Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Alvin Plantinga

To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.

The good news? All you have to do is to believe it.

Am I really arrogant and egoistic just by virtue of believing something I know others don’t believe, where I can’t show them that I am right?

Probably, let's say.

Argument is not needed for rational justification. The believer is entirely within his epistemic right in believing, for example, that God has created the world, even if he has no argument at all for that conclusion.

Ah, of course: the Immanual Can Syndrome.

Freud's complaint is that religious belief lacks warrant because it is produced by wishful thinking, which is a cognitive process that is not aimed at the production of true belief; in Freud's words, it is not reality oriented. But even if it were established that wish fulfilment is the source of theistic belief, however, that wouldn't be enough to establish that the latter has no warrant.

Besides, there's a sucker born every minute. And, as Mike suggested to Margaret, "two to take him".

If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God.



Unless, of course, it's true.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Woman Feels Like She’s Finally Ready To Start Receiving Unsolicited Vulgar Messages Again

Yo, Urwrong! You're up!!

God Reveals He Occasionally Eats Humans

You know, the dreg from Hell.

Man Anxiously Scanning Bar’s Reaction To Jukebox Selection

To wit: https://youtu.be/HCqg-vhiBAc

Sam Bankman-Fried Sobs After Accidentally Dropping Last Crypto Down Sewer Grate

Just out of curiosity, any hapless crypto losers here?

Raphael Warnock Loses All Faith In God After Being Forced Into Runoff Against Herschel Walker

That'll do it.

Clueless Commuters Walk Past World-Famous Subway Masturbator Without Realizing

Glued to their smart phones no doubt.

[iambiguous]

Virginia Woolf from The Waves

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Instead, she consumed herself.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Not unlike me banging my head here, right?

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

Though not at all like me here, is it?

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Or, as Simon Critchley once suggested, "very little, almost nothing."

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is dispatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

Or not pretend at all.
Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I am rooted, but I flow.

For example, from the cradle to the grave.

[Sculptor]

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom & philosophy

--Beethoven

"...Don't ask us to attend
'Cos we're not all there
Oh don't pretend 'cos I don't care
I don't believe illusions 'cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
'Cos we know what we feel

Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
We're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
Vacant..." - Johnny Rotten

-Imp

Beethoven was right about some music.
The sex pistols showed him where he was wrong.

[attofishpi]

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom & philosophy

--Beethoven

"...Don't ask us to attend
'Cos we're not all there
Oh don't pretend 'cos I don't care
I don't believe illusions 'cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
'Cos we know what we feel

Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
We're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
Vacant..." - Johnny Rotten

-Imp

Beethoven was right about some music.
The sex pistols showed him where he was wrong.

Mmm..

..she was a girl from Birmingham
she just had an abortion

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him

Anyone here warn him?

Homeless Matt Damon Forced To Sell Kidney After Losing Everything In Crypto Pump And Dump Scheme

Next up: reaction from Ben and J Lo.

Stolen Bitcoin Worth $3 Billion Found In Popcorn Tin

Your turn to Google it.

Facebook HQ On Lockdown After Mark Zuckerberg’s Avatar Breaks Out Of Metaverse

Last seen orbiting Pluto.

Family Has Strict No Smartphone Rule While Eating Dinner In Front Of TV

Let's weep for their future.

Man Honestly Better Off For Having Turned Self Over To Algorithms

Next up: turning self over to dasein.

[iambiguous]

Sean Carroll

The idea of “Ten Commandments” is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave.

Next up: ten reasons for that.

It doesn’t include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is.

Next up: ought that to be the case?

We talk about “awe and wonder,” but those are two different words. I am in awe of the universe: its scope, its complexity, its depth, its meticulous precision. But my primary feeling is wonder. Awe has connotations of reverence: “this fills me with awe and I am not worthy.” Wonder has connotations of curiosity: “this fills me with wonder and I am going to figure it out.”

Next up: shock and awe and wonder.

"Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative." Stephen Toulmin

Pick one:
1] brilliant
2] ridiculous

Everybody dies. Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it’s a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It’s a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.

You know, being philosophical.

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. “Do you know how fast you were going?” asks the cop. “No,” Heisenberg replies, “but I know exactly where I am!” I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are. They are less good at accurately conveying physics. This particular chestnut rests on familiarity with the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, often explained as saying that we cannot simultaneously know both the position and the velocity of any object. But the reality is deeper than that.

