Happy atheists in foxholes?
This is inspired by a discussion from another thread, which is by now closed:
Reply to Christoffer :
[i]What I said was that it is possible to accept life, nature, the universe, as it is, no more or less, and any meaning in life or to existence, can be built upon that, rather than delusions that come out of a life crisis.
So, you say that poverty and living in the gutter will make people turn to things like religion easily. This I agree with, but I'm not talking about the psychology of religious people or how people turn to it, but that it is possible to accept the pointless existence of life and the universe and still feel meaning without adding religious delusions.[/i]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/553994
First of all, no, I'm not saying that "that poverty and living in the gutter will make people turn to things like religion easily", because I don't think they do. From what I've seen, religious people tend to forget about religion once the going gets tough. I do not think there are no atheists in the proverbial foxholes; on the contrary, foxholes seem to make people miserable, regardless whether they were theists or atheists when going in.
Reply to Christoffer says: "it is possible to accept life, nature, the universe, as it is, no more or less" and "it is possible to accept the pointless existence of life and the universe and still feel meaning".
So how does one do that?
What is the secret to being happy in a foxhole?
Reply to Christoffer :
[i]What I said was that it is possible to accept life, nature, the universe, as it is, no more or less, and any meaning in life or to existence, can be built upon that, rather than delusions that come out of a life crisis.
So, you say that poverty and living in the gutter will make people turn to things like religion easily. This I agree with, but I'm not talking about the psychology of religious people or how people turn to it, but that it is possible to accept the pointless existence of life and the universe and still feel meaning without adding religious delusions.[/i]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/553994
First of all, no, I'm not saying that "that poverty and living in the gutter will make people turn to things like religion easily", because I don't think they do. From what I've seen, religious people tend to forget about religion once the going gets tough. I do not think there are no atheists in the proverbial foxholes; on the contrary, foxholes seem to make people miserable, regardless whether they were theists or atheists when going in.
Reply to Christoffer says: "it is possible to accept life, nature, the universe, as it is, no more or less" and "it is possible to accept the pointless existence of life and the universe and still feel meaning".
So how does one do that?
What is the secret to being happy in a foxhole?
Comments (160)
My own view is people often hold beliefs with minimal commitment to them. Sometimes beliefs are held lightly so a person can feel a sense of belonging in their community.
Furthermore, people often jettison belief systems when things get very hard. - whatever those beliefs may be. An ontological crisis can generate significant disruption wherein the old ideas no longer seem to work.
That said, it goes both ways. A significant crisis is also an opportunity to seek a new belief system, perhaps for consolation.
The secret to being happy in the foxholes is probably to expect chaos and suffering in the first place. Some people are fortunate and do not get to know the foxholes.
The saying there are no atheists in the foxholes refers specifically to the fact that otherwise secular people become superstitious and religious when facing death for the first time in a terrifying war
zone. This falls under what might be called 'folk wisdom.'
There are of course some people who thrive on crisis and chaos. Their beliefs are unlikely to change in the foxholes. If we are to take the 'foxholes' as standing in for the vicissitudes (fortunes and tragedies) encountered in life, then who knows?
I generally think people derive meaning from immediate things - possessions, relationships, community, work, friends, place, hobbies, nature, prejudices, hatreds and loves. I suspect the big questions relating to transcendence play a minor role. Theism or atheism refer to clubs people belong to, it's a rare individual who lives them with commitment.
Meaning is use.
Even if life was intrinsically meaningless, extrinsic meaning can come from how life is used. Chess pieces on a chess board are intrinsically meaningless. The meaning of chess comes from how the pieces are moved on the board.
IE, meaning comes not from life itself but how life is used.
But the meaninglessness of the game may be the very meaning that you are searching for. A Dadaesque rejection of reason and logic for irrationality and intuition, a Continental rather than analytic approach.
As Duchamp wrote: "All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”
I was in what would have been a very serious car accident with an 18-wheeler and trailer, around 15 years ago. I got super lucky, the car was smashed, but I was totally fine. So there were no consequences to me or anyone else other than my car crushed and a fence broken when my car flew into it. I managed to open the door and just stroll right into organizing the police and everything on the location, the truck driver more traumatized than me.
When I got home a friend asked if I'm religious now. I replied sincerely: fuck off.
Quoting RussellA
Exactly my point.
People put so much effort into finding a cosmic meaning to everything that they can go through their entire life without putting much meaning into that life. Accepting the meaningless nature of the objective universe does not mean the subjective experience has to be meaningless, and I think that if one actively finds meaningful things out of the meaningless mess, that is worth every breath of one's life. A futile surrender to religious belief somewhat makes people miss out on actually feeling a meaning of existence within the life that they have. They focus all that energy on the hope of something totally unproven to show itself after death and it means wasting an entire life with the risk of nothing being beyond death, which by any facts about biology, is the truth.
For me, religious belief and people who are consumed by it are one of the great tragedies of the human condition.
Of course, some find meaning in the practices of religious belief, and that I'm not opposed to. The problem I have is when such belief is forced upon other people, indoctrinate them, and consequently affecting many others by the irrationality out of such forced belief. Not many major wars and conflicts have been done without any religious themes.
If people can find meaning in religious practices that doesn't force itself onto others, then that is a purposeful meaning in their life. But it's my hypothesis that we can find "rituals" outside of irrational belief, we can find meaning without irrational belief and we can live happily, even in face of tragedy, without irrational belief. Meditation is a great example of how some religious practices were made into practice outside of belief. Meditation is by many researchers found to be of great health benefit to the physical and mental state of the one practicing it. If someone creates a daily routine, a "ritual", to meditate every morning or every night, it can create a tremendous sense of calm and tranquility. Without having anything to do with belief or religion.
Finding meaning outside of belief systems and religion means it's always a search inwards. Introspection, listening to the inner voice as a guide for the meaning of external events. It requires an open mind, it requires learning new things, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy. Religion and belief is a safety blanket, something to hide under, but never really true when examined. It's always limited and I can't even imagine the horror one feels when dying, getting a sense of nothing being there beyond the horizon when all their lives they've been taught there will be a paradise. Accepting and knowing the end is the end, like a computer being shut off, not showing anything but a black void on the screen, is very scary. But accepting this horrific thing, as it is, removes it of its scary power over you. You know it's the end, memories of you continue past your death, eventually, you are an unmarked grave in history, eventually nothing at all. So you start focusing on the time you have, it's the only thing that matters. The time you have and the things that actually exist; the things that can be witnessed, experienced, felt, learned about, understood etc.
Religious people and people with belief often think of atheism, or the "ideal atheism" as I've been told is my definition of it, as "lacking something". But I would argue that you add something. You add your own existence to the time you are alive, not excluding it as being something temporary before the "real purpose of existing" after death. You dismiss all the "belief noise" and start to actually fill your life with real things, you put your time into those things, skip the wasted time spent on religion and do something substantial instead.
There's more to life than religion and belief.
Quoting RussellA
Still requires an atheistic approach. If you reject set "rules for life" then there's an absence of them. If atheism is the absence of belief and faith in God or religious motifs, then the rejection works best within atheism. I still feel that rejection of reason and logic isn't necessary in order to not preoccupy oneself with "winning or losing". You can be very analytical and still not have an interest in winning or losing. Analytical people are very interested in arriving at substantial truths that exist and can be witnessed, but it doesn't mean they're doing it to win, just that they find meaning in the pursuit of knowledge. That pursuit doesn't have an end or is able to be won or lost, it just is a meaning in itself. As life is not a journey towards the end goal, death is not a win or loss, it just is.
It's a relief to know that nothing exists and it's just all a case of words being naughty. But we are back to chess again. Can it be that the man who codified modern art for us by way of a parodic fountain can also reinvent epistemology through a 6th century Indian board game?
This is not true at all except in the most trivial sense.
(Attempting to combine the insights of the 5th C Greek Tigranes son of Artabanus, a 6th C Indian board game, the 18th C German philosopher Kant and the French 20th C avant-garde artists).
Life is like chess, where the pieces and board are intrinsically meaningless, yet there is meaning in use, in that the meaning of chess comes from how the pieces are moved on the board.
Meaning is in the journey, not in the final destination, not in a momentary win or loss, where “Tis not for Money they contend, but for Glory”.
The game is played using one's free play of imagination and understanding, one's reason and logic in harmony with one's irrationality and intuition. In this foxhole of sometimes crisis and chaos, rather than timorously looking outwards for imagined support and consolation, to look courageously inwards in order to find the strength in the reality of one's own existence.
IE, meaning comes from playing the game using the human spirit of imagination and understanding.
Do you mean that there are rarely religious themes under the actions of people through war throughout history? Including all those who thought they were guided by God or Gods to invade and conquer other lands? I'd say that religious beliefs and similar irrational ideals were the core of most wars and conflicts. Rarely have I found intentions not related to religious themes as reasons for such acts. Maybe you can explain why this is superficial and that there are reasons other than that at play. Remember, even conquers for power were mostly generated by illusions of divinity for the conquerer, rather than conquering for anything else.
EDIT: I seem to be largely defending religion atm. I have no explanation for that.
