A question on Armageddon

Thanks for getting in deep here, y'all. Hard to know, where to jump in. Howmany times have we brinked?
& yet we are still here. Why is that? There has to be an outside influence

 

Much of religion & other modernities are hampered by deep fragmentation

 

A serious question now that we, as a species, actually have the ability to destroy all life on earth and make the earth uninhabitable for decades, even centuries, to come.

 

If we didnt have that. We would only have ourselves which is most dismal of all conspiracies. Am i missing something? We woulda found a quicker path to suicide. Especially with no powerEver hear of nature abhors a vacuum? Well no place else does this apply biggerly than humanity. We are for most part the biggest vacuum ever known. & this is after billions of yrs of study.

 

What actually happened is this. Since we suspended our belief systems. The bad kinda took over mostly. As is wont to happen. Again the vacuum fill.

 

Have we become more evil because we suspended our belief in God? There has always been evil in the world. The Bible is filled with evil ones, and the righteous, as well, who commit evil in God's name. The ancestors of both the Jews and the Palestinians were the Canaanites. The Bible tells us that the Jews killed all the Canaanites because they believed in a different religion. At least that kind of evil has been stopped in the Modern World... Oh, wait... ...never mind.

There has always been greed and corruption and murder. My wife's mother was murdered by the State of the Philippines when my wife was only 4 years old. This event broke up her family as her father had a nervous break down over the grief and left my wife and her 6 siblings in the care of grandparents. He didn't come back into their lives till many years later and with a new wife and kids. We could say the church and the State murdered her. She had a high risk pregnancy and abortion is strictly prohibited in the Philippines. She died in childbirth, and the baby only lived for about a 1/2 an hour. And yet the most zealous believers in God today here in America are winning victories in enforcing these very same laws.

The evils of Vietnam occurred at a time when most Americans went to church, or at least that this was the cultural ideal----you know, the Father-Knows-Best America. If we go back a few decades, Hitler rallied the people around him through their belief in God. The exact same thing that Trump is doing today.

The media certainly exaggerates the appearance of evil in the world. Apparently shoplifting is so bad that soon most of our stores will be closed. (There is a podcast called, On the Media, that recently did some interviews of industry writers that showed how all the data that is being used to make this claim comes from the National Retail Federation which is a lobbying group, and the data is incorrectly interpreted, used, and manipulated, and the claims are actually false. The same podcast talks about how Americans believe crime is getting worse, which is partly because crime dropped pre-pandemic and then returned to normal trend levels afterwards, but that Americans have always been bad at assessing crime. In fact, violent crime has been in a long downward trend, from, if my memory serves me right, the 90's. I have watched the statistic on this for quite a while, and wholeheartedly agree with the podcast.

Now shootings are becoming more prolific, but the greed and political manipulation that created the abundance of guns in this country has always been around---they just happened to hit a gold mine with guns.

But I understand your feeling on this. Look at the epidemic of drug abuse and suicide and all these terrible things that are happening.

Maybe it is not that we have become more evil, rather that life has become more meaningless. Depression, for example, is another thing that has become epidemic. It is not evil that creates depression. We could also argue that greed and the quest for power has its psychological roots in an unfulfilled need. The materialism that feeds our economy, and become even mindless or ugly (and here I am using materialism in the pop cultural/religious sense--of acquiring things---rather than the philosophical sense of a belief that only the material world exists), is an obvious quest to fill our meaningless lives.

I was going to bring Leibniz' Principle of Sufficient Cause into the argument, but I didn't because Tishomingo did not make as much of a materialist (here I am using it in the Philosophical sense again) argument as I thought he might. But one of the aspects of the Principle of Sufficient Cause is that Liebniz said that every question why, can lead us to a deeper question of why. This process can go on and on getting deeper and deeper until we reach the deepest questions of why. If we do not have an answer to these deepest questions of why, then the questioning continues ad nauseum, and life is absurd.

Materialism cannot answer these deepest questions of why. Even hundreds, or thousands, of years from now we may be able to answer very specifically what came before the Big Bang, but we still won't have an answer to the deepest questions of why in an existentially meaningful manner. At least not as long as it continues on the materialist trajectory that Kant placed it on. I have entire books in my library that try to argue that science can bring meaning back to our world, but I disagree. The answers they provide are dry and do no more than to say, which Heidegger did decades earlier, that the finality of our existence is what makes it meaningful.

This does not mean that we have to believe in a traditional god to bring meaning back into the postmodern world. We definitely do not need to believe in a specific god. Just a god with horns. (I'M JOKING!) One could even be an atheist who believes in Quantum Information, which is what gives meaning to each and very particle that makes up our physical world.

Heidegger said that in order to find meaning in a world of Nihilism, we have to look into the void. And I agree. Our world has become meaningless because we have alienated ourselves from the nonphysical. Even science itself, is limited by its denial of any concept of nonphysicality. So it is a mystery why paired particles moving away from each other can communicate instantly even if this means a communication that is faster than the speed of light. This shouldn't be a mystery. The communication simply happens at a nonphysical level, in other words, a different dimension.

To bring the nonphysical back into science, does not mean that we put religion back into science. But it does change our scienctific understanding of cosmology in a subtle but profound way.




So once everyone believes this way, we can finally live in a happy utopian world of love and peace. But in order to do that, we will have to kill all the nonbelievers, and any dissdents will have to be sent to camps for reprogramming, and of course all nations have to follow this or it won't work so we will need to seek world domination and dehumanize and label as evil anyone or anything that opposes this at a global level. We will have to reinstate the draft...

