Catholicism and selfishness

[Nick]

Hope you're okay. Sounds like life was very difficult for you when growing up.

I didn't have the easiest life growing up, which I am thankful for. I don't know if I would have turned out the way I have if it weren't for some of lifes tests. Still, I know many people who have had much harder struggles in their lives compared to my own. I actually consider myself very fortunate, especially for my health and intelligence.

[Carrotblog]

I didn't have the easiest life growing up, which I am thankful for. I don't know if I would have turned out the way I have if it weren't for some of lifes tests. Still, I know many people who have had much harder struggles in their lives compared to my own. I actually consider myself very fortunate, especially for my health and intelligence.

Thank you for saying Nick. I'm glad to hear you are in good health too.

I'm struck at how in suffering, there are scars. Perhaps it is the ones who bear none who notice these scars. Whereas man can wander walking wounding, never realising, never grasping the mortal injury of his condition. And the hardest scars to see are the ones which are hidden. Hidden deep; just the way we can no longer feel.

Lots of love.

xoxoxoxo

Miffy

http://carrotblog.livejournal.com

[Trevor Salyzyn]

miffy,

carrot toast

Next time I feel the need to cuss, "oh, carrot toast!" I'll exclaim.

Why are you required to take side on the "God-debate"?

That's a question whose solution is found in autobiography: I used to find such debates enthralling; eventually it seemed prudent to choose sides.

If "God is", what use is your debate?

Touche. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to ever debate God or gods with me. Fortunately, I would rather argue whether the Justice League or the X-Men would win in an all-out fight. (Justice League, unless Professor Xavier was connected to Cerebro)

I wish I could fathom sense out of pantheism

Nevertheless, your attempt was dizzying. You are correct, though. If God is everything, then morality, metaphysics, physics, logic, duality, language, and insanity all belong to God. Of course you make one mistake: nothing does not belong to God because well, it's nothing. Nothing can't be anything.

...can such a position lead to a fertile mind?

If I recall correctly, several of the founding fathers of America were pantheists. Whether or not you consider the drafting of the American Constitution the result of fertile imagination is your perogi. ...err... perogative.

On the other hand, I've spent the last three weeks alternately playing computer games, reading the nutcase drama in the worldly matters forum, lying on my bed surrounded by comic books, and watching cartoons on my computer. Not all pantheists can write constitutions. At best, I could probably write a few dozen pages discussing the morality of The Green Lantern Corps.

Naturalist or atheist? The former invests belief in nature; the latter invests belief in denial

As I understand it, "naturalism" is just a name that clever atheists adopt to avoid all the stigma that comes with the word "atheism". I guess it works, too.

To fortress one's whole life on believing that "something is not" is perturbing down to its foundation.

You give atheists too much credit; in my experience, most never even bother thinking about God at all, except in the span of time it takes them to call the whole kit bogus. It doesn't take much effort not to believe in something, just as it takes me almost no effort to re-assure myself that goblins foot-soldiers are probably not at this very moment overpowering my alternate self in the shadow dimension. I don't believe that goblin foot-soldiers can survive for very long in the shadow dimension. So I don't have to build a very high wall around something that I assume is not. I believe atheists work on similar logic. But what do I know? I use whimsical little definitions to build fortresses around my own beliefs. My tower is built on language.

in order to refute God's being, it is required of me the following conditions

Naw, you make it sound hard to refute God. All that is required is to find a logical contradiction in a given definition. Very few theists have the, erm, carrot toasts to define what it is that they believe in, so the vast majority of claims can be ignored. Those who are willing to define God often make mistakes like trying to make God simultaneously within and outside of the causal framework of the universe, or both infinite and finite, or any number of impossibilities. This destroys most of the remainder of possible deities, unless you don't trust the principle of non-contradiction (which, I am sad to say, would make everything you say meaningless). As to the left-over possible Gods? Either they are self-evident (such as with pantheism), or emasculated to the point of powerlessness (such as a transcendent Creator that can no longer effect the universe or just a wild alien entity). In any event, you will not be able to find a logically consistent deity worth any supplication or worship.

