Philosopher questions are a total crock of S***

While making the rounds of news websites, I notice that it is supposedly "World Philosopher Day" or something like that. I scanned the article and found it, as expected, full of the crap that modern philosophy is today. But then I realized that I had an excellent case study to help those of you who are trying to detox from the strange problems of faith and reasoning deficiency that has afflicted many moderns. This is especially for you young readers, in genuine fondness.

First some background. Philosophy ain't what it used to be, so do not be fooled that it still has its intellectual and noble luster. Here's the problem. Ancient philosophy, which was noble, was the amalgamation of the best of human beings pondering about the meaning of life. Thus the ancient philosophers included their perceptions of the divinity (their faith) and also what we call psychology (the reasons for human behavior). Thus ancient philosophers would draw upon all aspects of life, and hence leave open all possibilities, when they reasoned their way through problems.

Modern philosophers have, in mirroring modern intellectual thought, compartmentalized philosophy out of the natural fullness of background of what modern philosophers now consider to be ancillary and thus invalid considerations, such as faith. Thus they tend to think they are posing philosophical questions when they construct binary decision trees and pose them to each other or to the unsuspecting reader. So a modern philosopher question is not "Why" but "Would you do A or B?" When one ponders "Why" one has to consider that C, D, E, F and unimaginable xu6mx? might exist as explanations or options. Thus modern philosophers are guilty of collusion in rendering modern thought of humans to be more and more like rigid computer programs that deny the noble, the unknown, the unexpected and the numinous. They both deliberately and unconsciously contribute to the societal darkness of spirit and depression by implying that everyone would be helpless in dire situations. Just reading their "ruminations" is depressing, and I'm glad I had a great piece of chocolate cheesecake before I read the article rather than after.

So here is the case study. I copy here one of their stupid scenarios, which they have the nerve to call a "philosophical question."

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

It's almost insulting to all our dignity to deal with this "case" but I know that many of you, through no lack of intelligence, will take the bait when you hear such a question. So I will deal with it so you learn to recognize the stinking thinking (as they call it in AA rehab) behind these so called philosophical questions.

First of all, you are forced to accept a totally unrealistic scenario because it has been stripped to lifeless lack of detail. Are the hostages bound or free to move around? Not even such basic information is given, yet you are supposed to answer which of the only two choices you would make. What if the rest of the hostages were fellow kidnappers that he had turned on, and thus they were not innocent? Are any of them children or infants? You are supposed to gobble up a lifeless situation that never reflects real life. In real life there are real people with real contexts in every situation that informs what you might or might not do. So you should refuse to answer such a moronic and stupid "philosophical case" right from the start, since it does not describe a genuine human situation, having been stripped of all detail.

Second of all, since you lack extra information (like how well armed is the hostage taker?) you cannot answer any more plausible answers than the "yes" or "no" to the "deal" you are offered. For example, suppose he has a gun that is not automatic. Suppose some of the hostages are smart and able people. Could you pretend to agree, take the gun, and catching the eye of the first person you are supposed to "shoot" give him or her a signal to fall to the ground while you shoot the hostage taker? I mean, duh.

Third, even if you agree to the stupid scenario, why would you not choose in reality to do an option "C" or "D?" For example, what if you refuse to make the decision and instead, make an impassioned plea for grace to the hostage taker, ask him if he ever had a mother, fall on your knees and refuse to answer, praying only to God, and etc. and so on. World history is full of such events where the hostage taker has a conversion, an enlightenment and/or a change in heart, being baffled by such a response.

So do not fall for ridiculous modern poseurs who claim to be philosophers, since they have stripped all the context and richness of humanity and the divine from their supposed ponderings, and make them like cheap quiz shows. I had a former friend who used to love asking these types of questions which he called 'out of the box' or 'lateral'" thinking, and they annoyed me for their binary tree depressive computer thinking back then, and that was fifteen years ago.

A genuine philosopher of the ancient sort would never have thought of a question such as the "case" above. He or she would have pondered something like "Where does the desire to take a hostage come from?" That could have led into all sorts of fascinating, intellectual and spiritually rich mining of true philosophy. What does make a "hostage taker" anyway? A philosopher could write books about that very subject and thus, in the exploration, provide some genuine information and thoughts about context, scenarios and options for reaction.

So happy "World Philosopher Day," another fake by fakes in a poseur society. *Loud raspberry* for self satisfied modern manipulators.

And young people, do not be buffaloed into answering stupidly crafted questions. This quiz and reality show generation needs to realize that you should model yourself after what I demonstrated above, which is to refuse to be fooled into thinking that if you were "smart" you'd answer the questions as posed, and select the "right answer" (or, accept the depressive doctrination that there is no happy ending to the question, since it is arranged to be deliberately nihilistic). Refuse to let your mind be stultified by such artificial and destructive games.

I hope that you have found this helpful. It is not a trivial matter, if you think about it. Since faith has been artificially decoupled from reasoning, at the same time that genuine rational reasoning has become taught by society to be increasingly irrational, you need to identify such brainwashing techniques that pose as asking "morality" questions, but as you can see, since they provide no reference point for morality, TOTALLY lack a moral context rather than as falsely promoted being a morality based case.

The term "quickening"

I have used the term "quickening" in my blog postings about life beginning at conception. I see that Senator Biden is glomming onto that term but using one specific ancient unscientific definition of it. So lest my readers be confused, here is the scoop on the word "quickening."

