Probably a vain exercise, but here's a critique of Thinking and Destiny:
In Percival's scheme of things, desire 'fell', under spell of the senses, but true reason and knowledge remain pure in a higher realm. This premise gives everything that he imagines the authority of truth, if he has agreement from his 'higher self'. As a practical matter, this allows for no discernment between fact and fiction as long as everything seems to fit together internally. Contrary evidence is dismissed as superficial and misleading, since it is 'of the senses'. And any criticism of what he 'knows' is felt and dismissed as intemperate and uncivil, since it would force against what has no accommodation for it. Ironically, this characteristic is shared by theistic religions, which Percival dismisses as nature worship.
Percival's physical description of 'The Way' is borrowed almost exactly from a 19th century science fiction story called Etidorhpa, written by a 'pharmacist', and taken literally. It seems silly even to say it, but the earth is not hollow.
Percival regards sex not merely as a bad distortion of something essential, but as a mistake entirely. Where, in his vision of perfection, do individual identities intersect or make contact creatively, in relation to physical things? In my mind, all contact at any level is creative and conceptive. To Percival, it seems its all wrong, identity is confined to a single individual, a single 'unit', complete unto itself.
In the original Word Magazine version of Adepts, Masters, and Mahatmas (I'm not certain its in the later version), Percival speaks of egoistic and egotistic mahatmas. The egoistic ones perceive themselves as gods through all the worlds, and are at the center of religions. The egotistic ones withdraw into themselves. But by the time Thinking and Destiny was written, the concept of a delusional mahatma is gone. The gods of religions are entirely of nature, thoughts created collectively by men, while our 'heavenly fathers' of knowledge and reason are eternal and perfect. Is this division between 'nature' and 'intelligence' real? How can a single 'unit' be intelligent, or 'receive impressions'? These seem to me to require a very large number of interrelated units. Percival's distinction between the 'nature' and 'intelligent' sides of the zodiac is central to his entire argument, but it looks to me like another form of the same distinction he makes between the 'unmanifest' top and 'manifest' bottom. Its inspiration seems akin to the theistic division between god and demon, where gods are forever trying to hide from the offspring of their own lies by pushing them away as 'other'.
Percival's organization of all of his thoughts around a circle with twelve points gives them a consistency and coherence that they would not have otherwise. But very many distinctions he makes between things are particular to that framework, and much can not be understood that way. How does he have so much confidence in details about cosmology, prechemistry, and the formation of a thought that seem to be contrived and largely imagined? It appears that he doesn't even know that he's working with a mental model. It would be like someone driving a car that had a cartoon of the outside world projected on the windshield, and thinking that the cartoon is the real world. The cartoon does have connections to the rest of the world, but its a cartoon.
Percival describes mythical cycles of civilizations at length, borrowing from other unnamed sources. But his trigonometric model of reality does not allow him to place 'where' these places are. He places them in the historic past, separated by cataclysms. That puts him at war with science, which puts him at war with reason. This is a large part of what has rendered his work largely unknown, not simply that people are too primitive to appreciate it.
In Percival's mind, complete beings reincarnate (or 're-exist') cyclically as a chain of 12 individual human fragments, having 'past lives'. But since he has
The thing about learning about the occult is that most of the books and resources are flawed and downright misleading, but that's sort of the idea, I think.
While I don't disagree with your observation, personally I have a pretty low regard for that sort of thing. Crowley famously said that it doesn't matter if occult ideas are true, what matters is that given certain acts, certain results follow. Well, if you don't know the truth of the ideas, in the long run you don't actually know what results follow either. A person could save time and just cut their own throat directly. I think Crowley was an f-ing moron.
Another result of the dishonesty in occultism is relatively little new content gets developed that way. People recycle the same half-ridiculous ideas in different forms, while trying to obscure their sources so that it looks like they've got something original. Its a stupid game, and it gets boring. Studying the history of stupid games gets boring too. Let's break some new ground, and repair some things that are broken. But I guess the good thing about corrupt pseudoscientists is their ignorance makes them less dangerous than they would be otherwise.
I would like to see the term 'aether' resurrected, minus the characteristics that have proved to be false. A lot of the properties now referred to with words like 'vacuum energy', 'quantum foam', etc seem to me to be an improved version of the old aether, but usually not explained well.
