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

[Mark1955]

now what?

I know many people like to make arguments for God's existence. Let's say you convince someone. Is there anything else that follows? If so, what? And why?

I'm asking because I think arguments for God's existence are interesting, and I think they do provide a rational answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?". I don't think it's irrational to believe in God. I can even see myself believing in God as some kind of intelligent mind (I'm partial to arguments for panpsychism and a conscious universe... a conscious universe that could be considered to be God) that is the reason that everything exists. It's just that I don't see what, if anything, must follow from that belief.

You must do as god tells you and behave in the approved way. Funnily this often seems to involve someone else telling you what god says thus ensuring you do what they say. Far be it for me to suggest that this is the real purpose of religion.

[Belindi]

Anonymous66 wrote;

I'm asking because I think arguments for God's existence are interesting, and I think they do provide a rational answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?".

That there is something rather than nothing is only part of the answer and the remainder of the answer is that the something whatever it may be is ordered.

[Sy Borg]

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.

Obviously. So what's this crap about guessing me to be a woman? My name is Greta FFS.

Also, it appears by your response that you have not read the Selfish Gene at all. What you "know well" is only Dawkins's response to theists attacking his evolutionary biology work.

Dawkins produced brilliant and perceptive work in EB before idiot theists pulled him away from his work with relentless attacks. It's like the old school game - throw a spit ball and when the other kid reacts, they get the blame. That is largely the standard of today's public discourse as far as I can tell.

I can argue my beliefs well using the tools of twentieth century Logical Analysis, if you would care to take me on.

It depends on whether you can be logical or whether you want to refer to things that you don't know as something that you "know well" as a cheat.

I have stipulations re: debate. First, I demand complete intellectual honesty in debate. Any games, any tricks or devices and - if I can be bothered - I will go for the jugular and will hammer and crush any dud comments until I have a retraction or retreat.

Yet so far, you have wrongly assumed that a creative nature lover who enjoys logicality is a rationalist, with an ad hominem implication of relative mindlessness. So secondly, you must admit that you assumed wrongly about me.

Then you used weasel words to give the impression of reading the Selfish Gene when you clearly only know of Dawkins's reputation and nothing of his writing. Third, for debate, you need to admit that you do not know Dawkins's work at all, just his reputation for atheism.

Now it's up to you.

[GaryLouisSmith]

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.

You seem to be a man who is proud of his dispassion or of having no passion in regard to his philosophizing. To each his own I say. One of the reasons I detest Dawkins and the rest is their show of having no emotion, whether real or not. Give me a passionate corrupt priest any day over a robot. Of course Dawkins isn't a robot, though he likes to think he is. That guy really does get upset. It would be fun to push his buttons and watch him fly into a rage.

Now for Nietzsche. First I want to know how you managed to edit your already posted post. Anyway, Nietzsche, as you know disliked small-minded timid people. He loved the heroic man. He hated the fact that mankind was losing his taste for magnificence. Everything was becoming small. Man no longer wanted to live in a castle; now he just wanted a little cottage in the country with a family and a little business. For Nietzsche God was the symbol of all things Majestic and man had come too hate majesty so he "killed" it. Now man would have to learn to live in a world without majesty of any kind.

[GaryLouisSmith]

My name is Greta FFS.

I love it. You really got on a roll there. Passion. That’s the way philosophizing should be done. Thanks for teaching me about FFS, Greta. I’m slowly learning all those abbreviations. I’m not going to try to prove to you that I know well Dawkins and The Selfish Gene. I will only say that when Dawkins was young he was really a cute little Anglican. Later he became uncute, as we all have, but he is still a high-minded Anglican atheist. There is a certain British and American high-mindedness that really irks me. I was and to a degree still am a street **** who liked to read books. You probably wouldn’t like to debate with me because I, just as that Satyr Socrates, like to mix together analysis with eroticism. Many years ago I was an in-your-face gay activist. All those militant atheists that I hate strike me as trying to be so butch and ungay – proper Anglicans. I assure you also I am not trying to get my genes into the future generation, though I am usually trying to get into some cute guy’s jeans. As for creative nature lovers, I obviously am not a devotee of the Great Goddess (that Bitch), Gaia. I think most atheist males today are, though they would never admit it. They just don’t like the idea of a male God pawing on them, wanting to “love” them. In that sense atheism is homophobic. And for good reason.

