on discussing god and religion

The Meaning of Life
Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

Again, the important distinction here is between an overall essential meaning applicable to everyone and an existential meaning embodied in and through each and every individual. In other words, for many, the fact that different people in different sets of historical, cultural and interpersonal circumstances find meaning in different things for different reasons isn’t acceptable. There has to be someone or something they can go to in order to “officiate” when disputes break out over that which the objectivists among us insist that all reasonable and virtuous men and women are obligated to find meaningful. And for the right reasons.

Thus, historically, being either “one of us” or “one of them”.

On the other hand, it’s impractical for any atheists who choose to interact with others, not to accept that, one way or another, meaning is going to be a part of their lives. It’s inherently a manifestation of all human social, political and economic interactions. Here things come to be more or less meaningful for each of us in any particular context.

Then distinctions can be made between meaning in the either/or world and meaning in the world of conflicting value judgments. Then [from my frame of mind in a No God world] it comes down to how “fractured and fragmented” the self becomes [for all practical purposes] in interacting with others.

This, of course, is just one line of reasoning that those who embrace God and/or a No God religious narrative can take. First God and/or one or another pantheistic “entity”, then the parents/community whose job it is to pass down the ultimate meaning of life to the children. Then on and on into the furture where for most religions there is for each and everyone of us Judgment Day.

Though, clearly, the extent to which science is thrown into the mix here, will vary considerably. At least in the modern world where science is everywhere.

It seems to me that “meaning of life” is a metaphor which implies that there is something outside of or beyond life that life refers to like a word refers to an object. So the trope "meaning of life " implies transcendence. Of course, to me transcendence isn’t necessarily theistic in the narrow sense that you describe it. Anyway, the metaphor seems to depend on a cognitive frame implying transcendence. So if you remove transcendence as a possibility, the expression “meaning of life” has no meaning.

i’ve got this excellent essay in a book somewhere but i ain’t about to type the thing out and i can’t find it online… but there is this:

reasonandmeaning.com/2015/11/23 … he-absurd/

philosopher’s have been wrestling with ‘meaninglessness’ for thousands of years… and yet it didn’t take nagel three pages to

Read and appreciated Nagel’s “Vew from Nowhere”. Still, the unconscious psyche speaks to us in images including those of transcendence. The insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein came in images not hypotheses or conclusions drawn from logical deduction. There is more to reality than the divided self of the western modern mindset which dismisses it or tries to explain it away.

Again, another intellectual contraption.

From the perspective of God and religion, coupled with the manner in which I choose to approach them here, the “meaning of life” revolves around one or another denominational narrative, such that meaning becomes the embodiment of the “will of God”. That becomes the overarching teleological component of one’s life – either from the perspective of Western faiths or Eastern faiths.

Religious agendas, in other words, that revolve around this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism

But my aim is to go beyond general descriptions of one’s faith and focus instead on how one intertwines one’s beliefs and value judgments in the behaviors that one chooses on this side of the grave. As that pertains to one’s belief about the fate of “I” on the other side of it.

Thus, in any particular context, what is meaningful to you? Why is it meaningful to you? How, in the course of living your life, did that meaning come about? How is that meaning related to your religious beliefs? How did those beliefs in turn come about given the agglomeration of a particular set of experiences?

And then the part where the religious folks here go beyond merely stating what they believe and attempt in turn to demonstrate through descriptions of actual experiences and an accumulation of substantive evidence why and how what they believe goes beyond just what is all “in their heads”.

Yet 67 pages into this thread, and how often has that sort of exchange unfolded?

What you did right there I dismiss as an intellectual contraption. That was easy. It didn’t require a reasonable argument or even that I comprehended what you meant. That’s how you dismiss people’s thought on virtually every one of your posts. Why would anyone bother to play your game according to your “heads I win tails you lose” rules?

In my view, you point this out only in order to avoid [over and over again] discussing in detail your own chosen behaviors on this side of the grave, as that pertains to your religious beliefs, as that pertains to what you believe about the fate of your own particular “I” on the other side of the grave.

Let alone in supplying us with actual evidence able to demonstrate that what you believe here is in fact true.

So, again:

Or, once again, wiggle out of going there by making me the issue instead.

