Poland's atheist loonies have had their 5 minutes

Or in fact none at all. People are entitled to believe in the supernatural, though never, ever, has even one scrap of proof turned up.

Not a good example, although an incredibly intelligent writer, it's quite easy to pick him apart.
He was also incredibly closed-minded in his beliefs, as this quite clearly illustrates.


Even if it was proved to him, he wouldn't have been able to accept it, not someone you should be basing the hinge of your argument on as even if presented with the truth he wouldn't have accepted it.


Well, it's not hard to find an argument against this famous Russian....


utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/06/165.shtml


&


We can all agree that Dostoevsky was a good writer (although many of his characters were quite wooden), but his views of Christianity are not only outdated (you have written before that religion is 'relevant'?), but most damning of all....


All quotes from hereutoronto.ca/tsq/DS/06/165.shtmlDawkins himself did of course criticise Dostoevsky, when he said:


voices.yahoo/dostoevsky-nietzche-christian-novelist-influenced-3217680.html

However, Dostoevsky did himself give quite a nice image for what a godless/heavenless/eternal life-less might look like.


notesfromanidiot.wordpress.com/tag/dawkins

Not right, because God is not only transcendence, but also immanence. Even beyond the question of intellection, which in itself surpasses both faith and reason and is able to see the reality for what it is, anyone with a spiritual disposition will still find the atheist world to be a monstrous impossibility, for the face of God is everywhere, as the Muslims say. I didn't start my journey towards spirituality because I was "indoctrinated" by this or that religion. I started out because i saw the absurdity of the modern world, which sees value only in the material, where I always saw value in things which by their nature are transcendent and cannot be "proven". Discovering the Sophia Perennis and the spiritual life has basically confirmed what I knew to be right all along. The world is nothing, only that which transcends this reality matters.


What Dostoevsky did was actually quite spectacular, because he basically agreed with Nietzsche in his critique of conventional morality, but then rejected the latter's definition of what morality was actually about by demolishing the idea of the ubermensh, which technically would have led to a complete nihilistic conception of morality, except he then demolishes nihilism as well. His solution was conventional (faith!), but it sort of feels hackneyed, because faith is not actually what Dostoevsky has in mind. At the end of the novel, what Raskolnikov actually went through was a complete annihilation of the self, an experience which is central to all religious traditions, Buddhism in particular. Dostoevsky basically did what Nietzsche never could do. He stepped over the boundaries of conventional human thought right into the transcendent.


I'm waiting to see your contribution to this thread...

Now, to quote Schuon again:


Does the fact I cannot "prove" that I can see light actually mean that I do not see it? What does the existence of a something have to do with my ability to provide "proof" for its existence? If I see light, do I not see it anymore if i cannot "prove" that i do? And so, if I see that Beethoven is a genius, do I cease to see it merely because I cannot provide proof for its existence? Thus, the fallacy of rationalism is that it seeks certainty in dialectic without taking into account for the fact the existence of a something is completely independent by our ability to explain its existence using words alone.

You're mixing up 'a something', with a something, belief in which has caused countless damage to humanity over the centuries and continues to cause real misery today.

Fairy tales, whose proponents think we should all believe in.

I wouldn't agree with that for a second. Nietzsche was one of the greatest philosophers the modern world has seen, Dostoevsky wrote fiction.


Again, I cannot agree with this, Dostoevsky didn't 'demolish the idea of the ubermench' at all. In actuality wasn't it Nietzsche who was inspired to get working on his idea of the ubermensh after he had read, and disagreed, with Crime & Punishment?

In the simplest terms Dostoevsky said that man would not function with a god and that if man should live without a god they would fall into a world of brutality, vulgarism and egoism...nihilism.

Nietzsche believed that by rejecting the idea of god, man would flourish in a fully secularized world. The ubermench would be the ideal that humankind would try to attain. He is godless but he is far from being immoral, vulgar, brutal or egotistic.

Too many people believe that Nietzsche wanted a nihilistic world, that wasn't the case at all. He saw the world of science taking over the world of religion, leading to overall nihilism which would in turn would lead to the rise of his ubermench.

