What do those who believe in a singular creator generally think their creator was doing before he started creating?
Just floating in space, going mad.
ending destroying
>>479800
>before
There is no before.
There is no after either.
Atleast, not for God.
Lets say hypothetically, all roads were privatized, and I bought the highways encircling a city. Would it be within my moral and ethical right to prevent trespassers and demand a fee for people who made use of my land to traffic goods and people, based on the concept of a toll road? Could I then, essentially control the flow of goods and people in an out of the region, place tariffs and make various demands in return for granting the privilege of passage through my land, despite having no jurisdiction on the land outside my borders, and within my encirclement?
>>479163
>All roads were privatized
The government would seize it or you would go bankrupt due to there being no government for a while.
>>479163
Assuming there are no guidelines for road ownership. I suppose so.
>>479163
>would it be within my moral and ethical right to prevent trespassers and demand a fee for people who made use of my land to traffic goods and people.
yes, if you own the road you can do literally anything you want with it. You could just tear it up and turn it into a large circle of corn around the city and practically no one could stop you.
>would it be within my moral and ethical right
you'd be a dick, but you would have both a moral and ethical right to do so.
For most of recorded history "the East" was vastly superior to "the West" in every material and scientific field. By a stroke of luck, the American continent was inhabited by technologically inferior people and for geographical reasons was accessible only to Europeans. It was raped by them and provided the resources for the West to buy technological parity from the East. Then the British-led Industrial Revolution started (sparked by British profits from the slave trade), and resulted - say from 1750 to 1950, give or take some decades - in world domination by Europe and the US. After this, the historic pattern seems to be starting to reassert itself, with the "East" again taking its place.
The West has been superior since man crawled out of the mists of time. Compare Rome's economic output with Han China's.
Having an ongoing argument about this, opponents claim that objective reality doesn't exist. I can't wrap my head around how that would begin to work. My assumption is that it's a platitude to allow for everyone's ideas to be accepted and we can all live happily and have no kind of discourse.
Do any scholars of merit advocate for this idea?
>>474999
Time to start with good ol' Hume.
I don't understand
you want philosophers who have argued for idealism?
just google it
>My assumption is that it's a platitude to allow for everyone's ideas to be accepted and we can all live happily and have no kind of discourse.
I don't know what this means
you are saying people don't really believe in idealism?
>>474999
I can only believe that there are objective truths myself.
But i am no philosopher
Many people accuse the Orthodox Church of idolatry because we love icons. They say our veneration of icons is worship ("latria", the term meaning the respect due and due only to the Trinity). They say, "There is no distinction here, except semantics." After all, we apparently pray to icons, we even kiss them and bow to them. How is that distinguishable from worshiping them?
Well, first off, we don't pray to the icon, we pray to what the icon represents. When an icon poses as the truth itself, it becomes an idol, but when an icon is a stand in for the truth, it remains an icon.
Here is an example: we venerate the Bible (yes, we kiss that and bow to it), because it is an icon of the Word, the Truth (and thus Jesus Christ). But it is NOT Jesus Christ, it is NOT the truth, it is merely a description of it, a stand in. Protestants think of the Bible as the Truth, but we do not. So we see Protestants as engaging in idolatry when it comes to the Bible.
This very important theology is employed in regard to all our icons: our representation of saints, for instance, is intentionally two-dimensional, there is a specific style, realism is intentionally avoided. Why? because if the icon is super realistic, people mistake the icon for what the icon is a representation of, on some level. Icons are painted in such as a way as to remind us that they are icons of what we venerate (or in Christ's case, worship), they are not what we venerate in themselves. You'll notice we don't like statues too much for this reason. We also think the Bible sometimes deliberately says things in a more poetic way than it has to, because trying to convey things too well might cause people to think the Bible is the Truth itself, instead of an icon of the Truth.
Now you might say, "Well this is all well and good, but the bowing and the kissing and praying? aren't those a bit excessive?"
cont
>>473288
Not really. We see the saints as our elders, and before modern times, elders were shown respect by bows and kissing their hand. "Well," you say,"if they are not the saints themselves but not icons, you are obviously making an idol out of the icon by treating it like the saint herself." Really? Imagine if you carried around a locket with your mother's picture in it, and sometimes kissed it; would you be confusing the locket with you mother? I don't think so. But you would be venerating her by kissing it.
