Axiology has a plethora of products. Yet if morality describes what people actually do regarding behavioral norms, wicked behavior counts as much as ideal systems designed by philosophers. The first civilization mentioned in Genesis was destroyed for the wicked ways of the people. Humans had pretty bad morals 10 or 20 thousand years ago. A non-battle site at a village excavated in the Middle East found that about 80% of the people had died from crushed skulls. Police weren't about for a few thousand years.
God is a light in the darkness for humanity. The God of Abraham and His Son Jesus Christ have reached a billion people with the word and some element of faith at least nominally, yet it would be an over reach to say that human morality is primarily based on divine inspiration. It may be so that the world’s major religions have shaped at least nominally the majority of the systems of 8 billion living people. I don’t believe there is any sort of pro forma adherence to the morality of major religious systems that govern day to day life of a majority though, as if they were strict Jews in the Temple era before God with the Lord brought a new covenant as promised.
The sort of morality people of the west have today probably has a fiscal basis reflecting permissible behavior in regard to a political economy rather than Christian ethics or perhaps those of some other religious system.
Secular humanism’s practical focus isn’t much different from the humanism that even Christians have accepted. I attended one theology school where there seemed to be agreement that asceticism isn’t popular today. I suppose most commercial Christians sleep on mattresses and take baths instead of sleeping on the ground and get a shower every few months. They probably use worldly medical care generally. It didn’t seem like Jesus would eschew common goods; it’s just the value one fixes them with that matter. If one focuses on God and His will the Lord said He would provide. He mentioned that a human is worth many sparrows, and sparrows are provided for. https://www.udio.com/songs/wKdkBuPCwuTayHZ8RWiBtp
Everyone is learning. Honest inquires aren’t stupid. Science means knowledge. Materials science has a lot of investments and is monetarily rewarding and protected and defended like any vested business. It is those scientists and minions, that full of themselves, venture unscientific opinions or crackpot opinions regarding philosophical and spiritual affairs beyond their ken. Some scientists have the problem of being experts in one field they feel themselves authorities to extend their beneficence over all realms, making themselves seem like arrogant idiots.
I like science a lot having grown up in an era where Linus Pauling, Albert Einstein, Watson and Crick et al were making ground breaking discoveries routinely and/or their ideas like special and general relativity were being popularized. Yet the anti-Christian crowd of the post-deconstruction era have poisoned the atmosphere of the public toward a Godless lifestyle they hold dear. There is no question that they have created a civil divide that is lasting.
Scientific knowledge is itself challenging to keep up with. New expensive hardware brings new insights and opportunities to test theories. I like cosmology and computer science and have little time for biology. Long ago I was quite interested in it and all fields reading such scientific publications that were easily available in libraries and over the counter like Scientific American (before it was bought by the Dutch). I watched Attenborough’s Life in Earth series when it was new in the early 80s yet by then I had learned of evolution at least 20 years before. I am also Christian and learned a lot about Biblical composition and history. Philosophical history and linguistic, analytic philosophy and logic reading let me more readily understand how the indeterminacy of translation applies in all fields. W.V.O. Quine left a book that was a series of Tarner Lectures named ‘Ontological Relativity’ wherein he explained that different ontology exists for various languages and fields each with their own unique and untranslatable lexicon. Knowing that word means have different values in different lexicon or a different ontology as a set of meanings, concepts and ideas lets one assemble meanings from the Bible better. Even deictic references such as occur with Urartu/Ararat, geology and the prehistorical researches and discoveries supporting the Bible and prehistorical and early human settlements such as the 10th millennium B.C. Gobeki Tepe in Anatolia may be combined with historical climate change for increased understanding.
It is quantum mechanics today that lets one better understand the nature of reality. It is a paradoxical key to enter the realm of uncertainty and a Higgs Field entangling massless two-dimensional wave fluctuation that observed appear as particles. Philosophical considerations of the nature of mind and object, as well as language reveal that physicalism also known as materialism or matter is founded almost upon nothing with a very mysterious foundation premise of a field made of the unknowable presently without time except within itself as it is manifest. Time is then a relative condition of location in the space-time field.
Nothing is stupid except to make assertions about noumenon or operative noumena (i.e. extra-terrestrials cannot exist in this Universe) that cannot be supported. That applies to atheist assertions regarding God. Christians know what they believe and why. It is a faith after all and one that all the scientists that fit on the metaphorical head of a pin in a star trek transporter room when shrunk and on the way to some place beyond the Universe because it has no distance scale when not enmeshed in it, could controvert.
European leaders are swelling up to rearm better than ever in their history. That generally leads to general wars. The dynamics of power lead imbecilic leaders to bring the world to ruin in their quest for glory, promotion of fear in the populace aided and abetted by a supportive media. Russia of course is the perceptible threat enabling European rearmament to an unprecedented scale. Poland with nuclear weapons- imagine that.
