WEIRD CHRISTIANITY #5: "Pray To The Lucid Dreamer!"

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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[size=200]Foreword[/size]

[b]Hopefully, this installment of Weird Christianity will not be my last.

I’m undergoing light surgery tomorrow, and hope nothing goes wrong. If all goes well, I will continue with the second part of[/b] Weird Christianity [b]#5 (the first part presented for your perusal below) with all due haste, with a planned presentation by late August or early September. Then on to the penultimate (next to last) issue of Weird (a psychoanalysis of Satan the Devil) followed by the last installment of the series, Weird Christianity #7 (something very special for everyone).

Following the surgery I will post my return and engage other threads in ILP while finishing WC#5. To all moderators, thank you so much for allowing me the space to present these unique threads. You are awesome. Thanks also to all ILP correspondents who responded, with praise or criticism, to this fantastic strain of Christianity and my other views, particularly those in denial of the existence of the physical.

So on with the show! Behold the pageantry below, the ultimate Christian hypothesis.

Ciao (for now),

phenomenal graffiti[/b]

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I haven’t read much yet, and have some things to do, but I hope the best for your surgery, and want to give you kudos on these Weird Christianity’s you’ve been making. I think all the work you put into them is awesome :slight_smile: I disagree with a lot of it, but it is very engaging. Maybe when you’re finished you can try publishing it as a graphic “novel” or something.

As I said, I didn’t read much, but I sort of disagreed on the relevance and point (validity of the logic, and argument your moving towards) only a few pages in, because I feel what follows kind of rests on a misunderstanding, and contradiction (a very popular one). When Epicurus says “good” and “evil” he pretty just means pleasure and pain. So the word is completely individualized…it only seems like a definite absolute and object thing/quality because most everyone associates certain things with pleasure and pain; because certain things are so obviously and definitely good and evil, the idea of their being an absolute goodness and absolute evil are “common sense”.

Epicurus’ “riddle” assumes:

A) there is no afterlife

B) goodness and evil are objective; that which is good is absolutely (not subjectively–maybe for one but not necessarily for another) good, and evil is evil

C) his own pain/displeasure is (objectively) evil (it, as a totally accurate insight of evil, demonstrates an objective existence of evil)

So he defines and uses good and evil as if he (by experiencing pleasure and pain, and how he feels at a moment) is the absolute judge of its existence. That’s reasonable if he knows “good” and “evil” are not real things in themselves, but completely individual colors that one paints things that concern him, and that since he sees no reason to believe there is any god (objective maker/judger of a “good” man must strive for, which man can get closer to through “good” actions that maintain their goodness regardless of any displeasure that may result) he has no reason to actually think of those words–to operate according to them, to use them, as ideals–in any other way than according to his own personal reactions to stimuli.

But he doesn’t do that. He actually then uses those words, that only have that reasonable consciously-subjective meaning with the denial of objective goods and evils (that are not always in line with one’s personal pleasures and pains), AS IF they ARE objective, to argue against the existence of an all powerful and all knowing benevolent god (with good will towards man), because the ultimate value and plan and righteousness as defined by such an ultimate creator, and approved when he “saw it was good” throughout his creation, must agree with the judgement of “good” and “bad” made by one who bases his definitions solely on his own likes and dislikes…

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Matthatter:

[b]Thank you very much for your kind sentiment. The surgery went quite well (although I was unconscious: what must have been an hour or two to the people working on me, and my mom in the waiting room, was mere seconds to my first-person subjective point of view :sunglasses:. One second, after receiving a dose of anesthesia in my IV, I’m making friendly conversation with the attending staff: a microsecond later I’m coming to, my doctor and several nurses standing before me, half out of their scrubs, to inform me that everything went fine. Karl Popper’s scientific demarcation at work, my friend. Through “scientic” research in undergoing the procedure, I verify to myself that consciousness is, after all, nothing but a simulated reality or a subjective universe unto itself. Existence, to the conscious being, is only first-person subjective experience. Whatever exists beyond that is a matter of faith (even with denial of sollipsism ).

