A question on Armageddon

Yes, but there are so many shades in between. The I-Ching, as you know is the 2 yin and yang lines which make up the 8 trigrams of the bagua, which in term form the 64 hexagrams.

 

We all strayed a bit from the OP, and it was my OP. So---I think its fine.

 

Hegel was more than just something that was in vogue. He had at least as much as Kant to do, if not more, with shaping the world we live in today. If there was no Hegel, there would be no Marx, and the world may not be so dogmatically Materialist.

People often think that philosophy, even when it gets metaphysical, is in its own world and has nothing to do with ordinary life. I argue that there are many works of philosophy that impact and shape ordinary life and our cultural programming. But it is a slow process. First a philosophy is spread through the world of philosophy, then it makes its way through the universities and eventually it shapes everyday life.

Consider existentialism. Its heyday was in the early 20th century up through World War II. Its message really spoke to Europeans after World War II and in France especially you had the existentialist students who wore black turtle necks and smoked cigarettes in coffee shops, listening to jazz. The nihilism of some existentialists really appealed to them. But it hasn't really shaped American culture as much as it has done in recent years. I started a post about existentialism in today's movies in the existentialist section, I forget what movies I talked about---I'm sure the Lego movie, for example, was one. Or consider Derrida's deconstruction which he began publishing in the 1950's I think. It was all the rage in universities in the 60's. But it wasn't until the last decade or decade and a half that I really began hearing it used among the general public.

I know its a metaphor, you know its a metaphor, but do many Christians know its a metaphor---especially those that are trying to hijack and destroy our democracy right now? If many a christian answered my question with the statement of 'its just a metaphor,' that would give me great hope.

 

By the way, I am thoroughly enjoying this debate. The great French philosophers of the 1800's and early 1900's sat in the cafes of Paris debating their philosophies and the criticisms and counterpoints helped greatly in shaping their work.I used to have firepits in the summer when we weren't travelling, and I'd cook steaks, while my friends and people that were invited debate philosophy long into the night. sometimes every night. HipForums has also been a great place for me to debate, and I have gone back and rewritten whole chapters in my books after debates here.

Subjectivism, as I pointed out recently can be a tricky subject, muddied up in various uses of the term. I see from this that I need to clarify my own usage of the term and probably go back and see how it responds to some of the implications that can be made from it, or at least see what exactly I wrote. (Objectivism is also that way---some people immediately wonder if I am talking about Ayn Rand's version of objectivism. I have written quite a bit on why I disagree with Rand's objectivism, but that is generally not what I am referring to, though it is related.) The past year or two I have done very little work on my books, i.e. on my philosophy. I have been too busy helping my wife, now that she has embraced her own gift of healing, and in political activism, and other things----things that have also kept me off HipForums. Its hard to work on things when the threat of our very freedoms is at stake with Trump. Then too, I have found that sometimes you just have to get away from something for a while, and then come back to it later with fresh eyes. This is my 'coming back to my work'----I hope. My wife has taken up painting and I hope that enables me to spend more time writing. She is gaining an understanding of what it means to have a passion to create. Maybe this time she will understand why I want to sit at my computer for long hours at a time and not jump up to serve her constant needs. My one big mistake, when I left the stock market, was not renting an office somewhere to work in while I write.Though I have, from time to time, gotten a hotel room, where I would get tons of work done, and when I would get tired, I would soak in the hot tub and do some laps in the pool. It is great. At night I would go home and get my wife. Or a casino---she'll gamble all day and well into the night, and I can just sit and write in the room.

Let me go back to these points:

I am very good friends with the Black Elk family the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Black Elk, and their father/grandfather, Wallace Black Elk was a famous medicine man as well, and cured one of the Rockefeller children who had a fatal disease that medical science could not cure. Wallace knew and hung out with a lot of famous people---the Dalai Lama, Albert Einstein, and others. Albert Einstein called Wallace the 'only true teacher he ever had.' A TV Station back east somewhere broadcast a bunch of his lectures, and these are really amazing to watch. His daughter has all of them on video tape from the TV station, and we have talked about repackaging them and putting them out there for the world to see. Quite a bit of it is about Lakota belief and how it relates to science. I haven't seen all of the video tapes, but they are incredible. She wasn't sure what her legal rights are over these tapes, and if she could legally put them out there.

I have written here on HF about how her son, Carrie Black Elk, would come over and we would drink coffee and talk quantum mechanics all night long. He graduated from High School and never pursued any higher education, but his grandfather taught him about these things. I would use words like quantum information, probability waves, particle-wave duality, etc, and he would use terms like spirit, taku shkan shkan, and wakan, but he had a deep understanding of quantum mechanics that he said went way back in Lakota knowledge of the universe. Certainly back before quantum mechanics and Einstein, and so forth. I would argue that the Lakota creation myth, if understood as metaphors and translated into scientific equivalents, is far more scientifically accurate than the creation myths of judaism and so forth. I thought about doing that, but it should probably be done by a Native, and Carrie Black Elk would be the perfect one to do it, but nothing has come of that idea yet.

