Allah: the One and Only Deity

167 views
Skip to first unread message

Samiya Illias

unread,
May 22, 2019, 1:35:39 AM5/22/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 


John Clark

unread,
May 22, 2019, 8:53:21 AM5/22/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
First we have Cosmin Visan's nonsense and now this. Is The Everything List turning into Crackpot Central?

 John K Clark

Tomasz Rola

unread,
May 22, 2019, 9:42:17 AM5/22/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 08:52:44AM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> First we have Cosmin Visan's nonsense and now this. Is The Everything List
> turning into Crackpot Central?

Perhaps the guy only wants to share with you the best thing that he
knows. Cosmin earned his entitlement by consistently making certain
opinions and not quite willing to learn from discussion, as far as I
can be a judge (but since I have not read all of his postings, I might
be wrong).

--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomas...@bigfoot.com **

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 22, 2019, 3:07:26 PM5/22/19
to Everything List


On Wednesday, May 22, 2019 at 7:53:21 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
First we have Cosmin Visan's nonsense and now this. Is The Everything List turning into Crackpot Central?

 John K Clark



The primary world's religious texts have some poetic value at best, but there's a ton of humanity-damaging content in these (some more than others) as well.

Best to stick to stuff about real stuff: 

But for crackpottery, what a number of physicists (especially) write today is up there. The list is growing ...

@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 23, 2019, 4:03:01 AM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 22 May 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom.


That is coherent with your will to not debate. But the natural question is “why the Quran”, and how can you defend the Quran if you don’t try to compare with all the other texts. Why not the Vedas? Why not, the bible of Jerusalem, which is somehow praised in the first half of the Quran? 

You might try to answer the post when you feel to disagree, but citing the Quran, a bit like giving links, without explanation of why the Quran or why those links is not much informative.

As you have probably realise now, I think that Chirstianity ended in 529, and Islam died in a large part in 1248. At those moment both have substituted the literal fairy tales for the science and forbid the critical thinking an reason, with some important exceptions persecuted ever since (Bektashi, Alevi, Mutazelit, …).

I agree with you that God is the ultimate one guiding us, but God is not “God”, and nobody on Earth can use its name for any temporal spiritual living. It brings automatically the argument per authority, which is catastrophically, especially on he fundamental research.

God is good, but “God” is the devil. It trains the people to accept argument per authority, which leads to the fake certainty and the violence. It leads to the feeling of superiority and the condescendance. It makes people blind on alternative thinking, and eventually reject the doubt and reason. It becomes the nth version of the “the boss is right” theory, which can lakes sense in the army, in urgent situation, when lacking the time to use reason, but when it is based only on that, it needs the war and the conflicts to sustain itself.

Bruno





This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CANgFmkEg4tUhkRaDgVK8J_TJTTV6jBzHuKqhs54RRWNa2xnbJA%40mail.gmail.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 23, 2019, 4:35:16 AM5/23/19
to Everything List


On Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 3:03:01 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 22 May 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom.


I agree with you that God is the ultimate one guiding us, but God is not “God”, and nobody on Earth can use its name for any temporal spiritual living. It brings automatically the argument per authority, which is catastrophically, especially on he fundamental research.



Bruno



You don't agree with J.-P. Sartre that "Existence precedes essence." We are born existentialists, not "guided" by any God.

Dissolving the "free will" question, G. Strawson just says "We have the experience of freedom." That experience in and of itself is enough, regardless of any God or physics or arithmetic.

That experience we do know exists, except for the experience/consciousness deniers.


@philipthrift

Samiya Illias

unread,
May 23, 2019, 5:21:04 AM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


> On 23-May-2019, at 1:02 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> That is coherent with your will to not debate. But the natural question is “why the Quran”, and how can you defend the Quran if you don’t try to compare with all the other texts. Why not the Vedas? Why not, the bible of Jerusalem, which is somehow praised in the first half of the Quran?

Obviously you haven’t read any of my posts.

Telmo Menezes

unread,
May 23, 2019, 5:24:59 AM5/23/19
to Everything List


On Wed, May 22, 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias wrote:
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 

"God is great, chances are
God is good, well I wouldn’t go that far"

-- Nick Cave

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 23, 2019, 1:04:54 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 23 May 2019, at 10:35, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 3:03:01 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 22 May 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom.


I agree with you that God is the ultimate one guiding us, but God is not “God”, and nobody on Earth can use its name for any temporal spiritual living. It brings automatically the argument per authority, which is catastrophically, especially on he fundamental research.



Bruno



You don't agree with J.-P. Sartre that "Existence precedes essence." We are born existentialists, not "guided" by any God.

I use God in the (Neo)platonician sense. God is the ultimate truth/reality that we search, with some insight that it is bigger than us.

Yet, with the digital mechanist hypothesis, the arithmetical truth is not distinguishable from God for the (finite) creature/machine/number, and a machine having stronger induction axioms can somehow study the theology of simpler machine, without necessarily lifting that theology on itself (which needs extra-caution, universal machine are confronted to a theological trap, and the wise machine remains silent on many “true” propositions).

That is the original sense of “god” by those who invented theology, from which they extracted physics and mathematics as competing theory about the fundamental reality (to simplify things a little bit).



Dissolving the "free will" question, G. Strawson just says "We have the experience of freedom." That experience in and of itself is enough, regardless of any God or physics or arithmetic.

Yes, free-will is the experience of freedom, and above all, its possible personal exploitation, as free-will concerns acts, not just the phenomenological sensation associated with it.

It happens when the machine leaves the cocoon of security (enumerable set of total computable functions, which always miss some total computable function) to insecurity or universality, where all total computable functions are available, but mixed in a highly non mechanical manner among the total computable.

Free-will require universality, not Löbianity (universality + knowledge of one own universality). Nut to know we have free will, this require Löbianity. Löbinanity arise from Universality + enough strong mathematical induction axiom, like believing that if P is true for 0, and if it is true that P(n) -> p(n+1) then it has to be true for all n.

For a platonist, God is what remain when you stop to believe in (ontological) physical universe. 

The traditional debate about God and Non-God is like an Aristotelian (weak materialist)  trick to make us forget that the original debate of the greek theologian was about the existence of the physical universe, seen as primary, that is origin of all the rest (consciousness included).




That experience we do know exists, except for the experience/consciousness deniers.

We all agree in this list that consciousness exist, and that we do know our experience.

The problem is how to relate those experience with some reality that we are searching, or how to relate the experience and the observation, and what we can prove about this, and what is consistent with this or that theory, and how to test them.

Your approach is unclear if eventually you will not be the one denying consciousness to a large variety of persons or entities, due to the fact that they would not have the genuine metaphysical stuff to support their soul.

Bruno






@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 23, 2019, 1:20:49 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
You said that you did not want to debate. I read all your post, and reply long ago explains what I am not convinced, and why I think it departs from the sort of truth consistent with my working assumption.

I think we have agreed on where we disagree, but I am open to discuss this further. But your post seems to reflect more Al Ghazali than Averroes (Ibn Rushd). If I am wrong on this, please correct me. To sum up the difference, the difference is in between submitting text to reason (and thus comparison), Avrroès, instead of submitting Reason to Text (Al Ghazali, which leads to literalism, which leads to conflicts).

Islam has open itself to Platonism for a long period, leading them to the science, which eventually will lead to to the Renaissance, but the motor of science has been destroyed in the Middle-East , in 1248, by the apparition and enforcement of the literal interpretation of the texts, leading to notions of heresies, exactly like the Christians did in 529, and still used by influent trends today.

Bruno



> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/D7DD5757-E64B-42DD-8CFE-17DBF9243D85%40gmail.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 23, 2019, 1:25:06 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 23 May 2019, at 11:24, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:



On Wed, May 22, 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias wrote:
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 

"God is great, chances are
God is good, well I wouldn’t go that far"

-- Nick Cave


The Truth is great, that is quasi obvious, isn’t ? With or without Hubble, with or without the axiom of infinity.

Truth is good?  Well, it might be like democracy, the worst thing in Town except for all the Lies.

Bruno







--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 23, 2019, 2:55:24 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/23/2019 10:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> That is the original sense of “god” by those who invented theology,
> from which they extracted physics and mathematics as competing theory
> about the fundamental reality (to simplify things a little bit).

Those who invented theology observed many events that affected their
lives and which involved forces beyond their control and comprehension:
disease, storms, earthquakes, famine, volcanoes,... So just as they
attributed the actions of their acquaintances to inner emotions
reflecting their own, they attributed these forces to spirits, inner
agents, that acted out of passion and which could be placated as one
would placate an angry human.  For them there was not the distinction
that came later between religion, magic, and science.  As science,
beginning with Thales of Miletus, rejected the idea a agency behind
events it was split from religion and magic. The failure of magic to
provide control resulted in religion largely rejecting it and instead
claiming that the god(s) demanded various moral behaviors favorable to a
priesthood and control by leaders, and could not be manipulated and
controlled by magic.

Brent

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 23, 2019, 3:01:23 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/23/2019 10:25 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 23 May 2019, at 11:24, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:



On Wed, May 22, 2019, at 07:35, Samiya Illias wrote:
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 

"God is great, chances are
God is good, well I wouldn’t go that far"

-- Nick Cave


The Truth is great, that is quasi obvious, isn’t ? With or without Hubble, with or without the axiom of infinity.

Truth is good?  Well, it might be like democracy, the worst thing in Town except for all the Lies.

Bruno

"Don't you truth me and I won't truth you."
         --- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
May 23, 2019, 6:37:45 PM5/23/19
to Everything List
On Wednesday, May 22, 2019 at 12:35:39 AM UTC-5, Samiya wrote:
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 

There are similar ideas in Christianity. God chooses who is to have paradise, which raises a curious conundrum. If there are those not chosen and they die eternally or suffer in flames eternally then it means God has effectively selected them for that fate. If this is the case then ultimately God creates many humans just so they can suffer eternally. Such a God makes Adolf Hitler look benevolent by comparison.

I read a translation of the Koran right after the 9/11 attacks. It is heavily marinated with eschatology with flames and suffering. In fact it is far more than what exists in the New Testament, which itself is pretty threatening along these lines.

A related issue, say with whether God is good, was discussed between Socrates and Euthyphro 4 centuries before Christianity and 1000 years before Islam. The question is whether God is good because he is inherently so and has no choice in matter, or whether God is good because He chooses that. In the first case this is a limitation on God's free will, which limits his omnipotence. In the second case if God has the choice to be good, then what is good, ethically right or morally pure is something outside of God and thus God is not omnipresent with all things. 

In fact this sort of thing is the type of paradox that always emerges with the matter of God. God is then an infinite unknowable and anything we try to define as God or to label as His character runs into contradictions.  For this reason the topic is not appropriate for science or a related subject where proof, evidence, measurement and empiricism are used.

The Torah, Tanach and to a degree as I understand the Christian New Testament are mythic narratives meant to bring meaning to various aspects of inner mental space or psychology. I am not sure about the Koran, maybe there are similar currents. While we can't disprove the existence of God, we can illustrate how certain ideas about God do not match a scientific understanding of the world. Also much of these things involve magical thinking. Jesus turning water into wine is really much the same idea as Cinderella's fairy godmother turning mice and a pumpkin into a carriage drawn by a team of horses. It's magical thinking.

LC 

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 23, 2019, 7:08:11 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/23/2019 3:37 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
The Torah, Tanach and to a degree as I understand the Christian New Testament are mythic narratives meant to bring meaning to various aspects of inner mental space or psychology.

I think you impute to much cleverness there.   A lot it is, or was, intended as real history providing both provenance and justification for whatever ethics was being pushed at the time.

Brent

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
May 23, 2019, 8:00:51 PM5/23/19
to Everything List
The writers of these narratives were rather clever. These are done in a literary "shape-shifter" fashion so that they can be interpreted in a wide range of ways. The book of Exodus, or Shemot (שְׁמוֹת) in Hebrew Shem = name and Shemot is plural or means the list of names, has the children of Israel leave Egypt (Mitzrayim) in the narrow place (Mezaryim), narrow in one meaning because of the Nile. They are lead to the Red Sea where the water is separated and crash, where red is symbolic of blood. Also remember one of the plagues on Egypt was the Nile turned to blood. This is a birth motif, and certainly one message is this is a metaphor for the birth of Israel. The Torah is packed full of this sort of thing, and it involves a lot of word play. 

This is not to say there are not literal meanings as well, which in different ages are rather different. The American conservative Protestant idea about Christianity is a peculiar redaction on the whole meaning. I can't say about the Koran and what Islamic scholars think. It is not a subject I have delved into, nor am I ever likely to. Samiya has posted some curious stuff that equates Koranic passages with meaning about atoms and at one time if I recall about the Higgs boson. So the writers there were clever enough to make the narratives and poetry shift metaphors and retranslate meaning into different forms as the world learns and matures. It really is one reason these scriptures have remained so culturally and socially powerful for many centuries.

My religious background is Judaism and Catholicism. I ended up choosing Judaism, simply because it is in a way more intellectual, it is more fun, and Catholicism has it perks here and there but it is also rather grave and grey. I generally consider myself quite agnostic about the idea of an infinite disembodied entity that created and controls everything. The idea simply runs into contradictions. I can still go to the minion, where it is the same reason the fiddler stays on the roof (Issac B Singer) --- tradition. If I were Catholic instead I think it would be the same thing. 

LC

Samiya Illias

unread,
May 23, 2019, 10:27:37 PM5/23/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


> On 23-May-2019, at 10:20 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> You said that you did not want to debate. I read all your post, and reply long ago explains what I am not convinced, and why I think it departs from the sort of truth consistent with my working assumption.

Yes, you do respond to posts on this list. What I meant to write was that you haven’t read my blogposts, since I do refer to The Bible in a number of my blogposts. It is an article of faith to believe that just like The Quran, prior scriptures have also been revealed by Allah for guidance.

>
> I think we have agreed on where we disagree, but I am open to discuss this further. But your post seems to reflect more Al Ghazali than Averroes (Ibn Rushd). If I am wrong on this, please correct me. To sum up the difference, the difference is in between submitting text to reason (and thus comparison), Avrroès, instead of submitting Reason to Text (Al Ghazali, which leads to literalism, which leads to conflicts).

I believe that the God who created me and granted me the ability to speak and express my self is capable of expressing and communicating perfectly, and thus the scriptures must be taken literally.

I’m delightfully pleased with the factual accuracy of The Quran and share my learnings in over a hundred blogposts.

I have neither read Avrroes nor Al Ghazali. You can draw parallels if you wish.

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 24, 2019, 3:56:44 AM5/24/19
to Everything List
The advantage for being raised Protestant is that the only next step is atheism - the ultimate Protestantism.

Protestantism (in the US) today is split: A collection of (sometimes) church-going virtually-atheist liberals, and the Republican Party.

@philipthrift

John Clark

unread,
May 24, 2019, 6:55:47 AM5/24/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 6:37 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:



> I read a translation of the Koran right after the 9/11 attacks. It is heavily marinated with eschatology with flames and suffering. In fact it is far more than what exists in the New Testament, which itself is pretty threatening along these lines.

