lemur

This is a broad assumption. Is it falsifiable? If so, have you tried or are you too biased in favor of modernism? Take your modern standpoint that no God exists external to human subjective version of "God." (is it accurate to say that you don't believe God exists outside of human subjectivity?) Then consider a situation in which two or more people disagree about what the will of God is, the correct interpretation of scripture, etc. Now, is it not possible to argue that one opinion or interpretation is better than another on the basis of citation and reasoning? If two or more interpretations would emerge that were equally validatable, wouldn't this be recognizable through careful application of critical logic? A good way to look at this is in terms of the expression, "higher power." "Higher power/authority" can refer to one worldly power/authority being higher than another, right? E.g. you could say that the supreme court is a higher authority than the "lower" courts it reviews, right? So, by that logic, what would be the supreme power/authority in human matters? Would it be the king of some jurisdiction over that jurisdiction and not others? Or would kings submit to each other when one's authority/power was deemed to supercede another's? Logically, if any human authority is always less than supreme, then there must be a concept of authority that is higher than even the highest human authority, correct? So why shouldn't this ideal of super-human authority be called "God?" And why shouldn't humans be able to make appeals to each other on the basis of such an authority that trumps any human authority that either could cite? This would be similar to asking whether scientists always have to cite other scientists or can they make appeals directly to empiricism and reason? What it seems you are dong is to seek to undermine the very possibility of identifying logic within theology. Then, once you have established it as being inherently flawed and internally inconsistent, you can reject it completely and throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?

You think reading a report can acquaint anyone with any realities that they aren't living and experiencing for themselves? My question is why you are taking such a guarded stance to making whatever point it is you are trying to make? Why cite a report instead of just stating your points? You can always cite the report as backup.

The ideal of communism is a utopia in the sense that everyone works happily to contribute to the good of all and conserves for the same purpose. Ironically, this was also the original goal of capitalism: i.e. 1) produce as much as you can to make as much money as possible and 2) spend as little of your money as possible to save and re-invest in getting even richer. Both strategies basically pursue the famous Marxian ethic, "to each according to his needs and from each according to his abilities." The difference is that communism involved abolition of private property while capitalism maintained private property as a motivation to strive and save for the future. The most striking example I've heard of communism in practice is that if you are driving in Cuba, I am told, you are required to pick up hitchhikers because the car belongs as much to them as to you. Theoretically, the person walking would only hitchhike if they were really in need, because it would otherwise be a waste of your effort (not to mention brakes, tires, and gas) to stop to pick them up. Likewise, you would probably not be driving in the first place if you could walk to whatever you needed to do. But what are the chances no one would abuse the right to appropriate public property for less than rational reasons? Probably about as high as the chance that individuals under capitalism maximize productivity, efficiency, and savings in the most rational, self-denying sense. In all economic systems greed, waste, short-sightedness and other irrationality, etc. impair attainment of maximum social-economic good; not the system itself.

I am really interested in these kinds of ideas. I find that people have a hard time with them, though, because it comes more naturally to them to think of objects as external to each other and themselves as external to situations as they perceive them. I'm not sure what it would take, cognitively speaking, to enable people to be able to think in terms of internal configurations of intersecting entities, but if anything I think it would render mathematics impotent (saying this without sufficient breadth of knowledge about mathematics, btw). As far as I know, all mathematical logic relies on a boolean-type notion that a set of elements must be mutually exclusive unless they themselves are sets with their own mutually exclusive elements/contents. But otherwise, why couldn't the table be inside the chair and the chair inside the table at the same time?

