Posts by Sandra Murphy33

I don't get the impression you're actually thinking here 😛
So, regarding that specific point, you can rest easy—you’ve succeeded (assuming your goal was to reach some sort of non-linguistic state, or at least step outside the linguistic box without resorting to psychedelics; though that isn't exactly a novel concept. Human culture has documented similar attempts since the late 19th and early 20th centuries when experimentation peaked across all disciplines—just look at Dadaism or automatic writing...)

Furthermore, coherent expression isn't about being a perfectionist; it's a prerequisite if you want another "I" to understand you. To be perceived as a distinct entity. Because only then can one truly be considered "spontaneous."

George Wood2 said:👍 🙂
Everything is fine. I am simply acting out of curiosity, nothing more—this isn't some personal attack.
If you didn't grasp the actual essence of my question, then I suppose I have received an answer that satisfies my curiosity.
There is absolutely no need for anyone here to get defensive, try to outsmart one another, or posture as the sole arbiter of truth.

I didn't quite get it either.
The point is muddled and riddled with enough typos to make it nearly impossible to follow.

Furthermore, I fail to see how your—or anyone's—curiosity can truly be satisfied if others aren't even able to understand you.
At that point, you're just engaging in a self-indulgent monologue. It’s pure solipsism; all that "curiosity" is directed inward toward the self. The other person becomes irrelevant—just a screen onto which you project a phantom interlocutor, when in reality, you're just talking to yourself.

steelridge58 said:This is our space to talk about round six

Sigmund, I have to say it again—huge congrats on having your response picked as the winner in the last round.
The latest question he’s thrown our way
is just so strange and intriguing and honestly quite brilliant, and I have to admit that it immediately
really struck a chord deep within me...

It inspired me to write anything from my most private fantasies to convictions that might actually hold some weight in reality...
But then it hit me: this is likely a trick question. Sigmund probably just wants to gauge our level of "metaphysical consciousness" on a scale of 1 to 100, so he can use the data to predict certain political possibilities and report them to some dubious scientific circles in Washington, D.C. 🙂 😬 ....

Quote : Weekend Warrior said:If I wanted to be "a bit different" from the rest, I'd go with Metatron. 😁

According to certain traditions, he sits at the top of the hierarchy, which might mean he possesses a greater capacity for understanding the typical limitations of an ordinary human. He would better grasp the earthly circumstances—those daily cognitive and conative constraints, along with the accompanying existential dilemmas and trilemmas. In that sense, he could truly understand where I am, who I am, and where I am headed.

You might find it interesting to look into Swedenborg. 🙂

Amanda Jackson5 said:It’s not even that I have a problem with them; I’m just feeling a bit let down, honestly. The whole point was to ask what you’d change about your life if you suddenly realized everything you thought you knew about the afterlife was totally wrong. Maybe I overcomplicated things by being too broad with the question.

Studies on near-death experiences (NDEs) have established that when participants reach the end of that famous tunnel and see the light, they encounter figures from their own religious or spiritual backgrounds. For instance, Christians often see Christ, Muslims see Muhammad, and Buddhists are met by Buddha, and so on.
The conclusion is that at the threshold of death—in that transitional space between life and whatever comes next—an individual's existing beliefs and "knowledge" regarding mortality are activated.

So, are all those various opinions we hold—which you don't seem to value much, if I've understood you correctly—actually relevant to our agreement on what constitutes truth, or are they just noise?
If opinion doesn't matter for the sake of our agreement, then what does?
Is it evidence?
But doesn't the very interpretation of evidence rely on opinion anyway?

Terry Martinez10 said:Beautifully put.
I find myself agreeing with every single word here.

Thanks!
🙂

"Those who surrender to ignorance dwell in a dim twilight
but those who take pleasure in knowledge find themselves in an even deeper darkness."
(Vede)

We all tend to "postulate" some sort of ultimate, finalized truth—essentially the completion of what Amanda Jackson5 referred to as "fragmented" truth during her discussion on Hegel.
Everyone "revels" in the possession of knowledge.
Whether we label this absolute, total truth as God, the Absolute, Consciousness, or whatever else fits the narrative, we require it; without such a framework, basic functioning becomes impossible.

