What's your religion
Posted by MajorStu 13 years, 9 months ago to Philosophy
Many years ago now, while on active duty in the Army, some missionaries (you could tell by their clothes) came to our worksite and struck up a conversation. Eventually came the question, "So, Sarge, what religion are you?" My motor sergeant unhesitatingly replied, "Capitalist." Came the response, "But, Sarge, that's not a religion." Sarge replied "It is the way I practice it."
Although I cannot really call myself a religious individual, I have great respect for the tenets of Christianity and it's basis in our Judea-Christian laws, and judicial system.
I believe that Objectivism and Christianity can co-exist just fine, and maybe both can be enlightened.
http://thechristianegoist.wordpress.com/...
www.thechristianegoist.wordpress.com
"The eye of the beholder!"
I perceive what I think. I think because I know.
Is knowledge necessary for thought or vise-versa?
As I see I am relaying information through a filter of what I know. But what do I know? Can a being of such thought such as the human mind produce thought without previous knowledge?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPspvwQr...
In my view, that doesn't appear to involve any kind of imposition of the state of our minds onto the state of reality. Whether or not our brains are capable of understanding every aspect of reality is irrelevant to the nature of reality itself. Reality is as reality is, regardless of whether or not we are capable of understanding it.
Hopefully I'm not misinterpreting you here.
Axioms work as the necessary first step in an epistemological hierarchy to order our concepts and form conclusions about the nature of reality, but we still are only thinking of the kinds of things that the neural networks that our brains consist of – are capable of conceiving. And that’s the fundamental limit of understanding of existence that we cannot get beyond. No philosophical or scientific “wizardry” can get us beyond what the limits of our minds are. In a sense that is the A-is-A limitation but its imposed by reality on us and not the other way around.
How true is a person's belief it its given under threat of coercion? One of the aspects of Christianity that first started me on the road to atheism 44 years ago was the totalitarian aspect of it where we judged morally for "thought crimes" of rationally examining the evidence for the nature of reality and honestly asking if we could conclude that God existed. My commitment to reason was made with full knowledge of the implications that my secular ethics were judging the whole idea of God to be both unreal and monstrously evil, and that I'd be damned if my judgment was incorrect in the matter. I've lived 44 years with my head upright with the confidence that I was living a moral existence. If I'm mistaken about this, I'll be paying the price. But my judgement about God will remain the same. Torturing those who don't believe and who don't bow down does not make someone loving and moral.
Oh, your opinion on the imaginary friends will fall on deaf ears from the Christian and Judaism camp. Muslims will come after you and if you refuse to convert, they are obliged to kill you. Here you go, just a few from THEIR OWN TEXT:
Qur’an:9:5 - “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” And this one:
Qur’an:8:39 “So fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief [non-Muslims]) and all submit to the religion of Allah alone (in the whole world).”
So, Mr. Atheist, when you find yourself surrounded by those who want you dead because of your disbelief, who will come to your rescue? When Death (Islamic hordes) is staring at you in the face, what will you do? According to you own beliefs, when you die, nothing happens. But according to Islamic beliefs, when they die, (while performing Jihad) they (guys only!) get 72 virgins. People like you will be easily defeated.
I'm a Christian. Oh, BTW, I fight. No pacifist here. Don't worry, I'll protect you and your belief, just like I did for 20 years in the military. Thanks for having my back...
Instead of looking to a mystical source for guidance we need to use reality and reason. But we weren't born without a cultural past that included religious context. So its difficult finding a fully secular grounding for ethics that hasn't been influenced by the religious past. Such a grounding is frought with difficulty as the disaster of Marxism has shown.
For decades, I held that much more could be derived from the Objectivist axioms than I now think is the case. These axioms remain as true and valid as they've always been, but it turns out that not everything that was alleged to follow from them is true.
As to the use of A=A imply more about reality than it does and this representing the primacy of consciousness -- extreme claims require extreme reasoning and evidence to support. This is a more fundamental topic than mere competing quotes could dispense with.
As to theories versus reality "the universe would look like what?", the standard scientific method is to take the any proposed theory and then see what it predicts about what would be observed, and then see if the observations match the predictions. That was all I was saying about what the universe would look like if God existed. There is absolutely no evidence of a purposefully designed universe as some cosmic morality play to demonstrate God's wisdom, glory or goodess for the sake of Man. Since this is what religions claim, this can be shown to be not just nonsense, but evil nonsense as well.
