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God is perfect because he is real and if he weren’t real he would cease being perfect.

Here’s your enlightenment era philosophy bro. We’re ditching the scholastics forever in lieu of this
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>>24774913
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>>24774913
>God is perfect because he is real and if he weren’t real he would cease being perfect.
Kek, I almost forgot about this dumbass argument. You make fun of, but I think this is exactly why retards love the medieval philosophers so much, they make arguments backwards from the assumption of their opinions in the first place, which means, that the way their arguments are formulated, is formulated in a way to NECESSARILY lead to the conclusion they want to be true.

Its not quite the same as circularity, as this argument plays with words and the unsubstantiated intuition that something must be real to be perfect, let alone that the concept of "perfect" is even remotely a real or objective thing, and not just a complete fabrication of the mind projecting its ideals onto the world.
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>>24774941
Just because a 'superior' supernatural entity declares itself to be God, doesn't mean it actually is God himself. Some cultures were duped by daemons/fallen angels feeding them solid, impenetrable metaphysical frameworks, as those entities both relish the process of making fun of human beings (a fact that has been reliable retold by ancient myths) and possess more knowledge and intellectual capabilities than we did back then, which makes it much easier for them to weave seemingly sound stories. The true realm that you can trust as the first base of your belief should be the one where those entities do not appear, and that is the material realm, and from the (real) Goodness and Wisdom found in said dimension you can jump up to the higher planes.
>I'll figure out myself through astral projection!
Nonsense. You will always be under the overwhelming attacks of said beings, and can never figure out what is a mere illusion from that which is True. That's akin to attempting to explore the Abyss ; of course you're gonna explode into a million pieces once you're past a certain point.
How to get out of this maze? Be kind or kill yourselves.
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>>24775250
>let alone that the concept of "perfect" is even remotely a real or objective thing, and not just a complete fabrication of the mind projecting its ideals onto the world.
>empiricist retard accidentally pulls a dualism
kek, love to see it
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>>24775317
Rationalizing copium
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>>24775328
that's not dualism
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>>24775343
non-dualists and to a lesser extent monists do not reject god's perfection, because doing so would be incoherent.
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>>24775317
The spirits are fundamentally neutral like nature. When a tornado seems to target only your house some anthropomorphic stories about it are more useful than others. Saying it's punishment for building a shitty house in a bad place is relatively accurate.
Metaphysical spirits form embodiments like tornados, from the right conditions including intent from the people involved. If there's malicious mockery involved it originates from the people.
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>>24774913
You are assuming that being nonfictional is more perfect than being fictional.
This isn't true. Their value is mutual and interdependent.
Let's say that "actuality" (all that occurs) is comprised of reality and imagination.
Actuality is constrained by what is actual. Imagination is only constrained by what it is able to imagine. Imagination is endlessly more malleable than actuality, because it can always take actual experience and mutate it into a speculative narrative or novel form.

the fundamental problem with this argument is that it assumes a dynamic of valuation (perfect/imperfect) without presenting any theory of value. It just assumes that being real is "more perfect" than being imaginary is true and the "more perfect" part is coherent.
In the end it's just another example of the nonsense generated when you try to use a system to prove itself.
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>>24774913
All Descartes really did was repackage Anselm's ontological proof, which Aquinas had already shown the foolishness of way back in the Middle Ages. So Descartes is demonstrably dumber than Aquinas, in light of this.
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>>24775317
Schizo moment. Take your antipsychotics.
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>>24775412
Asking "what is it like to be an imaginary entity?" is one of the most important philosophical questions. It is to ask the nature of the relationship between human creator and mental creation. This is a big part of the reasons why the idea of being in a simulation and awakening to the reality of it fascinates us so much.

One aspect of cultural materialism is to discount the value of the imagination except for the purpose of making some material product. If it isn't invention, it's entertainment. So in assuming the "lesser than" status of the imaginary, Descartes was actually a crypto-materialist.

