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SAM HARRIS / THE MORAL LANDSCAPE:
Well, what does "physical health" mean? Does it encompass the health of dangerous individuals, societies, or national rulers? Does it prefer mental prowess, emotional stability, or cultural purposefulness? How should it encompass goals for genetic and cyber engineering, and for which individuals? Or fitness to an assigned job? To be assigned or determined by whom? Does physical health favor conditioning for speed, or endurance, or strength, or disease resistance?
Is it objectively moral to improve the health of a despotic psychopath able to put his finger on the button? Should every person receive medical treatment to maximize "physical health," even if it leads to reduction of effectiveness of inoculations or susceptibility to pandemic because of lack of genetic or health diversity?
Nonsense, Per Steven Weinberg: "Now, Sam Harris is aware of this kind of counter argument [to utilitarianism], and says it's not happiness, it's human welfare. Well, as you make things VAGUER and vaguer, of course, it becomes harder and harder to say it doesn't fit your own moral feelings, but it also becomes less and less useful as a means of making moral judgements. You could take that to the extreme and make up some nonsense word and say that's the important thing and no-one could refute it but it wouldn't be very helpful. I regard human welfare and the way Sam Harris refers to it as sort of halfway in that direction to absolute nonsense."
IAE, what would maximizing the physical health for the greatest number entail? Whose health would be sacrificed so the health of the greatest number could be maximized? Who would decide? Some healthy people stay that way because they decline to live in antiseptic environments. That way, they harden their immune systems. Can any moral scientisimist say who should thus harden himself and who should not?
What resources should be sacrificed to pursue the greatest physical health for the greatest number? Should resources be sacrificed for developing technologies to defend nations or the world against artificial or natural asteroid attacks? What objective moral science based on physical health or well being can or should objectively answer such questions? Should the masses have no say against the "moral experts"?
NOTE: I do not oppose scientific research to find cures or to improve health. I think populations should seek to assimilate values for pursuing such aims. But to call such assimilations of values "objectively good" in the sense of being purely determinable by expert moral scientists is a reach too far. I agree with the idea of contingent morality. I agree that an idea of mutual empathy is both contingently and objectively valid. However, because such idea of empathy necessitates reference to subjectivity, I think moral issues, like existentiality generally, entangles both with objectivity and subjectivity. To me, that seems obvious.
To me, a notion that morality is entirely subjective is nonsense. And an idea that morality can be reduced to pure objectivity is likewise nonsense. Rather, the idea of morality is entangled both with innate empathy and with particular subjectivity. As Jesus said: Good Faith (Great Commandment), and Good Will (Golden Rule). If (CONTINGENTLY) we want a decent republic of free thinking and responsible adults, we need to stop teaching children that morality is entirely subjective (or does not exist), and we need to stop teaching children to believe, irresponsibly, that morality is entirely objective (what fake moral scientisimists say it is). And we need to stop ridiculing or reviling wisdom just because it may be found in ancient texts.
Btw, I suspect some neuroscientists believe they can objectively quantify pleasure. Problem: Do we really want a world of pleasure addicts? Maybe we can put everyone on the Cloud/Matrix after we divine algorithms to control AI to service our pleasures. Lol.
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SCIENTISM:
I am surprised that, for someone so apparently dedicated to science, you seem unfamiliar with the now common term of scientism.
A good primer is here: https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_scientism.html:
Scientism is the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of research of the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even essential) to all other disciplines, including philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. It is based on the belief that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, and that the methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any philosophical (or other) inquiry.
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Proponents of Scientism often assert that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. In its most extreme form, Scientism can be seen as a faith that science has no boundaries, and that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour will be dealt and solved by science alone
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It has been argued that Scientism, in the strong sense, is self-annihilating in that it takes the view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Scientism is either false or meaningless.
Certainly, it requires the almost complete abandonment of any metaphysical or religious discussion, (and arguably also any ethical discussion), on the grounds that these cannot be apprehended by the scientific method, which is very limiting for a supposedy all-encompassing doctrine. Some would say that proponents of Scientism merely avoid actually engaging with many important arguments.
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Since you seem unfamiliar with the concept, you probably have not thought much about tendencies loosed when corrupt or fake elites indoctrinate a citizenry into radical scientism. A society so indoctrinated will be trained to defer to so called scientific experts in every field, including morality, art, and politics. This is what I consider to be very dangerous to any citizenry that values and wants to preserve itself as comprising a representative republic. If you refuse to appreciate that, then I agree, we have very little to discuss.
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When it comes to managing a discussion forum, I suspect Conservatives tend to believe each adult should be primarily responsible for steering his own way, and that such course tends to be best helped by according broad tolerance for give and take in the exchange of ideas. I suspect Progressives tend to believe they have found the Truth and that there is little need to avail the little people to learn it on their own. Theirs is to shut up and obey. So, when communication becomes controversial, Progressives will tend to be the first to shut down further exploration of ideas and their consequences. The result is the infantilizing of the masses and the generation of a two class society, comprised of rulers and those whose only duty is but to obey. I suspect this is why Progressives/Socialists tend to produce fascism.
I suspect people who are receptive in walking with their own sense of higher mindedness, without needing to be intrusively evangelistic about it, tend to be similar in their practice of altruism in respect of strangers. It's intrusive fundies and militants who are often the problem.
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Otoh, when full and heated debate is encouraged, it becomes more likely that ideas can be explored, improved, falsified, and assimilated. For that, I suspect Conservatives (Conservers of Liberty) tend to have an innate advantage over Progressives when a full exchange of ideas is encouraged. Otoh, Progressives tend to have an advantage when they can gang up to enforce speech codes in ways that are discriminatory against Conservatives. From what I have seen, it's as if Progressives fear they might be exposed as shallow in their thinking. Just my opinion.
The person who wants to use science to take away the moral participation of his fellows is halfway to making himself a subhuman souldead. When subhuman souldeads reach critical mass, they float only their own crap to all positions of institutional power. Critical Souldead Theory.
Math and models are important, but this Climate Science Debacle demonstrates the problem when Math Nerds start believing the bs that they and their Elite Masters push: That they ought to replace representative republicanism. For that, their facts are inadequate to their premise. This is the problem with all fake social scientists and moral scientisimists. To follow them tends to be to volunteer for monstrous fascist central rule. Under the guise of central carbon banking, world government, open borders, moral scientisimism, and fake fairness and equality.
More than that, there lies a fundamental problem at the core of social scientism. It presumes something that, on more mature reflection, seems not true. It presumes that, given enough facts and tinkering with explanatory models, all human action can best be subjected to science-based, totalitarian rule. Why defer to the ordinary electorate, when everything can best be determined by science?
Problem is, the way our cosmos of consciousness, substance, and information fluxes, we get to measure correlates and dynamic feedback, but not ultimate causes. And we don't get to test our social "sciences" against a parallel cosmos in which everything but the test factor is kept constant. Every time something new in measurable Substance is added to the Information base, something new in immeasurable Conscious awareness is also added. And that Conscious Awareness can redesign and change course unexpectedly, in response to each new factor and model that is added.
IOW, we participate in the feedback-design for the unfolding of our World, as well as for how we change ourselves in it --- with respect to our interests, mores, customs, values, and purposes. There are nearly always unforeseen consequences to systemic changes. Since we change our very selves, how can we say, in "science," what is best for us for all time? Answer: We cannot. To argue that we can is to over indulge facts that are inadequate to their premise.
Simply put, it is hubristic for science nerds to pretend they can measure and model what is best in terms of social science, because their models can never be entirely complete, consistent, and coherent for all needs and purposes. Moreover, it is evil for oligarchs to farm the people at large by hiring Nerds For Fooling The People, Shills For Picking The People's Pockets, and Crowds For Hire.
To find our way forward, we can use science and measurable facts, but we must not abandon conscious, participatory, responsible, individual human insight, intuition, and empathy. To do so would be to force many among us into a category of farmed subhumans. That is the Evil of Fascists, Socialists, and Moral Scieitisimists --- wannabe knowitall people farmers, all.
Lefty moral scientisimists do not believe they should have to listen to anyone beneath their delusions and pretensions about themselves. Except for lip service and kabuki, that is. They think the problem with the Court of King Louis XVI is that he did not do elitism right.
Re: "The elites are using illegal immigration to change the composition of America to resemble the Third World and anyone who tells us it is for our own good, or not a big deal is sorely mistaken."
Those elites are rotten to the bone. They would tell us that anyone of any color who advocates for a representative republic of free thinking enterprisers is "acting white" or "white privileged." IOW, they bring race into a non-race issue, and then have the chutzpah to call us racists, while they are the biggest racists and belly-crawling subhumanoids on the planet. They constantly hammer race to divide us, then call us the dividers. These corrupt belly-crawlers have been with us since Genesis. But the time for believing their evil, forked tongues is over. The time for a roundup of belly crawlers is nigh.
Corrupt money now buys incredible influence over social mores simply by laundering money with the right institutions. So many of our prideful institutions spent years convincing us how virtuous and elite they are. Now, they take money from the worst of goons and sell the masses into depravity. When they own Harvard, they own a base for corrupting Western Values. Ditto, Courts, Congress, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Clinton Foundation, Crowds on Demand, Media Matters, and what loosely now calls itself Social Scientists and Churches. And so it goes.
Meanwhile, College Kids, more than ever, are not taught how to think, but taught not to think at all (beyond PC). This is a very big problem for most of the world. The more liberty-illiterates that are imported and indoctrinated into the U.S., the more certain it becomes that our representative republic (except in pretense) is in its last days.
In NoKo, people get their minds right at the point of a gun. In the U.S., they volunteer to go deep into debt to get themselves indoctrinated by those who own and operate the institutions. As mind slaves, which are the more loathsome: Those forced into mind enslavement, or those who line up to volunteer for it? In neither event will string pullers have any respect for the mind slaves. The system, as currently rigged, would not select them if they did.
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The Border: Actually, I don't trust a word you say. I think you should just admit, you don't want a border. You want Soros' Open Society. We see how the people funding and agitating for that operate. A lot of fake sympathy, fake innocence, and fake *scholarship. We know what you and your cohort really want.
