Listen guys I am sorry for this whole mess, I am just bored out of my mind so this is basically a stream of consciousness dump. Be prepared for that when you read it.
The Controversy (You have never heard of)
Recently there has been controversy on my profile page. @Puppeter raised some concerns about the small cult of personality that I have attracted on this forum. Tbh I agree with him. Too many people here take me serious. This inspires unwarranted jealousy. Most of the things I write are just parroted of other people, who I have read over the years. There is little original thought.
To the people that worship me: I encourage you to read up on everything yourself. Don't be sycophants. A sycophant is someone who sucks up to a person they view as powerful. I can offer you nothing anyway. Follow the sources I link you. Read more. @Puppeter and @DarkStarDown are correct: I don't say anything special. Most users here mog me. I am incapable of holding down a job, my dick does not get hard anymore and I have a hunchback. If you can work, consider yourself blessed. Even if you hate it. You don't realize how good you have it until it's gone. Rotting takes it toll. Even for giga schizoid autists like me who have a low desire for human interaction. The grass always seems greener on the other side.
So please, do not worship me. Instead research worthwhile topics that actually help you discern issues quicker. Study topics like philosophy of science, common fallacies, problems in philosophy etc. Ugh, mentioning fallacies and cognitive biases always make me shudder because soys like to throw these terms around like crazy. Though they always fail to apply them to their own worldview somehow. Sure, nobody is immune to this. But soys seem to go hard in the pain when it comes to biting themselves in the ass.
And now for something completely different.
In the following associative ramble I will try to lay out how I think about God and hopefully give a somewhat coherent insight into how I reason when it comes to defending my faith.
To the people that worship me: I encourage you to read up on everything yourself. Don't be sycophants. A sycophant is someone who sucks up to a person they view as powerful. I can offer you nothing anyway. Follow the sources I link you. Read more. @Puppeter and @DarkStarDown are correct: I don't say anything special. Most users here mog me. I am incapable of holding down a job, my dick does not get hard anymore and I have a hunchback. If you can work, consider yourself blessed. Even if you hate it. You don't realize how good you have it until it's gone. Rotting takes it toll. Even for giga schizoid autists like me who have a low desire for human interaction. The grass always seems greener on the other side.
So please, do not worship me. Instead research worthwhile topics that actually help you discern issues quicker. Study topics like philosophy of science, common fallacies, problems in philosophy etc. Ugh, mentioning fallacies and cognitive biases always make me shudder because soys like to throw these terms around like crazy. Though they always fail to apply them to their own worldview somehow. Sure, nobody is immune to this. But soys seem to go hard in the pain when it comes to biting themselves in the ass.
And now for something completely different.
In the following associative ramble I will try to lay out how I think about God and hopefully give a somewhat coherent insight into how I reason when it comes to defending my faith.
The Truther Trap
For me the word blackpill is equal to the word truth. I just want to learn more, understand more and move towards some sort of resolution before I die. But in order to measure if I am progressing, I need a overarching, mind-independent purpose for my life. For me this is God. Without this mind-independent purpose you are condemned to just walk in circles forever. Why do anything? You are just masturbating, always looking for the next big thing to "expose" or "uncover." You are engaging in the truther version of female prattle.
Which brings me to my next point: I am exhausted with all of this shit. I spent the last 12 years online everyday, looking into conspiracy, blackpill and other content. I am reaching my breaking point. In the 2000s, people were putting out much more written content which made consuming conspiracy candy much easier. But now everyone makes four hour live-streams, often multiple times a week. You need to be fully dedicated to some shitty e-celeb just to get the gist of their message. Worse, the message can usually be summed up in one essay.
On principle, I don't dismiss anything as too impossible or unlikely. Anything can be put into question. This applies to almost anything scientific, historic, any evidentiary claims or findings. Note: The word evidence refers to findings made by observation (hence I encouraged you earlier to study philosophy of science, so you learn about the inherent limitations of the scientific method. Learning about the history of science and ideas in general can also be informative).
As you can imagine, this level of skepticism gets exhausting quickly. Additionally, the only consistent finding you get from this approach is that almost any evidentiary claims fall miles short of establishing what they promise: Concrete truth.
