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Middle Barael wrote:

If you get a PhD, you can actually say that you are a doctor of Philosophy!

I'm afraid to say that I am a "master" of philosophy.

Turbeaux, broken-double quote much? That aside, I was poking fun at newspapers and sensationalists who hype up the so-called "lungs of the world". It's often the unseen that does it all, and much of that unseen lives in the oceans... because, quite naturally, water covers about seventy-one percent of the world's surface.

Cameroi wrote:

as for statues, i'd rather see odd three dimensional shapes, then anything that looks like anything human.
as for learning from history, we repeat its mistakes deliberately when we do,
and until time machines become as common as cars, most of what is taught as history will remain distorted for purposes of deception.

Welp, better get out that Welcome mat for Jesus!

The young ur wrote:

Fun fact: C. S. Louis was converted partially because it made no sense that poor uneducated fishermen have any understanding of philosophy or writing. So because of the lack of any other good exclamations, he took the obvious explanation.

There's a bit of a broken thought in this sentence. Lewis was converted because of what now?

I always took the explanation he presented in Mere Christianity as his reason for conversion.

Middle Barael wrote:

Biology major sounds cool! Since you didn’t mention anything else you were studying, I had assumed you were majoring in philosophy, but biology sounds more practical and interesting! I’m not yet in college, but I’d like to double major is Political Science and some sort of environment studies, as I’d like to be an environmental policy maker, which combines my loves for politics, science, and climate activism, and that career is steadily growing.

About the history of Judaism and Canaanite religion. somewhere in a relatively old part of the Bible, Yahweh battles another god, and we’ve found carvings of a female counterpart to Yahweh named Asherah. Also, realistically speaking, it is unlikely that suddenly a bunch of people decided to fully become monotheistic. The scholarly consensus seems to be that the people from Abraham until the Babylonian exile were hedotheistic and later monolatrist, but that the Israelites status as another ethnic group was only cemented while in exile, and so they only became fully monotheistic around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. The Israelites did, however, syncretize many Canaanite gods with their new religion, with many of Yahweh’s other names, such as El, El Elyon, and El Shaddai all previously being the names of Canaanite gods, and the Canaanite concept of the “70 Sons of El” possibly leading to the idea of angels.

Coincidentally, one of the religions in Middle Barael is called “Phoenician Judaism”. It is essentially Judaism, but with an even bigger Canaanite flavor, as well as a lot about the history of god pre-creation, and also a bunch of complicated things that I do not want to get into right now.

*Henotheism...

Darths and Droids wrote:

*Henotheism...

Oops. I must’ve accidentally somehow combined “henotheism” with “hedonism”. For those who do not know the meanings of some of the terms I used (or misused):
Monotheism- Believing in and worshiping one deity
Polytheism- Believing in and worshiping multiple deities
Monolatry- Believing in many gods, but only worshiping one of them
Henotheism- Belief and worship of one god without denying the existence or possible existence of other gods
Hedonism- The belief that pursuit of joy and happiness are more important than anything else, often used to defend seemingly unharmful behavior that others may deem immoral

And a few more for good measure:
Atheist- Belief in no god (strong atheism) or absence of a belief in a god (weak atheism)
Gnostic- Belief that it is possible to know for certain whether or not a god exists.
Agnostic- Not knowing for sure if a god exists, or believing that it is impossible and/or useless to attempt to solve the aforementioned question.
Anti-theist- Against the belief in gods
Anti-religious- Against the organized belief in gods, or against dogmas and/or dogmatism
Kathenotheism- Worship of one god at a time, with one god eclipsing another in power or syncretizing with the previous one.
Omnist- The respect and belief (to a degree) in all religions, usually summed up with the following creed: “All religions have truth in them, but no single religion has the full truth”.
Pantheism- The belief that god is the universe, and that they’re one and the same.
Panentheism- The belief that god interpenetrates everything in the universe, but that he transcends it and is more than the universe, I.e. god is within everything in the universe, but is not the same as the universe.
Deism- Belief that god can no longer be reached personally, so study of the natural world is a better way to reach god than through revelation.
Pandeism- A combination of pantheism and pandeism, the idea that god was a separate being, but that god became the universe.
Humanism- Belief that the study of humanity is more important or more relevant than the study of the divine. Could be related to deism. Please note that they still find the study if religion important, but they focus more on the society and thought process and world view that led to the religious beliefs than whether or not the religious beliefs were true, I.e. they study them more from a sociological and anthropological view than a religious one.
Misotheism- Hatred of a god or gods
Dystheism- Belief that a god is not fully good, and possibly even evil.

And if you are wondering, I am a humanist agnostic omnist panentheist possibly pandeist theist (try saying that 10 times fast)

Kinectia wrote:

You say this like it’s a bad thing. Why would you not want your trout fishing industry to expand? Except that it’s an absurd concept now that trout have become so rare.

More importantly, there’s a lot more to trout fishing than fish. I can’t be sure about how this came to be an industry stat in NS but I suspect it might have something to do with one of my favorite books:
https://www.amazon.com/Trout-Fishing-America-Richard-Brautigan/dp/0547255276

Richard Brautigan made a very good case for trout fishing as a concept and as a means of capturing the world around you creatively. Reading this very short book could change your life. It will at least forever change how you think of trout fishing.

I don't want the oceans around South Wal Saland to run out of fish; being in the top 1% in the world for the trout fish industry would interfere with that.

