Confession may be good for the soul but it’s often bad for the body! What I believe I state here, hoping not to be stoned for expressing it.
Humans experience being, becoming and belonging. Feuding religions have emerged when any of these three experiences are thought to lack some absolute, substantiating answer to the spurious questions of their meaning and value.
Being is its own meaning and value. To exist is one’s right to exist. No one was born corrupt in a corrupting world. Even the OT has its God elated over the goodness of his/her/its creations. (Matthew Foxe, “Original Blessing”.)
Becoming is a genomic mandate. It is not a test of endurance in a world predestined as some cosmic plan for human salvation. It is a moving potential.
Belonging is the only criteria for ethics we have. The Spinozan concept of a diety comprised of all that exists in the physical world is the only religious philosophy that accounts for the evolution of a diety as an intrinsic part of human evolution.
Now a thing is some material in some form. The human mind abstracts, when it is functioning, form. It cannot abstract material.
I thought Spinoza was one of the greates comedians in the history of Philosophy. Plato had a Theory of forms, which means a theory of definition and judgment.
Spinoza created a theory of material, and could not construct even his fist proposition without a logical fault. Anyone who praises Spinoza reminds me of a person who never gets a joke.
It is clear that Spinoza’s design was deliberate, and that it was a spoof of a high order.
Phil,
Check out Doidge’s “The Brain That Changes Itself”. Every thought leaves a physical trace in the brain. We are now in the 21st century in a time when the Cartesian mind/body split has been disproved. Spinoza saw this coming! Read “Ethics: Part II.”
There is no such animal as an abstraction if by that you mean some mental quality divorced from its physical precursors. Our brains project into the unknown. That amounts to a growth of potential, not to an acknowledgement of some absolute ideal, which was Plato’s bullshit.
Now, in order for us to discuss religious aspirations in a way that does not include judgmentalism, can you actually believe that the Platonic/Christian belief in absolutes has not caused considerable harm to a large majority of humans?
Plato’s bullshit is based on physical fact.
A thing is any difference in any shape or form. Your bodies senses can abstract either shape or form, never the thing in itself.
For example, when you see a brick, the material of the brick does not end up in your head, you abstract its form and disregard its material.
When you eat a burger, you do not become the form of the cow–you abstracted material and discarded the form.
This gives two fundamentally primitive logic systems, which has never been recognized. A fromal system presents them in pairs.
Since you name your abstractions, what Aristotle called inductions, you have this: a definition is the equating of the name of a thing with the names of its various forms and material differences. This maintains an equality in names. Plato tried to get the reader to abstract these notions, but he did not write for the weak minded. Predication is thus the inverse function of abstraction, this maintains truth in language, this is why he told you before you can think, you have to study the exact sciences, they teach you how names, words can and cannot be manipulated.
Plato was a genius, ahead of his time, and certainly still ahead of this time.
Irrellus: [b]One thing, I think, that everyone forgets is that the Cartesian mind/body split cannot be disproven, given that:
Consciousness (subjective experience) and the “physical” are two ontologically distinct entities. The mind is distinct from the “body”. If not, then did consciousness exist before there were such a thing as brains? What happens to consciousness once electrical activity in the neocortex ceases? To follow Chalmers, why do the functioning of neurons give rise to subjective experience (if it does) in the first place? Why can’t this functioning go on “in the dark”, completely independent of conscious experience?
We do not even know if the physical exists. It seems as if we perceive only a simulated reality of the external world beyond conscious experience (if it even exists). It seems odd that nature accidentally gave rise to a three pound piece of flesh at the top of our spines that, shaped as it is and functioning as it does, accidentally possesses the power to create simulated realities (waking “reality” and dreams), with waking reality supposedly existing as a reasonable facsimile of the world existing independent of any conscious experience.
The psychophysical (mind/body) covariances and correspondences (the reflection of a conscious-state with a corresponding brain-state) may, for all we know, only exist as an internal aspect of the simulation itself, independent of a mimickry between subjective experience a mind-independent external world.[/b]
One can say that running does not exist also.
