/lit/ - Literature

>>11550299
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains
[citation needed]

>>11550299
This

Every meaning is ultimately a delusion that you make to keep leaving

>>11550299
Sounds like you've already made it up.

>>11550299
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains
?

This is as stupid as saying all computer programs can be reduced to silicon. Software != hardware.

Start with the Greeks

>>11550306
It's kinda obvious from a scientific perspective.

>>11550318
It's really not. The only people who believe it is don't understand neuroscience.

>>11550299
>There is no God
>no higher purpose
>the world is ultimately meaningless
>life is worth nothing
>good and bad are illusions
citation needed

are you excited to be going into the 10th grade?

obligatory pic related

>>11550318
Care to extrapolate?

This is your mind on Internet Era. WUBBALUBBADUBDUUUUB

>>11550299
When did /lit/ become /r/im12andthisisdeep?

>>11550333
>333

June 21, the first day of Summer.

>>11550299
And now what? Even if that was true, it wouldn't change anything. You will still cry when your mother dies.

>>11550349
Now I know that these feelings are illusions

>>11550299
Bump

>>11550392
so, junior, what are you gonna do with all these (You)s? exchange them for candy or stickers?

Belief in God is just a comforting delusion. There is no evidence for something else, it's even worse: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could made every single one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize thier bitter life; yet stingly cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet requied his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell, mouths forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibilities of man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites the poor abused slave to worship him...

These things are impossible, yet here there are. There is no meaning, no reason why they happen. There is no afterlife; this is all there is.

>>11550413
>t. Job

>>11550299

No book , no science and no philosophy can;t change your mind. You have arrived at truth of the universe. Now make something up and embrace the absurdity

Ironically, the only way to deal with these people may be genetic or neural re-engineering. We must put down our fruity novels, study science, and become the STEMfags ourselves. Or do you want to leave all the infiltration up to SJW's?

>>11550318
You're the guy that gets btfo in every russian novel ever.

>>11550444
>trusting russians over pure-blooded americans
drumpf?

>>11550458
>being american unironically

>>11550424
Embracing the absurd is another delusion

>>11550299
>What book will change my mind ?
this is what I struggle with

I consistently move between periods of finding meaning and direction with different stimuli

and someone on 4chan or real life will recommend something
>this is life changing
>this is the ultimate answer
and I'll experience it
maybe for months
maybe for years
and I will be changed and maybe get fulfilled
maybe even somewhat happy

but gradually, it always fades to nothing
and in the end I always feel the same way I did at the start
that is that there is no meaning behind anything or there is no objective truth behind anything

There is a God, a higher purpose, the world is full of meaning, all of our spiritual values are rational, life is worth so much, good and evil are both real and with time everything will come to fruition.

What book will change my mind?

>>11550521
Anon's OP.

>>11550493
yes, so? everything is a delusion.

>>11550521
What is the nature of God?

>>11550521
The Mysterious Stranger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_tYrnv_o6A

Look at those little machines, it's all due to stochastic thermodynamic processes, the protein doesn't "know" it should walk, the way the arms fold makes the lowest (optimal) energy state to be each next step, and when a certain ligand is metabolized, another state is engaged and so on. imo it is really a mistake to call them "machines" because that term carries automatic associations of purpose and a "mission to accomplish". the proteins don't "want" to move, the cell doesn't "decide" to divide, it's all actually more similar to a stream of water running down a riverbed rather than an assembly of machines. everything runs on gradients and energy imbalances, a myriad of proteins perform the task less than perfect, countless others perform above average, together their activity is distributed according to the governing impulse (local concentration gradients, temperature, pH gradients, electric potentials, etc.)

Do you think if those little guys could think, that they would wonder what their purpose is?, that they could delude themselves into thinking they have free will? Or perhaps they would invent a religion to give meaning to their life. Or the smart ones could use the sceintific method to uncover how they move around?

Yet the Why is something that is impossible to understand or know. Perhaps "Why" is a nonsensical question.

>>11550413
this is your mind on richard dawkins

>>11550562

so twain was a time traveller.?

retard

>>11550562
Why do people on this board literally always resort to mocking atheism? At first I thought it was just board culture, that it wasn't worth the time to engage in arguments. But people here get into long arguments about much sillier subjects. I think it's just that there's no good argument in favour of religion

IF EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS SO TOO IS THAT VERY STATEMENT

IT'S BASIC LOGIC

>>11550573
logic btfo

>>11550573
logic is meaningless.

>>11550573
lol brainlet thinks he had an epiphany

>>11550299

Beyond Good and Evil
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Notes from the Underground
Brothers Karamazov
Bhagavad Gita
The World as Will and Representation
Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul
Mediations
Enchiridion

>>11550583
>Mediations
Meditations*

>recommending kneechee and evola to an 18yo
you better mail him a fedora as well

>>11550585
brainlets guide to "it's just common sense bro"

>>11550318
Prove to me a scientific perspective is the truth.

>>11550590
This, nobody should read those books without a decent grasp of philosophy for the first one, and Hermetics for the second

>>11550591
Read it again, carefully. You might see something new in it.

>>11550580
>>11550579
>>11550577
No, it's plainly obvious. Materialist and nihilist shills in between deepthroating models, love to claim to represent nothing but cold hard rationality, and yet their "truth bombs" are all self-refuting on their face at even the most cursory examination, and no one seems to take them directly to task on it. The straight reality is that they're simply reciting literal nonsense like a broken record.

>>11550572
You don't have to be a bible thumper to not be an atheist. I'm not going to claim it's the majority, but there's clearly a large demographic on /lit/ of people who having a platonic conception of God / Reality / Truth etc. and are engaged in mysticism, meditation, etc.

Scientific reductionism is logically indefensible and about 100 years out of date as a model to describe reality. Now, that doesn't mean you have to give up science altogether, I don't think there's any reasonably person alive today that thinks science hasn't benefited us greatly. However, as a basic view of reality, it's utterly nonsense and the fact that modern society still clings to it in one way or another is a great disservice, all things considered.

>>11550592
You don't even need it, just rid your mind of comforting delusions and societal conditioning. Sure, there is no absolute truth, however the probability that a belief supported only by feelings is true is low

>>11550598
LARPer detected

>>11550607
>Sure, there is no absolute truth
[citation needed]

>however the probability that a belief supported only by feelings is true is low
Right, which is exactly what scientific reductionism is

>>11550605
Great post Anon

"Everything is just chemicals in your brain bro" doesn't explain your subjective feeling of emotion at all. It bothers me greatly people don't realize this. If your emotions are an illusion, who (or what) is being tricked? What casts the illusion? Materialists are stuck when it comes to the brain. Somehow the brain, this material object among other material objects, is responsible for your illusory experience of the immaterial. What makes this material object so special that it creates the illusion of the immaterial?

*15 year old listens to a school of life video on Neechy once*

>>11550605
Why is it logically indefensible though? What makes it nonsensical? I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just that you still haven't made an argument.

>>11550611
>anon posts something that paints him in positive light
>calls it a great post

for somebody who supposedly aims to find truth, you're suspiciously like one of those slaves in Plato's cave

>>11550621
? I was just saying I enjoyed reading his insight. Whats wrong with that?

>>11550624
You enjoyed being flattered and confused it with greatness

>>11550612
Then there are the people who insist that ALL OF OUR REALITY is a product of the workings of our brain, and the brain alone. You can't use your phenomenal experience of the brain as an object as the cause of your experience of reality, because the brain itself is part of what is being created. Just as a fish cannot adequately explain what an ocean is. In Nietzsche's words, he's "party to the dispute."

>>11550607
You can't rid your mind of these "conforming delusions". The very language you are speaking is an ideology. The notion of "societal conditioning" is also a delusion of liberal anthropology that puts man before society- a complete lie which Generative Anthropology has exposed. Not only that, by saying that there is "no absolute truth" you are making a truth claim which is a performative contradiction.

>>11550626
Are you thinking im someone else in this thread? I just said that he made a nice contribution, there's no deeper psychological meaning to it grow up you total autist.

>>11550572
because this view is like
>le god is a old man on a cloud and religion is ultimate truth, not a thought about him

>>11550618
The main reason reductionism makes no sense is due to the sheer fact that existence **exists.** You can't use deconstruction and experiments to explain the existence of non-contigent thing (existence). A materialist will then say "but it is contingent, on our brain chemicals!" without realising that that's just existence trying to understand itself through a limited prism of analysis.

Grasping this is actually a little difficult if you've been stuck in the materialist paradigm your whole life, but if you're willing to try and grasp it makes instant sense the moment you do. Existence produces itself, even existence that doubts its own existence.

>>11550618
quantum uncertainty for example

>>11550605
The only logically tenable position is the agnostic one. If you think that faith-based beliefs are somehow better than scientism, then you're just as bad as them.

