Philosophy Now Forum

sthitapragya wrote:I think theists need to clarify this once and for all. Either God is everywhere or he is not. Choose one. And stick by it. You cannot say that God is everywhere "in a certain sense". Because that implies that God is NOT everywhere in other senses. If God is everywhere, then He is in every atom or my body. That would make me a part of God.

Yes God is everywhere, but anthropomorphising something that is just as much the beast, rock, as it is man, is falling short of the MARK.

sthitapragya wrote:If, however, it does not make me a part of God, then you need to explain why it does not make me a part of God.

It makes you and i and every arrogant short sighted atheist that is part of this forum, part of God.

sthitapragya wrote:You also then need to explain why God sends a part of himself to heaven and other parts of himself to hell. You also need to explain why certain parts of God commit evil and other parts do not. You also need to explain why God only saves certain parts of himself and does not save other parts of himself.

Please forget the 'him' stuff. Lets address it as 'it'. Heaven and hell exist here on terra-firma for those that are made aware of its existence. Ive experienced both courtesy of this entities existence. Ive been a bad little fucker and ive also been an awesome little fucker. Fact is, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of God's testing and 'hell' ...how much respect will you put Christs way through the tests? Will you call Him every bitch **** under the sun? Trust me. You will. And then you will start to show respect for the system that brought you to your knees. (atheist scum around these parts will have a laugh around about now, but at least i'll have a litte laugh knowing they will go to their grave with the biggest philosophical discrepancy that there is!!)

sthitapragya wrote:Why does God want parts of himself to worship him? If God is everywhere which Gods are the false Gods and how are they false Gods if God is everywhere? Is God not there in ANY SENSE in those false Gods? If so, does that mean God is not everywhere in a certain sense? Does is mean that there are places where there is no God in any sense whatsoever?

I think you have been digesting too much buy bull (bible) written by man...man sucking up to its own interpretation of God.

sthitapragya wrote:Why does God perform miracles on parts of himself while excluding vast parts of himself from such miracles?

Why are we not all in nirvana already? Why isnt life in some sort of sweet heavenly perfection, where we all know God exists and can skip through rainbows while blue eyed blonde chicks are queued ready to give us the best blow job since the last blow job?
The reason God exists...ENTROPY...pork chop!

sthitapragya wrote:Why do parts of God believe in God and other parts of God not believe in Him?

ENTROPY - there is a HUGE reason for giving the masses (man) DOUBT!

sthitapragya wrote:If God is in every atom of me, what does the soul do? Is that an extra God in me somewhere?

YOUR soul does whatever the fuck it wants...if you make the wrong choices then you become the energy of man...entropy is less than a bitch.

sthitapragya wrote:But basically, is there God everywhere or is he not? If not, in what sense is he NOT everywhere?

He is not, IT is.

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:Actually no they do not have to be asked or answered. Since we choose to want to ask and answer
them. There is no element of compulsion to do so other than to satisfy our curiosity. And so if we
were not naturally curious then we would not have any interest in wanting to ask or answer them

I used the imperative in a different sense. I would say that when a man asks questions of a certain sort that he is invariably in that region which is philosophical, metaphysical, and religious. And again as my understanding goes, these are the prime questions of Occidental philosophy: What is this place? and What are we to do here?

While I understand that you may couch your views in what sounds to be an Enlightenment relationship to knowledge, to ideas, to exploration, etc., my understanding is fundamentally different. I understand that we are impelled by higher sources to gain understanding of this Realm. I sense or in any case I understand and believe that this activity is one of consciousness itself. That consciousness and awareness involve commitment and effort. True, this project can be abandoned and forgotten by some or even by many. But I assert that as an imperative it resonates through all levels of the Cosmos.

I'd also suggest that there is a negative force, that is one that operated as-against consciousness and awareness at a Cosmic level, and this force requires active resisting. I would further suggest that some aspects of our cultural systems - state enterprise, cultural enterprise, mercantile enterprise - have little or no interest in consciousness and awareness as I'd define it, and ask for and train people up in lower forms of awareness which are debasements of what we *should* attain to.

