Albert Cipriani

Dear Adrian,
I love this question of yours:


Well, according to the US army for the past decade you could. You could "be all that you can be." But alas, according to today's US army, you can only "be an army of one."

Seriously, even the semantics of normal speech betray the truth of my position. "Be yourself" implies that there is a real existent self independent of and perhaps never actualized by the person you end up being.

Sainthood is the process of being yourself. If you only could be yourself totally, you would be a saint, you would perfectly reflect the face of God. Be yourself, by all means. But know that in that process you are simply assenting to God's being fully Himself through the atoms you call yourself.

All any of us can do is assent to or dissent from who we are. To the degree you assent, it is not you being all that you can be, but by your assent, you are allowing God's being to be through you. You are doing nothing, no more than the earth, water, and light is doing when an acorn grabs a hold of this triad and transubstantiates them into an oak tree.

You are not the acorn or the oak tree or the sun, water or earth. God expresses Himself through being these things. You are, to the degree that you assent to being yourself, the entity that appreciates the growing tree. To the degree you do not assent to being yourself, you circumscribe God's being like a bonsai tree in a clay pot. To the degree that your stunted existence exists at all, it exists as a result of you having assented to God's being.



I mean God. God is the only substance, or essence, or existent thing that there is. What we perceive as existent things are really just relationships between God Himself. The 0.0001% of the relationships we’re privy to between things, we call the thing itself and claim its existence for itself! This is a false god before Him.

All that is, is God, for God is Being. All that is for us here in the space time continuum is our awareness of relationships between God's being. To the degree we assent to those relationships we are worshiping God. To the degree that we dissent from those relationships we are worshiping non-existence.



To the degree your baby daughter knows herself, she exists to herself. Ditto for you yourself. Ergo, Socrates' dictum: "Know thyself." But just because your daughter's too little to know herself at all and you’re too busy being distracted by bullshit to know yourself does not mean that her or your existence suffers any deficiency. Rather her and your access to your own existence suffers, not that existence itself.

Even in hell, our existence remains intact. The experience of hell is in being aware of how much we have constricted our access to our own existence, that is, to what is, which is God. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ion

Again Albert like in past discussions between you and me, do you have any proof of these assertions outside of the Bible?

Because what's in the Bible, in Exodus for example, it's contradicted by science in archaeology, physiscs, biology which keep you alive today unlike the Bible.

Ender

I take it you cannot conceive of abandoning your adopted methodology in order to think outside of the box. Valuing loyalty over intellectual honesty produces nothing but dogmatic sheep.
Only according to a very outdated positivistic methodology. How many times should I state this until you get a clue? If you’d care about a fruitful discussion long enough to remove your head out of your bunghole, it will improve your vision and hearing, and consequently, your understanding. The nitty-gritty is your adoption of a very specific methodology that rules out emotions as a quantifiable element.
I could equally ask you if the scientific method could supply us objective data on aesthetics, on taste, on values. Since this is a Godzilla-sized non-sequitor, you’re falling behind on the scorecard. Do try and put in some effort.
Check out my first post in this <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=21&t=000215" target="_blank">thread on ontology,</a> if you’re ever curious about such juxtaposition.
Phenomenology is a corrective for positivism, the initial attitude for scientific investigations, and a body of critica thought and broader interdisciplinary movement (read feyerabend’s incommensurability). In addition, phenomenology is the foundation of the post-modern perspective, social constructivism and narratology. Personally I want to get beyond phenomenology and correct its own failures.
Not if you’re hellbent on doing a broken vinyl record impersonation. No need to repeat yourself.
Hasty generalization, strawman, unrepresentative sample, slothful induction all in one! But I’m positive, with time; I could find more fallacies within this ludicrous statement!
No, your ignorance won the day. It’s a losing effort in discussion with a ignoramus whose proclivity for pulling a Nixon sabotages whatever possible discourse could have been had.
In that case, name-calling suits you to a t!

Have a nice day.
~Speaker 4 the Death of positivists~

Jobar

Mystics and gurus are "poster children for an arrogant God that disgusts me" in the sense that only an arrogant God can be sought. A loving God seeks and knocks. The Catholic God is the latter. All pagan gods are the former. Hence pagans have mystics and gurus to light their way and instruct them how to sit, meditate, exercise, and what food to chew and what mantras to spew. They're hucksters for flimflam gods.

Albert, just how are 'mystics and gurus' different from priests? Why does your version of God, who 'seeks and knocks', need guides and spokesmen? And why are these guides and spokesmen just as, if not more, likely to be involved in reprehensible behaviour as the guides and spokesmen for any other religion?

If God is truly seeking us, don't you think He would be responsive to those who seek *Him* in all honesty and humility? I tell you I find your notion of what 'seeking' means to be pretty damn strange, indeed incomprehensible.

