How do things like love and justice exist in an atheist/evolutionist worldview? If we're all just evolved bags of meat with no actual purpose in an accidental world without meaning, then who cares about injustice? Love doesn't exist, it's just a series of chemical reactions mothers evolved so they would protect their offspring. Following the atheist worldview to its conclusion must lead to nihilism. Anything else is borrowing from a religious view that says people have meaning, there is such a thing as right and wrong, etc.
>hunger is just a series of chemical signals
>therefore eating is meaningless
I still eat because I don’t like being hungry and I like eating food. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter if the “universe” doesn’t feel my hunger. I do.
Hunger isn't an abstract concept like love and justice.
Love is just wanting to protect those you care about. Justice is wanting to punish/reward others in order to regulate others’ behavior. Other animals have their own social rules. Read a book.
Love isn’t an abstract concept, it’s something that’s felt. When you hold a lover in your arms, when you look your child, you know what love is. It’s as real as hunger is. Justice too, although more abstract a concept than love, is something that is felt. Watch footage of courtrooms and see the intense emotional reaction of families of victims as they see the killer of their loved one sentenced. That emotional catharsis is feeling justice being done. I don’t see how the existence of a God makes either of these things more or less real.
But what are feelings to an atheist? Just electro-chemical impulses. Without a God to give them a meaning, they have no meaning. Truly, there can be no true warmth of love without God’s participation.
I'll take my electrical impulses as being more real than being a mudpuppet animated by god.
You don't want an answer, you've already got the answers in your head and any sort of point will just be thrown away.
You equate atheism to nihilism when both of those philosophies are separate and not related.
You deny that humans can give things meaning and say that meaning must derive from God.
In short, you are a dogmatic idealogue and you created this thread to shitpost. Fricking Abrahamics, always doing the same bullshit.
Abrahamism is just nihilistic cope (Kierkegaard). Scratch an abrahamic and a nihilist bleeds.
>You equate atheism to nihilism when both of those philosophies are separate and not related
nihilism is the end of atheism if one is intellectually honest.
Why?
Because without God, nothing has meaning at all. Reality just is what it is. If you think it does have a meaning, that's a cope and you're taking a religious view without admitting it.
Why can't people make their own meaning?
You can, but it's ultimately a cope for the atheist. Any personal "meaning" is just making more feel-good chemicals before you die. That's it. If you want to call that "meaning" then be my guest.
>Any personal "meaning" is just making more feel-good chemicals before you die
ok. and?
I didn't realize that knowing this and enjoying life anyways was a "cope".
>You can
So you admit there can be meaning without God
Nice, you have declared your position
Now make arguments in favour of it
God is a special electro-chemical signal that gives meaning to electro-chemical feelings.
>stating the scientific explanation for something erases all emotional weight
Rick and Morty brain with a Oyish skin
A theist accusing atheists of cope is really something. Religion itself is the ultimate cope, the cope for people who are incapable of accepting the reality of the world. And that’s very obvious from this thread. You don’t believe in God because you have any empirical or evidential basis to believe, you believe because you have a personal, emotional need for there to be a God because without one you would be unable to cope with the pointlessness of existence and the knowledge of your own inevitable death. The atheists are the people who can simply accept reality as it is, who don’t need a headcanon to reassure that they get to live in a magical kingdom in the clouds forever after they die. They just get on with their lives and make the most of the time they have on this earth.
Even Nietzsche acknowledged only some people can, that seems to be his idea of a superperson. Someone who can rise above herd mentality, who isn't, in modern terms, an NPC.
I think he means only some will, not only some can.
I didn't realize not being a depressed sack of shit and pursuing my goals and personal happiness was "religious".
Wrong, nihilism is a transition state like a cocoon.
Yeah it’s really just sort of an adolescent phase when a Christian breaks free of Christianity.
No. You probably just have clinical depression. A mentally healthy persons life has meaning.
Understanding the physical, chemical processes which exist behind feelings doesn’t make those emotions any less real to me. I don’t see why they need this additional “meaning” you seem to think they need, or even what meaning you seem to think God gives them.
If you’re a Christian which I assume you are, then in the end the only meaning of life is to worship God, with the hope you’ll be rewarded with a place in heaven where you get to spend the rest of eternity continuing to worship God. Tbh, if that’s the meaning of everything it doesn’t sound so attractive to me.
If there is no God then there is no inherent meaning to anything, but then that leaves us free to invent our own meaning for our own lives. Many people might find that much more attractive than the “meaning” for life that you propose.
>Just electro-chemical impulses.
Yeah but they're what make us people. It's like saying what is an engine? Just metal, gears and tubes. Without those things it's no longer an engine, so you can't just split them individually when form a part of a whole.
Love is an action, not a feeling. What you're feeling in that sense is the joy of union with the beloved.
Love is just an intense emotional bond between people. It doesn't need some metaphysical reality in the ether to be real, and for us to want that.
We're social creatures after all.
As for justice, we live in communities, we're not autonomous individuals. Justice and fairness and self-evident goods for the community.
But from an atheistic worldview, the only reason we love and want to be loved is because we evolved to seek that to lead to better chances of survival. It doesn't mean anything beyond that. That's what I mean when I say it "isn't real" and basically just leads to nihilism.
Again, you can make the same argument for hunger. Doesn’t mean hunger “isn’t real.”
I don't think you can though. Rats and dogs get hungry because they must eat to survive, same as us. But humans are capable of love for one another in a way that dogs are not.
dogs love humans though. And some animals mate for life. And have you not seen that video of the chimp mother crying because she thought her baby was dead? Your illusions are being destroyed in real time.
>dogs love humans though
We might project that onto them, but no, they don't. They are nice to another creature that provides them with food and shelter, but it's dishonest to say that is love in the same way a man loves his wife.
There are studies that show dogs have a strong bond with their owners similar to a parent and child.
those dogs must have conscious feelings towards humans, though. Don’t you think it is similar to our feelings of love? Love exists to strengthen the bond between you and another person, to make sure you don’t just abandon them. It doesn’t mean love isn’t real
So love is merely a combination of chemicals produced to make it harder to abandon others? How is that not depressing?