A significant part of my argument and discourse arises out of these understandings. And it is also why I take contrary positions to this sort of declaration:

Leo wrote:We all find our personal fulfillment in whatever it is that floats are personal boat and there is no valid reason to suppose that one person's personal fulfilment is of any greater significance than another's.

To understand this phrase requires 'metaphysical dissection'. It is a loaded statement despite the fact that it appears as cloaked in simple, common-sense terms. Who would take issue with it? You're free to do what you want, I'm free to do what I want.

I would necessarily take a contrary position, and naturally because my predicates about life, existence, meaning and value are established on a very different base. I hold a different philosophical and also religiously-oriented position (carefully qualified) and I define this reality differently. One of the reasons I come into conflict with people like Leo, established as they are in specific and active ideological positions, is because I hold to other, different value-sets. The nature of our disagreements are ideological and also metaphysical. I am interested in pointing out how the different platforms came to be established and what in fact it is that drives them. Predicates drive all activity.

I wish to point out that this is not light material, and also that 'my opponents' do not take it lightly and indeed can play quite viciously: If they don't like opinions and ideas they can arrange to see them wiped off the board. What recently happened, despite false-characterisations, was not an accident. Ideas have consequences.

As long as I am on this board I will make all efforts to further define and refine my views and you can count on my to clarify what I see as the metaphysical and foundational difference that produces such different views. I say that 'our present' offers us one, that it has monolithic dimension and intention, and that it requires being resisted: for moral and ethical reasons.

That's all pretty much what I said, Gustav.

Some people are satisfied with an amoeba-like existence. It's easier, and because it's easier, all effort to clarify and refine your views for their benefit is futile. It's like drilling holes in the bottom of their boat, to which they do not take kindly. I suspect, however, you don't do it for their edification only, but for yours as well.

Here I assume you mean?

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Here I assume you mean?

Yeah. Unpacking it is not an easy proposition. There's a lot of internal conflict that goes along with it -- at least in my experience.

Inglorious wrote:Some people are satisfied with an amoeba-like existence. It's easier, and because it's easier, all effort to clarify and refine your views for their benefit is futile. It's like drilling holes in the bottom of their boat, to which they do not take kindly. I suspect, however, you don't do it for their edification only, but for yours as well.

This it seems to me is a very good question. The question of 'motives' - personal motives, social motives, culture-wide motives, and the general motives of our Present - all these things are part of this conversation.

We all remember hearing that you can't take something away from a man unless you give him something in return. You cannot undermine a culture or an identity and vacate it but then offer little substantive to fill in the void. As it pertains to modernity, and certainly to nihilism and its presence, we have to ask the 'depth' questions as you say about 'this reality'. About who we are, what we are, where we are, and what all this *means*.

Interestingly, I'd say that we note in Leo and Skip and others here the desire and motive to drill holes in a 'boat' or a vessel for movement over the waters of life. (Excuse the cheesy use of the metaphor). But a concept-system is indeed a mode of transportation, an organisation of perception, a structure of idea, to make one's way though life. And I think we have to understand spiritual systems and metaphysical systems in this way. This is not to say they are 'false', but it is to say that we have acidic eyes when we look at them.

Do we have the best eyes?

As an example: In Wizard of the Upper Amazon, a book about living among Peruvian Indians, the author describes his own experience as an outsider learning to live, track and hunt in the jungle. They use a powerful hallucinogen and have encounters with the Anaconda Spirit, the presiding entity of the place. He describes his own experiences and encounter with the Anaconda Spirit which initiated him into the mysteries of the jungle. For these people, this Anaconda Spirit, is the source of intelligibility in their domain of the forest. You cannot just take it away, or explain it away, or destroy their relationship to it, nor the means they pursue to encounter this entity. To do so is in a sense an act of cultural murder and destructiveness.

Yet in a sense, what 'they' desire to do is do away completely with a conceptual vessel, and one that many people rely on, and that serves a function. They wish to replace it with the facsimile of a full and functional one, and yet the one they offer is not really a 'conceptual order', it is a substitute, or a perversion of a full model. What it is is hard to say. But there are problems with it, and philosophy is aware of those problems (it can be talked about).

