged,
to my face because I gave them a wrong answer because I misheard their question.
This name calling is judging. They have judged me stupid or retarded without
even realizing I misheard their question. I have faced judgments all my life.
But to judge you must have some point of where you judge from…
these people declared me stupid but in fact, I am smarter than
most people…Their judgements of me is wrong and I know it.
Their judgement of me is wrong because they are reacting without context.
To judge you must have context. To judge you must compare various levels
all the while you yourself is on a level. so, to say for example, David Beckham is
a terrible footballer is to judge, but you have to compare him to someone to be
able to say if he is in fact a terrible player. You have to put him into context to
be able to judge if he is a good or bad football player. If I say, Beckham is a
shitty player, compared to… me, hell no, I am a bad soccer player and there
is no comparison, he is a million times better than me but what right do I have
to say, he is a terrible player when he is clearly far better than I am. My judging of
him fails because I am in no position to judge him. My level of football play is far
lower than his so by what right do I get to judge him? I can say Beckham
is a better player than say, Pele. I can compare those two, but given the
different times they played in, I can’t really compare those two, so it really
becomes a matter of individual preference, I prefer Pele over Beckham. So
what really happens is judging really becomes nothing more than, preference.
I prefer X over Z because I can’t create context between the two.
How would you create context between Pele and Beckham?
By number of goals scored, by championships won, by world cups,
by awards? No matter what context you create, there will be other
ways to create context which can be used to prove or disprove your
preference. Now let us say, that we decide to poll “experts” to see
who they say is the better player, we might get 10 results back
and eight of them say, Pele and two say, Beckham. So we get people
who seem to know and understand football/soccer and most seem to
say, Pele is a better player. So, we have somewhat, a census of people
who believe Pele is a better player than Beckham.
We can feel a bit better about our preference for Pele over Beckham,
because by people using different methods of creating context, have
said, Pele is a better player. If we get 100 people voting on who is
better and we get 80 saying, Pele, we feel even better about our choice.
Different methods of creating context and they seem to agree on a choice.
If you have a 1000 or a million or a hundred million people voting, with each vote,
given the different criteria used and the different context created, you can
get closer to an idea of who is the better football/soccer player…
This method of judging by having a large number of people judging,
all using different criteria and different context used, is a better, more solid
method of understanding what/who is being judge… This is why
democracy is a better choice to make decisions than a monarchy or
dictatorship. One person saying Pele is a better player is far less
convincing than 1000 people or a million people saying Pele is a better player.
So we use a majority based judgement system to make decisions
because it creates a bigger method of creating context.
Individual people may be wrong because of lack of context
but by having many people, their own individual method of creating
context creates a more unbiased method of judging. I might judge
Pele a better player because of goals and you might because of
championships won and this person because of style played but with
each judgment, we come closer to an group judgement which is
more accurate because our individual creation of context becomes
a larger more accurate creation of context.
Kropotkin
the newest thread defending and attacking Nihilism leads me to wonder
about our shared history. Humans have been around for roughly 2 million years
and we have several different periods within those 2 million years.
the longest lasting period was the hunter/gatherer which lasted for
most of our history, say 98% of all human history was hunter/gatherer.
the rise of cities and agriculture and what we would consider the
stepping stone of modern civilization didn’t occur until the last say, ten thousand years,
but lets give it a benefit of a doubt and call it fifteen thousand years. So,
we have most of human history, over 1.5 million years being hunter/gatherer.
Life was short, nasty and brutish for most of human history. I seriously doubt
many people lived past 40 during that time period. the world was large and
human numbers were always small, I don’t believe there were more than
twenty thousand humans on earth at any point in time for most of human history.
to survive we needed each other. a human alone was a dead human.
Everything we are today was put into place during that million and half year
time frame. the human creature we know today was made during that time
period. All the basic human responses were created during that time.
You are who you are because of those hunter/gatherer years. You cannot explain
humans without reference to those years. All human values we have were created
during those years…So we ask while thinking in terms of the hunter/gatherer
years, what is the meaning of life? What was our meaning during those long years?
Simple survival. that was the whole meaning of life for over a million years,
survival. the only goal a human had was to make it to tomorrow and then
survive that day. There wasn’t a great deal of thought about tomorrow because
it was hard enough surviving today. There wasn’t a great deal of discussion
about the meaning of life which is perhaps why we don’t do that very well today.