I'm talking about human history. Quantify the entirety of that before concluding the reasons for all conflicts. I would say that even in the cases where conflicts and wars were seemingly by other reasons, religion has a core anyway.
But, after everything I wrote, this is the thing to hang up on. It kind of shows how the argument gets steered off course when some get triggered by these notions. This is not about religious war, but the need to defend religious history around that seems to be a valuable point to many, to the point of ignoring the rest. I think I've made my point around this specific thing.
We're talking about religion, not "similar irrational ideals." Here's a link to Wikipedia "List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
It would be wrong to classify most of the wars listed as religious wars, even though they might have had religious components. In general, even most wars where religion was heavily involved were primarily to build empires.
Oh sure, if you define religious war to include all wars not about religion, then trivially all wars are religious wars. Perfectly logical.
Quoting T Clark
Exactly right.
Ah, that kind of argument again, it's getting old and has been countered so many times without any of the theists able to remember the conclusions of those counterarguments. I think I've countered this a dozen times on this forum. Maybe create a search button for all the biased theists needing to get some counterarguments of that bullshit, I'm tired of doing it over and over in all the evangelical threads of indoctrinated believers.
It's so interesting to see you all focusing on this out of the entirety of my argument. It's like you don't get my point whatsoever.
Actively clinging on to a point that you can stretch to be the only thing to argue about. That "no, not all conflicts are religious, look at these examples, look at all the proof that this is NOT the case". Yeah, sure, some conflicts are not religious in nature or have anything to do with religion. That's not my point. Seriously. If this is the thing that gets people riled up, no wonder I'm fucking right.
That's true but you can have religious empires so the question is where to draw the line between the empire building and the religion as the source.
I think its a worthwhile distinction to make.
Also I think whats really being referenced on the “religion as source” side is just an example of human nature, specifically the tribalism of which religion is an extension of. I think its tempting to blame religion because it’s such a good example of what dumb apes get up to in groups but its really about the sociological burdens evolution equipped human beings with.
Timely thread. Personally I moved away from religion a long time ago, I felt it as indoctrination and limiting thinking more than anything else. I became a new atheist before the New Atheists. Thankfully I moved away from that.
I can see how many, many people can find comfort in religion. Comfort that would otherwise be very hard to find.
I think meaning can be problematic, irrespective of religion. Few people are spared from episodes of doubt, anxiety or meaninglessness, it comes with the ride. Would me believing that in another life I would be assured a meaningful plentiful existence help me in this one? Probably.
What's often missing is the flip side. For every heaven there's a hell. We cannot, unless we know we have acted perfectly, guarantee that our actions wont lead to a much worse eternity, however hard that may be to grasp.
So to answer your question, there's no secret beyond truisms. But these are available for all to see.
___
Definition of what constitutes religion is problematical, I think, mainly because of the way it was defined and thrashed out in the early Christian church. 'Orthodoxy' means basically 'right belief' or 'right worship' and (speaking of truisms) it was a truism that you defied orthodoxy at your peril. This puts tremendous, almost exclusive, emphasis on 'belief', as a kind of 'proposition' about some being that purportedly does or doesn't exist. But
[quote=Karen Armstrong; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/12/religion-christianity-belief-science ]In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of attaining truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were crucial and each had its particular sphere of competence. Logos ("reason; science") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to control our environment and function in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external realities. But logos could not assuage human grief or give people intimations that their lives had meaning. For that they turned to mythos, an early form of psychology, which dealt with the more elusive aspects of human experience.
Stories of heroes descending to the underworld were not regarded as primarily factual but taught people how to negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche. In the same way, the purpose of a creation myth was therapeutic; before the modern period no sensible person ever thought it gave an accurate account of the origins of life. A cosmology was recited at times of crisis or sickness, when people needed a symbolic influx of the creative energy that had brought something out of nothing. Thus the Genesis myth, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion, was balm to the bruised spirits of the Israelites who had been defeated and deported by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar during the sixth century BCE. Nobody was required to "believe" it; like most peoples, the Israelites had a number of other mutually-exclusive creation stories and as late as the 16th century, Jews thought nothing of making up a new creation myth that bore no relation to Genesis but spoke more directly to their tragic circumstances at that time.
Above all, myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.
Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.
But during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied. Christians bought into the scientific theology, and some embarked on the doomed venture of turning their faith's mythos into logos.[/quote]
I would add that philosophically, I find atheism barren, because the implications are that life is an absurdity - a thought Camus was very familiar with. It is taken for granted by many people that life arose by chance, kind of a cosmic fluke, and that human life has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. But a lot of that is because of the repressed fear of orthodoxy, so ultimately, and ironically, religion as understood in the Christian world has a lot of the responsibility for that.
What is important about religion is finding the source of what Christians call agapé, unconditional compassion, and what Buddhists call bodhicitta, buried behind all the ruins of the ancient faiths. It is both the easiest and most elusive thing in the world. To turn your back on that because of religion is the cruelest irony.
Religious people are just as likely to be abject and bereft as anyone else. After 30 plus years of working in the field of mental ill health and substance misuse, I am more likely to meet with people who have a faith than not, particularly amongst the suicidal. I think this is because they are more likely to harbor guilt and other negative emotions as a consequence of surviving church initiated traumas. The high levels of sexual abuse and violence perpetrated and covered up by religious organizations has become one of their defining cultural legacies.
“Religion is based primarily upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly as the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand."
Bertrand Russell
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On topic, I'd never really considered the fact that the whole notion of 'no atheists in foxholes' is a comment less about atheists than it is about religion - the fact that religion is what one turns to when one is in a desperate, base situation of immanent death.
Just that it isn't so easy to contrast the barren atheist with the loving believer. Notions of the Absurd are really the domain of faiths where the above evils seem to happen so often on behalf of transcendence and moral foundations.
Sure it does. The reality of religion - as opposed to the idealized self-image, which pales before it - is that is has left its mark on the world in trains of blood, and in this one, not at all isolated case, hundreds of dead children.
As far as life being an absurdity without religion, I find the opposite to the case - that religion appeals to the fascist in all of us, who wants to be told what to do by way of some prior cosmic ordering. It is a trembling before freedom, rooted in fear, expressed in the arrogation of tribal campfire stories to cosmic proportion. There are few things more stifling and oppressive. It is no accident that religious history is just another name for a history of oppression and institutional murder and avarice, for millennia. To look at the utter insanity wrought by religious belief and to see in it 'love' is to have have engaged in the highest form of self delusion. It is no accident the most revered Christian theorist of love was the same one to have so vigorously pursued a campaign of persecution against those who dared to deviate from his teachings - Augustine and the Donatists, to wit.
You're on an internet forum, get over it. If a little subdiscussion starts over what you think is one trivial and uninteresting detail, you don't have to entertain it, just move onto the next comment without whining.
Yes, a philosophy forum, meaning, a higher quality should be expected. Outside of picking out a single point, that point has been discussed so many times on this forum and believers defend it saying “No! Religion is innocent, it has no blood on its hands. But look at atheism and communism, that’s where the blood is”.
It’s a blanket statement that’s both wrong and mind-numbingly lacking in philosophical quality. It’s tedious going down that route every time believers get triggered by the notion that religion has a bloody history that isn’t at all as visible on the atheism side. People need to pick up a history book, and also understand what they read.
"It is possible to accept life, nature, the universe, as it is, no more or less..." "...it is possible to accept the pointless existence of life and the universe and still feel meaning"
Given people do precisely this, it must be true. I think for all the lofty talk about meaning requiring some transcendent foundation, I believe people obtain meaning from being in the world, interacting and doing things. Possessions, nature, music, food, friends, family, home, whatever you are into is where your meaning comes from. I believe this is true for theists and atheists alike.
If, on the other hand, free will is as important as people make it out to be, it's more reasonable to assume that God would grant us full self-determination which means we're at liberty to pick n choose our own purpose, our very own meaning, suited to our tastes and temperament.
This, as you might've already guessed, is precisely what an atheist would recommend - life is meaningless in the sense there's no real, forget about grand, reason why we're here. We're just here, that's all. Given this, each person now has power over faer destiny, fae can decide on his own terms, what to do with faer life. The bottom line is we exercise our free will to spend our lives the way we want to and that is our meaning/purpose.
The choices are clear, either one, be like the theist and let God dictate your life's choices (no free will) or two, be a theist still and realize that God's will is for you is to be master of your fate (free will) or three,be an atheist and decide in complete freedom to what purpose you want to consecrate your life to.
A theist should opt for the 2nd choice but the difference between it and the atheist's choice (3rd choice) is trivial.
If you read my post carefully you will see it's not religion I'm defending. I said, what is important about religion is finding the source of compassion. But to realise something like the source of compassion, to find if there is a source of that, is rather a religious kind of idea. If you can find a way to seek or express unconditional compassion without any recourse to such ideas then so much the better. But in the absence of that, it doesn't come naturally, I don't think.
Quoting TheMadFool
It's more that: if what materialism says is true - if we are a kind of 'rogue chemical reaction', the outcome of a 'collocation of atoms', as Bertrand Russell put it- then any idea of meaning is basically an illusion.
Quoting TheMadFool
That is actually what mainstream Christianity believes.
Quoting TheMadFool
And that isn't.
