h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If there is life after death (I know that's a very big *if*), it is probably not life as we know it. I find some comfort in the Existentialist idea that if there is a God, we cannot understand God in this life anyway. So, our concept of "God" was designed by us, in order to fill some apparently deep-seated need of our own. That's why I have no patience for the self-flagellation that seems prevalent among some people in some religions. Maybe some people derive spiritual meaning from enduring pain, and that's their prerogative, but it's an option that humans chose, not God. Everything we think we know about God has come to us from things that *people* have said.

Not that I don't respect the wisdom and insight of the best of these people. I do respect them. I also respect the religious practices of people outside th Christian faith. I do this as a manifestation of the Golden Rule, which I wish more people would put into practice.

I think tt we would be better off concentrayting on the present; the present life that is ; and i hope it is a long and fruitful one.

The thought of the journey of the soul, is an appealing one; if you are an enlightened soul -- like most of the people i have met on hootoo (enlightened i mean , not perfect- if perfection is but an ideal humans, and humankind strives for without hoping to ever achieve it; is God just an ideal, a thought- something that we needed to be thought, something that is not alive - hey truly God might well be dead then )

I have no real conviction either way. But i ask: is it necessary to know, to want to know if their is a hereafter -- or a God?
Alot of people lead VERY productive, virtuous, happy fullfilling lives without such knowledge-but does having the knowledge that God really exists make anyone a better person than those that do not know, surely the people who dont need a God might be stronger for relying on thier own resources, and God by nature of being God ( or even jus "a" god ) would favour the children that needed help ( unbelivers ).

If God , the hereafter and the existance of evil in the world are some of the "big" questions; what are the little ones, and are big ones more important, by virtue of being bigger than little ones which might make ore sense??

Does any of that make sense?



Dont we all love yapping away abouy God?
Funny, i can remember when i was a kid, say 7 years old maybe, and we all speculated on the existence of God and such like, as a matter of course; the same as we discussed, or just cussed , the virtues of our favourite football teams.

Yes, I think it makes sense.

F1926355?thread=5515389

keeping Jab's thread (sane version)
you can always be less serious here

Paul any chance of explaining it to me then

"according to the scientific method if there is no evidence of something, the default position is, it does not exist"

You cannot put that forward as a positive argument, substituting 'the default method' for 'therefore'. Lack of evidence does not prove non-existence. At one time the existence of the Americas didn't exist for some. Yet they existed, self-evidently. Hence the problem with trying to prove a negative.

[There's also the awareness of the evidence, but that's another question.]

So this sort of fallacy cannot say one way or another whether God exists.

I'd like to know the origin of this quote.

Jabs

Does anyone believe in 'The Second Coming' of Christ........

I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who speculated on thes in one of his articles....

He also stated that to be consistent, God must be restricted by the Speed of Light.....

We will be waiting a long, long time if that is the case!!


GT

Nobody believes in the Second Coming of Christ. Yet everyone, in a sense, be they Christian, Muslim, Buddhists, Atheists, Followers of the Tooth Fairy, whatever, does believe in the second coming of Christ in their own way, put thus by Freud:

No-one believes in his own death. Or, to put the same thing in another way, in the Unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 1899


The Second Coming is not the thinking of a natural event. It is the thinking of the personal and the universal at once. Much like you or I coming to life in the universe in the first place. Comprehensible yet incomprehensible.

It is personal and universal, like the depths of our own minds are. It's beyond the limits of language and thus cannot be talked about intelligibly, except in a shorthand way like this - see Wittgenstein and Heidegger - but it can be the object of (conscious or unconscious) belief.

It can be thought of, and possibly dismissed, naturally - but that's the easy way out and misses the point. (Begs the question).


Jabs.

I wish there were some school that taught a course in what to do when one encounters someone who has taken enough philosophy courses to throw around philosophical concepts as if they were somehow ironclad.

The closest I come to philosophical adequacy is existentialism, because I was a French major in college, and you can't study much French at that level in the 1960s without reading more Camus and Sartre than you ever wanted to.

Wittgenstein? Basil Fawlty made a joke about him in "Fawlty Towers." He also punched out some rival philosopher in the 1950s. Beyond that, he's just a name, nothing more.

Martin Heidegger? I wouldn't want to quote him anywhere because new scholarship is linkingt him more closely to the Nazis, and he was already uncomfortably close as it was.

Nietzsche? I love Richard Strauss's setting of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," which is said to be somehow connected to Nietzsche's writings.

I liked Monty Python's drinking about the philosophers, but I don't know how accurate the song was about the favorite brews on the philosophers that were named.

