Hi

I, too, have no problem with religion. But I do have a problem with some religious people, particularly those who try to shove their religion in our faces.

Thanks for that update on your history and current philosophy. That description fits me pretty well, too. Welcome to the club. Yes, that seems about right. That's a good way of putting it (in my opinion).

It is the "Cheers" below the poster's name.

I like that kind of questioning.As best I can tell, the past is an inference from the present. And that's all it could possibly be.An example: As best I can remember, yesterday I made a diary entry. Today, I can read that entry to see what I wrote.Except that is wrong. When I read that entry, I am reading what is currently in the diary. I cannot know that it is what I wrote. Maybe it changed. And yes, I remember writing that in my diary. But that's my current memory, and might not be what actually happened.The way that I look at it, is that we have a conventional theory of the past. I happen to believe that theory works very well, and in ordinary life I don't question it. But it still shows that we are using that theory to infer the past from the present. Theories, such as our conventional theory of the past, are accepted because of pragmatism. There is no guarantee that they are true.

Yes, I pretty much agree that it doesn't really matter.

Spirits fighting in your head?I think you have been drinking too heavily.

How about Christian responsibility, as in "love your neighbor". How about the Christian responsibility to follow the teachings of Jesus?

I am taking Hangdawg13 to be exploring ideas, rather than taking rigid positions on them. You might be reading too much into what he said. I agree with you there. I do think Hangdawg13 is giving more weight to "materialism" than he should.Yes, there are some people saying that consciousness is an illusion. One of them is Dan Dennett, be he is a philosopher, not a scientist. And when he talks of "illusion" he does not mean what Hangdawg13 is probably taking him to mean. It is worth reading what Dennett actually says about this. It is in his book "From Bacteria to Bach and Back". I'm not sure what Hangdawg13 meant by that. The so-called "hard problem" was posed by David Chalmers, who is a philosopher and not a scientists. Personally, I think Chalmers is looking at consciousness the wrong way. This is a word used to refer to the qualities of experience, particularly of perceptual experience. It is another term that comes from philosophers. Personally, I'm a qualia skeptic (or a "qualia-phobe" as they like to describe it). I'm guessing that Hangdawg13 is also a qualia skeptic.More generally, I see Hangdawg13 as teasing out ideas rather than making rigid assertions.