Christianity

[Belinda]

I prefer to think of evil as absence of good.

If IC is also happy with that definition, or mine, it will certainly mean a lot less work for me when I come to reply to his response.

It was St Augustine's reply.

[Harbal]

It was St Augustine's reply.

I don't know who St Augustine was, so I don't know how much weight he carries with IC.

[iambiguous]

How can I make it clearer? Connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality there and then is what I construe to be the fundamental point of God and religion.

So, having acknowledged your observation/complaint about a 'wall of words' and your assertion that you think I am trying to impress ("Now that is a philosopher!"), I feel inclined to repeat a smallish observation about you: You turn over and over in the same groove like a broken record. You seem to be stuck in a conundrum from which you cannot get out of.

That's fair, I believe. Given my own preoccupation with this...

"How ought one to behave morally in a No God world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency chance and change"

...yeah, I do tend to come back to encompassing this in what zinnatt over at ILP called my "groots".

Only here, for the Christians, it's a God world. So, by all means, let them explain to me how connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then is not the fundamental purpose of God and religion. Your own assessment above certainly didn't impress me. Other than to confirm that by and large you do prefer being up in the clouds. Words defining and defending yet more words still in paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph.

That and making it all about me...

So with this quoted sentence you clearly indicate that you have identified the problem which captures you, but simultaneously you repeat a verbal formula about Dasein which, neurotically, spells out the negation of any *solution* to the issue that you declare that you face. You ask "How can I make this any clearer?" And indeed you cannot make it any clearer. It is really very clear. You are stuck like a broken record is stuck repeating time and again the condition in which you turn in circles. What does one do to the armature and the needle when it is stuck in a groove? One either applies downward pressure so that the needle progresses in the groove established, or one lifts it up over the damaged part to the next part of the recording.

How [existentially] does this make God and religion any less about connecting the dots between morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it?

Note to the Christians here:

Is my own assessment of the most important purpose/function of Christianity in your lives not also your own? Doesn't it always come down ultimately to saving your souls? Given the gap between the miniscule 70 odd years you exist down here and "for all the rest of eternity" up there?

And then on and on in much the same didactic vein...

Now what is the point in even saying this when, it seems, you will react against it with such adamancy (as so many here do)? The point is to clarify, to bring out into the open, to expose, that you and so many like you are stuck in a place from which you cannot extract yourself. My observation then, on a philosophical forum, is to make statements about that condition. This is not a personal issue and if you interpret it as such you will make the mistake that all here seem to make and which turns all *conversations* (in the best sense of the word) into unending bicker-sessions that go on day after week after month and after year.

So then the issue becomes: How does and how can this existential problem be surmounted? Or, do you propose (and again I really mean a you-plural and refer to *us* as people stuck in a psychological condition) do you propose that staying in this groove or in this impassable rut is something you desire? Does this represent a *good* for you? Is this where you want to be? In ideal terms where would you like to be? So then, what I am saying goes like this: You actually like the place where you are stuck. It gives you something (what I can only guess).

Talk about being stuck in the same pedantic "serious philosopher" let's make this "all about iambiguous" groove!

So, whatever others here might deem the bigger picture -- the whole picture?! -- to be is of interest to me only if they are willing to bring it around to my own set of priorities. Though let's not forget that absolutely no one here is obligated to read anything I post. Let alone to respond given my own conditions.

Yes, and your 'set of priorities' is a series of neurotic declarations about your own impotence. Why would anyone desire to participate with you in your set of priorities when doing so will lock them into the condition of a skipping record?

See, you essentially are *looking for company* and this too is part of our present condition out of which we do not seem to be able to move. Misery loves company, right? Or something along those lines.

Absolutely shameless. Well, okay, as always, "if I do say so myself".

And I've heard it all before. It's not not what I conclude here...

1] that in a No God world human existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless
2] that in a No God world there does not appear to be a way for secular philosophers and ethicists to "think up" a deontological moral argument that can, in fact, be demonstrated to encompass what everyone craves... an objective morality
3] that in a No God world death = oblivion

...it's that thinking as I do is just so godawful grim and gruesome, this in and of itself makes it wrong. Who would want to think like that?!

