(October 14, 2026 at 8:06 am)Silas Vane Wrote: What makes preventing evil an obligation for God, rather than a choice He has the power to make?

Well, it's an obligation for us.  Do you believe in a god that is unaccountable to basic moral standards of the kind that we humans are subject to? If you saw someone being murdered...or even just in trouble... and you could help, but didn't, that would be a moral failure, right? We have cops and firemen and first responders...all of these folks exist, and we support those systems with our taxes, so that we can help reduce some amount of death and misery. On a more intimate level our familial bonds are expressed in terms of overlapping webs of obligations and care. If you permitted evil...that would be a moral failure, no? We don't say "John watches the kids kick the dog when he's not molesting them, but he's a good provider and it can't be helped". It does seem a bit strange to throw all of that out the window when we think about a god that is alleged to be or supposed to be a moral exemplar.

I've gotta say....if this whole god business is like that, it would only be a sideline to me whether it existed or not. I don't see the point in worshipping a moral failure in heaven, and if I wanted to worship a moral failure there's plenty right here on earth. OFC, the whole idea of gods as moral exemplars may be false. Maybe they do exist and they're just like us in that regard. Limited, flawed, compromised. Maybe gods can't help with this or that thing. Maybe gods fail to recognize this or that evil. Maybe they do bad things and allow bad things and ask others to do bad things for them when they have some personal goal in mind, some need or desire. That'd be a shame, a tragic waste of ability and potential, don't you think?

(October 14, 2026 at 8:41 am)Silas Vane Wrote: You've equated divine authority with slave ownership, but you've yet to establish why one necessarily entails the other.

You havent read your holy book, have you!?

Lev 25,42 Wrote:For they are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sol

Lev 25,55 Wrote:For to me the Israelites are servants; they are my servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Isa 41:8-9 Wrote:But you, Israel, my servant,
   Jacob, whom I have chosen,
   the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
you whom I took from the ends of the earth
   and called from its farthest corners,
saying to you, “You are my servant;
   I have chosen you and not cast you off”

Isa 44:21 Wrote:Remember these things, O Jacob,
   and Israel, for you are my servant;
I formed you, you are my servant;
   O Israel, do not forget me

Isa 48:20 Wrote:Go out from Babylon; flee from Chaldea;
   declare this with a shout of joy; proclaim it;
send it forth to the end of the earth;
   say, “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!”

@Silas Vane

Quote:What makes preventing evil an obligation for God, rather than a choice He has the power to make?

What makes you think God has the power to make choices?

Boru

god doesn’t have free will

Maybe they dont. Maybe, as so many people have believed over time. The gods are fated. Maybe they try to help, maybe they try to do right and be better…but what was going to happen happens all the same…and we misread that because we overestimate their agency in it all.

(October 13, 2026 at 7:24 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think emjay and Bel have misunderstood the point.  If engaging in some practice helps you, that's fine.  But be skeptical of theories about what is specifically happening and why and how what follows does so.  I used to attend Buddhist meetups and I would hear a ton of different interpretations of the Buddha's teachings.  Everybody had a theory about what the Buddha's method was and how it was supposed to work.  For every ten Buddhists there were eleven interpretations.  Quite simply they were all simply applying their own biases and beliefs to their experience to create the Buddha's meaning.   It was largely just baseless speculation.  Likewise with meditation and mindfulness.  There is evidence that as a practice, it has benefits.  The mechanism behind that correlation, though, is less well understood.  Again, it's important to separate out that it is a correlation, and correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation.

Thinking about this more, is your primary concern here my 'attribution' of my 'interpretation' to/of Mindfulness ™ and/or Buddhist Teachings ™... i.e. is your problem that you think I am claiming that my interpretation is what Buddhism itself is claiming? I.e. thinking that I think I have the only right interpretation of it? If so then that's not the case at all IMO. I.e. everyone can have different interpretations of it, any maybe none of them, including my own, are exactly what the Buddha taught, if he even existed, but that doesn't matter because everyone's interpretation works for them, and maybe them alone. So is that what the problem was? Would it have been solved if I had said... and going forward, continue to say... 'my (idiosyncratic and biased etc) interpretation of Mindfulness teachings reliably reduces my anxiety, rumination, anger etc' rather than 'Mindfulness ™ reliably reduces my anxiety, rumination, anger etc'? Is that what it comes down to?

