Atheism

[phyllo]

Anybody who replaces atheism with materialism, deserves whatever he gets.

That would be like replacing a staple gun with a carrot.
WTF are you talking about?

You don't read the posts?

[phyllo]

On the other hand, Christians [and Muslims] in the desperate grip to God also do not have empathy for non-theists as human beings.
I just had a personal bad encounter from some Christians; one son of my relative coerced his father [terminal, bed-ridden and skeletal] into declaring his faith for Christ; the father is his weakened state agreed due to the son's persistence; but later he told the other children he does not accept Christ; the father died a week later and the other children gave him a non-Christian burial.
This is spiritual terrorism!

No doubt he thought he was saving your father from eternal damnation.

And your father made him happy and he made the other "children" happy.

Win-win all around.

[Sculptor]

Anybody who replaces atheism with materialism, deserves whatever he gets.

That would be like replacing a staple gun with a carrot.
WTF are you talking about?

You don't read the posts?

Not every single one, no.

[phyllo]

Search for "materialism" and you will see the categories agnosticism, atheism and theism morph into agnosticism, materialism and theism.

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ in a nutshell:

"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist." Will Durant

Ironically enough, Durant noted this in his book, The Story of Philosophy.

Iambiguous, you fool, you don't seem to know enough about Will Durant to understand what his focus was. You extract this portion only because you believe that it encapsulates and explains my focus in the world of ideas. It does not. My suggestion to you would be to place a mirror in front of your computer screen and perform a wee bit of work in relation to your own (ridiculous, circulatory) non-intellectual project. What you have quoted of Durant functions better as a self-critique. I will demonstrate.

If you were interested in ideas, and if you had a genuine sense of their relevance and importance, the discussion of ideas would be your focus. Instead, what you do is to defeat the possibility that ideas offer through a reductive and insidiously boring cut'n'paste in which you reduce ideas to inanities. You are not moved by ideas, Iambiguous, and you do not deal in ideas. What then motivates you? A type of crude Marxism is perhaps the best description.

If you were not yourself involved in both dishonesty and the same sterile intellectualism you condemn, or in your case the blabbering of a frozen intellect, I think you would have a great deal more to say. You would engage with ideas not merely shoot down those who work with them. It seems to me that because you lack mental integrity that it is you who avoids the problems of human existence. That ideas lead to action -- to making decisions -- affronts your sensibilities. If one idea is presented as higher than or superior to another this causes a freak-out in you. You crap yourself and then languish in the aromatic squishiness of it. Your perpetual refrain is "What about the Blacks, the Gays, the Women and the Jews?" yet you never delve into the issue or the problem in which you are stuck. If it is not correct to say you are a *stale intellect* (since you have so little intellectuality) I would certainly say that you need to confront ideas; become more familiar with them; allow them to work on you. You won't and in fact you can't: you established yourself on specific lines and you will follow those lines until you leave the earth-realm.

In this sense, I regret to put it to you, I see you as a failure. But you are a failure among many failures. You are a failure in a time of failing. At the very least you could, with some humility, simply face this. And let others carry the torch that is inconceivable to you.

In this sense, jackass, I could refer to you in this way: "at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth". First, for you no truth exists. You are situated in an anti-truth position and defend it like a junkyard dog. Just admit it! The burden will lift.

It is also true that you do not have an *ivory tower* per se but you do have a *tower* of another sort: your reductionism, your anti-intellectualism, and the neurotic repetition of the same idea in post after post after post. Not for a week or a month but for decades. Indeed it seems to be about a half-century.

I cannot be sure from this snippet where Durant was coming from (you take a quote out of its context and fail to explain the particular thrust he was working)(and likely have no idea yourself what it was) but your use of his reference to "esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals", if it is intended to knock me back on my ass with its confrontational honestly, misses the mark. First, I have no involvement with or interest in "professionally philosophical periodicals" and no real interest in esoterica. You make a ridiculous mistake here. For you -- and for example -- a reference to Shakespeare or the philosophers of the 17th century (an area that interests me for valid intellectual reasons) is interpreted as something unearthly and esoteric. But in fact it may well be one of the foundations to our own age and is certainly a foundation of our own self. This idea though is incomprehensible to you, pea-brain, and you seem to get offended that something you don't understand it talked about. Durant & wife wrote 10-11 volumes titled The Story of Civilization [his life work] and I can assure you that he was familiar with and concerned about the ideas that helped in the creation of Occidental culture and civilization. You do not have even a foggy idea of what this entails.