I think that this is what we have to look at when we consider 'conceptual systems' of any sort, and especially religious and metaphysical or cosmological systems of description. We are *smart* enough, or perhaps too smart for our own good, and we *know* that when they describe, for example, an Anaconda Spirit they are not describing a 'real thing' but a phantasy, a dream, an hallucination. But in fact we are explaining away a conceptual system, a description of reality, a conceptual interface, and much more.

We live in an era of uprooting and uprootedness. We live in a metaphysical chaos. We live in descriptive chaos. On a vast scale old orders of metaphysic, old orders of cosmology, are being revised. We do not have a descriptive system that can define 'truth' and we do not know anymore what 'truth' is.

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote: We do not have a descriptive system that can define 'truth' and we do not know anymore what 'truth' is.

Suck it up, Gustav, because that's the way it is. Your yearning for an Absolute Truth is a function of your own psychological insecurities and thus you close off your mind to the real world. Your mind is an artefact solely of your own creation and your truths are simply a function of the way you interpret the events of the world around you. In other words the world is real but your understanding of it is a movable feast definable only as a journey and never as a destination. You're putting des Cartes before des Horace and living a life of conceptual circularity by defining your conclusion without ever establishing the validity of your premises. In philosophy the distinction must always be maintained between reasoning and rationalising and this is a distinction you singularly fail to observe because you are arguing backwards from your conclusion.

Given your horror at the notion of an empirical fact I assume you have never read an anthropological work from the perspective of an anthropologist.

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:As an example: In Wizard of the Upper Amazon, a book about living among Peruvian Indians

I have a copy of this book and many others like it because anthropology is part of the journey for a student of applied metaphysics. If you can't understand that shared myths are simply a mechanism for maintaining social cohesion in socially organised species then you should take your hand off your Willey and read a bit more science.

Leo wrote:In philosophy the distinction must always be maintained between reasoning and rationalising and this is a distinction you singularly fail to observe because you are arguing backwards from your conclusion.

What I hear in what you write, and the way that you express yourself, is a note of total certainty. You make 'declarations', as I say, which in truth cannot be supported simply by their assertion. And every element that you assert is contested, 'out there', beyond your limited assertiveness.

I'd suggest that outside of a specific and closed experiment, anything and everything you'd say about *reality* is a rationalisation. If you have 'sure knowledge' it is only of details, and even those have often been dispersed.

But we use reason, and reasoning-intuition, to come toward propositions about larger meaning and design in this world. You too must do this, as you could not live as a robot within a scientism-system. You would have to turn yourself into a mere instrument: a thermometer, a spectrometer, a data-gathering device. With this I suggest that you are talking nonsense of a sort and yet exclaiming it to be a penetrating truth. Rather than listen to you - and yet I would undoubtedly pay attention to you in the specific field of your expertise, say biochemistry - I am certain that I gain much more from numerous other sources. Here the question of epistemes comes up again. Your episteme is largely irrelevant to my sense of meaning and value. I have no reason or desire to offend you in saying that. Yet what concerns me is that people like you seek power in our world, and your definitions and your endeavours and your influence is tangible. At the same time I could certainly say the same thing for those in the 'delirious religious set'.

But in any case I just want to get certain perspectives on the table, as it were. To establish a base for conversation.

I bridge the polarities that both sets invest in. I do not deny 'your' epistemological platform, I think it must be exanded and incorporated into new, emerging systems of view and interpretation.

Suck it up, Gustav, because that's the way it is.

This is a stark metaphysical statement and one that would necessarily possess you in odd ways. That is, be possessive and reign in your idea structures. I suggest paying attention to it, understanding its determining power. Again, it is declarative and expresses a whole range of ideological tenets which, apparently, you are not aware of. It is AS DECLARATIVE as a religious proposition. I prefer to hold myself back and in a more fluid relationship to declarations of this sort.

Your yearning for an Absolute Truth is a function of your own psychological insecurities and thus you close off your mind to the real world.

Similarly, I could simply assert, on a whim, that your present definition of things, and your declarative, totalising statements, are indicative of 'insecurity', psychological terror, and yearning for simplicity or for freedom from any existential difficulty. But what would such a statement amount to? Very little. Thus, declarative, blustering statements as you routinely make should be seen for what they are: empty roarings of a Creme Cake Lion. I am certain I gain more hearing Whitman's 'thrush'.

