@vikorr,
vikorr wrote:Many People do avoid exhibiting characteristics that their professors/colleagues/etc scoff at...when those professors are present. So we quite agree on this point. The tangled mess your created from habitual avoidance...that now passes as logic for you is the reason you keep running into these errors in logic.
Why are you avoiding my basic point: religion and universalism are taboo among many academicians; universalism probably moreso than religion, because within a relativistic paradigm, they can accept religion by segregating into lots of diverse cultural contexts where its deviation from universal truths/values prevents it from unifying against sin.
The thing hedonists fear most is strong, unified moral critique of sin. Sin and hedonism go hand-in-hand because where pleasure is the guiding motive for choices, moral sacrifice of pleasure becomes an enemy. Academia is filled with very smart people who regard their morality (or lack thereof rather) as superior to restrictive primitive cultures whose avoidance of pleasure they consider superstition-based. In short, they want to rationalize pleasures and they do so by BSing themselves into believing that their POV is superior to primitive religions/superstitions that aren't smart enough to see through their own taboos. That is why you can read that various forms of sexual indulgence that are taboo among lower-educated people are not taboo among higher-educated people, and that is a motivation for many hedonistic (i.e. pleasure-seeking) people to pursue higher education and social/professional circles that are less judgmental of the pleasures they want to freely indulge in.
So relativism is really important to people all validating each others' different/diverse tastes and pleasures; and universalism threatens that; so that is probably the major reason relativism and atheism are popular among academicians and thus the reason they scoff at religion and/or universalism and basically banish those who fail to assent to their hedonist creed.
Quote:Several observations:
- usually these sort of easily influenced people don't know how to stand up for themselves, articulate their ideas, how to fully and logically explain them. They often haven't thought through their ideas as much as the professor. This 'problem' obviously doesn't apply to any of my writings. It leaves your day dreams of such motivation simply that - dreamt up justifications to avoid thinking about things you don't want to think about.
- On top of that, a person would actually have to be at University in the middle of a degree to 'be afraid' of such. And in the breadth of a persons life, university is a rather short few years. So you further stretch credibility to place me in those few years...which again is entirely self serving.
- Nor are there any of these invented bogeyman professors present, nor would they know who I was (if some other anonymous poster was this invented bogeyman professor), nor would I know who they were...so your dreams of them having affect are once again, self serving.
I was speculating about your motivations based on my observation that you simply avoid engaging with certain things I say. As such, it seems like you are just biased toward avoiding certain lines of reasoning, and so I question whether there's any point in trying to explain what I consider to be very strong reasoning; i.e. because you just don't want to be reasoned into accepting religion/universalism at a deeper emotional level based on your social-orientation.
Quote:- nor was what I was saying related to either atheism nor religion. Ie. God not being able to be sensed with the 5 senses is acknowledged by virtually every Christian I know, and by scientists, and by atheists. It is neither here nor there in the debate about God existence...so who would I be trying to please by saying this? What reason would there be for any fear from either side? There isn't any...so your assertions are once again, self serving.
This is a really interesting topic if you would just stick with it. As a believer, I understand what it means to not be able to sense God as a circumscribeable entity/being, but that doesn't mean we can't sense God's presence in all of the creation. Sensing God requires having an understanding of how the creation works and what it means for God to be the creator and for Holy Spirit to be present and active throughout the creation and within ourselves as God's creatures/children.
Quote:Basically your invention of such circumstance and motivation is entirely self serving, with the probability of such being correct (a person being fearful of a bogeyman professor) being around...what 0.0001%...and that high a percentage only if I possess some undiagnosable mental illness, where you are all just figments of my imagination.
You don't have to around a person to honor their POV. We honor Jesus, St. Paul, etc. even though they are not physically present or even physically alive. They live in us spiritually when we honor them, and many people keep their professors and other teachers/mentors alive spiritually within themselves and their work, even after those teachers/mentors are dead, gone, or just changed their perspective.
