Starboy

Amos, are you an idealist?

Amos

More like a realist, I think, but maybe my definitions are wrong.

Perchance

Why should anyone want eternal life, inside one's head or not? Long, gray, rainy Sunday afternoons are enough of eternity to last me.

-Perchance.

Amos

Good point and I never told you to search for it.
Variety is the spice of life and boredom is the best motivator to turn life into a merry-go-round, in which we go around and around and around and around without end.

Starboy

Do you think that what is real is confined to what is in our minds? We can only know reality by what we sense and all of this goes on in our minds. In some sense shared reality is some sort of shared mind, perhaps an idea we share with the mind of god? Physical things would then be ideas and thus the term idealist.

Starboy

Amos

Good point and that is why my reservation about the labels.

So now you say that physical things are ideas and that these shared ideas are real. Would that not make me a realist? I hold that in the end only beauty and truth are real and this idea we find in the universal mind of God.

I have this same problem with reason, intuition and pure reason. Human reason is always mixed with intuition and it is not until our intuit knowledge has been rationalized that we can speak of pure reason.

Also with free will. As human beings we are free from our rational perspective for as long as we can over rule our intuit mind. It is when our intuition and our rational mind are one and the same that we truly have a free will.

The same is true with love and hate. Love cannot be conceived to exist without hate and it is not until we reach into the universal source for love that hate can be elimnated (hate only exist in our conscious mind).

The same is true with pleasure, pain and in fact is true for all of our senses including light and darkness.

Oops, I forgot. The same is true with life and death. Just as pleasure, pain, darkness, light, and all our sense perception are illusion so is life an illusion (and idea) and if life is an illusion death could not possibly be real. The reason for this is that eternal life is just as opposite to life as death is opposite to life and if life and death are not real eternal life must be real to justify the opposites of life and death combined.

I think now it is time to stop.

[ November 01, 2002: Message edited by: Amos ]</p>

Ronin

I think now it is time to stop.

Wise words.

Amos

Thanks for the confirmation.

Kassiana

"God never promised we would not die!"

Atheist: Of course not. God doesn't exist, so he or she or Great Cosmic It can't promise anything.

Zen Buddhist: But he does have tasty gerontologists.

Pagan: There are probably Gods who have promised that, but I don't believe in them.

Fundamentalist Christian: Of course he did. Our souls cannot die. Duh.

Starboy

Greetings Amos,

My understanding of the philosophical term realist is it represents the point of view that real objects exist independently of the mind. These objects would have an existence even if there were never a mind to know of it, even the mind of god. This is the basis of modern scientific thought. It seems to me that you think that without mind, specifically the mind of god, there would be nothing. I think that makes you an idealist, whereas I am definitely a realist.

Starboy