on discussing god and religion

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

Over and over and over again:

“Being for-itself (pour-soi) is the mode of existence of consciousness, consisting in its own activity and purposive nature; being in-itself (en-soi) is the self-sufficient, lumpy, contingent being of ordinary things.”

Whatever “for all practical purposes” given the same sets of circumstances experienced differently by each of us that actually means.

Then the part where genes give way to memes, nature to nurture. The part where sense perception gives way to mental constructs about ourselves in the world around us. A world no others experience in precisely the same way. The part then where scientists pass the baton over to the philosophers.

And that’s before we go out to the very end of the metaphysical limb and speculate about sim worlds, dream worlds and matrixes

Then the part where all of this is further recalculated given either a God or a No God world.

Here, however, construed by and large in intellectual contraptions that come down to earth only to focus in on the most banal examples of the behaviors we choose in the either/or world.

In other words, the part where common sense ends and philosophy begins. Not to mention the other way around.

But the bottom line still takes us back to God. An alleged omniscient and omnipotent God. Why? Because given His existence we have that transcending font able to establish the truth about everything and anything.

Sans God and what’s left [on this planet] is…us?

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

In fact, millions upon millions of human beings have gone from the cradle to the grave interacting in precisely this manner. And have given but the occasional passing thoughts spaced days, weeks, months apart about the course of their lives “philosophically” in this way. Historically and culturally, for the overwhelming preponderance of us, that is the role of religion.

But then those who do set aside time spaced days, weeks, months apart to contemplate it all…intellectually. To concoct one or another TOE. From RM/OA to Value Ontology, we have ourselves been deluged with them. There have in fact easily been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them down through the ages.

And the only limitations they all seem to recognize is that everyone must think as they do about the part that transcends the so much more complex, convoluted…even catastrophic…reality of our day to day lives. Heidegger himself seemed to settle on one of his own.

So, he too just shrugs off the part where the dots are connected between how it is that he believed he understood being and all there is that he didn’t have a clue about regarding all there is to be known about being going back to, well, you tell me. Thus his “understanding” here, not unlike yours and mine, is just a more sophisticated WAG. As opposed to those millions upon millions who do go to the grave entirely ensconced in the reality that they have been indoctrinated as children to believe is true about themselves in the world.

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

Yes, and I challenge anyone here to argue that this is not profoundly rooted in the lives of individual human beings “thrown” adventitiously at birth into any number profoundly different historical, cultural and experiential contexts. In fact, one of the crucial components of religion is to make that part all go away. How? By subsuming everything that anyone chooses to do out in any one of these worlds in God Himself. In the end, it is always about Him and not whatever your “existential” circumstances might be. That’s the whole point of making religion the crucial link that connects mere mortals to the transcending reality of God’s Kingdom.

Or to whatever it is that the “reality is identical with divinity” pantheists connect to the universe itself.

Let me ask you: why do you suppose that very, very, very few of us are likely to subsume what in a No God world is an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence in that frame of mind? Why, instead, are they far more likely to deal with anxiety/angst through God and religion…or through drugs or booze…or through all of distractions available to us to take our minds elsewhere — food, the arts, sports, politics, careers, love and sex.

Yes, one way or another, to “throw” yourself back into the game. The only game there is. The world as each of us individuals know it…live it. For all practical purposes as it were.

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

Okay, but it never seemed to dawn on him that Hitler, Himmler and all of the other Nazi fanatics treated fascism – National Socialism – as though it were for all practical purposes a religion itself. You committed your whole existence to it. And Judgment Day was everyday if you didn’t toe the line. Or you were a Jew. Or you were black or brown or red or yellow. Or you were a homosexual or some other “deviant”.

What of the Nazis’ “phenomenal description” of, well, everything, right?

As for Aristotle’s God, those like Ayn Rand, who revered Aristotle, simply excised Him from the metaphysical manuscripts.

Okay, suppose you weren’t able to believe in God? Isn’t the next best thing to subsume that fear/angst in such ideological dogmas as fascism. Yes, you may die, but the cause that you dedicated your life to lives on. And thus so do you – sort of – as long as it is around.

Besides, how dumb would God have to be not to see though that scheme? Yeah, you believe…but not because you really do. You simply placed your bet on God being around to get you into Heaven.

Next up: it all culminating in your own absolutely unique experience of waiting for godot.

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

Instead, I turn it around. It’s not what makes sense to someone [about God or anything] but how what they believe makes sense to them allows them to feel more or less anchored to something – anything – in the way of a meaning of and a purpose to their existence. It all becomes entangled in the complex interactions of the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious mind trying to make sense of the lives that are lived from day to day. But here such lives can become so vastly different there is simply no “one size fits all” narrative. You can only go from individual to individual and try to connect the dots between biological imperatives and the existential parameters of their own unique collection of experiences. Theodicy becomes just one more component of how enormously complex and convoluted all of these interacting variables become when “I” confronts meaning and purpose in my life.