Hall was a Theosophist, a follower of Blavatsky. Her teaching, like that of those after her, was inspired but objectively is about half bullshit. Where her ideas obviously conflicted with scientific understanding, rather than adjusting her views or trying to understand how to reconcile the apparent contradictions, she responded with misinformation and by attacking the credibility of science. That's a pretty serious problem for anyone claiming to value 'the truth' in my view. No matter how much a person or culture knows, they'll eventually regress into superstition and stupidity if they can't approach questions honestly and admit mistakes.
That said, there was a lot that fell under the heading 'alchemy' that was true and which is not appreciated or understood by the scientific community, in my opinion.
H. W. Percival, who was president of the New York Theosophical Society for most of his life, wrote what I regard as by far the most interesting book in that tradition, Thinking and Destiny. The same criticisms apply here though.
And as others have pointed out, let see a computer take down a top ranked (10th Dan) player at Go. The best a machine has done (I think) is winning against a 5th Dan.
I think that would be a 5 dan amateur, not a 5 dan pro, which is a lot stronger. But to me that's still impressive enough that nothing would surprise me now.
The bandwidth in and out of those tiny spu memories is great, much better than between main memory and cache on an x86 processor, or generally between cache and processor on a GPU. I don't know what anyone needs that for though.
Maybe they also felt that they couldn't trust him not to betray their relationship and get egg on everyone's faces.
Also, depending on what country 'X' is, they might have been genuinely affronted by the brazenness in suggesting that they murder his wife. Even people in deeply immoral lines of work often like to think of themselves as being bound by ethics, and will be offended if you treat them as if they have no ethics.
I would suspect the only long-term problems would come after thousands and thousands of years of continuous global leaching of heat on a huge scale - like most of the world's energy usage coming from geothermal. Obviously, that's not the most likely scenario for the long term once other things come online (like fusion).
Yes, I was thinking of use over a longer time frame than that actually. Degradation that develops over a million years is too long for most decision makers to worry about, yet its still pretty fast geologically.
Its not obvious to me that fusion is ever going to be practical, but I hope you're right.
Since the heat that's already being 'thrown away' will be the easiest to get at, maybe that's all people will go after, since the more difficult tapping won't be competitive with other things like windmills.
Much of the earth's internal heat is not generated by radioactive decay or tidal forces, but is transient, left over from when the earth formed. Its necessary for plate techtonics, which helps keep the surface chemically in balance despite erosion and natural forms of pollution. Its also necessary for the magnetic field and its shielding effect.
If we drill for geothermal energy for power on a large scale, do we hasten the earth's cooling by any appreciable amount? The effect must be tiny, and adverse results would be very, very, long term. But people don't seem to care very much about the very long term, and hastening the geological death of the earth would seem to me to be a very bad thing.
Maybe someone who's done a crude estimate could answer this. I haven't seen it discussed anywhere on the net.
Actually environmental protection, primarily in relation to salmon, has been a big issue in relation to dams. It doesn't take enormous political clout, just a few favorable regulations and court rulings. The hydroelectric companies like Idaho Power aren't tremendously strong politically either. I agree with your general pro-environmentalist sentiment though.
Factory farming has got to go, it's horrible on so many fronts....[W]e have to figure some kind of practical way forward, because we can't keep packing animals in to dark crates, standing in their own filth and pumping them full of drugs and then call that dinner.
Someone else commented that men will not become free of war until we start treating other animals decently. I agree with that. It contaminates our whole way of thinking and living in a way that eventually comes back to us. I'm not vegetarian either, for practical reasons, but factory farms are just insane.
Actually, you know, I can't think what to write next.
Lack of protein and/or necessary combinations of amino acids does that to one's cognitive abilities. Try mixing mushrooms with lima beans. And eat more nuts and sprouts.
Why is it that it is considered terrible that China would kill its own citizens but yet it apparently is a "troll" to point out that the US does it to citizens of other countries?
Its because people don't care about people in other countries, they think of themselves. And they hate to admit the wrong in their own conduct.
Ironically, the many chinese people I've known, while good intelligent people in other regards, seem to be remarkably bad at accepting criticism of Chinese actions, such as in relation to Tibet or the south china sea. I think that a significant reason China has been relatively benign internationally is they are cognizant of their internal challenges and weaknesses. If they were as powerful as the US, things would be different.
