Pleasure and Joy

[Harris]

We are biological beings much like every other being on this planet that we know of.

Somewhere along the way we somehow achieved a complex language(s) (I think that is mostly what separates us from any other animal) in which we are able to transmit complex ideas with each other.

This launches us into being social animals (more than any other) and we start developing systems (farming and agriculture) that rely more on societies of people.

As our groups become larger and larger there is a need to be more efficient as a group. One of the ways to be more efficient is to conform into certain ways of thinking in order to detract from the goals of the group. One of the best ways found is an agreed upon ideology.

As the human race grows there is inevitably more variation within the species that does not directly fit into the ideology and preferences. There is also the inevitable contact with groups that have conflicting ideology.

The same ideology that takes hold of a group can and is used to an abusive extent.

Hi Gilbert,

Thank you for submitting an enlightening post. If you are interested to learn about “who we are”, “from where we come and where we go”, “what is the purpose of our life” then Quran is the text I refer you to consult with. What science and philosophy failed to explain, Quran has given answers to all those questions. The subject of Quran is “Human”.

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That is what I am trying to elaborate that the fossils of human like species don’t have any historical or biological links to consider them to be ancestors of contemporary humans. It’s an absurd to assume fossils as our ancestors only based on their physical appearances.

Well, then it's a good thing we have genomics on Neandertals and Denisovans for comparative genetics!

Are you trying to say that scientists have the haploid set of chromosomes or the complete set of genes or genetic material, which were present in the cells of:

a. Lucy
b. Homo sapiens
c. Neanderthal man
d. Cro-Magnon man

Are you also trying to say that scientists have connecting links in history and biology, which help in studying procedural development of those genes and manifest how:

1. Lucy evolved to Homo sapiens
2. Homo evolved sapiens to Neanderthal man
3. Neanderthal man evolved to Cro-Magnon man and
4. Cro-Magnon man evolved into present day humans.

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“Professor gave lecture to his students”.

Based on the above statement if I say, professor has more knowledge than his students do, in this case do you think I am guessing.

I don't think you are guessing, you are guessing, you don't know the mental state of the professor, you don't know the mental state of the students, there isn't enough information in the statement for you to even know what the professor is lecturing about, who the students are who he is.

It's not that I think you are guessing, you ARE guessing.

Professor is known as an expert in his subject based on his degrees, diplomas, and research work. That is the reason professor is appointed by an educational institution to teach the students. It’s a common sense understanding that professor knows more than his students do.

I haven't had enough time to reply to the other stuff.

If you strived in preparing a counter response to the example of professor and student then for sure you have time to answer other stuff as well. So far, you have endeavoured well. I have respect for all of your efforts.

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I can even exaggerate and say that fingerprints in fact are fingertips.

You could say that but then you would be wrong.
My exaggeration would perfectly fit within the norms of logic.

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Either you do or don't understand English, if you don't I can't be bothered to explain to you how this doesn't talk about the perfection of fingertips.

Here you are misrepresenting my position to make it appear less plausible. You have used a tactic in which the conclusion is itself required as a premise to support the argument being advanced to justify the conclusion.

The surface meaning of this verse is vibrant in every sense. It doesn’t need second interpretation due to its simple and clear format.

You obviously ignored the links I posted previously.

During China's Qin Dynasty, records have shown that officials took hand prints, foot prints as well as finger prints as evidence from a crime scene.[49] In China, around 300 CE, handprints were used as evidence in a trial for theft.

After rechecking Wikipedia for fingerprints what I found that you intentionally omitted the part where it clearly states:

ALTHOUGH ANCIENT PEOPLES PROBABLY DID NOT REALIZE THAT FINGERPRINTS COULD UNIQUELY IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS, references from the age of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE) indicate that law officials would take the fingerprints of people who had been arrested. During China's Qin Dynasty, records have shown that officials took hand prints, foot prints as well as finger prints as evidence from a crime scene. In China, around 300 CE, handprints were used as evidence in a trial for theft.

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[quote='paulpablo' pid='512410' dateline='1380222642']

only skin part which is responsible for burning or cutting sensation

Try cutting or burning your eyeballs, are your eyeballs made of skin?


Why did muslims not know these facts when they were presented to them in the quran?

I said, people previously thought that whole body is responsible for pain, which is wrong. I never said that skin is the only part of body that feels the pain. You are quoting my statements out of context. You are distorting and misrepresenting my statements to change the topic and meanings.