Take this very good essay on the history and methodological issues behind the science of ADHD as an example:
The author points out that all the claims behind what ADHD is are based on a whole host of different and contestet claims about how the human brain works and processes information. This leads us down a whole rabbit whole where we delve into issues in neuroscience, such as whether you can even pinpoint any specific brain areas as "causing" a specific effect in the human body, or if this should be classified as "neo-phrenology," as some scientists put it. Phrenology was the idea that you could measure skull bumps and somehow derive important information from this.
While this approach is nowadays decried as mere pseudo-science, the idea that you can essentially do the same by isolating and analyzing specific brain regions is as strong as ever. In the case of ADHD some propose that specific brain regions and "imbalances" in them are behind ADHD. This idea of chemical imbalances that need to be "balanced" of course instantly reminds us of the ancient greek concept of the "four humors" in the body which need be balanced to restore health. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
The ultimate conclusion of the author of the paper is that we really have no idea how ADHD comes about. We even struggle to concretely define the symptoms, which are arbitrarily assembled in our Diagnostic Manuals based on... yes what criteria actually? Nobody really knows. And the symptoms as defined are very vague, to top it all off.
So, this little side-quest into ADHD research has revealed to us that we know very little about the human brain and that neuroscience is no better than ancient quackery when it comes to studying what goes on in the human being. And we did not even touch on philosophical issues yet, like the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is the question whether the mind and the body are one, separate, what the mind is, if the mind exists immaterialy or not, how the mind processes information and so on. This is far out of the league of empirical science, which chiefly deals with observable phenomena.
Since all empirical science falls victim to what we just laid out in our ADHD example, our quest for truth is at an end here. We have to turn to philosophy, which was once called the handmaiden of science. Or more, it's master, as we shall soon find out.
Which brings me to my next point: I am exhausted with all of this shit. I spent the last 12 years online everyday, looking into conspiracy, blackpill and other content. I am reaching my breaking point. In the 2000s, people were putting out much more written content which made consuming conspiracy candy much easier. But now everyone makes four hour live-streams, often multiple times a week. You need to be fully dedicated to some shitty e-celeb just to get the gist of their message. Worse, the message can usually be summed up in one essay.
On principle, I don't dismiss anything as too impossible or unlikely. Anything can be put into question. This applies to almost anything scientific, historic, any evidentiary claims or findings. Note: The word evidence refers to findings made by observation (hence I encouraged you earlier to study philosophy of science, so you learn about the inherent limitations of the scientific method. Learning about the history of science and ideas in general can also be informative).
As you can imagine, this level of skepticism gets exhausting quickly. Additionally, the only consistent finding you get from this approach is that almost any evidentiary claims fall miles short of establishing what they promise: Concrete truth.
Take this very good essay on the history and methodological issues behind the science of ADHD as an example:
The author points out that all the claims behind what ADHD is are based on a whole host of different and contestet claims about how the human brain works and processes information. This leads us down a whole rabbit whole where we delve into issues in neuroscience, such as whether you can even pinpoint any specific brain areas as "causing" a specific effect in the human body, or if this should be classified as "neo-phrenology," as some scientists put it. Phrenology was the idea that you could measure skull bumps and somehow derive important information from this.
While this approach is nowadays decried as mere pseudo-science, the idea that you can essentially do the same by isolating and analyzing specific brain regions is as strong as ever. In the case of ADHD some propose that specific brain regions and "imbalances" in them are behind ADHD. This idea of chemical imbalances that need to be "balanced" of course instantly reminds us of the ancient greek concept of the "four humors" in the body which need be balanced to restore health. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
The ultimate conclusion of the author of the paper is that we really have no idea how ADHD comes about. We even struggle to concretely define the symptoms, which are arbitrarily assembled in our Diagnostic Manuals based on... yes what criteria actually? Nobody really knows. And the symptoms as defined are very vague, to top it all off.
