lemur

My point was that the implicit reasoning behind knocking on a table to demonstrate its solidity and by extension suggest the unquestionable existence of matter is incorrect because it is not the matter itself but its structure that is causing the observable quality of solidity. Your reasoning process is based on assumptions about plausibility. Plausibility does not existence make. It is no more reasonable to say that matter exists than it is to say that it doesn't. Intuition doesn't count in philosophy. The ontology of the existence of matter is a relevant issue, imo. How can you deny its relevance if you recognize that if matter in fact doesn't exist that perception/cognition is strong enough to render its existence as a given? In other words, the amazing thing is that we (materialists) really don't expect proof that matter exists because we use it as the very basis for defining existence to begin with. It's existence is assumed as an axiom.

Really this deserves another thread, but I just have to comment. You're right that people should discuss specific problems and solutions in a non-nationalist/racist way, but since it basically becomes that once you begin with the native/foreign distinction, the media is right to warn that such politics always work their way toward calamity. This is not specific to the native/foreign distinction. It happens with any ethnic polarization, and even other kinds of polarization like men/women, hetero/homo, liberal/conservative etc. Just analyze any discourse and watch how organizing politics around a polarized dichotomy tend toward essentialism (i.e. blaming social problems on entire slews of individuals just based on them being classified as different from the classification deemed normal). If you start addressing social problems by claiming that the cause is that certain people just don't belong where they are, all you're really doing is questioning the fact that people are where they are because of existing cultures and social patterns and harassing them to go away. Try addressing any person in any situation with this same approach, i.e. tell them they don't belong where they are and being there is in itself a problem and see if it leads to a constructive discussion in any way. It won't. It just makes people defensive, self-righteous, and angry on both ends of the accusation. It's called territorialism and it's the basis for most human and other animal aggression/violence.

Imagine that just a few centuries ago, fleets of wind-powered ships sailed the globe carrying everything from cinnamon to slaves. Colonialism got a bad name for obvious reasons but it remains impressive that so much cargo was moved around by wind-power, and that was without modern technologies of food-preservation and medicine. Of course, I don't know if I'd want to see the rates of casualties on those ships, even not counting the people chained in a single position for weeks on end. Today if wind-shipping was re-introduced, it would be interesting to see what the cost-benefit analysis would look like. Surely it would require a lot more labor-hours per shipping unit, but it would also be a way of employing people with zero CO2 emissions, zero fuel-consumption, and a way for people to combine their work with travel. If couples and families could incorporate as owner-operators of wind vessels, they could basically live on the ocean - assuming they could secure their routes from pirates, weather calamities, etc. I realize this sounds very idealistic, but it's the only way I could imagine people voluntarily committing to the long voyages and heavy work that would be required for manning a sailing ship large enough to transport cargo intercontinentally.

I think of "cognito ergo sum" as Des Cartes' brilliant answer to anyone who questions the existence of everything. He's basically saying, "if nothing exists, how can you perceive yourself thinking that it doesn't?' Mississippichem, thanks for the compliment. I definitely have a strong will to Nietzche;)

For a long time, I blamed religious persecution on religion but now I think that the culprit was actually authoritarianism and religion was just the ideological vehicle the tyrants used to try to control others. I say this not because I want to defend religious people against the blame, because I definitely think the people themselves were to blame. Just after having studied the theological philosophies, I don't think that persecution is inherent in them. They are abused for that purpose. Religion also motivated many monks and others to study nature rigorously and perform impressive feats of design and labor. Probably it was the impressiveness of such work that stimulated some people to usurp religion as a means of control. It's not easy to sort out the users from the abusers in history any more than it is to sort out physicists with good intentions from those who intend to contribute to the instruments of killing and domination. What would make atheism vs. theism a "fairer fight" would be for it not to be a fight at all, but a survey of the beneficial and detrimental aspects of various aspects of each ideology that falls under the two general umbrellas. Likewise, it would be interesting to study the ways in which theism or atheism have been used and also abused to see how the same ideologies can be used for good in one situation and evil in another (if you can bear to use the terminology "good" and "evil" that is; otherwise you can replace them with "beneficial" and "detrimental").