Of course here where is all virtual.

[promethean75]

Just a friendly reminder.

"... the first exercise in linguistic chicanery that we know of in the 'West' took place in Ancient Greece. This was undertaken in order to transform earlier, aristocratically-motivated myths and Theogonies into secular, or metaphysical, 'truths' in order to provide a de-personalised (but now rational) legitimacy for the new forms of class power emerging in and beyond the sixth century BC.

These concepts, inherited from Traditional Thought, were aimed at 'justifying' and rationalising the consolidation and reproduction of ruling-class power. Hence, if the state 'reflects' the underlying 'rational', or 'objective' order of reality (as Traditional Theorists have almost invariably maintained -- albeit modified in line with each subsequent Mode of Production, to suit the ideological priorities of contemporaneous ruling elites), then any opposition to it could be waved aside as "irrational", against "the natural order", or even contrary to "the divine plan", and hence ultimately futile. The moral order of the state was thus inter-twined with the "rational order" of reality. Indeed, the ethical condition of the soul and the structure of the State weren't just accidentally linked (for example, in Plato's thought, or in Ancient India and China); this was constitutive of both the entire cosmos and rightful governance on earth. The same was true of the other 'rational principles', derived from thought alone by countless generations of ruling-class hacks, albeit expressed in a different idiom as local economic, political and social conditions required." - Rosa 'the rad red' Lichtenstein

[promethean75]

in response to the occasionalist's attributing the contiguity of events to continuous acts of divine will in order to provide a logical connection between things, Hume replied...

71qw25.jpg

[iambiguous]

God

I can't suspend Elon Musk from Twitter, but I can suspend him from a cross.

Promises, promises.

The sun is 100% solar-powered.

All the way around in fact.

Why do bad things happen to good people?
To balance out the good things that happen to bad people.

Of course: human history in a nutshell.
Well, so far.

There's almost nothing I wouldn't do to get verified.
But paying $8 a month is one of them.

Take that, Elon!

If Elon Musk kills Twitter you will never hear from Me again and My son will communicate with you only on breakfast foods.

On the other hand, what if He actually means it?

I'm sick of this shit, but I'm also sick of that shit.

Next up: your shit.

[iambiguous]

Emil M. Cioran from The Trouble with Being Born

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

He got that from me.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.

The unbearable lightness of something, right?

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

More to the point, if he does, what's he think about now?

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

One way or the other...and, of course, the other way around.

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Not counting the pinheads, of course. At least the pinheads here.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth...

Heads they win, tails we lose.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." Socrates

Aside from knowing that, of course.

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.” Saul Bellow

Or, here, unexpected intrusions of intelligence.

"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." William Faulkner

See, I told you.

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth." William Faulkner


No, seriously.

"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge..." Tom Waits

And, after all, he's big in Japan.

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy

Also, every ten years, double it.

[iambiguous]

Albert Camus from The Stranger

I opened myself up to the benign indifference of the world.

Though not so benign for some of course.

Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.

What, even here?!

The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started.

The rest of his life, for example.

I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. For the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

"Not unlike myself here", he said, bursting into laughter.

...he said firmly, God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble.
Obviously, I replied, they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it. I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.

Me, I'll take God's help in a heartbeat. So, by all means, tell Him that I'm still interested.

...maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occurred to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen....Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.

We still remember him though, right?

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it. You find that out really fast." Tom Waits

Still, that it's often the case here can be demoralizing.

"If you wish to improve your life, you must be prepared to sacrifice it." Leo Tolstoy

Where to draw the line, right?

"Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women." Leo Tolstoy

Let's name names.

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." Igor Stravinsky

Next up: lesser philosophers.

"What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators." Igor Stravinsky

Same with philosophers. And here they follow you around. Failing miserably of course.

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough." John Updike

Okay, true, but only all the way to the grave.

[iambiguous]

Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Context anyone?

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Yo, gib!!
Well, among others.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Or stay and choose strength themselves.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Our guillotine, of course, not theirs.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Let's try to explain why.

[Nietzsche's] idea of eternal return is a mysterious one....to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it and that recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal returns states that a life which disappears once and for all....is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than a war between two African kingdoms in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a 100,000 blacks perished in excruciating torment....

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit...?

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period of my life, a period that would never return?

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of aworld that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

And your own reconciliation?