For you, you fuck, to insinuate that I "wander farther and farther away from [my] time and place, and from the problems that absorb [my] people and [my] century" is completely misplaced. Are you drunk? I think this is why you cannot understand conservatism and also why those who are more radical than mere Conservatives, and who oppose some of the perversions of Liberalism with clear enunciation of idea, are portrayed by you as bad/evil. Again your constant refrain is "What about Blacks Women Gays and Jews?" Yet you know nothing about Blacks and Black History, nothing about women and their political and social struggles (which certainly have their place), but simultaneously you have no understanding of the foundations of conservative throughy in relation to femininity, to the structure of the family. And what's this about Gays and Jews? You do not know what the historical Jew is, you dolt. You are absolutely ignorant in this area.

What you do is that you block the discussion of idea in relation to contemporary issues. By wandering farther and farther into a reductionist position you ties yourself up in a limited pit in which you have trapped yourself. I already explained this to you months back. Had you done work in relation to it you'd be in a different place now. But your will has been set and in that morass you will remain.

So let's take this:

The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist.

And rewrrite it a bit in such a way that it describes not my situation but your situation.

You have no concern for philosophy. You pose here and nothing more. You retreat into a tiny corner which is expressed in your cut'n'paste posts which repeat, time and dreary time again the same semi-idea! You yourself are disconnected from *the world* by your choices. And indeed you have a 'technical terminology' that circulates around you with your notion of Dasein and how you are *drawn & quartered* as well as *fragmented* and of divided mind that results in no mind at all.

Take a fucking hike, jerk!

[The relevance in writing this, and with this apparent invective, is only to shed light on the failures of our age and the failures of ourselves in relation to the challenges of our age. Don't take it personally!]

[Alexis Jacobi]

The world as it is — the biological, the physical world — in itself does not express god.

And yet, both Torah (Ps. 19, e.g.) and the NT (Rm. 1, e.g.) say it does. And I see it, and I think it does.

So what is wrong with your eyes?

A better question is What is wrong with your ears.

Anyone can write a poem (Psalm 19 is a poem) which links the wonder of the created world (the heavens) with the notion of a Supreme Being. And Psalm 19, which like many Psalms is magnificent poetry, communicates the idea that the world that God created reflects and in this sense explains or reveals God to anyone who can see, is what I take issue with. I explain this and you cannot hear what I mean.

In actual fact when we (scientists for example) examine Nature what they discover is a world of absolute and sheer brutality. The dynamic of life and life's processes is a never ending violent and brutal struggle. We humans rose out of that world and we are subsumed in it. If you listen, for example, to Gary's lamentations you have there a pretty clear enunciation of what the issue actually is. The God that created this world (if one chooses to see the world as a divine creation) is a terrifying, demonic entity! If *the way of the world* explains or reveals anything about God, what it reveals flies totally in the face of the notion of a benign "good" God.

Now, I well understand how your interpretive religious and metaphysical philosophy works. The sin of our *first parents* not only led to their expulsion from a Perfect World (free of death and pain) but brought down with them the entire creation. The Creation is now contaminated by death and pain and this is the responsibility of our First Parents. That is the core idea on which Christian religious philosophy is founded. The Advent of Jesus Christ -- the Second Adam -- heralds not only the possibility of the salvation of man's soul into God's favor, and then Eternal Life, but the thorough restoration of the entire Cosmos. The Creation will be recreated, renovated and redesigned according to the Original Plan.