So, this little side-quest into ADHD research has revealed to us that we know very little about the human brain and that neuroscience is no better than ancient quackery when it comes to studying what goes on in the human being. And we did not even touch on philosophical issues yet, like the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is the question whether the mind and the body are one, separate, what the mind is, if the mind exists immaterialy or not, how the mind processes information and so on. This is far out of the league of empirical science, which chiefly deals with observable phenomena.
Since all empirical science falls victim to what we just laid out in our ADHD example, our quest for truth is at an end here. We have to turn to philosophy, which was once called the handmaiden of science. Or more, it's master, as we shall soon find out.
Philosophy, My Ticket to Sanity and the End of the Truther Trap
You can read a thousand books and not take a single step. Most people mistake change for progress. Philosophically speaking, any worldview without an ultimate purpose will struggle to even define progress. If there is no singular goal, how do you even determine if you have progressed? Science can not provide you with goals, since questions of purpose are philosophical in nature. In philosophy they call the investigation of purpose "teleology." A worldview that has no ultimate purpose is called "dys-teleological."
Can't you define your own purpose? Not really. Because by that metric, you could just say, "well my purpose is to be whatever I already am. I am done, I win." Nobody would take you serious if you did that, but logically speaking, that would be valid. It would be valid because if you can just define your own purpose, then anything is valid. The only criterion is that you want it, and therefore it becomes right. Might is right.
Problems arise when we dissect this closer. If the only criterion for why something is true is that you want it, how do you know that this is true itself? If you say "its true because I want it" you are doing circular reasoning. So this does not work. It also eliminates the possibility for choosing between different purposes. Why? Because anything you choose is what you want, right? So it does not matter what you choose, all choices are the same, since you want them.
This leads to a form of determinism. Determinism means that everything in your life is pre-determined. You don't make choices anymore, you are a robot. And determinism also leads to the impossibility of knowledge. How? Because knowledge requires choices. Choice assumes there is a person making choices, not a robot. Machines can not make choices, just as a river does not choose to transport salmon to a specific location. Knowledge requires an object of knowledge and a knower with self awarness.
If everything was determined in a mechanistic sense, there would be no person making choices anymore. Anything that enters your mind would not be chosen by a person with intellect, but rather just have been absorbed, similar to how a bucket fills with water. If I threw a book into an empty bucket, you would not say the bucket learned the contents of the book, would you?
So in the final analysis, determining your own purpose is kind of impossible. There are other issues too here. For instance, if you define your own purpose, how do you measure progress? Because even the idea of progress is dependend on you as a person in this model. You are the only one determining how much progress you have made towards your goal.
Imagine a swimmer. He is an ocean. But he defined the dimenions of the ocean himself. And now he defines how fast he is swimming himself. But he does not know how fast he is actually swimming, since that would require some external standard. He just makes up numbers in his head. It's all on him. If he wanted to, he could just wish the ocean away or imagine he is swimming 900mph an hour. It's all arbitrary. An being arbitary is not an argument, it is fallacious.
This last example of course still assumes agency on the swimmers part, which we have shown to be impossible prior.
The question of purpose also is tightly connected to the more general question of morality existing. If there is no morality, then there is no obligation to do anything. Anyone who replies to this thread claiming morality does not exist will not receive a reply from me for this simple reason. And as I already laid out, there is a direct line from amorality to the impossibility of knowledge. No morality = no preferable choices = no choice = no will = no will = no personhood = no knowledge = no argument. If you claim truth does not exist, ditto. You have said nothing since none of your statments are true. Dust in the wind. I will not reply.
If you don't believe in objective morality, you can not explain why we should even be truthful or logical. Why should I not believe in something illogical if morality does not exist? So we can easily see this position is redundant and can be dismissed instantly. If we want to believe anything at all, have free will, agency and choice and ultimately, purpose to our lifes, we need to look for a way to ground morality objectively.
As I already explained far up in this thread, I believe in God. What I laid out so far is part of the reason for this belief. If we want to have any objective morality at all, we need a mind-independent standard that does not rely on humans. And since morality is tied to agency and personhood, the source of that objective morality we look for also has to be personal. A river can not judge our actions. Neither can a cloud. Only a personal God can do this witout being arbitrary. Here we run into another issue: Divine voluntarism.