[GaryLouisSmith]

I have stipulations

Now it's up to you.

Dawkins and the Meme. Consider the Meme of Postmodernism. Consulting the Meme of a Meme, I discover that a Meme is a cultural thing. It all comes back to culture. I mean of course culture in the broad sense, again consulting the Meme of Culture. So now the Meme of Postmodernism is a cultural thing. But is it?

We have here three main items: Memes, Postmodernism. Culture, Now let’s consider a religious understanding of those things. We have the three gods: Meme, Postmodernism, Culture.

Many people today consider religion to be a cultural thing and the very idea of the gods to be a cultural Meme. I am not going there. The gods in my consideration exist outside culture and natural human life. They are Super-natural. They are not a Dawkins Meme.

Another way of thinking about all this is to see those so-called Memes as Platonic Forms separate from the particulars of this world. I am saying that the gods are those separate Platonic Forms. Universals as opposed to cultural concepts.

So is Postmodernism a Platonic Form or an idea existing in the minds of human beings in some cultural setting. Is it a real thing separate from humans or is it an ideal thing is the collective mind?

This is the old problem of Realism vs. Idealism. Dawkins has tried to dress it up in quasi-scientific drag.

So am I as a gay person lusting after that ever sought after Form, that god, a cultural Meme? Mei genoito. No, I am not a cultural Meme, nor am I a handmaiden to the heterosexual agenda of passing on some genetic replicator.

[GaryLouisSmith]

an ad hominem implication of relative mindlessness.

Now it's up to you.

Dawkins and company, Western secular Buddhists and cool-headed techies, fashionable celebrities and internet social climbers, en masse all belong together. They are the church of high-minded compassion. Altruism. Cooperation. Thoughtful respect. Such nice people. We are here far from anguished Abstract Expressionism, roiling passion, lust and unquenchable desire. Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet and The Beats are forgotten in the sharp smile of fine sensibilities. Passion succumbs to cool intellect.

I speak of the gods, not of memes and quasi-scientific replicators. I do so because the gods are full of passion and sexuality and poetry and real art. They will **** with your cultural paradigms. And leave you exhausted and wallowing in scandal every time. I have not been a good rationalist. This is decadence. This is the Absolute.

I am Voodoo and Pentecostal gyration, not proper Anglican concern. I deal in angel-headed hipsters and choir boys and corrupt priests who need it bad, not smooth talking moralists. Street hustlers know more real theology than do bookstore pundits. Armchair popery with it acute pain of feeling your disrespect needs the gentle balm of your silent attention. I summon spirits of apocalyptic destruction. Nothing has made a difference. Let’s begin again.

Alas, the Internet is a cool medium. We are all close to freezing to death.

[Sy Borg]

Many people have great passions in life, but without don't feeling the need to engage in display behaviour to let everyone know how terribly passionate they are.

Also, by disparaging rational thinking you fail to understand the "many paths" concept to growth. Abrahamics take the emotional path. Fakirs and martyrs take the path of suffering. Others follow transcendent experience. Others take the path of the mind. They are all just ways of interrogating and connecting with reality in the process of developing.

Ultimately people gotta do what people gotta do and IMO the kindest thing is to get out of their way and let do as they must, as long as they aren't wrecking the joint.

Of course sexuality is not a meme. Our impulses and tendencies will influence the memes we focus on, but they are not memes in and of themselves. Memes are just ideas that spread, like religions, just as traits spread genetically. There's a fair bit of "cross pollination" between genes and memes these days, though, because the jungle we live in largely consists of human opinions, memes - an abstract layer overlaying our physical realities.

BTW all poor old Dawkins did was respond in kind to creationists. He had been under constant attack for simply doing his job - researching and writing about evolutionary biology. Ultimately, he was alarmed at the idea of creationism being brought into science classes and a retreat into superstition, as described by Sagan:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

THAT was the concern that Dawkins, Hitch and others tried to address. To suggest they are worse friends to gay people than theists is backwards. They are the kinds of people who would try to stop theists from stoning you.