Now, If I were to write a poem about thew world that we now see -- and such poems are written -- it would be much more along these lines:

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

So what has happened here? I confront you (by *you* I mean a certain sort of man in a certain locality within the world of ideas and of world-interpretation) by suggesting to you that the View of Reality has changed -- unalterably! I suggest to you that the people you preach to now see the world through a very different lens than the one that you employ. You ask them to return to a child's version of world interpretation but they cannot! They can only go forward and struggle, all over again, for the conceptual tools needed to live in this world.

This is not to say that ethics should be abandoned. You, like many or all Christians, make the statement that without God man has no hope. I say this is at the very core of it a false-idea. It is a lie. And in that sense the poetry of Psalm 19 is, in its beautiful way, also a lie. And to dismantle that lie is not easy.

You say that there is something wrong with how I see. You mean that I do not see the same world as you see. That is, that I do not have the same lens (or optical mechanism). That is true, in a way.

But here is the Key: Because the world is the way it is, and the way the world is, if it expresses God, is actually semi-demoniac, if I am to define God or let's say discover God it is clear that it is something in myself. This idea, naturally, is anathema to you and your sensibilities. And what I say is that when one confronts you (encounters you, deals internally with what you mean) that one is forced to the position I describe.

You associate this with atheism in the sense that the Romans described the Christians, or that the Christians describe the Romans. You say that if I (we) do not *believe in* the God that you define that we are atheists. What I say is that we really have no way now to define what God is. All descriptions are historical and involve former symbolism.

[A *graveyard of meaning* is how I put it in Chapter 6 of the 10-Week Email Course.]

What I present to you -- I agree that it is deliciously bold and strange! -- is the picture that Nietzsche described. And what I say is that a man must confront the truth of the real situation. I say, therefore, that you are not a man as I define what a man should be. You are not an intellectual man. In a way you are a woman. Your choices are feminine not masculine. But of course I would have to develop further my sense of what *a man* should and must be .....

[Sculptor]

Search for "materialism" and you will see the categories agnosticism, atheism and theism morph into agnosticism, materialism and theism.

Do you mean contributors to this thread conflating these terms?

[Immanuel Can]

Here is Dawkins' latest discussion on his position where his focus is on the Science perspective;

I'm not interested in him, other than the fact that he's one of the most celebrated of the so-called "angry Atheists." I think what he knows about "religion" as he calls it, would just about fit in a thimble.

If the above is that little you know of Dawkins, how come you talk as if you know a lot about him in the earlier posts.

I didn't say I don't know about him. I said I care little for his views.

Yes, Dawkins appears to be an "angry Atheist" perhaps he was molested by a priest during his childhood days.

No, I haven't heard that. But what I have heard is that he hates his father, as do a great many Atheists. It may be from that source, the adolescent rebellion of a 17-year-old, that the whole thing comes.

I don't agree with such attitude. As a biologist, what he lacked is the Psychology of Religion and empathy for the majority of supposedly good-minded theists.

Well, and even basic knowledge. Anybody who thinks "religion" is just one blobby thing doesn't know anything at all about it.

On the other hand, Christians [and Muslims] in the desperate grip to God also do not have empathy for non-theists as human beings.

Muslims, yes; Christians, on the average, absolutely not. There's actually no more generally compassionate and empathetic group of people on the planet. And you can see that much from the fact that they are the overwhelming contributors to charity and the public good. And if you know Christian theology, you know that Jesus was hated because of his association with the tax-collectors, prostitutes and lowlifes of his day. Far from lacking compassion, He said, "The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost," i.e. the "non-theists" and those otherwise very far from God.

I just had a personal bad encounter from some Christians; one son of my relative coerced his father [terminal, bed-ridden and skeletal] into declaring his faith for Christ; the father is his weakened state agreed due to the son's persistence; but later he told the other children he does not accept Christ; the father died a week later and the other children gave him a non-Christian burial.

Well, maybe that's how it happened; maybe the boy was overzealous and became unkind. Maybe.

But now, try to look at it the other way. One son of your relatives was the only person who had concern for his father's soul. He might have stayed silent and saved himself the conflict with your other relatives. He might have let the older man go to Hell. But he did not. He risked his own situation, pled with his father to choose an eternal destiny with God, even at the last minute, when the old man had no other prospect in view but death; and the father refused. How tragic! Who, in that situation, was really deficient in empathy: the boy, or the other relatives?

