Donnadogsoth

As a Christian I recognise that my rights come from God as a result of my being made in God's image. I do not own myself, but rather God owns me. My Constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others, are derivative rather than original or logically deducible. You will say that you do not recognise God, the Constitution, or rights in general, and that is fine, but you are at the disadvantage of trying to apply your atheistic, materialistic morality to me. Neither I nor you own ourselves and so when I speak I am using lent property, which I will surrender upon death to its original Owner. Trump, if he is not a liar, will save the country's jobs from being devoured by internationalist free trade, will stem the tide of unwanted alien immigration, and will annihilate the orthodox Moslem threat in the Middle East. Unless one believes he is a liar and refrains from voting for him on that basis, not voting for him means that one wants the attack on economy, on identity, and on security to continue. If one values these things, not voting for Trump November 8th is suicide.

The essential point I have to make is of man in the image of God. Do you believe that? Science tells us this is so, to the degree science is principled and so deals with principles, discovering, transmitting, and assimilating principles into society. That's what's at stake, man as a principled individual, mankind as a principled entity that is potentially immortal. Religions, philosophies, dogma, they all must bow before this idea that man is made in the image of God, or they are nothing but bestial relics. We can learn from studying beasts, true, but we do not base our society on that.

I'm sorry, I thought that was a typo, which I corrected. So you believe we should be complacent when we think we know it all. I disagree. There are always paradoxes hidden like mice in the walls of our theorem-lattices, which we do well to ferret out. Remember how the patent office was supposed to be closing soon in the late 1800's, because everything had already been invented? So with our knowledge. Complacency means a lack of imagination and the crustiness of old age. Find me any non-human capable of doubling the square, and I will give it a blue ribbon and honourary membership in the human race. If we stand from the point of neurology, we won't see anything different between beasts and humans than some extra brain tissue. The difference is in potential. There is no known principled limit to human knowledge, only the practical limits imposed by time, space, stamina, culture, etc.., just as there is no known principled limit to the growth of the economy in terms of power over nature. Human mind, human civilisation, power to know, power over nature, these are the important things to remember when dealing with the human race, and if we believe that, then we are de facto believing in Genesis 1:27 and 1:28. That is the power of the human mind. In modern parlance, the beast has a mind of a kind, but it is limited and unprincipled, lacking intellect as such, and free will as such. Again, if you can find an ape that can discover the principle of gravitation, or can comprehend Shakespeare, bring it forth! And the fact that most human beings have been bestialised throughout history you should see as a testament to the powers of the historical forces of the elites to subjugate man, not as evidence that man and beast overlap in potential. Tolkien is a very narrow gateway into Catholicism. But none of the filmmakers or authors you list describe and defend man's mind as I have above. Better look to the Classical music of Europe for a wider gateway into the kind of thinking that characterises man's angelic mind, as opposed to his bestial brain.

Until individualism figures out who gets the nukes and how to stop money power from taking over completely in a vacuum of political power, I'm sticking with nationalism.

Good commentary by Ezra Levant on the trillion dollars at stake in the US Presidential election. Will they kill Trump to stop him?

https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/48120-what-isnt-a-concept/page-2#entry439960

In Hegelian terms Platonic forms are "real," but don't "exist". Just as a monad (e.g. you or I) "exists" but isn't "real," to Hegel. So, that sense, strictly speaking I agree with you. Platonic forms don't "exist" in a Platonic realm, rather they are real in God's mind, just as their manifestations are real in ours.

Happy birthday, Stefan!

