Saturday, May 28, 2022

Infinite Regress and Empirical Reality: Zeno´s Paradox and Thomas Aquinas´ (Thomistic) Thought

Apologetics of Emptiness Apologetics of Emptiness 11 months ago (edited) @Thomistic Disputations I was using your own example as a demonstration of the emptiness of the reasoning you are having at 11:33 (section "argument II"). In this argument you are using the infinite regress based on an effect "having its motion in another" as a reasoning to negate an infinite set of causes and claim there is a first cause / first mover giving its actuality to the motion. 11:59 "having an infinite series of things in motion would not solve the problems because none of these things have the principle of motion primarily" But the issue with using "actuality" or "primarily" like that is that it fails to represent a basic example of motion, such as the car. In the case of a car, the motion of the cylinder is caused by the spark in the gas. I hope we agree on that. We can decompose that if you like : spark ignites the reaction of the molecules of the gas, causing heat, causing pressure to rise, causing pressure to apply to the surface of the cylinder, causing the cylinder to move up. But for the sake of simplicity let's say the spark causes the motion of the cylinder. I hope we agree this is a "per se" causal relationship, again trying to use your terms of the problem. Would you say the motion of the cylinder has its actuality from the spark? I am just asking to clarify, but my point is beyond that. The thing is... the motion of the cylinder and the spark DO NOT COEXIST. Indeed, when the cylinder is still moving up, the spark is long gone extinct. Even if the "per se" cause of the motion can be traced back to the spark, those are not existing together in the same time. The motion has its actuality in another that pre-existed, earlier in time. The motion of the cylinder is actual, but it's cause that gave it its actuality... is no more. To go back to your conclusion at 12:22 replacing paintbrush by cylinder here : "(the cylinder) does not have the principle of motion primarily, so it must receive this principle from something that does, the first mover". No, you have failed to prove that. There CAN be an infinite series of CAUSES, no problem with that. The only problem you have with that is you are trying to force this notion of "actuality" unto it, when it just doesn't fit to describe a changing process. Apologetics of Emptiness 3 days ago (edited) @Green Peacemst "Infinity applied to any of the component of a spark to cylinder chain of events would prevent the chain of events from happening". No it doesn't, the video has failed to demonstrate that. That's all I am saying. Also, I hardly understand how you can in one comment hold together, on one side a relationship between my car's cylinder movement and something as remote and infinitely distant as Karl Benz, and on the other side say an infinite series of causes is not supported by empirical analysis. My main point of disagreement overall is that, for a cause to produce an effect, the cause has to change (and one could argue disappear). And that change can be observed empirically in all phenomenons. Once you introduce that in the line of reasoning of the video, that wonky notion of "finding its motion in another" and the infinite regress it claims to point to, is just non-existent. The infinite regress in that line of reasoning is problematic only if you remove time and change from the problem. There can be other lines of reasoning not requiring that, but this one in particular does. Ultimately, one of the failure of the reasoning of the video, is that it fails to consider reality as continuous, impermanent and interdependent. It is stuck considering objects and events as independent and discrete entities or states. It's limited to thinking time as a series of instants, rather than a duration. Once you get to view time as duration, and reality and continuous, an infinite chain of causality can literally be observed every moment, everywhere. Green Peacemst Green Peacemst 2 days ago ​ @Apologetics of Emptiness The video´s own philosophical domain language isn´t too difficult to clean up with the language of empirical scientific philosophy. And you show how easy it is to confuse notions, apparently by basing yourself in scientific materialism. You extend your assumption of physicalist truth to the term "infinity" and it´s all wrapped up in your own present to you. That´s not how reality works. You make an assertion about "reality" as "continuous, impermanent, and interdependent" relating to "time and change" which even sounds spiritual, or Buddhist. I see that you use the term "line of reasoning," but not "perception." So, let´s see. You also try to assert "an infinite chain of causality" observable "every moment, everywhere." And then suddenly you apply a name. A human symbolic sound that can be used by the evolved human primate animal capacity combining tool-making cognition and interpersonal communication. Non-verbal awareness through meditation permits perception to perceive. Relaxing permits perception, and then the next stage, our awareness of our perception. That also involves a state of consciousness, conventionally referred to as Left/Right brain thinking, serial linguistic or spatial creative. Your assertions of "continuity" can be reasoned, but psychology has studied human perception, and identified "awareness packet units." Frogs, in a fun analogy, have evolved powerful perception faculties to track flies in motion. We have our bio-physical limits. So, welcome back to Earth. Awareness of symbolic thought then has led to useful knowledge like Ogden and Richards triangle of reference: symbol-referent-thought of referent, rich in implications. I recall Bertrand Russell approached this issue in On Denoting. So, now, your citing qualitative variables and dimensions like continuity, impermanence, and interdependence is confusing the issue of the infinite. None of that establishes the unending nature of empirical reality. Zeno´s paradox is an act of philosophical imagination framed in an imagined context. Combining all achievements in empirical knowledge, including the scientific and psychological philosophical, we observe that you are imagining a spark-cylinder action sequence, and failing to distinguish your imagining an infinite regress willfully with empirical reality. In reality, you run into the turner of the car key. Continuity meets the discontinuity of discrete units of different kinds in a human conceived sequence in the case of spark to cylinder. Impermanence as a quality is in fact opposed to "infinite" anything, much less any context of extended permanence. There are forms of temporary permanence, although all permanence in the physical plane is temporary, a point not adequately raised by Buddhists, in my understanding. You are confusing all these qualities with the abstraction that is the concept of a mathematical infinity. Scientific knowledge has traced matter - energy down to atoms and subatomic particles and the Higgs´ particle in the Higgs field. Discrete units with identifiable qualities. Not "infinite." My Karl Benz reference relates to the shift from your imaginary scenario fixation to empirical reality involving an ignition key turner, and extends that into historical time to mark a significant form of human technology use, its invention by individuals. Not its infinite unending qualities. As for the enormity of the macrocosmic Universe and the extent of diminutive microcosmic units, enormously large or extensively small numbers are not infinite. That´s where the Big Bang makes a fine modern reference. Yet Aquinas showed the power of the Judeo-Christian theological metaphysics and the Creator God from before Moses to Jesus and Jesus´ legacy. No space between A and B is infinite, as in Zeno´s proposed paradox. Aquinas´ motion argument, thus, really is a strong one. There is a First Cause, and it is transcendental and powerful, along with being immaterial, ie not of the material plane. Understanding the human mind, biologically evolved into a symbol-using phenomenon with agency. It is a dual interactionist system, reflecting the expression "Mind over Matter." In your case, you´re not quite aware of the nature of your own mind. Buddhism helpfully teaches the powerful basic awareness of perception and the sense-perceived world.

Friday, May 27, 2022

Science as Method.....

