Philosophia

[Drake Dun]

Are there actually people who are not at least weekday objectivists? I don't think I've ever met one, although most people (including myself) have their occasional tendencies toward philosophical idealism.

Drake

[orionedarnell]

Resurrection proofs - Is there historical evidence?

Christianity has many extraordinary claims but they all rest on one event, the resurrection of our Lord. If this event did not come to pass, Christianity is of no use. 1 Corinthians 15:14 says, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith."

The Christians of the early Church agreed with the Apostle Paul's statement. The Church would have come to nothing had the resurrection been discredited. Yet when the Church was experiencing growth, the Romans did not debunk the resurrection. There were certainly a plethora of hostile witnesses to the events of the Gospels, but not a single Roman came forward to expose supposed fallacies. Many Roman critics attacked the philosophy of Christianity, but they were unable to attack its historical accuracy, as they were witness to the events of the New Testament. The Church could not have grown in Jerusalem if Jesus' own generation (who had Him put to death) could have immediately exposed the resurrection as lies.

The resurrection is not a lie. Christ died. Roman soldiers were experts at execution. They plunged a spear into Christ's side, and resultant blood and water flowed through the wound. This was recorded in the gospels, however they did not understand the medical connotations as we do today. The fluid was flowing from the pericardium and Christ could not have survived.

Many historians readily accept the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Caesar. Plato wrote between 427-347 B.C., with our earliest copies of his works dating from the 900s (1200 year span), of which 7 copies have survived. Aristotle wrote between 384-322 B.C., and his earliest works are dated from the 1100s (1400 year span), with 49 surviving copies. Thucydides wrote around 460-400 B.C.; our copies of his works are from the 900s (1300 year span), with 8 copies in existence. Caesar's life was chronicled from 100-44 B.C. Our earliest copies of the chronicles of Julius Caesar date from the 900s (1000 years) and we have 10 surviving copies.

The New Testament, on the other hand, was written between 40-100 AD and our earliest copies of the New Testament manuscripts are from the 130s (less than 100 years) and we have 5000 Greek copies, 10,000 Latin copies and 9300 copies in other languages.

The New Testament stands alone in historical accuracy. It is the greatest of the resurrection proofs. The gospels themselves are the most reliable historical books in existence. However there are secular sources to confirm the gospels' claims. Josephus, a prominent Jewish historian, corroborated the prophecies, miracles, and crucifixion of Jesus. Tacitus, a Roman historian, goes as far as to say, "Christus…suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea. . .but even in Rome." (Tacitus, Annals 15.44 as quoted in Case for Christ)

Scholars assert that when Tacitus says Jesus, "checked for the moment" it indicates Jesus' death, and, "again broke out" refers to the resurrection.

The Bible also says the Earth went dark for three days. This is supported in the writings of Thallus, a mid-eastern historian, who noted the darkness, which was parallel with the time of the crucifixion. Phlegon also wrote about a great earthquake and the greatest eclipse in the 202nd Olympiad, which is the year A.D. 33.

Also, after Jesus' resurrection He appeared to over 500 people. It has been very well documented and is more proof of His resurrection and why would the christians of those days be willing to die for their belief if they knew it was not true.

These miraculous historical events mysteriously come together and are explained in the Bible. There is undoubtedly an abundance of resurrection proofs to confirm the claims of the resurrection. We don't have to take a blind leap of faith, to follow assorted stories from a 2000-year-old book. We can accept the most significant event in history, which coincidentally is the most well documented event in history.

[HellforgedX]

I always thought the purpose of life is to perpetuate itself.

[biohazard]

I don`t acually see any point in life. We live, we die, we can do what we want in between. It is up to us to figure out our own destinies as we live each day.

[Circle V]

I don't see why life should have a purpose. What is the meaning of a pencil? What is the purpose of up? Seems like these things only have purpose when we (life) give one to them.

The purpose of life is to provide purpose to other things?

Nah, that's crap. We invented "purpose," we give purpose -- why is it that we expect our purpose to be different?

[Circle V]

Originally Posted by orionedarnell

Tacitus, a Roman historian, goes as far as to say, "Christus…suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea. . .but even in Rome." (Tacitus, Annals 15.44 as quoted in Case for Christ)

Scholars assert that when Tacitus says Jesus, "checked for the moment" it indicates Jesus' death, and, "again broke out" refers to the resurrection.