So I am trying to understand what your position is here. You seem to be making an epiphenomenalist argument that the human mind is nothing more than a product of the physical brain and its functions. But then you also say that the ideas ('eidos in Greek) are more important than the material brains that formed them, hinting to a possible Idealism. If you are saying that the eidos is greater than the material things that they arise from, then do you think that there is an essence underlying reality (eidos being the Platonic forms). Then elsewhere you hint to the existence of a God or some kind of transcendent absolute.

So where do you stand on these things, and what is your definition and belief in a God or transcendent absolute?

Then I will bring in Liebniz' Principle of Sufficient Reason.

 

Also one quick question I'm curious about---off the top of your head, would you consider the Vietnam War a religious war?

 

Under the banner of the red scare and the domino hoax, Viet Nam was an effort to accomplish two things. Foremost is that the Capitalists and the Industrial-Military Complex had a whole new bag of toys that they wanted the government to buy in order to enhance profits. The U. S. Security network was pissed off by the failure to get support for the invasion of Cuba. They killed Kennedy and could influence Lindon Johnson to go along as long as they offered Social Programs as a carrot. My father and I were both in the military at the time and were amazed how incompetent the strategy and implementation of our response. I will never forget the horror of seeing American soldiers dying from Russian made White Phosphorus.

 

My concern with the thread title and introduction is that it suggests general or widespread acceptance of a war among the three world religions, when I think those are minority views based on misinterpretations of scripture. I can only speak for myself and what I regard as a reasonable interpretation based on the historical context. I suspect the same folks who think otherwise would include Democrats and "libruls" on their enemies list. The late televangelist Jack van Impe, , concluded that the Anti-Christ was (then) King Juan Carlos of Spain, because of his ties to the Hapsburg dynasty associated with the Holy Roman Empire. Revelation is obscure enough that anybody can read just about anything into it (s)he wants. My reservations about the thread title is that it suggests these are somehow characteristic beliefs of the religions concerned. Tertullian (c.155 –240AD), one of the early church fathers, declared that "only without the sword can the Christian wage war, as Christ has abolished the sword". (Arnold, Eberhard (ed.). 1997. The Early Christians in Their Own Words

In Islam, here are passages in the hadith predicting a final battle between Muslims and Jews
(hadiths of Ibn ‘Umar, Abu Hurayrah, etc.) However, Muslims believe that all righteous Christians, Jews, and Muslims will be united in a belief in all of God's messengers (Qur’an 4:159) united under one creed of monotheism and belief in all of God’s messengers, and only the misguided ones will follow the Dajjal.

 

Even so determined an atheist as Sam Harris, a neruo-scientist, acknowledges that science doesn't fully understand the phenomenon of human consciousness. "The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present,and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient either to prove or disprove it." In that sense, I guess, I might be more of a materialist than Sam Harris, since I think the intimate connection between mind and body seems evident, and I find it hard to conceive of minds existing independently. Brain lesions and neurochemicals result in cognitive changes and/or altered states of consciousness. D. Aguinaga, et al.,(2018) Frontiers. Mol. Neurosci. 11:11; F.X.Vollenweider and Preller, K. H. (2020) Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 21, 611–624; Davis et al (2008) Brain Lang. 105: 50–58. Seems to me the research Harris himself is doing with neuro-imaging (fMRI) supports that conclusion.
The mystery of human consciousness: How much do we know?
A Neuroscientist Explains The Difference Between The Mind & Brain | mindbodygreen
Our Brains Make Up Our Minds Before We Know It
How the brain focuses on what’s in mind | Brain and Cognitive Sciences
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02091/full

Yet I don't think the consciousness is exactly "epiphenomenal". It could also be, of course, that mind causes brain activity. Mind may use the brain "as an instrument, as an interface of expression. Mind and consciousness are constrained by and interdependent from the brain, but may not be generated by the brain itself. The important point for me is that the two do not seem to exist independently, so I don't assume that my soul takes flight when my brain ceases to function. As neuroscientist Carolyn Leaf puts it, "the mind is separate from, yet inseparable from, the brain".

