God

[Melchizedek = Michael]

Dutch knows I have him on permanent block,but still replies!

 

[BidenPresident]

Dutch knows I have him on permanent block,but still replies!

Yes, Doc Dutch is a stalker.

Now how did I know that stalker would send me a notification?!

 

[Dutch Uncle]

Dutch knows I have him on permanent block,but still replies!

That's because I reserve the right to point out fucked up people.

 

[Dutch Uncle]

Yes, Doc Dutch is a stalker.

Is that what all you girls say when you go to the powder room together?

 

[Cypress]

While I am unfamiliar with what Huxley is getting at here it actually is kind of a liberation to realize that there is not inherent "meaning" to life, at least in my humble opinion.

I have long been of the opinion that the "meaning" of life is whatever I bring to it. There is no necessary reason for things to be as they are.

There's a great song by the Cure called "Where the Birds Always Sing" (sorry to invoke a goth rock group here but it's a great set of lyrics):

The world is neither fair nor unfair
The idea is just a way for us to understand
But the world is neither fair nor unfair
So one survives
The others die
And you always want a reason why

But the world is neither just nor unjust
It's just us trying to feel that there's some sense in it
No, the world is neither just nor unjust
And though going young
So much undone
Is a tragedy for everyone

It doesn't speak a plan or any secret thing
No unseen sign or untold truth in anything...
But living on in others, in memories and dreams
Is not enough
You want everything
Another world where the sun always shines
And the birds always sing
Always sing...

I don't know very much about Huxley

Disintegration by the Cure was the best album of the 1980s

 

[Saint Guinefort]

You made it sound like your solid citizens were on there way to salvation because they are good people

I know enough about soteriology to understand the point. And no, that is not what I meant. They are just good people to be around. Unlike the ravening wolves in sheep's clothing that often pass for "Christian" you meet from time to time.

 

[Cypress]

Since they were living at the end of the British Victorian age, I can see how all that sexual repression was depressing and dark.

A psychological theory on Jack the Ripper blames, in part, repressive Victorian ideas on sex. Like the preacher's kid is often thought to be one of the wildest of any group, there might be something to backlash of repressive ideas.

Huxley seems to have been somewhat after the Victorian era since he lived well into the 20th century. The roaring 20s was supposed to have been an era of decadence.

Still, I can't see basing the value of life around sex, that would be a pretty shallow and meaningless existence.

 

[IBDaMann]

If He wills it to be so then there will be a rock He can’t move. However, God can then choose to move the rock and He will be able to do so because He is God.

You state that God always has the ability to move the rock that he cannot move. Your logic seems spot-on and air tight.

So the answer to this question is yes and no ...

You state that the answer is "yes" and "no." Of course it is. It seems pretty obvious to me.

... but it is not the answer that is important it’s the logic behind it.

Well, now that you put it that way, it's totally clear. I get it. Now I can totally see why you get called in to fix organizations that are broken. It's the logic that's important. Who knew?

Two opposite reactions cannot happen at the same time and this even applies to God.

Absolutely correct! This is very astute of you. If two opposite reactions were able to occur at the same time, you'd see acids and bases neutralizing each other, you'd see diminishing returns within economies of scale, forces with opposite equal forces, and all sorts of crazy shit! I'm glad that we have universal prohibitions against opposite reactions occurring at the same time. Whew, we dodged that bullet.

I am disappointed that nobody here was able to figure this out

I'm so ashamed. My head is hanging low. I'm scraping my chin.

 

[IBDaMann]

I am just in awe of the universe and life.

... unless it would be more convenient to kill it, right?

Kill the universe, that would be difficult for a mere human.

That was lame ... on an elementary school level. If you require additional clarification, sure, I'm happy to help. Let's run through it again:

I am just in awe of [the universe and] life.

... unless it would be more convenient to kill it, right? (referring to "life")

 

[Melchizedek = Michael]

Huxley seems to have been somewhat after the Victorian era since he lived well into the 20th century. The roaring 20s was supposed to have been an era of decadence.

Still, I can't see basing the value of life around sex, that would be a pretty shallow and meaningless existence.

At 18 sex seems incredibly important ,every passing decade it becomes less important

 

[Dutch Uncle]

Huxley seems to have been somewhat after the Victorian era since he lived well into the 20th century. The roaring 20s was supposed to have been an era of decadence.

Still, I can't see basing the value of life around sex, that would be a pretty shallow and meaningless existence.

Fun, but slightly depressing.


Born in 1894, Aldous would have been 26 at the beginning of the Roaring 20s. He was able to skip WWI due to partial blindness but would have seen the results of the war upon his peers. He'd also have seen the decadence of the 20s as you pointed out.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aldous-Huxley

Brave New World (1932) marked a turning point in Huxley’s career: like his earlier work, it is a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses Huxley’s distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology. The novel presents a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State. The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to shoot barbs at the emptiness and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley’s growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative....

...The author’s lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century life, expressed most forcefully in Brave New World but also in one of his last essays, written for Encyclopædia Britannica’s 1963 volume of The Great Ideas Today, about the conquest of space, make him one of the representative writers and intellectuals of that century.