Which scholars? It seems pretty obvious to me that what was "checked" and "broke out" was "a most mischievous superstition"-- Christianity-- not Jesus himself.

[Drake Dun]

Seriously. It couldn't be any plainer. You need to get with some of the spiritual crusaders that has their act a little bit more together, Orion. They're out there just waiting for people like you to lend a fanatical hand. It's not like you need to have an original thought or write anything yourself, you know? Just find better prefab material. Hell, I'll do it for you, if you ask me.

When your distortions are plainly evident in your polemics, without the reader even needing to check your facts... really. That's just embarassing. Please show us more respect by making a proper effort to deceive and manipulate us. Any politician or advertiser would show us that level of basic courtesy.

Also, you forgot to put the fear in. A Christian broadside without a good veiled threat or two is like a BLT with no bacon.

Poor marks this time, I'm afraid.

Drake

[Breathless Horror]

Good point Drake. Where's the fire and brimstone? The "this is true and if you don't like it you'll burn in hell"? Not only is he spouting poor material, but he's not even being properly fanatical.

With regards to the civilian/soldier dilema, you forgot justification. If I walk down the street with a rifle and kill people randomly for no purpose or reason, then is is quite right that I be imprisoned. But what of a justified murder? Would you say that the murder of a random civillian is just as wrong as the murder of a crazed despot who oppresses and kills his own people?

And what of the death penalty? Is it right to murder a murderer? I find it is a logical solution to habitual killers or people with irrepressable homicidal urges. By one act of murder, you prevent several others. A dead person cannot go on killing sprees. An offsetting series of destructive acts, see?

Please share your thoughts.

[Clockwork]

Allow me to entertain a mad thought I've suddenly had, that I may not still hold in the morning.

Perhaps the meaning of life depends on the existence of a god - if there is one, then the purpose lies with that god and possibly his/her/its will. If there is no god, then there is no purpose to life.

If you believe in a god, then usually there's aspects of right and wrong... good and evil, in the religion. At least in Christianity, this is set in place by that god. However, with no god, what is right and wrong? I'm thinking we as people only define the two by the amount of pleasure or pain something causes (i.e., giving a present to someone makes them happy: good; killing someone makes people unhappy; bad). Yet, pleasure and pain are only sensations, the interpretations of a neutral world around us. With no higher force governing the world, then everything is by chance, and if everything is by chance, then there is no intended purpose toward good or evil, and our feelings of pleasure and pain and good or evil exist no more than does the color red. Then again, what would the will of a god that created us even matter? Doesn't matter, but they'd have a purpose for US, and our existence.


Someone please convince me out of this mode of thinking.

[Drake Dun]

I don't work things out in terms of "right and wrong" quite the way one expects, but with that qualification in mind I'll respond to some of your questions.

With regards to the civilian/soldier dilema, you forgot justification. If I walk down the street with a rifle and kill people randomly for no purpose or reason, then is is quite right that I be imprisoned. But what of a justified murder? Would you say that the murder of a random civillian is just as wrong as the murder of a crazed despot who oppresses and kills his own people?

First, and most importantly, the idea of justification is separate from the question of whether there is a difference between a soldier killing someone and a civilian killing someone. In our world, the soldier occupies a protected moral space. Or more accurately, he borrows a kind of moral immunity from the power structure. As long as he is acting under orders, he can do no wrong.

This has got to stop. Just holding soldiers accountable to the usual principles of justification, whatever those principles are, would be a gigantic leap forward. If Private Pile has a justication to shoot Pol Pot, then so do I, and if he doesn't, then neither do I. There is no reason to allow the fact that he is a marine and I am not to distort that picture.

As for justification, I think we all share the inclination to treat some acts of violence with greater horror than others, and it's not an inclination I am interested in trying to stamp out. The classic example is, of course, self defense. I guess what I want to say is that the principle of justification has to be treated with profound circumspection. There are few ideas in the human moral universe more ripe for abuse.

Taking the case of soldiers and civilians, anybody who has read any history book on any geographical area in any period of time should know that war practically never has much to do with helping innocent people or anything so noble like that (although this is an occasional happy side-effect). Those are just the lies that we tell to sooth our conscience. War is the classic example of the principle of justification run amok.