It's like when Nietzsche came along to announce God was dead because we killed Him. All those folks screaming, "The horror! If God is dead then all things are permitted!! So Nietzsche must be wrong!"

You see my focus here as but an "aspect" of Christianity. Okay, what other aspects are more important given that the fates of our very souls [for all of eternity] are said to be on the line by the Christians here.

If you actually conceive that your soul is on the line, then I can assure you that right there, in that, within that thought or perception if it is taken seriously, the answer will emerge.

What on earth is that supposed to mean?!

Of course, the Christians among us will proclaim what the only answer is: accepting Jesus Christ as your own personal savior. Once you do that you've got Commandments regarding how to behave on this side of the grave in order to pass muster on Judgment Day and receive your eternal reward...immortality and salvation in Heaven forever and ever and ever...on the other side of it.

Go ahead, ask them. Ask them if their Christian faith revolves around anything more important? Ask them if they are more preoccupied with the "philosophy of religion" or the history of Christianity instead.

But you seem to not really get inside the question. Yes, you ask the question but then, with your verbal and mental trick, you undermine any sense which might be contained in the question.

What trick? Noting that, in my view, morality and immortality/salvation are at the heart and the soul of Christianity?

I can only begin to imagine a congregation's reaction to you at the Sunday Service, rambling on and on up in the spiritual clouds as you do here.

To wit[less]:

What you do not seem aware of -- and I find fault with your lack of familiarity with the philosophical problem -- is that this question and these questions are part-and-parcel of *our traditions* and they actually have substantial answers. Or allow me to put it a bit differently: a trapped soul, a trapped person and a trapped personality can find a way to *move* creatively beyond an existential quagmire. I grant you that in the larger scale that our civilization and our culture may indeed be stuck in downward-tending processes, but the individual has freedom. Can act positively and creatively.

And frankly that is and that has been my own focus in this particular months-long conversation.

What say the congregation to this? The one here for example.

[iambiguous]

“Now there’s a moral nihilist!”
_______________________

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Again, given a moral conflagration of note revolving around a set of circumstances most here will be familiar with, let him start a new thread in which we compare and contrast our own moral philosophies.

If only to see how successful I might be in bringing him down out of those ponderous clouds of abstraction. Paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of "it's so deep it's meaningless" words defining and defending yet more words still.

[promethean75]

Absolutely shameless.

[iambiguous]

Absolutely shameless.

Yeah, that too.

[Belinda]

It was St Augustine's reply.

I don't know who St Augustine was, so I don't know how much weight he carries with IC.

You can be sure IC knows. One of the rewarding things about talking to IC is he knows scripture and theology, and if he doesn't he will look it up.

[Harbal]

You can be sure IC knows. One of the rewarding things about talking to IC is he knows scripture and theology, and if he doesn't he will look it up.

Yes, I have no doubt about that.

[Alexis Jacobi]

That's fair, I believe. Given my own preoccupation with this...

"How ought one to behave morally in a No God world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency chance and change"

...yeah, I do tend to come back to encompassing this in what zinnatt over at ILP called my "groots".

Only here, for the Christians, it's a God world. So, by all means, let them explain to me how connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then is not the fundamental purpose of God and religion. Your own assessment above certainly didn't impress me. Other than to confirm that by and large you do prefer being up in the clouds. Words defining and defending yet more words still in paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph.

That and making it all about me...

My impression of you, so far, is that your effort is not so much to receive an 'answer' that could help to move you from the position you have invested in, but rather to cement the position that you have and which, as I say, you have invested so much in. I suppose it would result in a personal cataclysm were you to begin to see out of different eyes.

Personally, I do not begin from the point of a No-God World and yet to say such a thing on a forum populated with people who for different reasons are invested in asserting and affirming the common doctrines of post-Christian atheism always rouses them to come an do battle. If one is dead-set on disproof there is no proof or even allusion that will be accepted. So for this reason I am more interested in examining the rigidity of that position and as I often say understanding its 'function'.

You have outlined very clearly the point you began from (raised I assume in Christianity and a 'believing' one) and you've made it plain how it happened that you came to see all of that as totally false. The way I think about that -- the process you describe -- is simply to see it more or less precisely as the standard Nietzschean realization. That a conceptual model about what god is or how god is is what died. And yes, we certainly did kill that conception. I believe that I understand all of this quite well. And I also understand and agree that certainly the former god-concept, the personality and agency given to god, is nowhere to be found in the world of raucous phenomena. It is true: one has to *explain* a phenomenal world that is ruled, as our world is, by random and mechanical forces and where a supervising god-entity is absent.

