Of course you do. With them [and with those like Felix] the discussion can be contained in an exchange of general description intellectual contraptions that almost always avoid the points that I raise.
Understanding here revolves almost entirely around thinking you understand what the other person means by the words they use to define and defend the meaning of other words.
Still with your poetic psychologisms, I see.
Sure, I can humiliate you here too. But I’m not a cruel man. I’ll stick to thumping you over on the corner. Where phoneutria can weigh in. 
We all appreciate that.
And, once again Iamb adds nothing to the discussion but his own personal agenda.
Pedro, I use the word personal in my argument not to stand for personal opinions such as those of Iamb, but in realization of actual experience. We are all involved in the chain of being. We are all part of the evolving of the biosphere. Evolution is personal.
I tend to have the same idea.
There is this idea that you have to comprehend reality as out of experience, that experience will lie to you and that bias is confusion. That the chemically reckoned components of a pea are true, while the deliciousness of it is only illusion, granted by evolution to help the animal gravitate to certain bias-less, personal experience-less, universally true chemical elements. But this idea misses that the only reason you have an analysis of the pea reckoned in chemical terms to begin with is the deliciousness of the pea.
So the question becomes not so much in what way humans are impersonal, but in what way the world is personal. Which will of course in turn cause the investigator to bring into doubt everything they had until then understood as person. And then, as well, what is known as the physical world is no longer an obvious starting point (nor are any of a million promulgated starting points, like meditative spirituality of any dogma, or morality, or metaphysics). It is a true scientist’s perspective because it accepts no previous answers, cannot accept them, as that would taint the investigation.
Note to others:
I may nudge him into bringing his spirituality down to earth, but he still chooses to allow himself to be reduced down to posts like this. Utterly lacking in any substantive depth relating to God and religion and the lives that we live. The life that he lives.
“We are all involved in the chain of being. We are all part of the evolving of the biosphere. Evolution is personal.”
Okay, let him make this personal. Let him note how being a progressive Christian who believes in orthogenesis reacts to sets of circumstances in which there are many different, conflicting religious, moral and political paths available to mere mortals.
Why his and not theirs?
From my frame of mind, he lacks even the intellectual integrity to own up to this failing on his part. Instead, he makes me the issue.
On the other hand, I am rather used to that here.
On the other hand, God help those who share this “general description spiritual contraption” but who are also not wholly committed to the “cult of Trump”.
In fact, why don’t Pedro and Ierrellus explore Trump’s own commitment to Christianity. They can start with the evangelicals that constitute a big chunk of his “base”.
So I lack intellectual integrity. Poor me for not confining my argument to Iamb’s narrow limitations.
I outgrew the evangelicals, probably by reading more books than they are able to read.
Old Testament is where it’s at anyway Irell, I feel you.
You lack intellectual integrity only from my own existential perspective. I would never argue that others are obligated to share that point of view. And, even then, I limit this accusation to my own contention that you refuse to bring your spiritual contraptions out into the world of actual conflicting goods.
Now, why don’t you pursue those evangelicals in a discussion with Pedro. After all he is fiercely committed to Trump and Trump’s base is populated by millions of evangelicals.
See if you can sort that out.
Note to Ierrellus:
Go there with him. Progressive Christianity and Jesus Christ. Isn’t the New Testament considerably more “where it’s at” for you?
Note to Iamb.
Your attempts to destroy my thread have not been unnoticed. Regardless of those, I will not succumb to your narrow agenda. And I don’t think Pedro needs to go there either. The world of conflicting goods is the old world which needs to be overcome. Why you cling to the status quo as if it were the only possible reality, I haven’t a clue. Are you capable of caring whether or not your grandchildren and the Earth itself have a viable future, a destiny of improvement over what now is?
Boy, did I underestimate your intelligence!! You really will take these “arguments” to the grave.
And, given what I’ll take to the grave, you win.
And I’ll “destroy” it no more. I’m out of here. [-o<
There are no winners and losers here, only two different takes on reality. Iamb’s take does not fit the existential experience of most people, but is an outdated take on the condition of humanity, especially on human destiny. The difficulty here is in attempts to describe spiritual matters in logical terms, in ways not poetic, in ways not intuitive.
