With the domain as truth and error instead of praise and blame, whether or not "I" am wrong is trivial. I will most certainly be wrong from time to time, but if that means I hide in the darkness then that is a problem. Being wrong is not a problem, we are all born in ignorance and have to learn to interpret reality. That I am wrong sometimes does not surprise me, it is far more important to me that we are able to talk to each other with mutual respect for each other and for our plight as beings born in ignorance and primarily living in ignorance. I see no justification for these praise-blame games you all play with each other and try to play with me. What I'm trying to say ought not to be an offense if taken literally. When I say "Ignorance" I literally mean "Ignorance" which is a quality shared by all humans. I do not mean to attach any egotistical valuation of the independent self, because such a thing has no reality apart from the appearance of it. That you are wrong or ignorant is not your fault, believe me, but sufficient determinism is required to correct you. My disagreeing with you and advancing the inquiry through the various modes of perspective is one such determinant. I may not be very good at it, but at least I know what I am doing is being done because I have discovered it to be correct, and not because you may or may not love me for it.
I should really clarify my position, because it seems that comparison and personal worth valuations are prominent. In my time studying and attempting to discover the truth of things, I came across many great thinkers that inspired growth in me. Anymore, I have difficulty finding such thinkers, and find that my own mind is much better at producing frontier realizations. There are a few exceptions with thinkers like Alan Watts, Anthony de Mello, and the great teachers Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, Lao Tzu, etc.. Other than them, I earnestly do not find much thought-provoking matterial. But I'm always on the look out, and a lot of my posts are motivated by that lack. I want to provide pointers, hints, and leads for people who really want to know. I'm really not interested in making friends or proving anything. If there is someone that wants to have a discussion, even if that person is 4 years old and believes in the tooth-fairy, I will try to speak to their level, but that's not always easy or possible. I wouldn't do this for my own gain, because I would not accept your praise. Apart from the people who have insulted me neatorama, there are a few people who have praised me, and the insulters have said "Don't praise him." Personally I don't care, don't you see, praise and blame are manifest determinants of ego, I am 'preaching' a message of transcendence beyond praise and blame and into truth and error.
It is ironic that some of you will complain about "theists" being uneducated or simple-minded, but when I come and talk turkey to you, you don't like it. No, maybe what you like is inferiority because that gives you a false sense of pride.
Why is it verbal diarrhea when I challenge pervading opinions, but when someone uses infantile banter you don't bat an eye?
horned_one24 says "It really shows how freakin stupid the majority of people are."
Well that is a pretty shallow way of saying the same thing I'm saying, the difference is I back it up. You can safely ignore horned_one24 by assuming you aren't one of his "majority". But I will say things that makes it clear that you are part of my "majority".
Furthermore, r, made a statement that begged my response "speaks volumes about where this country is headed. absolutely zero evidence and fairy tales peddled by iron age goat herders that didnt know shit is the favored choice over mountains of evidence and the true reality of the world as proven repeatedly via numerous branches of modern science with empirical and testable results."
You don't have a problem with his vulgarity or flippant attitude towards theology. Did you ever consider maybe you are biased in favor of your own cherished opinions. You can speak vulgarity in the face of sculpted art, and using colorful language to criticize that which has no ability to defend itself. What I am doing here is no different, I'm just examining and criticizing things that actually matter. Things that most wouldn't criticize for fear of disapproval from the "Majority" of people who are "idiots".
Lame adherents to any ideology are 90% of the problem. People who don't truly grasp the distinction between empiricism and rationalism or fail to synthesize the two properly. People who pick a side, and pridefully lambast the other without due consideration of the other's actual point of view. People who arrive at their conclusions through myriad ego-bound pressures, such as prestige, honor, respect, dignity, praise, recognition, and fear. People who believe what they believe simply because it earns them the most respect and grants the appearance of understanding.
Argumentum ad verecundiam - that science is 'established' and has a wide following, and appeals to the rational mind in some measure, and is accompanied by all kinds of badges and recognition of "goodness" toward the enterprise, provides the basis for egotistical distortion of the facts. That religion has the same problems cannot be neglected either.