Your efforts go unabated, to flip the demographic, so that we will have a new electoral majority that will vote for its own enserfment under the bs meme of social justice, equality, and fairness, i.e., socialism imposed by the usual breed of fake do-gooders, like Kim. Socialistic crap.
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*The use of easy stats to imply direct correlations is suspect. For one thing, given all the years South Americans have been illegally crossing the border, it stands to reason that the supply would diminish at some point. Especially as Mexico enforces its southern border, and as it clears out a lot of its backlog of wannabe crossers. And as Mexico wants to help the political argument that a wall is not necessary.
Moreover, Lefties would want to cooperate to produce or show a temporary drop, while they finagle for "comprehensive solutions." Once comprehensive solutions are enacted, it's back to the game plan for opening the borders.
Every person who values the representative republic sees the axis of Dinos and Rinos as plain as day. And we simply do not trust or believe you, anymore. Nor do we trust your scholarship on illegal voting. After all, if you truly valued the republic, you would not be a staunch supporter of Lefties and Socialists.
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Altruism is innate, but you can't force its degree or level. It occurs as a result of wiring, proximity, and similarity --- to such an extent that you identify the person you are being empathetic towards, as if he were an extension of yourself. Mothers identify with their children. Not so much with distant and unseen children, absent special conditioning and inspiration.
The reason Communism fails is because it cannot inspire the necessary empathy among disparate and distant clans, cultures, and countries. A parent will be altruistic to a child, regardless. But one city will not tend to be altruistic towards another unless groundwork is laid to inspire and organize general shared participation. Once traditional families are destroyed and child rearing is turned over to the State, altruism will weaken and decent civilization will unravel.
To put it plain, I do not much see Islamists who engage in FGM, child marriage, killing of apostates, banning of music, destruction of free expression, spreading of mass fear, constant jihad against other civilizations, dhimmification of infidels, and neurotic thinking about fairyland metaphors as if they were science based, as extensions of my identity. I do not want to work to pay taxes to support the spread of such a way of thinking or life. My general altruism to future generations of human beings forbids it.
A person otherwise good in science and math has to study stupidity hard to apply them to aspects of beingness to which every person of common sense knows they do not apply. The idea of a scientific allocation of equality and fairness (or even the greatest pleasure to the greatest number) is so filled with obvious internal flaws that only studiously stupid goose steppers and their usefully idiotic brownshirts could believe in such moronic idealization.
You have a reading comprehension problem. Natural empathy is distorted because of perpetual infants being abused by people farmers. People farmers are rapacious, whether it be by crony capitalism or by thug nomenklatura.
Our Founders sought to check and balance for a representative republic, that availed free enterprise. Buying and selling gov and gov influence, like commodities, is not free enterprise. It is something a representative republic needs to check. I have suggested ways that might help accomplish that. (They include: Restore common sense to the public square. Progressively tax consumption, especially consumption of gov influence. And a number of other things.)
Everything out of moderation can become bad. To say that immoderate capitalism is bad is not to evidence that free enterprise within a sustainable political system is bad. It is just childish spit balling. The way of every form and set of form is that they eventually become genetic drag to the flux of the encompassment, as it unfolds in its various states of becoming manifest.
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I would stand firm in my faith that the Godhead is Trinitarian, we are all simply differing and limited perspectives of the same Consciousness, empathy is a fundament more so than an emergent, atheists tend to be drama queens who know least about what they don't know, Jesus was an exemplar of good faith and good will, there is no unitary thing-in-itself that we can comprehend, we tend to become as we believe, coming together in respect of innate empathy tends to help us move towards decent civilization that respects familial freedom and dignity.
Consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the trinity does not die, it is only temporal perspectives of Consciousness that flux and pass on between their seeming emergences and their seeming endings, all this has been said before but in different modalities and sequences, appreciation between the reconciling Godhead and its exploring perspectives is a dynamic feedback process, we tend to reap as we sew, an underlying message behind the metaphors of most sacred and inspiring stories remains not inconsistent, and the main message of Jesus as derived from the stars and through the ages remains not inconsistent with all of that.
People who try hardest to take metaphors literally tend to hoax themselves. The task of a spiritual leader is to help people see truths through the mists of metaphors. For mortals, there is no other way to approach "the way and the truth and the light." Otoh, the task of a denier of the essential truths behind metaphors, who seeks to replace the hopes and insights that metaphors can inspire with the phony truths of moral scientismists, is to reduce human beings to subhuman serfs in the service of knowitall elitists and oligarchs. IOW, to sell the masses into bondage under false promises of benevolent fairness, equality, and "progress" --- to be provided by people farmers and their new world alchemy based on moral scientism.
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What about the Normal Wing v. the Abnormal Wing? Is the Normal Wing more dangerous?
Normal for a human being is to want to become a competent, responsible, decent, respectable adult. But a lot of people nowadays are led into gross abnormality. There's profit in that. Entire cultures and countries to cannibalize. Plus fun. Fun to poke your stuff around against everyone who ever made you feel insecure. So how does an Abbie cope? Find and maraud with homies. Gain control over the definition of morality. Base it in "moral science," to render all opponents illegitimate. This is how you tear down a civilization, and have fun doing it. S/
There is a difference between providing information for social and moral advice based on wisdom borne of experience versus staking a claim that such advice is founded in moral science. If it were founded in moral science, it should be testable and falsifiable. But life is not like that. We do not get to live out a number of simultaneous and blind test alternatives. Life moves on before that can be done. So moral advice necessarily relies on wisdom rather than on science. Now, if one supposes mechanical, physical applications rely on science, no one disputes that. But only a fool would argue that moral applications are mechanically controllable in a scientific sense. Such a fool may argue that chocolate ice cream is scientifically better than vanilla, or spinach. Or that such science is settled by consensus. Or that, but for Alexander, Persia would never have been conquered. Or that moral science shows that a particular child should spend x time on y games and z studies.
The people who argue their abnormal drives are blessed as superior by moral science do so because they cannot argue based on what is seen to be normal or the wisdom of the ages. So they cheat and claim the blessing of "moral science." Perhaps the same people would argue that economics based on free enterprise is or has become immoral? Perhaps economics is not part of their moral science? So, should they (like Obama) deem it more moral to have fair and equal distribution of misery, or vast distribution of wealth, however unequal? Perhaps, instead of a feedback and participatory process of Reconciliation, some Oracular Oligarch tells them which goal is most blessed in nature as "moral science"?
An illustration: If by imposing draconian measures we sustain populations while reducing climate change, but such attempt to hold back time and defend evolutionary drag instead greases evolutionary opportunities for bugs and diseases, then how has science shown such a path to be "more moral"? Can any moral scientisimist even say whether a mother should love her child no more than any other, or a citizen should love his country no more than any other?
To argue that principles of scientific falsifiability should be applied even to those subjects and concerns that are obviously and innately beyond falsification is the height of moral scientismic stupidity and trained bot-ism. It is the mark of a brain that has been deformed by weird predilections and/or deliberate indoctrination for bot-ism, for bots whose "special purpose" is to jerk off society. Are college kids no longer trained to actually think for themselves about moral issues, instead of just how to mouth pc platitudes and hate the USA?
To think the putsch to import ever more immigrants from nations with little history for supporting individual freedom of expression or enterprise is not a divisive and dangerous attack by a corrupt and abnormal oligarchy and its useful idiots against our representative republic is the stance of a fool, i.e., a moral scientisimist.
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Too date, few scientists have been so presumptuous that science, in matters of morality, can replace values based on social relationships. To revert to slippery slope caricature is to display utter cluelessness with regard to the push for central carbon banking, one world currency, open borders, openness to international law, expulsion of faith based values from the schools and public square, and the assault on traditional families. To say it plainly, if you can't see the assault on the representative republic, then you are too blind to give credence concerning any moral concern.
You need to learn more how to read and less how to presume. Your argument based on historical and Catholic Church influences is a strain too far. Catholicism was not popular among America's Founders. Whatever the political deficiency of Catholicism, that was not of significant influence among the Founders.
IAE, if you want to apply a science based model and falsifiability to issues of morality, you might first postulate a rigorous model, how to acquire and measure reliable data, how to square the circle with regard to what is best for a person a group and a time, and how to derive a science based formula for measuring degrees of morality, etc. Until then, your pretended justification for Soros' Open Society amount to bunk.
When you base moral values on scientific falsifiability, you display all the understanding of a bot. When you read and perhaps have a real thought, get back to me. Until then, be well, but I would decline invitation to a bot dialogue. If you ever ponder whether schools, media, and other institutions have indoctrinated regurgitators instead of thinkers, you might look in the mirror.
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Moral scientisimist is my term of derision for a person who tries to convince himself or others that his methods for determining moral values are or can be strictly grounded in science. Read up on Sam Harris, who thinks science of neurology can lead us to how to make moral decisions, perhaps based on what tends to provide the most pleasure for the most people for the least effort. Once the masses can be convinced that moral, social, and political decisions should be based on such science, it becomes but a short leap to argue that no one unfamiliar with such science should be allowed to participate in the decision making process. This leads to a two class society: So-called scientists who pretend to know how to make the best moral decisions, to be willing and trustworthy to make such decisions, and so to rule over everyone else. (For goodness sakes, why else do you think there has been such a push for central carbon banking, one world currency, open borders, openness to international law, expulsion of faith based values from the schools and public square, assault on traditional families, and on and on and on?)
The middle class you want would not be allowed in such a two class society. It would be divided, penned, multi-cultured, and ruled. There would be the oligarchy of people farmers and the divided rabble of farmees. After all, why should trained moral scientisimists defer to the untrained rabble?
This is what you get with open borders, an overflow of laborers desperate to compete for cheap jobs, and centralized consolidation of oligarchic wealth and power.
An independently wealthy middle class is not a commonality. It arises when a society shares many of the same values. That is when they can more confidently trust that their sense of fair play, good faith, and good will is shared by others. That trust is lost as wealth and power are consolidated and the masses are excluded. As faith in higher mindedness is replaced by forced rule under fake moral scientisimists, what may once have been a free thinking middle class becomes a herd of sheeple, to be told what to value and believe ... because "science" ....
The wealthy middle class you speak of has been a recent and short termed phenomena, most often arising in nations with a strong Christian foundation. America's Founders were mainly brought up under a system of Christian values. Not Jewish, Hindi, Law Drooling, Moral Scientism, Marxist, or Muslim based values.
