GENIUS FORUMS

A yes or a no is sufficient---and the only possibility---for a binary computer. You can't speak any other way to a computer.

Inside your brain, you struggle with an unsolvable paradox, and yet (I suggest) you don't really allow the paradox to work in you, to have its way with you, to come under its influence.

There is a little fan you can get, and you can install it above your left ear, and it will blow a cooling breeze through your mental equipment, keep those panels cool.

A yes or a no is sufficient---and the only possibility---for a binary computer. You can't speak any other way to a computer

The above statement demonstrates "binary computer" nature as well. But you seem not to realise it. Look at the statement: "You can't speak any other way to a computer." This is a "No." The alternative is: "You can speak another way to a computer." This is a "Yes."

So, I repeat my question, is it true to say that causation can be caused? Answer!

Naw, it is a dumb question. The way to look at the question is only to examine language, phrasing. Anyway, you know what the answer must be, and that's all that counts.

"Is it true to say that causation can be caused? Answer!"

Can you allow the energy that might be released by a good answer, to propel you to new, different and better vistas?

Pure evasion.

Of course. Your 'question' is a trap, and that is why you ask it---to entrap.

I wish you would do it with more charm and panache, it would be less insulting!

Alright. I'll take the bait if Alex won't.

To Special Forces commando soldier Kelly Jones in God's Army of Jehovah's Reasoners I answer "Who cares?"

I asked Alex, "Is it true that causation is caused?" quite deliberately. It's not gratuitous belligerence, Carl.

Alex believes in a God that not only creates all things, but has a direct and personal involvement with him. He is really a theist, not a deist, as he imagines. So I asked Alex, quite reasonably one would imagine, if it is true that causation is caused. If he would like more information in the question, then: is it true that all the processes of causation exclude things that are created?

(To answer your question, "Who cares?" : whoever is caused to care).

Oh, so it was THAT spider that you wanted to rout from under the bed. If only I woulda known!

First: deism and theism are of course merely words. A word tends to operate rather tightly and definitively (thank the Lord for that), but there are always shades, adjunct qualities, caveats. There are many different sorts of 'deism', and some deisms move toward theism, just as some theisms incline more toward a deism. It's because a living person is a process, a movement, an experience, that the person trumps the word definition. I could never be a mere word definition, since what happens in me, my experience of me, me being, is really a pretty miraculous thing, just as you are too. We are not words though, and so I resist of course your categories, your mapping.

Your cartography---if you will permit me---leads right up your own asshole, and nowhere else (IMHO).

;-)

God certainly did create all things, insofar as God is all creation. There never was a beginning since (by definition?) it is eternal. It is. It is always. There is a very strange and a very powerful paradox that, as I implied, has the power to propel. Obviously, all things and all beings occurring here with me are part and parcel of God, and there have been so many instances of God demonstrating concern for me that I could never rule it out, I could never deny it. Mostly it is evidenced through other living beings, of course. But the implication of that go far beyond a person, or people in plural. In an extended sense, through turns of fate, through omens and signs, through internal processes as well as external processes, there is an intelligence that responds, and so in that sense I am obviously theist.

But deism is also a word that could describe my attitude or perception, insofar as God also passes me by, takes no heed of me, is unconcerned. If I see myself as just an atom in creation, just a particle of awareness, I know that I can be stamped out with no thought about it at all. In so many ways I am left to my own devices, to work it all out for myself. In that sense, the universe is a cold, uncaring creature, and I do see that and feel that.

With us humans, it seems to me, it all turns on what happens in consciousness, what we do with it, how we 'handle' it.

"Is it true that all the processes of causation exclude things that are created?"

Bad poetry, sweetheart. You're just dragging clanking iron through your beautiful brain and giving yourself a false hard-on over it.

I don't know how else to put it to you.

Take the plug out of your left ear, tilt your head over the garbage can and drain out all that crap, and start over!

Alex wrote:God certainly did create all things, insofar as God is all creation. There never was a beginning since (by definition?) it is eternal. It is. It is always. There is a very strange and a very powerful paradox that, as I implied, has the power to propel.

This indicates you don't understand causation, and why you need to invoke a personal God.

Causation is not a separate force from things. Causation is in things. Things exist because of their causes.

Take an ordinary tree, for example. The tree appears to consciousness. What appears, appears to be a tree, because it has certain identifiable properties. Such as, a trunk, branches, roots, maybe leaves and so forth. These are some of the tree's causes. It has other causes, that go beyond the tree's "internal" causes, like light, gravity, water, nitrogen and other molecules, and so on. Why those causes are what they are, is because of other things that go beyond them. So causation cannot be explained by looking outside causation for something like a God. It is in things.

