In response to the two Christians : no I cannot say that God does not exist but nor would I either for it is only gnostic atheists who think so. I am
an agnostic atheist and so have to allow for the possibility that God [ Christian or non Christian ] could exist even if only infinitesimally so. More
specifically I am also an apatheist and so it matters not to me whether a metaphysical being exists or not for I cannot prove or disprove it either
way. And furthermore my atheism is not even the most important aspect of my worldview [ my nihilism and egalitarianism are more important ]
Hahaha.
Yes, Christianity is the best major religion simply because it has already succeeded in disbelieving in its own madness, which means it has become self-questioning and critical, cynical at times even, and deeply skeptical as we see in the kind of politics it produces.
There are no real Christians left anywhere in the West. This is a good thing, because it allows Christianity to act as a fertile ground for human things, a kind of necessary lie that potentiates its own negativity. The most interesting people I’ve known have been raised by Christians parents but themselves rejected religion at a young age or in a adolescence. Christianity and indeed any religion isn’t a true substance, it is simply a symptom, a side-effect of other things.
Christianity become Western-Capitalized, it learned to accept its own contradictions with a smile. Which means it forgot about them as they became structurally, functionally unconscious. Lies and untruths aren’t the same thing; Being is built upon the lies it can actively manage through an active defense against them, and by the untruths it can learn to incorporate into itself as an unconsciousness.
Christianity has nothing to do with your Nietzschean limitations presumed upon it.
Second time I’ve mentioned this text today… Must be his feast day or something.
St. Anslem’s Proslogion
Obvious they are referring to the Faith vs Reason aspect of Anslem’s Ontology. Had you been better read you would know your blunder here, Nietzscheans rely on the same formula for the Overman, except Anslem was able to probe the whole desparity between Duality and Non-Duality. Their question is quite valid… Painfully so when you get what it is exactly what they are saying. Not so obvious if you don’t get the whole bewildering scope of the question. The question isn’t why your not aware specifically Jesus, Son of Nazareth, but awareness of the unifying effect of consciousness, both personal and impersonal. This has profound implications in philosophy, it is a absolute challenge to all modern philosophers to explain… Most fail to even grasp the question, and Anslem knew this, he addressed this.
Here, this video explains it a bit more in depth.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=eFZ4UCwZ4Bo
Lecture by Gregory B Sadler, worth your time, so you don’t go walking around in ignorant confusion and in lacking comprehension at the nature of the question being asked. It is a very deep question. One when you start pondering it, every time you’ve come up for a defence against it, you realize it already considered it, and that refutation doesn’t strike at the nature of the question at all.
It is one of the very few, clever questions in philosophy a matrix like AI would be interested in, or be referred to in 50,000 years given it’s cleverness in scope. What makes it so hard is how deceptively simple it is, and how easy it is to answer it, then walk away… Before it strikes you you didn’t quite succeed in refuting it, because the problem posed isn’t what it initially seems.
In terms of loans and paradoxes, it is one if the best ever crafted. You would have better luck in untying the Gordian knot by hand then in completely and authoratively dismissing it. That is the very reason it is still taught. It is the Objective/Subjective divide in philosophy. Devilishly difficult.
I thank God Christians aren’t stuck living within the confines of your demented, limited world view Wyld.
Lol?
You really have no idea what philosophy is, do you.
LOL, you really don’t even know the Ontological Argument of God Anslem proposed, a classic of philosophy, do you?
Looks like someone here is drenched in ignorance, and his name starts with a W.
If Islam would at one point become the same sort of thing against which young people push themselves off into the world, then we’d be on the right track. Ive been pushing for that, looking for that, but it’s tricky in a de-intellectualized society like ours - the day to day ‘intelligentsia’ are far less stimulating than that old book full of sex and death.
I believe that our modern world must and will intensify its non-Abrahamic values; Rome is central, the old Rome, to what we still are at heart.
Are you seriously making the ontological argument for God’s existence? Does it get even dumber than that?
What is this, the 12th century?
Shared, more or less.
