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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Why Be Good?
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-be-good.html
Did Man Invent God? Wednesday, July 31, 2013. In my last blog, I talked about drivers who ignore the one-way sign posted at the end of the street on which I live. A frequent tactic of those who live on the street to discourage this flouting of the rules is to shout “WRONG WAY”, at cars failing to adhere to these rules. I suppose this will alert someone who was not aware they were driving in the wrong direction to their misdeed, but mostly it will make them aware that people are watching. If no one sees t...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Finale?
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2011/07/finale.html
Did Man Invent God? Saturday, July 9, 2011. 8220;Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.” (1). We have an inbuilt desire to do things that matter. But what if everything we build and love and fight for is gone someday? Without a trace. As if it never was. Would it matter that we existed for an instant in the face of an eternity without us? The inescapable answer is that it would not. The problem is that we know, with the rarity of absolute certainty, that we will die. Is it some kind of cosmic joke?
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Kant's First Antinomy - Can We Know If the Universe is Finite or Infinite?
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2015/06/stephen-mcandrew-department-of.html
Did Man Invent God? Thursday, June 25, 2015. Kant's First Antinomy - Can We Know If the Universe is Finite or Infinite? Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Is a towering and original work in the philosophical cannon. Kant’s transcendental idealism is designed to remove skeptical doubts about empirical science that Hume had raised by asserting that space and time are conditions of experiences that are internal to each of us. Kant wants to use the antinomies to motivate us to accept transcendental ide...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Religion and Violence
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2013/04/religion-and-violence.html
Did Man Invent God? Thursday, April 11, 2013. 8220;Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival.” – Christopher Hitchens (1). Instead, let’s do a thought experiment. What if you had a magic ray gun that could remove someone’s religious beliefs instantly? Imagine further that you had a way to spread the effects of this ray gun over the entire earth, so that every person on the planet was struck, and no longer had any religious belief. It is to ...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Did Man Invent God?
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Did Man Invent God? Did Man Invent God? The idea of the divine or God is, if you think clearly about it, a very strange concept. To many contemporary scientifically minded people it is childish and even laughable to believe in God. They contend that the physical material world is all there is. So why invent ghost stories? But does this explanation make sense when we look at it more closely? Two assumptions underlie the theory that man invented God. First, some human or humans were born into a world w...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Songs in the Key of Joy
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2010/12/songs-in-key-of-joy.html
Did Man Invent God? Wednesday, December 22, 2010. Songs in the Key of Joy. 8220; Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world. 8221; – Salman Rushdie. How to fill in these gaps without some belief in the transcendent? If these artistic revelations are to have any meaning there must be more to life than random chance, otherwise they are just talking rubbish. Writes the following to describe his fellow atheists:. We are not im...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: A Standard Of Measure
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2012/01/standard-of-measure.html
Did Man Invent God? Thursday, January 12, 2012. A Standard Of Measure. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. - Ludwig Wittgenstein. The metre stick in Paris, therefore, holds a special place in the measurement system. It is the standard by which all other metres are put against to see if they measure up. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the celebrated twentieth century Austrian philosopher, wrote ...The c...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: July 2015
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2015_07_01_archive.html
Did Man Invent God? Wednesday, July 8, 2015. Mackie’s Argument From Queerness – A Double-Edged Sword. What are objective moral values? If moral values are objective there should be some way that we can come to agreement on what kinds of things that they are. . Are they sui generis. Non-natural properties with which we can somehow get into contact? If so, do such things exist? The peculiar qualities of objective moral values present a strange problem. . So my conclusion will be that the argument from qu...
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Some "Thoughts on Mind & Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2013/05/some-thoughts-on-mind-cosmos-by-thomas.html
Did Man Invent God? Monday, May 27, 2013. Some "Thoughts on Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel. I have been a fan of Thomas Nagel since I first read his essay “What It’s like To Be a Bat”. His lucid, common sense analysis was striking to me as an undergraduate philosophy student. I was therefore intrigued about his latest book – Mind and Cosmos. Especially since there was such a furor surrounding it. There has been much talk, well in certain circles, about Mind and Cosmos. But I think the book is neither.
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Songs of a Semi-Free Man: Reversing Forward – Is Morality Just Rule Following?
http://songsofasemifreeman.blogspot.com/2013/06/reversing-forward-is-morality-just-rule.html
Did Man Invent God? Monday, June 24, 2013. Reversing Forward – Is Morality Just Rule Following? I live on a one-way street. However, I frequently observe cars going the wrong way up the street. But even more interestingly, some people go the wrong way up the street in reverse. Does this make it O.K? Isn’t that the human condition, we know the right thing to do, but it can be inconvenient or painful, so we try to do something else? Not perfect, but then we are only human – right? To extend our traffic met...