A very topical poll. Enjoy!

page=poll/p=159244

Auphelia wrote:

A very topical poll. Enjoy!

page=poll/p=159244

For once your post had an actual important bearing on current events! Well done Auphelia! Also, if anyone is wondering, I was the first category in the poll, and please refer to me as he/him.

Middle Barael wrote:

If you get a PhD, you can actually say that you are a doctor of Philosophy!

I'm actually going to be studying physics once I finish my Computer Programming and Analysis Associates! My goal is a doctorate's in Astrophysics.

But uh, Philosophy is really interesting, I think. I don't know much about it officially, but I do enjoy thinking long and hard on why things are the way they are, especially when it comes down to society. Just something I find rather interesting.

117 minutes ago: Gabhate idan removed regional password protection from Region Land.
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The mysteries of the universe... O_õ

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I hope everyone is doing well, by the way! Things have been kind of busy IRL, but I hope to be on more in the future. :-)

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Edit on Gnosticism:

Middle Barael wrote:

Your definition was correct, but Gnosticism and Gnostics also we’re a 1st century CE sect/religion which believed in a greater hidden god of light and a lesser evil deity of darkness, and that the divine and the spirit were the world of light, and that the material world is the world of darkness. They sought to escape the material world via their esotericism and their spirituality.

I've often come to wonder about these sorts of ideas or schools of thought. I can see inheriting the idea of a duality of light (daytime, the sun, the moon, fire, candles, etc.) and darkness (nighttime, caves, holes, the unknown, danger for a diurnal creature, etc.), but it always struck me as kind of bizarre and "forced," so to speak. Like, precisely why should things on earth that would seem to more naturally go with the light (i.e. all living things, especially plants; fruits or products of living things, etc.) be aligned with the lesser, evil spirit of darkness? Why are pleasurable things, things that come from the Earth, creature comforts, etc., so often associated with darkness, evilness, or sinfulness? If anything, it seems much more natural that they would have made evil or sinfulness out of things like deprivation, sadness, violence, chaos, and things in that vein.

But no; the worst fear of so many religious systems and thinkers seems to ultimately be that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. And, there seems to be a long, gradual arc in human society that has gradually removed the natural world from something good, and instead has turned it into something that is meant to be "improved upon" by the addition of humans, society, people, systems of laws and rules, and the general reorientation of the natural world to a world of, for, and by humans.

Small wonder that our gods have shifted from being forces of nature or representations of features of the natural world to being anthropomorphic and anthropocentric "super" humans. And, having increasingly shaken off even those gods of past couple millennia, we now just view the natural world as a "resource" to be "used" and "harnessed" so that we can have "progress" and "growth," as we devour everything all at once and convert the world to a wasteland.

Kinectia wrote:

Being somewhat dismayed by the recent (IMO) excessive focus on religion, I was reminded of a discussion of the links between religion and brain damage (https://www.sciencealert.com/damage-to-a-specific-part-of-the-brain-could-result-in-religious-fundamentalism). I do like the idea of “hedotheism” though (which I was disappointed to see retracted). When I think about gods, in my mind they are usually quite consumed with their own pleasures and completely unaware of humans.

Also, although I often use statues as landmarks, I rarely think about whom they depict. When people vandalize them I wonder if they also burn books. What gets me much more wound up is carving enormous faces of “cultural heroes” into cliffs, especially when that vandalism involves breaking a treaty. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rushmore-sioux/

So I suppose you’d be an anti-theist? And about the statue, vandalizing them does not make them any less of a landmark. The people who vandalized them are perfectly fine with having landmarks, but they don’t want statues that celebrate racists, and most people don’t even pay attention to the statues anyway.

Luvas wrote:

I wonder what CWA's deleted post was about.

Same thing the one before this one was.

Middle Barael wrote:

So I suppose you’d be an anti-theist?

Not at all. If anything I would describe myself as an anti-labelist. I prefer not to be allocated to any specific pigeon-hole, especially with regard to religion. If the gods don’t believe in me (and I have no reason to expect them to do so) then whether I believe in them is irrelevant.

Candlewhisper Archive wrote:

There's no church of humanism, of course, nor any official viewpoint.

However, as someone who self-defines as humanist, my definition would be that humanists derive ethics and moral code from human experience and rational thinking. We reject the idea that moral authority can be handed down from "on high", whether that's from supposed Gods, or arbitrary philosophies that claim ultimate truths.

This is a linguistic drift from the original meaning of the word "humanism", which was initially coined to describe an education framework based on the study of classical literature. However, modern language is defined by usage, and in the modern age it's considered most politic to allow groups that bear a given label to define what that label means.

Most humanists I've encountered are solidly atheist (rather than agnostic), believe in rationalism and science, and are broadly optimistic about the inherent capacity of human beings to act morally. Most humanists also prefer not to generalise.

Many of my relatives are humanistic Jews. They summarize what they beleive as "We care about the Jewish customs and things because they are part of Jewish history and heritage, not because we actually believe in God". I wonder if this is related to what Faurexus was talking about?

Also, I totally understand now, Kinectia. I'm sorry for giving you a label. I myself don't even fully understand what I believe. Some people I suppose like trying to figure out which groups/philosophies we belong in, while others I guess don't. I guess that I am that first group, as evident from my attempt to figure out which of those philosophies I am (I'm an agnostic omnist humanist panendeist theist), while I guess you simply don't like labels, and that is perfectly fine. Sorry for giving you a label and possibly offending you