And around and around you go. Up in the clouds of “general accusations” against me. Your very own “intellectual contraptions” that ever and always make me the problem here. Stooge mode.
But in regard to your value judgments relating to a set of circumstances that involve your own thoughts and feeling about God and religion? How that part can precipitate contacts with others who have very different assessments of “morality here and now and immortality there and then”?
The part where you connect the dots between the bahaviors you choose on this side of the grave given your current assumptions about the fate of “I” on the other side?
The part where you discuss how your own value judgments, your own understanding of God and religion are not just a subjective “existential contraption” derived from dasein?
The part where you demonstrate how and why your own spiritual path is in fact that which all other rational and virtuous men and women obligated to take…with so much at stake on both side of the grave.
The whole point of the thread? No, you can’t, don’t, won’t go there.
And yet, from my frame of mind, if you are going to level accusations about me “dismissing concepts as contraptions without showing that you have understood the concept or presenting arguments for why it should be rejected”, would not attaching those concepts to our respective assessments of actual human interactions make your indictment that much more clearly understood? Isn’t that precisely my point in suggesting that you do bring your accusations “down to earth”?
We all await death. And we all have an abundance of existential meaning embedded in the lives that we choose to live.
But only the religious objectivists are able to think themselves into believing that death is just the beginning for the “soul”. And only the religious objectivists have a God or a Buddha to fall back on when attempting to grapple with the right thing or the enlightened to do on this side of the grave. That is precisely the font around which they can anchor the “real me”.
I get that. I once believed it fiercely myself. But now my conclusion that my existence is essentially meaningless in what I presume to be a No God/No Religion world is derived from what “here and now” seems reasonable to me. That it makes for a rather grim outlook on life doesn’t make it less reasonable.
Instead, all I can do is to come into threads like this this one and note the extent to which those who do believe in God and religion are able to relate to me why they believe what they do. And how they are able to demonstrate to me why I ought to believe it too. And then in the process being able to note how the arguments I make in my signature threads here – the source of my own thinking – are not nearly as reasonable as I think they are.
But: only in bringing our arguments out into the world that we live in – circumstantially, existentially, descriptively.