Originally Posted by kinnikpasswordforgetter

and no, its not important not to have a clear position. what would be important is saying the truth about the afterlife. its a yes or no question. and the answer is no. unless you want to talk about the tiny pieces of your dead body that decay or turn to dust and become parts of other organisms. you could try but then the notions of life and death break down. which they should since the christian conception is just so crude and ugly and provides so much torment to so many people that can't find anything different to read about.

heaven, hell. again the answer is no. jesus is dead. there is no monotheistic god. just humans stretching their experiences of concioussness and imagining some sort of self magically made or resides in the universe then calling it god. which is a mistake. gods a good concept yes. but nothing more. the world wasn't created by him. etc. etc.

Originally Posted by kinnikpasswordforgetter

more avoidance. ontology - that means being right? well god does not exist. presence/absence. again - god does not exist and heaven and hell are not there. so i'll take absence. epistemology - yes, we can know that heaven, hell, gods existence and the resurrection of jesus are all not real and didn't happen/don't exist. logic - the very thing you have to abandon for your myths to work.

you want to avoid your argument coming down to "you can't prove these things aren't there so how do you know they aren't for sure?" but you can't really do it. no matter what words you use.

you are ultimately trying to avoid having to impose a bizarre and primitive creation myth and tribal back story onto someone else. that's all it is.

i mean, are you really trying to tell me since i'm a human (not god) i can't know for sure how things are out there in themselves and so maybe there really is a central operating room with god himself at the helm. lol.

as for your question. i'm not sure how to answer that. the question implies language has some relation to reality. do you want me to describe it? what description could suffice for reality other than reality?

telling that you said; "what is it, to you, please?"

i have no "personal" or individualised interpretation of reality. nor do i have a self that could accomplish this task.

Originally Posted by afonso

She did Jesus in the sepulcher.

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

I heard afterward, he wept.

Originally Posted by kinnikpasswordforgetter

the first sentence doesn't mean anything. i don't agree with the second. you can't do anything to reality. you are inside it.

you won't agree with me, neither will the majority of people except for strains of buddhism. its a view that is violently in opposition to the western conception of self.

an easy way to understand it is to think about how all concious decisions are made in certain areas of the brain a split second before you become concioussly aware of them. therefore there is no free will. hard for people to face up to but its been verified by neuroscientists.

you could read thomas metzinger if you still think you have a self. but really you have to go to buddhism (and actually understand it which is not easy) to get right down to it.

or, even better would be to read scott bakkers outstanding horror novel neuropath were he faces up to these truths.

Originally Posted by kinnikpasswordforgetter

that our thoughts are not magic and can't affect reality

Originally Posted by kinnikpasswordforgetter

well i'll never agree with you.

and i dont find my position tormenting, the opposite is true. the torment was in the initial difficulty of accepting it and the difficulty in abandoning a lifetime of culturally enforced preconceptions. in fact i'd go so far as to say the initial horror in accepting it. thomas ligotti knows what i'm talking about. it's telling that for an american (former catholic) like him, these perspectives form the basis of his book of pessimistic philosophy. probably the pinnacle of the genre. he even said in interviews about it he absolutely would kill himself if he didn't have family commitments.

but like i said, i dont expect many to agree with this.

although it is completely true.

we haven't yet developed a way of talking from this perspective in the west. you can read some ligotti stories about the horror of puppets (hint, you are the same as a puppet) or you could try stephen batchelors buddhism books. its not like i expect my posts to convince people here to give up on the idea they are the creators of their own life and can shape reality with the force of their own will. it is this idea that is impotent.

everyone assumes i am "tormented" or "angry" and just say those things over and over again. i would expect to be attacked in far worse ways if i went around aggressively confronting people with these viewpoints.

in fact, someone like zizek who clice mentioned earlier you can imagine wanting to throw people who think like this in his "gulag". i think he'd hypothetically have to.

as i've said, the buddhists messed up this knowledge by offering a form of redemption (nirvana). which can only make sense when you accept this perspective. (although i don't believe in reincarnation). another thing they did was lead their people into war. they used a great arguement, which zizek himself extrapolates as "when your sword is going into the enemies chest, do not worry as this is not true reality. this is the viel of maya (illusion) and so it is permissable to kill in these situations as you are merely the passive observer of your hand thrusting the knife into the other person." which you have to admire in its evil genius. basically telling you to just disconnect from your actions and become a passive observer of your body as it kills someone else.

however, none of you can possibly disagree with my point about free will being non existant because the brain has been scientifically proven to make its decisions a moment before you become concious of them.

you can try, and undoubtedly this kind of humiliation will be fought against by the left and right alike. you can deny it. but it's an observable and scientifically verified phenonemon.

and the reason it freaks you the fuck out is because this means that hypothetically, if someone was to get wireless access to your brain with some future technology they could control your actions and you wouldn't even know it. the way to stop worrying is to realise this is effectively happening already, but (for now at least) its not the cia.

however, they've recently observed that with the technology they have now, the brain tends to obey 5 out of every 6 of the small range of commands they are able to send to it. they don't know why this is, i heard it put forward it was some sort of quantum phenomenon. like the brain has a built in security system or something.

now do you all understand why schizos tend to say things like "the cia is stealing my thoughts" and "my teeth are picking up radio transmissions"?

Originally Posted by afonso

Post hoc ergo propter hoc
What if, for example, "free will" is not strictly conscious?

Originally Posted by afonso

I also like how I'm being roasted for using the word 'feminazi' like if I actually meant it. Let alone the fact that I'm not even a native english speaker and that the first time I've read that word was here on SYG.