As a Christian you ought to familiarise yourself with the story of the little boy who wanted to use a small pail to put the entire ocean into a small hole he’d dug at the beach. There is a moral to that story. Consider it.

I’d add this. A fruitless struggle to “make all the pieces fit together” and to “attain a definite and final picture” is the expression of a wish for omniscience. You’ll never attain that.

Far from mind crushing, the journey through life is a liberating experience of attaining knowledge, experience, learning, traveling, adventure, making good friends, meeting people, having children, doing honest business, innovating, building, producing, struggling against adversity, meeting challenges, doing interesting things, goal setting, obtaining property, etc etc etc. It’s about releasing your potential and enjoying the results of application of your abilities and attributes. It’s about learning what your attributes are. Far from mind crushing it is amazing how good you can make things to be if you apply yourself.

Abandon that which crushes your intellect and spirit. It is not worthy of you. Spend what time you have well. It is precious- too precious to waste on being mind crushed.

Sione

It was recommended that you take the time to consider carefully and seriously ideas that challenge or contradict your own. You should so do especially when what you are informed rebuts your favoured position. On this occasion you clearly failed to make serious enquiry or take serious consideration of ideas that challenged your assertions. It’s a poor habit you have developed and one you ought to remedy sometime soon.

Think on it.

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What you do about your so-called “sex drive” is a matter of volitional choice. For example, there are persons who choose a life of abstinance and celebacy and there are those who do not. The point isn’t whether they have a “sex drive” or not, it is what they decide to do- how they decide to act. Another example, there may be those with high “sex drive” who choose to refrain from committing aggressive sexual violence upon others. Unfortunately there may be those who choose the opposite approach. What each actually does is a matter of conscious volitional choice.

When enquiring about the nature of human beings it is important to understand that volitional consciousness is a primary attribute. Indeed, your entering into discussion with me is an expression of your own volitional consciousness. You made a choice to do it. You are unable to evade or avoid your own volition- not until you are unconscious or dead.

As to the rest of your post, well what you reckon “looks like” someting or other, and what you reckon something does or doesn’t “feel” like to you, aint anything more than arbitrary assertion- just unbacked opinion. You need to do a lot better than presenting illogical constructions and relying on baseless generalisations.

This time around how about taking the time to research the matter in some depth?

Sione

“Science does not know the word believe……”

Yet your post is, as usual, replete with your personal beliefs.

Sione

Watch “Colossus: The Forbin Project” to see how THAT turns out.

True, there is a great deal of strife and suffering on earth. The most common experience of the human species is one of being on a constant brink of starvation, full of disease, pain, and early death.

Your angst, difficulty reconciling different aspects of thought, and lack of understanding of the world and how it works and how it’s causing you a great deal of anger (etc.)… is your problem. It’s your personal issue. Your perception is skewed and you are either lying to yourself, being deceived, or a combination of both.

Instead of trying to measure the universe by your impossible and illogical standards maybe it would be better to just relax a bit and just open yourself to understanding.

Maybe counseling would help.

But then again, if you look at nature and history, war seems to be a natural and genetic imperative.
So I don’t know what to make of it. Should we find ways to prevent war or should we find ways to win the war ? You know, this whole survival of the fittest thing so for those who lost the war, it’s all their fault even if they were the “good” guys.

And speaking of war, there seems to be a war between cooperation and competition in nature, in mankind, in ideas, in action.

War therefore seems to be the greater container and cooperation seems to be a subgroup of war.

The universe in which we live seems to privilege the reptilian brains and to punish the humane and the humanitarian and God seems to be on vacation.

“For me, life is easy, life is fun, life is exciting, life is filled with golden opportunities when, following the advice of Jesus,”

I am happy for you that you have found peace in your faith.

Unfortunately, for me, life is filled with grief and I can’t make all the pieces fit together neatly like you do, because I try to make all the pieces fit together, not just a part of them. If you take the christian faith, nature, physics, the universe, politics etc. and try to make them all fit together, you will discover that they don’t fit together, there is no definite and final picture, it’s as if all the pieces come from different puzzles and are not meant to be fitted together but the different puzzles they came from don’t exist and those pieces are all there is.

This is mind crushing.

Because those “gifts” end up producing individuals who exist only for extreme misfortune, like cattle, livestock, preys, war victims etc.

If the bovine species could extinct itself, it would serve it much better than the “success” of spreading it’s genes only to be mutilated, maimed, abused and tortured to death for it’s meat.

When I watch a video of a kosher and halal slaughterhouse, I fail to see how spreading their genes is a success.

You can say what you want, but life is based on extreme brutality, forces of nature that use extreme brutality to make us into what we are and to maintain us into what we are.

For example, I don’t see how sex drive could be construed as a gift if you act upon it only to produce a deformed or severely sick offspring or one that will become a war casualty etc.
Maybe, in that case, the conscionable thing to do is to resist and refuse those “gifts”. Don’t open that “gift”, it’s booby trapped.

And no, I will not shut up.

So how you touch your joystick is volitional, even if you are forced to rub it in some kind of way, LOL

It’s a shame that Bourne died so young. It would seem that given a full career, he would have written dozens of fascinating works by the time he retired. Years ago I read “War and the Intellectuals” and it had a profound influence on how I view the intellectual class.

http://www.bigeye.com/thewar.htm

Nobody does. That’s what faith is for. Faith is belief that is not based on proof.