Thanks but that post was more of a question than a statement, or at least it was intended to beckon responses about the seeming discrepancy between the ideas expressed in the two posts. As for the lightning rod story, it is cute and funny but it also obfuscates the fact that there are deeper philosophical issues in theology. I think it's worth distinguishing well thought-out theology from superstitious ideas about natural phenomena. It's actually one of the most undermining facets for serious, intelligent theologically interested people to have to deal with notions like ghosts and spirits flying around in the air and "the body of Christ" referring to the physical flesh that was crucified. There's a quote where Jesus says that things of the flesh are flesh and those of the spirit are spirit. A TV news story that enlightens you to the dangers of alcoholism and stimulates you to clean up your life could be interpreted as an "angel" bringing you a message of good will. That doesn't have to mean that a physical or energy being actually manipulated the TV broadcast or transformed itself into a TV signal, etc. It's just a way of interpreting the complex interactions of life-circumstances that result in a particular person being inspired in a particular way at a certain moment. Same thing could be said if a cat caught the attention of your dog and the dog jumped for the cat and ended up pulling you by the leash out from under a tree branch that would have fallen on you if you had stood still. You could say that an angel saved you at that moment without believing that a physical entity actually released the cat to seduce the dog to pull you. It's just a way of talking about meaningful coincidences as being a form of goodness in the universe. You don't even have to think of it as intentional - a pantheist could see such life-changing events as direct messages from God since God is viewed as existing in and through everything. Someone else might see it as angels, but there's really no need to invoke the idea that the angel has to be an actual being in some form, because it's ultimately a question of lucky random events defying human ability to experience them as equally meaningless as any other random event.

This is where there seems to be a conflict between these two models of gravitation. If gravity consists of particles or waves that are mobile (at C), then how can gravity exist as spacetime curvature? My impression, anyway, is that when you talk about "space-time surrounding the black hole," you're implying that such space-time exists outside the event horizon without being emitted by it. But how can this be if gravitation travels (at C)?

Compare the following posts: The first says that theists need absolutes and atheists can deal with uncertainty. The second says that atheists won't rely on faith because they need absolute facts, truths, proofs, etc. I don't think atheism fights fair because it basically seeks only to differentiate and conquer by any means possible. Theism, on the other hand, seems to advocate certain positions and tries to do so in language that will appeal to atheist reasoning, but ultimately they're just trying to share their peace of mind with the atheists one way or the other. Atheists, on the other hand, revile at such peace of mind because they see it as false consciousness and prefer to travel the various roads to falsification. Ironically, faith is ultimately what saves you from total nihilism when you reach the point of total doubt; but before you reach that point, you have a sense that there are certain fundamental truths that cannot and will not ever be falsified and so you live in a consciousness immune from fear of ultimate doubt. It is also ironic that as long as you have this feeling of immunity from fear of doubt that your state-of-mind is basically the same as someone who lives by faith.

I started to hypothesize that if light traveling at C gets caught in a black hole, then so would gravitation, since that travels at C. Then I wondered how gravitation escapes a black hole in the first place if light can't.

By "strictly scientific," are you referring to empiricism, i.e. that science is done based on what can be observed and measured using the senses instead of purely in theoretical abstraction? If so, you should realize that empiricism itself is a philosophy, so there is not really any non-philosophical "strictly scientific" approach. Your idea that there is one is based on a relatively naive philosophical approach to disciplinary boundaries as mutually exclusive. No matter (wow, that's actually a pun in the case of this thread), whether it is philosophical or scientific, the point is whether it is possible to prove the existence of matter. I would say that it isn't except self-referentially. Matter is its own proof, therefore it can't be proven in some other way. If you are dreaming, you can wake up to prove the dream was just a dream. Since you can't wake up from the existence of physical matter, you cannot prove it is just a dream - but you also can't prove it's not. You're stuck in tentative limbo, which is actually a tenet of the philosophy of scientific falsification, i.e. that verification of a theory is always tentative as falsification must always remain the primary goal of theory-testing.