God/no god does not influence my decisions. I would only accept a God that pertains to my own values, after all.
Wyld - shows like Game of Thrones could be seen as the most effective means in this time to bind young muslims (intensely popular among them) as it involves comparable violence and morals. It is possible that the West is producing such things in order to retain some if its toughness in the eyes of the young, while as a military society it declines to a robotic sigh.
We always crave rugged strength and violent down to earth combat, it’s deep in our genes. Rome had its coliseum, we have HBO.
HBO is sitting on your ass watching it.
Your being neither rugged nor powerful, but demanding someone else do it. That is the sports mentality, of a few million flabby fucks sitting back drinking, watching a few men kill themselves physically in desperate need for a break.
Someone else formulated that phenomena, I can’t recall who… but it is a fucking joke.
No, Im not defending the Ontological Argument, as I dont defend Ontology… Ive long been skeptical about the legitimacy of Ontology in the first place, Ive noted this in the past, that crazy fuck Christian Anderson (he is a Nietzschean) even formed a so called Ontological Fallacy from it (which is twice as bizarre from my perspective, given I don’t believe in fallacies either… but thats Mr. Anderson for you).
However… What anslem did do was graft the ultimate question one can have for the Dualism Non-Dualism debate. Weve been debating it constantly for the last few thousand years. You really can’t possibly craft a more efficient meyhod than what he did. We still struggle hard with it to this day, underlines our hardest questions about the nature of cognition and knowing.
If you weren’t so much of a noob to philosophy, you would of known a little about this. I called it the Ontological Argument because that is what it generally is known by, not because I support the ideaof Ontology… I have to adapt to the common vocabulary here.
How should we judge Anselm, by his words or his deeds? He was Archbishop of Canterbury shortly after the Norman Conquest, and as such was part of the European occupation of England and the suppression of its people. I’ve never read any of his works and nor do I want to.
Story telling is the oldest and still among the most potent forms of active engagement with human values, existence, and life. There is nothing passive about partaking of exceptionally good quality stories. These sort of things literally change the world. What, do you think sitting around reading a book is somehow passive? It’s no different with very high quality films.
As for dualism or non-dualism, that entire “debate” is a joke. No serious philosopher cares one bit about that nonsensical idiocy, only fools in academic philosophy departments care about that stuff… well also the young kids who those fools attempt to brainwash. Seems to have worked on you, though.
Ontological Argument… I still can’t get over the fact you actually brought that up. You think there is a good “framing of the issues” here? Why don’t you actually tell us what that framing is, why don’t you make a real argument and lay out your ideas plainly for all to see? So far you’ve done nothing of the sort, merely given a YouTube link and then ranted for a while about things I never even brought up, like Nietzsche and ontology.
By default it is passive. Unless you got ADHD. Sit the fuck down and listen or read.
Yeah, also worked on a few of the presocratics, heavily on Aristotle and Theophrastus, who divided all the previous philosopher they know into Dualist and Non-Dualist camps, and most of the philosophers since then touching upon various arguments, to this day, remains a hot academic topic. In India, philosophy is still divided by these divides (I actually use their terminology, given how Liebniz fucked up the terminology in the west) and China and Japan divides it on that basis too.
I’m going to have to stick with all the major philosophers and reject you. You gotta be careful, cause Nietzsche was active on both sides of the argument as well. Half this forum discusses it with AMbigious on and off with his Dasein discussions… That us exactly what he us fighting in.
And YOU, not me, brought up Anslem’s Ontological Argument, you simply failed to grasp the context they were discussing it in. Faith as the basis of knowkedge isnt different from stating the anwser preceeds the question. We wouldn’t be able to have fields like Pure Mathematics if it wasnt for this cignitive insight of St. Anslem. Alot of ideas you thing are purely secural and athiestic, come directly from this.
It is because you never took this seriously (philosophy as a whole, not just Anslem here) that ut is comming as a bewikdering shock. Your used to just shrugging stuff off, saying “Christians bad, athiests good” because you’ve never been challenged on your own ignorance, your used to preaching to a choir of liked minded individuals. Never occured to you to actually apply yourself to difficult problems, great ideas of the past.