 Sam Harris in his book "The End Of Faith" provides some interesting quotes in that shows the tone you're talking about:

"Open the Koran, which is perfect in its every syllable, and simply read it with the eyes of faith. You will see how little compassion need be wasted on those whom God himself is in the process of “mocking,” “cursing,” “shaming,” “punishing,” “scourging,” “judging,” “burning,” “annihilating,” “not forgiving,” and “not reprieving.” God, who is infinitely wise, has cursed the infidels with their doubts. He prolongs their life and prosperity so that they may continue heaping sin upon sin and all the more richly deserve the torments that await them beyond the grave.  In this light, the people who died on September 11 were nothing more than fuel for the eternal fires of God’s justice. To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in order of their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the universe apparently has on his mind (when he is not fussing with gravitational constants and atomic weights):

“It is the same whether or not you forewarn them [the unbelievers], they will have no faith” (2:6). “God will mock them and keep them long in sin, blundering blindly along” (2:15). A fire “whose fuel is men and stones” awaits them (2:24). They will be “rewarded with disgrace in this world and with grievous punishment on the Day of Resurrection” (2:85). “God’s curse be upon the infidels!” (2:89). “They have incurred God’s most inexorable wrath. An ignominious punishment awaits [them]” (2:90). “God is the enemy of the unbelievers” (2:98). “The unbelievers among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], and the pagans, resent that any blessing should have been sent down to you from your Lord” (2:105). “They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter” (2:114). “Those to whom We [God] have given the Book, and who read it as it ought to be read, truly believe in it; those that deny it shall assuredly be lost” (2:122). “[We] shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate” (2:126). “The East and the West are God’s. He guides whom He will to a straight path” (2:142). 

“Do not say that those slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, but you are not aware of them” (2:154). “But the infidels who die unbelievers shall incur the curse of God, the angels, and all men. Under it they shall remain for ever; their punishment shall not be lightened, nor shall they be reprieved” (2:162). “They shall sigh with remorse, but shall never come out of the Fire” (2:168). “The unbelievers are like beasts which, call out to them as one may, can hear nothing but a shout and a cry. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they understand nothing” (2:172). “Theirs shall be a woeful punishment” (2:175). “How steadfastly they seek the Fire! That is because God has revealed the Book with truth; those that disagree about it are in extreme schism” (2:176). “Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from  which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage. . . . f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded: but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme. But if they desist, fight none except the evil-doers”(2:190–93). “Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. God knows, but you know not” (2:216). “They will not cease to fight against you until they force you to renounce your faith—if they are able. But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to nothing in this world and in the world to come. Such men shall be the tenants of Hell, wherein they shall abide forever. Those that have embraced the Faith, and those that have fled their land and fought for the cause of God, may hope for God’s mercy” (2:217–18). “God does not guide the evil-doers” (2:258). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (2:264). “The evil-doers shall have none to help them” (2:270). “God gives guidance to whom He will” (2:272).

Those that deny God’s revelations shall be sternly punished; God is mighty and capable of revenge” (3:5). “As for the unbelievers, neither their riches nor their children will in the least save them from God’s judgment. They shall become fuel for the Fire” (3:10). “Say to the unbelievers: ‘You shall be overthrown and driven into Hell—an evil resting place!’” (3:12). “The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam. . . . He that denies God’s revelations should know that swift is God’s reckoning” (3:19). “Let the believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful—he that does this has nothing to hope for from God—except in self-defense” (3:28). “Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred which their breasts conceal” (3:118). “If you have suffered a defeat, so did the enemy. We alternate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you (God does not  love the evil-doers); and that God may test the faithful and annihilate the infidels” (3:140). 

“Believers, if you yield to the infidels they will drag you back to unbelief and you will return headlong to perdition. . . . We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. . . . The Fire shall be their home” (3:149–51). “Believers, do not follow the example of the infidels, who say of their brothers when they meet death abroad or in battle: ‘Had they stayed with us they would not have died, nor would they have been killed.’ God will cause them to regret their words. . . . If you should die or be slain in the cause of God,  God’s forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all the riches they amass” (3:156). “Never think that those who were slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord; pleased with His gifts and rejoicing that those they left behind, who have not yet joined them, have nothing to fear or to regret; rejoicing in God’s grace and bounty. God will not deny the faithful their reward” (3:169). “Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful punishment awaits them” (3:178). “Those that suffered persecution for My sake and fought and were slain: I shall forgive them their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running streams, as a reward from God; God holds the richest recompense. Do not be deceived by the fortunes of the unbelievers in the land. Their prosperity is brief. Hell shall be their home, a dismal resting place” (3:195–96).

“God has cursed them in their unbelief” (4:46). “God will not forgive those who serve other gods besides Him; but He will forgive whom He will for other sins. He that serves other gods besides God is guilty of a heinous sin. . . . Consider those to whom a portion of the Scriptures was given. They believe in idols and false gods and say of the infidels: ‘These are better guided than the believers’” (4:50–51). “Those that deny Our revelation We will burn in fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than We shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge. God is mighty and wise” (4:55–56).

“Believers, do not seek the friendship of the infidels and those who were given the Book before you, who have made of your religion a jest and a pastime” (5:57). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbelief of many among them. We have stirred among them enmity and hatred, which will endure till the Day of Resurrection” (5:65). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (5:67). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbelief of many among them. But do not grieve for the unbelievers” (5:69). “You see many among them making friends with unbelievers. Evil is that to which their souls prompt them. They have incurred the wrath of God and shall endure eternal torment. . . . You will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans, and that the nearest in affection to them are those who say: ‘We are Christians’” (5:80–82). “[T]hose that disbelieve and deny Our revelations shall become the inmates of Hell” (5:86).

“[T]hey deny the truth when it is declared to them: but they shall learn the consequences of their scorn” (6:5). “We had made them more powerful in the land than yourselves [the Meccans], sent down for them abundant water from the sky and gave them rivers that rolled at their feet. Yet because they sinned We destroyed them all and raised up other generations after them. If We sent down to you a Book inscribed on real parchment and they touched it with their own hands, the unbelievers would still assert: ‘This is but plain sorcery.’ They ask: ‘Why has no angel been sent down to him [Muhammad]?’ If We had sent down an angel, their fate would have been sealed and they would have never been reprieved” (6:5–8). “Who is more wicked than the man who invents falsehoods about God or denies His revelations?” (6:21). “Some of them listen to you. But We have cast veils over their hearts and made them hard of hearing lest they understand your words. They will believe in none of Our signs, even if they see them one and all. When they come to argue with you the unbelievers say: ‘This is nothing but old fictitious tales.’ They forbid it and depart from it. They ruin none but themselves, though they do not perceive it. If you could see them when they are set before the Fire! They will say: ‘Would that we could return! Then we would not deny the revelations of our Lord and would be true believers’ (6:23–27). “But if they were sent back, they would return to that which they have been forbidden. They are liars all” (6:29). “Had God pleased He would have given them guidance, one and all” (6:35).

“Deaf and dumb are those that deny Our revelations: they blunder about in darkness. God confounds whom He will, and guides to a straight path whom He pleases.” (6:39) “[T]heir hearts were hardened, and Satan made their deeds seem fair to them. And when they had clean forgotten Our admonition We granted them all that they desired; but just as they were rejoicing in what they were given, We suddenly smote them and they were plunged into utter despair. Thus were the evil-doers annihilated. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe!” (6:43–45). “[T]hose that deny Our revelations shall be punished for their misdeeds” (6:49). “Such are those that are damned by their own sins. They shall drink scalding water and be sternly punished for their unbelief” (6:70). “Could you but see the wrongdoers when death overwhelms them! With hands out-stretched, the angels will say: ‘Yield up your souls. You shall be rewarded with the scourge of shame this day, for you have said of God what is untrue and scorned His revelations” (6:93). 

“Avoid the pagans. Had God pleased, they would not have worshipped idols. . . . We will turn away their hearts and eyes from the Truth since they refused to believe in it at first. We will let them blunder about in their wrongdoing. If We sent the angels down to them, and caused the dead to speak to them, . . . and ranged all things in front of them, they would still not believe, unless God willed otherwise. . . . Thus have We assigned for every prophet an enemy: the devils among men and jinn, who inspire each other with vain and varnished false- hoods. But had your Lord pleased, they would not have done so. Therefore leave them to their own inventions, so that the hearts of those who have no faith in the life to come may be inclined to what they say and, being pleased, persist in their sinful ways” (6:107–12). “The devils will teach their votaries to argue with you. If you obey them you shall yourselves become idolaters. . . . God will humiliate the transgressors and mete out to them a grievous punishment for their scheming” (6:121–25). “If God wills to guide a man, He opens his bosom to Islam. But if he pleases to confound him, He makes his bosom small and narrow as though he were climbing up to heaven. Thus shall God lay the scourge on the unbelievers” (6:125).

John K Clark


Samiya Illias

unread,
May 24, 2019, 11:51:52 AM5/24/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
The Quran, Surah az-Zumar, ayaat 53-67
39:53 Say, "O My servants who have transgressed against themselves [by sinning], do not despair of the mercy of Allah . Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful."
39:54 
And return [in repentance] to your Lord and submit to Him before the punishment comes upon you; then you will not be helped.
39:55 And follow the best of what was revealed to you from your Lord before the punishment comes upon you suddenly while you do not perceive,
39:56 Lest a soul should say, "Oh [how great is] my regret over what I neglected in regard to Allah and that I was among the mockers."
39:57 Or [lest] it say, "If only Allah had guided me, I would have been among the righteous."
39:58 Or [lest] it say when it sees the punishment, "If only I had another turn so I could be among the doers of good."
39:59 But yes, there had come to you My verses, but you denied them and were arrogant, and you were among the disbelievers.
39:60 And on the Day of Resurrection you will see those who lied about Allah [with] their faces blackened. Is there not in Hell a residence for the arrogant?
39:61 And Allah will save those who feared Him by their attainment; no evil will touch them, nor will they grieve.
39:62 Allah is the Creator of all things, and He is, over all things, Disposer of affairs.
39:63 To Him belong the keys of the heavens and the earth. And they who disbelieve in the verses of Allah - it is those who are the losers.
39:64 Say, [O Muhammad], "Is it other than Allah that you order me to worship, O ignorant ones?"
39:65 And it was already revealed to you and to those before you that if you should associate [anything] with Allah , your work would surely become worthless, and you would surely be among the losers."
39:66 Rather, worship [only] Allah and be among the grateful.
39:67 They have not appraised Allah with true appraisal, while the earth entirely will be [within] His grip on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens will be folded in His right hand. Exalted is He and high above what they associate with Him.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

John Clark

unread,
May 24, 2019, 12:31:03 PM5/24/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 11:51 AM Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

>The Quran:
And on the Day of Resurrection you will see those who lied about Allah [with] their faces blackened. Is there not in Hell a residence for the arrogant?

And that is why I say Allah as depicted in the Quran is far more evil than Satan as depicted in the Quran as Satan never came close to doing anything as evil as fiendishly torturing somebody for an infinite number of years. You'd expect a perfect being would be more moral than me but even I wouldn't do that, not even to a unrepentant Hitler. In fact if I were omnipotent (as Allah claims to be) on the very day I created the universe I would also create a law of physics that would make suffering of that magnitude flat out impossible.  

 John K Clark

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
May 24, 2019, 9:34:16 PM5/24/19
to Everything List
These passages you quote are thick. In fact reading the Koran became a chore out of shear boredom with this. It is not so much horrifying, but damned soporific. There are pages after page of this sort of thing, some with descriptions of the various torments. Religion largely exists as a way to control people and society. Orwell in his treatise on the social-psychology of authoritarian and totalitarian power made this very clear; the police that controls people are in their heads with thought-crime and crime-stop. This treatise was written in fictional form titled 1984.In religion sin and the fear of consequences of this are thought-crime and crime-stop. 

LC

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 6:31:57 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 23 May 2019, at 20:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/23/2019 10:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> That is the original sense of “god” by those who invented theology, from which they extracted physics and mathematics as competing theory about the fundamental reality (to simplify things a little bit).
>
> Those who invented theology observed many events that affected their lives and which involved forces beyond their control and comprehension: disease, storms, earthquakes, famine, volcanoes,... So just as they attributed the actions of their acquaintances to inner emotions reflecting their own, they attributed these forces to spirits, inner agents, that acted out of passion and which could be placated as one would placate an angry human.

I agree. That’s how naive theology is done at the popular level. But with Pythagorus and Plato, the reflection get much deeper, is the god-like notion of agent is no more invoked, except in allegorical ways.



> For them there was not the distinction that came later between religion, magic, and science.

Indeed. The doctor were shaman, religion was still science, even if very naïve at the beginning, notably with the quasi instinctive feeling that the physical reality is a given. Plato is the guy who took some distance from this. Aristotle is the guy who came back to this.



> As science, beginning with Thales of Miletus, rejected the idea a agency behind events it was split from religion and magic.

OK.


> The failure of magic to provide control resulted in religion largely rejecting it and instead claiming that the god(s) demanded various moral behaviors favorable to a priesthood and control by leaders, and could not be manipulated and controlled by magic.

The problem is that the institutionalised religion have confused magic and the mystical experience, which is the true origin of religion, to begin with consciousness. The other problem is that when theology has been separated from since, not only magic and mystical experience have discouraged (to sy the least), but Reason has been forbidden too, leading to the obscurantist era (in 529, when the neoplatonist will escape in the Middle-east, making science surviving there (the golden Islamic era) to eventually dssaper there too after 1248, where the neoplatonist idea will comes in Europa leading to the Renaissance, yet still not really transformed, as the fundamental science per-definition is still in the and of the pseudo-religious people of the inset-itutionalized religion and academies.

Bruno




>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/8a798113-26af-cec1-af70-a98952c5bd6a%40verizon.net.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 6:42:53 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 24 May 2019, at 00:37, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, May 22, 2019 at 12:35:39 AM UTC-5, Samiya wrote:
I have just read several messages on various threads in this list about God. I really don't know which one to answer to, nor do I wish to debate the subject. It is God to choose and guide whoever He wills; I can only keep my duty by sharing the ayaat of The Quran and the knowledge I learn therefrom. This page contains links to various aspects of God, which are being theorised in your various posts: matter, energy, consciousness, soul, etc. 

There are similar ideas in Christianity. God chooses who is to have paradise, which raises a curious conundrum. If there are those not chosen and they die eternally or suffer in flames eternally then it means God has effectively selected them for that fate. If this is the case then ultimately God creates many humans just so they can suffer eternally. Such a God makes Adolf Hitler look benevolent by comparison.

I read a translation of the Koran right after the 9/11 attacks. It is heavily marinated with eschatology with flames and suffering. In fact it is far more than what exists in the New Testament, which itself is pretty threatening along these lines.

A related issue, say with whether God is good, was discussed between Socrates and Euthyphro 4 centuries before Christianity and 1000 years before Islam. The question is whether God is good because he is inherently so and has no choice in matter, or whether God is good because He chooses that. In the first case this is a limitation on God's free will, which limits his omnipotence. In the second case if God has the choice to be good, then what is good, ethically right or morally pure is something outside of God and thus God is not omnipresent with all things. 

OK.


In fact this sort of thing is the type of paradox that always emerges with the matter of God. God is then an infinite unknowable and anything we try to define as God or to label as His character runs into contradictions.  For this reason the topic is not appropriate for science or a related subject where proof, evidence, measurement and empiricism are used.

That is the mistake. When discovering that Earth is not flat was also considered as a contradiction, but in science, we never abandon a concept because it leads to a contradiction: we improve the theory, we change the concept, keeping the most of it, but attempting to make it coherent. There are always problem with the notion of “all” (like, the set of all sets cannot be set, the Number of the numbers cannot be a number (Plotinus), etc.). 





The Torah, Tanach and to a degree as I understand the Christian New Testament are mythic narratives meant to bring meaning to various aspects of inner mental space or psychology. I am not sure about the Koran, maybe there are similar currents. While we can't disprove the existence of God, we can illustrate how certain ideas about God do not match a scientific understanding of the world.

God exists by definition for the ancient greeks. The question was “could God be the physical universe” or is God something else responsible for the (only apparent perhaps) physical universe. For some Platonist, like Xeusippes, the question was almost the question “is physics or mathematics” the fundamental science?”.




Also much of these things involve magical thinking.


OK. But with mechanism, the concept of “ontological real matter” becomes magical thinking, like the Vitalism of the biologist some century ago.

The problem of not letting theology in science is that it confines it in tradition which will opposed science and religion, leading to a social schizophrenia.