Beyond economics, there is the matter of becoming an autonomous, free-thinking, responsible adult versus a subhuman, corrupt, people-farmer or ignorant farmee. A capable, responsible, adult human being would not value group security, fascist fairness, or Marxist equality over individual freedom of expression, enterprise, and association. But an indoctrinee under moral scientism would.
To my thinking, a moral scientisimist is someone with so little understanding of history and humanity that he would sell his soul for an extra widget. Or a bigger orgasm.
Good faith and good will based on receptivity to a higher Reconciler had everything to do with the design, budding, and growth of a wealthy middle class under the shared vision of the Founders. That vision was based on Christian values and a budding respect for the freedom and dignity of all citizens of the new republic. As the ideals of the Founders with regard to faith, family, and fidelity are unraveled and trampled, that republic cannot survive. The middle class of which you speak will instead turn to ashes.
What marks an act or thing as temporally right or wrong is not in the act or thing itself, but in how it is assimilated over time in a feedback process with that which reconciles history. The process is dynamic. If we want to promote the farming of most people as animals, with the fairness of that entrusted to moral scientisimists, we can conceptualize a justness to that. How the Reconciler manifests to any given world or time is influenced by how various temporal agents conceptualize. Over time, we become what we conceptualize.
The writing seems to be on the wall that much of the world wants to conceptualize moral fairness and equality as something not to be entrusted to each person in his/her relationship with higher mindedness, but instead to be entrusted to those who make themselves wealthy and powerful enough to control the media that shapes most minds and what is politically permissible for them to believe.
You need to learn more how to read and less how to presume. Your argument based on historical and Catholic Church influences is a strain too far. Catholicism was not popular among America's Founders. Whatever the political deficiency of Catholicism, that was not of significant influence among the Founders.
IAE, if you want to apply a science based model and falsifiability to issues of morality, you might first postulate a rigorous model, how to acquire and measure reliable data, how to square the circle with regard to what is best for a person a group and a time, and how to derive a science based formula for measuring degrees of morality, etc. Until then, your pretended justification for Soros' Open Society amount to bunk.
When you base moral values on scientific falsifiability, you display all the understanding of a bot. When you read and perhaps have a real thought, get back to me. Until then, be well, but I would decline invitation to a bot dialogue. If you ever ponder whether schools, media, and other institutions have indoctrinated regurgitators instead of thinkers, you might look in the mirror.
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Moral scientisimist is my term of derision for a person who tries to convince himself or others that his methods for determining moral values are or can be strictly grounded in science. Read up on Sam Harris, who thinks science of neurology can lead us to how to make moral decisions, perhaps based on what tends to provide the most pleasure for the most people for the least effort. Once the masses can be convinced that moral, social, and political decisions should be based on such science, it becomes but a short leap to argue that no one unfamiliar with such science should be allowed to participate in the decision making process. This leads to a two class society: So-called scientists who pretend to know how to make the best moral decisions, to be willing and trustworthy to make such decisions, and so to rule over everyone else. (For goodness sakes, why else do you think there has been such a push for central carbon banking, one world currency, open borders, openness to international law, expulsion of faith based values from the schools and public square, assault on traditional families, and on and on and on?)
The middle class you want would not be allowed in such a two class society. It would be divided, penned, multi-cultured, and ruled. There would be the oligarchy of people farmers and the divided rabble of farmees. After all, why should trained moral scientisimists defer to the untrained rabble?
This is what you get with open borders, an overflow of laborers desperate to compete for cheap jobs, and centralized consolidation of oligarchic wealth and power.
An independently wealthy middle class is not a commonality. It arises when a society shares many of the same values. That is when they can more confidently trust that their sense of fair play, good faith, and good will is shared by others. That trust is lost as wealth and power are consolidated and the masses are excluded. As faith in higher mindedness is replaced by forced rule under fake moral scientisimists, what may once have been a free thinking middle class becomes a herd of sheeple, to be told what to value and believe ... because "science" ....
The wealthy middle class you speak of has been a recent and short termed phenomena, most often arising in nations with a strong Christian foundation. America's Founders were mainly brought up under a system of Christian values. Not Jewish, Hindi, Law Drooling, Moral Scientism, Marxist, or Muslim based values.
Beyond economics, there is the matter of becoming an autonomous, free-thinking, responsible adult versus a subhuman, corrupt, people-farmer or ignorant farmee. A capable, responsible, adult human being would not value group security, fascist fairness, or Marxist equality over individual freedom of expression, enterprise, and association. But an indoctrinee under moral scientism would.
To my thinking, a moral scientisimist is someone with so little understanding of history and humanity that he would sell his soul for an extra widget. Or a bigger orgasm.
Good faith and good will based on receptivity to a higher Reconciler had everything to do with the design, budding, and growth of a wealthy middle class under the shared vision of the Founders. That vision was based on Christian values and a budding respect for the freedom and dignity of all citizens of the new republic. As the ideals of the Founders with regard to faith, family, and fidelity are unraveled and trampled, that republic cannot survive. The middle class of which you speak will instead turn to ashes.
What marks an act or thing as temporally right or wrong is not in the act or thing itself, but in how it is assimilated over time in a feedback process with that which reconciles history. The process is dynamic. If we want to promote the farming of most people as animals, with the fairness of that entrusted to moral scientisimists, we can conceptualize a justness to that. How the Reconciler manifests to any given world or time is influenced by how various temporal agents conceptualize. Over time, we become what we conceptualize.
The writing seems to be on the wall that much of the world wants to conceptualize moral fairness and equality as something not to be entrusted to each person in his/her relationship with higher mindedness, but instead to be entrusted to those who make themselves wealthy and powerful enough to control the media that shapes most minds and what is politically permissible for them to believe.
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When people think and act in good faith and good will, they can be conceptualized as acting in respect of Godliness -- whether or not they want to use that term. A person can be godly and still be repulsed by the term.
Regardless, when that which is good or godly is removed from the assimilative discussion of the masses (in public squares and churches) and handed over to moral scientisimists, that marks a sudden turn back to fascist despotism.
Much of the God debate is silly, because it is a debate that is controlled by conceptualizations. If moral goodliness is conceptualized as based on a connecting, reconciling capacity for empathy (good faith and good will), then God can be conceptualized as simply the innate source for that connecting, reconciling empathy. Such conceptualization implicates respect for goodliness that is beyond oneself, which is the basis for higher mindedness. Conscious Mind is such that, if given the same particular origin and sequential unfoldment of experiences, it would generally signify the manifestations of its mortal perspectives in the same way. Under that conceptualization, thou art simply a (local, temporal) agent for the Reconciling God. As ye conceptualize, so shall your soul (and your civilization) be turned.
What is the consequence of deep seated lack of higher mindedness? Well, it is the reverse toilet. The promotion of self serving crap over the free thinking society. Expulsion of moral debate from the public square, with replacement by moral scientismists in the employ of corrupt people farmers. Tenure for those willing to deny freedom of expression in order to serve some rising despot's twisting of "fairness and equality." Political favors for money laundering pigs at the public trough. Constant agitation and division of the masses in order to enrich and empower the few. Selective advantage to the most corrupt and evil of people farming wannabes, whose debate skills center around putting makeup on their demons.
Every society that sins greatly will eventually fight sin with sin. Great goats will need to be made and then sacrificed. For idiotic Proggies, the goat-du-jour is the white male Christian American. When the battle gets hot and we who respect faith, family and fidelity finally tire of being made the goat, we will return the favor. The alternative is to allow the destruction of the faith, family, and fidelity that is essential to sustain decent civilization.
Unfortunately, few responsible brains remain among our multifarious institutions. Most brains have been bribed, intimidated, compromised, drugged, indoctrinated, or overrun. Indeed, our colleges are filled with sods who actually go into great debt to become indoctrinated to serve the new world enserfment.
EDIT: Like their heroes, they want to get scruued, and likely they will get scruued.
Societies that broadly respect rather than punish the moral responsibility of family units have been rare. Such societies are hard to establish, but easy to undermine. Almost inevitably, they are undermined by clueless narcissists whose perpetual infantilism was made possible only because of such family units. They destroy what they utterly fail to appreciate. They are proof you can put lipstick on squishes. And now, too many otherwise decent people are running from the squishes --- turning them into role models instead of ridiculing and reviling them. We felt so sorry on account of their victim act that we allowed them, in recompense, to undermine our civilization.
EDIT: To feel the absurdity, imagine Spartans running from men in lace and lipstick.
Use Fake Science to divide and rule. Support the Left as it divides. Support the Right as it replaces individual responsibility with herd control under elite scientisimists. Wallah! The open range, free cowboying of the intimidated herds. Git along little doggies, it's your misfortune.
Our system has been made a reverse toilet, as it projects crap to the uppermost positions of power, while resolutely refusing to flush it. It appears, indeed, that you can put lipstick on a t***,
Christianity does not seem complicated. The Godhead is Trinitarian. Yolo is false. Good faith and good will are important. Honoring your father and mother is important. It is only when schools under authoritarians claim special license to speak or interpret directly for Christ and power to enforce such interpretation on pain of confiscation. torture or death that such so-called schools become complicated.
****************
No one has posited a consistent, coherent, complete explanation. So words like reality, morality, belief, etc., are not completely understood in common. There will always be the opportunity for people to talk past one another.
I don't think the Universe is evidence of the God of any sacred text. Sacred texts tend to deal with beginnings and end times. I don't think either existentiality or God are like that. I think they are perpetual, beyond end time inventions, maybe infinite and eternal.
A more interesting question is whether there abides good reason to advocate for belief in a generally compassionate and reconciling Godhead.
If you value the freedom, dignity, good faith, and good will of individual citizens over the presumptive diktat of Progressive Moral Scientisimists, then that is one reason. Likewise, if you value the principles under the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. But for the New Testament, I doubt the values expressed in those documents would have assimilated.
There are some other arguments, that relate to how existentiality may not be quite what scientists want to model it as. (Some scientists raise their heads to pose questions, but they tend to be shot down with "Shut up and calculate!")
Looking for ultimate causes among the cosmos is like expecting to beat the Trinitarian Godhead at Three Card Monty.
