I can't help myself:
tl;dr
"Too long; didn't read."
thanks for explaining that acronym, I've been noticing it and hadn't a clue what it meant!
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I can't help myself:
tl;dr
"Too long; didn't read."
reminds me of when my kids were little - -
I certainly see where you're coming from. Religion is undeniably a great way to control people. And when you pair with an afterlife concept... there's nothing better than a post-mortem rewards system. "You do what I want now... I'll pay you after you're dead." Right.and I still want to comment a bit on what you've written AP, but I'm not sure how coherent my thoughts will be. Suffice it to say, however, that I've had for years a pretty cynical viewpoint towards the development of religious thought, and it boils down to one group using religious belief and ceremony to control others. I think some of the ideas you've expressed, such as the human need to give their lives meaning, evolved more because the tribal leaders used it as a form of mind control, so to speak. I don't know much about the historical beliefs of Native Americans in primitive times, for instance, but it seems to me that in many of their beliefs they accepted death and didn't "crave" an "ultimate and eternal meaning" to their existence. I realize I don't know enough about it, but i the idea of "an ultimate and eternal meaning of one's existence" seems to me to be more strictly Christian than universal to many religious systems.
Of course, since you're studying primarily Christian theology, I guess that makes sense.
I do not see being unchangeable and "perfect" as leading to the direct result of not feeling emotion.
And even if it did, we have only to look around to discover that the vast majority of humanity is not remembered at all -- some leave gravestones weathered smooth, and others leave pieces in museums or books on shelves, but for most people death brings almost total obliteration in a very few generations. Faced with such facts, where are we to look for meaning?
Human beings refuse to conceive of themselves as only transiently useful, whether they admit to such a conviction or not. We all hold to the conviction that we are building or contributing to something definitive, something which will persist even when we are dead and gone. And it is this final ineradicable confidence in the worth of our existence which we call "God."
To assert that God can do absolutely anything without fail is to assert that God ultimately has all the decision-making power in the universe, that any decision by another agent is not really the agent's decision at all, because it is God who ultimately allows it -- in this conception, no agent can make a decision which God cannot overrule.
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Moreover, the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence to God in the Christian tradition leads to the notorious (and ultimately unsolvable) riddle of the problem of evil: if God wants only the best for us, and has all the power necessary to eliminate suffering from the world, why does God not do so?
... that some things really happen that do not ultimately make the world better, and that to deny this idea is only to deny verbally what we affirm in practice.
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To say that God has grown by experiencing something new is not to say that It was imperfect before, as if the universe was an empty glass and God's knowledge of it was the water which had just now filled the empty space and reached the top; rather, the universe is like a glass that keeps growing and expanding, and the water is always at the top.
Such a conception of God has other advantages, not the least of which is that it makes intelligible how there can be an objective past.
But while we can enjoy experience beyond the feline imagination, cats are not subject to the intensity of pain that humans are -- as David Griffin pithily notes, few cats commit suicide. Freedom, as noted earlier, carries risks -- the greater the freedom, the greater the value, but also the greater the potential for evil and suffering.
One of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's most potent metaphors is his idea of human self-conscious reflection as the "boiling point" of neurological evolution. ... The rise of self-conscious creatures was the sudden and revolutionary change of evolution becoming aware of itself as an object.
It is what makes intelligible the notion of a soldier sacrificing himself to defend his country's flag, because for him it is far more than a bit of cloth, but stands for all the things which he holds dear.
I think this underplays the permanence of our actions, by engaging in the very egoism you later say is a taint on various beliefs in the afterlife. Every step I take on a sidewalk sets off a cascade of molecular interactions, and the energy from these actions never disappears. It merely dissapates until it's effects are indistinguishable from other effects, hidden by the "noise". Similarly, every interaction I make with another human has a permanent effect. It may disappear below the other noise, but it persists nonetheless. My rememberance is the sum of these continuing effects. Even if human life dies out, the energies are never destroyed.
Given the finality of death, my "useful"ness can be nothing but transitory, although the aftereffects of that usefulness are permanent. I suppose if you want to call billions of scattered effects, indistinguishable from noise, "God", then I can't say it is more disagreeable than any other conception of God.
The conception of God you present here does not offer a better solution to this problem than that of Christianity. Omnipotence remains even with the allowing of free choice, as God isstill able to negate actions based on that choice. In your example, the child goes to bed regardless of will, not because the child is an automaton. God does not merely permit the choice to rape/murder, he permits the actual rape/murder.
Is God's glass diminished by evil actions, or increased? If it is diminished, there is a detriment to evil actions, yet they are allowed to persist. If increased, is God improving himself at our expense? If there is no effect, then God becomes unconerned with the plight of the world in exchange for the occasional aesthetic "fix".
Why is an objective past needed?
Cats murder (for example, male cats kill male kittens they did not father). Cats rape each other. Cats acquire cancer. While not many commit suicide, some do. Cats seem to have just as great a potential for evil and suffering as humans do.