That raises the question of what if at some point when Russia has achieved its reconquista of enough historically Russian owned land in Ukraine that was given to western puppets by Western leadership carpet-baggers at the end of the Cold War 1.0 when the reemerging Russia was weak as a kitten militarily and the west under Bill Clinton had irrational exuberance; what if the Russian stop their advance, declare victory and dig in defensively to defend their position? Would or could European war mongers accept that position and quit their extreme military build up?
Building more nuclear weapons and larger armies to increase international safety appears suspiciously like a retarded idiot savant President’s idea about security gained from reading a history book in elementary school thirty years ago that was written 70 years ago.
Since European leaders of the far west tend toward support of war on Russia until all an apropos belligerent attitude demanding the return of war with Russia until all Russian held or annexed areas are restored to the comedian–in-chief’s control, doesn’t that mean that a gradual upgrade to World War Three is inevitable and unavoidable? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and less time consuming to simply roll out the weapons of mass destruction presently since I for one hate suspense and even suspense movies?
Maybe they are hoping for a miraculous intervention to roll back Russia to borders acceptable to Europeans desirous of all of Ukraine. Maybe they have not an inkling of such a thing and believe they can frighten Russia to into retreat, or alternatively that Russia will just battle with conventional weapons soldiers foregoing nukes, chemical and biological weapons because of retaliation by Poland, France and England? At least they would be lft with nuclear weapons after their glorious victory over Russia and have a credible deterrent to possible German or Russian aggression in the future.
Elon Musk's plan to place 42,000 Starlink satellites above the Earth present a danger when making reentry for destruction by releasing aluminum oxide that will reach the stratosphere. So it makes sense that DOGE would want to trim the Environmental Protection agency and prevent legislation from arising to compel those that launch satellites that orbit the Earth to pay a tax for the safe disposal of satellites rather than burning them up in the atmosphere. The amount of aluminum oxide released into the upper atmosphere greatly surpasses anything approaching normal. The consequences may be profound down the road.
I once bought a used sailboat on the Severn River and sailed it to the Chesapeake without a motor or depth charts. Unfortunately with some ways and no wind the vessel eventually rand aground in shallow water with the full keel and the waves took it to a concrete berm where it had holes broken through the fiberglass. I was informed that on the Chesapeake Bay it is illegal to let a boat become derelict-- a felony crime actually. So I therefore had to pay a business $2000 dollars to haul the boat away and break it up safely for disposal. The rich have no kind of similar responsibility to safely dispose of their space trash that threatens the safety or well being of human life on Earth and that is wrong.
Jesse Watters said recently that all boomers are rich and the generation spoiled. Such statements is why people hate journalists.. President Johnson began he war on poverty in the 1960s because so many Americans were poor. Some boomers died in Vietnam and other wars. not everyone was a pampered journalist in the 3rd millennium. Many Boomers are still poor and many never made it to old age. When I got off that sailboat on the Eastern shore I bought some chicken for dinner and ignored the subtle head shake of the sales lady at the service station convenience store. I went to a hotel room across the street and ate a drumstick and got a sharp shard of chicken bone stuck in my throat sideways where it remained until it dissolved much later because I couldn't afford to remove it. Watters would have 911 there if such a circumstance befell him with full medical coverage. He has no idea about the inconvenience of poverty.
Building on automatic trash cleaning machine to gobble up dead satellites in space, compact them and shoot them into the sun should not be beyond the technical capacity of those disposable, non-recycling kind of people that dominate in government. Maybe people would even pay something for the service or face federal charges for placing aluminum oxide sources into the stratosphere above the United States.
“A Different Universe; Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Up’ by Robert Laughlin- a Nobel Laureate in Physics was a good read. It was some time ago when I read that. He speculated about phase changes comprehensively reforging nature, including mind. Scalar fields aren’t the only sort of potential analogy for space-time histories. God may have issued Leibniz’s one-dimensional spiritual monads with a thought- one couldn’t use a reductionist investigation from a Universe to reach a point before the existence of mind with much conviction. It’s always an extrapolation of what probably occurred. One sets compass directions and speculates on what can be found at the start or end rather, if one goes an infinite distance in time and space and what can be found there. One seeks theory-consistent candles at half the distance to the theoretical end that might provide confirmation. Until one has a better theory some are satisfied they have produced the final theory and explanation of everything.
A theory of God besides that of divine revelation is as difficult to prove or disprove as the existence of extraterrestrials that may deem it better to stay hidden or that have evolved to a non-physical, non-planetary form of being. I appreciate frontier scouts mapping the known and speculating about lies beyond the observable.
Physicists speculate that below absolute zero there is a phase change to infinitely hot. Hell may be the necessary destiny for all that have an immortal soul and aren't gathered to heaven with Jesus Christ; the universe would take the lost to a singularity and infinite heat or a phase change from a cold dead low temperature Kelvin Universe to absolute hot.
I believe comparing human and artificial intelligence and the question of if they are the same thing or equivalents is easy to provide an answer to. It is like comparing a carburetor or distributor to human intelligence and asking if they are the same thing. A.I. is a kind of fancy distributor of bits or qubits quite unlike a mind. Maybe computer architecture could get more bits for the buck if they used motion with existing micro-circuits in some way to multiply logic gate grids in Hilbert Space. Maybe they could add more dimensions to logic gate grids.