A photon carries information in respect of the pervious Substance with which it collided or interacted. If it interacts with nothing but space-time in the interim, then its dimness, intensity, frequency, wavelength may convey some general information with regard to the space-time traversed in the interim, subject to guesswork for renormalizing in respect of space-time curvature.
EMR appears to interact with curvatures in space-time such that it is not allowed to carry or convey Information unless the Information is renormalized to show general "flatness" in all directions. That is, regardless of locus in space-time, no observer will be privileged to sense the Universe except as being, in relation to him, of generally equal density in all directions.
If our Universe were the creation of something or someone outside it, then the limits for the space-time-matter-energy of our Universe would be within a form, such as a "bubble" or sphere. It would have an apparent perimeter. It would appear to dissipate, rather than to be equally dense and dissipate in all directions. But it does not do that.
This suggests that the model-idea of a "bubble" is only a metaphor --- good for some purposes, not for others. (Shut up and calculate.) IOW, our Universe is not really a bubble, nor does it really have a center from which it exploded outward in some Big Bang. Even though such conceptualizations can be made highly practical and useful for some purposes.
Our Universe is not a bubble-artifact of any physical Big Bang. The model of a Big Bang may just as well be conceptualized as an artifact of whatever the perspectives of Consciousness that we happen to share.
The model (that our Universe arose from a collapsed Singularity) is just that --- a model --- not "The Truth." For all we know, the "ultimate cause" may better be conceptualized, for scientific AND moral purposes, as expressing itself only in the trinity-flux and phase-shifting of CSI. For that, we factor and participate in the unfolding apprehension and appreciation.
So there does not appear to be any causal agent for the curvature of space-time or its apparent flatness in all directions. Rather, that effect appears to be a correlate of how the trinity fluxes among Consciousness, Substance, and Information. Ultimately, more as correlate than cause. (Surely, some meta/immeasurable flux accounts for the curvature and flattening, not mere random clusters of dense Substance or Matter.)
Consciousness can experience and sense caring, regardless of whether or not it (or anyone or anything else) is the "true causal agent." Subject to its unfolding reconciliatory function, Consciousness as a Whole cares about each of its Perspectives as much as each Perspective cares. Jesus Wept. That idea supports church-forums to come, reason together, and assimilate moral values and purposefulness. The alternative seems to be bad faith, division, and enserfment under morally-diseased people farmers.
Most of Congress are more like chits in the pockets of funders than representatives on behalf of their constituents. They give their influence to their funders, but mainly lip service to their constituents. Except the constituents helping to destroy the republic. Those they give the gas. This will continue so long as oligarchs are allowed to retain wealth for greasing the open season open borders against the republic. A third Party for Conservers of Liberty may offer the only hope for the republic. If it had even small success, it may expand to a bipartisan caucus.
Re: "liberal democratic order that it views as a threat to its oligarchy"
I am glad this is on PRB, where crap can be called crap. Every person with an ounce of sense appreciates how oligarchies thrive by dividing and ruling so-called democratic orders. That is why our Founders crafted a representative republic, not a democracy. The REASON prog-lib-antifa-fascist morons want so-called "more democracy" is so that oligarchs can run riot over the people by paying for Crowds On Demand.
Russia has its own version of Prog-Lib-Fascism for "scientifically" ruling its "democracy." The whole thing for Prog Morons is posing fake social science (critical race studies, ad nauseum) as science, the better to indoctrinate reams and reams of doped up dupes.
To postulate that Russia fears a liberal democratic order is pure idiocy. Russian oligarchs do not fear our lib morons. Russian oligarchs make use of our lib morons -- for the useful idiots they are. Our usefully idiotic Libs are busy killing Western Civ by importing and indoctrinating liberty-illiterates out the wazoo. Why would Russia, if it wants to dominate, stand in their way?
One thing is certain: Whatever the talking points coordinated by the handful of oligarchs that run Western media, they are all bent to a narrative for promoting scientifically imposed "fairness and equality" -- as deemed by the oligarchs. They are bent on farming you, not on respecting you as a person. Their ghettos and Section 8 housing programs are people farms, for raising needed dupes.
I can think of only one reason why Russia may favor Trump. I suspect it would be because Russia views the Clinton/Bush Dino/Rino axis as serving a competing mob of lying oligarchs posing as democracy lovers, bent on putting the world in chaos. Russia has likely become more pragmatic and nationalistic, and not desirous of the NWO. The Clinton/Bush axis would want to take the oligarch/useful idiot meme to a worldwide level, while Trump would not try to impose that kind of dystopia on Russia. I suspect most of the new, conniving, lying dreamers of a NWO of oligarchic ruled socialism are from the West, not from Russia.
The Antifa of the Left calls Conservatives "fascists," while Antifa serves the real fascism. They call the liberal democratic order a threat to oligarchs, when, in actuality, the modern liberal democratic order is the handmaiden for oligarchs. They are big filthy liars who pay liars to propagate lies.
Fascism and Communism will always be fashionable among people who think science, to the exclusion of faith (good faith and good will) holds all the best answers to all our moral, social concerns. These people want to be ruled under moral science, to the exclusion of faith and participation by those they deem to be insufficiently educated in moral scientism. They want to be ruled by busybody moral scientisimists under a NWO or a dictatorship of the proletariat. They hate republicanism that is representative of the common citizen. Moreover, they are bent to import and indoctrinate so many liberty-illiterates as to make representative republicanism non-feasible, if not impossible. IOW, good people slept while mind-toddlers throwing fits flooded our schools, borders, and institutions. There will be much fit-throwing, goat loving, and sacrificing before this can be resolved.
The Left does not want moral responsibility, but it does want to rule.
I already answered. You were not paying attention. It has to do with inspiring and facilitating the assimilation of values that can sustain decent civilization without the over intrusion of knowital law droolers.
The idea.of an essential, unifying, reconciling aspect of Consciousness is indeed spiritual and religious. Perhaps you are religious, but only slowly beginning to apprehend it? That's ok. Rand, Assimov and Deutsch were/are similarly afflicted.
*****************
You want me to accept your axiom, while you are unwilling to think about the essentials of spirituality -- the character and nature of consciousness and identity. Those are hardly supernatural, by the way. Because of that, I have.no reason to take you as any kind of serious critic on the subject.
******
I don't seek an explanation for what created the cosmos. I concern myself with how to appreciate the cosmos as having abided, and apparently to abide, always. Mainly, I seek appreciation for the character/nature of how the cosmos is guided and reconciled as it fractalizes it's myriad of signals, expressions, information, and communications. I seek appreciation for that process by which our innate artistic purposefulness is guided, connected, and reconciled.
For that unfolding, evolution is at least a two way street. It is not predetermined by a scientific, bot program. As a system, the cosmos is dynamically responsive to feedback. Mortals participate. We can become powerful agents for helping to define how evolution unfolds.
The Buddha and Socrates sought the essence of consciousness. That is not in what separates us, but in what unifies and connects us. At root, we are of the same consciousness. It is only our temporal experiences and situations that avail is to have temporarily separate perspectives of Identity. You may believe or behave as if your identity were fixed apart, but that is delusion.
It is only our form-like variability in local perspectives that avail is to act and believe as if we were separate identities
But those local variations are not permanent. You and what you think you believe will not be the same tomorrow as today. Your temporal experience of Identity, like every other Perspexrive's, is in continuous flux. Whatever it's source, it is continuously coordinated and reconciled with Consciousness --- which, at its root, is of the same essence for every perspective.
This is not worship of any particular perspective, but of that which reconciles all perspectives.
My point is that religious belief can be based in reason and self evidence. Your denial is just that --- inconsiderate denial. You simply decline to think about it. Which is fine. Until you pretend to know something about it.
It does not appear that you have thought much about the nature of consciousness or identity. Or the feedback capacity for even local perspectives of consciousness to participate in how the unfolding design for evolution proceeds.
Do you believe I (have faith in) the conscious higher mindedness and general good Will of others? Do you believe or not believe that a person can be morally wrong or right, according to some kind of higher law or standard? Does science "legislate" that law? When it changes according to the common weallll, is it science that reconciles that?
I am not saying everyone is an atheist. I am saying no atheist has much of an idea what he/she is.
The reason to care: Because we all seek, but do not achieve, fulfillment. We are social animals. We seek common purposes and values. We seek forums in which to reason together, to put what common definition we can in such values. Churches can, not necessarily do, provide forums for people to come together in good faith and good will to invest their egos and identities in common purposes. Metaphors and music can provide the language and inspiration to facilitate that. I would rather have that process than a process of phony elite moral scientisimists laying out law drooling legalisms to rule us out the wazoo.
That's why our Founders were guided mainly by the New, not the Old, Testament. The rule of good faith (Great Commandment) and the rule of good will (Golden Rule). When you erase those, you are well on the way to erasing the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, to convert us to a master-slave despotism.
It's not my supernatural realm. it's the realm that defines all of us. You think you "know" reality. But ourselves, our world, our cosmos could be obliterated tomorrow, and your reality, for all "you" in your mortal sense would know, would have never been more than a fictional figment of the image-ination of the Trinitarian Godhead of Consciousness-Substance-In-form-ation. Yet, you have no comprehension of what any Source of such obliteration may be.
Non-belief is as impossible as non-choice. To choose not to do something is to effect a choice. You, as a perspective of Consciousness, cannot exist without formulating or expressing goals, hopes, purposes, beliefs. Indeed, you write now to express your belief, certainly not conjured out of pure science, that non-belief "has every advantage that belief has and you also don't have to pretend anything". But that is self contradictory and self defeating. If you have no beliefs, then you have no belief that any pursuit or art is worthwhile. How is that of any advantage? How can that inspire people to come together? If, after congratulating yourself on non-belief, you sit with fellow congratulators and get bigly high on non-productive dopery, how is that an advantage in any sensible math or science? No one gets to live without pretending that some of his purposes are more worthwhile than others.
I do not concern myself with speaking for other believers or with Pascal's Wager. Why would you bring that up? I just said I do not believe in a heavenly hereafter. Rather, I believe in an Eternal Now, for which our bodies simply cycle through various formulations for repetitively expressing many of the same kinds of fears and joys. (This is a little different from Nietzsche's Eternal Return. Nietzsche indicated he would thank the demon that could offer to allow him to re-live the same life over and over again, for eternity. I think Consciousness experiences much the same fears and joys, in perpetuity, but not in precisely the same chassis, body, or sequence.)