That said, I think its right to criticize American wrongs, so I don't really have a beef with your post. Morality isn't a competition. As an American, I want it to be faced honestly, and there's a lot of room for improvement.
Lots and lots of countries still have almost no middle class, even though the printing press has been around for quite a while now. So maybe other factors, such as some of those mentioned, do matter some also?
Not that you're wrong about Stallman, or that the printing press wasn't important, or that your post deserved to be attacked like it was.
Stories of historical miracles and promises of miracles (in response to prayer, supplication or meditation) are common to all of the religions you mentioned, except arguably for Taoism. By the standard you stated earlier the religions are all false on the same basis. But it seems you prefer some theologies over others, for justifiable reasons, so you have selected the system of nomenclature, from the many possible alternatives, that puts the religions you most dislike in a special category. Then you pretend you're making a purely objective distinction about which religions are demonstrably untrue.
A subset of other people who are attached, positively or negatively, to the same western religious tradition may be playing the semantic game. But parroting their arguments doesn't make them any more or less valid.
It seems you're not serious about adjusting your views to reality, or maybe you really don't know as much as you pretend to about those other religions.
Theory notwithstanding, a not insignificant number of eastern Buddhists, not the Hollywood kind, pray to Buddha in pretty much the same way a Christian might pray to Jesus. (My family is half Chinese.) And even though in theory the eastern religions are supposed to be pluralistic, in practice they still threaten heretics with their version of damnation, which is being lost and unable to achieve nirvana. Or they threaten you with famine if you don't pay them to pray for the harvest. Those are exactly the same kind of miraculous claims you were attributing to theism and criticizing earlier.
Buddhists are obviously far less aggressive than Muslims. I don't think its entirely fair to say the Buddhist societies are less violent than Christian societies though. There has been a lot of brutality in India, and mass murder in China, even though Christian nations have been a lot better at projecting violence overseas. This reminds me of some pictures I saw a couple years ago of club wielding Korean monks rioting over some petty pay related dispute. One doesn't see that with Christian monks too often.
But if you prefer the best aspects of those other theologies to those of Judiasm, Islam, and Christianity, which you call theistic and I called totalitarian, then I have no criticism of that.
From what I have seen, Hinduism, as commonly practiced, is quite theistic by your definition, even though there are multiple godheads, and there are esoteric teachings in the religion that are more atheistic, for those who are so inclined. Likewise for many varieties of Buddhism, even though the more abstract, self-help variety that's been embraced in the west is atheistic. Similarly Taoism, as commonly practiced, involves quite a bit of trying to suck up to a luck-god, even though there's none of that in the Tao Te Ching. The eastern gods may not have as much as a moral claim over people as western gods, but they still have arbitrary power and people still try to petition them for favors, notwithstanding all the talk about karma.
But if you're cool with all those other religions, than there's nothing atheistic about your atheism that I disagree with. Maybe you're even less a-religious than me, after all that. I do think that a lot of embrace of Buddhism by westerners is a reaction against Christianity without understanding the extent to which Buddhism is the same bullshit in a different form.
I think if they're "pre-fallen" they'll leave us alone, at least in any way we recognize, or they'll interact with us and we'll corrupt them. Then they'll fall spectacularly towards our level until they withdraw.
It seems to me that any contact between individuals is a small act of creation. I don't see how they can feel and know us without partially becoming like us.
I think there are levels of sin that we can scarcely imagine because our thinking is too primitive and corrupt. This is one reason scripture writers have trouble cooking up a credible 'fall' stories that fit what we know about natural history. We can only understand sins that are possible for us in our current condition. And we can only know history as it leads to our current condition: we do not know history that leads to other better conditions. Lacking imagination of any other possibility, people try to place 'the fall' in our past, but they can never make that work without ignoring contradictions with what we know about our evolution.
I think its probable that there are aliens who are both more advanced than us and more psychologically messed up than us. But there are reasons why its difficult for them to visit, in addition to the astronomically large distances, which they wouldn't be traversing anyway.
I think my disagreement comes down to this: theistic models of the world are wrong, but not entirely. So when I parse your definition of theism, "the belief that God communicates with man personally and that he intervenes in the world directly", it breaks down at what the definition of God is. You permit supernatural beliefs under atheism, and anything supernatural, if real for us, must have effects in our world. If there is also conscious agency in anything that's at least partially supernatural, and I don't see why that should be excluded, then it starts to take on the qualities that you call theistic.