Since there is no proof regarding God/Nature as friend or foe, you may choose friend or foe or neither. Of the three choices that are yours to make, I suggest NOT choosing foe, regardless of any evidence to the contrary (since the evidence is likely flawed and certainly is not proof). The days that I choose “foe” are not good days… ever.

When thinking “infinitely hostile” consider that infinity stretches in a positive direction as well as a negative one. You are robbed of peace of mind only by your own mind. THAT is tyranny.

Why do you perceive bodily functions as aggression on the part of nature/God, as opposed to being a gift? If someone prepares you a lovely meal consisting of their favorite foods, unaware that they are foods you despise, you may curse their intended blessing. Your anger is based in your interpretation, not in reality. My advice? Shut up, eat, and say thank you.

The drives are forces that may oppose, not necessarily override, human volition. There is nothing intrinsically authoritarian in a relationship between opposing forces. At least that’s what my wife tells me.

I am here, in an infinitely hostile nature and environment, longing for a God because I was raised as a Christian even though I’m struggling with the faith. I wished I could be in peace with God and nature but I am constantly reminded of the brutal and revolting aspects of both nature and God when I witness predation, torture, sadism, violence etc.

The closest thing to God on earth is the government and is the nation state and the way it treats it’s constituents and the way nature treats it’s life forms, I see enemies in both nature and God. I am robbed of the peace of mind I would normally have with the concept of God.

God and nature, for me, are becoming another subject of war instead of peace.

“Human beings have the attribute of volitional consciousness. Their actions are the result of the decisions that they make by exercising this attribute.”

Are you a male ? Do you think sex drive is “volitional” ?

Then make this experiment, for the next three months, don’t have sex, don’t masturbate and don’t even get aroused. Do that for three straight months and then come back to me and tell me that it’s fully volitional.

It is this part where forces of nature overrides human volition that constitute, in my opinion, an aggression from the part of nature. I understand that there are bodily functions to keep an individual alive, but sex drive seems to be a force that overrides human volition and that doesn’t feel very “libertarian” to me, in fact it looks authoritarian, therefore I conclude that nature is a tyrant.

Science does not know the word believe and is always opened for debate and complete destruction and reconstruction of previous ideas.

I, as an individual, have observed nature and mankind and I find that war in all it’s forms and derivatives is as much part of evolution as cooperation. It’s there and cannot be removed. Libertarians want to remove it, that’s a mistake because it’s there. However, the solution would be to fight together instead of fighting each other, but fight we shall.

The common enemy is both the constrains imposed by nature and the constraints imposed by the nation state. One could spin the case to fight “war” against both nature and the nation-state to embetter the human condition as a whole.

You have obviously invested a lot of intellectual effort in your idea. That’s fine. A trap for you lies in waiting. It is this. When you are confronted with a challenge to your idea, or the assumptions it relies upon, it is very convenient to dismiss that challenge without serious analysis, let alone honest consideration and enquiry. To a large extent this is related to the magnitude and duration of effort previously spent in developing, believing in and promoting your idea to yourself and to other people. To some extent this is a matter of ego- after all it is never pleasant to have to admit to error, especially very large errors (e.g. accepting and promoting a false ideology). Beware the trap, for it is particularly cruel. Interestingly, it is very easy for others to identify when someone is snared within this particular trap. That is one of the attributes of the trap which makes it so exqusitely cruel and potentially so destructive. Beware.

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Another trap to be wary of.

While it is convenient to employ analogy when communicating ideas, concepts, principles and the like, it is gravely erroneous to treat an analogy as though it were the same as the concept it is being employe to illustrate. An analogy may possess “similarity to” but it is not the “same as”.

When dealing with the social behavious and interactions of human beings it is important to avoid the error of pretending them to be the same as, say, those of ants or herds of sheep, groups of asteriods, viruses or sub-atomic particles. While it is possible to project similarities from one to the other, that does not mean they are the same. One should aways be very cautious of any conclusions drawn by the employment of generalised analogy. Beware.

–

Something to think about at length.

Human beings have the attribute of volitional consciousness. Their actions are the result of the decisions that they make by exercising this attribute. War is something that human beings may at times engage in. War is an expression of certain volitional and conscious decisions which human beings make.

Nature/the Universe is not volitionally conscious. It does not make conscious decisions. Similarly, most of the entities within Nature/the Universe are not volitionally conscious. They possess various attributes, sure, but volitional consciousness is not amongst those. Such entities do not decide to “go to war” in the sense that human beings do. They interact according to their identites, but they do not decide to engage in warfare. For example, that a termite self-destructs is not a result of a volitionally conscious decision any more than is the snapping closed of a relay switch in the HVAC system of my car when a specific voltage is encountered. That Whetu Kara joins the SAS, undergoes basic training, deploys to Afghanistan and engages in war with members of the Taliban is the result of volitionally conscious decisions (a sequence of them, including his ideology, religious beliefs, political affiliations, personality, evaluations, values, and so on- he has his reasons and he is fully conscious of them).

In dealing with the concept “warfare”, it is important to understand that human beings are not the same as termites or most of the other entities encountered throughout Nature/the Universe (or indeed Nature/the Universe itself). The difference lies in the attribute of volitional consciousness. Beware of pretending otherwise for it leads to a terrible error (which you are not going to be the first to make).

Anyway, when El Tonno wrote that “an ant has no idea what it is doing”, he was making a significant point. It is one that requires far more thought than it has been accorded. Please think on it.

Sione

That’s funny, because when I observe most of mankind, I arrive at the same conclusion, LOL