Daniel Bunn Coming in here as a Christian, the fact is that the Bible cannot be considered entirely metaphysical. It recounts historic episodes like the flood, the day the sun stood still, and the day it went backwards. It has a "valley of the dry bones" coming to life and people raised from the dead. Religion has some rather interesting things to explain from a scientific position. As yes, I'm steeped in Science. 35 years associated in Civil Engineering in one form or another. D B Science is a method of exploration and observation. The philosopher who exemplified this is Hume. Daniel Bunn You clearly have your favorite definition of what "science" is. And you even go so far as to mention Hume as a philosopher who, you think, exemplifies your favorite definition, that being "a method of exploration and investigation." Hume´s not a bad start, and has some good strong points. Yet, he also argued against causality, along with trying to push the crass fallacy that miracles can´t happen because witnesses of miracles are unreliable and ignorant. They violate scientific laws, I believe he already asserted as part of that. Crass ideological circular reasoning. And he´s been treated with kid gloves in general, or just used as a source of what is in fact a fallacious ideologial doctrine. However, what you demonstrate is how "science" has tried to play by its own terms. "Methods" that just exist might apply to technology historically, which goes far to explain why the term "science" emerged. It appears to be a term that pleases technophiles as well as having popular flare. From my thinking below, I might give a short conclusion here, "The process of observation and investigation involves thinking and making logical coherence at one level or another. A "method" thus, can even in a tinkering technology sense, can be identified as a basic philosophical form. Thinking matters. The key appears to be that technophiles try to focus on the physicality of "methods", and lose sight of their own philosophical activity. That also limits their awareness as thinking about more complex levels of physical objects and processes like Einstein requires extensive philosophical awareness of it as a full philosophical method, scientific and naturalist in focus. The implications of Freud´s work help indicate how that makes empiricism crucial. You mention Hume, whose own proto-psychological observations impressed me, along with his perception of the importance of emotional life, and the process of meaning and abstraction. But, Freud helps illustrate how Hume was an empiricist, and how that is the higher order classification of scientific natural philosophical method itself. It covers both physical and non-physical philosophical observations and investigation. As biologist turned philosopher M Pigliucci notes, "Science is a kind of philosophy." I mentioned Thomas Aquinas, who made fundamental tweaks on ancient Greek philosophy, from Aristotle, the student of Plato, student in turn of Socrates, primarily. Aquinas requires a little further commenting," The thinking about that conclusion gets laid out as follows: However, the reason "science" had to get renamed in the 1800s, was that it isn´t just a technological method of tinkering. It isn´t just random that you seem to have identified Hume for some of his qualities. Einstein makes a good case for identifying the issues involved. Einstein had excelled at math and physics, not inventions like Edison, we might note. He was thinking about those kinds of things. Thinking is a philosophical process, not merely technical investigation. Einstein´s dad Hermann was an engineer, which made have helped Albert´s imagination and affinity. At 12, he developed an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem in math. At 15, Einstein wrote a paper on the "...Ether in a Magnetic Field". That´s not primarily observational investigation, although it is based on the history of observational scientific natural philosophy. Physics, like the other "sciences" also specifically, is itself directed to physical objects and processes. All told, that´s why Newton was still called a natural philosopher. That´s basic History of Science. We also observe that Einstein´s affinity for math and physics learning also involved his being open and interested in Kant´s Critique of Pure Reason. In brief, Einstein´s famous process of approaching light involved him imagining being on a beam of light. His philosophical activity would have involved him interrelating his speculative scenarios with his math and physics knowledge, not merely observing. Einstein was taking others´ work that had involved experimental observation in his own thinking processes. The formula for kinetic energy E=1/2 mv2 would have been one element in his mind. Einstein was, after all, able to produce his anno mirabilis while working in a patent office. He was a classic scientific natural philosopher. Freud the neurologist helps illustrate the alternatives from another angle. Freud had patients with pain, but no organic disease. He learned from some therapeutic relaxation techniques, and applied those. He asked his patients to relax, touch their painful area on the arm or whereever, and allow their thoughts to flow freely. He took notes, and traced his patients´ associations as they recalled in steps through trains of thoughts to painful childhood moments, and called his first theory The Seduction Theory. The patients´ recovery during and from this practice led him to label events like "abreaction" as emotional connection in remembering, and "catharsis," as the alleviation that resulted after adequate abreaction. That´s confirmed by the modern understanding of child abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics. Freud used his notes to identify non-physical entities like the "id" and the "ego." Not microscopes or experiments. Thus, Freud´s and others´ thought processes in these acts of observation and investigation are not scientific physical methods, but more broadly "empirical" methods. Since the recognition of logical coherence between the patients words and the therapeutic psychological healing and Freud´s efforts alone required thinking, it is not itself a technical process, but a philosophical one. Just like math and physics, in their domain. The process of observation and investigation involves thinking and making logical coherence at one level or another. A "method" thus, can even in a tinkering technology sense, can be identified as a basic philosophical form. Thinking matters. The key appears to be that technophiles try to focus on the physicality of "methods", and lose sight of their own philosophical activity. That also limits their awareness as thinking about more complex levels of physical objects and processes like Einstein requires extensive philosophical awareness of it as a full philosophical method, scientific and naturalist in focus. The implications of Freud´s work help indicate how that makes empiricism crucial. You mention Hume, whose own proto-psychological observations impressed me, along with his perception of the importance of emotional life, and the process of meaning and abstraction. But, Freud helps illustrate how Hume was an empiricist, and how that is the higher order classification of scientific natural philosophical method itself. It covers both physical and non-physical philosophical observations and investigation. I mentioned Thomas Aquinas, who made fundamental tweaks on ancient Greek philosophy, from Aristotle, the student of Plato, student in turn of Socrates, primarily. Aquinas requires a little further commenting, but he can be acknowledged as an essential proto-scientific philosopher like Einstein. Aquinas addressed Aristotle´s First Cause argument, which was limited by Aristotle´s ancient Greek esoteric First Cause assumption of a co-eternal Universe and esoteric god. Aquinas took Zeno´s Paradox of the mathematical appearance of infinite divisibility of space between two points. He noted the absurdity of that in reality, ie empirical physical reality. He then made his powerful five arguments for God, including the argument from motion. He apparently lacked the confidence to draw the conclusion that his refutation of infinitely small in relation to the the Biblical assertion of the Judeo-Christian Creator God. That correlates further with his empirical formulation of the empirical Motion argument of the First Cause. He declined to argue for the Creation of the Universe. He was discreet, but overly so, I´d say.

Monday, May 23, 2022

"Spiritual Gifts" In Paul and Their Modern Meaning; University-based Philosophical Truth, Anyone? Healings, For Another?

Kenneth Chan Mark Huston sorry I got lost. I was already lost in your citations of Paul. In any event, you asked a lot of questions and they all predicated on some assumptions that I am seeking clarification. Are you asking what Paul meant by Love. Well, … how many PhDs do I have to get in order to attempt a guess. Are you asking what “prophecy” is in Paul’s times? Well, more PhDs. “Spiritual gifts?” I am still seeking a clarification of what you meant. Let me look up your scriptural references first. Reply Share 2h Mark HustonAuthor Group expert Kenneth Chan As above: 'Have you had experienced any of these SGs on this list? 'How' does how work for: 'Be transformed by the renewing of ones mind...' How does one go about doing that? 'Putting to death the flesh (survival-based ego-self) How does one go about doing that? To 'Let this consciousness be in you...' be 'in Christ' consciousness, a 'new creation in Christ' consciousness How does one go about doing that? 'Pursue love...' as in developing more of it that 'God is' How does one go about doing that? '...earnestly desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.' OK - 'earnest desire' supports all matters achieve, but how may one go about accomplishing this regarding SGs generally and prophesy in particular? How does one go about doing that? While these for some may be about 'reinventing the wheel' any thoughts about the 'Hows' of these?' Reply Share 2h Mark Rego Monteiro Kenneth Chan Your delegating the task of responding about something like Paul´s view of Love to "PhD´s" can be viewed from a lighter angle, but you seem to be demonstrating the problem of overintellectualization and even entering the area of the fallacy of appeals to authority. In using my modest degrees in Bio Anthro and later International Relations, I have learned to value my own good taste in combining education and personal experience and effort over formalism by specialists. Philosophical truth is the central objective of any conventional academic scholarship, in fact, and a nice and adequate simple gauge of balancing empirical and conceptual reality. And philosophical truth, my puny masters degree powered by a Harvard undergraduate degree in the biological evolution of human symbolic behavior has allowed me to discern, is based on its origins in Christian spiritual practice that have been amply limited, or even misdirected, by ideological forms of materialism. I won´t even worry about being specialized, and just say casually, didn´t Paul at least say, "Love is patient, etc."? He also asserted the need to "pray constantly" and "test all things, and hold on to what is good." These are central high integrity assertions that dispel the most dismissive stereotypes, or possibly modest misguided notions of Paul the Apostle. The Apostle of Jesus Christ, and among the first powerful steps in Jesus´ legacy that is the central foundational feature usually now neglected in identifying modern University-based PhD´s. Thomas Aquinas´ Christianization and empirical treatment of Aristotle linked Jesus´ heritage revamped in his legacy as the lawful and loving Creator God who made a loving, finite creation. As for prophecies and spiritual gifts, please see my comment to MH. Philosophical truth in Jesus´ legacy is the driving force in globalized University-based, UN human rights culture. It needs to be re-spiritualized to address the misdirected influences of ideological materialism. We need to go beyond overvaluing and misconstruing the role of "science," and understand the liberal arts and sciences as more than just a description of University curriculum. Instead, we need to "upgrade" the description and operationalize it as Multidisciplinary Philosophy with empiricism. That, along with spiritual-religious phenomena and knowledge. It´s a good idea, I suggest, to start with situating "science" and reclaiming it as scientific natural philosophy, understanding that it is in fact a symbolic system, and exists in a spectrum of human University-based philosophical scholarship with empiricism. Comparative Religious Studies, and its adequate valuing of psychosocial studies disciplines in addition to scientific resources, seems a good philosophical disciplinary goal for reorienting emphasis in modern empirical knowledge. For spiritual gifts related to spiritual phenomena, then, we might then focus our faculties on all symbolic representations capable of identifying something as basic as the scientific data labeling meditative behavior, and then switching awareness to the meaning of medically attested, medically and classically scientifically impossible healings with spiritual-religious testimony. At root, however, is understanding the diverse formulations of cause and effect, choice and consequence in empirical philosophical scholarship and data.

Reality is an Illusion- Einstein; Question, is an Illusion False or True?

