Greetings A Smoking Fox,
Good post. Now I know from where you draw your conclusions.
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Some quotes i gathered togheter from your all previous posts Faust.While i must agree that you are not directly advocating the destruction of life, you are indirectly doing so.
Common, that’s circular reasoning. I am telling you now (as I have directly said in previous posts) that I am not advocating the destruction of life, my posts did not advocate the destruction of life. I am apathetic to a concept which seems to be of primary concern to you…I merely point out that from death comes life, from destruction comes creation… something which you are now agreeing with.
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You where advocating being passive about saving the earth so as a result you are indirectly destroying life on earth.
Its a point of, if your not part of the solution your part of the problem.
Yeah I’ve heard this rhetoric before… I don’t buy it. You are swinging from extremes; I don’t find myself at either end. It just seems like a political attempt to polarize mass consciousness. Following this logic, by living on this planet we are all contributing to the problem so we might as well all commit mass suicide (sarcasm intended)!!!
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And on some level you where even directly advocating its destruction at one time. You say we are a part of nature,
with our atomic bombs and pollution, and then you say to let nature run its course, meaning our destroying of life on earth.
Yes I did say something along those lines (though I never mentioned pollution), and yes I meant that natures course will be eventual destruction.
Here I quote my last post directed to you:
“We are nature and as I expressed in my first post everything that we make and do is nature. By destroying the current ecosystem we are letting nature take its course, by not-destroying the current ecosystem we are letting nature takes its course. In the end nature’s course will be destruction and then creation once more.”
I think that’s pretty clear. Notice that both possibilities are mentioned as natures course.
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Another main point is that you claim the earth does not care about destruction of life. Wich i believe is false to say.
To show this i pointed out the moral flaws in your logic, i did not make this clear, wich was my error, but i knowingly turned it into a moral debate.
My moral point was in my eyes a direct result of your point of view. You said the A, and i said what i felt the resulting B.
Ok? Morality and logic are two separate things; I think I stated that clearly in the last post.
Your transitive argument (A=B) is flawed. The process is occurring in your head, not in what has been said. Normally the transitive argument would be expressed A=B and B=C therefore A=C. Problem being that there never was a “B” in the conversation, since I never took a definitive stance on A. You are simply extrapolating “B” from what you “felt” and are therefore bringing emotion into your argument thereby automatically rendering it as biased.
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As far as the value of life goes, with logic you will always win this discussion, because there is no logical reason for life to even exist. There is no logic that can define the importance of life, there is also no logic that can define the goodness or the need for life. The moon has no life, an neither does the sun, yet they exist. Nothing on this planet, not even nature has a logical reason to exist. That is because nature is pure chaos, it just seems orderly on the outside, it has no reason it just exists.
Logicly speaking, life has no real value, hell, the existance of the universe has no logical value, it just exists. being coldly logical it does not matter if the universe exists or not, but that logic serves no purpose.
You were the one who questioned my logic, now you are saying that my logic will always be right. Which is it? Also, what is this “purpose” of which you speak?
Do you know why we are here? I don’t. Can you answer the eternal philosophical question of what is our purpose? No, it can’t be answered. For this reason I embrace an approach where we look at various possibilities regardless of how callous, cold, and immoral they may seem (after all, these are only human perceptions).
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But as far as the earth goes, that does not mean it is incapable of being sad.
You see I have a problem with extending human emotions and perceptions to non- human realities. Sad::Happy, Bad::Good, Love::Hate these are all human perceptions of duality used to understand, order, and orient our existence. They simply don’t apply to non-human beings.
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Also, you seem to base some part of your reasoning on the idea that being enlightened equals being cold and logical. In this point i disagree.
No, I didn’t mention anything about cold and logical in reference to enlightenment. My exact words were “An enlightened being realizes that there is no separation between him/herself and other life. There is no hierarchy of what comes first as there is no separation.”
In other words, it is the realization that you are everything and nothing, or better put, that you are not everything and not nothing, not something, not anything. It is embracing and loving (in the highest sense of the word) the void.
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Why is this important, because you claim the earth does not care about the life on it, you seem to be of the idea that the entity "earth" is cold and logical in nature.
For this, neither of us have proof. But if the earth is an enlightened being, i believe it cares for the life on its surface and desire to keep it alive.
As such we should respect its wishes. So we may not be damaging the earth physicly, we surely are i believe, damaging it spiritually and emotionally.
So it could be possible that the earth is crying out in pain.
I stated my cosmological views in the post to Hagetaka Kuro. The spirit/ entity earth and our spirit are one in the same…they are both fragments of the One source. This is what I have come to know. You, of course, are welcome to your own interpretation and belief. I’m not here to preach.
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Yore logic about the destruction of earth eventually is true. But that does not mean there is logic and reason to accept an early end for life on its surface.
Its not because someday you die, you have to kill yourself now. Its not because someday the earth will die we have to kill it now.
You seem to forget the existance of time in your argument. It is cold logic that if we do not interviene and play god, the earth will have this ecosystem for some million years into the future. The value of this time may be debatable, but the time is here, and we humans play a significant role in the scale of that time.
Your logic equates a million years of life, to perhaps a few years if we go out killing things at a massive scale.
Youre logic is flawed in the same way as this.
If a is a letter and b is a letter then a and b are the same.
If "destruction tomorrow" is destruction , and "destruction in a million years" is destruction , then both destruction are the same.
They are both deaths, but they happen on a different scale, and different beings are killed. Also, the millions of creatures and people that might live in between the two points make the two deaths different.
You claim there is no difference in the two destructions, while there clearly is. There is a clear logical difference between the two destructions of life on earth, and that difference lies in the time and events occuring in between the two.
You can claim that there is no value in the life and time that goes between these two events, but that is not logic, you cannot prove or disprove the value of that time and life and the equality of the two events.
Yes, I now see your point of reference. Unfortunately time does not exist. It too is a human perception. To be more precise Time is a human perception of galactic motion.
Don’t get me wrong, you indeed have a strong argument coming within the framework of human experience. If one accepts time, morality, and emotion as universal constants then there is no argument- your point of view is clearly the more logical. However, as I have explicitly stated, because we do not know the purpose of creation (and in particular because WE are NOT the purpose of creation), we must look at the question of destruction outside the realm of human experience. In these dark waters, time, morality, and emotion do not exist hence they cannot be used to structure an argument. In this abyss, Creation and Destruction are one in the same. QUOTE
You can claim it holds no value, but that is not logic, that is negative morality, or what some call "evil".
Would not be the first time I was called evil…;)
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Also, don't get me wrong, i am really enjoying this discussion at the moment
Likewise, my friend. There is however no point in continuing the debate since it will not be resolved for the reasons stated in the bold section of this post. Were coming at it from two entirely different frameworks.
Peace be with you
F
This post has been edited by Faustopheles: Dec 20 2006, 08:48 PM