Donnadogsoth

Yes, Mahti, but why is God not to be held responsible for loosing the freely-willed devil on the world? If I've got a superintelligent supercriminal in my super jail and I let him go, how is it not partly my fault when he inevitably commits a crime?

You are still insisting that humans are nothing but robots. I, too, would like to know how you can prove such a thing.

Anyone who knows anything knows that humans are partially robotised creatures. Our brains have circuits that trigger reflexively (reach out for cookie) and have to be trained through experience and the application of will (self-consciousness: do not reach for cookie). This will exists in a core of the mind and can theoretically, given time and application, overcome all robotic circuits, though practically this is very difficult. Without the will there is no person there, just a bundle of reflexes. I'm not going to die for a bundle of reflexes. Are you?

As nontrivial as your reasons are, they don't cut to the meat of the matter which is the existence of evil. Consider a hypothetical conversation with Ray Comfort: Ray: Have you ever stolen anything? Me: Yes. Ray: What do you call someone who steals things? Me: A thief. But I have a question for you. Ray: Sure. Me: If I have a rabid dog in a cage, and I let it out and it bites someone, am I guilty? Ray: Of course. Me: What am I guilty of? Ray: Oh I don't know, endangering the public? Me: How about criminal negligence? Ray: Yeah okay, criminal negligence. Me: Now, the universe is in a fallen state, according to you, right? Ray: Right. Me: What caused it to be in that state? Ray: Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden. Me: And who instigated that sin? Ray: The devil. Me: And who let the devil into the Garden? Ray: God did. Me: And what does that make God guilty of? Ray: . . . Care to answer for Ray?

Why should we trust God's character?

Thanks for the recommendation. Are you saying that Peterson is the inverse of Trump? If only we could combine them into a single superorganism . . .

How can Peterson be an effective psychologist, acclaimed teacher, good father, popular writer for laymen, and popular lecturer to laymen, without emotional intelligence? Am I misunderstanding what you mean by emotional intelligence? Not everything he does is Maps of Meaning; he's popular because he's a great populariser. How can that not require a significant amount of EQ?

Interesting article. Makes a lot of sense. Other remarks: 1. The fundamental experience of white people is not white people as white people, it is an individual white person experiencing life as an individual intersecting with whiteness. Individualism versus collectivism is a dastardly paradox, one that hitherto the Alt Right has weighed in favour of collectivism. This is dangerous, not just because collectivism is dangerous but because it defeats the emotional intelligence perspective you are promoting. We must be free individuals first, freely giving allegiance to whatever group(s) we feel we best identify with. 2. The number one ethos-killer for the Alt Right is the widespread perception that it represents violence. This includes (most relevantly for an AnCap forum) the violence of the State used against non-white people. This is a fifty-million-ton boulder chained to the Alt Right's progress up a 70-degree hill. If there is to be any sort of racial reordering it will happen not using 1930s methods but through the freely chosen associations and disassociations of free individuals. No amount of make-up covering the pustules of violent intent will do; the Alt Right ought to completely disavow violence. 3. The greatest global proponent of free speech and individualism at present is Jordan Peterson. His stance on free speech and individualism--a real stance, mind you, not just a pose for political effect towards left or right--is shaking people up in a way needed to resist the leftist brainwashing. He is one of the leaders of the West at this point. But, it comes at a cost: the more people believe and act on his insistence on the absolute necessity of free speech and the Western innovation of individualism, the more people will become immunized against the allure of Alt Right violence. Again, violence is not the solution, freedom is. So, freedom, individualism, non-violence, and Jordan Peterson. If that and any compatible principles don't solve the present internal racial political problem of the West, nothing will, and nothing ought to.

I grew up Catholic. I attended weekly mass. I never detected any fellowship or fraternal love. We used to call our fellow parishoners "stone faces" for all the joy they exuded. I lost interest in mass when I realised it was the same 156 Bible passages year in, year out. Man is made in the image of God and yet nothing intellectual is offered by His church in mass. There are plenty of controversial passages, why not challenge people? Perhaps most people are going for their spiritual mush ration. What Terence McKenna said about psychedelic drugs also, methinks, applies to church: "When you get the message, hang up the phone."

7) The Benny Hill Rule: Do unto others, then run.

