/lit/ - Literature

I'm an epistemological conservative. The simplest answer is that God exists, take basic things like Aquinas's Five Ways and apply Pascal's Wager and you're there. I believe that God exists, and have no reason to think otherwise. Any rationalizing against it doesn't undermine my faith in this conclusion because it's simple and makes sense. I feel like I actually delude myself when I think too much about it, trying to force my simple human mind to understand something (to you potentially) so much grander.

>>19976136
The Aquinas’ Five Ways state that God is the first cause and, although it makes sense to think there’s a Creator, I also think it makes sense to think there’s not.

Not trying to undermine your faith nor change your mind, but, in my opinion, the Universe exists just because it exists; if something must exist (which it does) it is supposed to be just the way it is (i.e. our current universe).

When I look at the structure of things in our reality, be it galaxies, living beings, cells etc., although I’m absolutely astonished by their perfection, I think that they are that way just because it is mathematically necessary for those things to be like that, it simply makes sense logically speaking.

Pascal’s Wager is scary to me not because of the perspective of eternal damnation in case God does exist, but in the perspective of wasting the only life you were given in a delusional worship in case God does not exist and there isn’t an afterlife.

May I ask you how you developed your relationship with God? Any readings that guided you?
I feel like I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to my agnosticism because I grew up an atheist, but I would absolutely love to try and develop a relationship with God myself (assuming it exists of course, which I guess I might figure out by trying and exploring religion even more).

Some other anon mentioned this the other day. It seemed interesting, so I started reading the first chapter. So far it seems that no one actually thinks of invisible entities the same way they think of 'real' things, and that belief in god requires deliberate practice, akin to imagination or play.

To me, it sounds like willful delusion, but maybe there's more nuance I haven't gotten to yet.

>>19976762
Thanks, I’ll check it out.

>To me, it sounds like willful delusion
That’s exactly how I feel with most religions. Not trying to bring anyone down, but I think (or rather, feel) they’re just really, really complex, man-made explanations of reality itself; as an example, through meditation I have seen and felt what the Buddhist define as Manipura, yet I can’t help asking myself if that was just a phenomena occurring because of my consciousness playing with my physical body rather than a spiritual experience.

I do, however, feel like there must be something out there (as in metaphysical or divine) that I’m missing out on.

>>19976113
Buddhists will admit that cosmology is a meme because phenomena are illusory while ultimate reality is expressionless. For Christianity and its soteriology to even work conceptually, the Bible must be entirely true, otherwise some parts are true and some are false, and who is to say which are which?

>>19976113
Here's a good video for this subject. Fr. Ripperger is great for spiritual topics,
I highly recommend watching his videos on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q73aoHXsLq0&t=9s

>>19976136
Pascal's wager is the definition of bad faith—mere superstition and fear of being 'caught.' It's the same way a soulless bureaucracy is staffed, in that one does x or y merely to cover his own ass and not because of any investment in the outcome or genuine concern. If there is a God who will truly 'know his own,' he should be able to figure out which employees deserve to be [hell]fired.

>>19976853
It's a pretty common dialectic in religions though. Basically if you believe in God and he does exist, you will be rewarded. Whereas if he does not, you'll become nothing like the atheist. It goes without saying that the atheist will have had a lot more going on in his life, unburdened by morals and all that stuff. He's also going to be rewarded more than you as a religious man if your society values that, because he can probably pretend he's a better religious man than you are.