I'm not an atheist (or a typical non-theist) but I will grant you that I see planets and stars as gods. The more I learn about them, the more incredible they are to me in their beauty, power, complexity and dynamism, especially the Earth, which is simply astonishing. All we can do is wonder what it will force humanity to do next in this metamorphosis.

However, I'm unusual in that Mum was very religious, so I was conditioned to believe in gods from childhood. Once you are conditioned, it's not a matter of believing in God or not. It's more a matter of who or what will act as your God (or gods) within the conditioned God placeholder in your mind. It's just a model, a filter through which we can interpret reality.

Once a child's mind is sculpted around the God meme, then they will find themselves treating their most revered thing as a god whether they notice it in themselves or not. For a fair while I was a bit of a pantheist, rather Spinozan, but I can't see the universe as God. It's too big. Too remote. Most of it has precious little to do with me.

So my conditioned emotional attachment is centred more on the Earth and the Sun. Given that the Sun comprises 99.98% of the solar system, there is a fair argument to be made that all of the planets are actually part of the Sun (that the Sun comprises more than just its nucleus, so to speak). This view ultimately manifests as love for the Earth and non-human nature. Ok, I love humans too, but in the same way as I love volcanoes, cliffs, clouds, the ocean and other dangerous things that are best admired at a distance

[GaryLouisSmith]

.

It's just a model, a filter through which we can interpret reality.

That is a very gentle, caring piece full of love for humanity, the earth and the whole Cosmos. It is sweet. And it is so far from the Hinduism I study here in Nepal. I mainly study Tantra and Jhakri shamanism. The divine feminine is always close. She is a demonic terror that must be appeased, forced to be motherly. It’s quite a show.

Here spirits and gods are on every street corner. Temples and mangy sadhus. Animal sacrifice is of course necessary because these goddesses are not vegetarians. It’s all on Youtube. Including the violent shaking by the devotees.

You wrote, “… they will find themselves treating their most revered thing as a god”. Only if reverence equals holy fear. Then when you come away from that thing unscathed still alive, you feel elation. Some men feel that holy fear and elation with the act of entering and exiting a woman. To me woman is a nightmare and I stay away, even from the goddess kind. I understand Tantra. I am not a Tantrik.

[Sculptor1]

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.

You seem to be a man who is proud of his dispassion or of having no passion in regard to his philosophizing. To each his own I say. One of the reasons I detest Dawkins and the rest is their show of having no emotion, whether real or not. Give me a passionate corrupt priest any day over a robot. Of course Dawkins isn't a robot, though he likes to think he is. That guy really does get upset. It would be fun to push his buttons and watch him fly into a rage.

But what you say is palpably ridiculous.
Everyone has emotions.
You are simply angry that Dawkins makes more sense than all the priests in the world, and is capable of calmly telling the truth.
You would be risible if not so sad.

[GaryLouisSmith]

But what you say is palpably ridiculous.
Everyone has emotions.
You are simply angry that Dawkins makes more sense than all the priests in the world, and is capable of calmly telling the truth.
You would be risible if not so sad.
[/quote]

Do you seriously believe his theory of memes is the calm truth?

[Newme]

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.

Ha ha! Not even attempting a strawman! How can you deny something you don’t even bother defining?

[Sy Borg]

You wrote, “… they will find themselves treating their most revered thing as a god”. Only if reverence equals holy fear.

Eg. my earlier comment, "in the same way as I love volcanoes, cliffs, clouds, the ocean and other dangerous things that are best admired at a distance".

Gaz, fun to see that you found my posts as quaint as I found yours infused with overheated display behaviour.

[Belindi]

Sculptor wrote:

You seem to be a man who is proud of his dispassion or of having no passion in regard to his philosophizing. To each his own I say. One of the reasons I detest Dawkins and the rest is their show of having no emotion, whether real or not. Give me a passionate corrupt priest any day over a robot. Of course Dawkins isn't a robot, though he likes to think he is. That guy really does get upset. It would be fun to push his buttons and watch him fly into a rage.

Do you just react ? Or do you ever think before you act?

[Sculptor1]

[
Do you seriously believe his theory of memes is the calm truth?

You hate him because of a theory you do not understand?