Perhaps the most well-known play by the most well-known English playwright, is Hamlet. But who is Prince Hamlet, really? A man is never more himself than at the moment of momentous decision, hence the excerpted soliloquy below which defines the play. In it we see inside Hamlet's mind in such a way that we ourselves can become him. Not in dress or exact mode of speech, but in intellectual understanding, though, we should hope, in our understanding of Hamlet's life as ending in the unfolding and conclusion of a tragedy, with a different intent and therefore immortal outcome. Thus, the soliloquy: HAMLET: To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-- No more--and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep-- To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. A mouthful, sure, but what does it mean? Is Hamlet talking about suicide (“might his quietus make with a bare bodkin”)? And hell (“But that dread of something after death,” and “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”)? The key decision is found early on: To be, or not to be--that is the question: [to be what? To be a human, or to be an animal.] Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [to be passive, an animal] Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-- [to be a leader, courageous, human] So he's saying we have a choice from the beginning, to be passive or active against the world. No more--and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep-- To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, Problem: the “sleep” is merely the sleep of the higher, principled intellectual faculties. It can't be literal death because no one dreams when they're dead. So “perchance to dream” is the problem, and what dreams come forth with “intellectual death”? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, When we have "shuffled off" the mortality of the beast in seeking the immortality of man. Next he creates a double effect: the suicide motif, and the troubles to be expected by one pursuing a higher destiny. Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? The animal self has two ways to "his quietus make": literal suicide, and the suicide of being absorbed into the inner "God" of the intellectual human mind. Both are equally terrifying. Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? We thus bear the ills of the beast, the yoke of the beast, rather than stand up as men and face the terrors of politics and the yawning abyss of the inner space of the creative mind. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, He uses “conscience” ironically here, again referring to his metaphor of suicide but meaning that our duty to our animal feelings act as a kind of conscience against “betraying” our bestial brains for our higher minds, which our brain-based bestial selves views as a kind of God. And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. And thus the man dies in beastly impotence, trashy gestures, and futile violence. -- Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. Here he admits his sin of cowardice when faced with the possibility of becoming a real leader of men and taking decisive action. Hamlet is a tragic figure not because he “couldn't make up his mind” to kill his father's murderer, but because he failed to rally the courage needed to escape his lower self (inferno) and reach the “undiscovered country” of paradise described in Dante's Commedia, “from whose bourn no traveller returns” because the travellers there always realise that after drinking the mere waters of paradise, the strongest wines of inferno are like dirty dishwater. He failed to take the action needed to rally Denmark from the "rot" that was threatening it. The irony is that Hamlet was no stranger to courage and violence, carrying a sword he killed Polonius with one thrust with and later used skilfully in a duel with Laertes. He was not suicidal or craven, except in the dimension of the approach to the higher mind, the imago viva Dei, the mind of principle and potent political action. Thus, a tragedy, and a classical one because it is one we can use to become Hamlet and choose to attain the “undiscovered country” where he did not.

Hi jroseland, Congratulations on your assignment. As a Trump supporter I'll help if I can. In any attempt at persuasion you need to include ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is your personal character and credibility. "Who is doing the talking here, why should we believe anything he has to say?" So that means be punctilious in your grooming, posture, take it easy and smile (really smile, like you're glad to be alive and it's a privilege to be here), don't be grim. And if you can fit in any credentials, degrees etc, in an understated way (don't come across as self-important), that's helpful too. Pathos is your appeal to the animal brain, "the emotions" or "the passions" of the audience. Talking about smouldering mountains of bodies is not logos, it's pathos. A purely human debate would have no such dramatic flairs, it would just be pure rational argument. Beware emotionalism since it can give your debating partner an in on manipulating you using your animal brain. Even if you use the height of passionate rhetoric you should remain cool as a cucumber inside. Logos is your rational argument, your logic, your evidence, the appeal to the human mind's conceptualising ability. With logos you are attempting to access the systematisation tendency in your audience, getting them to think on a "higher level". Do all three things better than your opponent, in the eyes of the audience, and you win. Remember that you're not trying to persuade your opponent, he or she is already nailed to the cross of their position and is immovable. You're trying to persuade the audience, seen or unseen, that you are right. On to Trump himself. The thing to understand about his platform is that it is threefold, and each of the three planks can be reduced to a single descriptive word. Trump's agenda is to: 1. Stop the immigration invasion. For America's part, this means both the illegal part and the immoral part. Stopping the illegal part means securing the Mexican border. Stopping the immoral part means denying entry to terrorists and terrorist sympathisers such as adherents of Sharia law. 2. Destroy ISIS. This means launching a war against the orthodox Islamic terror state of ISIS to destroy it. If any state needed to be destroyed, ISIS is it. The more it is allowed to consolidate its gains, grow its power, and spread its franchises across the Moslem world and into the Western world, the more terrorism, subjugation, organised crime, Sharia law, and other barbaric practises we can expect to suffer from. 3. Save the economy. In particular, stop the British Free Trade system (TPP, NAFTA, etc.) fostered by the elite banking, aristocratic, and corporate interests and replace it with laws and policies more in line with what is known as the American System of protectionism and development of domestic industry. If we want jobs and industry in America, we will protect them from predatory free trade globalism. These three things reduce to three words, which Trump has not spoken as summaries of his platform, to my knowledge, but which underpin psychologically these planks. They are: Stop the immigration invasion = IDENTITY. The Western man is in an existential identity crisis, not knowing who he is or what he stands for. The professors, media, and politicians have supplied for him the queasy drug of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” guilt-tripping him into inviting in the world, no matter how unassimilable, and, so, creating an uneasy oil-and-water mosaic in our countries. Trump represents a more solid identity for America, a renewed pride, one that rejects Sharia and uncontrolled immigration, and which will embolden the other Western countries to proudly reaffirm their own identities. Destroy ISIS = SECURITY. The West is entangled in a confrontational attitude towards Russia and China, and has spent itself waging wars and proxy wars across the world as part of an Anglo-American imperial posture. Now the orthodox Islamic threat, materially created by American foreign policy, must be dealt with. Trump as a family man has nothing to gain by war with Russia or China, and is committed to solving the problem (ISIS) that was created by his predecessors. Save the economy = ECONOMY. Without an economy man has nothing. No family, no city, no agriculture, industry, or commerce, and no nations. Trump is intimately familiar with economics as a practical science and will attack the economic ills of America, and by example the world which in former days envied America for its economic system. Without identity, security, and economy, there is no liberty. You cannot be free if you have no identity, no roots from which to grow. You cannot be free if there is no security and you fear for your life and your family's well-being. And you cannot be free if there is no economy, leaving you to starve in penury. These three ideas explain why Donald Trump should become the 45th President of the United States.

