Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Hell and Hedonism | Dr. Peter Kreeft | EP 291" video.
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At 25:30, Kreeft says when you get to the end you'll find out if you were right or wrong, about God, I guess, and that's a popular notion. What if it's not that simple? What if the lifetime practice of your belief CREATES your "afterlife" experience! What if the lifetime practice of atheism prevents you from having an "afterlife"! Then, no matter what you believed, you will have been RIGHT! hahaha...I love it...the internal balance of Nature making everything TRUE. They say, "Nature abhors a vacuum"! Think thrice before using terms like non-existence, eh? The logical principle of "negation", while having local utility, is philosophically invalid. In the same way, there can be no such thing as "absolute evil". What you have is a human filter pattern overlay of Natural law in execution, calling it "evil", the only meaning of which is available in myth and legend. Your perspective, your interpretive framework, or context determines your descriptors. The language of the religious perspective includes terms like good and evil, so a variety of sense is made of such words for the edification of adherents. Some perspectives, though, lack the language for certain concepts, so those ideas would be invisible within that perspective. You gotta speak the same language to see eye-to-eye...
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At 6:50, Jordan says, "The emotional functions that fill us with enthusiasm and hope and also the emotional functions that quell anxiety and despair are related to our apprehension of sequential goals." His use of the term, "apprehension", is problematic: first definition, "fearful or uneasy anticipation of the future"; third, "understanding". Fortunately, I'd like to focus on the earlier part of the statement where we find the idea that there are "emotional functions"; and they can fill us with enthusiasm, hope, as well as QUELL anxiety and despair. A casual search turned up only "function of emotion" stuff. At any rate, I don't get it. What is it that fills us and quells us? An "emotional function"...sounds like a fancier variable name than "x, the unknown"...hehehe. The fact is you can generate the emotional values you wish at any time--it's the actor's art. You don't need an intermediary emotional "function" to act for you. The emotional/mental distinction is mistaken in modern "psychology".
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The "will to truth" Kreeft mentions is a matter of personal alignment toward the universal action of spirit, which is "association", the Love that God is. This principle, being universally operative, determines the behavior even of gross matter. "Spirit" is the "material" of God's Being. It is also the inspiration of each individual "awareness". "Imagination" is the Seat of spirit. The clear imagination will reflect most truly. BUT...clarity is difficult in the presence of preference. Any secret preference will distort or malform the image. This sort of confusion is a monkey mind specialty. Not only do you get to deceive yourself, but you get to have fun doing it! hahaha...The monkey is very clever; he'll pretend to be mastered, hiding in wait for opportunity to, even briefly, "take the helm". The monkey is the "mind of emotion", capricious, opportunistic, even vicious, though, more than anything, jealous of the superior position of intellect and resentful of intellect's ability to wrest control from the monkey. The monkey is like a vestigial intellect left over from youth, when it was "master", driving the child to exploration through play and hijinks, directing an important initial learning process. As the intellect matures, though, the monkey gets unruly in its jealousy. The practice of "dispassion" banishes the monkey to its rightful domain.
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Nearing 40:00, Kreeft maintains the distance between God and Man, which, I think, is the problem with religion--the embrace of a slave mentality. "The spirit that guides us has to have a unitary nature", Jordan follows: "You're just not wise enough to generate a whole system of universally applicable values out of whole cloth in the span of your trivial life", without explaining the need for "wisdom" in the process. But isn't that exactly what everyone does as an expression of sanity in evaluating their experience over time?! I don't see any other choice, except trying to shoe-horn your experience into an external mold, like a religious belief system. Kreeft says, "You have created the meaning of life. Who is the creator? You?! What gives you the right and power to do that? You did not create the universe. How can you write the laws of morality any more than you can write the laws of physics." The laws of morality have the same basis as the laws of physics. You exercise your power to create by "imagination", the seat of spirit, operative through the full extent of your being, physical sensation, emotion, and intellect. The spirit is unitary, as Jordan says, meaning, "one"; it is God. So, the question becomes, "what does Kreeft think 'you' are; what is a human being", that he can be separate from God". "Omnipresence" should mean something to the good doctor.
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