(NO! the last thing we need in this world is more Utopian thinking!)

 

I didnt mean belief in god per se. What i meant was. Many beliefs in anything non physical. Fall off from time to time. I cant even explain cloudbusting on some of these threads. Or the possible control of dice rolling is also not taken seriously. By the way i just foundout there are 30000 active colliders worldwide. This likely has opened portals. Other dimensions aint even the tiniest bit
a good thing.
Here is simply a small example of what reality may be. Ok here we may mostly be kinda enslaved to a puny 3dimensional reality. While all around us is stuff including voids. We have mostly been this way for approx 12000yrs. As there was a cataclysm called younger dryas event. Which wiped out mostly an earlier advanced civilization. During those intervening yrs. Small attempts @ advancements ensued. They fall not completely.
Around all this are the lower astral plane & its nearby 4th dimension. Former bad latter good. Altho some brag abt unscathed longterm with lower astral plane. That actually has a twisted sorta merit. As that realm is easier to access. & occasionally provide benefits. But @ high price which also can affect others. The better places are as mentioned harder to interact with. Aint mentioned the 5th one yet. Because also many disbelieve reincarnation. In some cases a lifeslong work can be quickly squashed Erased misinterpreted etc.. & this can be thru assassination, imprisonment etc..
It really aint necessary to believe. Becuz i know mostly wont happen.
Maybe jes a tiny lil acknowledgement. Im speaking of much more ancient stuff. To be honest i lose faith alot. But something brings me back. Like synchronicities etc. A whole galaxy of beings is on our side even tho we mostly scoff it. Ya see in some cases we partly came from there. They are our relatives. Fine go ahead & squash the place. Only problem is. There are innocents invoved.

 

A little side note, maybe MeAgain might know the answer. Apparently 'Likes' are temporal things on HipForums. I used to have thousands of likes, and now I only have 872. I thought, hmmm, they must drop off after a while. Then I found this little piece of comedy that I thought had numerous likes. But it now doesn't have any likes.

Granted it was in the Existential section and maybe not that many people go there. (Rereading it made me laugh and sparked the vanity in me of wanting to repost it somewhere, hence the pretense of the issue of likes---but seriously, what's up with that?)

It was in response to someone asking if there was word that existentialist use to put meaning into their lives. But more directly it was a response to Woolehorn who I thought liked the post--his response is quoted.

I agree, it is terrible that people abuse the language like this. Words have meanings and that is how we communicate. So why make it difficult by changing the meanings of words and then creating some kind of elitist use of that word that makes others think of something else?

But it is hard to talk about this concept without explaining what it is about. The problem is there is no word that refers to this. But not to worry, I have created a new word that will refer to this very thing as a noun, verb, adjective, however you want to use it to stimulate conversation around this problem: Clitoris.

It is a great word, and has a certain feel about it that I'm sure you will agree. Because I define it as a noun and a verb and so forth, we can use it in all kinds of ways, for example, I was talking to a bunch of women and wanted to impress them so I clitorised each of them. In fact, just like people use the same word with their own meanings, the very way in which we pronounce this word depends on the person. Some people will stress the first syllable, making it a smaller word, while others will stress the second syllable, making it a bigger word, that rhymes with Deloris. (I used to know a Deloris, a cute Filipina that was married to an American. I once remarked to my wife that Seinfeld made a joke about Deloris rhyming with Clitoris and she proceeded to tell Deloris, who then gave me a mischevious and almost longing secretive smile, which suggested to me that her husband did not clitoricize anything. I suspect that he spends his days on his couch drinking beer rather than writing philosophy...)

But is it wrong to clitoris? I know it can rub the wrong way. But if manipulated properly a clitoris can stimulate all kinds of conversation and new concepts and experiences. On the other hand, a clitoris can certainly be a source of scandal. But how are we to know whether someone is using a literal or a clitoral definition of a word. And what if they are frustrated and subconsciously referring to something else--they may not even realize it. The thing is, once the clitoris is out there, it grows. It seems to be a natural process. And certainly, if the clitoris brings enjoyment, or a new realization, then in some cases everyone will use it.

 

Are a couple of excellent threads around the term mindfulness.

 

When Dawkins coined the word "meme", not to be confused with the popular usage of online imagery, he was doing so call attention to his observation, as an evolutionary biologist, that the principle of natural selection might apply to ideas, as well as genes, and to make an analogy between genes and units of culture. That seems sensible to me. Words are tools for designating, symbolizing and communicating knowledge. Definition of WORD When a new virus, technological innovation, dance, etc., is discovered, it's useful to give it a name. In medicine, this tends to be a long, unpronounceable Latin one. If the folks who use the term use it as Dawkins suggests, they aren't babbling nonsense. As in the case of the "selfish gene", Dawkins believes memes are selfish, in the sense of being more concerned about their own survival and propagation than that of their human hosts. (not that the memes and genes actually have concerns). Teaching kids how to use the dictionary will be of no use, since dictionaries are a compilation of common usage, and the term was new and not in common use. As long as Dawkins is clear about how he's using the term, and others find it useful, there should be no problem.