That's not terrorism. It's compassion.

[Immanuel Can]

The world as it is — the biological, the physical world — in itself does not express god.

And yet, both Torah (Ps. 19, e.g.) and the NT (Rm. 1, e.g.) say it does. And I see it, and I think it does.

So what is wrong with your eyes?

A better question is...

I'm not bothering with you, AJ. All you do is rattle on absurdly. You're not quite as bad as "Age," and you're certainly a little smarter than him; but you're no more rewarding to converse with.

Sorry.

[Alexis Jacobi]

And yet, both Torah (Ps. 19, e.g.) and the NT (Rm. 1, e.g.) say it does. And I see it, and I think it does.

So what is wrong with your eyes?

A better question is...

I'm not bothering with you, AJ. All you do is rattle on absurdly. You're not quite as bad as "Age," and you're certainly a little smarter than him; but you're no more rewarding to converse with.

Sorry.

Esteemed Colleague:

No need to feel sorrow or any other emotion, Old Bean. I am fine with commenting on what you write. I do not ask nor require a response from you.

I am also aware that, for you, there could be no reward as you call it for conversation. And given your orientation that makes sense. I do not perceive that I have, in the realm of examining your religion, and perhaps of religion generally, much that I feel I need to *discuss*. After a good long time involved in thinking about the questions I have more to say or to *declare* (as I put it) about religious metaphysics and mythology and not much to haggle over.

However, I do want you to know that I am aware that it is not that I *rattle on absurdly* that gets your knickers in a bunch, but rather my critique of your position gets too close to home. You cannot allow yourself to examine your own position and therefore it follows that any stance that involves such examination must be dismissed by you as *rattling* and as *absurdity*. This logic is foundational to your system, isn't it?

In some sense, though I cannot admire the adamancy of your faith-position that takes on all comers and defeats them, I do respect it in a way. It is my duty to understand people like you. People who think like you. You have enormous position in our world.

As I have said, in relation to you I have been able to clarify my own sense of my own *faith*. I am not a person without a 'belief'. What I must state is that mine is simply a space that is tremendously larger.

Again none of this do I write because I think you can hear it. I only write (or rattle!) to concretize what I do think. I have always made it clear that I am here for my own purposes.

Now, since I do believe that if we do encounter what I might call *the divine* on an inner plane -- I have made it plain that the outside world does not give us a picture of what *God* is and if it does it is something alarming, strange and terrible -- I have to follow-through on what this means. Again, none of this is relevant to you. But it certainly is for my *development*. I have (more or less recently) come to understand that I long ago realized this but not necessarily with the clarity I now have. My work -- *the work* -- is on an inner plane. I do not at all negate this.

I realize that none of this can make sense to you. For all you have ears you cannot hear. However I do bank on the possibility that it could have relevance for others. And the reason I think so is because we who are *post-Christian*, and in various senses and to differing degrees in another stage of metaphysical apprehension, my statements about my own views and ideas could be relevant. Isn't that all that we can really do? Share our picture of what things look like?

My tone here is calm, naturally. I speak to you *as if* you could hear. But do not imagine that I will go any less hard on you! You will be beaten without mercy! In fact this pathetic sort of post that has the word *sorry* in it, I take as your solemn request that the merciless beating continue. And I promise that it will.

Burning at the stake. To be fed to the lions. Exquisite spiritual tortures: you know the routine! You will be martyred!

Glory in it!

Very truly yours,

A local Housefly

[Alexis Jacobi]

NB: When I saw that Age could transcend capitalizations, it was at that point that I realized our unlimited human potential!

[Immanuel Can]

I do not ask nor require a response from you.

Excellent. Then at least we can agree on that.

[phyllo]

Now, since I do believe that if we do encounter what I might call *the divine* on an inner plane -- I have made it plain that the outside world does not give us a picture of what *God* is and if it does it is something alarming, strange and terrible -- I have to follow-through on what this means.

Only the picture that comes from the outside world can be verified.