This concept struck me as being highly species-centric. Almost all social primates exhibit ideas of being treated unfairly, certainly a concept that requires a sense of self (else what could the unfairness apply to). If anything, self-consciousness seems to be linked to the ability to learn, or a pre-requisite for it. You can't learn without having some notion that you are a self recognizing patterns outside that self. Parrots would not repeat phrases unless they had a notion that the phrase was an outside thing and they were generating a response of themself to it.
I have heard that a few herd species exhibit similar behavior. An older gazelle, slower than most of the herd, my run off in a different direction, often taking the predators along with it. It sacrifies the safety of numbers for the sake of the rest of the herd.
...One of the reasons the idea of an afterlife never made sense to me when I was younger was that it didn't make sense to me that people somehow lived on while other creatures didn't. It was, as you say, "species-centric." I thought it was awfully presumptuous of us to think we're so much more important than everything else in the universe. Very self-serving and all that.
However, I came to realize that it's a little silly to deny that humans are different in what amounts to a difference in kind. It's not like we haven't been living with fairly intelligent animals for quite a while now... and yet none of those animals has shown the kind of capacities that humans have. The proof is in the pudding...
Cats seem to have just as great a potential for evil and suffering as humans do. Really? I don't imagine that a cat would ever lock up his children in his basement for ten years and have several children by them. I don't imagine a cat would go out on Saturday night and kill homeless people just for kicks. I also don't imagine a cat would ever sacrifice itself for a bunch of strangers -- as some humans have been known to do -- but only, maybe, for its children. Lastly, I don't think cats are plagued by the kind of existential despair that humans sometimes experience... they don't ask why they exist, they just know they do....
Well, theoretically the threshold of self-reflection... perhaps the ability to tell right from wrong. Something like that. That's the best I can think of... but as I said, it never really made sense to me, either. I would certainly argue that humans are more advanced in their mental capabilities than any other animals are -- there's not much sense in arguing otherwise -- but I don't see how that has anything to do with living after death.This sort of ties into the evolution thread, and is something that puzzles me about the concept of heaven or afterlife - - at what point in our evolution did man create the idea of heaven/afterlife? What was the evolutionary threshold that man had to cross in order to enter the "Pearly Gates"
No, haven't read it or heard of it. I have a giant reading backlog, but I'll put it on my list.Do cats or other species ever premeditate their actions? I would say no, and that to me would be a big difference right there.
AP, have you ever read the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach? It's very interesting, fascinating really - and has a few chapters that touch on beliefs of death and afterlife from sort of a religious perspective
But what I believe -- which I'm fairly sure from talking with you that you won't agree with -- is that human beings are driven by psychological necessity to believe that their actions have a meaning that will persist in a form with which a self-conscious being would empathize. ... It is God that answers this worry.
Those sorts of actions require a finite, localized body, which God does not possess. ... Nor can God change a free agent's decision any more than another person can.
I am not sure what you might mean by God "improving himself at our expense." Would our nonexistence be better? Is there something you think we deserve to have that God is somehow withholding?
As for God being "unconcerned..." God is supremely concerned, because God is supremely related to all of existence. He empathizes with each being more than any other person possibly could. ... Not to sound corny, but love is one of the driving forces of the universe.
Would it surprise you if I identified the gravitational constant as love -- the affinity of matter with matter, the force which draws things together no matter how far away?
I think you're being a little too clever for your own good. One could argue that we do not strictly need an objective past in an ultimate sense, but we do need one functionally.
Without the belief that there exists an objective reality, society could not function.
Imagine a crime was committed... perhaps a victim's leg was chopped off with a machete. If we believed that there was no objective past, then the criminal could simply say that what the victim claims the criminal did was only his subjective experience; in fact, the supposed criminal says he never met the victim before in is life. Are you saying that we could coherently suppose that both persons are speaking the truth... that the victim could have had his leg cut off by the criminal, but that the criminal had never met the man before and never been within 100 yards of him?
But the two ideas are mutually exclusive; only one can be true. The idea of God simply makes that idea more intelligible, that's all.
I would recommend J.J. Valberg's Dream, Death, and the Self on the this topic. The book isn't about God at all, just on the nature of self-consciousness.
However, I came to realize that it's a little silly to deny that humans are different in what amounts to a difference in kind. It's not like we haven't been living with fairly intelligent animals for quite a while now... and yet none of those animals has shown the kind of capacities that humans have. The proof is in the pudding.
But I think it needs to be accepted that humans have reached a level of self-conscious reflection that other creatures aren't capable of.
Really? I don't imagine that a cat would ever lock up his children in his basement for ten years and have several children by them.
I don't imagine a cat would go out on Saturday night and kill homeless people just for kicks.
I also don't imagine a cat would ever sacrifice itself for a bunch of strangers -- as some humans have been known to do -- but only, maybe, for its children.
Lastly, I don't think cats are plagued by the kind of existential despair that humans sometimes experience... they don't ask why they exist, they just know they do.
