EclecticIdealist

A libertarian government would not create or maintain a welfare state. The two are mutually exclusive, unless the welfare is provided entirely by completely voluntary contributions. The proportional response to someone voting for a tyrant is expelling them from your society. Voting for tyranny is a vote for violence by proxy. Unfortunately, we live in a society that is already so sick that expulsion of those disposed to tyranny is all but utterly impossible except in the most extreme circumstances (if even then).

Sounds exactly like a "blank out" from rationality.

Sex-trafficking is presumably the trafficking of sex-slaves, not voluntary prostitution. Involuntary slavery is prohibited on the basis that it violates the Non-Agression Principle. Consequently, those who engage in it in any voluntary way, including solicitation are prosecuted for their crimes. Perhaps a better question would be: What would be the penalty for those who buy, sell, and trade human beings who are not only enslaved, but physically, sexually, psychologically and emotionally abused? What would be the penalty for those who pay those who engage in human sex-slavery to gratify their desires?

Hypocrisy has nothing to do with the primacy of actions over words; hypocrisy is the lack of correlation or fidelity between words and actions. It matters not one whit whether one places words before actions or or actions before words, the hypocrisy would be the same. It does not at all suggest the primacy of actions over words to condemn a person for engaging in vice while espousing virtue instead of espousing virtue and engaging in vice. It is simply a matter of linguistic aesthetics whether one chooses to precede virtue with vice or vice with virtue in the description of the hypocrisy. What exactly does this mean? Since the "discovery" of immaterial concepts can only be asserted (they are not self-evident), how can the legitimacy of such an assertion be established? Suppose someone claims to have discovered the "Divine Right of Kings", how does one challenge such an assertion? This assertion that rights are not innate and must be discovered requires more explanation to be regarded at all.

I simply answered how one could conceptualize rudimentary addition without any of the characters supplied. "Mental pictures" as you pointed out, need not be visual concepts, although our minds which are based in brains evolutionarily developed for complex visual stimuli are more adapted to manipulated visual concepts than manipulating complex concepts of smell, or taste, or touch, or hearing. I have no doubt it could represent addition as "mental pictures" in any of these ways, and more than one mathematical savant has expressed "seeing numbers" with sound and color, taste, smell, and texture, suggesting synesthesia aiding in their arithmetic computational abilities.

All Cusa is doing is holding onto the idea, in spite of the absence of evidence in support of the idea, and evidence to the contrary, that an unfathomable, deity must exist. Cusa then goes on to invent his way around every limitation by simply declaring God to be exempt. God doesn't require space--God is immaterial. God doesn't require time--God is timeless or outside of time. God does not require an origin--God is without origination or beginning. God cannot be understood--God is unfathomable. It doesn't require any special knowledge or intelligence to come up with these ideas at all. A kindergartener with only a little prompting could do it. The answers or descriptions are by no means actually explanatory of anything, they are the opposite of explanatory, they end any attempt at explanation with the mental equivalence of an engine seizing up. What you have is a non-explanatory solution for every problem or challenge that is as previous individuals have mentioned, the equivalent of "I don't know". It is a non-answer without any justification beyond the desire for a definitive answer.

I never realized it was possible for any show to continue getting better with time.

Consider it another way. You claim God is the source of all. But where did God come from in the first place? You see a creator of ultimately complexity, but from whence did this ultimate complexity arise? With any metaphor or reference to deity you could care to use, including God, Source, Creator, Origin, Being, Father, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Principal, Chief, Supreme Being, this entity which you claim to be the Chief Cause of all that is surely didn't arise from nothing at all; and to be Supreme, could not have any greater than itself, and to be first, could not have any come before it. If you don't care about reason or philosophy, then your problem is solved, you can go about believing whatever irrational stories you've been told or whatever fantastic stories you wish to believe and your life will likely be just fine. But if you actually do care, not simply profess to care, but actually care about being rational, if you actually believe in philosophy (the love of wisdom), then you will take the uncomfortable step outside the comfort zone of your beliefs and seriously consider and examine the question honestly, and without reservation: Where does God come from? If everything else has a first cause, why doesn't God? If God, the most complex being in the entirety of existence doesn't require a cause, then why does the less complex entirety of the universe require one? Where is the evidence for an unmoved prime mover? The best answer is, "I don't know". The best speculation is, "There is no prime mover, the whole of existence is eternal, even if the universe as we know it may not be."

Given there is no credible evidence supporting the claim, "the nature of substance is perception, desire, and purpose", I shall ignore your absurd and irrational claim and substitute a more humorous one of my own which you are likewise free to deny. It is the nature of matter to be angry. Consequently, all matter in the universe is in constantly trying to get as far away from all other matter as possible in order to avoid violent exchanges of energy. This is the proper explanation for what physicists erroneously refer to as the Law of Entropy or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Why does anything exist? The answer: there is no why for existence. Why implies purpose. Purpose implies an actor. An actor must exist before it can act. Existence is a precondition of action and purpose. Therefore, there cannot be a why or purpose for existence other than the purpose we make for ourselves or others have for us.

