Відео

Thank you, PsyOneal. 🙌🏼

This makes me happy. Thanks Cheesy!

Thank you so much. ❤️

Thanks so much Alex. I appreciate that! 🙌🏼

Wdym?

Thanks so much, Flabarre. That means so much. Let me ask you, what types of videos would you really like to see?

Thanks again MacksOnAMission. I really appreciate your conversation. The Epicurean dilemma is, as argument, objectively substantial and timeless. It cannot be overturned without destroying the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. You have mentioned the fact that you are a father on a couple of occasions now. May your children live long and prosper. If God came down from his mighty throne and asked you to sacrifice your children as Abraham was commanded to sacrifice son Isaac at Moriah, what would you say? We, with our tiny human hearts, spring into action at the mere weeping of a child , and you think that a god who is INFINITELY compassionate would fill the world with such horror (amongst the beauty, of course?) Infinite compassion would mean, not an iota of suffering. That is love. That is compassion. Maybe you have something to teach the divine king about true love? (Don't shrink from the possibility). Further, what both Satan and Prometheus gave to man was the knowledge of Good and Evil - and let it not be forgotten that without knowledge of Good and Evil, one can be neither Evil, nor Good in the human sense. So whether propositional; procedural; or relational, it was indeed knowledge that was endowed to man by these benefactors. And notice that in fact, these distinctions are arbitrary and artificial. Knowledge implies them all. The attack on science, didn't take long to emerge. And (if you'll forgive me for saying so), is rather expected from one on a mission. It comes with the territory. Darwin has a lot to tell you about your relationship to your children, and this is no disparagement to our human love - which I would argue, is the only house of love to exist. Isn't that incredible to you? It is to me... There is deep beauty in it. Knowing that we are mammals, for example, gives us a lot of 'oughts', and 'ought nots', as does neuroscience, chemistry, physics, biology, etc. Finally, the idea that "Science was carried and handed down to the enlightenment thinkers, (which I notice, you placed in quotation marks) by Christians and Muslims who'd been at it for centuries," is so wrong, (forgive me) that it stalls attempts at negation. The Enlightenment was ignited by a rediscovery of ancient Greek approaches to knowledge, and those Christians and Muslims (temporarily) rested on the shoulders of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers - that is, their methods were successful ONLY insofar as they departed from dogma and faith. As for Iain McGilchrist, I would argue that Satan (and Prometheus); by allowing for human beings to "see the whole", would render them Masters to begin with. I could be wrong about this juxtaposition though, and I'm currently reading through his, "The Matter With Things". Thank you MacksOnAMission. I really appreciate it. Sapere Aude.

​@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow I'm so thankful you honored my comment with a substantial reply, even if you think parts were too wrong to even really bother with. I have listened to the pedigree of science arguments on both sides, and it really seems more nuanced than either extreme position would have it, but let us at least allow that the "rediscovery" (I'll say dissemination) of ancient Greek approaches was dependent on the preservation of those texts by (who else?) religious people. The combination of printing, translation, and intercourse between Greek, Latin, and Arabic-speaking civilizations, as well as the weaking grip of the Roman church following the various reformations were necessary groundwork for the century of the luminaries. Copying and preserving to laborious work before printing, so the access of such works for rediscovery does not exactly betoken neglect or suppression by the religious scholars who preserved them. The Epicurean dilemma is watertight, like more arguments, only if one grants all of the premises. I would not grant the second premise, namely, that if God is able to prevent evil but is not willing to, then he is not all-good, or, as you put it, "Infinite compassion would mean not an iota of suffering." I don't buy that at all. In fact, I'd like to know how you justify it. In fact, as a finite being, many of the greatest goods I have experienced depend on suffering. If you remove all suffering, you also remove all courage, self-sacrifice, heroism, selfless love, generosity, meaningful honesty, humility, self-control, patience, and most other virtues to boot. Every meaningful, beautiful, transformative moment in my life depended in some fashion on suffering. Christian anthropology is content that God, in permitting a zone of genuine agency to creatures and thereby opening the gates to finite evils, also afforded the possibilities for greater ultimate goods. If any story bucks that premise, it's the Christian story, in which the Son of God himself suffers the greatest evil only to turn it into the greatest good. As for the attack on science, I am an agricultural microbiologist by trade and employ and delight in the wonderful tools of science in my daily work learning about the incredible nexus of soil, plant, and microbe. It isn't science I attack, but the exaltation of empiricism above all other knowledge. I invoke McGilchrist because in The Master and His Emissary, he elaborates on the left-hemispheric tendencies of the famous enlightenment thinkers like Descartes and Voltaire. I do indeed place it in quotes. By covering up the eye of the gestalt, of the agentic, the new scientists were able to more readily grasp and wield the world. The left hemisphere has awesome powers of manipulation and control, but only by ignoring and shutting out some aspects of the combinatorially-explosive, unintelligible, non-empirical dimensions of reality. And so that which afforded clarity on the physical world obfuscated much. It discarded the dimension of the sacred, dispensed with the wisdom that would impede "progress" for progress' sake, dehumanized man himself, and ignored that which it could not subject to computation. At least in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist classed the enlightenment as a turn away from the whole in favor of the dissection, categorization, and manipulation of the parts. You won't here any argument from me though about faith and dogma having a mega distortion field if pressed into science. I see that plenty in my own circles. But it is a mistake too to think that intelligent science demands the wholesale rejection of all things faith and dogma. I will appeal to "enlightenment" contemporary Blaise Pascal on this point, whose fervent faith and mathematic and technological prowess makes that point well enough. You are bothered that my Christianity concieves of man as a child relative to God. Yet Christianity, acknowledging our lowness, promises theosis. The "enlightenment" makes man the highest creature in the cosmos, namely, a very clever primate. Will you tell me an "ought" that you think science hands us on its own? Godspeed on The Matter with Things". I have yet to brave those waters. P.S. As I recall, God did not actually have Abraham sacrifice Isaac, and indeed child sacrifice is rather on the top of the list of things that God finds abhorrent in the Hebrew scriptures.