Would a person who believed in the ancient Greek gods be a theist or an atheist in your definition? Those gods are not omnipotent or omniscient, and are only rarely personal or immanent. I think that a person who believed in them would be a theist. How about a person who believed in those gods, but who did not believe that the gods were what they represented themselves to be, or what other people represented them to be? I'd say atheist, except that the possibility of those gods communicating with man personally or intervening in the world directly would still be accepted by such a person.
It seems that your definition still hinges somewhat on the acceptance or rejection of so-called monotheistic theologies. I say so-called, because the major monotheistic religions appear to me to be more accurately described as totalitarian polytheistic religions. They elevate one god from among many, then condemn the rest to being false and/or in opposition to the one true god. But the chosen god is still one among many in the smallness of what it encompasses as an idea, and in that opposition to those other gods is usually a critical part of its cult dynamic.
Why quibble about where the definition of theism breaks down at the margins? Its because the margins are where the truth is. It seems a shame to me to bundle truths together with a lot of lies under the heading of 'God' and then accept or reject the whole thing as a package. This is actually one of the main things that pisses me off about religious people, they lay exclusive claim to a lot of stuff that should belong to all of us, smear it with shit, and teach people from infancy that their choices are to take it or leave it.
A related issue is that the policies of banks, employers, and other institutions have a huge impact on a person's life. So even if you can risk the legal penalty of representing yourself and losing, getting the conviction on your record can be a huge issue. So even when you'll probably win if self representing, you still may want a lawyer if it helps your odds, particularly if you've got dependents.
We do that too sometimes, but we call it rape, and when it's organized and sanctioned by a political group, as in Bosnia or Congo, we call it a crime against humanity.
Yeah, invasive behavior is in our genes, but the capacity for respect and self control is also.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a vain exercise, but here's a critique of Thinking and Destiny:
In Percival's scheme of things, desire 'fell', under spell of the senses, but true reason and knowledge remain pure in a higher realm. This premise gives everything that he imagines the authority of truth, if he has agreement from his 'higher self'. As a practical matter, this allows for no discernment between fact and fiction as long as everything seems to fit together internally. Contrary evidence is dismissed as superficial and misleading, since it is 'of the senses'. And any criticism of what he 'knows' is felt and dismissed as intemperate and uncivil, since it would force against what has no accommodation for it. Ironically, this characteristic is shared by theistic religions, which Percival dismisses as nature worship.
Percival's physical description of 'The Way' is borrowed almost exactly from a 19th century science fiction story called Etidorhpa, written by a 'pharmacist', and taken literally. It seems silly even to say it, but the earth is not hollow.
Percival regards sex not merely as a bad distortion of something essential, but as a mistake entirely. Where, in his vision of perfection, do individual identities intersect or make contact creatively, in relation to physical things? In my mind, all contact at any level is creative and conceptive. To Percival, it seems its all wrong, identity is confined to a single individual, a single 'unit', complete unto itself.
In the original Word Magazine version of Adepts, Masters, and Mahatmas (I'm not certain its in the later version), Percival speaks of egoistic and egotistic mahatmas. The egoistic ones perceive themselves as gods through all the worlds, and are at the center of religions. The egotistic ones withdraw into themselves. But by the time Thinking and Destiny was written, the concept of a delusional mahatma is gone. The gods of religions are entirely of nature, thoughts created collectively by men, while our 'heavenly fathers' of knowledge and reason are eternal and perfect. Is this division between 'nature' and 'intelligence' real? How can a single 'unit' be intelligent, or 'receive impressions'? These seem to me to require a very large number of interrelated units. Percival's distinction between the 'nature' and 'intelligent' sides of the zodiac is central to his entire argument, but it looks to me like another form of the same distinction he makes between the 'unmanifest' top and 'manifest' bottom. Its inspiration seems akin to the theistic division between god and demon, where gods are forever trying to hide from the offspring of their own lies by pushing them away as 'other'.
Percival's organization of all of his thoughts around a circle with twelve points gives them a consistency and coherence that they would not have otherwise. But very many distinctions he makes between things are particular to that framework, and much can not be understood that way. How does he have so much confidence in details about cosmology, prechemistry, and the formation of a thought that seem to be contrived and largely imagined? It appears that he doesn't even know that he's working with a mental model. It would be like someone driving a car that had a cartoon of the outside world projected on the windshield, and thinking that the cartoon is the real world. The cartoon does have connections to the rest of the world, but its a cartoon.