There’s no logical inference to be made to support the idea that this is “depressing.” The problem is that you grow up believing in fairytale illusions about how the world works, and now you don’t know what to believe anymore. But you get used to it and start to see the beauty in it. I think it’s fascinating. Biology is incredible, there is still much more to be discovered.
You’re incredibly ignorant of animal behaviour then if that’s what you feel. Animals in captivity sometimes stop eating when another animal they had a companionship with dies. I know of one instant of a dolphin literally committing suicide by drowning itself after being separated from a human trainer which it had a strong emotional bond with. All you have to do is go on to YouTube and you’ll see compilations of animals showing intense emotional bonds with other creatures. Look at how dogs react when they reunite with owners they haven’t seen for years. The love animals experience as is as real and visceral for them as it is for us.
Interesting way to justify that you suck your dogs dick
Nah, a lot of animals had attachments. Even in the wild social bond have a function.
>There are studies that say chopping off your dick makes you a woman too. Doesn't make it true.
>Transexualism existvso all science is wrong
>Transexualism existvso all science is wrong
Are you moronic? My point is that just because some ~~*study*~~ claims something, it isn't automatically true.
And from a theistic worldview the only reason we want those things is because we were designed to want them.
Just because my body evolved to enjoy the company of other, and to want fairness in my community's rules, doesn't mean those things shouldn't matter to me.
So? I still feel it. I know it’s not like a magic force in the air, that doesn’t negate it.
Why would the fact that humans are "just evolved bags of meat" imply that there's no such thing as right and wrong?
You call things right and wrong by comparing them to some standard. If we're evolved bags of meat in a world that is accidental and has no inherent meaning, then those standards are arbitrary and I have no reason to accept yours over mind. You can say slavery is wrong, but why? Because we decided it as a society? If that's the case, then it wasn't wrong before it was outlawed.
There are studies that say chopping off your dick makes you a woman too. Doesn't make it true.
>You can say slavery is wrong, but why?
Suppose I say it's just necessarily the case that it's wrong. Why is any further explanation necessary?
Because I can simply reject your opinion that it's wrong. Why does your opinion hold more weight than mine?
>There’s no logical inference to be made to support the idea that this is “depressing.”
Depression isn't something that is rational or logical. To me the idea of love being just a utilitarian thing to increase survival chances is very depressing. What's even the point of living then? Why shouldn't I rope myself?
>Because I can simply reject your opinion that it's wrong.
Well, that won't change the fact that it's wrong.
I can't give your life a purpose anon, that's on you.
Personally my biological drive for carbohydrates doesn't stop me from enjoying sweets.
> What's even the point of living then? Why shouldn't I rope myself?
If you don’t inherently love and affirm life, and you need a logical reason to go on living, then you probably should have a nice day. Humans should be more adaptive and more sturdy than that. You discover physicalism and determinism and you want to have a nice day? How weak.
Based post
Weak spirited mofos will say it's cringe
But it is based
>If we're all just evolved bags of meat with no actual purpose in an accidental world without meaning, then who cares about injustice?
Caring is an emotional reaction. What does it have to do with any of those things?
>Why shouldn't I rope myself?
What do you aim to accomplish by roping yourself?
What is your definition of "meaning"? If something is commanded by God, it suddenly becomes meaningful, instead of another brute fact? How does this solve the is-ought distinction?
Reality is not just what it is with God, on the other hand? How? In traditional Abrahamic theology, God's creation is not even something that can be questioned, with equally brute fact metaphors like the clockmaker and the clock, etc.
>Love doesn't exist, it's just a series of chemical reactions mothers evolved so they would protect their offspring.
What is your definition of love?
Do you suppose to say that a meaning should have no relation to happiness?
What is your definition of a real person, as opposed to just a hunk of meat animated by electro-chemical signals?
>common sense
>self evident
>obvious
not an argument. not an explanation, just because it benefits you to live in a community doesn't mean anything, and doesn't explain why the community arose in the first place. "Thou shall not kill" and "love your neighbor" prevent communities from stripping human rights of those they don't like, being forced to allow people you don't like to live and prosper as you do regardless of your personal feelings towards them is not rationally explainable, it would only make sense if they gave you something you couldn't live without which is not the case for most people around you today, you could mow them down and feel very little repercussions in the long run assuming no one knows you did it.
if its just obvious and anyone can see it, then why are women basically property in some countries, why do some cultures have harsh physical punishments for criminals? if it was obvious then everyone regardless of upbringing would have arrived at the same conclusion. Then slavery would have never occured. etc.
my dog gets happy when he sees me. debunked.
>They are nice to another creature that provides them with food and shelter
kids dont love their parents turns out
Justice an emergent property of being numerous evolved meatbags with problems that have to live together.
Justice makes no sense to god. God has no peers, thus, there is no concept of fairness. God omnipotent, and therefore has no problems.
Justice is irreconcilable with the idea of an absolute singular god, which is why YHWH is an absolute schizo and makes up random shitty rules, and it took Jesus, who was fully meatbag, to come up with some religious laws that kind of made sense to meatbags of the time.
>How do things like love and justice exist in an atheist/evolutionist worldview
They exist as ideas in people's heads, just like all other worldviews
>it's just a series of chemical reactions mothers evolved so they would protect their offspring
How does that mean it doesn't exist?
In a theist world view nothing matters because everything comes from a israelite in the sky and you live forever in a magic israelite castle as a disembodied troony spirit when you're dead.
You're thinking of dispensationalists who think they're going to get raptured so nothing matters. For most theists, practicing and spreading their religion matters and how to practice it and spread it (by civilization, by person or both) is what drives debates. Unfortunately anyone who knows the history of Europe or the Middle East will know these debates aren't always peaceful, but the fact that they were willing to kill shows that it did matter.
