Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Newme]

Then...

1. You gain an appreciation for intelligent design & “gratitude is the parent of all virtues.”

2. You begin to explore “the kingdom of God within you” and stop looking for love/God in all the wrong places.

3. You begin to acknowledge the kingdom of God in others and treat them better, making this world a better place.

=
Still, I realize that what I (or anyone else) interpret God to mean, is more a reflection of the interpreter than of God/Truth/Love/Intelligence etc.

The Philosophy-God is definitely an intelligent Designer.

While the concept evolved with Aristotle's "Prime Mover," in modern philosophy (which is mostly British Empiricism) God solves the problem of paradoxes and contradictions with "First Cause" (an Aquinas concept).

I’ve read similarly - about Aristotle influencing the bible. And Diogenes said Aristotle corrupted society. Maybe he meant by using his knowledge to help war - or maybe more philosophically. If the latter, maybe the corruption referred to focusing more on temporary conditions rather than eternal principles (like Plato’s “forms”).

What do you mean by, “God solves the problem of paradoxes and contradictions with "First Cause" (an Aquinas concept)”? Please expand.

[Newme]

1. You gain an appreciation for intelligent design & “gratitude is the parent of all virtues.”

It seems to me that the evidence very clearly suggests that if God exists, He did not intelligently design His creation. That is, if given the choice between intelligent design and evolution- evolution is clearly the best choice.

Evolution is intelligence. I think of Stephen Hawking’s definition of intelligence as “ability to adapt to change.”

[Sculptor1]

No need. God is still dead.

The God you are talking about is the rationalist’s God of Reason.

No, not at all. I mean any and all gods.

[Newme]

The God you are talking about is the rationalist’s God of Reason.

No, not at all. I mean any and all gods.

Which of the +800 biblical & many more in polytheistic definitions are you using as a straw man logically fallacy to deny the rest? One definition is “I AM THAT I AM” aka “the kingdom of god is within you.” How in the world - can you claim internal experience within others “is dead”? Just because Nietzsche said it, doesn’t mean it’s universally applicable. It is theorized he said it more like he meant “how arrogant to pretend to be so all-knowing as to dismiss Intelligent design/truth, just because it doesn’t fit in our belief paradigms.”

Context is everything...

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

[GaryLouisSmith]

No, not at all. I mean any and all gods.

Which of the +800 biblical & many more in polytheistic definitions are you using as a straw man logically fallacy to deny the rest? One definition is “I AM THAT I AM” aka “the kingdom of god is within you.” How in the world - can you claim internal experience within others “is dead”? Just because Nietzsche said it, doesn’t mean it’s universally applicable. It is theorized he said it more like he meant “how arrogant to pretend to be so all-knowing as to dismiss Intelligent design/truth, just because it doesn’t fit in our belief paradigms.”

Context is everything...

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

You are ever the rationalist. If you want to know the gods you don’t go into your rational mind and seek understanding through logic. You go into your Dick and feel the sexuality of existence. The gods are sexual, violent, rapacious, terrifying things. Even the earliest Israelite God, Yahweh, was the object of a Phallic Cult. It is dreadful and alluring. And this god, every god, is jealous. It’s the same all over the world. Watch your step! Mankind tried to kill this God because his sexual advances were becoming intolerable, especially among heterosexual men, the poor dears. Get over your clean clean clean rationalism and your Freudian anal complex where you try to wipe away the **** of religion. Yes, religion is dirty, violent, full of killing and very sexual. The gods of religion in literature are there in full sexual force.

[Karpel Tunnel]

It seems to me that the evidence very clearly suggests that if God exists, He did not intelligently design His creation. That is, if given the choice between intelligent design and evolution- evolution is clearly the best choice.

Evolution is intelligence. I think of Stephen Hawking’s definition of intelligence as “ability to adapt to change.”

Bacteria are pretty intelligent than and certainly viruses.

[Sy Borg]

It certainly is a teaser. We may be on the threshold of new discoveries in physics, even new paradigms.

Logically (if that can be applied to physics any more) it would seem that some of the energy out there is not adding but cancelling out other energy.