There is always an excuse, and the excuses are pretty well interchangeable. No WMDs? Oh well, we're fighting terrorism. Oh, hang on, no terrorist connections either? Well, that's okay. We're spreading democracy. Nobody ever fights a war for oil or land or wealth. The Romans only invaded the British Isles to help the poor Britains. The French only conquered Indochina to help the poor Asians. The Polish only subjugated the Africans in what is now Congo for their own good. The English only colonized India to help the poor Indians. The United States only took the Phillipines to help the poor Phillipinos. The Japanese only established Manchuko to help the poor Chinese.

What's incredible is that it usually doesn't take all that long, in the broader historical picture, for the lies to be seen for what they are, yet the people always believe the exact same lies the next time around. We're going through that again right now.

Add to this the inconvenient little details of war. Even if we assume, for example, that Saddam Hussein deserved killing (a proposition for which a strong case can be made), most of the people dying in the Iraq war are... and it's embarassing that I have to point this out... NOT Saddam Hussein. They're poorly paid trigger-pullers suffering under the same flag-humping delusions as our poorly paid trigger-pullers, or now, freedom fighters who just want a foreign occupation force out of their country (some of whom are admittedlty also fuck-nocker terrorists). That's leaving out all the civilians, of course.

One silver lining in the Iraq conflict is that Hussein actually faced justice. This almost never occurs. The usual solution is to kill a lot of nameless, faceless, voiceless people, and then leave the people who are actually responsible untouched (remember Desert Storm?). Sometimes, of course, they are subjected to a very severe punishment, like being forced to live as the lavishly provided guest of another country, or even (as in Napolean's case) forced to rule a single island, with a measley retinue of only 600 personal servants! We should all hope for such punishments. Perhaps we could spend all the free time to consider what the real motives for war are.

Anyway, long story short, it's a rare war that can be justified.

And what of the death penalty? Is it right to murder a murderer? I find it is a logical solution to habitual killers or people with irrepressable homicidal urges. By one act of murder, you prevent several others. A dead person cannot go on killing sprees. An offsetting series of destructive acts, see?

That's one issue that I have never settled myself on with complete comfort. I have occasionally upset people who mistake me for a garden-variety liberal by voicing support for the death penalty, and I think I'm still on that side of the line, although just barely. At the same time, I'll point out that preventing future murders is probably not much of a reason, since the same thing can be accomplished by way of life imprisonment.

Drake

[Circle V]

Originally Posted by Clockwork

Yet, pleasure and pain are only sensations, the interpretations of a neutral world around us. With no higher force governing the world, then everything is by chance, and if everything is by chance, then there is no intended purpose toward good or evil, and our feelings of pleasure and pain and good or evil exist no more than does the color red.

Pleasure and pain and the color red are real. They exist, even if they are simply mental constructs. Unless you believe in the concept of mind/body dualism, there is no difference between something that is "real" and something that is "in your head." Both are defined only by interaction with them, and in terms of how we experience the world, both are valid.

Quantum physics suggests that perception actually changes reality-- in some cases, a particle exists only as probability until it is actually detected. For instance, a photon detector determines the location of a moving light particle at one moment in time. A few moments later, a second one does the same at a different location. The strange thing is, between the two detectors the photon does not exist except as a probability wave that collapses when all of the possible locations of the photon at a given time shrinks down to one. It's very hard to explain, but it is what modern science indicates to be true (but keep in mind that a scientific theory doesn't need to be true-- it need only be accurate.)

[Crying_Crimson_Tears]

Personally I believe that God lives life through each and every one of us. But he also created us to live to see which souls are good to take to Heaven and which ones are doomed to Hell. We live and love and we eventually die. but God wanted it to be that way, to see life and to experience it through us.

[raineofblood]

No Long Rant Here :P :

But The Fact that the most popular choice has been that there is no meaning in life disappoints me. We do not live to die either. Think about it:




There is no nature made (or even human made) item/creature with no purpose whatsoever or with the simple purpose of death. There isn't. So why would we humans, the most intelligent life form on our planet and maybe even the universe , be pointless? Without Purpose?

Think About It.

[Godslayer Jillian]

There's not much to think about.
Saying the purpose of life is to die is a purpose in itself too.
Life simply has no purpose. I'll paraphrase something Circle V said once that I loved:
Why must there be a meaning to life? What's the meaning of a pencil? What's the purpose of up?

