popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 12:50 am
"IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES, WE MUST OVERCOME FAITH." CARL SAGAN
This is silly. Faith suggests having the courage of one's convictions. I believe India is the most populous nation in the world becauae I have faith in almanacs. I believe the evidence of my.own eyes becauae I have faith in the dependable accuracy of my senses. All knowledge depends on faith, which Sagan should know, but apparently doesn't.
I suppose he wants us to have faith in his wisdom.
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 12:50 am
"IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES, WE MUST OVERCOME FAITH." CARL SAGAN
This is silly. Faith suggests having the courage of one's convictions. I believe India is the most populous nation in the world becauae I have faith in almanacs. I believe the evidence of my.own eyes becauae I have faith in the dependable accuracy of my senses. All knowledge depends on faith, which Sagan should know, but apparently doesn't.
Is this the reason the faithful have always been so good at killing each other. Faith is brainstem activity into a collective trance.
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 12:50 am
"IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES, WE MUST OVERCOME FAITH." CARL SAGAN
This is silly. Faith suggests having the courage of one's convictions. I believe India is the most populous nation in the world becauae I have faith in almanacs. I believe the evidence of my.own eyes becauae I have faith in the dependable accuracy of my senses. All knowledge depends on faith, which Sagan should know, but apparently doesn't.
Is this the reason the faithful have always been so good at killing each other.
Well, if by "faithful" you mean Socialists, then you're right. Nobody has come close to killing as many people as they have...120 million + in the last century alone. By contrast, religious wars account for less than 8% of the total wars there have been...4% to Islam, and 4% to all other religions combined. So it doesn't seem they're ever going to come within a million miles of competing with the Socialists.
Lol, i don't even have to research this fact, and i know more people have been killied in the name of a god than anything else on earth with the exception of cancer.
The difference is these people were real christians and muslims while Stalin, Mao, and company weren't real Socialists.
That's like a double-whammy, bro. You're getting very good at these. I'd call you the devil for bearing such false witness to history but you don't even know you're doing it. So you're not guilty for reasons of insanity, then.
Statements are helpful and will, I think, help to clarify things for us:
a) There is no ‘morality’ comparable to Christian morality certainly, nor comparable to any moral system that I am aware of, in Nature nor in the working of the cosmos. Nature is a cruel, unconscious, merciless machine of material, chemical and biological processes.
b) Man discovers, or intuits, or creates moral systems. These seem to act against Nature and to act as impositions on man’s behavior. Simply put and as example: an animal takes from another animal what is has or has captured without any concern as to its being right or wrong. The hunting animal kills to eat, and the victim suffers the victim’s fate, without “moral complaint”. Pain, fear and shock are registered in the victim, but ‘the world’ looks on without concern. There is no one nor anything to ‘care’. Nature and the Cosmos have no feelings in this sense. One other thing: no animals could deviate, on any level, from nature’s game. To do so would amount to risking survival. And to survive is the imperative that drives all natural life.
c) Man, becoming conscious of the nature of things, reacts against ‘the way things are’. Man in this sense becomes a rebel. He feels, or intuits, or perceives, that there is a higher order for his ethical and moral conduct. For us — Judeo-Christians — we need only refer to Hosea or Amos to grasp the moral imperatives that are at the base of our sense of justice.
d) Here is the essence of this issue and problem: the God who gives the command, or is pictured as doing so, is no part of Nature. Nature is a system of processes, unconscious processes. But the visualized, perceived, imagined or created God as Law-Giver, has no material being or essence. What is represented, then, is wholly metaphysical. And ‘invisible’ as well as ‘undetectable’. And this perceived or revealed metaphysics is not discoverable in Nature. In fact, the more that Nature is examined and let’s say penetrated by seeing and understanding, the less anything ‘metaphysical’ (and certainly supernatural) is perceived or recognized. And this is actually the state of perception and understanding that most of us here live with and see through. We see ‘with the eye’ but have tremendous difficulty seeing ‘through’ the eye (quoting Blake).
e) This is where, I believe, the split that Christopher Dawson outlines can be understood. Man’s world is really & truly one where metaphysical ideas are interwoven thoroughly with both his understanding and his perception. But here is an interesting thing: ask the brutes who dominate this forum to describe this interwovenness of man’s essence, and all they can do is growl and bark. Take Atla as an example. A brutish mind not because he is dumb or not intelligent, but a mind that has been indoctrinated, in essence, by hard science and perception that cannot recognize metaphysical categories as being real. The same is true for Wilbur Boneman (in different ways) and for many others (yes, Gary, you too) because they have been extruded by specific processes of modernity that mold and control thought-categories.
f) In my view, this is where metaphysics does not die in irrelevance but rather resurrects with new vistas of meaning.
There are a few Nietzsche quotes which fit the bill here — that is, of really realizing what Nature is. Here’s one:
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.
promethean75 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 6:21 am
Lol, i don't even have to research this fact, and i know more people have been killied in the name of a god than anything else on earth with the exception of cancer.
Apparently, you do need some research. You're simply obviously, verifiably wrong, and by many orders of magnitude, you'll find.
Stalin, Mao, and company weren't real Socialists.
So...the millions of Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Cubans, Zimbabweans, North Koreans, Congolese, Venezuelans...none of them was bright enough to know what "real Socialism" should be...
...but you are? You alone know what "real Socialism" requires? And if you had been Stalin or Mao, you could have done it right?
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 2:05 pm
There are a few Nietzsche quotes which fit the bill here — that is, of really realizing what Nature is. Here’s one:
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
My story is better than your story. Sort of thing.
This is an even better Nietzsche quote on ‘nature’:
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 2:11 pm
This is an even better Nietzsche quote on ‘nature’:
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
Nietzsche is all about, how all of the old authoritarian gods are dead, and each man is a lonely searcher after how to live a good life.
Nietzsche is the springboard for existentialism and the wholly immanent god that is immanent in human culture. Simply: we make God up as we go along.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 1:51 pm
b) Man discovers, or intuits, or creates moral systems. These seem to act against Nature and to act as impositions on man’s behavior. Simply put and as example: an animal takes from another animal what is has or has captured without any concern as to its being right or wrong. The hunting animal kills to eat, and the victim suffers the victim’s fate, without “moral complaint”. Pain, fear and shock are registered in the victim, but ‘the world’ looks on without concern. There is no one nor anything to ‘care’. Nature and the Cosmos have no feelings in this sense. One other thing: no animals could deviate, on any level, from nature’s game. To do so would amount to risking survival. And to survive is the imperative that drives all natural life.
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE --- "an animal takes from another animal .........." THAT is discussing inter species relations. Not the intra species relations between the animals of a SOCIAL ANIMAL GROUP. Social animals most definitely have "rules of behavior" governing how they relate to each other. The rules themselves almost certainly not built in instinct but LEARNED (what is probably built in tools to help learn the rules).
We humans have been social animals long before we were human (almost certain that the last common ancestor of us, the chimpanzees, and the bonobos was a social animal). So we have had "morality" for a long time.
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 12:50 am
"IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES, WE MUST OVERCOME FAITH." CARL SAGAN
This is silly. Faith suggests having the courage of one's convictions. I believe India is the most populous nation in the world becauae I have faith in almanacs. I believe the evidence of my.own eyes becauae I have faith in the dependable accuracy of my senses. All knowledge depends on faith, which Sagan should know, but apparently doesn't.
I suppose he wants us to have faith in his wisdom.
Perhaps he asks too much.
Sagan endorses reasonable faith. Faith and reason are variably mutually consistent.