And though all of that is true, and I would say undeniable, I do not think you are enough aware of how people have confronted and dealt with the truthful realizations around the death of a god-concept and explored other routes. Essentially that involves turning inward. Oddly, to begin to speak about that inward turn is also anathema to true-believer Christians and other religionists. I think this had been made plain here by Immanuel when the turn to 'therapeutics' was brought up and when a god out there was no longer a perceptual possibility. The only alternative is to turn inward. And to see that the god-concept is essentially a 'projection' of inner content onto the world of appearances and becoming. If I had to be completely honest about my own perceptual stance I would have to agree with the atheistic view of the phenomenal world as being 'absent' of god.

I can nonetheless sort of appreciate those who try to go the route of seeking god as 'designer' and as having set things in motion, but that view even if true does nothing to explain the strange world we are in and, additionally, any picture of god that is based on Nature and the way things are here could only reveal a sort of demonic god or one that is Abraxas-like. There certainly does exist a contrary though repressed current within Occidental mysticism that cannot accept the conventional god-concept offered by mass-religion but does not become 'atheist'. It does present very different pictures though.

What interests me about your statement (about me) as being lost in clouds of abstraction seems way off the mark. I would say something similar to you about your 'declared stance'. And indeed I have pointed out that you skip over the same issue and problem. You cannot make any sort of decision at all. You say that this applies in the moral-political realm but I think the problem is deeper: you literally are subsumed in a world (that is a descriptive world) in which there are no solidities whatever. And then you go on, I think honestly, to state that what happens to one captured in that sort of world is that the *I* fragments. On what basis could you hold yourself together? So my way of interpreting *you* (the position you reveal, your conundrum) is to see you as having been victimized by the mutable world of Becoming. What is the alternative? Discover and define a world of Being.

Perhaps it is simplistic but I find the Platonic conceptual pathways to defining *god* to be still very useful. Personally, and this is simply a known thing, Christianity and Catholicism (Catholicism especially since to say Christianity today means moreover Protestant Christianity) is obviously a smorgasbord of a wide array of 'common sense' notions that were common intellectual currency when the Hebrew evangelists brought their doctrines to the Greek world. Again personally I think Christianity must be disassembled and its parts understood. It more or less returns us to the sort of world-picture that you describe (and which captures and possesses you -- at least that is my perception) but with the same possibility as was defined by Plato in Phaedo:

Consider then, Cebes, whether it follows from all that has been said that the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble, and never consistently the same.

I assume that you are familiar with this way of conceiving things. I suppose I should assume that you do not accept it or that it does not answer enough of the questions and problems that confront you.

Again personally I have come to embrace, to put it plainly, an anti-Christian position. Or I could say anti-Pauline:

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness”, and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

I see this as mind-fuck. It is I think a very good example of Hebrew Idea-Imperialism. If you try to reduce it to what it really says, what it says is really disturbing and destructive. You are told that you must give yourself over to this 'god' and thus give over your own power to see, think, decide, choose. This statement invalidates at the most basic level. It is tantamount to neutering or castrating oneself. I absolutely do not believe this is the way to go.

So in my own view I think that culturally, intellectually, and also politically, it is crucial to see and to throw off this basic idea that everyone must submit to this god-figure defined as Jesus and, as a result, give up oneself and subscribe to a mass-current. Recovery of oneself, at a most fundamental level, must then mean turning against a whole array of false-constructs and false-admonitions that have been thrust on people generally. But not in a merely rebellious mode. But creative rebellion. Therefore the object is not spiritual disempowerment, neutering and castration, but rejecting a god-image of uniformity and sameness through which people are controlled. And beginning to reconstruct the self and the actions of the self in contrary ways. Recovering genuine but ordered will. Recovering self-determining power. And as part of that also turning against egalitarianism and also progressivism which are the modern expression of those Pauline ideologies.