God and religion is merely one possibility for connecting all these dots to a transcending font. But it’s the psychological need itself to connect them that I focus in on. And the part that my own understanding of dasein plays in all of that.

On the contrary, human existence is such that there are any number of distractions – wants and needs – able to take our minds elsewhere. And isn’t God and religion always an option for taking any thoughts you do have about oblivion to a comforting and consoling place “in your head”? Sure, some can talk about the need to be “authentic” in regard to facing up to death…but what is that but just another existential component of dasein.

The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

Existential gratitude…and God? Of course speculation such as this is almost always going to be a profoundly problematic reflection of dasein. Some give in to it in the early rounds, others grapple with it for years, while still others will fight it all the way to the grave. The fact that there are all manner of foxholes built into all manner of battlefields in all manner of histroical and cultural contexts is reason enough to presume it is not likely to change anytime soon. And the bottom line that I come back to has now been sustained by me for decades: what else is there?

So, sure, if I could figure out a way to get back up into the spiritual path saddle again, I’d be there.

Instead, that saddle is as far removed from my current frame of mind as ever and I am left patching together intellectual contraptions like this:

Just don’t ask me to take that down out of the clouds and explain how I intertwine it into the life I now live from day to day. Now, ironically enough, it’s mostly about the distractions that take me away from thinking about things like this.

Then it comes down for some of us to one or another rendition of this:

That’s it right? Maybe, just maybe, there is someone out there that is beyond me. Someone able to point me in the general direction of immortality. With or without salvation.

Only in the almost certain likelihood that there is not, I have no self to return to. Only the bits and the pieces that are still around.

And noting it will only conjure up the usual reactions.

Like yours right?

Just for the record: youtu.be/ML4kiFCKZGo

Yeah, this is certainly one way in which note the covid-19 virus in regard to spirituality, religion and God. The scientific route.

But that’s not the direction that I was going in when I posted on this – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … &start=550 --thread.

Instead, my focus was on theodicy. The virus doesn’t know anything about pandemics and disease and mortality, but how could the God that brought it into existence not know of these things?

That’s the part that always most fascinates me. How can a God that many describe as loving, just and merciful – as well as omniscient and omnipotent – bring such things into existence in the first place?

Make nature itself a hellish slaughterhouse of predator and prey. Create a planet bursting at the seams with what the lawyers call “acts of God”.

Forget the endless arguments about whether a God, the God, my God does exist. Let’s just assume that. He does in fact exist. Your God. So, what’s the story given the horror that has plagued the lives of millions around the globe given the existence of the covid-19 virus. With it’s new variants.

What options are there for the faithful other than 1] His “mysterious ways” or 2] Harold Kushner’s speculations about a benevolent God who, for whatever reason, is not omnipotent.

Since I promised Ierrellus I would no longer post on his thread, I’ll take this reference to me here.

First of all, when he is not in Stooge mode, I do respect both the intelligence of felix and his commitment to explore these issues in depth.

He merely comes to different conclusions than I do. Predicated on different initial assumption about religion and the human condition. Which I derive largely from my own understanding of dasein, and not because one of us is actually more capable to coming to the most reasonable conclusion of all.

And the only thing that might be deemed as “heroic” by some regarding my own conclusions is that despite how grim they are in regard to my own life in what I have come to believe is an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence culminating [soon enough] in oblivion, I am sticking to them because here and now they still seem to be the most reasonable understanding of the human condition in a No God world.

Whereas, for me, Sculptor, while more or less in alignment with my own prejudices regarding a God, the God, my God, is just another fulminating fanatic objectivist hell bent on propagating the myth that unless others think exactly like he does about these things they are basically morons.

And, come on, that’s less heroic than pathetic. You know, given the gap between what any one of us conclude about these things and all that can possible be known about them going back to, say, an understanding of existence itself?

From Ierrellus’s thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … &start=575

This is basically in reaction to the fulminating fanatic Sculptor there who sneers at anyone who would dare not to think exactly as he does about God.

He’s basically the atheist equivalent of an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian.

Me, I am more than willing to acknowledge that, given the profound mystery embedded at the very heart of human existence itself – going back to mystery of why there is something and not nothing, and why this something and not something else – God [whatever that means] is one possibility.

Music especially being the classic example of this profound mystery. Or, as Emil Cioran encompassed it…

“If everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie…As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, ‘well, what is it? What state was I in?’ You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared.”

Same with God. Where does the lie end and the truth begin.

No, instead, with regard to God or the One, my own reaction to those like Polkinghorne, felix and Ierrellus revolve more around these things…

1] Theodicy. Okay, let’s assume that a God, the God does exist. What then of the points I raise on this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=196522

2] The gap between what they believe about the existence of God or the One, and what they can actually demonstrate [even to themselves] is in fact true about His existence. Why their own assumptions about God and not all of the other ones? Especially with so much at stake on both sides of the grave.