As for the meaninglessness of life and desperation, I tend to agree that there is no over-arching, objective meaning that is assigned to each of us. I that sense I'm an existentialist, in agreeing with Sartre (1945, "Existentialism is a Humanism") that "existence is prior to essence". Being human per se doesn't dictate for us any inherent meaning . I also agree with psychologist Viktor Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning; The Quest for Meaning) that meaning is perhaps the most important human motivator. It helped Frankl survive a Nazi concentration camp. He stressed that what gave a person meaning varied a lot from one inmate to another--light coming through a crack in the wall, memories of pleasant past experiences, etc. For him, it was the hope of being reunited with his wife, who unbeknownst to him was already dead. Yet he thought that several common paths to meaning taken by humans were blind alleys: wealth, status, power and self-indulgence. In Christian metaphorical parlance, these are "false gods". I find life to be always interesting, and am willing to make what Luther called a "joyful bet" on objective reality accessible to reason and the senses. I don't know how "desperate" that is. It seems sensible to me. In that sense, I make my own meaning (within the bounds of reason, evidence, and good judgment.) I agree with Tillich that religion is a search for ultimate meaning.

 

My position is that words are tools, which can never be right or wrong, just more, or less, useful or useless. In the English language, it's not uncommon to find the same words being used in completely different ways. They're called homonyms. A woman can bear a child, but a bear could still attack her in the woods. A pen can be a writing instrument or a holding area for animals. We can read a book and/or book a flight. A band can be something married people wear on their fingers or a rock group. English is a confusing language, but people get used to it. Then there's the difference between colloquial speech, common usage and technical speech. When I hear "pig", I think barnyard animal. But depending on the context it could also mean a law enforcement officer or (in pipeline terminology) a device for performing oilfield maintenance operations. I don't consider the pipeline people "elitist" for using such terminology. It's just one of those things English-speakers need to get used to.The real Question is whether these words are causing more confusion than clarity. In your "clitoris" example, I'm not clear how your new usage of an existing word in a radically new way helps in understanding the phenomena being described. But if it did, I'd say you'd be justified in using it that way--making sure, of course, to be clear how you're using it.

If you're taking Dawkins's use of the term "meme" as an example of such "abuse", you (and Wooleeheron) have it all wrong. Dawkins was the inventer of the term, not he abuser. He invented it cuz there was no word "meme" in the dictionary. He explained: "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. " I've already explained the usefulness of the term, as originally defined, as a tool of analysis in the study of cultural evolution. (see Post #134). The usage which has become the dominant one--"an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video)-- that is spread widely online especially through social media"--came later. So if changing the meaning of words upsets you, you might redirect your anger to the geeks who reinvented it. But I'd say, go easy on them. Obviously, their new usage served a purpose, too.

A related issue, in light of our previous discussions, is why folks in a particular field might use an established word to designate something a little different from the prevailing understanding. Take, for example, the word "law". Everybody knows what that means, right? Before 1913, it meant the command of a sovereign, and was identified by relating the norm in question to its source in a hierarchy of institutional authority. But then an anthropologist named Malinowski noticed that Trobriand islanders could walk on the beach at night without getting mugged. The prevailing way of describing their society was to say it was lawless, since it had no hierarchical government that could be conceptualized as a sovereign. They had "only" customs. He thought that if "law and order" was our objective, maybe those "primitive" islanders had something going for them our legal system might learn from. He introduced a new usage of the term law--focusing on how norms functioned as means of social control. He was the founder of functionalism as an approach to law and other social institutions Crime and Custom in Savage Society . Law" he said, denoted :"‘A given norm or rule is Legal ‘if it is enforced by a direct, organized, and definite social action. ‘Without the norm the social action would be mere violence. Without the social enforcement, the norm would be a moral or customary rule; so enforced, it may properly be called a law’ (pp. 14-15). Not everyone accepted the new approach, but those who did became the school of "cultural jurisprudence". In The Morality of Law, Lon Fuller uses a functionalist approach to show that the Nazis, who made a big thing about "law and order" were essentially lawless, using "law" to legitimize every perverted whim of the Fuehrer. the decrees may have come from the right office in the hierarchy, but they undermined the essential function of the rule of law: to promote regularity in societies.

Anybody who's gone to a Rainbow Family gathering may be impressed by the fact that, for the most part, thousands of people can gather for annual and semi-annual gatherings with minimal formal organization and leadership. The hippies like to say: "the only rule is there are no rules". But a closer look finds that they have lots of norms, and volunteers to enforce them more or less effectively. It would be incorrect to say they have no rules or government, when infraction of basic norms risks bringing the Shani Sena down on the violator. (For those unfamiliar with the Family, Shanti Sena means peace force, which can be exercised by members of the family or by a group of volunteers (focalizers) who have appointed themselves for the task. It works, after a fashion, and attendees usually like it that way.