Maybe we are in the throes of his period of nihilism currently, or maybe it is soon to come? Atheism is certainly rising (in the West at least).

Dostoevsky was the pessimist of the two, he believed we were doomed without a god, Nietzsche believed that the sooner we as a species accept that there is no god then the sooner humans can truly come to realize their potential.

If a blind person is calling the light a fairy tale, and demands proof of it's existence, how I should respond?


Nietzsche called Dostoevsky his "favored" philosopher once. This might be the first time in history where a philosopher build a philosophy out of a refutation of that philosophy. Raskolnikov is almost the perfect blue print of what Nietzsche envisioned with the "ubermensch" except Dostoevsky actually showed us what a pitiful figure that truly is.

But that's impossible, Nietzsche's book where he spoke about this ubermensch, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was published in German in 1883. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov was published three years earlier in 1880...since that's the book we were talking about.

However, if you want to change to the character of Raskolnikov from Crime & Punishment then I again must whole heatedly disagree with you. Raskolnikov was a figure driven by Dostoevsky's (baised) view of what rationalism was.

You may not agree with this, but I think we can certainly agree on the fact that what Dostoevsky & Nietzsche understood by rationalism were two completely different kettles of fish.

Nietzsche's ubermensch bears almost no resemblance to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. And he couldn't have shown that the ubermensch was a fallacy when he wrote Crime and Punishment in 1866, because the concept itself wasn't published until 17 years later in a different language.

Your imagined 'light'. Unless you can prove fairy tales are real.

I'm not the one making any claim here. If you want to claim something, you need to be able to prove it.


It isn't me who is trying to tell people that they must live their lives in line with my morals and beliefs.

while you're at it, Harry, prove that Santa does not exist as well.

If you want to claim that I say that god doesn't exist? Prove I've said that.

Again, I'm not the one arguing that things cannot exist a priori unless they can be proven to exist. The fact I express absolute certainty in the genius of Beethoven doesn't mean this certainty automatically constitutes proof to those who cannot see that genius, but this is not the same thing as saying my conviction cannot be "objective", or rooted on something that is absolute and very real. The fact I cannot prove the existence of this genius does not automatically mean my impression is false, or relative, but it is according to modern rationalism.

I submit that an Absolute must in fact exist since all phenomena is invariably bound to relativity. Notice that modern science is fond of positing the exact opposite. That the relative "something" is predicated upon a "nothingness" rather then an absolute somethingness. What's arbitrary to me is the idea that this proposition is somehow more "rational" than its opposite.


They are exactly the same, except the Crime and Punishment shows the actual consequences of what a world without religion actually leads to.
Without placing "meaning" in something which transcends the purely material it is sure nihilistic. After all, "belief", by definition, transcends that which is readily visible and tangible, I.E., the relative world. Speaking of which, nihilism in general, at least in its actual "serious" incarnation, I.E., Nietzsche and philosophers of that irk, arose precisely after "belief" was killed off by rationalism (God is dead, etc.). That is, when you deny any reality which transcends the relative world, the latter simply loses all meaning. The so called "Age of Enlightenment" and the optimistic materialism that arose out of that milieu was something only dupes could truly believe in. The "reality" of the rationalists ended up being no reality at all. But while those smart enough to see through the bullsh!t wallowed in their own demented nihilism, the rest of society kept going with their merry charade. Only with Dostoevsky one can find a solution of sort to the problem raised by Nietzsche, but even that wasn't enough since Dostoevsky only knew religion in its exoteric dimension. Ultimately, only pure metaphysics can deliver the modern world from its predicament, but this is a type of knowledge that is extremely hard to come by this days. Western civilization has driven itself into a cul-de-sac.

I would agree with the first part, but I'm more hopefully that the West will find a way :)

We aren't asking you to prove that your god is a genius (as 'genius' is a subjective term; there are a good number of people who really do genuinely believe that Justin Bieber is a genius); we're just asking you to prove that your god exists. After all, the people who claim that Justin Bieber is a genius can at the very least prove that Justin Bieber, unfortunately.

