Moral Compass

[Immanuel Can]

IF you say so, professor.

Let me make it simple.

Think of the causal chain as a line...supposing that it's an infinitely long one.

Where is the starting point?

Who knows?

Think, Gary. This isn't hard. It's just basic maths. Anybody can do it, and anybody will get the same answer.

[Dubious]

Abraham was the first Hebrew, and the grandfather of Jacob, whose name was changed by God to "Israel." See Genesis 32:28. As for circumcision, it was part of the Abrahamic covenant: see Genesis 17:9-14.

I know, that's what I explicitly stated. None of the conditions which created the "Chosen People"; circumcision or the Jewish nation applied to Adam who's depicted as the first human and as such, uncircumcised, certainly not as the first Jew.

So why did you write...

Wow. So you really don't know even basic things about the Biblical narrative? You've never even heard of the Abrahamic covenant? But somehow you've heard of circumcision?

Where to start...

...but now agree said covenant does not apply to Adam? How do you explain that, or do you have a reading disability in understanding the written word if there's more than one?

[Immanuel Can]

Abraham was the first Hebrew, and the grandfather of Jacob, whose name was changed by God to "Israel." See Genesis 32:28. As for circumcision, it was part of the Abrahamic covenant: see Genesis 17:9-14.

I know, that's what I explicitly stated. None of the conditions which created the "Chosen People"; circumcision or the Jewish nation applied to Adam who's depicted as the first human and as such, uncircumcised, certainly not as the first Jew.

So why did you write... "Wow. So you really don't know even basic things about the Biblical narrative? You've never even heard of the Abrahamic covenant? But somehow you've heard of circumcision? Where to start..."

Because there's NO person who knows the Biblical record at all who would EVER have told you Adam was a Jew. Why would he need to be? And what's circumcision got to do with Adam? Who thinks the two things are related? Certainly nobody who has read the Tanakh.

So it's not clear to me at all what you thought you were telling us that everybody didn't already know. You seemed to trot it out like it was some sort of revelatory insight you were having, some marvelously telling discovery, something that shattered some myth you thought people were believing...but I can't imagine who that would have been.

So maybe you should make your point...because it's not obvious what it was supposed to be.

[Dubious]

But we do know that God is transcendent of time, being its Creator, as well as everything else's. So time is surely not an issue for Him.

WE don't know any such thing, literally.

What I mean is that we know that if there is a God, He must, by definition be transcendent of time. The creator always has to be greater than the thing He creates, or He is not the creator of it...and God, by definition, refers to the Creator of all things.

GOD, being only OUR conception, has never explained anything except human psychology,...

And old saw.

That's merely an assumption, not some kind of compelling argument or self-evident truth. I understand that's what skeptics would like to think; but that doesn't imply they're right, merely that that is what they like to think.

Who says god must by definition be transcendent of time? That's an old trope, one that's thoroughly useless in explaining anything except to provide the old folks from previous times an explanation. You wouldn't have noticed, but we're beyond that now.

What is severely self-evident is that a god explanation no-longer applies based on our current state of knowledge. God explains nothing except in old scripture when people knew virtually nothing of how the world works. If the facts are not known then its stories which offers an explanation. Obviously, their Weltanschauung would have been radically different from ours; to them it would be like living on another planet while to us, the strangeness, customs and rituals of those times appear nearly alien.

God remains a relic of those times, leaving us with nothing useful to think about regarding its existence, except possibly its detrimental effects in having virtually existed for so long.

Most of the gods we created rank as travesties, starting with that idiot god whose first commandment was to have no other gods before him; gives Adam and Eve a brain but disallows its use! Poor pathetic bastard; couldn't stand the competition from all the surrounding equally created gods! Even apprehensive of the first couple in what they may discover though it be at their expense!

A good question in reference to god is how would we regard a human who behaved in such a pathetic obnoxious manner as the OT god who, not least, manifests criminal tendencies!

[attofishpi]

IC I am still really interested in your thoughts on my questions here..