Turning to the subject of religion, you and Meagain have expressed discomfort at a functionalist approach to religion, and a modified functionalist approach using the "4 Cs". Functionalism came about when scholars in the field of comparative religion noticed a number of belief-value systems in Asia and other parts of the world that lacked a belief in God but seemed to have other practices associated with religions in the West. Take Buddhism, for example. It is godless, but has sangha, chanting monks, temples, monasteries, metaphysical beliefs about karma and the afterlife, doctrinal disputes and schisms--enough of such similarities that some scholars concluded it might be more productive to broaden the concept of religion to recognize it as one. If not a religion, what is it? Just a philosophy with a bunch of extras? Likewise, students of hunter-gatherer societies noticed that some didn't exactly have gods, but that concepts like ancestors, spirits and forces--wakan, orenda, mana, etc.--performed similar functions. Twenty years ago, Daniel Everett, linguist, ex-missionary and amateur anthropologist, surprised the world by announcing his discovery of a group of "atheist" Indians, the Pirahã, living in the Amazon rainforest. The discovery had such a profound effect on him that he lost his own religion. He thought they were atheists, because they didn't believe in a transcendent God, as Everett understood Him. But actually, if Everett had been more sophisticated, he would have realized that they were animists, who, like other hunter-gatherers, believed in spirits. They wore charms around their necks to ward off evil spirits. Everett might have gotten a clue when the Pirahã warned him not to go into the jungle, because Xigagaí , an invisible being from the clouds, who was standing on the beach threatening to kill him if he did. (Everett,2008) Don't Sleep, there are Snakes. The practical difference between an amimist and a theist seems less important to a functionalist than the fact that they both believe in supernatural beings that control nature. That's the trouble with having an ethnocentric concept of religion.

The 4 Cs were a concession to those who objected that sharper boundaries were needed to distinguish religious happenings from patriotic and athletic events with similar overtones. I personally think a 5th marker should be added, although I can't think of one that starts with C: a belief in the sacred, supernatural, spiritual, supernatural, unworldly or metaphysical--the sense of some Higher Power or presence beyond the visible or tangible.

Who might object to this, and why? (1) laymen unused to technical usage. One objection, mainly from "laymen", that it causes "confusion" when a word in common usage has a more technical meaning for specialists, seems tenuous, when it seems to promote clarity for the specialists who use the term and have made their usage and reasons for it clear. Anyhow, it's a fairly widespread phenomenon that the savvy reader needs to be alert to.
(2) essentialists. Another objection might come from essentialists--people believing, like Plato and Aristotle, that everything has a fixed set of distinguishing attributes that are necessary for their identity. Some Remarks on Essentialism - Volume 65, Issue 20, October 1968 From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, this view now seems questionable.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1600910X.2010.9672755
Essentialism
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/216427.pdf
In any event, the question would remain, what is the true essence of religion? Worship of deities? Or a broader encounter with things beyond the material realm?
(3) religious traditionalists. Objections from traditional theists might, likewise, be expected. But many of those tend to regard even other theistic religions as questionable. (4) anti-religious militants. The fourth set of objectors I find particularly interesting: persons who are intensely atheistic or disenchanted with the predominant belief-value systems of their own culture and therefore are allergic to having anything they happen to believe in called "religion". Some may embrace Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism, or some similar set of beliefs and practices to provide spiritual uplift, but resent having it said that they are in any way being (gasp) religious. That's certainly their prerogative, but functionalists should feel free to ignore them in pursuing important scholarly goals of clarity and utility in comparative studies.

There seems to be no primal or ancient society yet discovered in which spiritual feelings are divorced from ceremonies and rituals, collective beliefs about the spirit world or the way nature operates, norms of social conduct, and a community of believers. Traditional Buddhists put it in terms of the three refuges: "I take refuge in Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha." Those adventurous westerners who have gone on vision quests may be aware that the practice isn't original with them, and that the why and wherefore of it, how to do it, what it does, and what to expect are defined by cultural traditions of the primal societies to which the westerner may be drawn.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

Getting back to the OP, Bible scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out on the subject: Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End. Like most Christians outside the fundamentalist and Evangelical traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, and Mainline Protestant), atheist agnostic Ehrman (his own designation) doesn't think that Revelation predicts a literal apocalyptic religious war that will happen in our future. He thinks it should be understood either metaphorically to convey God's sovereignty, or about events of the first century C.E. that have come and gone.

Among his main points:
1. The book was written for a Christian audience, in particular, six churches of Asia in the Johannine community, and all of its symbolism and imagery relates to the context of the late Roman empire, not our future. The Antichrist is Nero, then already dead but (like Elvis in our own time) thought at the time to still be alive and about to make a comeback. The number 666 is gematria (letters corresponding to numbers) for Nero Caesar. The first commentary on the book, by Victorinus in the third century, identifies the "whore of Babylon" and the Beast from the sea as Rome, itself, fueled by the dragon which is Satan. All prophecies are about the decline and fall of Rome, not anything to do with our future. This is the theological position known as preterism.
2. The book is an apocalypse, a genre of literature in which a heavenly being discloses a transcendent reality. Revelation is modeled on the last 6 chapters of the book of Daniel, an apocalypse which also made it into the New Testament.
3. The God portrayed in Revelation is the God of vengence of the early Old Testament, not the God of Love Jesus preached. John's view reflected the perspective of an embittered Christian community that thought it had experienced Roman persecution under Domitian. (Ehrman thinks they may have been exaggerating.)
4. Interpretation of Revelation in the early centuries of the church after the author's death followed Saint Augustine's metaphorical approach (Christ has come again in spirit) until the twelfth century, when Joachim of Fiore decided Revelation was about our future, and pioneered an early version of the approach later known as dispensationalism. This later became the standard Evangelical take on the Bible, associated with a more literal view of scripture. Fiore'ss view was disputed by St.Thomas Aquinas, but later embraced by Dante in his lurid description of hell in Inferno.
5. The notion that Revelation is about our future took hold in the eighteenth century with the French Revolution, and gained ground in the nineteenth century, when pre-millenial dispensationalism came into its own, fueled by the Rev. John Darby's notion of the "rapture" lifted in the 1830s from Saint Paul's 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 and 1 Corinthians 15:50–54 and yoked to Revelation. And the advent of the Cold War and the atomic bomb gave it a new edge. Failed efforts to predict the End's occurrence haven't stopped the Evangelicals from keeping the predictions coming: the Millerites, Hal Lindsey, David Koresh .
6. John of Patmos didn't think of Revelation as exactly a religious war, since he thought many Christians would also be cast into the Lake of Fire at the end.

