Are you speaking about the return of Jesus. Will you yield on examination? Such wasted time. Do you not think the empty set exists? It arguably does. And doesn't. I like talking to priests. They're so corrupt.Jklint wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 6:40 pmNo! I mean return on investment. Nothing to do with investiture! Arguably I don't like wasting time on empty set concepts which yields nothing upon examination.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 5:52 pm
When you say "investment" I presume you mean "investiture". Presumably, you are a priest in the dark hole of the empty god (or goddess). Call in the accountants!! Holy Writ!!
Are we all born an Atheist?
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
You seem to be comfortably ensconced in this world without a need for metaphysical rebellion. If that's what you are, I really don't care. I understand that quick turn-around. Everything always comes again.Sculptor1 wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 6:02 pmOkay - my error.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 5:43 pm Yes, I am not that guy, ...
Anal sex is gloriously without purpose.
As for anal sex being "unnatural" its irrelevant . Blow jobs are might seem without purpose too, but I not be happy to live without mine.
Anal sex, blow jobs, and even wanking - are all very purposeful indeed. Since when was sex just about getting pregnant anyway?
Bonobos and humans love to do it. I love to do it. I'm just through doing it, and I'm ready to do it again. I have one child. God only knows how many times I've had sex.
I'm no fan of anal, but a hole is a hole.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
I've no idea what you are talking about here.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 7:12 pmYou seem to be comfortably ensconced in this world without a need for metaphysical rebellion. If that's what you are, I really don't care. I understand that quick turn-around. Everything always comes again.Sculptor1 wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 6:02 pm
Okay - my error.
As for anal sex being "unnatural" its irrelevant . Blow jobs are might seem without purpose too, but I not be happy to live without mine.
Anal sex, blow jobs, and even wanking - are all very purposeful indeed. Since when was sex just about getting pregnant anyway?
Bonobos and humans love to do it. I love to do it. I'm just through doing it, and I'm ready to do it again. I have one child. God only knows how many times I've had sex.
I'm no fan of anal, but a hole is a hole.
Is this supposed to be a response to the above, or did you misplace your post?
Have you ever had sex?
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Actually, the definition of delusion fits those who deny anatomical facts, as some do when claiming a man dressed as a woman is a woman, or being in denial about consequences of anal sex - like anal fissures, colon rupture and bacterial infection.
Homosexual propaganda is anti-truth, thus delusional. And what’s funny is they call others “homophobic or haters” for stating facts they fear or hate.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Could we please at least move within the vague area of the topic?
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Try to tell that to the many species that have already been identified as having homosexual behavior,Newme wrote: ↑June 19th, 2019, 7:35 pmActually, the definition of delusion fits those who deny anatomical facts, as some do when claiming a man dressed as a woman is a woman, or being in denial about consequences of anal sex - like anal fissures, colon rupture and bacterial infection.
Homosexual propaganda is anti-truth, thus delusional. And what’s funny is they call others “homophobic or haters” for stating facts they fear or hate.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... l_behavior]
and the 3.6 million of of human homosexuals living in the UK, and the 9 million in the USA.
Gay lions and penguins are not susceptible to "gay propaganda".
Why are you so scared? Are you in the closet. They say most people have some gay feelings some of the time. Maybe it is time for you to come out of your closet?
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
I don't want to take away any pleasurable frisson that might add for you, but since some humans have done it going as far back as we know (not a pun) and since various mammals do it, and not just in domination or rape situations, and heck, even then, I can't see any reason to call it unnatural. It happens in nature.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 5:43 pm Yes, I am not that guy, but I might say that anal sex is unnatural.
I believe in all sorts of things that get classed as supernatural, but I think the word is not useful. To me if ghosts are real, well, their natural, for exmaple.Hang on, I’m going to talk metaphysics. I did say that it was a match made in heaven, which makes it supernatural.
The natural vs artificial distinction I think can be useful.
The nature vs. nurture distinction I think can be useful.
I don't think the natural vs. supernatural is useful.
And natural or nature would mean different things in each dichotomy.
a lot of people seem to take it that way, but actually there can be all sorts of surplus or neutrality. IOW if a mutation does not make something go extinct, well, its fine. Perhaps some creature gets a tiny red dot on the back of its skull and it neither helps nor hurts. Well, there it is.I guess the supernatural is also the unnatural. In the natural world everything has a function and a purpose. Everything works for the preservation of the individual, the species, the selfish gene or whatever. That seems to be the current idea in evolution theory.