Probably that's how they think about it, but can you see that there's an implicit acceptance of impossibility in such pragmatism? Look at Bascule's post above for the same implicit logic, only with him it is the idea that if true fiscal conservatism is a minority, it ain't gonna happen period. Of course, fiscal conservatism has a few tactics to prove that spending can be controlled. One of those is military- and police- spending because these are the active defenders of property-rights. So when people refuse to seek non-spending methods of surviving economically, they have the option of fighting for the right not to be taxed without representation. It took me a long time to figure out why the struggle against socialism is so epic in republican ideology, but it is directly related to the idea that individiuals should ultimately control their own expenditures regardless of whether others spend themselves into bankruptcy. Allowing people to spend themselves into bankruptcy and then bail them out never really equally distributes the pressure to conserve money, does it? While some people maintain a tight budget to avoid losing wealth, others spend-it-up with the idea that they will have the right to a certain level of economic welfare, right to a job, etc. if they go bankrupt. In my mind, they do, but I find it so irritating that people would live above the absolute economic minimum knowing that someone else might have to pay the bill for them at some point. In other words, in an economy where spending is liberal, there is lots of money flowing in various directions and people have to cater to the spending to get the money. In other words, you end up devoting as much time as possible to keeping up your income as high as possible, because it is a competition to keep up with rising housing prices, etc. Now, if you found this type of liberal boom economy undesirable, how would you promote reductions in the various flows of money that would lead people to spend less and use their own labor as much as possible to avoid spending unnecessarily? I can see how the US would appear this way if you are entrenched in the extreme nationalist ideology that most people are globally. However, you should consider that the US is a national charter that checks and balances its own centralized national government with the ideals of freedom and decentralized self-regulation, which is called 'republic." Now, I know France, China, and other nation-states use the word 'republic' and, like the US, none of them fully achieve the ideals of de-centralized self-governance of the people, by the people, for the people - but I would guess that like the US, each manages to check and balance centralized authority in certain ways that achieves some level of self-governance. So your question, "are you a nation, or not," was actually foreseen in a way by the designers of a checks-and-balances republican form of governance. This is necessary, in a way, because if you would choose not to be a nation, other nationalists would be free to colonize people and natural resources in their own national interests. However, if you choose to be a monarchy or some other form of centralized nation with unchecked authoritarian rule, you would be defeating the dream of the republic by fighting nationalist-authoritarian fire with fire. So that's where I think you get the third option of having a republic that is a nation but is divided in numerous institutionalized ways that generates conflicts that check-and-balance centralized authority. What this ultimately amounts to is that anyone (globally) who looks to the US for clearly defined authoritarian guidance will always be frustrated because the whole point of authority in US republican ideology is to frustrate authoritarianism. In other words, it's intentional though sub-conscious in a sense. You will always get led on in one direction only to watch the assumptions you've built up crumble before your eyes. In this way, the US will continue to destabilize all forms of nationalist command-control globally forever. Obama claimed that the US was "ready to lead the world again" but he has no dictatorial power to ensure that, so leadership in the US is never more than individuals expressing what would be a very good idea for people to pursue voluntarily. There's a reason they call the US president, "the leader of the free world." People are free to listen, ignore, or throw their shoes and books. Authoritarians are never satisfied with freedom. They don't see it as being effective enough. People who love freedom dislike people who would so desire effective policy that they would sacrifice freedom to achieve it. It's an epic conflict that is never-ending. I can see how the US would appear this way if you are entrenched in the extreme nationalist ideology that most people are globally. However, you should consider that the US is a national charter that checks and balances its own centralized national government with the ideals of freedom and decentralized self-regulation, which is called 'republic." Now, I know France, China, and other nation-states use the word 'republic' and, like the US, none of them fully achieve the ideals of de-centralized self-governance of the people, by the people, for the people - but I would guess that like the US, each manages to check and balance centralized authority in certain ways that achieves some level of decentralized self-governance. So you're question, "are you a nation, or not," was actually foreseen in a way by the designers of a checks-and-balances republican form of governance. This is necessary, in a way, because if you would choose not to be a nation, other nationalists would be free to colonize people and natural resources in their own national interests. However, if you choose to be a monarchy or some other form of centralized nation with unchecked authoritarian rule, you would be defeating the dream of the republic by fighting nationalist-authoritarian fire with fire. So that's where I think you get the third option of having a republic that is a nation but is divided in numerous institutionalized ways that generates conflicts that check-and-balance centralized authority. What this ultimately amounts to is that anyone (globally) who looks to the US for clearly defined authoritarian guidance will always be frustrated because the whole point of authority in US republican ideology is to frustrate authoritarianism. In other words, it's intentional though sub-conscious in a sense. You will always get led on in one direction only to watch the assumptions you've built up crumble before your eyes. In this way, the US will continue to destabilize all forms of nationalist command-control globally forever. Obama claimed that the US was "ready to lead the world again" but he has no dictatorial power to ensure that, so leadership in the US is never more than individuals expressing what would be a very good idea for people to pursue voluntarily. There's a reason they call the US president, "the leader of the free world." People are free to listen, ignore, or throw their shoes and books. Authoritarians are never satisfied with freedom. They don't see it as being effective enough. People who love freedom dislike people who would so desire effective policy that they would sacrifice freedom to achieve it. It's an epic conflict that is never-ending.

