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Imo, NIV cuts out a lot of rather inconvenient language that doesn't jive with modern Christianity and King James uses overly grand language for the sake of majestic effect. While there's nothing inherently wrong with either one, I prefer a translation that aims to have the most historically accurate reading. I use NRSV because it's the most academically focused translation but uses standard English and notates whenever important words have debated meanings or when names have important connotations (e.g. the roots of Elohim or YHWH) or there's notable shifts in narrative, contradictory messages, etc. My copy also has accessible scholarly essays giving historical context and extensive footnotes focusing on how readers contemporaneous to the books' writing would have interpreted the material. Here's an amazon link for 14 dollars :)
Tell that to the people taking thumbprints and coming back fine. People react to those changes in chemistry extremely differently and there are steps that can be taken beforehand to mitigate problems, primarily in regards to knowing full well what is happening to you once you do it. Some people can handle it and some people can't. The 'mental fortitude' is the little voice in the back of your head telling you that it's not real and to calm down, take deep breaths, and focus on something else.
I'm afraid you're seriously mistaken. Two people of the same sex can't be married. It's like how a square can't be a circle. It just goes against the definition of the term.
If you want to understand why I say this, I highly recommend this book. It explains why it is illogical to consider anything other than an exclusive man-woman union as a marriage.
This isn't about "tolerance". This is about the meaning of the term marriage.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Cephalopods have the most developed nervous systems and brains of any invertebrate. They really do deserve special legal protection, especially w.r.t. experiments in scientific studies.
A particularly interesting book on the topic, if you care to read it is Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Despite the title, the book covers cephalopods in general.
Check out the book Descartes Error. He goes into the split-brain studies, and yes, two distinct consciousnesses do seem to form.
Other Minds, it’s about the consciousness of octopuses and consciousness in general. It’s a very well written and fascinating book.
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764
What is actually considered apocryphal, as you might imagine, isn't completely agreed upon.
The Apocrypha in the NOAB, however, includes more than the typical Apocrypha in the KJV tradition, containing 3rd and 4th Maccabees and Psalm 151, which are usually omitted. It's going to contain more than most Apocryphal Bibles.
You can also glance at the "Look Inside!" on the Amazon page for the book to see what books the NOAB specifically contains.
This does help. Thank you for that and for taking the time to explain ❤️
I guess I should really get back to finishing this book. The miracle of mindfulness. Seems to line up with a lot of what you described
The first chapter talks about how you can't enjoy a peach if you're just mindlessly eating it without taking the time to enjoy and appreciate each bite. Have to be present at all times.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807012394/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_dVHFFbH1BG8JS
> There are multiple core ideas in eastern philosophy that have uncanny similarities of recent findings in various other sciences. The Tao Te Ching for example describes everything we perceive as an "emergent phenomenon" of a higher reality. It starts by making clear that it will use a new, unloaded word for that higher reality (the Tao) and explicitly denies any knowledge about the nature of this higher reality.
As do all of the Gnostics, and most of the Neoplatonists. Ismaili Islam believes this, as do certain forms of Protestantism. I mean hell I can just start listing western religions that believe this, or even just mention Kant, Schopenhauer, Schelling etc etc.
What you are describing is not particular to Eastern Philosophy, and is a kind of naive intro level obsession with the cool strange Eastern Philosophers. This is not to attack your interest but the stuff you are mentioning is not "Eastern" in any coherent sense. We see it even in Aztec Philosophy were all of reality is an expression of the eternal and ever changing Teotl.
> Is there anybody from the philosophical department who is working on this, since Alan Watts?
David Bentley Hart's https://www.amazon.co.uk/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300166842 is probably a good place to look as he is quite informed on the things you are interested in, i.e. Eastern Philosophy, Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind.
Most apps I'm aware of don't have many notes, but here's one of the most popular versions, on Amazon. The Catholic Study Bible is also good, and its notes are a bit more readable in my opinion.
I know I'm a little late to the party but The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh is a good introduction for Westerners. He's a Buddhist monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr.
My personal advice is to keep it simple. You don't need a bunch of complicated different ways of meditating or things to meditate on. At the beginning, meditating is mostly focusing on your breath, staying present as much as possible, and forgiving yourself if/when it doesn't come easy.
It's not "fast" because it's called a practice for a reason. You just have to want to do it. If you don't, you need to probably find a therapist to get through this aversion to doing ANYTHING you don't want to do.
