If one believes there is some sort of divine purpose to the universe, does this presuppose a teleological direction? And if so, would not history be able to give us some clues as to what that direction is?
What does history show us about where we’ve been and where we’re headed, and does this process - the process of history - tell us anything about divinity?
Hi Jerry,
To answer your question one must expose their apriori assumption of knowing. Some will say that all is knowable. Theat there is only known and yet to be known Others would say that there is known and unknown (duality) and the unknowable (ineffable). I’ve been battered about enough on that subject, and I ain’t going there.
The fun begins when we attempt to use the tools of our dual nature to “know” of the metaphysical nature of the universe. It would be amusing, but some actually take it seriously. I will go to hell for that.
Historically, you can find any answer you want. The blind men and the elephant seems the most accurate for me, but I’m already at risk of being stoned, so I’ll leave off.
JT
male/female=male/female
God=0,nonexistent,fake,lie,word-worship,gay rights,the whole nine yards of stupid and evil thought that made the bible and it’s nonsense.
Donnie,
Seriously. You’re absolutely non-sensical.
Why are you here? Why are you here at ILP and, more specifically, why are you here under one of my threads again?
You’re a total nut case. Go home.
Here are your alternatives, Jerry.
1a. The universe will implode and immanent life will cease.
2a. The universe will remain and immanent life will continue organically.
3a. The universe will remain and immanent life will continue cybernetically.
1b. The universe will implode and immanent life will become transcendent. God exists.
2b. The universe will implode and immanent life will cease and not become transcendent. God exists.
3b. The universe will remain and life will continue both immanently, transcendentally, organically and/or cybernetically. God exists.
That’s pretty much it. Now, given all these alternatives, the best one to shoot for would be 2a. Its the least controversial belief system to run things by. So now life becomes a sort of utilitarianistic hedonist imperative-- we want physical pleasure, long life, successful species, and limitless resources. So what do we do? We become gardeners and great planners.
Now for the bad news. Capitalism is the worst possible form of horticulture. It burns the soil up faster than accomodations can be made to find more soil. We gotta keep population and materialism calm until we get our hands on the moon, or Mars, or somewhere else where we can plant our wretched roots.
So you are looking for God, Jerry, and I’m telling you that this search is irrelevent right now. God will not save us or justify us or anything else. You’re never going to defend capitalism or democracy or freedom any other philosophy by resorting to some kind of metaphysics. Our existence is in the meat and potatos. If we have spirits, great, but we’re not concerned with that while the atmosphere is warming and ice caps are melting and mad cow disease is rampant and japanese girls grow junk in da trunk.
I want science. Screw God. I want Feuerbach.
Hmm. Rambling, but at least you make a bit more sense than Donnie.
And I think that’s important, détrop. It’s a worthwhile goal to keep in mind, making more sense than Donnie.
Hang in there, kid. You’re gonna to be just fine.
im here to spread the Truth.
i am Home.
Well if you’re sincerely interested in that, then you’re going to have to find a way to make yourself more clear.
Please take this in the spirit with which it is intended. Hopefully there is something you can learn here. Something important.
If your purpose here is to engage others in dialogue, and make yourself understood, then you’re going to have to learn how to communicate much better than you are communicating. You’re going to have to, first and foremost, learn something of empathy. For one to communicate effectively, one needs to consider one’s audience. Ask yourself how your writing might be perceived by others. Ask yourself if your attempts at getting a point across are effective or not. Put yourself in the shoes of the potential reader. Try to have the reader in mind as you are writing.
My advice to you, Donnie, for whatever it might be worth, would be to take a week or so and hang back and just read some of what is written around here. Notice how some of the more effective posters convey their ideas. Take note of their styles and their methods of getting their ideas across.
Try to refrain from posting for a bit. Just watch, and learn. Then come back when you’re more ready. We’ll be here. And we’ll all look forward to more rewarding, more cogent, more understandable posts.
Best of luck to you, my friend.