3] The arguments I still adhere to going back to my days as a Marxist. In other words, that God and religion can in fact become the “opiate of the people”, able to be used by those in power to sustain their power.

Question of the Month
Is There A God?
The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. The harvest was abundant, unsurprisingly; just sorry we couldn’t fit you all in. The votes were, loosely, Yes: 52%, No: 31%, and Don’t Know: 17%.

Michael Williams, Bolton, UK

No, the answer to the question will hinge on someone actually being able to demonstrate that a God, the God, my God does in fact exist.

But of course to the best of my current knowledge no one has. And as for the meaning of God…?

You tell me.

After all, it is just a word-sound the English speaking world invented to encompass what is thought to exist. There are even word-sounds for things that do not exist like unicorns and fire-spewing dragons.

So, in regard to love, does this coincide with your own meaning of God? Through faith in God [leaving aside proof of His actual existence] how would you encompass pure love? A love “beyond restriction”? And who is able to pin down given all of vast and varied human contexts one might imagine, where instinct and calculation end and a purer, more spiritual love begins?

Also, does hate exist “necessarily”? Doesn’t love that trips and stumbles over into any number of sets of convoluted existential variables often reconfigure into hate? And whose moral sense in regard to what set of conflicting goods?

In fact, how is this assessment not just one more “general description spiritual contraption” that simply shrugs off all of the conflicting ways in which each of us as individuals might come to embody his or her own subjective interpretation of love and morality?

Got that? No, of course not. But isn’t that really the whole point? God becomes a “necessary impossible” in much the same way that anything might be possible that you find it necessary to believe in. Possible because no one can prove He does not exist and necessary because who else are you going to turn to for a moral scripture on this side of the grave and immortality on the other side? And who wouldn’t want to go “beyond themselves” any number of times in this world?

And don’t we have any number of members here at ILP who have thought up spiritual tautologies to infer God into existence. And haven’t I acknowledged this need be as far as they go to make it true? For them, God does in fact exist “in their head.” And nothing those like me argue here is likely to change that.

I can’t help but be puzzled as to why many here will sustain discussions with Ecmandu after reading assertions such as this. About God or most anything else.

He believes sidewalks are sentient beings. He believes we are never born and never die. He believes we “all chose to incarnate in this particular iteration of the current plan to keep us from being bored”. He believes that he knows how to make existence perfect. He believes he can teach us the perfect plan for all beings.

Now, again, for me, my own reaction to assertions like this is to say, “okay, you believe them ‘in your head’. So, what actual hard evidence do you have that all rational men and women are in turn obligated to believe them too?”

That way he can either choose [in a free will world] to at least make an attempt to provide this evidence or just continue to insist that as “an enlightened being” the only source he needs is the things he believes in his head.

Thus, on this thread, if he is willing to come here and focus in on what he believes we are obligated to do on this side of the grave in order that “I” can attain what it wants its fate to be on the other side of the grave, fine, as long as he is willing to substantiate what he believes by providing us with substantial empirical, material, phenomenological evidence to back his beliefs up.

Okay, let him bring these particularly obscure intellectual/spiritual assumptions into a discussion with me pertaining to these points:

As for value ontology, I’ve lost track of the number of times I have asked him to bring that down to earth.

Logic and God. Logic and value ontology, logic and astrology.

He insists that…

“…logic is the outline of the consequences of the irrational. These consequences are really consistent.”

What else can I do but to challenge him to note how, given his interactions with others in which God, value ontology and astrology all came into play, he is able to describe in some detail the situations as they unfolded.

A Change of Mind for Antony Flew
Peter S. Williams
at the bethinking web site
This article was written before Flew had died

Of course that still makes sense to any number of atheists around the globe. We don’t know why there is something instead of nothing. We don’t know why it is this something and not something else. We don’t even know for certain if human autonomy itself is actually a reality in discussing all of this.

But what are you going to fall back on to give you the most likely – the most reasonable – answers, science or religion? And, if religion, which one? Scientists at least are dealing with the laws of nature. And, as far as we know, there are not competing laws. Not in the same way that there are competing Gods and religious denominations. And with the laws of nature there are predictions to be made, experiments to be conducted, results to be replicated. And, of course, the results themselves: the world that we live in today. The scientific discoveries, the technologies, the many, many, many things in our lives that we just take for granted that came into existence only as a result of the march of science over the centuries.

Is there anything even remotely the equivalent of that in regard to God and religion? Perhaps the Taliban in Afghanistan can provide us with an answer.

But then he changed his mind…

You seem to really enjoy talking to yourself.

i.postimg.cc/vBSffCjb/hehehe.gi … height:500

.

Yeah, Phyllo brings this to my attention from time to time.