God gives you a purpose, God elevates you into a real person instead of just a hunk of meat animated by electro-chemical signals. God is what makes us human.
Electro-chemical signals give you a purpose, electro-chemical signals elevate you into a real thinking person instead of just carbon mudpuppet animated by gods stinky breath. Electro-chemical signals are what make use people.
>christcuck throws temper tantrum no.5820461
stop shitting up the board
>christians are either hinting that they would commit the most heinous crimes without fear of hell or projecting their nihilistic existential crisis on non believers
>in both cases every atheist on the board tells them they're wrong
>they persist in these anti social tirades day after day
they have an identity that was formed in christian greco-romantic ethics, so their sense of justice comes from the same place as everyone else in their culture: the Bible.
I like how it’s either “people need Christianity for the morals” or “everyone in the west already follows Christian morals” depending on which argument a Christian is losing at the time.
those aren't mutually exclusive, which is probanly why you hear them at various times from the same people.
They are actually. If everyone in the west already follows Christian morals then they wouldn’t need to become Christian to follow the morality.
if Christianity didn't exist then people wouldn't ascribe to those Christian morals, and if it ceased to exist they would no longer ascribe to them. so Christianity would still be fundamentally necessary for Christian social morality.
You're going to have to define "Christian morals" here.
"the universal fraternity of man" is a convenient umbrella that probably covers most of the specifics. to be honest, i'm too lazy to list it all out, so just being up whatever you specifically want to talk about and we can go from there.
No, that's good enough, I agree. I thought you were going to be one of those "you physically cannot work at a soup kitchen without first rejecting the evils of triclavianism" types, but you're absolutely right.
Christians are not my brothers, especially the right wing, the hyper conservative and fascist ones.
This is a common view.
i would argue those statements likely appeal to some sense of common brotherhood that in your view Christians should have recognized but didn't. thus, inescapably you are drawn back to a morality on part formed by influences from Christian ethics.
My distaste for conservatives could arguably be re-framed as a rejection of Christian morality.
a rejection likely influenced in some part by Christian ethics.
I’ll keep arguing with you because I disagree.
But let’s pause for a minute and say you were right that my distaste for Christian morality is rooted in my Christian morality, what is your point? Why would this matter?
idk. i'm not the OP and i don't really think it's a very good argument. ultimately people don't care why they think things are right or wrong, they just judge things based on whatever moral standards they have.
probably true, but Christian ethics still have left an inescapable influence on the modern man, whether he likes it or not.
Anon basically no one follows Christian moral rules including Christians. It’s a whole package of rules and the ones people actually do follow tend to be older than Christianity in the first place.
Murder and theft are universally taboo
universal fraternity is not exactly a common theme in most pre-Christian moralities.
Christian ethics were not simply handed down from on high, they were influenced by pagan philosophy that came before them. While most Christians today subscribe to a liberal philosophy, many earlier Christian scholars would probably reject it. Many liberals were also looking at the pagan past for inspiration.
>Many liberals were also looking at the pagan past for inspiration.
They were reading Aristotle and Plato but most Liberals were reacting against these men. Many of them were disgusted by Aristotle's views on slavery and Plato's ideas of caste and race. If you caste a wide enough net with "Liberal" such that everyone short of Robert Filmer was "a Liberal" then sure, but that's still an awfully wide net.
Also, the majority of Liberal interest in the Classics was to recreate better government on the plan of Classical ideals, not actually to implement Classical society. No one was advocating going back to something like the Athenian herrenvolk system or Sparta's Spartoi/Helots setup, and many Liberals were aghast at the ancestor worship, racism (for lack of a better term), and polytheism of the Romans (such as Thomas Macaulay). If anything what they were trying to do was create a fictitious lineage of Liberal ideals back to the Classical world, not actually pull something forward.
Well Christians also reacted against the parts of classical philosophy they didn't like. Liberal philosophers (and yes I am using the word in the widest context possible)also were reacting against (other) Christian philosophers. Nothing develops in a vacuum. Yes, Certainty definitely influenced modern morality in the west. But what does that mean? It doesn't mean they still apply christian metaphysics without thinking about it, at least not atheists who read atheist philosophy.
>It doesn't mean they still apply christian metaphysics without thinking about it, at least not atheists who read atheist philosophy.
True, but the Christgays aren't really arguing against Dawkins or Dennett or any of these other "let me sit down and think up a totally complete philosophical system from basic axioms!" types. They're trying to bully and attack reddit tips fedora m'lady communism could work religion is a scam funko pops losers to demonstrate that they're higher status than them to anons on the internet, and these types of "atheists" (in quotes because they're not the same thing as Dawkins/Dennett) absolutely apply Christian metaphysics (and ethics, and epistemology) without thinking about it.
Okay, more properly they continue certain strains that Gay Race Communism inherited from Christianity.
>True, but the Christgays aren't really arguing against Dawkins or Dennett or any of these other "let me sit down and think up a totally complete philosophical system from basic axioms!" types. They're trying to bully and attack reddit tips fedora m'lady communism could work religion is a scam funko pops losers
Those are the same people, moron. I can only imagine how stupid and intellectually underdeveloped you have to be to find Dawkins a compelling thinker LMAO. Attacking Dawkins and Dennett IS low hanging fruit.
Well that doesn't seem to be the case because secular societies who are primarily irreligious still follow these "christian morals".
Only the ones that have entered secularism from Christianity, though.
Japan today follows most of what you're calling "christian morals" and they started out Shinto/Buddhist and are now mostly irreligious with lip service to both.
>Japan today follows most of what you're calling "christian morals"
No it doesn't.
>they started out Shinto/Buddhist and are now mostly irreligious
The Japanese have a higher Shinto shrine attendance rate and a higher birthrate than any Eastern Orthodox country.
i don't really subscribe to the idea of 'atheist = no moral action' anyway, so idk man, i'm not gonna defend that too much. i think there are some obvious common moral trends that trace themselves back to history and it's impossible for any modern person to not be affected by them.