This thread is derived from another thread where it was claimed that religious logic can't be defended because it is subjective and therefore totally open to interpretation. Imo, theological ideas make more sense when viewed according to some logic than others. Arguing that God is an external entity, separate from the people who write "divinely inspired scripture," for example, doesn't make sense in the logic of spiritual inspiration to write in and of itself. I.e. if someone claims to have been inspired by God, that is in itself the essence of divine inspiration - i.e. the subjective experience of God. To apply objectivist logic and claim that there is some objective, external entity that is separate from the experience of divine inspiration itself doesn't work within the logic of spirituality. The question is whether it is legitimate to criticize logical inconsistencies in people's interpretations and discussions about religion, or must we always defer to the authority of whatever logic the OP assumes? By this logic, should critics of religion also be restricted from questioning or expressing criticism about inconsistencies or other interpretations that hold religion/theology accountable to scientific, materialist, or other logics? I.e. if each thread is going to be protected as its own axiomatic regime, should all threads be afforded equal protection and posters be required to conform to the premises and assumptions of the OP, without voicing dissent or critique of those?

How can people wage war without being well-fed? I don't see how people could ever rise up if they didn't have the means to mobilize. My issue is to question what uprising and civil war achieve? What can emerge from a political movement that involves force except governance that involves force and repression? I'm not saying that power doesn't, can't, or shouldn't ever check other power - but I think people too often have the idea that they'll mobilize with a group and use their power to dominate; only they never reflect on their own will to dominate because all they focus on is the thing they're rebelling against.

Wouldn't the glass gradually absorb the photons and dissipate them as heat? I find it hard to imagine that anything could be a perfect conductor of photons except vacuum. edit: e.g. when you put two mirrors face-to-face, you don't see an infinite "tunnel" of mirrors but rather one that darkens and eventually disappears in the distance, correct?

Solar-powered heating can be done as simply as constructing a glass-enclosed box painted black inside and ducted into the room you want to heat. Maybe you would need some fan to blow the hot air from the box into the room but I'm not sure. I also don't know how well the box would need to be insulated or how effective such a system would be given your outdoor temperature. If you get creative and come up with designs, it would be interesting to see them posted.

I don't understand this logic of criticizing presidents when they continue with one activity instead of going somewhere else to deal with something different. What can a president do in person that can't be done by phone, internet, etc.?

There would be other consequences. E.g. there would be no internal logical consistency in math. This is the same problem with talking about scientifically proving God. God is inherently spiritual and therefore faith-based. When you start talking about scientific proof for or against the existence of God, it undermines the internal consistency of spiritual reasoning. Suddenly evidence becomes more important than sincerity. Objective becomes more important than subjective. Religion collapses in this way, the same as math would collapse if you would start assigning arbitrary sums to sums and products. I DID, but everyone keeps accusing me of not having done this because I refused to keep my mouth shut about critical flaws in the premise as well. I don't see any problem noting the logical flaws in the premise as long as I'm not trying to destroy the discussion, which I wasn't. That's why I started another thread on literalism in interpreting religious mythology. I said if God showed up and said all the scriptures were wrong, or otherwise criticized them, I would just want to hear her/his reasons so that I could be enlightened. If God showed up, all I would want was enlightenment. I would not care about protecting any existing dogma, religious, scientific, or otherwise. I already said this but I don't feel like going in search of which post it was now. I'm sorry, but I find this "accept it or leave it" attitude rude. I gave my response with the assumption of the premise but I ALSO noted problems with the premise. I don't see how this is any different from responding to a post entitled "if we could break the speed of light, would we go back in time" by saying that it is impossible to travel faster than light and/or go back in time. No one would be telling me to respect the premise of the OP or leave if I said that there, would they?