So I can only continue in the projects and processes that I have defined for myself and declared to be my own. I see Immanuel as carrying forward a distorted and distorting Christian doctrine which I have come necessarily to oppose. His ultimate threat (I mean that of Christianity) is spiritual annihilation! But the opposite is true. Recovery is 'life'. Yet I do not think that everything that was channeled into Catholicism is philosophically wrong -- Platonic doctrines seem sound in most ways still -- but because Christianity is a movement of establishing uniformity through undermining freedom of thought and existential freedom. It disempowers at the most essential and crucial level as that excerpt from 1Corinthians demonstrates.

This is why I am more interested in paths of recovery of power; of concept-pathways that rediscover or redefine *god*; which bring out metaphysical truths that apply in the concrete and *real* world and which empower people to act in their world in an integral way. I am much more aligned with a dissident and Right-tending intellectual movement and more and more opposed to those currents of thought that seem communistic, egalitarian and 'progressive' for these reasons.

[Belinda]

That's fair, I believe. Given my own preoccupation with this...

"How ought one to behave morally in a No God world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency chance and change"

...yeah, I do tend to come back to encompassing this in what zinnatt over at ILP called my "groots".

Only here, for the Christians, it's a God world. So, by all means, let them explain to me how connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then is not the fundamental purpose of God and religion. Your own assessment above certainly didn't impress me. Other than to confirm that by and large you do prefer being up in the clouds. Words defining and defending yet more words still in paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph.

That and making it all about me...

My impression of you, so far, is that your effort is not so much to receive an 'answer' that could help to move you from the position you have invested in, but rather to cement the position that you have and which, as I say, you have invested so much in. I suppose it would result in a personal cataclysm were you to begin to see out of different eyes.

Personally, I do not begin from the point of a No-God World and yet to say such a thing on a forum populated with people who for different reasons are invested in asserting and affirming the common doctrines of post-Christian atheism always rouses them to come an do battle. If one is dead-set on disproof there is no proof or even allusion that will be accepted. So for this reason I am more interested in examining the rigidity of that position and as I often say understanding its 'function'.

You have outlined very clearly the point you began from (raised I assume in Christianity and a 'believing' one) and you've made it plain how it happened that you came to see all of that as totally false. The way I think about that -- the process you describe -- is simply to see it more or less precisely as the standard Nietzschean realization. That a conceptual model about what god is or how god is is what died. And yes, we certainly did kill that conception. I believe that I understand all of this quite well. And I also understand and agree that certainly the former god-concept, the personality and agency given to god, is nowhere to be found in the world of raucous phenomena. It is true: one has to *explain* a phenomenal world that is ruled, as our world is, by random and mechanical forces and where a supervising god-entity is absent.

And though all of that is true, and I would say undeniable, I do not think you are enough aware of how people have confronted and dealt with the truthful realizations around the death of a god-concept and explored other routes. Essentially that involves turning inward. Oddly, to begin to speak about that inward turn is also anathema to true-believer Christians and other religionists. I think this had been made plain here by Immanuel when the turn to 'therapeutics' was brought up and when a god out there was no longer a perceptual possibility. The only alternative is to turn inward. And to see that the god-concept is essentially a 'projection' of inner content onto the world of appearances and becoming. If I had to be completely honest about my own perceptual stance I would have to agree with the atheistic view of the phenomenal world as being 'absent' of god.

I can nonetheless sort of appreciate those who try to go the route of seeking god as 'designer' and as having set things in motion, but that view even if true does nothing to explain the strange world we are in and, additionally, any picture of god that is based on Nature and the way things are here could only reveal a sort of demonic god or one that is Abraxas-like. There certainly does exist a contrary though repressed current within Occidental mysticism that cannot accept the conventional god-concept offered by mass-religion but does not become 'atheist'. It does present very different pictures though.

What interests me about your statement (about me) as being lost in clouds of abstraction seems way off the mark. I would say something similar to you about your 'declared stance'. And indeed I have pointed out that you skip over the same issue and problem. You cannot make any sort of decision at all. You say that this applies in the moral-political realm but I think the problem is deeper: you literally are subsumed in a world (that is a descriptive world) in which there are no solidities whatever. And then you go on, I think honestly, to state that what happens to one captured in that sort of world is that the *I* fragments. On what basis could you hold yourself together? So my way of interpreting *you* (the position you reveal, your conundrum) is to see you as having been victimized by the mutable world of Becoming. What is the alternative? Discover and define a world of Being.