At least Nietzsche as a philologist tried to do this at times, snd came back with a admiration of catholic philosophers. He was largely opposed to the insular, ignorant and uncultured Germans who never tried to think or study, or look into the past or abroad for ideas.
People like you. One of the great paradoxes of Nietzsche is why as a wide thinking, well read yet conservative author who detested sloth of mind and insular thinking, he only attracts liberal idiots who general don’t get the sources he is referring to because they don’t read, are more or less the reincarnation of the thick headed Prussian youths he tried to drill new ideas into.
I find it absolutely fascinating and disturbing at the same time. Only conservative (in the Nietzschean sense) I’ve met so far, anywhere, whatsoever was Cezar… But he suffered from the same intellectual languidity. None of you fuckers ever read. I’m sure if he was resurrected, he would earnestly try to kill all of you. If I had followers like you centuries after my death, I would hope for them too all die too.
It is better to have a handful of intellectuals who grasp your system than a sea of misfits misrepresenting it, ruining it. He had a shitty system to begin with, but it is no where near as bad as the collective idiocy on this forum takes it. I think it is unfair to blame Nietzsche for this, why I general attack Nietzscheans instead of Nietzsche here. If we ever get real Nietzscheans here, I will more actively denounce Nietzsche, but that requires a certain level of intellectual activity not found on these forums. Wasn’t on Nietzscheforum.com either.
No, by definition neither reading nor watching film is passive. It can be passive if you’re… passive while doing it.
You’re a “man of action” huh, or prioritize busy-ness (“business”) for its own sake, physical movement, for certainly actually sitting quietly and thinking and working through information and ideas can’t possibly be “active” to you, right? Lol.
Ok now let me read the rest of what you wrote, I’m holding out hope for you still.
No, I didn’t bring up Alselm, you did. Same with Nietzsche.
Those Christians weren’t talking about Alselm, they were talking about how atheists can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, therefore God must exist. It’s classic pathological level stupidity. The ontological argument isn’t something they were seemingly aware of, or if they were they didn’t mention it.
Let me summarize your position:
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A bunch of other philosophers think that a “dualism vs. non-dualism” absolute categorical distinction makes sense, therefore I’m going to think this too, despite that I’ve offered nothing so far by way of explaining any of my ideas along those lines.
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Anselm said some stuff about “faith in knowledge” therefore… (Well I don’t even know, what the fuck is your point even?)
The two common forms of the ontological argument are that 1) we can think about a greatest possible being (whatever “greatest” means) therefore one must exist, and 2) it’s “greater” (again, problematic) to think about a being than cannot be conceived to not-exist than it is to think about a being that can be conceived to not-exist.
These are, both formulations, the stupidest loads of shit that ever passed for reasoning or philosophy. If this is what you think reasoning and philosophy are then you are absolutely incapable of either.
And I read quite a lot, incidentally, as well as currently working on my third book. In one second I think a thousand times more profoundly and deeply than any of this ontological argument garbage… This stuff doesn’t even count as thinking, it’s pure fallacy, psychologism, empty rationalizing.
Atheism is the absence of divine faith, revelation, or intervention.
Great, thanks for that kernel of wisdom.
So others aren’t tempted to think along these same lines, let’s look at what’s wrong with the ontological arguments.
These arguments are nothing but lies. They pretend that we come to an idea (in this case the idea of God) by a way that we do not in fact come to them. How does anyone have this idea of God? Someone told them about it; they were born into a culture with deep historical factors of pushing a certain religious mindset and telling children that this “God” thing exists and has such and such properties and aspects. But religion stays silent on the logic of why such a God should exist, so the medieval philosophers stepped in to try and justify it.
