Conceiving how God could logically exist.

[Reflex]

Reflex wrote:

Good post, Nick. Especially the last part. The problem with that, though, is that people come to a philosophy forum to be titillated rather than to discuss the relative worth of worldviews.

Apparently true Reflex. I've learned that the attraction of a philosophy forum for the majority is intellectual jousting making philosophy the last thing that is wanted. I'm glad you are aware of it. A welcome change from the usual.

There is a YouTube video showing Nei deGrasse Tyson answering a religious "troll." The audience showed its overall stupidity by applauding Tyson's response without reflecting on what was really said. When boiled down, his answer amounted to "Mine is a meaningless existence of unyielding despair."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=orCZUfnK1J0

Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Religion concluding paragraph:

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."

Complete essay is here

[uwot]

Uwot wrote: Who told you that? It is a perfectly simple idea to grasp; the difficulty comes with trying to believe it.

If it is so easy, tell me how God is simultaneously one and three.

Duh! Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The creator. The material. The animating force. It is piss easy, unless you actually are a Christian and have to reconcile the fact that one third of your 'perfect' god, is not perfect. Painfully, that is Jesus Christ himself, the flesh of the universe. Who brought up St Augustine? Author of Confessions and City of God, two of the books I have read that have turned me into an imbecile. Favourite quote: "Lord make me celibate. But not yet." Yes indeedy; Christians are so fucked up by bodily functions, because they still aspire to the Platonic ideal of a purely intellectual relationship with the universe. Still, they haven't all taken it to the extreme of other monotheistic sexual fascism, by insisting that the foreskin is ritually removed, the only function of doing so is to desensitise the penis and make sex less of a distraction for men.

Is this an intellectual, or emotional decision?

It could be either. That’s the trouble.

You are deluding yourself. The trouble is you haven't the wit or the courage to put forward any sort of meaningful argument that you think you can defend, so you just plead stupidity, which I readily grant you, by saying it's not intellectual, it's emotional.

What is your philosophical reason for suggesting an equivalence between the trinity and Taoism?

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. The essence of religion joins with the essence of philosophy making the pursuit of wisdom other than self justifying fantasy.

What the fuck has that got to do with the question?

"The wisdom of Plato is not a philosophy, a search for God by means of human reason. . . . . Plato’s wisdom is nothing but an orientation of the soul toward grace.”- La Source Grecque

Apart from being a brilliant philosopher, Plato was an elitist propagandist. You clearly are too dim to understand the difference.

Conscious contemplation of the Trinity and the vertical relationship of the three elemental forces is one means of consciously turning the soul from its enchantment with the shadows on the wall towards the direction leading to the “light”

For the benefit of people here, who are not blithering halfwits, could you put that into English? Who am I kidding? Of course you can't.

[Reflex]

Conscious contemplation of the Trinity and the vertical relationship of the three elemental forces is one means of consciously turning the soul from its enchantment with the shadows on the wall towards the direction leading to the “light”

For the benefit of people here, who are not blithering halfwits, could you put that into English? Who am I kidding? Of course you can't.

It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit.

[Dalek Prime]

Conscious contemplation of the Trinity and the vertical relationship of the three elemental forces is one means of consciously turning the soul from its enchantment with the shadows on the wall towards the direction leading to the “light”

For the benefit of people here, who are not blithering halfwits, could you put that into English? Who am I kidding? Of course you can't.

It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit.

And you couldn't have stated that first?

[Reflex]

It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit.

And you couldn't have stated that first?

Even though he may disagree or choose different words, I was responding for Nick. It is, however, not an uncommon comparison.

(Recall the excerpt from The Cloud of Unknowing.)

[Nick_A]

Uwot wrote: Duh! Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The creator. The material. The animating force. It is piss easy, unless you actually are a Christian and have to reconcile the fact that one third of your 'perfect' god, is not perfect.

The question is how God is simultaneously one and three. Uwot posts this and says he doesn’t believe it. Well I don’t believe what you wrote either. All you are doing is ridiculing your conceptions of Christianity while avoiding the question. That is why you think it is easy. Ridicule is always easy; conscious contemplation is not.

You are deluding yourself. The trouble is you haven't the wit or the courage to put forward any sort of meaningful argument that you think you can defend, so you just plead stupidity, which I readily grant you, by saying it's not intellectual, it's emotional.

You do not yet appreciate why understanding the Holy Trinity requires both intellectual and emotional intelligence. Your intellectual intelligence is restricted to duality and your emotional intelligence is restricted to blind denial in matters of God. I don’t see how you can hope to understand how God is both one and three from such a limited perspective.

What the fuck has that got to do with the question?

Understanding the relationship between Taoism and the Trinity has nothing to do with fucking. There is a time to fuck and a time to contemplate. You must learn not to let one function get in the way of the other.

Nick_A wrote:Conscious contemplation of the Trinity and the vertical relationship of the three elemental forces is one means of consciously turning the soul from its enchantment with the shadows on the wall towards the direction leading to the “light”

For the benefit of people here, who are not blithering halfwits, could you put that into English? Who am I kidding? Of course you can't.

