Christianity vs Earth, the right vs the left (the Nietzsche reading club)

[steve ridgway]

Our entire existence has been mapped in advance.

Over 13,000,000,000 years is an awful lot of predestination. I can imagine watching the universe evolve through its combination of physical laws and quantum unpredictability being far more satisfying, although personally I'd want the ability to tweak the probabilities when it suited me.

[Opus131]

Over 13,000,000,000 years is an awful lot of predestination. I can imagine watching the universe evolve through its combination of physical laws and quantum unpredictability being far more satisfying, although personally I'd want the ability to tweak the probabilities when it suited me.

I'm not pretending an atheist would believe this but from a religious perspective there is no difficutly.

God is outside both space and time. His existence is essentially that of an eternal "present" from which all possibilities are known by virtue of the fact his very essence is the principle cause of everything. What you experience unfolding in time for God is an already fulfilled reality.

This is not to deny that there is freedom as well as choice, but neither can be considered to be limitless. Man's freedom is not the same as God's freedom. Your freedom is bound within a certain number of possibililties, all of which are already known to God, and for the most part, free will actually entails internal disposations and is not merely a matter of taking certain actions in the real world. Sometimes the choise is how to "repond" to God's challenges and tests from an inward point of view.

[Henk]

Over 13,000,000,000 years is an awful lot of predestination. I can imagine watching the universe evolve through its combination of physical laws and quantum unpredictability being far more satisfying, although personally I'd want the ability to tweak the probabilities when it suited me.

The Bing Bang was necessity, the first and only law. 😋 Quantum reality comes a little time after the Big Bang.

Chance does only exist in a human world, chance is interpretation. I agree with Einstein: 'God doesn't play dice.'

Although Mills says there already existed galaxies before the Big Bang and, if I understand well, survived the Big Bang.

[Opus131]

It's great that you've found that some modern christian thinkers take ecology seriously, their work doesn't actually falsify the claim that christianity has historically been pretty rough on the earth. They are doing corrective, reinterpretive work precisely because the dominant christian tradition has long leaned toward human exceptionalism and "dominion" being interpreted as having rights to pillage and shape centuries of resource exploitation through various means and colonialism. Modern eco-theology is valuable and hopeful, but it's a recent response to a very long problem, not evidence the problem never existed. I think your premise is showing what christianity should become, not what it historically was.

Again, we are blaming Christianity for the sins of Humanism (as well as blaming the religion for human nature in general. As if conquest and empire building was unknown in the non-Christian world). It was Humanism that launched the age of exploration. The reason Europeans begun to focus on the world to such an exceptional degree is a direct result of forgetting God between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and putting all emphasis on man alone.

It's also interesting to see this claim that the "dominant" Christian position is human "exceptionalism" (again, that is humanism, by definition) when a few pages back we had quotations by Nietzsche arguing the complete opposite, the "dominant" Christian position for him being human mortificaton. While it is true that Christianity considers man to be at the center of creation (for good reason. To me it feels as if the atheists have replaced God with "nature" or the "universe"), this is still the religion that believes human nature is fallen and in need of redemption.

Quite frankly, to me it feels as if the moderns are trying to scape goat their own sins on Christianity when the history of the west for the past few centuries is entirely their doing.

[Henk]

The Bing Bang was necessity, the first and only law. 😋 Quantum reality comes a little time after the Big Bang.

Chance does only exist in a human world, chance is interpretation. I agree with Einstein: 'God doesn't play dice.'

Although Mills says there already existed galaxies before the Big Bang and, if I understand well, survived the Big Bang.

Or is the Bing Bang the ultimate toss? But can there be just one toss? That sounds quite eerie te me.

[Henk]

Again, we are blaming Christianity for the sins of Humanism (as well as blaming the religion for human nature in general. As if conquest and empire building was unknown in the non-Christian world). It was Humanism that launched the age of exploration. The reason Europeans begun to focus on the world to such an exceptional degree is a direct result of forgetting God between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and putting all emphasis on man alone.

Christianity is a universalizing religion. The message of Jesus is addressed to all humans. It wants to expand. With much success it has spread and converted all kinds of peoples and countries.

When Europeans wanted to improve other peoples and colonize them, it was among other things on the ground of religion.

And weren't the Spaniards and Portuguese not catholitics and the Dutch and English not protestants?

[Henk]

It's also interesting to see this claim that the "dominant" Christian position is human "exceptionalism" (again, that is humanism, by definition) when a few pages back we had quotations by Nietzsche arguing the complete opposite, the "dominant" Christian position for him being human mortificaton. While it is true that Christianity considers man to be at the center of creation (for good reason. To me it feels as if the atheists have replaced God with "nature" or the "universe"), this is still the religion that believes human nature is fallen and in need of redemption.