That's obviously not the case, since the universe itself is not eternal.

On what basis do you claim that there was a time when there was no matter?

Simple. Matter is in the process of entropy...which means that scientifically, we can observe that it's developing from a state of higher organization to one of lower organization. It's deteriorating, in other words.

So how is Heaven going to work where you would like to spend the rest of eternity? Is there a place in the universe where entropy is not at play?

[Immanuel Can]

Who says god must by definition be transcendent of time?

It's unavoidable. If God is subject-to or less-than anything, then the entity we are talking about is not the Creator, not the First Cause, and not the Supreme Being. The Creator is then something prior to that entity, which itself has to be prior to time, and is the real first cause of things, and that other entity is the "supreme" one.

So (leaving aside for the second the question of whether God exists) you can see that the very concept "God," as understood by Christians and Jews, means an Entity that transcends all things. But if He does not exist, then He is also not the Creator, the First Cause or the Supreme Being, but is rather a fictional entity. So any Christian or Jew has to be also talking about an Entity that exists.

And it's only THAT entity, the Creator, First Cause and Supreme Being that is being debated here: not some demi-god or lesser deity. Christians and Jews have no stake in contending for such lesser "god" concepts.

What is severely self-evident is that a god explanation no-longer applies based on our current state of knowledge.

You're actually in the vast minority if you think that. According to the CIA Factbook, at least 96% of humanity on this planet still thinks that God is a live issue. So it's not at all "self-evident," and certainly not "severely." You'll need to justify that claim to most of the planet.

God explains nothing except in old scripture when people knew virtually nothing of how the world works.

That's called the "God of the Gaps" argument. The idea is that God only stands as a relevant explanation of things so long as we don't really know what causes them. And allegedly, as human knowledge increases, this "god" shrinks and diminishes in utility until we no longer need that explanation at all. Nietzsche thought that's how it was.

But there are plenty of problems with that. One is that our knowledge doesn't really save us from the basic experience of human existence...birth, tragedy and ecstasy, and death. Those still remain beyond our power, as does the moral condition of our species and a variety of other things...disease, contingency, entropy, necessity...and so on. So reference to God will never disappear, even if the "God of the Gaps' thing were correct at all...which I think it pretty obviously isn't.

Jews and Christians do not believe in "the God of the Gaps." They do not believe that "God" was ever an explanation for routine scientific phenomena; rather, they believe that God has created a world governed by discernable natural laws, and has intervened only very occasionally in that since, only on particular miraculous occasions. Thus, it is impossible to deduce from something like the realization that lightning is generated by heat and cold fronts that God has shrunk in size, or that that explanation takes away any job we have been attributing to Him. The "God of the Gaps" critique is just naive about what we actually believe, and about how God operates in this world.

Most of the gods we created rank as travesties,

The Bible completely agrees. It says, "Can a person make gods for himself? But they are not gods!" (Jer. 6:22)

...that idiot god whose first commandment was to have no other gods before him

For your own sake, please be very careful. I'm not threatening you, because I have no power to do so, so take this in the right spirit, please: it's just information for you, but very relevant information to your welfare, I believe. Jesus Himself said, "But I tell you that for every careless word that people speak, they will give an account of it on the day of judgment." (Matthew 12:36)

But on the contrary to what you wish to indict in Him, look at it more objectively: if God did not care what we did, and abandoned us to believe in what you already have said are false gods that only confuse us and teach us evil, instead of teaching us to pursue relationship with the one true God, the Source of all goodness and blessing, would such a "God" be loving at all?

[Alexis Jacobi]

So how is Heaven going to work where you would like to spend the rest of eternity? Is there a place in the universe where entropy is not at play?

Religious phantasy, similar to mythological phantasy, bound up in psychological phantasy, and poetic to a degree, can solve all contradictions by deftly leaping right over them.

The curious thing about IC is the costume of rationalism — references the maths abound — yet the entire premise of his religious construct is ur-irrational. It has as much substance as a poem. But I would not say it is without meaning. Meaning is a special category.

