Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Cathal]

One humorous way to reconcile Christianity with Hinduism might be that reincarnating from a human to animal might seem like a negative to a human but it’d be a positive from an animal’s perspective as if an animal doesn’t want to reincarnate as a human! If humans were the most recent life form in evolutionary history then animals might view themselves as far more entitled. A non-rational animal isn’t tempted to be as evil as a human as if part of an animal’s physical strength is their reluctance to view themselves as evil no matter how evil they might appear. So animal reincarnation isn’t only a punishment but can also be a tantalising reward only if we recognised how much more superior an animal felt to a human where few could be so selfless! For all we know it’s human reincarnation that’s the punishment!

[Adam Finch]

That's an interesting perspective! It suggests that reincarnation as an animal could be viewed as a form of liberation from human complexity, where animals may not experience the same moral dilemmas as humans. It really flips the traditional view of reincarnation as a linear progression.

[Sy Borg]

I disagree. The gap between modern humans and simpler animals is so great that coming back as another species would be a disaster for most of us.

Humans can perceive the passing of time - a whole other dimension of existence. Other animals cannot. They cannot mentally time travel as we do, conjuring up memories or projecting the future at will. Think back to when you were a child. Imagine your own death. Other animals, for all their charm and cleverness, cannot do that. There is simply a gap, just as there is a gap between, say dogs and frogs. Would a dog want to reincarnate as a frog when the the latter is less capable than young puppies?

The fact is, there is progression of potential complexity - within genes. The Earth could undergo another major extinction event, and the new era might be an ostensibly simpler time than many preceding eras. However, the complexity of genes built up from the past would remain, resulting in regrowth being more complex than before. All an extinction event does is slow the level of genetic complexity over time. During "The Boring Billion", when the Earth was only inhabited by microbes for a billion years, without much ostensible change. However, during that time, two revolutions were quietly brewing in the microbial stew - multicellularity and sex. These resulted in sudden, rapid evolutionary leaps in the Cambrian Explosion.

Yes, religions include an element of fiction and overdramatisation (for memorablity), but the ancients were no fools. They knew that they had an extra capacity to understand reality, that what they were doing with civilisation was unprecedented in nature in terms of sophistication.

I do agree that that humans' greater ability to detect the passage of time does also mean a greater capacity for suffering - for more trauma, shame, guilt, regrets and fears. When humans are good, no other life on Earth can be a trustworthy, kind, recent, reasoning and rational, and when humans are bad, no other being can be as cruel, sadistic and destructive.

That's the apple in the Garden of Eden, the burden of mind. That's why, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, when the Librarian of the Unseen University for wizards was turned into an orangutan in a magical accident, he refused to be turned back into a human.

Being a human is a tough gig, but life in the wild is, on average, harder - parasites, high infant mortality, watching friends and family being eaten alive, bit by bit, or being eaten alive oneself. There's no anaesthetic when you lose a body part, often no treatment.

Personally, I think any existence other than human or pampered pet prior to the advent of general anaesthetic in 1847, is extra hard.

[Cathal]

A superficial attempt to reconcile atheism with theism might be in how if your body fully decomposes after death then the memory of you in someone else’s unconscious mind is more real materialistically than your past dead self. So an alternative version of God is to simply rent in other people’s unconscious minds hopping from one person’s dreams to another person’s dreams after your death. Being a ghost haunting others so to speak might ironically have more scientific credibility than an eternal afterlife!