>>19976113
No.
>I did not find satisfying answers in [other threads]
There's no satisfaction in contemplation of immaterial concepts, barring delusion.
>[Many religions seem irrational, made up]
They are. All human thought is made up. Some words are more accurate than others, sure, but they're all the product of human minds. Different religions have served different purposes and different interests, because they tend to become more political than spiritual over time, and their mythologies reflect those changes. There's a lot to be understood from the contexts involved in the variety of sects/subdivisions within religions. For example, Catholics aren't Quakers or Gnostics, and Buddhist Cosmology deviates heavily from any literal understanding of the words of Buddha himself.
Excepting all the details, mythologies, and political underpinnings, all religions tend to say the same things about reality and whatever God/Humanity's Creator was/is: it's outside your headspace, but what you think affects how you experience it, and its comprehension is beyond reach despite being gripped by your imagination/beliefs/delusions. Chase it, it flees. Fear it, it chases you.
I hope you're able to reach a point of comfort in understanding that belief isn't really spoiled or wrong from being the same as delusion. There's no right or truly wrong answers when there's no proof or disproof possible for the *big* ideas. People quibble over details, because it's easier to notice differences than similarities when cognitive grouping is involved.
>>19976796
>That’s exactly how I feel with most religions. Not trying to bring anyone down, but I think (or rather, feel) they’re just really, really complex, man-made explanations of reality itself
Can't say they're really all that complex, IMO. The point, generally, was/is to simplify a reality which is too complex to ever be fully understood by any individual. There's a lot of spooky stuff out there.
>as an example, through meditation I have seen and felt what the Buddhist define as Manipura, yet I can’t help asking myself if that was just a phenomena occurring because of my consciousness playing with my physical body rather than a spiritual experience.
It's down to the individual what importance they want to put on their experiences, but pretty much every religious experience *may* be explained by brain-body interactions. That doesn't mean spiritual experiences are without meaning, to me. The broad tradition of Buddhist/Chen/Zen meditation necessarily advises any practitioner to disregard passing experiences as trivial, because the point of the practice is more about self discipline than any attainment of state or being.
>I do, however, feel like there must be something out there (as in metaphysical or divine) that I’m missing out on.
And you'll go to your grave feeling that way, unless you don't. There's no right or wrong way to reach spiritual peace/satisfaction, unless you don't.

>>19976894
>without god I don't have to be ethical
teenage opinion discarded

>>19976113
>Is it possible to distinguish between genuine faith and delusion?
No. They're one and the same.

>>19976113
>Kierkegaard’s writings on faith left me embittered as he states that faith goes beyond reason
Yes, Kierkegaard is a fideist, and fideism is inherrently irrational. Fideism is not the original church's understanding of faith, however. It began, for the most part, with Luther (whether or not he can be truly said to be a fideist is another matter).

>>19976113
Read the Confessions of St. Augustine

>>19976113
I think genuine faith requires an amount of delusion. Regardless of how much I wish I was religious, I simply cannot be without the delusion.

>>19976136
>>19976689
>>19976853
Pascal's wager is inherently the work of a cowardly midwit and the meaning of it falls apart if you apply some basic external information, but it's also just factually wrong. Even a lazy investigation of the subject will quickly tell you that the idea of Hell was invented and shoehorned into Christianity long after the death of Jesus, it is simply not a valid claim given the source material.

>>19976977
>Fideism is not the original church's understanding of faith
It wasn't "this guy did miracles so he's God just believe me"?

>>19976962
You have to be mentally retarded to believe in secular humanism in 2022

>>19976997
This. I really like Swedenborg's teachings and his model of the afterlife but I just can't fucking internalize it. I don't think it has an actual zero percent chance of being true but there is no basis whatsoever for being anything close to sure of it. This might not have been the case if I was raised to value "faith" but I wasn't, and I'm an adult now.

>>19977032
If someone literally raises you back from the dead, you'd have to be a retard not to believe him.

>>19977033
Ethics are better understood as a situational agreement that we're politely expected to take to heart enough that we follow them even when we don't have to, they aren't "above us" like morals are. You can be a Stirnirite Egoist and have ethics, he was basically suggesting that you do so. Just find like minded-people and come up with a realistic list of rules and practices you can agree on.

>>19977029
The earliest Christians believed in the widespread presence of demons and that Jesus was magically capable of warding them off. I don't see why hell would be incompatible. A Christianity without hell is a "so what?" kind of proposition. If there's no hell, where do the non-Christians go? They just die? Well that's boring, you could just believe in another religion where you aren't dead forever. Christianity introduces something unique: you must be a Christian, you must reject all false gods, you must accept Jesus as savior, or you are damned. If there is no eternal damnation, the sale falls through.

>>19977046
Well doesn't that only apply to Lazarus? Who else was risen and would know incontrovertibly that this was so?

>>19977049
Hit the nail on the head, it's a marketing ploy. Except you are wrong about the implication that demons=hell. The demons in it are from Judaism and Jews didn't and still don't believe in hell (excluding some particularly schizophrenic Talmudists).

>>19977033
People were moral before Abrahamism and they will be moral after. That you hate "secular humanism" is just your personal punching bag, has nothing to do with anything. You could believe most people are subhuman and still treat them with civility. You probably won't wash their feet or kowtow to them for being so innately meek, but you could acknowledge them what they are due for their station in life and this would be entirely moral or ethical in its context

>>19976113
Yah, epistemologically there is a difference.

