MilSpecs wrote:For me, being open minded and willing to change is essential.
I say, let's get the federal government completely out of abortion, education, and association. Which of those ideas are you open minded/willing to change to?
This thread is about religion, not politics. Spirituality is about personal growth. Keep the focus on your own uterus, your own education, and your own associations. We should be asking ourselves: what kind of degenerates am I hanging out with?
Schoolmarms gonna schoolmarm, I guess.
Sorry that I missed the point that you are only open minded about religion.
To whom should I pray for your "personal growth" and "spirituality?"
Fife wrote:
I say, let's get the federal government completely out of abortion, education, and association. Which of those ideas are you open minded/willing to change to?
This thread is about religion, not politics. Spirituality is about personal growth. Keep the focus on your own uterus, your own education, and your own associations. We should be asking ourselves: what kind of degenerates am I hanging out with?
Schoolmarms gonna schoolmarm, I guess.
Sorry that I missed the point that you are only open minded about religion.
To whom should I pray for your "personal growth" and "spirituality?"
The Flying Spaghetti Monster, who else?
Seriously, arguing about religious belief is like arguing about colors or taste - it's completely subjective. It can only be personal. The benefits of the practices can be proven or disproven, but the brand makes no provable difference. In other words, prayer can be of benefit. Who it's directed to makes no difference.
MilSpecs wrote:Who it's directed to makes no difference.
That's spirituality, folks.
GrumpyCatFace wrote:Dumb slut partied too hard and woke up in a weird house. Ran out the door, weeping for her failed life choices, concerned townsfolk notes her appearance and alerted the fuzz.
Hastur wrote:I'm currently working through Jordan Peterssons series on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. It's quite an eye opener for an old secular agnostic like me. He shares my fascination for Nietzsche, Jung and Solzjenitsyn. That helps. I'm almost on the verge of joining a church again. I left the Swedish state church as soon as it was made possible. If I join a congregation again it would probably be Catholic. We just last week got the first Swedish Cardinal ever.
I still don't believe in a Personal God.
Oh wow. I have been looking for something like this, if it is what I think it is.
Speaker to Animals wrote:
GrumpyCatFace wrote:
Speaker to Animals wrote:Oh wow. It almost remained civil for an entire page.
I don't mean to be 'uncivil' at all. Just giving my genuine personal view on religion. The 'pacifier' phrase isn't meant as an insult, but I don't know of a nicer way to put it.
I understand where you are coming from. But it is an insult. I am not sure you understand it, though. I came from no religious background at all. I was raised as you are now. From my perspective, the direction you are taking will deprive your children of meaning and hope. They will only find so much satisfaction chasing pleasure and wealth.
I think this is a real problem, though I don't believe in God.
Right now, I have a hypothesis that Christianity (really, all JCI faith) is largely to blame.
I was baptized and all that stuff, but it was mainly going through the motions. My parents are not particularly religious. Some of my relatives are.
Anyway, the problem is that God or Jesus is the conduit for everything. There are a lot of good messages and ideas about how to live your life, but with the JCI religion they all ultimately rest upon divine command theory. (What is moral is moral because God says so). There isn't much in the way of deep examination of our inner workings in the original texts.
I studied philosophy in college and focused on ethics but the preponderance of post-Christian ethics is stuff like utilitarianism and deontology/kantianism (rules based ethics). And it's about discovering some external system of thought that tells you what to do, often with Christianity mixed in.
If you connect with religion, that is all well and good (or at least, let's concede that.)
However, I never connected deeply with religion. It just doesn't make sense to me. And, indeed, I think I was morally rudderless for most of my youth. Now, I mean morality in the big, Aristotle sense. How to live. Eudaimonia. I certainly had principles. I did some good things and some bad things. But there wasn't much general direction. Most importantly, I didn't know how to break down my own thinking and rebuild it in more useful and productive ways.
Later in life, after college, I rediscovered ancient philosophy. While much of it asserts a god or gods as a foundation, the ideas for how we should think and behave come from rigorous self examination. What causes us anxiety? What makes us happy? What do we think will make us happy, but won't? etc. Yes, the bible et al will provide answers to these questions, but not pages and pages of detailed answers based on dialectic, or logic, or just describing our thought processes in detail.
This sort of thing is pretty impoverished in the West these days. There is psychology and self help gurus, some of whom really are helpful. But they mostly fall quite short of what was going on in antiquity, when men wrote endless volumes addressing these subjects directly and in great detail and some lived almost like monks, devoted to the practice of their philosophy.
I take in a lot of contemporary Buddhism for this reason. The overlap with ancient Western thought is very high and I think in some ways, (examining what constitutes the self) they surpassed it. And this is an active tradition with many people living as Diogenes or Epictetus once did. So, while I don't consider myself a Buddhist, contemporary Buddhism is closest to what I'm interested in. Buddhist talks or teaching often mention the Buddha only in passing, focusing instead on something like recent developments in neuroscience and what they tell us about our own behavior.
Some of these people believe in flying monks shooting lighting out of their asses, and actually being reincarnated as a squid. But that's mostly way in the background.