So, there is a third possibility for getting rid of God. You can look at each definition and logically refute Him. Atheism is not the result, since God will not be proven not to exist. You will simply see which kinds of Gods can exist. There might be a Creator, if the universe had a beginning. That is a problem for empirical science. There might be an alien presence in the universe. That is a problem for conspiracy theorists, movie producers, and bored astronomers. Or everything is God, in which case it is definitionally correct. I know, it's boring and anticlimactic, but it's logically consistent and irrefutable.

Anyway, your mission seems to be one of self-discovery, which makes all this logico-metaphysical stuff I wrote irrelevant.

Gonads worshipping monads

I remember someone once wrote, "the brain is a gonad". That made me laugh.

Trevor

[Carrotblog]

Quote:
Why are you required to take side on the "God-debate"?

That's a question whose solution is found in autobiography: I used to find such debates enthralling; eventually it seemed prudent to choose sides.

Problems are soluble in solutions; your confusion between a problem and a mystery entails that a indissoluble question is posed as a problem. In such a reductionist framework, it is impossible to have anything approaching authenticity within autobiography. Instead, we become shaped by the problematising of our problems.

Why do I exist? Am I merely wild-cat fodder? There is a mystery in life that is unfolding before me. Away from me. Coming closer towards me, yet while I move away. Moving me. Moving me closer to the mystery. What does it mean to me, that there might be a God? If it means nothing to me, then clearly I have greater problems to contend with, such as the sterility of my spiritual condition. Sterile facts do not yield brute truths, and in a sterile spiritual condition, no amount of truth will shift a brute.

Thus, ignorance is bliss. Playstation time!

Quote:
If "God is", what use is your debate?

Touche. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to ever debate God or gods with me. Fortunately, I would rather argue whether the Justice League or the X-Men would win in an all-out fight. (Justice League, unless Professor Xavier was connected to Cerebro)

In traveling I have wondered why meaning matters more to me than happiness. Why do I ask: “who am I?” Others find the self takes root in God; others still, in refuting God. Protesting against God. Denying existence thereof, and relevance. Indifference.

Yet can a rabbit in mortal danger, sit back proclaiming indifference and boredom to what lies before him? Perhaps Epicurus lives on. I, rabbit, run. To what? To where? I know not. But the comfort of indifference in this warren is not good enough.

Nick too has rejected Epicurus; for in suffering, there is meaning, and in shaping personality, there is some satisfaction. Not happiness, yet am I satisfied in taking the path less rabbit trod, suffering me, twisting meaning, branching forth and signifying all that I have never seen before.

And yet again - the X-Men? What does this signify? Who are these people whom I have heard legend mention word of? Do they wear underwear on top of their genius?

If so, then come! Come on. Oh muses and moderators~! Show your genius as the X-Men do.

Quote:
I wish I could fathom sense out of pantheism

Nevertheless, your attempt was dizzying. You are correct, though. If God is everything, then morality, metaphysics, physics, logic, duality, language, and insanity all belong to God.

Dizzying? The mind boggles, and in boggling, the signpost stops me in vertiginous flight. “If”. The metaphysician is not a logician. And the conditions of this “if” are illogical, with premise heaped on premise, as contradictory as the speculative thought on which it rests. Logic by which the mind can apprehend, goes so far. Not so far that it extends and replaces metaphysics - a dead metaphysics that would be.

Of course you make one mistake: nothing does not belong to God because well, it's nothing. Nothing can't be anything.

Your grasp of pantheism may be provincial and mere North American. The philosophy of "nothing" rides high and “If” pantheism is valid, “then” God is here, there, everywhere.

The eastern pantheist: "If nothing does not belong to God, then God has control over nothing. If God can not make nothing into anything, then God is not an omnipotent God."

In my warren, burrowing where I go; going before any bunny can. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with continental philosophy:
Heidegger: “Nihilation is neither an annihilation of what-is, nor does it spring from negation.” In being, nothing is. Nothing does not nihilate being. If that isn’t clear, then you may need a rabbit’s A-B-C to logic in truth tables. God and nothing exist, as being and nothing in Being and Time.

How is it possible to reduce the world to logic? Even if the world seen from your lens conforms to a nominal representation of a world-view, curtailed and conforming to the narrow structure within logic, there is no longer any scope for authenticity.