You have no idea about this reality in the most important senses. You can make no statements about it. Your epistemological platform and its tenets do not allow it. Therefor, when you speak to me, or anyone, you are really speaking to yourself.

Your mind is an artefact solely of your own creation and your truths are simply a function of the way you interpret the events of the world around you.

What an odd circularity I note in this. It is also largely incorrect. My 'mind' and our minds are shared and historical instruments, and our perception and the ability to perceive has been carved out of apparent chaos by the hard work of many many people over and through time. Additinally, it is not impossible that my *mind* as consciousness and awareness connects to other awarenesses and consciousnesses in this strange, difficult-of-intelligibility Cosmos. Again: You *can* make no positive statements but the statements you do make are imperious, declarative, even pompous given the depth and variation of philosophical, religious and existential opinion.

I have no good reason to believe much of what you say, except of course in your limited domain.

In other words the world is real but your understanding of it is a movable feast definable only as a journey and never as a destination.

Another consequence of your beloved predicates ...

And so it goes with you: You work hard to bring the affect of your acidic views into the public and the philosophical sphere, but when pressed you have no basis for such certainty.

You're putting des Cartes before des Horace and living a life of conceptual circularity by defining your conclusion without ever establishing the validity of your premises.

You cannot with any accuracy of certainty make such a statement. Because you have no idea what my premises are. My 'premises' are substantially unintelligible to you. I might speak of them, allude to them, suggest them in the only way they could be communicated, and you'd get none of it.

If you can't understand that shared myths are simply a mechanism for maintaining social cohesion in socially organised species then you should take your hand off your Willey and read a bit more science.

Another declarative statement in which your predicates simply scream. I see far more 'function' (to put it in such terms) in these mythos as they are man's interface with the Cosmos. You turn them into mechanisms that are 'shared'. This is a debasing reduction, and a misunderstanding.

Take your hand off of your misunderstanding and get it onto Willey: you'll make more progress and your vision might even improve!

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:We all remember hearing that you can't take something away from a man unless you give him something in return. You cannot undermine a culture or an identity and vacate it but then offer little substantive to fill in the void. As it pertains to modernity, and certainly to nihilism and its presence, we have to ask the 'depth' questions as you say about 'this reality'. About who we are, what we are, where we are, and what all this *means*.

All very true, of course. If life is not the endless quest for values, then what's the point of this or any other discussion?

We live in an era of uprooting and uprootedness. We live in a metaphysical chaos. We live in descriptive chaos. On a vast scale old orders of metaphysic, old orders of cosmology, are being revised. We do not have a descriptive system that can define 'truth' and we do not know anymore what 'truth' is.

I think we are living in the unsettled times between paradigms. Instead of Willey, I would suggest the atheists here read Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos by Edward Harrison.

I compared the lack of interest in the deeper truths to an amoeba-like existence because even amoebas can learn from their immediate environment, the physical world. I suppose I could be more generous and liken it to that of a chimpanzee and it might be more accurate, too, because chimpanzees are innovative, but its a distinction without a difference because in both cases the stimulus-response phenomenon is little more than a mechanical process: we don't see chimpanzees writing a Shakespearean play or symphony.

There are just three elements in universe-reality: fact, idea, and relation. They can be identified in various ways: as science, philosophy, and truth; reason, wisdom, and faith; physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality; and thing, meaning, and value. It sounds simple, but we do not see the atheists here attempting to build a vehicle or carrier for their ideas. All they do is tear down and all they have going for them is....well, nothing, really. Just a few facts, disorganized ideas and no values to live by. They lack entirely an organized universe frame in which to think.

sthitpragya. I fear your topic has suffered the same fate as Lacewing's. It has been hijacked by preachers who lack both the intellectual courage and the intellectual honesty to address the points you raise.

Gustav. What you are doing is dishonourable conduct in a philosophy forum.

Work on your own honour you crackhead!

Obvious Leo wrote:sthitpragya. I fear your topic has suffered the same fate as Lacewing's. It has been hijacked by preachers who lack both the intellectual courage and the intellectual honesty to address the points you raise.

