Philosophy Now Forum

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:41 pm We’d be more equal if I could feel amused that you never respond fully to the critiques brought out that challenge your position.

It'd be nice if you had any relevant ones, or understood anybody else's position before you talked. However, I find what you offer pompous, long-winded and ill-informed. You seem to have much more interest in hearing yourself expatiate wildly than in knowing anything from anybody, so far as I can see.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:40 pm

bahman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:14 pm Let's talk about them. What is the evidence, proof, and experience of such a thing as your God?

I've done a great deal of pointing to all that in my earlier comments on the Christianity thread. So I invite you to seek that out there, if you're interested.

So you decline to discuss things with me!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:03 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:03 pm But neither you nor I can beat the strategy of simply denying what's there.

I don't know what is there as I am agnostic despite extensive experiences of God, Jesus, Satan, and the like.

How could that be?

If your alleged "extensive experiences" were actually "experiences," then how could you still "not know"?

Well, you know that there is something that is called the subconscious mind. All the experiences of the conscious mind are produced by the subconscious mind. I am not sure whether my spiritual experience is produced by my subconscious mind or if they are real. As simple as that. So I stay agnostic until I become sure. That is after when I die!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:43 pm It'd be nice if you had any relevant ones, or understood anybody else's position before you talked. However, I find what you offer pompous, long-winded and ill-informed. You seem to have much more interest in hearing yourself expatiate wildly than in knowing anything from anybody, so far as I can see.

I turn pomposity into a High Art. And my lung strength is obviously unparalleled.

Please clearly indicate — to me and here among your peers — what you believe I do not understand of your (‘anybody’s’) position.

Make it plain so that I do understand.

What is it I am “to know” from you (or ‘anybody’)?

Can you make that plain?

bahman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:56 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:40 pm

bahman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:14 pm Let's talk about them. What is the evidence, proof, and experience of such a thing as your God?

I've done a great deal of pointing to all that in my earlier comments on the Christianity thread. So I invite you to seek that out there, if you're interested.

So you decline to discuss things with me!

Far from it. I tell you where to look, so you can have the discussion. If you can't be bothered to look, then it's you who doesn't want the discussion.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:03 pm

I don't know what is there as I am agnostic despite extensive experiences of God, Jesus, Satan, and the like.

How could that be?

If your alleged "extensive experiences" were actually "experiences," then how could you still "not know"?

All the experiences of the conscious mind are produced by the subconscious mind. [/quote]
If that were true, then there would be no "subconscious" mind: just the mind we happen to have. There'd be no "conscious" or "subconscious," just the latter.

I am not sure whether my spiritual experience is produced by my subconscious mind or if they are real.

Wait: now you've got two categories, not one: "subconscious" and "real." But you say that all our experiences come from the former, so what does the latter indicate?

So I stay agnostic until I become sure. That is after when I die!

What makes you "sure" of anything -- including the subconscious mind, or of the real, or of death, of your own agnosticism?

This isn't making sense. Can you fix it?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 9:17 pm I turn pomposity into a High Art.

Nobody cares. You're fluffing and clucking to the wrong audience.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 9:34 pm …

These are the questions :

Please clearly indicate — to me and here among your peers — what you believe I do not understand of your (‘anybody’s’) position.

Make it plain so that I do understand.

What is it I am “to know” from you (or ‘anybody’)?

Can you make that plain?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 9:50 pm These are the questions :

Hamlet: ...to be demanded of a sponge! what replication should be made by the son of a king?

Here, you have an opportunity to clarify a point which you said was important. That there is something I am not understanding.

But you seem to refuse.

It really makes no sense. Those who converse with you notice what they believe is bad faith.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 10:20 pm Those who converse with you notice what they believe is bad faith.

Well, if "they" (all those people to whose inner thoughts you have such marvelous access) spent less time on ad homs and extemporaneous pontification, and more on listening to the actual content of propositions, then they might be smarter than that.

Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 9:34 am

iambiguous wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 4:52 am

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 10:45 pm
Well let me modify it by saying it makes no difference to me. I can't say there is not something that fits within someone's definition of the word God, but it is blindingly obvious it takes absolutely no interest in the minutiae of our insignificant little human lives. Whether you believe in God or not might make a difference to how you feel, but it's not going to make a difference to anything else.

I basically agree. But what doesn't change [for me] is that in the absence of God, we don't have access to moral commandments, to immortality and to salvation.

And those things become more or less important to us as individuals depending on the actual circumstances we find ourselves in.

I don't understand why you need God for moral commandments, but then I don't know your circumstances.

With God moral commandments are derived from both omscience and omnipotence. There's no question of getting away with being a sinner. And there's no question of being punished.

Now, sure, there may well be the secular equivalent of that among scientists and philosophers. Again, among these No God folks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

And, by all means, if anyone here is convinced that objective moral commandments are within reach without God, let's explore that given a particular moral conflagration and a particular set of circumstances.

Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 9:34 amI don't find the experience of being me so wonderful that I wish it to continue for eternity, so I don't see mortality as a particularly bad thing.