I think it's more a question of mechanics, assumptions, and conflations...than fidelity to traditional interpretations or word choices. We believe a thing is working a certain way - but that's not been adequately demonstrated and there is alot of data behind the suspicion that it is not working that way...honestly, as with most things mind related. This is an inherited problem more than a mindfulness problem. An experiential problem, even. That there very much are external assumptions that must be made...even if only implicitly...to make the sorts of claims about mindfulness that we might find interesting. That the idea that mindfulness is just logic, is just absolutely false.

These were things you specifically asked about.

(October 14, 2026 at 9:12 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think it's more a question of mechanics, assumptions, and conflations...than fidelity to traditional interpretations or word choices. We believe a thing is working a certain way - but that's not been adequately demonstrated and there is alot of data behind the suspicion that it is not working that way...honestly, as with most things mind related. This is an inherited problem more than a mindfulness problem. An experiential problem, even. That there very much are external assumptions that must be made...even if only implicitly...to make the sorts of claims about mindfulness that we might find interesting. That the idea that mindfulness is just logic, is just absolutely false.

These were things you specifically asked about.

Okay I get that I think, but do you understand what I'm trying to say when I say something directly follows something, logically, moment by moment?... referring to just changing experience in the mundane way we expect... i.e. if I turn my eyes to face a certain direction, I will naturally see and experience seeing whatever I'm facing... that there's nothing superstitious or woo-ish about that... it's just a description of what 'seeing' or any other mundane sensory action is doing. 'I will see whatever exists in the direction I'm facing' does not seem to me to be an outlandish claim. Obviously it wasn't that exactly, but similar; if I focus on something I will naturally be thinking about it more, and likewise if I choose to focus on something else, I'll be thinking about that more, in its place. But basically only talking about mundane, moment to moment experience here... nothing exceptional, supernatural, or superstitious... do you understand what I'm trying to say?... that I'm just talking about basic, mundane attention, and the basic, mundane logical consequences of that attention... nothing special, just essentially, 'I turn my head and I see what's in front of my eyes in the new direction I'm facing'.

I get what you mean, yes, that you experience or remember time in a particular way and in that experience this followed that. The very idea that something follows logically because it follows temporally, as intuitive and inescapable as it may be in our experience... is a technical description of a logical fallacy.

The crux here, is that not everyone who does mindfulness practice gets the results you have - so it actually isn't like turning your face left or right. Those benefits don't follow naturally. They sometimes correlate for some people in some ways. Sometimes the literal and clinical opposite occurs. Sometimes nothing occurs. Somehow...no one really knows how.

Mundanity is not the opposite of supernaturality. A thing is not made more or less supernatural, superstitious..or just "other-than" explicitly scientific or logical by it's mundanity. Mundane superstition would still be superstitious. A superstition is, by definition, a pseudo causal claim about mechanics. Can you see how your self report (all of our self reports) might fall under that category?

(October 14, 2026 at 10:03 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I get what you mean, yes, that you experience or remember time in a particular way and in that experience this followed that. The very idea that something follows logically because it follows temporally, as intuitive and inescapable as it may be in our experience... is a technical description of a logical fallacy.

The crux here, is that not everyone who does mindfulness practice gets the results you have - so it actually isn't like turning your face left or right. Those benefits don't follow naturally. They sometimes correlate for some people in some ways. Sometimes the literal and clinical opposite occurs. Sometimes nothing occurs. Somehow...no one really knows how.

Mundanity is not the opposite of supernaturality. A thing is not made more or less supernatural, superstitious..or just "other-than" explicitly scientific or logical by it's mundanity. Mundane superstition would still be superstitious. A superstition is, by definition, a pseudo causal claim about mechanics.

Ok as long as we're on the same page, to talk about this that's the main thing... and do you think Angrboda has the same viewpoint/issues as you? Do you mind if we continue this chat another day... its past 3am for me, I should be asleep, but if we're not talking past each other that's at least comforting. I don't fully understand what you're saying yet, but we'll see another day, if that's okay? अच्छा रात I think it was in my newly learning language... good night

Edit: I just saw your edit after my post... at the end there, about 'self reports'... that might be the term I was looking for before, so yeah I think that should be interesting to talk about but another day as I said... gute Nacht again