 

As for me, I would never ever coin my own term.

...what do you mean, logosummonism? That's an old word! It's in the Bible! It was my evil twin! It wasn't me! Are you trying to clitoricize me?

Ok, I obviously disagree with Woolehorn on such matters. My response was entirely tongue in cheek. Whether life is meaningless or not, you have to have some fun! I thought my response and its irreverence, produced a good laugh.

I have been heavily influenced by existentialism. In fact I have described Archephenomenalism as an essentialistic existentialism. In fact I wrote a piece with the title, Essentialist existentialism, or maybe it was existentialist essentialism, or something like that.

My argument for essence is in response to the Existentialist criticisms of essentialism as it was known throughout the history of Western philosophy. Mainly the criticism that essence determined who we are, and therefore denied our existential freedom. For example, Christianity, deeming that all men are sinners because of Eve, that this is the essence of who we are. Or the idea that white people are essentially superior and that other ethnicities are inferior and lazy, prone to commit crime, and so forth. There is obviously a big problem with the idea that essence determines who we are. The solution is where subjectivism comes in--that existential freedom is found in the individual, and that the individual's essence must be subjectively unique, and that it is also subject to that individual's existential freedom. In fact, my whole focus on subjectivism comes from existentialism, being that existentialism is a return to the individual in the Post-Kantian, Post-Hegellian, Post-Nietzschean world where God is dead, and objectivism and materialism was paving the world on a highway to human-induced self-destruction. (Though Nietzsche also spoke out for the individual and he too was very influential to existentialism).

I certainly agree with Frankl that the drug abuse, depression, suicide and so forth are epidemic because people do not have meaning in their lives. Individually, it is ok to decide that there is no "...over-arching, objective meaning that is assigned to each of us" if we can create meaning in our own lives as you do, and I do. But the problem is society as a whole. Materialism robs society and its social programming of any transcendent meaning to life in its disenchantment. Not that meaning has to be complex.

I believe that the overall arching meaning to life assigned to each of us is a combination of, 'to experience, and to be.' And this is even the meaning of every individual particle that exists individually in each individual moment in the universe. Each particle manifests out of the random soup of absolute potentiality (the future where anything can happen), and how and where it manifests is based on past phenomena (the history contained in quantum information), and its collapse into actuality--the physical particle, is a collapse into a singularity of one actual event from all possibilities determined by that quantum information (hence the particle or subatomic particle is the literal intentional object of the quantum information), by manifesting in this way, it is the realization, or experience if you will, of the phenomena that came before it, and in turn it leaves us with the phenomena of its existence (new quantum information) which helps shape the particles that come after it. And this is true whether or not particles even collapse into physical things--because Quantum physics cannot tell us whether particles actually collapse into existence, or if they merely come close enough to existing to appear to exist. The particles themselves, i.e. physical reality, is just passive in this process. They can only collapse into being where the information has them do so. We can even point out that the physical particles do not experience anything. They are merely physical objects trapped in the moment of their existence. It is the quantum information that experiences this actuality, as it is the information that changes with each new bit of information--learns, grows, remembers...

The human mind is not trapped in the moment, and it too experiences, learns, grows, remembers. Our own intentional objects are thoughts (absolutely every thought has its own intentional object according to Brentano), and these shape our reality through our actions, reactions, memories, intentions, perceptions, and ideas. We are present in the world, both our minds and our physical bodies, and in every minute infinitessimal moment, we are creating countless forms of phenomena, therefore we have the purpose of being, and we are experiencing countless forms of phenomena therefore we are experiencing. While much of our being, and especially the physical particles that make up our being, manifest based on the phenomena that came before it, our minds have free will. We can respond based solely on past phenomena, and, in fact, this is instinctual. Or we can choose not to and respond differently. Whatever action we take creates meaning, as it creates phenomena that changes the world. We could create meaning in trend with our reality and what happens around us, or we could create new meaning that goes against those trends.

My second principle states that all physicality exists in its totality in the here and now, the present moment, which I argue is the Quantum Now, a moment so small that it is in terms of Planck constants, and to go any smaller would cause the laws of quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity to deny each other, meaning physical existence is impossible. How can it be any other way? Imagine if we tried to let an object fall out of the present moment---it is impossible within the laws of physical existence. We have to break the speed of light to travel in time, and this requires infinite inertia against infinite mass (Relativity tells us that the faster we move the more mass we gain, requiring more inertia to move faster--this is the number one barrier for anything with mass to reach the speed of light. Physical objects can only reach the speed of light as energy not mass, which by my archephenomenalist definition is not physical).

Existence is presence in the physical--to be physically present. Hegel's ideas shaped the world of today where this is the only way many people can see it--that everything is physical. The brilliance of Schopenhauer that the world is wille (will) and vorstellung (representation), and that life is a Will-to-be, was limited by this Hegellian idea of materialism. Heidegger with his idea of Being was too. And Jung, and so many other great thinkers.

