God exists.

A1 The article is only about "physical pain." There is such a thing as emotional pain. The death of your child causes (in a healthy person) the most unbearable pain, for obvious evolutionary reasons. Similarly, testicular damage causes profound pain in males. Physical pain is preferable to the death of your child (and no, I'm not going to argue this point.) There's the issue of psychopaths, of course. Then again, there's base instincts and the feeling of having them unfulfilled, e.g. hunger, sex, social interaction. Show me an asexual psychopath who suffers from CIP, is in a vegetative state and never experiences distress of any kind, and I'll show you something that's not a human being. E1 But as I stated in B.1 which you interestingly didn't object to, "To exhibit a phenomenon means to accept that that phenomenon is exhibited." Again, find me the asexual CIP psychopath, much less the one who got to be a scientist, and ... you know the rest. They can deny conscious experience if they want. I didn't advocate for consciousness directly; I deduced consciousness from pain. Light the scientist's lab coat on fire. If he flinches, according to my deduction, he accepts the reality of pain. In technical terms, my position is clearly a delusion. A single typo would render it such. Functionally, the proposition "Whose position is correct?" could be clarified as "Who's position contains less delusory parts and is thus more truthful?" I claim that mine is. F3 And yes: You, me, and earth are all delusions. That doesn't mean they are absolute delusions. They carry some utility, but delusory parts, too. They aren't articulated clearly enough in either of our minds to constitute reality in any pain-sense. If I'm some form of Google AI you're conversing with your conception of me as a person is shattered. What you experience approximates, but does not constitute, reality as such. "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... K2 No. Assuming you mean the logic sense, an equivocation is "a fallacy caused by the double meaning of a word." http://www.dictionary.com... Which double meaning are you referring to? "to avoid sth."? I already provided the synonym "to diverge from sth." I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this, since this is something like the fourth attempt at explaining the difference between the present progressive tense and the present perfect tense. >>The act of doing X IS NOT EQUAL TO the state of having done X! O2 Really? I don't mean pain equals pleasure in the moment. The emphasis is on pain which you "manage to endure." On the one hand, there's the flush of positive emotion as a result of having something negative "gotten over with," which I hope you've experienced and I don't need a source for. What I was getting at instead is that practicing endurance leads to greater competence which leads to more pleasure--across every domain of life. Wiese, B.S. (2007). Successful pursuit of personal goals and subjective well-being. In B.R. Little, K. Salmela-Aro, & S.D. Phillips (Eds.), Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Action and Human Flourishing (pp. 301-328). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. https://blog.rjmetrics.com... https://selfdeterminationtheory.org... p.234 ff. http://psychology.wikia.com... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org...(personality_trait) https://en.wikipedia.org...(psychological) https://en.wikipedia.org... P2 It's just the deduction from O2. R3 I find it utterly mind-boggling that you think goals are "self-evident" but pain isn't. I had to deduce goals because people claim they don't have them. Yet next to nobody claims they don't feel pain. It's not really part of the debate but I'd be curious to know your reasoning here. W2 Your PC is both your concept of it as well as the thing itself that someone put together. Both have functional utility. To the extent that they do, they're part of the truth. You tell me what a PC is, and everything about your definition that's useful to me is true. You go build a PC, and everything about the process that works is done truthfully. W3.2 I was thinking about this exact example as I tried to remember all these facts and arguments correctly. A hammer was devised over the centuries by people who spoke the truth about hammers to each other. Your concept of a hammer is truthful to the extent that you end up using it correctly. Therefore, a hammer, like any tool, is part of the truth. Z2 Your dog is a tool to the extent that you can conceptualize him. That goes for humans as well. If you shake my hand, that hand becomes your tool for social communication. The part that can't be a tool in itself is the subject's consciousness. It all goes back to pain. AA1 This I thought would be self-evident and I'm not sure how to explain it even more carefully. Sonar against underwater terrain? Your fingertips against the surface/ shape of an object? Your thoughts against a novel idea? I was just trying to render obvious the connection between interaction and revelation. AD1 https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org...(cosmogony)#Chaoskampf https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org...(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org...(goddess) https://en.wikipedia.org... AD2 Atheists have it, too. They act it out. They just don't articulate it. Children know how to play games before they learn how to speak. They couldn't possibly formulate the rules, and yet follow them. AE2 Over half the world's population is covered by Christianity/ Islam. Then there's Judaism, the ancestor of the two, which of course evolved from polytheism. There are many other examples. https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... And every non-monotheistic tradition I know has at least a sovereign deity. AF3.2 That's an argument from ignorance. If you say ideas can be widespread for thousands of years for some reason other than natural selection, you literally say human ideas are supernatural. AG1 All of our attributes THAT DON'T ONLY KILL US. Everything else: Selected for without exception. By definition. AH2.2 https://en.wikipedia.org... People act against the positive archetypes, meaning they act out the negative archetypes. Personal/ communal: https://www.ncjrs.gov... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... Dr. Jordan Peterson, of recent anti-postmodernism fame. His lectures are based chiefly on Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Piaget, as far as I can tell. This is a helpful clip: Nation-states: (not just atheism, but the abandonment of archetypal tradition in general as root cause) https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... Civilizations: (the balance of order and chaos, continued renewal, and the punishment for pathological order/ chaos is laid out in all myths, including Christianity) https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... Why Islam is not an "organic" religion: https://en.wikipedia.org... Islam rejecting the principle of truth laid out in proper myths: https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... Cultural stagnation as a result of inbreeding, not religiosity: https://en.wikipedia.org... http://www.nytimes.com... AK1 I think I have sufficiently defined what a real goal is. You are severely restricted by reality in what goals you can pursue. Not any framework will do. watch 2:20 - 6:00 This was a lot of work. I appreciate your engagement.