"Even supposing I agree with you," you continue, "just supposing, that cannot, CAN NOT justify praying to saints." First of all, praying is just pleading or asking, we do that with people in real life all the time. Secondly, we don't see the saints as dead, so we don't see asking them as any worse than asking someone who is very holy and with here on earth (in fact their icons in Church represent them being with us in worship). Thirdly, the major thing we ask saints for is to pray for us. You say, "But we ask them instead of God directly?" Well, if there were a very holy person you knew, do you think it would be unreasonable to ask them to pray with you? Are you going to tell people who do that, that they should not? Worshiping and praying with others is a very enriching experience, and that includes worshiping and praying with the saints, most certainly.
while you're at it please explain the choice of wood, the impregnation, the basic countouring, the gilding, the painting, the saturation and highlights, the accents, the polishing and the varnishing of an icon.
>>473288
no rituals nor conventions will save mate. otherwise, you remain in the realm of faith and not of certainty.
you can say that rituals matter to preserve the material, given how is perishable anything that humans do, but there is nothing more than this to it.
if you must be recalled day After day to adopt such or such behavior, then it means that you do not behave appropriately as expected beforehand, and it means that you follow the doctrine only by faith and not certainty.
How can Christianity claim to be about helping the poor and charity when they still haven't sold the Sistine Chapel or any of their works of art?
How can Muslims claim to go to Paradise upon martyrdom if they haven't even blown up Mecca in a Sunni-Shiite conflict yet?
Because the Catholic Church is the world's largest charity.
>>473033
So? That doesn't justify this.
How the hell did circumcision arise?
Washing your dick was hard back in those days.
>>472642
In an age before modern hygienic or safe sexual practices, circumcision went a long way to prevent infections of all sorts. It was mostly a practical measure that was then written and into a few religious law codes.
>>472642
Just a form of body modification some people thought looked nice. No different than tattoos, head wrappings, piercings, etc.
What would SPAIN look like today, if republicans had WON?
Post-communist poor as fuck
No one can say. It was a long time ago, the path it was going was winding and with crossroads everywhere, and there's no similar situation to compare it to.
It might have gone back to being just another capitalist republic, might have been a better cuba, might have been a stalinian hellhole, might have been a libertarian (in the european sense) federation.
In any case we would have learnt a lot from it.
>>471984
>In any case we would have learnt a lot from it.
Spainards disagree
ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, AND I ALONE WILL BE CONDEMNED
-Jesus "Can't Piss Off the Christos" Christ
Reading List
-Philokalia
-Sayings of the Desert Fathers
-Summa Theologica (The 4000 page version)
Question: What was the alternative to young earth Creationism among early Christians?
Also, another question: How was Heaven and Hell imagined before Dante?
>>468766
The year is 2015. Man has peered into the darkest corners of the cosmos, and observed the universe on its smallest scale. You walk around with more computing power in your pocket than was available to all of NASA in the 1970s. You live twice as long as your ancestors ever could have dreamed of, you have food in abundance and the future is brighter than ever. Humanity has achieved more in the last century than it ever has in its entire history. People are happier, freer, crime is lower, you're safer, more secure, and the entire wealth of human knowledge is available to you at your finger tips. You live in the dawn of humanity, you were born after the long dark night and you will never know the suffering that every other generation did.
And you still think the words of dehydrated desert madmen in the middle east are literal truth, you unironically believe in God and think Homosexuality is a bad thing.
You're literally a walking insult to everything humanity has ever achieved, lmao.
>>468780
Crime is at one of the worst in history senpai, and the only reason science is where its at today is because of the efforts of the church to keep it going during the middle ages
what is the most overated philosopher of all?
confucius.
literally "its wrong because its wrong lol" conservatard.