 

[Cypress]

Fun, but slightly depressing.


Born in 1894, Aldous would have been 26 at the beginning of the Roaring 20s. He was able to skip WWI due to partial blindness but would have seen the results of the war upon his peers. He'd also have seen the decadence of the 20s as you pointed out.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aldous-Huxley

I thought it was important to read 1984, but I never got around to Brave New World.

Both Orwell and Huxley based their idea on the Russian writer Yevgeny Zemyatin, who wrote a book called We in 1923, about a totalitarian mass surveillance State in a dystopian future.

 

[IBDaMann]

Wrong.

I am correct and you are incorrect in an absolute sense. This is not a subjective matter and you have no wiggle room. I'll rip you apart if that's what you want. Bring it on.

There are two general classes.

Nope. It all comes down to "if P1 is a lack of X and P2 is a lack of X then P1 = P2", if P1 =~X and P2=~X then P1=P2. This will not end well for you.

The "A" in "Atheism" means "lack of" ... hence "athesim" means "lack of theism." You don't have any wiggle room on this.

If Person 1 has atheism version P1, and Person 2 has atheism version P2, then P1 = P2, and Person 1's atheism = Person 2's atheism

QED. Have a great day.

One group makes the universal negative claim "There is no God"

You confused yourself with your own poor wording. A person who affirmatively believes that there are no gods is a theist, whose theism is devoid of gods, like Budhism, the religions of the Sioux, etc ... That there are no gods is an affirmatively theistic statement, and that precludes atheism.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in any gods and I do not believe that there are no gods (because there might be). I also do not believe in any spirit of the river. I also do not believe in the Buddhist Yama, guardian of the direction South, or in any of the Buddhist celestial Gandharvas. I have no theistic beliefs. I lack all theism.

 

[IBDaMann]

We have no evidence of earth existing before the sun,

We have no evidence of the sun existing before the earth.

 

[Dutch Uncle]

I thought it was important to read 1984, but I never got around to Brave New World.

Both Orwell and Huxley based their idea on the Russian writer Yevgeny Zemyatin, who wrote a book called We in 1923, about a totalitarian mass surveillance State in a dystopian future.

Notice the time period when all were written, the first half of the 20th Century. A time of both an astounding leap in science and technology but also the horrifying mass murder of almost 100 million human beings. Most of them civilians.

https://worldhistory.us/military-history/casualties-of-world-war-i.php

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/casualties-of-world-war-ii/
Some 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.

 

[IBDaMann]

The same holds true for negatives that are close to universal...negatives, for instance, that involve distances too great for humans to travel.

No, Frank, you are describing the concept of unfalsifiability. Religions are unfalsifiable. Science is entirely falsifiable.

 

[Saint Guinefort]

I am correct and you are incorrect in an absolute sense. This is not a subjective matter and you have no wiggle room. I'll rip you apart if that's what you want. Bring it on.


Nope. It all comes down to "if P1 is a lack of X and P2 is a lack of X then P1 = P2", if P1 =~X and P2=~X then P1=P2. This will not end well for you.

The "A" in "Atheism" means "lack of" ... hence "athesim" means "lack of theism." You don't have any wiggle room on this.

If Person 1 has atheism version P1, and Person 2 has atheism version P2, then P1 = P2, and Person 1's atheism = Person 2's atheism

QED. Have a great day.


You confused yourself with your own poor wording. A person who affirmatively believes that there are no gods is a theist, whose theism is devoid of gods, like Budhism, the religions of the Sioux, etc ... That there are no gods is an affirmatively theistic statement, and that precludes atheism.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in any gods and I do not believe that there are no gods (because there might be). I also do not believe in any spirit of the river. I also do not believe in the Buddhist Yama, guardian of the direction South, or in any of the Buddhist celestial Gandharvas. I have no theistic beliefs. I lack all theism.

Sorry you think so highly of yourself.

 

[Saint Guinefort]

We have no evidence of the sun existing before the earth.

Except the earth is formed from the accretionary disk around the sun.

Again, you seem to think more of yourself than is warranted.

 

[PostmodernProphet]

He invented the word.

then he didn't say otherwise.......why did you lie?.....

 

[IBDaMann]

those who deny are atheists.......

Yes, I am one such atheist who does not affirmatively believe. I also do not affirmatively believe the negative.
Those who reject are theists.

those who will not choose are agnostics

Nope. These are atheists, such as myself. Agnosticism, i.e. the position that a particular set of beliefs is knowable, has nothing to do with whether one holds that set of beliefs or what choices one makes.

......then there are those who do not even think about it.......those are the apathetic.

Nope. They merely haven't thought about it. It is not the case that people are somehow apathetic about everything that isn't their top priority at the moment.

The question of what one believes only considers what one believes, not what he considers knowable, what his energy level is, what choices he makes, etc ... All that matters is what is believed.

There are theists, i.e. those who hold some affirmative belief about the supernatural, and atheists such as myself who do not hold any affirmative beliefs about the supernatural.