Spirits are beyond the humans that serve them. By that I mean that people can change even while the spirits that manifest through us remain. There is a spirit of relativism that will remain and manifest in various ways even after you and/or I and others have traded it in for the universalist spirit, just as there is a spirit of religious adherence that remains in atheists even after they have ostensibly rejected any formal religious creed/identity. Culture goes deeper than superficial identities and classifications. People exhibit and express/manifest various spirits and, as such, the spirit transmitted from teachers to students can live on in the students long after contact has ended between teacher and student, or even if the teacher's perspective changed since the student became indoctrinated.
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Bill was saying something somewhat different however - that the professors you claim are causing fear, are in the minority and so unlikely to cause such a reaction
That's bad logic that relies on BSing at the statistical level. If some POV is in the minority, it might be less likely at the collective level that any random student will be influenced by it; but for an individual who is influenced by it randomness isn't a factor. Basically this logic is him (and now you) trying to hide in the statistics instead of acknowledging reality at the individual level.
Quote:(while you on the other hand are asserting that they must exist AND be in my life...which is an invention in your own mind of the status of things...and that and they must be the reason for my posts...all this guessing despite this being an anonymous forum with no such bogeyman professors present...and all this despite all I have stated were absolute, utterly obvious facts...which have nothing to do with either religion or atheism...and everything to do with pure fact)
I never said that anything 'must' be true, because I can only hypothesize based on my observations of how you write.
Nevertheless, for someone so concerned with honesty/dishonesty and hypocrisy, you certainly exhibit a lot of it; probably that's why you preach about it so much, i.e. to cover up your own manipulations.
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You can fix this, but would have to start engaging in self honesty (particularly not avoiding anything you consider inconvenient). My guess is it would take decades for you to fix, such is the tangle of self deception you engage in.
I may not be perfect but I engage in a lot of honesty. You should try it, instead of defecting your own self-reflection by goading others to self-reflect and correct.
Quote:Quote:You never bothered to understand what I explained before arguing against it, which is why I think you're just biased.
This is yet another self deception you create for yourself. I followed precisely what you said, and even agreed with some of it...but until you stop avoiding fact (ie. actually acknowledge obvious fact), going on to another discussion only serves to encourage you to continue to engage in avoidance...which is why I keep bringing the conversation back to your behaviour of avoidance.
You just spend so much text blathering on about this kind of interpersonal details, when you could be sorting out the reasoning of actual discussion topics.
Quote:So why do you have so much difficulty that the being of God is not perceivable by our 5 senses? Not acknowledging this to yourself is just lying to yourself. Even when I belonged to a church - every other Christian I knew acknowledged this...so it is entirely bizarre that you cannot bring yourself to acknowledge this.
I told you before, but you avoided just engaging what I was saying, that perceiving circumscribed entities with the senses limits you from recognizing God, who is not circumscribable.
The atmosphere is only perceivable in a circumscribed way from a satellite view where you can see it as a glowing layer around the solid/liquid part of the Earth. In reality, there is no outer limit to the atmosphere, as the ionosphere connects with the ions of the solar wind, but we think of the atmosphere as being circumscribed as the thin layer of glowing gas immediately surrounding the Earth from a satellite view.
So when you talk about perceiving God with the senses, you're talking about some circumscribed entity that can be defined as separate from other entities/materialities of the universe, but God's Holy Spirit exists throughout ALL of the universe, so everything we perceive with our senses is animated and directed by Holy Spirit, yet Holy Spirit has also manifested all the other spirits that exist, including the evil ones; so when the story of Lucifer tells that there are angels who are fallen angels, that serve evil instead of good; those angels are also products of God's creation and Holy Spirit, but they have deviated from the goodness of intent that is pure in God and His angels.
But spirits are not circumscribable entities like trees or animals. E.g. you can't say that the spirit of Christmas is a single entity or a countable number of entities. Christmas spirit manifests in various ways and circulates among people who feel it and express it in various ways. It is perceivable with the senses when someone does something to materially express it, but there is an invisible component that people feel inside at a spiritual level.
If you can't understand what I'm explaining here, you're not reflecting thoroughly and honestly enough on your own experiences as a living sentient being with consciousness of inner/spiritual life happening within your body, mind, and heart.