To grasp the Whole, the Beginning, and the End (concepts we place our absolute, unwavering faith in...)
is, in reality, a question of purpose—the very thing that allows us to initiate action and actually live our lives.
And that is precisely the maya described in Eastern philosophies, the grand illusion we are submerged in:
this supposed perfected, finished truth of ours, along with everything stemming from our belief in it, constitutes nothing less than our entire world—every action we take, every word we speak, and everything we strive to achieve.

ruggedraven36 said:So what's your plan then? How would you describe it? Using non-human terms?

Just another guy who lost his cool and thinks he’s presenting the world with total objectivity, completely stripped of any trace of subjectivity.😉 😁

Gerald Jackson48 said:He wasn't the first Christian to think outside the box, and he certainly won't be the last. There have always been people who looked at how institutions interpret the mind of God and decided to push back. You see it all the time with reformers, reconstructionists, and those unorthodox movements that just refuse to follow the status quo. People have always challenged the establishment.

What I am pointing out, and what everyone seems to be ignoring, is that in that period, he couldn't have been anything other than a Christian.
An American in the late 18th or early 19th century was defined by that social fabric in the same way a citizen is defined by their contemporary society...
And that is fundamentally different from being a Christian today.

His "alternative view of God" is functionally identical to someone today proposing an "alternative view" where God isn't the Christian God, but rather something like the Field, or Consciousness, or some other morphological concept.

To put it bluntly, the gap between his reasoning and actual Christian thought is much like the modern gap between Christianity and so-called pseudoscience.

That is my assessment.

As for his philosophy: if we strictly decouple it from his persona and his life—much like how modern science attempts to separate "personal belief" from professional expertise—then the two published works mentioned by Sigmund don't actually engage with theology at all.
Though, one could certainly debate just how feasible such a rigid separation really is.

Amanda Jackson5 said:The thing about Hegelian philosophy is that it’s aggressively self-critical and essentially starts from scratch without leaning on any preconceived notions. Because of that, I don't see how it could possibly link up with religion, unless you count deriving the existence of God through some sort of logical deduction within a metaphysical framework—but frankly, I’ve yet to encounter a formula that actually pulls off a logical proof for God. It seems pretty clear to me, though, that this intense drive some believers have to "prove" God or make Him fit into a "logical" box probably just stems from their own underlying doubts.

But he does address God in his work... interpreting him, or at least attempting to... critiquing and refining the concept... In that sense, there isn't really a hard line separating his philosophical pursuits from his engagement with religion. Isn't that just part of being human? It serves as proof of his authenticity and his sincerity...

I would argue he was a believer who carried a seed of doubt in his heart—a doubt that ultimately served as the foundation for his entire philosophy. 🙂

James Lee77 said:I mean, I guess every believer deals with doubt at some point. If you didn't have those questions, maybe it wouldn't even be about faith anymore—it would just be about facts and knowledge. Even when you look at all that research from theosophists, mystics, or folks out in the East, it all kind of points back to that one piece of advice from Pavlov for Christians: “Test everything to see if it’s from God, and then hold on to whatever is good.”
Quincy:

Since he’s got his own whole thing going on regarding God as... I guess it’s all just part of the process. (not just about a person or a being) the whole fact that he wasn't even looking for God, but rather... battleI mean, if we were living in today's world, maybe we’d actually just call Hegel an agnostic. I guess that's how it would go down now.

I don't know about that specific fact, honestly. If someone claims philosophy is basically theology and that philosophizing is just a way to serve God, I guess we might call them a panentheist nowadays. Maybe.

We pulled that particular quote, along with several others, from ZL, where he offers various critiques of Christian theology.
As for his assertion that philosophy is theology, I actually went ahead and bolded and somewhat exaggerated that point in my previous post regarding 😬
In reality, what he is doing is replacing Christian theology with philosophy itself.

James Lee77 said:Was he just talking out of his ass in those lectures? And were those philosophy of history talks total nonsense too—you know, that whole bit about history moving toward this ever-growing consciousness of freedom and all that? I mean, he didn't even write the book on it. Same deal with aesthetics?