In fact delusion and therefor illusion is usually misunderstood. For if you sense something, it is there by all measures of reason. We only say something is an illusion when we mean that it is only a partial truth. A rainbow is in one sense an illusion, but it is real insofar as it is an actual light phenomenon of rain and sunlight (which we proclaim as actual because the rain and sun seem like a fuller[but not complete, simply practical] grasp of practical reality).
An illusion is a partial understanding of reality as understood by the subject. A practicalist simply leaves everything beyond empiricism as not worth commenting on either way.

While faith is the level of trust you have in particular realities. In fact I would call them inverse termonologies in regards to a subject. Absolute Faith would be something you validate over anything else, and as such you validate it over causation (which Hume proved is only practical and not actual. x seems to happen given y and z), something that Is a priori to reason. And as such if you bend faith to reason it is no longer faith absolute. It is then better to be faithful to the absurd as it proves that your faith is an absolute, a perfect form, a sole edifice from which all else both reasoned and unreason can spring forth from.

Just to give you my two cents, I think theoretically, a level of faith is required for practicality to spring up from. And that materialism is downstream of idealism and is more a subset of. we take it on faith that x and y will probably precede z.

Absolute faith exists regardless of context or even facets of basic observable reality, through and beyond intuition. Of course, this doesnt mean a particular Absolute faith can be determined as all of them are absolutes in their own frame, and to imply otherwise would be to create a false equity.

>>19976113
>Is it possible to distinguish between genuine faith and delusion?
>I’m a materialist agnostic

Hmm...

>>19977074
The demons are an involution of hellenistic thought; instead of the pagan gods having daemons through which they work, Satan has demons, the old gods become the messengers of Satan rather than the 'angels' of the Lord. It's a slave morality thing. Whatever the Macedonian or Roman conqueror introduces is evil, whatever the book says is good

>>19977075
I really think that people basically just treat others in the way they naturally are inclined to (which includes formative experiences) and "big idea" morality has almost nothing to do with it.

>>19977049
didnt the greeks have a hell as well as the buhdists and hindus? And those last two im pretty sure the internment periods scaled into the millions of years, not exactly to far removed from the all eternity/resurection of Christianity.

>>19977103
Its basically hellenistic thought when you get right down to it. It makes more sense when you realize that Israel's ancient-ancient history is fake and Judaism didn't start until about 400 BC. At the time of Jesus, they'd spent more time getting culturally enriched by Greco-Roman BVLLS than they had spent on their own.

Saint Paul was the real nail in the Semitic coffin. He took a very superficial image of Jesu and covered it in western ideas and his own "my god is bigger than your god" wishes, and that is the Christianity we know. It has almost nothing to do with the claimed origin.

I guess if you understand this, it's more forgivable that the Church fabricated so much material. These are just fabrications laid on top of other fabrications.

>>19976136
>>19977029
>>19976689
>>19976853
>Pascal‘s Wager
I wish people would actually read Pansees instead of retardely talking about his wager as a talking point…
hes a deeply methodical man and its probably one of my favorite writings.

>>19977141
There is a difference between "you'll be there for eons and should avoid it since your present existence is so fortuitous as to allow you to pursue excellence" and "it's forever, no escape without [insert dogma]"

>>19977141
The Christian hell is literally the Greek Hades (literally the same word, go check). They just added a lot of their own nonsense to the concept to change its significance. Hades is just a place you go when you die, it isn't inherently bad and you might not even be conscious there.

>>19977161
The whole point of the Wager is that it is the single most important decision point in life. By ignoring whatever else that psued may have wrote and focusing on it, we are validating him.

>>19977166
Existence in Hades is described as plainly inferior to earthly life. It was shadowy and aimless. Not torture, but it is dreary. Being faced with such a fate is alone enough to kindle in you a desire for a heaven. At least, it seems, this was the case for many of the pagans.

>>19977178
Yah, as part of a larger text. and the idea behind it was that given all the information you should look and persue for the Absolute true and good. He gives scriptural prophecy and fulfillment as well as platonic ideal fulfillment nt as his specific proofs for christianity. The wager itself is for the honest Pursuit of religion rather than a set one proper.

