[Guille]

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

I see we are all russian literature enthusiasts. Dostoyevsky was my favorite, followed by Gogol and then Tolstoy.

I've never read Gogol but will, Tolstoy I find him excelent. But the czech Kafka is at the top for me (of eastern european writters).

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

Guille I understood nihilism to be belief in nothing (which would make sense, given its latin root "nihi"=nothing)

Nietzsche is the most self-contradictory philosopher of all. In fact, Tolstoy himself said "Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." His philosophy meant both believing in nothing and believing in everything. It was about believing in no-thing as in no-thing which represents everything or a universal, such as god, human being, politics... But he did mean every-thing as in all things not-universal, to believe in everything but not as everythig. By the way, the meanings of words are not always it's root.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

What then is the difference between agnosticsm and your version of nihilism?

Agnosticism is believing that we can't tell if god exists or not. Nihilism--from Nietzsche's view, not the latin root--is believing that we should not believe in anything for there is no truth and so every-thing is truth. The only relationship is that agnositicism is uncertainty and so is nihilism, but they talk about different things completelly.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

I still don't understand why you think the Goddess doesn't depend on us (or why its not a possibility). Maybe we are here so that she can experience this reality directly? In any event, didn't we create her?

Let's see if I can communicate intelligibly the message. Let's assume god exists. Let's assume, further, that the god that exists has the fundamentla properties of: absolute, infinite, eternal, perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, all-of-nature, and other total-properties. By simpel analize, we can see that all the properties can be reduced to the property of Perfection. So if god is perfect, or perfection (in the case that you don't believe in god as an independent entity but as nature-as-whole), then it should not depend on anything, at least on anything imperfect. It doesn't matter how much you try you will always be a human and therefore imperfect. Therefore god's existence is independent of human beings, their beliefs, their language, their religion... And of this discussion we are having now. In fact, the god as such is described by christianism, judaism, islam, hinduism, budhism, couldn'y be less altered by us. It woudln't take us to heaven or hell, it would give us a choice to act well or wrong, it wouldn't help us in bad moments... For it would have nothing to do with us. And yet everything. Strange, god, in the wel-defined way, is very like nihilism, and just as wrong.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

Time doesn't stop, we do.

Let's not get into terminology! I know that we are not mooving through time. Neither does time "go by". We do not travel through time; neither do events change through time. All these are just expressions used in language to refer to time. For god's sake it's obvious, we all know this, the thread "Time" has around 450 posts and we've concluded quite a lot of things, it mighte help reading some.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

And we don't "want" anything.

Your' speaking for yourself. I want. For example, I want to be a philosopher and/or physicist when I'm old. I want to learn, to discuss in the forums, I want to post. I want to eat, I'm hungry. I want, I want...

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

Of course human rights are interepreted as species rights. That comes from the definition of "human". There is a great deal of work to be done in this area. That is not to say that the animals and the environment don't have rights. There are some societies which take this into consideration. Bioregionalism is growing here, which designates different people on the decision making body to represent for example, the ocean. Also societies like Greenpeace, Sierra Legal Defence Fund, different aboriginal societies ensure that some regard is given to non-human life forms.

Yes. But all I wanted to say is that it's wrong the foundation that human rights are base don us a species. They are absed on us as rational beings, as symbolic beings, I've said already, with a mind, a personality, an individual. This is what Roussau, Voltaire and all romanticism is about. But we must not forget that jsut as romanticism was based on individuation, it was also based on ideation. It had not real connection to reality, and many poets (like Lord Byron, Espronceda...) felt the confrontment of their ideals with reality. Here came Hegel. The state is everything, we can't be in charge of each individual, as the human rights want to make us believe. And if indeed we say that it's not about each individual but all individuals, then we're automatically leaving individuation and generalising.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

I agree with you that democracy is the dictatorship of the majority (as Plato said "rule by the ignorant masses") but all the various alternatives which have been tried to date are infinitely worse. The solution, as I see it, is to make sure the masses aren't ignorant.

The ignorant doesn't want to be wisdom. The wisdom doesn't want to be ignorant. Here it's true what you said up there that we want nothing, in the sense that we want nothing else than what we are. You can't have intellectuals all around, I know it seems unfair but if we're all the same it's also unfair. There is such infairness for Capitalism just as well as in Communism. But I don't see these two as ways of living, but ways of dieing (maybe I got this by reading Hidegger's Sein Und Zeit): capitalism eliminates time by going so fast that each moment, each point in time is insignificant and stops existing, and on the other side communism elliminates time by going so slow that each moment is eternal, that there is no moment at all at the end. By the way, Spain's economy is not particularly the best, a few control a lot, too much, but it's the country in Europe with th ebiggest ration of total population under population in university. We will see in the future of this dis-ignorantation is as good as it's seen by most.

Originally Posted by harmonygirl

I really don't know what you mean by your next response to my post post-modern comment. I feel the earth move and the life that imbues everything. There is death, but it certainly is not universal or even profound. Maybe it's just a question of perspective.

What are you refering here to (by post postmodern comment)? I believe death to be very profound, in fact the most profound thing of all, it is the proof of the life, just as the number that comes oout of the dice is the proof of the throw, that is, the neccesity is the proof of the gamble. Everything is a question of perspective, but at the same time nothing is. I'm slowlly but strongly devleoping an attack to Hegel and Nietzsche which I will finally write and post as article. I hope to find a solution to this moment in time. Maybe time has gone and it's too late to do so, though.