Jerry,
I will take your words into consideration,only if a deal is made,i would love to spread the truth with more wide open thoughts but that is hard for me to do because i’ve always been a closed-minded person around many groups of people.
i have had some past theories,some still remian in mind,but every time i mention one of them i’m either laughed at or cursed at which is wrong for any thread running,i would open a thread that allows everyone to the truth,but i’m not going to take another risk of being a humor to others.
your suggesting i slow down my thinking,and stop posting,that’s very difficult for me if your not aware,that is because i have been like you have said “everywhere at once”,it’s hard to be more clear when the truth can’t extend itself much furthur.
i will try to see things with a two-person perspective but that’s kind of hard i don’t have a back up consciousness to tell me what i should or shouldn’t be doing,it’s not part of my character.
in conclusion i will do my hardest to try and refrain posting as you desire,
when i arrive i might be able to use more upper-class words to make my points,but that’s very hard for me as well,i come to these forums to share myself into the world i might never be in again,isn’t that reason enough to be a philosopher of a different taste?.
P.s
i usually ignore when people are talking to me in forums,so i guess it was instinct that made me have to answer you,this time above many others.
If there is even one man, even he has many many directions during his time, and what of all life on our earth?
We have many, many directions and purposes; when we claim one is divine, it is arrogance; when one works in the long term, it is pragmatic, which is what I consider to be real truth.
He’s not a nut-case. 
“gay-rights” should be replaced with the word “reproductive outcome of homosexuals.” The idea here is that “God” doesn’t work or produce results, but it is still prepetuated and we see all religion that contradicts itself, and it keeps on sucking resources out of society and corrupting the children of the future.
Please, for once, why doesn’t anybody’s all-might God defend and speek for himself, instead of those claiming to know “Him” speeking for “Him”?
“Why do we expect life to have one meaning, when the eagle’s meaning is to kill the fish, and the fish’s meaning was to not be killed by the eagle, but instead its meaning was to reproduce and live long? We expect life to have one meaning – when we expect life to have one master, which is who we call “God”. Life has no master. Those who play the master over life, will kill without reason, and they will become madness.”
The eagle may make the fish’s meaning into “Food”, though if the eagle were not alive, the fish’s meaning would not be a death for another, but life for itself.
The eagle is the tyrant here, which is then viewed with reverance and respect by the men of nature.
God… You took this eagle’s place, and you struck down the wicked and then gave commandments? Or were you an anceint lie of an old despot?
Life’s meaning – is selfishness and responsability. Stop serving the master, stop mastering others, I’d then call this freedom.
Life has Two meanings:
1.Live
2.stay alive
(until you expire by ntural human death because your cubic human metamorphosis).
the eagle meaning is to stay alive by consuming the fish;'Word God eats Child Life".
the fishes meaning is to stay alive and avoid the eage;
"St. Petersburg Times is Evil
for refusing to inform public
about the recent discovery of
Nature’s 4-Day Time Cube -
greatest scientific discovery
of humanity… provingTime
Cube obscurantism as equal
to Forbidden Knowledge, or
to a criminal brainwashing
of children by the educators. "
i hope Dan~ sees what i’m saying,adults are no better then God in his eagle form their actually more of a deceitful snake,just remember “love your enemies” you can warn your parents of them doing wrong,showing them is hard,that’s why their is no cubic educator on earth,gene ray is the wisest human,i know he is old,yes thats very true,but you might be older then me,but i would never disrespect you.
that’s right,humanity should be aware of itself,but doesnt mean you have to cause war because someone recognizes your CubelessnessWord Worship. we expect life to have one meaning indeed,but we should give it the chance of a square rotaion meaning-without a “God”.you can save yourself and dodge the eagle and the other fish,its called self-awanress and Cubism.
Okay, I’m going to try to sidestep the weirdness here and try this again because, dammit, this is a good topic.
Hegel, for example, believed that if the world is under the control of God, then the whole historical process might be contemplated as divinity realizing itself in history.