Why? Nothing imbued me with a shirt. I'm still wearing one; it's not an illusion.
How can I possibly cope with such soaring rhetoric? Obviously I'm well out of my depth here.
I don't think there is one. We are vulnerable, weak, and even pathetic creatures -- invulnerability, happiness in spite of circumstances, is a myth. When life is miserable then it makes sense that we are too.
The point about philosophical materialism is that any notion of meaning is at best a biological adaptation. And don’t take my word for that. Read the evangelical atheists - Alex Rosenberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the like.
[quote=Richard Dawkins] We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.[/quote]
Strictly speaking, of course, ‘astonishment’ is itself simply a byproduct of adrenaline and ought to be given no especial significance (unless, of course, it’s an unconscious echo of Dawkin’s Anglican ancestry which might be mined for a bit of irony.) But that’s what the scientifically-literate atheists are seeking to persuade us of. If you feel that they’re wrong by all means feel free to correct them.
Then you have a low opinion of humanity. Which, considering religion dehumanizes at every point, is unsurprising. This is of course, built into religious strategy - paint the human as a wretched, fallen creature, all the more in need of saving. It's cult mechanics, employed by abusers everywhere to foster a sense of dependency - writ large by religion.
Which? This:
Quoting Wayfarer
? Agreed, but there's nothing wrong with starting simple and refining it as we go (this is how science proceeds, for instance, a huge improvement over having to get it right first time and stick to it regardless of its increasing apparent silliness).
So if materialism says we're not given meaning by a creator, and let's assume we're not given meaning by our genetics (unless you don't want to assume that), we're still not necessarily deprived of meaning. The argument, as you presented it, needs refining at least, perhaps discarding. Is there anything missing from it that would deprive us of meaning?
Quoting Wayfarer
Another simplistic statement, and very wrong. There's no biological adaptation for watching Netflix, painting Warhammer miniatures, reading one book and not another, having roast beef only on Sundays, or any of the other myriad things we spend our time on, nor is there any claim for such. Biological adaptation specifies our capacities: it cannot dictate outcomes, like finding a particular meaning, or not.
Hopefully this isn't a pile on Wayfarer thing. :smile:
Isn't that a bit of a crude apologist style argument, based around pushing the point too far? I think the atheists would argue that meaning exists because we are meaning making animals who endlessly invent things - a range of loose, shared meanings being amongst these inventions, which include mores and morals. We also have evolved to have empathy (how else could we rear our young?). We have invented whole worlds and landscapes of meaning despite the lack of an obvious transcendent one. These meanings still matter to us and our emotional lives and have a continuing traction and relevance, even if they do evolve over time. Do we need more than this?
Judaism doesn't do this, and I'd be interested to hear from a Christian how pervasive this idea is and what role is plays across different forms of Christianity. I'd also be interested to hear what Muslims think of this given they don't believe in original sin.
Hindus and Buddhists welcome to chime in as well.
It's a matter of underwriting meaning - not simply 'making it up'. Buddhists don't believe they are 'given meaning by a Creator' but they nevertheless accept there is dharma, that is, moral law, and a meaning beyond the endless caravan of birth and death, sa?s?ra.
Quoting Tom Storm
I really don't believe in evolutionary basis for ethics. Of course humans evolved, but compassion can't be meaningfully explained as a biological adaptation, or rather, if it is, then it has no inherent meaning. Humans seek for something more than simply the mechanics of successful propogation, that's part of what makes us human.
Indeed, true or not, I feel that Synergy is applicable to some systems and that,
[quote=Aristotle]The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.[/quote]
Though biology sees us as "sacks of chemistry" as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, it still must contend with the plain and simple truth that we're not just "sacks of chemistry". There's so much more to us than that.
The analogy I like to use is that of a building. Yes, the floor on top supervenes on the floor below but each floor has its own thing going on, its own unique characteristics, its own perspective as it were to reality. Likewise, though the mind depends on biology and biology depends on chemistry, so and so forth, each of these levels must be treated as fully legit areas of concern/study.
Quoting Wayfarer
:ok:
Good point. So...
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm an atheist (and a physicalist), but even with my protest to I'm not claiming to have meaning or believe that anyone else does beyond the sort of illusion he refers to. My point is more that, if meaning is an illusion, it must be shown to be so with something more thorough than "Neither God nor evolution gave it to us," which misses out a lot, for instance most of culture.
The existentialists hold meaning as something you arrive at: it's personal, perhaps even unique, like a fingerprint or your DNA. There's also a compelling argument that the language is itself meaningless: it borrows a concept that is well-defined in theism but doesn't really have a correlate in a Godless world.
A good way of approaching the question imo is anthropologically: do humans tend to behave as if their life has meaning, not just value? There are people for whom this seems to be true, but they are likely exceptional. I doubt that I, being unexceptional, would live much of a different life whether it had meaning or not, which is as good an indicator as I can think of that it doesn't.
So "illusion" was the wrong word, then. A refinement might go something like:
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to be approaching tautology now, but at least it's trivially true.
I hear you and I agree.
There are, of course, numerous Christian apologists (e.g., Matt Slick) who make the argument that atheism is self-refuting because no meaning or logic is possible if all that exists is just matter and chemistry behaving. Also since evolution is not about identifying truth, only what works for survival, then anything that comes out of an evolutionary perspective (e.g., anything by Dawkins) has no truth value. We've seen this one from some more sophisticated philosophers too.
I'm an atheist who finds meaning in the usual things, probably not much differently from theists and other non-believers. I think that's just what humans do. Calling any values 'underwritten' is just a labelling exercise - like having a brand of marmalade that is sold by 'appointment to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth' (reference for Commonwealth country folk).
I agree. But theists tend to apply an unnecessary layer that wastes "life time" on irrelevant interpretations that lead nowhere. Atheism is Ockham's razor of meaning in life. The shortest path to a sense of clarity, the least clouded by confusion when worldviews get challenged.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm not though. People just say I'm wrong, they provide nothing substantial behind it. For around two weeks now, everyone whom I've been in discussion with on this forum radically fails at basic philosophical reasoning. It's just believers spewing out opinions and that they are right because "God" or whatever. It's getting rather tedious hearing the same thing over and over when so many, not just me, has already countered the lack of logic or knowledge in many of the claims.
It's rather all these people who are the ones not able to understand when they're wrong. I'm still waiting for true arguments to bounce off into the next argument. But I'm paddling in the manure of biases and fallacies.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Let's start with everyone else supporting their counter-argument first, please. I can either roll my thumbs waiting or just continue to ask for something substantial.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The cherry-picked portion of my argument had to do with religion and its bloody history compared to atheism. Now, theists really love to mash together communism and atheism to make the point that "atheism is worse", which, by looking at the actual mechanics behind the communist movement throughout the 20th century, shows that it has nothing to do with atheism, it's not "part of the murdering", it's rather a way to create guilt by association to a political movement with their own doctrines, in no shape or form linked to atheism just because there wasn't a religion at the core of communism. Just like religion, the communism and corruption of Marxist theories of the 20th century act out as a form of institution, almost by religious standards. Atheism isn't an institution, there is no "church of atheism". There can be atheistic organizations that have a place of gathering, focused primarily on giving guidance to those seeking to move away from religion, but there's no single "church" or institution or a gathering of rituals, rules, laws, principles etc. There are nothing binding atheists together as a form of "method of life". So to blame atheism for murders throughout history makes zero sense whatsoever and is a straw-manning attempt at attacking atheism whenever the notion of "religion's bloody history" is being brought up. The bloody history of religion is, however, very documented. The suffering, terror, prosecution, mass murder, torture etc. for thousands of years, throughout many different types of religious beliefs and institutions that through rules, laws, practices, and principles gathered a group behavior into these acts. It's the entire nature of religious institutions and doctrines to force behavior onto the practitioner of that belief system and it's been a source of power over the people for as long as human history. Atheism is a rejection of all of that and the antithesis of it makes it impossible to be a "reason" for mass murder. Someone murdering "in the name of atheism" doesn't really refer to anything.
So, anyone claiming either that religion doesn't have a bloody history, or that Atheism is responsible for more terror and murders than religion, really needs to prove those points with some actual logic, history, and support. Straw-manning atheism in an attempt to shift blame from religion to atheism is fundamentally stupid and childish and an insult to the intellect of those who actually just paid attention to the information, knowledge, and records of history we have.
I considered this matter to be closed years ago. Believers still seem to form a sound reasonable argument that doesn't use every bias and fallacy in the book to reach its conclusion. It's tiresome and I rather just sum up the conclusion with theists are wrong in this matter, period. End of discussion, until an unbiased, sound argument is made with an antithesis to this.
Quoting Wayfarer
Life is hard, but religion really makes it more confusing and harder, requiring someone to accept a "truth" without proof. Either people are idiots and accept such a truth without questioning it, or they try to understand it, spending years of their life in search of an explanation behind that truth, only to sometimes come to the conclusion that it was just made up by people throughout history and that there's nothing more to it. It's a great waste of a lifetime. Why not just make it "less hard" and accept things around and in the universe, for what they are or what we can perceive them as? The rest is just irrelevant time-wasting noise.