I don't see much of my day increasing the chances my genes will go anywhere. I will not have any children in the future. Yet, I merrily go along with a wide variety of activites: some would even be called supernatural, some natural. I see nothing wrong with any of them, though I wish I surfed online less.In the natural world you are trapped. You have to go along. A dark spirit calls you. You must pro-create. That is the vision of Naturphilosophie and the Hegelian Spirit. My supernaturalism is a rebellion against all that. If you want, if you’re in rut, you can go stick your genes in the dark hole of Nature, but I’m outta here.
I don't seem to be itching.Anal sex is gloriously without purpose. It is contemplative. (I do have experience with that.) It is worship of visible Form, not the hidden urges. I am a supernaturalist all the way. Now if you are itchin’ to say “Gibberish”, go for it.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 5:50 amII'm not sure what the point of your comments was but it was fun to read. Let me try and show a distinction between the natural and the supernatural.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 17th, 2019, 5:43 pm
I don't think the natural vs. supernatural is useful.
A rationalist (which I think you probably are) thinks that there is one objective reality out there. And we are able to make clear, unambiguous sentences that describe that. If they match the reality out there then they are true. We are able to think true sentences. So given that, we can say that there are true and untrue sentences. And that what is real, what is objectively real, is absolutely different from what is unreal or only imagined. A rationalist draws sharp lines. Real vs. unreal. True vs. false. His world is ordered along that line of demarcation. That is the natural way of looking at things.
So now the supernatural. Imagine that demarcation line becoming porous. The imagined leaks into the real. The real becomes at times the imagined. You read something in a piece of fiction. Later you see that something you read has escaped from those pages and is right there in reality. Or you dream that such and such is happening – it’s only a dream – then it happens. Your dream was a pre-cognition of what will happen. The line separating now from then is broken. Or someone dies and later that one comes to visit you and stays for tea. The line between the living and the dead is crossed. The supernatural violates the critical line of demarcation. It is an in-between thing.
Rational naturalism has lines that cannot be crossed or become porous. That is natural law. The Supernatural violates that law. A rationalist, a naturalist, will always say that the law is never, it cannot be, violated. The Supernaturalist does not believe in one objective reality, one truth. He brings on chaos, lost order. His sentences are ambiguous and maddening.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 7:05 am II'm not sure what the point of your comments was but it was fun to read. Let me try and show a distinction between the natural and the supernatural.
I don't think reality is 'out there' or that 'in here' and out there don't have all sorts of overlap and are actually same, though they are also different, and more.A rationalist (which I think you probably are) thinks that there is one objective reality out there.
Maybe sometimes about some stuff, sure. Unambigious statements can be useful, if distorting.And we are able to make clear, unambiguous sentences that describe that.
I do think some people are deluded and some poeple are more in connection with 'things'. I'll bet you think some people have blinders, too.If they match the reality out there then they are true. We are able to think true sentences. So given that, we can say that there are true and untrue sentences. And that what is real, what is objectively real, is absolutely different from what is unreal or only imagined.
I don't like the law of identity, let alone the law of the excluded middle. So, no. I do communicate, sometimes, as if I use those, often because others do, so me undermining, but also because I don't see a good reason to exclude that kind of communication.A rationalist draws sharp lines. Real vs. unreal. True vs. false. His world is ordered along that line of demarcation. That is the natural way of looking at things.
Yeah, that's the nature of things, sometimes....So now the supernatural. Imagine that demarcation line becoming porous. The imagined leaks into the real.
I don't believe in laws, I think there are habits. Sort of Sheldrake taken to the enth degree. He's more of a traditional naturalist who has noticed anomolies and is focusing on demonstrating stuff to his peers who don't think he is a peer. But I don't believe in laws. I do see patterns. Out there, in here.The real becomes at times the imagined. You read something in a piece of fiction. Later you see that something you read has escaped from those pages and is right there in reality. Or you dream that such and such is happening – it’s only a dream – then it happens. Your dream was a pre-cognition of what will happen. The line separating now from then is broken. Or someone dies and later that one comes to visit you and stays for tea. The line between the living and the dead is crossed. The supernatural violates the critical line of demarcation. It is an in-between thing.
I actually see the rational naturalism as violating the full range of life. It is a useful bag of tricks that is trying to take over all of ontology. Kinda pisses me off.Rational naturalism has lines that cannot be crossed or become porous. That is natural law. The Supernatural violates that law.