The difference between determining the existence of the mind vs an invisible supernatural being that causes rain is that the former fits all the evidence, whereas the latter does not. We know that the brain is the domain of the mind for a variety of reasons (which I'd rather you not force me to list as it should be commonly held knowledge), we know that an invisible weather manipulating god is not the direct (or likely indirect) cause of the rain.

While the ideas are somewhat interesting, the terms "Newtonian" and "Einstienian" are highly contrived and designed to appeal to the ignorant masses bamboozled by pseudoscience and pop-psychology.

1 - They're just "Indians" (Native Americans) 2 - They aren't armed with weapons

A single item grouped together with another single item form a group that is equivalent to a group of two items. Additionally, If I gather rocks and clay from the forest and build a foundation upon which I then erect a structure made from rocks and trees from the forest, and then thatch the roof with boughs and branches of evergreen trees, and then cover the roof with mud and leaves and straw with which to water-proof it. Have I not just built a shed from the forest?

I never said anything about imagining something that doesn't exist in the physical world. I said, "inconceivable" or in other words, "unimaginable" in the first case, and "never imagined" (yet) and therefore not a concept (yet) in the second.

A mental picture of that which is not mentally picturable or has never been mentally picturable is still mentally picturable? Oh yeah, I forgot. Whatever you say is so.

That which is inconceivable is not a concept. That which has never been imagined is not a concept.

Yes, those simple particles... barely a conscious awareness of anything, but they have the desire to behave in very specific and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Some are even mutant particles... we can call them "X-Particles" with the powers of telepathy, telekinesis, magnetism, etc. actual "Children of the Atom".

Actually, the real reason why light takes the shortest path is out of desire, because it's the moral thing to do. It's the reason why photons choose to do anything--morality. Amoral photons choose to scatter; they're "PGTOW" (Particles Going Their Own Way). Immoral photons, on the other hand, are constantly selfishly abusing other particles. They are low-energy/low vibration particles constantly trying to raise their energy state by taking it from other particles. As they steal the energy of higher-energy/higher vibration particles, they bring them to a lower and lower state. They are what are known as "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy". They are also the real reason why people get tired and depressed. don't take my word for it though, It's true because somebody else said so.

Consciousness is the quality or state of being wherein the senses relay information to the brain of an organism which then processes that information to create a concept of the environment which it may then use to successfully interact with the environment, to hunt and gather food, to work with tools and other implements, to interact with other conscious and non-conscious entities and so on. We know that our brains are the organs which manifest consciousness, as do the brains of other animals. We know this by virtue of the fact that absent a correctly functioning brain, the body will not self-animate in any meaningful, deliberate, or purposeful way. The functions of the brain rely upon the physical structure of the brain, electricity, and chemical processes to create the experience and manifestation of consciousness. There are but two alternatives. Either consciousness is the result of natural, physical processes, or it is the result of supernatural, metaphysical processes. If the universe were conscious by natural means, the consciousness would be very, very, very slow on the order of billions of years for any given “thought” encompassing data from the entire universe due to the great distances between the star systems and the amount of time it takes for light (the fastest thing out there) to get from one point at the furthest distance from all the others in the universe. The notion that the universe is conscious of itself and in absolute control of itself would require that the constituent elements of the universe (or at least significantly large portions of it) would need to be sensory in nature, and others would need to be capable of altering itself in some way as a consequence. Now I suppose it’s possible; however, again, the time it would take is on the order of billions of years. You might be able to justify calling the universe conscious, under such a hypothetical scenario, but from a practical standpoint for you and I, the universe could not be conscious of any of us… our lives would be shorter than the blink of an eye over the span of 100 years. Now, if you want to hypothesize that consciousness is supernatural (as some have suggested), then all bets are off, as you can imagine anything and everything you wish, such as a consciousness that is not bound by space or time, and non-localized to this universe. It can be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and anything else you might wish, because it’s non-temporal and non-spacial, not bound by any of the laws of physics; not to mention completely unfalsifiable and indistinguishable from one’s own imagination.

As someone who has benefited from therapy myself, I am not at all meaning to be disparaging of therapy or the use of a therapist, especially if one has undergone significant abuse or other trauma, and I apologize if I inadvertently conveyed that message. It was intended more as a sarcastic commentary on the self-serving state of the medical community in over prescribing therapy and medication for things which not long ago people easily and successfully worked out on their own, or with a sympathetic friend or family member. I agree that likely everyone can benefit from therapy administered by a skilled therapist (or in some cases, a skilled non-therapist such as an experienced bartender, minister, life coach, mentor, or friend), especially to assist them in coming to terms with, if not in fact resolving the traumas in their lives.