It may be strange but it's not all alarming and terrible. There is also the joyful and wonderful. It's a mix. Which indicates that god is not one-dimensional.

The inner plane may be real or unreal. There is no way to verify it.

[iambiguous]

AJ in a nutshell:

"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist." Will Durant

Ironically enough, Durant noted this in his book, The Story of Philosophy.

Iambiguous, you fool, you don't seem to know enough about Will Durant to understand what his focus was. You extract this portion only because you believe that it encapsulates and explains my focus in the world of ideas. It does not. My suggestion to you would be to place a mirror in front of your computer screen and perform a wee bit of work in relation to your own (ridiculous, circulatory) non-intellectual project. What you have quoted of Durant functions better as a self-critique. I will demonstrate.

If you were interested in ideas, and if you had a genuine sense of their relevance and importance, the discussion of ideas would be your focus. Instead, what you do is to defeat the possibility that ideas offer through a reductive and insidiously boring cut'n'paste in which you reduce ideas to inanities. You are not moved by ideas, Iambiguous, and you do not deal in ideas. What then motivates you? A type of crude Marxism is perhaps the best description.

If you were not yourself involved in both dishonesty and the same sterile intellectualism you condemn, or in your case the blabbering of a frozen intellect, I think you would have a great deal more to say. You would engage with ideas not merely shoot down those who work with them. It seems to me that because you lack mental integrity that it is you who avoids the problems of human existence. That ideas lead to action -- to making decisions -- affronts your sensibilities. If one idea is presented as higher than or superior to another this causes a freak-out in you. You crap yourself and then languish in the aromatic squishiness of it. Your perpetual refrain is "What about the Blacks, the Gays, the Women and the Jews?" yet you never delve into the issue or the problem in which you are stuck. If it is not correct to say you are a *stale intellect* (since you have so little intellectuality) I would certainly say that you need to confront ideas; become more familiar with them; allow them to work on you. You won't and in fact you can't: you established yourself on specific lines and you will follow those lines until you leave the earth-realm.

In this sense, I regret to put it to you, I see you as a failure. But you are a failure among many failures. You are a failure in a time of failing. At the very least you could, with some humility, simply face this. And let others carry the torch that is inconceivable to you.

In this sense, jackass, I could refer to you in this way: "at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth". First, for you no truth exists. You are situated in an anti-truth position and defend it like a junkyard dog. Just admit it! The burden will lift.

It is also true that you do not have an *ivory tower* per se but you do have a *tower* of another sort: your reductionism, your anti-intellectualism, and the neurotic repetition of the same idea in post after post after post. Not for a week or a month but for decades. Indeed it seems to be about a half-century.

I cannot be sure from this snippet where Durant was coming from (you take a quote out of its context and fail to explain the particular thrust he was working)(and likely have no idea yourself what it was) but your use of his reference to "esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals", if it is intended to knock me back on my ass with its confrontational honestly, misses the mark. First, I have no involvement with or interest in "professionally philosophical periodicals" and no real interest in esoterica. You make a ridiculous mistake here. For you -- and for example -- a reference to Shakespeare or the philosophers of the 17th century (an area that interests me for valid intellectual reasons) is interpreted as something unearthly and esoteric. But in fact it may well be one of the foundations to our own age and is certainly a foundation of our own self. This idea though is incomprehensible to you, pea-brain, and you seem to get offended that something you don't understand it talked about. Durant & wife wrote 10-11 volumes titled The Story of Civilization [his life work] and I can assure you that he was familiar with and concerned about the ideas that helped in the creation of Occidental culture and civilization. You do not have even a foggy idea of what this entails.

For you, you fuck, to insinuate that I "wander farther and farther away from [my] time and place, and from the problems that absorb [my] people and [my] century" is completely misplaced. Are you drunk? I think this is why you cannot understand conservatism and also why those who are more radical than mere Conservatives, and who oppose some of the perversions of Liberalism with clear enunciation of idea, are portrayed by you as bad/evil. Again your constant refrain is "What about Blacks Women Gays and Jews?" Yet you know nothing about Blacks and Black History, nothing about women and their political and social struggles (which certainly have their place), but simultaneously you have no understanding of the foundations of conservative throughy in relation to femininity, to the structure of the family. And what's this about Gays and Jews? You do not know what the historical Jew is, you dolt. You are absolutely ignorant in this area.