>>11550650
Not that guy, but the only logically tenable position is actually believing in some kind of metaphysical first ground, such as a Prime Mover, a Kantian Thing-in-itself or any of its derivatives, or a Cartesian rationalist grounding of reality.

>>11550636
Pretty much this. If the reduction has to be made, it's already refuted.

>>11550628
You know what I meant, the inability of a person to prove something beyond all doubt. And I said "comforting" not "conforming", you are a human and see the world through a human eye, the insights that you have are obviously biased, the emotions that you have bias them towards least emotional pain. You assign logic and inteligibility to the world because you think of yourself as logical. You assign a conciousness, or a concept of goodness to a supposed ultimate cause. You can't concieve the experience of dearh, so you create an afterlife. You run from pain so you make it a heaven. You hate and fear others so you create a hell. You live in a society and experience pain so you create virtues, ethics and morals. The ultimate cause of God is man.

>>11550650
Well agnosticism either ignores inductive reasoning or implies an equiprobable relation between God and the absence of God.
If one has no sense of inductive reasoning it is hardly a rational position to take, and if they are equiprobable there is a 50% chance of God which normally implies at least some belief with it.

>>11550299
>I believe true and false don't even exist, everything is an illusion because its chemistry or something and also God doesn't real.
You just presented a series of incoherent grunts and chemical farts. Begone poop demon. Your ideas are made of shit.

>>11550299
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains
>life is worth nothing
Why do you dismiss value judgements as mere brain chemistry and then make a great value judgement as if it has importance?

>>11550561
>Do you think if those little guys could think, that they would wonder what their purpose is?,
cute desu

Science by definition cannot model subjective phenomena despite its existence being more ‘real’ to us than anything else.

That alone should tell you that scientism is not the way.

>everything is meaningless! because its just brain chemistry!!
>also, I trust my brain chemistry to guide me to the truth about everything.

Woke.

>>11550561
>Do you think if those little guys could think, that they would wonder what their purpose is?, that they could delude themselves into thinking they have free will?
I remember being something like 5 years old and while brushing my teeth I wondered if the cup I used to rinse my mouth had some kind of consciousness or memory, if it was aware of its own existence. It has kept me busy for quite some years. My body is an object in the world, just like the cup. What makes me special? Some chemicals in my brain? But those are also just objects in the world, just like the cup. Or do the objects in my brain have some kind of special property - if so, what is it?

>>11550673
>agnosticism ignores inductive reasoning
Huh? Induction as the basis of scientific knowledge is obviously riddled with problems and has been proven to be so since at least Hume. There is no need to ignore it. And there is an obvious difference between claiming equiprobability and stating the impossibility of proof on either side.

>>11550653
I somewhat agree with you but it's funny how both of the guys you mentioned (Kant and Descartes) went on to make leaps of faith to justify the existence of God. The reality is that any "metaphysical first ground" is not really more advanced than plain agnosticism in terms of what corollaries you can derive from it.

>>11550299
>>11550318
>muh science

>>11550735
>The reality is that any "metaphysical first ground" is not really more advanced than plain agnosticism in terms of what corollaries you can derive from it.
You can look at Schopenhauer for a completely atheistic, empirically based metaphysics, or alternatively the rational proofs of God (not in the Abrahamic sense) proposed by Aristotle for something more "otherworldly." The point is metaphysics, by its very nature, has to go 'beyond' ordinary experience - it's in the name. It is very different from agnosticism, which, depending on your particular brand, basically says "it's 50/50" or "it's completely unknowable." Schopenhauer for example derives his entire ethical system from his metaphysics. Very much more 'advanced' than plain agnosticism.

>>11550299
It's hard to believe there are people holding these opinions who can read, so I really wouldn't know.

>>11550444
trips of truth

>>11550493
Your perception of things being delusions are a delusion/spook

>>11550299
my diary desu

the amount of pseuds in this board has exponentially increased since the election.
Specially the quacks who misrepresent quantum field theory and use it to justify their magic.

That an subjective idealists who should honestly be gassed

>>11550299
>no higher purpose
define "higher purpose"

>>11550735
Let's try this. Let's say John only drives to either work or school from home. John leaves and you don't know where he went. Someone asks you "Where did John go off to?" You say, "I don't know." They say "What is the chance he went to school?" You say, "I just honestly can't tell because there is no proof of either side."
:-/

Nietzsche already explained how people can live a psychologically fulfilling life in spite of everything. Just don’t fall for the false gods of religiously driven asceticism or materialistic hedonism.

All belifs (mathematics, logics and science) require unfounded axioms that can only be justified with pragmatism, beliving in god is as justified as beliving in the external world.

>>11550590
How did you find out that I'm 18yo

>>11550794
Daily reminder QFT really models jiggling spring mattresses with ping pong balls attached.

>>11550880
do you consider valuing sensory input unfounded?

>>11550299
congratulations, you just summed up material world
but where did this world and all of its laws and particles came from?

>>11550914
From nothing

>>11550914
nobody knows.

>>11550905
Yeah brah. All of knowledge is based on unfounded axioms that can only be motivated by utility.

>>11550914
From me, you're welcome.

>>11550856
>explained
No, he *opined* how one could theoretically(himself failing miserably) live a psychologically fulfilling life in spite of his *opinions on everything*.

>>11550928
How do you know that?

>>11550933
No, he explained using a substantial degree of argumentation over several books to do so. And the fact that he ‘failed’ is to do with that fact he eventually developed mental illness (and not the self induced kind).

>>11550824
black/white fallacy

>>11550856
>in spite of everything
literally what did neetshit have to struggle with aside from his own shitty constitution

>>11550949
being an incel

>>11550824
How do you know John only drives to work or school? What if he is headed from work/school back to his house?

>>11550949
Existential terror like every other comfortable middle class person

>>11550926
Knowing is just possessing knowledge of something. If your concept is representative of the actuality of reality, no matter how you arrived at this conclusion, it could be said that you know the truth.
Not with absolute certainty, but what is absolutely certain besides self-existence? And even that is called into question with talented sophistry nowadays.

>>11550949
>living with neurosyphillis is really not so bad desu

>>11550325
The default is to trust those cheimicals. You don't move from it without a good reason.

>>11550981
Isn't that curable though?

>>11550995
in the 19th century?

>>11550299
shut the fuck up

>>11550937
It's a usefull belif sweetie

>>11550605
>it's utterly nonsense
It's really not though, your worthless literature and philosophy books notwithstanding :^)

>>11550299
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains
Isn't that incredible? where does it come from?

>>11550299
Wow congrats on getting to where everyone else was in the seventh grade. Maybe you can finally start catching up.

>>11551212
>worth
How do you ring worth out of your precious atoms, anyway, poindexter? You got the polynomials for that all graphed out?

>>11550583
OP isn’t gonna read any of these lol

>>11550603
absolutely based

the posters in this thread make me want to kill myself

>>11550299
Confessions by St. Augustine.

I wonder at the hardihood with which such
persons undertake to talk about God. In a treatise
addressed to infidels they begin with a chapter
proving the existence of God from the works of
Nature . . . this only gives their readers grounds
for thinking that the proofs of our religion are
very weak. . . . It is a remarkable fact that no
canonical writer has ever used Nature to prove
God.
pascal, Pensées, iv, 242, 243
Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had
asked me, ‘Why do you not believe in God?’ my reply
would have run something like this: ‘Look at the universe
we live in. By far the greatest part of it consists of empty
space, completely dark and unimaginably cold. The bodies
which move in this space are so few and so small in
comparison with the space itself that even if every one of
them were known to be crowded as full as it could hold
with perfectly happy creatures, it would still be difficult
to believe that life and happiness were more than a byproduct
to the power that made the universe. As it is,
however, the scientists think it likely that very few of the
suns of space—perhaps none of them except our own—
have any planets; and in our own system it is improbable
that any planet except the Earth sustains life. And Earth
herself existed without life for millions of years and may
exist for millions more when life has left her. And what is
it like while it lasts? It is so arranged that all the forms
of it can live only by preying upon one another. In the
lower forms this process entails only death, but in the
higher there appears a new quality called consciousness
which enables it to be attended with pain. The creatures
cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and
in pain they mostly die. In the most complex of all the
creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call
reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain
which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering,
and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.
It also enables men by a hundred ingenious
contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they
otherwise could have done on one another and on the
irrational creatures. This power they have exploited to the
full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease,
and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed
to give them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of
losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of
remembering. Every now and then they improve their
condition a little and what we call a civilisation appears.

>>11550413
>wtf why is the definer of good and evil doing things I don't like

But all civilisations pass away and, even while they
remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably
sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have
brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilisation
has done so, no one will dispute; that it will pass
away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it
should not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race
that comes into being in any part of the universe is
doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down,
and will sometime be a uniform infinity of homogeneous
matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to
nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a
transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face
of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the
work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that
all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either
there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent
to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.’
There was one question which I never dreamed of raising.
I never noticed that the very strength and facility of
the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem. If the universe
is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did
human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a
wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but
hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black
to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless
work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The
introductory
3
spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can
never have been the ground of religion: it must always
have been something in spite of which religion, acquired
from a different source, was held.

