Has anyone ever took interest in Theosophy around here? It seems to posit a sort of principle, an Absolute Infinite Omnipresent Divine Principle which is the source and substratum of all. It is the Causeless Cause and the Rootless Root of all. It is impersonal, immutable, and unconditioned. It is the “One and Only” eternal Reality. It is really beyond all definition and description but is THAT which is referred to in Hinduism as Brahman or Parabrahm, in Buddhism as Adi-Buddhi, and in the Kabbalah as Ain-Soph. It is not a Person or Being of any kind. It would be misleading and misrepresentative to speak of It as “God” since It is not any type of God. It can be better spoken of as the infinite and eternal energy and consciousness which is all and in all.  It seems to posit that it doesn't matter which abstraction you prefer, it is found within man and is something akin to a Godel statement of our universe: something which can't be fully comprehended from our hierarchical level of existence. 

However, it also seems to fight every anthropomorphic conception of the great unknowable. Theosophy would teach its adherents that animal man, the finite, having been studied for ages and found wanting in everything but animalism - he being the moral as well as physical synthesis of all the forms and beings through which he has evolved, hence beyond correction and something that must be left to time and the work of evolution - it is more profitable to turn our attention to the spiritual or inner man, the infinite and the immortal.There seems to be a conflict between classical theism and Theosophy, (Blavatsky's, in particular), but to my eye, it seems at face value quite compatible, what do you guys think? Did the Masters of Wisdom contact Blavatsky? Is Theosophy the only tool that could save civilisation from materialism? Could it be the white ray of the spectrum, and every religion only one of the seven prismatic colours?

It has come to my attention that some people find a problem with Christ being material and Him also being eternal. How is Christ eternally both human and Divine? And how is that reconcilable with simplicity?

 It seems we would need to cash out what it means for something to be a composite being. Since the doctrine of simplicity differs from the East and West. Both accept the doctrine of simplicity, but they understand it in very different ways. See Radde-Gallwitz' book on "The Transformation of Divine Simplicity" in the Cappadocian Fathers. Perl's "Theophany" goes into it as well. Christ is metaphysically ultimate, he's God, he doesn't change. How then can Christ acquire a human nature? Is Christ a material being in Heaven, and thus eternally in flesh?

 

Hello all. I am new to the realm of classical theism, and I had a question that creeped through my mind in regards to the value we attribute to human beings above animals. To some degree, it seems obvious that humans are not animals. There is no memory, project or future attached to an animal. What is for an animal, the equivalent of the world? What projection is the animal capable of doing in the world? He lives in an environment, not in the world, unlike humans. It is your anthropomorphisation of animals here that is an inverted epistemology of life. I respect animals more, in the sense that I respect the animal as he is in all of the mystery of what it means to be an animal. I do not project my intentions, I do not project intentions at all that is, onto the animal. I dont know if a cow's will to life is as strong as mine, I do not know if the cow has moral considerations, and that is because I do not believe life to be man's monopoly. I accept my nature and I accept his. When we blindly kill men, we blindly kill the project that comes with himself, we kill the future genius of humanity. Every human is a genius in this sense, but can you say a hamster is a genius? Am I like a mosquito? Of course not.

However, this begs the question for me of  why exactly do we attribute a positive value to all of this above that of the animal when this also opened the capacity to greater suffering? One answer I've gotten was as follows : there is no "I" to the animal. It's a simply acknowledged fact that suffering is a bad thing, we don't like it. Obviously, there's more to it than that. Morality has always concerned itself with persons because there's an "I" to the suffering.

This also seems to cause problem to me, because  [color=#1d2129]I feel that it is discounting an animal's emotional capacity. They definitely feel fear, anger, pain, pleasure, etc. much like humans. Computers don't have feelings or co

Hey, I'm new here and I thought if anything, this post might be the best first thread since the other ones I had in mine were pretty much one-liners, and this one kinda shows where I situate myself in terms of philosophical knowledge. So, I was scrolling through the internet and reading about the argument from contingency and I found a website that "claims" to debunk it. I was wondering, what would be a thorough (or rather, your thorough) objection/rebuttal/reply to the said website? Here are the links

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Argument_from_contingency
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Infinite_regress_does_not_occur
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=The_first_cause_implies_God_exists
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Proof_by_logic
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Not_all_events_necessarily_have_causes

Hello to all, I'm Charlemagne, king of the franks. Orthodox people tend to hate me cause they're not on my level and they think I ruined christendom for political reasons, but that's all calumny. In all seriousness though, I'm new to this website and pretty much an overall newb in philosophy, so I hope I'll get to learn from here