Oh, and how on earth do I win anything here? I don’t believe in the “real me” able to be in sync with “the right thing to do” on this side of the grave. I don’t have that to comfort and console me. On the contrary, to me it seems reasonable to assess the human condition as encompassing what appears to be, in a No God universe, an essentially meaningless existence. And one that ends in the obliteration of “I” for all of eternity after I tumble over into the abyss that is death.

Now, of course, I am no more able to demonstrate that this is true than you can your own beliefs. Instead, I can only point to the accumulattion of personal experiences that I have had that predispose me existentially to believe what I do “here and now”.

It’s just when I suggest this appears to be applicable to everyone that the objectivists will often become rather apoplectic.

I think your POV and your conditions of discourse require objective dogmas for you to shoot down. The way I think doesn’t fit into that kind of frame.

Apparently you used to hold an religion dogmatically like that yourself. So that’s religion as you understand it and it failed you. When someone departs from that model, you “don’t know what on earth [they] are talking about.”

In addition to that, I have observed that in your dialogue with others you play a zero-sum game. You seem to learn nothing from the interaction. That can be seen by your repetitive use of the same old tropes, post after post.

There are smart people here who come at life from a variety of perspectives that one can learn from. I don’t see evidence that your doing that. I do see you displaying scads of confirmation bias.

But, openness may be to some extent a personality trait that is relatively stable across time. If so, what you suppose to be a point of view you arrived at by way of reason, may actually be a fixed feature of your personality. Sad but maybe true.

To top it off, when people become frustrated with your modus operandi , you think they are the ones with a problem. I’ve watched you do this over and over.

It’s possible that you persist here because on some level [probably unconscious] you are actually seeking a way to transcendence that you can’t shoot down. The Tao Te Ching talks about the principle in which everything becomes its opposite. Based on what you have shared of your bio, that apparently has happened to you more than once in your life. Maybe you hope it will happen again.

Shortly followed by…

iow what is good for the goose is verboten for the gander…

Both posts with a footer that says…

Thus making his entire output in the context of what he is doing to others - shooting them in a barrel, metaphorically - and the reasons why they do what they do to him, his psychic conclusions, in advance of any possible discussion.

and where every post is asking people to describe their own personal experiences, how they affected them, their own epistemology, so that he can tell them it is only in their head, since they have not convinced every rational person.

IOW there is an extreme irony in the ‘making me the issue’. It should read…the terms here are only you are the issue, I transcend.

Note to others:

What on earth does that have to do with this:

It’s just another wiggle to me.

He will focus in on the whole point this thread was created or he won’t. Though, sure, if he needs to make this all about me, instead, why doesn’t he just start a new thread: on discussing iambiguous.

In Rant if he prefers.

Sure, why not. If thumping me floats your boat here.

With you though, I am discussing these relationships with someone who, I presume, like me, is both in the No God camp and on the side of those who “here and now” eschew objective morality.

We are both pragmatists. Only I am still unclear as to how you react to others at the existential intersection of conflicting goods, dasein and political economy. To what extent, in your interactions with others re conflicting goods, are you not as “fractured and fragmented” as “I” am.

How in a No God world can a mere mortal not be?

So you call yourself a pragmatist. Geez, you mean like Peirce [“pragmaticism” ] or William James or Dewey? Or more recently Rorty?

Furthermore Rorty said,

If that’s your position, I’ve been following your posts for a while and somehow I missed it.

And for me it’s a surprise since I once called myself a pragmatist and for months he took this to mean I had contraptions. I pointed out that he was a pragmatist in the sense I meant it and I do not recall him ever acknowledging this, in fact calling me a pragmatist was part of showing that we were different, that this was part of the just in my head contraptions that kept me from being as fractured and fragmented as him. I could have missed his acknowledgment, give the massive output of, well, both of us.

Of course, if he thinks this

is good, then he is not merely a pragmatist, but an objectivist. If he thinks it is what he prefers, then he can be pragmatic about trying to achieve it and not be an objectivist. As always there are contradictions. point them out at one’s own risk.

IOW what is contained in there has nothing to do with pragmatism, per se. Though one can be pragmatic in relation to those goals.

My point in quoting Rorty is to show that this leading pragmatist effectively argues against the moral nihilism that iambiguous maintains necessarily follows from pragmatic premises in a so-called " godless" world.