The meme: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” -Albert Einstein Second dialogue below: Rob CK is illusion a false thing or a true thing?🙄 Reply Share 1dEdited Mark Rego Monteiro Rob CK Great question. Short answer, both, depending. Einstein here is also a great case study. Einstein trained as a physicist with philosophical orientation. He came to comment also on "epistemology," with a scientific emphasis. His comments about "reality" come from a scientific basis primarily, with much less insight in detail of the psychosocial studies philosophical disciplines that already had some important advances and shifts taking place in his days. He had a schizophrenic son, for example, and he never took advantage of Freud´s diverging student Wilhelm Reich´s successful treatment of a schizophrenic. We might note two aspects. Our individual existential perception of the Sun is that it rises in the East and sets in the West. That´s true for most practical tasks, meaning "that frame of reference." It´s only false from the point of view of empirical scientific and mathematical philosophical knowledge. It can also be framed as simply less true. A similar dynamic can be noted for the shift from Newtonian classical mechanics in scientific philosophy to Einstein´s relativistic physics, and then in turn Quantum mechanics in the subatomic realm. But that´s just mostly the narrow scientific angle. The broader empirical philosophical angle already presents what is really a more complex frame of reference, the psychosocial and symbolic realms of phenomena and knowledge, which includes the human development and use of "science" in the first place. The illusion might start with "science" being the "truth." Einstein, for one, already knew the term "epistemology," and so had a foot in the door, to that degree. Wilhelm Reich´s divergence from Freud, and successful treatment of a schizophrenic already suggests more. Max Weber in the 1920s was one of a group of psychosocial philosophers and scholars who formulated antipositivism and interpretivism to designate the distinction in the human realm from the scientific physical realm that had spawned logical positivism and then, or as part of, scientific materialism. Developments were bubbling in the psychosocial domains, with anthropologist B Malinowski doing field studies with Asian-based tribes and developing functionalism, or is it structuralism? His idea was based on human needs. Behavioral anthropologist ED Chapple drew on Pavlov´s salivating dog conditioning for the basic "symbol" biology, and more, including JB Watson´s Little Albert experiment with a baby and a rabbit, to develop emotional-interactional foundations of anthropology. In the spiritual-religious studies area, we can also note Mircae Eliade´s profane-sacred type concepts, and all being corralled in the developing field of comparative religious studies. Einstein´s own relative openness also characterized the spiritual angles he was capable of, as in his recognition of Jesus´ historicity based on the quality of the NT, and Einstein´s recognition of Gandhi´s spectacular accomplishment at his death, "Who would believe that one such as he ever walked upon the Earth?" Connecting all the dots there illuminates the levels of "illusions" and "lesser or greater more false or truer realities." &&& Doreen Davis-Ward 'Reality is formed by any number of an individuals experiences, education, culture, understanding, mental health, socialization etc., and therefore very much just that... individualistic ... inthat sense it is illusion. It doesn't mean it's any less felt or seen, but determined by and understood on an individuals level of understanding. Reply Share 2d Mark Rego Monteiro Doreen Davis-Ward Good scope in your starting an assessment. Individualistic points of view have gained broader recognition in modern times because of a very specific shared community framework, that the categories you mention derive from. In fact, I think you are implying that the individualist side is somewhat illusory without actually articulating the substantive reality of the psychosocial foundations. Common trends include ideological free individualistic materialism, with three main versions in secular, economic, and scientific. Individual ideological freedom is the focus. They are commonly referred to as Western Civilization. In fact, it is in Jesus´ legacy, to ground the term "Christianity" in a less easily stereotyped empirical term. I might offer the suggestion, building on others, that as any of us engage in spiritual practice, our self-awareness is encouraged, developed, or reinforced, that allows us to situate an externalized and objectified materialist view of "individualism" to an interdependent, interrelated spiritualized and responsible individualism in community and society. Spiritual and social responsibility has been a key focus there. An excellent case study of the forces in play took place when some number of UK Quaker Friends were acting in George Fox et al´s own component legacy for God through Jesus. The Quaker Friends by the 1780s were agitating against slavery, that inspired University-based activity, with essay winner T Clarkson becoming galvanized. He then joined a group of Quaker Friends and other Christians dissenting from the establishment Anglican church and other denominations, including W Wilberforce. Clarkson thus led the crucial organizing and research of the pioneering modern social movement campaign. Quaker lead co-founder George Fox had his context in British culture, its advanced educational culture since the likes of Alcuin the monk from around the year 800 and Charlemagne´s day, but up through the founding of two powerhouse Universities by monks who studied at either the U of Bologna or Paris, the latter where the monk Thomas Aquinas emerged from studying with Albertus Magnus to pivotal efforts. Thus, the little educated George Fox´s spiritual brilliance outside big city London in innovating silent meditative worship, stopping bowing to aristocrats, valuing individuals and women, and protesting injustice by 1650 is noteworthy. As is its convergence with University culture, and expression by individuals organizing in society at large. Newton´s and Locke´s own emergence at the same time, just after Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes and their groundbreaking work, reflects the role of the Christian University and society networks. Christian society, in fact, which we do well to call empirically, "in Jesus´ legacy with its standards of loving integrity." We can also then distinguish deviations into cruelty by the human bio-psychosocial component, which used to be identifiable already as the "temptations of the flesh" or perhaps the "animal nature." The context of the University also becomes important to identify, around Descartes´ so-called "Cartesian mind-body split." That is, while Pascal objected to Descartes directly about the problem as a doctrinal Catholic, we also can note the significance of Luther´s protests and inspiring the Reformation. Luther´s efffort was in fact a form of philosophical analysis, that owes its growing application to Thomas Aquinas´ Christianization of Aristotle´s esoteric First Cause at the U of Paris. Aquinas equated the co-eternal Universe and god. Aquinas used Zeno´s paradox that posited infinite divisions following mathematical abstraction. Aquinas observed the absurdity of that in empirical reality. No infinite regress between two points A and B in the real world. That insight was consistent with the Christian doctrinal hypothesis of a lawful Creator God creating a finite Universe. Aquinas approached that with his 5 arguments, including his empirical argument from motion. Even so, he seems to have been insecure in asserting the empirical hypothesis that the Universe was created. Perhaps a true scientific spirit in methodological naturalism. "I can´t do the experiments to prove it!" Meanwhile, the Cartesian split, mechanicist and secularist in nature, can be spiritualized by identifying Aquinas´ type of activity as Christian spiritual practice using the philosophical method, which uses principal methods of truth in logical coherence and correspondence to reality.

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Thinking that No One Knows Anything Contradicts Love Thy Neighbor

When something exists, we know it is real. And if something is imaginary, we know it doesn't exist. Of course we want our imaginings to exist, this is called wish fulfilment. It touches our hearts but bounces off our heads. \ The interesting problem is that we respond to our imaginings in a almost the same way we respond to reaity. This can be helpful in. terms of rehersal and planning, but the temptation is always there to believe our own imaginings. And worse our temptation is belief and faith, which takes the form of revealed religion and even pornography. Who would have believed that revealed religion and pornography use the same tropes and techniques. But no matter how far we stray in imagination, we can always return to reality, like a cool, clear mountain stream on a hot day. . 74 Comments Micah Hoover Socrates and Descartes gained notoriety for admitting no one knows anything. Why did you discover that they missed ? If people who looked at porn were believers, why wouldn't they believe they could find an actual woman who wanted to be with them?… See more Reply Share 1d Mark Rego Monteiro Micah Hoover Socrates insightfully observed that, paraphrased, "What he didn´t know, he WAS AWARE that he didn´t know." That is the insight that has been distorted. You may agree with the conventional distortion "nobody knows anything" as Christian dogmatists like to identify with verses like "me, a miserable sinner," but the Commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself, as Jesus did" isn´t about people not knowing anything. That itself is self-contradictory in the power of logical reasoning that was originally Christian spiritual practice, and can easily be reclaimed. Reply Share 20h Micah Hoover Mark Rego Monteiro If Socrates was aware he didn't know, that also means he didn't know. My view is a dogmatism and your view isn't? I don't see what is self contradictory between not knowing and loving someone. And I definitely don't see what is logical about spirituality. Love can be very absurd. Reply Share 56m Mark Rego Monteiro Micah Hoover As for Socrates, you missed him. No, he indicated that HE KNEW what it was he didn´t know. All told, Jesus´ legacy had to corrall ancient Greek philosophy in order to make modern globalized University-based, UN human rights society with structured pluralism. Love is only absurd if you haven´t understood the meaning of that phrase, that is my basic spiritual revelation. We don´t just live in Western Civilization. We live in Jesus´ legacy, and before we can shift to effective and widespread spiritual modernization, people need to understand that they have been hijacked and indoctrinated into ideological materialism in various ways. You just distorted a basic piece of information without batting an eye, that I am correcting you on a second time now. Dogmatism creates mental, and spiritual ruts. I am not dogmatic, but asserting the search for spiritual truth, having made the rather innovative effort to connect all the dots from Jesus to modern University-based philosophical truth, through scholarship with empiricism. What is "self-contradictory between not knowing and loving someone"? Well, it gets at the monster that Jesus´ legacy has become due to the power of its fruits and the despicability of human bio-psychosocial tendencies to indulge in the abuse of power, privilege, and pleasure. Loving people as Jesus did has been glorified in the traditional saints, and has become a widely forgotten value in the infamous turn of modern capitalist materialism. Jesus´ religion, even in the hands of someone as cultivated, progressive, and capable of insightful concern as former president and former community organizer Barack H. Obama. A progressive individual and Christian, he showed every sign of psycho-social spiritualist materialist reductionism, as typically polarized against fundamentalist supernaturalism. Obama talked in favor of a pro-active modern medical system, but made no mention of the benefits of updated spiritual psychosomatic medicine. For example. "Christian loving people" in modern society shows how Jesus´ mission was not in fact self-contained, but as open-ended as the term "love" itself. In 270 years, Anthony of the Desert became the pioneering Christian ascetic and Father of Christian monks. Western monasticism in John Cassian´s slightly later legacy led through Cassiodorus and Benedict of Nursia´s own influences to the founding of the U of Paris from monastic schools. Christian spiritual practice using philosophical scholarship with empiricism was then launched by the monk Thomas Aquinas. Jesus´ very legacy led to the University-based philosophical scholarship with empiricism that in fact is the very nature of "secular society": modern "science," business, democratic government, and social movements. And flitting about, or dancing on puppet strings, that figure with antiquated orientation overall, churches. The Religious Right dances on puppet strings, having been funded to obey modern profiteering business ideology and turn evangelical Christianity to their bidding. Mainstream progressives have also acquiesced, with Obama´s original Christian denomination United Church of Christ (formerly Congregationalist) having some impressive activist tools. The historically high-powered Quaker Friends have their Nobel Prize-winning American Friends Service Committee as a signpost. Gandhi´s own image as an interfaith Christian Hindu, along with FD Roosevelt´s vision and legacy of UN human rights form even more public beacons, although perhaps Rev MLK´s image does as well. Thus, "not knowing" in the form of not valuing philosophical truth, characterizes the responses to FDR´s legacy UN human rights and sustainability, both in the US and abroad. How right wing evangelicals followed Trump, and as they orient themselves by worshiping US Big Biz and ideologically and aggressively opposing only communism and smearing the political opposition, makes them the extreme example. The late CEO Ray Anderson, and apparent Methodist, had an awakening after the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit. After a client´s inquiry, he led the Interface Carpet multinational company to engage in massive ecological and social sustainability efforts. Matt Sleeth MD author of Serve God, Save The Planet and Mitch Hescox former coal executive and pastor leader of the Evangelical Environmental Network are two other prominent examples in that area. Love can be expressed in the simplest terms and level, but that has long failed to be sufficient as the fruits of Jesus´ legacy have been appropriated by profiteering businesspeople in the Industrial Revolution and converted into ideology after the 1929 Crash, FDR´s Social Gospel New Deal and UN, leading to all the events that resulted in Reagan´s overconfident delivery of anti-social, pro-rich kind of extremist business deregulation after his election. That is why my revelation has been the need to respond to all three main forms of ideological materialism: secular, economic, and scientific by taking authors´ insights like Fritjof Capra, JB Cobb, and Karen Armstrong to the next level. University liberal arts and sciences not only appears more balanced than scientific and economic materialism, but requires a viewpoint that acknowledges efforts in Multidisciplinary Studies. The simple and sensible label for the method and practice is Multidisciplinary Philosophy. Love can´t be expressed sufficiently in the face of toxic ideological sin that is for profiteering unlimited economic growth (funding anti-social Christian fundamentalism) and scientific supremacism. It requires the knowledge that I have benefited from, and am taking to the next level. Including the simple point Socrates made. And the differences between dogmatism and the standard of modernizing Jesus´ legacy and spiritualized Christian philosophical truth. That is, in fact, an interfaith Christianity in modern society with structured pluralism. But connecting those dots takes knowing how to relate to not knowing.

