Four Conscientious Choices

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_I have a question
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Re: Four Conscientious Choices

Post by _I have a question »

KevinSim wrote:
I have a question wrote:5, the conscientious person can decide it’s not worth worrying about and instead put all their efforts into their relationships with family and friends.

IHAQ, what's the difference between (4) and (5)?

(1)

But seriously, you can’t see the difference between “There is no God” and “I’ve no idea if there’s a God or not”?

And in what way is a person who doesn’t spend time contemplating the idea of “God” not conscientious?
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Four Conscientious Choices

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

KevinSim wrote:Conscience is that that motivates someone to do good things.


I think when you're subjecting billions of people to 4 things you run the risk of reductio ad hominem. I don't really know what that means, but it sounds kind of smart, kind of like reductio ad absurdumb.

Conscience is really just a person's inner dialogue or process regarding their morality. This morality mechanism isn't subject to your narrow interpretation of deliberation.

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:What is good?
What are good things?


Doctor CamNC4Me, why are you asking those two questions?

Is it because you hope that I will answer them? I think it probably is. You want to carry on a conversation with me. Why would you want to carry on a conversation with me if you didn't think it was a good thing?

And why would you expect me to answer your questions, if you didn't have some expectation that I would think answering them is also a good thing?

People like to talk about good and good things as if they need to be defined, but really they don't. Everybody has some sense of what those terms mean. For example, the biggest difference between a genuine poster and a troll is that the former is good and the latter is not.


Is that what you do? You deflect, and then insult? I don't appreciate the argumentum ad hominid.

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:What is God, pragmatically speaking, and how does it serve your question of preserving "good things?"


I told you what God is, someone who knows how to preserve forever some good things, and who is in fact preserving forever some good things. I'm not sure I know what you mean by asking me how "does it serve" my "question of preserving 'good things?'" Can you reword that?


Well. First of all, ain't no one preserving nothing forever. There's a law and it's called the 2nd Law of thermal and dynamics. If your god, who lives on a planet, and has to use the space stone to appear and disappear that's a lot of energy to use. And the universe is running out of natural resources, but instead of finding balance within the universe your god insists on unlimited reproduction and life just keeps multiplying and using up all the resources and then what?

I'll tell you what. We need to halve all life in the universe because I've seen what happens when too many people keep making more people and there's no space and it's crowded. It's called Korea, Kevin. People live on top of each other, and that's unsustaunable.

Is that a "good thing?"

No. And you're on this board pushing unlimited and unregulated consumption as if it's the panacea for all our ills.

You know who else did that?

Satan did. Are you actually stating that the Father of All Lies is good? Because that's the message you just sent loud and freaking clear.

- DOC
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Dr Exiled
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Re: Four Conscientious Choices

Post by _Dr Exiled »

Seems like "good" could mean almost anything to Mr. Sim. Without a definition of terms, then what is the point of the conversation? How do I know that Mr. Sim's concept of what "god" is doing in preserving some "good" things is the same as what I envision, if I envision it at all, if no terms are defined? Seems like more circular nonsense that the religious seem to love. How about this nonsensical statement I once heard when I still attended church ..... "god is doing what he does and more for us."
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen 
_Res Ipsa
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Re: Four Conscientious Choices

Post by _Res Ipsa »

So, I've noodled on this a bit and am not sure what to think.

On the one hand, I think some part of everyone's brain tells some other part (or maybe itself) a story that tries to make life, the universe and everything make sense. Kev, if this is the story your brain needs to tell to make sense of the world, then more power to you.

But, to the extent this story is some kind of prescription for how others should think or act, then I disagree. First, the notion that the billions of people that live on this planet can be divided into four neat and tidy categories is, in my opinion, misguided. I think others have covered this point pretty well.

Second, the whole post seems to me to confuse two very different things: whether there is a "God" whose mission is to preserve some good things and the belief that an individual has with respect to the existence of such a being. That, in my opinion, makes the whole OP confusing.

Third, the whole idea of tying one's worth to the existence of some undefined entity that seeks to preserve some undefined "good thing" makes no sense to me. Until you make the case that the existence of such a being is necessary to give meaning to life, the whole analysis seems to me to be premature.

Finally, I'm skeptical about the notion of using "conscience" as some kind of foundation for your analysis. It seems to me that "conscience" is just a signal sent from one part of the brain to another. in my opinion, it is no different than similar signals that we classify as "emotions." Why should we consider it any different than the feelings of love, hate, happiness, etc?
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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