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As anecdotal as this may seem, when I was a kid, I went to Catholic school and we always visited the church before lunch for a worship service. On Sundays, I would go with my mother to a Baptist church. I have no complaints about the Catholic services. They were always solemn and humble. The...

Can the set of all sets contain itself?

That's fascinating. Most of the places I've lived, I've been surrounded by church-going evangelical Protestants, the kind of people that wear "God Saves" hats and end every interaction with "God bless you, have a nice day." I've been steeped in the culture for awhile now.

Or maybe good is the absence of evil and purity from vice, with no end to the depths of potential human depravity.

There's definitely more thought put into the mishvot than I think most people outside of Judaism give them credit for. There are quite a few ideas that, to this day, still seem stunningly progressive in comparison to our current state of affairs. Especially sabbath laws. People were supposed to...

Also, yeah, I don't like Dawkins and I don't think he really knows what he's talking about most of the time. I know a lot of atheists who think they don't need to read any sort of theology to wrestle with theological questions and it kind of confuses me. They just have blatant disrespect for the...

I've taken a brief break from my PhD program (in Data Science/Statistics) to focus on my health, it might be a few years before I go back to school and finish it, although I'm hoping to get a lot of my medical bills paid and my doctor visits over and done with a bit sooner than that. I will say...

You said that good is what God wills and that evil goes against his divine will. I may have misinterpreted this, but it sounds like divine command theory, where good and evil are defined specifically in reference to God's will. Under that perspective, anything God wills is good by definition...

I have. I'm particularly fond of their Meteora album.

I think there are two main ways of looking at evil. There are "evil agents" and "evil actions." An "evil action" is an action that directly leads to net harm. "Harm" here refers to a reduction in health, both physical and mental. Although health is a somewhat nebulously defined term, there are...

To add to the original post, I thought I would point out that this primary division between deduction (known truth) and induction (justified claim) can also be seen in the formal sciences. Specifically, mathematical proofs are deductive and statistical proofs are inductive. These heavy...

Oh, okay, duh. There's the main point of contention, I think. We're using different definitions of good and evil. Sorry for wasting so much time.

I've been taking a bit of a detour from my usual goth rock, grunge, and emo (more "classic emo" like American Football and Weezer than "scenemo" like Black Veil Brides and Hollywood Undead for me, although I do indulge in the latter on occasion) to look into a few more modern genres. I already...

I don't fully agree with you here, but I do think there is some truth to your specific example of evolutionary psychology. I am neither a biologist nor a psychologist, although I have gone out of my way to learn more about evolution from scholarly sources and biologists to gain a deeper...

This is true in Gnostic and Hermetic cosmogony, too. Well, the Gnostic sects are actually divided on this issue. When I was a Gnostic, I took mostly from Sethianism and Manichaeism, and in both of those all living things are animated with the spirit, with Manichaeism even specifying that plants...

No need to apologize, I was just a bit confused is all. I appreciate your candor.

This is fascinating to me. I've seen pets stop to admire paintings, too, and I've seen some of the more intelligent dog breeds like Collies sitting very still, upright, with their eyes gently closed. Did you know that some animals bury their dead?

I think I understand where they're coming from. At the very least, I don't think most people who fall along those lines have any ill intent. To them, they're trying to save people from the worst fate imaginable. They may even come to that conclusion reasonably according to the information that...

Nature has no agency. It can be personified as cruel and callous (and often is personified that way), but because it has no directed intention, those aren't wholly accurate terms. For somebody to specifically design a world with suffering in it, then that creator is clearly not trying to...

I can't wrap my head around why you would interpret me pointing out that genocide and abuse is evil as me "whining." I don't understand where that comes from. I don't believe in God. As far as I'm concerned, God has done me no wrong. He is essentially a fictional character to me. So there's...