Divine voluntarism is the problem of God's relationship to morality. If God merely creates arbitrary laws and then calls that morality, God would be amoral. It would make him a dictator. A solution to this problem is to avoid making God the source of morality. Instead we make HIM morality itself. God is the good. God's nature is the good. He does not decide arbitrarily what is good or bad. What is good is merely what is god-like, and what is bad is that which is distant from God. Just imagine it like concentric circles. In the center is God and the further we move out and away from him, the more "evil" a position is.
One issue people point out here is that this effectively makes God a slave to his own nature and not all powerful. God can not be anything but himself, he is bound to his nature. This is a question I can not answer yet. A response I can give though is that in terms of argumentation, this does not pose that big of a problem.
Why? Because we are not arguing particular points but rather the coherency of entire worldviews. Merely pointing out one thing in a whole worldview does not destroy the entire worldview.
In the case I laid out earlier, if your opponent can not even explain why he exists, as a whole person with free will and choice, then the question whether your God is bound by his nature is really a moot point, since the Godly worldview retains more explanatory power and does not default to absurdity like the opposition. If your opponent can not even explain why we should be logically consistent in the first place, then how can he attack logical inconsistencies in your worldview?
We started this long detour by asking ourself the question of how we can define an objective purpose for ourselves, so we can start the journey towards truth. On the way we found that it is in fact impossible to define your own purpose. We can only receive true, unchanging, immortal purpose from a personal agent who is equally immortal and unchangable. And not only do we receive our purpose from this personal agent, no, we also discovered that the agent in question must ultimately be the puprose himself, instead of him just merely defining it for us like an amoral game-master.
We have also discovered two other things: There are necessary conditions before we can even argue, make claims, be persons with free will. And that these conditoins are co-dependent. No morality = no personhood. But we need both. Morality and personhood necessitate each other. And if we want to have an objective grounding for these necessary pre-conditions, we have to ground them in some sort of personal Deity that is immortal, all-knowing and all present (or they would not be able to be perfectly objective).
Besides morality, there are many other necessary conditions, all of which intersect and depend on each other. Imagine it like a paint-by-numbers game. We connect all the pre-conditions of knowledge, reality etc. We further discover just how all of them depend on each other. When we have finished our little game of connecting the dots, we get a very, very specific picture. My conclusion is that this God is the God of Orthodox Christianity. This conclusion will seem far fetched to the first reader, but it will prove to be true with deeper investigation.
Once we grasp this, we can finally begin our journey and leave the moor of uncertainity forever. We surrender our feeble wills to a higher order thinking. We were constantly appealing to it anyway the entire time anyway, we were just unaware of it. For instance, many will reply to this with things like, god is evil because suffering exists. If you have read this far, go back to what we discussed already. To say god is evil presupposes evil exists and that god exists. It also returns us to the issue of defining our own morality, since the people making the claim of god being evil are merely arbitrarily defining things as good or bad. But can they justify why these are good or bad? No, they just are, because they say so. And if you have followed along this far, you should be easily able to dismantle this.
This is how my journey began and also continues. If you want to know more about this, google "the contingency of knowledge and revelatory theism." It should be the PDF on the website called "patristicfaith.com." It offers a nice summary of the whole issue. This thread is just my attempt to touch on it in my own way to maybe get some people interested in this topic.
I know I tend to go on insane tangents in my threads. I think kinda associatively so I want to tie this bundle of loose strings together in my final summary.
Can't you define your own purpose? Not really. Because by that metric, you could just say, "well my purpose is to be whatever I already am. I am done, I win." Nobody would take you serious if you did that, but logically speaking, that would be valid. It would be valid because if you can just define your own purpose, then anything is valid. The only criterion is that you want it, and therefore it becomes right. Might is right.
Problems arise when we dissect this closer. If the only criterion for why something is true is that you want it, how do you know that this is true itself? If you say "its true because I want it" you are doing circular reasoning. So this does not work. It also eliminates the possibility for choosing between different purposes. Why? Because anything you choose is what you want, right? So it does not matter what you choose, all choices are the same, since you want them.