Perhaps it is simplistic but I find the Platonic conceptual pathways to defining *god* to be still very useful. Personally, and this is simply a known thing, Christianity and Catholicism (Catholicism especially since to say Christianity today means moreover Protestant Christianity) is obviously a smorgasbord of a wide array of 'common sense' notions that were common intellectual currency when the Hebrew evangelists brought their doctrines to the Greek world. Again personally I think Christianity must be disassembled and its parts understood. It more or less returns us to the sort of world-picture that you describe (and which captures and possesses you -- at least that is my perception) but with the same possibility as was defined by Plato in Phaedo:

Consider then, Cebes, whether it follows from all that has been said that the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble, and never consistently the same.

I assume that you are familiar with this way of conceiving things. I suppose I should assume that you do not accept it or that it does not answer enough of the questions and problems that confront you.

Again personally I have come to embrace, to put it plainly, an anti-Christian position. Or I could say anti-Pauline:

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness”, and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

I see this as mind-fuck. It is I think a very good example of Hebrew Idea-Imperialism. If you try to reduce it to what it really says, what it says is really disturbing and destructive. You are told that you must give yourself over to this 'god' and thus give over your own power to see, think, decide, choose. This statement invalidates at the most basic level. It is tantamount to neutering or castrating oneself. I absolutely do not believe this is the way to go.

So in my own view I think that culturally, intellectually, and also politically, it is crucial to see and to throw off this basic idea that everyone must submit to this god-figure defined as Jesus and, as a result, give up oneself and subscribe to a mass-current. Recovery of oneself, at a most fundamental level, must then mean turning again a whole array of false-constructs and false-admonitions that have been thrust on people generally. Therefore the object is not spiritual disempowerment and neutering, and in no sense aligning oneself with a god-image of uniformity and sameness through which people are controlled, but everything that is the opposite of that. The recovery of will. The recovery of self-determining power. And as part of that turning against egalitarianism and also progressivism which are the modern expression of those Pauline ideologies.

So I can only continue in the projects and processes that I have defined for myself and declared to be my own. I see Immanuel as carrying forward a distorted and distorting Christian doctrine which I have come necessarily to oppose. Not because I think that everything that was channeled into Catholicism is philosophically wrong -- Platonic doctrines seem sound in many ways -- but because Christianity is a movement of establishing uniformity through undermining freedom of thought. It disempowers at the most essential and crucial level as that excerpt from 1 Corinthians demonstrates.

This is why I am more interested in paths of recovery of power; of concept-pathways that rediscover or redefine *god*; which bring out metaphysical truths that apply in the concrete and *real* world and which empower people to act in their world in an integral way. I am much more aligned with a dissident and Right-tending intellectual movement and more and more opposed to those currents of thought that seem communistic, egalitarian and 'progressive' for these reasons.

I don't see how "turning inward" is politically "Right-tending" . I'd have thought if God is a human creation then people who believed that would be politically liberal.(NB not liberal NOT libertarian).

I like your evaluation of Platonism.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I don't see how "turning inward" is politically "Right-tending".

It seems to me that on the whole it could well be. That is if we were to go forward to define a Platonic conservatism. I cannot see Plato (for example) as anything but deeply conservative (if I can even use these contemporary terms in a coherent philosophical discussion). Indeed I thought Plato was generally understood to be proto-fascist when examined straight on.

The inward turn I am thinking about includes practices of self realization more proper to yoga perhaps. An inward turn is toward Being while the outward focus is in Becoming. The former involving transcendental awareness or understanding -- metaphysical concepts -- the latter far more temporal involvements and concerns.

[Belinda]

So that's what you mean by "inward turning". It's vaguely mystical. I never did yoga but have practiced Tai Chi (the yang, long form) which is eminently practical and physical and has practical and physical aims.

I take leave of your philosophy at the point where Platonism diverges from existentialism. Platonism, when the soul is always a pilgrim is okay for me, but I can't be a Platonist when the soul is objectified.

[Alexis Jacobi]

So that's what you mean by "inward turning". It's vaguely mystical. I never did yoga but have practiced Tai Chi (the yang, long form) which is eminently practical and physical and has practical and physical aims.

