As I noted to Some Guy above…
[b]This thread was created in order for those individuals who do believe in God to discuss the manner in which they intertwine their behaviors on this side of the grave as that relates to the manner in which they have come to imagine their fate on the other side.
In other words, these narratives will [hopefully] be as far removed from “intellectual contraptions” as it is possible to convey in a forum such as this.[/b]
But you don’t want to go there, do you? Instead, of late, you pop up on the thread from time to time only in order to focus the beam on, well, other things.
Technical things.
Okay, sure, I can go there too.
Well, many folks study philosophy and theology in order to come up with a way – the best way – in which to answer questions like this: “How ought one to live?”
Perhaps because they have already been involved in a moral or political conflict and felt uncertainty; or because they come across them “in the news”.
Sure, they had been indoctrinated as children [with or without God] to view these conflagrations as conflicts between “one of us” and “one of them”. But now they want to “study up on it”. Explore what all the great minds have had to say about “ethics” and “politics” over the centuries.
And then sooner or later the manner in which they have come to assess these things in “intellectual contraptions” are going to bump into the conflicting “intellectual contraptions” of others. Only not up in the clouds but down here on the ground.
Then what?
That is what I aim to explore. Again, with or without God.
Indeed, how, with or without God, does that change things?
If it is not just “in your head” then what is the reasoning that justifies that it is not “in your head”? Where is the dividing line? What makes it “real”? What makes it “more real” than “general descriptions” … “more real” than any other thoughts?
That’s why I always insist that we explore “general descriptions” such as this “out in the world” of actual human interactions.
It’s just that on this thread we should aim to connect the dots between what seems “real” to us in our head and how this “reality” fares when confronted with another who insist that, on the contrary, “reality” is something else.
And then connect these dots to the behaviors that we choose on this side of the grave; and then to the behaviors that we anticipate on the other side of it.