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"I'm not relgious, I'm spiritual" --the hell does that mean? (pg. 3)
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by dj_alfi
Well, I am high, I'll give you that, but it doesn't explain why I can shoot green plasma out of my eyes. And when I say my eyes I totally mean my ass. |
You're far more likely to shoot red plasma out of your ass. |
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| dj_alfi |
:stongue:
We should start playing hockey or basket together. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| I rather like socket, myself. |
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| dj_alfi |
| Yes I am also fond of openings in any fitting that matches the outside diameter of a pipe or tube, with a further recessed through opening matching the inside diameter of the same pipe or tube. |
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| de+ |
| quote: | Originally posted by -FSP-
"I'm not relgious, I'm spiritual." What the f-word does that mean? |
Its a diagnosis. Persons concerned gladly pays for crystals and therapeutic stones. |
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| pointPi |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Someone who doesn't want to tie their beliefs down to any particular organised religion or pre-existing belief system. Not hard to grasp, and no real need to get hostile about it.
And I am not remotely spiritual, before you ask. |
This, pretty much.
Off-topic: I don't think science can ever prove or disprove the existence of gods, the soul, afterlife, karma, astral projection etcetera, since they exist on a non-physical level. They're not like gravity, electricity or dark matter that can be run through scientific equipment and/or calculations. However, since that's the case, I find it very unlikely that they carry some actual impact onto our physical reality.
For example, I'm fairly certain that there is such a thing as a soul, but with the latest fantastic advances in neuroscience, I'm seriously doubting the soul is the generator of its host's thoughts, ideas, emotions and so forth. In the meantime, I consider the soul to be nothing but a mindless zombie, passively observing its host's insignificant life. |
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| Meat187 |
| Let me translate: "I believe in bull, but not in the bull the church tells us." |
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| RyanVice |
You uneducated haters dont know isht..
How to Fight The Man
By DAVID BROOKS
A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old man named Jefferson Bethke produced a video called “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus.” The video shows Bethke standing in a courtyard rhyming about the purity of the teachings of Jesus and the hypocrisy of the church. Jesus preaches healing, surrender and love, he argues, but religion is rigid, phony and stale. “Jesus came to abolish religion,” Bethke insists. “Religion puts you in bondage, but Jesus sets you free.”
The video went viral. As of Thursday, it had acquired more than 18 million hits on YouTube. It speaks for many young believers who feel close to God but not to the church. It represents the passionate voice of those who think their institutions lack integrity — not just the religious ones, but the political and corporate ones, too.
Right away, many older theologians began critiquing Bethke’s statements. A blogger named Kevin DeYoung pointed out, for example, that it is biblically inaccurate to say that Jesus hated religion. In fact, Jesus preached a religious doctrine, prescribed rituals and worshiped in a temple.
Bethke responded in a way that was humble, earnest and gracious, and that generally spoke well of his character. He also basically folded.
“I wanted to say I really appreciate your article man,” Bethke wrote to DeYoung in an online exchange. “It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100 percent.”
Bethke watched a panel discussion in which some theologians lamented young people’s disdain of organized religion. “Right when I heard that,” he told The Christian Post, “it just convicted me, and God used it as one of those Spirit moments where it’s just, ‘Man, he’s right.’ I realized a lot of my views and treatments of the church were not Scripture-based; they were very experience based.”
Bethke’s passionate polemic and subsequent retreat are symptomatic of a lot of the protest cries we hear these days. This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.
This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual.
We can all theorize why the intense desire for change has so far produced relatively few coherent recipes for change. Maybe people today are simply too deferential. Raised to get college recommendations, maybe they lack the oppositional mentality necessary for revolt. Maybe people are too distracted.
My own theory revolves around a single bad idea. For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.
If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition. This is more or less what happened to Jefferson Bethke.
The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.
The old leftists had dialectical materialism and the Marxist view of history. Libertarians have Hayek and von Mises. Various spiritual movements have drawn from Transcendentalism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Thomism, Augustine, Tolstoy, or the Catholic social teaching that inspired Dorothy Day.
These belief systems helped people envision alternate realities. They helped people explain why the things society values are not the things that should be valued. They gave movements a set of organizing principles. Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.
Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.
If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.
Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change. |
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| Vector A |
| God David Brooks is such a blowhard. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
Let me translate: "I believe in bull, but not in the bull the church tells us." |
Hence why System-J's post is spot on :p
Actually, I'm always cautious when someone irreligious drops the s-word because (1) either they're very creative and, as they refuted religious dogma, they came up with something different thanks to a careful analysis even though I can't agree with their conclusions (2) or they're so gullible they had to find a way to believe in everything without being limited to a particular set of beliefs, which is the intellectual equivalent of having your cake and eating it.
I'm afraid nothing good has ever come out of that. |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Hence why System-J's post is spot on :p
Actually, I'm always cautious when someone irreligious drops the s-word because (1) either they're very creative and, as they refuted religious dogma, they came up with something different thanks to a careful analysis even though I can't agree with their conclusions (2) or they're so gullible they had to find a way to believe in everything without being limited to a particular set of beliefs, which is the intellectual equivalent of having your cake and eating it.
I'm afraid nothing good has ever come out of that. |
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human activities. The teleological argument suggests that, given this premise, the existence of a designer can be assumed, typically presented as God.
Various concepts of teleology originated in ancient philosophy and theology. Some philosophers, such as Plato, proposed a divine Artificer as the designer; others, including Aristotle, rejected that conclusion in favor of a more naturalistic teleology. In the middle-ages, the Islamic philosopher Averroes introduces a teleological argument. Later, a teleological argument is the fifth of Saint Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways, his rational proofs for the existence of God. The teleological argument was continued by empiricists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who believed that the order in the world suggested the existence of God. William Paley developed these ideas with his version of the watch maker analogy. He argued that in the same way a watch's complexity implies the existence of its maker, so too one may infer the Creator exists, given the evident complexity of Nature. This argument resonates with a notion of the fine-tuned Universe, understood as an alternative to the anthropic principle.
Many philosophers and theologians have expounded and criticized different versions of the teleological argument.
Commonly, they argue that any implied designer need not have the qualities commonly attributed to the God of classical theism. Scientists have shown alternative explanations for biological complexity, notably natural selection, with no requirement for supernatural design.
From the 1990s, creation science was rebranded as intelligent design, presenting the teleological argument while avoiding naming the designer with the aim of presenting this as science and getting it taught in public school science classes. In 2005, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that intelligent design is a religious argument and is not science, and was being used to give pseudoscientific support for creationism, the religious belief in a god-like designer.
According to Xenophon, Socrates argued that the adaptation of human parts to one another, such as the eyelids protecting the eyeballs, could not have been due to chance and was a sign of wise planning in the universe.
Plato posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. Plato's teleological perspective is also built upon the analysis of a priori order and structure in the world that he had already presented in The Republic. Plato does not propose creation ex nihilo; rather, the demiurge made order from the chaos of the cosmos, imitating the eternal Forms.
| quote: | R. J. Hankinson, Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought
Plato's world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent... This debate was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus... while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology... The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle , when still a young acolyte of Plato, saw matters. Cicero preserves Aristotle's own cave-image: if troglodytes were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. But Aristotle grew to abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it... But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature, or phusis. |
The watchmaker analogy, framing the argument with reference to a timepiece, dates back to Cicero, who used the example of a sundial or water-clock in his reasoning that the presence of order and purpose signify the existence of a designer. It was also used by Robert Hooke and Voltaire, the latter of whom remarked: "L'univers m'embarrasse, et je ne puis songer Que cette horloge existe, et n'ait point d'horloger"; "I'm puzzled by the world; I cannot dream The timepiece real, its maker but a dream".
William Paley presented the watchmaker analogy in his Natural Theology (1802).
| quote: | Suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for [a] stone [that happened to be lying on the ground]?… For this reason, and for no other; namely, that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.
—William Paley, Natural Theology |
A modern variation of the teleological argument is built upon the concept of the fine-tuned Universe. The fine-tuning of the Universe is the apparent delicate balance of conditions necessary for human life. In this view, speculation about a vast range of possible conditions in which life cannot exist is used to explore the probability of conditions in which life can and does exist.
In his Traité de métaphysique Voltaire observed that, even if the argument from design could prove the existence of a powerful intelligent designer, it would not prove that this designer is God!
So there you have it. God does not exist, and Science will triumph Jesus in this pending Apocalyptic battle of the Bands. |
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| Meat187 |
| Nice to have you back, w_ashley. :) |
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