It’s not just that Hegel claimed to be a believer; he actually was. Like, in his downtime, he’d hang out with that theosophist Baader just to geek out over Meister Eckhart. I mean, there's no way he wouldn't have lost his job because of that, right?

That just proves he wasn't a (Christian) believer—he was an researcher.
He sought out theosophists, mystics, and even traveled to the East...

A true believer doesn't research; they believe.
To them, investigation is synonymous with doubt.

Given the Hegelian view of God as a process (rather than a person or a being), and the fact that he was investigating being itself rather than "God," we would probably label him an agnostic by modern standards.
In that era, such a category didn't exist, so people today love to simply slap the "believer" label on him. They transplant facts from one century to another without accounting for the massive shifts in context or the zeitgeist.

If willfully ignoring those distinctions isn't bias, I don't know what is.

Jonathan Brooks8 said:Honestly, you can't really "contaminate" philosophy with religion—not when religion itself is a form of philosophy (an earnest pursuit of wisdom) whenever it strives toward true understanding.
Besides, we have entire academic disciplines dedicated to Christian philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_philosophy

But that’s beside the point—what actually matters is fighting for our interlocutor during a dialogue, rather than fighting against them. We seem to be suffering from a deficiency of both meaningful conversation and actual participants. I’m talking about the very method of inquiry here—we can't hear anything, let alone perceive truth, if we don't allow ourselves to truly listen; and we fail to do exactly that when we silence our opponent... at which point, they effectively cease to exist for us.

Everything said there is true, but I don't see the issue lying with the "unpleasant" speaker. Instead, the problem seems to be with an overly sensitive listener, 🤷
who identifies far too closely with "their own opinion."
Or perhaps they simply lack the capacity to respond just as "unpleasantly"—meaning assertively and with confidence.
So, they retreat in a fit of self-pity.
And then we're left forced to deal with their ego instead of the actual subject at hand.

I have no idea what you mean by "jumping on someone else" or why you’re calling my comment
"excessively biased." 🤷

What else can one even fathom once they see the word God written down?
I honestly haven't the slightest clue...
We’ve been conditioned enough to think we already know exactly what "God" means.

I think the friction arises whenever God is mentioned—not just as a deity (which triggers everyone's automatic association with a supreme being), but specifically when we discuss God in relation to Hegel.

The issue is that Hegel wasn't quite referring to that kind of God; he didn't believe in a supreme being in the traditional sense, which is exactly what we dissected in our discussion on Hegel and Nietzsche regarding the
Critique of Christianity.

...and similarly with his other works.

It is vital to distinguish between the "God" that is clearly the Christian God—the deity of organized religion—and what Hegel refers to as the Absolute or the Totality. These two concepts are nowhere near the same, even if Hegel himself didn't explicitly draw that line at the time. We’ve already covered why that was the case, but I'll reiterate: Hegel was a declared Christian simply because he was a product of his era and functioned as a conventional citizen; modern atheism hadn't even truly emerged yet (in fact, Hegel paved much of the way for it). He was essentially using familiar Christian terminology as a vehicle to explain his own philosophical framework.

What we might comfortably call "God" today—assuming we still find any use for such an outdated term that implies a hierarchical "above," especially in this post-patriarchal age—would actually be the
Universal consciousness.

😬 That is the plain truth, and nothing but the truth—so God help me. 🤣

There are three identical responses here:

Amanda Jackson5's, ND-owned, and WW-owned

🙂

jadeheron5 said:Truth is simply whatever we collectively decide to agree upon.

"All descriptions of reality
are merely temporary assumptions."

Buddha

(Quote: "The future of civilization depends most heavily on the relationship established between the two most powerful forces in history: science and religion," A. N. Whitehead)

The elusive Apemant 🙂

Lost in translation

Peter Russell

Absolutely stellar!!!!!
😂

🤣

Here’s the full album; I'm honestly obsessed


(Quentin Tarantino is basically the American version of a North American filmmaker 🙂 )