I take leave of your philosophy at the point where Platonism diverges from existentialism. Platonism, when the soul is always a pilgrim is okay for me, but I can't be a Platonist when the soul is objectified.

No, I'd say there are many different meanings possible if 'inward turning' is thought of as a way toward self-realization. Introspection is one term. Detachment another. Contemplation. Meditation. It is true that in the East there are spiritual practices which are centered on the *inner* more than the outer. There is a realm of knowledge dealing on 'subtle currents' within the body-system and of course the chakras. The Tibetans are said to have spend centuries exploring these inner realms. I do not practice such things but I am aware of them.

Where is 'god' encountered? And the voice of revelation? For many people, when outer revelation was cut off the *inner world* opened (or was all that was left).

In our own traditions, and when the therapeutic is mentioned, there is (for example) Jungian psychology which is a type of spiritual practice centered introspectively on the whole and dealing with the inner man. It is pretty clear that the effect of Nietzsche on people like Jung (and dozens of others) caused them to branch out into other areas of research. Yoga, mysticism, Taoism, certainly Gnosticism.

The point that I made to Iambiguous is that when *God died* for many intellectuals and indeed theologians, that this necessitated for some turning in a different direction. My point is that a god-concept died but obviously whatever is referred to by the strange term 'god' could not ever die. I also tend to think that when god is associated with being and existence that the term 'god' makes more sense.

I've referred often to Richard Weaver. I would say that taken on the whole his philosophy (pretty much a Platonist) is far more inner-oriented. He did coin the term metaphysical dream of the world and if that does not arise from an inner plane I can't think of anything that more would. An existential vision of the world also arises it seems to me on the inner plane.

[Gary Childress]

Let me ask the question a different way, then, Gary.

Do you think it's plausible that, if God knew a greater good was possible, it would be justifable for Him to allow some suffering in order to produce that "good"?

I'm not saying "Would it be okay for Him to allow ALL the suffering," or "Would it be okay for Him to allow as much suffering as we, in fact, see?" I'm just asking if a greater good could give God sufficient justification to allow ANY suffering. Any, at all.

Like, let's suppose God knew that the character development in becoming a triathlete was exceedingly good for human beings. That becoming such an athlete gave them fortitude, discipline, courage, persistence, and other wonderful character qualities; but that in order for people to be triathletes, they were going to have to learn to sweat, to have sore muscles, to have the experience of shortness of breath; and that in order for them to have the elation of winning, they were going to also have to learn the pain of losing.

If God knew all that, would he be justified in making people become traithletes? Or would the presence of the pain involved in their training and sport imply that God could never have a good enough reason to want them to go through that? Does the presence of pain automatically mean "bad" is all that's happening?

What do you think? Just as a speculation. I'm not making more of this than my present question, and I don't mean anybody but triathletes; so don't feel you have to get ahead of me on that. Just tell me what you decide.

The whole idea of triathletes is steeped in ideals of competition and struggle;

Well, that’s nothing to do with my actual question. Regard it as a pure “thought experiment,” because nobody’s suggesting God’s going to make everybody triathletes.


Given that, let’s answer the question. Could God have sufficient reason for allowing SOME amount of discomfort, struggle, pain and suffering, IF there were some very valuable goods in view? Or is all suffering automatically evil?

Suffering is suffering. It is never good. Maybe if it's a punishment from God then suffering is produced for sufficient reason if it was something truly deserved by the recipient. Certainly many rare goods are, for some, only obtained through suffering through the competition for them. Others require suffering to create. Some goods require little if any suffering at all to acquire. But just about everything requires some degree of suffering to create. Would the world be a better place without suffering? You bet! It might even take away some of the reason human beings sometimes resort to evil in order to avoid suffering. But all this is what drives natural forces that shape and create who and what we are, according to Evolutionists. Maybe they're right.

[iambiguous]

That's fair, I believe. Given my own preoccupation with this...

"How ought one to behave morally in a No God world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency chance and change"

...yeah, I do tend to come back to encompassing this in what zinnatt over at ILP called my "groots".

Only here, for the Christians, it's a God world. So, by all means, let them explain to me how connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then is not the fundamental purpose of God and religion. Your own assessment above certainly didn't impress me. Other than to confirm that by and large you do prefer being up in the clouds. Words defining and defending yet more words still in paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph.