Unlike, it seems, Phyllo, I do see the personal as the only route to the political and the philosophical. And the individual person’s philosophy. You frame this as ‘thumping’ you and that this might ‘float my boat’. As if that was a silly thing. In fact, I think that both in process and implicit content, there is something I dislike greatly in your philosophy. So, as dialogue partner and then in the implied specific type of nihilism you have. Not that lack of objective morals, obviously. So, not the floats my boat, gives me some kind of shallow, hey, if you wanna play pokeman all day way. But as something I think is important in relation to what I want things to be like, including ILP.

We can see a snippet of this here. There is nothing implicit in non-objectivism that leads to being fractured and fragmented. It does not in any way lead to one repeatedly needing to present hopelessness and not knowing what to do as you do here. There is nothing in it that leads to the conclusion that if someone is engaged with life, they must have contraptions (fake beliefs in their heads that soothe and comfort and unify them).

I have tried many times in a variety of ways to demonstrate that these are not logical or necessitated conclusions or effects of being a non-objectivist.

If someone is not like you, then you assume that they are a variety of things

Because IN YOU
certain ideas correlate (at least) with certain ways you suffer.

That other people migth react differently seems to be beyond possibility for reasons never fully articulated. In fact, according to you the onus is on others to convince you that everyone should feel like them via rational argument.

How do I deal with conflicting goods? Well, I view them as conflicting preferences (though often I think people think they should think X is good when in fact they are undercutting themselves). I recognize and try to be realistic about these people, how they may react to me, why they think the way they do, and do my best to protect myself and move any situation, organization, society, individual, if possible in the direction I wish they would go in.

An example: I’d prefer it if stores used decomposable bags, cornstarch, whatever. I try to influence the management of a store, real example. I may present the issue in moral terms, because that’s how most people think. Perhaps I get economic reasons why they ‘can’t’. I used, in fact, whatever tools available to pressure them to change. They did, though likely not because of me, or only in tiny part. I cannot mount an argument to prove that we should give a shit about microparticals of plastics ending up in fish bloodstreams (like nanoparticles of utterly unregulated nanoproducts are already causing in the first days of THAT industry). I cannot prove that we should keep nauture healthy even if it reduces G_NP or whatever. Nah. But I use the tools I have available, pursuing the protection and flourishing of what I value. I don’t feel fractured because…

No, wait. I do not have the onus for that.

You have the onus for demonstrating why I should feel fractured because people have different ideas of what they want and most of them call X good and Y bad objectively.

I see no reason.

You have written threads about ‘how one ought to live’. Like it is obvious that everyone should and does want to know this. To me this is as if you do not exist already. If someone came up with what seemed like a perfect argument about why we should all be pedophiles, even if I could not refute it, I ain’t gonna be one. And I will continue to struggle to minimize their acceptance. Perhaps I am selfish and you’re not. I have accused you of having a Christ complex. Shit, I dunno. But it seems like, at least in the facade you present here, you see no reason to trust yourself. You yearn for a deity or scientific proof of how you should live. Animals don’t have this. They are not fractured and fragmented, unless they are traumatized. I have suggested that in fact your fragmentation comes from trauma. I don’t know if this is true, but it seems to you as if you do not even need to consider this. No, you are fragmented because of metaphysics or perhaps epistemology. I think that is likely parallel to that the anorexic with parents who lived through the Holocaust thinking she will be happier if she weight less and it is her weight that is the problem. But I don’t know if and or how much you’ve been traumatized.

It’s just that what you present doesn’t make sense.

And you function as a kind of lure into conversations in which you do not participate as an equal. You presume high status, while at the same time, often, bemoaning your state. I dislike the disruption you cause here in ILP, regularly hijacking threads. I dislike the way you treat people mocking them and judging them morally while at the same time saying you cannot know morally and also playing the victim when they make you the issue, despite you placing them as the issue over and over.

Again, look at your footer. I mean, at least it is honest. The first quote is smug and superior and aggressive.

You can make disclaimers, yes. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think I know wink to the gallery stuff.

But that’s nothing like conceding a point or really considering another person’s position.

So, it floats my boat to try to contain and signpost what I see as an icky, primarily anti-life position. Where someone not fractured is presumed to be some kind of objectivist and that that person needs to prove to you why every human on earth should be like them.

Yes, on the surface you are different from the fundamentalists, who generally cannot manage to utter a disclaimer that they might be wrong.

But implicit is a very rigid position and one that fills up so much space,not just restricted to your threads.