We are agreed here. I can imagine nothing more philosophically benign than to distinguish between man and beast. It is this crucial difference which I must underscore in my argument. Man is distinguished by his mind which contains the potential, unique to the world, of, through suitable provocation, discovering universal physical principles and related artistic and moral principles. This mind is associated with, but not contracted to, the human brain. To the degree man thinks using his brain, he is a beast, incapable of intellect and free will, as all beasts are so incapable. To the degree man thinks using his mind, he is human. The directive of behaviour towards beasts in close company is training. A beast has nothing but a brain, not a mind in human terms at all but just a brain, and the brain learns through training. The directive of behaviour towards humans is provocation. A mind cannot be taught anything, but can be provoked into realisations of principle, whether physical, artistic, or moral. No beast can ever discover the principle of universal gravitation, or the idea of the Sublime. I raise all this to highlight man's mind as being unique in the world, possibly in the Universe, uniquely constituted as to be the master of that Universe, at least in principle, through the discovery of those principles which govern all sensory input and interaction. Thus, we are gods. Not God, but gods. And our mind, containing all knowledge as seen if through a carnival glass mirror, therefore contains the totality of Truth. And therefore we are made in the image of that Totality, and it is the Archetype of us. But given we are conscious, it would be imperfect without consciousness, incapable of stamping its image on us, and so it is, and that makes it God. It may be that the pillar of the State can be replaced by sufficient, free, principled, and ligamented organisation that imitates its functionality, but the pillar of Religion, to the degree it is faulty, will never be replaced except by profoundly understanding what I have written above, and what others have written similarly. The elites train our brains and deny that our minds exist, and we believe them and become malleable beasts in their service, on their farms, and on their tables.

"true", to use an example of my own, is logic "true" to an electronic computer, I would say no, something is present/exists or it does not, i.e an electrical charge is there or it is not. A computer is an abiotic entity, which has as I see it little relevance to knowledge. What does a toaster know? My answer is no, not in that form. Then in what form? How can anyone take issue with the idea that there is knowledge known and knowledge unknown and together they form the totality of knowledge? I believe the answering concept is metaphor. As a potentiality, actuality or both? Or something else.... maybe in the only way that really matters. Potential to us, actual to God.