Saturday, May 14, 2022

Osho: "Christianity is Anti-Christ" Ouch. That´s A Little Polarized for a Higher Consciousness

In response to Osho´s talk beginning: "CHRISTIANITY IS ANTI-CHRIST Osho on Jesus Christ and Christianity I WILL SPEAK ON CHRIST, but not on Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. In fact, Christianity is anti-Christ — just as Buddhism is anti-Buddha, and Jainism is anti-Mahavir. Christ has something in him which cannot be organized: the very nature of it is rebellion and a rebellion cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it. Then, only the dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you,. It will not liberate you. That’s why from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you want Christ, you have to go beyond Christianity. ..... With Jesus, a chaos entered into human consciousness. Now the organization is not to be done on the outside, in the society; the order has to be brought into the innermost core of your being. Christ has brought a chaos. Now, out of that chaos, you have to be born totally new, an order coming from the innermost being. Not a new Church but a new man. Not a new society ...but a new human consciousness. That is the message." Mark Rego Monteiro Hmm. Are churches always "anti-Christ"? It´s more like degrees of integrity and hypocrisy, not merely oppositional polarization. It is about a new human consciousness, and that involves spiritual practice and modernization, and has the crucial resource of philosophical scholarship in Jesus´ own legacy. The principles of University-based, UN human rights culture now provide the structured pluralism and principles of logical coherence and real world correspondence that check anybody´s assertions. Even beloved gurus. Stereotyping creates its own problems of perception. Gandhi also fell into that trap a bit. Human beings in Jesus´ legacy have been able to develop and unleash the incredible power of historical Christian spiritual practice that developed monastic schools into University-based Christianized philosophical scholarship with empiricism. Their human inclinations, bio-psychosocial in nature, in people as merchants, soldiers, and monarch-aristocrat-politicians with their universal human role priorities, have appropriated those powerful tools of thought into universal human activities that involve violence and enslavement in ALL human cultures, worst of all post-tribal settlements. Christianity and WWII showed humanity what extremely high developments of destructive power even worse than colonialism´s own demonstrations can do. Not because Christians are worse than the rest of humanity, but because ALL of humanity is like that, and the Christians have developed the most powerful systems of destruction and, incidentally, CAN´T be ignored. It also requires finding the solution to the problem of the misuse of that power by merchants, soldiers, and politicians, and that resides in the good side of University-based culture and the meaning of Jesus Christ´s loving integrity itself. That´s what Social Gospel FD Roosevelt´s vision of and legacy in UN human rights and sustainability means for the world. It was proposed by his vision and legacy after the devastating consequences of WWII, and negotiated with the world at the moment when everyone had the heights of destructive power of humankind in their faces and the urgent imperative to take it or leave it. And they all took it at the key step of basic membership participation. All this stereotyping is the result of insufficient valuing of the truth, and instead indulging in popular scapegoating. Indeed, the value of the greats, led by Buddha and Jesus, is on display. I value Gandhi as the major prophetic figure of modern times, because his major message reflects valuing Jesus´ loving integrity in interfaith spiritual practice, which attains the rich meaning of University-based, UN human rights-sustainability structured pluralism. Christian churches aren´t the enemy, per se. Their literalist fundamentalist examples of low-end spectrum of integrity, high-end spectrum of hypocrisy are a big problem to note, while their examples of high-end spectrum integrity and low-end hypocrisy are a good thing to be aware of, with Barack H. Obama having been a United Church of Christ member, Al Gore having left the conservative SBC, and the Quaker Friends having lead and sparked the pioneering abolition modern social movement campaign, and more, among others. Gurus may help people take first steps to accept alternatives, but University-based philosophical scholarship, multidisciplinary like biological anthropology, is how "higher consciousness" can be grounded like Gandhi with his law degree, Jack Kornfield with his Buddhist monastic training and psychology degree, or Simone Weil with her philosophy degree.

In a Dark Room, with a Black Cat, What is Philosophy and Science All About?

This is a good meme to deconstruct, and revise, so I did, for adequate modern well-rounded spiritual-religious clarity, and addressing scientific materialism.... Mark Rego Monteiro It´s not all that smart, or "lighter side of science" at all. It´s badly done anti-anything but science, by a scientific materialist..A good comparative scenario is more like this: Philosophy is like somebody in a dark room who hears the meow of a black cat, sees its eyes, or feels its fur, then asks, "What does that meow, etc mean?" and then says, "Meows, etc, come from cats, or using empirical methodology, from a few possibilities including a cat. Therefore, there is, or a good hypothesis that there is, a black cat in the room." Metaphysics is like being in a dark room, doing the basic philosophy, and then asking, "Where did that cat and this room, and myself, come from, and who feeds it, who built it, and who am I, who developed University-based philosophy from monastic schools, and what does it all mean, anyway?" Good theology is like saying, "Descartes may have invented modern philosophy, but Thomas Aquinas earlier took Aristotle´s esoteric First Cause and established the metaphysical assumption of the lawful parental loving Creator God of a lawful Creation, so that we know that outside this dark room there is Western Civilization with its heritage in Jesus, the self-described Son of God and Man, and UN human rights-sustainability global community also with its heritage in Jesus´ loving integrity. And in modern domesticated society somebody feeds that cat, that first evolved thanks to Darwin-Wallace´s evolution as the creation went past abiogenesis, also studied in University-based knowledge in Jesus´ legacy." Science is like someone in a dark room with a black cat, hearing it meow and saying, "How does that cat meow? What is this darkness, anyway? Let me pet the cat repeatedly and count how many times it meows and purrs." And then saying, "Oh, yeah, this is scientific philosophy, in the first place." Scientific materialism is like an obsessive fan of science then saying "No, it isn´t scientific philosophy. It´s the absolute truth. There is no evidence for any other truth. Darkness? Black cat? Nobody is qualified except the scientist to tell me what the evidence means." A technological engineer might develop a flashlight. And, oh yeah, can easily be well-rounded enough to know that "f*ing" means someone is misdirecting their feelings of self-righteous anger instead of actually understanding their own psychological and spiritual-religious needs and what philosophy, etc really is about.

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Brain, Mind, Consciousness and "Intuition"

This dialogue developed in response to a meme that compared a Television being a box incapable of generating its own images, but that were received from an original generative source. The conscious human mind, it is suggested, is also dependent on its own transcendent source.
R B It actually is generated by brain which is responsible of storing informations gathered by the 5 senses. However, as conscious self develops, it gains independence, if and when, the informations resonate with the Infinite ocean of Universal Consciousness. Just like droplet of water, an individual consciousness once it unites with the UC it becomes the UC itself!
D D. A R B what about the 6th sense call it intuition if you will, or telepathy if you won't. What if telepathy is factual through thought stimulation carried electromagneticly from transmission of brain wave to brain wave. Would this add to our t… See more
R B D D. Arnold “6 sense”, is simply the integration of all inputs from the 5 senses!
D D. A R B But thought is interconnected to energy actual brain waves or frequency modulated energy Vibrations. We are not our bodies, who we really are no one can touch and no one can see .. We are both physical and metaphysical phenomenon with m… What if telepathy is factual through thought stimulation carried electromagneticly from transmission of brain wave to brain wave. Would this add to our thought perception of soul or spirit, if we connect thought & energy.
Mark Rego Monteiro R B I agree that it involves the five senses in integration, but I think it involves a higher order track that is the transpersonal, transcedentally oriented spiritual-religious. There´s a great testimony by two close neighboring families and a grandfather Mr. P who fell injured from his tractor. He crawled a way until he let out a frustrated exclamation prayer. An amazing sequence took place, with a daughter in high school having a brief visionary intuition that something was wrong with Mr. P. She prayed. At about that moment, her younger brother called the P family to invite the older son Rob there over to play video games. Rob began walking over, but stopped from his own perception of a strange, unknown noise. He looked around, and at a little distance, saw the elder Mr. P crawling. I started thinking about bio-electromagnetic fields way back when, but see that we have to talk about a deeper field, and where we arrive at the implications of a lawful and loving transcendental/immanent Divine Mind.
If we are talking about spiritual-religious practice, experience, phenomena, and knowledge, in the way that you insightfully mentioned as "resonance", which I associate with topics like musical experience and the Holographic paradigm of lightwave and information storage processes. One author talks about the brain´s serial processing in standard IQ, parallel processing in emotional-psychosocial intelligence, and then synchronized processing in spiritual intelligence. Transpersonal psychology, and the Transcendental locus and nature of the Cause of the Universe in philosophical reasoning give us some more conceptual and practical notions about the transcendental/immanent origins of "Universal Consciousness." Additional philosophical information gives us the notion of "emergentism", which basically helps accentuate the notion of a transcendental/immanent Entity, aka a Divine Mind.