Defining the ineffable adequately is impossible for us mortals. To me, God is the felt presence of a Higher Power "in whom we live, and move and have our being". I think of God as transcendental, but not exclusively so. I tend to be a panendeist, and as such, think of God as both transcendental (more than the universe) and imminent (present throughout the universe: "closer to us than our jugular vein", as the Qur'an puts it. (50:16). Panendeism is the belief in a god who contains the whole universe but who is also bigger than the universe and takes a “hands-off” approach to the maintenance of creation. "God’s absoluteness can be an abstract unchanging feature of a changing totality." Pantheism - Nature, Unity, Monism

 

It is a popular concept. I grew up in a church that was not so hell bent on fire and brimstone and and did not preach about the end times, but they had their own version of Zionism and believed that in the latter days they would be protected. So most of what I learned as a kid came from friends, like our neighbors who were pentecostal and they talked about it. Then the book, The Late Great Planet Earth, came out, and my mom read it and informed us of all this terrible things that were supposed to happen, though we were supposed to be protected in our Zion, if I understood correctly. My sister is evangelical, and I suspect that she subscribes to a Christian Zionism, not the Zionism of the church we grew up in, but the type of Christian Zionism that I know believes in a final battle and that Jesus will come down and rebuild the Temple on the Mount and so forth. I know that she believes in the rapture. My mom described to me how my sister saw a copy of the Koran on their shelf and she pulled it down and immediately went to the scripture of the heathens dying by the sword. Just that stunt with the Koran tells me that she doesn't share the respect of nonchristian religions that I do. I do know that Christian Zionism and Zionism are a huge driving force in the US support for Israel.

I would find it reassuring that those are minority voices as you say, but one would hope that Christian Nationalism is a minority voice, yet look what is happening. I have a real knack for making forecasts that turn out to be true. Nothing earth shattering mind you, things that I think are usually fairly obvious---like the epidemic levels of gun violence and mass shootings happening around the country. I predicted the stock market crash of Japan, when (the end of 1989, it actually began on the first trading day in 1990) and where the Nikkei would be (between 38,000 and 40,000) and that it would be followed by a serious recession. Actually I am very good at predicting market turns with a combination of market psychology and technical analysis (reading the charts), but in the case of Japan's massive collapse, I predicted that a year and 3 months early when the Nikkei was still at 32,000 or so granted, and I stuck by my prediction till the end. Granted, the fact that I was so accurate was luck as well). But I would have never seen the overturning of Roe vs Wade or the rise of Christian Nationalism, or the election of Trump. I mean, after Trump was elected, sure, anything was possible, but if you asked me in 2012, or 2008, or something like that, I would have never guessed it.

If such a minority has power like that, its not really an issue of whether they are a minority or not.

In Christian Zionism, there is this prophecy that many Jews will convert to Christianity, and those who don't will not be saved. The Muslims consider Jesus a messenger, but obviously the monotheism in the Muslim version is not Christianity. Likewise there is a Jewish prophecy that all will live in a religious utopia, but obviously there too, the assumption is that it will be a Jewish religious utopia.

 

I often hear about this---I assume this is still based on Libet's experiments which is a very popular argument and what I refer to as neuroscience rediscovering epiphenomenalism. But Libet's experiments have been largely debunked, and even Libet came out and said he was not trying to disprove free-will and believe that we still have free-will.

I am not sure how mind could arise from physical interactions within the brain and not be epiphenomenal.

Archephenomenalism argues that mind is the First Cause, though mind can refer to many aspects of mind or spirit. But I argue first of all, that physicality is trapped in the moment of now. The implication of the 2nd Principle of archephenomenalism, as I shared in a previous post, is that all of physicality exists for only that moment, and there is no physical reality outside of that moment. That moment represents all simultaneous collapses into particles. The third principle states that mind transcends because it remembers and anticipates and experiences the present, trancends beyond the present moment, i.e. transcends the physical. Epiphenomenalism states that consciousness is a reflection of the physical activity of the brain. I argue that brain is actually a reflection of the activity of the mind.

I find it very interesting that you argue materialism for the brain, yet panendeist. If I understand this correctly, you deny the physical on one hand regarding the human mind, yet defend the nonphysical for a transcendental absolute. I don't know if I have ever known anyone that comes so close to Hegel in the Modern World.

Im falling asleep and will continue in the morning.

 

Strange question. No, I'd say that there was nothing apparently "religious" about it, as far as I know--unless you consider communism to be a secular religion. U.S. policy was driven by the perception that the Viet Cong were advance troops of a communist monolith, and that if we didn't face the commies there, other countries would fall to communism like dominoes. There was a religious conflict within the larger conflict: the Buddhist resistance to the Diem regime that the U.S. was supporting. But that was peripheral to the main conflict.

 

Back into the late 70's my answer would have been like that too, actually, somewhat similar, I would emphasize that the real fight from the Vietnamese perspective was about the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese farmer peasants who had been promised their land back after the French pulled out. The wealthy landowners did not want to give that land back and Diem, the puppet we put into power supported the wealthy classes. The communist North Vietnamese did not even want to get involved, but they started supplying the Viet Cong and soon were involved in the fighting.

But then in the 70's we started getting the Vietnamese refugees, and later the boat people. Denver gained quite a few and the younger ones enrolled in the universities which is where I got to make friends with them. Most of them came from upper middle to upper class families. But time and again, I would hear them tell things like this (I paraphrase because I don't remember the exact conversation, but I do remember very well what was said): 'Americans don't understand what the war was really about. It was a really a religious war, between the Catholics and the Buddhists. I heard the phrase, religious war from numerous Vietnamese.