I've looked at a lot of Christian stuff. Watched a whole Yale lecture series on The New Testament. Listened to some youtubes of just Jesus's teachings. It's interesting, but just doesn't cut it for me. Another reason is that they seem driven by covering up fear of things like death, rather than coming to see that we have much less to fear than we think.
An example of what I'm talking about is the stoic practice of negative visualization. Here it is discussed along side recent observations in psychology.
“The psychologists Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein have studied this phenomenon and given it a name: hedonic adaptation. To illustrate the adaptation process, they point to studies of lottery winners. Winning a lottery typically allows someone to live the life of his dreams. It turns out, though, that after an initial period of exhilaration, lottery winners end up about as happy as they previously were. … Another, less dramatic form of hedonic adaptation takes place when we make consumer purchases. Initially, we delight in the wide-screen television or fine leather handbag we bought. After a time, though, we come to despise them and find ourselves longing for an even wider-screen television or an even more extravagant handbag. Likewise, we experience hedonic adaptation in our career.”
He then presents the Stoic solution to the problem:
“The stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value— that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique— let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus . 5 It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.”
----
“By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent . We will no longer sleepwalk through our life. Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.”
Here is another good example. I was listening to a talk now and he was going through ways to clear your mind for meditation purposes.
Even if you don't meditate (you should though) it's good to combat the monkey chatter. So, 2 suggestions for doing so.
One was to just observe it. Name your thoughts. Think, "I am mad at X because Y." Don't get involved. Like watching a crazy person go on a rant, rather than engaging in a conversation with a crazy person. This can be hard.
The other, when plagued by self doubt, is to really dwell on the good things you have done for people. Acts of generosity, for example. This is pretty easy, but effective. Like many such tactics, it seems obvious. But have you ever tried it, particularly when in the midst of beating yourself up, or doubting yourself?
Perhaps I'm just particularly screwed up, but I require this level of practical advice.
LVH2 wrote:Here is another good example. I was listening to a talk now and he was going through ways to clear your mind for meditation purposes.
Even if you don't meditate (you should though) it's good to combat the monkey chatter. So, 2 suggestions for doing so.
One was to just observe it. Name your thoughts. Think, "I am mad at X because Y." Don't get involved. Like watching a crazy person go on a rant, rather than engaging in a conversation with a crazy person. This can be hard.
The other, when plagued by self doubt, is to really dwell on the good things you have done for people. Acts of generosity, for example. This is pretty easy, but effective. Like many such tactics, it seems obvious. But have you ever tried it, particularly when in the midst of beating yourself up, or doubting yourself?
Perhaps I'm just particularly screwed up, but I require this level of practical advice.
Haven't tried the first one - usually just spend the time battling myself to shut up inside.
The second one, I use throughout my day. It's a cornerstone of my identity. I don't get much external positive reinforcement, so I learned a long time ago to create my own. Without it, I don't know where I'd be.
MilSpecs wrote:
This thread is about religion, not politics. Spirituality is about personal growth. Keep the focus on your own uterus, your own education, and your own associations. We should be asking ourselves: what kind of degenerates am I hanging out with?
Schoolmarms gonna schoolmarm, I guess.
Sorry that I missed the point that you are only open minded about religion.
To whom should I pray for your "personal growth" and "spirituality?"
The Flying Spaghetti Monster, who else?
Seriously, arguing about religious belief is like arguing about colors or taste - it's completely subjective. It can only be personal. The benefits of the practices can be proven or disproven, but the brand makes no provable difference. In other words, prayer can be of benefit. Who it's directed to makes no difference.
When you just talk about health and mental benefits, that's plausible. But religion is usually more than that- for Christians, it determines your eternal fate, for Hindus, your next life's quality, etc. So to those people, it very much matters who the prayer is directed to. As an example, taking a Christian view (that probably being the most familiar to everyone here), Tom's praying to Vishnu might give him peace of mind, of less stress, or lead to better behavior morally, but it is really useless and harmful in the long run, because his soul would still lie apart from God in hell, forever.
So understand that the lifetime benefit of something like prayer on Tom's life might not depend on who it is to, but to the religious person, it is not at all subjective. It is personal, yes, but for all religions I can think of the existence of their deity is objective- according to them, God is God whether you believe or not.
To whit, religious belief is personal, but not subjective.
"Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage...
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such Liberty" - Richard Lovelace
Postby Speaker to Animals » Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:58 pm
You cannot really guess how anybody will be judged, though. You are not able to see the totality of a person's life and make an objective assessment of their culpability.
The only thing we can do is confront very bad ideas to dissuade others from making poor choices. Confronting the wishy-washy new age universalism espoused by milspecs is rather straightforward, as it usually is not even internally consistent.
I think that, just on rational grounds alone, monotheism becomes the most likely truth, though it's not strictly provable, only more likely than the alternatives. Of the monotheistic religions, I think you end up with Judaism or Christianity as the most likely culprits, if you are to assume God directly interacted with humanity at all. Deism is a perfectly rational conclusion, though that requires the assumption that God does not, will mot, and never has intervened with humanity, which is an equally risky assumption.