Look at it this way. Think about space. Space is not a thing, but one cannot say it exist or that it does not. A boudary also, is not a thing, but one cannot say that it exists or does not. However, when a boundary is applied to a difference, we do have a thing, and things exist.
This was one of Plato’s points. We abstract from things, either boundary or material, we then can predicate these of a thing, but since we cannot abstract a boundary from a boundary, or a boundary from material, we cannot predicate of them either, they are called first principles, or elements. This is why Euclid named his Geometry the Elements, the elements referred to were difference and boundary. They did not use the term element in the way we use it today.
Plato said, you cannot even assert existence of these elements, you cannot predicate of them at all, it is logically impossible. Predication is the inverse function of abstraction. All you can do is give them a name. This is why convention is the root of all language–and why language is not possible without shared abstractual ability.
My religion has no God just a superior being that is only a superior being with a vested interest in this planet and others. If I had to liken it to any deity it would be the Norse. But even then that is still far from it.
I’m a me-ist. I’m the only one who understand the flux of the universe as it is relevant to me. So I follow the path that only I can see. Sorry guys, you can’t join. It’s a one person religion. Maybe I should be called a scott-ist. I bet the indexicality of the term me-ist would confuse alot of people. Who knows. That’s my two cents. I think the current economic climate, (and other factors) may mean that it’s actually my 1/4 cent, (if you think in terms of buying power). I think I’m getting off subject. I’ll stop now.
I dont have a religion. I have been visiting Kmart for the last past 37 years hoping to get one on a Blue Light special–but so far I have had no luck. Been thinking about switching to Wall Mart, but became paranoid over the idea of my god walking out on me because of patronising the place.
Makes it easy to say the whole population is composed of infidels!
OMG! K-mart? You consort with the wily Bluehairs? Those old ladies scare me. They can get down right mean about those sale bins. Then when the blue light goes on, they become downright cruel.
You are a guy, they might be gentler with males, they may think you are not strong enough to fight. I take my cue to run when I see the teeth come out and the canes start swinging. What ever you do don’t get in front of one with a walker, those are just a ploy to put you off gaurd.
There are some good posts here and some that are incredibly stupid. Not many here seem to comprehend what’s going on in neuroscience as we speak. Oh well, frustration aside, I like the neat comedic deflations of ego some have given here. Now, onto the business at hand–
(Doidge, 2007, p214)–
"By depicting a mechanistic brain Descartes drained the life out of it and slowed the acceptance of brain plasticity more than any other thinker. Any plasticity–any ability to change that we had–existed in the mind, with its changing thoughts, not in the brain.
“But now we can see that our ‘immaterial’ thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won’t someday be explained in physical terms. While we have not yet understood exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is clear that they do, and that the fine line Descartes drew between mind and brain is increaingly a dotted line.”
Here Doidge expresses the fundamental philosophies of neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists.
Demystifying our need for religion entails shooting sacred cows, destroying emotional attachments to idols and debunking reifications that masquerade as reason. In the West Plato’s notion of absolute ideals amounts to a sacred cow, a false idol and a reification. It claims that the human moving potential demands a final end, a closure, an absolute. That claim inevitably leads to an ends justifies the means mentality, which justifies social and religious intolerance. It leads to bifurcation of the real from the ideal in that the latter is held up as superior to the former. Our natural progression of a self that interacts with its environment can, by that claim, become secondary to someone’s visionary experience, even if that experience has not been shared by any majority.
And what does this simplistic criticism add to the discussion? My thoughts on Plato are not my own. The can be found in hundreds of books. You do not state anywhere how “My” (actually not mine") interpretation of Plato is amiss. Do you ever read anything?
I have posted various translations of Plato on the Internet Archive, in both audio book and ebook. Check your own quotes against the text.
internet Archive search johnclark8659, you will not find my name posted on any of it unless you look really hard, but it will bring up what you need to check the validity of your own statements.