Logically, I mean according to mythical reasoning, Heaven is the antithesis of the corrupt material creation. When Adam & Eve sinned their sin disrupted and polluted the entire creation. That explains “entropy” and the inevitability that things will forever expand with no hope of reuniting again.

This description may be scientistic but it is also an expression of poetic-religious meaning.

Might Jesus command the helplessly expanding Universe to re-amalgamate? According to IC’s belief, yes. But that would disrupt and derail a more important passage in the mytho-poetic story: Heaven is the very bosom of God’s self. It is a realm outside of time and material determinism.

The Vaishnavas embellish the heavenly poem through their pictures of “God’s spiritual energy”. They say we are trapped in God’s external energy which cannot but proceed according to its cruel determinism. It is the “inward turning” that sets the stranded soul on a path back toward the true freedom of immaterialism: dis-incarnation really.

This sense of division, of entrapment, of being in the wrong place, of being out of sync, being cursed, being punished — these are felt ideas that call forth the “poem” of transcendency.

I do not say that this is bad or wrong — no. As Dubious and I recently agreed (or seemed to) a mythological map is a reality of human life, the way we conceive. Again: our “metaphysical dream of the world” is what we are talking about.

We seem to resist the confining vision that IC believes is “absolutely real”. I.e. his terrifying demon-god named Yahweh-Hashem — in truth a Satanic figure when closely examined.

IC’s vision, his metaphysical dream, is ultra-possessive — like Islam. Though Christianity has far less constricting possibilities and sects, IC is far more a Calvinist sort.

A clear example of much more fluidity — even radical fluidity — is that of Attofishpi.

I go into this issue of dogmatic rigidity vs an also metaphysically-determined belief in freedom from all restraint in the 34th and 35th chapters of Section Six in my Ten Week Email “the bird achieves escape velocity” Course.

[attofishpi]

For your own sake, please be very careful. I'm not threatening you, because I have no power to do so, so take this in the right spirit, please: it's just information for you, but very relevant information to your welfare, I believe. Jesus Himself said, "But I tell you that for every careless word that people speak, they will give an account of it on the day of judgment." (Matthew 12:36)

Do you honestly think there are enough minutes in a day for one to account for every careless word?

The Day of Judgement - where time is stretched to weeks\months perhaps years for twats like me What a bloody long day that is going to be!!

[Immanuel Can]

IC I am still really interested in your thoughts on my questions here..
So how is Heaven going to work where you would like to spend the rest of eternity? Is there a place in the universe where entropy is not at play?

Well, the truth is that I don't see most of your comments now. This is because I put you on my "ignore" list when you vaulted into some rather extreme recreational blasphemy, and I didn't want to become the occasion on which you to harmed yourself further. But I did happen to notice this comment, so I'll make an exception and respond.

Modern theologians pretty much all agree that "heaven" is not a geographic location in the physical universe. It is some state-of-being that is beyond the physical to such an extent that we currently lack the mental categories even for describing it by analogy. That is, it's beyond time and space as we now know and experience them. In the Bible, we are given features of this state of being, but no exhaustive description to which we can relate. As it is written, "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love Him."

Entropy (or "death") is a feature that Genesis says came into the world only after the fall. It was not originally intended to be part of the creation, but rather took place because mankind severed itself from the Source of eternal life. Our current entropic universe is thus completely contrasted, Biblically speaking, to eternity, in which death has no hold and entropy does not occur. As it is written, speaking of the commencement of the eternal state, "The last enemy to be defeated is death." So Heaven has no death.

[attofishpi]

IC I am still really interested in your thoughts on my questions here..
So how is Heaven going to work where you would like to spend the rest of eternity? Is there a place in the universe where entropy is not at play?

Well, the truth is that I don't see most of your comments now. This is because I put you on my "ignore" list when you vaulted into some rather extreme recreational blasphemy, and I didn't want to become the occasion on which you to harmed yourself further. But I did happen to notice this comment, so I'll make an exception and respond.