Percival describes mythical cycles of civilizations at length, borrowing from other unnamed sources. But his trigonometric model of reality does not allow him to place 'where' these places are. He places them in the historic past, separated by cataclysms. That puts him at war with science, which puts him at war with reason. This is a large part of what has rendered his work largely unknown, not simply that people are too primitive to appreciate it.
In Percival's mind, complete beings reincarnate (or 're-exist') cyclically as a chain of 12 individual human fragments, having 'past lives'. But since he has
The thing about learning about the occult is that most of the books and resources are flawed and downright misleading, but that's sort of the idea, I think.
While I don't disagree with your observation, personally I have a pretty low regard for that sort of thing. Crowley famously said that it doesn't matter if occult ideas are true, what matters is that given certain acts, certain results follow. Well, if you don't know the truth of the ideas, in the long run you don't actually know what results follow either. A person could save time and just cut their own throat directly. I think Crowley was an f-ing moron.
Another result of the dishonesty in occultism is relatively little new content gets developed that way. People recycle the same half-ridiculous ideas in different forms, while trying to obscure their sources so that it looks like they've got something original. Its a stupid game, and it gets boring. Studying the history of stupid games gets boring too. Let's break some new ground, and repair some things that are broken. But I guess the good thing about corrupt pseudoscientists is their ignorance makes them less dangerous than they would be otherwise.
I would like to see the term 'aether' resurrected, minus the characteristics that have proved to be false. A lot of the properties now referred to with words like 'vacuum energy', 'quantum foam', etc seem to me to be an improved version of the old aether, but usually not explained well.
Not that it makes much difference.
Hall was a Theosophist, a follower of Blavatsky. Her teaching, like that of those after her, was inspired but objectively is about half bullshit. Where her ideas obviously conflicted with scientific understanding, rather than adjusting her views or trying to understand how to reconcile the apparent contradictions, she responded with misinformation and by attacking the credibility of science. That's a pretty serious problem for anyone claiming to value 'the truth' in my view. No matter how much a person or culture knows, they'll eventually regress into superstition and stupidity if they can't approach questions honestly and admit mistakes.
That said, there was a lot that fell under the heading 'alchemy' that was true and which is not appreciated or understood by the scientific community, in my opinion.
H. W. Percival, who was president of the New York Theosophical Society for most of his life, wrote what I regard as by far the most interesting book in that tradition, Thinking and Destiny. The same criticisms apply here though.
And as others have pointed out, let see a computer take down a top ranked (10th Dan) player at Go. The best a machine has done (I think) is winning against a 5th Dan.
I think that would be a 5 dan amateur, not a 5 dan pro, which is a lot stronger. But to me that's still impressive enough that nothing would surprise me now.
The bandwidth in and out of those tiny spu memories is great, much better than between main memory and cache on an x86 processor, or generally between cache and processor on a GPU. I don't know what anyone needs that for though.
Maybe they also felt that they couldn't trust him not to betray their relationship and get egg on everyone's faces.
Also, depending on what country 'X' is, they might have been genuinely affronted by the brazenness in suggesting that they murder his wife. Even people in deeply immoral lines of work often like to think of themselves as being bound by ethics, and will be offended if you treat them as if they have no ethics.
I would suspect the only long-term problems would come after thousands and thousands of years of continuous global leaching of heat on a huge scale - like most of the world's energy usage coming from geothermal. Obviously, that's not the most likely scenario for the long term once other things come online (like fusion).
Yes, I was thinking of use over a longer time frame than that actually. Degradation that develops over a million years is too long for most decision makers to worry about, yet its still pretty fast geologically.
Its not obvious to me that fusion is ever going to be practical, but I hope you're right.
Since the heat that's already being 'thrown away' will be the easiest to get at, maybe that's all people will go after, since the more difficult tapping won't be competitive with other things like windmills.
Much of the earth's internal heat is not generated by radioactive decay or tidal forces, but is transient, left over from when the earth formed. Its necessary for plate techtonics, which helps keep the surface chemically in balance despite erosion and natural forms of pollution. Its also necessary for the magnetic field and its shielding effect.
