Tag: philosophy

I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.

The celebrity that is God 

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To me, God is like a celebrity – He had been perfect until His history of plastic surgery surfaced. After that I had become more interested in his history than in him.

The fact that we now have a history of Christianity and a history of God means he loses his power upon man. No longer is ‘he’ with a capital ‘H’. And no longer is God beyond quantifiability. Once quantified we can measure him, compare him.

But by insisting that he is unquantifiable we put him beyond criticism and blame. And by quantifying him we can now make him take responsibility for his role in the past, make him accountable for the present, and make him change for the better in the future.

“You are light as air & heavy as clouds”

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These lines are from my poem atheist become.

For me, a metaphor is what creates the illusion of something like God. They are concepts and nothing more. So they can be as light or as heavy as you can imagine. In the same way we can imagine that when we die we go to some place better. But do we? Is there some place to go? I ended the poem with but nothing will free you / from death and / to nowhere will you go to suggest perhaps the reason why we do imagine a heaven is precisely because the idea of nowhere to go is rather lonely. Atheists must overcome loneliness as they do not have something to comfort them as Christians do. It reminds of the line from Kafka’s novel, The Trial:

“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.”

Damn it, Dennett! Why did you have to say it?!

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Someone had to say what had been going on in my mind. 

All along we thought robots can become humans, when in fact we, humans, are nothing but fancy biological evolutionary robots. 

The joke is on us. And the sad thing is we can think about this. 

I want to read this smart guy‘s books. 

The Necessary Angel

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Wallace Stevens has a collection of essays called The Necessary Angel. I have always liked the title. I personally do not believe in angels (I am Buddhist) but I do believe in the need for angels and such. To be human is to use the imagination. I am all for the imagination (it is only when angels interfere with the our lives of many that I see a problem).

God is a metaphor. What I mean by this is that Christians use God to present their beliefs. And as a Buddhist I use Buddha and Bodhisattvas to present mine (Buddha is a metaphor). It is not a question which is correct but that what is exactly being presented that is important. We need to put our ideas in some kind of concrete way (we have no choice) and no better is it to personify our ideas and concepts.

God/Word/Saussure

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (St John, Ch. 1, v. 1)

Perhaps this is the genius of the writer of these words. God is language. End of story.

But if we take Saussure to his word then words are just a system of difference. We can conclude that God is what everything else it is not. The word God must be empty, must be a container holding meaning only inasmuch as it is a concept, never to fully have presence, eternally is God marked with absence.

Philosophy must be questioned

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It is rather strange (or rather not) that philosophy spends so little time question itself. We need a “Thomas S Kuhn of Philosophy”, someone to put a spotlight on the problems and habits of philosophy.

Non-religious Buddhism

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There is something comforting about Buddhism as a religion without gods to worship. And Buddhism is better than philosophy because it has application rather than being a theoretical thing. Philosophy does not have much of a system to deal with how to live. 

So when I sit down and meditate or think about Buddha I look at it as embodying the ideals of the teaching (call it philosophy if you will). You can say then Buddha is the only philosopher who gave us a course in living. 

Why I am an atheist but not against religion

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As a person who looks at language for a living and have come to believe all of what we know and believe comes from a combination of experience, thought and language. 

Not matter where we look cultures have religion. We, as human being, like to make religion, as much as we like to make language or literature. We are different to other animals in our ability to do so in such a way. 

So I cannot be “against” religion, or language or literature. It is inherent in us to make religion, language, literature and the such. 

What I do have believe, though, is that we also have the same capacity to “see through” the need for religion, language, literature, etc. For whatever reason we have religion, language, literature, etc, we have to learn to deal with it as reasoned but critical beings in a physical universe. 

What and how do I know?

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To know is to have a knower and things to know. Therefore, it entails space, objects, time and consciousness. Existence of things does not infer that there is a god or creator, only the state of affairs is such. For sense-tools to come into existence must mean the knower’s object-self is a priori, and has an “understanding”, that is, assumes the existence of space/object-time.

air/glass/concept

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there, but not
seemingly with substance

like air
invisible until smoke

and glass
transparent until rain

or god
real until conceptualised