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[quote='Harris' pid='511598' dateline='1380127228']
The trouble is you are behaving like a frontline solder who is obliged to shoot anything that moves in front of your eyes without having a second thought on what you are shooting.

The trouble with you is that all the targets you have given me are easy shots unworthy of a second look.

Thanks for your sincere and honest statement. At least you have proven my guess correct that you are indeed a frontline solder. It doesn’t matter anymore whether I am giving you easy targets or difficult because you are obliged to shoot anything and everything as part of your job. Solders have nothing to do with thinking rather their obligation is to obey the commands.

Because you are making those claims right in the air.

At least I am making claims and giving proper reasoning, but what has you done other than rejecting them in the air unjustifiably by abusing them as inappropriate for you. Based on your behaviour I can assume that you simply cannot refute those claims and left with no choice than to reject them in the air.

Bullshit. Starting with disbelief and waiting for evidence does nothing to limit my perspective.

You think your perspective is not limited. This thinking itself is a sign of narrow perspective.

I negate your claims because your claims are nonsensical. And I'm unaware of any lament over the question of transcendent "I" or the origin of universe.

Your negation is in the air and unjustified. Do you think materialism has the explanation for consciousness, which is non-material?

The moment you failed to address my post and started off on the tangent of questioning my motives is the moment you started ignoring my post. And what you read here is contempt and disgust - not hatred and violence.

You are correct! It is hard for me to answer those posts, which are full of thick stinky mucus. You really enjoy spiting people’s faces. You correctly observed I ignore your posts when there is nothing other than filth.

Do you even read what you write? Sounds like a bunch of word-salad.

I hope you liked the flavour of this word-salad.

I won the debate on merits. The disrespect was for fun.

Dreaming is not bad for health. Keep on spiting on people’s faces and have more fun. Good luck with happy spiting.

Its good that you don't care about winning or losing - because you've already lost.

You are debating for wining; I am debating to share my knowledge and experience. You are fighting for a reward, which I already had gifted you long ago.

Where this thread is concerned - sure. My own view of human agency and its relation to morality and the world is explained elsewhere. Here, the subject of discussion - the one that you presented - is your moronic - I mean, quranic - view. I think its moronic and therefore I;m arguing against you.

One more guesstimate. This time it is concerning my views.

As for “moronic”, you are using these types of words for the use of personal attack to try to undermine or refute my argument. Mostly you try to shift the burden of proof unjustifiably. Instead of justifying the proposition by good evidence, you use abusive and violent language to suppress the truth. You also take support of popular views in atheism but this is wrong and unacceptable in so far as it deviates from logic, or from the accepted view based on coherent thinking.

None of the above. I haven't heard of any of them before.

You should study harder to be a good student.

Atomical atheism (according to which all things come about by chance),

Hylozoic atheism (which imputes life to matter, associated with Strato of Lampsacus),

Hylopathian atheism (which is merely materialistic, associated with Anaximander) and

Cosmo-plastic atheism (which makes the world soul the highest numen).

Wrong. Many atheistic philosophies reject materialism. And I'm not a materialist.

Argument without references. Argument in the air. If you are not materialist that means you are not atheist.

Wrong. Materialism gives an alternate view of mind and spirituality. Therefore it follows a different set of morals than religions.

Again, it is an argument without sufficient matter for proper justification. Your answers are not satisfactory at all. I am interested to see what ideology you have about spirituality.

Wrong. We don't need to distort or exaggerate anything. We haven't found any contrary evidence so far.

But this is exactly what you are doing when you say there is no spirit. You present spirit as brain function with the help of popular scientific notions. Contrary evidence is your own existence. Why suddenly you start thinking? Why you are conscious being? You are a complete conscious person who is living with impressions, ideas, imaginations, and emotions, you have power to contemplate, analyse, and reason in order to make your choices, yet, your existence and life span are not engendered by your choice. You are deceiving your own self by simply closing your eyes over these facts or by means of disguising them by popular scientific concepts.

Nonsensical. Nothing said here makes any sense.

It is nonsensical as you look at consciousness as chemical reactions, neural interactions, and other brain functions but you don’t realize brain science is in its primitive stages and many things are not clear to the scientists. Making conclusions based on the insufficient discoveries in neural sciences is no more than a self-deception.

On the contrary - we do have a pretty god grasp of this and other basic concepts. Maybe you don't, but others do.

Argument in the air.

Except, I use rationality to view morality - not science.

So, perhaps, you have already collected many moral laws based on your rationality. It would be highly appreciated if you share those laws with everyone.