If we drill for geothermal energy for power on a large scale, do we hasten the earth's cooling by any appreciable amount? The effect must be tiny, and adverse results would be very, very, long term. But people don't seem to care very much about the very long term, and hastening the geological death of the earth would seem to me to be a very bad thing.
Maybe someone who's done a crude estimate could answer this. I haven't seen it discussed anywhere on the net.
Actually environmental protection, primarily in relation to salmon, has been a big issue in relation to dams. It doesn't take enormous political clout, just a few favorable regulations and court rulings. The hydroelectric companies like Idaho Power aren't tremendously strong politically either. I agree with your general pro-environmentalist sentiment though.
Factory farming has got to go, it's horrible on so many fronts....[W]e have to figure some kind of practical way forward, because we can't keep packing animals in to dark crates, standing in their own filth and pumping them full of drugs and then call that dinner.
Someone else commented that men will not become free of war until we start treating other animals decently. I agree with that. It contaminates our whole way of thinking and living in a way that eventually comes back to us. I'm not vegetarian either, for practical reasons, but factory farms are just insane.
As a vegetarian....
Actually, you know, I can't think what to write next.
Lack of protein and/or necessary combinations of amino acids does that to one's cognitive abilities. Try mixing mushrooms with lima beans. And eat more nuts and sprouts.
I'm an American, and I value my freedom over a false sense of security. If you aren't comfortable with that, perhaps America isn't for you.
You're telling the 90% of Americans who value false security over freedom to leave?
Why is it that it is considered terrible that China would kill its own citizens but yet it apparently is a "troll" to point out that the US does it to citizens of other countries?
Its because people don't care about people in other countries, they think of themselves. And they hate to admit the wrong in their own conduct.
Ironically, the many chinese people I've known, while good intelligent people in other regards, seem to be remarkably bad at accepting criticism of Chinese actions, such as in relation to Tibet or the south china sea. I think that a significant reason China has been relatively benign internationally is they are cognizant of their internal challenges and weaknesses. If they were as powerful as the US, things would be different.
That said, I think its right to criticize American wrongs, so I don't really have a beef with your post. Morality isn't a competition. As an American, I want it to be faced honestly, and there's a lot of room for improvement.
Lots and lots of countries still have almost no middle class, even though the printing press has been around for quite a while now. So maybe other factors, such as some of those mentioned, do matter some also?
Not that you're wrong about Stallman, or that the printing press wasn't important, or that your post deserved to be attacked like it was.
Stories of historical miracles and promises of miracles (in response to prayer, supplication or meditation) are common to all of the religions you mentioned, except arguably for Taoism. By the standard you stated earlier the religions are all false on the same basis. But it seems you prefer some theologies over others, for justifiable reasons, so you have selected the system of nomenclature, from the many possible alternatives, that puts the religions you most dislike in a special category. Then you pretend you're making a purely objective distinction about which religions are demonstrably untrue.
A subset of other people who are attached, positively or negatively, to the same western religious tradition may be playing the semantic game. But parroting their arguments doesn't make them any more or less valid.
It seems you're not serious about adjusting your views to reality, or maybe you really don't know as much as you pretend to about those other religions.
I think I'm probably done here.
Theory notwithstanding, a not insignificant number of eastern Buddhists, not the Hollywood kind, pray to Buddha in pretty much the same way a Christian might pray to Jesus. (My family is half Chinese.) And even though in theory the eastern religions are supposed to be pluralistic, in practice they still threaten heretics with their version of damnation, which is being lost and unable to achieve nirvana. Or they threaten you with famine if you don't pay them to pray for the harvest. Those are exactly the same kind of miraculous claims you were attributing to theism and criticizing earlier.
Buddhists are obviously far less aggressive than Muslims. I don't think its entirely fair to say the Buddhist societies are less violent than Christian societies though. There has been a lot of brutality in India, and mass murder in China, even though Christian nations have been a lot better at projecting violence overseas. This reminds me of some pictures I saw a couple years ago of club wielding Korean monks rioting over some petty pay related dispute. One doesn't see that with Christian monks too often.
But if you prefer the best aspects of those other theologies to those of Judiasm, Islam, and Christianity, which you call theistic and I called totalitarian, then I have no criticism of that.