Before Darwin, life had been such a mystery that one could almost forgive people for hypothesizing some other dimension to explain it, but not since then.
The axiom A=A is true, but it imposes nothing on reality, because it says nothing that isn't trivial about what reality really is. I used to be scandalized when an small 'o' objectivist acquaintence (who also happened to be a physicist) would say granted, A-is-A, but A-is-A what? For the last decade I have worked for a company that makes scientific laboratory systems containing super-cooled magnets, SQUIDs and other devices that rely on the quantum effects to measure fundamental physical properties that occur at near absolute zero. The axiom A-is-A is true but quantum physics is definitely real as well. As to God, the universe would be very different if God existed and had created it. The axiom A-is-A would still be valid but it would be a very different universe out there than we in fact do observe. A-is-A only protects us against straw men which no one is really arguing for at all. Another problem I have with the contention that A=A eliminates or guarantees anything is that it is similar to other "primacy of consciousness" systems of thought which also include religions. There is a fundamental issue of consciousness about validating our internal perspective against external existence, but its more complex than something that A=A can solve.
When confronting someone who is a theist, there is a tremendous emotional edifice that the person holds, which effectively circumvents frontal-lobes brain activity, in favor of automatic, reptilian and mammalian emotional processes from the more primitive areas of the brain.
We have only recently begun to learn how the brain functions, and in which areas the brain is active under particular sets of cognitive and emotional circumstances. Although, the effect of consciousness is still a great mystery, the field of neuro-science is advancing rapidly and giving us a clearer picture of what is happening in our grey matter.
However, we need not look any further than the basics of philosophy –the field of cognitive understanding and integration- that led us to the sciences, psychology and insights into our own minds.
Theism does not occur naturally in the human mind. It is a philosophical process of either cognitive or subconscious indoctrination, as we see in the children of theists. Theism is an act of willful choice, and in most cases arises from an argument from ignorance. In other words, one could not think of a better explanation so they make one up – God.
Unfortunately, the west has created a disintegrated educational system, which largely ignores philosophy, leaving it as a mere plaything or a bobble of the mind. These attitudes have left the individual in a disintegrated or misintegrated (Leonard Piekfoff: The DIM Hypothesis) state in regards to their intellectual ability to integrate and understand reality. The modern individual, because of this indoctrination process, can no longer feel and know confidence in looking inward towards his or her own cognition.
As such, the brain must emotionally return to the state of pure, sensory perception and emotional experience, as it did in our infant state of tabula rasa. Frontal lobes consciousness is replaced by perceptual, feelings-based consciousness, until frontal lobes consciousness and critical thinking are replaced by heuristic logic rather than reason. The individual now believes that his feelings are truth and reason is false.
At this point, an individual is no longer able to integrate their intellect. As intellectual integrations subside, deeper heuristic confirmations begin to occur as a series of emotional and logical errors. Prayers lead to confirmation biases -all feelings become heightened- as the brain desperately tries to decode and make sense of its world -as it did in infancy. The person begins to have moving emotional experiences that the individual interprets as “spiritual”. They may even begin to develop mild schizophrenia as their own thoughts are replaced with Gods voice!
Since the brain cannot integrate a concrete of reality as an intellectual placeholder to neurologically establish God (or any other fantastical floating abstraction) as a metaphysical constant -it must hallucinate. At this point, the individual seeks cultural confirmation to satiate his disintegrated cognition in the form of unexplored feelings. He believes these feelings are a supernatural state, and as long as he maintains the misintegration, the brain experiences more feel-good chemical rewards, thus confirming his spiritual experience.
However, the brain has evolved to accurately decode and categorize the world it experiences. Since the theist has cognitively neglected it, emotions rein supreme and only an authoritarian, group, cultural norm, or historical tenure can provide the illusion of stability and heuristic feelings of truth the brain desperately requires to feel whole.
Depending on the intellectual development and education of the individual, this process can become so pervasive that the person becomes locked into their cultural role of support for this ongoing fantasy. He begins to build edifices of social taboos, laws and threats against those who may expose them to reality. He may then begin to hear voices in his head that compels him to commit genocide against “infidels”. More commonly, he finds himself in a perpetual state of mystery, confusion and mental illness constantly looking for the next emotional / chemical rush, Authority, God, or Guru to provide stable answers for his life. Faith cannot provide these answers, as it is not a short-cut to a “superior realm” but rather a willful, short-circuiting of reason.
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