For being a complete vegetarian to be completely consistent, you would have to believe that there is absolutely no violence done to plants to use them for consumption. I found it somewhat difficult to understand the philosophies that recognize all life as entailing violence/destruction because I wanted to find an ethics that transcends violence/destruction. Then, when I did come to terms that it was impossible to totally avoid/transcend violence, I wondered why not accept everything as ethical, including homicide for pleasure or cannibalism. I finally came to the conclusion that it is ethical to reduce violence when and how possible, but that some amount of violence will always be occurring in some way or other and being at peace with that is one facet of resisting violence (because reacting to violence is another form of violence). So if whales were abundant and could be killed quickly, that would be as ethical as hunting deer? I would say at least you are thinking in a critical way. I have a feeling that many people have a sacred view of certain species that is purely aesthetic and they bolster their own egos by protecting those so they don't have to feel bad about being responsible for the slaughter of thousands of chickens in their lifetime to underwrite their KFC fetish. I have the same reasoning to justify eating fish, although they exhibit complex behaviors too. Whale song was thought to be complex language (I believed it was after Star Trek IV) but recently I've heard that they only do it during mating competitions to intimidate each other to go away so they don't have to fight. In other words, it may just be grunting the loudest, like when cats stand off. But what if whales are no more sentient than cats? There are laws against unnecessary cruelty to cats, aren't there? Stray cat hunting is not allowed, is it? Ultimately, I think any unnecessary intervention in the lives of animals is somewhat unethical, but the complex part is weighing the ethics of protecting one animal against the ethics of allowing another (including humans) to intervene in its life and even torture/kill it. There are many differences between different animals but I think that it's a bit naive to think that distinctions that radically differentiate humans from other mammals aren't anthrocentric. After all, it is HUMANS who are romanticizing humans as being special. For me, it doesn't make a big difference ethically because I don't think that I can control the world. So my ethics are primarily geared toward minimizing violence against others in my own actions and social-economic participation. Would I personally kill a whale? I'd avoid it, but if I was stranded on a desert island with no other possible food and a shipwreck load of starving people, I might then. What if I was a fisherman and the whales were consuming all the fish? Maybe I would fight the whales for the fish or maybe I would look for a new fishing area with less whales. It all depends on the specific circumstances. What I WOULDN'T do would be to declare it categorically ethical to kill whales under certain conditions because I would respect the life of each individual whale and think twice before killing one at the moment the decision was necessary. This is an anti-systematic approach, I know. I agree with everything you say here except the endangered part. I don't see why something not being endangered should automatically legitimate its killing. How would you feel if someone decided one day that humans in your area weren't endangered so there's no problem with killing one or two and the government started selling licenses while in another area there were precious few people so those people were all protected? Killing should have to be justified by reason, imo, not legitimated by default of abundance.

Maybe, but if there was a benevolent dictatorship, wasn't it only benevolent by means of selling oil to global markets? As such, wasn't the regime just a welfare state designed to manufacture consent and cooperation with the imperialism of the global oil economy?

But wouldn't they then also be obligated to diminish human pain insofar as humans are animals? At the point you get overwhelmed with all these ethical "requirements," you might consider a different approach to ethics that involves voluntary intervention at the discretion of individuals. I consider this more ethical, anyway, since requiring people or animals to do things causes them more pain than allowing them to act on their own will. But isn't the same true of ethical obligations to humans? Anti-racism doesn't seek the elimination of all difference, just the elimination of attributing difference to categorical-determination instead of viewing individuals as uniquely constituted from multiple influences. It would be species-ist to say that dogs are loyal because they're dogs instead of recognizing that part of the loyalty of each dog individually comes from socialization with the people or other animals they are loyal to. The problem with racism or other group-isms is that they reduce individuals (humans or animals) to mere iterations of a category. This automatically subjugates individuals to group-knowledge regardless of whether the group-identity is being recognized as one's own or that of another. Individuals of any "sort" are not "unnatural" when they behave in ways that are not recognized as typical according to group-imagery. All individual behavior is a potential expression available to the organism as a result of all the means available to it from all sources, including genes, environmental factors, socialization, luck, etc. Thus the individual should be seen as defining one possible expression of all "sorts" it may be associated with instead of being evaluated according to criteria attributed to a certain group-identity that is given definitional primacy in its contextualization. E.g. Toto is as much part of the set "Dorothy's friends," which includes the scarecrow, tinman, and lion as he is part of the set, "dogs," "residents of Oz," or "beings that have traveled in a flying house carried by a tornado." Toto is a unique individual whose individuality is shaped by all these aspects of his identity. Sorry for the silly example, btw, but it just came to mind as an easy example.