Just once, it would be a miracle, if you said: hm, maybe I really don’t know what I am doing here. Or, maybe you are right, maybe the source of my problem is not what I present it as. Or yes, you might be right, maybe I have been dealing with others in a way here that is disrespectful or assuming the onus is on you when I in fact as assuming the things you are pointing out…let me mull that over. For real. Not these disclaimers wehre it is clear you have no interest in actually exploring, but presented as ways to be consistant.

It’s a part of a larger pattern. You are unique case. A unique individual. And mixed in with what I see as incoherencies and a lack of candor, are also good points and ideas, unfortunately repeated ad infinitum. But part of the reason it

floats my boat. Or, I would say, part of the reason I find it important to me to get in your way, is because I dislike people, like the fundamentalists, who don’t know how to live or take care of themselves, or notice their own complexity, or have the courage to introspect and be honest about how they feel and what triggered it,
waving the moral finger.

And you do this. Yes, you add disclaimers. Because this is what one should do. One should be like you adding in disclaimers. One should be like you willing to negotiate and compromise (as if many objectivists aren’t capable of these things).

You are yet another entitled moralist. Filling vast swathes of media space - in my little world in this case - and seeming not to even know yourself while constantly pointing a finger. At least now the finger is more openly present in the footer of every post.

I wish the larger group of which you are a unique member could all actually face what their feelings are, rather than the egosyntonic ones’ they present. I don’t know exactly what you are going through. But your presentation does not hold. It doesn’t even match your footer, where at least something honest is peeking through.

And no matter how many quite intelligent, including emotionally intelligent people, you dismiss it.

That’s the confidence of a fundamentalist. Fortunately, I gave up long ago thinking you could listen. I do like putting up warning signs about the algae levels at the beach. And it is interesting holding up the mirror even if you can’t look into it.

But God it would be nice if you’d stop having loose verbal bowels all over the place in the forums.

The Meaning of Life
Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

This in and of itself speaks volumes. First we define God. And then we agree that this definition includes goodness. Then we define goodness. And then we agree which behaviors are good and which are not. All “by definition”.

Meanwhile beyond this world of words itself, what God? What behaviors? In what context?

And then the part where, in one or an other scripture, we note that God does things that, if mere mortals were to do them, they would be ostracized and condemned. Or punished legally.

What to do? Well, make it part of the definition of God that He works in mysterious ways…beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

Again, it’s all done with words. Words defined in particular ways. But definitions of things and of relationships that are not really there to be tested or demonstrated or confirmed beyond a particular consensus in a particular community.

Same with the really Big Questions…going all the way out on both the metaphysical and the existential limb:

There is almost nothing that cannot be defined into existence here. If you can think it up, imagine it, want it, desire it, then make it part of the definition. Here a definition of God in relationship to the existence of humankind on planet Earth. And all of those trillions of other planets in billions of other galaxies in what may well be billions of other universes? Just make all that part of your definition of God Himself.

Same basically for the secular religions. Define nature in a particular way. Define the parameters of a political ideology in a particular way. Define the boundaries of an enlightened spiritual path in a particular way.

Some things and some relationships will exist that can in fact be demonstrated to be true for all. Other things, however, will bind you together based more on the definition of words used in order to encompass things and relationships revolving around actual existential identity and value judgments and political power.

Here things only have to be accepted among any aggregation of human beings “in their heads”.

The definition and the meaning of words will alone suffice.

What is he going to get out of my personal stories or your personal stories?

Someone might ask another for their opinion on the morality of abortion. She is smack dab in the middle of an unwanted pregnancy and is uncertain which way to go.

Now, the pro life objectivist is likely to tell her why [re God or No God] it is immoral to kill her unborn baby.

While the pro-choice objectivist is likely to tell her why [No God most likely] it is immoral to force pregnant women to give birth.

Me? I can only point out that I am drawn and quartered. My “I” here is “fractured and fragmented”. She wonders what I mean by that.

So I note how, given the actual existential interaction between my “personal stories” and the philosophy I have read relating to ethics, my own “I” here is embodied in the points I raise on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

Now, as that pertains to the gist of this thread, I can only tell her that “I” am still in fact divided and conquered in regard to conflicting goods; and that, since I don’t believe in God, the behaviors I choose in regard to abortion on this side of the grave are moot. Why? Because I don’t expect there to be the equivalent of Judgment Day re the other side.