Quoting Wayfarer
Any meaning that has some cosmic objectivity, yes, not meaning as invented, felt, and built by us humans for us humans. It's the "cosmic meaning" that is both non-existent and irrelevant.
It's just a comfort blanket for theists to crawl under. The universe is mind-blowingly big and we are so impossibly small in comparisons that they just can't accept that we are basically the same as bacteria on a cosmic scale. They can't wrap their heads around these things, so they pull the blank over their heads and tell themselves that there truly is a cosmic meaning to their existence. It's the same reason why religions came to be in the first place, we've just scaled up the knowledge of the world around us into the size of the universe and its timeline. Before, we tried to explain thunder, couldn't, needed some comforting explanation so we invented thunder gods. Crops died unexpectedly, so we invented agricultural gods. And so on. Then it was just easier to use one God for everything. A basic "god works in mysterious ways" to sum up all the shit we can't explain and you're all setup and ordered the comfort blanket ultra mega 2000 experience package, with some action figures of prophets and downloadable content with predictions for the end of time, so you don't have to think about your meaningless and upcoming death.
It's basic psychology really.
Aye, which is clearly wrong, since most of the things I'm looking at right now as I wait for this bus weren't biologically selected for (just the trees and bushes really), hence shirts.
Which was my point to Wayfarer: whether or not meaning is illusory is an interesting question. "If there's no God, it must be" is not a good answer.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yeah, mostly. That said, I think the word means something different to creationists than to, say, the French existentialists. Creationists believe that humans are an outcome of a teleological process, and 'meaning' here largely denotes 'higher purpose'. Sartre's idea of meaning is non-teleological and individualist, more like 'personal values'. How we use the word dictates our conclusions: for Wayfarer, 'meaning' is apparently "underwritten" by definition. There's no analogue of that in atheism or, to date, physicalism.
Quoting Christoffer
I can see how you'd like that to work, but that's not how it works. Claims aren't true until proven otherwise. Since you are unwilling to defend your point, no one else is obliged to disprove it. That which is claimed without justification can be dismissed without justification. I also reject the idea that your above performance was anything like an entreatment for naysayers to expound upon their views. It was infantile tantrum-throwing and nothing more, quite obstructive to the sorts of detail you now claim to want.
Which is why I provided it if you bothered to read it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I write maybe ten times longer posts than most in here and a majority of each post is the actual arguments. Then things get cherry-picked, conclusions ignored, and I'm drawn into explaining things that have been explained to absurd lengths in many threads on this forum, by many others including me, that to stay on the topic of the current thread, we just point out the conclusion of those countless other posts. But I provided a sum up, I still like to hear the counter-argument to that logic, but I suspect it becomes the usual "straw-manning atheism" thing again, which I'm not interested in because it's frankly stupid and beneath me to put time and effort into saying the same things over and over to people so blinded by their own belief biases that they cannot form tangible arguments.
If you have anything to counterargue what I just wrote in the previous post, please do that, because I'm tired of infantile belief arguments that would never pass basic philosophical scrutiny or believers just saying I'm wrong without any further elaboration. I'm still waiting for anything substantial.
As am I. To be clear, I'm an atheist with a strong dislike for religion. But claims like 'most wars in human history have been religious wars' need to rest on more than having atheism in common. In no sense have you supported your claim, and this shouldn't be too surprising given a) your unnecessary hostility toward disagreement, b) your preference for expansive complaints over a single sentence of justification, and c) your inconstant attitude to whether the problem is that people are focusing too much on this one thing or aren't going into enough detail.
Let's take what should be an easy example for you: jihad. On the one hand, nothing could be a better example of the warlike nature of religiosity than something that calls itself Holy War and whose Cyberman-like message is 'convert or die/be raped'. It's written there in their primary text, so no escaping it.
And yet, for the most part, Islam has been and remains a particularly peaceful, sophisticated religion. If 1001 people read the same book, 1000 think "peace" and 1 thinks "kill", is the religion accounting for the war, or the difference between that 1 and the other 1000?
No one is arguing that religion isn't an enabler for war, it clearly is. But you have to show that religion is the reason for war to pin it on theism, and that's not possible. The Church definitely has an insane amount of blood on its hands, but the history of the Church can be exemplified more succinctly with the word "power" than with the word "piety". It was a powerful, violently expansive state, with more in common with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union than with, say, Buddhist Tibet or Jainism. The common denominator in all war is definitely not religion, and the common denominator of all religions is not war.
Because it's taken out of context of that post. The claim is in relation to atheism, to atheism being linked to violence and blood when the statistics or religious violence is quite clearly higher going through the history books. It was a summed up sentence but should have maybe pointed out "violence" instead of war since it seems like it confuses more than "violence".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I literally expanded on that part of the original argument, because it's linked to the argument that atheism is being blamed for more murder and violence than religion. I lifted the logic that you have religious doctrines that easily come in conflict with other doctrines and practices and therefore are prone to conflict, while atheism does not have any binding doctrines or practices to stand behind, it's rather a lack of it. This means there's a logical gap when blaming atheism for violence and murder in history, compared to what religion has caused. This is the argument.
In no sense have you countered this logic.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Compared to not reading the book at all? And being a peaceful religion can also mean that it is peaceful within itself, that if the community or society with it as its foundation, it may be peaceful if all worship under it because it becomes homogeneous and has no freethinkers or critics.
The problem arises whenever you have someone questioning the status quo. Human history is filled with violence attributed to when people question the status quo, and there's nothing more "deep core" of a status quo than religion being a foundation of a society. Questioning or confronting another nation/people with other religious beliefs almost always led to bloody conflicts. And since religion isn't a political theory, it isn't something that can be argued and converted easily into something new or different, because it is at the core of the heart of every person in such a society, questioning it means, in their eyes, questioning existence itself and it's a threat that feels like being about survival instead of intellectual discourse.
The argument I made was that religion causes violence far more than the lack of religion. The mechanics of religion almost forces people into conflict whenever there's a different voice that doesn't follow that specific religion. This is because religion finds its way into the core values of a person much more than any other system of knowledge. It more easily corrupts and more easily controls people. It can make them utterly abandon all intellect to do as a text says. It works in a bubble, but introducing another element almost always leads to conflict.
If you take what I wrote out of context, of course, it becomes problematic, but that was not my argument, it was in relation to the view on atheism as a violent "church". And the logic I present here is the logic of how religion works and why it leads to a conflict far more than anything else.
Add to that the actual number of cases of religious violence and wars rooted in conflicting religious views and you have everything in support of this right there.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And this has never been stated or said by me. It is a simplification of what I actually argue. If people cherry-pick stuff from my argument and make further simplifications of it, you might begin to understand my frustration here. It's straw-manning after straw-manning without really reading what I actually write and understanding it before forming a counterargument. Because of this, I get oversimplifications like the one you wrote there and that this is somehow what I meant in my text? How does any of what I write here conclude that all wars are religious and all religions are about war? Where did this come from?
And, of course, he was sipping latte in the shade of his villa while he penned those thoughts, eh.
What happened to you? Who did this to you? :joke:
My issue with atheism is that it's a fairweather friend. Atheism, and along with it, hedonism, nihilism, pessimism are all fine and well -- as long as health and wealth last. But they are not conducive to living a productive life, and they are especially not conducive to rebuilding one's life once health and wealth are lost.
Why do you think this is important?
Not if the creator has a thing for tormenting some of his children. Why on earth should the creator abide by the motto of the French revolution?!
Not that I wished this upon you, but it would be more relevant for the OP topic to see your reaction and your attitude toward life if the accident would leave you permanently and severely disabled. If you could still be so cheerfully saying that life is meanigless.
We're at a philosophy forum, where critical thinking shall reign supreme!
Empirically proving what a particular war was (actually) about is virtually impossible. So as much as one might dislike religion, there are things one cannot say about it without thereby losing one's self-respect as a lover of wisdom.
I didn't think I had anything of interest to offer about your entire argument. It's not something I have strong feelings about. On the other hand, I am quick to pick up on specious arguments against religion, "the church starts all the wars" in particular.
But is this really a fact?
Do you know of any study that shows that in the face of grave danger or hardship, (previously non-religious) people tend to turn to religion, and, more importantly, find solace in it?
I suppose that in the face of grave danger or hardship, many people probably do consider religion, but I doubt many find solace in it, or only for a relatively short time.
(For example, a Hare Krishna insider told me that by their informal estimate, 80% of newly joined people leave within their first five years in the religion.)
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't see religion that way at all. I grew in a monoreligious monoculture. From what I've seen, religious people don't care about the religious teachings at all; it's all just for show and keeping up appearances, apparently for the purpose of playing power games and maintaining social order. These people live artfully crafted double lives: with an official, public face, and a private one that is quite unaffected by the public one. Those who end up troubled and traumatized are the ones who weren't able to build and maintain this dichotomy.
I suppose things are different for religious people who live as religious minorities, or in religiously diverse cultures.
Agreed.
Looking at the list in Wikipedia, it seems to me that most wars are caused by empire building, even when the entities involved have strong religious connections, e.g. the Muslim expansion into India. I would be interested to hear differing opinions from someone who knows better than I.
