Philosophy and the Art of Reason: Let us enter the high country of the mind

I'm honoured :sunny:

 

Good now we just need to work on being honorable, go pray for them poor chickens

 

No poverty in the fact that life yields only to more life. To be honorable is to be honest and honesty is consistency when what you say and what you do are the same.

 

Empathy is selfish or self affirming.

 

Empathetic maybe is better

 

A lack of empathy has brought us to where we are today, and that lack is directly related to evolution= she's a slow one. Ayn Rand is now god.

 

Who hasn't loved something? Illumination happens at the speed of light!

Ayn Rand?, she's dead too.

 

She's alive and well, worldwide. Please--let's elbow this-here empathy to where it belongs.

 

Pathetic is pathetic. No difference between a half wit and a whole wit, wit being what wit is.

 

Okay, we share our thoughts.

 

Nature and nurture both make up empathy. My temperament is hardwired despite the harshness of my family. A killer having had never seen violence lacks empathy for victims. A saint that volunteers in orphanges is altruistic derived from empathy. These are variations of good and evil.

 

N'aww, you guys... :grouphug:


Lets say the killer cannot feel. He's got a mental "disorder", and he's just playing his genetic role. Is he evil?

(Everyone says it's bad to kill someone, but he can't relate to why.. like if a child gets told not to draw on the walls)

 

There is no such thing as good or evil, there is only human interpretation of each act we experience.

 

Yes--there are no universals (ethics, morals, etc.). Everything is understood from a human perspective.

It is presumptuous to assume that man can understand what God would say is good or evil. Especially since any God would have to exist in a non-physical dimension or a dimension that is transcendent of the physical and non-physical.

This means that a God's understanding of death would be from a complete understanding of life after death of the physical body. Death is a finality, loss, assumed inevitable point of pain, we face it with fear, etc. Many of the worse things---the most evil, involve death. To a God, it is merely a passage to another dimension---a dimension that is possibly even better than the physical one.

Can we presume that God undertands the evil surrounding death just as we do?

 

Because harm has no face.

 

Can you reconcile the two statements in bold for me? Or even these words in the first two sentences, no universals and everything?

Our presumption is this regard is similar to thinking we create our own parents.

We can make any presumption. We could understand the life yields only to more life. There is no life beyond death, life is a metabolic fire and heat is constantly creating new alloys of ferrous blood.

 

Wow man... deja vue! I gotta stop doing these drugs, man, it seems like I am repeating conversations... (I'm joking)

I am using universal just as existentialists use it. First---let's consider universals vs everything. The term universal in this sense states that the laws of ethics and so forth apply to all things clear across the universe. The Christian concept of Good and Evil suggest that there is a moral law that would be just as true to life in a galaxy 400 Million Light Years away as it is here on earth, and that these same laws are true in heaven and hell as they are on earth. These laws are God's laws not our laws.

But everything we perceive, understand, and think is from an existential perspective, in other words, a purely human perspective. Our idea of ethics and good and evil clearly cannot apply to the animal kingdom, nor can we assume that if there is a divine element to the universe, they, or it, would understand the same thing. We can't even agree from one nationality to another, or one religion to another on ethical issues. The everything in the second sense is not universal---it is only a human understanding, and even then is extremely subjective. 'There are no universals' means that our understanding of good and evil is only a human understanding.

The second statement is not a statement that God exists and how he exists. But I thought about it before I wrote it---could a god be purely physical? No it wouldn't make sense----unless you can convince me that a purely physical god is possible. I am not talking about whether god exists or doesn't exist----other than it seems to me that a purely materialistic philosophy by definition would have to be atheistic.

That is my whole point---a belief that there is a universal good and evil is like assuming that we create our own parents.

Yes we can make any presumption---but it is only from a human perception---which is my point that we cannot make such a presumption.

 

evil isn't very important . it doesn't even deserve a unique
symbol , and so evil shall be terribly indeterminate confuctionary
nonsense . o

pirates only happen to sound unreasonable . they'll kill
you for not laughing . i-eeE!

 

Sorry man, I get existence and existentialists existence mixed up because the word existence looks the same in either case.

Thank you for being qualified, (in an existentialists sense?)

 

Yes---existentialist is a complex term in philosophy. Existence is the root.

One usage refers to the experience, and being of human existence---which is the way I use it here.

Another usage is that it is the opposite of essentialism (that the ground of being is essence). In this case it means that the ground of being is existence. Philosophy was almost all essentialist up until after the enlightenment. After that, the idea of a physical only existence began to take on more shape, and become more influential. The Platonic form is an example of essence. Spiritual, religious, or idealist philosophies are all essentialist.