"justification by nature" is just another sort of teleology.

@georgia This whole "natural" meme is medieval.

Natural things were part of God's plan. Thus, nature = good.

Artificial things were part of humanity's largely sinful willfulness. Thus, artificial = bad.

Really, everything is natural and includes both the good and the bad.

We shouldn't be using heuristics from the medieval era that have about as much relation to reality as miasma or humors.

@urusan nature = everything is a meaningless definition for the word, unless you make it equivalent to the very god's will you detest so much, in which case it's simply misleading and uncommon. The only meaningful definition is that nature is what we consciously/willfully are not.
@georgia

@namark @georgia Is it really such a meaningful distinction though?

Is there really anything separating humankind from the rest of nature?

Beyond probably not existing, the distinction has many problems, but one of the biggest is that it implicitly separates humanity from nature.

Once we think of ourselves as separate from nature, we don't need to rely on nature and can do as we please to it without consequences. We only need to rely on the artificial things we build.

@namark @georgia This way of thinking also makes it hard to think of nature as anything other than the god-given environment that we started with, even though in reality nature is always changing. Any changes we make to nature destroy it permenantly by turning it artificial.

This is simply not true, nature and humanity co-exist and co-evolve, because they are one in the same. We can move forward together rather than leaving nature behind as a twisted wreck, which we may or may not survive.

@urusan I have no idea what you are going on about, no offence, but it sounds like a religious babble to me. Can you address what I wrote, or are you advocating to not use the word nature at all?

To reiterate and elaborate: your definition of the word is meaningless. The only meaningful definition is that it is what is not conscious/willful, or in some sense related to such as words are flexible. The distinction is as important as the distinction between any other two meaningful words, because language.

Examples:
It is human nature to be hungry.

Your definition (nature = everything):
It is human everything to be hungry.
Or simply, Humans get hungry. The use of word nature was pointless.

My definition (nature = not will):
It is human not will to be hungry.
Or rephrasing a bit, humans do not hunger by choice. The word expressed a clear meaning.

The only interpretation I got when pressing people on this is nature = everything = god's will:
It is human god's will to be hungry, that is, humans are hungry by god's will, that is someone with some sort of an appetite disorder is not human. Does that sound like a good interpretation of the original statement?

This new Gaia religion, teaching nature = everything (= god's will as that's the only way to not make the word completely meaningless), is in no way different from any other, and this is what you preach, while most normal people have an intuitive understanding of the word far superior to you conceptions.

@georgia

@namark @urusan acknowledging that humans are part of nature and therefore all our conduct is "natural" and appeals to nature are causistic folly isn't particularly religious. seems like a rejection of teleological metaphysics if anything.

@georgia I do not understand what you are saying, so I'm just going to use your sentence as another example. This is not a common sense use, so my definition does not even apply. With nature = everything, what you wrote makes no sense, unless of course again being natural means being according to god's will (which I'm privy to as the prophet). The former makes your second sentence arbitrary and the latter makes it contradictory.

@urusan