>There are literally 2000 years of theology about god being an actual being
you literally don't know Christian theology.
https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300166842
David Bentley Hart is kind of a big deal in Christian, he would say you don't know anything about Christian theology.
>From Augustine to the contemporary theologians at the Vatican
Augustine definitely doesn't believe in the super being. And Bishop Barron, of the RCC, recently dismissed that idea of God as modern confusion and heresy.
Beyond yourself, do you have any philosophers or theologians who also believe in the super-being?
I saw the word entity and started to scroll past the post, but I think this is actually a really interesting theory that makes sense. If you haven't, you should read Descartes' Error. He explores the studies done on blind-sight and split brains, and it does appear that separate, distinct consciousnesses can emerge in one brain under the right conditions (this is entirely different from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which isn't really multiple distinct consciousnesses the way it's popularly portrayed in media).
Currently reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
People often have an extremely myopic view of intelligence (in an overly like comparison sort of way). If we can't anthropomorphize it, we can't empathize with it.
The further you climb around the evolutionary tree, the more alien (to us) the concept of sentience becomes... that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that we have little respect, or imagination, for the different ways it might manifest.
You might enjoy the book.
Try to find someone experienced to be with you there - depending on where you live, you're likely to find some psychonauts and maybe even therapists who offer such services. Also, check out the Psychedelic Experience, a book written by Tim Leary with Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, the three professors from Harvard (later kicked out) largely credited with bringing psychedelics to the mainstream in the 60s.
Also, this book is likely a solid resource https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Experience-Tibetan-Citadel-Underground/dp/0806516526?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=6255369c-74e8-4ef2-84e6-210de7188340
Absolutely. Great book called <em>Other Minds</em> discusses the differences between human and cephalopod intelligence (octopi and cuttlefish being some of the most intelligent animals on the planet) and the differences are staggering. Machine intelligence has absolutely no reason whatsoever to look similar to human intelligence, other than our assumption that it should. Since we will probably not hand-build the first AI model to surpass human general intelligence, but rather use some kind of random or data-driven process, our expectations may not matter all that much.
This is nowhere near a religious text, rather a rational discussion of how you can have an intimate relation with the deceased. Douglas Hofstadter has written extensively on the mechanics of the mind and how it comes from brain activity. His wife died and yet she was still in his head. Turns out some of your brain capacity has you in it and makes up your mind, and some of your brain cells have the same capacity to form a personality of someone that isn’t you. It’s your loved ones and it’s how you know “what would uncle think?” https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793
>So MM encompasses both hard atheist skepticism and MN, but not soft atheism…
Yes. Materialism is the strongest (most extreme) claim (in that direction), because it leaves no theoretical space for anything supernatural (of any sort).
>And neither skepticism nor MN includes MM
They don't have to, no. You can be skeptical or a naturalist without being a materialist, and the distinction is quite important. Thomas Nagel, for example, has spent decades trying to explain to people why materialism is wrong, but he's a naturalist and he's a skeptic regarding God - he "just can't bring himself to believe in such a thing".
>but MN is a purely science perspective but doesn’t encompass atheists of either type
If you are a MN then you believe science can, in theory, explain everything that is going on in the universe. That is very hard to square with belief in the existence of anything worthy of the name "God".
>And the only difference between PS and NPS is that PS believes science and metaphysics are compatible, and NPS believes that supernatural is always the answer.
Not quite. Science is science and metaphysics is metaphysics. Whether or not they are compatible doesn't make sense as a question. The question is whether science is compatible with mysticism (which are both epistemic claims ie they are about what we can know and how we can know it). PS views the laws of physics as limits to what is possible - not even God can break the laws of physics. NPS claims that physically impossible things can happen if God or some other supernatural agent wills them to happen.
That was one of the many things in the book “Other Minds” that blew me away. They basically have 8 sub-brains in their arms, which appear to work in unison with their brain-brain. It’s an amazing book about cephalopod intelligence, and we’ll worth a read.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764
>However, recent studies and tonnes of research are cohesively beginning
to align in the direction that most of the knowledge at hand indicates
that the greater current probability is that our consciousness is
(merely) a product of our brain and pretty much all of our life,
This is simply not true. Recent philosophical developments suggest the exact opposite. Materialist/functionalist theories of mind hit a high watermark between the 1950s and the 1980s, and are now under serious and sustained attack. Indeed, I'd say we are looking at the early stages of major paradigm shift which consigns metaphysical materialism to intellectual history.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
This book is a little outdated now, but when I was an undergrad philosophy major, this was THE book for the materialist viewpoint: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/neurophilosophy
I'd also recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X . Again, it's a little dated but should help you understand where most materialists are coming from.