This leads to a form of determinism. Determinism means that everything in your life is pre-determined. You don't make choices anymore, you are a robot. And determinism also leads to the impossibility of knowledge. How? Because knowledge requires choices. Choice assumes there is a person making choices, not a robot. Machines can not make choices, just as a river does not choose to transport salmon to a specific location. Knowledge requires an object of knowledge and a knower with self awarness.
If everything was determined in a mechanistic sense, there would be no person making choices anymore. Anything that enters your mind would not be chosen by a person with intellect, but rather just have been absorbed, similar to how a bucket fills with water. If I threw a book into an empty bucket, you would not say the bucket learned the contents of the book, would you?
So in the final analysis, determining your own purpose is kind of impossible. There are other issues too here. For instance, if you define your own purpose, how do you measure progress? Because even the idea of progress is dependend on you as a person in this model. You are the only one determining how much progress you have made towards your goal.
Imagine a swimmer. He is an ocean. But he defined the dimenions of the ocean himself. And now he defines how fast he is swimming himself. But he does not know how fast he is actually swimming, since that would require some external standard. He just makes up numbers in his head. It's all on him. If he wanted to, he could just wish the ocean away or imagine he is swimming 900mph an hour. It's all arbitrary. An being arbitary is not an argument, it is fallacious.
This last example of course still assumes agency on the swimmers part, which we have shown to be impossible prior.
The question of purpose also is tightly connected to the more general question of morality existing. If there is no morality, then there is no obligation to do anything. Anyone who replies to this thread claiming morality does not exist will not receive a reply from me for this simple reason. And as I already laid out, there is a direct line from amorality to the impossibility of knowledge. No morality = no preferable choices = no choice = no will = no will = no personhood = no knowledge = no argument. If you claim truth does not exist, ditto. You have said nothing since none of your statments are true. Dust in the wind. I will not reply.
If you don't believe in objective morality, you can not explain why we should even be truthful or logical. Why should I not believe in something illogical if morality does not exist? So we can easily see this position is redundant and can be dismissed instantly. If we want to believe anything at all, have free will, agency and choice and ultimately, purpose to our lifes, we need to look for a way to ground morality objectively.
As I already explained far up in this thread, I believe in God. What I laid out so far is part of the reason for this belief. If we want to have any objective morality at all, we need a mind-independent standard that does not rely on humans. And since morality is tied to agency and personhood, the source of that objective morality we look for also has to be personal. A river can not judge our actions. Neither can a cloud. Only a personal God can do this witout being arbitrary. Here we run into another issue: Divine voluntarism.
Divine voluntarism is the problem of God's relationship to morality. If God merely creates arbitrary laws and then calls that morality, God would be amoral. It would make him a dictator. A solution to this problem is to avoid making God the source of morality. Instead we make HIM morality itself. God is the good. God's nature is the good. He does not decide arbitrarily what is good or bad. What is good is merely what is god-like, and what is bad is that which is distant from God. Just imagine it like concentric circles. In the center is God and the further we move out and away from him, the more "evil" a position is.
One issue people point out here is that this effectively makes God a slave to his own nature and not all powerful. God can not be anything but himself, he is bound to his nature. This is a question I can not answer yet. A response I can give though is that in terms of argumentation, this does not pose that big of a problem.
Why? Because we are not arguing particular points but rather the coherency of entire worldviews. Merely pointing out one thing in a whole worldview does not destroy the entire worldview.
In the case I laid out earlier, if your opponent can not even explain why he exists, as a whole person with free will and choice, then the question whether your God is bound by his nature is really a moot point, since the Godly worldview retains more explanatory power and does not default to absurdity like the opposition. If your opponent can not even explain why we should be logically consistent in the first place, then how can he attack logical inconsistencies in your worldview?
We started this long detour by asking ourself the question of how we can define an objective purpose for ourselves, so we can start the journey towards truth. On the way we found that it is in fact impossible to define your own purpose. We can only receive true, unchanging, immortal purpose from a personal agent who is equally immortal and unchangable. And not only do we receive our purpose from this personal agent, no, we also discovered that the agent in question must ultimately be the puprose himself, instead of him just merely defining it for us like an amoral game-master.