The theme of this thread is that evolution is God in action. It is much more than a “mental contraption”. It has a plethora of references on the web, but is most understood as a real experience in which all partake. We all are involved in evolution.
The basic difference between the two points of view consists in the atheistic charge.that if Theism be true, why the need to suffer?
This has stumped most everyone who seriously tried to think about it. But if the correlate problem with the distinction between body and mind, and brain and mind , and body and soul are considered, the question can be simplified by the notion of a continuous evolution between them.
The conscious manifestation of an objjective consubstantive spirit , becomes more and more evident, rather than less, as can be seen by the positive effects that codes of ethics have in behavior in general. The proof is in the pudding that ancient wisdom, and it’s preoccupation with ‘the Goid’, flows over and conflates into religion, exactly for that reason.
Reason itself is not primary, it is the need to assure and perpetuate the continuous progression of evolution.
By a higher analogy, the mind as an effected neural totality of the brain, is more similar to the matrix like informational sum of reality of the universe, then not. This is a jump, but a future hyperglide will certainly bear it out. The sum total has been in a quantum sense has always “existed”, and since it does consist of a 0 sum, it is eternally reoccurring.
This model is far more believable than justifying the existence of ’ nothingness’!
That’s not accurate Meno.
The conception of a God that would not allow any suffering is a relatively new one in the history of humanity, and pertains only to the very specific figures of Jesus and Buda.
Being a gentleman that knows the Old Testament, this will not be a strange concept to Irrellus, but being a Christian, I believe he is also attuned to the idea of a God that would not willingly allow suffering.
There is absolutely no reason for there to be any contradiction between religion and evolution. Again, it is very recent that religion has been held to be anti-naturalistic and separate from the natural world. Ancient philosophers before Plato would often speak of very advanced scientific concepts and Gods in the same sentence. Plato is the one that put an end to that, that introduced the idea that we have a right to demand anything of God, that it is God that has to fit our ideas of what is correct.
The problem Irrellus poses is very far beyond such petty considerations as “why is God such a dick?” The problem he poses is: how can evolution be reckoned while accounting for everything, which it would have to. See, a purely materialistic study of evolution leaves out, well really most of what experience is. A scientific quesiton is: how does evolution include teleology? Teleology exists. So how is it involved in evolution?
The standard Darwinian answer is: teleology exists because it helps us survive and procreate. So survival and procreation is the teleology of evolution. But teleology is not a point of evolution, but a consequence of it. This is an absurd circle. Why does it do X? To survive. Why does it survive? To do X. This is not a circle any scientist is trapped in. Only people that want to inject an agenda into science.
Evolution simply describes the way things have come to be the way they are. It is the explanation of how things are the way they are that leaves nothing outside itself, no explanation for the state of things that is outside of it.
Only Aristotelians have any need for a figure that is that which stands outside of things that are to make them be. It is not an actual question that poses itself, it is a question that poses itself after you have posited an ideal world. Meaning, it is a disingenuous question.
If they had the capacity for honesty, Platonists and Aristotelians would say: given that an ideal world exists, how is this real world derived from it? This is an entirely different question from: how can things exist without being derived from an ideal world?
Ideal just means coming from an idea, which means something in a person’s imagination.
I strongly feel the burden of proof is on the Platonists, to show that there is any reason the real world, the one we all see, is derived from a thought a person had, and not the other way around. I cannot stress enough how strongly I feel this.
Pedro: Your argument is a legitimate ine, and the fact that the archaic and the post modern temporal flows are being perceived by less configured spaces, brings into question the relevance of distinction been the Old and New way of holding a Supreme Being responsible fir the shift .
Not that it doesent “exist” on the level of the Old, testimentally, but the New doesen’t intend to negate the Old, it merely humanly forgets the distinction.
Artificially the flow can be reconstructed, like the frames of still reality on a photograph nears perfected filmed simulation.