This really is just the flip side of the pseudo-intellectual Redditor/rick and Morty paradigm.
That because things like emotions have a scientific basis, they are meaningless. It’s pretty clear it’s just rationalization of having emotional problems.
My love for others has taken zero hits since I learned about oxytocin. It takes nothing away from the emotion.
However if I already had a low capacity for emotion and I was a weaker or less intelligent man, I may blame science for that problem instead of say unresolved psychological issues and bad mental health habits.
>save me brown israelite from being israeliteed by a israelite in the sky
Haven't read the thread but I can already guess all the atheistard responses are sophomoric dillentante nonsense that is philosophically and metaphysically illiterate.
I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve drawn a conclusion without reading the thing you’re talking about.
Christianity is more than just that anon, and again Christians have barely ever followed that even if it’s in the Bible.
A persons morality is an expansive list of do’s and donts. Jesus expressed a list of do’s and donts, there is little if any overlap and much of that overlap is not originated from Christianity in the first place.
Again it’s baffling to me that you think this would mean anything even if you were right.
>it’s baffling to me that you think this would mean anything
maybe i wasn't clear: i don't care for this argument or "think it means" much at all.
the vast majority of modern people and every modern society appeals to a concept of universal fraternity, and that is absolutely due to the moral influence of Christianity.
Christians have spent thousands of years killing people just because they weren’t Christian and plenty of them still do think like that to some degree. I’ve been Christian anon, they are not humanists, they hate or at least dislike, or at least see themselves above non-Christians
a failure to act according to moral standards is a completely seperate topic from the profession or belief in moral standards. a man may broadly believe that theft is wrong, but still find some way to justify his own stealing.
the moral fabric of the modern world has inarguably been affected by Christian ethics.
I disagree but some secular people would agree, so what?
>so what?
idk. i don't think the widespread social adoption of some elements of Christian morality really makes very compelling statements about either morality or Christianity. i'm just arguing that it did happen, not that it was partcularly exciting.
Good talk
>I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve drawn a conclusion without reading the thing you’re talking about.
Anon, you atheist morons repeat the same exact few regurgitated platitudes and strawmen every single fricking time. I have spoken to so relatively intellectually coherent and charitable atheists, and almost all of them have been Stirnerites or agnostics sympathetic to religion. But everyone here is a moronic homosexual who has not intellectually progressed past embarrassing and sophomoric Christopher Hitchens trash that actually intelligent and introspective atheists cringe at. It is also so utterly embarrassing of you to say this in light of the fact that the response of most atheist to my lengthy essays on the nature of morality is to say "DIDN'T READ LOL", strawmanning and sardonic indignation. Spare me the whining.
Oh there’s no whining. You didn’t read the thread and made up your mind and I’m not surprised.
Plenty of people explained that they feel these emotions like love regardless of knowing the scientific explanation.
I just finished the thread and it was literally everything I expected it to be. Lmao, you homosexuals really are hopeless. Allow me to school you.
There are two aspects to morality: morality as goodness, and morality as law. Pursuing the Good is intrinsically valuable, but without disincentives for eschewing it, creatures who by their composite nature subject to change and thereby contingently as opposed to essentially good, prone to alteration and evil, will be prone to straying away from it; thus, God imposes morality as a law, to ensure the goodness of His creatures.
Now, God is by His simple nature an energeia -- activity. In God, there is scarcely any real distinction between His attributes and His operation, we merely logically distinguish between the two, because we cannot conceptualize of God in His ineffable and incomprehensible essence due to our delineating Him on the basis of our creaturely observations; all our descriptions of God are in some way or another on the basis of negation, whether as privation or eminence: we begin to be, so God must be unbegotten; we are composite, so God is ineffably simple; we exist in time, so God is timeless; we undergo alteration, so God is subject to change due to His transcending time and space; we are finite, so He must be infinite. We never truly define God as His essence is unattainable, we merely delineate the realities around Him in relation to ourselves.
>Pursuing the Good is intrinsically valuable, but without disincentives for eschewing it, creatures who by their composite nature subject to change and thereby contingently as opposed to essentially good, prone to alteration and evil
The instrinsically valuable benefits to acting morally motivate the person to engage in it. Punishments for being immoral are ubiquitous too. Immorality involves infringing on others and you will face consequences.
So even if your empathy or morals aren’t working either temporarily or permanently, you will face consequences.
>The instrinsically valuable benefits to acting morally motivate the person to engage in it.
The intrinsically valuable benefits only exists if one presumes the existence of a higher transcendental plane or planes, towards which striving induces a form of pleasure, fulfillment and happiness higher and more sublime than that of indulging in the carnal passions. Presuming materialism, such a thing does not exist.
>Punishments for being immoral are ubiquitous too.
...the enforcement of which is sparse and uncertain. Evil doing is quite frequently not punished, especially in less developed societies or ones undergoing debilitating societal turmoil.
>So even if your empathy or morals aren’t working either temporarily or permanently, you will face consequences.
So you presume a non-theistic form of karma? It is utterly childishly naive to believe that justice is inevitable (due to purely natural factors). People obviate just retribution for their crimes all the time. Enforcing laws more strictly also does not offer recompense to victims of injustice in the past nor does it compensate for past failures; only an omnipotent God can truly right all wrongs.
Yawn. This hysteric indignation is effeminate and unseemly. Sorry anon, but most people are in fact religious in one way or another, at very least spiritual, so you can't make your gay pissy little appeal to popularity. Nothing will ever change the fact that you're too much of a whiny homosexual coward to confront the inevitable conclusions of your beliefs. Adopt some belief in the supernatural, or become a Camusean existentialist and Stirnerite egoist. Those are the only two coherent positions.
And want if someone engages in immoral behaviour if they want to, moron?
Luckily, I know in my heart that Jesus will heal the world, so I am effervescent and satisified with my life.
Childish drivel.
>hysteric indignation is effeminate and unseemly
Why do you type like a euphoric fedora atheist despite being the opposite?
