There is a prominent dogma about religious equality under which all religions must be treated with respect. According to this dogma, sacredness is a private belief, and there is no objective sacredness in anything. Hence, either all religions must be rejected or all of them should be given equal respect. The fact is that those …
The Fallacy of the Idol Worship Argument
Some religions argue against the Vedic system that its followers worship “idols”. An “idol”, or a deity, as most of us call it, is a symbol of God, like symbols in a book communicate meaning. If you burn a book, you don’t burn the ideas denoted by the book; you only remove one way of …
Problems of Hegelian-Marxist Ideologies
Hegel is credited to have been the first in the Western world to bring the study of history as a subject of philosophy proper. He did so by creating the thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework for history. Hegelian philosophy became the foundation of Marxism that saw society in terms of dualisms of antithesis and thesis. Their conflict led …
A Personalist Foundation for Social Sciences
I used the last post to weave many seemingly disjointed ideas—modalities, inseparability, qualities, how the illusion of motion is created without a motion by revelation and hiding of modes, how this leads to alternative ideas of space and time, an alternative conception of laws of motion, and why the idea of a separated reality modeled …
The Implications of Compression and Incompressibility
No two people are completely alike. No two roses look exactly the same. No two oranges are identical. Even as we classify the world into concepts, those classifications do not entail that two things are exactly alike. This fact is accommodated in modern physics by permitting different distributions of matter and energy, subject to some …
The Conception of God in Vaiṣṇavism
Vaiṣṇavism presents a conception of God that doesn’t fit into well-known categories such as monotheism, polytheism, monism, pantheism, panentheism, henotheism, deism, and others. This is because Vaiṣṇavism accepts all their assertions and rejects all their negations. For example, the monotheistic claim that “God is one” doesn’t negate the polytheistic claim—i.e., “God is many”. Likewise, the …
Non-Dualism, Inseparability, and Entanglement
In the previous post, I made a pithy remark in passing—Progressive history doesn’t have revolutions and paradigm changes. I will use this post to explain how this is a consequence of the modern scientific assumptions about the separation of locations, times, and things. Separation allows us to count things, and then describe them using mathematical …
Laws of Increasing and Decreasing Returns
Laws are supposed to predict and explain. Predict means to describe the future relative to the present. Explain means to justify that prediction based upon ideas about reality. The Law of Diminishing Returns is a law that predicts that returns on investment must diminish over time but does not explain it. Without the explanation, we …
Free Will—Self-Control vs. Other-Control
In Abrahamic religions, free will is defined as the soul’s capacity to control matter. The soul is said to be free in the sense that it can do whatever it wants with material things. Conversely, the soul shouldn’t do such things to other souls, unless they acquiesce, because they too are free. Since animals and …