Instead, if, for all practical purposes, I am ever in a context that involves abortion, my concern is likely to revolve around what the law says about abortion there and then and what the consequences might be if I choose this behavior instead of that.

For example, if the Supremes rule to abort Roe v. Wade here in the USA and a pregnant woman ask my help in getting an abortion, I risk getting arrested and imprisoned for doing so. And the judicial system is not likely to take into account my own moral ambivalence in regard to it.

How about you? What would you do? What would you tell her? Why? And how is your answer here not going to be intertwined existentially in your “personal stories” and your philosophical propensities?

Go into some detail here and I will tell you what I get out of it.

Or, sure, wiggle out of that part [again] and go back to making me the issue.

A pregnant woman is not asking me anything. An old guy is.

Is this an intellectual contraption or not?!!!

The only way in which any of us could fully understand either the optimal or the only rational manner in which to confront those objectivists who believe they are the embodiment of the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”, and those subjectivists who are hopelessly “fractured and fragmented”, is to grasp an ontological understanding of existence itself.

Well, that’s not me. Instead, I put myself out in the world and, existentially, attempt to explain how “I” think and feel when confronting conflicting goods given a particular context. And given some measure of autonomy

After all, for all practical purposes [in a No God world],what else is there?

Here I can be a pragmatist in that I recognize my thinking and feeling are derived more from dasein than from what I have come to believe philosophy or science is able to establish as in fact true. About anything from abortion or the rights of animals to human sexuality or genocide.

This part…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…is still always there for me.

How, in a particular context, is this not applicable to you?

Again, in what particular context? Instead:

Same thing. How are our reactions to words like this given a particular set of circumstances brimming with conflicting goods not going to be the embodiment of dasein?

And yet any number of other people dealing with the same set of circumstances use their own tools to come to the same or different conclusions. And the narcissists/sociopaths can argue “fuck all that, what’s in it for me”?

My point is only to suggest that, sans God, there is no argument that mere mortals can make that settles it once and for all. Such that all rational human beings must behave in a particular way here because philosophically they are obligated to.

Or, rather, that the argument may exist, but I have not yet come across it myself.

On the contrary, the onus would be on me if I insisted all rational men and women are obligated to be or to feel fractured and fragmented because that is the only thing rational thinking dictates here.

I have no idea what this means. I merely point out that, given the “human condition”, we live in a world where individual people [biologically] have wants and needs. This is embedded in many, many different historical, cultural and experiential [interpersonal] contexts. So, given this, it’s only realistic to note that when behaviors come into conflict, people will wonder what the rules of behavior ought to be. Tao facilitate the least dysfunctional interactions. And, then, will they be predicated on might, on right, or on moderation, negotiation and compromise?

And I point out that had your life been very, very different, you may well have been one yourself. And even if historically and culturally the general consensus is that the sexual exploitation and abuse of children is wrong, there are those able to rationalize it because their whole moral perspective [in a No God world] revolves entirely around “what’s in it for me”?

And in fact the way you feel about the abuse of children is precisely the argument that pro-life folks makes in arguing against abortion. What abuse could be worse than shredding babies in a Planned Parenthood clinic? Or discuss and debate the consumption of animal flesh with PETA fanatics. Or the right to bear arms with NRA members. There are any number of folks regarding any number of conflicting goods who insist they too would never be “one of them”; and will “continue to struggle to minimize their acceptance.”

My point again are value judgments of this sort derived more from the manner in I construe the meaning of dasein in my signature thread or more from the manner in which these folks have been able to concoct the “perfect argument”?

Including the relationship between the “self” that you have accumulated existentially and your own value judgments.

Again, we need a context. A discussion regarding our own behaviors with respect to the existential juncture that is identity and value judgments. A discussion in which you can point out in detail how I am guilty as charged of all these practices.

But, by and large, you prefer to keep everything up in the general description clouds of abstractions:

Note to others:

What do you think he is proposing about me here? And let’s make it about something we can tie in to the thread. Something, in other words, that he and believe about the relationship between the behaviors we choose on this side of the grave, as that pertains to God and religion, as that pertains to what we anticipate our fate will be on the other side of grave.

But:

As that pertains to the manner in which I construe my self here as “fractured and fragmented” and the manner in which he construes his own “I” differently.