And, as I noted to him, I will note to you: I post here in part to generate discussions between virtual friends I have accumulated over the years through email exchanges. Not much more than a handful admittedly but still rather important to me.

Besides, my philosophy posts generate many, many views from many different people. And that’s no small thing to some of us here. This thread alone has garnered over 387,000 views. Not bad for someone more or less now just waiting for godot.

So, why don’t you and Chakra contribute to it. How is God and religion important to you when making moral decisions on this side of the grave in order to sustain your hope regarding the fate of “I” on the other side of it.

The whole point of the thread you might call it.

Or, perhaps, all the more telling, explain to us why you don’t.

A Change of Mind for Antony Flew
Peter S. Williams
at the bethinking web site
This article was written before Flew had died

And if you start with any of the arguments broached to rationalize the existence of a God/the God – courses.lumenlearning.com/sanja … -overview/ – the definition and the meaning of the word “evidence” can be encompassed in any number of conclusions.

Still, the bottom line remains: none this evidence from any of these arguments has resulted in an actual demonstration that a God/the God does in fact exist. At least not to my current knowledge.

Again, think this through. He acknowledges at last that he is a convert to theism. But not necessarily to Christian theism. So, then, what for “all practical purposes” does that mean in regard to his own life? In particular, for me, as it comes back to my own interest in God and religion. Okay, you were once an atheist. Then your own personal understanding of the evidence changed and this leads you to God.

So, now what? You are still out in the world interacting with others who, given their own religious and secular beliefs, have come to accept particular moral and political value judgments. You still clash over them but now you have God and religion to fall back on. So, if you were to stumble upon this thread here at ILP, how might that prompt you now to connect the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then?

Yes, if someone you once respected the intelligence of when they thought like you did about God and religion you no longer respect the intelligence of when they go over to “the other side”, you yourself may well be the problem. On the other hand, with questions like God and religion, what does it really mean to be intelligent? Instead, my focus is always more on not what “intellectually” you believe about God and religion but the extent to which even to yourself you are able to demonstrate that what you believe “in your head” is “in fact” true.

And then the part [re this thread] where you connect the dots between what you believe, the behaviors that you choose, and your “leap of fate” to “I” on the other side of the grave.

Otherwise, it just becomes one more instance of dueling definitions and deductions between “intellectuals”.

A Change of Mind for Antony Flew
Peter S. Williams
at the bethinking web site

Let’s face it, when you consider how utterly complex the human brain alone is [not to mention all the other organs in the human body autonomically doing their thing in tandem], it’s not hard to imagine that nature was unlikely to have just come up with this extraordinary design through random mutations. And what of mindless matter mutating into self-conscious entities that can invent computers and an internet allowing for these very exchanges to exist here at ILP.

Sure, a God/the God becomes one possible explanation for it. No actual proof of that of course but to completely rule it out? Nope, I’ve never really been able to do that myself. In the staggering mystery that is existence itself, the existence of God is not even close to being an altogether ridiculous assumption. At least for some.

Instead, for those like me, it has always been theodicy I keep coming back to. Okay, it’s not impossible that He exists but, if so, it’s either Harold Kushner’s God or the sadistic monster.

Define miraculous? On the other hand, whether in regard to God or to determinism or to so many other things, figuring out how nature’s robotic mechanical matter made that leap to nature’s self-conscious living matter remains one of the deepest mysteries of them all. Perhaps in our lifetime science will replicate it in precisely the same manner that nature did: chemically.

In the interim, this still allows the theists among us to insist it was God.

Again, we’ll see what science is able to accomplish here “down the road”. On the other hand, given that it is only through God and religion that one can hope to attain both immortality and salvation, even if science and philosophers are able to explain everything, many will still take that leap of faith to God.

I know that, if I could, I would.

Just a few thoughts:

Flew, who is dead now, apparently was senile, or becoming senile, when he made his “conversion” from atheism. That doesn’t make him wrong, but it should be taken into account.

There is no evidence for intelligent design. No biologist, to my knowledge, incorporates it into any research program, or takes it seriously at all. ID has religious underpinnings, notwithstanding the denial of this by many ID advocates. See: Wedge Document.

Flew did not “convert” to Christianity, but apparently to some airy-fairy Deism. In any event, his opinion means nothing.

There is more to evolution than random mutation. There is random mutation in conjunction with natural selection, plus there is neutral evolution which may account for most evolution at the genotypic level at least.

There is much more to evolutionary theory than Darwinism. Darwin knew nothing of genetics or DNA, for example.

The theory of evolution has never purported to explain the origin of life, only the origin of species. The study of the origin of life is called abiogenesis.

The idea that life could never have arisen from nonliving matter by chance processes alone because the odds are astronomically against that happening is false.

The idea that extreme complexity, including cells and brains, could not have arisen except through design is false.