If you look at the section of the wager (233 in Pansees) he mentions chrisitanity once, and in the capacity of a religion vs atheism diologue.

>>19977294
Hell really just doesn't come up as a concept in early christianity. The things Jesus is alleged to have said about it make way more sense if you interpret them in other contexts.

>>19976113
Real faith doesn't consist of "idea matrices", it is a daily, moment to moment walk. Walking in authentic faith tends to (I say this because I cannot, as a man, make any sort of absolute guarantees) result in gifts of affirmation from God. Once you receive any such gifts, give proper appreciation, acknowledgement, and thanks, then seek to pay them forward in whatever methods and opportunities one winds up seeing in one's walk henceforth. This tends to result in more and possibly greater such gifts ahead, but one should continue in faith regardless and not out of desire for ever more gifts. *One* "really good" gift should be enough to last a lifetime, but God is generous. Such gifts are undeniable. They are not for others, but for oneself, one should not boast of the gifts. There were times in the Holy Bible that Jesus healed and told them to go and tell no one. Each person must seek their own gifts through walking in faith.

>>19976113
Schizophrenic here. Yes, there is a difference between most delusions and standard religious faith. If you want to be extremely picky, though, there's no particular reason not to believe that they're just different varieties of psychosis. The fact that God is constantly talking to me doesn't mean God is real, it just means that my subjective experience of reality has very little in common with consensus-reality.

Read religio Medici

>>19976113
Faith is not rationally explainable, but it is reasonable. Delusion is not rational nor reasonable.

>>19976113
There's a whole other world out there that we can't see with our eyes. Though we can get a glimpse of it in our dreams.

>>19976113
>I’m a materialist
>why can’t I find spirituality and believe in God?
You should kill yourself

>>19976113
faith often presents itself in the form of paranoid delusion
but delusion is a less hateful thing to give in to than reality
maybe schizophrenia is the direct experience of the Holy Spirit
we just don't know

>>19976894
>the atheist will have had a lot more going on in his life
like what

>>19976113
If you feel religions like buddhism are not satisfactory, maybe check out chan/zen. DT Suzuki, joshu, blue cliff record, dahuis treasury, foyan etc.
Might even try some specific keywords on zenmarrow and see what comes up.

>>19976113
Consider that absolutely every single worldview demands some degree of faith given the innate uncertainty of knowledge. It is for this reason that Theists and Atheists are but separate points on the same retard-turd.

stop overcomplicating everything

>>19976689
>The Aquinas’ Five Ways state that God is the first cause and, although it makes sense to think there’s a Creator, I also think it makes sense to think there’s not.
Essentially if you believe causality exists and the universe exists there must be something beyond the macro scope of the universe, this is dubbed God. You get to God simply be removing contradictions.

>>19976954
>I hope you're able to reach a point of comfort in understanding that belief isn't really spoiled or wrong from being the same as delusion. There's no right or truly wrong answers when there's no proof or disproof possible for the *big* ideas. People quibble over details, because it's easier to notice differences than similarities when cognitive grouping is involved
So your big idea, which states proofs are invalid, is more valid to the big ideas which say proofs are valid? I normally try to be nicer to posters but you write with a level of intelligence that needs this: repent immediately. This is disgusting in the least and a pathetic groping at enlightenment to calm your inability to be charitable at best. Don't make me post another response.

>>19977075
>People were moral before Abrahamism and they will be moral after.
You know that they sell history books, right? The reason we have cities which survive massive wars starting in year 0 is because Christians didn't slaughter the entire city they conquered.

>>19976136
Aquinas' five ways aren't convincing in the slightest, I have no idea why you people meme that shit so hard

>>19977057
>Who else was risen and would know incontrovertibly that this was so?
Jesus; the apostles and the 500 or so witnesses of the risen Jesus.
Even the Jewish religious leaders had to invent the cope that the disciples somehow sneaked past highly trained Roman guards to steal the body. Effectively, this admits that 1) they were in possession of Jesus' dead body and 2) then they weren't, despite taking extensive precautions.

>>19981434
>the 500 or so witnesses
According to whom?

>>19981434
Paul of Tarsus.
>Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.
>1 Corinthians 15:6
Most secular biblical scholars place the composition of 1 Corinthians in the early 50s AD, which is only two decades after the resurrection. At the time, it'd be very easy to call Paul on his bullshit if he were lying.