>>11550299
the book you write.

take this philosophy, anon, and now try to make it *beautiful.* write a story or a screenplay about this idea and make it a *good* one. and not a self-indulgent catastrophe.

you will probably produce Purest Ideology on the first take and be dissatisfied with it. but in doing so you will discover that you believe all kinds of things and in funny ways that you didn't even understand.

writing your own myth is the best 'cure' for nihilism. which is to say, it makes your own nihilism insufferable and unbearable in ways that will only make sense to you.

It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were
ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions
about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled.
For centuries, during which all men believed, the
nightmare size and emptiness of the universe was already
known. You will read in some books that the men of the
Middle Ages thought the Earth flat and the stars near, but
that is a lie. Ptolemy had told them that the Earth was a
mathematical point without size in relation to the distance
of the fixed stars—a distance which one medieval
popular text estimates as a hundred and seventeen million
miles. And in times yet earlier, even from the beginnings,
men must have got the same sense of hostile immensity
from a more obvious source. To prehistoric man the
neighbouring forest must have been infinite enough, and
the utterly alien and infest which we have to fetch from the
thought of cosmic rays and cooling suns, came snuffing
and howling nightly to his very doors. Certainly at all
periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious.
Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people
squeezed between great warlike empires, continually
defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia
with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense
the problem of pain
4
to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down
this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all
the great religions were first preached, and long practised,
in a world without chloroform.
At all times, then, an inference from the course of
events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the
Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it
was never made.1 Religion has a different origin. In what
follows it must be understood that I am not primarily
arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origin—a
task, in my view, necessary if we are to put the
problem of pain in its right setting.

In all developed religion we find three strands or elements,
and in Christianity one more. The first of these
is what Professor Otto calls the experience of the
Numinous. Those who have not met this term may be
introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you
were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would
know that you were in danger and would probably feel
fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next
room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is
often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be
based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily
afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact
that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous,
and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread.
With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the
Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply
‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it.
Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of
danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You
would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of
inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration
before it—an emotion which might be expressed in
Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’.
This feeling may be described as awe, and the object
which excites it as the Numinous.
Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a
very early period, began to believe that the universe was
haunted by spirits. Professor Otto perhaps assumes too
easily that from the very first such spirits were regarded
with numinous awe. This is impossible to prove for the
very good reason that utterances expressing awe of the Numinous
and utterances expressing mere fear of danger
may use identical language—as we can still say that we are
‘afraid’ of a ghost or ‘afraid’ of a rise in prices. It is therefore
theoretically possible that there was a time when men
regarded these spirits simply as dangerous and felt
towards them just as they felt towards tigers. What is certain
is that now, at any rate, the numinous experience
the problem of pain
6
exists and that if we start from ourselves we can trace it a
long way back.

A modern example may be found (if we are not too
proud to seek it there) in The Wind in the Willows where
Rat and Mole approach Pan on the island.
‘“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you
afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining
with unutterable love. “Afraid? of Him? O, never, never.
And yet—and yet—O Mole, I am afraid.”’
Going back about a century we find copious examples
in Wordsworth—perhaps the finest being that passage in
the first book of the Prelude where he describes his experience
while rowing on the lake in the stolen boat. Going
back further we get a very pure and strong example in
Malory,2 when Galahad ‘began to tremble right hard
when the deadly (= mortal) flesh began to behold the spiritual
things’. At the beginning of our era it finds expression
in the Apocalypse where the writer fell at the feet of
the risen Christ ‘as one dead’. In Pagan literature we find
Ovid’s picture of the dark grove on the Aventine of which
you would say at a glance numen inest 3
—the place is
haunted, or there is a Presence here; and Virgil gives us the
palace of Latinus ‘awful (horrendum) with woods and
sanctity (religione) of elder days’.4 A Greek fragment
attributed, but improbably, to Aeschylus, tells us of earth,
sea, and mountain shaking beneath the ‘dread eye of their
Master’.5 And far further back Ezekiel tells us of the
‘rings’ in his Theophany that ‘they were so high that they
were dreadful’:6 and Jacob, rising from sleep, says ‘How
dreadful is this place!’ 7
We do not know how far back in human history this
feeling goes. The earliest men almost certainly believed in
things which would excite the feeling in us if we believed
in them, and it seems therefore probable that numinous
awe is as old as humanity itself. But our main concern is
not with its dates. The important thing is that somehow
or other it has come into existence, and is widespread, and
does not disappear from the mind with the growth of
knowledge and civilisation.

>>11550521
First dialogues concerning natural religion followed by genealogy of morals.

Christians have never really recovered.
Christians

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the
visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from
mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully
Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural
that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and
therefore frightened, should invent the uncanny and the
Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we
mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human
nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine
yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way;
and this reaction is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of being in
accord with human nature. But it is not in the least ‘natural’
in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the
Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous,
or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the
wounds and death which it may entail could give the
slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to
an intelligence which did not already understand them.
When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he
makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which
could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts
and logical deductions from them. Most attempts to
explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be
explained—as when anthropologists derive it from fear
of the dead, without explaining why dead men (assuredly
the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted
this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must
insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from
fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives
to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just
as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful
object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest
hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aes
thetic experience, so no factual description of any human
environment could include the uncanny and the
Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be
only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere
twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing
objective and serving no biological function, yet showing
no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest
development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a
direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the
name Revelation might properly be given.

The Numinous is not the same as the morally good,
and a man overwhelmed with awe is likely, if left to himself,
to think the numinous object ‘beyond good and evil’.
This brings us to the second strand or element in religion.
All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge
some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain
proposed actions the experiences expressed by the
words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’. These experiences
resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be
logically deduced from the environment and physical
experiences of the man who undergoes them. You can
shuffle ‘I want’ and ‘I am forced’ and ‘I shall be well
advised’ and ‘I dare not’ as long as you please without getting
out of them the slightest hint of ‘ought’ and ‘ought
not’. And, once again, attempts to resolve the moral experience
into something else always presuppose the very
thing they are trying to explain—as when a famous psythe
problem of pain
1 0
choanalyst deduces it from prehistoric parricide. If the
parricide produced a sense of guilt, that was because men
felt that they ought not to have committed it: if they did
not so feel, it could produce no sense of guilt. Morality,
like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything
that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience. And it
has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The
moralities accepted among men may differ—though not,
at bottom, so widely as is often claimed—but they all
agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail
to practise. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien
codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore
are conscious of guilt. The second element in religion is
the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a
moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness
is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference
from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our
experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable
illusion, or else revelation

The moral experience and the numinous experience are
so far from being the same that they may exist for quite
long periods without establishing a mutual contact. In
many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and the
ethical discussions of the philosophers have very little to do
with each other. The third stage in religious development
arises when men identify them—when the Numinous
Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the
introductory
1 1
morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this
may seem to you very ‘natural’. What can be more natural
than for a savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to
think that the power which awes him is also the authority
which condemns his guilt? And it is, indeed, natural to
humanity. But it is not in the least obvious. The actual
behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts
bears no resemblance to the behaviour which morality
demands of us. The one seems wasteful, ruthless, and
unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities.
Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a
wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire
nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is
already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims
of the Numinous. Of all the jumps that humanity takes in
its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It
is not unnatural that many sections of the human race
refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality,
existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a
people, took the new step with perfect decision—I mean
the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have
taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from the
obscenities and barbarities of the unmoralised worship or
the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism. Judged
by its fruits, this step is a step towards increased health.
And though logic does not compel us to take it, it is very
hard to resist—even on Paganism and Pantheism morality
the problem of pain
1 2
is always breaking in, and even Stoicism finds itself willynilly
bowing the knee to God. Once more, it may be madness—a
madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in
its results—or it may be revelation. And if revelation, then
it is most really and truly in Abraham that all people shall
be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously
identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain-tops
and thunderclouds with ‘the righteous Lord’
who ‘loveth righteousness’.

The fourth strand or element is a historical event.
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to
be, or to be the son of, or to be ‘one with’, the Something
which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver
of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox,
and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking
too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible.
Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually
abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He
said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first
hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second.
And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians
becomes credible—that this Man, having been killed, was
yet alive, and that His death, in some manner incomprehensible
to human thought, has effected a real change in
introductory
1 3
8 Psalm 11:8.
our relations to the ‘awful’ and ‘righteous’ Lord, and a
change in our favour.
To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like
the work of a wise and good Creator or the work of
chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the
outset all the relevant factors in the religious problem.
Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate
on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical
event following on the long spiritual preparation of
humanity which I have described. It is not a system into
which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself
one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any
system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves,
the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless,
side by side with our daily experience of this painful world,
we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate
reality is righteous and loving.