Now it just so happens I knew exactly what they meant, just as I understood the land issue for the Viet Cong, because most of my real knowledge about Vietnam began with the book, Dr. Spock on Vietnam. And he explained how Madame Nhu (I have to admit, like any female supervillain, she was Hot!) was trying to turn South Vietnam into the ideal Catholic State, and was openly oppressing the Buddhists who were predominantly Buddhist. That's why there is the famous picture of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who threw gasoline on himself and torched it.

The amazing thing is that Dr. Spock is not even human, but some pointy eared Vulcan, and yet he knew more about the world affairs that America was involved in than most Americans.

(OK, before anyone corrects me, yes I know who Dr. Spock is, he wrote that classic that every married woman read in the 60's and 70's, what was it? Monkey and Ape Care? (Yes, I'm still joking, I know the real title, and speaking of classics, my copy of Dr. Spock on Vietnam, which I still have is a paperback version, but it has the picture of the Vietnamese baby sitting what is obviously the rubble of war.)

I knew this part of the book, but I was still surprised to hear these people say that the war was really a religious war. It was not a religious war for America---but then, it wasn't even a war---if you recall it was never officially declared, so it was a 'Police Action.' I'm sure the Viet Cong would have understood that it was a war to get their land back, but they were also the Buddhists who could not, under Madame Nhu, celebrate their holy days, and were discriminated against by the government and its system because they were Buddhist. But as I said, it never dawned on me until then that it was a religious war.

And this gets down to part of what I am referring to as the problem of objectivism. We could objectively define the was as a war to stop the spread of communism, that began with a revolt by peasant farmers over their land. We could objectively add, as Wally Pitcher said, that it was an opportunity for the industial-military complex to test out all their new toys and add that it was a proxy war for the Eastern Block and the Western Block. Objectively we would be right. But it ignores the subjective experience of the population that actually experienced it first hand (not that our soldiers did not, and thank you for your service, Wally Pitcher, even if the government should never have sent you there, and far too many Americans were slaughtered in a senseless clusterf#ck of the highest magnitude). But from the perspective of many Vietnamese, who had good reason to say this, it was a religious war. So we would have to conclude that, among other things, it was a religious war. I would bet my last dollar that if we look at the data you provided of the total number of wars, and the number of those that were religious wars, that the Vietnam War would not be included as a religious war.

I have a friend who argues with me that Zionism was started by atheists and Israel is an atheist state. I have Jewish friends who claim that Israel is an abomination because the Torah says that the Jewish people are not to have a state until God gives it to them. The current battle in Gaza can be explained away as an angry act of revenge over October 7th. And yes, Hamas needs to be removed not only for Israel, but for the sake of the Palestinian people. But 17,000 civilians, over 60% being women and children, over a period of less than 2 months (remember there was a cease-fire so this is not even 2 months of fighting). In Ukraine I believe it is 9,000 civilians killed over a period of 20 months. I am pretty sure that if Palestine was filled with Hassidic Jews and Israel was filled with other Jews that this would not have happened (though I do like to argue that in Ireland one side killed Catholics in the name of Christ, while the other side killed Protestants in the name of Christ). We could argue that ethnicity is a part of this, and Israelis like to see it this way, but the Palestinians and Jews are closely related. The Palestinians spoke Jewish and Aramaic until about the 7th century when Arab people ruled over them and they needed to communicate with them.

Everything that is happening in Israel, is leading us to a big war, and is ideologically connected to the Abrahamic religions. Not, I would argue, because God wills it so, but because too many people believe this is what is supposed to happen, and have steered global politics in this direction. It doesn't matter if it is a misinterpretation of scripture. The Bible says nothing about pro-life ideology, and I can argue that with scripture, to the point where pro-lifers resort to insults and then stop talking to me. Yet, look at the mess we are in for women's rights and the proper management of their health.

I would like to educate people on what the actual implications are, the validity of such concepts as the apocalypse and so forth. When given the opportunity, I have talked to numerous people about interpreting the story of Abraham in a different way that applies to all of this.

 

As I said, the Catholic versus Buddhist issue was involved at one stage of the conflict, but it became peripheral to the main issues: for the Viet Cong, a peasant's revolt over land; for the U.S., containment of Communism. When you say the Viet nam war was religious, I think you;re confusing the main war with the Viet Cong with a side conflict (hardly the War) with the Cong. I think you were right before--back to the late 70s. The "Viet Cong " first appeared in 1956, and they launched their first major offensive in 1959. The Buddhist resistance you refer to erupted in 1963, as a result of perceived favoritism of Catholics by the Diem government and, largely instigated by Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Diem's Younger brother. The regime perceived Buddhists to be unreliable in the struggle with the Viet Cong, and they became targets of restrictive policies.Diem was overthrown and killed in a coup d'etat at the end of 1963. Diem was eventaually succeeded by a government headed by prime minister Ky and Buddhist President Thieu. Another uprising the Buddhists erupted in 1966 Government forces put it down. The war continued until 1975. The Buddhists never joined forces with the Viet Cong (that we know about). Buddhist Uprising - Wikipedia The U.S. wasn't fighting the Buddhists. So it would be misleading to say that the Viet nam war was caused by or fought over religion.