That and making it all about me...

My impression of you, so far, is that your effort is not so much to receive an 'answer' that could help to move you from the position you have invested in, but rather to cement the position that you have and which, as I say, you have invested so much in. I suppose it would result in a personal cataclysm were you to begin to see out of different eyes.

Right.

I believe...

1] that my own existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless
2] that I am hopelessly drawn and quartered -- fractured and fragmented -- in regard to moral and political conflicts
3] that I am inching closer and closer to oblivion...death

So, of course I am eager to cement that frame of mind into place.

Personally, I do not begin from the point of a No-God World and yet to say such a thing on a forum populated with people who for different reasons are invested in asserting and affirming the common doctrines of post-Christian atheism always rouses them to come an do battle. If one is dead-set on disproof there is no proof or even allusion that will be accepted. So for this reason I am more interested in examining the rigidity of that position and as I often say understanding its 'function'.

Again: what on earth is that supposed to mean "for all practical purposes" in regard to connecting the dots between mortality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then...the main function of Christiantiy and most other religions from my frame of mind. Though even here I am "cracked"...yanked in different directions.

For me "rigidity" revolves around objectivism. For theists, the belief that one has a soul that he or she is in sync with such that religion is embraced to provide for the most comforting and consoling consequences pertaining to both sides of the grave.

You have outlined very clearly the point you began from (raised I assume in Christianity and a 'believing' one) and you've made it plain how it happened that you came to see all of that as totally false.

No, not totally false. How on earth, given "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule", could I possibly know that? Instead, I am no longer able myself "here and now" to believe as I once did in the Christian God.

Then [from my frame of mind] just more of the same from you...

The way I think about that -- the process you describe -- is simply to see it more or less precisely as the standard Nietzschean realization. That a conceptual model about what god is or how god is is what died. And yes, we certainly did kill that conception. I believe that I understand all of this quite well. And I also understand and agree that certainly the former god-concept, the personality and agency given to god, is nowhere to be found in the world of raucous phenomena. It is true: one has to *explain* a phenomenal world that is ruled, as our world is, by random and mechanical forces and where a supervising god-entity is absent.

And though all of that is true, and I would say undeniable, I do not think you are enough aware of how people have confronted and dealt with the truthful realizations around the death of a god-concept and explored other routes. Essentially that involves turning inward. Oddly, to begin to speak about that inward turn is also anathema to true-believer Christians and other religionists. I think this had been made plain here by Immanuel when the turn to 'therapeutics' was brought up and when a god out there was no longer a perceptual possibility. The only alternative is to turn inward. And to see that the god-concept is essentially a 'projection' of inner content onto the world of appearances and becoming. If I had to be completely honest about my own perceptual stance I would have to agree with the atheistic view of the phenomenal world as being 'absent' of god.

I can nonetheless sort of appreciate those who try to go the route of seeking god as 'designer' and as having set things in motion, but that view even if true does nothing to explain the strange world we are in and, additionally, any picture of god that is based on Nature and the way things are here could only reveal a sort of demonic god or one that is Abraxas-like. There certainly does exist a contrary though repressed current within Occidental mysticism that cannot accept the conventional god-concept offered by mass-religion but does not become 'atheist'. It does present very different pictures though.

To me -- subjectively, subjunctively -- mental masturbation. I'm sorry, but that is how I react to it.

I note that my own interest in God and religion revolves around this:

"How ought one to behave morally in a world swirling vertiginously in both conflicting goods and contingency chance and change..."

Such that...

"...one strives to connect the dots between morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it."

And I get the above from you? Or, okay, sure, maybe I'm just not able to grasp how relevant your points really are to my own aims here. If others here do, by all means, let them point that out.

What interests me about your statement (about me) as being lost in clouds of abstraction seems way off the mark. I would say something similar to you about your 'declared stance'. And indeed I have pointed out that you skip over the same issue and problem. You cannot make any sort of decision at all.

Okay, we can agree to disagree about each other here. And it's not that I don't come to decisions, it's that I recognize them to be but moral and political prejudices rooted existentially in dasein. And that while I myself have not been presented with a deontological assessment of any particular "conflicting goods" such that I myself am convinced that there is an optimal set of behaviors, that's not the same as arguing that there is no optimal assessment. God or No God, tell me about yours.