Where can I read more?
I view God in a similar way to how you described it in the first few posts. I thought I was alone.
You might enjoy the following essay I wrote on the Trinity.
Trinitarianism is perfectly coherent. There are three hypostaseis and one ousia; the ousia is a nature, a universal property. A hypostasis is a particular nature or a subsistence, something which is ontologically prior but logically posterior to the bundle of properties that constitute it. The universal is contrary to the speculations of many learned Greeks numerically singular; the property of being a height 175 cm predicated of Paul is identical to the property predicated of Peter, it is not the case that there are instantiations X1 and X2 of the universal X that immanently subsist in the particular subsistences A1 and B2. They are exactly identical, for immanent properties are proper to space but do not exist in space as such, for they cannot subsist on their own when not coinhering coextensively with other properties -- for all existences are but that, collections or bundles of properties. Thus, though there are three divine persons, there is but one numerically singular divine nature, common to all three; the divine persons separated by their idiomatic properties. The Father is unbegotten, the Son is only-begotten, and the Spirit proceeds. Thus, just as Peter, Paul and John are all man yet differentiated from each other by their idiomatic properties, so too are the Father, Son and Spirit all God without being identical to each other.
Now, if you presume that this does not go far enough to secure monotheism, you would be correct. The true securing of the teaching of there being only one God derives from the Divine Monarchy of the Father. As the Son says, the Father is greater than I (John 14:28); by this He means not ontological inferiority, but causal inferiority. As John 1:1 says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word as with God, and the Word was God.
Note that the Word's Godhood is posterior to His being with God; the Son is God inasmuch He is begotten by God the Father Almighty. All that the Son possesses, He received from the Father. So too the Spirit; the Son and Spirit are mere extensions of God, just as our arms are an extension of ourselves, but to be a mere extension of God is no mere thing, for God is immaterial, timelessly eternal, incomposite, spaceless, adiastemic, all-powerful, all-knowing, endlessly transcendental, ineffably ineffable, blinding incandescence, beyond being itself; to be an extension of God, one must be God Himself. Because God acts through His Son and Spirit, they possess His essence and His power. There are no three arkhai, but only one source, God, Who is called Father through His begetting of the Son. We in piety reserve the name God for Him, to accentuate Him as the Source of the Trinity and lynchpin of its Oneness and Unity; the Son and Spirit are God, but in a predicative sense but only rarely in a nominative sense. This is why St Paul says on 1 Corinthians 8:6 that there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and in whom we live. Paul safeguards monotheism by addressing the Father as God, for He is the source of divinity, whereas the Son as Lord, acknowledging His divinity and possession of the most exalted Divine Name YHWH, for it was He who spoke it to Moses. There is one God the Father, who accomplishes all His wonders through His Son and Spirit, who are eternally subordinated to His will (Not my will, but yours be done, Luke 22:42).
Consequent to the Divine Monarchy of the Father is the doctrine of inseparable operations. Because there is one will, there is but one activity in God. All that the three divine persons do, they do as one.
The Father wills, the Son executes, and the Spirit perfects, for the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does (John 5:19). Their unity of activity is not merely accidental as in men, but essential; men achieve unity of action contingently, but in the Godhead, God does all He does through His Son, and His Son completes and perfects all things through His Spirit, gifted to Him by His Father. It cannot be any other way. It is a metaphysical necessity. This applies equally to the external activities that are but a mere extension of His internal activity as it does to the latter; God generates the Son and Spirit for the purpose of His eternally perpending His own grandeur. God contemplates Himself, and to contemplate Himself, He generates two other divine persons who share in His essence: how or why He does shall remain eternally inaccessible to us, for His activity is identical to His essence, and His essence cannot be grasped. All we know of God we attain through conceptualization and notions we derive of Him through comparison to His Creation: creatures exist in time, so God must be timeless; creatures exist in space, so God must be spaceless; consequently, creatures are composite, so God is necessarily incomposite and perfectly simple; consequently, creatures are subject to alteration, and God cannot change for He transcends the metaphysical preconditions for potentiality, being pure actuality; consequently, creatures are subject to passions, so God must necessarily be impassible; creatures are finite, so He must be qualitatively infinite; consequently, God must necessarily so eminently transcend creatures He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenelovent; and so forth. But these conceptualizations do not define God, they but merely delineate Him; His essence we try to circumscribe, but it remains inaccessible to us.
It lies behind the eternal qualitative infinity of God, infinitely greater than infinity; our notion of infinity allows us to see its incomprehensibility, to comprehend it, but the essence is so beyond God's infinity that it is incomprehensibly incomprehensible and ineffably ineffable. It is the very essence of mystery. God's attributes are extensions of His essence; they are consequent to and derivative of it. The essence necessarily entails His being omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenelovent, omnipresent, eternal, timeless, spaceless, incomposite, simple, etc.; the attributes we predicate of God are not identical, but mutually entailing, for one cannot be omnipotent without also being omniscient, adiastemic, impassible, and so forth, and vice versa. All we know of God is engendered by the essence, but all we know are the realities which surround God, as the essence itself remains inaccessed and inaccessible. We cannot exist His infinity, yet alone the magnitude beyond the infinity.
Thus, we can provide explanations for the Trinity, but it eternally remains a mystery. The Trinity is a product of the Father's omniscience, for in eternally contemplating Himself, the Father generates a second person in whose reflection He perceives His own visage, coming to know Himself more perfectly, and in the Spirit truly most perfectly; the Trinity is a reflection of God as Love, for He generates a person whom He can love, and a third one through Him that He grants as a gift so that their love may be perfected as a truly unselfish love; the Trinity is engendered by God perpending His omnipotence, for He is so powerful that He generates another as great and ineffable as He, whose own omnipotence is vindicated by His eternally manifesting and sustaining the Spirit, who Itself is vindicated as God by anointing the Son Who sustains and manifests Him eternally as God. Yet we can very truly and fully understand.