Jesus turning water into wine is really much the same idea as Cinderella's fairy godmother turning mice and a pumpkin into a carriage drawn by a team of horses. It's magical thinking.

It is myth and legend. It is “religion” for the maternal level, in which “politicians” confined it, so as to be able to take control on people, and usually steal their money. It is anti-religious, and anti-science.

Religion is the only goal,
Science is the only mean.

Bruno




LC 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 6:52:43 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
With Mechanism, the infinite disembodied entity that creates and controls everything is what the logician call “the standard model of arithmetic”, which is the same thing as the arithmetic taught in high school.

Personally I think that christianity has ended in 529, going from the open dialog to pure argument per-authority. The same for Islam, as a genuine religion, it ceased to exist after 1248, for similar reason. 
Maimonides seems to have helped the jews to not fall in christian and Muslim traps, although the Orthodox Jews does it, but without the felt necessity to impose this to non-jews. 

Note, that christians and muslims have kept a bit of their initial platonism, and have sub school or internal dissident at all period, trying to get back to reason.

When the anglican theologian tried to bring back reason in theology, notably on the trinitarian/unionist problem, they created mathematical logic. (Cf the book by Daniel J. Cohen)

Bruno




LC

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 7:15:35 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 24 May 2019, at 04:27, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 23-May-2019, at 10:20 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>>
>> You said that you did not want to debate. I read all your post, and reply long ago explains what I am not convinced, and why I think it departs from the sort of truth consistent with my working assumption.
>
> Yes, you do respond to posts on this list. What I meant to write was that you haven’t read my blogposts, since I do refer to The Bible in a number of my blogposts. It is an article of faith to believe that just like The Quran, prior scriptures have also been revealed by Allah for guidance.

Which is a bit annoying, unless the texts are not taken literally, and that we do some historical/psychological cleaning of them.



>
>>
>> I think we have agreed on where we disagree, but I am open to discuss this further. But your post seems to reflect more Al Ghazali than Averroes (Ibn Rushd). If I am wrong on this, please correct me. To sum up the difference, the difference is in between submitting text to reason (and thus comparison), Avrroès, instead of submitting Reason to Text (Al Ghazali, which leads to literalism, which leads to conflicts).
>
> I believe that the God who created me and granted me the ability to speak and express my self is capable of expressing and communicating perfectly, and thus the scriptures must be taken literally.

That’s the problem. When Islam did not taken its Text literally, the muslims were rich both “materially” and “spitulaly” and they were so open that they translated the greeks and did the best science ever, which stopped when Al Ghazali declared that Reason must be subservient to the Text, a bit like the modern “Muslim Brotherhood” have developed a model of democracy subservient to Islam, but that does not make much sense.

Literalism in religion leads to atheism, which will usually take the last religion for granted, like today most atheist are believer in the metaphysical Aristotelian conception of reality. Then, they act like priest when science contradicts them, like the Church with Copernicus or Giordano Bruno.



>
> I’m delightfully pleased with the factual accuracy of The Quran and share my learnings in over a hundred blogposts.

Psychology explains that factual accuracy can even been found with random text, when people are pushed to believe the text makes some sense.

Even the arithmetical proposition gives problem of interpretation.

Then when you take the gospel or the Quran literally, antisemtisme and the hate of the homosexuals, and the jews, if not the killing of those people, is not very far.

I tell you frankly that from my personal reading of the Quran, I even doubt it has been written by the same people. I can appreciate the first half, but the second half seems hateful. The numerous radical muslim groups use this in their discourse of hate.

Litteralism automatically makes you like asserting “I know the truth”. It is embarrassing for people having other Text.



>
> I have neither read Avrroes nor Al Ghazali. You can draw parallels if you wish.

The parallel is that I am close to Averroes and Maimonides who criticise literalism in religion, and suggest to use only science, to get better and better non literal understanding of the theological ideas which might be in the Text. It points on what is common, and non trivial, in all religions. It proceeds like in the axiomatic way in science. It can be improved. You seems closer to Al Ghazali, who has reshaped Islam by enforcing the literal reading of the text, which has led the Middle-east to follow the same darkness than the christian after their religion has been enrolled in “politics”, for special lucrative interest.

To mix religion and state, or the spiritual with the terrestrial, seems tp me to be already blasphemous.

Bruno




>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/92503E6D-DAA2-45E9-8F94-27B1B559E52B%40gmail.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 7:19:13 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
From a (neo)platonic perspective, atheism is a slight variant of Christianity:
- same conception of the creator (and interdiction to improve the notion) than the christian, even if it is just to deny its existence.
- same conception of the creation (a well defined reality made of stuff).

Bruno




Protestantism (in the US) today is split: A collection of (sometimes) church-going virtually-atheist liberals, and the Republican Party.

@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 27, 2019, 7:27:30 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 25 May 2019, at 03:34, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

These passages you quote are thick. In fact reading the Koran became a chore out of shear boredom with this. It is not so much horrifying, but damned soporific. There are pages after page of this sort of thing, some with descriptions of the various torments. Religion largely exists as a way to control people and society.

It becomes like that when it is institutionalised and sacralised, with not new comments allowed (unlike the taoist and the jews). It is not much the institutionalisation, but the use of argument per authority, and that is made possible when we separate religion and science. Religion is just the search of truth, with the understanding that is big, which leads to modesty and the listening of all theories, and the discussion, etc.

When someone claim he knows the truth, it becomes a tool to exploit fear through argument of violence.

To claim that someone will go to hell if it does not obey to some humans (cling to represent God) is the worst act of terrorism possible.

The love of god comes from the personal heart, never through order or command. 





Orwell in his treatise on the social-psychology of authoritarian and totalitarian power made this very clear; the police that controls people are in their heads with thought-crime and crime-stop. This treatise was written in fictional form titled 1984.In religion sin and the fear of consequences of this are thought-crime and crime-stop. 


Yes, Orwell is vey lucid on all of this.


Bruno



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

John Clark

unread,
May 27, 2019, 8:20:13 AM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 7:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> From a (neo)platonic perspective, atheism is a slight variant of Christianity:

I see. So according to the (neo) platonic perspective a philosophy that says there is no God is just a slight variant of a philosophy that says Jesus is the son of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient and created the universe and became furious with the entire human race because one if its members ate an apple even after being specifically instructed not to and even though He is omnipotent the only way He could forgive the humans is if they slowly tortured His son to death.

And thus after examining all the statistically significant evidence in the matter I can conclude with considerable confidence that the (neo) platonic perspective is as dumb as dog shit. And I hypothesize that is the reason the (neo) platonic perspective has not advanced a nanometer in 2500 years.

 John K Clark

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 27, 2019, 1:39:57 PM5/27/19
to Everything List


On Monday, May 27, 2019 at 6:19:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 24 May 2019, at 09:56, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:


The advantage for being raised Protestant is that the only next step is atheism - the ultimate Protestantism.

From a (neo)platonic perspective, atheism is a slight variant of Christianity:
- same conception of the creator (and interdiction to improve the notion) than the christian, even if it is just to deny its existence.
- same conception of the creation (a well defined reality made of stuff).

Bruno



Recent writers have revealed Thomas Aquinas to be a materialist.


Denys Turner’s exciting new reading of Thomas Aquinas emphasizes what he provocatively calls Thomas’s materialism, his insistence that matter bears meaning. 

Perhaps surprisingly closer to what Strawson calls "real" materialism, vs. the mockery the "physicalists" have made of it.


@philipthrift 

spudb...@aol.com

unread,
May 27, 2019, 4:56:16 PM5/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
This, somehow makes me hungry for apples.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 28, 2019, 3:38:58 AM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 27 May 2019, at 14:19, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 7:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> From a (neo)platonic perspective, atheism is a slight variant of Christianity:

I see. So according to the (neo) platonic perspective a philosophy that says there is no God


You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist, which might not believe in the God “matter”.

Neoplatonist are usually “atheist” with respect to physicalism, or with respect to the idea that the physical reality is at the origin of the other (psychological) realities.

I remind you that we have define “God” by whatever is responsible for our conscious experience. The atheist and post-529 christians are believer in the “second God of Aristotle” i.e. a primitively material universe, or a primitively physical universe.




is just a slight variant of a philosophy that says Jesus is the son of a God

Not all christians interpret this literally, but most christians and most atheists believe that the physical reality as a primitively ontological reality.



who is omnipotent and omniscient and created the universe and became furious with the entire human race because one if its members ate an apple even after being specifically instructed not to and even though He is omnipotent the only way He could forgive the humans is if they slowly tortured His son to death.

And thus after examining all the statistically significant evidence in the matter I can conclude with considerable confidence that the (neo) platonic perspective is as dumb as dog shit. And I hypothesize that is the reason the (neo) platonic perspective has not advanced a nanometer in 2500 years.


Neoplatonism has given all sciences. When it has been forbidden in Occident after 529, it has escape in the Middle East, where the progress has continued up to 1248, where Islam fell in the same trap than the christians (the pre-eminence of the texts on reason). Neoplantonism will escape back in Occident where it will lead to the Renaissance, and enacted again the judo-islmo-greek sciences, except for theology which is still in the hand of the pseudo-religion which used the argument per-authority.

I have discover that in all place and time when neoplatonism was the mainstream metaphysics, the place were prosper, peaceful and science made big progresses.

Bruno




 John K Clark


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 28, 2019, 3:41:35 AM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
The universal machine explains already that all machine invoking word like “God”, “Truth” “Real” are con artist.

And that rings as rather plausible to me.

Bruno 





@philipthrift 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

John Clark

unread,
May 28, 2019, 7:56:21 AM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 3:38 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 27 May 2019, at 14:19, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 7:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:


I see. So according to the (neo) platonic perspective a philosophy that says there is no God is just a slight variant of a philosophy that says Jesus is the son of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient and created the universe and became furious with the entire human race because one if its members ate an apple even after being specifically instructed not to and even though He is omnipotent the only way He could forgive the humans is if they slowly tortured His son to death.
You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist,

If so then I can conclude with considerable confidence that the neoplatonist are as dumb as dog shit for thinking they have made a great philosophical discovery by abandoning the idea of God but not the ASCII sequence G-O-D.


> Neoplatonism has given all sciences. When it has been forbidden in Occident after 529, it has escape in the Middle East, where the progress has continued up to 1248, where Islam fell in the same trap than the christians  [...] I have discover that in all place and time when neoplatonism was the mainstream metaphysics, the place were prosper, peaceful and science made big progresses.


Before about 1248 dead Greek philosophers had a iron grip on the thoughts of European thinkers. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages.  About 1248 Roger Bacon made the first modest steps toward the scientific mething and slightly loosened the stranglehold on imagination and creativity that dead Greek Philosophers had held for a thousand years. This period is sometimes called the Renaissance.

John K Clark

Telmo Menezes

unread,
May 28, 2019, 8:12:27 AM5/28/19
to 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List


On Tue, May 28, 2019, at 13:56, John Clark wrote:


On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 3:38 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 27 May 2019, at 14:19, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 7:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:


I see. So according to the (neo) platonic perspective a philosophy that says there is no God is just a slight variant of a philosophy that says Jesus is the son of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient and created the universe and became furious with the entire human race because one if its members ate an apple even after being specifically instructed not to and even though He is omnipotent the only way He could forgive the humans is if they slowly tortured His son to death.
You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist,

If so then I can conclude with considerable confidence that the neoplatonist are as dumb as dog shit for thinking they have made a great philosophical discovery by abandoning the idea of God but not the ASCII sequence G-O-D.

You should upgrade this quip to Unicode, nobody uses ASCII anymore...

Telmo.



> Neoplatonism has given all sciences. When it has been forbidden in Occident after 529, it has escape in the Middle East, where the progress has continued up to 1248, where Islam fell in the same trap than the christians  [...] I have discover that in all place and time when neoplatonism was the mainstream metaphysics, the place were prosper, peaceful and science made big progresses.


Before about 1248 dead Greek philosophers had a iron grip on the thoughts of European thinkers. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages.  About 1248 Roger Bacon made the first modest steps toward the scientific mething and slightly loosened the stranglehold on imagination and creativity that dead Greek Philosophers had held for a thousand years. This period is sometimes called the Renaissance.

John K Clark


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 28, 2019, 3:59:11 PM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/28/2019 12:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist, which
> might not believe in the God “matter”.
>
> Neoplatonist are usually “atheist” with respect to physicalism, or
> with respect to the idea that the physical reality is at the origin of
> the other (psychological) realities.
>
> I remind you that we have define “God” by whatever is responsible for
> our conscious experience. The atheist and post-529 christians are
> believer in the “second God of Aristotle” i.e. a primitively material
> universe, or a primitively physical universe.

I'm reminded of a quip by Bertrand Russell:

“People are more unwilling to give up the word ‘God’ than to give up the
idea for which the word has hitherto stood”

Brent


Brent Meeker

unread,
May 28, 2019, 4:00:20 PM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/28/2019 12:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> The universal machine explains already that all machine invoking word
> like “God”, “Truth” “Real” are con artist.
>
> And that rings as rather plausible to me.
>
> Bruno

Strange remark for someone who invokes arithmetical realism and claims
that it is God.

Brent

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 28, 2019, 5:38:25 PM5/28/19
to Everything List
Where God and Karma are sort of the same thing:


In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle particles of matter that pervade the entire universe. Karmas are attracted to the karmic field of a soul due to vibrations created by activities of mind, speech, and body as well as various mental dispositions. Hence the karmas are the subtle matter surrounding the consciousness of a soul. When these two components (consciousness and karma) interact, we experience the life we know at present.

@philipthrift 

Samiya Illias

unread,
May 28, 2019, 11:24:18 PM5/28/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
image1.jpeg
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 29, 2019, 6:22:23 AM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 28 May 2019, at 13:55, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 3:38 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 27 May 2019, at 14:19, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 7:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:


I see. So according to the (neo) platonic perspective a philosophy that says there is no God is just a slight variant of a philosophy that says Jesus is the son of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient and created the universe and became furious with the entire human race because one if its members ate an apple even after being specifically instructed not to and even though He is omnipotent the only way He could forgive the humans is if they slowly tortured His son to death.
You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist,

If so then I can conclude with considerable confidence that the neoplatonist are as dumb as dog shit for thinking they have made a great philosophical discovery by abandoning the idea of God but not the ASCII sequence G-O-D.

They did, actually. The official term for the Neoplatonist is the ONE. It is reflects the monist idea in the fundamental science. Then they discuss the nature of this One, and Plotinus already explained why it is not among the being (like the taoist, when they say that what is responsible for the being cannot be a being, and this is akin to Cantor’s idea, and followers, that the set of all sets cannot be a set, like Plotinus explains that the Number of the numbers is not a number). 





> Neoplatonism has given all sciences. When it has been forbidden in Occident after 529, it has escape in the Middle East, where the progress has continued up to 1248, where Islam fell in the same trap than the christians  [...] I have discover that in all place and time when neoplatonism was the mainstream metaphysics, the place were prosper, peaceful and science made big progresses.


Before about 1248 dead Greek philosophers had a iron grip on the thoughts of European thinkers. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages. 

?



About 1248 Roger Bacon made the first modest steps toward the scientific mething and slightly loosened the stranglehold on imagination and creativity that dead Greek Philosophers had held for a thousand years. This period is sometimes called the Renaissance.

?

Renaissance is when the translation of the greek philosophers came in Europa, after neoplatonism was made illegal (so to speak) in the Middle-east.

By mocking the idea to let theology come back to reason, you defend the statu quo in religion, the ambiant relativisme, and, de facto, the institutionalised charlatanry in the domain.

Bruno

<<I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who---in their grudge against the traditional "opium for people"---cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and humans aims.>>
(Einstein, See the book by Max Jammer on "Einstein and Religion", page 97).