Modern theologians pretty much all agree that "heaven" is not a geographic location in the physical universe. It is some state-of-being that is beyond the physical to such an extent that we currently lack the mental categories even for describing it by analogy. That is, it's beyond time and space as we now know and experience them. In the Bible, we are given features of this state of being, but no exhaustive description to which we can relate. As it is written, "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love Him."

Entropy (or "death") is a feature that Genesis says came into the world only after the fall. It was not originally intended to be part of the creation, but rather took place because mankind severed itself from the Source of eternal life. Our current entropic universe is thus completely contrasted, Biblically speaking, to eternity, in which death has no hold and entropy does not occur. As it is written, speaking of the commencement of the eternal state, "The last enemy to be defeated is death." So Heaven has no death.

Thank you. (and yes I said some terrible profanities towards the great architect, you have no idea what God has put me through, but we made up and are on the best of terms now, life is fantastic! I am amazed every day at the perfection of it all. If only humanity wasn't so bloody daft we truly could have heaven right here.)

[Immanuel Can]

Thank you. (and yes I said some terrible profanities towards the great architect, you have no idea what God has put me through, but we made up and are on the best of terms now, life is fantastic! I am amazed every day at the perfection of it all. If only humanity wasn't so bloody daft we truly could have heaven right here.)

I'm glad you've made your peace with God, then. The truth is, this world is a long way away from what it ought to be, and we have terrible suffering here because of it. But that's not God's fault; it's our own. As you point out, things could be a lot better here, were it not for the people. What we choose to do to each other and to ourselves is often the real source of our suffering; and the fact that we live in a fallen world that has been detached from proper association with its Creator is responsible for the rest.

But God's plan is not that this should continue. This is the meaning of salvation: it is deliverance from the hopeless state we're in now, to a better state in which these things are not so: and it is God who is most earnest that we should embrace that prospect, and then come to experience it. This is the purpose of His sending of His Son, too: for we must remember that whatever suffering we have, it's not greater than what He has gone through for us. Some of us may have known a physical pain like a crucifixion, though not many and none still alive -- but none of us have ever known the pain of full separation from God...which He has known, so that we would never have to.

So God's absolutely as much on our side as He could possibly be. In fact, the name "Immanuel" which is not my own, means "God-with-us." And God IS with us, if we will be with Him. So bitterness and blaming God are not any help to us: but God Himself can be, if we will let Him.

I'm glad, therefore, you're feeling sorted-out about that. Good for you.

[attofishpi]

Amen to that!

[Alexis Jacobi]

Now hold on a cotton picking second! Atto, do I take this to mean that you are not going to keep beating on poor Immanuel?!?

What’s with it with this forum anyway? Where did Veggie get off to anyway?!?

Even Harbal has become docile as a kitten.

This is not right, people! It is simply not right.

[attofishpi]

Now hold on a cotton picking second! Atto, do I take this to mean that you are not going to keep beating on poor Immanuel?!?

What’s with it with this forum anyway? Where did Veggie get off to anyway?!?

Even Harbal has become docile as a kitten.

This is not right, people! It is simply not right.

I'm in a good mood!! Just spent the day with my Dad, since Mum passed away last year, we actually sort of get along (he called me a twat about 20 times and loves my dog more than me, but its a bloody good laugh - he's a cranky miserable git at times - cooked him an awesome dinner - and retorted many times to his insults by calling him a dickhead - what can I say, maybe I've run out of 'beating' mode for the day!!)

Ya I don't know what's happened to Veggie, she's awesome fun...n Prom75 is probably incarcerated (again) - isn't life a larf

PS. Even me and Lacewing are getting along!!!

[Sculptor]

Gary Childress suggested common sense as a moral compass.

Are the Ten Commandments common sense?

No they are not.
The first four are a bloody waste of time.
When you could be making commandments; to not wage unjust wars or to protect children, women and other vulnerable people from abuse, you throw away nearly half your commandments on getting on your knees for god.


PS.
DO not forget this winter.
BREAK NOT THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT, lest yea burn in hellfire

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