What you do is that you block the discussion of idea in relation to contemporary issues. By wandering farther and farther into a reductionist position you ties yourself up in a limited pit in which you have trapped yourself. I already explained this to you months back. Had you done work in relation to it you'd be in a different place now. But your will has been set and in that morass you will remain.

So let's take this:

The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist.

And rewrrite it a bit in such a way that it describes not my situation but your situation.

You have no concern for philosophy. You pose here and nothing more. You retreat into a tiny corner which is expressed in your cut'n'paste posts which repeat, time and dreary time again the same semi-idea! You yourself are disconnected from *the world* by your choices. And indeed you have a 'technical terminology' that circulates around you with your notion of Dasein and how you are *drawn & quartered* as well as *fragmented* and of divided mind that results in no mind at all.

Take a fucking hike, jerk!

[The relevance in writing this, and with this apparent invective, is only to shed light on the failures of our age and the failures of ourselves in relation to the challenges of our age. Don't take it personally!]

Jerk, fool, jackass, fuck...

The more you are confronted with the points I raise about you, the more flustered -- then incensed -- you get. Attacking me becomes the whole point of your outburst.

And I'll bet that you insist this pedantic wall of words Stooge Stuff is true. You are Satyr's sock puppet here, aren't you?

Now, let's get back to the thrust of my post on this thread:

Just a reminder of what is at stake here...

1] moral commandments on this side of the grave...letting God do the thinking for you
2] immortality and salvation on the other side of it...soul to soul

You know, the actual "for all practical purposes" reason that Gods and religions exist in the first place.

That's why for those like me, any discussion of God has to eventually get around to something in the way of proof that a God, the God, your God does in fact exist.

Well, that and theodicy.

Now, in regard to God and religion, what exactly do you believe about them?

And in regard to morality, if you do not believe in them, do you still believe that mere mortals have access [philosophically or otherwise] to objective morality?

And your thoughts here and now on immortality and salvation?

And in regard to the behaviors that you choose pertaining to conflicting goods, how do you connect the dots between science and philosophy and religion?

Me? Well, I believe that science and philosophy have [so far] failed to establish anything in the vicinity of an objective, deontological morality. And only with religion does it appear possible that "the afterlife" is a factor.

And how could our own individual assessments of all this not be the embodiment of dasein? Given when historically and where culturally we are born, and given our own uniquely personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge...of course we are going to come to many different conflicting conclusions.

Indeed, this is one of the main reasons Gods and religions were/are invented. A need for that "transcendant" font...a Creator that can pass "final judgment" on us.

Then this part...

Again your constant refrain is "What about Blacks Women Gays and Jews?" Yet you know nothing about Blacks and Black History, nothing about women and their political and social struggles (which certainly have their place), but simultaneously you have no understanding of the foundations of conservative throughy in relation to femininity, to the structure of the family. And what's this about Gays and Jews? You do not know what the historical Jew is, you dolt. You are absolutely ignorant in this area.

Look, I admit that in regard to race, gender, sexuality and Jews, I am no less fractured and fragmented. My personal opinions are no less derived existentially from dasein. Instead, with those like you, who seem considerably more adamant and arrgogant regarding their own assessments, I ask them to focus instead not on what they believe "in their heads" about thses things, but on how their beliefs would play out for blacks, women, gays, liberals and Jews if they were actually in a position of power in a community and could enforce their own political prejudices.

You'll go there or you won't.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Jerk, fool, jackass, fuck...

Have you no sense of humor?!? It’s all in fun. Sham irritation. Just focus on the ideas …

You are Satyr's sock puppet here, aren't you?

You’ve got it backwards. I animate Satyr.

Look, I admit that in regard to race, gender, sexuality and Jews, I am no less fractured and fragmented.

Then you had better go to work and put yourself back together, you Nazi …