The historical process embodies progress, but progress through continuous series’ of opposing ideas meeting each other, doing battle with one another. New qualities result from the tension between opposing ideas. Idea A conflicts with Idea B, and Idea C results from the conflict. It can be brutal, it can be hard. History shows this. But from the wreckage of conflict come new ideas and new directions, inexorably moving the world through a teleological path.
The question is, do we see evidence of this happening? Can we spot a direction for the universe using history as evidence?
And can one contemplate such a thing without appealing to hard determinism?
This is good stuff, folks. I’m not letting it go.
Hey Jerry,
Good man! Hegel was right, but his understanding came with the one-behind-many theses intact. As one contemplates the metaphysical questions you can always find those interpretations to fit whatever you would like to see, but you’re stepping off into the soft stuff.
I have no problem accepting an awareness of something, but to say I “know” anything about that awareness is merely projecting my own preferred explanation.
It is equally possible that God, or any other label you choose, is shown historically to be the ebb and flow of coming into being and returning and nothing else. Science may someday be able to explain all of the ‘hows’, but not the ‘whys’.
The single point creator does bring with it the problem of a determinate universe because it removes sponteniety and novelty from the equation. You and I have been through this before, kinda sorta, but I simply have no confidence in a be-all creator POV,regardless my christian upbringing. The eastern understandings, of which there are several, seem intuitively correct to me. Of course, once we approach the metaphysical, I have as little proof to offer as any. So I join all the other street corner magicians in front of their little fold-up tables. “Pick a card, any card…”
JT
Careful brother tenative. Fixation with particular labels can obviate an obviously useful philosophical discourse.
Singularity of divinity is entirely a human creation, not a divine one. Our fractured and segmentary perception finds need of limiting “god being” to our scope of understanding. True divinity is as without limits as Tao, and the two can be said to be the manifest of the same.
A flowing, ever experiential universe as divinity or Tao is not outside context. Providing “proof”, in the defined empiricism of human understanding represents an unsovlable due to a lack of unfalsifiable definitions.
Still thinking … <****>
Hi Mas,
ummm, isn’t that labeling all that is (field) as divinity? And don’t we have to use manifest language to express that? 
Yes of course Tao and divinity are without limit, but in that, is there not only silence as a response?
Ineffable
JT
Only from the perspective of your thinker rock, not from the state of original being. I contend disagreement.
Mas,
But that which is can only be seen from a perspectival point. To suggest that one may apprehend outside of thinking feeling is incomprehensible. Conceptually I agree with you, but the moment you apply thought you have introduced perspective. You’ve a mind. Sorry, but you’re stuck with it. 
JT
Again, I contend disagreement.
The mind is only one facet of learning, and is easily equaled by the entirety of the neural map of the body. In meditation, these neural pathways can be brought to full “awareness”, much in the same way a satellite antenae works.
There is no cognition involved, it is sensory, not cognitive. Christians I have spoke with, along with Sufists, Kabbalahists, Buddhists, Zen have all expressed states of “body awareness” in deep meditation/prayer/fasting prayer.
During these states, a higher level of working can be achieved, more directly, a “natural level” of working, and the human stops being a cognitive mind, and drifts towards aware totality of being. Which in essence is the root of Tao, or divinity - ultimate state of awareness. Thus cognition is superceded by original being.
Micro and macro merge, inner and outer merge, duality and paradox fall away, revealing a singularity of existence.
Singularity of existence can then be furthered. After consistent exposure to the state, time becomes oblivion, as no point on the line differs from any other point on any other line. Past, present, future become a single dot pitch.
It portends the possibility of expressing “god-being” from singularity, which illuminates the difference in perspective as grasped through a construct of time, delineated, making the “historical” to be “present”.
History of the universe being “known”, perhaps not. Singularity of existence, stripping away the human constructed, yielding awareness - possible.
Mas,
Yes. I have been there for brief excursions from time to time, but while one can say “I have experienced” one may not say that experience without mediated thought and language. Total awareness and expressing the content of that awareness are two different things.
Jerry, help me out here. Aren’t you asking for a sharable understanding vis-a-vis language?
At least in my understanding of the original question, we are still stuck with expressing the experience, and not having the experience itself.
JT