God´s Perfection, Evil, and the Lie of the Abrahamic God? Or AN Whitehead´s Di-Polarity and Human Development?

Ke Stanl Is not God perfection? Is perfection fleeting? Does perfection change? No. That version of god would not evolve. That version of god would have known before creation what would become of mankind and yet he created us just the same. That is evil. The concept of the Abrahamic God is the lie. The god of Abraham is an abomination. An invention of man to control other men. Reply Share 1hEdited Mark Rego Monteiro Ke Stanl What we have is a modern society full of freedom of expression that actually has a center of standards and criteria, that of University-based philosophical scholarship. If God is "perfection," is it not also a Divine, eternally based perfection that infinitely transcends human efforts to limit it? In Einstein´s day, his peer and philosopher AN Whitehead developed the notion of the di-polar God, one that has both an atemporal/eternal nature and a temporal expression. Process Theologians like JB Cobb have worked with that to some degree, understanding the temporal expression of God as God´s relatedness to people. As someone with a degree in Biological Anthropology, I grounded myself in detail in the evolution of human speech, symbolic behavior, and religious ritual. That moves from biological genetics to human developmental processes. Human beings are commonly understood for our technological development, from the Paleolithic stone age to the Neolithic and the beginning of agricultural settlements and a new level of cultural activity that that made possible, including materialistic idolatry of idols in Mesopotamia, in which idols of gods like Marduk and Ishtar were stolen by neighboring groups, and it had meaning. The appearance of ancient Greek philosophy is often associated with an important advance, such that modern secular culture often idealizes, or even idolizes, the figures of Socrates and Plato, among others. Were they not the source of science, democracy, and virtues? Didn´t Christianity obstruct the advancement of science and knowledge? That is a common secular myth. In fact, Clement of Alexandria used Christian neo-platonic philosophy to try to argue that Plato was a proto-Christian, and Anthony of the Desert became a pioneering Christian ascetic and monk. Both traditions advanced and intertwined, until around 1100, when Christians turned their monastic schools into Universities at Bologna and Paris, then Oxford and Cambridge, and more. The monk Thomas Aquinas Christianized Aristotle, with Aquinas turning the esoteric First Cause of Aristotle into the virtually empirical metaphysics of the Judeo-Christian Creator in Jesus´ heritage for his legacy. It is that shift that linked the lawful Creator to a lawful Creation, the lawful Universe. Humans included. Jean Piaget is famous for his innovative developmental psychological studies of children. He was followed by his own proteges and legacy in psychology, with L Kohlberg studying stages of moral development. I took a freshman class in cross-cultural psychology with Jerome Kagan, no less. We learn about issues like Malinowski´s work in anthropology, where his studies of tribal people and their culture led him to ideas of how culture meets human individual and group biological and social needs. Psychologist Julian Jaynes gained some fame for his study of ancient historical literature, leading him to note shifts in consciousness, his book titled The Origins of Consciousness and the ...Bi-Cameral Mind. Thus, as ancient historian Arnold Toynbee also became famous for his discussions, we see that people had to learn things at various levels, technology from the Neolithic to the Copper, to the Bronze to the Iron Age and the heating of alloys and the like. However, there were also psychosocial and cultural processes of growth going on, with Hammurabi´s Code a famous example of law by a Babylonian King with his gods of the likes of Marduk and Ishtar. So, I suggest that calling the God of Abraham an "abomination" is an anachronistic projection based on ideological judgmentalism. In historical terms, we see that a man presented with a new relationship to God was engaged in a way that may have been familiar from the past in terms of committing a sacrifice, in a powerful visionary dialogue. Abraham´s obedience to this manifestation of God occurred in sociocultural terms of that level in human development, and what is still a human archetype in interpreting Jesus´ death by conspiracy and execution preceding his Resurrection. Even today, scapegoating enemies and materialistic addictions and ideologies in a fixated way shows how people avoid personal spiritual balance and empowerment. Endowing God with attributes of "perfection" may have an appropriate level of usage. However, to begin projecting that "God must have known and created us just the same. That is evil." is responded to by some philosophers as "God having sufficient moral reason, because by definition God is love." In fact, we observe that scientific reality in biological evolution, and then the rough and tumble of human psychosocial and cultural development is highly physical in nature, with "evil" related to Jesus´ very highly developed and advanced socioreligious historical appearance, message, and legacy in all its complexities. Jesus taught the personal effort of spiritual practice for personal growth, as in "clean the cup on the inside," already 2000 years ago, that now has the structure in Christian-derived University and constitutional Civil Rights society with diverse resources facing doctrinal churches in a range of literalist conservative to often helpful progressive stances. Thus, the way to reconcile human free will and value in individual personal growth in diverse ways is to draw on AN Whitehead´s di-polar concept of God. God´s "perfection" doesn´t make God evil, but God´s love as a transcendent, immaterial Divine Mind, the origin of Spirit, Truth, and Love, was presented to us with clarity in the multifaceted figure of Jesus´ life, mission, and messages. We now live in his legacy of Western Civilization with UN human rights-sustainability, and structured pluralism. If we dedicate ourselves to the implications of University-based philosophical knowledge, we can understand that humans have free will, and it is dedication to God´s love through Jesus that provides the necessary standard to accept the complexities and learn how to reconcile them with loving processes. If God had merely told Abraham, "Hey, love ya babe. Just go to Canaan, and we´re cool, ´kay?" that would be anachronistic, and even based on modern illusions of corporatized profiteering and technophile convenience consumerism. Carl Jung has given us a powerful concept in archetypes. If humans are well-oriented and educated in history, they can learn from it "the easy way." If not, as most people don´t get oriented that way, they have to do it "the hard way." Either way, it has been a long, strange trip, and not one to try to cover up with hatred and judgmentalism.

Monday, May 9, 2022

Colors Don´t Exist, Just Lightwaves and That Thing Human Perception. And Things Like Flowers? Different Knowledge Domains?

Mark Rego Monteiro Ah, attempts to shift perception. Yet, colors ARE really there, since light reflects off of objects which don´t absorb the wavelengths we perceive as those colors. With our color-coded-neural sensor configuration and its own biophysic-chemical details. Flowers color-codings that we perceive do have a relation to their visual attraction to insects. Reply Share 5h John McNeely Mark Rego Monteiro Light waves exist which is an electromagnetic wave comprised of energy derived from oscillating magnetic and electric fields. Color however, is a feature of human and animal perception that arguably doesn't exist as a physical entity. It does exist as an element of the human experience. Color is perception of wavelengths of light known as the visible spectrum. Reply Share 3hEdited Mark Rego Monteiro John McNeely Indeed, what´s involved is the contextualization of terminology, and your own personal conduct in interaction. You´re trying to insist with me that scientific terminology can reduce all phenomena to mere scientific terminology. "The yell… See more Reply Share 57mEdited Mark HustonGroup expert Any interpretation of colour from electro-magnetic waves by insects is as much an interpretation in their brain as well. This and the huge gap between atomic particles, and that those particles appear and disappear, and are not particles by more wave fields among others , are the basis for physicists conclusions that there is nothing really 'out there'. Reply Share 3h Mark Rego Monteiro Mark Huston Yeah, no. You´re simply trying to force one limited contextual issue and overemphasize it based on leaving out necessary and sufficient categories for classification. And with certain orientations in personal conduct and interaction. Simply put, discussing color only in terms of physics and human perception, or even insect perception, already enters into psychology, and neurophysiology, which both relate to biology. And guess what? As renowned biologist T Dobzhansky once said, "Nothing in biology makes any sense without evolution." Which gets us to ecosystems and evolutionary relationships. Color isn´t just lightwaves and perception. It´s also about the flower´s pigments and additional color-related features. Biologist´s use the term "color" with reference to the biological context, that isn´t just the lightwave, or the bee, but the flower itself. For starters. Moreover, that relates to the philosophical study of the phenomena to develop the knowledge using symbolic language in contexts whether biology, physics, or many others. The term "color" is used in biology, although biologists will usually also understand the physics context, along with appreciate the analogy to human contexts. The assertion that "colors don´t exist" has a scientific component, but it is a form of scientific reductionism and materialist ideology. In physics, methodological naturalism through instrumentation provides an alternative way to conceptualize colors as lightwaves. However, trying to assert that "colors don´t exist in the objective world" is false. It ignores that the term "color" has a sense-perceived referent to the symbolic language term used by a person. Here´s how. Scientific technical terminology of e-m waves is derived from scientific instrumentation and symbolic language in that philosophical domain of phenomena and knowledge. Those symbolic scientific terms are being interrelated here, as anywhere, with multiple alternative philosophical contexts. Thus, I looked up a biological research paper on bees, and was reminded of how they refer freely to colored flowers. The physical technical lightwave terms are available, but not exclusively necessary or preferred in doing biological studies. Your, and JM´s overemphasizing the signficance of physical scientific views goes with an imbalance in your considerations of a comprehensive assessment of necessary and sufficient views to establish the truth. It isn´t just what physicists think. Physicists don´t study bees, for example, recently voted by a British scientific society as the most important insect on the planet. Why? Because of sustainability concerns, in all likelihood. Thus, biologists have no problem referring to flowers as, say, blue and red, and doing experiments with either the flowers or simulations in labs, because it´s all physically, and empirically, real and out there. Physicists perceptions of there being "nothing out there" are based on their physical scientific domain studies, epistemically of phenomena and epistemologically developing knowledge, based on equally real experiments, say, Thomas Young´s 1801 double slit experiment that demonstrated the wave-like properties of light, or Millikan´s on the photoelectric effect, in classical times still, and more recent ones. Fritjof Capra´s Tao of Physics was his exploration of analogies in quantum physics and Eastern spiritual traditions. All of those are related to spiritual-religious meditative practices in perception, however, in distinction to physicists using instruments and scientific philosophical cognition. Capra went on to study alternative human phenomena and knowledge domains like economics and psychosomatic medicine. Not because "there is nothing really out there", but because old classical materialist words and ideas don´t apply and have to be reworked. Biologists studying bees provide a good first alternative step away from physics that you´re trying to beat to death and force like a square peg into a round hole. To get clear about different contexts, that color reflects not just lightwaves, electro-magnetic as it is, but also the reflecting objects, like flowers with pigments and physical qualities that correspond to genotypes and phenotypes. Those flower configurations also correspond to geo-time scale and historical evolutionary processes and dynamics. It´s not just the light waves. Its the objects, and living things, involved as referents. That corresponds also to the kind of philosophy being conducted, scientific or human-related, and as even the kind of scientific philosophy, physics or biology, say. So, time to hit the books. If you want to make a point, get ready to seek the truth. https://phys.org/.../2021-07-bees-tiny-petals-intense...