John K Clark


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 29, 2019, 6:26:37 AM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Yes, but the first meaning in God in the serious literature was “whatever” is at the origin of Reality. In this list we have certainly given up the idea that we have the answer, or even that if such answer exists, it can be communicate with certainty.

Those who keep the idea and the term are those who defends the dogma, even when it is just to criticise it.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/4101cc1d-0a3f-33ab-912d-bbf6e3f2f2c1%40verizon.net.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 29, 2019, 6:29:14 AM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Assuming mechanism, including admitting that mechanism cannot be proved and required an act of faith, and using the neoplatonist standard definitions. Then, that is justified as being a part of G* \ G, so indeed, I was close to the theological trap. But I did not fall in it, by insisting that it requires some faith, and explains that a doctor who would claim “we know that we are machine” is indeed a con artist.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d70a40db-0ec9-8286-a1e1-a8e56e06d0fd%40verizon.net.

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 29, 2019, 2:29:33 PM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/29/2019 3:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 28 May 2019, at 21:59, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5/28/2019 12:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist, which might not believe in the God “matter”.
>>>
>>> Neoplatonist are usually “atheist” with respect to physicalism, or with respect to the idea that the physical reality is at the origin of the other (psychological) realities.
>>>
>>> I remind you that we have define “God” by whatever is responsible for our conscious experience. The atheist and post-529 christians are believer in the “second God of Aristotle” i.e. a primitively material universe, or a primitively physical universe.
>> I'm reminded of a quip by Bertrand Russell:
>>
>> “People are more unwilling to give up the word ‘God’ than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood”
> Yes, but the first meaning in God in the serious literature

That is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.  It is imposing your view that
literature is not "serious" unless it comports with your view...even
though your view is an esoteric one not shared by the billions of people
who pray and worship the God of their ancestors. You propose to steal
their work "God" because...why?, you want to borrow the awe and
authority wielded by a priesthood?  And don't tell me you are using it
in the original meaning.  God was given a meaning many thousands of
years before Plato and it meant a supernatural human-like agent:
Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu,
An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares,
Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian,
Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi,
Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh,
Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou,
Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis,
Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli,
Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?

Brent

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 29, 2019, 2:32:01 PM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/29/2019 3:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 28 May 2019, at 22:00, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5/28/2019 12:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> The universal machine explains already that all machine invoking word like “God”, “Truth” “Real” are con artist.
>>>
>>> And that rings as rather plausible to me.
>>>
>>> Bruno
>> Strange remark for someone who invokes arithmetical realism and claims that it is God.
> Assuming mechanism, including admitting that mechanism cannot be proved and required an act of faith, and using the neoplatonist standard definitions. Then, that is justified as being a part of G* \ G, so indeed, I was close to the theological trap. But I did not fall in it, by insisting that it requires some faith, and explains that a doctor who would claim “we know that we are machine” is indeed a con artist.

Everyone who promotes belief in a reality and a God says that it
requires an act of faith.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 30, 2019, 2:47:44 AM5/30/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 29 May 2019, at 20:29, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/29/2019 3:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 28 May 2019, at 21:59, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/28/2019 12:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> You need to use the word “god” in the sense of the neoplatonist, which might not believe in the God “matter”.
>>>>
>>>> Neoplatonist are usually “atheist” with respect to physicalism, or with respect to the idea that the physical reality is at the origin of the other (psychological) realities.
>>>>
>>>> I remind you that we have define “God” by whatever is responsible for our conscious experience. The atheist and post-529 christians are believer in the “second God of Aristotle” i.e. a primitively material universe, or a primitively physical universe.
>>> I'm reminded of a quip by Bertrand Russell:
>>>
>>> “People are more unwilling to give up the word ‘God’ than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood”
>> Yes, but the first meaning in God in the serious literature
>
> That is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. It is imposing your view that literature is not "serious" unless it comports with your view..


Come on Brent, here it is a remind that there has been one millenium of serious theology, by which I mean “not using any argument per authority, and that such kind of endeavour has been forbidden (to say the least) once theology has become “the opium of the people”, and the so called pagan theologian have been persecuted and will escape in the Middle-Age, and be at the origin of "the golden age of Islam” until 1248, when it will again be forbidden, and the neoplatonist will escape again in Europa, where it will lead to the Renaissance (the partial Renaissance, as the natural philosophies came back to the academy, but not theology which remained until now in the hand of the argument per authority.

Plato is my view, not Aristotle, so seriousness has nothing to do with my view, which remained a minority for most of the time. But even when and where Aristotle “won”, the scientific attitude was back.




> .even though your view is an esoteric one not shared by the billions of people who pray and worship the God of their ancestors.

Only a minority of Platonist ever defended the Theurgy (with possible rites). Actually I know only Porphyry to have been inspired by the Christians on this (despite he is also the one writing a treatise “Against the Christians” which unfortunately has been lost.

Why, because contrary to what you say, there is no esoterisme in neoplatonism, except in its secret version when they were too much persecuted.



> You propose to steal their work "God" because...why?, you want to borrow the awe and authority wielded by a priesthood?

Of course not, and you know that. The reason is Plato’s definition of God: the Ultimate Fundamental Reality that we search, with the insight that it is above us, transcendental, a bit like Cantor universe of set in ZF or NBG.
It is the same use as the God of the philosopher, like in Spinoza, but I have an entire book entitled “The God of the Philosophers” which mention all the notion of God (that very word) in the writing of laïc.



> And don't tell me you are using it in the original meaning. God was given a meaning many thousands of years before Plato

OK. But I use the original sense of those who have study theology with the scientific attitude, with the level of rigour permitted by their time, of course.

Then I have explained how both mathematics and physics, as systematic science is born there, and how and why in the 18th and 19th century, such kind of theology came back for a short period and led to Mathematical Logic.

Only atheists insist to use “God” in the sense of the Christian (and only Aristotelian among them, where indeed materialism has been *the* dogma).

You confirm, like many, that the atheists "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”, to quote Einstein.



> and it meant a supernatural human-like agent: Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?


I will ask you to use the word “Earth” for a Flat object on which the human stand up.

You know, for many years I have been mocked because I dare to use the words “consciousness”, “mind”, etc.

To attack a theorem in applied mathematics to the mind-body problem with vocabularies consideration is just not valid.

The fact that atheists are the only one doing that shows how much they have not evolved, and that they are more radical in Chirstianity than most intellectual Christians.

Bruno




>
> Brent
>
>> was “whatever” is at the origin of Reality. In this list we have certainly given up the idea that we have the answer, or even that if such answer exists, it can be communicate with certainty.
>>
>> Those who keep the idea and the term are those who defends the dogma, even when it is just to criticise it.
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>>
>>> Brent
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
>>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/4101cc1d-0a3f-33ab-912d-bbf6e3f2f2c1%40verizon.net.
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/c446f177-5d0f-dc57-bcd6-a9f526ca6815%40verizon.net.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 30, 2019, 3:02:05 AM5/30/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 29 May 2019, at 20:31, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/29/2019 3:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 28 May 2019, at 22:00, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/28/2019 12:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> The universal machine explains already that all machine invoking word like “God”, “Truth” “Real” are con artist.
>>>>
>>>> And that rings as rather plausible to me.
>>>>
>>>> Bruno
>>> Strange remark for someone who invokes arithmetical realism and claims that it is God.
>> Assuming mechanism, including admitting that mechanism cannot be proved and required an act of faith, and using the neoplatonist standard definitions. Then, that is justified as being a part of G* \ G, so indeed, I was close to the theological trap. But I did not fall in it, by insisting that it requires some faith, and explains that a doctor who would claim “we know that we are machine” is indeed a con artist.
>
> Everyone who promotes belief in a reality and a God says that it requires an act of faith.

A Reality and/or a God.

Yes, and with Gödel theorems we have an explanation (perhaps wrong, but well motivated when we assume mechanism), which is that not machine (identified by its set of rational believable propositions) can prove its semantics, or can prove that it has a model (equivalent by Gödel’s completeness theorem).

Yes, God is defined by <whatever is at the origin of what we experience>, it is the fundamental reality, and by incompleteness we cannot prove the existence of such a reality (if it is rich enough to encompass the behaviour of the machine).

That explains why when a machine (Löbian) look inward, it develop an insight into something that the machine will judge being transcendant and required an act of faith.

The other reason to use the theological vocabulary is that the theology of the machine is not something new: he was found by many neoplatonist. Read Plotinus Enneads,(translated in Arab with the title “theology of Aristotle”, actually!) or Proclus’ treatise “theology”, etc. It is plausibly not a coincidence: they were both mystic and rationalist, and they probably just introspect themselves genuinely.

Mathematicians homogeninize the concept. Even strong atheism is a theology as it claims that “there is no God”, which is a theological proposition. It does not makes sense, because they usually believe in a physical primary universe, which is just an exemple of “God” (that thing at the origin of all the rest), even if an impersonal one, like the Tao for the Chinese.

I use “theology” to remind everyone that “materialism” also requires an act of faith, and to hemp the understanding of Mechanism, which needs the “YD” act of faith, and where “YD” can be shown inconsistent if taken as an axiom in the fundamental theory (like self-consistency).

Bruno




>
> Brent
>
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>>
>>> Brent
>>>
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
>>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d70a40db-0ec9-8286-a1e1-a8e56e06d0fd%40verizon.net.
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/33848157-a2e0-64e0-6253-e3fc9144f3d4%40verizon.net.

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 30, 2019, 1:43:55 PM5/30/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/29/2019 11:47 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Only atheists insist to use “God” in the sense of the Christian (and only Aristotelian among them, where indeed materialism has been *the* dogma).

Words are for communication and so their meaning is determined by their usage.   "God" in the sense of Christians is also God in the sense of Muslims and Hindus.  So it is the usage of at least 70% of humanity.  To use it to mean something else is obfuscation.



You confirm, like many, that  the atheists "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”, to quote Einstein.



and it meant a supernatural human-like agent: Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?
I will ask you to use the word “Earth” for a Flat object on which the human stand up.

An attempted analogy that does not work.  Unlike "god", we can define Earth ostensively and so learn that it has different properties, like being spheroidal, without changing the definition.

Brent

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 30, 2019, 1:48:59 PM5/30/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/30/2019 12:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Mathematicians homogeninize the concept. Even strong atheism is a theology as it claims that “there is no God”, which is a theological proposition.

That is a misrepresentation of atheism.  Atheists claim "there is no
reason believe there is a God".

Brent
"Atheism is a belief system the way "Off" is a TV channel."
    --- George Carlin

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 31, 2019, 4:33:30 AM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 30 May 2019, at 19:43, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/29/2019 11:47 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Only atheists insist to use “God” in the sense of the Christian (and only Aristotelian among them, where indeed materialism has been *the* dogma).

Words are for communication and so their meaning is determined by their usage.   "God" in the sense of Christians is also God in the sense of Muslims and Hindus.  So it is the usage of at least 70% of humanity.  To use it to mean something else is obfuscation.


Then mathematics and science is obfuscation 100% of the time.

In science we don’t do vocabulary discussion. If you want call god “Arthur” or “Josephine”, just do it.

Then what you say does not make sense. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have always been divided between the Aristotelian conception of God and Matter and the Platonist conception of God and matter, which are totally different. The Platonic conception is not well represented because Christians and Muslims have stolen theology from science to make it into an instrument of power, and have forced the Platonicians to exil, when they have not killed them.

I think you want to please me by illustration how much atheists defend the Aristotelian Christian and Muslims materialist metaphysics. 

The God/Non-God debate looks exactly like a fake debate to make us forget that the original metaphysical question was about the fundamental existence of a primitive physical universe. The question took the form of what is more fundamental among mathematics and physics later.

I am the atheist or agnostic here: I do not believe in your God Matter. I found no evidence. My whole work show how we can test mechanism/materialism, and the test shows that Nature confirms Platonism.

I will change my mind if the physics which is in the mind of all universal machine differ from nature, but up to now, the evidences are that they fit. There is no evidence for materialism. None. It is speculating on some god to avoid science.





You confirm, like many, that  the atheists "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”, to quote Einstein.



and it meant a supernatural human-like agent: Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?
I will ask you to use the word “Earth” for a Flat object on which the human stand up.

An attempted analogy that does not work.  Unlike "god", we can define Earth ostensively and so learn that it has different properties, like being spheroidal, without changing the definition.

No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation. Similarly, even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent. The correspondence between cantor and a bishop shows that christians can have a conception of God quite similar to the neoplatonician one, still in the 19th century. Only atheists defends the fairy tale religion, I guess to just mock it.

I got problems with "atheist scientist” which are shocked by the vocabulary. For a very long period, the terms which shocked them was not God, but “consciousness” or even “mind”. That is because they confuse physics and metaphysics, and that is rather natural after 1500 years of metaphysical brainwashing.

If you have just one evidence for a physically *primitive* reality, you can show it to us. The ostensive physical reality itself is no more an evidence that physics is the fundamental science that the sharable introspection would be an evidence that reality is psychological. You need to address metaphysics with the same level of rigour than you show in physics.

Bruno 







Brent

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 31, 2019, 4:44:41 AM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 30 May 2019, at 19:48, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/30/2019 12:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> Mathematicians homogeninize the concept. Even strong atheism is a theology as it claims that “there is no God”, which is a theological proposition.
>
> That is a misrepresentation of atheism. Atheists claim "there is no reason believe there is a God”.

Yes, but they believe only in the post 529 Aristotelian-Christian notion of God.

Then I am atheist too.

But if you read the “Element of Theology” by Proclus, you can see that during a millenium, theology was a branch of scientific research. And I use “god” in that original sense.

With that definition, atheism does no more make sense or become a form of nihilism or irrationalism, as God is defined by whatever is the reason why we are here and now, and that we search.

Now, I have decided to stop using the nuance “agnostic atheism” and “non agnostic atheism”, and use instead agnosticism and atheism instead, as all self)called atheist I ahem met believes in physicalism, consciously or not, and most of them even believe that God des not exist, which is far different that not believing in God.


> Brent
> "Atheism is a belief system the way "Off" is a TV channel."
> --- George Carlin

That is what they claim in theory, but in practice that is not the case, given that they fight on all theologies, not just the christian one. They dismiss a millenium of progress in the filed (read Proclus!) and they defend exactly the same metaphysics than christians. Atheism is, in absolute value, the same as christianism, but in a radical form.

Bruno




>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/905612f9-db1d-8dca-2cf8-6b5b8e8011de%40verizon.net.

John Clark

unread,
May 31, 2019, 12:12:50 PM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 4:44 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>  if you read the “Element of Theology” by Proclus...

... then the time you spend doing that would be time you're not reading a book written by an author who, unlike Proclus, *did* know where the sun went at night.

> even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7 page 792:

"The son of God is omniscient and omnipotent knowing history in advance and being able to control its course".

John K Clark

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 31, 2019, 2:50:11 PM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/31/2019 1:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 19:43, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/29/2019 11:47 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Only atheists insist to use “God” in the sense of the Christian (and only Aristotelian among them, where indeed materialism has been *the* dogma).

Words are for communication and so their meaning is determined by their usage.   "God" in the sense of Christians is also God in the sense of Muslims and Hindus.  So it is the usage of at least 70% of humanity.  To use it to mean something else is obfuscation.


Then mathematics and science is obfuscation 100% of the time.

In science we don’t do vocabulary discussion. If you want call god “Arthur” or “Josephine”, just do it.

Then what you say does not make sense. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have always been divided between the Aristotelian conception of God and Matter and the Platonist conception of God and matter, which are totally different. The Platonic conception is not well represented because Christians and Muslims have stolen theology from science to make it into an instrument of power, and have forced the Platonicians to exil, when they have not killed them.

I think you want to please me by illustration how much atheists defend the Aristotelian Christian and Muslims materialist metaphysics. 