Hence how we know that God is One: for our knowledge of God is corrupted by our defining Him in relation to creation, as we by negation delineate Him in opposition to ourselves, either by privation or through eminence. We say there are three hypostaseis and one ousia, but this is a product of our considering God as though He were a creature: because God is simple, in Him there is identity of activity and attributes. The essence is a property and an activity; the property is actualized through the activity, and the activity fully and exhaustively communicates the property. God is pure act: He is Thought Thinking of Itself. He is pure, supreme contemplation. Because we are limited creatures, we distinguish logically between the activity and the property it communicates, for our being limited creatures, our powers lie dormant and idle quite often, and we do not manifest the activities that communicate our essence. There is a temporal disjunction.
The distinction between three hypostaseis and one ousia is solely the product of our considering the essence as a property; but this mirage dissipates if we consider the universal as an activity. Because God is perfectly simple, the universal and the subsistence it inheres in are perfectly identical. Ousia and hypostasis are one and the same. The essence of God is equal to God, namely the Father; the Son and Spirit fully and exhaustively possess the essence as a property, but they are not equal to it as an activity, for the eternal contemplation of God entails His generating His Son and Spirit. The hypostasis of the Father necessarily and inevitably eternally generates the hypostaseis of the Son and Holy Spirit.
This is mystery of God.
Apologies for taking almost an hour to post this; this is from an Eastern Orthodox perspective btw.
Incomprehensible gibberish.
Have sex.
I forgot that you need to have above average IQ for a Hispanic to comprehend what I'm saying.
> Now, God is by His simple nature an energeia -- activity
Are you referring to a deistic God or the God of a specific religious tradition, and if so which tradition?
I'm Eastern Orthodox. I reject the Aristotelian argument that the Prime Mover is wholly sequestered and perhaps unaware of his own generation, and the concomitantly consequent argument that he cannot interact with the world because creaturely responses would endanger his divine simplicity with contingent knowledge and disrupt his activity by introducing alteration and stages into, turning into motion; God, being eternal, interacts with creature from outside time, therefore possessing contingent knowledge only in a qualified sense because He could have chosen not to make the world, but it is not contingent in the sense that God has passive potency, since He had always chosen to create the world and always known He had done so in a mystically ineffable way incomprehensible to ourselves.
Forgot to mention: while Aristotle argues that thinking constitutes an activity inasmuch as there is no temporal gap between the beginning of an act and its reaching its telos, the act of having thought being fulfilled the moment one begins thinking, this completely ignores the content of the contemplation itself, which can have stages, gradually trending towards its consummation through its telos; my act of thinking might be aimed towards figuring out a puzzle, which is completed when the final cause of its being solved is attained. Thus, thinking can be reasonably characterized as both an activity and a motion. Aristotle's distinction between activity and motion applies to neither creatures nor God, for for creatures all activities are in some sense motions by virtue being possessed by time (as opposed to saying *occurring* in time, which is terminology Aristotle eschews on a technical level), and all of God's motions that occur within time are in some sense activities since they are but an extension of His eternally perpending Himself, being executed from beyond time.
We try to circumscribe Him, but He is uncircumscribable. We differentiate in Him between essence and subsistence -- ousia and hypostasis -- on account of the fact in creatures the hypostasis is ontologically prior but logically posterior to the many ousiai that constitute it, for all existences are but bundles of coexistent attributes, various universal properties predicated of a hypostasis but which cannot subsist outside of it; thus, we say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all equally "God" because divinity is a property -- a numerically singular universal -- that subsists in all three hypostaseis, just as the numerically single universal property of humanity subsists in all particular human persons, no different between any of us. Yet when we say so, we conceptualize of the essence as a property as opposed to activity, and of it as ontologically posterior to hypostaseis: but God's essence is identical with Himself, and His Son and His Spirit are not due to the fact that His generating the persons that causally derivative and therefore inferior to Him yet nonetheless ontologically equal on account of the fact that they are mere extensions of His existence -- for to be a mere extension of God is no mere thing, as it requires ontological equality with Him on account of incorporeal, simple, transcendental nature -- is *part* or His essential activity. God is Thought Thinking of Itself, and in the process of His most sublime, supreme contemplation of His grandeur, He generates the Son and through Him the Spirit, for He comes to know Himself most perfectly in the reflection of others: His generating the other two divine persons is indicative of His omnipotence (for He produces minds who equally possess His attributes), His omniscience (for through Them, He most perfectly actualizes Himself by knowing Himself in Their reflection) and His omnibenelovence (for it is the ultimate, most sublime act of Love), but it is undefinable in its essence
Thus, God is Pure Act. And being simple, He has a single activity: His eternally perpending Himself. Thus, Creation cannot be a second activity, rather it is an operation that is an extension of His essential rumination of His own Self. Ergo, the ultimate purpose of Creation is to serve as a monument to God's glory, and all creatures within it are destined for eternally imitating God, seeking to contemplate Him as He does Himself, but failing to do so; and in doing so, vindicating His ineffable glory, for even finite, imperfect creatures such as ourselves are left stupified by His magnificence despite our inability to fully comprehend it.
The skopos and telos of Existence is epektasis: our eternally circling around God, growing in our knowledge of Him, but never exhausting all that can be said and known of Him. For He is like an infinite well of water from which we seep, yet also infinitely greater than infinity, for His being infinity is merely a notion we have of Him in relation to ourselves -- His infinity is comprehensibly incomprehensible, but His essence is so incomprehensible we cannot even comprehend it, for we can have no direct notion of it.
Everything in Creation exists to facilitate our contemplation of God; God man made in the image of God, and his existing in a community is a most sublime imitation of the loving, perichoretic unity of the Godhead. The community of men is a symbol, an icon, of the Most Holy Trinity. We seek to attain its perfection, but never can, for the Son and the Spirit are extensions of God, His Being and His Doing, eternally subordinate to His will; God is one since in the Godhead there is one source—the Father; one will—that of the Father; one nature and power—that which the Father communicates to His Son and Spirit; one activity—that which the Father completes through His Son and Spirit.