I don't think matter does exist in the sense that structure is assumed to be inherent in it. If you can reduce a table to a cup-full of ashes, was the solidity of the unburned table a function of its matter or the organization of its matter? Density, tensile strength, structural integrity of objects, etc. seem to be what people refer to when claiming that matter exists in contrast with supposedly less-existent things. Imagine your professor mentions the efficacy of matter while doing the cliche's knock on a table and his fist passed through the table like a cloud of dust. Would the students still be convinced of the efficacy of matter? Matter certainly exists, but just not in the sense that is often attributed to it.

I think there is fundamental ignorance about the ideology of fiscal conservatism and how that relates to the ideology of a republic. Of course spending money accomplishes things, even good things. The problem is that the more you accomplish by spending and taxing, the more dependent you become on government to tax and spend. Republicanism is about decentralizing power to the people. How else can you decentralize economic power except by freeing people from working all the time for liberal spenders? Most fiscal liberals I discuss this with are totally convinced that spending money is the only way anything could ever get done economically. They don't believe in voluntarism or free-market mechanisms that require businesses to lower prices when flows of money dry up. Yes it is tough to restructure and work for what you believe in under constrained means in a fiscally tight economy, but "can we do it, yes we can!" Fiscal liberals don't seem to realize that they by pumping loads of money into things, they are being cynical that those things won't happen without funding. The irony of that is that the more they act on this cynicism and fund every little thing, the more people will think that nothing is possible without money behind. At that point, what hope is there for the poor or others who lose income during a recession? Little to none. Republicanism is about building up economic resources that are recession-proof because the labor is there even when the money isn't flowing, imo. Everyone loves more money. I would certainly love some more. The problem is the more we get used to the stimulus, the harder it's going to hit us when someone manages to cut off our money supply. So there is some preventive care in spending cautiously and conservatively. Yes, but look closer at the game. The goal is to get so many people spending at such a rate that there's lots of opportunities to make money. But guess what people are doing while that money is flowing so much? They are attempting to secure increasingly higher levels of income and wealth. For example, the stock market is booming so investors are reeling in loads of profits and consistently building up safety nets like insured savings deposits to avoid losing it when the market turns sour. The net effect of this is that more spending leads to more saving, which leads to decreasing money supply. So everytime the economy soars, it crashes that much harder because that many more people secured their fortunes from the boom. Well, I can't say I totally understand the logic of republican spending and whether it's just hypocrisy. I do have a theory, though, which is that if you want to stimulate fiscal conservation, you have to move money to people who will conserve and not spend it. So republican spending may have the logic of rerouting money to people who have the most resistance to the temptation to spend. I noticed this pattern during GWB's presidency where, for example, assets were frozen and bailouts were directed to banks, the most secure guardians of money during a deflationary period. Of course liberals hate this because they would do just the opposite, spend as much as possible to get money to others who will do the same. They're just two completely opposite philosophies of economic stimulus. One stimulates working for money, the other stimulates working in the absence of money. Well, let's say you did actually believe in stimulating people to work in the absence of money. How would you encourage that if there were loads of money-making opportunities and pressure to "keep up with the rat race" to avoid "falling behind the Joneses?" How would you reduce that pressure to promote more economic at the individual level of self-determining one's labor instead of submitting to the will of whoever is spending it?