Hegel was just providing a scaffold for Darwin and Marx, each of whom would deny the teleology of Hegel. I lean toward agreement that dualism doesn't need to be in an either/or relationship with physicalism in the same manner that monism and pluralism may simultaneously coexist in physicalist parameters for a Universe. The actual construction of quantum field, particle-waves etc are very strange in regard to a wealth of philosophic lexicons. Plainly mind is a different configuration of field entanglement. Since all other physical elements tie into the basic local field (the Higgs) providing an extra dimension for two dimensional, massless particles it is reasonable to expect that mind and intentionality also alter quantum relationships. It is difficult to know if that is permanent. Free will is apparently another emergent state or phase change arisen from and within the local concatenated field entanglement compresence.
Pejorative opinions about the nature of social groupings abound; that's the nature of original sin. Hate of antipathetic and even entirely neutral social identity groups from politics, to race, wealth status etc are the normal way of the human race. Without God the futility of mankind only increases.
Defining very intense social groups as a cult is customary. Farming may be a cult, if one goes on the Miriam Webster footing. "Cult, which shares an origin with culture and cultivate, comes from the Latin cultus, a noun with meanings ranging from "tilling, cultivation". There are other etymologies including French and meanings such as adopt, adore, worship. I tend to understand it as a sub-culture of a small scale.
French President Macron took a big step toward the destruction of Europe through nuclear war with Russia. He has said that Russia is a threat and need be pacified- apparently meaning rendered harmless and without weapons or missiles. Macron is organizing upgrades to the Ukraine conflict placing France on a path to direct war with Russia. Perhaps he can do better than Napoleon did in failing to capture Moscow.
One might keep in mind that Macron’s blimpistry occurs against a backdrop where France quit N.A.T.O. before the Soviet Union faded away. The French may have wanted to seem harmless in the hope that the Soviets would not nuke them.
Europeans are functionally insane in regard to war on their continental portion, history informs us. At some point fighting against invasions from Asia and Africa, Europeans had legitimate reasons for conflict with external threat vectors, yet Russia is not an outside threat vector in regard to the Ukraine. Among themselves the dynamics of European political power brought them to war against themselves interminably; it was only with the nearly complete destruction of Europe in the Nazi war- the Second World War, that Europe became generally pacified for several decades. Europe was broken and military depleted.
The rise of American and Russian/Soviet nuclear powers rendered Europe impotent; they were compelled to rebuild in peace and develop a new prosperity with comparatively small military spending. Opportunities for world conquering were set back. Political egos smoldered forced to await a future when wars for global conquest could resume. Then Russia/the Soviet Union opted for peace, freed Eastern Europe and peace should have developed.
Besides the war on terror and a brief Balkans post-communist adjustment war peace continued. Maladjustment of the post-Soviet reapportionment of political entities created conflicts and the potential for the Ukraine war, yet peace prevailed. Europe then became the EU and N.A.T. O. Expanded eastward as if Russia was some kind of threat. That breaking of trust and taking advantage of Russian weakness after the end of the Soviet Union to expand N.A.T.O. was a direct cause of the present conflict. A rearmed Europe finds itself in a position to flex its strength and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war because ts leadership is replete with historically runty malcontents and agitators striving to outdo one another with militancy toward Russia.
France and Europeans would like to be the big dog of politics again. In 2020 the French Army had 118,000 members and not all of those were combat soldiers. Europeans have experienced weak U.S. leadership in the Biden, Obama and Clinton administrations that was too Eurocentric. They may have believed that with the end of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany that Russian power had vanished forever and Russian nuclear weapons power would disappear. That latter point was a delusion.
Macron will need to adjust to the fact that Russia has 5,580 nuclear weapons and France something like 290. Russia is not going away and France will not be the planet’s big dog. Europe rather than butting their heads into a concrete wall need adjust to reality and accept that peace is again going to be forced upon them; this time before they bring about a global world war.
President Trump on the other hand has sought to neutralize European lunacy in regard to Russia.
The rapid progress with the Trump administration toward renormalizing relations with Russia and ending the Ukraine War occurs in an interesting historical paradigm that John Meirsheimer reviewed in a video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKjFD9fPQxg
Some have nominated former Assistant Sect. Of State Victoria Nuland for the designer of Joe Biden Ukraine policy yet I think that is an inadequate place to lay the blame. Bureaucrats may be a focal point or catch basin for social forces desiring policy directions yet they for-themselves couldn’t bring powerful disagreeing parties like the military industrial complex to support those or other policies they felt were counterproductive to profit although they might comply if required by the chief executive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland
Other have reported that the reason for the meeting in DC of President Macron and P.R. Starmer were to hand off supervisory custody of President Zelensky to the C.I.A. Apparently France was given custody by outgoing President Biden in order to prevent the Trump administration C.I.A. from gaining access to information that might be deleterious for the members of the Biden administration.