We have also discovered two other things: There are necessary conditions before we can even argue, make claims, be persons with free will. And that these conditoins are co-dependent. No morality = no personhood. But we need both. Morality and personhood necessitate each other. And if we want to have an objective grounding for these necessary pre-conditions, we have to ground them in some sort of personal Deity that is immortal, all-knowing and all present (or they would not be able to be perfectly objective).
Besides morality, there are many other necessary conditions, all of which intersect and depend on each other. Imagine it like a paint-by-numbers game. We connect all the pre-conditions of knowledge, reality etc. We further discover just how all of them depend on each other. When we have finished our little game of connecting the dots, we get a very, very specific picture. My conclusion is that this God is the God of Orthodox Christianity. This conclusion will seem far fetched to the first reader, but it will prove to be true with deeper investigation.
Once we grasp this, we can finally begin our journey and leave the moor of uncertainity forever. We surrender our feeble wills to a higher order thinking. We were constantly appealing to it anyway the entire time anyway, we were just unaware of it. For instance, many will reply to this with things like, god is evil because suffering exists. If you have read this far, go back to what we discussed already. To say god is evil presupposes evil exists and that god exists. It also returns us to the issue of defining our own morality, since the people making the claim of god being evil are merely arbitrarily defining things as good or bad. But can they justify why these are good or bad? No, they just are, because they say so. And if you have followed along this far, you should be easily able to dismantle this.
This is how my journey began and also continues. If you want to know more about this, google "the contingency of knowledge and revelatory theism." It should be the PDF on the website called "patristicfaith.com." It offers a nice summary of the whole issue. This thread is just my attempt to touch on it in my own way to maybe get some people interested in this topic.
I know I tend to go on insane tangents in my threads. I think kinda associatively so I want to tie this bundle of loose strings together in my final summary.
Final Summary
I hope I could give anyone reading this some hints on how to approach. Note, I am not denying that people can make choices or anything the like. I am rather challenging people to justify why they can, logically speaking. That is the argument. It can be summed up in the problem that all questions of justifications ultimately end up in three possible fallacies: One, fideism. The claim that things just are true, based on faith. Two, circular reasoning. Things are because they are. Three, infinite regress. A infinite chain of statements dodging the actual why question. Also known as question-begging.
I left something out though: This only applies to questions that begin from a human-standpoint. Because, before any human can even propose something like a criterium for why something like truth or morality exists, they already have to appeal to some ultimate, perfect standard outside themselves, or their propositions would be meaningless. This we may call the jumpstart problem. In the presented model, the thing we appeal to would be God of course.
The question of purpose in Christianity is also a contentious one. The protestant and catholic visions of what God is and what his purpose for us is are quite different. Note: This does not constitute an argument against christianity. It would be like saying, since there is disagreement between scientists, all of science is wrong. In orthodox christianity, the faith I want to join in the future, the purpose question can be nicely summed up in this quote from Saint Athanasius: "God became man, so that man might become god." This is a radical departure from the other christian denominations.
For more on this idea, which is refered to as "theosis" in concept, this pdf will serve to enlighten the curious reader:
Also, why do I always end up sounding gayer and gayer the longer I write?
Anyway, enough of this.
I left something out though: This only applies to questions that begin from a human-standpoint. Because, before any human can even propose something like a criterium for why something like truth or morality exists, they already have to appeal to some ultimate, perfect standard outside themselves, or their propositions would be meaningless. This we may call the jumpstart problem. In the presented model, the thing we appeal to would be God of course.
The question of purpose in Christianity is also a contentious one. The protestant and catholic visions of what God is and what his purpose for us is are quite different. Note: This does not constitute an argument against christianity. It would be like saying, since there is disagreement between scientists, all of science is wrong. In orthodox christianity, the faith I want to join in the future, the purpose question can be nicely summed up in this quote from Saint Athanasius: "God became man, so that man might become god." This is a radical departure from the other christian denominations.
For more on this idea, which is refered to as "theosis" in concept, this pdf will serve to enlighten the curious reader:
Also, why do I always end up sounding gayer and gayer the longer I write?
Anyway, enough of this.