Say person A hates Bieber while person B thinks he is actually a great musician. Person A can still be right while person B can still be wrong whether person A can actually prove his case critically or not. By claiming that person A can only be right unless he can "prove" his opinion automatically implies no true evaluation of the music can actually be considered to be objective or absolute in any way or form, because nobody can actually prove something like that.

I posit that person A can actually be right whether his opinion can be proven rationally or not, and that my evaluation of his opinion is independent of said proof, since I can simply pit my own subjective assessment of the music and decide for myself which one of us is right. By stating that only that which can be proven can be considered to be objective, the rationalist hinders this process of acquiring knowledge from the opinion of others simply by establishing a priori that no opinion is truly objective and cannot be so in principle, and not simply in fact.

Opinions are, by definition, not facts.

Right that he 'hates' someone...


Right that he thinks something.

Neither of those two people's tastes or 'beliefs' have any impact on the nature or existence of Justin Bieber.

I like Santa - it doesn't mean his beard is real enough to pull. I hate Fanny Price - it doesn't mean she'll leap out of the pages waving a wet fish.

But that's liek, your opinion, man.

Why do you also sound like Torquemada on a bad day?
Btw...I have asked this a few times...What is your opinion of Pope Franciscus? As compared to pope benedict and pope JPII ?
Somehow I have the idea he is not of your ilk....

Pope Francis is doing everything he can to aggrandize himself with both the media and the dumb masses. There isn't an ounce of sincerity in his bones, he has been acting like a media star since his appointment.

Despite all this, lefists will still gripe and complain, since it is the Church itself they hate, pedophile priests and things like that are just an excuse.

Why would pope Francis need 'aggrandise' himself, he is The Pope. And acting like a media star??? You have lost me.
From what little I understand he is trying to sort out the Caligulan vipers nest of crypto-facist nonces that have infected the Vatican.

No I would say that is your view point and not a fact. yes there are some who are anti religion but not most....

I am probably one of those you call a "lefists" however I do not see myself as such. I personally think The new pope has been a breath of fresh air and have for the first time in years agreed with what he has being saying (at times). I still think more can be done to sort the CC but feel he is at least moving in the right direction. He seems a lot better than the previous recent popes and is trying to sort some of the problems out.

Agreed. The best since John XXIII.

The scandals won't go away though unless they're tackled head on. The sexual abuse is the big elephant in the room, and the next big thing will be the RCCs links to organised crime in Italy and elsewhere.


Someone with a golden throne whose picture is on sale in every other village doesn't need to do that.

Of course you would not like him. I would say he is the opposite of being a media star. Longing for Pius XII, do you?

Well, yes. The last noble pope: Also among the most hated by the current establishment. Coincidence? I think not.

JPII and most Poles wouldn't be pleased to hear that. Unless you're trying to mean noble in the sense of background in which case Paul VI (also an excellent Pope) would be somewhat bemused.

Let's see...
- He intends to clean up the pigsty called the Vatican Bank
- He wants the clergy to lead a life of modesty and shun luxury cars
- Even the cardinals in the Vatican now have to register in and out when going to "work"
- He attacks paedophile priests really hard
- He wants to reconciliate the Church with the people
- He thinks gays and divorced people are....people
- When he was still an archbishop he went to work by public transport
- He is living very modestly as a Pope

And please define "dumb masses". Everybody else besides yourself?

Btw Pius XII was a virulentanti-Semitic, who did not mind working together with Hitler, and wrecked his Centre Party in Germany.
He did not lift a finger when the Nazis deported the Jews of Rome, right beneath his window.

Whatever. Who cares. Still, one have to admire his style, when he fought the communist italian party. We could use a pope like that nowdays, who would not flinch to excommunicate everyone supporting abortion or gay marriages.

We can argue all day long, but if someone anty-religious like Jon speaks about current pope with approval, you must see that something is wrong with the guy.


Also known as usefull idiots.

Interesting that you fail to mention his tolerance of the mafia.