The "numerous Vietnamese" you heard from (how numerous were they, and how representative were they of the general population?) were probably most involved in the Buddhist resistance part of the conflict--i.e. urban dwellers, and as you say the upper class elite, probably not the peasant guerrillas wading through the swamps. The Viet Cong guerrillas who were the principal anti-government forces in the South weren't fighting for Buddhism, but rather for land reform. (Was Ho Chi-minh important to the conflict? Was he a Buddhist or a Catholic?) One might as easily say it was about colonialism and its aftermath, since the French colonization and subsequent withdrawal created the power vacuum which the U.S. tried to fill. BTW, Dr. Spock, a pediatrician, was a celebrated anti-war activist, an honorable endeavor but one that hardly makes him an expert on a complex subject outside his field. It's basically a polemic. No historian these days would cite him as an authority on the war, if any ever would.

Wars tend to be complex. Another dimension which your Vietnamese friends probably wouldn't understand is that it was also a laboratory for testing the latest theories of military strategy brought in by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and whiz kids who applied game theory and scientific management concepts to the conflict: Walter Rostow's theory of getting developing nations to "takeoff", Schelling's bargaining theory, and MacNamara's "graduated compellence", which would apply military force "efficiently"--gradually increasing it until the other side cried uncle. (The problem with that is that disaffected peasants aren't necessarily guided primarily by "rational" calculations, and U.S. public opinion made it difficult to tell who would cry "uncle" first.) With the Buddhists and Catholics, I'd say the main issue wasn't religious doctrine but rather the privileged position of the elite who happened to be Catholic that lay at the root of that problem. After the fall of Saigon, the Communist regime discouraged Buddhist practice, imprisoned Sangha leadership, and seized their properties. They were Marxist-Leninists. I doubt that they were Buddhists. No organized sangha is permitted to operate independently of the state in Vietnam. Regardless of the "subjective experience" of the individuals you happen to have talked to, I think the objective factors are the ones that were important.
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You'd be right, cuz it wasn't one.

Have you checked the history of the Zionist movement at all? It was primarily a movement of secular Jews. And yes, many religious Jews early on raised the objections you mention. So your friends were right. But your conclusion is questionable. I'd think that would help to show the present conflict is NOT primarily religious. The fact that there are differences between the Palestinian and Jewish populations, one of them being religious, certainly contributes to the conflict, but it's primarily a territorial conflict, fueled now by accumulated grievances over mounting body counts and displaced persons over many decades. The fact that there are historic ethnic similarities between Jews and Arabs is irrelevant. Family feuds are often the most intense--e.g, red states vs. blue states. The troubles in Ireland are, likewise, between two groups in which religious divisions are superimposed on socioeconomic and cultural differences. Many Ulster Protestants were resettled there from Scotland by the British, and enjoyed a superior economic
position.

The people who believe this are mainly Evangelical Christians. I see no evidence that they've "steered global politics in this direction", although they do provide political support for a pro-Israel policy. We can easily imagine a scenario in which they gain political influence because of their position in the MAGA movement, but how that plays out remains to be seen.

Yes. But what does that have to do with Armageddon?

A worthy endeavor! I'd like to do the same thing. I recently told my Sunday school class that Abraham probably never existed. Today we watched a video based on Abraham's covenant with God--including the part that God will curse anybody who curses Abraham. (Uh oh!)

Am I understanding you correctly that you think your own subjective impressions and those of people you talk to are a more valid and reliable path to truth than the objective, systematic methods of science and published scholarship? I disagree, but I suspect it would be futile to argue the point with you.

 

I'm not a "materialist" in the sense of denying non-material reality. I'm a rationalist and an empiricist. I try, as best I can, to hold views of reality which seem most consistent with the available evidence, logic and sound judgment. The latter adds dimensions of experience and intuition to the mix, and includes ideas I picked up buying used cars. And I demand substantial evidence for things I'm supposed to believe.

Not being a philosopher, I tend to think of "mind" as consciousness. Consciousness is obviously not matter. Is it then energy? Seems more like that to me, but maybe it's something else science hasn't labeled yet. The phenomenon of consciousness is still a mystery to science and to me. But I find it hard to believe that my body is inhabited by a ghost, the real me, that will fly away to heaven or some other destination after my body ceases to function. Consciousness is our most immediate experience, the one thing we can be sure of. Yet it remains something of a mystery--especially its subjective, phenomenal aspect. Sam Harris calls "that peculiar dimension that each of us experiences. Philosophers use the term "qualia"to denote these " introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives". Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers thinks that that mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to brain activity. He calls qualia the "hard problem": Why do we have qualia? What is its function? Why were we selected by evolution to be conscious? Couldn't we get along just as well without it as zombies and still get the jobs done? Would we still be having discussions like these?