Philosophers of science offer conflicting viewpoints concerning these criteria. Some reject one or more completely. For example, while many accept the idea that science is empirical, rationalists reject it, at least for fundamental principles regarding space, matter and motion. Even among empiricists differences emerge, for example between those who advocate that scientific principles must be verifiable and those who deny that, this is possible, claiming that falsifiability is all that is required.

And where are you getting this?

In your opinion, am I writing correct or not?

You are endeavouring to show self-consciousness in terms of physical sciences but in doing so you have entangled your being with self-deception in fact. Self-deception is complicated and perplexing because it concerns all major aspects of human nature, including consciousness, rationality, motivation, freedom, happiness, and value commitments. In a wider sense, you refer to intentional activities and motivated processes of avoiding unpleasant truths or topics and the resulting mental states of ignorance, false belief, unwarranted attitudes, and inappropriate emotions.

Wrong. You are deceiving yourself with this assumption.

Explain how I am deceiving myself?

In the state of self-deception, Atheist camouflages his strength of mind that he can wilfully get his own selves to believe the opposite of what he knows is true. He knows, he feels, and he experiences self-consciousness yet he endeavour to fiddle this reality. This way he supports greed, rudeness, disrespect and other forms of wrongdoing.

Wrong. They are not forms of wrongdoings.

You mean greed, rudeness, disrespect are not forms of wrongdoing? I need a logical answer in place of simple yes or no.

No matter you deceive your thoughts by masking self-consciousness (spirit) under deep layers of materialism but this self-consciousness (spirit) is in fact responsible for our sensations and feelings. Consciousness depends on sensation and this sensation is not aided by intellect. Bodily sensations have been seen as a major problem for any attempt to give an account of the mind that takes it to be part of the material world as investigated by the physical sciences.

Your ignorance is astounding. But what's even more amazing is how blatantly you can beg the question.

Shot in the air

Wrong. Once again. Sensations are very much within the grasp of language.

You have not elaborated on how sensations are very much within the grasp of language.

Concepts, which is what mind aspires to, are not invisible or eternal "realities". And don't confuse mind with spirit. One exists, the other doesn't.

Brain of the elephant is the largest contained by any living land-dwelling mammal. The adult male elephant's brain can grow to be a whopping 12 pounds. Now compare it with the normal human brain 3.1 pounds. Elephant’s brain has 400% more mass than the brain of human yet poor elephant can’t have fun by spiting on people’s faces.

If you can imagine without contradiction that your poop tastes like chocolate and smells like strawberries then why not take it as possible and just accept it?

That's why.

Whether you have not understood the proposition or you have ignored it intentionally.

Is this garbage supposed to be an argument?

Your first error is the assumption of agency.
Your second error is assumption of dualism.
Your third error is the failure to understand causation.

Would you mind elaborating on errors you find in the agency, dualism, and causation?

It'd seem I represented your quotes pretty accurately. I never indicated any enjoyment in Afghan bombings - thus making your reply an inaccurate personal attack. Also, you are not going to stop me from being confrontational and provocative. In fact, if these forums are any indication, the only place confrontation and provocation inspire hatred is when the other side is compensating for their deficiency.

You are using abusive language. This is itself a provocation. If you are doing it for fun then okay, it’s your way of having fun but if you are debating then you don’t have a right to insult counterparty for fun in order to keep the spirit of debate intact. You can use the vulgar language only if counterparty abuse or attack your person.

That trick has been tried before. Claiming it to be a universal fact does not make it so. I don't have to deny your claim that "everything has a cause" - I'll just wait for conclusive evidence. If you'd said "everything we know of has a cause" - that would be easier to accept. But given the limits of knowledge, the first statement has not been established as of yet.

Alright! Let us try this way.
Everything we know of has a cause.

Let us say that everything that we know comprise of 80% of the whole. 20% is unknown.

My argument is if 80% is true then 20% unknown would also be true or at least 99% qualify to be true.

All new discoveries what science and rational thinking is making are only confirming every beginning has a cause. Based on this fact it can easily be established that Universe has a beginning hence it has a cause.

First you have to establish that the universe began. That it came into existence.

That was established by Hubble’s discovery of the galactic red shift in 1929. The ‘Big Bang’ theory has since been modified in one important respect by the addition of an inflationary episode in the first fraction of a second of cosmic expansion.

Like I said before - no one needs to disprove what hasn't been proven in the first place.

