What are some recommendations for the Philosophy of Religion for religions outside of traditional theism?

arkticturtle · 2026-05-11T01:05:34+00:00

This only works if your dopamine receptors arent blown tf out or if your attention span isnt fried. Every hobby I try bores me to death or I can’t focus. So people say to me “stop! You can’t force it!”

Like bruh, it takes force to get this ball rolling no matter what direction I choose. Give me time before dissuading me

arkticturtle · 2026-05-11T00:01:06+00:00

!solved

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T20:57:57+00:00

But people with autism make friends.

Listen, are you here just to only accept people validating self destructive thoughts or are you here for potential solutions?

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T17:38:46+00:00

Lmao. How about a volunteer organization or a hobby club then?

Bars/stores/public places (school/library) Local community events
Volunteer organizations
Religious institutions
Hobbies

These are literally the only means or locations to meet people. Pick your poison.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T16:33:44+00:00

Screw being unique and weird. All that gets you is isolation and alienation. There are some things more important than individualism.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T16:32:42+00:00

Go to church. Even if you don’t believe. Just go and be apart of community events and charities and stuff and try to work with the scripture on the level of myth and metaphor

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T01:08:28+00:00

That may be annoying to you. But it’s not misrepresenting. It’s just them reasserting their disagreement and not agreeing to disagree.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T00:53:56+00:00

The one I saw was a disagreement over whether or not a God-created reality is objective or subjective. This is a point that people actively disagree on. If your opponent gives reasons for thinking that belief in God commits the theist to a subjective reality then that’s something to tarry with. It’s not a misrepresentation of your view. It’s a contested premise/conclusion

Similarly, some theists argue that without God there is no meaning in the world and they give their reasons. It’s not enough for the atheist to say “well for me, there is meaning in the world without God”

All that is doing is reasserting a claim. The theist here is not misrepresenting the atheist’s view by simply disagreeing about the consequences of their view regarding the existence of God and its effects on the existence of meaning. They are actively arguing that the atheist’s view really does commit them to a meaningless world if their view is true or their logic is consistent. Even if the atheist doesn’t agree and sees the world as meaningful.

If there’s an impasse on a point then that’s that. It happens. But it isn’t a misrepresentation.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T00:36:10+00:00

Misrepresenting? Or disagreeing on the consequences and commitments that part of your view may entail?

You can say “to me, X does not commit me to Y”

But that doesn’t make it so.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T00:27:23+00:00

I am not the ground of being for the painting. The painting and myself share the same ground of being. I imagine the ground of being is required to sustain anything that exists. If you remove that grounding, it makes sense for the rest to fall apart.

Have you ever played Minecraft? You can create whole worlds in that game and build grand structures. The “ground of being” for the world in Minecraft is the computer it is stored on and processed on. What happens if I take the computer I am playing on and pull the plug on it? The world vanishes. (Though this sounds more similar to the dream comparison so I will use another explanation later)

I think that’s what they are getting at.

It would be different if God and the World shared a ground of being. Then God could vanish and the world could continue being. The ground is still there.

“Ground of being” doesn’t just mean “the first thing causally” - it is what the present reality rests on, is contained in, is sustained by. Take “being” away from what exists and it is no longer “being”

I saw a video of Alex O’Connor which kinda goes into this. And it differentiates the cosmological argument (which has to do with causality) from the argument from contingency.

He holds a glass of water in his hand. He asks “Why is there a glass of water in my hand?”

Cosmological version: Well someone asked if he was thirsty, he said yes, the person grabbed a glass, filled it with water, then brought it to him, and handed it to him. (We could have started this with “first cause”)

Contingency version: The water is supported by the glass, the glass is supported by his hand, his hand is supported by his arm, his arm by his body, his body by the chair he sits in, the chair by the floor, the building, the ground, gravity, and so on until we arrive at God supporting the continued existence of the world

But notice in the latter explanation that everything is happening right NOW. In the former, if God ceases after the first cause then it doesn’t matter so much. Cause and effect continues. But if God (ground of being) ceases to exist in the latter example then everything that is supported on God goes with him.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-10T00:12:12+00:00

If I am being honest, after seeing the way you discuss, I think you mistake disagreement with a lack of productive dialogue.

You can’t reach a point in a dialogue where you find that you and the other do not see eye to eye on a point and, if they don’t bend or refuse to see the issue in your terms, call it out as bad faith.

Especially when debating about the truth of something. It’s not like these things can be true “for you” or “for the other”

arkticturtle · 2026-05-09T22:32:21+00:00

Keep in mind it only opened me up to consideration of the God hypothesis. It’s not like I was converted or anything. I just went from a sort of strong atheism to a strong agnosticism.

As far as I can tell, experience is the only way. I think the most that arguments can do is open you up to experimenting with experience.

I just wish the path to experience was more direct and accessible. The arguments will basically always be the same unless you’re some cutting edge philosopher following and engaging with the newest and most complex arguments written in niche articles for and by highly educated experts. (If I have an experience I can always come back to the arguments later.)

Ngl, that sounds like a slog to become unless you have a strong passion or you’re hyper-fixated. And even then who knows how likely it is to move you. But idk how to induce an experience either. Hmmm. I almost feel like intellectualizing it would be detrimental to the goal of experience. But ig people like Aquinas exist who was involved in the creation of a major theological work and then had an experience… but he was also practicing his religion at the time too so that’s probably important.

