A Group for Furries to Discuss Philosophy

I have recently been reminded that you shouldn't take anything for granted. As each day seems to draw by faster and faster, we forget to stop, step back and enjoy the view. I know the attractions of that next big high (next holiday, next paycheck, next latest must have fashion accessory), but how many of us are grateful of where we are already? Dissatisfaction is so easy to listen to, but when a good thing goes you'll miss it:

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone"

This fits in very closely with the Buddhist teachings which I've taken to heart. Everything that is here and now we should endevour to appreciate, and when tomorrow becomes today we should appreciate that as well. Its almost as if there are these treasures that we pass by every day because we've got our sights fixed too firmly on a bit of pretty glass in the distance.

"Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love." - Kahlil Gibran

I just came across this quote doing more cryptograms....and it's a fascinating view of love. It presents love as comparable to a self-sustaining organism. A perfect concept; perfectly balanced, as it needs nothing but itself for both manifestation and sustenance. Yet the quote belies the potential power contained therein. Love appears to be the ideal that not only lies in harmony with anything and everything, but is the creator of that harmony in so many cases.

But the universe proves that everything has a price. I'm trying to figure out the price of love as presented as this distant, vague, and broad--yet almost personified and therefore individualized and highly approachable--concept. Surely, we cannot appreciate love without knowing its antithetical enemies--concepts such as war, hate, and hurt. But once love is manifested--allegedly of its own accord, giving the manifestation itself a price of nothing--what is its price? I have seen those who give love freely continue to give until they are exhausted of it, because they have not received comparable reciprocation. Perhaps this is what Gibran meant in saying that "love is sufficient unto love." But true, unyielding, undying love needs not reciprocation. The giver will continue to give, uncaring of its own drain on other resources, both internal and external, until it withers away, used up to nothingness by its own endless generosity built from love. Perhaps this is the price of what is allegedly the most perfect and most powerful of all emotions and experiences. Love requires reciprocation, or else its bearer becomes drained until it can go no further.

As for me, I want to continue to love, and I am eternally happy and grateful to know those who reciprocate it to me. It is a blessing beyond blessings, and truly, the penultimate reason to be alive each and every day.

Any thoughts?

It seems to be a common thread, many thinkers are also fiction writers.  Fiction is probably the best way to explore a hypothetical "what if," test it out, and see how plausible it sounds.  That said, fiction also is something of a vacuum in which you can make just about any idea work.

Anyway, my biggest question is about personal preferences.  To those who write fiction, how much of your own thoughts about issues do you inject?  Do you make an effort not to become too wrapped up in declaring your stance on everything?  Do you just casually let the chips fall where they may?  Or maybe you are very open and blatant about what you put into your fictional stories.

I tend to try to keep a certain distance between a lot of my ideas and the stories I write.  I do have some stories that usually have themes related to my ideas, but I try to make that secondary to telling a good story and making the chemistry between the characters believable.   My characters may go through the same inner monologues I do, but usually come to vastly different conclusions about how to handle things.  They're products of their own time and place, and I sort of let the story write itself that way.

Of course, I've read works by some authors who were able to write decent work without even going into the nuances of their characters' thought processes, and those whose every story embodies their values to the point of being unreadable.  How do you write yours? 

Hello everyone, sorry I hadn't posted anything sooner.

I'm Threetails, most of my friends even call me "Three" IRL.  I've been a fur since about 2002 and I've been a deep thinker for most of my life.

I don't know how to describe my personal philosophy; it's sort of still under construction, but I guess it borrows ideas from a lot of different philosophies and combines them in a new way.

The gist of it is to allow people to make as many decisions on their own as possible, but always with the pretext of having been informed first.  In that respect I hold truth as the highest virtue because only when the truth is known can people act in a healthy and rational way on their own accord.  I hold prohibition culture as the greatest vice because prohibition- whether it be of a device, a substance, or a way of thinking- automatically assumes that the better part of society is in need of a paternal state.  I see prohibition as the pretext to fascism and all forms of oppression.

I also value a certain benevolence.  People should have consequences for their mistakes, but they should also have the chance to learn from them and move on in their lives without having to revisit them incessantly.  In allowing people to make their own choices it is inevitable that certain mistakes will be made, and rather than legislate against these I believe that these mistakes are the necessary cost of liberty. 

I believe in giving the chance for redemption until such time as someone has proven a pathological offender; I also believe in investing more into good, objective science to permanently cure the pathological offender rather than force them to either become a prisoner or a casualty.  I am convinced that more than the subjective idea of justice, the objective idea of redemption and rehabilitation are the key to allowing people to grow from their mistakes rather than diminish from them. 

I also have some very interesting thoughts about how philosophy and science have divorced from one another, and how the two might eventually come to a point of harmony when certain theories of the mind are reconciled, but I think I'll save that for another entry.

In Science class at the moment it's turning into a RS lesson because we're learning about what horrors science can lead to if not watched and put into the wrong hands, and how ironicly that can completely go against the good intenions of the scientists who researched into what influenced it. For example theres a famous poem:

Einstein's eyes
were filled with tears
when he heard about Hiroshima.

Mr. Tamihi
had no eyes left
to show his grief

Nobel must have been ticked when he made dynamite to be used to prevent deaths. Because unlike say volatile gunpowder, which burns rapidly. It detonates, and only under very precise circumstances. But soon after dynamite was re-purosed as a weapon and killed many.

Fritz Haber looked into and revolutionised pesticides which would in the long run save a good BILLION people from the agonising death of starvation. But he allowed that information to go the Germans who used his creations as weapons used in the trenchs and later in the Holocaust gas chambers. Fritz's wife commited suicide in the shame of what her husband inspired.

But heres the question. What if Charles Darwin lived to see the Holocaust? What would he think of the hell that he indirectly concieved? Would he be happy with it?

Spend a day in a gay! God damn do I do the most disgusting things! I can't believe we haven't been taken out of our misery!

So with all the people who just don't get what DWOAG means, here's something you can do all day everyday!

So I made a video! I hope everyone watches it to see what "hate" is according to Google.

Someone in a forum I frequent posted this nifty article involving recent scientific work testing the notion of retrocausality: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/arti…

The article is a year and a half old, but still provokes interesting questions. I thought this line was particularly unique: "While it would mean we cannot change the past, it also implies that we cannot change the future."

In other words, if retrocausality is proven to be true, this could also potentially prove the concept of destiny...or at least a semblence of it. However, if conscious minds retrocaused the shaping of the universe to be sufficient for life, as the article propose plausible should retrocausality be proven true, that begs some other questions as well: Why wouldn't conscious minds shape the universe to provide us with more advanced life for ourselves, or life that does not require cessation? Also, this would suggest that all the information of the universe's total existence along the span of all time was already preset--all of our lives were already set in stone, so what greater force set up such a complex weaving of detailed intricacies?

This week mars the 60th birthday of israel (or rather the 60th year since its declaration of independence on 14 May 1948). So if you could send a greetings card or a letter to israel, what would you put on it?

SP