For Spinoza God is nature.

I think I don't need the concept of God. I believe in health.

God is a way to defend against anguish, to feel protected. Health does the same but is much more practical.

[Florestan]

But the way your life unfolds is predestined.

Our entire existence has been mapped in advance. Within this preordaned set of events

Looks like I'm talking to a brick wall. I give up.

[71 dB]

But the way your life unfolds is predestined. There is no random casuality. Events that occur in your life, challenges you may face, it's all preordinaed in the end. Whether you die tomorrow or not is not something you have any choice over.

Does this mean people should just accept for example hard times, because it is all predestined? Sounds like very convenient message uttered by those in power wanting to stay in power and preventing people to try and change how things are.

If my life is predestined, do I do good things because they are morally right, or because I was going to do them anyway? Is the existence a holographic millions of years long movie?

Is time an illusion experienced by living creatures? This matters because the whole concept of something being predestined requires that time exists. If time is an illusion, predestination is also an illusion. I believe we have AT LEAST the illusion of free will. Maybe that's enough? Maybe quantum physics allows real free will?

I need to use many question marks here, because I don't know definite answers to these questions despite of having pondered them for decades. Maybe you are a super genius based on the level of confidence you write about these things as if we were talking about 3rd grade math problems.

So God is the master of our destinity as much as he is the master of all reality.

Which God? Mankind has come up with concepts of about 4000 Gods. People don't fully agree what kind of God(s) exist(s) and some people like myself don't believe in any God. Given this, how is it reasonable to assume we have any kind of definitive knowledge of what master(s) we and our reality has?

Our entire existence has been mapped in advance.

How do you know? These are questions the brightest minds have been thinking about for thousands of years. Are you unsure of anything or why is it that you don't need question marks?

Within this preordaned set of events we have the "freedom" to make choices, and our salvation depends on those choices, so it is true that we are not predestined to be saved or damned, but we are still not the masters of our lives. We have a free "will", but we are not free from contingency.

Wait a minute? Now you say we have some freedoms, but that means our lives can't be predestined! Even if the only freedom was to choose whether we watch Snooker on TV or not, that would automatically mean our lives are NOT predestined, because we would be able to choose whether our lives contain watching Snooker or not.

Again the message of being saved or damned based on how you use your freedoms is convenient for those who rule over others. It is possible of course, that it is pure coincident that the religious message you are presenting here happens to be convenient for those in power, but I point it out anyway because in critical thinking one should not ignore such things, right? 

I'm not so convinced they are. Or rather, i'm not convinced it is within our power to actually "kill" the planet.

You don't believe mankind is capable of causing untold harm to this planet? Really? How about all those animals that have gone extinct because of mankind? Were these animals predestined to go extinct? Sure, we can't kill the planet as in blowing it to pieces like in Star Wars, but we can do damage that makes life very difficult if not impossible for ourselves.

Defiling the environment is one thing, but this idea it is within our abilities to actually cause an apocalypse doesn't really sit right in my mind.

Really? Have you never been worried about a nuclear war for example? To you what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago was not apocalyptic in nature?

[71 dB]

Looks like I'm talking to a brick wall. I give up.

Don't worry, it was simply predestined you'd give up. 

[Florestan]

Don't worry, it was simply predestined you'd give up. 

Good one. 

[steve ridgway]

I'm not pretending an atheist would believe this but from a religious perspective there is no difficutly.

I agree there are many perspectives and am trying to see as large a picture as possible based on what I have confidence in, but that's only how the Universe looks from where I'm standing.

[Henk]

For a sense of civilized interaction: Don't expel members and their ideas:

'The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism.

Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.'

[AnotherSpin]

For a sense of civilized interaction: Don't expel members and their ideas:

'The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism.

Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.'

By the way, I don't remember if I ever thanked you before for pointing me toward Byung-Chul Han. In any case, thank you once more. I managed to find a few of his books; so far I've only read one, but it's already clear he's a really interesting author. I'll definitely keep coming back to him.

[Henk]

Civilization means being able to overcome processes of short-circuiting that keep us ill by means of reason that give a lot more happiness and satisfaction, that give us joy.

[DavidW]

For a sense of civilized interaction: Don't expel members and their ideas:

'The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disorientation and senselessness is compensated through self-harm, or even harming others through acts of terrorism.

Byung-Chul Han argues that our times are characterized not by external repression but by an internal depression, whereby the destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from the self. It is only by returning to a society of listeners and lovers, by acknowledging and desiring the Other, that we can seek to overcome the isolation and suffering caused by this crushing process of total assimilation.'

