Last words of eminent athesits

Democrat congressmen good.

Republican congressmen bad.

Shoot the bad ones.

 

That's precisely where Scientology breaks down for me. That we are all part of some fractured alien psyche I can buy, but absolute stoicism?

My conclusion: God doesn't love you. It's not so much that God was created in Man's image and thus given Man's qualities, but more the case that Man expresses God in his limited language, and that's where God inherits Man's qualities, such as love. My guess is the cause for your suffering is either indifference or lack of awareness of you on God's part.

I prefer to believe that we are all a part of the same hive. I don't pretend that the hive has any significance beyond this life, but it doesn't hurt to work toward that assumption.

 

Language grew out of metaphysics; not vica versa.

 

Guys, what the fuck are you talking about. We don't live in hives.

 

My view of god is the same as my view of everyone else. If they're not cool enough to sit down and talk with me/the world and clarify the situation, they're an asshole and not worth my time. At least God has the excuse of probably being the figment of some guys imagination that people took waaaaay to seriously.

If it does exist, it's an asshole not worth revering, if it doesn't, I haven't spent like a 1/14 of my life making an ass of myself by revering something that doesn't exist. So I'm covered either way. If they are not chill enough to come down and have a chat like a reasonable person, they are simply not worth the time.

 

Do some drugs. Then you'll speak to god (or a personal manifestation of what you perceive to be god).

 

Please elaborate.

 

Language didn't come from metaphysics, it came from a communal need to express ideas like "where are we getting our next meal." Metaphysics came later, some time around 50,000 years ago when man was behaviorally modern and had time to think about the world, and what is there. Before man had modernized, people lived in groups of 150-200 and had little time to speculate on the bigger picture, living by foraging and hunting and having a nomadic lifestyle. It was the title of Aristotle's first books, and comes from the greek Meta (beyond) and physika (physics). The chapters covering metaphysics come after the chapters on physics in his books, and are what Aristotle called "First Philosophy." Aristotle's editor titled these books "ta meta ta physika biblia," or the books that come after the books on physics. Latin scholiasts misread this as the science of what is beyond the physical. Essentially meaning what is beyond the physical, metaphysics took hold after we had become modern and could wonder about such things as the great immaterial, and was finally described much later.

 

Let's all worship nature like me

I was once called a druid when I was making a salve from some plants at the Camping forest.

 

Oh right, I see; it was just an imperative means of expressing the abstract idea of— Ruh-roh..! Abstract..? Idea..?

What I meant was that language was created in order to allow us to manifest abstract concepts; such as hunger, love, and buttrape. I was trying to say that these concepts obviously didn't arise out of language, but precedented and necessitated its creation; so it's not that our language confines our expression, in the same way that experience of objects and animals doesn't limit our imagination of things. In fact, it seems to be this very principle which gives birth to ideas such as perfection and God: since we can imagine only what we've seen, and picture imaginary objects by taking our experiences to their limits, we can create 'new', imaginary concepts by the same process linguistically, metaphysically.

 

Well then that's what you should have said. You're taking for granted that we all experience the same reality, when clearly there are differing perspectives all around you.

 

What? (See what I did there? )

 

The way I can see the future is concepts arrive to my mind before there is language and indeed context for them to happen, and then several weeks later they do! If I can alter those concepts in the dream, suppose what I could do if I unlock this potential.

 

Language is symbolic, so it requires that much metaphysics at least, that a word can represent a thing.

But language is everywhere in nature, and much older than merely our species.

 

It's actually more like an umbrella term for all concepts and ideas &c.

So what?

 

That's what I thought, it's just a model applied to various social/cultural constructs and other phenomena in order to describe something that just doesn't fit in with the current dogma.

What I don't get is how they can say "language needs metaphysics". Metaphysics isn't a thing, it's just a man-made construction provided in order to group a further set of constructions. Language is something that we didn't create but rather something we were born into - it's intuitive and without it, how were a group of like-minded individuals ever even agree on the concept of metaphysics, let alone assign a name to it?

 

Agree on a concept of metaphysics? Good thing we all had that big conference on agreeing on what everything ever is. Otherwise, there wouldn't be anything! How would anything have ever been created without our definition of it, which is its creation? In fact, by that 'logic', how could the definition of anything begin to exist without a definition of definition?

We didn't create metaphysics, in just the same way that we didn't create anything that we see, out of nothing. Born innately or not, it's not a man-made concept; just as colour and sound are not. Though we may experience these things in our own unique, human way, it's as a result of the things themselves and not of any conscious construct, except by interpretation.

It looks to me like you've got it backwards: we did not create metaphysics, and we did create language. Metaphysical concepts are common to everyone: though we may not always know under which category something falls, good and bad are naturally arising concepts, as well as the concept of anything once it is experience. Language, on the other hand, needed to be constructed; as is evidenced by its evolution, the neccesity of its being learned and not innate, and the diversity of it throughout the world. The fact that we have different words (in different languages, I mean) for common concepts such as 'chair' or 'pleasure' lends further verisimiltude to this argument. Further, and ironically, when you say that language is 'intuitive', by its very manifestation this does not make sense, and what you are referring to is the concept of language, which is not language itself, but the abstract, metaphysical idea of it.

 

So what you're saying is there are really no new concepts, but things that haven't been described yet? By the way, sorry for the outburst about superpowers.

 

Exactly; and just to be hilarious, that's not even a new idea. It's at least a couple of thousand years old, and features in the thoughts of philosophers such as Parmenides of Elea and Plato, as well as in religious texts such as the Bible.