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  1. S

    Common sense vs Global Skepticism

    What are the best arguments against global skepticism? Cartesian? Russelian? Moorean? Personally, I favor semantic-based arguments. Putnam’s semantic externalism yields some good points regarding context-based meanings, but still has its own fatal flaws. David Chalmers’ cheerful skepticism...
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    Individualism vs Egoism

    Individualism is the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant. It’s also a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control. Egoism is an ethical theory treating self-interest as the foundation for morality. There’s an important...
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    His Dark Materials

    Has anyone else read the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman? Or currently watching the TV series for BBC and HBO? It would seem to be fruitful story to discuss on a website such as this. It’s been called the atheist alternative to the Chronicles of Narnia and an inverted Paradise Lost.
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    Is Time a Fact?

    I find these questions to hold enormous weight in many other domains of inquiry. Is time merely an illusion? Or is temporal passage a reality? Does a measurement of the intervals between events matter in practice? In life?
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    Justice as Fairness

    The American philosopher John Rawls’s political theory was called Justice as Fairness. He approached justice as a rational decision-making process that was defined by two principles. The central idea is that a just distribution of social goods would be one that all members of society would agree...
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    Best Short Arguments

    “Brevity is the soul of wit.“ -Shakespeare Today’s on-the-go atheist rarely has time for long form debates about the existence of gods. What are the best short arguments that cut to the chase? 1. There’s no hard evidence for the existence of a god. 2. If a god created the universe, then who or...
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    SOMA and the Nature of Consciousness

    Any Frictional fans out there? Going through a survival-horror phase for the season and just played through Amnesia and SOMA. The latter being exceptional in regards to raising questions of the nature of consciousness and what defines a ‘human’. If we could copy an individual consciousness...
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    An Agnostic Metaphor

    I’m agnostic. Some think this means I’m a seeker. Others say I’m sitting on a fence with only two sides. I view it more as a wall, the limit of human knowledge. The wall reaches higher and stretches farther than any single individual can see. Every brick is data. Every section of the wall is...
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    Everything Wrong with Objectivism

    Greetings all! It’s been a while since I’ve been online, but I’m excited to become active once again. I’m not sure how Ayn Rand fares in these waters. It seems like something adolescents and young adults would be more prone to study. I’ve only recently become hip to all the hype. My research...
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    Survival vs. Eternal Life

    So I just watched a video linked to an ad on this site about surviving the end days. It's difficult to tell whether the advocates of it were genuinely sincere in their interpretation of Biblical prophecy or just your everyday run-of-the-mill charlatans. Either way, it raised some interesting...
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    Sam Harris on Self-Transcendence

    I'm currently reading through Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion by Sam Harris where he discusses the mystery of consciousness, the riddle of the self, and meditation. In his book and elsewhere, Mr. Harris claims that self-transcendence is the primary goal of all spirituality...
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    Stoicism: Theistic vs Atheistic

    Some stoics are theistic and some stoics are atheistic. Practically speaking, does it really make any difference? Theologically speaking, which variation makes more sense?
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    A Game of Cards

    Imagine that you find yourself in a card game, with cards being dealt constantly from a mysterious origin. You do not know what the purpose of the game is. Every once in a while, along with the numbered cards, you get a special directive card with some assertion about the goal. One directive...
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    Heaven the Potter's Wheel

    Let's talk Zhuangzi! "...all things are neither formed nor destroyed, for these two also open into each other to connect. It is only someone who really gets all the way through them that can see how the two sides open into each other. Such a person would not define rightness in any one...
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    Zen without Buddhism?

    Does Zen make any sense without Buddhism? Some folks claim to practice Zen without being Buddhists. They may or may not call themselves "Zennists". Where do we draw the line between Zen and Buddhism such that we could distinguish? Does it come down to ethical precepts? Some may say that if we...
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    Koans

    Let's share koans! Twenty monks and one nun were studying meditation with a master. The nun was a beautiful woman, a fact that was not lost on the monks, despite her head being shaven and her clothes very plain. Several of the monks fell in love with her. One went so far as to write her a...
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    Zhuangzi in a Box

    Let's talk Zhuangzi! Why here rather than in the Taoist threads? Because I'm more interested in what is essentially Zhuangzian rather than Taoist in general, especially within the context of Western philosophy. There has been a considerably wide diversity of perspectives on the Inner Chapters...
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    Are suffering and nirvana Dharma Seals?

    Are suffering and nirvana really Dharma Seals? The Dharma Seals, or marks of existence, are basic characteristics shared by all sentient beings. The traditional three are impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Nirvana is also listed in some teachings. Impermanence, interdependence, and non-self...
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    Law of Reversed Effort

    The law of reversed effort, or backwards law, is the paradoxical notion that trying too hard to make everything just right is a major aspect of what's actually wrong. The struggle to always feel secure and seek happiness only results in more feelings of insecurity and unhappiness. As...
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    Egophobia

    According to Anton LaVey in The Satanic Bible: "All religions of a spiritual nature are inventions of man. He has created an entire system of gods with nothing more than his carnal brain. Just because he has an ego and cannot accept it, he has had to externalize it into some great spiritual...
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