Sure, but whence this desire to build an empire, whence the motivation for it, whence the justification for the killing, raping, and pillaging?
It does seem that it is religion that gives people those: "You are God's chosen people, therefore, you can take from others, even with lethal force, but others may not take from you."
But the religious can actually say the same thing!
Accept the way things are. Know what difference one can make. Be content with what one does and/or has done.
This sounds awfully abstract.
As it must be, it is a set of universally applicable principles...
As far as I can tell, as soon as people started gathering in large groups, their leaders started wanting the groups and the area controlled to get larger. There have been hundreds of empires throughout history. I'm reading a neat book right now - "The Mongoliad" by Neal Stephenson and others. It's about the Mongol invasion of the west in the 1200s. This relatively small band of people took over everything from India to Poland. It lasted for two Khans and then dissolved when one of them died. It kept popping up in different locations in different incarnations for a couple of hundred years. There have been a bunch of empires - Roman, Hunic, Holy Roman, British, French, Spanish, Uyghur, many Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Moghul, Russian, and on an on. Let's not forget Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I don't understand it, but it's just the way people are.
Of course, but this thread is about the proverbial foxholes. Ie. those times and places when health and wealth are gone, when friends, family, home are gone.
:100: :up: :heart:
Where did I say this? I said:
Quoting Christoffer
See the difference?
Since this connects to what I said, it's important to note that I said more things than what wars were actually about. Most notes in historical records and research on reasons for wars throughout history do exist, while the rest of the idea I had, had to do with the psychology behind religion compared to atheism. If you combine such psychology and review history, it's absolutely in high probability to conclude that most conflicts had religious reasons over other reasons.
This also applies to political reasons because many of those societies had power that was a mix between religion and politics and not separated. So religious reasons were political and political reasons were religious. But conflict also means outside war; peace times when other atrocities happened within society or from institutes of power using religion as tools for that power. So in the end, most conflicts had religious reasons. But in here, when I say "most" in an argument, that seems to be interpreted as "all".
When I said 'meaning was an illusion', I referred to the Dennett and Dawkins style of evangelical atheism. That style does explicitly say that what humans interpret as meaning is always essentially shaped by evolution, and that humans are basicaly programmed 'survival machines' whose sole purpose is the propogation of the genome. It’s not an exaggeration to characterise them that way although they do present it in the most stark form. Obviously in the context of the 'culture wars', the perceived conflict between evolutionary naturalism and bilbical creationism is one of the major faultlines, but I think it's quite possible to maintain a Christian outlook regardless of that. Both sides of that particular conflict are very literal-minded in their intepretation, but for those Christians who never interpreted the creation myth as a literal account, the fact that it's *not* a literal account is not especially significant. Besides are many dissidents from Dennett and Dawkins 'ultradarwinism' within science itself (see The Third Way).
But overall, the erosion of the sense of meaning, the loss of the sense of mankind having a meaningful place in the Cosmos, has been a major theme in modern culture, expressed in countless works of philosophy, drama, art and literature. Existentialism was one of the responses to that, but there have been many others. I don't think it's necessary to be religious to live a meaningful life, but as a consequence of my own search, I interpret religious ideas as expressions of mankind's search for meaning or of the relationship of the human and the Cosmos. Ultimately the major religious figures achieve a kind of cosmic identity, in more than simply a symbolic sense. By orientating our understanding in the light of theirs, we are able to realise something similar.
Yes. I was overstating the case for rhetorical effect.
I understand - my first response was:
[i].... people often jettison belief systems when things get very hard. - whatever those beliefs may be. An ontological crisis can generate significant disruption wherein the old ideas no longer seem to work.
That said, it goes both ways. A significant crisis is also an opportunity to seek a new belief system, perhaps for consolation.
The secret to being happy in the foxholes is probably to expect chaos and suffering in the first place. Some people are fortunate and do not get to know the foxholes.[/i]
Lucky you! I was raised by humans. :smile:
Whereas an atheist may say "meaning comes from playing the game using the human spirit of imagination and understanding", a theist may say "meaning comes from playing the game using a spiritual imagination and understanding".
I understand, and figured this is what you meant. 'Meaning' in the sense you... uh... meant is not 'meaning' but a specific meaning or kind of meaning: a meaning that places us as the most important things in the universe, the point of the universe perhaps... according to us.
But again I question whether even this kind of meaning is meaningful. Does it change the way a person behaves, for instance? I'm pretty sure every individual who believes that mankind is the point of it all would say yes, yet statistically it doesn't seem to hold up. My Catholic housemate defended the Church against accusations of being effectively a paedophile ring by pointing out that the church had exactly the same percentage of paedophiles as the secular UK. (She apparently didn't see how damning this was in terms of the church being any kind of moral authority.) If this kind of meaning, even when backed up with some awful threats, neither deters nor attracts the most wicked behaviours, can it be said to be worth a damn? I'm sure some would point to the interior life of these people but, of course, you can't (the problem with hypothesising a completely invisible part of people is that you can't say anything about it).
Either way, it doesn't seem like much of a loss. If there is a teleological meaning to us, we don't know it. It could be to worship a vain, jealous god, or to figure out that we're in a simulation, or to make the greatest possible cheese. It doesn't seem beneficial to pick one and run with it or, worse, have one picked for us, and be almost certainly wrong than to evaluate our own biases and admit that maybe we can exist without being the reason for everything's existence. (If any other species develops religion, or even just metaphysics, you can be quite sure that they will conclude that they're the point of everything.) Delusions aren't the gold standard of meaning. We can do much better. In fact, no meaning at all is a huge improvement over your definition of meaning imo.
I’d be careful about that collective pronoun.
Don't be sorry! Being human has its charms if chain smoking is one!
No, I'm confident about that one.
Good. I'll think of y'all getting your anal probes while I sit safe in my tin hat.
Speaking of things that smell bad...
Quoting TheMadFool
Only if you say "Mish me, Moneypenny?" Sean (actual name Sorn) is the only person who makes me wish I still smoked.
That depends on what is at stake. If we're simply material aggregates and death is the end, then nothing is at stake. But if there is a higher purpose, and we don't see it, then we've missed the point. And it's a very important point to miss.
I think a naturalistic explanation for religion would be along the lines that the states of higher awareness that sages exemplify are the true fulfilment of a natural process, but that it goes far beyond what can be defined naturalistically (in the sense that Western culture defines it). There is a theme that surfaces in various schools of philosophy, that we are nature become aware of herself, that the purpose of human existence is that the Universe can realise itself in ways that wouldn't be possible were the processes of evolution not to occur.
Yeah, like Pascal's wager... Believe in this arbitrary and utterly daft collection of iron age fictions because, according to those fictions, we're screwed if we don't. This is only compelling to people who already believe: it doesn't change a Buddhist into a Christian.
This is the communication problem in a nutshell: theists struggle to understand that what seems compelling to them is a product of a religious upbringing and of holding the religious beliefs they're trying to argue for. Stepping outside of the Jesus-riddled brain, the 'higher meaning' of Christianity is no more compelling or less arbitrary-seeming than any other, or none, or some as hoc theory one could construct right now.
Any religion or ethical ideology has firm opinions. Most, if not all, have to be wrong
Quoting Wayfarer
I expect it's much like stock traders today. Once we moved far from the equator, our historic ways of living didn't work. There was an expertise gap, and human nature abhors a vacuum, religion being the best example of this. Experts were those who said, 'If we do X, Y will happen'. If they happened to be right, they were elevated. These became the people others came to for advice, and the people that had to make decisions for the group. Problem was, no one knew why things worked. Like all such expertise without comprehension, a certain amount of bias is required to maintain it.
I maintain that the creationist hypothesis was a perfectly good scientific hypothesis thousands of years ago, but another advantage of it was that, for experts in petitioning a creator, it's no mark of failure on the part of the expert if X doesn't yield Y. It is simply not God's will that Y be done, and no amount of X-ing is going to change that. The appending of "if the god's will it" or similar is a memetic adaptation that makes perfect sense since, without it, the memes risk being made extinct by turns of events.
What do you call a Greek skydiver?
You're doing exactly what you're accusing religious people of doing, i.e. interpreting the question through your preconceptions. You immediately transpose what I'm saying into creationism, Christianity, and so on, even though I've said nothing about them, because they're the only categories against which you can interpret what I'm saying.
This is a philosophy forum, and I'm putting the question in philosophical terms, but I don't detect any familiarity with that discipline in your responses, only tired stereotypes.
Your not, that's my point. It oughtn't be profound that what's at stake in terms of meaning is only considerable if you already are biased about what that meaning is. From within a particular ideology that makes claims about meaning, those meanings are important. But outside, other meanings are important, or none are important. What's at stake is relative to what you believe. You cannot compare the meaning of life as understood by a creationist to that of a Buddhist, or an atheist, or a simulationist, since the values of each kind of meaning differ from reference frame to reference frame.
Quoting Schopenhauer, Religion and Metaphysical Need
Nobody can accuse Schopenhauer of being a religious apologist, and yet he too recognises the basic demand of the search for meaning. But he says that philosophy seeks that meaning through understanding, not through mere belief, although that is a distinction I guess won't get any traction here.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's a clear statement of relativism.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The point about any kind of philosophical hermenuetic is to try and discern what factor, if anything, they are pointing at, so as to disclose a larger truth.