It may also be that all that all of reality already is actually a humongous black hole-like object, with the BB the bounce of energies from the "singularity". Might God be an ultramassive black hole? Capable of mass creation. Check. Huge. Check. Incredibly powerful. Check. Not subject to normal time as we are. Check. Very different in nature to Earthly things. Check.

I think you are standing on the edge of poetry. That's not a bad place to be standing. We are leaving the modern, rationalistic age and this new postmodern, post-postmodern time is very different. I think literature is where the gods will return.

Reality is poetic in its fractal layering. The same dynamics appear over and over at different scales that build upon themselves.

For me, planets and stars (including black holes) as the closest things to deities I can imagine. The Earth is terribly underestimated, so much so that we humans start thinking we are apart from it, imposing our will from above rather than being its change agents. The blue green algae were change agents too, and the result of their changes (multicellular life) was pretty incredible. I suspect that what can emerge from humanity's changes will be pretty incredible too, but it will surely lack the beauty and innocence of the nature we know.

Alas, even biospheres appear to have to cast off their "childish things". So it goes.

[GaryLouisSmith]

Evolution is intelligence. I think of Stephen Hawking’s definition of intelligence as “ability to adapt to change.”

Bacteria are pretty intelligent than and certainly viruses.

I prefer Darwinism to the modern understanding of evolution, which is a form of Hegelianism. Darwin emphasized the struggle of existence. It is the violence of that struggle that is beautiful. Modern evolution is a working out of the idea of internal relations, which Bertrand Russell destroyed. Whatever ... the gods have nothing to do with "intelligent design" which is a rationalist's idea.

[GaryLouisSmith]

I think you are standing on the edge of poetry. That's not a bad place to be standing. We are leaving the modern, rationalistic age and this new postmodern, post-postmodern time is very different. I think literature is where the gods will return.

Reality is poetic in its fractal layering. The same dynamics appear over and over at different scales that build upon themselves.

For me, planets and stars (including black holes) as the closest things to deities I can imagine. The Earth is terribly underestimated, so much so that we humans start thinking we are apart from it, imposing our will from above rather than being its change agents. The blue green algae were change agents too, and the result of their changes (multicellular life) was pretty incredible. I suspect that what can emerge from humanity's changes will be pretty incredible too, but it will surely lack the beauty and innocence of the nature we know.

Alas, even biospheres appear to have to cast off their "childish things". So it goes.

You say you are retired. Were you a science teacher? You now think very rationally, which I think is a very poor way to understand God and the gods throughout religious history. My guess is that you are a woman. Have you read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae? I think that book would help you get over your extreme rationalism.

[Sy Borg]

Reality is poetic in its fractal layering. The same dynamics appear over and over at different scales that build upon themselves.

For me, planets and stars (including black holes) as the closest things to deities I can imagine. The Earth is terribly underestimated, so much so that we humans start thinking we are apart from it, imposing our will from above rather than being its change agents. The blue green algae were change agents too, and the result of their changes (multicellular life) was pretty incredible. I suspect that what can emerge from humanity's changes will be pretty incredible too, but it will surely lack the beauty and innocence of the nature we know.

Alas, even biospheres appear to have to cast off their "childish things". So it goes.

You say you are retired. Were you a science teacher? You now think very rationally, which I think is a very poor way to understand God and the gods throughout religious history. My guess is that you are a woman. Have you read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae? I think that book would help you get over your extreme rationalism.

I did various jobs. Mostly I am a musician, cartoonist and writer. Not sure how I overcame my "extreme rationalism" in order to create. It's a miracle!

BTW, if my forum name was Bob would you guess me to be a woman or would you not think twice about it?

Have you read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene? I think that book would help you look at reality more as it is rather than through the filter of anthropocentric mythology.

[GaryLouisSmith]

You say you are retired. Were you a science teacher? You now think very rationally, which I think is a very poor way to understand God and the gods throughout religious history. My guess is that you are a woman. Have you read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae? I think that book would help you get over your extreme rationalism.

I did various jobs. Mostly I am a musician, cartoonist and writer. Not sure how I overcame my "extreme rationalism" in order to create. It's a miracle!