Jim Palmer´s Critique of Fundamentalism, and Spiritualizing the Solution Further and Recognizing Jesus´ Special Significance

Jim Palmer dnte7 9hh5rhf1a21st07 · 10 Things about Christianity that Jesus Would Vehemently Dispute if he Returned: 1. That his vision for a transformed society, which he called the "kingdom of God", got twisted into an afterlife fantasy about heaven. 2. That a religion was formed to worship his name, instead of a movement to advance his message. 3. That the gospel says his death solved the problem of humankind's separation from God, instead of saying that his life revealed the truth that there is no separation from God. 4. That the religion bearing his name was conceived by the theories and doctrines of Paul, instead of the truth that Jesus lived and demonstrated. 5. That he was said to exclusively be God in the flesh, putting his example out of reach, rather than teaching that we all share in the same spirit that empowered his character and life. 6. That the religion that claims Jesus, teaches that his wisdom and teachings are the only legitimate way to know truth and God. 7. The idea that humankind stands condemned before God and deserving of God's wrath and eternal conscious judgement, requiring the death of Jesus to fix it. 8. That people are waiting on Jesus to return to save the world and end suffering, rather than taking responsibility for saving the world and solving suffering ourselves. 9. That people think there is magical potency in uttering the name of Jesus, rather than accessing our own natural powers and capabilities to effect change. 10. That people have come to associate Jesus with church, theology, politics and power, rather than courage, justice, humanity, beauty and love. Jim Palmer 29 Comments Mark Rego Monteiro Many good points. However, his notion that the solution involves negating Jesus is its own form of problem. His assumption that Jesus will really return, instead of posing that as one possibility, is one thing. That would be fun, I would think, if Jesus did really return spectacularly. Leaving that as an unlikely outside possibility, continuing on. 1. Jesus´ vision of the Kingdom of Heaven is for this life. 2. To advance his message, including the importance of spiritual-religious practice. 3. That his life revealed that spiritual seeking while honoring Jesus and his message allow unified empowerment with and by God. 5. Jesus taught, "Go and heal the sick and spread the Good News to the poor. These things I do you too shall do and greater." He did teach that he was the Son of God and Man, giving him a basic dual-interactionist nature. Again, he taught that people who followed him, seeking the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth on the inside, could do the same things and greater. Palmer says, "that we all share in the same spirit that empowered his character and life" as we honor Jesus´ loving integrity in the Divine. 6. Jesus did teach that his way was important and of primary significance, and that is the way of God´s love through Jesus´ love in people seeking the Kingdom of Heaven on the inside and among others. History has shown, in Jesus´ legacy, that ancient Greek philosophy was immediately taken up in syncretism. Clement of Alexandria made an early effort to reconcile Greek culture with Jesus´ message, and called Plato a kind of Christian. Anthony of the Desert pioneered Christian asceticism, and became the Father of Christian monks. Christianity, meaning the people in Jesus´ legacy, and especially in Europe, Important things were happening in Christian culture including invasions by outside tribes at first which were converted by missionaries. Later by 711, Islam began invading Europe from the Southwest, until they were stopped in 732 by Charles Martel in their greatest single historical threat, among others. By 1258, the Khan Mongols destroyed Islamic Bagdad, but stopped their advance at Moscow, and never posed the same threat against Christian Europe. By 1150, indigenous Christian culture developed as Christians changed monastic schools into Universities, and the pivotal monk Thomas Aquinas was able to make important innovations. A good exercise, up to this point. Jesus is not sufficiently recognized by secular materialist spirituality. If Jesus is distorted by Christian fundamentalists and their economic materialist funders and corporate-consumerist ideology, their distorted passion is a perverted version of a true spiritual religious power that is virtually "magical" and missing from secular materialist spiritual progressives. That is my analysis as a longtime interfaith seeker and eco-social justice activist, having identified with the spiritual-religious power through the sequence of modernized transcendent transpersonal psychosomatic medicine and Christian Science, along with spiritualized Unitarian Universalist interfaith.

Sunday, May 8, 2022

From Spiritual But Not Religious to Multidisciplinary Philosophy in Jesus´ Legacy

Pete Blo Pete Blo 6 months ago Another perspective to consider is the analogy of sports and the arts. So many people enjoy watching athletes do their thing and support their favorite teams with a religious zeal. – even to the point of starting fights with adherents of opposing teams. People practically worship their favorite artists, especially actors and musicians. In all these variations it is extremely common for people to consider their favorite athlete, team, actor/actress, musician, band, etc. to be the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)–practically a god or at least a demi-god. Out of every million of these fans, maybe a few thousand get inspired to try their hand at the sport or art they admire. Out of those thousands of dabblers perhaps a couple dozen take it seriously enough to attempt the work. Out of hundreds of those, one or two are serious enough to continue the work required for mastery after initial failures or setbacks. Out of those, perhaps a few have enough perseverance, patience, persistence, and capability to accomplish something significant. (This is a loose paraphrase of an Indian description of the spiritual life.) 99.99% of religious people (no matter the religion) are really nothing more than fans. Hopefully benign, but in the current era they are getting increasingly malignant. Many of these cannot discern the difference between being a malignant dangerous "fan" of their religion and actually spiritually transforming. SBNR people may be attempting to live outside of these various religious "fan" clubs, but that doesn't mean they haven't simply created their own new "spiritual" fan club. Membership in any religion or SBNR philosophy is no guarantee of achieving something spiritually significant nor is membership in any particular religion a guarantee of NOT achieving something spiritually significant. The current state of religion and spirituality requires something like a SBNR movement to prevent complete malignant calcification of existing religions. 2 Wil Hou Wil Hou 2 months ago Yes, what you are touching on is how individual the inner life is. We are in community, experiencing effort, conflict and struggle - just the right environment/conditions for growth/to be grown, while loving and serving our fellow man/beings.! It’s a full life, with free-choice and decisions galore. &Just enough time. Green Peacemst Green Peacemst 0 seconds ago Great point. I have been and continue to be a fan of University-based culture, and have seen the necessity to integrate and resacralize all my secularized, desacralized cultural inputs and common notions. Thus, in responding to anti-theists, mostly scientific materialists, but also fundamentalists, I´ve drawn on my own background to identify the need to supersede "science" as the prime source of status academic work. Comparative Religious Studies actually is part of what I recognize, but even more broadly, to capture liberal arts and sciences, as Multidisciplinary Philosophy, and Theology, and in fact noting that it is in Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity of structured pluralism. They were talking about the compartmentalization factor, and trying to get into activating comparative thinking. It´s a modernized Christian impulse advancing in the end Christianity´s trump card. It operates around Jesus´ two loving Commandments, with no 2 being "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Thus, colonialism was perpetrated by nominal Christians prioritizing merchant, soldier, and political power motivations. Christianity has its self-correcting empirical mechanisms in resurgent integrity, with University-based philosophical scholarship central to that, US based constitutional democracy and Civil Rights, and its elevation to UN human rights and sustainability. Thus, globalized secularized Christianity has been established with its strengths and weaknesses. Unsustainability and human rights abuses, by the UN related University-based standards with structured pluralism, allow for diversity, but require modernization under pressure of existing problems and the Christian basis of secularized educational and western cultural tools and sustainability standards. Gandhi´s interfaith Christian Hinduism was something he developed with a law school education and Jesus´ Jewish heritage and legacy in social justice prophetic justice as essential and unique. Even Buddhism´s high lovingkindness integrity failed to impact India much, or achieve extensive development on its own. Prophetic social action was pioneered by Elijah under God´s influence, so that he spoke truth to power, to King Ahab, and was protected. Key associations and causal connections through spiritual-religious practice, study, experience, and phenomena.