As far as Buddhists are concerned, of course they don't believe in God, but they do say:
Because of fear. It takes existential courage to live without all that trash. Most people who stare into the concepts of reality are overpowered by the enormity of it; the extreme facts that put them into a context of such insignificance that they feel like they will implode; they cannot comprehend it, so they invent a lullaby to sing for themselves in order to feel calm.
Society teaches us to have small minds. Upbringing and education, work, and social life all have in common that they focus on making insignificant things feel important. More complex knowledge, more complex ideas about existence have usually been devoted to the church of that society, whatever religion was present in that time. So if and when someone asks a hard question, the "church" was quick to answer.
But then came the enlightenment era and more and more people had the ability to gain knowledge by themselves. When someone then dared to peak into complex knowledge and discover how much more complex the world and universe are and how contradictory the "church's" answers were, it was a pure horror of awakening.
Such horrors are portrayed by writers such as Lovecraft for example. Where the ones who dares to open their eyes to the actual truth of the cosmos rarely had their minds intact. The horror of turning your back against the fluffy answers by the "church" and instead embrace the extreme nature of the truth.
I think the reasons why most theists can't accept "meaning" as something coming from us, invented by us or figured out by us, individually or as a group, is because they must first peak into pure reality without fear. Only when the fear is gone, like accepting death without fear, even though you know it is as cosmically pointless as your life, can meaning be built. It's only when the cosmic fear has past away and you are ok and friends with the idea that everything is pointless, only then can meaning be built.
We externalize building things, like houses and art. We demolish something to rebuild something new. To build meaning internally, we must demolish something first. But theists think that's about demolishing religious belief and God. It does however have more to do with demolishing the fear in order to build meaning. Demolishing the fear demolishes the reasons to have belief and a God. Because belief and God aren't something built, it's a consequence of something already built. The fear has been built long before birth and taught down to all children. Reject the fear, then God and belief will start to erode and disappear. Without fear, there's no need for fluffy fairy tales to comfort life and instead, life and the universe is open to be interpreted honestly.
Which simply implies conflict and confusion, as far as I can see, which is writ large in this thread.
Quoting Christoffer
I read one Lovecraft novel many decades ago. I was very much moved by it. The idea he had of discovering other domains of being through dream-states I found very evocative. Unfortunately however Lovecraft's vision was essentially demonic in nature, as if the forces he intuited were utterly alien to humanity. But I think Lovecraft's idea of there being kind of parallel planes of being that interpenetrate with our own is completely plausible, in fact, I'm sure he drew on the grand tradition of mythology and occult religion as a source of inspiration for his (unfortunately deviate) stories.
Your inability to function - much less think - without a mythic crutch does not warrant an arrogation of this impotence to cosmic proportions. Much less make the basis of rendering judgements upon other modes of ethics that do not find their raison d'etre in a dearth of imagination.
The allegory, the power of religious writing as stories, is not the same as belief in the supernatural or God/Gods. You can have stories, they can be powerful. We have stories all around us in literature, movies, games, music, art etc. With great imagination and powerful emotions. All of these make us examine life and existence.
There's a difference though, when someone believes allegorical stories and fantasy to be truth rather than fiction. To interpret allegory and stories as being true in themselves. This is a religious belief.
It's no less valid than starting to believe in the Avengers as actually existing deities protecting our world. To interpret the Marvel cinematic universe as factual representations rather than allegories.
This is done out of fear. Instead of using allegory to give perspective in order to figure out a meaning in life, it is taken literally in order to give the responsibility to a higher power to figure that out. Instead of me understanding Iron Man's journey through the Marvel cinematic story, and because of this allegory, get a new perspective on life, I take the story literally and actually believe Iron Man is out there figuring all this shit out. This is one of the main problems with theism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Has nothing to do with demons. It is an allegory of how alien to our human perception the nature of reality actually is. Like our human vision only able to see a very small spectrum of light, if we were suddenly able to see all light spectrums it would blast our mind with such intensity of perception that we would go insane. It's an allegory for humanity's inability to stare into the extreme complexity of the universe and never be able to comprehend its enormous existence without going insane.
So the point is that it is alien to us, that's the whole point. It does however have nothing to do with "demons". Just like the movie Annihilation isn't about a demon coming to earth, but something truly alien and uncomprehensible. (Which in turn takes great inspiration from Color Out of Space)
Quoting Wayfarer
Why do you take Lovecraft literally? Like, why do you speak of it as plausible? It's fiction, it's a story, an allegory. It's like you are proving my point of religion being wrongly interpreted by theists and believers as truth when the texts are allegorical stories of fiction. The Bible and Necronomicon are the same kind of things: stories, allegory, fantasy, and tales to speak about the human condition. They are not the truth, they are meant to examine the behavior of humans in situations that put these humans under moral, emotional, and political pressure. It's storytelling, not reality.
I'm an atheist but I get what you are communicating, your argument is nuanced and reflects philosophy, not dogma. I wonder if there's a way to reconcile the non-overlapping magisteria.
For me atheism is experiencing the radical absence of any transcendent guarantee. It comes with no pangs of dread or emptiness and absurdity makes only an occasional appearance.
I hope it does, you might yet see my point. Having an arbitrary belief of a particular teleological meaning isn't good enough. I'm not saying abandon anything, but you demonstrate an astonishing inability to gauge the value of your beliefs outside of the narrow framework you acquired them in. Your average ideologue can probably handle the "and what if such and such a belief isn't true" okay, simply because there's less fear surrounding doubt. Since your idea of philosophy is ad hominem, i.e. largely to quote somebody important saying the thing you want others to believe, here's another:
[quote=Lamarana14]
I have often said that if science proves facts that conflict with Buddhist understanding, Buddhism must change accordingly. We should always adopt a view that accords with the facts. If upon investigation we find that there is reason and proof for a point, then we should accept it. However, a clear distinction should be made between what is not found by science and what is found to be nonexistent by science. What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. An example is consciousness itself. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions.
[/quote]
The Dalai Lama can get his head around the idea that the teachings of his religion can be erroneous and subject to change. You can't get your head around the idea that the meaning of life you're taught isn't even worth a ha'penny to those not so taught. Similarly...
Quoting Wayfarer
I gather you're using "relativism" much as right-wingers use "woke". You know that's only a negative term to absolutists, right? It's not a thing that needs to be defended. If you are sitting down right now, the altitude that you are sitting at depends on the height of whatever you're sitting on. Same thing. Of course it's a clear statement of relativism, I used the words "relative to" :groan:
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is incompatible with the idea that the loss of a particular artefact of a particular religion or ideology that has zero value elsewhere must be protected and vouchsafed for its own sake.
I think it's best to say that no one system has all the answers and that value can be found across many different religious/belief systems. Obviously there's a huge difference between trying to destroy the remnants of e.g. Nazi statues and Buddhist statues that are a thousands of years old.
I don't know too much about Buddhism and I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist, but I also acknowledge that Buddhism likely has value even if I'm not too familiar with the actual teachings and practice. I'm granting an allowance here, sue me. Even if it doesn't have value to me at the moment, it might have legitimate value to someone else and I have to respect that.
I would still protect Buddhist statues to the point of using lethal force if I saw others trying to destroy them because the destroyers don't have the right to do that even if they really, thoroughly believe Buddhism to be wrong. I don't care if someone 100% believes Buddhism is wrong (and admittedly there are concepts in Buddhism that I don't agree with) -- those statues get protected because humans don't have all the answers and they can't possibly have them no matter how smart people think they are. My value system places ancient religious statues above the types of people who would actively try to destroy them so using lethal force wouldn't bother me in that instance.
So much of it just comes down to having a basic modicum of humility and understanding that maybe one's own narrow scope of knowledge and beliefs could be wrong and that there are other legitimate approaches out there. Or one could plant their foot in the ground and behave as if they have all the answers and therefore anything outside of that truth becomes falsehood and essentially valueless.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It can't have much value to you since you haven't looked into it :p The value we're talking about here is philosophical though, more than decorative. I value churches, cathedrals, temples, statues, etc. too but they're not a reason to live your life according to a specific definition of religious meaning.
The Buddhist meaning of human life is comparable to the Christian one: both are transcendental, involving ascensions for the ethical and devout, which is unsurprising as both religions concern how the existence of different kinds of afterlife should dictate how we behave in this life. Remove that afterlife and the meaning disappears: the meaning only had value in those religious belief structures. Wayfarer believes this is a loss, and I'm just trying to get him to see that it could only be a loss if you believe in that meaning, in which case nothing is lost.
Not the least bit ironic because religion is not about agapé. That is not and never has been the core of it. Religion is about binding a community in shared values, norms, narratives, telos, etc.
What’s important in religion is knowing who’s holding the reins, and keeping in mind that power corrupts.
Well said. :fire:
I did look into it a while back, but what happens is once I find that I don't agree with the core premises of a system it generally prevents me from engaging further unless I need to understand it for some reason other than personal philosophy.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Can we just clarify this concept of "philosophical value" here - what exactly do you mean? Are you saying that since e.g. ancient statues from lost cultures or tribal statues don't have "philosophical value" it's either okay to destroy them or not to maintain them? Can we just simplify this discussion and replace "philosophical value" with "reason?"