[raineofblood]

There actually is something to think about Jilly. Dying is not a purpose. If it was, suicide would have to be a must for what is the best thing but to fulfill our purpose ASAP?

There may not be a meaning to life, but there certainly is a purpose. Just as there is not much meaning to a pencil, there is a purpose and that is for the pencil to be used as a writing/drawing utensil.

[Godslayer Jillian]

But that's an arbitrarily assigned purpose. I could assign the purpose of a pencil to be specifically to stab people in the eye.
Any purpose is just an apparent purpose caused by the childish outlook of life during our evolution.
We thrived because we mastered the use of tools and weapons. To be able to do this, we had to find a use to anything we could find.
That's where we got the idea that everything has its use (purpose).
This is crystal clear in children. To them clouds are for raining, fire is to heat, sharp rocks are to scratch, TV is for fun...
If you try and define a purpose of 'up', you'll see that it's only a rationalization.

As for:

Dying is not a purpose.

That's exactly the point. You were the one that found 'there is no purpose to life' and 'The purpose of life is to die, Mr. Anderson' interchangeable.
If the purpose of life was to die, then indeed killing yourself would be a virtue.
But, as I said, dying is not the purpose.

[raineofblood]

Le sigh. Once more you are correct about one thing. Yes, nothing has an assigned purpose BUT a purpose it does have. Our being on this Earth is purposeful but we have to find that purpose ourselves, hell: CREATE that purpose. Like we both said, dying is not a true purpose, but for the guy who plans his suicide for no reason maybe it is. For X her purpose in life may be to become an influential political writer while for Y his purpose may be to mull around the house and see how many cans of beer he can down before regurgitating. There is no purpose as a whole species but there are purposes, Jillian, it's impossible to say there aren't. What is your purpose right now? What is mine? To persuade the other of each one's opinion. So we have a purpose even if it is for this moment.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Originally Posted by raineofblood

Our being on this Earth is purposeful but we have to find that purpose ourselves, hell: CREATE that purpose.

Precisely!
Sartre would have agreed with you.
But I'm an absurdist, so I have to add something to that for me to agree with it:
Each man creates his purpose. Each man creates his perception of totality. But this is not because we have to. It's only because we need to.
Yet, with any assigned values, absolutes, meanings, and purposes, we might choose, we have to remember that they are not the same to each person, and with the ones that seem too obvious and intrinsic, we have to be skeptical about them, leaving room for other alternatives, but furthering our own.

[raineofblood]

Exactly!
Oh my Goth. An agreement. How rare.

I too will add to your additive:
And the only reason we need to create a purpose is because if we had no purpose we would be in something akin to a coma and would soon decompose for the worms to fulfill their purpose.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Agreements generally come up when you talk and dissect an argument enough.
Socrates used to be a master at it. Using a dialectic knife, people ended up with the same conclusions as he did. This is because, under the same manner of thought (e.g. western thought), there are some underlying absolutes.
And adding to the additive of my additive:
Someone without the need of assigning meanings and purpose (even if recognizing they're not absolutes) doesn't necessarily mean they're in a coma, but they surely do not fit within a definition of Man.

[raineofblood]

I'll have to agree. :P
Because even when one is in a coma, we don't know what exactly is going through their minds and as a conclusion: I had no right to use that as an example, because hey, maybe they want to be doing something but the state they're in prevents them. Fie on me. XD

[Clockwork]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Agreements generally come up when you talk and dissect an argument enough.
Socrates used to be a master at it. Using a dialectic knife, people ended up with the same conclusions as he did. This is because, under the same manner of thought (e.g. western thought), there are some underlying absolutes.

Bahahahah. That's so awesome.

[Godslayer Jillian]

..Why? O_o

[Clockwork]

Because. He could effectively turn people around in an argument - have them entirely on his side by the end of it. A lot of arguments just end in frustration, or without any connection between the parties. But to get in someone's mind and guide them into agreement with yourself... that's quite a talent.

[raggedyanne]

Conversational manipulation; interesting. Inquiry; which are more satisfied? Those who spend their life searching for it's purpose; or those who live life to the fullest and, in reflecting on the life, find life's purpose after they have fufilled it?