Answers range from speculation to denial. At the speculative end of the spectrum are those answers invoking quantum physics.Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Alex Vary, a retired NASA scientist from the Nuclear Materials and Materials Division , thinks consciousness involves the intertwining of transcedent and material realms thru quantum processes, placing us simultaneously in transcendent and material domains and linking us ultimately to the Mind of God via "impossible loops". (My Universe: A Transcendent Reality.) Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of Black Holes, and his co-author, Stuart Hameroff, theorize that microtubules in the brain structured in a fractal pattern is responsible.

At the other extreme is atheist "horseman Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained , which seems to solve the hard problem by denying that there is one--i.e., denying the reality of qualia, which he dismisses as the "tricky illusory theatrics of consciousness." (I wonder if the guy moonlights as an extra on The Walking Dead ! (Chalmers has jokingly called him a philosophical zombie. Dennett is the principal champion of the monist-materialist take on consciousness, of which I've also been accused of. People just think they have subjective conscious experience. Fellow philosopher John Searle comments: "I regard Dennett's denial of the existence of consciousness not as a new discovery or even as a serious possibility but rather as a form of intellectual pathology." But Dennett doesn't exactly deny consciousness. He redefines it., in his "multiple drafts' theory of consciousness. Consciousness is our account of various calculations happening in the brain at about the same time. Consciousness is simply the brain's computational features.

So where do I stand on the issue? Dazed and confused. I definitely believe in qualia more than I believe in physical reality, since I'm experiencing it directly every waking second. I'm not a materialist monist like Dennett. And the theories of quantum consciousness seem plausible, although I'd want further evidence before accepting them as fact. On the other hand, I think there's convincing evidence that consciousness is brain dependent (post #88). But I could be convinced otherwise by substantial evidence to the contrary.

 

So, are you saying that a religious war can only be a war fought by priests, monks, and nuns? Because...

Actually, we were fighting the Viet Cong who were predominantly buddhist, and were revolting against the upper class which was predominantly Catholic, and a government that had literally enacted laws that discriminated against the Buddhists, and had an ideological goal of creating a Catholic State. I guess Wikipedia did not have that side of the story. Did they even tell how Diem was murdered, and by who, and where he was buried? I mean, that is a pretty fascinating part of the story. I've got, The Pentagon Papers, if you need the light that book sheds on it. (If I remember what book had all the juicy parts about the assassination---I have numerous ones).

And for that matter, why did the US lose patience with Diem? Well, a part of that had to do with Madame Nhu and her husband and her Catholic state, and anti-Buddhist stance. (And that last part I pulled right out of The Pentagon Papers, because I just remembered (in the last paragraph) that I have it (though I already knew that anyway).

That was many years ago, so I don't know how many Vietnamese I had these discussions with. I am still friends with 3 of them. And another was a Vietnamese girl that I had a relationship with (and man, I haven't thought of her for years---she liked to wear a tight one piece short skirt that had a large hole on both sides that showed off a bit of underboob and her hour glass waist. She had several in different colors. There were rumors on campus that if you did her homework she'd sleep with you, which wasn't true, but people may have thought that's why we were a thing. She didn't care, because guys were always helping her with her homework...) Anyway, I doubt any of them were actually a part of the Buddhist Uprising. Just of the three I still know, two are catholic, and the other is buddhist. That chick was Buddhist too. The Viet Cong were fighting to get their land back, as I said, but they also felt discriminated as buddhists. To quote from, The Pentagon Papers, "Popular discontent with the Diem Regime focused on Mr. Nhu and his wife."

Why does that matter? Ho Chi-Minh was resistant to join the conflict for quite sometime. The war was already being fought, and the US were already involved before he joined the war. As I said, when he did finally start to help the Viet Cong it was only to supply them. The North Vietnamese were tired of war after fighting with the French. Eventually they were pulled in. There is a war movie about the battle the Americans fought, where the North Vietnamese first joined in. I forget what it was called.

Yes, that's true. But...

Bingo!

You've never seen the book have you. You seem to be making a lot of objectivist assumptions here. Did he set out to write a polemic? No. People were trying to get him to join the Anti-War Movement. He responded that he did not know where he stood on the war, and he just can't join something without knowing the facts. SO he proceeded to get all the facts from Senate hearings, speeches, the press, and everything else he could dig up that would give him the facts on the war, and the result was that book. Everything he claims in the book is well documented, everything is cited. And for those who didn't believe him at the time, The Pentagon Papers and other exposes that came later made it pretty clear that he knew what he was talking about.