The literal interpretation would be that God is a burning bush, or that God is Jesus, or the rainbow, the flood, the red sea parting, or any one of the other manifestations of divine presence in the stories. But God is supposed to be something that is not confined to any subset of the creation, and logically "the creation" refers to the entirety of the universe. So if God can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously, how does it make any sense to interpret God as a material being living somewhere in the universe and not elsewhere? This is why God is sometimes referred to as Holy Spirit, which basically means the manifest presence of God within people or in signs or miracles witnessed in the material world.

It doesn't really matter which is meant literally and which symbolically. When you interpret the meanings in the text, the non-literal language becomes meaningful in its interpretation. Islam means "submission" and this word provides insight into people's relationship with moral-culture. They submit to either their will to do good or their will to destroy/oppose/etc. In Freudianism, they're called libido (life drive) and whatever the word for death drive is, I forget. People submit to their inner-drives/wills the same way they submit to human authorities/institutions. What's interesting about personifying these drives/wills is that they can be externalized as have power beyond any human authority/institution, including churches, kings, governments, etc. So instead of empowering people by telling them to listen to their inner truth, religion tells them to pray to God and listen to the ultimate truth that does not submit to any arbitrary "worldly" authority. This is the same idea of transcendent, universal, truths that are claimed by science. God is associated against egoism, not with it. You are confusing God with Satan. Satan is the figure that wants to command people's worship. God just wants to enlighten people so they can live well by making fruitful choices in the creation. Look at the story of Cain and Abel. Cain gets jealous of Abel's sacrifice because it pleases God so he kills him and lies about it to God. It is Cain's obsession with pleasing God that costs him his brother and God's favor. God just wanted him to live well in the first place, and arguably he was doing so by raising vegetables in the first place since this was part of God's curse on Adam after banishment from the garden of Eden. So Cain was just doing what he was supposed to and became jealous of his brother for making animal sacrifices. See, people aren't supposed to worship God as much as they are just supposed to learn life-lessons and attempt to redeem themselves from past sin. This is why the issue of forgiveness comes up in Christianity, because it is supposed to divert people away from making sacrifices as penance for sin to living well to begin with.

Will it help if I accept responsibility for vagueness in my language? What I meant was that during the transition from photon to mass-particle, the energy has to go from being C-imperative to being sub-C-imperative. So something must change about the particle that is responsible for this change in its behavior, right?

I would like to "factor" the concept of God for you so it adds up logically, but if I do I will be told I'm hijacking the thread. So apparently this thread relies on the insistence that the concept of God has to be nonsensical to appropriately respond. So you must simply accept as axiomatic that 2+2=17.3 and then say how you would react if someone would tell you that 2+2=4 was wrong. You'd thank them for saving you from your misguided beliefs, wouldn't you?

I know the photon doesn't decelerate. You really like to respond to me as if I don't know basic things. What I asked is what is it that changes within the photon(s) that causes them (or at least one) to gain inertia/mass (I guess the antimatter particle would have inertia/mass too but I don't understand those well enough to know). Do you see what I'm getting at though? Something changes between the photon being a photon that travels at C without mass and it becoming two particles with mass and sub-C velocity, but what is it that changes?

I think you're assuming a lot, and failing to state your basis for claiming what is ethical about treating animals with less respect than humans. What is logical about saying, "these beings are different than these beings so it's ok to kill them?" Doesn't there have to be more reason to justify killing or protection than saying that one species or group deserves to kill another because it's different? Having said this, I think you have a point that it may be unfair to demonize people more for whaling than for other forms of hunting or domestic animal slaughter. The question is whether it is ethical to prioritize certain animals lives more than others on the basis of subjective aesthetics. Ok, so you find whales, polar bears, and giraffes beautiful, majestic creatures. Does that mean you're a saint for protecting them while you eat your steak and gas the doves in your city to keep the droppings-level under control?