No, I'm saying that something like "the meaning of life is to honour God so that he will let you into Heaven" has no value outside of religions where there's a God and a Heaven and an afterlife. Likewise the Buddhist meaning of life has no value in the absence of Nirvana. These sorts of meaning are binary and relative: they take on non-zero values only in the frames of the religions that beget them.
The point of my conversation with Wayfarer is that he believes these sorts of meanings, where there is some higher purpose intended and some ultimate goal to aspire to, have values generally, such that to be without such a meaning is a loss.
It doesn't really have anything to do with statues, sorry.
Of course.
But this thread is about the proverbial foxholes, those challenging situations that put to the test what one believes and holds dear.
Sure, and if a person can firmly hold their peace-time beliefs also once they are in a foxhole, then there's no problem for them.
But what if they can't?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Of course, but, again, we're talking about the proverbial foxholes.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Does he simply want others to believe it?
Or is that your projection?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Actually, I'm not so sure he does believe them, because I think that if he did, he wouldn't be discussing them here, in such a manner. Personally, I think that if I would believe those things, I wouldn't be discussing them at a forum like this.
Of course. But atheism is predicated on relative material wellbeing. It's a fairweather friend.
And yet all this self-reliance and self-sufficiency of the areligious individualist is built on the work of so many that came before him, including the religious. He didn't invent himself out of nothing.
Individualists are really just thankless brats, refusing to acknowledge their sources, viewing such acknowledgment as a weakness.
What evidence do you have for that curious claim? I was an atheist when I was broke (years ago) and had to shelter in phone boxes at night to stay dry. My situation made no difference. You are either convinced of something or not convinced of something.
You also made the claim that people lose their religion when life goes bad. So is it the case that you think people's beliefs are held in place by their situation?
What 'narrrow framework' are you referring to? What 'framework' have I been arguing for? You're writing as if I've been pushing evangelical Christianity, which I haven't. I studied the subject through comparative religion, which is as broad a framework as is available to study that subject. I think there is common ground between pre-modern philosophy, and philosophical spirituality, but I am not pushing any form of dogma.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's correct, and I stand by that.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You don't say. I've mentioned that quote numerous times on this forum. That book came out in 2003. And note the qualification that immediately follows:
He says that despite the many benefits of science -
[quote=Dalai Lama]The danger...is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure change in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction. [/quote]
Bottom line is, all I said was that there is something good about religion. That triggers hysteria on this forum.
It doesn't get much traction in religious/spiritual settings either.
Indeed, a self-respecting philosophizer shouldn't read philosophy books or converse on philosophy discussion forums simply because he's bored or can't sleep.
Quoting Wayfarer
Only on the condition that there is rebirth/reincarnation.
Any type of "higher meaning" stands and falls with rebirth/reincarnation. If there's no rebirth/reincarnation, then nothing is lost if a person doesn't pursue some "higher meaning".
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course. I think this loss of meaning goes hand and hand with the increase of material wellbeing, or at least with the enormous emphasis on it that is evident in modern times.
Acknowledging one's sources is an immediate manner of bringing man's relationship with the Cosmos to one's awareness.
I don't know. I've never had a single experience with religious/spiritual people or their texts that I would consider positive or encouraging. Of course, they're all eager to blame me, but I take this eagerness as a sign that they have nothing to offer, or that I'm simply a lesser being who is simply out of their league and would only waste her time trying to understand them.
My primary reasons for skepticism about religion/spirituality are the low quality of interpersonal communication and their caveat emptor attitude. By being that way, they make themselves irrelevant to me, and I can sustain interest in them only if I myself, too, engage in the sort of character assassination against myself that they enact against me.
I’m curious about what prompted you to start this thread, then. Struggling to see a point.
It's my own experience, and the experience of many seekers who turn to religion when they are facing hard times. Existential despair can be a powerful motivator.
It's hard to objectively measure hardship and suffering to begin with. One person's rock bottom might be another's "still manageable". But the point is that they both have a notion of "fallen on hard times", even though they differ in what exactly that means in practical terms (for one, it might be living in a one-room apartment, for another, sheltering in phone boxes).
I only said that some people lose their religion when life goes bad, that I have perceived a trend.
For some people, they seem to be. There are many factors to consider.
An areligious person was bragging about the benefits of their areligious stance, and I wonder if such people can still brag like that once life gets hard.
We can certainly give life meaning, as we do all the time, without recourse to religion. But I do think the point is well made that for many people, religion does offer a ray of light in otherwise extremely dark circumstances.
Religion can be used to justify the most rotten of actions, as well as the most enlightened actions. It would be unfair today to say that religion is all bad. But to overlook the harm it does, is also a mistake I think.
The point is not so much that we need to consider the good and bad in religion and stand in the middle, it's to recognize that like almost all human topics, there's a lot to pick out in favor of any specific view one may have.
You don't think there's an objective truth over whether God exists? Last time I checked these religions set forth hypotheses that one will come to know after death or who knows in some cases maybe even before. Islam, Christianity and Judaism assert the existence of a certain type of God and that is a proposition.
In an interesting way, as a theist, I view your quote there as probably blasphemous - the purpose of life is to connect with God, but not because of the afterlife and but because connection with God is good in itself. Jews virtually never talk about the afterlife and if that's how Christians have pitched it to you I'd be turned off as well.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I was glancing over an earlier response and I must have confused artefact with artifact.
I didn't say you were arguing for a narrow framework, rather that your posts betray an inability to think outside of one.
Quoting Wayfarer
And it holds true only in that narrow framework.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you rather missed the point, which is that even the leader of a religious group can step outside of their own current beliefs for a moment and gauge how they might appear in a broader context.
Quoting Wayfarer
Some specific points you've made have triggered disagreement from a few people. No one, except perhaps yourself, is being remotely hysterical.
You don't say. Whereas I, being a fundamentalist, am saying that the Bible is the innerant word of God and the sole path to salvation.
Objective truth has nothing to do with it. This concerns belief. If you believe in an afterlife, your idea of life's meaning will be with respect to that. The relative quantity here is the value of that meaning. The belief is a reference frame. If you don't believe in an afterlife, such meanings are valueless and of no loss to the disbeliever. Likewise if you don't believe in a creator, or a simulation, or the Fatherland, etc.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It was an example. Different religions have different beliefs and therefore different claims about the meaning of life.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Haha no worries.
Quoting Wayfarer
Whereas you don't seem to be able to wrap your head around the idea that a meaning derived from a teleological creator isn't worth a damn outside of a creationist framework, that other meanings that are worth a damn in other frameworks are actually the weightier ones in those frameworks. No one's craving a higher purpose from a non-existent entity, it's not that conceptually difficult.
I never said that, but then, you can't paraphrase what you don't understand.
I feel like you've had a bad Christian education here to some extent, is that true? I mentioned earlier how Judaism never really stresses the afterlife; sure we believe in it but we don't really know the details and I've never heard it talked about at a sermon and certainly not as a reason to be good.
Connecting with God is a good in itself; the ultimate good, really. Jewish teachings as it was taught to me has always been to not worry about the afterlife until one is near death.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
There's no bigger anti-smoker than an ex-smoker, and no greater evangelical than a recent convert. So you went for Judaism? Good for you. This Christianity nonsense is just a fad, it'll pass :D
Same problem, though. If you believe that your purpose is to love God, nothing can be more important, right? But if you don't believe in God, that notion of meaning is worthless. The meaning only has value if you believe in it, which means it's basically arbitrary (insofar as one can choose to believe anything else or nothing).
:clap:
:100:
:death: :flower:
Quoting StreetlightX
:strong:
:up:
Quoting StreetlightX
:fire:
[quote=The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays]It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.[/quote]
:point: What do 'believers' 'theists' 'idealists' et al mean when they chastise atheists and/or materialists, etc by saying, in effect, that atheism / materialism entails "life has no meaning"? And do tell why that is an objection (bug) rather than an affirmation (feature).
If you had to write an explanation of that topic as an encyclopedia entry, what do you think it would say?
No takers. From the opposite perspective:
1. An existential meaning is personal, so long as one is rigorous in excising bad faith (religion, communism Mr. Sartre, etc.). A personal meaning is more important to me than an impersonal, shared one that takes no account of who I am.
2. A meaning can only be important to me if it is a meaning in the world. Believing that the meaning of life is to psychically rearrange the planets of a distant galaxy to allow the Great Yaggant to be reborn in the flames of a dying star to defeat the evil Bong F'Dassir and bring balance, peace and life to a part of the universe that will, according to prophecy, unlock the Great Secret which will allow the whole living Universe to ascend to Bahkt Morran, events which our descendents will know about in the year of Yaggant 3,845,297 isn't very valuable to me since the world is much the same whether it's right or, more likely, I'm delusional. Meaning has to have a real context, not a made up one, which means being alert to the world, being curious, seeking answers to questions rather finding questions for your answers, correcting one's errors, identifying and adjusting for one's biases.
I expect this is likely only valuable in an atheist or physicalist or skeptic framework though, and has no value if you know that life is about getting into Heaven, ascending to Nirvana, proving you're in a simulation or whatever.