What is the world of human imagination to us? It is the world of human souls intertwining, communicating, dreaming, fighting and connecting. It is the lifeblood of history. It is meaning and purpose. It is the truly immaterial - comprised not of "stuff" but connections.
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>>24775438
Good post.
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>>24775429
Anslem’s was less foolish. It was “the highest thought you could think” which in turn thinks all other thoughts into existence. Anselm didn’t use baseless jargon like “perfection” on which to hinder his argument.
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>>24775438
>Asking "what is it like to be an imaginary entity?" is one of the most important philosophical questions
>It is to ask the nature of the relationship between human creator and mental creation.
Your post is entertainment, to me.
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>>24775429
This reminds me, I've heard that Kant has a critique of Aquinas' Unmoved Mover proof. What is it?
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>>24775459
Hylic.
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>>24775473
>he's a gnostic
Shocker.
>>24775469
Well like the critique of the ontological argument he gets deep in the weeds and it's worth just reading it for yourself. But basically an 'uncaused being' is inconceivable - and also logically necessary, hence the antinomy. The proof seems correct but there's an equally valid counter-argument and no way to decide between them. Also Kant thought the unmoved mover argument in itself did not tell you anything about the nature of this first principle and had to be supplemented by the ontological argument. This is historically ignorant ofc, Kant never read Aristotle or Aquinas. But the dialectic Kant lays out replays itself in every jeet Godproof thread, with one side saying 'the series must end' and the other saying 'it can't end' or 'it doesn't actually need to end' or 'even if it needs an end how can we know the nature of this end? Why can't it be nature itself as an abstraction?' etc. The fundamental issue is that the unmoved mover argument is demanding that you accept a being that is completely beyond experience and, if you dig a bit deeper into its nature, inconceivable. Hence it is incapable of convincing the other side.
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>>24775492
Not a gnostic. Just borrowing their language to call you hopeless.
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>>24775492
>Kant never read Aristotle or Aquinas
Why do people admire him them? What a fool lmao. Imagine not having read Aristotle.
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>>24775502
I dunno man, he is an admirable philosopher even if deeply flawed. He barely read Hume or Berkeley either and much of his system is meant to respond to them especially the former obv. You can also know for a fact that he barely read Leibniz because most of Leibniz' work wasn't published until the nineteenth century. He mostly read his contemporaries, fellow German philosophy professors who are now for the most part obscure.
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>>24775492
The annoying part is how everyone thinks they need to be "convinced" of anything.
Given a set of premises we rely on every day something inconceivable exists. It's not possible to argue against that, how "convinced" you are is irrelevant but we also don't know how reliable these premises are to reveal something about fundamental reality. Especially when the point here is precisely that the tools we're relying on aren't reliable, they aren't capable of describing everything.
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>>24774913
To say that "I think therefore I am" infers that the act of thinking, as committed by the actor "I" is absolute and true. However, thoughts in and of themselves cannot be consciously controlled. Thoughts arise in the mind at seemingly random times as triggered by subconscious memories or feelings. This occurs absent of the conscious actor "I". It is therefore invalid to say that the "I" thinks. Rather, the "I" is the person on whom the thinking is acted. Using this rationale, even the action of thinking cannot be taken as true and absolute. The only absolute that can be posited by an individual is one's existence. It is more appropriate therefore to say that "I exist, therefore I am".
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>>24775517
>Given a set of premises we rely on every day something inconceivable exists.
Yeah but Kant's point is that this is not logically necessary. Neither side gets the last word. I said in that post that it IS logically necessary but that was poor phrasing, I meant that it is a cogent argument with an equally cogent counter-argument. It is neat how what for Kant was abstruse philosophy is in our day 'common sense'. Even people who have never thought about philosophy will naturally repeat Kant if you talk about proofs of God with them, the endgame being agnosticism. But Kant was not an agnostic, he was a theist, he just didn't think theoretical proofs were the place to look for God.
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>>24775492
the thing about an uncaused being being inconceivable, I'd say the thomist response to that could be that being-qua-being is conceivable simply by virtue of the fact that anything exists at all. what I think would be difficult to work with is the notion that causality (relation) is one of the categories, and so is shackled to phenomena and not to the thing itself, but then you could point out that the phenomena-noumena distinction is epistemic and not ontological, so what can be said about the uncaused cause is valid because existence 'exists' as an effect of the cause. I don't know, I might be completely wrong.
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>>24775511