When one religious group discriminates another over religious differences, and a war develops, is that not a religious war? When one religious group tries to force their beliefs upon a nation as a whole, to the detriment of another religious group and a war develops, is that not also a religious war, and a war fought over religious doctrine? When peasants try to regain land that was promised to them, and religion, particularly a religion that is different from their own, is used to supress them and dehumanize and discriminate against them, and they get angry and start a war, is that not in part a religious war? If the Buddhist temples, which are normally very pacifistic, and apolitical, are so upset over conditions and the way their own followers are being treated, because of the religion they believe in, that they rise up against the government, more than once, isn't that a symptom of a religious conflict playing out?

But the war was not even started over communism. The domino theory was a farce. But the end result all over the world was situations like this. Every government that the CIA and KGB messed with came back to bite us later. (Vietnam didn't actually. They became a communist country and that was it. I was living in the Philippines when we closed our bases there----because of greed on the part of the Philippine government, and then a volcano that sealed the deal. Vietnam actually wanted us to set up bases there. They would have loved to have us rent there!)

Your whole perspective of the war is based on the US experience there. Its as if America is the only country that matters in all of this. When Ho Chi Minh entered the war, it added a whole new dimension, but you can't say that this negates all the reasons for war that came before the communists, and even came before America entered.

You aren't making a very good case for that. You are, in fact, demonstrating exactly my problem with Cartesian Objectivism---arrogantly defining the whole world in terms of their own subject view of objective reality. You said it yourself, war is very complex, The problems in Vietnam did not begin when America entered the war. The Americans were foreign visitors (arrogant as Americans tend to be whether soldiers or tourists) who came into this quagmire to support a government they put into power in order to play a global chess game against the Soviet Union and China. But the war was brewing before that. Other countries, besides America, have their own versions of history, and reasons for being. When America interferes, it doesn't turn everything into the American viewpoint. America does not invalidate everyone else's experience and viewpoint.

Maybe my friends and the people I talked to did not represent the Vietnamese people as a whole. Maybe they got together before I knew them and decided to fool that American kid with the long hair (well at least I got to sleep with that chick for a year). I doubt that. But they grew up and lived in Vietnam and they were all convinced over each of their similar viewpoints, and they must have had some reason for feeling that way. And besides, my subjective side has an awful lot of objective facts behind it.

 

No. I'm saying that religious wars are those fought for religious reasons, not simply because the rich and powerful in a certain community are of a certain religion.

The Cong were also predominantly peasants under Marxist-Leninist leadership. Which of those affiliations was most responsible for their guerrilla activities? Was the United States a major player in the war with the Cong? Do you think religion was a motivating force for it? When someone asks me what caused the Vietnam war, of course I'm thinking of the one the United States was involved in, which turned an otherwise local conflict in a small country into a major international one.

 

Not when the Americans entered the war. The fear was that if Diem was toppled then the North would move right in and take over. But any kind of government resistance at that time had the risk of becoming Marxist, or even Marxist-Leninist, because Marx was all the rage with the left back then and any and all rebellions against an American state or puppet, had to be leftist in the opinion of America. And also because the Soviets or the Chinese were clearly trying to influence it---it was a global chess game. The VC did not care about Marx, or politics. In an issue that is a lot like Israel today, the whole mess could have been avoided and South Vietnam would have remained non-Marxist if the US simply told Diem, 'give them their land, it was promised to them, and stop forcing catholicism down their throats. Otherwise, we are going to load you into a staff car, drive you around for a little bit before we shoot you, and then bury your body in the vacant field next to our ambassador's house.' The the whole thing would have been avoided. The North VIetnamese would not have supplied them, and then later taken over the war effort. Saying that the VC believed in Marxist-Leninist ideology is a lot like saying that all the Palestinians are Hamas. (In the case of Israel, the US should simply say, 'Give them their land, treat them as equals and the cousins of yours that they are, or we will cut off all funding and aid to you completely, and we will load Netanyahu into a staff car, drive...' Oh wait, we don't do that last part anymore.)

And we haven't even mentioned the fact that Marxism was, in many ways a pseudo-religion (not in the sense that I apply this term to planter culture cults on the way to developing religious institutions from their ancestral spirituality, but)---it literally created a cult of personality in the States it took over. The whole religious justification of fighting communism was that it would eliminate religion, and that too, sounds like a pretty big religious reason for going to war.

And by the way Marxism does have a cultus, a creed, belief, what am I forgetting? It fits your definition of religion.

LMAO!! What? How does any of my last post, or the one before it, sound like two peoples who just happen to have different religions, going to war? My whole 8th response to you after talking about Dr. Spock, where I used what was happening at a religious level in Vietnam and wrote, Is this not a religious war, at the end of each sentence was the religious reasons why the VC were figthing the Diem regime, and the Diem regime were fighting them, which was the entire core of the war.