I said:
SomeTHING beyond existence"? Can't you see that this is nonsensical? "Thing" is an existent entity.

Agreed. You are so right. I misspoke. We can only infer that things exist. And we can only infer that a Being is. Based upon experience, we infer the existence of things.

I agree. Our experience- our senses- are our only link to existence. However, I still cannot see any difference between existence and being. (I will reserve the capital 'B' to refer to your use- God is Being.)

Based upon on our inference of existent things, we infer a Being is.

Why? I think that Occam's Razor chops you off at the ankles here.

Definitively, God is Being. Derivatively, God is Actor. So to suggest as you do that He must be acted upon, is to suggest that there are false gods before Him.

I never did! I said that you need to show that there is an unmoved mover- not that there is not such a thing. (Although I am an atheist when we talk of a personal, separate, monotheistic God.)

For example, would you likedumb argue against the existence of neutrinos because they cannot be counted or weighed (as they have no mass), nor spoken of comprehensibly since we can only detect their movement but not their there-ness?

Er, Albert- neutrinos *can* be counted (admittedly only under highly constrained conditions), and some theories of quantum mechanics give them mass. We have physical evidence for the existence of neutrinos. We have *no* physical evidence for the existence of God.

In answer to my poke at Amos' statement which denied free will if there is a Prime Mover, you answered

Free will must be conceived of not in terms of physical movements, all of which God does, but in terms of assent. We have the freedom only to assent to or dissent from His movements.

Albert, can't you see that this means nothing- or else it means that every horror, every sin, every injustice ever done or created by man or nature is actually the doing of your God, at the whim of a wisp you call free will? It makes no sense. And if it did make sense, it means that your God is a whimsical monster, whose treatment of His creations makes a small boy tormenting ants with a magnifying glass look like a saint!

I find your dialog with Adrian to be fascinating, and almost precisely straddling the line which separates my own understanding of pantheism from the philosophy of those atheists who espouse- call it materialism, the idea that consciousness is not in any way a necessary ingredient of the universe. And you are dancing back and forth across this line- when I press you with pantheism, and the notion that God IS the totality of reality, and vice versa, you say no, Being and Existence are two separate things. But when pressed from the materialist side-

Adrian: So the apple itself is merely your experience of it?

Yes. Our experience of an apple is just that, our experience of what may or may not "really" exist. I, as a traditional Catholic, believe, (don't know, don't experience, but believe) that the apple exists as a manifestation of God and *has no existence independent of that manifestation of God. In other words, the apple's being is God; what we experience of the apple is God's being in the form of the apple*, not an apple per se.

-you use pantheistic arguments.

I want to clarify my own understanding of some of the high-level abstractions we are throwing about here. For shorthand, I will use the ~ symbol to mean 'is related to'.

Subject ~ Consciousness ~ Experience ~ Meaning.

Object ~ Existence ~ Reality ~ Being.

(I have said before that I think your dichotomy between Being and Existence is a false one. )

I myself think that all these terms are inseparable- that consciousness is indeed a necessary and inextricable aspect of the totality of reality, that subject is in a way object, consciousness is existence, etc. "THOU art THAT." And if there is any meaning at all to the word "God" it must be as much in our own minds- our consciousnesses- as it is in all we perceive as external to us. I realize that some of my fellow atheists disagree- I save that dispute for a different thread. Indeed, for a thousand years' worth of threads, probably.

What I am still hoping for- despite being unhappy with what I see as your waffling, Albert- is an explanation of a 'God' which is both separate from the reality we perceive, and separate from we ourselves who do the perceiving.

....Which is of course the thread title.

Afterword: Though I am not the mod here, I would like to encourage all participants to engage in a bit less sniping and backbiting, name-calling and arguments ad hominem. We have a deeply philosophical discussion going on here; I repeat my personal opinion that, however incorrect he may be, Albert is the most sensible monotheist on these boards; if we find his arguments to be specious let's just note that without calling him anything worse than wrong, shall we?

Albert Cipriani

Dear Ion,
Jaliet asks me to document the philosophical source of my definition of God.

I document it as Exodus 3:14.

Now you ask me:


Excuse me, Ion, but your allergic reaction to that Book is showing. Assertions can't be proven. Definitions are just that, assertions that describe something more rigorously than do descriptions. Asking me for proof of my definition is like asking green grass to prove that it's green.

If revelation is so abhorrent a source for you, consider the later sources of Plato and Aristotle who, without the aid of revelation, came to the same basic conclusion, that God was pure being, The Idea from which all the things we call reality are but shadows.

This is funny:


Yeah, in emergency rooms everywhere we can see archaeology keeping old folks alive and physics text books propping up the infirm and people everywhere sustaining their life by eating lunch from biology petri dishes.

No discipline keeps us alive. Eating other life forms keeps us alive.