>He barely read Hume or Berkeley either and much of his system is meant to respond to them especially the former obv. You can also know for a fact that he barely read Leibniz because most of Leibniz' work wasn't published until the nineteenth century. He mostly read his contemporaries, fellow German philosophy professors who are now for the most part obscure.
Retard, that only makes him more impressive and intelligent, than 90% of the modern retard individuals like you and some academic philosophers who have read like everyone and everything, and cant produce a single original or even emergent thought.
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>>24775533
>I said in that post that it IS logically necessary but that was poor phrasing,
>I meant that it is a cogent argument with an equally cogent counter-argument
I got the meaning but it also is IS logically necessary. The counter-argument is basically something like whenever a conclusion points to something logically inconceivable it's usually dismissed as fallacious, like a circular argument. This is born out of practicality more than anything since we can't analyse the inconceivable so this counter argument is basically an appeal to the same practicality, there's no reason to struggle to conceive of something inherently inconceivable.
The fact remains that our favourite tools tell us they have limits and we can't use them to conceive of everything.
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>>24775391
I'd buy it if accounts of possession and torment weren't so prevalent, as well as the numerous stories of these entities enticing people toward acts of evil, with an overwhelming percentage of practitioners ended up in pretty dire straits, by will or by entrapment. The demon/angel dichotomy is still the most accurate depiction of ''spirits'' that we have, because it accounts for the existence of forces of Good and Evil, and dismissing them as purely neutral seems foolish to me, historically, metaphysically, and spiritually. They are as sentient as you are. That's not even getting into the LHP stuff.
But then again I am open to further argumentation from the other side, especially if backed by first hand experience.
>>24775332
wig wag wom
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>>24775593
>The demon/angel dichotomy is still the most accurate depiction
In some ways but even in the anecdotal stories I'm pretty sure you'll find that they demons exploit the baggage of the people involved, the demons don't bring their own baggage.
The point is not to let tornados destroy your houses but to build better houses. The same principles applies to tornados, volcanos, bears, the forest spirits and le machine elves. When you manage them they're part of the environment, scenery even. When you turn your back, introduce the wrong energy in some way they turn into the monsters of nightmares. God is proud of the behemoth, He thinks it's cool, it's not "ontologically evil".
In old European folklore Satan is often a silly little guy you trick into serving you by being learned and pious.
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>>24775576
The random, flailing hostility from anonymous strangers is what keeps me on /lit/. It's cute that you get so upset by other people reading more than you do.
>>24775590
Something logically inconceivable isn't something that's really hard to understand, it's something that's incoherent. Kant would say that an ultimate cause, standing apart from everything contingent, was simply incoherent. It's not a matter of practicality, it's a matter of logic. Although, again, you can also point out the illogic of the opposing position. I can make a simple enthymeme here - if God's existence was theoretically provable, how come so few accept these proofs? Anyone who accepts them needs to explain this phenomenon; and I don't think "some people are just, like, totally addicted to their passions, and, like, porn and shit, and it breaks their mind so they can't understand this proof" works because there are plenty of people who accept the proofs who are not particularly virtuous.
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>>24775697
>Kant would say that an ultimate cause, standing apart from everything contingent, was simply incoherent.
The defining characteristics we've given make it inherently incoherent, if it wasn't we could describe it using logical models.
Any logical model of anything is still contingent on something not covered by that model. That means any coherent model of reality is incomplete, it's missing something, something presumably "incoherent" that still really exists.
It's similar to black holes, the math lead to something "incoherent", the argument against their existence was that the math must be wrong since it leads to a singularity but then it turns out these things really exist and we will likely never understand fully what they are since information can't escape them.
We're back to the conclusion that something inconceivable exists whatever path we choose, if we rely on practical tools like logic then something inconceivable exists and if we don't rely on logic then everything is inconceivable.
That our tools have limits doesn't mean God with all the baggage that word entails exists. Whatever worldview you adopt you're working from at least one leap of faith.
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>>24775741
>Any logical model of anything is still contingent on something not covered by that model.
This implies that logical/philosophical "models" (theories, systems) pretend to determine everything that exists, but none of them do. The thing that they don't know is there in the system with an explanation as to why it is not knowable as such. There's more to deal with here like the question of the presuppositions of a philosophical system and where they come from; I don't want to go down that road because it isn't relevant to the question at hand.