Why this assurance seems to me good, I have more or
less indicated. It does not amount to logical compulsion.
At every stage of religious development man may rebel, if
not without violence to his own nature, yet without
absurdity. He can close his spiritual eyes against the
Numinous, if he is prepared to part company with half
the great poets and prophets of his race, with his own
childhood, with the richness and depth of uninhibited
experience. He can regard the moral law as an illusion,
and so cut himself off from the common ground of
the problem of pain
1 4
humanity. He can refuse to identify the Numinous with
the righteous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping sexuality,
or the dead, or the lifeforce, or the future. But the
cost is heavy. And when we come to the last step of all,
the historical Incarnation, the assurance is strongest of all.
The story is strangely like many myths which have
haunted religion from the first, and yet it is not like them.
It is not transparent to the reason: we could not have
invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious a priori
lucidity of Pantheism or of Newtonian physics. It has the
seemingly arbitrary and idiosyncratic character which
modern science is slowly teaching us to put up with in
this wilful universe, where energy is made up in little
parcels of a quantity no one could predict, where speed is
not unlimited, where irreversible entropy gives time a real
direction and the cosmos, no longer static or cyclic,
moves like a drama from a real beginning to a real end. If
any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us,
we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness,
that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the
Christian faith. It has the master touch—the rough, male
taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting
us in the face
If, on such grounds, or on better ones, we follow the
course on which humanity has been led, and become
Christians, we then have the ‘problem’ of pain.

divine omnipotence
Nothing which implies contradiction falls under
the omnipotence of God.
thomas aquinas,
Summ. Theol., Ia q xxv, Art 4
‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures
perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be
able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not
happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or
both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.
The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the
terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’, and perhaps also the term
‘happy’, are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the
outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words
are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument
is unanswerable. In this chapter I shall make some
comments on the idea of Omnipotence, and, in the following,
some on the idea of Goodness.
Omnipotence means ‘power to do all, or everything’.1
And we are told in Scripture that ‘with God all things are
possible’. It is common enough, in argument with an
unbeliever, to be told that God, if He existed and were
good, would do this or that; and then, if we point out that
the proposed action is impossible, to be met with the
retort ‘But I thought God was supposed to be able to do
anything’. This raises the whole question of impossibility
In ordinary usage the word impossible generally
implies a suppressed clause beginning with the word
unless. Thus it is impossible for me to see the street from
where I sit writing at this moment; that is, it is impossible
to see the street unless I go up to the top floor where I
shall be high enough to overlook the intervening building.
If I had broken my leg I should say ‘But it is impossible
to go up to the top floor’—meaning, however, that it
is impossible unless some friends turn up who will carry
me. Now let us advance to a different plane of impossibility,
by saying ‘It is, at any rate, impossible to see the street
so long as I remain where I am and the intervening building
remains where it is.’ Someone might add ‘unless the
nature of space, or of vision, were different from what it
is’. I do not know what the best philosophers and scientists
would say to this, but I should have to reply ‘I don’t
know whether space and vision could possibly have been
of such a nature as you suggest.’ Now it is clear that the
words could possibly here refer to some absolute kind of
possibility or impossibility which is different from the
divine omnipotence
1 7
relative possibilities and impossibilities we have been
considering.

I cannot say whether seeing round corners
is, in this new sense, possible or not, because I do not
know whether it is self-contradictory or not. But I know
very well that if it is self-contradictory it is absolutely
impossible. The absolutely impossible may also be called
the intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility
within itself, instead of borrowing it from other
impossibilities which in their turn depend upon others. It
has no unless clause attached to it. It is impossible under
all conditions and in all worlds and for all agents.
‘All agents’ here includes God Himself. His Omnipotence
means power to do all that is intrinsically possible,
not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may
attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no
limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a
creature free will and at the same time withhold free will
from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about
God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly
acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them
the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all
things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities
are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for
God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out
both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because
His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense
remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
It should, however, be remembered that human reasoners
often make mistakes, either by arguing from false
data or by inadvertence in the argument itself. We may
thus come to think things possible which are really
impossible, and vice versa.
2 We ought, therefore, to use
great caution in defining those intrinsic impossibilities
which even Omnipotence cannot perform. What follows
is to be regarded less as an assertion of what they are than
a sample of what they might be like.
The inexorable ‘laws of Nature’ which operate in defiance
of human suffering or desert, which are not turned
aside by prayer, seem, at first sight, to furnish a strong
argument against the goodness and power of God. I am
going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create
a society of free souls without at the same time creating a
relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.

There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness,
the recognition of a creature by itself as a ‘self’, can exist
except in contrast with an ‘other’, a something which is
not the self. It is against an environment and preferably a
social environment, an environment of other selves, that
the awareness of Myself stands out. This would raise a
difficulty about the consciousness of God if we were
mere theists: being Christians, we learn from the doctrine
of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to ‘society’
exists within the Divine being from all eternity—that
God is Love, not merely in the sense of being the Platonic
form of love, but because, within Him, the concrete
reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence
derived to the creatures.
Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to
choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose
between. A creature with no environment would have no
choices to make: so that freedom, like self-consciousness
(if they are not, indeed, the same thing), again demands
the presence to the self of something other than the self.
The minimum condition of self-consciousness and
freedom, then, would be that the creature should apprehend
God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God. It is
possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and
themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so, their freedom
is simply that of making a single naked choice—of
loving God more than the self or the self more than God.
But a life so reduced to essentials is not imaginable to us.
As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge
of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity
of ‘Nature’.

God declares the world meaningless, making it so

People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two
naked minds to ‘meet’ or become aware of each other. But
I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common
the problem of pain
2 0
medium which forms their ‘external world’ or environment.
Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting
between disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiously
the idea of, at least, a common space and common
time, to give the co- in co-existence a meaning: and space
and time are already an environment. But more than this
is required. If your thoughts and passions were directly
present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality
or otherness, how should I distinguish them from
mine? And what thoughts or passions could we begin to
have without objects to think and feel about? Nay, could
I even begin to have the conception of ‘external’ and
‘other’ unless I had experience of an ‘external world’?
You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in
fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without
signs of ‘externality’. Yes: and the result is that most people
remain ignorant of the existence of both. We may
therefore suppose that if human souls affected one
another directly and immaterially, it would be a rare triumph
of faith and insight for any one of them to believe
in the existence of the others. It would be harder for me to
know my neighbour under such conditions than it now is
for me to know God: for in recognising the impact of
God upon me I am now helped by things that reach me
through the external world, such as the tradition of the
Church, Holy Scripture, and the conversation of religious
friends. What we need for human society is exactly what
divine omnipotence
2 1
we have—a neutral something, neither you nor I, which
we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each
other. I can talk to you because we can both set up
sound-waves in the common air between us. Matter,
which keeps souls apart, also brings them together. It
enables each of us to have an ‘outside’ as well as an
‘inside’, so that what are acts of will and thought for you
are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only
to be, but to appear: and hence I have the pleasure of
making your acquaintance.

Society, then, implies a common field or ‘world’ in
which its members meet. If there is an angelic society, as
Christians have usually believed, then the angels also
must have such a world or field; something which is to
them as ‘matter’ (in the modern, not the scholastic, sense)
is to us.
But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a
fixed nature of its own. If a ‘world’ or material system had
only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment
to his wishes—‘trees for his sake would crowd into a
shade’. But if you were introduced into a world which
thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable
to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free
will. Nor is it clear that you could make your presence
known to me—all the matter by which you attempted to
make signs to me being already in my control and therefore
not capable of being manipulated by you.
the problem of pain
2 2
Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant
laws, not all states of matter will be equally agreeable to
the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for
that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body.
If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will
destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a
perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals
which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently
designed to transmit. Does this mean an inevitable element
of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I
think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an
incalculable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and
pains below a certain intensity are not feared or resented
at all. No one minds the process ‘warm—beautifully
hot—too hot—it stings’ which warns him to withdraw
his hand from exposure to the fire: and, if I may trust my
own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into
bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable.
Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from
being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable
even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter
of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that
it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member
of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a
journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction
must be going up hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it
to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you
want it to lie.