But in man, there are many wills and many activities, which only contingently and not essentially as in God align. We can never be like the Trinity God engenders, but through living imbricated in a community, we can most truly and fully come to know ourselves, for man can only comprehend himself in relation to others; and by comprehending himself as the extension of a community, he can begin to comprehend the community of love, will, nature and activity that God engenders through His Son and Spirit.
By learning humility through existence in a community, where man is compelled to rely on others as an extrinsic good -- extrinsic, inasmuch as he is compelled to rely on others to accord the material conditions prerequisite for the leisure necessary to engage in contemplation of the divine -- and intrinsic good -- intrinsic, inasmuch as his reflection on himself and others allows him to comprehend divine realities -- man learns humility before God; and through humility, reverence for and unity with Him.
That is the source of all morality.
As always, atheists are too idiotic to realize that in a world wherein God does not punish people for behaving immorally and merely allows the good to attain the intrinsic reward for pursuing that which is noble and transcendental, only those who intrinsically pursue the good do good; in a world in which he does, both those who do what is right for its own sake and those who would do good insofar as they wish to avoid being punished will choose to pursue higher ends. To this one might subsequently add that laws and their concomitant punishment have a pedagogical purpose: they induce the bestial and profligate to contemplate the good through habit. Men are insufflated through discipline and punishment with knowledge of that which is good and transcendental; many who are driven solely by fear to do good are instilled through conditioning with a desire to intrinsically pursue the good.
Furthermore, midwitted atheists misapprehend that morality depends on God in two senses: an ontological sense, and a legalistic sense. God, being the most highest and transcendental reality, is the telos and skopos of all that lower realities depend on and find most desirous. All the carnal pleasures of this plane are false desires, mediated desires for the ultimate and most sublime reality that is God; indulgence in the hedonistic passions is fictive, finite, fissiparous, fleeting form of pleasure, tiresome and inpermanent, whereas unity with God in His energies is the most highest form of self-actualization, the most supremely sublime and fulfilling bliss. Without any sort higher supranatural realities, there is little reason to eschew dissipation in the atavistic instincts of this world -- little reason not to succumb to the desire to satiate each vile passion at the expense of others. Since doing good to others is not itself a path to fulfillment, since there is no higher telos beyond the material, morality is a mirage.
>Without any sort higher supranatural realities, there is little reason to eschew dissipation in the atavistic instincts of this world -- little reason not to succumb to the desire to satiate each vile passion at the expense of others.
You’re just a sociopath. You might as well be colorblind ranting about how other people can differentiate colors.
It is only subsequently that morality depends on God as a Lawgiver, who punishes those who deviate from their telos in His transcendental being; His being the metaphysical principle that engenders the Good as the Supreme Good and His being the Will imposes norms on our wills is mutually complementary, since His Will is identical to His Intellect; His Laws are a reflection of His most perfect Wisdom and could not be any other way, and His being the ontological basis for the Good induces Him to impose His moral laws upon to guide us to Himself.
What sophomoric dillentante nonsense that is philosophically and metaphysically illiterate.
Here, observe my dismantling the ridiculous and insubstantive argumentation adduced in this thread:
The existence of the sensation of hunger doesn't make the imbibing of replenishing food normative. There is no intrinsic reason to remain alive beyond one's personal fancy, so the existence of evolutionarily inculcated preservation instinct does not as such provide incentive to a suicidal individual to alter their subjective value judgement that it would personally better for them to terminate their existence, whether through starvation or otherwise.
We live in communities inasmuch as it is convenient for each individual within them to do so, to maximize their own self-interest. There is no intrinsic good in pursuing communal life, it is simply the most convenient and efficient way for each individual to pursue their own selfish interest, and the moment any incentive for their doing so or behaving in socially positive manners dissipates, there is no reason why that individual ought not simply trample on the lives and happiness of others to trample to satiate their own depraved carnal desires. All morality is simply reducible to power relations, and once any and all power leverage an organized community holds over any potential legal trespasser evaporates into thin air, there is no meaningful way to persuade him to not prioritize his own subjective desires.
That is not as such a suggestion that all forms of antisocial activity were to be sagacious at all times, but rather that any argument one might adduce for a particular individual who seeks to pursue their self-interest and subjective pleasures at all cost is a pragmatic one, itself presupposing that the sole limit one to the pursuit of one's self-interest is imprudent decisions made to maximize one's self-interest in the short term that harm in the long term.
>The existence of the sensation of hunger doesn't make the imbibing of replenishing food normative
It literally does.
People eat because they want to, and they engage in moral behavior because they want to.
>There is no intrinsic reason to remain alive beyond one's personal fancy
True. I'm not going to stop you from killing yourself if you have no desire or reason to live anon.
Observe furthermore:
So? It does not make that meaningful in any way.
And what ground do you have to condemn for being suicidal? There's no normative grounds for you to subject him to disapprobation, as ultimately survival and reproduction are biological drives that are the product of absolute chance. There is no teleological normativity found therein.
>Justice an emergent property of being numerous evolved meatbags with problems that have to live together.
>Justice makes no sense to god. God has no peers, thus, there is no concept of fairness. God omnipotent, and therefore has no problems.
Complete drivel. Justice is the redressing of inequity that is derivative of and consequent to a notion of the ultimate good, that can in the most logical manner be defined as absolute univocal goodness, wherein everything that can be predicated as good of any person or entity can be predicated as good for any other. It is the absolute convergence of all self-interest into one point, a state where all attain bliss and perfection and true pleasure at the expense of no-one. God created us so could we participate in His most perfect eternal activity of contemplating Himself, so naturally His justice entails redressing all unjust things which prevent our attaining the most perfect fulfilling bliss.
The morality of the NT is the same as the OT. The only way you'd think otherwise is if you're a mongoloid moron.