Saturday, May 7, 2022

Quantum Physics Ended WWII, but Christianity Is Supporting Putin´s Russian Invasion and Dangerous Threats?

De Ran Mark Rego MonteiroQuantum physics, of course, brought an end to World War 2 - and may bring an end to mankind but if we don't self-destruct, god knows what we will learn. Physicists agree that what we have learned so far is the tiniest of tips of the iceberg. Imagine clinging to Bronze Age beliefs at such an exciting time. I can't. PS Evolution won't stop with humanity as we know it, unless we blow ourselves up. Imagine a world where one mad man, supported by a huge branch of Christianity could destroy us all. THAT is our reality right now. Be blessed. Quantum physics developed and practiced by scientists was used by Social Gospel FD Roosevelt´s adminstration and military divisions to avoid potentially greater losses of allied lives. Your very phrasing is abstracted from its human psychosocial reality referents. Bombs don´t kill people. People drop bombs that kill people. Quantum physics developed and practiced by scientists was used by Social Gospel FD Roosevelt´s adminstration and military divisions to avoid potentially greater losses of allied lives. Your very phrasing is abstracted from its human psychosocial reality referents. Bombs don´t kill people. People drop bombs that kill people. On the other hand, you try to take credit for "Quantum physics" in ending WWII, and to blame Christianity for Russia´s invasion of Ukraine and weapons threats. You´re hypocrisy, derived from Christianity´s unprecedented complexity in the legacy of Descartes´ type of mind-body split and the corporate business profiteering of the Northern European East India Companies, is showing. All forms of humans indulging in the bio-psychosocial symbol-using tendency to abuse power, privilege, and pleasure in forms of ideological materialism, and reject spiritual-religious practice and integrity standards. What "we" can learn requires that we practice diligent awareness of some key values, currently dominated by "GDP and economic growth for executive and shareholder profiteering", instead of "Love thy neighbor as thyself.", although NATO support of Ukraine has been doing that in a Just War context. Your reference to scientific philosophical knowledge as the standard of unknown knowledge, you follow by using a label of belittlement "Bronze Age beliefs," implying the scientific materialist stereotype that technological progress equates to progress and, in fact apparently, supremacy. Yet, we see in scientific philosophical analysis alone that the ancient origins in the Big Bang that long before biological life itself began on Earth, before any human beliefs, before even "dumb rocks" existed, that something happened that defies physicists calculations and interpolations. We see scientific materialists like yourself in denial and fixated on "science" without awareness of its place among a range of philosophical disciplines, and in fact just one example of human empiricial psychosocial philosophical disciplines. The philosophy of religion and metaphysics is able to analyze the conceptual dynamics, informed by scientific philosophy, no less. Where physical processes and concepts break down at the Big Bang white hole singularity, philosophical concepts indicate to us that the Cause of the Universe is timeless, powerful, and immaterial. Not ever left at any "multiverse generator," but the Cause of any such hypothesis. Not merely physico-energetic, we can philosophically and empirically seek other potential immaterial objects. Abiogenesis hasn´t actually got many key details of the origin of life, and at the very least, is in the territory of philosophical emergentism and the need to understand complexity processes and dynamics. Could the Transcendent Cause of the Universe be a timeless, powerful, and immaterial form of DNA/RNA? Except that we note that DNA proceeded once formed along a contigent route of complex ecosystemic and geo-physico-energetic historic processes. Until mammalian brains and rudimentary forms of consciousness emerged. Could the Transcendent Cause of the Universe be a mammalian type and level brain like a cat or elephant, dolphin, or gibbon, or even a higher primate orangutan, gorilla, or chimpanzee? Those brains that we know show some forms of sentience. Are human brains any different? Human psychologists and physical anthropologists have tried to teach higher primates to communicate with symbols, as with the researchers working with Koko the Gorilla, or Nim Chimsky the chimp. Human beings, however, go back to complex users of symbols like Pavlov illustrated basically with dogs, JB Watson with a child, a rabbit, and a gong, and with complex learning theory like Piaget. Einstein attracted a lot of attention because of the simplicity of his energy-matter equivalence equation with constant using the speed of light squared. His personality also shined through in his violin playing, bike riding, and sticking his tongue out at the camera. Less famous, however, was his appreciation of the vivid quality of Jesus, and the amazing quality of Gandhi, such that Einstein gushed, "Who would believe that such a man ever walked the Earth?" Yet, Gandhi, with his wife Kasturbai, had drawn on Jesus and Jesus´ legacy in his law degree and social movement activism in his interfaith Christian-Hinduism. Not to mention the often neglected and misrepresented FD Roosevelt influenced by the Social Gospel, his wife Eleanor, and related contemporary examples like Afro-Ams Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda Goode and pioneering Black psychologist Francis C Sumner. And the implications of the Nazi Germans and Soviet Russians. All of which combines to illuminate the concept of Einstein´s, Gandhi´s, FDR´s, Eslanda Robeson´s, and FC Sumner´s minds. Is the human mind powerful enough to create the Universe and its full range of complex and emerging processes? No, therefore there is something equally or more powerful, a Transcendent Divine Mind. That is among the highest modern logical philosophical thinking that appropriately situates "science", and refutes scientific materialism´s ideological assumptions. Your attempt to cite the military technological threats of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine notably continues your kind of simplistic scapegoating. Your contradictions are self-refuting, and self-incriminating. You want "Quantum physics" to have ended WWII, but deny any awareness of the secular materialism that tried to insert democracy in Germany without compensating societal mechanisms either in Civil Society or socioeconomic safeguards, along with the key strengths of the "Social Gospel" FDR. In the modern Russian invasion, you ignore the two-edged nuclear sword not only for its environmental problems, but its steroid-pumping effects on who? The post-Cold War ex-KGB president and product of what? The US profiteering ideological socioeconomic context that first converged with militarism during the Cold War, then avoided Social European social market influence in the conversion. Soviet Russia itself had resulted from its own secular materialist distorted social extremist ideology. "Christianity" is a human psychosocial spiritual-religious phenomena that requires more complex empirical and symbolic analysis to avoid the careless kind of stereotyping you try to push, as is typical of your ideological viewpoint. Putin reflects the way that the fruits of Christian spiritual-religious practice in empirical philosophical scholarship have been unleashed by humans indulging in their bio-psychosocial tendencies to abuse power, privilege, and pleasure. The Russian Christian Church has not shown high integrity in relation to Jesus´ loving standard of integrity. The relation is similar to how the UN human rights and sustainability have shown a high standard of modern integrity forms in FDR´s Social Gospel legacy negotiated with the world. The US´s own general religious submission, conservative and progressive, to profiteering businesspeople´s economic ideologies, and Social Europe´s own failure to insist on condemning the excesses, are all underlying complicit factors. Your own stereotyping of religion so ideologically, failing to recognize the basic social movement alternatives that directly reflect high integrity Christianity´s continuous presence is typical. George Fox et al´s Quaker Friends embodied high integrity Christianity in the English Reformation, sparking the pioneering social movement campaign of abolition in the British Empire and US North. Meanwhile, at the same time, "Science" and technology were being appropriated by economic materialists in the British Industrial Revolution as they treated workers brutally. Social Movements like the women´s movement immediately followed. Often ignored is the alternative social economic model noted by JS Mill and devalued by Karl Marx and F Engels. Robert Owen´s, inspired by a Christian doctor, himself inspired, along with T Clarkson´s abolition movement, the co-operative co-ownership pioneering store and business model at Rochdale near Manchester is reflected in its 1895 international organization ICA and the US organization founded by 1920, the NCBA. The ILO had a co-op division, and the UN created COPAC for co-ops in 1970. Besides that is the value of understanding spiritual-religious phenomena and practice like prayer and meditation, also typically devalued by your kind of position. OC Simonton MD gives one of the most modern examples demonstrating the reality of healing prayer phenomena, medically attested, medically impossible healing with spiritual-religious testimony. You finish with the blessing, "Be Blessed." The implications of using that terminology involve recognizing the integrity of spiritual-religious phenomena, not denying it. Stay kind, stay curious, and stay connected to Divine Love in the West´s spiritual-religious integrity origins and legacy, and accomplishment of framing structured pluralism.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

