GENIUS FORUMS

So many people get hung up on the name of the place.

More personal stuff... I own a cell phone, but I don't use it very often. Sometimes I've thought of leaving my cell phone at home and driving straight out to do a bit of sight-seeing for a few days, just being completely alone and unreachable. Then the "what ifs" pile up, many of them havi...

I can't keep talking as if I'm innocent in the larger scheme of "constant interconnectedness," though. I have to admit that I am addicted to the Internet, or very near to being so. A few months ago, I had a week where I resolved to use the net for nothing but schoolwork, so I was on for ma...

Cell phone use in the car more dangerous than drunk driving. I don't think that cell phones themselves are necessarily a problem, it's just that many people seem to let them dominate their lives. It's no longer considered rude to interrupt a conversation and suddenly start talking to someone else. ...

Why would he have done this unless he's not totally powerful or not totally good? The notion of totally good (omnibenevolent) doesn't actually make any sense. "Good" is not a fact about a state of affairs, but an opinion or value judgement made from a particular point of view. You can sti...

I thought that I had seen it before.

Good article, though.

Would you really want to live in a world of people with no inner constraints against evil, who had not expanded their egos to include other people? So God permits evil for the purpose of moral instruction? Why not just tell people that murder and rape are wrong and develop their "inner constra...

I've thought of a couple reasons that depression might be higher... First is that traditions have largely deteriorated in the "developed" countries. Most people want to feel like they know they're doing the right thing, and tradition (religious, familial, societal) can provide a means of a...

People like to dream up exceptions to freedom of speech, such as hate speech laws, which are causing such ridiculous fiascos in Canada. You either have free speech or you don't. There's no partial free speech. But there are exceptions to free speech in every country. The most obvious example is tha...

The other problem that I see with your solution is that it's hard to believe that this universe is the most perfect that it can be. From the Christian perspective, a place exists where its inhabitants experience perfect bliss i.e heaven. So why the need for earth and hell? Why not just heaven? Woul...

Nat has pretty much abandoned boards. He still drops by SW once or twice a week, though.

Dan Rowden wrote:Ok, but do you agree that most people experience egotistical "wants" at a level such that they feel like it is, indeed, an absolute requirement, and are therefore capable of violence in their effort to sublimate any such desire?

Yep.

Sex would be one of those things, for example. :-P

The problem of "evil" has its own problem in that there's no reason to suppose that our moral interpretations of events are correct - or in line with God's. But many (probably most) religious people do presuppose this, which is why the problem of evil "works" at showing the inte...

Says Philosophaster, If it would be trivially easy for someone to stop a great evil from occurring, and yet he did not stop it, would you blame him? Or does basic moral reasoning not apply to the actions of "God" for some reason? OK, let's try again. We are not here to be babysat for all ...

Dan Rowden wrote:Indeed - but what is a "need", exactly?

I used it to mean anything required to keep the body functioning.

Non-violence naturally arises when the needs of a people are met. Not really. Lots of people will initiate violence simply to fulfill various desires, even if those desires aren't actual needs. When people have mutually exclusive desires and they're unwilling to compromise in any way, then violence...

The only logically consistent way to maintain all three attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, always-doing-good) at once is to say that the way things actually turn out is the best possible way that they could have turned out. If God does not make things turn out the best possible way that they cou...

Let's assume that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, that everything he does is good and let's ask the question: why do bad things happen? For the sake of discussion let's take the killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis. If God is omnipotent, then it must be the case that he allows what we call &q...

I like that.

DMT, eh? Maybe you might enjoy this page: http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/psychedelics_entheogens.html I found it pretty interesting. Yeah, it is. Personally, I would do some "entheogens" like LSD and mushrooms probably once a month if they were legal and there were reliable regulation on...

No, but it does refute the idea that acausality could never result in a world that has many predictable elements. :-) ...And it doesn't refute that at all. Random results of measurables within a probability distribution are not acausal for starters (so in your example, the results are caused to be ...

But even using a mathematically random process, the average would still end up as a predictable result: about 50. A random process generating a predictable result. "But wait!", you might protest, "The constraints on the number-generation, '1-100,' are not random." Very well then...

No, but it does refute the idea that acausality could never result in a world that has many predictable elements. :-) how? Your example wasn't "acausal" at all. The numbers that I would chose wouldn't be "random" in that I would be caused to pick those specific numbers. Oh, I sa...

According to Dr. Gene Ray's research, this discussion is educated stupid and evil.

Anyway, random things can easily have a predictable result. Generate a random number between 1 and 100. Do that a thousand times. Then average all the random numbers together. The result will be 50, or something quite close. :-) this doesn't refute causality No, but it does refute the idea that aca...