A person can believe in God as the reconciling aspect of the flux of the immeasurably qualitative consciousness with the measurable aspect of substance and the cumulative recording aspect of previous history. As such, God signifies and communicates in metaphors and models set to substantive measurables. We do not directly sense any substantive reality. We experience what substantive reality is like. To say what something is like is to apply a metaphor to it.
IOW, we experience what we call reality through models and metaphors. None of which are ever entirely consistent, coherent, and complete. We are able to communicate because of a process of give-and-take feedback and reconciliation, that never quite reaches fulfillment or perfection. If it were not for models and metaphors, we would have no means of communication about sequences, feedback, events, desires, or beliefs.
The only reason you are able to postulate that "No literal belief is indistinguishable from no belief" is because you apply a fuzzy and fluxing model, at some subconscious level, concerning a meaning of "literal" (or "real"). I am saying we never quite get to know what reality really is. Apart from truisms, there is little of reality that we "really know." However, there are working conventions that we happen to share, for our temporally fluxing bubble.
So, we can, because of conscious engagement in give and take, communicate about our changing experiences and values --- which we assume to be real and function "as if" they were real. Much as we can try to hold lightning in our hands in a bubble, while we discuss it. But we are not really holding it. Rather, we are fluxing with it, as it fluxes with us, for a bubble that itself is changing.
It is a mistake to try to confine God within an end-times-bubble, to be caretaker of some heavenly hereafter bubble for some ideal of permanently unchanging souls. We never live in the hereafter, but only in the here and now, i.e., The Eternal Present. It is when we idealize God as the caretaking-prisoner of an end-times-bubble that we often mis-model God as some misanthropic master-slave monster.
Forget Muslims. The idea of a God (Allah?) or Elite Despot to lead humanity to an end to history is an insult to free thinkers. An end-to-history-God-or-Hegelian can easily be abused by corrupt mouthpieces to lead us into master (Allah) and/or slave (Sheeple) thinking. Humanity should be about more than service to master/slave (Mohammad/Stalin) charismatics. Humanity should be about direct feedback relationships with an inviting Reconciler.
Is Skynet/Borgdom unavoidable? Is Putin right, that nations will fall to that despotism that first gains first strike capability over all opponents' drones? Must society fall to the most corrupt despot who gains sudden control over the most deadly technology? If that is considered unavoidable, must society fall, because every despot calculates that, if he is not first to do his despotism, then others will be?
Nietzsche looked to Will to Power, but succumbed to diseased madness after piously sobbing over a horse that lay dying of being whipped. His sister, not he, published his ruminations on a morality to replace Christian charity. Later, the Nazis parodied and bastardized that into a film, Triumph of the Will.
Perhaps Jesus was about something more than Christian charity to help us see a way beyond the possible cyborg-ian replacement of humanity. If such a way exists.
Can inspiration to assimilate civilizing empathy (faith, family, fidelity) forestall the obliteration of human morality? Can it defeat Rino Corrupti and Dino Ignoranti, and forestall the legalese out the wa-zoo that is so much the desire of law droolers?
Like Nietzsche, I would criticize an orthodoxy that blindly rationalized the spirituality of heaven and the hereafter over the spiritual art of the here and now. I think we never live except in the present, i.e., the here and now. I think the S (substance) and I (information) aspects of CSI will be with us --- whatever the perspectives of C (consciousness) --- in perpetuity.
However, I would not agree with an atheistic elitist who thinks we are free to "kill God" or to create or legislate our own values. We are not ourselves the sum of the Determiner. We are system-feedback-participants. I think we are only free, under God's grace, to part-icipate in how our values are to be consciously interpreted, appreciated, assimilated, fluxed, and Reconciled.
My stance is one of humility before God, but disinclination to bow to elitist despots. Neither master-wolf nor slave-sheep, but black sheep with attitude. Equipped with Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. F Zoo-man Zoolander!
Systems based in pure materialism often float demonic, self-godded, lyng Oligarchs to power, everywhere. Including in America and China.
Other nations and cultures often revile Americans not for their ideals but for falling so far from them, by allowing themselves to ceaselessly promote and be ruled under self-godded, morally corrupt, oligarchs. Their angst is multiplied as they recognize that the brutality of the modern world, especially during the first half of the 20th Century, has continued to put their own cultures under similarly corrupt rule. They recognize how far practical reality is removed from big lying idealism.
Many people of China were trained under Confucianism, with regard for familial virtue throughout institutions and rulers. They want virtue and virtuous rulers. They want to get away from immoderation, war and corruption. But the 20th Century would not let them. So they tipped to lying immoderation in their ideals, which resulted in totalitarian communism, i.e., an excuse for self-godded nomenklatura to farm the masses, with the withering away of the state only a grand big lie.
Today, communism is recognized as a failed ideal, but so is phony free trade and oligarchy-mooching capitalism. So China has a hybrid of rule under phony princeling-capitalists. Yet, they have an ideal of cultural assimilation. Under any NWO, they would see their society as superior. Under Confucianism, they likely would hope eventually to assimilate a superior republic that would accord familial respect for independent thought throughout the republic-family.
However, that ideal and hope will be subordinated to rule under princeling-capitalist-oligarchs, until the brutal threats under modern harsh self-goddingness can be subjugated. The harshness has been reflected in China's brutal policy of one-child per family. IOW, they rely on their own self-goddeds to protect them from other self-goddeds.
Without respect for a process for assimilating good faith, we are lost to lying self-godded demons.
What we have in the world are self-goddeds ruling and competing over every divided nation-culture. Who can say where this will lead? Confucius died bitter. But his devotees planted trees and kept his dream alive: That humanity should rule itself more as a virtuous family than as farm animals under the totalitarian rule of brutal despots. That we should assimilate virtue, more so than legislate it. Faith, family, fidelity, instead of humans being farmed under giant goose steps of legalese and big lies.
Regardless, when that which is good or godly is removed from the assimilative discussion of the masses (in public squares and churches) and handed over to moral scientisimists, that marks a sudden turn back to fascist despotism.
Much of the God debate is silly, because it is a debate that is controlled by conceptualizations. If moral goodliness is conceptualized as based on a connecting, reconciling capacity for empathy (good faith and good will), then God can be conceptualized as simply the innate source for that connecting, reconciling empathy. Such conceptualization implicates respect for goodliness that is beyond oneself, which is the basis for higher mindedness. Conscious Mind is such that, if given the same particular origin and sequential unfoldment of experiences, it would generally signify the manifestations of its mortal perspectives in the same way. Under that conceptualization, thou art simply a (local, temporal) agent for the Reconciling God. As ye conceptualize, so shall your soul (and your civilization) be turned.
What is the consequence of deep seated lack of higher mindedness? Well, it is the reverse toilet. The promotion of self serving crap over the free thinking society. Expulsion of moral debate from the public square, with replacement by moral scientismists in the employ of corrupt people farmers. Tenure for those willing to deny freedom of expression in order to serve some rising despot's twisting of "fairness and equality." Political favors for money laundering pigs at the public trough. Constant agitation and division of the masses in order to enrich and empower the few. Selective advantage to the most corrupt and evil of people farming wannabes, whose debate skills center around putting makeup on their demons.
Every society that sins greatly will eventually fight sin with sin. Great goats will need to be made and then sacrificed. For idiotic Proggies, the goat-du-jour is the white male Christian American. When the battle gets hot and we who respect faith, family and fidelity finally tire of being made the goat, we will return the favor. The alternative is to allow the destruction of the faith, family, and fidelity that is essential to sustain decent civilization.
Unfortunately, few responsible brains remain among our multifarious institutions. Most brains have been bribed, intimidated, compromised, drugged, indoctrinated, or overrun. Indeed, our colleges are filled with sods who actually go into great debt to become indoctrinated to serve the new world enserfment.
EDIT: Like their heroes, they want to get scruued, and likely they will get scruued.
Societies that broadly respect rather than punish the moral responsibility of family units have been rare. Such societies are hard to establish, but easy to undermine. Almost inevitably, they are undermined by clueless narcissists whose perpetual infantilism was made possible only because of such family units. They destroy what they utterly fail to appreciate. They are proof you can put lipstick on squishes. And now, too many otherwise decent people are running from the squishes --- turning them into role models instead of ridiculing and reviling them. We felt so sorry on account of their victim act that we allowed them, in recompense, to undermine our civilization.
EDIT: To feel the absurdity, imagine Spartans running from men in lace and lipstick.
Use Fake Science to divide and rule. Support the Left as it divides. Support the Right as it replaces individual responsibility with herd control under elite scientisimists. Wallah! The open range, free cowboying of the intimidated herds. Git along little doggies, it's your misfortune.
Our system has been made a reverse toilet, as it projects crap to the uppermost positions of power, while resolutely refusing to flush it. It appears, indeed, that you can put lipstick on a t***,
Christianity does not seem complicated. The Godhead is Trinitarian. Yolo is false. Good faith and good will are important. Honoring your father and mother is important. It is only when schools under authoritarians claim special license to speak or interpret directly for Christ and power to enforce such interpretation on pain of confiscation. torture or death that such so-called schools become complicated.
****************
No one has posited a consistent, coherent, complete explanation. So words like reality, morality, belief, etc., are not completely understood in common. There will always be the opportunity for people to talk past one another.
I don't think the Universe is evidence of the God of any sacred text. Sacred texts tend to deal with beginnings and end times. I don't think either existentiality or God are like that. I think they are perpetual, beyond end time inventions, maybe infinite and eternal.
A more interesting question is whether there abides good reason to advocate for belief in a generally compassionate and reconciling Godhead.
If you value the freedom, dignity, good faith, and good will of individual citizens over the presumptive diktat of Progressive Moral Scientisimists, then that is one reason. Likewise, if you value the principles under the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. But for the New Testament, I doubt the values expressed in those documents would have assimilated.
There are some other arguments, that relate to how existentiality may not be quite what scientists want to model it as. (Some scientists raise their heads to pose questions, but they tend to be shot down with "Shut up and calculate!")
Looking for ultimate causes among the cosmos is like expecting to beat the Trinitarian Godhead at Three Card Monty.