Quote:
...can such a position lead to a fertile mind?

If I recall correctly, several of the founding fathers of America were pantheists. Whether or not you consider the drafting of the American Constitution the result of fertile imagination is your perogi. ...err... perogative.

I see you live in Canada. Well done!

On the other hand, I've spent the last three weeks alternately playing computer games, reading the nutcase drama in the worldly matters forum, lying on my bed surrounded by comic books, and watching cartoons on my computer. Not all pantheists can write constitutions. At best, I could probably write a few dozen pages discussing the morality of The Green Lantern Corps.

And is this a meaningful life though it satisfies well? The life that is unoriginal is also the one most copied. My carrot-grater stands, carrot-juice quenching my thirst this hot summer.

Quote:
Naturalist or atheist? The former invests belief in nature; the latter invests belief in denial

As I understand it, "naturalism" is just a name that clever atheists adopt to avoid all the stigma that comes with the word "atheism". I guess it works, too.

I am less concerned with the label, and I am not a designer rabbit.

Perhaps in return, I can offer that you have credited atheists with too much beyond our capacities. John Dewey’s anthropo-morphic naturalism and the American version, charted by Morris Cohen are less concerned with atheism than the laws which govern the organization of the world and shares more carrots in common with scientific materialism: after all, a toasted carrot depends on the heat of the barbeque fire: thus natural conditions depend on physical phenomena. Perhaps it was not until Nagel nibbled and furrowed out ‘ an ‘introduction to logic and the scientific method’ that naturalism came into its own. Think Santayana. The rabbit in the States is as rare as it is well done! Out done by hares, I know less of American philosophy, appreciating it all the while when its signposts point me back to home. Still, American naturalism may indeed be approximated by atheism for arguments.

Yet the unoriginal does not interest me.

For if approximation of a method is the atheist' draw, he is less concerned about method; and his a priori remains as great as his blind spot.

Does the function of language, never transcend witty-go-getty stoned games? Word-concepts have functions, however function is not the word, and in atheism, I am asking for conditions to explain its root derivation (a-theos: without faith in God/s), and the constellation of problems it has raised in trying to remain tenable.

Quote:
To fortress one's whole life on believing that "something is not" is perturbing down to its foundation.

You give atheists too much credit; in my experience, most never even bother thinking about God at all, except in the span of time it takes them to call the whole kit bogus.

No credit at all; a credit to the conscious, is also a debit to the unconscious, and being indebted to the unconscious inner life, there is absolutely no credit at all in one’s leanings, anti-thetical to the awareness of one’s own spiritual condition.

Two paws up or acknowledging that failure to believe in something, is as much a universal prison sentence for all of us born into the modern world. And a famous rabbit hath quoted: when rabbits fail to believe in God, it is not nothing that he believes in, but anything.”

Growing up with no reference nor signposts on life’s way, how is it possible to develop conviction – to believe in something worthwhile. With all of one’s life, body, heart, and mind intact?
Some believe in love, with their bodies, clothes non-intact; others love ideology more than the god they proclaim, and yet others, are mindless in their convictions, condemning the mind for daring to doubt, or daring to speak.

>>My tower is built on language.

Yet within one's fortress, which tower? The one which is unassailable, hidden in the unconscious, can not be articulated as it resides within the realm of the unthought known. The tower which you speak of lies predicated on the assumptions made explicit in your beliefs; this much is known. And know through your language which expresses. Yet it is the unthought known which man fails to grasp; its language rests in code, resisting his mechanical logic. That rabbits live in warrens is telling: there is a life underground, and a different language within the warren, than the official language of the funky street rabbit, all mouth and talk with impressive superlatives.

Quote:
in order to refute God's being, it is required of me the following conditions

Naw, you make it sound hard to refute God. All that is required is to find a logical contradiction in a given definition.

Forgive me, for it is the sound of my efforts. Again, if all that is required is to find a logical contradiction in a given definition, I am heading for one-up-manship in my witty-getty-go-getty-stoned word games.