The God/Non-God debate looks exactly like a fake debate to make us forget that the original metaphysical question was about the fundamental existence of a primitive physical universe. The question took the form of what is more fundamental among mathematics and physics later.

I am the atheist or agnostic here: I do not believe in your God Matter. I found no evidence. My whole work show how we can test mechanism/materialism, and the test shows that Nature confirms Platonism.

I will change my mind if the physics which is in the mind of all universal machine differ from nature, but up to now, the evidences are that they fit. There is no evidence for materialism. None. It is speculating on some god to avoid science.





You confirm, like many, that  the atheists "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”, to quote Einstein.



and it meant a supernatural human-like agent: Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?
I will ask you to use the word “Earth” for a Flat object on which the human stand up.

An attempted analogy that does not work.  Unlike "god", we can define Earth ostensively and so learn that it has different properties, like being spheroidal, without changing the definition.

No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.

Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.


Similarly, even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent. The correspondence between cantor and a bishop shows that christians can have a conception of God quite similar to the neoplatonician one, still in the 19th century. Only atheists defends the fairy tale religion, I guess to just mock it.

I got problems with "atheist scientist” which are shocked by the vocabulary. For a very long period, the terms which shocked them was not God, but “consciousness” or even “mind”. That is because they confuse physics and metaphysics, and that is rather natural after 1500 years of metaphysical brainwashing.

If you have just one evidence for a physically *primitive* reality, you can show it to us.

Can you show one evidence for anything being *primitive* reality?  As you often say in other contexts, belief in a primitive reality is a matter of faith...except more cautious scientists call it an hypothesis, not a leap of faith. 

The ostensive physical reality itself is no more an evidence that physics is the fundamental science that the sharable introspection would be an evidence that reality is psychological.

You use the word "fundamental" as though it were a sacred benediction.  You don't know what is fundamental...or even if anything is fundamental.  So you are merely inventing a pseuedo-religion of physicalism in order to criticize it and pretend you are above it.

Brent

You need to address metaphysics with the same level of rigour than you show in physics.

Bruno 







Brent

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/a8585c1b-8134-bc81-59f6-145160c6bebe%40verizon.net.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 31, 2019, 3:03:28 PM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 5/31/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

      
On 30 May 2019, at 19:48, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/30/2019 12:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Mathematicians homogeninize the concept. Even strong atheism is a theology as it claims that “there is no God”, which is a theological proposition.
That is a misrepresentation of atheism.  Atheists claim "there is no reason believe there is a God”.
Yes, but they believe only in the post 529 Aristotelian-Christian notion of God.

As Bertrand Russell noted, there is no fixed meaning to "God".  It is a notion appropriated by every ideology to provide unquestionable support.


 

Then I am atheist too.

But if you read the “Element of Theology” by Proclus, you can see that during a millenium, theology was a branch of scientific research. And I use “god” in that original sense.

And what science did Proclus produce?  The efficacy of magic rituals?

Theurgy is possible because the powers of the gods (the henads) extend through their series of causation even down to the material world. And by certain power-laden words, acts, and objects, the soul can be drawn back up the series, so to speak. Proclus himself was a devotee of many of the religions in Athens, considering that the power of the gods could be present in these various approaches.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 3:16:51 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 31 May 2019, at 18:12, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 4:44 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>  if you read the “Element of Theology” by Proclus...

... then the time you spend doing that would be time you're not reading a book written by an author who, unlike Proclus, *did* know where the sun went at night.

Penrose said gross stupidity on Gödel’s theorem, but that does not make its spin networks and all its contribution if physics less interesting.

Yes, in physics, both Aristotle and Plotinus, and Proclus, have regressed, with respect to Erathostene, for example, but here we discuss theology, where you seem to have regressed to literal christianism.





> even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7 page 792:

"The son of God is omniscient and omnipotent knowing history in advance and being able to control its course”.

The Pope Jean-Paul 2 made explicit that all statement of that kind are parabola and should never been taken literally. Of course, that is debated by some catholic, bu I have still never met a christian who believe in the anything as naive. You might read the book by Jean Trouillard or Paul Valadier. You might change your mind on this, but perhaps you don’t want to change your mind.

Bruno 




John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 3:30:38 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 31 May 2019, at 20:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/31/2019 1:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 19:43, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/29/2019 11:47 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Only atheists insist to use “God” in the sense of the Christian (and only Aristotelian among them, where indeed materialism has been *the* dogma).

Words are for communication and so their meaning is determined by their usage.   "God" in the sense of Christians is also God in the sense of Muslims and Hindus.  So it is the usage of at least 70% of humanity.  To use it to mean something else is obfuscation.


Then mathematics and science is obfuscation 100% of the time.

In science we don’t do vocabulary discussion. If you want call god “Arthur” or “Josephine”, just do it.

Then what you say does not make sense. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have always been divided between the Aristotelian conception of God and Matter and the Platonist conception of God and matter, which are totally different. The Platonic conception is not well represented because Christians and Muslims have stolen theology from science to make it into an instrument of power, and have forced the Platonicians to exil, when they have not killed them.

I think you want to please me by illustration how much atheists defend the Aristotelian Christian and Muslims materialist metaphysics. 

The God/Non-God debate looks exactly like a fake debate to make us forget that the original metaphysical question was about the fundamental existence of a primitive physical universe. The question took the form of what is more fundamental among mathematics and physics later.

I am the atheist or agnostic here: I do not believe in your God Matter. I found no evidence. My whole work show how we can test mechanism/materialism, and the test shows that Nature confirms Platonism.

I will change my mind if the physics which is in the mind of all universal machine differ from nature, but up to now, the evidences are that they fit. There is no evidence for materialism. None. It is speculating on some god to avoid science.





You confirm, like many, that  the atheists "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”, to quote Einstein.



and it meant a supernatural human-like agent: Agdistis or Angdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brent, Brigit,...Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, YHWH, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil or Zeus?
I will ask you to use the word “Earth” for a Flat object on which the human stand up.

An attempted analogy that does not work.  Unlike "god", we can define Earth ostensively and so learn that it has different properties, like being spheroidal, without changing the definition.

No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.

Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.

Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.




Similarly, even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent. The correspondence between cantor and a bishop shows that christians can have a conception of God quite similar to the neoplatonician one, still in the 19th century. Only atheists defends the fairy tale religion, I guess to just mock it.

I got problems with "atheist scientist” which are shocked by the vocabulary. For a very long period, the terms which shocked them was not God, but “consciousness” or even “mind”. That is because they confuse physics and metaphysics, and that is rather natural after 1500 years of metaphysical brainwashing.

If you have just one evidence for a physically *primitive* reality, you can show it to us.

Can you show one evidence for anything being *primitive* reality? 

Yes. But you might need to revise some of my papers. If all of S4Grz1, Z1* and X1* depart from nature, that would be an evidence that the physical reality is primitive.




As you often say in other contexts, belief in a primitive reality is a matter of faith…

Belief in any reality different that the consciousness here and now require faith. But being primitive or not is theorisable and testable



except more cautious scientists call it an hypothesis, not a leap of faith. 

There is a subtle difference between faith and hypothesis. It is typically the difference between reasoning with the mechanist hypothesis (and stating neutral or mute about the personal belief we can have or not), and saying “yes” to the doctor in a concrete real life situation. Faith is when some aspect of your first person experience depends crucially on the truth of an hypothesis. It is the difference between jumping from a cliff with an elastic, and just assuming the elastic is good enough without jumping.





The ostensive physical reality itself is no more an evidence that physics is the fundamental science that the sharable introspection would be an evidence that reality is psychological.

You use the word "fundamental" as though it were a sacred benediction.  You don't know what is fundamental...or even if anything is fundamental.  So you are merely inventing a pseuedo-religion of physicalism in order to criticize it and pretend you are above it.

?

Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.

We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.

Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life cannot be recovered, even in principle,  by another science like chemistry or physics.

I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only in principle. 

With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.

When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject: what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the whole picture.

Bruno





Brent

You need to address metaphysics with the same level of rigour than you show in physics.

Bruno 







Brent

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/a8585c1b-8134-bc81-59f6-145160c6bebe%40verizon.net.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/D56FA904-9E25-4BE2-B8E9-21F1B98FA23C%40ulb.ac.be.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 3:48:39 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 31 May 2019, at 21:03, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/31/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

      
On 30 May 2019, at 19:48, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/30/2019 12:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Mathematicians homogeninize the concept. Even strong atheism is a theology as it claims that “there is no God”, which is a theological proposition.
That is a misrepresentation of atheism.  Atheists claim "there is no reason believe there is a God”.
Yes, but they believe only in the post 529 Aristotelian-Christian notion of God.

As Bertrand Russell noted, there is no fixed meaning to "God”.

That is a good point.



  It is a notion appropriated by every ideology to provide unquestionable support.

That does not follow. Politics can appropriate genetic, or even health. But then it is politics and no more science. When doing science, all support becomes questionable. To let theology in the hand of politics, is to defend the idea that there are unquestionable support.





 

Then I am atheist too.

But if you read the “Element of Theology” by Proclus, you can see that during a millenium, theology was a branch of scientific research. And I use “god” in that original sense.

And what science did Proclus produce?  The efficacy of magic rituals?

Of course not. If you read Proclus, you will see only definition, and reasoning. There is no magic, nor rituals, nor anything like that. 

Indeed, the discourse of the neoplatonist is quasi-isomorphic to what you get from the Gödel-Möb-Solovay self-reference logic. It is normal, the neoplatonist reason about themselves, and if they are consistent machine, they get the same thing than any machine can find by reasoning from introspective data.



Theurgy is possible because the powers of the gods (the henads) extend through their series of causation even down to the material world. And by certain power-laden words, acts, and objects, the soul can be drawn back up the series, so to speak. Proclus himself was a devotee of many of the religions in Athens, considering that the power of the gods could be present in these various approaches.

It was the influence of Porphyry and the christians. Plotinus fight this, Prophyry was more neutral, (he wrote a treatise entitled “Against The Christians”, but when Proclus defended this, but it was a way to attract the christians which were more and more successful at his time. Then the sentence above actually makes sense in the Mechanist frame. The henads are the i in the phi_i. They are the machines. Th series of causation is the notion of computation, and that extend indeed “even down the material world” as that is why we have physical computers. The soul (the first person) van drawn back the series (that is get the universal notion of computation). Then, Proclus indeed expect God (truth) and gods (concepts) capable of being usefully transmitted to non intellectual, illiterate people with the help of theurgy (a point of contention and debate all along neoplatonism. I am myself reflecting on this since long (and my standard concussion, coming from Alan Watts, is that this works as long as the “priest” is able to blink, and not taking him/herself too much seriously.

Bruno




Brent

With that definition, atheism does no more make sense or become a form of nihilism or irrationalism, as God is defined by whatever is the reason why we are here and now, and that we search. 

Now, I have decided to stop using the nuance “agnostic atheism” and “non agnostic atheism”, and use instead agnosticism and atheism instead, as all self)called atheist I ahem met believes in physicalism, consciously or not, and most of them even believe that God des not exist, which is far different that not believing in God.


Brent
"Atheism is a belief system the way "Off" is a TV channel."
    --- George Carlin
That is what they claim in theory, but in practice that is not the case, given that they fight on all theologies, not just the christian one. They dismiss a millenium of progress in the filed (read Proclus!) and they defend exactly the same metaphysics than christians. Atheism is, in absolute value, the same as christianism, but in a radical form.

Bruno




-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/905612f9-db1d-8dca-2cf8-6b5b8e8011de%40verizon.net.

    


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruce Kellett

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 3:51:50 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 5:30 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 31 May 2019, at 20:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 5/31/2019 1:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.

Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.

Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.



Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.

We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.

Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life cannot be recovered, even in principle,  by another science like chemistry or physics.

I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only in principle. 

With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.

When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject: what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the whole picture.

And accepting some set of fundamental principles is just to adopt a hypothesis -- not necessarily an act of faith. Faith, characteristically, enters when we stake our life on something. So your "mechanism" is very much an act of faith, since it requires staking your life on the knowledge and skill of the Dr. But physicalism is not an act of faith, because our life in no way depends on whether we adopt that hypothesis or not.

Bruce

Bruno

John Clark

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 9:11:15 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 3:16 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> From the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7 page 792:
"The son of God is omniscient and omnipotent knowing history in advance and being able to control its course”.

> The Pope Jean-Paul 2 made explicit that all statement of that kind are parabola and should never been taken literally.

That's the exact same excuse Trump suporters use when they to try to explain away his many many lies.
 
> Of course, that is debated by some catholic, bu I have still never met a christian who believe in the anything as naive.

You sure have not met many Christians!  I have never met a Christian who didn't believe something exactly that naive. I concede there are a few that have abandoned the idea of Christianity but not the ASCII sequence C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n-i-t-y, although I have not personally met them.
 
> You might read the book by Jean Trouillard or Paul Valadier. You might change your mind on this, but perhaps you don’t want to change your mind.

I don't want to read their books because I see little point in reading a book written by someone who knows even less about how the world really works than I do. Life is too short to read every book ever written so one must use judgement and be selective.

 John K Clark

PGC

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 10:52:56 AM6/1/19
to Everything List
"His mechanism" - you're being way too generous for speculative personal mathematical philosophy. As if, merely by manipulating any/every conversation towards his bag of rhetorical flourishes, this week "comp", next week "mechanism", next week "machines", then "universal numbers", he secured a tenable description of the origin of reality. With infinite explanations and confessions as to what cannot be explained, while you're offered a privileged place in the correction of the history of science, right? Consider the discursive attempts to domesticate you, including the artificial politeness that never truly listens, learns, or respects peers; that would and does defame each and every one of you in the blink of an eye, if it could advance its own agenda of aimlessly misguided infinite influence. It is our answers that these discourses feed on, that grant them legitimacy. In most moderated settings, such posting gets folks kicked out. Free lists by all means - but most folks can't defend or handle such freedom and the proof is we have perpetual brainwashing of discourse under the guise of public education, or social media etc. 

So much intolerance, yes even on this list, and so much liberal understanding for it in "open mind" fashion. Too weak, too slow, too helpless. 

Take a look at the world around us and all the attempts of media/politicians to domesticate the discourses of children that have no sense of values, checks and balances, craving juvenile power and influence as ends in themselves. Imho we've been way too lenient with the conspiracy crowd, with the alternative facts crowds, the religious freaks, their constant conspiracy-theory-like victimization discourses that purport to explain everything without convincing evidence, which they all find explanations for! The foreigners, the other religions, realists, those guys over there, the physicalists because...

You can't domesticate animals. Even when they come dressed as polite scientists or clean, strong men. They are neither democrats, nor scientists. PGC


Brent Meeker

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 11:54:54 AM6/1/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people
>>> believed this by ostentation.
>>
>> Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by
>> pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.
>
> Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive
> definition makes sense.

Ostensive definitions are semantic.  You point down where you're
standing and say "Earth"...that's how children learn words.  And having
defined Earth as that which we stand on we have not believed anything
about it's overall shape.
Then I would say nothing is primitive.  That's the point of my virtuous
circle.

>
> We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we
> believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.
>
> Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to
> get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life
> cannot be recovered, even in principle,  by another science like
> chemistry or physics.

No.  Physical things don't have to be assumed, they are defined
ostensively.  It is only the theorizing that hypothesizes principles.

>
> I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist
> accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only
> in principle.
>
> With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is
> explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.
>
> When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject:
> what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the
> whole picture.

But you've then already assumed there is a hierarchy of explanation.

Brent

PGC

unread,
Jun 1, 2019, 5:25:47 PM6/1/19
to Everything List


On Saturday, June 1, 2019 at 5:54:54 PM UTC+2, Brent wrote:


On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

> Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.

Then I would say nothing is primitive.  That's the point of my virtuous
circle.


That is a good point! 