Well, not in this post. This seemed like a pretty rationalist argument/description of a metaphysics.A rationalist, a naturalist, will always say that the law is never, it cannot be, violated. The Supernaturalist does not believe in one objective reality, one truth. He brings on chaos, lost order. His sentences are ambiguous and maddening.
I still don't get anything out of calling ghosts supernatural. I mean, I don't call them natural either in my practical life. It's a bit like a multiverse with different rules in one place. But the rationalists (or what i would call the 'reasonists' to make it clear I am not talking about Rationalists like Descartes, say), get a lot of milage out of using deductioin on the term supernatural while making it seem like they are arguing on empirical grounds against the existence of some X. I don't see how the term helps. It may be useful for you, though your use seems to presume rules and anomoloies and a kind of dualism that I don't think is necessary. I don't see why I should put, say, telepathy and communicating with someone directly in the way mainstream science acknowledges as phenomena from two different categories. Or ghosts or past lives or multiverse like stuff or, like the kinds of stuff that get bagged under the Mandella effect. I have what I am dealing with. I know it's not universally dealt with. I am not hard and fast about inside verses outside. But supernatural seems to me like some concession to a metaphysics (scientific physicalism) that, even in its own limited epistemology, is still confirming new phenomena and slowly changing and expanding its own ontology (with its adherents often not admitting or even noticing this).
To say a ghost is not natural doesn't make sense to me. I can see where it might to someone else. I am not big on proselytizing unless I am cornered, which is fortunately rare these days.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Your posts are always a pleasure to read, but I always come away wondering where you stand. All my life I have studied Logical Analysis, the type of philosophy that came out of Cambridge a little over a hundred years ago. I also like the Phenomenology that came out of Vienna. It's all very rational. So I am a rationalist that far. I become an irrationalist when I approach the limits of analysis. Then everything breaks down. All philosophy at its extreme fails. It crashes and the philosopher has to put up with that. I do believe that eventually every philosophy becomes paradoxical. So does logic. Cantor and Goedel showed that. And then they went mad. I now think that if a philosopher is going to describe what happens at the extreme, where a philosophy is carried to its logical conclusion, then he is going to have to resort to poetry. And religion. Then philosophy becomes a scandal. Criminality and immorality and pathology are all about. You walk in the demi-monde. I have written it up extensively for many years. Reason in extremis. The disreputable. The incorrigible. A god who is your trick for the night.Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 9:35 am Well, not in this post. This seemed like a pretty rationalist argument/description of a metaphysics.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Thank you and, I can understand that it is not clear where i stand. I tend to reveal a stance since in a philosophical forum that becomes something I must defend. I've asserted then a position, and so I suddenly have an onus to justify it such that rational people, theoretically, should agree. But since I think that one's beliefs are very dependent on experience, including practices, I feel like words on a screen are not really what people need to test out my beliefs or any beliefs for that matter. So I use philosophy forums to probe other worldviews and other minds. And often worldviews that dominate 'out there' and still harry me 'in here'.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 9:59 am Your posts are always a pleasure to read, but I always come away wondering where you stand.
Thanks for letting me know Gödel went mad. Pattern recognition and paranoia have a lot in common and I think a very rational life is a kind of madness. I love him for his incompleteness theorum(s) but never looked at the man. Love that he was a Christian, not that I am a fan of the Abrahamic religions, but that he is not a positivist, a pernicious group to my mind. A lot of people think they are only rational and never base their beliefs, in part or in the whole, on intuition. I could cry about how ludicrous this is a thing to think. His theorum cuts to the heart of that and now I see this may have been more connected to his life than I realized. Cantor also. Got to get out of the verbal logical head more than these guys probably allowed themselves to do.All my life I have studied Logical Analysis, the type of philosophy that came out of Cambridge a little over a hundred years ago. I also like the Phenomenology that came out of Vienna. It's all very rational. So I am a rationalist that far. I become an irrationalist when I approach the limits of analysis. Then everything breaks down. All philosophy at its extreme fails. It crashes and the philosopher has to put up with that. I do believe that eventually every philosophy becomes paradoxical. So does logic. Cantor and Goedel showed that. And then they went mad.