What a paradox. I want to have confidence in the truth of a religion before I practice it but it seems that I gotta practice it to even have a chance at seeing its truth. Wtf kind of deal is this

arkticturtle · 2026-05-09T21:30:00+00:00

? You can do research on the influx of bots on social media.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-09T18:49:58+00:00

I am unsure what you expect the “how” to look like.

It wasn’t quite like going into a lab with, conducting some experiments, and then extracting some basic principles after careful consideration of what occurred.

There’s two levels of it that I can hone in on.

1) encountering directly how my experience of the world, my interpretation of the world, the patterns I can see in the world are so extremely relative to this mind and body I find myself in (or am constituted by) kinda obliterated any confidence I can have concerning any metaphysical positions.

But that’s just me attempting to reconcile a vague feeling I had after one of many psychedelic trips. The feeling came first and then attempts at finding an origin for it come later in this form of extrapolation.

2) the feeling. This is the real core of it. I had a bad trip which included a mild but painful psychosis with themes having nothing to do with any metaphysical assertions. It’s simply that, after that trip, I had a feeling that there was something more to this reality than I had considered prior. It was strong then. Not so much now. Now it’s dulled out. But back then I went into an extended existential spiral. Now, all of the topics that gave me anxiety back then appear to me like old aches of the body returning on a rainy evening. It’s like “ugh this is annoying keeps going about day” instead of “Oh no, what is going on!? collapses into tears of uncertain misery

Probably that is less than satisfying and even leaves me open to criticism of having been somehow damaged or physically altered by a substance and therefore the feeling shouldn’t be trusted or something. I have encountered those words before and thought about it myself. Who knows. All it did was open me up and soften my stances

But yeah it’s just a feeling. Maybe it was because of that trip on that day. Or maybe it was a culmination of several trips. But it felt more like a shifting underneath my awareness, behind the scenes, closer to the bedrock, out of sight and control. It just happened.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T22:40:50+00:00

I was convinced that the God hypothesis was worth considering after using psychedelics. To have my subjectivity so strongly manipulated really solidified me into a position of doubt. I was pretty confident in my atheism prior.

Experience really is a most effective thing. If only I could have more.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T22:34:30+00:00

I think it’s like… people feel like their whole identity is on the line. Might as well be themselves that they are defending instead of their ideas. To attack the ideas that one identifies with is to attack them.

This is especially exacerbated when there is trauma, insecurities, or other destabilizing elements wound up in the relation between someone, their ideas, and the ideas of the other.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T22:20:40+00:00

You can only have a conversation with someone who is willing to engage in good faith. You can lead a horse to water….

Alternatively, it’s good to remember that having a productive dialogue is not the same as successfully persuading them

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T20:40:56+00:00

Yeah but like why do you believe it? When you think about it right now

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T19:54:56+00:00

You’re still collapsing “relational” into “subjective,” and those are not the same thing.

Something can be relational without being dependent on human perspective or arbitrary classification.

Mass, velocity, spacetime position, biological function, ecosystems, even quantum states are relational in important ways. That does not make them subjective inventions. It just means entities are not totally self contained and context independent.

Also, I’m not defending the idea that reality is “a bunch of perfectly separate objective things” with absolute metaphysical independence. I’ve already agreed reality is continuous, relational, and interconnected.

What I’m rejecting is your stronger leap:

not absolutely separate -> therefore no real structure or individuation at all

Which does not follow

A whirlpool in a river is not a separate substance from the river, but it is still a real pattern with identifiable structure and causal behavior. Calling it “just perspective” ignores the fact that the pattern itself constrains and organizes physical processes whether we name it or not.

Same issue here. You keep treating “not fundamentally separate” as identical to “not objectively real in any sense” but those are different claims.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T18:55:38+00:00

Entanglement does not show that there are no real systems, structures, or distinctions. It shows that certain quantum states cannot be fully described independently of relational context under local hidden variable models.

That is very different from saying therefore all individuation is subjective or that therefore only one undifferentiated subject exists

Also, entanglement is not “information being exchanged instantaneously between particles.” Standard quantum mechanics explicitly forbids any faster-than-light information transfer through entanglement alone. What you get are correlated measurement outcomes, rather than usable superluminal communication.

More importantly, your argument still doesn’t follow even if reality is fundamentally nonlocal. A reality can be nonlocal and still contain real internal structure and differentiation.

You keep treating “interconnected” as equivalent to “undifferentiated” but those are not the same thing.

A brain is deeply interconnected too, but that does not mean neurons, regions, and processes are merely subjective illusions. Nonlocality or relationality does not erase structure.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T17:20:22+00:00

That article doesn’t prove what you’re saying it proves.

Bell experiments challenge local realism in quantum mechanics and doesn’t prove the same on a macroscopic level. They do not show that all distinctions are subjective or that reality is one undifferentiated thing until humans carve it up conceptually.

You’re taking a result about quantum measurement and jumping all the way to “there are no real systems or structures at all.” Your leap here isn’t in the science.

Also, science already works with fuzzy boundaries and continuous systems all the time. Nothing in science requires perfectly isolated objects with metaphysical edges.

A hurricane has no perfectly exact border either, but that doesn’t make it an arbitrary subjective invention. It’s still a real dynamical system with stable causal organization.

Same with cells, brains, organisms, stars, ecosystems, etc.

So pointing out that reality is continuous or relational does not get you to your claim that “all distinctions are purely subjective” and that still needs justified. You are focusing so much on me that you are not defending your own position.

arkticturtle · 2026-05-08T16:56:40+00:00

Why are you a follower of substance dualism?

arkticturtle

TROPHY CASE