greylorn:
What is this “infinite value of life” blather?
What value do you attach to your life and the lives of your family?
None.
Now if I was stupid enough to spill hot coffee on myself and found an attorney smarmy enough to convince a jury of idiots that my burnt crotch was the fault of the company who sold me the coffee, my estate might be worth a few million dollars, and my offspring might wish me happy father’s day or something for a change.
But I would be worth exactly what I was worth before I was born. Zero, zip, nada. From dust we come and to dust we shall return.
greylorn:
What does “infinitely good” mean?
Life is infinitely good because it is the source of all that we have and are - including the power to deny that life has any value…
I expected better from you here. I’ve no problem accepting that you or anyone else finds life to be good, wonderful, exciting,or whatever. It is your use of the specific term “infinite” with which I quibble, because you are using a word which I suspect you do not appreciate the meaning or implications of.
The word “infinite” is commonly employed by religionists who are attempting to declare a subject off-limits and beyond argument— except I notice that they always reserve to themselves the privilege of saying something suitably definitive about it.
What “infinity” really means is that some pinhead has managed to divide by zero, or the mathematical/intellectual equivalent.
The word “infinite” is unnecessary here. Its only purpose I can see is to attempt to gain some theologically based high ground. If you really mean to use it as an imbecilic adjective such as “mega,” do it in a conversation with Charley. If you mean to use the term infinity in its mathematical sense, kindly explain your usage more credibly.
greylorn:
What makes you think that human beings have free will?
Without free will all our thoughts have physical causes, we have no control over them and there is no guarantee that any of our conclusions are true…
Guess what. Most of our “thoughts” are generated by a physical device called the human brain. We don’t have control over them, and except for really simpleminded observations, few of what passes in the average human for “thoughts” are true.
If you imagine that you have any control over your thoughts, try sitting down and not having a single “thought” for 20 minutes.
There are a large number of information processing mechanisms going on in the brain and at a variety of different levels. Then there are processes going on within the soul, if the brain in question happens to be interfaced to one.
These are commonly lumped together in conversations under the general term “thought.” Without making distinctions between mechanisms, a conversation which uses the word “thought” as a focal point is absurd.
Clearly, all “thoughts” emanating from within the brain are coming from a biological machine, and most of us recognize that machines do not have free will.
A thought in the form of a creative idea might appear within the brain/soul simplex. I suspect that you have not the slightest idea how to distinguish “soul” from brain, and are unqualified to declare from which mechanism a “thought” emanates, much less define the term “thought.”
What you perceive as “true conclusions” are simply the programs inserted into your brain by your family, society, and Church. They are equivalent to the “prime directives” of a robot.
Although you are capable of genuine thought at the level of soul, you limit those abilities to simply justifying the beliefs which others have programmed into your brain.
greylorn said:
:
The truth is that we are enslaved by our lusts, passions, and inherent greediness, all attributes programmed into the human species to insure its survival.
If we are enslaved by our lusts, passions, and inherent greediness your conclusions are the product of your lusts, passions, and inherent greediness - and therefore irrational…
Tony, I am losing respect for you as a philosopher. I used the word “enslaved” purposely. A slave is required to do his master’s bidding, but on his own time he gets to live according to his own thoughts. If those thoughts are beliefs programmed into his brain my his master’s church, then he’s not going to have much of a mental life. But if an enslaved person has rejected, rebelled against, or even whined loudly about his programming, some properties of his mind may be his own, and some few of his actions may reflect the tiny bit of independently conscious soul that emerges from the morass of the pre-programmed brain.
You speak from a philosophy which in the context of your own Catholic beliefs is illogical. You appear to accept the notion that we as human beings have only a single information processing mechanism, i.e.the mind. You are way too bright to discredit the scientific knowledge which shows the brain to be the human person’s primary information processing mechanism. As a Catholic, you seem to think that “you” will go to heaven, know God, etc. etc. Exactly which part of “you” is going to do that? Are you having your brain pickled and posthumously FedEx’d?.