I'd have to mull on that. I don't identify as a philosopher. You seem to engage in activities that use epistemologies different form the typical and even atypical philosophers. It's all well and good to require philosophers to learn Germand and/or French if they are coming from English, say. But how much better to demand they take hallucinogens or form a complex bond with a member of another species that they have not before or that they must move to a significantly different culture and live there for a time or....give them a real outside perspective on all their assumptions. Otherwise philosophers are just word pushers.I now think that if a philosopher is going to describe what happens at the extreme, where a philosophy is carried to its logical conclusion, then he is going to have to resort to poetry. And religion. Then philosophy becomes a scandal. Criminality and immorality and pathology are all about. You walk in the demi-monde. I have written it up extensively for many years. Reason in extremis. The disreputable. The incorrigible. A god who is your trick for the night.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
I should have said 'I tend not to reveal my stance(s)...' above.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 9:59 am Your posts are always a pleasure to read, but I always come away wondering where you stand. A
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
Yes, I understand the desire to change what I have posted. I wish I knew how. I'm sending you some quotes by Borges and Emerson. https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/ ... alist.html .Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 21st, 2019, 1:58 amI should have said 'I tend not to reveal my stance(s)...' above.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 9:59 am Your posts are always a pleasure to read, but I always come away wondering where you stand. A
For the last two and a half millennia those philosophers who have been aligned with Plato have been more of an artistic nature, while those aligned with Aristotle has had a scientific bent to their thinking. I am a Platonic Realist, not an Aristotelian nominalist.
Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite writers. He was an anti-realist, but he very well describes the strangeness of the Real.
From From Allegories to Novels -
In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason; but the nominalists are Aristotle, the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes has opined that the only medieval debate of some philosophical value is between nominalism and realism; the opinion is somewhat rash, but it underscores the importance of this tenacious controversy, provoked, at the beginning of the ninth century, by a sentence from Porphyry, translated and commented upon by Boethius; sustained, toward the end of the eleventh, by Anselm and Roscelin; and revived by William of Occam in the fourteenth.
As one would suppose, the intermediate positions and nuances multiplied ad infinitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that, for realism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them abstract concepts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: "Ultra-realism garnered the first adherents. The chronicler Heriman (eleventh century) gives the name 'antiqui doctores' to those who teach dialectics in re; Abelard speaks of it as an 'antique doctrine' , and until the end of the twelfth century; the name moderni is applied to its adversaries." A hypothesis that is now inconceivable seemed obvious in the ninth century, and lasted in some form into the fourteenth. Nominalism, once the novelty of a few, today encompasses everyone; its victory is so vast and fundamental that its name is useless, no one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else. Let us try to understand, nevertheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the fundamental thing was not men but humanity, not individuals but the species, not the species but the genus, not the genera but God. From such concepts (whose clearest manifestation is perhaps the quadruple system of Erigena) allegorical literature, as I understand it, derived. Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; there is something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that novelists present aspire to be generic; there is an element of allegory in novel.
The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individual, from realism to nominalism, required several centuries, but I shall have the temerity to suggest an ideal date: the day in 1382 when Geoffrey Chaucer, who may not have believed himself to be a nominalist, set out to translate into English a line by Boccaccio – "E con gli occulti ferri Tradimenti" (And Betrayal with hidden weapons) – and repeated it as "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke." The original is in the seventh book of the Teseide; the English version, in "The night's Tale."
The last paragraph of The Total Library by Borges –
One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic Ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors. Operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism … I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.
From A History of Eternity by Borges –
The ideal universe to which Plotinus summons us is less intent on variety than on plenitude; it is a select repertory, tolerating neither repetition nor pleonasm: the motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes. I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote Greek who devised it ever made its acquaintance, but I sense something of the museum in it: still, monstrous, and classified …
And a footnote from the same –
I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: The generic can be more intense than the concrete. There is no lack of examples to illustrate this. During the boyhood summers I spent in the north of the province of Buenos Aires, I was intrigued by the rounded plain and the men who were butchering in the kitchen, but awful indeed was my delight when I learned that the circular space was the "pampa" and those men "gauchos". The same is true of the imaginative man who falls in love. The generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the tantalizing destiny invested in it) takes priority over individual features, which are tolerated only because of their prior genre. The extreme example – the person who falls in love by word of mouth – is very common in the literatures of Persia and Arabia.
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Re: Are we all born an Atheist?
There is no way to do it. I asked after I joined. I only correct things that I think will be very confusing. I'll read the rest of your post later.GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑June 21st, 2019, 3:53 am Yes, I understand the desire to change what I have posted. I wish I knew how.
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023