I wish I could but you have proven you are closed to such ideas and would prefer ridiculing Christians. I could share on this with someone like Reflex but not with you. Your negativity would prevent it.

[Nick_A]

Reflex, thanks for the link to Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Religion and also the concluding paragraph. The concluding paragraph reminds me of the human condition described by Plato in the cave analogy. I'll have to read the essay.

As far as conscious contemplation is concerned you wrote: "It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit."

But it is easy tp pass this off as Eastern foolishness. People here want immediate answers obtained through dualistic reason. They call this process of dualistic reason contemplation. Question – answer- simple enough. However real religious philosophy values the question more than superficial dualistic answers so strives to consciously keep the question open to experience what consciously reconciles it. Simone Weil describes it well:

“When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.”

A religious philosopher intentionally seeks to consciously contemplate the question creating the contradiction which goes against our automatic conditioned human nature. But it is through conscious contemplation of the contradiction that a person can experience higher understanding by going through the door, the void, opened by conscious contemplation..

[uwot]

It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit.

Don't be silly. The trinity is meant to be literally true.

[uwot]

The question is how God is simultaneously one and three. Uwot posts this and says he doesn’t believe it. Well I don’t believe what you wrote either. All you are doing is ridiculing your conceptions of Christianity while avoiding the question.

I'll say it again:

Duh! Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The creator. The material. The animating force. It is piss easy, unless you actually are a Christian and have to reconcile the fact that one third of your 'perfect' god, is not perfect.

That is answering the question.

That is why you think it is easy.

It is easy; the only people who find it difficult are the ones that simultaneously believe it.

You do not yet appreciate why understanding the Holy Trinity requires both intellectual and emotional intelligence.

So teach me. What is emotional intelligence, and how does help one understand the trinity?

[uwot]

Reflex, thanks for the link to Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Religion and also the concluding paragraph.

Don't thank him Nick_A, if he teaches you much more, you'll turn into an imbecile. Isn't that right, Reflex?

[Reflex]

Bertrand Russell was an intellectually honest atheist, which makes him a very rare kind of atheist. I've seen atheists praise the essay and theists remark how depressing it is. Obviously, I fall into the latter group. The only thing I see praiseworthy from an atheist's point of view is the sentiment behind it, which, of course, is irrational by definition.

[Reflex]

It means it serves roughly the same purpose as a koan, you blithering halfwit.

Don't be silly. The trinity is meant to be literally true.

Your world is tiny, indeed. You believe that the continuance of what your know to be your reality is certain, but this ‘knowing’ precludes further investigation and interaction with variable conditions.

'Free thinker,' indeed.

[Reflex]

People here want immediate answers obtained through dualistic reason. They call this process of dualistic reason contemplation. Question – answer- simple enough.

Also called "dialectics": thesis, antithesis and synthesis. People here think it's all about people think and believe. This, of course, is very naive.

[uwot]

Your world is tiny, indeed. You believe that the continuance of what your know to be your reality is certain, but this ‘knowing’ precludes further investigation and interaction with variable conditions.

I have said many times that the only thing I know for certain is that there are phenomena. The ultimate source of those phenomena, the stuff the universe is 'made' of, if that is indeed the case, is a mystery. Any metaphysical hypothesis could be true, and I am quite willing to take several of them seriously, including the possibility that there is such a thing as god. Of all the variations on that theme, the one I find most compelling is pantheism, but I do not believe it. Doing so would shrink my options and make my world relatively tiny. In a weird piece of projection, you apparently believe that by insisting that your preferred hypothesis is true, you have expanded your world. All you have achieved is to discount any other possibility; the irony is that I get called a blind denier, rather than you.

'Free thinker,' indeed.

That's not a term I have ever used about myself. You are just creating a narrative based on your wishes, rather than any facts, which, let's face it, is exactly how you arrived at your god belief.

[Nick_A]

Reflex wrote:

Bertrand Russell was an intellectually honest atheist, which makes him a very rare kind of atheist. I've seen atheists praise the essay and theists remark how depressing it is. Obviously, I fall into the latter group. The only thing I see praiseworthy from an atheist's point of view is the sentiment behind it, which, of course, is irrational by definition.

The essay you linked seems to be a good example of what Simone Weil described as atheism as a purification. I don't see what is irrational about it. As I understand it animal Man lives in a world of darkness in opposition to ourselves destined to be ruled by force. It may be depressing but there is no sense in denying it.

Should we try to imagine something better that brings contentment or should we make the conscious attempt to witness it for what it is or as is said in Christianity "carry ones cross?"

Why witness it? What happens is bad enough but why consciously witness the reality of the effects of the dominance of blind force on the human condition? Maybe Simone Weil was right when she wrote: "“The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” Until we witness the human condition within us for what it is, we remain a prisoner of it. The essay and the question of our relationship to blind force should be discussed in accordance with what the Ways offer. However once the spirit killers and blind deniers get a hold of it the depth of ideas would be lost and once again the dominant assertion would become: "Yo momma sucks." If you can figure a way around this problem you'll have my vote.