The study of life known as biology, does not keep us alive. It does what its Greek roots says it does, it studies life. The knowledge obtained from that discipline may be used to overcome the deathly hurdles thrown up against us. We don't need scientific knowledge to stay alive, only to avoid the many death traps a little longer. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ion

No again, Albert.

1) "Definitions are just that...", but below I see unproven Biblical claims, not definitions:
2)"Yeah in emergency rooms everywhere we can see...": people who escape illness through medicine based on science, biology, chemistry, physics.
In contrast to "...emergency rooms..." when was the time when going to church made one ill person become healthy and alive? I am not aware of one single such example recorded in human history, but I am aware of "...emergency rooms..." based on science that keep thousands alive every day.

3) As for archaeology, it disproves Exodus claims as being bogus.

Amos

Just for fun Helen.

A traditional Catholic would say that since only Catholics can go to heaven God must not be seeking protestants because I am convinced that a merciful God sends nobody to hell. While this is true, it does does not mean that hell is not real because if heaven is real so must its counterpart be. Needless to say, I am not much for eucumenism.

Amos

John You wrote,<strong>

Why can't I be myself? Also, are you suggesting that for something to be, it must experience itself being, or have something experiencing its being? It seems perfectly right to me that things just are, and unless we are those things we can't be those things.</strong>

The answer here is that you can't even try to be yourself because you do not know WHO you are and if in trying to be yourself you CHANGE will just become ANOTHER pretender. If you just want to BE who you are you will just be who you THINK you are.

Understand here the "essense precedes existence" is just opposite to "Cogito Ergo Sum" and this is not just an argument but a reality. To realize this the cogito must be annihilated because not to likely will it rapture on its own. Hence, when the ego raptures that which remains is the "I AM" now in heaven (kind of just opposite to how protestants think it is).

I like the words "to thine own self be true," and also "my whole life I punish myself, my whole life I punish" because they so clearly point at our duality during the involutionary period.

With regard to your last question, maybe we cannot "be those things" but we can be "one with" those things. That is to say, we can be[come] worthy and rightfully say AMEN to "This is my body" and "this is my blood" because it is in recognizing that that indeed is the Body of Christ that we are one with Christ.

It seems to me that nothing has changed or the argument would have never been an argument.

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: Amos ]</p>

Adrian Selby

"No, on the basis of the operative word "your" experience. The apple has no existence apart from experience itself, not apart from my own experience of it. God's experience of the apple is the means whereby the apple is maintained in existence. "

You invoke God only because your theory demands that existence is experience. How is the atheist position weaker with regard to thinking that things exist in and of themselves. Sandlewood put the criticisms better than I could, I confess I too am confused by Being.

"Be yourself" implies that there is a real existent self independent of and perhaps never actualized by the person you end up being. "

No it doesn't. I was only asking a question about whether or not I could be myself in order to explore the difference between Being and experience. Only I think I experience myself Being. I say think because I'm not sure what you're talking about, and I'm exploring your thoughts on it.

"All any of us can do is assent to or dissent from who we are. To the degree you assent, it is not you being all that you can be, but by your assent, you are allowing God's being to be through you. You are doing nothing, no more than the earth, water, and light is doing when an acorn grabs a hold of this triad and transubstantiates them into an oak tree.

You are not the acorn or the oak tree or the sun, water or earth. God expresses Himself through being these things. You are, to the degree that you assent to being yourself, the entity that appreciates the growing tree. To the degree you do not assent to being yourself, you circumscribe God's being like a bonsai tree in a clay pot. To the degree that your stunted existence exists at all, it exists as a result of you having assented to God's being."

All of this would make sense if God existed, but so far I don't know why things must be experienced to have being. Meaning I equate existence with being. To be is to exist. I haven't found a reason in anything you've said to doubt the notion that things can exist independent of them being perceived.

"To the degree your baby daughter knows herself, she exists to herself"

RIght, so again, if she only exists insofar as she knows herself, she can't completely exist. But God makes up for that by doing some being for her, is that it? I take itI can't completely exist because I don't completely know myself? Whatever that means. I'm glad you think these questions are bullshit, I would not be so impolite as to return the favour.

Adrian

Ted Hoffman

Ender
I read your assesment of phenomenology. Pretty heavy stuff. I must say I was impressed. I will get a printout and read it in the quiet of my room.

I notice you are drawing me to a kind of brawl "jaliet fumbles, blunders, flounders etc" and you are making this a battle between loyalty and intellectual honesty.

About the brawl, I wont go there. About intellectual honesty, I think this part is sufficient:
If you agree with my assesment, I think that is adequate for the purposes of the point I was trying to make.
Its totally besides the point whether or not my methodology is inclusive of all viewpoints.

About phenomenology, I have a lot to read. Thanks.

[edited to remove [u] how the heck do I underline?]

[ March 19, 2002: Message edited by: jaliet ]</p>