Maybe that is not why the Americans were there. But there too, the existential reasons for fighting the war for Americans were grounded in the religious basis that Marxism was an atheistic evil. The John Birch Society as I recall certainly used religion to fight the Red Scourge. The religious side to America was very different in the 1950's and 1960's than it is today. Sunday mornings everyone woke up, got dressed, and went to church. Now that may have not been literally true, but that was the pop cultural accepted norm in the Father Knows Best America of that time. There was an expectation at that time that Armageddon would be fought ultimately between the US on the side of Christianity, and the Soviet Union on the side of Satan, I remember in the 60's that if the subject of Vietnam ever came up in prayer, it would be something like to protect our boys in Vietnam who are fighting for God and country. I remember this because I remember thinking, why do we have to fight a war for God,and why would he want that?

You said it yourself, war is complicated. And we were told the VC were communist scum, and in Israel, there are many Jews who believe the Palestinians to be Muslim scum that are at heart terrorists. In fact the BBC literally did a segment on this over the weekend about Hebron.

I think it is very difficult to separate religion from war, especially many big wars. If you said Ukraine was not a religious war, I would agree with you. The Falkland Islands was clearly not a religious war. But Vietnam was, and so is the Israeli conflict. World War II had its religious elements---the genocide of Jews, Hitler's use of Christianity to manipulate the people just as Trump does, in Japan there was State Shinto which is what gave the emperor his power. I have a Japanese school textbook from the 1930's in my possession which teaches about loyalty, the highest being loyalty to the emperor, and it is rich with Shinto imagery.

 

Now you're sounding Post-modernist: There is no objective truth. Science and scholarship are just efforts to assert one point of view over others by unwarranted claims to authority. All views are valid or invalid, and the best way to decide which to adopt is how we feel about it. I thought you were afraid it led to Nihilism. I agree with you on that. If you can produce compelling evidence for your views, bring it on. The eyewitness testimony of your Buddhist friends who were there on the scene is certainly evidence to consider, although second-hand thru you, weakened by the lapse of time and fading memories, and possibly biased as the views of one side of the conflict. To say that religion was the cause, or main cause, of the Vietnam War would, I think, be misleading without further evidence, for reasons I've explained supra.

If you think it's arrogant to require empirical evidence, to be systematic and use standard procedures in gathering it, and to prefer such methods to the alternative, I guess I'm arrogant. However, if you think these methods have their limitations, I'd agree. Science is always inherently tentative, and as a human enterprise, and as such, fallible. Kuhn demonstrated that sufficiently in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science today is dependent on the priorities of funding sources and the feasibility of testing refutable hypotheses in a given area of inquiry, and it is more useful in eliminating Type One statistical errors (false positives, or accepting something true that is not) than Type Two errors (false negatives, or not accepting things that happen to be true. But in areas where it is feasible, it's the gold standard for valid and reliable knowledge. Every week, I seem to have go-arounds with one person or another over whether or not to trust accepted information sources. I remember one on this site a few years back where a Christian fundamentalist was denying evolution and the scientific consensus on the age of the earth. I went over the evidence, gathered by scientists from different disciplines who devoted their professional careers to investigating he subject and asked if he thought they were all wrong or dishonest. Of course, he said "Yes". Similar encounters with climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxers, and my MAGA friends have followed the same pattern: can't trust the scientific establishment (in bed with the Deep State), the MSM (librul bias), the CDC (guvment tool) etc. Fox News, OAN, and Truth Social are where to get the good news; and guzzling invermectin, hydroxychloroquine, or bleach is the sensible approach to COVID (which is a myth anyhow). What can I say? It's a judgment call, but I try to make fact-based judgments. Is that so bad?

 

Tell that to Meagain. I've been trying to convince him of that for years. But if its a religion, it's a secular religion. To say the Vietnam War was a religious conflict because of that would be confusing. When you say "religion causes wars", most people are thinking of the old time religions, with god(s), the supernatural, and all. The point of saying "religion is the major cause of war," is to discredit that kind of supernaturally based religion. So the new usage would have to be clarified.

But was it a major reason why American decision makers (Kennedy, Johnson, MacNamara, etc.) were pursuing the war? I'd find that hard to believe!

"had its religious elements" is a good way to put it. Nazi ideology was influenced by Teutonic mysticism, in which some Nazi leaders like Himmler were deeply involved. And I think it would be accurate to describe National Socialism as a secular religion--certainly using powerful rituals, doctrines, racist doctrine, Nietschean moral code (ubermensch-untermensch), and feelings of national community to achieve its ends. But I think the historians are right in not giving it major attention. It would be stretching it, and Meagain would be all over us.

As for the genocide of Jews, I'm not sure that was a major cause of the war, or played much of a part in us and our allies getting into the war. The Nazi movement benefited from a legacy of anti-Semitism partly resulting from Christian anti-Jewish animus. But the primary reasons for the genocide were race and eugenics.

Religion is around for politicians and demagogues to use in stirring up a mob, rallying the troops, etc. Even Stalin used Russian Orthodoxy after the Nazi invasion of the USSR. But only in a minority of cases has it, per se, been the primary factor in starting wars.