But how can existence exist out of the physical moment? It cannot, which is a problem for conscious experience. Husserl, who was the essentialist that inspired existentialism, argued that we cannot enjoy music, for example, without retaining at some level what came before. We have to understand the progression of notes to enjoy a melody, and even an anticipation of what comes next. If we only heard each note individually without the context of all the others before it and after it, it would simply be meaningless noise. This is where the power of qualia comes from. Unfortunately for Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and others, they did not have the knowledge of quantum mechanics to break them out of the mold of materialism, so they were very limited in how far their ideas could take them. To them physical reality flowed with time, and material objects and their existence were constants. that is no longer true. In fact, I don't think anyone has really come to terms with this implication of quantum mechanics because we see it all as a physical thing, without realizing that if physical particles only exist in brief moments of physicality, then they only 'exist' in what we actually understand as physical for a brief moment at a time.

If there was nothing that transcends the physical moment of now, to take us from one moment of existence to another---i.e. quantum information, mind----essence----then physical reality would give way to the chaos of quantum randomness, all phenomena would become meaningless, and then there would be no existence. Therefore, I can only see essence as coming before (during, and after) existence.

The problem with Hegel, which he himself realized but didn't dwell on it in order to avoid the ire of the church, is that placing everything into a material mold, leaves no place for a nonphysical thing. I fail to see the logic of a God or absolute being which would represent essence, being that it transcends physical existence, if there is nothing beyond a physical reality. Why would humans be mere existents, and why give them minds to think, and then have a god that is nonphysical and transcendent? It is a dualism where where the nonphysical has no connection to the physical. Like two separate universes that don't overlap. At the very least, if someone does not believe in life after death, it would be more logical to at least argue that there is this spark of life---as the Lakota say, Taku Shkan Shkan---the animating power that is the essence of all things, and that after our deaths at least it returns to the universe as essence. (Hegel's own solution was to simply place God in the collective will of mankind--which made God a physical thing. And thus mankind and everything else was physical.)

But this still leaves the problem of the authenticity of free will, man must have some deeper connection to his soul as essence.

For me it is spirituality, or if referring to religion specifically, the spirituality at the core of that religion. This is the connection to the universe, the absolute. All the rest is mere political and social structure that gives it its institutional purpose.

 

Merry Christmas! And I hope everyone has a good New Year

Now I remember that that post got fewer Likes than I thought it should, and why. But I think Woolehorn liked it even though it was a jab at him. I guess as we move away from the 60's people are losing their sense of humor, I hope not. Leave it to a hippie, to right in the middle of a serious debate, to bring in some ridiculous irony that is likely to be tied to sex, or some other craziness, like getting the pentagon to float in the air (ala Abbie Hoffman), and no one has fun with it, because they're all too serious.

In the post I pretended to agree with Woolehorn, but I didn't actually because then I made up the word, clitoricize, a word which I made pregnant with double entendres, that were, I would have hoped, more obvious than most double entrendes. (And to impregnate a word like clitoricize is a double entrende in itself, I must say...) I wouldn't actually use clitoricize (though I would like to), just as Abbie Hoffman didn't really think the pentagon would float in the air even if the whole world meditated on levitating it. But such irreverent humor always has a deeper point. Woolehorn, as I recall, wanted to ridiculize all things with irreverant poetry because he saw an absurdity in trying to find a solution to all things scientifically cosmological and, as he said, the number 49 was just as good a solution as anything else. So I fed it right back to him in a way that I hoped he enjoyed. But everyone read it too seriously and completely missed the humor. (Even when I added my story of Deloris and the Zeinfeld joke that it rhymed with Clitoris, which happened to be true by the way. She did give me an embarrassed smile that seemed to say, 'call me.')

But there is a new ironic twist in this thread if people take that post seriously here too. And that makes me laugh (and I do enjoy a good laugh, and I think that every good hippie hopes everyone laughs with them too, even if it might be a poke at the person involved). You see, I have already brought up terms that I have coined to make sense in my philosophy of Archephenomenalism (which that label itself is a word I created), and that this part of the thread is entirely about how I define the words religion and spirituality in a way that is different than the normal academic method. So, of course I agree with you, "...that words are tools, which can never be right or wrong, just more, or less, useful or useless. In the English language, it's not uncommon to find the same words being used in completely different ways."

Yes. LMAO! Not to clitoricize too much the subject at hand, but that is why I use spirituality and religion with the definitions that I do, is that I feel there is something lacking in the functionalist approach of the 4 C's. Donald D. Palmer wrote about Malinkowski and his functionalism, which gave birth to Levi Strauss's Structuralism, saying, "This technique produced a form of anthropology generally known as Functionalism, which tries to demonstrate that 'curious' and 'exotic' behaviors and institutions actually have important social functions. The empirically minded anthropologists have been generally satisfied to produce monographs and ethnographies covering only the details of the specific peoples they study. They are less interested in issuing broad generalizations..." (Donald D. Palmer, Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners). He was explaining that Functionalists actually went and lived with the people they studied, experienced their lives directly, rather than to speculate on it from an armchair as did James Frazer, author of, The Golden Bough.

I feel that using the term religion in this so-called Functionalist way is a broad generalization that is painted in a civilization-based context. We could even say it is a Colonial context. (Come on, isn't the irony of all this funny? ---"words can never be right or wrong, just more or less useful or useless..." If not, then I suggest, being that it is Christmas---drinking a fair amount of spiced eggnog (or smoking a bowl, whatever your preference) and then rereading this part.)