>>478439
he was more of a political theorist than a philosopher
Meditation as a secular path to spiritual enlightenment is perhaps unequaled, and ought to be mastered by all. It does have beneficial effects on health and self-understanding. But the most common path to godless spirituality is through an appreciation of science: by truly taking in the awe of nature and her complexity, many a scientist has had a spiritual awakening that had nothing to do with God, but everything to do with profound reverence and amazement in the face of tremendous beauty, fearsome power, and the unimaginable depth and complexity of space and time. It sparks the realization of how tiny and insignificant we are, yet how wonderful we are despite this.
Is this a common sentiment among /his/?
>>471861
Sagan is based
>>471861
Spiritual atheism...
"I have a spiritual experience but there is no God"
Yet everyone has spiritual experiences which implies the source for all spirituality comes from somewhere.
Not the Earth's creation or the development of mankind as much as the Source of the Spiritual existence...
The only person in all history to be a bigger faggot than Carl Sagan is Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Out of Africa or multi-regional theory?
>>469117
Genetics showed that the mutli-regional hypothesis was false.
>>469117
no, it's basically everyone else who left africa and niggers have a common descent, but everyone else didn't evolve from niggers
>>469117
>Out of Africa theory
Idiots latching on to studies surrounding Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA, which is an incredibly small amount of human genetics.
Not to mention they ignore recently unearthed remains of human ancestors that date back to 100,000+ years ago outside the African continent.
All of them
>>468278
War on drugs
None of them.
Why have the conservative right intellectuals largely ignored post-modern ideas as a way to justify their claims? The concepts made in them are ideal for descrediting progressiveness, and multi-culturalism. I could also totally see /pol/ jumping on board with Baudrillard's theories about hyper reality replacing the real world.
Could it be that right-thinkers are often anti-intellectual and avoid getting into philosophy in general?
>>478286
I don't think right thinkers are ant-intellectual so much as the academic field today does not tend to award right thinking.
For all the good academic study has brought, it tends to be somewhat insular, and minority ideas get extra tough criticism, which makes sense if I am proposing some radical new concept, but when it bleeds over to political discourse its becomes poison.
>>478286
I think it's as simple that right-thinkers aren't interested in the social sciences unless it's economics.
There's a lot from contemporary society that can be used to argue for right-wing reforms in one form or another. Two things that comes to mind are the fragmentation of the importance of classes in Beck's description of the risk society, or the importance of flexibility among individuals as well as organizations as a result of globalisation.
I'm right-center myself and vegan on libertarian grounds. The non-violence principle ought to be taken pretty serious senpai.
As a leftist moving more rightward every week, I think it's because a lot of PoMo is just stuff that right intellectualism doesn't care about. PoMo spends a lot more time using flowery language to describe concepts conservatives don't even need to use metaphors to express. Rightist thought is more open to explicit theism than leftist thought is, so it doesn't have to spend paragraphs handwaving the concept of God and explaining it away; it can just get right down to it and say "When government works this way, order and/or prosperity are achieved." This is the most common form of rightist thought: the assertion that these things can be sustained at best. Leftist thought often says: "This is how governments can make the world can achieve order and prosperity." It goes beyond the statism/libertarianism divide, it's a disagreement about the nature of the relationship between the world and the state. One side sees the state as an agent for good, the other sees the state merely as an agent. Postmodern treatments of the nature of collective action ("muh revolutionary bodies") do not appeal to rightists, who feel the need for individuation as much as leftists do. Rightsts are naturally distrustful of collectives. Many would agree with Hobbes more readily than leftists would; leftists would assert more easily that an evil King deserves loyalty than rightists would, even though they would have similar reasons for giving these different assertions.
The Jews and the Roma are both ethnic groups with a tendency to not integrate into the local populations. Both have long histories of oppression in Europe. Both were killed in the Holocaust. Yet only one group is respected in the modern world, while the other is still hated, and their slurs and stereotypes are still completely normalized. Why?
>pls no /pol/
>"gypsy" is a racist slur
>to not integrate into the local populations
Europeans will fuck a Jew. Europeans will not fuck a gypsy. That's why you see white Jews and all gypsies still look like they came straight out of India.
No influential Roma groups in the Anglo Sphere to influence things.
No Roma homeland that could be carved out of a European colony.
You don't see too many Roma winning Nobel prizes, becoming university professors, running corporations, etc.