Couldn't you replace the word "whales" with "humans" in the OP and ask all the same questions?

Right, I'm talking about high frequency, gamma-rays or something like that. If I said "high wavelength" I must have mixed up terms - sorry. I guess light expands by the photon density of the array decreasing with distance from the source then. I also understand that a particular frequency of light has a particular photon-energy. That's what Max Planck discovered to establish quantized energy as the basis for understanding electromagnetism. So the issue for this thread is still in regards to why/how a particularly high density of EM energy can create a particle of matter (+ antimatter?). Why does/would it suddenly have mass and be able to decelerate below C? I guess the next question should be what phenomenon could be capable of generating such high frequency EM energy and how.

Without science, how would you know that "cars consume several times the resources and energy needed for a person to actually walk to work, or other places," as you say in your post? I like your approach to defining productivity to reflect efficiency and maximization of good, but I think it could be confounding. You would get more clarity from defining all actions as productive in some way and then evaluating why each form of productivity is good and/or bad. Buddhism actually has several ideas/values in common with science. Value-freedom in science, for example, resonates with the idea of detachment in Buddhism. Scientists are supposed to be detached from their ego's will to be right. I.e. Scientists are supposed to be more interested in finding the truth than in confirming any dogmatic beliefs they may hold. I'm not sure, actually, if its Buddhist, Hindu, or both but the idea of (a)himsa may be useful for understanding productivity. Himsa is the idea that all life is unavoidably destructive and therefore violent in some way, yet the ethic of ahimsa is to resist violence and increase compassion amid the violence of life. Productivity must also be a universal effect of all actions, which also must contain some destructiveness. Seeking an ethics of productivity could be like seeking an ethics for (non)violence. I.e. you must produce to live but how to produce in the least destructive and/or resource-deleterious way would be something that science could contribute to. In fact, how would you pursue such an ethic without science as a means of knowing and measuring productivity, resource-inputs, waste, etc. and compare distinct processes in standardized units?

Both theists and atheists have a habit of interpreting the mythology of the bible and other religions as literal. God is seen as a physical being who lives in an actual place called heaven while the angels are seen as human-like beings with wings, etc. Although these can be helpful metaphors for visualizing the spiritual forces treated in theological philosophy, have people taken these mythological descriptions so literally as to obscure the ideas and ethics they are meant to describe? If so, why do you think literalism has become so difficult to overcome in theological discourse? Does it have to do with the rise and dominance of materialism in culture maybe?

I think there's a bible of anti-semitic conspiracy theory called, "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was very popular with Nazis during the pre-WWII period. Personally, I don't see the necessity of attributing corruption in the media or anything else to ethnicity. What's so hard about being critical of cultural practices without indentifying them ethnically? My sense is that the reason it is hard is that open-criticism prevents the possibility of using ethnic loyalty to romanticize and/or otherwise validate everything associated with one's own ethnicity/ies. In other words, without an ethnic other, there's no basis for claiming everyone who's not like the other's stereotypes is good. edit: it's like with terrorism. Why is it so hard to attribute terrorism to itself instead of attributing it to one or more religious identities or to secularism/nationalism? It's because secular people want to believe that because they are non-religious they are automatically too rational/reasonable to be prone to terrorism or authoritarianism. People seek an Other to project traits that they are afraid of encountering in themselves. edit2: they do this as much by making anti-Semitism the Other as anti-Semites make Jews Other. There are as many Othering-cultures as their are collective identities, maybe more actually.

Imo, "universe" is a boolean term that refers to the superset of all possible subsets and their contents. If you regard "space" or "spacetime" as part of "the universal set" that includes everything, then it would have to contain "space(time)." By the same logic, if the universal set is to be truly ultimately universal, nothing else could contain it. I think a lot depends on how you define "space(time)."