First of all, I'd like to point out that I do not have too much problem with Functionalism, in fact, I agree very much with its ideals and process. (As far as the Structuralism and Poststructuralism that grew out of it, and which was, in my opinion, a Materialist reaction to Existentialism--I find it very useful in its techniques and methods and its explanations--but I have trouble with many of its conclusions---but nonetheless, I think it was the beginning of the logical end conclusion of Western philosophy which ended in Deconstruction. Meaning that it is now time for a new philosophy to rise from the ashes (and Archephenomenalism is my humble contribution).

I would then add that I do not fit into any of your categories of those who have a problem with the 4 C's. To be honest, I had to pause and reflect on number 4 (Anti-religious militants). I have always supported all religions. I have a history of posts on this forum that display that. Even the OP of this thread, I posted simply to hear what people thought and not ridicule or discredit it, even though I disagree. I wanted to get a feel for how many people believe in such things. Years ago I even returned to my mom and dad's church to help teach an adult Sunday School class with the book, Finding Your Own Religion. (Obviously they thought, what strange person could we get to help with this book, and called me. LOL) But with the rise of Trump, and the in-your-face militancy and proselytization of Evangelicals, and the way that they are forcing their interpretations of the Bible down everyone's throat, it has made it harder for me to be a supporter of all religion, or any religion. I have to check myself now, and remind myself that everyone has their own path. It was easier to support Hindus, for example, despite their blatant misogyny and dogmatic argument that dharma was not dogma, or Muslims or Buddhists, or whatever that did not have any impact on the politics of my country and how I live my life.

My problem with the word religion goes back well before the rise of Trump and Christofascism. So I feel rest assured that 4 is not my case. The kernel of the idea began when I was a teenager, and after exploring all kinds of religions, trying to experience them as a believer would, in my quest for truth and proof. It was then that I recognized that there were common values to all religions, and they shared the same truths, but that the difference was in the culture more so than the actual truths and the deeper cosmological conclusions of the universe. I realized that my problem was not so much the beliefs, though I was still trying to find my proof, but rather the institution itself. I then went to Japan, and my observations on religion were confirmed. For example, in America we have Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons, in Japan they have Soka Gakkai (They also have Mormon missionairies---blonde-haired Americans, so many, in fact, that I told my brother not to wear a suit when we went out in public together. I worked in the Stock Market and always wore a suit. My brother came to live with me for a while and he worked at an English School and he wore a suit to work too, we looked like a pair of Mormon missionaries in Japan).

Over the decades, I had spent time with numerous tribal groups. Some Ainu in Japan many years ago. Bontoc, Aeta, and Dayak in the Philippines, And then of course, here in the States I started participating in ceremony with the Lakota almost 20 years ago. I was also very fascinated with Shinto in Japan, and found its connections to Taoism and Siberian mysticism very interesting. Looking at the history of Shinto from the context of religion as an institution, I wrote a college paper at Kansai Gaidai when I was a student in Japan that argued that Shinto, before the Chinese came to Japan, was not a religion in the sense of an organized institution. But when the Chinese came and introduced Buddhism, which was a religious institution, then Shinto adopted the formalities, structure, and political stature of a religion. The Japanese people each had 2 religions, at that point, both of which were established institutions of Japan. But I argued that because of the spiritual nature of Shintoism, it was more of a pseudo-religion than a religion like Buddhism. Of course, the idea at that time was largely speculative, like the anthropology of James Frazer, that functionalism rebelled against. I think I even suggested that there were elements of Japanese Buddhism that represented a combination of Shinto and Buddhism just as Zen was a combination of Buddhism and Taoism. I compared pre-Chinese Shintoism with Taoism, which is very deeply intertwined with the culture and performed a very important social and cultural function (this was before the postmodern concept of Unifying Myth) yet did not have a political motive nor did it define a dualism that one could be outside of. You either believed in the spirits and made homage to them, or you didn't believe in them and were unaware that they were there, either way, it didn't matter except that they were more likely to help those who paid homage or respected them.

Years later, after a period of agnosticism, and then the inspiration to again search for my truth by the mysterious healing of my stepdaughter by an indigenous peasant in the Philippines, I found my proof and my truth, and began walking the Red Road. But like a functionalist anthropologist, I validated my earlier speculations about religion, experiencing firsthand that there is an existential difference between spirituality and religion, and that spirituality---the connection to the nonphysical side of reality can exist alone, or it can exist as the core of a religion.

For me, religion is something that was created as an institution for civilization. I disagree with anyone that argues, like Nietzsche or Marx, that the Gods were created to serve the needs of ruling over people--to provide legitimacy to the ruler. That was religion. The Gods were found through the spirituality---they were what people connected to through this doorway to the nonphysical. Hunter-gatherers, for example, did not need a ruler or a king, so much as they needed divine intervention when things got rough. They needed magic. Ritual provided that magic in a way that was swift and clean. The raw ritual of spirituality is very different from the sanitized ritual in a church, or a temple, or a synagogue, that is largely alienated from the nonphysical, and that serves more of a social function than one of magic. I argue that the religion that formed with civilization, in fact as a precursor to civilization, grew around the spirituality and used the gods to legitimize the ruler and the civilization.

