I don't think you have much knowledge of what the Catholic Church actually teaches. You immediately rail about miscegenation not being thoroughly condemned, as if 1) wignattery informs your rants, and 2) your knowledge of Christianity comes from the United Church.
Your use of words is also so at odds with the perennial meanings that you render your own discourse practically incoherent. Depriving oneself of food and water and shelter is supposed to be an act of selfishness?
Your rhetoric also seems to lack an end, that is to say, a sufficient reason. What's your point?
I think that it amounts to a 'just is' perspective, which is something I've faulted other belief systems for also representing.
There can be no morality in such a system, because everything 'just is'. With a hand wave, you dismiss the significance of consciousness and of rationality and judgment (which is fundamentally necessary to recognize The Good).
It winds up being an inconsequential description of the world with no teeth; properly, we've got a better description in modern physics. Besides his discussion of the One and the Many, there is no real metaphysical substance in any of this; rather, it seems like a rejection thereof, where what remains is merely esoteric-sounding physics. Newtonian physics does a proper job of explaining everything that he is attempting to, without the unnecessary confusion - and rife with confusion all of this is.
Notice how without a shred of justification for a moral system, he continues to cite an 'ought', i.e. that we ought to behave in kind with the instincts. From where or what does this ought arise?
The instincts are roundly recognized as acting, when they are not tempered, in total discordance to everything that makes a man, a man. Governed by the instincts, a man becomes an animal. My instincts might regularly have me killing a man for staring at my girlfriend. My instincts would have me eating far too much. My instincts would cause me to masturbate past some small libidinal threshold, in public at any moment that I was aroused by a fit female body. Worse yet, far beyond the masturbatory libidinal threshold, my instincts might cause me to just club her over the head and rape her in a mall food court.
This philosophical perspective amounts to animalism, it lacks the very principles which would justify the emanationist cosmology he points to, and I can't help but get the impression that his insistence that 'belief equals holding onto' is really a prescription for the rejection of consciousness, of succumbing purely to the physical and simply being a lump of deterministic matter. This is brute materialism trying to smuggle in some vague pantheism. It won't work. It never does.
It can't even get as far as the Thelemic 'do as thou wilt', because even Satanism requires a more robust structure to reality than he is willing to admit.
I have no real interest in continuing this thread.
All of this together is a simple distraction from ones need to adapt to constant change within motion.
We're just particles colliding, baby! Enjoy the ride, Peace. ARM, get your dick out of that grinder, we got some stuff to collide with!
I agree with your analysis.
I have no real interest in continuing this thread.
Me either. At least when I read yours and @ARM's long posts, I get something out of it. With these, there is no meaningful substance.
I'm reading as essay by Jean Borella responding in part to Hawking's Grand Design, which is what Smith responded to in his Science and Myth, except Smith did so with a background in physics, and Borella is purely philosophic in his approach. One thing he notes is how Hawking seems to lean on Heidegger - or rather, go beyond him - by simply dismissing any need for an explanation of why there is being. It "just is", as you say. It amounts to a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason, which I think is a rejection of intelligibility itself.
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