R K Says, Humanity Barely Has Consciousness, So God Can´t Have Human Proportions

R K@ Mark Rego Monteiro The imposition of the "identity" and "intentionality" construct of humanity, a creature just barely beginning the development of consciousness, onto the origin of the Universe, and of Being itself, is understandable - to be expected. But a moment's reflection reveals that all the thousands of religious myths of humanity are creations of humanity, projections onto the great mystery of Being by an immature, impulsive, highly self-centered, egotistic, insecure creature trying desperately to reduce the unfathomable mystery of existence to something of human proportions - viola - humanity's gods. Someone we can talk to, Someone who cares, our dreamed of perfect Mommy or Daddy. Our only real path to spiritual growth is through inward searching and understanding, since our 'self' is the only aspect of existence we experience From Within, our only actual link to the Essence of Being. Concocted dogmas and rapacious, pretentious rigmaroles passed down from on high by centuries of popes are not the way to wisdom or spiritual expansion - but rather a dead end, as should be blatantly obvious to anyone bothering to take even cursory advantage of recorded history. %%% R Ki PS - 'Transcendent Immaterial Mind' is a fantasy construct. It is clear that, through the evolution of life, consciousness emerged through the mounting complexity of neurological development. If perfect mind, perfect consciousness per-existed, before the developmemnt of our material selves, why go through the martial process at all ? Why the redundancy ??? Why bother with matter??? I shbmit to you that Matter IS Spirit. Equally sacred, and holy and transcendent as any sensation, instinct, intuition, feeling, emotion, thought or aspiration we experience as within Body, through Body, as Body. The degradation of physical existence is the great conceit, the wanton arrogance, the essential sin of the judo-christian tradition, the millennia old spell of which is beginning to crack and will surely shatter to shards of sand under the solid stones of the path to truth. &&&
Your characterization defining "religious myths (as merely) creations of humanity" is psychological reductionism, apparently derived from Freud, and not adequately empirically and philosophically informed reasoning, not least of all in anthropological terms. Describing "humanity" as "immature, impulsive, highly self-centered, egotistic, and insecure creature trying desperately to reduce the unfathomable mystery of existence ... to human proportions" is simply its own form of skewed projection approaching 'Original Sin' and not a balanced assessment itself. Modern society has its own toxic condition in which that negative aspect of humanity, its bio-psychosocial tendency, has been able to assume crisis level of control by ignoring spiritual-religious practice, indulging in the abuse of socioeconomic power through the likes of psychological ignorance, greed, and hatred. That balance in tribal cultures sustaining spiritual-religious practices is more recognizable. Behavioral anthropologist ED Chapple, no less, drew on Pavlov´s dog´s conditioned bell as symbol learning and JB Watson´s behavioral psychology to give field studies a behavioral anthropological framework. He identified the basis as individual and group emotional-interactional patterns, and later called them rhythms. The focus on spiritual-religious practice goes a little further and reflects primal spiritual-religious experience in human tribal experience, and schizophrenia itself has been identified cross-culturally in Jos. Campbell´s citing J Silverman MD a while back, and J Polimeni MD more recently made a formal evolutionary study and hypothesis. In general field studies, Anthropologist Richard Katz wrote Boiling Energy about his studies of the Kalahari Kung San healing rituals. Observing student shamans in training in the tribes, Katz notes in idiomatic terms what we might begin to translate in psycho-emotional terms: "As the students begin to dance through the night, their 'num' may begin to 'boil' and 'kia' (spiritual healing state of consciousness) becomes imminent."
Not unlike Freud´s own original observations as he sat as a neurologist with patients with pain and no appearance of organic wounds or conditions. He had to listen to patients words in his book Studies of Hysteria, all before his empirically refuted shift to an ideological metaphor in the Oedipus Conflict that blamed children based on Freud´s own desire to deflect social issues of what he first called "seduction" of children. Your Freudian source was already compromised in that crucial way. Freud´s early work, however, shows how he simply sat, relaxed the patient, asked them to visualize and associate around their pain, and he took notes and encouraged their sharing. He noted their healing and used his notes to develop his basic ideas. He developed his "id" from when they said "It hurts," and the "ego" from when they said, "I feel better, thanks." And so on. And so, as Jung demonstrated with his more mainstream spiritual-religious family and cultural background, he even caused Freud to faint on two occasions. It is shamanistic and in more modern terms, spiritual-religious practice, experience, phenomena, and knowledge long before Jesus and in other cultures, as far as archeology, or paleo-archeology can reach maybe 70,000 years in the Paleolithic in Africa with a snake image, or 40,000 years ago in a European cave with the Loewenmensch Lion man figurine that we see abstract representations suggestive of shamanic activity. And its psychosocial and emotional benefits understood with the power of Jesus´ legacy in modern philosophical empirical scholarship. You refer to the issue of "someone we can talk to, someone who cares" and then begin to ridicule it by infantilized terms of "mommy or daddy." That´s an example of how you sabotage your own conduct and reasoning. The legitimate quality of reference of the first part was demonstrated by Freud´s early work, and to the degree he continued with those elements. It was advanced by his diverging students as far as they remained in the integrity of those behavioral qualities. I´m happy to reflect that my dad oriented me to the value of education and psychology early on as an atheist humanist. He even had a realization at one point when I was in high school and before he got his fatal cancer complex, to hug me one time and say, "I love you." Around that same time, no less, I picked up a book by a religious scholar Huston Smith with a very scholarly approach about the value of religion and interest in the structure of them. I liked the Chinese Tao, myself, and Smith´s description as "a creative continuum that is always accessible." I also like Unitarian Universalist interfaith´s interest and support of spiritual paths in a pamphlet. Hardly reducible to your infantilizing distortion, it refutes any relate assertion, and exposes your own psychological projection. Whether my empirical personal experience, or the empirical references I give. Smith himself identified as an interfaith Christian I learned, and in his scholarship simply conveyed references to God with respect. Unitarian Universalism refers to the "direct experience with the Source of mystery" in its principles, for another. Your assertion that the "inward searching and understanding" is important, our inner "self the only aspect of existence we experience within", is itself a fixated view. You don´t acknowledge the sources of your own views, that I am able to begin categorizing and classifying appropriately based on my respect for my education, and the source in University-based philosophical scholarship. Where do you think any of your attempts at logical reasoning come from? You give no indication of being aware. Prominent materialists have tried to paint atheist humanists as the source of "science", when in fact they were Christian humanists who since Descartes´ "mind-body split" and mechanicization and naturalism of terms, have obscured the Christian contexts and assumptions that led them not to reject "Love thy neighbor as thyself", as in "Hate thy neighbor, and love thyself." That tendency is reflected in certain popular authors, with Dawkins having authored The Selfish Gene in his day, and scholars in certain disciplines like economics approaching similar viewpoints and actual conflicts in their contexts.
Biology itself involves recognizing more complex dynamics like inclusive fitness in which relatives value each other´s survival as important as their own, and reciprocal altruism. Those don´t refute spiritual-religious practice, experience, phenomena, and knowledge, but help understand how potential ranges of inclinations exist in human beings. We do, however, see, historical tendencies of tribal conflict, and universal human violence and enslavement, which corresponds to the historical significance of the rise of agricultural settlements, and the survival of the relatively politically weak culture of the Hebrew-Jewish people and the appearance of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ´s appearance is clarified with adequate treatment of how the Greeks splintered and failed to generate any unifying culture based on its most advanced philosophers, as Alexander the Great emerged from Aristotle´s lessons through assassination and execution of rivals, conquest through massacre, and died young himself by assassination, leading to a four-way Civil War. Followed by the Roman Empire´s brutal demonstration of conquest at Corinth, later Athens, and decline with Julius Caesar´s dictatorship, assassination, relatives´ revenge, and deification. Thus, all this psychosocial information can be studied by empirical philosophical scholarship in Jesus´ legacy of University-based study. It´s hardly negligible in relation to inner spiritual and psychological work. That refutes your subjective extremist claim. The rejection of external spiritual-religious phenomena was made formally by David Hume, and is simply fallacious. Craig Keener has noted how Pascal´s niece at that time had been a well-known sufferer of an open wound, and was cured by touching a relic. The confusion of false relics with genuine spiritual-religious faith is a form of psychological projection fallacy. If the truth of Jesus´ empirical origins were experienced by Pascal´´ s niece through a false relic making God through Jesus´ truth vivid, it is a healing that corresponds not to merely a psychosomatic healing, but a psychosocial, cultural one based on spiritual-religious components with transpersonal and transcendental implications. Your equating past information as "concocted and pretentious" confuses the complex psychosocial and cultural phenomena studied in University-based philosophical scholarship with empiricism with no acknowledgment at all of important standards. Instead, you are merely pushing your own psychological projection, and attempting to push that as "knowledge." Shaking pasteurized organic grape juice as disproving the existence of primitive manure-fertilized grapes needing sunlight is reductionist materialism, here your kind of spiritualized secular form. Certainly more advanced than Dawkins et al´s kind of non-spiritual kind.
Your response to the issue of a transcendental immaterial mind is similar in your attempt to push your own preferential assumptions onto the rigorous and empirical based reasoning that I believe I actually began to present. Empirical philosophy is studying the reality of a lawful creation, thanks to Thomas Aquinas´ work and Descartes´ et al´s follow up, and that includes the insights into minds already beginning with Bishop Berkeley that reignited interest in his work. More formally, work on emotions and preliminary aspects of psychology all bore fruit with Freud-Jung et al´s work. Your preferences for trying to ignore the meaning of the Cause of the Universe, and empirical psychosocially informed conceptual analysis requires you applying yourself to address your own disregard for philosophical scholarship and the University-based scholarly community. Again, as someone has argued elsewhere, supermarkets don´t make farms unnecessary. Pasteurized grape juice doesn´t make dirt, organic grapes, and the sun non-existent. You, however, need to study the work and learning the meaning of philosophical truth: logical coherence and correspondence to reality. Jesus Christ is part of what needs to be explained. You may not be ready to take that on at this time, and have the right to say, "I´m not interested." However, if you take it up, you are held to the standards of the University-based philosophical scholarship that´s involved in empirical logical philosophical positions trying to assert knowledge and truth.