Commentary on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground: Notes from the Underground presents a fascinating twist on the classic fate vs. free will argument. Fate in this case has nothing to do with divine will. If man is "fated" in any way, it is only because he is beholden to the laws of nature, like science or mathematics. 2+2=4, and this holds true whether we like it or not. How can there be free will if the world has such laws? The Underground Man argues that the only way to preserve free will is to beat one's head against the stone wall that is mathematical certainty. You may not be able to make 2+2=5, but you have to try if you want to be free. Additionally, he offers a terrifying vision of what might happen if we were to figure out all the laws of nature. If man always acts according to reason and the laws of nature, then we could predict everything man would ever think or do. The Underground Man argues that man will act against reason in order to prove his free will. He is willing to suffer, destroy, and abandon reason all for the sake of his own freedom. https://www.shmoop.com/notes-from-underground/fate-free-will-theme.html

Would you say that there is a finite amount of matter though in existence? If so, why should there not be any particular order to it, i.e chaos? (in the beginning there was darkness) Why given another form of disorder/chaos (chance)(Let there be light) should there not be order formed from two types of chaos. Kind of like 2 negatives making a positive. Would you equate structure to order, if not what would you say is the distinction? A Leibnizian universe would have no limit on how much matter could exist, because matter is just a reflection/shadow of the interactions between principles/monads. That is, there is the real/higher universe of substance, and the shadow/sensory universe which we see around us. There is no limit to matter in such a universe. What we see in the universe around us is an ongoing process of increase of order/structure (same thing as far as I can tell); this structure is brought into existence by the activity of God and man. This view makes the universe infinite in terms of development potential. Though does time increase like a balloon? or is it like some form of continium stretching out to eternity. Maybe entropy varies as matter interacts, perhaps varying forms of consciousness provides a way of counteracting entropy as uncertainty is partially resolved is consciousness. Given uncertainty i.e chance, winding back time is impossible, as micro affects would make it impossible to determine emergent phenomena, although consciousness & memory allows some "rough" winding back of time. We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back our memories...And those that carry us forward, our dreams." - The Time Machine (2002) Don't know. Are you talking about chaos theory/fractals? So instead of God, why not start a society called the Vulcans or something. ? What is the Logos how does one bring it into existence? Is it merely through truthful speech? What about truthful expression? The Logos is the ordering/creative aspect of God. In the human soul it combines with the Holy Spirit (charity, agape, love of neighbour). Christ was the Logos from whom the Holy Spirit flowed. Societies that conform to this prosper (through truthfulness in speech, expression/action); those that don't will die. Was listening to Geanology of Morals as another member had mentioned the book and I remember Nietzche referencing even the Greek God Zeus being subject to chance. My point being that with uncertainty, how does the Logos or Judeo-Christian God reign supreme and wouldn't this is turn destroy freewill? Unless God is outside of spacetime, different universe. God is eternal, existing in an unending “now” that is “sideways”/”parallel” to spacetime, if you want to try to visualise it. God sees all decisions men make as if they were making them simultaneously.

God is the Logos, essentially. Without the Logos we exist outside natural law, instead in chaos and the "law of the jungle". The ontological problem with chaos (luck) as the ruling principle of nature, is that it can't explain where structure comes from. Pure chaos is pure structurelessness, not pure creativity. The world is obviously not unstructured, and instead displays outrageous amounts of structure, perhaps infinitely so. One way to look at is to look at the entropic state of the universe as we find it, given a value N. As time increases, according to popular science, N increases. Fine, but try winding time back to the beginning of the universe, N must decrease. At some point N = 0. Atheists have no counter to this, other than waving "chaos" in our face.

Ain't religion grand?

Natural law only makes sense in the context of a Creator. If we retreat from natural law into a pre-universe state, we find ourselves confronting the Creator. The problem a mindless Creator or creative chaos poses (really a Creatrix as it wouldn't be rationally creating but essentially giving birth to things) is that nothing means anything without an observer, and therefore lacks sufficient reason to exist. That is, without an observer, no thing can be said to exist, including a chaotic Creatrix. And even if the Creatrix had a vacuous observing mind, such a being could not have given rise to the ordered universe we see around us.

Why would chaos be creative? That sounds like "quantum magic" nerd thinking. A broken car is more chaotic than a functioning one, no? Chaos means less and less structure and order, not more. The most chaotic possible system would be one with zero structure, zero order; in other words, a "system" that was identical to nothingness.

Interesting collection of claims about what the Koran claims. Anyone willing to fact check?

Interesting how these "moral relativists" are simultaneously the biggest moralisers.

"Lock them in and burn it down." Isn't self-deception a demonic trait? So, are they being serious, or are they being aye-ronnick? Can they even tell the difference? Do they not know that that is how atrocities start? Do they care? Do they relish the prospect? There must be some commissars among them, herding them, whipping them on. They appear to be soulless creatures, incommunicado with the phallologoic world, without an inner "I" to restrain them from total irrationality and the violence that that leads to. What does make them, then?

The perils of radical Individualism. If Peterson could nurture his inner Collectivist he might accrue a dedicated youth movement that would spontaneously relocate the disruptive gentlemen in question and allow him to speak uninterrupted.

I mean that if God were ruled wholly by mercy he would not have created the world at all, nor would he have created Hell.

Pantheism.

However, as much as what you say makes sense, you must agree that if God's mercy outweighed his justice he would simply destroy the world rather than leave it to suffer, much less throwing people into Hell.