And refer to Rick Strassman for some from the other side of the ideological fence.
How can you be a credible judge if they are failures or not. The majority doesn’t make the rules.
The idea of an egoistic (dogmatic) religion. Now that’s an oxymoronic thought.
Although, egoism does slide quite nicely into transcendental philosophy.
After we gotten “back of” the material , and then gotten “back of” the ethereal, the only thing that remains is to get “back of” the ego, working towards its dissolution as a “spook”, ending up returning to the state of “creative nothing”.
Because they are still religious. They are humanist, as opposed to deist, but it is essentially the same.
Can you explain your reasoning for calling people who don’t believe in any higher power religious?
Are you, perhaps, using a more metaphorical definition of the word “religious”, meaning something along the lines of “dogmatic” or “zealous”?
Why soytently!
They beleive in the existense of a big bad bogey man called Mankind (aka the greater good), which the individual must submit himself to, and become the servant of. Incedentally, all humanists believe this, regardless of their flavor (Communists, Parlimentary Liberals, Socialists, Humanist Libertarians, National Socialists etc.) .
Your definition of humanism is surprising to say the least (I naively [in that I have not given this much thought, so far] consider myself a humanist but I’d never call for people to be subjected to a greater good, even if we called it mankind), but even if taken at face value, it does little to convince me of the religious nature of humanism. That’s mainly because this greater good is a concept, as opposed to a supernatural being, and it was my understanding that you couldn’t have have religion without such a thing.
I would ask, how do you define a supernatural being? I would call it “a non-corporeal entity beleived to exist external to the mind”. By my definition, I could consider lots of things as supernatural. Mankind, God, the state of Ohio, etc.
Also, you need to consider your definition of “Religion”, I think of it as “a heirarchical system based on observance of a supernatural being within a dogmatic framework” so let’s apply this to my examples:
God - The Catholic church - The Bible (among many others)
Ohio - The state government of Ohio - The state constitution of Ohio
Mankind - Liberalism - The Human Contract, Bill of Rights (among many others)
you dig?
Stirner wasn’t the only Egoist! Jackson LaRose, are you perhaps a dualist?
Your view of liberalism is as bad as your view of libertarianism.
?
Why?
Its false. (collectivise)
Lazy post, I know.
Stirner not being the only egoist was in response to your post regarding the supposed incompatibility of spiritualism and egoism.
The question regarding dualism is unrelated to the former, and simply in response to a post or two in this thread.
Sorry for the confusion!
Now HERE is someone who sees the issue clearly, even if, judging by his posts, and his tag, he is diametrically opposed to historic Christianity - you, unlike all the other atheist contenders here, have seen the dialectical tension inherent in atheist socio-political theory. I’m personally more a fan of the Marquis and Sartre as opposed to whats-his-name Crowley, but there you go - to each his own.
I was really interested earlier in this list to see the definition of Libertarian ethics as given by Mises in Human Action…something that can & should be reduced to ‘Be really excellent to each other’, sort of like Ethics 101 as taught by Forrest Gump. Mises should have stuck to economics!
How?
and Huh?
I asserted that they were compatible, neigh, complimentary.
Well, I don’t claim to know the truth, but I personally lean towards non-dualism.
“Existence”, in my opinion, is a red herring when dealing with fundamental questions. All the thoughts and memories that I have are just ways of organizing the my perceptions. Whether those perceptions correspond to “something real outside myself” is relatively unimportant because, either way, I could never tell the difference between a perfect simulation of a non-existent universe which is in every way like this universe… and this universe. That is, if I am, in fact, a brain in a vat immersed in a sufficiently realistic simulation of the universe, I will never be able to tell that the universe is not, in fact, real, but only a simulation being executed in some other, more fundamental “reality”. However, since the “brain in a vat” hypothesis is less probable than the “reality is as it appears” hypothesis, I see no need to agonize over the possibility that I am actually a brain in a vat. I rank ontology a distant second to epistemology.
Clayton -
In short, I decidedly disagree. Your definition of religion strikes me as so ridiculously wide as to be irrelevant.
That said, I will not discuss what is a religion and what isn’t; the classical definition of religion is sufficient for my use.
Thanks, but I can’t really take credit for this deduction. It was merely a lame regurgitation of Stirner.
Are you afraid to type Aleister Crowley’s whole name? Don’t worry, I don’t think big J would mind too much.