A photon carries information in respect of the pervious Substance with which it collided or interacted. If it interacts with nothing but space-time in the interim, then its dimness, intensity, frequency, wavelength may convey some general information with regard to the space-time traversed in the interim, subject to guesswork for renormalizing in respect of space-time curvature.
EMR appears to interact with curvatures in space-time such that it is not allowed to carry or convey Information unless the Information is renormalized to show general "flatness" in all directions. That is, regardless of locus in space-time, no observer will be privileged to sense the Universe except as being, in relation to him, of generally equal density in all directions.
If our Universe were the creation of something or someone outside it, then the limits for the space-time-matter-energy of our Universe would be within a form, such as a "bubble" or sphere. It would have an apparent perimeter. It would appear to dissipate, rather than to be equally dense and dissipate in all directions. But it does not do that.
This suggests that the model-idea of a "bubble" is only a metaphor --- good for some purposes, not for others. (Shut up and calculate.) IOW, our Universe is not really a bubble, nor does it really have a center from which it exploded outward in some Big Bang. Even though such conceptualizations can be made highly practical and useful for some purposes.
Our Universe is not a bubble-artifact of any physical Big Bang. The model of a Big Bang may just as well be conceptualized as an artifact of whatever the perspectives of Consciousness that we happen to share.
The model (that our Universe arose from a collapsed Singularity) is just that --- a model --- not "The Truth." For all we know, the "ultimate cause" may better be conceptualized, for scientific AND moral purposes, as expressing itself only in the trinity-flux and phase-shifting of CSI. For that, we factor and participate in the unfolding apprehension and appreciation.
So there does not appear to be any causal agent for the curvature of space-time or its apparent flatness in all directions. Rather, that effect appears to be a correlate of how the trinity fluxes among Consciousness, Substance, and Information. Ultimately, more as correlate than cause. (Surely, some meta/immeasurable flux accounts for the curvature and flattening, not mere random clusters of dense Substance or Matter.)
Consciousness can experience and sense caring, regardless of whether or not it (or anyone or anything else) is the "true causal agent." Subject to its unfolding reconciliatory function, Consciousness as a Whole cares about each of its Perspectives as much as each Perspective cares. Jesus Wept. That idea supports church-forums to come, reason together, and assimilate moral values and purposefulness. The alternative seems to be bad faith, division, and enserfment under morally-diseased people farmers.
Most of Congress are more like chits in the pockets of funders than representatives on behalf of their constituents. They give their influence to their funders, but mainly lip service to their constituents. Except the constituents helping to destroy the republic. Those they give the gas. This will continue so long as oligarchs are allowed to retain wealth for greasing the open season open borders against the republic. A third Party for Conservers of Liberty may offer the only hope for the republic. If it had even small success, it may expand to a bipartisan caucus.
Re: "liberal democratic order that it views as a threat to its oligarchy"
I am glad this is on PRB, where crap can be called crap. Every person with an ounce of sense appreciates how oligarchies thrive by dividing and ruling so-called democratic orders. That is why our Founders crafted a representative republic, not a democracy. The REASON prog-lib-antifa-fascist morons want so-called "more democracy" is so that oligarchs can run riot over the people by paying for Crowds On Demand.
Russia has its own version of Prog-Lib-Fascism for "scientifically" ruling its "democracy." The whole thing for Prog Morons is posing fake social science (critical race studies, ad nauseum) as science, the better to indoctrinate reams and reams of doped up dupes.
To postulate that Russia fears a liberal democratic order is pure idiocy. Russian oligarchs do not fear our lib morons. Russian oligarchs make use of our lib morons -- for the useful idiots they are. Our usefully idiotic Libs are busy killing Western Civ by importing and indoctrinating liberty-illiterates out the wazoo. Why would Russia, if it wants to dominate, stand in their way?
One thing is certain: Whatever the talking points coordinated by the handful of oligarchs that run Western media, they are all bent to a narrative for promoting scientifically imposed "fairness and equality" -- as deemed by the oligarchs. They are bent on farming you, not on respecting you as a person. Their ghettos and Section 8 housing programs are people farms, for raising needed dupes.
I can think of only one reason why Russia may favor Trump. I suspect it would be because Russia views the Clinton/Bush Dino/Rino axis as serving a competing mob of lying oligarchs posing as democracy lovers, bent on putting the world in chaos. Russia has likely become more pragmatic and nationalistic, and not desirous of the NWO. The Clinton/Bush axis would want to take the oligarch/useful idiot meme to a worldwide level, while Trump would not try to impose that kind of dystopia on Russia. I suspect most of the new, conniving, lying dreamers of a NWO of oligarchic ruled socialism are from the West, not from Russia.
The Antifa of the Left calls Conservatives "fascists," while Antifa serves the real fascism. They call the liberal democratic order a threat to oligarchs, when, in actuality, the modern liberal democratic order is the handmaiden for oligarchs. They are big filthy liars who pay liars to propagate lies.
Fascism and Communism will always be fashionable among people who think science, to the exclusion of faith (good faith and good will) holds all the best answers to all our moral, social concerns. These people want to be ruled under moral science, to the exclusion of faith and participation by those they deem to be insufficiently educated in moral scientism. They want to be ruled by busybody moral scientisimists under a NWO or a dictatorship of the proletariat. They hate republicanism that is representative of the common citizen. Moreover, they are bent to import and indoctrinate so many liberty-illiterates as to make representative republicanism non-feasible, if not impossible. IOW, good people slept while mind-toddlers throwing fits flooded our schools, borders, and institutions. There will be much fit-throwing, goat loving, and sacrificing before this can be resolved.
The Left does not want moral responsibility, but it does want to rule.
I already answered. You were not paying attention. It has to do with inspiring and facilitating the assimilation of values that can sustain decent civilization without the over intrusion of knowital law droolers.
The idea.of an essential, unifying, reconciling aspect of Consciousness is indeed spiritual and religious. Perhaps you are religious, but only slowly beginning to apprehend it? That's ok. Rand, Assimov and Deutsch were/are similarly afflicted.
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You want me to accept your axiom, while you are unwilling to think about the essentials of spirituality -- the character and nature of consciousness and identity. Those are hardly supernatural, by the way. Because of that, I have.no reason to take you as any kind of serious critic on the subject.
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I don't seek an explanation for what created the cosmos. I concern myself with how to appreciate the cosmos as having abided, and apparently to abide, always. Mainly, I seek appreciation for the character/nature of how the cosmos is guided and reconciled as it fractalizes it's myriad of signals, expressions, information, and communications. I seek appreciation for that process by which our innate artistic purposefulness is guided, connected, and reconciled.
For that unfolding, evolution is at least a two way street. It is not predetermined by a scientific, bot program. As a system, the cosmos is dynamically responsive to feedback. Mortals participate. We can become powerful agents for helping to define how evolution unfolds.
The Buddha and Socrates sought the essence of consciousness. That is not in what separates us, but in what unifies and connects us. At root, we are of the same consciousness. It is only our temporal experiences and situations that avail is to have temporarily separate perspectives of Identity. You may believe or behave as if your identity were fixed apart, but that is delusion.
It is only our form-like variability in local perspectives that avail is to act and believe as if we were separate identities
But those local variations are not permanent. You and what you think you believe will not be the same tomorrow as today. Your temporal experience of Identity, like every other Perspexrive's, is in continuous flux. Whatever it's source, it is continuously coordinated and reconciled with Consciousness --- which, at its root, is of the same essence for every perspective.
This is not worship of any particular perspective, but of that which reconciles all perspectives.
My point is that religious belief can be based in reason and self evidence. Your denial is just that --- inconsiderate denial. You simply decline to think about it. Which is fine. Until you pretend to know something about it.
It does not appear that you have thought much about the nature of consciousness or identity. Or the feedback capacity for even local perspectives of consciousness to participate in how the unfolding design for evolution proceeds.
Do you believe I (have faith in) the conscious higher mindedness and general good Will of others? Do you believe or not believe that a person can be morally wrong or right, according to some kind of higher law or standard? Does science "legislate" that law? When it changes according to the common weallll, is it science that reconciles that?
I am not saying everyone is an atheist. I am saying no atheist has much of an idea what he/she is.
The reason to care: Because we all seek, but do not achieve, fulfillment. We are social animals. We seek common purposes and values. We seek forums in which to reason together, to put what common definition we can in such values. Churches can, not necessarily do, provide forums for people to come together in good faith and good will to invest their egos and identities in common purposes. Metaphors and music can provide the language and inspiration to facilitate that. I would rather have that process than a process of phony elite moral scientisimists laying out law drooling legalisms to rule us out the wazoo.
That's why our Founders were guided mainly by the New, not the Old, Testament. The rule of good faith (Great Commandment) and the rule of good will (Golden Rule). When you erase those, you are well on the way to erasing the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, to convert us to a master-slave despotism.
It's not my supernatural realm. it's the realm that defines all of us. You think you "know" reality. But ourselves, our world, our cosmos could be obliterated tomorrow, and your reality, for all "you" in your mortal sense would know, would have never been more than a fictional figment of the image-ination of the Trinitarian Godhead of Consciousness-Substance-In-form-ation. Yet, you have no comprehension of what any Source of such obliteration may be.
Non-belief is as impossible as non-choice. To choose not to do something is to effect a choice. You, as a perspective of Consciousness, cannot exist without formulating or expressing goals, hopes, purposes, beliefs. Indeed, you write now to express your belief, certainly not conjured out of pure science, that non-belief "has every advantage that belief has and you also don't have to pretend anything". But that is self contradictory and self defeating. If you have no beliefs, then you have no belief that any pursuit or art is worthwhile. How is that of any advantage? How can that inspire people to come together? If, after congratulating yourself on non-belief, you sit with fellow congratulators and get bigly high on non-productive dopery, how is that an advantage in any sensible math or science? No one gets to live without pretending that some of his purposes are more worthwhile than others.
I do not concern myself with speaking for other believers or with Pascal's Wager. Why would you bring that up? I just said I do not believe in a heavenly hereafter. Rather, I believe in an Eternal Now, for which our bodies simply cycle through various formulations for repetitively expressing many of the same kinds of fears and joys. (This is a little different from Nietzsche's Eternal Return. Nietzsche indicated he would thank the demon that could offer to allow him to re-live the same life over and over again, for eternity. I think Consciousness experiences much the same fears and joys, in perpetuity, but not in precisely the same chassis, body, or sequence.)