And this is very far from being an evil: on
the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of
courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and
good humour and modesty express themselves. But it
certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition
and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be
prevented from dealing with the problem by competition
instead of courtesy. And once they have advanced to
actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nature of
matter to hurt one another. The permanent nature of wood
which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use
it for hitting our neighbour on the head. The permanent
nature of matter in general means that when human
beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who
have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their
cause is unjust.
We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God
corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures
at every moment: so that a wooden beam became
soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air
refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the soundwaves
that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be
one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in
which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay,
if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion,
evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter
which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we
the problem of pain
2 4
attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood
of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable
alterations. That God can and does, on occasions,
modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call
miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception
of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands
that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game
of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to
your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the
game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can
deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes
to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you
conceded everything that at any moment happened to
suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your
pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board
was not to his liking—then you could not have a game
at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws,
consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole
natural order, are at once limits within which their common
life is confined and also the sole condition under
which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility
of suffering which the order of nature and the existence
of free wills involve, and you find that you have
excluded life itself.

>>11550299
How is a book supposed to change your mind? That's all possible and untestable. It's only a weight upon you if you deny your own feelings. Breathe the fresh air and pet a dog and try to believe it's all an illusion. Even if you know it is you can't make yourself feel it, and if you already feel it you can't talk yourself out of it. Books inform our theory of the nature of existence but they don't affect how we experience the world. Go on antidepressants if you need to and pull your head out of your ass and find what feels important. No book is going to talk you into regaining your innocence. That's not why we read.

As I said before, this account of the intrinsic necessities
of a world is meant merely as a specimen of what they
might be. What they really are, only Omniscience has the
divine omnipotence
2 5
data and the wisdom to see: but they are not likely to be
less complicated than I have suggested. Needless to say,
‘complicated’ here refers solely to the human understanding
of them; we are not to think of God arguing, as we do,
from an end (co-existence of free spirits) to the conditions
involved in it, but rather of a single, utterly self-consistent
act of creation which to us appears, at first sight, as the
creation of many independent things, and then, as the creation
of things mutually necessary. Even we can rise a little
beyond the conception of mutual necessities as I have
outlined it—can reduce matter as that which separates
souls and matter as that which brings them together
under the single concept of Plurality, whereof ‘separation’
and ‘togetherness’ are only two aspects. With every
advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and
the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though
this or that element of it could have been removed, will
become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the ‘best of all
possible’ universes, but the only possible one. Possible
worlds can mean only ‘worlds that God could have made,
but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done
involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s
freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom
cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives
and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never
debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom
cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
the problem of pain
2 6
The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause
other than Himself produces His acts and no external
obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the
root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence
the air in which they all flower

And that brings us to our next subject—the Divine
goodness. Nothing so far has been said of this, and no
answer attempted to the objection that if the universe
must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering,
then absolute goodness would have left the universe
uncreated. And I must warn the reader that I shall not
attempt to prove that to create was better than not to create:
I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous
question can be weighed. Some comparison
between one state of being and another can be made, but
the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere
words. ‘It would be better for me not to exist’—in what
sense ‘for me’? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by
not existing? Our design is a less formidable one: it is only
to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being
assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we
are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without
contradiction.

What the gecko you guys? 142 replies and no one even mentions existentialism maybe had some books on the subject?

>>11550299
So cute baby's first existential crisis. 'God doesn't exist, oh nors!" Adorable!

>>11551578
>>11551583
CS Lewis was a lot smarter than me but his argument here is weakening. Dread of the "numinous" is a fear of the unknown, and sometimes, a fear of certain doom as opposed to the uncertain threat of a wild animal. We feel the same dread if we imagine a superior alien as opposed to a ghost, but we do not conceive of the alien as a spiritual, "numinous" force.

Likewise guilt can also be tied to our unceasing focus on survival. Wronging others makes us more likely to experience vengeance, the distrust of society at large, and can even directly hurt our own survival if we previously depended on the person we wronged for survival.

>>11551654
Wtf I love Christianity now, what book is it from ?

That's just a meaningless statement with no real life implications once you turn off your computer and leave your room. It may be true (or not) that everything is reducible to chemicals etc. but nevertheless you won't just stop attributing meaning/intentionality to the things in your life upon realizing this.

>>11550299

>>11550299
>There is no God, no higher purpose, the world is ultimately meaningless,all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains, life is worth nothing, good and bad are illusions and with time everything will be forgotten.

[citation needed]
But what you recommended seems like a job for the Nietzschenator.

Nietzsche implores us to find an apparently purposeless universe as beautiful and maximally enabling. It is a free and open canvas for the human spirit to paint upon. Nihilism and resignation are symptoms of a diluted will to power, slave morality, the weakling impulse to prize the "next world" over the one that actually presents before our eyes.

>>11551883
>Nietzsche implores us to find an apparently purposeless universe as beautiful and maximally enabling. It is a free and open canvas for the human spirit to paint upon. Nihilism and resignation are symptoms of a diluted will to power, slave morality, the weakling impulse to prize the "next world" over the one that actually presents before our eyes.

What a fucking faggot

>>11550299
Bump

>>11550636
>but if you're willing to try and grasp it makes instant sense the moment you do.
No it actually doesn't, and you should be careful of assuming truth is so easily found. The problem is that you claim to understand things which you yourself say no logical reasonings can be derived from. Sure we cannot reason our way into an explanation for existence, but this is precisely why claiming it was made by a God is so foolish. A god is one of the most complicated explanations you could give to justify existence and it is prone to the exact same arguments as any other. You still have the issue that if a god existed before existence then it wasn't really before existence was it? It's circular logic. The only way to use God as an explanation is to reduce the concept of God to such vague generalities that it becomes essentially meaningless.
>Existence produces itself
This is a statement which sounds nice but signifies nothing. What does it actually mean? What even is existence? What does it mean to "produce itself?"

This isn't even getting into the fact that it might very well be possible to perform experiments to determine the nature of existence and the origins of the universe even if it currently isn't. Regardless of that being true or not it is irrelevant to your patronizing and foolish argument.

What really kills me is the extreme pretentiousness religious posters on /lit/ display when debating. They act like anyone who doesn't believe in God is a fool who has put no thought into the subject and that they are objectively and obviously correct. All atheists are 12 years old in their mind.

>>11551988
>god existed before existence
>this is somehow wrong
you are talking about God existence before matter existed, as well as dimensions and laws of physics, which is totally plausible, as God isnt limited to anything

>>11550299
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains

implying this is a bad thing and not an even greater reason to be amazed by life

>>11552173
But what does it mean to exist before matter and time and dimensions? Like if those things aren't there then what can existence even mean? Also you're making up this concept of a thinking being which can exist independently of all that with no evidence that that would be so and no conception of what such a thing could even mean. It's all well and good to say "God isn't limited to anything" but what meaning does that sentence convey? Is that really totally plausible if you can't actually specify what it even means?

>>11552398

>>11552007
4chan these days basically has the equivalent of fedora tipping religionists. Whether Christian or otherwise, they are obnoxious little twats.

>>11552454
Great response bud

>>11552398
>he tries to classify a transcendent spiritual being into an absolute material existence based on the mortal human experience
The fact in thereof that God exists beyond matter, time, and dimensions makes it impossible to ascribe Him a meaning to what that entails, because it is entirely beyond any possible frame of reference we would be able to comprehend

>>11552574
So then why would you ascribe that he is a "him?" Or that it has consciousness? Or that it still exists? Or that it exists at all? I'm not saying that we can understand what led to existence. I'm saying no one can and to claim it is a god is a silly and baseless proposition. It is projecting an anthropomorphic entity onto some force which likely has nothing to do with us and does not resemble us in any way. It seems far more likely to me it would be some unconscious trait of the universe or reality like the laws of physics than a consciousness, but either way there is no method to determine which is correct. There is no evidence of a god's existence so why suppose that?

*blocks your epistemology*

>>11550299

>>11550299
Camus is pretty good, not because he disproves it but rather says it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing if I told you that you are made up of a bunch of unconscious particle that together make your conscious mind. It’s a neat fact but it doesn’t really effect your life

>>11552620
I presume there is a creator on the fact that given that the general functions of the universe, with their obscene amounts of highly complex mechanisms built upon the other and intermingling and compounding on each other, managed to create themselves, function in such a way that managed to produce life, and then produce intelligent life that exists in a markedly spiritual and anti-materialist fashion, without a creator or God to guide it along that this managed to happen entirely through pure chance.
That the sciences exist in such a way that they operate and produce things on such sheer cosmic coincidence, where we can ascribe scientific functions to golden ratios or universal constants, that there be no outside interference in the matter is akin to throwing buckets of paint at a wall and making the Mona Lisa

>>11550299
The books of Sartre, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Camus all could help.

Also these books:
>Notes from Underground
>Steppenwolf
>Siddhartha
>Meditations
>Confessions
>Holy books (Bible, Koran, ect.)
>Lolita

>>11550337
You can´t believe how much I want to fuck Anzu.

>>11550299
Orthodoxy and or The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, alternatively Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

>>11550374
Illusions of what? Good luck surviving once you rip the carpet of the assumptions that allow basic humanity out from under yourself. Either you'll live like a retard or do it half-assed, no in between

Shake off the chains of conventional knowledge and see the nature of reality itself through meditation.

