Philosophy Now Forum

It appears that secularism versus religion has been debated in this thread, but each of these thought systems may have a place in our lives. I take a secular approach when my car breaks down and I look for it to be fixed -- my prayers and curses don’t seem to help. So I take it to a mechanic. But wh...

started on the Urantia Book but I stopped as it was referencing Yogananda so heavily, and I have read it all before. In younger, more idealistic days, I was a big fan of the famous tome, Autobiography of a Yogi, and read it rapturously multiple times. I felt like I was being told the truth from up ...

One possibility that entities with roughly the same attributes as God is yet to evolve in the future, in which case belief would stem from an intuitive projection, an extension of the human capacity to guesstimate the future, eg. we know without tasting that a sardine flavoured ice cream would not ...

Nick wrote: I believe in the perennial esoteric Christian tradition which is not limited to these four assumptions. The seed of the soul in those like Hitler has been corrupted and grounded serving only the process of involution further into creation. There is nothing to save. For want of a better ...

Hitler was an extraordinarily ordinary man who was a construct of his times and was given an inordinate amount of power. Give anyone that much power and they invariably go insane and start mass-murdering (rarely doing the actual killing themselves). People need to look at themselves before pointing...

Hi Mike, I’ve been enjoying your well-written and thoughtful posts. If we delve into the “Panentheistic” approach to God, then we can understand how God can not only be beyond the universe, but also a part of the universe itself (i.e., transcendent and immanent at the same time). If any of that sou...

This is what all existence ultimately defaults to which we as conscious beings find impossible to imagine; we then replace the unimaginable with what we can imagine as provided by the living similes of sleep...a necessary biological function which in its state of rest seems a vague resemblance of d...

Interesting problem. 🇺🇲PhilX🇺🇲 Hey, PhilX, do you like the responses to this question, or have they gone hopelessly awry? As long as they stay on topic, I like them. I tend to leave out a lot in my OPs to encourage discussion. I'm around to help clarify. No OP can anticipate everything that's in th...

Philosophy Explorer wrote: ↑Sun Jul 08, 2018 9:58 pm Interesting problem.

PhilX

Hey, PhilX, do you like the responses to this question, or have they gone hopelessly awry?

If I stick my neck out for the time being, let me pose this definition: "To exist" is to be detectable by human beings, or able to be investigated by human beings, or with which a human being may interact, according to the human senses or their extensions (e.g. telescope, blood hound, par...

Thanks, Noax!, for your interest and interesting thoughts. Finally, one might wish to discuss the universe despite one's disbelief that it exists in any objective way, similar to how one might wish to discuss prime numbers despite lack of acceptance of their platonic existence. One can talk about th...

Sometimes the physical observable Universe and the metaphysical state that God supposedly inhabits are treated as entirely separate domains But that is a category error because if the Universe is ALL THERE IS then that logically would include the metaphysical as well if it really exists Christians ...

If the universe is everything that exists, then God, if extant, would belong to the universe by definition. The Universe is defined as ALL THERE IS and so the notion of something beyond it makes no sense Even God can not inhabit a point in spacetime that does not actually exist for it is just impos...

What are the achievements of logic? It would seem to be hard to identify them. ... The computer you type upon is designed upon it. Does philosophy need this form of logic? If so what for? Does anyone have any suggestions? Reasoning. My understanding is that logic is a good method for arriving at as...

I A bit daggy to quote oneself, I know, but a posting I just made in another thread here fits the thread theme too well :) We have it all wrong. The Earth and Moon are our demigods and the Sun is God, but it's also a demigod subject to the greater deity - supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Our ...