There is something known as the "Decline Effect" in science which happens subsequent to a significant result. A paper might be published in a prestigious journal like Nature Neuroscience and meet all the control criteria for the specifications of the experiment. By all appearances it looks solid and unbreakable, but occasionally there is a decline effect that consistently erodes the findings over several decades to the point of eliminating the results completely and undermining the original paper.
"Science" has it's own superstitious fools; I could name a few; Parnia, Morse, Doidge, Dawkins and Gazzaniga. These people either believe in an after-life, an independent homonuculus (ego) and/or free-will.
You think their comments were stupid. What if I think your comments are stupid? Are you going to be offended and cry bloody-murder?
Want to have a rational discussion? Let's start with epistemology, why do you think empiricism is more important than rationalism? Why do you think that scientific explanations rooted in relativity and empiricism negate rationalist explanations grounded in subjectivity? Everything you experience empirically is filtered through you as subject, rendering all your empirical observations subjective. Just because everyone has the same faculty of perception and thus the same perceptual tunnel and share the same empirical reality, does not mean that there isn't some transcendent truth that supervenes on empirical reality, does not mean there isn't some trascendent order governing the laws of nature and what scientists discover.
The Bible and texts like generally try to break down the boundaries of finitiude, of empiricism, and reveal the interoperation of all finite things subsumed under the heading of an all-pervasive and infinite transcendent order. This is not the focus of "science" because "science" studies the "works of God" and is confined to experimentation with finitude and the shared manifold of human perception, which is beset by an error producing mechanism known as the human ego. The ego is central to pretty much all religion and perhaps a necessary realization, the first rung of Jacob's ladder leading up to heaven. The ego is something relatively unspoken of in physical sciences, with minor exceptions for the fields of psychology and neuroscience. During the behaviorist era we were lead to believe that all psychological content is irrelevant and human behavior can be explained by stimulus and response, cause and effect explanations. This would be accurate if it didn't negate the causative continuity the mind shares with its physical body. The ego is an integral part of a aggregated world-view consisting of finite objects and consequently for the study of those objects. Some of the subjective and error-prone properties of egoism, however, are taken into consideration which provides the basis for "control" methods, but ego as an abstract entity is not recognized apart from some fringe researchers.
That the ego exists and plays a causative role in our lives could hardly be denied, but for the behaviorists and many of the scientists following in their foot-steps, phenomenal (mental) reality just does not exist. These people call themselves "Eliminative Materialists" and attempt to reduce all psychological content (e.g. beliefs, feelings, emotions, etc..) to physical matter. This may seem wise, but in the thick of it, one must invariably invoke concepts which cannot be reduced as such, and all reduction of a concept into more discrete concepts only begs the question, what happens if we reduce these concepts? Religion and philosophy teaches us that conceptualization is merely one faculty and perception another, but religions generally include a third function not recognized by institutionalized science, that function is a redoubling of consciousness directed at consciousness. It is an awareness of being aware, which makes the metacognitive dynamics of conscious awareness something explicit.
Granted there are both theologians and scientists who are shallow-minded bigots.
Both perspectives? One of the girls had the right idea that they are not incompatible and are of a different ontology, but even she didn't know herself, she simply cited Pope John Paul II.
Well, I see what they are doing, but I don't care for it. Biologists and cosmologists think they have the answer to every philosophical question. If you aren't detecting sounds using your ears, you may be detecting "sound waves" using your eyes, and you may have used a recording device, none of that really addresses the problem.
It's easy to be a critic of something that doesn't have a will. My area of criticism would be that this was all generated as the result of human ignorance. There is really no need of or inherent beauty in any sculpted thing. I wouldn't even begin to criticize it in the way ted has because it's irrelevant. If I happened to be a "Particularly awful.. unflattering.. nasty-looking nobility." I might very well be offended. ted is pretty safe saying what he is saying and nobody picking up on any "offense" because you simply can't relate to the object of his criticism.
I'm guilty of believing in fairies. Only now I call them delusions. It's partially a consequence of my inherent ignorance, and partially a consequence of my desire to remain that way.
I don't care; get over it.
Why is it verbal diarrhea when I challenge pervading opinions, but when someone uses infantile banter you don't bat an eye?
horned_one24 says "It really shows how freakin stupid the majority of people are."