>>11551846
I think its Mere Christianity, if not any other of his theological books are about as good if not better

>>11552956
just another redditor who needs a permission slip from rocks and dirt to be allowed to feel anything transcendental, it's just sad

>>11552969
Nah

So did anybody ITT actually engage into a proper discussion and didn't just mock OP?

>>11552996
Not really worth it, he needs to read some stuff to understand anything beyond the scientism he's been raised in, and I don't think any of us on here are smart enough to get him there on our own

>>11553007
What should I read?

>>11553015
Hegel blows vulgar reductionism out of the fucking water in like a paragraph in the Preface to the Phenomenology. I don't have the passage on hand but it makes the rounds here on /lit/

>>11553015
How much philosophy have you read til now?

>>11553042
Dawkins and stirner

>>11553082
>Dawkins

>>11553023
>>11553015
Noob ain't gonna get somethin outta Hegel. Maybe some entry level existentialist can convince you God doesn't matter. Because he don't. Not sure why a modern person would still even be trying to get meaning from God. Live your life faggot, it's yours!
Try Camus maybe.

>>11553082
If you're interested in counterarguments to your current belief system you should definitely read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. It takes the ideas and arguments of many different philosophers and condenses it into a short and effective book. Also, if you're looking for something a little more interesting, I'd recommend The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton. The arguments in that book are less analytical and more.... emotional. I'm not sure how to describe it but its worth a read. But the more important of the two would definitely be Lewis' book, and its a much shorter read.

>>11550313
It's like saying that a computer program is a pattern of coordinated voltage signals in a circuit board. Which it is. That would be equivalent to chemistry of our brain.

What's the problem there?

>>11552956
This post is Jordan Peterson's fault

>>11553191
if there's something apart from the voltage signals or whatever that compels you to make this reduction, then it isn't "just" these signals is it? it is these signals but these signals are not it. wrap your head around that.

>>11553226
In OPs analogy the voltage signals are caused by an input, powered by an outlet, powered by a generator, powered by another source of energy and so on. What makes you think that there's something other than pure dumb momentum all throughout this process? What would make the original action in this chain something 'meaningful' or different in any way to any other of the subsequent iterations?

>>11553203
I hate Jordan Peterson and have never read anything of his or watched any of his videos

Doing acid or shrooms is simply an act of mildly affecting the chemistry in a brain. From your point of view, it's just as meaningless and insignificant.
Talking like that is easy. The experience is something else entirely.

Value is relative. To you, your experience literally is everything. There is nothing for you outside of your experience.
It doesn't matter how insignificant your experience is to a stranger on the internet. Or to the universe, the unconscious god that it is. It matters to you, and that's all that matters (..to you)

>>11550299
This is what atheists actually belive

>>11552773
>what is the anthropic principle

If the universe were made with the purpose of producing life you would expect there to be more of it and less empty space given that space outsizes us ten billion to one and that life hasn't existed for that long on a universal scale. It would make more sense to say that the universe was created to produce dark matter or planets or just space then to say it exists to produce life, especially when life will die out at some point while the universe will continue on. It isn't as unlikely as you would think for life to be possible and in all possible universes where it isn't no one is there to notice it. You're acting like because things behave in a set way that necessitates the existence of a creator, but if there really were a God he would defy those laws which would show that they don't really exist in the first place so your argument is a bit self-defeating there. You can't use the existence of predictability to show something unpredictable exists. Your argument would make more sense before we knew what we do now about cosmology and evolution which have shown exactly how complexity could arise from simple building blocks. You can claim a deist God set things up to be that way but once again that is an incredibly roundabout and complicated explanation for what is far more likely to just be random chance.

>>11553015
Ignore the philistines replying to you. They act as if God is obvious but the arguments are much stronger against the existence of God than for. Read the books sure, but don't swallow them wholeheartedly. It isn't that hard even for a layman to see the holes in their arguments especially with a little research.

>>11553398
>I hate someone I know nothing about.
Good way to live.

>>11552773
Woke

>>11553669
What should I do ?

>>11550299
bump

>>11553952
The theodicy of Abraham religions is just ridiculous. What more do you need?

>>11550320

Let me guess. You though exactly the same thing until you got older and, during a sad and depressing phase in your life you ended up discovering Christ and realizing the universe has meaning, that there is a God who loves you and that you and you’re loved ones are keep existing in some form even after the illusion of finitude that is death.

>>11550299
>>11550513
>>11553952

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWDIzHldPg

>>11550299
Of course there is you jackass. god's real, and he hates us all equally. The best book I can recommend is 12 Rules for Life by my man JBP, but certainly not for the reasons you think. God has to be real, no question about it, yet his hatred for us is most apparent in this abhorrent mish-mash of bullshit. What's more, the big man upstairs visits me in my fucking sleep every night and screams in my ears

>>11554256

I loved your last phrase. I’m thinking of stealing it.

>>11554267
By all means, please do. It takes the load off of me that's for damn sure.

OP is a fag

>>11553688
Obviously I meant I hate his work, now do you feel better?

>>11553952
Honestly if you are a total novice at arguments for and against the existence of God (and I will probably be ridiculed for this) look on Wikipedia. It has a list of the most common arguments and some reputations, many of which have appeared in this thread. Then the ones which seem more convincing or interesting you can read some of the originals.

>>11553669
Strong argument against God pls

>>11550299
>There is no God, no higher purpose, the world is ultimately meaningless,all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains, life is worth nothing, good and bad are illusions and with time everything will be forgotten.
Only a God could make that assertion

>>11550299
Maybe any introduction to philosophy.

>>11554364
Go fuck yourself you stupid shit. I swear to the one true God (otherwise known as Judas Iscariot) that philosophy is the biggest goddamn waste of anyone's time. As a matter of fact, Judas Iscariot invented philosophy once he had those 30 silver pieces wedged in his ass crack. Yeah, that's right. Judas was the pre-Socratic Socrates par excellence. Bet you didn't expect that one, huh? No one does, and then BAM they get fucking wacked by the Iscariot philoso-mafia with Judas at the helm taking names, kicking ass, and establishing modal logical arguments all at the same damn time.

>>11552967
>>11551846
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain

>>11554348
>I hate Jordan Peterson and have never read anything of his or watched any of his videos
>have never read anything of his or watched any of his videos
>never read anything of his
Do you see the problem yet? I'm not saying you need to read him but maybe tone down the hate until you stop talking out of your ass.

>>11554357
>God is all powerful and all knowing.
>God is good.
>There is evil in the world.
You can only pick two without contradiction. Explain how that fits with Christianity?

>>11554434
I think being an atheist means you don't believe in god.

>>11550299
wow really?
I guess so
actually could you tell me what exactly a "nothing" is? sounds pretty weird if you think about using that to describe every"thing"

>>11554357
Against the Christian god? If god created man, then why would he make it so some follow his will and others suffer in the absence of it? Surely if god did create man he would just make everybody follow to his will.

On the other hand, if man created god, it would make perfect sense of all these issues. God rules with fear/malevolance and bribery, two things that will convince a man strongly to follow his (gods) will. Using this, you can enforce any rule or sense of ethics you want. Civilizations in the past have used this tactic to enforce morality and various other rules extremely soundly for hundreds of years. What makes Christianity any different?

>>11554382
<3

>>11551177
that''s right. bitch.

>>11554535
Okay I see your point now. You right

>>11550299
>There is no God
If god is whoever first created the first thing, then sure there is a god.

>>11554637
>claiming the problem of pain is a “strong argument”

By not only presenting this argument in the first place, but by presenting it in such a simple and unrefined form, you prove your own lack of understanding. Read The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis, short book that defeats your argument.

>>11554738
Dude, I would love to respect your arguments but they are second grader shit. Are you saying that any being who doesn’t follow Gods will doesn’t deserve to exist? God gives free will and gives even those who refuse his love and will existence.

>>11554784
>Are you saying that any being who doesn’t follow Gods will doesn’t deserve to exist?
did you respond to the wrong person or something?

>>11554784
I think I understand what you are saying. If God was real, why wouldn't he just have everyone follow his will? Why have people that break it? Why accept evil? Isn't accepting evil evil in itself? Isn't god good? It would completely contradict itself.

>>11554792
No. God allows those who he knows will deny his will to exist. Honestly I hate to keep saying “CS Lewis durr” but Lewis has the shortest and most effective counters to uniformed arguments like yours. He’s got many essays and several books that counter this specific argument

>>11554825
See >>11554802

>>11554802
Would you rather I explain it to you poorly or can I recommend you a reaaaly good book on the subject. Even if it doesn’t convince you God exists or anything it should explain the problem of evil to you

>>11554838
See above. I do respect your objection as it is something I had trouble with for a long time but there are intelligent and effective counters to this argument

>>11554767
It's called theodicy and C.S.Lewis neither invented it nor solved it. In fact, I'm not just arguing he failed to solve it, but Lewis himself said his book was only a partial solution.
So maybe you go back to the kiddie table and let the grown ups talk.