I have noticed the pattern you mention as well, yes, I don't know about this thread, specifically. I was just thinking of a pattern of ideological positions that all seem to converge in opposition of religion in general and Christianity in particular. It's as if there is an ideological war against Christianity going on.

Creation is a concept by which transformation is defined as a change from one form to another. Without defining the new form as new and different from the old one, there is no transformation. Does a baby lizard "transform" into a lizard? No, but a tadpole "transforms" into a frog. Why is that. Who creates the distinction between tadpole and frog as being more radical than baby lizard to lizard? Humans do (or have). So people have tried to understand this power that humans have to engage in "creation" by virtue of ideas that differentiate forms, delineate their boundaries, etc. Doesn't it therefore make sense that the way humans would explain their own power of creation is to create a story about a being with ultimate creative power who created humans in its image? The more puzzling question to me is why so many humans attempt to transcend recognition of knowledge as being created by humans to attribute the knowledge created to nature itself. Why are humans unsatisfied with recognizing the fact that all their knowledge is created by themselves in one way or another?

I identify more with people who think independently and question party ideologies than that I identify with people who define themselves as being part of one herd against others.

Have you ever noticed how atheists reflexively go against anything religious people believe in, such as faith, free will, spirituality, etc. Why do you suppose that so many have taken a negation approach to religion instead of just understanding it as a form of culture?

That's because people get caught in the dualism of natural/artificial, which is actually not present in the creationist idea that God created nature. If you think about it, it is as simple as the fact that humans have power to kill each other and steal from each other, etc. So it makes no sense to say that God punishes you for killing or stealing, because your punishment is to live fearfully in a world of killing and theft. It's just what goes around comes around, and forgiveness, either feeling forgiven or feeling forgiving to others goes a long way to cure the fear by lessening thoughts of fear and retaliation that "poison your soul." It's complicated to explain in detail but the line in the lord's prayer I've already quoted sums it up, "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." When people don't do this, it leads to a vicious cycle of hate and retaliation which pretty well exemplifies the expression, "burning in hell," where burning refers to burning rage and hell refers to all the actions that flow from and to that rage. If you want to exclude it from the discussion, it may. It's actually very relevant to the thread topic, though, because the bible is the main source I can think of that explains human behavior in terms of free will. Many other texts only consider social or natural determinism as causing human actions. That is how we got essentialist theories that would postulate that criminality was inherent in certain people's genes/nature and inherently absent in others. Christianity views all people as inherently prone to sin insofar as they are human and not immune from being tempted to evil; but it also recognizes that people have the capacity to resist and choose for good over evil, however those are defined. According to Christianity, thus, an omniscient god would not know what choices humans are going to make, but s/he/it would understand many possible outcomes/consequences of various choices.