Well that is a pretty shallow way of saying the same thing I'm saying, the difference is I back it up. You can safely ignore horned_one24 by assuming you aren't one of his "majority". But I will say things that makes it clear that you are part of my "majority".
Furthermore, r, made a statement that begged my response "speaks volumes about where this country is headed. absolutely zero evidence and fairy tales peddled by iron age goat herders that didnt know shit is the favored choice over mountains of evidence and the true reality of the world as proven repeatedly via numerous branches of modern science with empirical and testable results."
You don't have a problem with his vulgarity or flippant attitude towards theology. Did you ever consider maybe you are biased in favor of your own cherished opinions. You can speak vulgarity in the face of sculpted art, and using colorful language to criticize that which has no ability to defend itself. What I am doing here is no different, I'm just examining and criticizing things that actually matter. Things that most wouldn't criticize for fear of disapproval from the "Majority" of people who are "idiots".
Argumentum ad verecundiam - that science is 'established' and has a wide following, and appeals to the rational mind in some measure, and is accompanied by all kinds of badges and recognition of "goodness" toward the enterprise, provides the basis for egotistical distortion of the facts. That religion has the same problems cannot be neglected either.
There is something known as the "Decline Effect" in science which happens subsequent to a significant result. A paper might be published in a prestigious journal like Nature Neuroscience and meet all the control criteria for the specifications of the experiment. By all appearances it looks solid and unbreakable, but occasionally there is a decline effect that consistently erodes the findings over several decades to the point of eliminating the results completely and undermining the original paper.
"Science" has it's own superstitious fools; I could name a few; Parnia, Morse, Doidge, Dawkins and Gazzaniga. These people either believe in an after-life, an independent homonuculus (ego) and/or free-will.
Want to have a rational discussion? Let's start with epistemology, why do you think empiricism is more important than rationalism? Why do you think that scientific explanations rooted in relativity and empiricism negate rationalist explanations grounded in subjectivity? Everything you experience empirically is filtered through you as subject, rendering all your empirical observations subjective. Just because everyone has the same faculty of perception and thus the same perceptual tunnel and share the same empirical reality, does not mean that there isn't some transcendent truth that supervenes on empirical reality, does not mean there isn't some trascendent order governing the laws of nature and what scientists discover.
The Bible and texts like generally try to break down the boundaries of finitiude, of empiricism, and reveal the interoperation of all finite things subsumed under the heading of an all-pervasive and infinite transcendent order. This is not the focus of "science" because "science" studies the "works of God" and is confined to experimentation with finitude and the shared manifold of human perception, which is beset by an error producing mechanism known as the human ego. The ego is central to pretty much all religion and perhaps a necessary realization, the first rung of Jacob's ladder leading up to heaven. The ego is something relatively unspoken of in physical sciences, with minor exceptions for the fields of psychology and neuroscience. During the behaviorist era we were lead to believe that all psychological content is irrelevant and human behavior can be explained by stimulus and response, cause and effect explanations. This would be accurate if it didn't negate the causative continuity the mind shares with its physical body. The ego is an integral part of a aggregated world-view consisting of finite objects and consequently for the study of those objects. Some of the subjective and error-prone properties of egoism, however, are taken into consideration which provides the basis for "control" methods, but ego as an abstract entity is not recognized apart from some fringe researchers.
That the ego exists and plays a causative role in our lives could hardly be denied, but for the behaviorists and many of the scientists following in their foot-steps, phenomenal (mental) reality just does not exist. These people call themselves "Eliminative Materialists" and attempt to reduce all psychological content (e.g. beliefs, feelings, emotions, etc..) to physical matter. This may seem wise, but in the thick of it, one must invariably invoke concepts which cannot be reduced as such, and all reduction of a concept into more discrete concepts only begs the question, what happens if we reduce these concepts? Religion and philosophy teaches us that conceptualization is merely one faculty and perception another, but religions generally include a third function not recognized by institutionalized science, that function is a redoubling of consciousness directed at consciousness. It is an awareness of being aware, which makes the metacognitive dynamics of conscious awareness something explicit.
Granted there are both theologians and scientists who are shallow-minded bigots.
http://www.lfpress.com/news/canada/2011/06/20/18309166.html