Our 2 million years training to be human didn’t require us to know what the
meaning of life was or what our role in the universe was… it was enough to survive
today. All those idea’s we think of that make us human like philosophy and history
and politics and science cannot exist in a day to day society that the hunter/gatherer
society was. It wasn’t necessary for survival to know those things. It was necessary to
know how to kill and how to defend yourself and how to attack animals and how to
create safe shelters. Those were the skill set necessary to survive. a violent skill set
was needed to survive those years. We are a violent species because that is what
was needed to survive those 2 million years. We adapted the skill we needed to
survive. Today, we don’t need those violent skill set to survive, yet we haven’t
yet learned this fact. We still act as if we need those skills to survive and we don’t.
So to survive, we need to learn new skills to adapt to the world we live in and violence
isn’t necessary for us to survive in this new world. So what skills are needed to survive
our modern world?
Kropotkin
I have been mulling over this idea of a philosopher being
a “lover of wisdom” and trying to reconcile it with philosophy
being a rational endeavor. the problem I have is “lover”. Now I may
be old, but I still remember being in love and love is passionate and
emotional and wild and unpredictable and full of storm and stress.
However philosophy is suppose to be rational and logical and reasoned.
How do I be rational and logical and reasoned about something that I love and
have emotional and passionate feelings about? It is not that I reject the idea of
a philosopher being a “lover” of wisdom, but how do we have rational thought
about being in love? so perhaps we should reject this idea of a philosopher
being a “lover” of wisdom and rename it something else… something that more
accurately reflects the rational, logical, reasoned thinking about philosophy.
but to reject the emotional aspects of philosophy is to reject an important
aspect of philosophy. Philosophy is about death and life and meaning,
all of which is about the emotional… It’s hard to be impartial and rational
and logical and reasoned about our death. Life is emotional. How am I to
reason logically about life? To do so means we must be impartial and cold minded,
but this conflicts with the lover aspect of philosophy. Either I reject the emotional aspect
of philosophy which means I am no longer a “lover” of philosophy or I accept this
emotionalism and “love” wisdom and forgo logic and rational thinking and reason
thought. A dilemma for sure.
Kropotkin
In my years of research I have found that those who promote conservatism
are often fearful and afraid. they see the world as against them, an enemy,
a place that fights against them… I have found that the world is really
not positive or negative, it just is… What we see as against us is really our
reaction to it. We create a mental construct of the world as negative or positive,
but that is just our reaction to it. the world is…and we provide context based
on who we are and how we see the world.
Walk on an beach
walk in a forest
stand in the everglades
see the night sky
None of these are negative or positive
none of them are good or bad
they just are until we put them into
some sort of context. I walk on a beach
in the sun and that might give me cancer, so the
walk on the beach becomes negative.
the forest has animals which can attack me,
so the forest is evil…
stand in the everglades and an alligator might get me
the night sky is positive because it is our future…
None of this is true because it is just an reaction to neutral places and events.
We create the context that make these events good or bad…
the world is evil or bad or a nasty place…
that is context you created…
Kropotkin
I see that the discontentment from in both America and the UK that lead
to that ill-fated vote the other day, in part stems from a feeling about
“elites”. Usually directed at the political center, US in Washington and
in the UK, Brussels. But the interesting thing is who is an “elite”?
If you include your average congressmen, then you have the means
to create change by simply voting them out… or do you include the average
nameless bureaucrat you can’t name. Much anger has been directed toward
these elites and yet, very little anger has been directed toward the
real elites, the so called 1%. The mistake here is thinking an elite
is political whereas the real so called “elite” is economic.
Both Marx and Adam Smith felt that the driving force of
life was the economic and not the political…
Personally, I think its not only economic and political but
also other factors, but anyway, the anger that exists is real,
I suspect just not directed at the right target.
Kropotkin
I was talking to my mom about Brexit and she brought up the point
about people, being and tribes. It got me to thinking about Brexit, tribes,
and identity. In reading comments about why the UK voted to leave,
many people brought up this idea of returning the UK to the UK.
This suggests to me, that a large percent of the UK population
didn’t feel part of the EU. They didn’t self identified as part of the
EU. They self identified as part of the UK, but not European.
I think this played a strong role in why the vote went the way it did.
This question of identity plays a strong role in our life,
who you identified with and why. I self identify differently
then a conservative would and that self identification plays
a major role in what we believe in and how we act and
our political and economic thinking.
I don’t choose the group and then self identify into that group,
I self identify and then choose the group. So I have been for most
of my life, been part of the working poor. Rarely have I made over $ 30,000
a year. These economic truths lead me to self identify with the working class.
I believe in freedom and equality and so this leads me to identify with
the Democrats. My beliefs lead me to identify with certain groups.
I believe in equality both political and economic, so I believe in
the democratic principles.
Would a self examination, an attack upon your beliefs as Nietzsche called it,
possibly lead to a new self identification and then to new groups, I
believe so.
So how do you self identify and why?
Kropotkin