But again, I'm not sure why you would deny that humans have evolved beyond other animals.
But you know what they don't do? Construct a symbol to represent their herd, and then die for that. Human beings are the only ones who might be willing to die for symbols or ideas, rather than real, concrete individuals. Animals don't sacrifice themselves for abstractions.
Is there some underlying point to all of this that I'm missing, or were these more just nitpicky side concerns of yours?
Actually, I agree with you on the psychological desire evinced by many/most humans to be immortalized in thought after their death. That's evident in the monuments we place, the names we give to street and airports, etc. Where I disagree is whether the need to answer this worry can be suffcient to argue that the answer exists. Ultimately, your position seems to come down to you adopting a world-view you find comforting. I have trouble joining you there. It's really comfortable, I don't deny, but that's not what I seek in a world-view.
Does God have any power to affect the universe that does not derive from the actions of rational beings reacting to God?
You can change an action without changing a decision. If I am withnessing a murder, I can intervene to prevent the murder, and this does not affect the decision of the murderer in any way I can tell.
If God has no power over rational beings, in what way do we owe our existence to him, so that the question "Would our nonexistence be better?" has the needed foundation behind it?
No, I don't think we deserve anything in particular from God. It's just that your description so far has been of a commensalistic relationship, not mutualisitic one. This may be because it is primarily framed in terms of differneces with the predominant religion of our culture, as opposed to a stand-alone explanation. Even when you describe God's influence as a lure, it is a lure where we generate the bait and determine its worth ourself.
When I feel empathy, that feeling stays interior untiul I make an overt expression of it. Does God make overt expressions of his empahty and love?
I'll just say I've read stranger things, and have no reason to object to your characterization.
However, the God you have described does not give us a functionally objective past, but if we can't use the version of the past God has, it can serve no function for us. What we can access is reasonable constuction of the past.
The existence of an objective reality does not imply the existence of an accessible objective past.
What we could/can do is create two constructions of the past based upon their testimony, and compare each construction to the evidence currently available. In this culture, we are supposed to convict only when the evidence that the former construction is correct is so convincing that we can find no legitimate reason to doubt it.
I am not saying that the objective past is accessible. All I'm saying is that without God it is difficult to say how an objective past could really exist. If no one remembers the color of Caesar's hair as he crossed the Rubicon, in what sense could we really say it exists? We can't go back and see it. It's just gone, forever. The only reason we say it exist is that we all agree that Caesar did cross the Rubicon at some point, and his hair had to be some color or other.I dont see how. I beleive in an objective but inaccessible past, and don't see how God makes that more intelligible or changes that dynamic.
Do. That's one of two books in the Philosophical Reflections on Death class I took recently that was really worthwhile. The other was Mark Johnston's Surviving Death.I'll look for it at the local libraries.
OK, fair enough. As you said, I think we can agree to disagree here. You haven't said anything I would strenuously object to. Besides, the "difference in kind" distinction makes no difference either way to the sort of points I was trying to make in the larger piece. I was just trying to get at the importance of humans specifically, since we are, in fact, human... which makes specifics about humans in this formulation more immediately interesting. Theology is usually for people rather than cats.Perhaps we sould agree to disagree here. I see the differences as differences in degree. In some cases, fewer than many humans would admit, our differences seem to have been pushed very quickly so that the degree of difference is large, but I don't see that as forming a difference in kind.
I agree with that. I would think we both agree that this describes only the current state of these animals, and is not limiting on their progeny.
Of course not, then the children would not be able to hunt. In case that's not clear, I'm talking about male lions, who have no compunction about keeping their daughters in their pride and having cubs with them.
Well-fed housecats kill mice and then don't eat them.
Cats, probably not. But that's not usually behavior we define as evil.
Cats can be depressed (or so it seems to me). A difference in degree, not kind; in expression more than feeling.
I don't deny we have evoloed unique capabilities. I only deny that it is a difference in kind.
What is a herd, or offspring, is not an abstraction applied to individual pieces of moving meat? Animals don't express their abstractions in the fashion we do, but they certainly use abstractions. Otherwise wthey couldn't tie a noise, smell, etc. to the possibility of a predator/prey being nearby.
Just noting that our differences with animals are differences in degree, not kind. I'm not sure if you would qualify that as nit-picky or not.
To quote Whitehead's Process and Reality: "In God's nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the world; in the World's nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World's nature is a primordial datum for God; and God's nature is a primordial datum for the World...
I am not saying that the objective past is accessible. All I'm saying is that without God it is difficult to say how an objective past could really exist. If no one remembers the color of Caesar's hair as he crossed the Rubicon, in what sense could we really say it exists?
This sort of ties into the evolution thread, and is something that puzzles me about the concept of heaven or afterlife - - at what point in our evolution did man create the idea of heaven/afterlife? What was the evolutionary threshold that man had to cross in order to enter the "Pearly Gates"