I suppose it is easy to play that off, unless something seems serious to one...
Why do you suppose religions might imbue things with seriousness? Because some of the subjects they set out to treat are very serious.
My biggest issue with the new atheists is the high level of philosophical illiteracy among them. They often don't understand the problems a philosopher might have with their underpinning everything they accept with pretty much nothing. They also don't tend to appreciate how serious things like...
As I understand it, some of the views in Hinduism about the gods 'springing from Brahman' could qualify as polytheistic. Do the Devas necessarily have to be synonymous with Brahman in total? In Advaita perhaps. How about Bhedabheda or Dvaita though?
In Bhedabheda Vedanta (the one I'm currently...
How many gods? There could be hundreds of thousands. No reason to think the Cosmos isn't full of them, as earth is with all it's forms of life. I believe all the ones in world mythologies exist.
I don't want to speak for @shunyadragon, but based on things I've seen him post- I'd say he's a philosopher. Philosophers don't find funny what other people do. We sometimes find funny what other people don't.
(I just remembered you're a philosopher. How COULD YOU ask a question that merits a...
Omniscience does seem rather problematic and raises a lot of questions. One problem that a philosopher might raise against it is that knowledge is acquired by experience. If there is no transcendent nature to knowledge> then only through experience is it gotten.
That would be very problematic...
Well it's only that I know the Anglican reason for not requiring absolution by a priest is because of acknowledgement that God actually forgives the sin. Rather you confess to a priest or not- and some Anglicans would choose to do so.
I think Eastern Orthodox are also less stringent on when...
Well it has the lineage, so only Rome says so. What makes Rome an authority? Does Rome have the authority to tell the Eastern Church their lineage is invalid as well?
Henry didn't found the Anglican Church as we have it today. Anglicanism as we have it today came about because Rome...
Yes, I'm aware that's how Christians historically interpreted that verse. A question:
Is that Jesus putting the authority to forgive in the hands of men, or only the authority to declare forgiveness with God acting?
Well and political moves like this set the middle class voters and poor against one another. As long as they fight one another- they'll never notice what the 1% are doing. The 1% keeps the pie except for one slice, which they toss to the poor and middle class and tell them to fight over it.
I'm...
Just another question for ya. Do you think we can know for certain how much the Jesus camp departed from the law? Because there were at least two Jewish groups known to scholars that followed Jesus and kept the law pretty strictly. The Ebionites and Nazarenes. Some things about the development...
Someone that follows the Vedantic school of Hinduism known as Advaita, which holds that there is no real difference between the Supreme Reality and Atman. Everything is Brahman at it's fundamental core and difference is only seeming. Not real.
This is somewhat in contrast with Bhedabheda...
I was looking at something earlier, where some young people stated they are very skeptical of evolution. Therefore, I have to say yes.
There may even be a number among younger Americans that accept creationism as more likely.
We should remember that the nones are spiritual- not necessarily...