"Why are things?" is a wrongly-asked question. Things are causes.

More simply, causation is the pattern-making processes of consciousness.

Edit: Click here for an easy-to-read explanation of causation: Cause and effect.

KJ

Duh, thanks Kelly!

Yet, I am not really interested in your tracing the outline of your butt-hole.

Y'all get really hung-up in conventions and dictates of language, but yet do not see the problem in that. Doing that, you sound like pseudo-intellectuals with ill-formed pretensions toward a brand of intellectualism that is---one must say this---acutely boring and pretty damned unintelligent. There are so many other---superior---ways to express wonder and curiosity.

I agree, basically, Alex, but don't forget this is a board about rationality. Here specificity matters.

The better 'rational minds'---Aldous Huxley comes to mind---take up ideas and explore those ideas in their discourse. They make a case for the ideas they are working with, say like in an essay. They make their best case for their point of view, but what seems to distinguish them from other, mediocre intellects, is not being absolutely locked exclusively into one structure of view. So, there is a 'reasonable approach to reasoning'. To get ensnared within a definition of a word, or two words that seem to oppose one another, is not a reasonable thing to do, and to do so does not indicate good reasoning ability. Reasoning is not like calculating numbers with a calculator, I don't think, but this is what so many here do, and they seem to end up chasing their own tails, ad infinitum. They also get very intoxicated with themselves, very inebriated with their own prowess.

I get the impression here, often, of folks who are locked into doctrinal formulations, and whose idea of reasoning has an absolute flavor to which they are dedicated much like a religious ideal. But it sometimes seems that it is less that they are dedicated to an idea, but rather that the idea dominates them. This is a disease of thinking, and it doesn't surpise me that, in some cases, there is direct evidence of mental illness.

Go figure...

Alex Jacob wrote:Reasoning is not like calculating numbers with a calculator, I don't think, but this is what so many here do...

I don't see that "so many here do" even this, but I agree that there is more to reasoning than this.

They also get very intoxicated with themselves, very inebriated with their own prowess.

What prowess? Apart from a few, namely the board founders, I don't see much prowess here for even what you are criticizing, although I do see a certain amount of wannabe prowess.

I think we can safely assume Alex prefers fantasies to reasoning. He is much like Anna in that way. They both believe in bizarre and otherworldly ideas, and believe that these provide them with true freedom. It's like a drug addiction. They are as excited as two little children yelling at each other, "It is!" "It isn't!" "It is!" "It isn't!"

That excitement comes from constantly denying what is in front of their eyes, and gives a strong feeling of power, free will and choice in what to believe.

And yet they are deeply imprisoned. Contained in a tiny cavern-like existence, and completely oblivious to the freedom of the Void.

Continuing the critique of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's video debate with Christopher Hitchens...

Here are a few of his slip-ups:

He says, "hence, my friends, Christopher Hitchens does not believe in any kind of heroes or human greatness."

He tries to proves it by pointing to Hitchens' criticisms of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Theresa, as if Hitchens' criticisms aren't actually based on a notion of greatness. King might have plagiarised his doctoral thesis, and cheated on his wife. Gandhi caused millions to starve, the Dalai Lama is a hereditary king, and Theresa was a fraud. These criticisms are based on valuing something which Hitchens might call "good".

But Boteach co-opts the idea of good, and says it is a spiritual trait, not something that has evolved like any other mammalian trait:

"My friends, religion has a vastly different vision... Yes, a man is a creature like any other, but he is born with a spiritual capacity to transcend instinct and to choose goodness, to rise above his animal nature and become godly."

Guess how he proves it? By saying that 2% of human DNA is spiritual, whereas the rest is mammalian! Here:

"Hitchens is right: humans in terms of DNA are 98% exactly like primates. But in that 2% lie human consciousness, and therefore human conscience; human transcendance, and therefore human choice. Human soulfulness, and therefore the indomitable human spirit."

Then he says, "A watermelon is also 98% water just like a jellyfish, but they are hardly alike."

As if this is proof that the difference between other primates and humans must be an act of God.

It's just woefully bad thinking.

-

Two last hilarious quotes from Boteach:

"God didn't bring the Jews to the foot of Mount Sinai to tell them not to kill. God brought them to the foot of Mount Sinai so they would understand that 'Do not murder' is God's law. Not now, not ever! There is no excuse. This is why genocide is perpetrated by nations who have man-made laws. There were laws against murder in Ottoman Turkey, there were laws against murder in Nazi Germany, there were laws against murder in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. But they were human laws subject to human tampering. That's why the 10 commandments have preserved the morality of a nation. Even when they were turned into soap and lampshades during the Holocaust, they never blew up a German schoolbus. Because we live by that edict: Do not murder! My friends, open your eyes!"