And the feelings that a sociopath feels as he attains pleasure by raping and mutilating women is equally real. To him, that is the apotheosis of life. Why ought he not pursue such an endeavour, provided he can obviate any and all retribution for his deeds, as many do?
>And the feelings that a sociopath feels as he attains pleasure by raping and mutilating women is equally real. To him, that is the apotheosis of life. Why ought he not pursue such an endeavour
Because he will be punished. And we will devise better and better ways of catching them.
>humans with guns kill sociopath to prevent him from harming other people
>religious people think the god the sociopath doesnt believe in will punish him later so they dont have to do anything now
Is there anything as anti-life-affirming as religion with justice and bliss found only in the afterlife?
What? Christians are totally fine with the death penalty. The non-cucked ones at least.
>Justice is the redressing of inequity that is derivative of and consequent to a notion of the ultimate good
The ultimate good has no need for justice because the ultimate good would lack such inequity. Justice can only be formulated by people who lack the ultimate good. The ultimate good does not exist in reality, it is only an abstract concept, and formulated by those lacking in the ultimate good. The very idea of justice acknowledges the ultimate good does not exist as reality, but as an ideal.
Justice presupposes the notion of the ultimate, univocal good. It is composed of retribution towards those who have prevented the attainment of the univocal good and the intervention to actualize said good. If the univocal good does not exist, then justice is a mere construct, because as I stated before, the non-existence of the trascendental entails the consequent non-existence of higher, transcendental bliss, and with it no reason why not to indulge the earthly desires.
OP is saying that he himself cannot construct his own subjective meaning knowing the truth about reality, and you have no arguments against what he is saying.
>That tends to lead to not believing in characters from 3000 year old mythology.
Your own arrogance and pride clouds your judgement.
>Your inability to understand that morality is a basic instinct
It's a basic instinct because it was instilled in the hearts of men by God.
>You don’t believe in God because you have any empirical or evidential basis to believe, you believe because you have a personal, emotional need for there to be a God
It's both, actually.
>The atheists are the people who can simply accept reality as it is
The opposite is very obvious from this thread.
You can't have God-meaning without God, though
I just don't get why God caring about things, should cause me to care about things
Like, what's the argument for that?
>nooo love is abusing your children by ripping off their foreskins as infants
People don't have "Christian ethics", they don't come from culture/religion they come from biology. Christianity is just one manifestation of those ethics, it's easy to mistake it for the source.
Why would learning about the neurobiology of love stop me from feeling love?
I wish Oyish was less autistic man.
>love
No such thing. It doesn’t exist. People pretend.
Tell your doctor you’ve never felt love before in your life.
Prove to me it exists.
You can’t detect it. You can’t show me a picture, you can’t smell or taste it. You can’t hear it. Etc.
(This is what atheists sounds like when they claim God doesn’t exist.)
I’m not claiming love exists outside of peoples’ heads. You are claiming that some god exists outside of peoples heads.
God doesn’t occupy a physical place, silly. But it is independent of the human mind.
>God doesn’t occupy a physical place, silly
According to Christianity god can, does and did appear in reality and interacts with it. I swear you people are all LARPers and have never gone to church or read the Bible.
>Jesus
>Church
>Bible
Who says I care about any of those. You assume everyone you argue with on the internet is Christian (or israeli, or Muslim, or Hindu, etc.).
Now prove that love exists.
Okay. I guess god DOES exist then!
Jesus physically resurrects in body to a physical place called heaven where he physically resides.
Prayer can physically affect reality according to Christianity
>Being a nihilist does not entail personally becoming depressive, but merely rejecting the idea that life has any objective meaning. A philosophical nihilist can still enjoy his life by reconciling himself to the reality that all meaning is arbitrary and subjectively constructed.
Well you’re defining nihilism differently than op, who rejects even subjective meaning.
By your definition there’s nothing wrong and more importantly, it’s just the truth. I don’t get love or drive or meaning from the sky or some ancient tribal deity, it’s my brain and my life shared with others.
>The fact that you are on this board trying to produce a lucubration that is more sophisticated and intelligent than that of the average idiot here demonstrates that you find pleasure in intellectual rumination on higher matters
That tends to lead to not believing in characters from 3000 year old mythology. Who knows where you took a left turn.
Your inability to understand that morality is a basic instinct leads me to believe you lack formal science education, at least biology.
why would knowing the mechanism behind a phenomena make it less real ?
It doesn’t. Christians have low IQ’s and are literally afraid of science.
It's so fricking moronic to think love is "a thing", like one (1) thing
just because humans made-up a useful word 'love', which captures a whole bunch of different emotions, attitudes and feelings
reifying the word to an actual silly extent, like there's love particles
can't take this seriously, too dumb
This. Also it doesn’t make sense to say “there is no purpose” or “there is no meaning.” Purpose and meaning are entirely derived from values, which exist whether or not God created them, or whether or not they are produced by chemical reactions alone. Even if hunger is chemical reactions, you can’t tell me that there’s no “purpose” in eating when I’m hungry
Emotions don’t exist.
When will Abrahamics (and lets be real, OP is one) realize that you dont have to be an atheist to even think about love/justice/assorted crap outside of religion?
Fricking pagans in China and Greece for instance thought their gods either are undealable forces of nature or fricking fickle manchildren, so they had to conceive of these concepts in the realm of human & mortal interaction.
"Goodness comes from da Gods" tends to be just a middle eastern/Hindu thing, and Christians spiritually are a bunch of desertnigs.
Plato and Aristotle constructed entire highly elaborate and intricate metaphysical systems to buttress their defence of conventional ethics against the immoralism of the Sophists, you fricking moron. Elite Hellenistic thought notoriously assailed popular piety as vile and immoral, and allegorized Greco-Roman myths to make them more palatable to their convictions.
It doesn't fricking matter how virtuous and moral certain peoples were without any sophisticated conception of morality and its sources on the basis of pure intuition, since all Christians believe that all humans were divinely imbued with the desire for reunion with God that engenders said moral intuitions, you mongoloid.
What a fricking embarrassment this board is.