[yid=JgVEEQgC4i0?si]
Lord Voldemort returns - Goblet of Fire

[Cathal]

A problem with Machiavellianism is to underestimate how Machiavellian Christianity itself might be in terms of stealth much like the CIA. Hence the trouble with justifying a lesser evil is to think that anyone else was needed to justify evil to knowing how self-sufficient others were meant to be were they involved in evil! So when it comes to the trolley problem in philosophy of whether it’s justified to throw someone over the bridge to stop a train carriage of multiple people crashing and dying then the most tactful perception might be to indeed push the person over but to say sorry while doing so no matter how hypocritical it might appear in order to not promote the cold and calculating perception to less trustworthy people! So much like the thieves who died on the cross with Jesus an evil person might not bear the death penalty but most nonetheless bear the cost of being ethically martyred to not represent an ethical system! No matter how annoying an evasive apology is from a politician it might still be better sometimes than a sarcastic “no comment” if only to not justify how serious the politician might have otherwise appeared to sincere listeners. So in the first scene of the movie below where the guy is sacrificed to tame the zombies it might appear inverted where the woman is lighthearted in nominating him for a human sacrifice only that the sarcasm can be circular relative to the hegemony of Christianity as if many of the group’s (spoiler) later internal deaths are a form of indirect atonement!

Army Of The Dead (2021) Movie I Scott Sacrifice Har Man I

Pantheistic versions of gun control seem only tolerable in America relative to a zombie outbreak as if even nuclear war were an insufficient incentive!

Time Loop Theory Explained | Army of the Dead | Netflix

[Cathal]

Part of the division between protestants and catholics stems in part from the paradoxical nature of forgiveness when it comes to wealth inequality as to whether we forgive poor people for being poor or to forgive rich people for being rich! Hence the vow of poverty taken by Catholic monks can also be a pun for how poor people are at risk of resembling monks without ever wanting to be a monk! Yet compromise is part of everyday life which is why I remembered being disoriented by immersive or over-enthusiastic online prayers like the one below when I was in a psychiatric hospital many years ago!

NOVENA TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS
‘O my Jesus, you have said: "Truly I say to you, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you." Behold I knock, I seek and ask for the grace of...’

An alternative version of divine judgement is as if each country’s history can be more serious than their present moment without even having to reference Christian history. So the way no one can speak their own casual Shakespearean English even if they can still learn Shakespearean quotes means that we might be better generalists than history but not always better specialists!

[Cathal]

One reason arachnids and snakes might be able to detect your fear might be owing to a chain reaction where the moment the creature is viewed as evil then the creature would’ve been evil throughout their entire evolutionary history for millions of years. The fear response risks objectifying the creature from the creature’s point of view!

(2:00) “This is devil’s snare; you have to relax.” - Hermione

Alohomora And Devil's Snare - Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone

[Cathal]

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers-Gandalf the White

It’s sometimes joke how someone isn’t racist if they hate every race equally. Yet when it comes to pure evil the problem of forgiveness arises where a pure racist wouldn’t actually personally or specifically hate an individual from the hated country but would really just hate everyone in the country equally much like a nuclear weapon! Hence one reason so many James Bond villains can be so captivating is due to the irony of psychopathy not being a personal insult to the victim. Hence the idea that the perpetrator was merely a representative of evil downplays how ethical someone else might still have been to the victim’s family in murdering someone they’d a grudge against. Hence an average male physique can ironically appear more fierce than an athlete’s physique were we purely racist seeing as you could adapt to counteract every single enemy physique be they bodybuilders or runners(!):

IMG_1058.jpeg (1.3 MiB) Viewed 887 times

Rob Schneider - Male Gigolo

Forgiveness can also prove tantalising when it comes to perverted websites. The irony of the likes of gore media is that those who support it might superficially appear forgiving to countries that committed evil in history as if the novelty of gore media were somehow worse or more violent than all the atrocities in history. Yet the flip side is that those who’d oppose gore media might appear even sexier on the grounds that had everyone mobile camera-phones before WW1 then it’d appear as international history were only ever gore media in a way that becomes boring and ripe for change! Likewise a limitation of animal porn might be to take the sanctity of human life for granted in how it’s not not necessarily ethical to deism to prioritise human life even if it’s ethical for theism to prioritise human life. In other words an ideal of being equal with animals might be that animals are only supremacists of their own species such that they’re condemned to feel mentally inferior to humans even if it’s not that way for materialism.