I disagree. Doubt just enables people to accept a certain level of bs when it's politically pragmatic to do so. Reason allows people to have different interests and views but still understand each other's point of view WITH CERTAINTY, without automatically compromising their own. This leads to a more rational and less emotional or pragmatic compromise that makes no one happy by trying to piece bits of different proposals together without any rationale except that interests should be balanced.

Genesis 2:?. You are assuming that God created sins as arbitrary rules to punish people if they violated them. Why aren't the commandments things like, "thou shalt not wear blue shoes on tuesday" then? Sins are things like killing, stealing, etc. that have a harmful effect on others or yourself. All the bible does it to try to teach people that if they avoid sins, suffering in the world is reduced. That's not because God is punishing the world for sinning; it's because sin itself causes suffering. That, and what goes around comes around. That's why the lord's prayer says to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." That's why in the book of exodus, Moses goes from killing an Egyptian to watching one Israelite kill another, to bringing God's message that no one should kill. Scripture is full of insights from people who realized that harming the creation is harming God and therefore yourself. This is why you're supposed to treat others as you want to be treated, because what goes around comes around, the last shall be first, etc. etc. Everyone comes to experience the consequences of their own sins and good deeds - basically the same idea as karma. That's also why you rehabilitate/redeem people instead of subjecting them to eternal damnation, but for that to work they have to believe in their own redemption/rehabilitation. That's what it means to "accept Christ's sacrifice and forgiveness for sin."

No, you're confusing redemption with retaliation. You have it in your head that Christianity is about God retaliating against people for sin but that's really not it. Christianity views sin as having natural consequences. God is the being that tries to warn people about the consequences so they can avoid them. The logic of redemption is based on the idea that your sins have already been paid for so you don't need to suffer for them, but in gratitude for your suspended sentence you have to live a better life. That's the same thing as rehabilitative justice. Your sentence gets suspended in exchange for you being rehabilitated from a life of crime to being a good citizen. What's the difference?

It is quite interesting to consider the idea of a fiscally conservative legislative branch coupled with a strong and idealistic executive branch. Really the last two years were just an artifact of anti-Bush/neocon backlash on the basis of economic disenchantment. If people wouldn't react to their dissatisfaction with the attitude of replacing the old with its opposite, the pendulum wouldn't have swung so far in the fiscal-liberal direction in the first place. Now that people have gotten the economic stimulus they rallied for, they're not happy to see the bill so they're going to once again try to reverse directions. The reason this combination of fiscally conservative legislative and progressive executive can be good, however, is that it challenges people to make changes without doing it for the money. In other words, it is time for people to make personal and professional choices to achieve the goals of less energy dependence, more efficient and better economic practices, etc. (all the things that Obama has preached) . . . to make those things happen because they are directly beneficial; not because there's money in it. There may actually be money in it ultimately, but without direct stimulus funding, the immediate goal will no longer be the carrot. edit: going green on a budget? yes we can!

I understand the validity of evolutionary theory as a materialist explanation of natural history. What I don't understand is why anyone would want to make it a basis for a life-orientation spiritually. Imo, it makes far more sense to choose a mythology to ground your worldview according to what kind of life-purpose you wish to have from an ethical standpoint. For this reason, I understand why many creationist reject evolutionism - i.e. because they are afraid it will transform their worldview from being about intelligence/wisdom behind creative power to being about an endless struggle for survival and competition to reproduce.

What's the difference between rehabilitation and redemption then?

First, I don't think you get that eternal suffering may just refer to the fact that your own conscience never gives up punishing you until you have accepted forgiveness from some source. Second, do you realize that rehabilitative punishment is a concept derived from the Christian approach to extracting penance for sin? It's basically the principle that a criminal can be forgiven if they redeem themselves by good deeds and prove their devotion to go(o)dwill instead of crime(evil).