The Logosummonistic aspect of the 4 C's is that they place the sacred into the physical. In communion, for example, one drinks wine to symbolize the blood of Christ, which as a religion did away with the actual blood sacrifice of times past. Blood is that mystical liquid which keeps all of us alive, how much more significant and raw is it to sacrifice a goat or other sacrificial animal, pour some of its blood into the earth, while partaking some of it for oneself, the actual magical liquid of life, than to drink some grape juice which you call wine, which you then say symbolizes the blood of Christ?

Religion, as an institution of civilization, seeks to place the sacred into the physical. Spirituality tries to enter the sacred to place the physical into the hands of the sacred. Academics cannot understand this, because in this post-Kantian post-Hegellian world, academics is grounded in materialism, and denies from the start the possibility of the reality of the nonphysical. That is to say that the Functionalist explanation of religion makes the very mistake which the functionalists were trying to prevent. But they could not see this because of their own ethnocentric perspective. They were hopelessly trapped in the world that Kant and Hegel created.

Perhaps it takes diving into the world of pre-civilization to understand this. I would hope that my philosophy finds a way of opening a door through Western philosophy that would enable postmodern man to understand this.

 

While it is true that I am an essentialist, and yes this is a very unpopular position in Modern Times just as it is to have an Arche, or First Cause, this category does not apply to me.

This is the criticism of existentialism on essentialism that I referred to in post #137. My response is that the universe is multiplistic and radically subjective. Therefore I disagree with Plato when he argues that a table is a table because of the eidos (form (eidos coming from the word, idea)) of tableness. I argue instead that each table has its own unique form that is the quantum information that gives rise to it, and that it could be a table or anything else we need it to be, but that its shape, size, and physical attributes will stay constant until we damage or change it at which point those changes will be maintained until it is completely destroyed.

I have done away with the idea of a general essence, or a fixed set of distinguishing attributes, and replaced it with an essence that is suitable to a universe where anything can happen in the face of quantum randomness and existential freedom. Things like religion, which, despite being an abstract human construct, were argued to have an essence nonetheless in traditional essentialism, are now fully dependent on the construct of the human mind and how we define it. There is no universal form. But if pressed to define the essence as we see it, from my definitions, I would argue that the essence of religion is the spirituality that forms its center. This would make sense in that the religion is the outward, physical institutional structure around the essence of spirituality. The essence and the existent are deeply connected, but they are just as different as the difference between mass and energy.

No, my problem with the 4 C's is purely functionalist as I explained in post #138.

As to the probem of essentialism in the 21st Century, I believe it will be revived as I envision it, once man comes to terms with the philosophical implications of Quantum Mechanics. I don't see how it could be any different.

 

Maybe you're in a category of your own: anti-civilization or anti-western civilization. When you talk about religion as a product of civilization, and about civilization as something formal, institutionalized, impersonal and bureaucratic, that's the way it comes across. Meagain sees religion as being about gods (Spirits won't do), which I also disagree with. I see religion as an evolving phenomenon that began in the Paleolithic, when stone age humans began burying their dead with grave goods, shamans began recording encounters with beasts on the walls of caves, and people began carving busty figurines, possibly cave man porn, but more plausibly the earliest goddesses.

Religion from the earliest forms to the present has been multi-functional, serving important psychological needs for ordinary people, as well as legitimation for clerics and government leaders. Early on, paleolithic congregations were guided by shamans, whose functions were to bring the game and heal the sick. Obviously, as society grew bigger and more complex, it became more specialized and less personal, especially with the first great "hydraulic" civilizations: Sumer, Egypt, China, Indus valley civilization, etc., with a need to co-ordinate sizeable populations for irrigated agriculture. (Wittfogel, The Hydraulic Civilizatiions; Oriental Despotism) The rulers either became divine or ruled with a divine mandate, and priestly specialists to discern the will of the gods. The unpleasant aspects of bureaucratic societies are well-known, and if that's what you think of as religion, your preference for the informal ways of hunter-gatherer bands is understandable. But anthropologists and sociologists familiar with the ways of hunter-gatherers put forward broader concepts of religion , such as Durkheim's: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community...all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Accord, Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution." If you're saying, as sometimes you seem to be, that modern scholars of religion are so hopelessly civilized that they can't think straight, you might be right, but it will be a hard sell.

My own people, the Chickasaw, are one of what has been called the five "civilized tribes" of Oklahoma (others being the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole): so-called because they readily took western European norms. When the Europeans first arrived, we were sedentary Neolithic agriculturalists (not hunter-gatherers) of the "Mississippian" culture, noted for its sacred mounds and "theocratic village-states" governed by priest-rulers.Mississippian culture | History, Facts, & Religion First contact between the Chickasaw and Europeans was with the Spaniards. By then, we had "a highly developed ruling system complete with laws and religion." History | Chickasaw Nation The encounter didn't go well for the Spaniards, but we acquired some excellent horses, which we learned to breed and trade as "the Chickasaw horse". After that, we readily adopted any civilization we could get our hands on. We survived the Trail of Tears and are holding our own in Oklahoma where we were dumped. We're even a major financial supporter of the Oklahoma Philharmonic (how "civilized" is that?!) So our experience is admittedly different from that of some of the Plains tribes, hunter-gatherers who have had more trouble adjusting to western culture. Although the ways of hunter-gatherers are more informal, it's hard for me to see how any group-shared belief system about the sacred and the spirit world, supported by chanting and drumming, ceremonies and shamans, must be regarded as something other than "religion".