If your circle can be tuned towards surviving with diverse joys pursuable for diverse agents, cleaning up the mess this creates, without the need for folks to feel like sinners in the eyes of the truth of the origin of the lord of the god of pure scientific reality... because they swatted a fly, flushed the toilet, stepped on leaves of grass, or treat their fridge like their Japanese Bot prostitute of coolness instead of being stuck in infinite undecidability of venerating her divine truth flying high in the platonic heavens or not... then congrats, your theory is ahead of all the purist approaches, including whatever Platonists', Christians', Atheists', Agnostics', philosophers', Allah's or whoever's flavor of the month happen to be. It might therefore even be a sexy thing. Go hard, go high. PGC
 

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 3:41:02 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 1 Jun 2019, at 09:51, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 5:30 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 31 May 2019, at 20:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 5/31/2019 1:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.

Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.

Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.



Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.

We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.

Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life cannot be recovered, even in principle,  by another science like chemistry or physics.

I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only in principle. 

With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.

When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject: what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the whole picture.

And accepting some set of fundamental principles is just to adopt a hypothesis -- not necessarily an act of faith.

I agree.


Faith, characteristically, enters when we stake our life on something.

OK.



So your "mechanism" is very much an act of faith,

Yes. That is the main reason why I prefer “theology” in place of “psychology”. That is confirmed by the proof/truth gap due to machine incompleteness (which applied also on many non mechanical arithmetical beings).

If the “doctor” says “we know that the brain is machine”, it is automatically a “con artist” (or someone talking colloquially to be short).



since it requires staking your life on the knowledge and skill of the Dr. But physicalism is not an act of faith, because our life in no way depends on whether we adopt that hypothesis or not.

That is right. But the mechanist hypothesis, with our without the personal act of faith, leads to the abandon of physicalism (or rationalism). Once we assume mechanism, a believer in physicalism has to explain how a “physical ontological reality” prevent us to belong (in the first person undetermined sense) to arithmetic. It is a fact that all computations are implemented and running, in the block-time sense, in arithmetic.

If we assume that the substitution level is so low that only a digital copy of the entire universe can make me “survive”, we get an approximation of physicalism in Mechanism. Lowering the substitution level makes physicalism looking correct, but with quantum mechanics, the evidence is that our substitution level might be given by the Heisenberg uncertainty relations. 

Bruno




Bruce

Bruno

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 3:44:15 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 1 Jun 2019, at 15:10, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 3:16 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> From the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7 page 792:
"The son of God is omniscient and omnipotent knowing history in advance and being able to control its course”.

> The Pope Jean-Paul 2 made explicit that all statement of that kind are parabola and should never been taken literally.

That's the exact same excuse Trump suporters use when they to try to explain away his many many lies.
 
> Of course, that is debated by some catholic, bu I have still never met a christian who believe in the anything as naive.

You sure have not met many Christians!  I have never met a Christian who didn't believe something exactly that naive. I concede there are a few that have abandoned the idea of Christianity but not the ASCII sequence C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n-i-t-y, although I have not personally met them.

That is possible. Maybe the European christians are more protected from irrationalism than the American one, where there is that evangelical permanent shows.




 
> You might read the book by Jean Trouillard or Paul Valadier. You might change your mind on this, but perhaps you don’t want to change your mind.

I don't want to read their books because I see little point in reading a book written by someone who knows even less about how the world really works than I do. Life is too short to read every book ever written so one must use judgement and be selective.

You confirme that you criticise what you have not studied. That is hardly rational.

Bruno 




 John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 3:52:47 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 1 Jun 2019, at 17:54, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.
>>>
>>> Now you're just twisting words. Ostensive definition is by pointing. One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.
>>
>> Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.
>
> Ostensive definitions are semantic.

OK.

But no sound machine can define its semantic. Ostensive definition requires an act of fait in some undefinable reality.


> You point down where you're standing and say "Earth"...that's how children learn words. And having defined Earth as that which we stand on we have not believed anything about it's overall shape.

Exactly like the god of the (Neo)platonists. They assume some Reality (called God) at the origin of everything, and they do not assume much more, but propose theories and means to make sense of them.

When a theologian has the scientific attitude, no one could know what is his personal opinion on that matter. He only propose principles or theories, shows the consequences and the means to test the theory.

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, and never propose anyway to test that idea. It is normal, because there are evidence and reason why the brain has not been prepared/“programmed”, through evolution, to handle the metaphysical subtleties.


Bruno




>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> Similarly, even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent. The correspondence between cantor and a bishop shows that christians can have a conception of God quite similar to the neoplatonician one, still in the 19th century. Only atheists defends the fairy tale religion, I guess to just mock it.
>>>>
>>>> I got problems with "atheist scientist” which are shocked by the vocabulary. For a very long period, the terms which shocked them was not God, but “consciousness” or even “mind”. That is because they confuse physics and metaphysics, and that is rather natural after 1500 years of metaphysical brainwashing.
>>>>
>>>> If you have just one evidence for a physically *primitive* reality, you can show it to us.
>>>
>>> Can you show one evidence for anything being *primitive* reality?
>>
>> Yes. But you might need to revise some of my papers. If all of S4Grz1, Z1* and X1* depart from nature, that would be an evidence that the physical reality is primitive.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> As you often say in other contexts, belief in a primitive reality is a matter of faith…
>>
>> Belief in any reality different that the consciousness here and now require faith. But being primitive or not is theorisable and testable
>>
>>
>>
>>> except more cautious scientists call it an hypothesis, not a leap of faith.
>>
>> There is a subtle difference between faith and hypothesis. It is typically the difference between reasoning with the mechanist hypothesis (and stating neutral or mute about the personal belief we can have or not), and saying “yes” to the doctor in a concrete real life situation. Faith is when some aspect of your first person experience depends crucially on the truth of an hypothesis. It is the difference between jumping from a cliff with an elastic, and just assuming the elastic is good enough without jumping.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> The ostensive physical reality itself is no more an evidence that physics is the fundamental science that the sharable introspection would be an evidence that reality is psychological.
>>>
>>> You use the word "fundamental" as though it were a sacred benediction. You don't know what is fundamental...or even if anything is fundamental. So you are merely inventing a pseuedo-religion of physicalism in order to criticize it and pretend you are above it.
>>
>> ?
>>
>> Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.
>
> Then I would say nothing is primitive. That's the point of my virtuous circle.
>
>>
>> We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.
>>
>> Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life cannot be recovered, even in principle, by another science like chemistry or physics.
>
> No. Physical things don't have to be assumed, they are defined ostensively. It is only the theorizing that hypothesizes principles.
>
>>
>> I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only in principle.
>>
>> With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.
>>
>> When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject: what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the whole picture.
>
> But you've then already assumed there is a hierarchy of explanation.
>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/4d728998-3ac5-5840-4591-422df6d5931f%40verizon.net.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 4:02:57 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 1 Jun 2019, at 17:54, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.
>>>
>>> Now you're just twisting words. Ostensive definition is by pointing. One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.
>>
>> Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.
>
> Ostensive definitions are semantic. You point down where you're standing and say "Earth"...that's how children learn words. And having defined Earth as that which we stand on we have not believed anything about it's overall shape.

I answered this, then send the mail to quickly. I add some more comment below.


>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> Similarly, even Christians have argued that God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent when they discovered that those notion were inconsistent. The correspondence between cantor and a bishop shows that christians can have a conception of God quite similar to the neoplatonician one, still in the 19th century. Only atheists defends the fairy tale religion, I guess to just mock it.
>>>>
>>>> I got problems with "atheist scientist” which are shocked by the vocabulary. For a very long period, the terms which shocked them was not God, but “consciousness” or even “mind”. That is because they confuse physics and metaphysics, and that is rather natural after 1500 years of metaphysical brainwashing.
>>>>
>>>> If you have just one evidence for a physically *primitive* reality, you can show it to us.
>>>
>>> Can you show one evidence for anything being *primitive* reality?
>>
>> Yes. But you might need to revise some of my papers. If all of S4Grz1, Z1* and X1* depart from nature, that would be an evidence that the physical reality is primitive.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> As you often say in other contexts, belief in a primitive reality is a matter of faith…
>>
>> Belief in any reality different that the consciousness here and now require faith. But being primitive or not is theorisable and testable
>>
>>
>>
>>> except more cautious scientists call it an hypothesis, not a leap of faith.
>>
>> There is a subtle difference between faith and hypothesis. It is typically the difference between reasoning with the mechanist hypothesis (and stating neutral or mute about the personal belief we can have or not), and saying “yes” to the doctor in a concrete real life situation. Faith is when some aspect of your first person experience depends crucially on the truth of an hypothesis. It is the difference between jumping from a cliff with an elastic, and just assuming the elastic is good enough without jumping.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> The ostensive physical reality itself is no more an evidence that physics is the fundamental science that the sharable introspection would be an evidence that reality is psychological.
>>>
>>> You use the word "fundamental" as though it were a sacred benediction. You don't know what is fundamental...or even if anything is fundamental. So you are merely inventing a pseuedo-religion of physicalism in order to criticize it and pretend you are above it.
>>
>> ?
>>
>> Fundamental, primitive … means “has to be assumed”.
>
> Then I would say nothing is primitive. That's the point of my virtuous circle.


To make this into a theory, you need to explain where that virtuous circle comes from. With mechanism, you have the mathematical tools to address the “circle” (recursive definition). Probably not its “virtuous” nature.

To say that nothing is primitive will not work: you will need the axioms to get the things making the circle into a reality.

Then with mechanism, you can choose any presentation of the sigma_1 arithmetical reality, be it the elementary axioms of arithmetic, or the combinators.




>
>>
>> We believe that he principle X is fundamental or primitive if we believe that it cannot be recovered from other principle.
>>
>> Physicalism assumes that some physical principle have to be assumed to get a physical reality, like vitalism assumed that some aspect of life cannot be recovered, even in principle, by another science like chemistry or physics.
>
> No. Physical things don't have to be assumed, they are defined ostensively.

A definition by ostension, requires the faith that there is a reality, that we are not dreaming or in an arithmetical video game, or an infinity of them.



> It is only the theorizing that hypothesizes principles.

But you need an act of faith to believe that there isa reality behind your hypothesises principles. You don’t need faith the formally deduce in a theory, but you need a faith in a reality to confront the theory with possible facts.




>
>>
>> I guess you agree that vitalism is abandoned, and that most scientist accept that biology can be reduced to quantum mechanics, even if only in principle.
>>
>> With mechanism, the same occurs for the physical reality. It is explain, in principle, by very elementary arithmetic.
>>
>> When interested in fundamental studies, that is part of the subject: what are the simple principles that we have to assume to explain the whole picture.
>
> But you've then already assumed there is a hierarchy of explanation.

I have assume YD + CT, and nothing else.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/4d728998-3ac5-5840-4591-422df6d5931f%40verizon.net.

PGC

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 6:01:39 AM6/2/19
to Everything List


On Sunday, June 2, 2019 at 10:02:57 AM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

> On 1 Jun 2019, at 17:54, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>

> No.  Physical things don't have to be assumed, they are defined ostensively.

A definition by ostension, requires the faith that there is a reality, that we are not dreaming or in an arithmetical video game, or an infinity of them.



> It is only the theorizing that hypothesizes principles.

But you need an act of faith to believe that there isa reality behind your hypothesises principles. You don’t need faith the formally deduce in a theory, but you need a faith in a reality to confront the theory with possible facts.

No need for faith in realities means that personal mysticism is up to each one of us and cannot be weaponized by folks like you, who may choose to do so to promote personal positions and credibility. Nobody needs that to proceed with science or metaphysics. One can assume some purposefully undefined pluralism and be done with hierarchical follies, their fascisms, sidestepping problems of the one and the many, including the deification of some lonesome subject who would think through existence, give it conditions and arbitrary hierarchies with heavy ethical burdens that may be conceptually unsolvable anyway, as well as perform the gullible pacifying Christian things, like accounting for the subject's origins and losing ourselves in defending unclear notions like consciousness and souls.

Purists and fanatics will always try to sell us the "truth thing" via some dialectical strategy of those bad other guys, or mistakes of the world, filled with physicalist fanatics for example, and will always emerge as messiahs insulting every intelligence in existence. And this doesn't cut it as metaphysics anymore. It's the conspiracy trick. Rhetorical flourish. Concrete metaphysics/philosophy will never be obtained by weighing the inadequacy of some supposed enemy or ideal, your physicalists for example against the inadequacy of the arithmetical realist and all the shit he can't explain => such metaphysics just concedes its inadequacy. Bad build quality. Even with infinite posts, Bruno. Purists will fail to account credibly for too many things and guys like me will always find the dirty secrets, your prostitutes, zombies, fridges in the sky, rhetorical trickery... and we'll call them out when you play preacher of science, truth, probity, and arbiter of morals and inquiry for others. 

You'll never get the perfect singular thing by correcting a generality like some supposed physicalism with another unclear generality like some supposed arithmetical realism. And if you think you can, you'll need an extraordinary amount of convincing evidence beyond speculative hunches and generalized logical fits and possible validities. All of Bruce's, Brent's, and all phycisists' Christmas wishes have to be fulfilled and optimized. You have not achieved this, therefore "mechanism" is insufficient and unconvincing for now. 

And guess what: not assuming some reality assumes your ability to explore and share your own mysticism. It values that to such an extent that it should be a general duty of citizenship but specifically not to impose a nativism or purism in the way others perceive the world and the commons. More genuine modesty and respect than "mechanism" on its infinite ontological police trip. A pluralism of diversity, aiming towards the benevolent avoidance of corruption and crime with a more or less pronounced emphasis of the value of the separation of powers and independent inquiry. And such metaphysics can have practical application because the environment is unclear and unspecified! 

Besides jazz and the pursuit of sexiness, we green buildings, walls, and roofs. We do biodiversity studies and try to preserve systemic plurality, not for some ideological trip, but because plurality of species in an area prevents desertification. Survival in style, open for optimization. Similar in politics and education: we don't need monoculture, puristic hierarchical thinking. That's corporations and spy industry running on cynical metaphysics of advertising and power, which places science in hiding. It's well-organized abuse even if all those folks have good hearts. And without some purist perfectionism we can still make deals with their agents, treat them with respect the way we treat ourselves, collaborate on a level where we get the most for common futures as far as we can see, confront them on what we believe to be the central issues, and work to limit our usual tendencies towards self-destruction in short term gain. With all the crazy shit out there, I also see more and more folks relating to these notions.

And that's infinitely better for than whining about perfect ontologies and their/our credibility. Doing it: everybody thinking, listening, acting, speaking up and sharing their personal awesomeness and their unique special thoughts. And guess what? The world is so full of opportunity these days, I don't feel a need to insult your intelligence with some well-specified ensemble theory, my company's name, even my name, or another book. 

The ensemble idea of this list could well be a trap/unsolvable and deserves to be argued against if we're indeed critical. Hence my continued presence as wolf arguing against them. Now you'll say "But without clear assumptions to have faith in: that is unclear! You could be manipulating me!" and I'll reply to you that whatever complete, unified picture you present, I could raise the same objection. Cards on the table doesn't mean we're not being robbed. 

Here's a problem for mechanism: If I rob you, while telling you honestly why I am robbing and manipulating you, confessing my own ignorance, then comp validates that as a truthful, sincere act. Sorry, but that's horrible metaphysics.

With some less specified pluralism: any agent taking resources from another has to find compensation for preservation of possibilities and diversity's sake. Working on the metaphysics and laws that stop incentives to rob ourselves, as the unbalanced transfer of resources just weakens us systemically, would be higher priority than ontological whining and hair splitting. The strength in weakness. PGC

Brent Meeker

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 2:38:20 PM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 6/2/2019 12:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

      
On 1 Jun 2019, at 17:54, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.
Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.
Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.
Ostensive definitions are semantic. 
OK.

