did Jesus really have to die?

Pretending for a moment that he lived, yes, all organic things die. To believe otherwise is to be either ignorant or ignorant.

When a christcultist writes that Jesus died so we could receive forgiveness is, to me, for lack of a better word thinking with the ass.

Anyone who thinks an animal or a person had to die to pay for their infractions has lost the use of their reason.

The question the godcultist must give an answer for is, why would an omniscient god, knowing full well the outcome of creating humans, go ahead and create them? It must have known it will have to die at some stage and that we would still go on a killing, so why do it?

Whoever Mac is, there is nothing wrong with recovering from a delusion. In fact, it is to be encouraged. So Mac, whether he Mitch’s fiction or a real guy, bravo to you for waking from the delusion.

On time and space

The two together are the form of our understanding.
Things are in space and happen in time. Beyond time and space, that is, beyond phenomenon, we are blind.
Is it, therefore, rational to classify things outside of experience, if any, that is, out of the sphere of cause and effect as knowledge?

In defence of freedom of speech

A columnist in one of our dailies has written an article that, would be, for any government be seen as a threat. What it has resulted in is idjits on twitter calling for the arrest of the journalist. Apart from being ignorant assholes, they remind me of the fact that governments; all of them, secular or religious fear ideas and their representatives than thieves.
I call these Kenyans idiots because they have put in a government that has excelled in corruption, land grabbing, stifling of free speech and any criticism of the government is reduced to tribal vendetta, what fools!
Now, it is pretense to claim we are a unified nation when every dispute, intellectual or otherwise gets resolved along tribal considerations.
Do I want secession? Do I want violence? I don’t know but if a case could be made for both, I would listen to their proponents.
This is to remind the idjits calling for Ndii’s arrest to wake up and get their shitty brains from their arses and use it for what it was meant, thinking!

On life

The pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer says this about life

..it is then well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson; to which, however, any one might reply: for this very reason I wish I had been left in the peace of the all sufficient nothing, where I would have had no need of lessons or anything else.

He continues, I guess, as a response to those who claim life is a gift

For human existence, far from being a gift, has entirely the character of a debt that has been contracted. The calling in of this debt appears in the form of the pressing wants, tormenting desires, and endless misery established through this existence. As a rule, the whole lifetime is devoted to the paying off of this debt; but this only meets the interest. The payment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted?  At the begetting.

I am tempted to agree with him.

on drugs

I support the decriminalization of all drugs.

These experts agree with me

In other news, how does Obama cutting short his tour make Belgium and the world at large any safer?

In defense of reason

I think we may have to start by a definition that we can all agree on

Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information

It has never occurred to me that it would be necessary to defend it until I met IB and Malcolm G.  He writes in a comment on IB’s post, I will quote him entirely, that

IB, it’s so interesting that we often agree with each other even though I’m an atheist and an anarchist to boot. There are so many important areas of our life where reason is unable to help us. Reason for example, and I think you will agree with this, cannot help us choose between fundamental values just as reason cannot help us decide which is the best play writer, Shakespeare or Sophocles. We simply have no way to objectively compare a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount to a life lived according to the Bushido code of the Samurai.

Furthermore, we live in a society run by moral rules and traditions which have evolved over time, with those groups surviving which had the most successful rules and traditions. For example, some groups accidentally developed a favorable tradition which we now call private property. These groups were very successful but the groups themselves have long since forgotten why they were successful, if they ever knew it in the first place. So we owe much of what we have achieved to a moral tradition which was never rationally designed nor indeed, intentionally created. Maybe faith in moral traditions is nature’s way of putting obstacles in the way of naive rationalists bent on replacing successful rules they have not designed with unsuccessful rules which they have?

In the first instance, the only thing, if anything differentiates us from the brutes is reason. Anyone who thinks that we can dispense with reason should go live with the brutes.

If reason can’t help us in choosing between fundamental values, whatever these are, what can?

I know he and many others will be quick to respond reason cannot help us on matter of taste. If reason is a way of making sense of things, then it is a guide in matters of taste.

And why would reason not help us arbitrate on who is the best playwright? where we expect each one to give a reason for their preference?