A person can believe in God as the reconciling aspect of the flux of the immeasurably qualitative consciousness with the measurable aspect of substance and the cumulative recording aspect of previous history. As such, God signifies and communicates in metaphors and models set to substantive measurables. We do not directly sense any substantive reality. We experience what substantive reality is like. To say what something is like is to apply a metaphor to it.
IOW, we experience what we call reality through models and metaphors. None of which are ever entirely consistent, coherent, and complete. We are able to communicate because of a process of give-and-take feedback and reconciliation, that never quite reaches fulfillment or perfection. If it were not for models and metaphors, we would have no means of communication about sequences, feedback, events, desires, or beliefs.
The only reason you are able to postulate that "No literal belief is indistinguishable from no belief" is because you apply a fuzzy and fluxing model, at some subconscious level, concerning a meaning of "literal" (or "real"). I am saying we never quite get to know what reality really is. Apart from truisms, there is little of reality that we "really know." However, there are working conventions that we happen to share, for our temporally fluxing bubble.
So, we can, because of conscious engagement in give and take, communicate about our changing experiences and values --- which we assume to be real and function "as if" they were real. Much as we can try to hold lightning in our hands in a bubble, while we discuss it. But we are not really holding it. Rather, we are fluxing with it, as it fluxes with us, for a bubble that itself is changing.
It is a mistake to try to confine God within an end-times-bubble, to be caretaker of some heavenly hereafter bubble for some ideal of permanently unchanging souls. We never live in the hereafter, but only in the here and now, i.e., The Eternal Present. It is when we idealize God as the caretaking-prisoner of an end-times-bubble that we often mis-model God as some misanthropic master-slave monster.
Forget Muslims. The idea of a God (Allah?) or Elite Despot to lead humanity to an end to history is an insult to free thinkers. An end-to-history-God-or-Hegelian can easily be abused by corrupt mouthpieces to lead us into master (Allah) and/or slave (Sheeple) thinking. Humanity should be about more than service to master/slave (Mohammad/Stalin) charismatics. Humanity should be about direct feedback relationships with an inviting Reconciler.
Is Skynet/Borgdom unavoidable? Is Putin right, that nations will fall to that despotism that first gains first strike capability over all opponents' drones? Must society fall to the most corrupt despot who gains sudden control over the most deadly technology? If that is considered unavoidable, must society fall, because every despot calculates that, if he is not first to do his despotism, then others will be?
Nietzsche looked to Will to Power, but succumbed to diseased madness after piously sobbing over a horse that lay dying of being whipped. His sister, not he, published his ruminations on a morality to replace Christian charity. Later, the Nazis parodied and bastardized that into a film, Triumph of the Will.
Perhaps Jesus was about something more than Christian charity to help us see a way beyond the possible cyborg-ian replacement of humanity. If such a way exists.
Can inspiration to assimilate civilizing empathy (faith, family, fidelity) forestall the obliteration of human morality? Can it defeat Rino Corrupti and Dino Ignoranti, and forestall the legalese out the wa-zoo that is so much the desire of law droolers?
Like Nietzsche, I would criticize an orthodoxy that blindly rationalized the spirituality of heaven and the hereafter over the spiritual art of the here and now. I think we never live except in the present, i.e., the here and now. I think the S (substance) and I (information) aspects of CSI will be with us --- whatever the perspectives of C (consciousness) --- in perpetuity.
However, I would not agree with an atheistic elitist who thinks we are free to "kill God" or to create or legislate our own values. We are not ourselves the sum of the Determiner. We are system-feedback-participants. I think we are only free, under God's grace, to part-icipate in how our values are to be consciously interpreted, appreciated, assimilated, fluxed, and Reconciled.
My stance is one of humility before God, but disinclination to bow to elitist despots. Neither master-wolf nor slave-sheep, but black sheep with attitude. Equipped with Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. F Zoo-man Zoolander!
Systems based in pure materialism often float demonic, self-godded, lyng Oligarchs to power, everywhere. Including in America and China.
Other nations and cultures often revile Americans not for their ideals but for falling so far from them, by allowing themselves to ceaselessly promote and be ruled under self-godded, morally corrupt, oligarchs. Their angst is multiplied as they recognize that the brutality of the modern world, especially during the first half of the 20th Century, has continued to put their own cultures under similarly corrupt rule. They recognize how far practical reality is removed from big lying idealism.
Many people of China were trained under Confucianism, with regard for familial virtue throughout institutions and rulers. They want virtue and virtuous rulers. They want to get away from immoderation, war and corruption. But the 20th Century would not let them. So they tipped to lying immoderation in their ideals, which resulted in totalitarian communism, i.e., an excuse for self-godded nomenklatura to farm the masses, with the withering away of the state only a grand big lie.
Today, communism is recognized as a failed ideal, but so is phony free trade and oligarchy-mooching capitalism. So China has a hybrid of rule under phony princeling-capitalists. Yet, they have an ideal of cultural assimilation. Under any NWO, they would see their society as superior. Under Confucianism, they likely would hope eventually to assimilate a superior republic that would accord familial respect for independent thought throughout the republic-family.
However, that ideal and hope will be subordinated to rule under princeling-capitalist-oligarchs, until the brutal threats under modern harsh self-goddingness can be subjugated. The harshness has been reflected in China's brutal policy of one-child per family. IOW, they rely on their own self-goddeds to protect them from other self-goddeds.
Without respect for a process for assimilating good faith, we are lost to lying self-godded demons.
What we have in the world are self-goddeds ruling and competing over every divided nation-culture. Who can say where this will lead? Confucius died bitter. But his devotees planted trees and kept his dream alive: That humanity should rule itself more as a virtuous family than as farm animals under the totalitarian rule of brutal despots. That we should assimilate virtue, more so than legislate it. Faith, family, fidelity, instead of humans being farmed under giant goose steps of legalese and big lies.
The bigger the gov gets, the more pay-to-play it becomes. The Uniparty lives and breathes on funny money. So who carries the actual load to do the good work? That would be the ordinary Americans, who get excoriated for their trouble as being greedy. Even as Rinos mooch multiple times over what they give, and Dinos give not at all. Their "charity" is bossing the producers while blaming them for having jobs. The enemy did not storm the gates. It grew as parasites, from within.
If coming generations of Americans do not want to kill the host and drown in parasite soup, they may want to consider:
- Stop blindly deferring to phony pc profs and moral scientisimists as authorities on civic concerns.
- Defend the borders.
- Enact a single payer health care system similar to that of Australia.
- Eliminate minimum wage laws.
- Provide a guaranteed minimum income for every person who is 21 years of age and older.
- Make it a safety net, not a hammock.
- Enact incentives not to have more children, but fewer.
- Address climate issues by incentivizing the reduction of population.
- Ask: What is needed to sustain a decent civilization of free-thinking, responsible, adult Americans?
The "Liberal" alternatives are easy to baa along with. They require no individual competence at all. The easiest and therefore most brainless thing of all is to go along with the herd and baa, "I'm a Liberal." It's also the quickest path to the sheeple farm -- to be sheared.
Sperm cells are still sperm cells. Let's ensure all come to fruition. S/
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God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
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Neither I nor the USA can salvage every person/nation. Nor are we equipped to say what is best for them. I think representative republicanism is the height of decent civilization. To become free as an adult to express your thoughts, enterprise your interests, and determine your associations is to become an autonomous human being. But that is not the default condition of humankind, nor is it a condition that we can dictate to cultures, traditions, lands, and peoples that are unsuited to it.
No sensible morality can justify requiring a representative republic to import so many people who are unsuited to representative republicanism as to sink the republic for everyone.
I do not despise the infantilized generation. I despise its mindset. Time to put it back in its crib. Lovingly.
Yes, I seeded children. But their unfoldment is a work in progress. For that, I am not done, nor are they, nor is their Reconciler.
Surely you have more than that for sense? Are you a barometer for what passes as education in modern schools? Suggestion: Learn a marketable skill and study philosophy and history on your own. That way, you'll actually learn how to think instead of be programmed for what to regurgitate. IOW, you can become a real human being, instead of a programmed bot.
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I brought it up because I notice a lot of *Gays are still angry. They got everything everyone thought they wanted, then they want more. And the more a lot of them seem to want is the destruction of the church, the family, and the USA. When there's a challenge to Christianity, it's nearly a sure bet it will attract atheistic Gays. Their crusade seems to be based in anger, not in truth or justice.
So when I see rampant un-reason, it is on my checklist to test how much of it is gay-anger driven. (As professionally angry victims soon learn, the money in imavictim is nearly unlimited.) Sounds like I struck a nerve with you? Like an epiddymis transport for dessert or pleasure? Are you some kind of dessert chef?
So now I'm insulting because I was insulted by your insults? Oh brother!
Then you try to play the Alinsky Card -- not very well, btw, because Jesus was actually pretty good at calling out Pharisees, poseurs, and phonies.
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*Sort of like how Blacks practiced in playing imavictim are still angry. And will continue to be angry --- as long as it pays. Many Practicing Perpetual Victims have utterly destroyed their own families and are now bent to turn the USA into a Venezuelan Paradise.
IAE, it's not my purpose to insult perpetual frauds. It's to help them find the way back to their cribs.
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Some denominations hold certain commands to be eternal, some don't. If you don't believe in the denominations that hold specific commands to be eternal, then find one that doesn't. Or else study the Master and work to reconcile yourself.
Personally, I don't believe Jesus cared that much what two adults do in bed. So long as it does not needlessly undermine broader society.
I think traditional families offer protection against the temptation offered by souldead oligarchs to marry their governance. I think traditional families are essential for representative republics. So I don't think the republic ought to be funding, extolling, or forcing the celebration of gay get-togethers, as if they were the kind of traditional families upon which the republic depends.
I think Gays who feel otherwise would do better by decamping to the socialistic paradise of their dreams. Toleration ought not mean Mind Forced Acceptance. Mind Forced Acceptance is too Old Testament (not to mention Islamic). When you try to "justify" Mind Forced Acceptance, you are eventually going to get a fight. And you will not like the results.
