One shouldn't beat one's self up. But one has to take it seriously, acknowledge where one has fallen short and try to do better. That motivational aspect, the determination to do better, is the training at work.
That's one way the Sangha (community) is important. If you supposedly become a...
Philosophically, I'm an agnostic. The only requirement for being an agnostic is the belief that we don't possess the secret of the universe. (That's pretty profound, when you get down to it.)
In Buddhism, becoming a Buddhist is called "taking refuge". One takes refuge (trusts as a means of...
I have no serious objection to those. (Changing them would require a Constitutional amendment, which is very hard to accomplish.)
I oppose an upper age limit, but can support requiring the ability to pass a standard cognitive exam for candidates above a certain age.
Other than that, I oppose...
One can argue that life itself is immortal. It's existed without a break or a gap ever since the origin of life. What we think of as individual organisms can be thought of as transitory fruiting bodies that the immortal chain of life generates periodically in order to branch out, change and...
I just logged in and saw some threads that I'd posted to earlier are active, but when I went to them my beautiful posts were gone! I immediately assumed a conspiracy to silence me!
It's tragic since my posts would have resolved all the arguments and set everyone else on the true path! And now...
First of all, I don't think that being male or female has anything to do with "gender" (whatever that word means).
Being male or female is biological.
Providing a biological definition might take some doing. (That isn't unlike giving a biological definition of 'life'.) We all know it when we...
All your example shows me is that there's a logical problem with at least one of the traditional theistic attributes. (I do think that it's a real problem.)
The idea that it shows that God can defy logic (an idea that I don't want to argue against) only seems to work if we feel the need to tie...
In that regard, I like Eastern Orthodox Christianity's essence/energies distinction.
This is the idea that God is unknowable in his essence and that he can only be known by his effects here in the world of human experience.
So in that spirit, I guess that I'd say 'no'. God is unapproachable...
Depends on how we are deciding superiority.
My point is that science and spirituality seem to have different purposes and goals.
Science provides a propositional sort of knowledge of how various items of sensory experience behave and inter-relate.
Spirituality offers a more intuitive and...
I don't agree that there's "no evidence for a god". If we define 'God' to be whatever the ultimate Source, Ground or Principle of reality is, then the reality of reality itself would be evidence of 'God', conceived of in that way.
I'm an agnostic, not a theist. I call myself an 'agnostic'...
Arguably.
I'm inclined to distinguish between
1. People who have never considered the question of whether 'God' exists and who have no opinion on the matter. Babies might belong here. I don't know of any word for this.
2. People who have considered the question, but who believe that knowledge...
The rest of you are in BIG TROUBLE now! Bwa ha ha ha!
I don't think that's possible. Certainly not for 'God' as (what I believe to be) rightly conceived.
I vote for #2. For one, I'm a huge believer in freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
For another, since I believe that your...
For me, a great deal depends on how we define 'God'.
Is God the ultimate source, ground and principle of reality?
Or is God a personified deity as depicted in the Bible, Quran or the more theistic Indian scriptures?
I don't know of any plausible argument against the first of those.
But I...
I'd call what you describe 'Christian' in the sense that it centers (a version of) Jesus in the central position in belief and practice. That distinguishes it from Islam, which considers Jesus to be a prophet but not actually divine, but don't center their religion around him. It's certainly a...
The news stories are all over the map about this shooter, but last I heard she was a biological female who "identified" as a male (whatever that means). So if that's true, she was a woman. Perhaps a woman with a psychiatric difficulty ("gender dysphoria" or whatever) but a woman nevertheless...
I think that idea dates back to Parmenides. Ironically, he appears to have used it (it isn't certain since much of his writing is lost) to argue for a very immanent sort of pantheism. Everything, everywhere, all at once. So our seeming-reality of space, time and a multiplicity of things and...
I don't think that anyone has proposed that "life sprang from dirt". It probably didn't spring forth at all, but rather appeared as the result of a whole succession of steps. Many of those steps probably involved the formation of a whole assortment of organic precursers.
But bottom line is that...
From that, it looks like the problem of evil is your concern.
I'm not a theist exactly, perhaps more of an agnostic deist in some of my moods. But I'll take a shot at that.
Suppose we conceive of "God" as the whatever the answer is to the ultimate metaphysical questions: What accounts for the...