Yes, the top mainstream academic study bibles include the <em>New Oxford Annotated Bible</em> and the <em>Harper Collins Study Bible</em>.
yeah, i read the definition, it's an attempt to describe a reality they don't fully understand and i know it comes across as arrogant, but most of them don't even know how genders function
the focus on the act of "relating to" is nonsensical and mechanically meaningless. it's just their attempt to understand "naming an expression of a specific pattern in a feedback loop started hundreds of centuries ago"
try reading this: https://gist.github.com/wchristian/ca7e34cb7b5b9188e7a5db291b12e119
and this: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Douglas-R-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793
> I'm sorry if that seems like a "shitposty" or bad-faith answer, I genuinely think there isn't really a better term for them.
Nah it's fine, that's about what i expected. And what i am pointing out is that mechanically you will not be able to draw a distinction between the supposed group of xenogenders and the group of "Named non-binary genders", unless you include the group of people who fundamentally misunderstand what a gender is.
On the question of God and Muslim-Christian comparisons, since you seem to be somewhat familiar with Islamic views, what do you do you make of the minimal description of the concept of God (minimal in that he says it covers almost all theisms, though he leans Christian) made by philosopher David Bentley Hart in his book <em>The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss</em>. It seems to me to to be similar to the conceptions of God in Asharism and Maturidi kalam theology (from what I've read of the two).
What do you think?
>Consciousness cannot be fundamental. It developed through evolution and it’s main use is to survive reality. It simply cannot be fundamental to the universe, because the universe will still be with or without it. It belongs to things that need to survive reality, things without consciousness need not survive reality.
There's no necessary link between consciousness and the need to survive. Plants need to survive, but that doesn't mean they need to be conscious.
As for whether consciousness developed through evolution - that is very much an open question. I believe there is a logical problem with materialism, and if you accept that materialism is false then materialistic accounts of evolution also have to be rejected.
See: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
I think the real question we need to ask is how to square what we do know about evolution with what we don't know about consciousness, and we will not end up at a position where we can safely conclude that consciousness isn't fundamental (or something along those lines).
> There is no point in debating true believers of any variety.
That seems tautologically true. Having observed and interacted with John W. Loftus while he was an atheist, I'm guessing you would have characterized his Christian self as a "true believer". Yes? No? If yes, then we could see whether atheists debating with him were any part of his deconversion. If yes, then perhaps it is impossible to tell who is actually a "true believer", making your observation pragmatically iffy.
> Beliefs are not points of debate, they are emotional premises upon which all else is built.
Is this true only of theists, or atheists as well? If only theists, can you point to peer-reviewed science which establishes your point?
> Emotions and reason (the mechanism of debate) have little intersection.
I suggest checking out Antonio Damasio 1994 Descartes' Error. Damasio found that people with brain lesions which disconnected them from their emotions made it very difficult for them to pursue long-term goals in life, while leaving their ability to solve logic puzzles and the like unaffected. Here's how Damasio summarizes his findings:
> When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions. (xii)
That book stands at 35,000 'citations'. While it might not be 100% right, it also isn't 100% wrong.
>Evolution is often portrayed as an "accidental process" whereby species evolve through a series of "random" mutations, which mysteriously seem to result the "optimization" of the species (or entirely new species).
>
>I am skeptical of this "accidental" view of Nature, although I try to keep an open mind.
OK. You really need to read this book if you haven't already: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
Nagel argues that in the case of consciousness, evolution must have been teleological. And I think he is right.
>It is clear to me that humans have superior brains, because they have been "designed" to eventually leave this planet and "infest" other worlds. Yes, like cockroaches, only on a larger scale.
This, I think, is wrong. The purpose - the teleology - was only for the "purpose" of getting to a that first conscious animal. After that consciousness already existed - it did not need to evolve twice. However, that first animal was really stupid. It had a tiny brain. Intelligence is not consciousness - it does not demand a teleological explanation, because it is very obvious what intelligence is useful for, and how it evolved. Humans have got very large brains because about 5 million years ago our ancestors started depending entirely on brainpower to survive. It's got nothing to do with leaving the planet. It was about becoming a super-predator. Unfortunately we have become too good at this, and we will now be lucky to survive the eco-apocalypse we've created. We aren't going to leave the planet.
For me...it world be The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version
It's the premier study Bible used by scholars, pastors, undergraduate and graduate students and the NRSV is the scholarly standard for study of the Bible.