Problem is, you can’t justify an idea you have simply by appealing to something about that idea itself, as idea. Do I believe in cheese because there is something about the “idea of cheese” that requires what I think of as cheese to exist? No, I believe in cheese because I am having an experience of something that has been given the name “cheese”. The ideatums of our ideas, the objects about which our ideas are ideas, are not equivalent to the ideas we have about them. Nor does the idea by itself cause itself to exist, nor does the actual reasons why we believe in the existence of an object come from the idea we have of those objects… In fact, it’s more interesting because our ideas come from, in part, both the object itself which the idea represents/names as well as from that idea’s participation in much larger idea-universes of meaning-- contextual relation.
To pick any idea and try to derive the existence of its supposed object merely out of the idea itself, not looking at either the actual real reasons in our experience for why we hold the idea nor looking at the larger contexts and connections between the idea and other ideas, is really stupid. We don’t believe in triangles because the idea of a triangle somehow gives necessarily the fact that triangles must exist, we believe in triangles because we can draw them and we can define them clearly. Defining the idea of a triangle (a two-dimensional object with three straight lines for sides, lines connected at the ends, with interior angles adding to 180 degrees) comes from how this idea 1) relates to other ideas such as lines, points, angles, and dimensions, and 2) can be demonstrated by simply using a piece of paper and a pencil.
Ideas that are more abstract, like say “justice”, are the same way but constitute more complex experiences and contexts. The idea of justice does not self-derive itself, nor does the mere idea of justice act as sufficient cause for us to declare that the object of this idea in fact exists. Even if we can take the idea and construct an argument from necessity for its object’s existence, this is never in fact how the idea came about. The idea of justice came about because we have experiences with things that we decided to include under the label/name “justice”, we had these experiences already and the idea or concept only abstractly gathered there together and provided further context and meaning to them. The idea extracts something from the experiences of which it is an idea. The idea serves to clarify, define, expand and explain. It is not necessary that any object or existence must produce a certain idea of itself, much less that such an idea would thereby be the rational justification for that object or experience’s existence let alone the in fact reason for why we had the experience, perceived the object, or thought the idea.
The ontological argument is saying that the very idea of God itself, because this is the “greatest” idea (whatever that means… what is “greater” and why, about it?) must therefore exist. The logically necessary implication on which the argument is based is that there is no possible way we humans could have come up with the idea of God unless God actually exists: problem is, that’s not true. It’s quite easy to understand how we could come up with the idea of God, and indeed humans have been having numerous different ideas about God and gods since there have been humans. One easy example of how to arrive at the idea of God, an example other philosophers have used, is to simply take a human being as we experience it, and abstract away all its limitations; limits of duration in time, extension in space, limits of ability to understand and know, moral limits to our goodness, limits of our ability to act (life heavy object, create things, etc)… once you take the idea of a human being and create a new idea of it without any of the limitations common to a human being, you arrive at the template for the idea of a god/gods.
Another example of how to arrive at the idea of God/gods is to look at the bicameral model of the human consciousness and the theory that in the past at a certain point humans started experiencing an inner voice, the inner monologue of language that we all experience today. Once symbolic language developed and became commonplace, at a certain point the experience of having an inner linguistic thought process whereby we can spontaneously talk to ourselves in our own head must have been new and probably overwhelming. Since one of the most basic functions of language is to name things, early humans may have experienced something like looking at things and suddenly had the names of those things appearing in their self-experience as if talking to them… the old pagans could easily have associated this experience with those objects themselves, thus believing that every object has a “God” associated with it or that every experience was a god since each discernible object appeared to speak to them. Objects of greater meaning and forcefulness on their perception would naturally be assumed to be more powerful gods, like the sun, moon, rain storms, and other people.
Ancient peoples believed that certain people among them were gods, and they also believed in gods of the sun, moon, rain, plants and trees, animals, etc. Our ideas about God have been many and evolved over time.
So the premise of the ontological argument is not only stupid but is simply wrong. You can’t derive the existence of something simply by looking at properties contained in your idea of it. Cheese doesn’t exist because the idea of cheese contains the aspect of being yellow, no matter how much “greater” the color of yellow or any other aspect of the idea might be or I might want to imagine it to be.
I can’t believe that anyone in the world even gives a fuck about whether or not there’s a god.