Again, all I will have done is to change the size of the carrot-grater to grate my toast in a fashion which suits me. My genius approach has been to limit God through definition, a task of semantics, when I can be living out my life of enquiry, instead of fooling around, wilful as a horse on heat.
Imposing a narrowly conceived rabbit cage or weltanschauung, onto “God”, and restricting “God” to a word-concept. I define God into the nonsense of my logical structure. And lo! poetry fades, as word forms collapse into sterility.

What do I refute then, if not my own integrity?

This is not good enough. God resists me grasping him in totality. It pains me to see how others grasp God through the communion table when I try to grasp through my tables of logic and chi-squares. This will not do. My efforts refute me, not God, and this much I know when I am danger of collapsing into the unthought known, claiming I know all the while.

Paws for logic: can these not handle God? These paws can do away with him, through the abracadra of my logical language. Then I can do away with her, confining God into a small square framework of logic, applying logic to refute my own creation. Now I, Miffy, am a Genius! I am then the Genius Rabbit! Great rabbit in the sky, controller of logical conceptualization and I can define any fellow-rabbits who defy me into non-existence! Muhahhahahah.

But this is not the way of the true rabbit. (apologies for misbehaving on a public forum in this way.) is this not how my moment of grandiosity grapples me, elevating my self to the Self, believing in the exercise of my universal rabbit logic, to refute all? I thus, have transcended myself using my own logic.

Those who are willing to define God often make mistakes like trying to make God simultaneously within and outside of the causal framework of the universe, or both infinite and finite, or any number of impossibilities.

Muhahuahaua! I = GENIUS (refrain II)

This destroys most of the remainder of possible deities, unless you don't trust the principle of non-contradiction (which, I am sad to say, would make everything you say meaningless).

Muhahuauaahha! I = double GENIUS (refrain III)


And contradiction operates within a sphere of paradox; logic defies reason when it fails to recognize paradox, and in paradox, logic ceases. Perhaps a rabbit in revision may need to review how truth values are assigned to testable parameters; as soon as a rabbit draws a truth table for imputing contradiction, then metaphysics has completely surpassed him.

Quote:
Gonads worshipping monads

I remember someone once wrote, "the brain is a gonad". That made me laugh.

It tickles you ;P


Tis' a long midsummer's night...adieu!

xoxoxoxo

Miffy (the Genius)

http://carrotblog.livejournal.com




















(PS - slight deluded and grandiose)

[suergaz]

The only hindrance to atheism and its pure child-likeness, is that the other 'religious' positions find it untenable, where atheism finds its opponents tenable to the last. Youngest child, but first-born! Atheism is what poetry was all along. Mature nature, the real as opposed to the real world, wisdom beloved.

:D

[Nick]

The only hindrance to atheism and its pure child-likeness, is that the other 'religious' positions find it untenable, where atheism finds its opponents tenable to the last. Youngest child, but first-born! Atheism is what poetry was all along. Mature nature, the real as opposed to the real world, wisdom beloved.

:D

Makes perfect sense, and worded quite nicely.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

miffy,
(wow, these are getting long)

your confusion between a problem and a mystery entails that a indissoluble question is posed as a problem.

How is a mystery anything more than a problem whose solution evades us?

It's silly to attach too much significance to mysteries (or clownish, as in the case of that embarassment of reason, the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?"). Seemingly indissoluble questions are only that because the untamed emotional response (wishful thinking, hopes) is preferable to the solid, "brute", boring, and often self-evident truth. It is not an impoverished spirituality that prefers the boring fact: in fact, it often takes years of spiritual progress to prefer seemingly dull facts over fancy (but otherwise worthless) speculations. It is the pinnacle of spirituality that finds logic fascinating, or that realizes that trying to answer the question of why red appears red will bring a person much closer to the heart of Being than meditating on God's divine plan.

Some questions I prefer:
1. Why should any person feel the need to know why they exist?
2. Can the natural sciences supply a satisfactory answer to that (or any other) question?
3. To what extent do the beliefs and knowledge of a person affect their actions or quality of their thought? Which beliefs are important enough to challenge (in myself and other people), and which beliefs can be left alone?