But on to the important stuff…[/b]

[b]The difference between “objective” and “subjective” as you imply, are the differences between individual responses and immutable “goods” and “evils” existing independently (if only in principle) of any human’s subjective experience or perspeective? If so, Epicurus, Hume, and everyone else are certainly unqualified to judge what is “good” and what is “evil”, much less use their quasi-knowledge (ultimately ignorance) to decisively rule out the existence of God.

But we have no knowledge of anything beyond our experience, and it may be that benevolence, as understood by God, means the same as it does to man (as Hume wondered in the negative). If so, then individual reaction to stimuli notwithstanding, “evil” becomes the objective rubric of all negative experience and all mentality that allows, supports, or deliberately causes negative experience. “Good”, then, becomes an objective rubric that is the polar opposite of evil: all positive experience (independent of that positive experience arising from allowance, support, and deliberate causation of negative experience) and that mentality that allows, supports, or deliberately causes positive experience.

This “objective” good and evil, then, is the product of every experiencing being, not the isolated relativity of a single being’s likes and dislikes. Good and evil becomes objective in the scheme of universal experience, and are not inscrutable stances of a being whose perceptions and views are so alien from those of men (as Hume wondered in the positive).

It is in light of this demarcation of good as “all positive experience (save for the positive that doesn’t mind or encourages the negative)” and evil as “all negative experience”, Epicurus’ “riddle” holds the weight of the world to become the veritable Gordian’s Knot of Judeo-Christianity.

Anything I missed, let me know. And thanks once more,

PG[/b]

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QFT.

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Poimandres:

QFT=“Quite f%$#-ing true”? :-k

J.

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Congrats on the successful operation :banana-dance:

From your reply I think my criticism (of the validity of Epicurus’ riddle/refutation) may have been missed. I’ll attempt my point another way.

My main criticism is that, basically, the riddle is a nonsense statement, because the (meaning of the) words it uses are contradicted (it lacks internal validity due to using terms in such a way their meaning is contradicted, rending them meaningless). The main problem is that the “riddle” attempts to show that God can’t exist–to do so by refuting the (rational of/logic behind the defining) aspects of its being (the meaning behind the text/the word), but the riddle’s internal reasoning doesn’t follow from the actual (meaning of/defining terms of God) precedent it seeks to “knot”.

Basically, the riddle’s reasoning/“rational” that (seemingly) leads to the conclusion that God
[size=150](the assumed precedent from which all steps must logically follow–that precedent being that God [/b]exists[/b] with certain inseparable defining characteristics) [/size]
can’t exist, because it’s possible to contradict it by making an argument that accepts its own terms (that actually argues against it).

Here I’ll reason in such a way that actually follows the precedent: (I’m going to use the pronoun “he”, just to make it less awkward… at least for me, while writing it)

  1. God is omnipotent, omniscient and all-benevolent (God’s always is/operates according to good-will)
  2. Since God is conscious of every thing (everything “thing” that is/can be known), and has the power to do whatever God wills (with any of those things that are/can be known), every response/action God makes is willed by/according to “good”, and thus cannot contradict good.

(Epicurus’ argument can’t even follow logic to this second step, because rather than defining/using/assuming “good” in such a way God’s will, and God’s power to will things, cannot lack it (which is the condition of the precedent that God exists), he uses it in such a way that contradicts it. His argument, and this his result, doesn’t logically follow the terms of the precedent, and this the “riddle” is nothing more than nonsense.

  1. God’s will–the program that processing all that there is, and then alters it, to output to/of/for (the purpose of/stability of/inevitable of) good–cannot not be, and result in anything other than, good.
  2. There is no thing (that exists, that one can be conscious of) that is not good, or can be more good
  3. Since God is conscious of everything and has the power to will anything and everything as good, and God (as it is defined) cannot not do so (its definition means everything must be good), nothing that exists (that one can be conscious of) can have a lack of good.
  4. Since nothing is not good (nothing can be more good than it is), but God’s will continually alters the world (of things), resulting in a changed/altered world (that as a whole is no more and no less good than it was prior to the effects of God’s good will), God’s good will is not good because it results/wills to produce good things–perfectly operating productively forward towards the creation/construction of a perfect ideal world/state of things that ultimately defines “good”), God’s will–that which takes what is and then makes (a resulting) what is (that which makes things be as they are and do as they do)–is the ultimate good.
  5. When man calls something evil, or bad, and treats it as an absolute, rather than something that makes him uncomfortable, he doesn’t simply think he would prefer an imagined alternative, and then willfully act in such a way to obtain that alternative–which can simply be walking away to remove the object resulting in one’s own subjective sense of (subjective) perfection,