But no sound machine can define its semantic. Ostensive definition requires an act of fait in some undefinable reality. 


You point down where you're standing and say "Earth"...that's how children learn words.  And having defined Earth as that which we stand on we have not believed anything about it's overall shape.
Exactly like the god of the (Neo)platonists. They assume some Reality (called God) at the origin of everything, and they do not assume much more, but propose theories and means to make sense of them.

You seem to be in a bubble of rationalism.  Everything is about axioms and assumptions and words.  Ostensive definitions point outside that bubble.  They are fuzzy, but they are not assumptions...they are based on, consist of, evidence.



When a theologian has the scientific attitude, no one could know what is his personal opinion on that matter. He only propose principles or theories, shows the consequences and the means to test the theory.

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.

Brent

Brent Meeker

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 2:41:00 PM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 6/2/2019 1:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> To make this into a theory, you need to explain where that virtuous circle comes from. With mechanism, you have the mathematical tools to address the “circle” (recursive definition). Probably not its “virtuous” nature.
>
> To say that nothing is primitive will not work: you will need the axioms to get the things making the circle into a reality.
The attitude of a scholastic: I will make reality out of axioms.

Brent

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 11:00:00 PM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 02-Jun-2019, at 11:38 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.

The Quran does mention the existence of something before and beyond the ‘universe/ cosmos/ space’ we live in. This may be of interest: https://signsandscience.blogspot.com/2019/01/space-before-and-beyond.html 

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 6:14:31 AM6/3/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 2 Jun 2019, at 20:38, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 6/2/2019 12:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

      
On 1 Jun 2019, at 17:54, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 6/1/2019 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. The early definition of Earth was a flat surface, and people believed this by ostentation.
Now you're just twisting words.  Ostensive definition is by pointing.  One can't believe a proposition by ostentation.
Semantic play. If you are right, then we cannot believe that ostensive definition makes sense.
Ostensive definitions are semantic. 
OK.

But no sound machine can define its semantic. Ostensive definition requires an act of fait in some undefinable reality. 


You point down where you're standing and say "Earth"...that's how children learn words.  And having defined Earth as that which we stand on we have not believed anything about it's overall shape.
Exactly like the god of the (Neo)platonists. They assume some Reality (called God) at the origin of everything, and they do not assume much more, but propose theories and means to make sense of them.

You seem to be in a bubble of rationalism.  Everything is about axioms and assumptions and words.  Ostensive definitions point outside that bubble.  They are fuzzy, but they are not assumptions...they are based on, consist of, evidence.


Given that I tend empiricism, and that I explain that it is the observation of the universe which counts, that is an astonishing remark.

Mechanism explains the appearance of the physical universe from an arithmetical web of quantum-like statistically interfering computations, and the observation of nature confirms mechanism, and add doubts to the idea that a physical universe is a thing for itself, independent of the number's experiences.





When a theologian has the scientific attitude, no one could know what is his personal opinion on that matter. He only propose principles or theories, shows the consequences and the means to test the theory.

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.


OK. Then we agree. My critics has never been on physics, only on physicalism, and only when taken together with Digital Mechanism.

Bruno





Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 6:17:23 AM6/3/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
All what I say comes from the antipode of that idea.

All what I say comes from the fact the arithmetical reality is not obtainable from any (axiomatisable, effective) theory.

The arithmetical reality is beyond all effective theory. You can formalise it entirely in second order logic, but then you loose the effectiveness and the notion of proof parts from chekability.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/06ed3e3b-d814-9268-41d2-80ebb2a23abb%40verizon.net.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 7:01:05 AM6/3/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
That is still rather Aristotelian. The first half of the Quran is better than that, it contains the just reference to Judaism, and you can feel the openness to neoplatonism, where indeed there was something deeper than the physical reality at play at the origine of the physical reality (the how and why being indeed addressed in the Quran).
The second half of the Quran is more problematic, and in my opinion, not written by the same people, or something happened to them. It is problematic both on the metaphysical level, but also on the ethical level, doubly so if it is taken literally (as it contains basic hate speech  toward non-muslims, especially the jews, even some call for murdering some people, or sentences which can be interpreted easily that way).

That is obviously even aggravated by the fact that many muslims do kill many people today, and this by invoking Allah. The media seems to skip this, but there is an actual genocide of christians in many muslims countries, and they refer to the Quran and even worst Hadith. 

The canonical theology of the machine (the Solovay logic G*) explains why theology, even as a science, contains a trap. It shows that the frontier between Enlightenment and madness is very thin.That is wise, in the ideal world of the self-referentially correct machine, the wise say mute and trust the big-one-who-has-no-name to make any religious advertising. Allah is being name and words, and religious text can help when not taken literally, and becomes a source of burdens and suffering when taken literally.

G* proves <>[]f   (the consistency of inconsistency)

G proves <>t -> <>[]f  (if I am consistent then it is consistent that I am inconsistent, if I am not mad, then it is possible that I am mad).

With Mechanism, the closer to Allah you are, the more modest and openminded you become.

Bruno




--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 10:21:48 AM6/3/19
to Everything List
On Monday, June 3, 2019 at 6:01:05 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 3 Jun 2019, at 04:59, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:



On 02-Jun-2019, at 11:38 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.

The Quran does mention the existence of something before and beyond the ‘universe/ cosmos/ space’ we live in. This may be of interest: https://signsandscience.blogspot.com/2019/01/space-before-and-beyond.html 


That is still rather Aristotelian. The first half of the Quran is better than that, it contains the just reference to Judaism, and you can feel the openness to neoplatonism, where indeed there was something deeper than the physical reality at play at the origine of the physical reality (the how and why being indeed addressed in the Quran).
The second half of the Quran is more problematic, and in my opinion, not written by the same people, or something happened to them. It is problematic both on the metaphysical level, but also on the ethical level, doubly so if it is taken literally (as it contains basic hate speech  toward non-muslims, especially the jews, even some call for murdering some people, or sentences which can be interpreted easily that way).

There are the Mecca and Medina portions of the Koran. The Mecca Koran is the start, at least chronologically, and some of it reads a bit like Psalms and Proverbs. As the story goes Muhammad wrote this in Mecca, but was later thrown out. The second portion is presumed to be written by Muhammad in Medina, and there he was piqued to say the least. This part of the Koran is pretty sharp edged with eschatology. Some think these two parts were written by different people, though saying that publicly in parts of the Islamic world will get your head served on a platter.

LC
 

That is obviously even aggravated by the fact that many muslims do kill many people today, and this by invoking Allah. The media seems to skip this, but there is an actual genocide of christians in many muslims countries, and they refer to the Quran and even worst Hadith. 

The canonical theology of the machine (the Solovay logic G*) explains why theology, even as a science, contains a trap. It shows that the frontier between Enlightenment and madness is very thin.That is wise, in the ideal world of the self-referentially correct machine, the wise say mute and trust the big-one-who-has-no-name to make any religious advertising. Allah is being name and words, and religious text can help when not taken literally, and becomes a source of burdens and suffering when taken literally.

G* proves <>[]f   (the consistency of inconsistency)

G proves <>t -> <>[]f  (if I am consistent then it is consistent that I am inconsistent, if I am not mad, then it is possible that I am mad).

With Mechanism, the closer to Allah you are, the more modest and openminded you become.

Bruno




--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.

spudb...@aol.com

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 6:04:30 PM6/3/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Look, Sam, you're not going to succeed at Dawa here, unless you get into the weeds, via physics. So, thus, you have got to be prepared to peek over Allah's shoulder and answer the biggest questions of all, not the Why questions, but the How, the mechanics of How Mister Allah does his things, say, 'qiama'

You must show how the mechanics will work, based on cause and effect. Otherwise, it's merely running away from the difficult issues of How. If you are afraid to offend, the Big Guy, that's a personal issue. 
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 4, 2019, 1:07:56 AM6/4/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Nobody succeeds at Dawah except as Allah wills. I'm not trying to do Dawah, just trying to keep my duty. This is how I understand it: The Quran 
I see a lot of speculative discussions on this list where even the basic assumptions are unknown. The word primitive matter, etc, keep popping up, so I shared what I know from the source I trust.      

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 4, 2019, 12:44:11 PM6/4/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 3 Jun 2019, at 16:21, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, June 3, 2019 at 6:01:05 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 3 Jun 2019, at 04:59, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:



On 02-Jun-2019, at 11:38 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.

The Quran does mention the existence of something before and beyond the ‘universe/ cosmos/ space’ we live in. This may be of interest: https://signsandscience.blogspot.com/2019/01/space-before-and-beyond.html 


That is still rather Aristotelian. The first half of the Quran is better than that, it contains the just reference to Judaism, and you can feel the openness to neoplatonism, where indeed there was something deeper than the physical reality at play at the origine of the physical reality (the how and why being indeed addressed in the Quran).
The second half of the Quran is more problematic, and in my opinion, not written by the same people, or something happened to them. It is problematic both on the metaphysical level, but also on the ethical level, doubly so if it is taken literally (as it contains basic hate speech  toward non-muslims, especially the jews, even some call for murdering some people, or sentences which can be interpreted easily that way).

There are the Mecca and Medina portions of the Koran. The Mecca Koran is the start, at least chronologically, and some of it reads a bit like Psalms and Proverbs. As the story goes Muhammad wrote this in Mecca, but was later thrown out. The second portion is presumed to be written by Muhammad in Medina, and there he was piqued to say the least. This part of the Koran is pretty sharp edged with eschatology. Some think these two parts were written by different people, though saying that publicly in parts of the Islamic world will get your head served on a platter.

Unfortunately, just being a christian is enough for that in many Islamic countries. 

We have resist and partially win the battle for separating state and church, and our political correctness makes many of us tolerating the intolerable, and cutting the branch on which we stand.

Thank you for confirming my feeling after a personal reading of the Quran.

The problem is not Islam, but the fact that since Al Gazhali, Islam has confined itself in literalism, which is frightening concerning the second part of the Quran, and the practical implementations of that religious oppression in many countries which called themselves islamic.

Before Al Ghazali, the muslims translated the greek, made progress in science, and, “thanks to the fanaticism” will make all this flying away in Europa, leading to the Renaissance (still not transformed due to the (understandable after so many years of religious oppression) confusion between religion and anti-science).

Theology has to come back at the academy of science, because like free-will need determinacy, liberty needs rigour.

Bruno 





LC
 

That is obviously even aggravated by the fact that many muslims do kill many people today, and this by invoking Allah. The media seems to skip this, but there is an actual genocide of christians in many muslims countries, and they refer to the Quran and even worst Hadith. 

The canonical theology of the machine (the Solovay logic G*) explains why theology, even as a science, contains a trap. It shows that the frontier between Enlightenment and madness is very thin.That is wise, in the ideal world of the self-referentially correct machine, the wise say mute and trust the big-one-who-has-no-name to make any religious advertising. Allah is being name and words, and religious text can help when not taken literally, and becomes a source of burdens and suffering when taken literally.

G* proves <>[]f   (the consistency of inconsistency)

G proves <>t -> <>[]f  (if I am consistent then it is consistent that I am inconsistent, if I am not mad, then it is possible that I am mad).

With Mechanism, the closer to Allah you are, the more modest and openminded you become.

Bruno




--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5FA9BBDF-1EAB-46A1-9270-0C9935CA13EF%40gmail.com.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/8101562c-6412-4180-b274-aeacdcc3f646%40googlegroups.com.

spudb...@aol.com

unread,
Jun 4, 2019, 1:22:53 PM6/4/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
The problem is that these guys are doing brainwork, while you are saying Mashallah, or, Inshallah, and going on your merry way. This has been done by the Uma for centuries and (it still is!) , in the face of Europeans, centuries ago, who were willing to do philosophy (Beyond Averoes), your team lost. In being willing to challenge The Big Guy, the Christians, and Atheists were also able to gain ground in science and machinery. Based on this, maybe the Dude upstairs, like a challenge. intellectually speaking? Maybe not? If it's not your thing, you fear gahanim, or being disloyal , understandable.  


Brent Meeker

unread,
Jun 5, 2019, 12:52:48 AM6/5/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 6/4/2019 9:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> The problem is not Islam, but the fact that since Al Gazhali, Islam
> has confined itself in literalism, which is frightening concerning the
> second part of the Quran, and the practical implementations of that
> religious oppression in many countries which called themselves islamic.

If you don't do experiments to test your sacred text, then there is
nothing left but literalism.  If you do experiments and test your sacred
text you find it's bull shit.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 5, 2019, 10:49:34 AM6/5/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

> On 5 Jun 2019, at 06:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/4/2019 9:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> The problem is not Islam, but the fact that since Al Gazhali, Islam has confined itself in literalism, which is frightening concerning the second part of the Quran, and the practical implementations of that religious oppression in many countries which called themselves islamic.
>
> If you don't do experiments to test your sacred text, then there is nothing left but literalism.

Counter-example: mathematics.



> If you do experiments and test your sacred text you find it's bull shit.

Counter-example: "the question of King Milinda", which has proposed the Mechanist philosophy in between an unknown date and the 11th century.

OK, to be honest I concede that the buddhist “religious authorities” have rejected “the question of kind Milinda” from the Canon Pali (the official sacred text of buddhism).

With both mechanism, and greek theology, there is just no sacred texts at all, just inspiring readings of good treatise.

Bruno


>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/0f5637a1-7013-1eae-4098-3efaf6919e84%40verizon.net.

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 5, 2019, 10:59:00 AM6/5/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 5, 2019, 11:00:18 AM6/5/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


> On 05-Jun-2019, at 9:52 AM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> If you don't do experiments to test your sacred text, then there is nothing left but literalism. If you do experiments and test your sacred text you find it's bull shit.

Can you please quote an ayat of The Quran and suggest an experiment as an example of what you mean?

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
Jun 9, 2019, 9:45:46 AM6/9/19
to Everything List
On Tuesday, June 4, 2019 at 11:44:11 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 3 Jun 2019, at 16:21, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, June 3, 2019 at 6:01:05 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 3 Jun 2019, at 04:59, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:



On 02-Jun-2019, at 11:38 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Here the materialist often fails, as they talk like if they knew primitive matter exists, 

A straw man.  Nothing I wrote referred to primitive matter.

The Quran does mention the existence of something before and beyond the ‘universe/ cosmos/ space’ we live in. This may be of interest: https://signsandscience.blogspot.com/2019/01/space-before-and-beyond.html 


That is still rather Aristotelian. The first half of the Quran is better than that, it contains the just reference to Judaism, and you can feel the openness to neoplatonism, where indeed there was something deeper than the physical reality at play at the origine of the physical reality (the how and why being indeed addressed in the Quran).
The second half of the Quran is more problematic, and in my opinion, not written by the same people, or something happened to them. It is problematic both on the metaphysical level, but also on the ethical level, doubly so if it is taken literally (as it contains basic hate speech  toward non-muslims, especially the jews, even some call for murdering some people, or sentences which can be interpreted easily that way).

There are the Mecca and Medina portions of the Koran. The Mecca Koran is the start, at least chronologically, and some of it reads a bit like Psalms and Proverbs. As the story goes Muhammad wrote this in Mecca, but was later thrown out. The second portion is presumed to be written by Muhammad in Medina, and there he was piqued to say the least. This part of the Koran is pretty sharp edged with eschatology. Some think these two parts were written by different people, though saying that publicly in parts of the Islamic world will get your head served on a platter.

Unfortunately, just being a christian is enough for that in many Islamic countries. 

We have resist and partially win the battle for separating state and church, and our political correctness makes many of us tolerating the intolerable, and cutting the branch on which we stand.

Thank you for confirming my feeling after a personal reading of the Quran.

The problem is not Islam, but the fact that since Al Gazhali, Islam has confined itself in literalism, which is frightening concerning the second part of the Quran, and the practical implementations of that religious oppression in many countries which called themselves islamic.