Unlike a feral, open-ended, over-hyped, and thoroughly subjective question like "why do I exist?", given time it is possible to produce valuable answers to these questions. Knowing why people search for meaning and what sorts of meanings they arrive at is far superior to simply picking something out of a hat. Understanding the place of science in establishing knowledge-claims makes one a superior philosopher, or at least one capable if not prepared to do the task that philosophy has taken in the western world (collecting, analyzing, and correcting the claims of scientists -- our supposed elite).

As to the last one, it seems really Christian to believe that beliefs are really important in some greater scheme of things, as though accepting one thing or discarding another is the difference between eternal salvation and eternal damnation. I believe that after understanding that science has no claim to establishing ultimate truth, it is just as important to castrate religion with the knowledge that, just as one's beliefs change over a lifetime, one's beliefs at any one time are not perfect -- and yet this inadequacy does not result in catastrophe. There are very few catastrophic beliefs.

And yet again - the X-Men? What does this signify? Who are these people whom I have heard legend mention word of? Do they wear underwear on top of their genius?

They wear full-body underwear. That said, too many of them are men.

Your grasp of pantheism may be provincial and mere North American... "...then God is not an omnipotent God"

My pantheism is merely personal, and makes no claims that God must be omnipotent. Omnipresent by necessity, but not omnipotent. The argument you laid forth by the eastern pantheist, hardly refuting the claim that God has control over nothing, merely sets a limitation of an omnipotent God. An omnipotent God must have control of nothing; in other words, by definition, an omnipotent God must be able to create anything from nothing.

My definition, which allows a God that may or may not be omnipotent is more inclusive, and hence is that much more likely of being true. I should be honest, though, and admit that when I say "God", I am actually saying "Reality". Reality is a more-inclusive concept than God.

And is this a meaningful life though it satisfies well? The life that is unoriginal is also the one most copied.

It was parodying what I did, but yeah, it is both satisfying and meaningful. I take pride in the fact that I have the freedom to enjoy the creativity of others without being compelled to contribute. I may not shake the world, or have any of my writing studied by university students three hundred years in the future... but neither did or will the mosquito I just swatted. Now, if I'm a genius and I take great pleasure in doing things that the average person considers a waste of time or brain-power, wouldn't I be correct? I mean, after all, I'm the genius. :)

Word-concepts have functions, however function is not the word, and in atheism, I am asking for conditions to explain its root derivation (a-theos: without faith in God/s), and the constellation of problems it has raised in trying to remain tenable.

This would only be a bad thing if the "constellation of problems" hadn't been so fruitful, as careful thinkers go down the list and try to answer each in turn. Raising a shit-storm of new problems is, in my opinion, a great thing. Atheists have very little support when trying to answer their problems, which means they have to rely ever-increasingly on their own powers of reason as they work out the solutions to each. So, do you still think that this is a bad thing?

Growing up with no reference nor signposts on life’s way, how is it possible to develop conviction – to believe in something worthwhile. With all of one’s life, body, heart, and mind intact?

I imagine when Thales first emerged from the mire of ancient Greece with his abject refusal to explain anything with the "god of the gaps", he was patronized in just that way. How could he possibly live in such a heartless world, without Zeus or Apollo or what-have-you to guide him and give him strength? When he bought up all the olive-presses and made a fortune, how that must have infuriated the Greeks! I imagine he looked greedy, as unscrupulous, godless, and "convictionless" as he was.

logic defies reason when it fails to recognize paradox, and in paradox, logic ceases.

Logic ceases? Pour quelle raison?

I was under the impression that logic is merely stumped by paradox, and even then only until you figure out where you made your mistake. The solution to Xeno's famous paradox is logical. Similarly, it is logical for a young kid to be stumped by the paradox, and to spend days trying to figure out how, by walking, he ever gets anywhere. But I guess when I hear the word "paradox" I immediately think "logic puzzle". Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces aren't in the right order.

Trevor

[Carrotblog]

Hello Trevor!

Yes, as the day draws long, I field carrots and work this warren, and life is indeed full.

miffy,
(wow, these are getting long)
Quote:
your confusion between a problem and a mystery entails that a indissoluble question is posed as a problem.

How is a mystery anything more than a problem whose solution evades us?

In so far as we are discoursing on ontology or spirituality.....