Isn’t all experience subjective? So that the only way we can compare lives is subjectively?

Why do we follow the tradition? Is it not because it comports with our reason? We have stopped, generally, from burning people at the stake for heresy because we have reasoned it was a stupid thing to do? Haven’t we generally stopped burning witches because we have reasoned it was really backward and inhuman and that there never were any witches to begin with?

I find people who disparage reason while also claiming maintaining they are reasonable and rational strange and bordering on the insane. I can excuse IB. Her username is insanity- that is, in her case the ship has sailed and their no help. For others, not so fast.

the god excuse and other stories

Some sheeple having read Dawkins’ God Delusion felt obliged to write him a letter to express what he thought he, Dawkins, did not get right.

This sheep is for once quite charitable. He is not wishing Dawkins a painful death and other niceties the godcultists are known to promise all heretics and blasphemers.

The sheep, for lack of space of time addresses three areas of disagreement with the book.

1. Dawkins is wrong about faith. He says faith is belief with evidence. Why call it faith then?
2. Evolution. I don’t understand evolution, so you are wrong.
3. Divine command theory. Here there are several arguments

a. read the bybowl in context

b. foreign language for example in biblical times kill all the children didn’t mean kill. It meant slaughter, you get what I mean?

c. god’s hand was forced. After giving his creation 1000 yrs to change, he became impatient and felt killing was the way to go.

I don’t know how a rational person can believe this.

On the other stories, IB, writing about the rational atheist almost shocks me that for once she has seen the light only to finish her post thus

So, I am a firm advocate of the non reasonable, the illogical, the emotional, the Spirit led.

and this is just after she wrote, bold face by us, ignore that she talks to god and he answers such trivial issues as what to do with a book,

Then God quietly asked, why are you allowing someone who calls himself the Voice of God and a Supreme Dark Lord  define what is rational? And in that moment I realized that atheism really is quite rational, logical, and reason based. It is actually Vox Day who is emotionally driven, irrational, his broken bits cloaked behind a mask of intellectualism, moral superiority, and reason. Trapped in a deception he cannot even see. Irrational, emotional, rhetorical.

And friends, had she stopped there, I would have toasted to her.

For amusement

Now I know most of the frequent readers and contributors to this site are not fans of philosophy, that is, the play of words as it has been adeptly described, but that my friends will not stop us from time to time sharing philosophical musings.

Here Schopenhauer is talking about love or rather here specifically sexual relationship, if I can call it that. He writes

First of all we have to remark here that by nature man is inclined to inconstancy in love, woman to constancy. The love of the man sinks perceptibly from the moment it has obtained satisfaction; almost every other woman charms him more than the one he already possesses; he longs for variety.  The love of the woman, on the other hand, increases just from that moment. This is a consequence of the aim of nature which is directed to the maintenance, and therefore to the greatest possible increase, of the species.  The man can easily beget over a hundred children a year, the woman, on the contrary, with however many men, can only bring one child a year into the world. Therefore the man always looks about after other women,  the woman, again, sticks firmly to the one man; for nature moves her, instinctively and without reflection, to retain the nourisher and protector of the future offspring.
Accordingly faithfulness in marriage is with the man artificial, with the woman it is natural.

In his book, the monogamy myth, David Barash looks at extra pair copulation among animals and reports it is prevalent in almost all species. He reports that among birds, when and if a bird pairs with a different male, it does so secretly so as not to jeopardise the relationship with the regular male.

Stirring the hornets nest

In his magnum opus, World as will and idea, on the topic of heredity, Arthur Schopenhauer claims a person’s character is inherited from the father and intellect from the mother.

He further argues, that for a while women had not the opportunity for intellectual pursuits thus depriving the world of monuments/ literary works by women. Were it for this restriction, he argues his claim about intellectual inheritance would be much more pronounced. He proposes as proof that you look for examples around you.

Is there any truth to his claims? I will do an audit of my family and report in future.

SOS

My previous post was on immortality. The contributions have been interesting but they got me thinking about a broader topic.

1. Why is metaphysics treated with apathy? Does it have any useful application?

2. What is time? Does it have a real existence?

3. What is space?

4. Does life has a beginning?  Does it end? Or put differently what is life?