Are you saying the qualifiers in the OP are intellectually honest and courageous?

The Inglorious One wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:sthitpragya. I fear your topic has suffered the same fate as Lacewing's. It has been hijacked by preachers who lack both the intellectual courage and the intellectual honesty to address the points you raise.

Are you saying the qualifiers in the OP are intellectually honest and courageous?

It's not my topic and thus not my responsibility to defend them. I'm merely pointing out that failing to address them is not intellectually honest or courageous because that's the whole point of having discussions such as this. If either you or Gustav feel that the qualifiers in the OP are in some way inadequate then bloody well say so with a well-reasoned argument to support your opinion instead of heading off at a tangent into a topic of your own devising which bears no relationship to the subject matter at hand. You blokes could simply start your own thread and keep congratulating each other indefinitely on how much more spiritually enlightened you are than the rest of us dumb schmucks. Nobody would notice or far less care.

Then Leo, you should take Gustav's advice.

The Inglorious One wrote:Then Leo, you should take Gustav's advice.

I've met enough Gustavs in my journey to last me for ten lifetimes. I need no advice from such as he, with his fatuous opinions spread ten miles wide and half an inch deep.

attofishpi wrote: Yes God is everywhere, but anthropomorphising something that is just as much the beast, rock, as it is man, is falling short of the MARK.

Okay. So according to you there is loss of "God value" as soon as something anthropomorphizes. If it falls short of the MARK, does that make it not God?

It makes you and i and every arrogant short sighted atheist that is part of this forum, part of God.

Okay. In which case, since I am a part of God, then why don't I believe in IT? Isn't that like not having belief in your arm? Since both you are I are part of God, both should be able to see IT. Why can't I? Is my mind so powerful that it can override God? It is obvious from your anger that belief in God is a requirement for everyone. So how come my part of God does not make me believe?

Please forget the 'him' stuff. Lets address it as 'it'.

Duly noted and action take above.

Heaven and hell exist here on terra-firma for those that are made aware of its existence.

So for people like me who do not believe in heaven and hell, they do not exist? That is so cool.

Ive experienced both courtesy of this entities existence. Ive been a bad little fucker and ive also been an awesome little fucker. Fact is, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of God's testing and 'hell' ...how much respect will you put Christs way through the tests?

How can there be any tests if I don't believe in heaven and hell and therefore they do not exist for me?

Will you call Him every bitch **** under the sun?

Never. Christ, from what I hear, was a really nice Guy.

Trust me. You will. And then you will start to show respect for the system that brought you to your knees.

Why should I respect a system that creates me simply to bring me to my knees? I would only have contempt for such a system. And I might fall to my knees out of fear. But there would definitely be no respect for a system that is created simply to bring me down to my knees.

(atheist scum around these parts will have a laugh around about now, but at least i'll have a litte laugh knowing they will go to their grave with the biggest philosophical discrepancy that there is!!)

Maybe. But how does that matter?

I think you have been digesting too much buy bull (bible) written by man...man sucking up to its own interpretation of God.

Which raises the question, why does God simply show man who IT is so that there would not be so many interpretations and so much disbelief? It seems God really wants people to believe in IT. Well, then considering that IT is all powerful, would it not be easier to simply somehow make us belief in the one true God so that people stop killing each other over their respective false interpretations of God?

Why are we not all in nirvana already? Why isnt life in some sort of sweet heavenly perfection, where we all know God exists and can skip through rainbows while blue eyed blonde chicks are queued ready to give us the best blow job since the last blow job?
The reason God exists...ENTROPY...pork chop!

Well, then shouldn't we simply believe in ENTROPY and start worshiping IT?

ENTROPY - there is a HUGE reason for giving the masses (man) DOUBT!

But why would God create entropy which create doubt when it is certain that God wants us to believe in IT? Isn't that a very weird thing to do? God desperately wants us to believe in IT, but God created entropy which create doubt. Why would God create something that hinders ITs own goals?

YOUR soul does whatever the fuck it wants...if you make the wrong choices then you become the energy of man...entropy is less than a bitch.

My question was not what my soul can do. My question was, if God is already part of my body, what is the soul? Is it an extra bonus God?

He is not, IT is.

Okay. So I am God too, right?