Thank you for sharing that. It does speak to me. I've been thinking recently how both my Father and I live in our own echo chambers (distinctly different too) where opinions are force fed to us. We're compelled to stick with the hive mind mentality. That doesn't nurture our own identity in this world, it just forces us to conform.

[Opus131]

For Spinoza God is nature.

I think I don't need the concept of God. I believe in health.

God is a way to defend against anguish, to feel protected. Health does the same but is much more practical.

Well, Spinoza was obviously wrong.

Pantheism is another incoherent idea because God, whose entire reason for being is his trascendence, cannot also be contingent like nature or the universe obviously is.

Panentheism is closer to the actual reality. Nature reflects something of God, but is not God in his essence, which is beyond all contingency (or else he wouldn't be God). Divinizing "nature" makes no sense because a God who is relative and contingent is no God, but just another creature.

[Henk]

Well, Spinoza was obviously wrong.

Pantheism is another incoherent idea because God, whose entire reason for being is his trascendence, cannot also be contingent like nature or the universe obviously is.

Panentheism is closer to the actual reality. Nature reflects something of God, but is not God in his essence, which is beyond all contingency (or else he wouldn't be God). Divinizing "nature" makes no sense because a God who is relative and contingent is no God, but just another creature.

'Spinoza argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case".[144] Therefore, concepts such as 'freedom' and 'chance' have little meaning.[138] This picture of Spinoza's determinism is illuminated in Ethics: "the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. ... All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak."[145] In his letter to G. H. Schuller (Letter 58), he wrote: "men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined."' (Wikipedia)

[Opus131]

Looks like I'm talking to a brick wall. I give up.

What i'm arguing is that it is both, where as i assume for you it is an either/or.

In my view, it's both freedom and predestination because while you can make choices your temporal existence is relative and bound to God's plan for creation as a whole.

I mean, if God is outside space and time, doesn't that imply our "freedom" in this linear existence we experience in "time" is relative and limited in some way compared to God's immutable will by which all things are ordered in their totality?

Keep in mind trying to come to terms with this and understand where exactly does free will end and predetermination start is likely something that is on some level or to a certain degree beyond our powers of comprehension. It's a bit like trying to envision "nothingness". As creatures bound in time, it is hard for us to concieve of an existence such as that of God where time and "linear" thinking doesn't apply at all.

And the reason we are bound to a particular "destiny" is that as creatures we are essentially bound to specific possibilities, possibilities which are then subject to the rules set by the principle out of which they proceed. And since God knows all things he can already see our entire existence as being mapped in advance. What we experience moment to moment in linear time, he has already seen all at once.

An analogy one can use is to envision our lives as water pouring down an empty river bed (this path rapresenting God's foreknowledge of our existence), which we can see as being analogous to "fate" (while God's foreknowledge pertains to providence, to cite a distinction employed by Boethius). Our point of view is bound to this motion. The twists and turns we make as we fill up this path will appear to be "choices" we make. From within our relative, temporal point of view, we have the freedom to make choices. From God's vantage point, where all events are present simultaneously and where "time" is a fait accompli, what we chose was known in advance and on some level was always part of his plan for the whole of creation.

So ultimately, it is not an either/or but there is a level in which there is both choice and destiny. And this applies  to the world itself. God has a plan for the world and it is up whether it ends tomorrow or not. That's why i'm skeptical to the idea man can actually destroy the earth irrespective of God's plans for humanity. To me that is to put our free will above God's omnipotence.

[AnotherSpin]

Well, Spinoza was obviously wrong.

Pantheism is another incoherent idea because God, whose entire reason for being is his trascendence, cannot also be contingent like nature or the universe obviously is.

Panentheism is closer to the actual reality. Nature reflects something of God, but is not God in his essence, which is beyond all contingency (or else he wouldn't be God). Divinizing "nature" makes no sense because a God who is relative and contingent is no God, but just another creature.

Imagine the sea is all there is: one huge, endless ocean. Every wave that pops up (you, me, trees, planets, every thought or argument) is made of exactly the same water and nothing else.

You're worried that if God is the ocean he can't also be the waves, because waves come and go and God must be permanent. But the ocean never actually comes and goes; it only looks that way when we stare at one wave and forget it's just the ocean moving. The wave never drags the ocean into being temporary; it's still 100 % ocean the whole time.

So when we say "the world is God," we're not dragging God down; we're just noticing there was never anything except God pretending to be waves for a bit. Take away the pretending and only the ocean is left, unchanged, untouched, and completely whole. That's it.