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[MEGA] God

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Chapter 2. Contents of the Gita Summarized
TEXT 14

matra-sparsas tu kaunteya
sitosna-sukha-duhkha-dah
agamapayino 'nityas
tams titiksasva bharata

SYNONYMS

matra--sensuous; sparsah--perception; tu--only; kaunteya--O son of Kunti; sita--winter; usna--summer; sukha--happiness; duhkha-dah--giving pain; agama--appearing; apayinah--disappearing; anityah--nonpermanent; tan--all of them; titiksasva--just try to tolerate; bharata--O descendant of the Bharata dynasty.

TRANSLATION

O son of Kunti, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.
 
Void said:
One of the major fuckups of our society IMHO is the great effort we goto not to feel even the slightest bit negative or in pain. If you sneeze near a psychologist and remark that you hate having a cold you might be put on anti-depressants for the next few years just so the quack meets his monthly tablet sales quota. Ok so maybe its not that bad, but in some areas I bet it is.

Pain can be a good thing, it tells you that you have your hand on a hot stove or if you feel negative it may be a sign that you need to re-evaluate something or focus on something more in your life. Being completely numb or completely 100% high all the time high doesnt ncessasarily lead to a well balanced and healthy life style. Though I think its a lot to do with the escapism that is a daily part of our culture. Why deal with things if you can just zone out for a while, or put your mind on something else. You also have high flying corperate execs who treat life as a chess game, completely de-void of emotion and out of touch with the reality of their actions. Which is kind of like an addiction to 'win', adrenaline junkies kinda thing.
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best answer so far.
 
Pomplemous said:
[B

if EVERYONE - and I mean everyone can do just one thing or even clubbed together to collectively help others less fortunate, then that would be a miracle. and if that helped the world and eased pain , then that would be a miracle - not a miracle as in it would never happen but a miracle as in a wonderful thing, a gift, a miracle. [/B]
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not to sound mean... but you are dreaming if you think that is going to happen. i'm sorry, i just don't have the blind faith that you do in humanity... humans are selfish by nature. even down to the basic level of helping out another human, you get a good feeling for doing that. people strive to feel good about themselves, some find it in money, power, sports, glory and others find it in serving, humility(mother theresa), but in the end... it's all about feeling like you've accomplished something. Altruism doesn't exist, or at least, I haven't found it yet.
 
A dollar doesn't corrupt, but a million does. If a million people all pass a dollar to someone to do "good" with it, they will take a cut for the responsibility, which cancels the whole point.
 
Pain can be a good thing, it tells you that you have your hand on a hot stove or if you feel negative it may be a sign that you need to re-evaluate something or focus on something more in your life
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it can also tell you
"you're fucked! you have cancer even though you haven't done anything bad"
"you're fucked! no one's ever loved you. too bad you're ugly!"
"you're fucked! your mom was just raped and killed and there's nothing you can do about it"
...
 
if God were to alleviate pain, then everyone would be happy

if everyone were to be happy, why would anyone want to go to heaven?

sheesh
 
St Anselms "proof" of God

I don't have the most intellectually stimulating crowd of friends, nor the luxury of going to school and having a fun round of philosohpy classes...so You bluelight can help me out here :) The theologians and their so called arguments for god are just absurd. I need to know what I am missing, and we can just start with this one. The idiocy in St aquinas and others' even exceeds this one, imo, but, you gotta start somewhere :) See to me, the glaring errors in the conclusion are so apparent, I need to know where I am in error. Because either centuries of philosophists who entertain this, and teach this are either the biggest idiots, or beyond my realm of understanding.

Here is a quick summary...

1. God is defined as a being that which nothing greater can be conceived.

2. only 2 possible alternatives

A1 god is only a concept in the mind or
A2 god also exists in extra mental reality

3. (St morons conclusion) Alternative 1 is impossible because it leads to a contradiction.
For, to exist in extra mental reality is greater than to exist only as a concept in the mind, so to say that god exists only as a concept in the mind is to say that a being that which nothing greater can be conceived is NOT a being that wich nothing great can be conceived. And this is clearly a contradiction therefore god exists in extra mental reality.


Huh/ No I just don't get it one bit. Aside from making my mind run in circles, by the time I think I figured the point, it was still absurd. Just stating the existance of god in alternative 2 doesn't in any way establish it as a real alternative. And doesn't substituting God with Invisible pink unicorn or Minnie mouse kinda show the insanity in it's entertainment?

When my husband and I were discussing it last night, he actually used this argument to DISPROVE God at all, and I will have to get back to you to show how I saw his point as glaringly obvious once he pointed it out.


Anyway, just wanted a little light shed, and others' opinions.

thanks amy
 
You're not looking at it the way Anselm looked at it. Like Aquinas, he was functioning on an Aristotelian paradigm, in which mere existence is a superior quality to non-existence. In our very post-Aristotelian world, few people reason like that.