That is a problem, whose solution evades you. Not a mystery, in so far as we are discoursing on spirituality.....A mystery, is more than problematic; it is more than problematic for the non-reductionist. For the reductionist, nothing is anything more than a problem. Nothing but a problem. Whose solution has yet to be discovered. That's all. Nothing but. And that "nothing but philosophy", is inherent in reductionism.

Is there any point in explaining anything to a reductionist who reduces carrots to ash? Probably not. Still.

What is a mystery? It is more than a problem, where the data is unverified. When the data is unverifiable, then it is no longer a problem; read Popper if you struggle with this concept. His classic declaration of falsifiability is not on the same wavelength as 'verifiability'. Why is mystery not a problem? We have murder mysteries; great train robbery mysteries; rabbit and tortoise race mysteries.

Because these are all problems, whose data is verifiable. A mystery proper, cannot be verified because the data encroaches on itself. A mystery lies in a different order from a problem, yet we trivialise (our reductionist tendencies) a mystery in subsuming it falsely as a problem. In encroaching on itself, the data cannot be useful in elucidating the "problem". "Being" is a mystery, not a problem. Once "being" is grasped as a problem, it has already escaped you. Thus spake Nietzsche: "we are not knowers."

To claim you are able to 'know' the mystery of being, means you are definitely one of those. Must be a 'genius'.

You have quoted the oft-quoted Zeno's paradox too, which deals with the concrete, and not the spiritual. Why formulate a concrete and poor example of spiritual life in the context of a tortoise race? How concrete is that?? Zeno's paradox is hardly a paradox of the existential order. Does anyone care if a tortoise beats Achilles in a race? The mathematical confusion is a contradiction of language, one in which a false paradox can be resolved, as you have done. Your logic says nothing about existence, yet your ego insists on it when it has left you in that very insistence. And Zeno's logical shaping of a problem poses its own issues. Not ones relevant to intellectual honesty, nor existential honesty: both are issues which geniuses fail to grasp through the lens of their own deluded grandiosity.

Arrogance, self-delusions of mastery over the cognitive world and sheer blind reductionist all belong to the dark void in a rabbit warren; there is much of this here, none of these conditions permit truthful emergence of anything other than a chimera of a genius' own ego.

Your comment on Christians desiring a greater scheme of things is amusing; your demonstration of your own attempts to trap nature and existence in your own logic is representative of man's will towards ordering his understanding of the universe. Atheists too also try to organise 'sense' out of nonsense. Humans perhaps, as an all inclusive rabbit, I prefer to think that humans, reflecting or otherwise, desire a schema to organise their world view.

Unfortunately in so doing, the sense they proclaim makes less sense than the sense they have insensibly refuted for themselves and no other. We refute the unverifiable; we refute what we cannot know.

My pantheism is merely personal, and makes no claims that God must be omnipotent. Omnipresent by necessity, but not omnipotent. The argument you laid forth by the eastern pantheist, hardly refuting the claim that God has control over nothing, merely sets a limitation of an omnipotent God. An omnipotent God must have control of nothing; in other words, by definition, an omnipotent God must be able to create anything from nothing.

I don't support either inconsistency: perhaps you might return to your original point and locate your tangent here:

Pray tell....why pantheism?

Because a careful observer would notice two things.
#1: Pantheism is little more than a sly way for indifferent rationalists to appear to be on both sides of the God-debate. It is a triumph to make the "God is everything"/"Everything is God" assumption: an overused word is settled into an impregnable fortress where it can ignored. A monotheist would agree with me to an extent (excepting that I don't have a proper religious upbringing), and an atheist (or naturalist) would agree that the definition doesn't infringe upon their unbeliefs (although, pragmatically, it's inefficacious). A pantheist only needs to worry about all-or-nothing fundamentalists and Romans (on second thought, we ALL have to worry about those damnable time-travelling Roman legionnaires).
#2: With just superficial juggling of words, pantheism is conceptually identical to monism.

Arguing about deities is boring, ergo I choose a position that lets me ignore the debate and think about other things. It's a calculated, shrewd, awe-inspiring, riveting, beautiful, exemplar, and above all lazy way for me to opine an opinion about a part of metaphysics that everyone and their rabbit seems qualified to categorically deduce and prove beyond all doubt (or in layman's terms, to inheret).