“Benedict was born Josef Alois Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, Germany. During World War II, he was required to join the Hitler Youth, a wing of the Nazi Party. He was later drafted into an anti-aircraft unit and then the infantry of Nazi Germany.”

[Cathal]

A sarcastic version of forgiveness might be to state that someone definitely wasn’t evil to commit a crime against you even if the criminal didn’t think they were evil in doing so. This removes a counterfactual in the criminal’s unconscious mind that they might have been evil to attack you even if they never took such a counterfactual seriously. This exploits the idea that people aren’t born evil such that the innocent notion during their childhood that attacking someone was immoral in a way that wasn’t very ethical to their future criminal adult self. Hence forgiveness might function a bit like an ultimatum to either forget some of their childhood or to welcome forgiveness as a belief. However this version of forgiveness might be too much of a gamble:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) - Detention Scene

[Cathal]

John Wick: Chapter 4 Movie Clip - Rules of Engagement (2023)

In spite of all the warfare in history few countries have ever actually managed to defeat Christianity. Part of the mystery might be karma in misleading others into loving your enemy with a backhanded compliment that they are still slightly serious just for yourself to appear even mightier. Yet Christianity can invert this by saying that people weren’t one bit serious to forgive people in a way that could compel vengeful people to be unrealistically too serious. Hence anyone parodying the Christian religion is ironically at high risk of promoting the idea the religion was even a tiny bit serious! Yet if the religion is unquantifiably ridiculous then they’re at risk of being accidentally sucked into the religion by making fun of the religion! It’s as if after the Cold War so many Christian countries mimicked the hinterland of Gotham with an endless American vibe in a way that never actually cared about New York not representing their belief system where everyone’s anachronistically out of place without a megacity of their own to back up such a dystopian vibe! A criticism of religion is how people are so likely to copy their parents’ religious affiliation yet this can be inverted as a version of forgiveness where anyone re-incarnated into a country that perpetrates evil is deterministically more likely to be individually evil without it representing their inner soul. A problem with paraphiliac websites is to take the religion for granted as if were people in the stone age routine promiscuous then monogamy would appear more rebellious in taking promiscuity as the norm in comparison to the boring status quo!

[Sy Borg]

Cathal, who are you talking to?

Is anyone here parodying Christianity?

Pantheism sees the universe itself as God. Everything is God. God is everything.

[Cathal]

Cathal, who are you talking to?

Is anyone here parodying Christianity?

Pantheism sees the universe itself as God. Everything is God. God is everything.

The idea of inheritance tax can be open-ended. A bonus of inheritance tax to socialism is to help poor people. Yet so-called death taxes can be a bonus too for capitalism as an ironic deterrent against caring about a country’s history where there might be baggage or war crimes here and there. In other words inheritance tax would function as a mild euphemism for what war reparations or ethnic land redistribution represented in history.

[Sy Borg]

I am guessing that you intended the above post for another thread. I've done that before too.

[Cathal]

I am guessing that you intended the above post for another thread. I've done that before too.

One problem with achieving a heaven on Earth is to look at history through rose tinted glasses as if each period of immorality or evil like colonialism, slavery and the world wars had ironically presented the peaceful eras beforehand as nicer than they might have been. Yet before English or French colonialism there was still lots of feudalism and poverty. Hence a humble way to view Christianity is merely as the lack of being evil rather than of trying to be actively nice. For example no matter how much of a disaster communism might have been it still succeeded in preventing criminals and thieves in poorer countries trying to mimic Robin Hood or doing so accidentally. Yet this would’ve been circular as we don’t know how much more drug gangs there might have been in South America were it not for them uniformly opposing communism!

[Cathal]

The rise of pornography could have a flip side where incels and bachelors might be at risk of mimicking the wisdom of virgin priests! I’ve to parody my version of pantheism with pornographic innuendo and immaterial perceptions as a deterrent to the sheer number of people expected to join my belief system!

Thin Lizzy - Sarah