How to Find God | John C. Wright's Journal
How to Find God | John C. Wright's Journal:
Went looking for opinions on the Litany of Tarski, and found this. BTW, John C Wright considers the Litany of Tarski to be "utterly primitive" in that any philosopher that rejects it, is not to be trusted.
Went looking for opinions on the Litany of Tarski, and found this. BTW, John C Wright considers the Litany of Tarski to be "utterly primitive" in that any philosopher that rejects it, is not to be trusted.
Comments
Atheism, if it wants to become mainstream, *has* to go there- and in fact already has. The reason _The God Delusion_ sold so many books is because it turned sex into a sacrament and insult into a sacramental- tickling the ears of a generation that had spent the last 40 years turning sex into a sacrament and insult into a sacramental.
But the problem is, unlike Catholicism- Atheism is based on the philosophy of Wicca and Crowley. "Do whatever the hell you want because there is no hell or heaven" is a nihilistic statement ( to be exact- Crowley's version, the Wiccan Rede, is "Do no harm- beyond that whatever you will").
You can't base ethics and morality on a lack of objective morality. It simply does not work.
What kind of analogy is that?
As far as "objective" morality, according to your objective morality, homosexuality and contraception are evil. What kind of objectivity is that. What if Jews or Muslims chose to define their rules as objective morality and tried to impose them on you?
So what. The primary motivation for sex is pleasure.
Not necessarily. Sex for pleasure can be part of a long and happy marriage.
"Rape is not sex"? You mean rape is not love. Sex for pleasure is not rape. You're very confused about sex.
Marriage based on sex, or even love, is not enough, commitment is what counts- the ability to be truthful and keep a vow.
Which is something I do not see Americanist Neurotypicals having the philosophical ability to do. On either the sexual or the fiscal side of the spectrum.
Yeah. Because she's a devout Catholic.
If I believed, I would say that I am tempted by demons. But there is no need to attribute these temptations to a supernatural entity. It is all psychological.
What the Church identifies as the seven deadly sins really do accurately describe our worst disorders. I am enslaved by my own slothfulness. In a very real sense, it will be the death of me. The thought of eternal rest beckons me and I try to compare it to life and decide which I would prefer should life for any reason become less than bearable. In the end, I just wouldn't choose it over the concern I have for my loved ones.
Psychology is spiritual- and spiritual is psychology.
I once wrote that if an atheist could but role play Christianity, then under current theology, that is enough to get a soul into purgatory instead of hell. I see no harm in seeing the seven deadly sins and even demon possession as mental illnesses- as long as you remain committed to defeating them in your own mind, rather than sucumbing to them.
I role play for the sake of my wife. But I am certain that death is nothing more than a permanent dreamless sleep in terms of what we experience. The idea of a soul going to heaven, hell or purgatory was invented in order to draw and control followers. No modern thinker should consider it as anything but a carrot and stick attempt to force entice and scare. Purgatory is just a ploy to sell indulgences.
The rest is just a repeat of 500 year old Protestant Propaganda.
I know Dawkins had lost the ability to think, I didn't know that you had until this moment.
You are not a modern thinker, because you are refusing to think. "modern thinker" is an oxymoron anyway- I have never met a modernist with the ability to actually think for themselves. The reason they go to hell is because they create hell with their certainty.
"Modern thinker" is not an oxymoron any more than "religious thinker" is. I find that the latter often often are the ones who lack the ability to think for themselves.
OTOH, I do know that if somebody is warning me from jumping off a cliff, I should listen. At least enough to avoid the cliff! It doesn't matter what their original intent was- Truth lives and lies die, if you are open minded enough to follow Truth wherever it leads.
All modern human beings have lost the ability to think for themselves for the most part- I know I'm really bad at it, and that's why I rely on the giants of the past.
Moral relativism actually is tyrannical- as the attempted insult against history shows. If modern thinking was actually leading to truth, there would be no need to defend it using such tactics.
It teaches that you must believe in order to be saved. There is no proof that what you must believe is actually true. To make matters worse, the things you must believe happen to be known to be impossible. The entire Nicene Creed meets all of these criteria. I listen to it every week and am awed by the audacity of insisting that we believe every word of it.
Or are you only going on what Dawkins claims the Church teaching is?
"It teaches that you must believe in order to be saved."
Uh, no. Nostra Aetate. This premise is wrong because the Catholic Church doesn't teach that. Pope Francis recently reaffirmed Nostra Aetate and the consistent teaching of the last 2000 years on this subject:
And it is even in a left-wing journal!
Anything that the Church says that goes against the laws of nature such as the virgin birth, resurrection, ascension, assumption, etc. is an absolute falsehood. The laws of nature never have, never are and never will be violated notwithstanding the Big Bang at which time these laws went into effect.
They are against the modernist scientific model of nature, which may or may not be correct.
So try again.
Ancient scripture is inerrant but our most up to date scientific models may or may not be correct. Right.
The ascension and assumption would violate the law of gravity and therefore they are contrived.
Pray tell why the law of gravity denies the possibility of very localized tornados.
Are you considering that as a possible explanation for Jesus and Mary be taken up to heaven?
At least two accounts in the Syriac Catholic Scriptures refer to a mashb (sorry about my transliteration, I don't have Aramaic on my keyboard!), or great wind, at the time of both assumptions.
And yes, I just went beyond the Roman Catholic Canon of scripture. I personally really appreciate the Syriac Catholic Church keeping some extra New Testament scriptures in the Peshitta, and while I have no real opinion on the argument between our Eastern Rite brothers and the Roman Catholic Church on whether the Peshitta was translated from Greek or actually contains the untranslated original New Testament (after all, the Apostles, like most Galileans, would have spoken Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew equally fluently) I do find some of the differences interesting (the best is the apparent disagreement within the Peshitta itself whether the saying of Christ to the young rich man was "A camel through the eye of the needle" or "An Elephant through the eye of a needle", and whether it was Christ or Peter who said it!)
Or maybe these stories were made up and accepted as factual when they are anything but. Why accept the impossible over the most likely?
People don't resist torture for made up stories- they instead make up stories to avoid torture, normally.
The fact that the Apostles, well, most of them, were willing to go great distances to die, says that these are not made up stories. There was no profit in ending up at the Vatican for Peter- which at that time wasn't a church and big complex, it was a cemetery for criminals.
This is the most overused and least convincing argument for believing stories that were made up years after the Apostles went out and preached the coming of the kingdom of heaven. They didn't travel and die for these stories because they didn't know them. All they needed to get started was the report of an empty tomb, which could of been the result of the tomb only being used for holding the body until the Sabbath was over. The Apostles would not have been the ones who moved the body. For all they knew, Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Then the stories spread and were embellished. It makes more sense than supernatural alternatives.
I'd suggest reading some of the non-biblical accounts for understanding, but I know you'll just dismiss those as "stories" also because they are inconvenient to your argument, you'd rather just claim "Nyah Nyah Nyah, I can't hear you" than deal with the Truth. It is the same with all hard atheists, you're just acting like two year olds, and then you wonder why we treat atheists like children who are incapable of reason.