I don't think it's confusion about the substance. You can debate substance all day, and it will sail unnoticed. What is going on is that some people, some of whom happen to be Gays or Blacks or Whatever, have some deep seated issues that they are unable to address, so they displace, act out, and lash out. They learn of easy rewards for playing imavictim. They set traps and snares, then wait to ambush. They set rules (like no name-calling), which they do not enforce amongst themselves. Then they occupy their general angst by baiting passers by, until they can get a response so they can let loose their snare. They're hollow souled Gamers.
I will leave you to think about that, if you are so inclined. I am not interested in responding to a horde of hollow souled gamers. What I will say is that appeasement will never work with such people. They say they ONLY want equality and fairness. But when you look at the applications, and their never-ending demands, you soon realize that they are only extending invitations to a Big Con.
5 comments:
No, Dimbulb. Atheists are not all libruls. Atheists are all people who tend least to appreciate how little they know. IOW, they are often miserable nose-ring pull-abouts. If anything unites them, it might be the nearest pleasure pill. Or the nearest goat (which, to them, would be someone to ridicule as a Believer). As for leaving you to your miserable self, that is no problemo.
Cool. I see how feelings of atheists are protected. Now, notice, how I was untruthfully name-called as someone who said "atheists are all libruls." Does Section 22 subpart b allow name calling if it is cached between the lines? Not to mention "twaddle" and etc. Yup, you're pure. Stay golden. Lol.
It's not a question. It's a statement of fact, but without a point. Regardless, I would agree if you mean to suggest that a good number of churches no longer do much charitable work and instead often serve the secular goals of a more godless government. That's why I would prefer that tax deductions NOT be given for charitable contributions.
Were that the case, people would be more selective about charitable giving, churches would be freed up to participate more in the public square, and the central gov would have less power over volunteer agencies and churches.
I want more common sense, less central intrusion, less legalistic drooling, more volunteerism, more freedom and responsibility for individual adults, less entitlement mindedness among able-bodied adults.
Yes. If you inspire me to give my money to a good cause, that is my money, which I gave, as charity. If you forcibly take it from me, it was my money, taken under color of law, not charity. The point is that to forcibly take opm is not charity.
Perhaps you're in a state of gross confusion most of the time? People were pointing up the difference between helpers of good will versus wanna whiners.
IAE, I saw you from far away. Federal hurricane funding, like military funding, can be infrastructure related, for the common good. Or it can be conducive to idiocy, as in continual re-funding of rich beach people. Presently, it's largely political footballism and optics. You know, vote-buying among mass mushminds.
I said "charity" with other people's money. You left off the quotation marks. The point is that ganging up to vote to take more of someone else's money to help out your homies while taking a commission for yourself is not charity. It is legalized, institutionalized fraud or theft. If it's for infrastructure or programs that advance society generally, that are approved by an informed electorate, that's one thing. If its for handouts for victim poseurs, that's another. Why don't you ask why nearly every member of Congress becomes filthy rich?
Faith based groups do real charitable work, while atheist groups do their "charity" with other people's money (which just so happens to fall mainly on responsible people with jobs). Yet, the atheists claim to be "just as moral" (which they "prove" with moral scientism). Even as they have never sustained a decent civilization. What are they smoking?
In the modern souldead environment, high minded don't tend to last long in politics ... or law, news, media, teaching, entertaining, ministering.
Re: "The stinking Augean stables really need to be torn down and rebuilt with modern sanitation."
Without assimilating higher mindedness, corrupt wolves and ignorant buzzards will reign, to make that impossible.
If Handel were proved a fraud, would the music and art of the cosmos suddenly be made uninspiring?
if you want to be left out of it, don't put yourself in it. So now you're channeling for Jesus? Who's next -- Mohammad?
The main points that Jesus stood for are clear and compelling. And they abide, regardless of whether you think or do not think that He claimed to be the "biological" son of God. His points, like the potential for Handel's music, exist, and always have existed. Music dances on structure, much as ceremonialism helps focus inspiration.
Now, if you want to confine Christians and Christianity to any particular literalistic sect, then the disproof of its literalisms would un-found and con-found that sect. Two problems: 1) IF. 2) Many Christians are not literalists. They find plenty worthwhile in the Gospels and ceremonies without needing to take inspiring metaphors as if they were physically demonstrable and measurable.
IAE, in this day and age, it is simply not important to me to try to convince literalists that they are or are not mistaken. In most instances, from my experience, Christians are a backbone for sustaining a decent representative republic.
A lot of people and knowitalls who don't like strictures against homosexuality dislike Christians. However, they can live as they like. No one is stopping them. But I think their political deconstruction of faith, family and fidelity is destructive of the republic. I dislike their politics on that basis. I am frankly not interested in, and generally opposed to, their prog/homosexualism/republic-destroying evangelism.
Among the militant atheistic evangelists, I wonder how many are motivated by their genitalia-centered "vision"? Or their nerd-like desire to be admired for their phony moral scientism?
A lot of atheistic Gays seem to be angry, but to have little insight into why. Sort of like how a tired baby doesn't know why. Probably because they have learned no competence, their family is doped, and/or their role models or owners are people farmers.
Here's a cite that explains some of it: http://freedomoutpost.com/homemakers-deconstructing-the-marxist-agenda-for-families/
"For example, the socialist model of society greatly benefits when families are broken, history is forgotten, current events in light of history are ignored, faith is abandoned, and people no longer credit their own abilities to care for themselves. They look for a great rescuer for their financial problems. The government is all-too-happy to step in and "level the playing field," which in turn, breeds a lack of motivation to do anything for ones own self and family, and begins the wheel of dependence upon government for their basic needs. An entire generation of women believe they cannot stay home to raise a family, God-given roles are usurped, feminism enters in, and a family breaks down under the stress of trying to make it all fit."
You don't seem to be actually blind, so I suppose you just like to see your "successes" listed. The trend for gay marriage (forced through the courts), Islam toleration, niece marriage, marriage per international law, polygamy, polyamory, gender confusion, gay Generals, military funding of sex transition, school indoctrination, destruction of the Black family, hatred of the flag, shouting down of Conservative speech, bathroom fascism, farce of so-called higher education, effective banishment of Conservatives from tenure, pronoun PC run berserk, assault against free speech, speech codes to encourage snowflakes, and so on. You see this being coordinated everywhere in Western Civ.
Some of the people behind this feign innocence even as they work to undermine the borders. Most of them are simply as ignorant and/or indoctrinated as those interviewed from time to time for Watters' World. Flooding the country with people who do not respect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, but who mainly want economic entitlements to welfare benefits, is undermining the republic. Trading individual freedom for equal welfare security is undermining the free-thinking republic. Making yourself a tool for centralizing political power under oligarchs that own DC is undermining the republic. Sagging your pants to teach kids to disrespect the country is undermining it.
Now go stick a fork in yourself, because you're not blind, but you are incapable of thinking or noticing what is rapidly unfolding before your eyes. If you come back with a reply as stupid as the last, I will make no more time for you.
Art thou oblivious that the Godhead abides as a Trinitarian flux of Consciousness, Substance, and Information? That the flux unfolds in a reconciliatory process of evolution? That nature and societies are often cruel, and often assign different names to "justify" their cruelty? Didst thou bounce out of a goofball dispenser? Art thou a paper hanging screwtape scribbler?
I suspect what is going on with you and your mates is the gleeful division and destruction of free-thinking republics.
No doubt, Fox News will soon make C. Manning a regular contributor. In this new world, if you wanna make a lot of fast bones, sell your soul fast. Even as souldeads feign innocence and act offended, they are besmudging everything in reach, throughout Western Civ.
I suspect their hollow cores have been filled with deep seated angst, which they displace by attacking everything sacred and treasured. This kind of deep seated upset cannot be salved by appeasement.
Appeasement does not address the root problem. Appeasement did not work for Hitler, is not working for Blacks, will not work for Gays, and will kill the republic if not stopped with Soros and Antifa.
Appeasement only agitates souldeads to demand ever more absurd sacrifices and abasements! This is because what they really want is for someone to teach them how to grow up and become real human beings. Alas, many of the respectable adults and leaders for that role have been chased into hiding. Including many among the Boy Scouts, many Churches, Colleges and Teachers, Media, Law Makers, and Courts.
Meantime, they keep their lairs, where bots gather and name call in unison against every pilgrim who enters, then they ban him when he responds in kind. Truly reprehensible, they are.
Board certified for the new Bhagavad Gita: Honorary Bot-arot Shita.
I don't think you have an honest clue about liberalism versus socialism. I suspect you have gone round the bend, into deceiving even yourself. Nor do you appear to have a clue concerning what is necessary to sustain a decent republic. IAE, I did not ignore any facts. But the fact that you say I did, condemns your argumentation. What I did indicate is that your facts are inadequate to your premise (that a wall is not necessary or would not help). A wall certainly is necessary, because of people like yourself!
The more Lefties we get like you, the more a border and citizenship will not make any difference. You will simply let illegals through the front gates on fake documentation, and then you will allow residents to vote, regardless of citizenship.
Either you are evil or ignorant, or perhaps both. Only an ignorant person would be unaware of Agenda 21, Soros' push for open borders under his Open Society, the assault on free speech by femi-flakes, the anti-law enforcement agitation in cities, the promotion of fake economic values of equality and fairness over individual enterprise and responsibility, the corporate demand for cheap labor. Only an evil person would be aware of those things and still promote them. I do not believe the truth is in you.
I think you are a calculating deceiver. Since you raise the issue, I would respond that I much doubt that you are like our Founders. I do not believe our Founders would have forced the central gov to fund gay marriage. Nor supported discrimination against citizens for declining to use exotic pronouns as desired by lefties. Nor deemed it a function of the central gov to ensure general economic equality. Nor tolerated the agitation of rabble and rioters to undermine public law and order. Nor tolerated the banishment of Christian based values from the public square.
Our Founders recognized that only a moral and virtuous people can sustain a republic. They certainly would not have tolerated the division and deliberate flipping of the demographic by encouraging the importation of Muslim immigrants or persons from communal and parasitical cultures alien to the idea of individual enterprise and responsibility. As long as you fail to stand against that invasion, your words ring of deception and carry no weight.
Good grief! Was your brain in hibernation during the reign of Obama, Holder, Lynch?
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