>>19981440
Sorry, meant to reply to your post.
>>19981499

>>19981499
>Paul of Tarsus.
Do you understand why this is not a credible source?

>>19981514
Pray tell, what would disqualify it from being a credible source?

>inb4 Paul was a Christian
To assume that non-Christians are inherently less impartial regarding historical accuracy compared to Christians is absurd. If someone objectively saw the risen Christ, they would probably believe the claim that he was God.
Also, he had previously hunted down and arrested Christians only shortly before. If you want an impartial source, it's the guy who had tried to destroy this sect before he was convinced otherwise.

>inb4 the Bible doesn't count as a source
1) Biblical texts are historical documents as much as any other text from that period. Even if you don't believe that they are divinely inspired, it'd be bad historiography to dismiss them as evidence categorically.
2) Paul didn't intend to write a holy text. As far as he was concerned, he was writing a letter to a community in Corinth.

Again, this passage was written only a couple decades after the fact. It makes sense that the people recording it believed it happened. As time passed, the news spread to a wider area to people without firsthand knowledge. Then you would find secondhand historians like Josephus or Tacitus mentioning something like "There's a sect called the Christians who claim that the man Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead."

>>19981684
>>/lit/thread/S19945695
>>/lit/thread/S19937644
Fuck off retard, I'm not doing this tonight.

>>19981514
>>19981705
ITT: pic related

>>19981735
?

>>19981738
>dismisses the force's existence despite literal space wizards ruling the galaxy not twenty years earlier

>>19981755
lol

>>19976113
my faith lies i he minds and hearts of all of the national guard.
>inb4caterpult

>>19981499
>cultist writes pamphlet about cultists for cultists on what cultists should believe
Yeah and? Why is that more admissable than Alice in Wonderland

>>19981862
Don't engage with that guy, he'll just keep repeating the same shit over and over and over and over and over until you give up, then claim victory. Don't waste your time.

>>19981870
Yeah I know epistemological weight when I see it

>>19981862
Because if the Romans or Jews wanted to shut them up, all they'd have to do is present the body.

>>19976136
>apply Pascal's Wager
Embarrassing.

>>19981940
why didn't the risen Jesus appear before anyone credible or important, like the Pilate, or the Senate... or the Emperor?

>>19979932
So does religion serve people, or does religion serve "civilization"?

>>19976113
>this linear Enlightenment framework created in the last couple centuries isn’t a myth/story
Your descendants(?) will laugh at you.

>>19979932
>all captured cities were razed prior to christianity
Got to give you credit; never heard that one before

>>19982891
>any politician
>credible

>important
>"You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above"

You are part of a greater whole. There's nothing delusional about knowing that. You can break down anything in the universe from the human body to a rusty tin can to a blazing sun and it's all composed of atoms.

You could say atoms are the building blocks of the universe. Simple as. Except atoms are themselves made of protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are sub atomic particles which in turn are made of sub-sub-atomic particles which are in turn made of sub-sub-sub-atomic particles and so on and so forth. Break everything down small enough and you get to the "elementary particles" called leptons and quarks, which are the basic building blocks of matter.

So fundamentally everything is made of leptons and quarks then? All matter is, sure. But then not everything is made of matter is it? You come to the whole mind/body argument, where the body is a physical thing constructed of matter - but what is the mind? The mind - or consciousness - is simply energy. Like heat or light or electricity. Einstein’s most famous equation says that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. So energy and matter are really the same thing.

But not everything is matter or energy, not by a long shot. What about time? Is time matter or energy? Or is time just an abstract concept we invented? While we're at it, what exactly is a dream? What exactly is a joke?

It seems no scientist worth their salt can definitively claim what the universe is made up of. The entire discussion often becomes about semantics and like a dog chasing its tail after awhile it just makes your head spin. There are just far too many unknowns to wrap it all up and stick a nice bow on top.

But knowing that we're all in this together helps a little. We're all part of a greater whole, part of nature, part of the universe, part of God, programs bouncing off each other in a giant computer simulation, all uniquely coded from an infinite number of programming languages. Or are we a virus? Is Earth just a turd in the punchbowl of the universe, an experiment gone horribly wrong? However you choose to think about it is fine as long as it's right for you. But of course you're almost certainly wrong.

As Douglas Adams puts it: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy.