instead, he actively judges that something is not as it should be (though, given the events that have caused it, it was inevitable).

  1. Bad, or evil, is not actually an opposite of Good (as it is defined according to God’s attributes from which this reasoning follows), but a denial or misunderstanding of it. To deem something evil is to demonstrate an ignorance of how God’s will operates.

  2. To be “good” is to accept the (absolutely good) direction of God’s wave (to accept the conditions one currently exists with), and steadfastly continue forward, always accepting and going with the current, and learning its patterns to better predict obstacles (to your own acceptance of what is), rather than wrapping yourself around every stone you run into, and insanely holding on for dear life–fighting the current pushing you forward–as you scream “This shouldn’t be here!”.

Basically, you can all say physical laws (and whatever other hypothetical laws that have inevitable results given certain circumstances) are/is “God”, and it is the lack of completely understanding them all, and being conscious of every thing, and thus knowing exactly how to manipulate the, and having the power to experience/produce exactly what one wants, that results in (experiencing/observing things/stimuli one deems bad/evil).

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matthatter:

[b]Thank you! Glad to remain in the land of the living. Recovery is a pain, though. Thank God for Hydrocodone. :sunglasses:

In regard to your argument that Epicurus’ “riddle” is nonsense, I must argue that it only becomes “nonsense” when one denies the existence of evil, or, as it seems you imply, misunderstand “good” as evil. But in this you seem to define “good” not as positive experience (as I and most others would define it) but as: "whatever God wills or creates. For example:[/b]

But what is “good” if it is something other than positive experience (i.e. the absence of pain)? If every response God makes is willed according to “good”, and “good” is not invariably positive experience, what is “good”? Is it merely the successful implementation of God’s will?

Once again, what are we to make of this statement if “good” is something that is not "universal positive experience independent of malice, pain, and cessation of existence (death)? Granted, God’s altering of reality produces an output, and that this output is stable and inevitable and cannot not be—but independent of the definition that “good” is positive experience, what does it mean for that such a process cannot result in anything other than “good”?

[b]Dictum #3 is the most striking and confusing of all, if “good” is not positive experience. Unless one entertains that there are things that God, despite his omnipotence and omniscience does not will, or reality that God does not affect, is murder and rape, for example, counted as “good”? Are human opinions that these things are evil nothing more than “misunderstandings” of an ultimate ‘good’?

Without belaboring the point, I think that Epicurus (his conclusion that God does not exist because there is evil notwithstanding), has rational merit depending upon the semantics behind the terms of “good” and “evil”. His “riddle” becomes “nonsense” only if one defines “good” as something other than positive experience, and denies that “evil” is nothing more or less than negative experience and the mentality that supports or deliberately causes it. If “good” is “positive experience independent of malice, pain,and death”, and if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, then God would will a world without pain, evil, and death. The fact that pain, evil, and death exists, however, draws the existence or at least the omnipotence of such a God into question, and necessitates(?) a viable theodicy. If, however, we deny that “good” is “positive experience independent of pain, malice, and death”, then the semantics of the equation (the “riddle” of Epicurus and the query of Hume) indeed becomes meaningless.

The question then becomes in your argument against Epicurus…how do you define “good”? What is “good”?

J. [/b]

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QFT = Quoted For Truth.

But aside from that, it’s the only observable fact in life that dictates God.

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Poimandres:

Indeed, sir. Sorry for the (assumed) crassness above. :blush:

[b]Go to the head of the class, guy.

J.[/b]