Given a particular context.

You say that this applies in the moral-political realm but I think the problem is deeper: you literally are subsumed in a world (that is a descriptive world) in which there are no solidities whatever.

Huh? I'm as much convinced as anyone that the either/or around us is solid. I don't subscribe to sim worlds or dream worlds or those Matrix illusions of reality. Though, sure, even here I have no way of actually demonstrating this. Same with solipsism. Or determinism.

And then you go on, I think honestly, to state that what happens to one captured in that sort of world is that the *I* fragments. On what basis could you hold yourself together? So my way of interpreting *you* (the position you reveal, your conundrum) is to see you as having been victimized by the mutable world of Becoming. What is the alternative? Discover and define a world of Being.

Again, to me, an intellectual contraption. Why don't you describe to me your own reaction to issues like abortion or gun control or animal rights. Explain to me the extent to which you are or are not drawn and quartered. Given your own assessment of God and religion.

In the interim, back "up there" you go:

Perhaps it is simplistic but I find the Platonic conceptual pathways to defining *god* to be still very useful. Personally, and this is simply a known thing, Christianity and Catholicism (Catholicism especially since to say Christianity today means moreover Protestant Christianity) is obviously a smorgasbord of a wide array of 'common sense' notions that were common intellectual currency when the Hebrew evangelists brought their doctrines to the Greek world. Again personally I think Christianity must be disassembled and its parts understood. It more or less returns us to the sort of world-picture that you describe (and which captures and possesses you -- at least that is my perception) but with the same possibility as was defined by Plato in Phaedo:

Consider then, Cebes, whether it follows from all that has been said that the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble, and never consistently the same.

I assume that you are familiar with this way of conceiving things. I suppose I should assume that you do not accept it or that it does not answer enough of the questions and problems that confront you.

Again personally I have come to embrace, to put it plainly, an anti-Christian position. Or I could say anti-Pauline:

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness”, and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

I see this as mind-fuck. It is I think a very good example of Hebrew Idea-Imperialism. If you try to reduce it to what it really says, what it says is really disturbing and destructive. You are told that you must give yourself over to this 'god' and thus give over your own power to see, think, decide, choose. This statement invalidates at the most basic level. It is tantamount to neutering or castrating oneself. I absolutely do not believe this is the way to go.

So in my own view I think that culturally, intellectually, and also politically, it is crucial to see and to throw off this basic idea that everyone must submit to this god-figure defined as Jesus and, as a result, give up oneself and subscribe to a mass-current. Recovery of oneself, at a most fundamental level, must then mean turning against a whole array of false-constructs and false-admonitions that have been thrust on people generally. But not in a merely rebellious mode. But creative rebellion. Therefore the object is not spiritual disempowerment, neutering and castration, but rejecting a god-image of uniformity and sameness through which people are controlled. And beginning to reconstruct the self and the actions of the self in contrary ways. Recovering genuine but ordered will. Recovering self-determining power. And as part of that also turning against egalitarianism and also progressivism which are the modern expression of those Pauline ideologies.

So I can only continue in the projects and processes that I have defined for myself and declared to be my own. I see Immanuel as carrying forward a distorted and distorting Christian doctrine which I have come necessarily to oppose. His ultimate threat (I mean that of Christianity) is spiritual annihilation! But the opposite is true. Recovery is 'life'. Yet I do not think that everything that was channeled into Catholicism is philosophically wrong -- Platonic doctrines seem sound in most ways still -- but because Christianity is a movement of establishing uniformity through undermining freedom of thought and existential freedom. It disempowers at the most essential and crucial level as that excerpt from 1Corinthians demonstrates.

This is why I am more interested in paths of recovery of power; of concept-pathways that rediscover or redefine *god*; which bring out metaphysical truths that apply in the concrete and *real* world and which empower people to act in their world in an integral way. I am much more aligned with a dissident and Right-tending intellectual movement and more and more opposed to those currents of thought that seem communistic, egalitarian and 'progressive' for these reasons.

Thanks but no thanks.

You:

Integral: necessary to make a whole complete; essential or fundamental.

Me:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Now, given a particular set of circumstances where moral and political conflagrations run rampant, let's compare and contrast our respective moral philosophies.