Personally, I love his "ontological proof." It may not prove God, but I remember that the first time I got it, it hit me like a thunderbolt, which is more than can be said in my case for any philosophical idea before or since.

Personally, I recommend reading Anselm's original argument, his colleague Gaunilon's (also Gaunilo, IIRC) rebuttal--which incidentally, is still the most common one used against the ontological argument--and Anselm's response.
 
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DM, is it really fair to say that nothing greater can be conceived than Invisible pink unicorn?

Not that I'm bigoted, some of my best friends are IPUs.

Did St. Anselm not conceive of God as virtues or an essence, and not as a "thing"?
 
Re: St Anselms "proof" of God

DarthMom said:
3. (St morons conclusion) Alternative 1 is impossible because it leads to a contradiction.
For, to exist in extra mental reality is greater than to exist only as a concept in the mind, so to say that god exists only as a concept in the mind is to say that a being that which nothing greater can be conceived is NOT a being that wich nothing great can be conceived. And this is clearly a contradiction therefore god exists in extra mental reality.
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by that argument...he is already assuming God exists, and then is just trying to figure out what he is

he comes to say that god exists in external reality, however...really, all he has proven is that god does not merely exist as a concept in the mind.

however you are still left with 2 possibilities:
1. God exists in external reality
2. God doesn't exist at all ;)

he seems to have forgotten about the second option if he is trying to prove that "God exists" 8)
 
You're not looking at it the way Anselm looked at it. Like Aquinas, he was functioning on an Aristotelian paradigm, in which mere existence is a superior quality to non-existence. In our very post-Aristotelian world, few people reason like that.
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That doesn't rememdy the inherent flaw in his logic, unless he wasn't trying to prove god's existence at all.

All he did was re-affirm what everyone who believed in God already assumed about him. I think that was what he was trying to do.

Trying to recruit some of the pseudo-intellectuals! 8o

He was going after those rich university kids from respected families and raised in cities....who lost their connection with folk, agricultural tradition and thus lost their respect for the backward "religious" folks out in the country.

If they could just find some way for theism to be clean, modern, and philosophical, they could recruit more robots...
 
Re: St Anselms "proof" of God

In less strange words it sounds like :

"1) We made him up
2) He exists
Since "We made him up" to me sounds worse than "He exists", He therefore exists."

This is no more a proof than "Because I said so!". :\
DarthMom said:
And doesn't substituting God with Invisible pink unicorn or Minnie mouse kinda show the insanity in it's entertainment?
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My thoughts exactly.
 
^

Premise: God is the limit of conceivable greatness

1) We made up
2) He's real

If (1) is true then he really wouldn't be all that great so therefore (2) must be true.

Logical enough, but the premise is absurd! To assume that, you have to assume God's existence in the first place.
 
Versions of this argument have been defended and criticized by a succession of philosophers from Anselm's time through the present day (see ontological arguments). Our concern here is with Anselm's own version, the criticism he encountered, and his response to that criticism. A monk named Gaunilo wrote a "Reply on Behalf of the Fool," contending that Anselm's argument gave the Psalmist's fool no good reason at all to believe that that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in reality. Gaunilo's most famous objection is an argument intended to be exactly parallel to Anselm's that generates an obviously absurd conclusion. Gaunilo proposes that instead of "that than which nothing greater can be thought" we consider "that island than which no greater can be thought." We understand what that expression means, so (following Anselm's reasoning) the greatest conceivable island exists in our understanding. But (again following Anselm's reasoning) that island must exist in reality as well; for if it did not, we could imagine a greater island--namely, one that existed in reality--and the greatest conceivable island would not be the greatest conceivable island after all. Surely, though, it is absurd to suppose that the greatest conceivable island actually exists in reality. Gaunilo concludes that Anselm's reasoning is fallacious.
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Jhon said:
Premise: God is the limit of conceivable greatness
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I'd also argue with that premise. If God is so amazingly super-dooper, and we're just just mortal inferior reflections of him, then surely we cannot conceive how great He is, and that his abilities are not bounded by our minds.

Since we have limited abilities, then our conceived notion of God also has limitations, but then I thought God was supposed to be omnipotent and omiknowing and omnipresent. While we have those words to reflect the notion, we cannot ourselves concieve what it is like to be those things ourselves.

Therefore the notion that God is the greatest thing conceivable comflicts with the notion he's all powerful, all knowing and ever present.
 
^Bloody hell that was difficult to understand.

[meant for protovack's post]

"that that than which" just hurts!
 
AlphaNumeric said:
Therefore the notion that God is the greatest thing conceivable comflicts with the notion he's all powerful, all knowing and ever present.
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Definitely true, though I assumed what was meant by this was that God is still supposed to be the greatest thing that can be possible. If that was the case then He would still fill up the human mind's "greatness-conceivability buffer" and go over the top of it.
 
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