>>19983639
Pretty much. Nobody genuinely has any idea what's going on and whoever says they do is trying to peddle his own brand of bullshit.

>>19983647
I'll drink to that.

The only possible way to distinguish faith and delusion is to check - if possible - whether the thing a person has faith in is correct. There's nothing more to it. For religious faith, this obviously does not work.

>>19976113
>Kierkegaard’s writings on faith left me embittered as he states that faith goes beyond reason (which just seems like an excuse)
I don't understand how somebody can read the story of Abraham and think that it's all somehow reasonable
Kant certainly wouldn't think so

>>19983639
Matter and energy aren't divided anymore. You have massless particles that exchange energy (e.g., photons) being emmited by leptons and joining them to form other particles.

We say particle(s) plural because there are different types. Particles lack haecceity though, you shouldn't think of multiple numerically distinguishable photons. Wheeler envisioned it as one electron being in multiple places at once due to not being effected by time. Others posit not particles but local peaks in a quantum field.

A lot of theories center around information as the thing that makes the universe what it is. Google "it from bit."

Conciousness is recursive information representing itself. Genomes are information about the enviornment. Fractal reoccurence, chaos, and information science are sort of better paradigms for this sort of question than particle physics.

>>19983996
https://plus.maths.org/content/it-bit

OP here.
I never read about the concept of it from bit. It’s a bit hard to grasp but I hope to understand it by reading about it further as it is very interesting.
Thank you.

>>19976136
fpbp

>>19976113
>Is it possible to distinguish between genuine faith and delusion?
In others, don't worry about it.
In yourself, as anon said if you don't have faith and you're a thinking sort read Aristotle's Categories then Aquinas. Read the Bible and go to Mass. Keep in mind also faith is a theological virtue, it comes from grace. Grace is given when it is asked for. Ergo, pray to God for an increase in faith. You're gonna make it anon. You're on the right track.

>>19977087
Interesting post. So faith is inherently dogmatic, but in your view this is necessary and serves as a foundation for intellectual activity? Would you say this is similar to how axioms are used as the foundations for proofs in mathematics? The axioms themselves cannot be proven, but exist, as you put it, a priori to reason?

Why did you post a picture of Kant? Did he not attempt to eschew dogma entirely?

>>19976113
>distinguish between faith and delusion
That's a tough one, but I'm trying to do that too.
I think yes, you can draw a line between the two if you operate within logical boundaries. This means studying formal logic, memorizing the structure of every possibly fallacy - also ideally you'd want to study literary techniques like abstract vs concrete definition, figurative vs literal speech (metonymy, synecdoche, studying how metaphors are created and dissected)

Basically that would take a lot of work even with mnemonic techniques to help, but I think studying that + the canon books would make everything a lot easier to define for you. Then you'd want to apply these techniques as much as possible with your reasoning so you aren't lying to yourself or making illogical arguments

>>19984194
Also personally I'm trying to get to a level where I don't repeat concepts I've heard from others. I realize I used do that more often without fully dissecting their pre-made arguments. That's a very dangerous thing and that's exactly what Orwell was warning about. We tend to believe new things very easily if they're dressed in attractive metaphors, that's why you see all these idiots abusing language and buzzwords in the current political landscape. I'm open to suggestions if anyone else has some good ideas though

>>19976136
Take this exact post and come to the exact opposite conclusions and that's how I feel.

Faith is delusion

>>19983996
You seem to have a good grasp on the science. What are your thoughts on faith/the divine?

>>19976113
Read my essay. This is the closest anybody has ever come to proving the existence of God.
https://pastebin.com/eH5jsPbG
>There is a way out of this problem that appeals to logic. The devil must be given his due: power is the only objective measurement of “goodness”. Good jokes, good songs, the presence of a good person, all are powerful and secretly revered as such. The most powerful thing of all is love. Love overcomes resistance without having to impose any will onto the world, a property shared only by truth. Love can only occur when one believes in other people, and other people can only be real if they are more than some mere phenomenological interpretation of stimuli. This requires either explicit or implicit belief in a third-party conscious observer of the universe whose interpretation defines reality. In short, the only possible way of achieving the highest form of power (which Peterson’s theory objectively articulates) is by subordinating your desire for power to the love of God so that you don’t de facto become a solipsist and eventually a psychopath.

>>19984703
Do you believe in evolution?