The sequence of human beliefs over time started with magical thinking, leading to religious thinking and we are now at scientific thinking - a reductionism of being to components.
We will never comprehend how time has put the human existential machine together through the ages, the epochs, the periods, the eras and the eons from a single common ancestor.
We are foolish creatures indeed trying to explain why we are here - just accept the fact that you are a part and not the whole of everything.
I think it was Voltaire who said, of religion, that “doubt is indeed a disagreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Thus I am in the camp of agnostics. I do have a question, though. If homo sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years, what sort of a god would allow 298,000 years of humankind to languish without the hope of salvation Christianity claims to offer?
The most plausible explanation is simply that God gave human's free will and that freedom is not possible without suffering — which is a core insight from Buddhism — and mirrored in various interpretations of the Fall, such as my own and that of Alan Watts.
The problem of evil is predicated on the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
But there are many conceptions of limited Gods — and those accounts would be more reasonable than the Sunday School depictions most people are arguing against in their heads.
The sequence of human beliefs over time started with magical thinking, leading to religious thinking and we are now at scientific thinking - a reductionism of being to components.
We will never comprehend how time has put the human existential machine together through the ages, the epochs, the periods, the eras and the eons from a single common ancestor.
We are foolish creatures indeed trying to explain why we are here - just accept the fact that you are a part and not the whole of everything.
I politely decline your invitation to pause my inquiries in this direction.
I did not say decline the thinking but just change the category.
I know quite a bit about categories. Tell me more ... https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/on-categories
I think it was Voltaire who said, of religion, that “doubt is indeed a disagreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Thus I am in the camp of agnostics. I do have a question, though. If homo sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years, what sort of a god would allow 298,000 years of humankind to languish without the hope of salvation Christianity claims to offer?
The most plausible explanation is simply that God gave human's free will and that freedom is not possible without suffering — which is a core insight from Buddhism — and mirrored in various interpretations of the Fall, such as my own and that of Alan Watts.
The problem of evil is predicated on the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
But there are many conceptions of limited Gods — and those accounts would be more reasonable than the Sunday School depictions most people are arguing against in their heads.
No magic. If a god needs magic then that god doesn't exist. That still leaves magic as undefined. As I think about it, I ralize it's not simple.
See my comment on Robert Pirsig a couple of posts back (An Argument in Three Costumes).