Fellow atheist here. Meaning isn't wholly delusional. The notion that meaning is inherent in the univers might be. But we as meaning creators understand the world to be as it is through our interaction with language, culture, art, work etc. If I can recommend any books I would suggest CPR, Being and Time, Hesiod's Theogony, and Kierk's Philosophical Fragments. Give these a serious read and the complexity of meaning and our interactions with preconceived meabing and created meaning might spark some interest in you. Nihilism is a lazy letting go of our struggle to pursue meaningful activities in life. There doesn't need to be any platonic heaven for us to refer to when understanding the world. Meaning has value insofar as we use it to further our experiences in the world.

One beautiful example is from the Theogony. Consider why Chaos comes first or how Zeus' fight with his father signifies our struggle and fight against our predecessors. Uncovering meaning is difficult and uncertain. But the uncertainty itself doesn't entail it's illusory. Rather the uncertainty shows our active role in interpretting the world.

>>11554841
Explain it to me poorly. It is just so unbelievable to me that God just happens to "respect all". It sounds like a cheap counter to the question of why God doesn't impose his will.

Why keep evil?

Either you will get a response about duality of good (then why doesn't god just make it not a duality and make good and bad seem self-evident), or about how god respects evil (a copout as to why god doesn't intervine, which they will then say he does but you just don't notice which is even more of a copout answer, and is really just people ascribing self-imposed meanings to symbols, and really anything can be made into a symbol or pattern if you are smart enough)

>>11554876
Ok, if I must. I’m sorry to say it’s been a long time since I’ve read theology and I’ll need to freshen up. I’ll do my best as soon as I can. However, if this thread ends before I can get back to you, I implore you to read The Problem of Pain by Lewis. It’s very short and will address your problems

>>11554876
Just read CS Lewis's response/argument to the question of "why keep evil?", and it was pretty much "I don't know, only the lord knows because he can see the full picture", which is bs on 2 accounts. First, there are people that live lives of complete suffering who will never feel happiness.

Second, why would a god create a duality of good/evil? Just remove evil, and instill what good is in all of us. Remove duality.

>>11554876
On a short-stop note, how would you respond to the suggestion that God allows evil to lead to a more perfect good? This was a view often held by the ancients

>>11554897
How much of the book did you read?

>>11554893
see >>11554897
I think I'll still read it because it is a concept I'm interested in. I also want to see if there is any more weight to his answer. I would still be interested on your take of it though.

>>11554899
Why can't he just create that more perfect good himself? He's a god.

>>11554905
see >>11554907
I just looked to see what his main argument was to my idea, and read a few pages of summary of the book.

>>11554913
There are laws of reality. God can’t create a married bachelor, he can’t create an honest liar, or a round corner. In the same way, he can’t create a repentant man who has never sinned, or a brave man who has stood in the face of evil who has never faced evil. There is beauty and goodness that can only exist as long as evil has existed.

>>11554920
Worth reading more. The beginning is meant to be very basic.

>>11554907
I’ll try and provide my take tomorrow

>>11554920
Also Lewis is meant to be available to the lesser-read, his works are generally distilled versions of other authors

>>11554897
Also important to note, if humans cannot recognize good and evil (because only God can) then humans cannot be moral actors and cannot sin anymore than could a dog or a cat. It denies the story of Eden.

>>11554941
So god isn't omnipotent, according to what you just said. This always happens when arguing with christians, you attack and disprove something, they say "oh yeah well that quality/place/thing doesn't actually exist/is just a metaphor". They will deny hell and heaven are places, they will say the spirit is just a state of mind, they will deny gods omnipotence, they will deny that god punishes, and they will deny that keeping people away from a reward is a punishment. Don't you think it is a little more likely that the Christian god doesn't exist? What makes Christianity different from countless other religions that you don't believe in? Christianity was invented to enforce morality and various other rules extremely soundly for hundreds of years.

>>11550660
>You live in a society

>>11554986
I deny none of those things. So no.

>>11554986
And just because God can’t create a fucking paradox doesn’t mean he isn’t omnipotent.

>>11550299
>There is no God

The same assumption can be made about there being a God. Faith in a greater purpose is in no way detrimental if you truly believe life is meaningless.

>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brains

Then would morality not exist if we weren't alive? Ideas are more than something tangible, proving the existence of non-physical entities.

>life is worth nothing, good and bad are illusions and with time everything will be forgotten

It's vain to assume morality is inherently human, even if the system was just put into place to benefit humans using rules and guidelines the fact that it progresses in two opposite directions forming two indefinite absolutes is proof of something greater than us. Even if humans all died out tomorrow, would the idea of absolute good just vanish? No one would be striving to approach a better defintion of it but the concept still exists.

>What book will change my mind

The Bible

>>11554913
He is the perfect good. Improving morality is a human concept, and he created us. He literally created a neutral state between himself and the devil to see which path we would choose. Like when a dog gets stolen and no one knows whether or not the thief is lying they set the dog down and see who he runs to. You could imagine he did it for fun, just to create a world of conscious beings, in this case free will would be definable as the choice to be wicked, good, or neutral, that being human.

>>11555106
>The Bible
Just because you're supposed to believe it does, doesn't mean it will.

>>11555139
Supposed to believe it does what? Who is forcing me? What are they forcing me to believe? I believe in a state of absolute moral virtue and that we are incapable of achieving this. I also believe that there is something capable of achieving this that is inherently greater than we are. And I believe that a morally perfect being would want what is best for everything conscious by defintion of morality. That is God to me.

>>11550299

>>11550299
Wrong

>>11555163
What other books do you recommend?

>>11552398
oof, absolutely embarrassing

>>11555829
>if I pretend those ideas make sense they do!

>>11550607
>Sure there is no absolute truth
>Makes an absolute truth claim a sentence after

you don't even deserve to be called brainlet

>>11550521
You are correct but evil does not exist ontologically, it doesn't have its own being. Evil is privation of good.

Don't let any book change your mind because it will be a book of demons.

>>11550536
No one knows, it is impossible to tap into the essence of God in this life. We can only know him through his effects/energies.

>>11555314
what is this picture a reference to?

>>11550572
Because atheism is literally irrational?
look at this total pseud f.e >>11550579

>What book will change my mind ?

Even asking this question is proof enough that your nihilism is simply bad faith.

>>11550299
>I'm thinking genuinely about how male I even am...
>Non-binary shit is fine, but it cannot explain me...
>There is no gender, really, from a rational and reductive pov
>It's merely a facade that masks the fecund sexual function...
NoLongerHuman.png
>If i could construct a gender for myself, it would be some kind of gay masculine one from antiquity
>Sacred Band of Thebes, for example
>It would be funny and dramatic... so I probably have vestiges of maleness deep down....
>Yet, now, my sexuality has gone into such free play that I no longer truly care about being fit to fuck normie girls, no longer desire jezebels noticing me.
>I want to cum on the planet instead... let this macrocosm be drenched in semen....
>I am no man

>>11555891
That's only how perceive the world at the moment, and I'm willing to change

>>11550299
Kys

The Book of Wisdom

“For, not thinking rightly, they said among themselves:
“Brief and troubled is our lifetime;
there is no remedy for our dying,
nor is anyone known to have come back from Hades.
For by mere chance were we born,
and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been;
Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and reason a spark from the beating of our hearts,
And when this is quenched, our body will be ashes
and our spirit will be poured abroad like empty air.
Even our name will be forgotten in time,
and no one will recall our deeds.
So our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
and will be dispersed like a mist
Pursued by the sun’s rays
and overpowered by its heat.
For our lifetime is the passing of a shadow;
and our dying cannot be deferred
because it is fixed with a seal; and no one returns.”

>>11556181

>>11550458
>pure-blooded americans
cute oxymoron

>>11553664
If one simply defines the universe sole purpose to produce life and an abundance of it then one can imagine generative matrix fields that create fully formed life in every direction.

However, the pattern of this universe is one of self-reliance. Life builds itself out of the simplest constituents. It is an efficient design. If one considers an efficient self-reliant universe to be God's purpose, then it is perfect.
Also, the universe is teeming with potential life, there are millions of hospitable planets in each galaxy. It may be the most effective form of such a universe. In regards to its effectiveness, one would expect to find a flat universe, or as much mass as possible before gravity would overtake it because God would be making the most out of a simple cosmological process. This is exactly what one finds. Merely coincidence or something greater is going on here.

Is humanity ever going to get tired of the reductionist meme?