BTW, if my forum name was Bob would you guess me to be a woman or would you not think twice about it?

Have you read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene? I think that book would help you look at reality more as it is rather than through the filter of anthropocentric mythology.

If your name was Bob I would guess you to be a man. As for the book The Selfish Gene, I know it well and I hate that book. I detest Dawkins and Hitchens and the rest of that crowd. Materialism as a philosophy is just silly. It's a non-philosophy for non-philosophers. I am an Extreme Platonist. I can argue my beliefs well using the tools of twentieth century Logical Analysis, if you would care to take me on. Right now I live in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I study Hindu Tantra and shamanism - marvelous stuff.

[Sculptor1]

No, not at all. I mean any and all gods.

Which of the +800 biblical & many more in polytheistic definitions are you using as a straw man logically fallacy to deny the rest? One definition is “I AM THAT I AM” aka “the kingdom of god is within you.” How in the world - can you claim internal experience within others “is dead”? Just because Nietzsche said it, doesn’t mean it’s universally applicable. It is theorized he said it more like he meant “how arrogant to pretend to be so all-knowing as to dismiss Intelligent design/truth, just because it doesn’t fit in our belief paradigms.”

Context is everything...

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was an atheist. That is his context. You misread his meaning. The dead god of whom he speaks was never living in the first place: no more than an idea which he declared killed by man. Whilst it is easy enough to kill an idea, no one is literally proposing a god so flatulent that man could actually kill him.

One of the key problems with people who tend to accept some sort of god into their lives in that they tend to be rather literal.

As for your silly attempt at identifying a straw man; I have no need to use ANY model of ANY god, to know that all of them are inherently ridiculous.

[Sculptor1]

If your name was Bob I would guess you to be a man. As for the book The Selfish Gene, I know it well and I hate that book. I detest Dawkins and Hitchens and the rest of that crowd. Materialism as a philosophy is just silly. It's a non-philosophy for non-philosophers. I am an Extreme Platonist. I can argue my beliefs well using the tools of twentieth century Logical Analysis, if you would care to take me on. Right now I live in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I study Hindu Tantra and shamanism - marvelous stuff.

People hate for several reasons. One is the tendency to hate what they do not understand. Another is to hate people who challenge their pet views. Such people are smart enough to know that those they hate have a better argument than they do but too close-minded to reject their obvious contradictions in favour of reason. Another reason is that they are scared. Scared to be alone in the universe. Scared that death is final. So scared they resort to mysticism and reject evidence and reason.

[h_k_s]

The Philosophy-God is definitely an intelligent Designer.

While the concept evolved with Aristotle's "Prime Mover," in modern philosophy (which is mostly British Empiricism) God solves the problem of paradoxes and contradictions with "First Cause" (an Aquinas concept).

I’ve read similarly - about Aristotle influencing the bible. And Diogenes said Aristotle corrupted society. Maybe he meant by using his knowledge to help war - or maybe more philosophically. If the latter, maybe the corruption referred to focusing more on temporary conditions rather than eternal principles (like Plato’s “forms”).

What do you mean by, “God solves the problem of paradoxes and contradictions with "First Cause" (an Aquinas concept)”? Please expand.

I meant the following:

The concept of an immortal unchangeable God or God(s) addresses the dilemma of everything we ourselves see around us as changing, dying, and decaying.

Of course it really only defers the issue to the God(s), but that is the only place to which we can logically and soundly defer it.

[Sculptor1]

You say you are retired. Were you a science teacher? You now think very rationally, which I think is a very poor way to understand God and the gods throughout religious history. My guess is that you are a woman. Have you read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae? I think that book would help you get over your extreme rationalism.

I did various jobs. Mostly I am a musician, cartoonist and writer. Not sure how I overcame my "extreme rationalism" in order to create. It's a miracle!

BTW, if my forum name was Bob would you guess me to be a woman or would you not think twice about it?

Have you read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene? I think that book would help you look at reality more as it is rather than through the filter of anthropocentric mythology.

I create though a rationalist.
My art can be quite literal - but that is what I rend to like.