The reason God is incoherent as a subject of proof for Kant is that God cannot possibly be experienced, is "just" a thought. And the theist will say "yeah, well, it's a necessary thought." But this is false, it is not a necessary thought. Someone like Russell can say the universe is just there and I don't know why and don't think the why is even meaningful, and a theist will never convince him. This is not a radically skeptical stance, either.
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>>24775660
I do agree with your general sentiment regarding building better houses and the possibility of taming the spirits, but that doesn't oppose the idea of predatory entities. What would you make of the existence of protective talismans/seals/scents (the latter is exemplified by the story of Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit) and how sacred texts were used for purifiying/banishing purposes?
I'm insisting on all of these points because they are directly related to our perceptive faculties, and if one was to rely on his interpretation of what he sees (literally and proverbially) then he has to make sure that his vision is not fundamentally skewed. To take a parallel from what else is being discussed in this thread: We can make an argument for Kant's effort to execute a sort of cataracts removal to one's intellectual faculties, but what about the things that do not inhabit this realm? How can I trust a, say, Egyptian oracle's teachings about ascending the astral realms (this is what influenced Neoplatonism) and not see it as the result of questionable practices that ultimately serve the benefits of a malevolent spirit?
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>>24775767
The prime mover is a necessary thought if the goal is coherence, the *if* is my main point, it's true given the set of premises, it's a model not reality. The "universe" can also still just be there with a prime mover, the mover has to "just be there" anyway but either way any structured, coherent description of this universe is incomplete.
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>>24775985
what if everything had already been moving for eternity?
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that's not how you use "in lieu"
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>>24776000
It's about logic not time. The parts we can describe have logical causes but not necessarily temporal causes.
We can model a universe that has always been moving but that model again rests on axioms not derived from the model. There's still the same demand for the prime mover outside what we can describe.
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>>24776042
Maybe causality only makes sense in the material world. Other worlds may not need causality or logic. What if we are just projecting our vision of logical causality into all worlds.
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>>24776066
I gave qualifiers that account for that. I'm talking about what can be described, conceived of. Without causality there are no descriptive models of a thing, only symbolic references it to how it's experienced.
>what if
Then that inconceivable multiverse whatever is the prime mover. Then there's an inconceivable entity outside space, time and logic that created everything coherent
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>>24776000
>>24776042
to add to the last anon, 'prime mover' is in terms of an essentially ordered series of contingencies, at any given point in time, all at once. it's not a cause in the far past, which even Aquinas said could be possible as the Greeks believed in the eternity of the universe/world, but the efficient cause of every single moment of existence in itself. in physics terms, that's like zooming in to all possible dependencies from the macro scale to the planck length, so the prime mover would be whatever it is that the existence of anything at the planck length is dependent on. you could logically have an infinite regress of causes back in time, but not an infinite regress of dependencies at any point in time, since this implies infinitely many dependencies acting all at once, and they could only act all at once if they all exist all at once, meaning that they still depend on the condition of existence, which they don't have on their own, implying a dependency for all dependencies that isn't part of the infinite chain. it's kind of like how Cantor proved that there's uncountable infinities by showing that there's a decimal expansion that isn't in the set of all countable decimal expansions. you usually don't see the prime mover explained this way, but this heuristic helps me understand the reasoning at least.
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>>24776096
NTA but thank you, but this is illuminating
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It's not new that the intellectual level falls with each new generation. Philosophy ended with Saint Thomas Aquinas. After him, only garbage wrapped in tomes came. There's a huge difference in intellectual level between the philosophers trained by the Church and those who emerged after the Middle Ages. Any medieval philosopher possessed a level of erudition unseen in centuries. Besides possessing a good understanding of other areas of knowledge, they also knew several other languages, which enriched their cultural and intellectual heritage. The modern philosopher barely speaks English, much less Latin and Greek. What the modern philosopher knows about ancient philosophies is only through rereading a rereading of a summary of another translator's rereading. Very few are interested in delving deeper into the original writings. The result is a series of crappy intellectuals who love to give their opinions on a subject they've never even read the primary sources for.
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>>24776700
>Philosophy ended with Saint Thomas Aquinas.
lmao what is seriously wrong with this place and its weird conservative christian larp jesus fucking christ this board has no critical eye. just confirmation bias everything.
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>>24776700
aquinas ripped off aristotle and is just begging the question most of the time
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>>24776752
>conservative christian
I'm Jewish though. If you cannot see the colossal difference between modern and medieval philosophers, perhaps (YOU) are the one who lack the critical eye.
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>>24776757
>I'm Jewish though.
wow, gee, difference without distinction when it comes to hijacking philosophy to confirm preconceptions and presuppositions
the fact you thought to bring that up anyway is exactly in favour of my point.
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>>24775328
>>24775362
I dont see what the problem is with dualism honestly. Most people seem to agree with monism and nondualism and if there's anything be gleaned from consensus its wrong. The masses are idiots.
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>>24774941
epic wojak bro
mind if i post it on X?
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I feel bad for René, this guy will forever live on my mind as one of the strongest Uchiha's ever loved...
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I'm not smart enough for this thread
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>>24775770
Not sure I quite got this post but I'll just yap.
>protective talismans/seals/scents
Can help you relax and feel secure. Is consistent with the idea that a major factor that shapes these tornado spirits is what the humans involve bring to the table.
>he has to make sure that his vision is not fundamentally skewed
There's no way to know that. We have to choose fundamental beliefs and work from them, to do anything needs at least one leap of faith.
Your interest in reasoning things out using language implies a fundamental belief in reason and dialogue.
Any statement that opens up avenues of exploration using reason is useful, even if it's a dead end. It's part of the project of mapping out reality. If a high wizard of satan says something useful the source doesn't change its usefulness. If the information has the ability to cause harm, trying to conceal it is not a reasonable mitigation of that danger since someone will run into it eventually anyway.
Trust is only needed for the foundational, fundamental beliefs, not what some Egyptian wizard or any preacher or scientist says.



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