From what I have seen, Hinduism, as commonly practiced, is quite theistic by your definition, even though there are multiple godheads, and there are esoteric teachings in the religion that are more atheistic, for those who are so inclined. Likewise for many varieties of Buddhism, even though the more abstract, self-help variety that's been embraced in the west is atheistic. Similarly Taoism, as commonly practiced, involves quite a bit of trying to suck up to a luck-god, even though there's none of that in the Tao Te Ching. The eastern gods may not have as much as a moral claim over people as western gods, but they still have arbitrary power and people still try to petition them for favors, notwithstanding all the talk about karma.
But if you're cool with all those other religions, than there's nothing atheistic about your atheism that I disagree with. Maybe you're even less a-religious than me, after all that. I do think that a lot of embrace of Buddhism by westerners is a reaction against Christianity without understanding the extent to which Buddhism is the same bullshit in a different form.
I think if they're "pre-fallen" they'll leave us alone, at least in any way we recognize, or they'll interact with us and we'll corrupt them. Then they'll fall spectacularly towards our level until they withdraw.
It seems to me that any contact between individuals is a small act of creation. I don't see how they can feel and know us without partially becoming like us.
I think there are levels of sin that we can scarcely imagine because our thinking is too primitive and corrupt. This is one reason scripture writers have trouble cooking up a credible 'fall' stories that fit what we know about natural history. We can only understand sins that are possible for us in our current condition. And we can only know history as it leads to our current condition: we do not know history that leads to other better conditions. Lacking imagination of any other possibility, people try to place 'the fall' in our past, but they can never make that work without ignoring contradictions with what we know about our evolution.
I think its probable that there are aliens who are both more advanced than us and more psychologically messed up than us. But there are reasons why its difficult for them to visit, in addition to the astronomically large distances, which they wouldn't be traversing anyway.
I almost agree with all that.
I think my disagreement comes down to this: theistic models of the world are wrong, but not entirely. So when I parse your definition of theism, "the belief that God communicates with man personally and that he intervenes in the world directly", it breaks down at what the definition of God is. You permit supernatural beliefs under atheism, and anything supernatural, if real for us, must have effects in our world. If there is also conscious agency in anything that's at least partially supernatural, and I don't see why that should be excluded, then it starts to take on the qualities that you call theistic.
Would a person who believed in the ancient Greek gods be a theist or an atheist in your definition? Those gods are not omnipotent or omniscient, and are only rarely personal or immanent. I think that a person who believed in them would be a theist. How about a person who believed in those gods, but who did not believe that the gods were what they represented themselves to be, or what other people represented them to be? I'd say atheist, except that the possibility of those gods communicating with man personally or intervening in the world directly would still be accepted by such a person.
It seems that your definition still hinges somewhat on the acceptance or rejection of so-called monotheistic theologies. I say so-called, because the major monotheistic religions appear to me to be more accurately described as totalitarian polytheistic religions. They elevate one god from among many, then condemn the rest to being false and/or in opposition to the one true god. But the chosen god is still one among many in the smallness of what it encompasses as an idea, and in that opposition to those other gods is usually a critical part of its cult dynamic.
Why quibble about where the definition of theism breaks down at the margins? Its because the margins are where the truth is. It seems a shame to me to bundle truths together with a lot of lies under the heading of 'God' and then accept or reject the whole thing as a package. This is actually one of the main things that pisses me off about religious people, they lay exclusive claim to a lot of stuff that should belong to all of us, smear it with shit, and teach people from infancy that their choices are to take it or leave it.
OK. That's real also, even though dominance behavior is also generally a part of that with other animals.
If you don't also talk and compromise, the sex approach may only go so far, particularly in very long term relationships. But I guess that's obvious.
I thought of that angle before I posted. But the animal behavior that "settles disputes" with sex is dominance behavior, not making up afterwards.
A related issue is that the policies of banks, employers, and other institutions have a huge impact on a person's life. So even if you can risk the legal penalty of representing yourself and losing, getting the conviction on your record can be a huge issue. So even when you'll probably win if self representing, you still may want a lawyer if it helps your odds, particularly if you've got dependents.
Thank god we've got citizen juries though.
settling disputes by fucking
We do that too sometimes, but we call it rape, and when it's organized and sanctioned by a political group, as in Bosnia or Congo, we call it a crime against humanity.
Yeah, invasive behavior is in our genes, but the capacity for respect and self control is also.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, defending yourself eats up so much time and money that even when you win, you lose.