Philosophy Now Forum

Interesting, two aspects of one thing. There is only one thing, Nature.(Theists think Nature is a Person). Your claim is Nature is unmanifested energy. I get "unmanifested" but I don't understand what energy is apart from it's being either potential energy or kinetic energy. E.g. potentia...

Not the primary value of Jesus, which was, as I affirmed earlier, personal relationship with a personal God . Sure, if you choose to ignore that that was Jesus's primary value, then you can frame his values in a secular context - but you then have to ignore others of them, and you change the origin...

That which is not a thing is unmanifested energy. Perhaps then one can ask, when does a condition become a thing? Thingness and "unmanifested energy" are each ways of imagining nature. Spinoza's Latin words for these ways were Natura Naturata (the things of nature) and Natura Naturans (na...

The values demonstrated by the life and work of Jesus fit well with impersonal God. Not the primary value of Jesus, which was, as I affirmed earlier, personal relationship with a personal God . Sure, if you choose to ignore that that was Jesus's primary value, then you can frame his values in a sec...

AJ, I always enjoy your essays, but this... ...ignores my question. Again (rephrased): is man Grendel, or is Grendel sumthin' 'other' than man? Is Evil man's defect, or is Evil the intelligent infection that, as I say, inflames and makes malign an otherwise benign imperfection? Or: did/does man eng...

Of course, to them he would have been an atheist, neither Jew nor Christian believed in God as nature. Christians in some places were still burning them at the steak were they not? The usage of 'atheist' is totally to denigrate. The word denotes nothing. Socrates was accused of being an atheist bec...

SOUL IS NOT THE CREATOR God gave the ability of creating robot, a duplicate human being, to the humanity to show that a human being is a created item only. The human being includes the soul, which is a special work form of inert energy. The inert energy was created by God as the first item in the b...

Alexix Jacobi wrote: Honestly, to get an understanding of what Satan is, one has to turn back to the Medieval Schoolmen. In simple terms, it is an issue bound up with definitions. The conceptual blending of the ‘picture’ offered by Genesis but refracted through a lens of platonism. This may be your ...

Yep, so, you're sort of "forced" to this position... Values is the main reason religions exist ...given that your atheism... The divine is a personification of a society's prevailing values ...precludes you from endorsing this one: connecting to and relating with the divine and transcende...

Glad to hear he wasn't in complete isolation, how is it they did not think of him as an atheist? Because S was not an atheist. He was truly "God-obsessed". His was not the personal God of conventional Jews or Christians but was impersonal Nature. As a Unitarian I have no difficulty believ...

The wrong that I've blamed you for is fairly trivial: that you claim(ed?) to value Christianity even though you (had) abstract(ed) beyond recognition whatever metaphysical principles you take(/took) from it, while otherwise explicitly rejecting pretty much every significant element of its Story. It...

Yep, so, you're sort of "forced" to this position... Values is the main reason religions exist ...given that your atheism... The divine is a personification of a society's prevailing values ...precludes you from endorsing this one: connecting to and relating with the divine and transcende...

I see no difference between political values and spiritual-religious aspect. Oh. That's odd. I wonder why. Values is the main reason religions exist Oh, so, you don't think that connecting to and relating with the divine and transcendent reality in general is the main reason religions exist? The di...

Oops, I forgot to post this: Yes, but what you believe is what you do. I get what you guys are pointing at, but I prefer to frame it slightly differently: sometimes, people are hypocrites. The values set out by Jesus are relatively good ones because they conduce to cooperative living among peoples....

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking. Do you learn something from it of significant value, and that would never have occurred to you otherwise? Yes, and No, I got the idea from a favo...