No, I didn't convert to Judaism. I've been a Jew for 30 years because I was born one and being an atheist doesn't disqualify one from being a Jew. There are plenty of Jewish atheists and they're no less Jewish than the Orthodox. I know this is different from Christianity, but it's just a matter of which lens we choose to look through; Christianity has made it all about faith, Judaism has not. For the record, all I am right now is a theist and a mostly non-practicing Jew (I will attend certain ceremonies but only if there's good food and people that I like.)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Under Judaism our purpose is to connect with God and we do this via rituals (like praying) and mitzvot (good deeds) - in other words, we do this largely through our lifestyle. Judaism prioritizes action over belief. We can't always control our beliefs, but at the end of the day we can control whether we act decently or not.
This "all or nothing" mentality you have here seems to me like it's a more of a factor in Christianity than in Judaism. There are plenty of Jewish atheists but just because one is an atheist at one point doesn't mean that that will always be the case or that God's non-existence is regarded as a certainty. Plus, plenty of our holidays just commemorate historical events which don't really need to involve God unless you want to acknowledge that factor. Judaism as a religion has strived pretty hard to avoid this "all or nothing" mindset where it's either God or no God and those who choose no God get effectively banished.
Judaism, like many other religions, is more than just a philosophical system. It's a lifestyle, it's a history, and it's a people. I believe there are other religions and belief systems like this, but for historical reasons the best spreaders like Islam and Christianity are universalistic and faith-based and they tend to spread quicker.
The second sentence doesn't support the first. Jewish is an ethnicity. Judaism is an ethnic religion, as you apparently know since you tell me that:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Or are you trying to say that Jewish atheists' purpose is to connect with God? :rofl:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That would seem to be an inferred "all or nothing" mentality then, not an implied one. Nothing in any of my posts to suggest that beliefs are fixed. Although a good way of fixing ones beliefs is to ensure that you cannot entertain others.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Well, one of them did have the Roman Empire at their disposal.
The semantics here are weird but yes, Jewish is an ethnicity but it's more than just an ethnicity in terms of how we normally think about ethnicity. You're considered part of the tribe and that's more than just sharing an ethnicity.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I am generally speaking not in a position to tell others their purpose. Purposes are personal. I believe in God but that doesn't mean I try to convince everyone around me that God exists.
Like I said before, you're optimistic and idealistic ...
You're not being fair. Wayfarer is a rare religious/spiritual person with whom it is actually possible to communicate. While you're painting him as the standard Southern redneck fundie.
It's not a new idea. The ancient Stoics, for example, set out to be happy and content, regardless of circumstances.
Wayfarer hit me with a similar accusation earlier. It's not true, though. My description is limited to the constraints in understanding how different ideas of life's meaning appear to different people. I'm hardly painting him as a placard-waving, abortionist-murdering, homophobe who loves his guns just for pointing out that the only meaning he recognises isn't worth a damn to many of us.
I think they believe that it's impossible to find meaning for yourself and that it must be spoon-fed to us by some robed authority figure. This nihilism, lacking a moral foundation, will make Johnny a bad person. :sad: But truth be told, Johnny is free to develop his virtue and not suffer the moral stagnation of religious tribalism, where it's all about the tribe and not so much anything else.
Nihilism is a phase, I think, and can be outgrown, and outgrown using the same elements as religion.
We have a built-in narrative generator that is actually rather difficult to turn off. We can find social groups and movements that can help us feel part of something greater than ourselves. We can find purposes that align with our skills or talents. We can have spiritual (in the sense of transcendence) practices such as meditation that can ease existential anxiety and perhaps feel a sublime oneness, even in a foxhole, etc...
This is a strawman.
It's not actually possible to "find meaning for yourself", although it's possible, and fairly common, not to acknowledge one's sources.
Even the most extreme individualist is still a person who has read what other people have written, who has listened to other people, and then incorporated bits of that into his own philosophy. As such, he did not "find meaning for himself". Just like one cannot be self-sufficient in terms of breathable air and food, so one cannot be self-sufficient in terms of one's worldview.
The individualism you speak so highly of is popular in religious and areligious circles alike. The sentence of yours I'm quoting is actually the kind of thing I've heard from religious people as well, when they say things like, "Think for yourself, look into various religions and then objectively, without bias, decide for yourself which one is the right one." This is an action that would require epistemic autonomy, which is impossible!!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Of course.
You're blocking the conversation from getting anywhere, it never develops into the directions I want it to go in.
The implication being that ...?
Then, the subtext surrounding the discussion. You stated above the "bragging" more than the case had originally been the object of heightened interest. The idea of selecting a belief based on the benefits of believing it and not the perceived truth of the matter seems odd. But, religions have always had a strong sales department, so seeing it from the other side isn't completely unusual. I guess we can thank Pascal for that one.
I'm doing no such thing. Everyone is free to try to take the conversation in an on-topic direction, although no one is obliged to follow them. I couldn't tempt WF to go my way, but there's nothing stopping you, fill your boots. Since my and WF's conversation died ages ago, the obvious blocker is that you're spending your time talking to me about my conversation instead of having yours.
Or do you mean I was supposed to take my conversation in your direction? I am not a performing monkey :rofl:
Sorry, that it's no loss to an atheist/physicalist that we have no teleological meaning. That you can't compare the value of this meaning in a creationist (in its broadest sense) framework to, say, to maximise one's contribution to the gene pool, or to know the universe, or to make art, or free a people, in the respective frameworks in which those meanings have utmost import.
For all my dislike of religion in general, I don't believe the above.
If you're a wuss, you'll be a wuss, with or without religion. And religion can certainly make you into even more of a wuss. But it doesn't turn a confident man into a wuss. And it can't help a wuss to stop being a wuss.
You're creating a hostile discussion environment that is not conducive to discussing the topics I want to discuss.
At the same time, what the vocal antireligionists are saying are clues for the topics I do want to discuss.
Hm.
I'm responding to your hostile posts in a very polite manner. If you don't like the state of things, you have the power in your hands to improve them greatly. You'd hear no objection or feel any pushback from me, just make that decision.
Of course. But what I see in this is braggartry. When people say or imply in any way that they "have it all figured out", I want to see how they actually hold up against life's hardships, regardless of whether they are theists, atheists, or whatever. I want to take them to Rhodes, to see how they jump there.
For centuries, it was expected of soldiers to have courage under fire, hence the phrase.
And in general, cowardice has always been looked down upon. Well, until relatively recently, when it seems that the psychologically "normal" thing to do is to fall apart under pressure, or else be branded as a psychopath.
Quoting baker
I haven't claimed to figure anything out. I've put forth no meaning of my own. Apparently I've been sufficiently even-handed that Carlos thinks I've more or less admitted to being a Christian while Wayfarer's accusing me relativism. I guess the moral here is that people fit information into their own frameworks any which way.
A thing I said before:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So I agree: putting it to the test, seeing how people actually behave, is the interesting thing. Everything else is largely posturing imo.
But you speak with great confidence. This is enough of a clue.
For prejudicial people, maybe. I still like the old fashioned ideas of facts and logic, curiosity over never needing to ask. Different strokes for different folks.
Who said that?
I'm not seeing any evidence that there was an interesting direction you wanted the conversation to go in. I naively thought, from
Quoting baker
and
Quoting baker
that there was some thinking on the horizon but, no, despite it being pointed out to you twice, you're still blocked by a need to be hostile, while complaining that the thread is blocked by the hostility of others.
Baffled, but I guess you never promised to make sense.
I can't post their real names. But I'm thinking of several religious people who have advised me on religious choice in just this way, and it's also a theme I've found in some religious books. The idea that one should "look within, honestly, without bias, and then one will see religious/spiritual truth" is hardly revolutionary.
Unfortunately for theorists, this topic requires some real examples, to wit:
Quoting baker
When in Rome!
Yes?
Resilience is a curious notion. My own intuition is it is likely to be found in people's personality and upbringing which has prepared them (for want of a better word) in some way to process and manage crisis and trauma. However I think the cumulative effect of several traumatic events is the hardest to overcome.
Because they'd be excommunicated for speaking such blasphemy?
Quoting baker
What books? If you're going to make claims like this you should be able to back them up.
:up:
No, because I don't want trouble.
Here's something from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
[i]CHAPTER ONE
MAN'S CAPACITY FOR GOD
I. The Desire for God
27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for:
The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.1
/.../
29 But this "intimate and vital bond of man to God" (GS 19 # 1) can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man.3 Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call.4
30 "Let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice."5 Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, "an upright heart", as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God.[/i]
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P9.HTM
Note: It says "man's capacity for God". You can infer from the above claims, as proselytizers do in their conversations with people, that "you have the capacity to know the truth, God" and that you need to rise above your biases (which are fueled by your revolt against evil in the world, the occasional indifference of the religious, etc.)
[i]II. Ways of Coming to Know God
31 Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments", which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.
32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.
As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.7
And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky. . . question all these realities. All respond: "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?8
33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. the soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material",9 can have its origin only in God.
34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".10
35 Man's faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith.(so) the proofs of God's existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.[/i]
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PA.HTM