If you look through a microscope at a living cell, just before it divides it appears to shake or vibrate. That is "quickening." That is why I use the term to mean that the human sperm fertilizes the human egg, forming a single embryonic cell. That cell moves to the wall of the womb and attaches itself. Once it attaches itself, if it is viable then it does that "quickening" vibration and performs its first cell division. (Living beings grow by a process of continuing cell division.) So what I have explained to you in the blog is that the moment the embryonic cell performs its first division (its very first "growth"), that is quickening and that is when it receives its soul and its guardian angel.

Now, ancient philosophers did not have access to scientific and biological knowledge that we have today. They would mostly have known about embryos and developing pre born babies via observing miscarriages. No one did dissections or have examples to study of babies developing in womb. So when a woman had an early miscarriage, by the time the baby came out, it looked much like a blob of matter and not an individual to the human eye. Thus some philosophers developed the theory that at some point in the womb the baby went from "blob" to "human" and that it was at the human appearing formation that it "quickened," meaning vibrating with life from receiving its soul. Do you see what I mean? They were judging, not surprisingly, that when they observed tissue that came out of a woman who miscarried that it does not "look" human yet, therefore it probably was not quickened with a soul.

Remember that these were very pastoral and agricultural societies, knowledgeable in the reproduction of field and farm animals. So if you break open a chicken egg, you see only a white blob where a future chick would develop. So no one today feels bad about having scrambled eggs. But if you looked inside an egg and saw a miniature baby chick attached, that would put people off of wanting to eat eggs for sure, because visually it would clearly be a little chick. So the people of ancient times were used to knowing that animal embryos looked just like blobs early in their life cycle stage. They likewise concluded that when a woman miscarried something that looked like a blob that this was the "prehuman" form of the baby. When a woman miscarried later in term, where it is recognizably a baby, even after being mangled in the course of being miscarried, philosophers logically assumed that at some point in the womb the proto baby blob "quickened" by getting a soul and then started looking human. They didn't know any better and if you think about it, that's not bad for people living two thousand years ago.

More to the point, they recognized that the soul is entered into the pre-born baby, NOT as the baby exits the womb, which is ridiculous, but obviously the attitude of pro abortionists and astrologers today. So the ancients, using the only evidence they had, which is the bloody mass of tissue after a miscarriage, deduced that at some point in the womb the blob "turned into" a human baby with a soul. They then tried to fix number of days and so forth and got into trouble by guessing that baby girls got souls at different months of gestation than boys and so forth. That could also be because they observed more miscarriages with recognizable gender features at different stages of pregnancy, and being philosophers, not scientists, deduced strictly from that anecdotal observation. In their defense that was not a bad attempt and was definitely a pro-life stance from the very beginning of discussion of this topic. No one doubted it was a baby in the womb and that it got its soul in the womb, but based on tissue observation from miscarriage and lacking microscopes and other devices we have today, they did not understand the early developmental stages of an embryo because they could not see it and see its human features.

Plus, philosophers always differentiated between animals and humans by a criterion of "self awareness." Humans are self aware, while animals are not, they assume. Thus they would think, using their deductive reasoning of the time, that a human baby would not "quicken" and have a soul until it looked like a human, that is, in their mind, that it had the features to be self aware (eyes, ears, fully formed limbs). Again, they would miss evidence of that in the early months of pregnancy because it would be "unclean" tissue that came out during an early pregnancy miscarriage, and not a recognizable human form, as it would be if they could see the scans that we can see today. Also, obviously there is a flaw in their logic that a human gets a soul only when it has the physique to be self aware. God does not wait to give a baby a soul until it has eyes, for example. So they missed that error in their own deductive reasoning process simply because they lacked a view inside the living womb in the earliest days of pregnancy.

I hope this helps.

Oh, by the way, here is another example of quickening that will help in your understanding of medicine. If you ever had an infection you know that an infection hurts. Well, why does an infection hurt? Infection is caused by bacteria which multiplies very rapidly (in terms of minutes and hours). Bacteria "quickens," that is, vibrates as it goes through this rapid cell division process. This applies pressure and heat to nerves, which is why the pain is rapid and acute. Some infections, gross as this sounds, you can feel the vibration of the bacteria growing (yuck). I have felt it and if you ever had "red eye" (conjunctivitis) you probably felt it too, times when your eye vibrates from the infection. That's the bacteria actually "quickening" and growing (yuck). An anti-biotic does not kill bacteria. An anti-biotic stops the bacteria from multiplying, so with the very short life span of bacteria cells they die out and are not replaced by new bacteria. That is how eyedrops work against conjunctivitis; the drops are not killing the bacteria but prevent them from reproducing and thus you wait until all the bacteria dies in the course of its natural short life span of days or at most weeks.

This is also why when one takes an anti-biotic in pill form, one must keep taking all the pills even after the symptoms are gone. This is because like I said, the anti-biotic does not kill the bacteria; it prevents it from reproducing. Thus you might have some bacteria that is still able to reproduce that take longer to naturally die off. You want to keep blocking its ability to reproduce until it does all die off on its own. And that is also why excessive prescribing of anti-biotics can (and already has) result in bacteria that evolve to continue to reproduce even when hit with that particular anti-biotic. That is called "resistence." But that is beside the point, I just thought as part of my series in helping people regain logic and factual information skills that I would provide an example of why the term "quickening" as in vibration came into use and how it is possible to feel it, albeit in a yucky infection experience. Yuck. I could really have skipped those feelings, like bacteria Frankenstein "It's alive." Very yuck.