>>11556181

>>11556473
someday they will realize they cant draw a perfect circle with straight lines

>>11550299
>the world is ultimately meaningless
not for you to determine or foretell
>all our values can be reduced to the chemistry of our brain
collective values often run counter to individuals interests as an animal.
>life is worth nothing
to whom?
>good and bad are illusions
clearly some things are good for you or bad for you. good and evil can be subjective to a large extant but never an illusion

>>11556473
When nietzsche died

>>11553266
>>11553191
PC can't run without OS

>>11556621
Prove it

>>11555043
If you don't deny hell, then surely you admit god rules through fear?>>11555071
A better good isn't a paradox you fucking mong.

>>11555138
Imagine being brainwashed into thinking your religion contains the perfect good lol. And you are probably the same person to laugh at cult members. Sort of funny how God just happens to be relaxed and not intervene, don't you think he might not intervene because he doesn't exist? Also funny how the only time he judges us is after our death when it is decided whether we go to heaven or hell, the one state we can fall in where we can't communicate with anyone alive lol. This has happened hundreds of times over with different religions, the idea of a convenient judgment after death. It is completely rediculous. Free will would be cruel, because then he is knowingly casting people to eternal torture. Lol he just happened to give us free will because he "loves" us, even though it is far more likely god was created by man and filled in bullshit to prove these absurd holes. Unless you are saying god is a passive aggressive pussy who rules through fear and bribery?

If you deny hell exists, then
>>11554986
>This always happens when arguing with christians, you attack and disprove something, they say "oh yeah well that quality/place/thing doesn't actually exist/is just a metaphor". They will deny hell and heaven are places, they will say the spirit is just a state of mind, they will deny gods omnipotence, they will deny that god punishes, and they will deny that keeping people away from a reward is a punishment.

If you say that we shouldn't understand God's will, then I can literally justify anything about anything using that logic lol. What do you think hundreds of other religions you would consider fake also said to their supporters when they were doing senseless shit that didn't benefit them?

>>11553191
>coordinated
That's the operative word here. Organization and information are real things in the universe that require a huge amount of energy to maintain. To say that a computer program is "just a bunch of electrical signals" is insulting, tantamount to saying Shakespeare is just a bunch of squiggles on a page.

>>11550605
Scientific reductionism is literally the only way of reliably finding truth. Plus, without it, we'd probably still be killing a bird and taking a live bird to dip into the blood and water of the first one and then sprinkle it on sick people to cure them.

>>11550636
>There is something we don't understand
>You must open your mind and just believe it is god

Would you be willing to admit there could be many different answers to the question "why does existence exist?", and if so, why do you assume it is "god"?

>>11550880
>everyone has presuppositions
>therefore I can have as many presuppositions as I want and I'm the same as anyone else
it's hard to believe some people are this stupid

>>11557103
yeah dude if it weren't for science we'd be stuck doing dumb shit all the time

>>11552007
I think with a little push, they might start infighting, just need to find a prickly subject between Christians and keep bringing it up so they start calling each other idiots who haven't put any thought into it

>>11552398
all the answers to this are
>god has magic properties
the truth is time and space are linked, so the question "what happened before the universe existed?" is a nonsensical question, because you are asking about a time that is before time existed

>>11550299
Start with the Greeks.

>>11552773
>the argument from personal incredulity
sad

>>11554767
there is no future state that can justify a single tear of an abused child

>>11557145
>don't make sense within the postulates i've taken as axiomatic to run my time evolution graph to t<0
LOL did a spastic quadriplegic leprechaun tell you that with his magic satanic talking box?

>>11557180
if you conceptualize anything "outside" the material realm, you become free to conceptualize literally anything. you abandon all rules of logic and reason. that is a completely indefensible position to take

>suffering is necessary because free will
>the road to heaven is narrow and few find it
>most will use their free will to forsake god
>therefore most become separated and continue suffering

conclusion: god must be mostly evil

>>11557189
>nooo it's indefensible for your synapses to fire in patterns outside of the realm i've trapped you in with MatLab

>>11557213
>can't answer as to what would stop you from making anything you wanted up and claiming it is "not within the postulates you've taken as axiomatic"
just sad

>>11557189
Unironically this. The only reason we can say what happened to the universe after the big bang is because we have evidence (specifically light from around that time which is just now reaching us). There is no point speculating about what happened before the universe because any guess is equally invalid absent of evidence.

>>11557221
>your bad neurons will cause a potential Leibniz explosion so it's morally wrong

>>11550660
Your statement about proof is in itself a statement discrediting your stance. If we could never achieve absolute proof you'd be incapable of saying that statement, a claim stating that you absolutely know there is no way we'll ever absolutely know something. You can't just blow that off as a "you know what I mean" thing

>>11557233
>muh realms
>light's reaching us now from just after when time came into being before which nothing made sense, look it's a psuedo-Reimannian manifold guy it doesn't have to make any sense

Why materialism is baloney, Bernardo Kastrup

Modern man in search of a soul, Jung

Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief, Zagzebski

>>11557269
You're retarded. I never said nothing made sense before the universe began, I just said there's zero point in speculating on it because we have no evidence to prove or disprove it. So claiming the universe was just a giant hamster prior to the big bang is just as valid as any other pointless hypothesis.

>>11557296
>haha it's a giant hamster, flying spaghetti, teapot orbiting saturn xd
>lambda cdm isn't even just pure conjecture at all
>if you don't subscribe to my autistic set of rules I plain came up with out of nothing and can't really justify with anything except strawmen, slippery slopes and handwringing, then you're somehow bad, even though I have no yardstick for "bad" because everything's just elaborate geometry anyway
Well, have fun being a particularly large and annoying tangent bundle or whatever

>>11557296
>science is the only form of acquiring human knowledge

>>11556773
>>11553191


It is not and never will be a physical proof that the soul is real, because the soul is beyond physicality (meaning outside the universe) and this truth can only be realized by the individual (whom is animated by a soul). Patterns manifested in nature can be stylized or artistically rendered into visual abstractions that facilitate the conceptualization of the nature of the soul.

>>11557283
Literally the only post in THIS thread aside from the guy who recommended Mere Christianity that gives the OP some books to read

>>11557422

Whatever makes you sleep at night, bitch

>>11556462
If it is a pattern of self-reliance you would expect it to last forever instead of eventually dying. You say it is efficient at building life yet it took a very long time and happened in very very few places when compared to the whole. Simpler universes can be imagined than this one so it is not the most efficient at using simplicity.
>In regards to its effectiveness, one would expect to find a flat universe, or as much mass as possible before gravity would overtake it because God would be making the most out of a simple cosmological process. This is exactly what one finds.
The universe's ultimate shape is not explicitly known by science yet but it is suspected to be "flat" though I don't know whether you are referring to the idea of space's fundamental geometry or saying the shape of the universe itself is flat (which it isn't). The mass statement is a little silly simplu because I don't think it is true. As far as I am aware we are a good margin away from a big crunch.
Humans are very good at seeing patterns, to the point we see them even when they are not present. There are an almost infinite number of patterns you could find in the universe to say "the pattern of the universe is empty space" or "the pattern of the universe is gravitational wells" or whatever else you chose to organize it by. Your arguments are you projecting a human idea of consciousness onto a blank unknowable void.

>>11550299
so what was this then? the wind?

>>11557283
I literally just recieved Modern Man in Search of a Soul today in the mail. I also ordered several Freud books, I assume I should read Freud first and then Jung?

>>11557338
our universe is a holographic projection by a universe that is also a holographic projection, just as our universe will eventually reach the point where is can holographically project a new universe

god is not real, only holographic universes like an ocean without a bottom

>>11557338
our universe is a holographic projection by a universe that is also a holographic projection, just as our universe will eventually reach the point where it can holographically project a new universe

god is not real, only holographic universes like an ocean without a bottom

>>11557233
>specifically light from around that time which is just now reaching us

>>11550299
A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy.

If the following passage resonates with you, and you would like to challenge these views within you and attempt to find meaning in life, then read Tolstoy's book.

“There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them. And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.

The delusion of the joys of life that had formerly stifled my fear of the dragon no longer deceived me. No matter how many times I am told: you cannot understand the meaning of life, do not thinking about it but live, I cannot do so because I have already done it for too long. Now I cannot help seeing day and night chasing me and leading me to my death. This is all I can see because it is the only truth. All the rest is a lie.

>>11550313
Bad analogy because that's just true. Software is basically idealized hardware.

>>11550299
good thread, you lot of dumbasses.

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>>11551654

>>11551177
Greek post best post

>>11557929
Yes.This is a literature board.

>>11554876
Goodness alone is insufficient for abstaining from evil.

>>11558323
>>>
> Anonymous 08/02/18(Thu)18:53:59 No.11558323▶
>>>11554876
>Goodness alone is insufficient for abstaining from evil.
brainlet

>>11550299
this is my first time on /lit/ and this is the first thread I see. I think I'm going to like it here.

>>11558757
wubbalubbadubDUB PICKLE RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK MY DUDE HAHAHAAHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHAHAH

>>11558757
Are you from Reddit?