Let me rephrase the question: do you believe in a totality of truth? That is, do you believe that we can measure truth out, saying that this is a truth (“water is composed of dihydrogen oxide”) and that that is a truth (“electrons have a negative charge”) and all the other things we have discovered are truths, and that this forms a collection of truths we know, to which we can add a collection of truths we do not yet know, and this combined collection forms that which we can rightly call a “totality of truth.” Do you believe that? On homo ignorans: Au contraire, we advance when we realise what we are ignorant of, not when we rest on our knowledge. Science in particular purports to be the ongoing, systematic effort to punch holes in our presumptions of knowledge. Please answer my question on the totality of truth, which is relevant here, before I reply to the rump of your post.

Seriously, though, you believe in a Totality, don't you? You believe in a sum-of-all-things that will always escape human understanding? We could call that the Totality. And despite being on Terra for several hundred thousand years, there's a good chance homo sapiens still doesn't understand very much about the Universe it lives in. So, in large measure, we are defined by our ignorance, not by our knowledge. Homo ignarus. So what, I ask, is the practical difference between a Totality which we are massively ignorant of, and a God which we are massively ignorant of? The same ever-receding comprehension is there, whether we view the origin of all as being natural or super-natural.

God is a very peculiar concept because he's, strictly speaking, beyond the categories. Any name we give to the Infinite is going to be inadequate and so we have to accept that our nomenclature will be inadequate. There can be greater and lesser degrees of accuracy but total accuracy is impossible. Our mental picture for God is going to be a placeholder like a RESERVED sign at a place at a table. Personally, my mental picture for the word "God" is a white amorphous expanse.

A knife, spear, toothpick, forest, collective, and government are all associated with mental pictures, regardless of one's size. I doubt it is possible to think of any of them without a mental picture of some kind. Granted, as with math, an individual's picture-processing may be so quick and short-handed that the original pictures (as for government) hardly figure, but the point is some kind of "picturing" is necessary for thought.

Seconded. I'll add that as per Hegel, abstractions such as Platonic forms as whiteness and transparency are "real" but don't "exist," while concretions such as a salt shaker "exist" but aren't "real." In other words for clarity's sake it helps to be aware that there are abstractions and there are concretions, the former occupying the dimension behind the eyes and the latter before the eyes.

What Christianity has on its side is the Crucifixion, which taps into the human nature of love as the fundamental emotion, the idea that Christ's love is God's is something we can participate in as being made in God's image--unlike Islam where man is not made in Allah's image, but is simply another toy. It's not as easy to explain, but it's a distinct and eye-catching image attached to a more sublime concept than simply "OBEY!" Christianity presupposes thought in application. And outside of the presence of violence, whether the violence of migrants penetrating Western borders, or of terrorism, rape, and bullying once they're in, or of a media hijacked by anti-Christian secularists, Christianity does appear to trump just about everything. It won Europe, Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas, and now is taking a sizable bite out of Southeast Asia. So, now it comes down to Christianity versus Islam. Or should I say Christianity versus everything, since Islam, like everything else non-Christian, is an official Ward of the State and so is shielded from critique. In other words Islam already, in a sense, rules over us, like a malicious toddler wrecking our tea party whilst his big, mean older sister stands behind him glaring at us.

The Bible killed the West because it is so long, complicated, abstruse, obtuse, apparently contradictory, seemingly incoherent, confusing, arcane, and recondite. Its recitation generates a haze of complacency in its audiences, most of whom have long ago given up trying to understand it as a literary document and have either rejected it entirely or followed along, mumbling prayers led by their chosen spiritual leaders. This has killed us because it kills people's access to great ideas. People think about the Bible the way they think about Science: way too confusing, impenetrable to anyone except specialists, and not worth the trouble to find out about. The difference between the Bible and Science is, the former produces intangible goods, whereas the latter produces tangible ones. Given the choice between understanding that Christianity provides a kind of immune response capacity in a culture to Communism, for example, or understanding that something magical and respectable called "electricity" means a flick of a plastic switch lets you read, eat, and otherwise live comfortably at night, the more believable, tactile, desirable choice is obvious. It is all too easy to shear off the former and simply trumpet the latter. In so shearing, however, one throws out the great literature of the age, the great art, the great music, the great philosophers, and is left with mere technologism, or Scientism, the notion that all problems, no matter how psychological in nature, are technical problems vulnerable to technical solutions, and that all that is lost—the soul, the identity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and the perspectives granted us by the geniuses of history—is of no account. Understanding the Bible is difficult, but not impossible, just as understanding Science is difficult, but not impossible. It's this difficulty that is defeating us as a society sinking deeply into the womblike comforts of a high-tech decadence. The Bible is to blame because it set the standard so high, its intangible benefits allowed so much—the Renaissance, the preservation of knowledge by the various orders of Christian monks, the scientific revolution itself, the Enlightenment, the abolition of slavery, globally extended European civilisation, and the glories and optimism that characterised the 19th and much of the 20th Centuries--that now the culture it has created can barely bring itself to crane its neck enough to look up to it. The solution, needed as a defense against inimical forces such as Communism, Cultural Marxism, Islam, British Free Trade ideology, and Nihilistic Hedonism, is to engage in depth expeditions to recover the Western canon now resting and corroding at the bottom of the Atlantic with the bones of the jettisoned Middle Passage slaves murdered in response to the encroachment of Christian liberty. We need people who understand Christianity, the Bible, the Philosophers, the Artists, and the Scientists who comprise the soul of the West. The Bible killed us, but the Bible promises a Resurrection. Christendom has nearly perished before, and revived, so the modern world appears poised to perish, and may yet revive--if sufficient heroes can be found in time.