​@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow McGilchrist has just reminded me through his recent interview with Jordan Peterson that, in the final chapter of "The Master and His Emissary," he points to Milton's Lucifer as a picture of the usurping intellect, of the titular emissary. It might be worth a pause in The Matter with Things to visit that chapter. Cheers, mate.

Hi Mack whose on a mission. Thanks for your contribution. I think it's telling that you would compare adult human beings to children; which implies an overseer and a father, and an infantilism which robs human beings of moral responsibility. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Second, let's not forget that the only reason that 'it' wasn't withheld, was due to the eating of the fruit, and that knowledge of good and evil (ie. of moral self-determination), was PUNISHED by god. Allegedly. And if, as you say, "Knowing good and evil is a frequent biblical idiom for maturity", make no mistake, that the credit goes to Lucifer, the light-bringer, and of course Prometheus, the fire-bringer.

​@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow I think you must have very different intuitions about parenting and moral responsibility than I. My guardianship of my children does not rob my children of moral responsibility. Far from it. My care is the arena in which they develop and grow their moral character by taking on greater and greater responsbility-not too little such that they grow selfish, callous, or uncaring; nor so much that they are crushed by the load. Our family is the arena that affords them the opportunity to *become* moral creatures. Having no parents does not produce an übermensch. It produces a feral child. It's no accident, I think, that God is call, by Christ, the Father. Relationship with the Creator has not robbed me of moral responsibility. It has been the most demanding, rigorous, transformative force in my life. It has been the school in which I learn to know good and evil, not to, as the refrain of chaos goes, "to do what is good in my own eyes." Along with Christian and Jewish sages back beyond written record, I beg to differ very strongly with your assertion that, "the only reason that 'it' wasn't withheld, was due to the eating of the fruit." It has long been held that that tree was a "not yet", not a "never". Adam and Eve were children, gullible, rubes. They were no more ready for that knowledge than my children are to be awakened to sexual knowledge by a predatory uncle or school teacher. The Father, just like every admirable human father, intends his children for maturity. The fruit was indeed desireable, as are so many things, but that which is desireable becomes death to us when seized on my own terms and in my own time. I differ as well with the simplistic notion that Adam and Eve were simply punished. If my son saw a horror film about a serial killer, introducing him to ideas and horrors he is not ready to process, and then he got hold of a knife and stabbed a kid at school, there may well be punishment, but many of the consequences would be the necessary steps to adjusting to the fact that he had discovered attitudes and means of destruction that he was not morally developed enough yet to manage. His separation from classmates would be as much protection as punishment. If he got a phone too soon and too soon discovered porn, there would be a fallout in his relationships with girls that would not be a punishment from anyone. They would come as a consequence of that knowledge come by too soon. Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden so that, in their now relationally-alienated (they don't even know yet to choose humility and repentance over petty finger-pointing), self-led state, they must be protected from making their current corruption permanent. But they are given the garments of skin for protection, given the gift of children, and given the promise of a final defeat of the serpent from their own offspring. Lucifer indeed brings a kind of light. He is the pedophile, the gang-leader, the child-trafficker, who comes telling you the Father is trying to keep you from realizing your full potential, that you should shake off his shackles and strike out. Surely he wants better for you than the Father. Sure, I'll give him that.

Thank you for your kind words, kind stranger. That means a lot to me...

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow There is only one God. And that is the father, the son and the holy spirit.

@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow And what you speak nonsense. God has shown his love and goodness.Through the sacrifice of his son.

@MagnusMorris-wp4it That adds up.

@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow And if you don't somehow understand. It means that God loves humanity. Because God is love.

Thanks Harry. But I think you miss the point. The clue is in Amis' position that "style is morality."

The free will argument is not an argument It's a fact. For if it was not true then no one will be evil. God would just make everyone to stop sining.

Agreed, completely, NoOne'sSomeone. Parts 2 and 3 coming up... Thanks for your comment. Need more of this.

@@TheWrittenWorldSubscribeNow Something else to consider is how impactful Milton’s perspective would be it be the still centuries away romantic period and the birth of Romantic Satanism. Easily digestible literature analysis is lacking on social media and I will look forward to what more you have to say.