Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Saturday, May 23rd, 2026
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents a theory of love fitting a comic poet. Ignoring the details included to explain/excuse homosexuality, the story is roughly that humans were originally spherical beings with no distinction of sexes, then the gods divided us, forming a male and a female out of each divided ...
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Friday, February 27th, 2026
In discussion, a friend proposed that the use of the via negativa might be defended even if it lacks logical or rational justification by supposing that there is an ‘aura’ that is associated with certain words and which remains when they have been definitionally negated in pursuit of some ‘deeper’ ...
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Thursday, February 26th, 2026
We do not generally think that it is acceptable to discuss a thing only in terms of what that thing is not, or in terms of what qualities may not be used to characterize it. Nor do we typically think it reasonable to declare that comprehension of some important concept ...
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Thursday, February 26th, 2026
Hilary Putnam claimed as a consequence of the causal-descriptive semantic theory, that if you were a brain in a vat then you could never think that you were a brain in a vat, let alone say it, because the terms would fail to be properly causally connected to the things ...
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Friday, February 6th, 2026
StageAchievementOccult power0. Salik (Seeker) On the Sufi path 1. Muridi (Discipleship) Accepted by a master – a Sheik or Murshid 2. Tariqat (Potentiality)Dedicated to oneness with the spirit of the Sheik or Murshid Sihr. (Lawful/white magic) only by permission of the Sheik or Murshid3. Safar-ullah (Journey to Knowledge)Dedicated to oneness with the spirit ...
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Thursday, October 14th, 2021
Le bouddhisme a la réputation d’être à la fois une religion et une philosophie : en fait, beaucoup de philosophes pensent que c’est une philosophie admirable. Il y en a cependant d’autres qui pensent que c’est un mélange des pseudo-profondeurs et d’incohérences. Par exemple, les bouddhistes disent que la fin ...
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Thursday, September 30th, 2021
Thus are God the Circle, God the Triangle, and God the Square all One God
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Wednesday, September 8th, 2021
The Buddha-nature (fóxìng – which translates Sanskrit tathAgatagarbha meaning the ‘matrix of the thus gone’ or buddhadhAtu meaning ‘the realm of the enlightened one’) was the subject of the second of Daosheng’s teachings that we will consider. The Buddha-nature was supposed to be that part of a being’s nature which ...
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Friday, July 9th, 2021
Qu’est-ce qu’un athée ? Quelqu’un qui croit qu’il n’y a pas de Dieu. Pourquoi croit-il cela ? Dans la littérature il y a pas mal de raisons et d’arguments données, mais pour un philosophe il n’y a qu’un seul argument significatif : qu’il n’y a aucune raison suffisante à justifier la croyance en ...
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2021
The idea that phenomena and noumena are the same thing also featured in the doctrines of the Huáyán (??) school, in which it appears as a consequence of a more general claim concerning the interpenetration of all levels of reality. This school is another of those Chinese schools which made ...
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