Conveniently forgot Israel's war against Palestine, I suppose. But what a fearful argument! I'd hate to be around him when he doesn't have a God as support for his tamperings.

"The moral sense is an innate part of being human. We are born with innate morality, it is not acquired. The list of human universals, collected by anthropologist Donald Brown, includes moral concepts, including distinguishing between right and wrong, empathy, fairness, admiration, generosity, shame. These are all character traits which are antithetical to evolution, which is about ensuring your genes survive!"

He must suppose that evolution is something that is acquired after birth. And also, that the ability to obey social rules and cooperate within a tribe does absolutely nothing to ensure one's genes survive.


I feel a bit of pity for him, though. He had an unsympathetic audience, and he was quite nervous. He didn't tackle proof of God's existence, just said "just as a door testifies to a carpenter, so does the whole world testify to God the creator" (but doesn't testify to Satan?). He was trying to explain that having a God necessarily creates morality, but I think he disproved the existence of God by lying. Or is it a sign of good morals to be a poor thinker?

Here's an interesting debate between Hitchens and his own brother, about Iraq, and about God:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnVQLOd9Lg

The two brothers being interviewed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTx1jsJygj8

Oh, the Hitchens v. Hitchens debate truly is a gem!

I shall offer a critical summary once I've finished watching the remaining 7 videos and then reviewed them all once over.

Christopher Hitchens' video debates are excellent resources.

For those without the downloading capacity to watch them, and would like DVDs, send me a PM. If all goes to plan, I'll put the DVD contents list on this thread in several days. You'd have to wait at least 2 weeks for the DVDs to arrive.

You'll need to cover the postage costs, roughly AU $6. Probably the easiest way is to make a donation to the forum, and Kevin can give the money to me later. All right with you Kevin?


KJ

Alex Jacob wrote:I had the strange fortune, around the age of 14, to come in contact with people who used peyote religiously. I had experiences at that tender age which, so to speak, opened my eyes to a far-reaching view of life on the planet. It may have been jump-started by ritual use of a psychedelic plant (this view, this understanding), but other strange events along the way seemed to conspire to form a world-view that...I just can't shake.

The mental world---the world of heady mentation---was also a part of my upbringing, but it came later, and was sort of overlaid on the already exposed metaphysical structure.

Y'all (many here, not all of course) seem to feel that organized mentation, a sort of rigid platform of seeing the world, which is called 'wisdom', but sometimes seems to mimic snotty teenagerism with a stick up the ass, is a sort of road to salvation, a way to exist in a rarefied atmosphere above the general and tragic fray of humanity, and teeming, chaotic life. The people who seem most to internalize (externalize?) such a view seem to me to turn into Robots of the Infinite, but they seem anything but free, anything but sublime, they seem ruled by a sort of intellectual rigidity that they dress-up as 'sagacity'.

Given the constant, repetitve nature of this claim, one could say the same about you, Alex.

Writing colorfully, creating smokescreens and indulging in theatrical skits doesn't hide the rigid postmodernist dogma which underlies them.

Hard to believe that you haven't advanced beyond a drug-induced insight experienced at the age of 14. Postmodernism is a powerful trap, however, so I guess it's understandable. Terrible to get sucked into it at 14, though.

-

As promised, here's a list of the probable contents of the DVDs.

DVD 1:
- Dan Rowden's "Men of the Infinite" videos.
- "The Reasoning Show" podcasts.

DVD 2:
- "Beyond Belief" videos, series 1 and 2.
- FLV software and codecs.
- A few other bits and pieces.
- Christopher Hitchens, "God is Not Great" videos. Speeches, debates, and interviews presenting Hitchens' arguments against religion and belief in God. With Timothy Jackson, Al Sharpton, Sean Hannity, Bill Maher, Shmuley Boteach, Dinesh D'Souza, George Stroumboulopoulos, David Allen White. Cacologies for Jerry Falwell and Mother Teresa. Includes "Hell's Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta". Also, miscellaneous topics: Women and Humour, Torture, Invasion of Iraq (debate with Peter Hitchens, and Penn and Teller clip).

(Some items may change).

If anyone's interested in obtaining copies, send me a private message with your postal address, to work out cost of postage. DVDs will probably be ready to post out in a week.


Kelly

This woman tells a good story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfTOcHONow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC5c2s82QA4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcBzvBdsPF0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdnXHq8MKEI

Christ, Kevin, I couldn't sit through 5 minutes of the first one. What an annoying woman.

Yeah, extremely low vibration material. It's like watching the Jerry Springer show. What do you find "good" about it, Kevin?