That's how it works, of course. The more most love their lives because it provides them with considerably more pleasure than pain, the more they would like to live forever. On the other hand, for others, the pain is so brutal and unrelenting [with no end in sight] they actually choose to end their lives.

But it's not for nothing that so many Gods have been invented down through the centuries. And that is because for many, oblivion is terrifying. To lose everyone and everything that you do love and cherish for all of eternity? Then the part those like Marx and Lennon focused in on...the politics of God and religion: "keep them doped with religion and sex and TV..."

Anyway, by all means, good for those No God folks who are actually able to take their own deaths "in stride". Here and now, alas, I'm just not one of them.

Yes, for those able to convince themselves to accept their own death along these lines...

Mickey: Look, you're getting on in life. Aren't you afraid of dying?
Father: Why be afraid?
Mickey: You won't exist! That doesn't terrify you?
Father: I'm alive. When I'm dead, I'm dead.
Mickey: Aren't you frightened?
Father: I'll be unconscious.
Mickey: But never to exist again?
Father: How do you know? Who knows what'll be? I'll either be unconscious, or I won't. If not, I'll deal with it then. I won't worry now.

...more power to them. It just doesn't work that way for me here and now because I do have so many things in my life that bring me considerable fulfillment and satisfaction.

Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 9:34 amBut I don't know what your idea of immortality is. Our memories, personality and thoughts are brain dependant, and we know that brains are definitely mortal, so what do you think remains of what you consider to be you after those things are gone?

More to the point [mine] none of us really know much beyond the "idea of immortality" what actually does happen to us. It just doesn't look good. Whether you become food for worms or go up in smoke.

Which is why my own focus here is less regarding what others believe about God and more regarding their capacity to demonstrate that what they believe is in fact true for all of us.

Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 9:34 amI can only tell you that I don't have belief in God, and I don't see any benefit or value in such beliefs, but others do seem to find value in them, or at least claim to.

Again, if moral Commandments are important to someone here and now, along with immortality and salvation there and then, what could possibly be more relevant to them than God and religion? At best, the secular equivalent of objective morality is sustained only to the grave.

Then what? Well, each of us then comes up with his or her own rooted existentially in dasein "personal opinion" here. Some are terrified at the prospect of death, others embrace it as the ultimate antidote to all pain and suffering.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:37 pmI might be more inclined to say that claims are either true or false,

Sure. The same is true of the Koran, aliens and anything else that is claimed to be but difficult or impossible to falsify.

All I suggest is that Jesus might have been an ordinary human being. His teachings are probably some of the best for forming a working community. I question whether non-believers are going to hell for it. But who knows.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:02 pm All I suggest is that Jesus might have been an ordinary human being. His teachings are probably some of the best for forming a working community. I question whether non-believers are going to hell for it. But who knows.

It's interesting, Gary...Jesus Christ is the only figure in history I know whom everybody claims to admire while refusing to hear most of the things He said.

But here's a whole lot of things He said on the subject of your present concern: https://www.crossway.org/articles/jesus ... the-bible/

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 10:42 pm Well, if "they" (all those people to whose inner thoughts you have such marvelous access) spent less time on ad homs and extemporaneous pontification, and more on listening to the actual content of propositions, then they might be smarter than that.

You have roundly avoided answering the questions which arose from your own stated concerns.

Put me aside. Can you answer the questions?

Please clearly indicate — to me and here among your peers — what you believe I do not understand of your (‘anybody’s’) position.

Make it plain so that I do understand.

What is it I am “to know” from you (or ‘anybody’)?

Can you make that plain?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:12 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 10:42 pm Well, if "they" (all those people to whose inner thoughts you have such marvelous access) spent less time on ad homs and extemporaneous pontification, and more on listening to the actual content of propositions, then they might be smarter than that.

You have roundly avoided answering the questions which arose from your own stated concerns.

I have no "concerns" about you. I've got the picture very clear. I know exactly where you're coming from.

You're somebody who hopes to make other people think he's somebody, by pretending to be an expert on every subject. You don't listen. You have some information, but not enough. You're not an unintelligent person, but you lack humility and self-awareness. And you're a terrible person to try to have a conversation with: too much preening, and not enough thinking and responding. You find yourself having a lot of one-sided and rather brief conversations (on their side, not yours).

However, "concern" is reserved for situations that can be fixed. I'm under no illusion that I can fix you, so long as you remain motivated by what you are motivated. That's on you.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:10 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:02 pm All I suggest is that Jesus might have been an ordinary human being. His teachings are probably some of the best for forming a working community. I question whether non-believers are going to hell for it. But who knows.

It's interesting, Gary...Jesus Christ is the only figure in history I know whom everybody claims to admire while refusing to hear most of the things He said.

But here's a whole lot of things He said on the subject of your present concern: https://www.crossway.org/articles/jesus ... the-bible/

OK. In that case, maybe I shouldn't admire Jesus. Maybe more reason not to become a Christian. ¯\_(*_*)_/¯