Carrot: Growing up with no reference nor signposts on life’s way, how is it possible to develop conviction – to believe in something worthwhile. With all of one’s life, body, heart, and mind intact?

Moose: I imagine when Thales first emerged from the mire of ancient Greece with his abject refusal to explain anything with the "god of the gaps", he was patronized in just that way. How could he possibly live in such a heartless world, without Zeus or Apollo or what-have-you to guide him and give him strength? When he bought up all the olive-presses and made a fortune, how that must have infuriated the Greeks! I imagine he looked greedy, as unscrupulous, godless, and "convictionless" as he was.

And does that example help you with the conviction of your own beliefs? It attempts a self-refuting and false justification of another, as oneself. Yet, you consider the gods, and you are not one. A man must be brave enough to consider his own conviction, instead of taking retreat in self-obsessed justification. I, rabbit.

Carrot Quote:
logic defies reason when it fails to recognize paradox, and in paradox, logic ceases.

Moose: Logic ceases? Pour quelle raison?

I was under the impression that logic is merely stumped by paradox, and even then only until you figure out where you made your mistake. The solution to Xeno's famous paradox is logical. Similarly, it is logical for a young kid to be stumped by the paradox, and to spend days trying to figure out how, by walking, he ever gets anywhere. But I guess when I hear the word "paradox" I immediately think "logic puzzle". Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces aren't in the right order.

And that is mystery - not the pseudo-mystery which is a problem. Nor is it the pseudo-mystery which others mistake for a mystery. The solution to Xeno's pseudo paradox lies in his reification of logic to create a pseudo-paradox: had Xeno not been so trapped in his own form of thinking, implying logic systematically, denouncing the possibility of motion, he would not have failed to see that he had imputed paradox where none exist. Your attempt to denounce paradox is limited by its concrete example. Here is one for you (from Rilke):

You are alive. Why? [insert reductionist explanation here]

And now see that you are alive, despite your explanation. Still I ask:why?

Moosestink: you do the very opposite to Zeno in denying mystery its proper place, yet allowing motion all the time. Finite motion, In mystery, the data turns back on itself, and without the rigid logical attempts to intellectual problems, stripped bare, before the Nietzschean reality, this is all you can know: that you are not a knower. We are not knowers.

I'll look elsewhere.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Miffy,

So far, you've called me an arrogant, cowardly, spiritually sterile, convictionless reductionist with grandiose delusions, overly obsessed with logic and incapable of knowing anything.

After collating your thinly-veiled insults, I agree with you on one thing: we are done here. Go look elsewhere for reading material.

(And, just so we're even: I'm sure you will easily find another person, even on this forum, willing to engage in a verbose spitting contest with a bookworm whose shocking discovery of her total lack of personality forced her to hide behind a cutesy mask while blubbering like an insincere Academian about existential problems and mysteries, paradoxes and "pseudo-paradoxes" (the word for a paradox that has been solved?). You might even find someone who cares that you can quote Nietzsche on a dime; and, if you're lucky, they just may allow ridiculously short uninformative summaries of Popper or whoever to be considered adequate proof/explanation of a position.)

Trevor

[suergaz]

I don't think Miffy was calling you any of those things Trev!

How can you say she has no personality? She wears a mask because her heart is great. She has a soft spot for you! It was where she writes "I'll look elsewhere"

The many-too-many, they must have respect before love.

:D

[Trevor Salyzyn]

suergaz you made me smile. :)

ok i retract everything i said.

[bert]

people ,people ,people..

truth is a bogey;our question should be not whether true or not,but - is this a 'means of expression'?(the dynamic tempo 'as now')

[suergaz]

Is expression itself a means of expression? Truth is a? What is dynamic never fails to present itself.

People people people, and then some!

[bert]

Is expression itself a means of expression? Truth is a? What is dynamic never fails to present itself.

People people people, and then some!

everything is a directional degree of functional purpose seeking 'means' of conative ability

[suergaz]

Everything is will to power? To itself? It makes perfect sense and then one finds oneself in the water at the end of the jetty. :D