Before Al Ghazali, the muslims translated the greek, made progress in science, and, “thanks to the fanaticism” will make all this flying away in Europa, leading to the Renaissance (still not transformed due to the (understandable after so many years of religious oppression) confusion between religion and anti-science).

Theology has to come back at the academy of science, because like free-will need determinacy, liberty needs rigour.

Bruno 

I am not in favor of extra-judicial punishments against Muslims or anything of that sort. However, after reading a translation of the Koran I found myself scratching my head. Islam actually teaches it is acceptable to lie to kafirs, or nonbelievers. There are other aspects to this, and Islam has a history of gaining adherents not be voluntary conversion but by conquest. Of course Christianity has a history of similar activity, but at least with Christianity there is more measure of voluntary conversions. With Islam there has been a long history of either outright conquest, or by out populating a region and then declaring an Islamic state, caliphate etc. There are some murmurs of this with respect to Europe. Once that happens then a Christian or Jew is relegated to d'himus (spelling might be off) and you are secondary status. If you think about it, we kept Russians from immigrating here if they refused to renounce Communism, and in some ways religion is not that different from political ideology. With religion "Big Brother" is supernatural.

LC

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 9, 2019, 12:16:22 PM6/9/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


> On 09-Jun-2019, at 6:45 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Islam actually teaches it is acceptable to lie to kafirs, or nonbelievers.

Where? Please quote the ayat from The Quran.

John Clark

unread,
Jun 9, 2019, 1:28:07 PM6/9/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:00 AM Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> On 05-Jun-2019, at'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> If you don't do experiments to test your sacred text, then there is nothing left but literalism.  If you do experiments and test your sacred text you find it's bull shit.

> Can you please quote an ayat of The Quran and suggest an experiment as an example of what you mean?

In 1872 Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin) wrote a paper presenting statistical evidence on the ineffectiveness of Prayer:  


Galton pointed out that for every denomination at every church service in Britton it was customary to pray for the sovereign: "Grant him/her in health long to live", for centuries millions of people begged God to grant their king a long life. And yet when Galton performed a statistical analysis he found that on average British sovereigns lived to be 64.04 but aristocrats who were not sovereigns and thus received no prayers nevertheless lived to be 67.31, doctors lawyers and the clergy lived even longer. Even officers in the army and navy lived longer as did artists. The longest lived of all were the landed gentry who lived to be 70.22.

John K Clark    

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
Jun 10, 2019, 9:22:18 AM6/10/19
to Everything List
I read a translation of the Koran right after the 9-11 events, which is now almost 18 years ago. I do remember this as one of those "oh really" moments in reading.

LC

John Clark

unread,
Jun 10, 2019, 10:14:21 AM6/10/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
“Those that deny Our revelation We will burn in fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than We shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge.” (4:55–56). 

 “[We] shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate” (2:126). 

Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme. ”(2:190–93). 

“Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. God knows, but you know not” (2:216)

“Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful punishment awaits them” (3:178). 

"Those that deny God’s revelations shall be sternly punished; God is mighty and capable of revenge” (3:5). 

“As for the unbelievers, neither their riches nor their children will in the least save them from God’s judgment. They shall become fuel for the Fire” (3:10). “

“Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred which their breasts conceal” (3:118).  

 John K Clark

Lawrence Crowell

unread,
Jun 10, 2019, 1:20:06 PM6/10/19
to Everything List
It is clearly a case of God or Allah as a supernatural form of Orwell's "Big Brother," who in the course of that novel you realize may have no more actual existence than Chef Boyardee, but which serves as an image of terror. God is really much the same. As Eric Blair, pen name George Orwell, got right; in order to have a functioning authoritarian or totalitarian system you have to make the police largely act in the minds of people. Thought-crime is an idea similar to sin, and just as Big Brother is watching you, God is also reading your mind. The supernatural version of Big Brother is a very powerful tool by which the minds of people can be shackled so that society can be controlled and organized for the benefit of some elite class. 

In reading the Koran I found the writings about hell fire and eschatology of eternal punishment thick and almost endless to the point it became painfully boring. The New Testament of the Bible has 7 references to eternal hell, though the practice of the religion leans heavily on that. Of course the idea of eternal hell fire is being down graded in a lot of Christian Churches. The Koran by way of contrast is richly marinated in this stuff.

LC

Philip Thrift

unread,
Jun 10, 2019, 2:20:28 PM6/10/19
to Everything List


On Monday, June 10, 2019 at 9:14:21 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
Being raised conventional (mainline) Protestant, I was taught the Bible stories of Jesus [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Story - a now vintage set of books for children ].

One of the oddest things I found in the Quran is how it talks about Jesus, like this which seems to suggest a crucification hoax: It seems to be important that Jesus wasn't killed.

4:157 That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not.

 
@pphilipthrift

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 12:20:16 AM6/11/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 10-Jun-2019, at 11:20 PM, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

One of the oddest things I found in the Quran is how it talks about Jesus, like this which seems to suggest a crucification hoax: It seems to be important that Jesus wasn't killed.

4:157 That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not.

image1.jpeg


Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 2:17:49 AM6/11/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
The problem is when religion is mixed with the temporal plane, which is a spiritual nonsense. Islam is not special about this, as the period before Al Ghazali illustrates. 

If you want, making Big Brother supernatural is a way to avoid it on Earth. But when literalism is encouraged, Big Brother becomes quickly the next very concrete dictatorship in town. When theology was scientific: the minimal understanding shared by all is that we cannot invoke the spiritual directly in any temporal endeavour.

Theology/religion is not a problem. The problem is the lack of rigour, which is maintained as long as we tolerate the authoritative institutional religion (in church or universities, whatever).

The difference between science and pseudo-science or pseudo-religion is the right to be skeptical, the encouragement of doubt and changing our mind, etc.

Now, one literalism is there, I can agree that the second part of the Quran becomes an incentive to convince the others by force, and in that sense, the Quran becomes dangerous. 

Any religion/science claiming truth is a fraud. 

Bruno





LC

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 3:43:10 AM6/11/19
to Everything List


On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 1:17:49 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Any religion/science claiming truth is a fraud. 

Bruno



spudb...@aol.com

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 3:31:52 PM6/11/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." -Lazarus Long aka Robert Heinlein


-----Original Message-----
From: Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Jun 11, 2019 12:20 am
Subject: Re: Allah: the One and Only Deity

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit

Philip Thrift

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 4:07:43 PM6/11/19
to Everything List


On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 2:31:52 PM UTC-5, spudb...@aol.com wrote:
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." -Lazarus Long aka Robert Heinlein


There is a religion called Comedism:


via Steve Gimbel


Comedism: The New Religion
Steve Gimbel
Professor of Philosophy, Gettysburg College


Origins 

It all started with a couple of experiences in the classroom. The first was when I was teaching a night class in ethics at a local community college. I was drawing the distinction between social mores and ethical precepts when a students raised his hand and asked, "Steve, what are mores?" I looked at him and responded, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a more." At that moment, I realized that set ups that perfect don't just happen randomly, it had to be humorous divine intervention. I had been touched.

Then a few years later, I was teaching philosophy of religion at the United States Naval Academy when I had my second insight. If you want to go anywhere in the religion industry these days, you have to be either Mother Teresa or Pat Robertson -- and neither seemed attractive career paths. But when you look at a number of those who are most exalted, they fit neither model. Abraham pimps out his wife to the Egyptian army, the disciples quarrel and quibble about everything. How'd these guys end up on the fast track to sanctification? They figured out the trick...get in early. So I realized that my only option was to start own religion.

Pondering this, I was teaching the tradition Christian arguments for the existence of God and realized that if the All-Being was to be all perfect, the traditional criteria of all powerful, all loving, and all knowing were insufficient...there was a perfect left out...all funny. Would you prefer to be with someone who had a good sense of humor or no sense of humor? Surely a perfect being would be omnihumorous! Yet nowhere in the traditional scriptures of the major religions could you find any real zingers. Not even a "Knocketh, Knocketh" joke. And so Comedism was born, I realized it was my job to hear the calling and spread wide the funny news.

Metaphysical Beliefs 

The basic beliefs of Comedism are not that different from other religions. Life is fleeting and a test for the hereafter. Like the Buddhists, we believe that on Earth you strive for a state of bodilessness. You can foresee this nirvana in the sort of full out belly laugh that you get from a really good joke. When you laugh so hard that your spirit is ultimately joyful, but your sides ache, you can't breathe, you roll around on the floor unable to stand, you realize that it is the humorous soul and not the things of the body that are important.

When you die, like Christians, we believe your soul goes up and there before the pearly gates stands Saint Shecky with his big book. Each of us is given a number of set ups during our life times and for all those, like "that's a more," that you convert into jokes, you get one mark in the good column. But then there are those you miss. Years ago, I was walking and a couple looked at me strangely. Before they passed the man said to me, "Didn't we just see you with a dog?" I simply reply, "I'm sorry, you must have me confused with someone else." But as they were walking away, I realized the correct response was to retort indignantly, "Excuse me, that was my wife." I had blown a set up. It was one in the bad column. When you are judged, if there are more in the good column than in the bad column, you go to Comedy heaven and sit at Groucho's right hand. If there are more in the missed than made column, you go to comedy hell where it is always hot, water is only in dribble glasses, all the chairs have whoopee cushions, and you have to watch reruns of Three's Company over and over again for all of eternity.

Ethics 

We believe that the key to acting well is understanding the nature of the joke. Jokes have two parts, a set up in which a normal situation you think you understand is sketched (a chicken crosses a street or the pope, a rabbi, and a Viagra salesman walk into a bar) and then the punchline that forces you radically rethink how you understood the world of the set up (to get to the other side or at least the beer isn't flat anymore). The humor exists in that moment when your brain is split, trying unsuccessfully to resolve the tension between the two incompatible interpretations. The very possibility of a joke presupposes that reality may always be looked at in more than one way. We must see life as a great joke -- there are always perspectives other than our own and we must strive to get the joke by adopting other people's perspectives. As such, it is impossible for there to be Comedist fundamentalists -- a fundamentalist is someone who takes a literal interpretation of scripture, someone who denies that there can be multiple legitimate interpretations, but this is impossible for a Comedist who believes from the start that there are ALWAYS multiple interpretations of everything or else it wouldn't be funny.

We believe in spreading joy. We believe in overcoming pride through self-deprecation. We believe through the symbol of the banana peal that nature provides and must be protected. We believe in gay marriage because "take my civilly united domestic partner" really screws up the timing. We believe that April 1st is the holiest day of the year. And we believe that Cosmic Comedist has revealed the universal joke in our Holy Skripture, the Comedist Manifesto (well, at least that he will since I haven't gotten around to writing most of it anyway).

All you have to do to join is to sing the chorus the next time it comes around...with feelin'. Comedism is a simple religion to convert to, just say you are in and you are. And remember, if you get in early, fast-track to sainthood...

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve


@philipthrift

 

spudb...@aol.com

unread,
Jun 11, 2019, 11:09:37 PM6/11/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
iI like the Pastafatians. However I am not against religion, just the mentality of the fanatic. 
Fanaticism usually means If you don't obey us, we will kill you
This mentality is not just hugely, seen, among the Islamists.
But also, their political chums, the Progressives (socialists & communists who are funded by billionaires)
There is also, surprisingly to myself, great self-righteousness expressed by this lot, in excess, of the Christian fundamentalist.
Beyond this, if Atheism works for you? Spectacular. If doing religious craps allow one to enjoy some psycho-social activity? Splendid.
I do love Outre' observations by some physicists, because it permits our species to break free. I mean it's physics, it's either going to work or not, right? On the other hand, a gigantic budget would be required to test some conjectures. 



-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Jun 11, 2019 4:07 pm
Subject: Re: Allah: the One and Only Deity

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 13, 2019, 7:27:30 AM6/13/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 12 Jun 2019, at 05:09, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

iI like the Pastafatians. However I am not against religion, just the mentality of the fanatic. 
Fanaticism usually means If you don't obey us, we will kill you
This mentality is not just hugely, seen, among the Islamists.
But also, their political chums, the Progressives (socialists & communists who are funded by billionaires)
There is also, surprisingly to myself, great self-righteousness expressed by this lot, in excess, of the Christian fundamentalist.
Beyond this, if Atheism works for you? Spectacular. If doing religious craps allow one to enjoy some psycho-social activity? Splendid.
I do love Outre' observations by some physicists, because it permits our species to break free. I mean it's physics, it's either going to work or not, right? On the other hand, a gigantic budget would be required to test some conjectures. 

Yes, the problem is not any domain per se, but the fanaticism of those who claim to know the truth, again, that works for any domain.

But sometimes, a political authoritative regime choose some domain to make truth claim, like Lyssenko in USSR genetics, or like with the frequent use of religion by unscrupulous manipulators.

People who claim not having a religion are usually people not aware of their hypotheses. They take something fro granted, unconsciously. It is normal, as we have plausibly been “programmed” in that way, for survival purposes.

Bruno 



spudb...@aol.com

unread,
Jun 13, 2019, 1:19:40 PM6/13/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Yes Bruno, back in the day, one of my college profs termed ideologies, to be a faith movement. Hence, Lysenko, Stalin, Mao, and in my view, progressivism (like Juncker, like Soros) push for their faith movement.  That is my dig, but also an honest observation. As we say in the US, ideologists aren't playing with a full deck. 


Philip Thrift

unread,
Jun 13, 2019, 2:12:16 PM6/13/19
to Everything List


On Thursday, June 13, 2019 at 6:27:30 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Jun 2019, at 05:09, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

iI like the Pastafatians. However I am not against religion, just the mentality of the fanatic. 
Fanaticism usually means If you don't obey us, we will kill you
This mentality is not just hugely, seen, among the Islamists.
But also, their political chums, the Progressives (socialists & communists who are funded by billionaires)
There is also, surprisingly to myself, great self-righteousness expressed by this lot, in excess, of the Christian fundamentalist.
Beyond this, if Atheism works for you? Spectacular. If doing religious craps allow one to enjoy some psycho-social activity? Splendid.
I do love Outre' observations by some physicists, because it permits our species to break free. I mean it's physics, it's either going to work or not, right? On the other hand, a gigantic budget would be required to test some conjectures. 

Yes, the problem is not any domain per se, but the fanaticism of those who claim to know the truth, again, that works for any domain.

But sometimes, a political authoritative regime choose some domain to make truth claim, like Lyssenko in USSR genetics, or like with the frequent use of religion by unscrupulous manipulators.

People who claim not having a religion are usually people not aware of their hypotheses. They take something fro granted, unconsciously. It is normal, as we have plausibly been “programmed” in that way, for survival purposes.

Bruno 


Feyerabend wrote of scientific fundamentalism, being indoctrinated into a particular theory as being TRUTH.

@philipthrift


Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 18, 2019, 5:52:50 AM6/18/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 13 Jun 2019, at 19:19, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Yes Bruno, back in the day, one of my college profs termed ideologies, to be a faith movement.

I would say that ideologues are blind faith, or dogma. Ideas are better, but faith is personal, and we need it to go out of bed every morning.


Hence, Lysenko, Stalin, Mao, and in my view, progressivism (like Juncker, like Soros) push for their faith movement. 

Faith movement makes no sense, but I guess I quibble on vocabulary here.



That is my dig, but also an honest observation. As we say in the US, ideologists aren't playing with a full deck. 

Yes, it is “bad faith”, or just a trick to steal your money.

Bruno



Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 18, 2019, 5:55:01 AM6/18/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
People seriously claiming truth are con artist only. It is scientism or outright crackpotery.

Bruno




@philipthrift



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Samiya Illias

unread,
Jun 18, 2019, 6:46:48 AM6/18/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 18-Jun-2019, at 2:54 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

People seriously claiming truth are con artist only. It is scientism or outright crackpotery.

Bruno

It is loading more messages.
0 new messages