So far, we know everything has a cause. Every new discovery is hardening this fact. If we think in terms of chance only then only we can assume that things may happen without a cause. However, science don’t valuate things based on chance. If anyone wants to deny that universe has a cause, then he/she can do so based on the foundation of assumption but he/she would not find evidences in support. Rather every know fact goes against this denial.

Second premise also stands firm because science has proven that universe had a beginning. Since first premise has not been proven false therefore, the idea that origin of universe had a cause is true.

No, actually, it hasn't. Sorry.

Can you disprove Hubble’s discovery of expanding universe to prove universe has no origin?

Your personal opinions on what constitutes a refutation is irrelevant. As is your characterization of these refutations.

Guesstimate! This is not my personal opinion.

I favor those refutations because they make sense.

I know they make sense of joy and pleasure for you because those fictions satisfy your desires.

You don't because you are blinded by your blind faith.

Aging is one of the most important aspects in the existence of every individual whether the structure of the individual is complex or simple. It is an irreversible process. There are hidden codes of commands in every individual, which control the ageing process and establish particular time of existence for every individual. This ageing does not only specify average time of existence but also responsible for a continuous change in the structure of individual. The conviction that everything is always changing (in as much as it is always subject to ageing) had resulted from the contemplation of the law of impermanence. Second, by referring to ageing everything changes all the time and thus undergoes origination and destruction at every moment. Any form of transformation implies the substitution of one entity for another. We don’t see any hitch in the process of ageing as it is perfectly controlled by the code of commands embedded within the structure of every individual. This code is the essence of consumption, which provides prices pulses of instructions to the transformation process.

How these codes originated and how they were embedded in the existence of every individual? Who writes these codes if there is no God and who is maintaining these codes so they provide precise instructions without any default?

This is one of many things, which hardened my belief in the existence of God.

I don’t have a blind faith, I came to this point only after having little contemplation over nature and on the verses of Quran. No one has forced me to believe in God. However, you have for sure blind faith in the non-existence of God. Interestingly, you don’t have any logical reason to prove non-existence of God other than you can’t perceive Him with your physical brain.

Which is why you are huffing and puffing and stamping your feet instead of actually addressing them.

I am not huffing and not puffing. I am enjoying the fact that you are representing those fictitious statements as your personal refutation. I am only waiting the moment when you will present them here for me.

If you can't address them - fine. Either put up or shut up. Otherwise. try to keep your word-vomit to a minimum.

You are avoiding presenting those fictions here. Isn’t it?

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We are biological beings much like every other being on this planet that we know of.

Somewhere along the way we somehow achieved a complex language(s) (I think that is mostly what separates us from any other animal) in which we are able to transmit complex ideas with each other.

This launches us into being social animals (more than any other) and we start developing systems (farming and agriculture) that rely more on societies of people.

As our groups become larger and larger there is a need to be more efficient as a group. One of the ways to be more efficient is to conform into certain ways of thinking in order to detract from the goals of the group. One of the best ways found is an agreed upon ideology.

As the human race grows there is inevitably more variation within the species that does not directly fit into the ideology and preferences. There is also the inevitable contact with groups that have conflicting ideology.

The same ideology that takes hold of a group can and is used to an abusive extent.

Hi Gilbert,

Thank you for submitting an enlightening post. If you are interested to learn about “who we are”, “from where we come and where we go”, “what is the purpose of our life” then Quran is the text I refer you to consult with. What science and philosophy failed to explain, Quran has given answers to all those questions. The subject of Quran is “Human”.

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We are biological beings much like every other being on this planet that we know of.

Somewhere along the way we somehow achieved a complex language(s) (I think that is mostly what separates us from any other animal) in which we are able to transmit complex ideas with each other.

This launches us into being social animals (more than any other) and we start developing systems (farming and agriculture) that rely more on societies of people.

As our groups become larger and larger there is a need to be more efficient as a group. One of the ways to be more efficient is to conform into certain ways of thinking in order to detract from the goals of the group. One of the best ways found is an agreed upon ideology.

As the human race grows there is inevitably more variation within the species that does not directly fit into the ideology and preferences. There is also the inevitable contact with groups that have conflicting ideology.

The same ideology that takes hold of a group can and is used to an abusive extent.

Hi Gilbert,

Thank you for submitting an enlightening post. If you are interested to learn about “who we are”, “from where we come and where we go”, “what is the purpose of our life” then Quran is the text I refer you to consult with. What science and philosophy failed to explain, Quran has given answers to all those questions. The subject of Quran is “Human”.