I also have a hard time knowing where philosophy ends and religious thought begins. "Don't push the river, it flows by itself" has variously been described as a Taoist precept and an old Chinese proverb. Maybe it's both.

As to the default position for things that science (a.k.a. science as we know it) cannot prove, I've always thought that the position would be that something is not proven. You don't have to prove every theory in this world, because there isn't enough expertise to go around, nor enough time. So, it's necessary to learn to live with uncertainty....

1.I used philosophers' names not to try to impress but to give an idea of who are my references, unlike whoever quoted that stuff about the default, fallback position, who gave no name for his/her reference.

I have scant regard for anyone who tries to impress, through the appeal to 'Big Names' or in any other way, instead of engaging with the subject as you have paul, and do.

2. I am not 'throwing around' philosophical concepts but using them to develop and explain what I authentically think myself. Reading such people develops my thought because at no time do I think I know everything.

3. I agree 100% with your final sentence, paul.

4. If I've upset anyone by seeming to try to be superior, I apologise. It wasn't my intention at all. It's not superiority, it's just the way I was educated. We're all different.

I did wonder, as I wrote it, but I decided to post it anyway, as a personal response to GT's question.


Jabs

What was it we were talkig about again?


Hey if thier is a spritual life, what do purely spiritual beings think of a material life??
Do they think it a dream, or do they aspire to get down and dirty??

I always thought that maybe there is more dead people (people that have already lived ) and so, potentially an incalculable number of spiritual beings, that all want to be born again, but obviuosly there are only so many places in this physical world that need to be filled.

I personally think we are the lucky ones, the chosen few, if i were a dead person-i would want to live, and also like has been said; heaven or hell are right here - right now--you chose.
Having said all that i think the idea of a purely good spritual world, where we transcend all our anamal instincts and live to our highest thoughts - is an apealling thought.
It seems quite logical then if there is a spiritual after(before?) life, that also as in the material world heaven and hell are one and the same.
Continuing on this train of thought, with the last thing i want to say: it seems that the idea of karmic forces, or a cycle where the soul journeys ever on makes complete sense, and sounds an entirely reasonable view of life; and now i shall pop that virtual bubble and make some coffee.

If it's any consolation, technically I was talking nonsense (at least, Heidegger and Wittgenstein - both very different thinkers otherwise, would think so), because, as I said, concepts such as The Second Coming are beyond the limits of language.

In other words, the concept is not primarily a linguistic one, not one you can meaningfully talk about. Perhaps, as Freud says, a concept from the Unconscious, below/above/beyond language.

It's not that the thinking's so obscure, it's my inability to make it plain (a common criticism of Heidegger anyway but even so).


So that's my inadequacy, my fault. Sorry.


Jabs

Good stuff myk

Enjoy your coffee

Jabs

Does what i have said fit in with the scientific method
or the the Christian dogma
or with athiest the argument
or common sense??


It doesnt really matter to me to be quite honest


It seems a shovel is still a shovel, and a spade is still a spade
...and wrong is still wrong, and right is still right


I know - i know - what is right and wrong etc.... i mean without pushing the definitions -- we can all agree on what is right and wrong -- only in the extreme exceptions do we need to reavaluate what is to all sane adults common sense-i believe.


... yak yak yak etc

Thanks Jabs

Just off now>>>>>>>>>..........................

If I'm not mistaken, I think the Jehovah Witnesses predicted the second coming (for the year 2000) oops! they changed some wordings after that year

Jabs, thank you for the thoughtful answer. I worry about getting in way over my head, which is my problem.

Every so often I wonder if the universe we know also exists in the afterlife (if there is an afterlife). If not, then is this universe real? Is this life real? Could the afterlife be located in another galaxy millions of light years away, but still in this universe?

I have *way* more questions than answers.

IF we knew everything, we'd be greater than "god", because HE made mistakes - problems with human DNA, a world "created" that suffers from jigsaw fault lines that destroys "his" believers, to name but few faults with "his" creations

Is it written in stone that we can't be greater than God in some way or other? Some people who lived 2,500 years ago thought so, but they didn't know about electricity and North America and nuclear fission. Maybe there were some important things they didn't know about God, too. Their notion of the universe being created in seven days has been undermined by subsequent scientific discoveries, to the extent where a giant wedge has been driven between science and certain religious sects that want to hold into the accounts in Genesis.

In times of trouble, I turn to Woody Allen:

"There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?"


Actually, I have. He pushed his way in, talking, talking, and once he was in we couldn't get rid of him, still talking, for well over an hour, though none of us had the slightest interest in buying insurance, and kept on saying so..

Now back to the hard stuff if you so desire.


Jabs