Them darned Wright kids and their flying machines, that'll never amount to anything!

Could it be that racial terminology exists because races exist, and attempts to smother such terminology by seemingly-well-meaning commentators like Mr. Freeman are really de facto ways of helping eliminate one of the races in a manner possibly unheard of in history: to exterminate a people while denying they exist?

1. A platter of irrelevancies. If you hold to the materialist scientists' view of entropy, then entropy, universally, has a net increase with time. Thus my question stands, what happens when we rewind time to the point of minimum entropy? 2. What could possibly have created redness, extension, being, and nonbeing, and all other categories and Platonic forms, as I as much as ask above, if not something on the order of a God? I'm not talking about creating "matter" or "energy" as modern scientists speak of it, as if there were an "in between" you and I called the objective universe, I'm talking about the respective experiences that you and I have. According to the moderns, there is no explanation for this metaphenomenon called experience, it is merely now and forever a brute fact, not even logical enough to merit the prestige of a mathematical necessity such as 1+1=2. Your position is that experience just is, for no reason. Mine is that it flows from a Source that is higher than it is, higher than everything is, rather than merely associating with a substrata (matter) that is beneath it. 3. Cusa was never condemned by the Catholic Church for his teachings, so they are at least rigourous enough not to conflict with Catholic teachings. Kindergarteners would need (and want) to participate in that rigour, rather than merely being set loose with chaotic conjecture. Then they could have fun at a high level of thought at a very young age.

Is there more than just bipedalism in humans? Could some humans naturally walk on four limbs? Cue clips of feral children raised by wolves. And what about tripedalists: people who deeply feel the need to walk with a cane? Or monopedalists, people compelled by amputation to hop on one foot everywhere?

1. The Universe is aeternal? What happens when we rewind time and entropy reaches minimum—how can we rewind time more than that? 2. Given that I hold that substance is monadic in nature, what generates the preestablished harmony between monads if not God? 3. Indeed, we should teach Cusa to kindergarteners. It would improve their minds and they would have a natural delight in it that hardened adults do not.

Those who haven't studied Nicolaus of Cusa are at a disadvantage in answering your question because they still think of "space" and "time" and the "categories" (extension, duration, density, complexity, etc.) as being implicitly aeternal from the get-go. The question's presumptions are designed to guide the mind toward the answer you give of "I don't know" and "the whole of existence is eternal". The God of Cusa, however, is not like that. He is radically strange, and so precedes concepts like space and time and all the categories. We cannot say "Where did God come from" because he created "from-ness" in the first place, he created "where-ness". It is not as if there is an immutable spacetime with God at one end and the created Universe ranged along the middle and opposite end. That makes God into a creature, when God is the author of creatures, including space and time. This is why Cusa goes to such lengths to find more accurate names for God, such as the Not-Other and the Origin, he realises that such a strange God is beyond the rational apprehension and can only be considered through intellectual intuition. So, "Where did God from"? God created "where" and so precedes it. "Who created God?" God's radical weirdness leaves no room for any other "who" since anything that was as he is--beyond the categories--would be him.