::Makes note of the irony, plans to ponder at some future time the odds that, rather than a typo it’s a Freudian slip, then recalls his stated location and decides it’s hardly worth the effort::
Lobsang, your OP reminds me that we stand on two different sides of the same coin and quite nicely defines that coin.
For me, as I have grown spiritually, it appears more and more that we humans are moving further from God each passing day. Not just further from the Father, but further from the metaphorical coin I mentioned earlier.
From a thiestic POV, viewing the rational side of the coin represents a belief structure that goes against everything we believe in and therefore we must either change it or distance ourselves from it.
IMHO, from an athiestic POV, viewing the emotional side of the coin represents irrationality and an unnecessary constraint that must be altered or disposed of.
From my POV, we can understand what God did (all of this), we can understand how God did it (nuclear fusion and fission, evolution, cause and effect of what we refer to as the Laws of Physics, etc) and perhaps someday we will understand why God did it. Here lies the drawing line; religion tries to speculate on the why’s, often sacrificing and denouncing the how’s and even disagreeing on the what’s. Putting aside the why’s (which we may not know until death, and possibly not even then), accepting the what’s for what they are and searching to understand the how’s will take us as close as I believe we will ever understand to understanding God. But this violates the convention of religion.
For me (and bear in mind this is only my opinion) the sum and total of God can be described in three words: God Is Love.
Often men do nasty things in the name of God and this tarnishes His credibility but this is and should be the focus of the study of Man, not God. We are, in the end, creatures of free will with the power to discern right from wrong. If we choose to ignore what we know is right and then blame God by saying “He told us it was His will, we thought it was right.” then history will rightly judge us by our own standards.
From God comes the Son of God and, again only in my opinion, the Son is best defined by His own words: “Treat other people the way you would want to be treated.” Again this is part and parcel of the Son, no other standards or explainations are needed. Also, as in the case of the Father, many atrocities are performed in the name of the Son in spite of His one and only commandment.
All of this needlessly complicates matters. For me it is as simple as those two phrases and all humanistic involvement just muddies the waters. It is better to simply sit back and let the universe go on about it’s business (it will anyway no matter what we do), remember those two phrases and enjoy the beauty of life while we still hold it. We can strive to explain the why’s with dogma or understand the how’s with diciplined scientific research but in the end it won’t make a mustard seed’s bit of difference to anyone or anything but ourselves.
When I find out new data about a program I’ve written, I don’t rewrite it, I incrementally improve it. We don’t create ourselves anew every day, we just change slightly on most days. I’m just as happy not having to look up the way to work every morning. So this create ourselves anew stuff sounds good, but is rubbish.
So, I’ll now look deep within my heart. Look, look, look. Yup, just as I thought, no god.
I’d say that people selling create yourself anew nostrums and never following up to see if this stuff actually works are the ones hearing what they want to hear, and avoiding seeing what might knock their little worldviews askew. I have this advantage that when I code something, if I’m wrong I find out immediately, and the computer doesn’t care if deep in my heart I was right. It keeps one humble, something I’d advise for those selling celestial snake oil.
What does that even mean?
What if I’m a masochist? Is it then OK to go around hurting other people? No? Then clearly more explanation is needed. The Golden Rule isn’t self-contained by any means.
Simple, God is Love. It means nothing more than that. God is not some invisible bearded guy in the sky. He is not an omnious cloud being floating around the universe passing out laws. He is not anything we could ever define because the definition would be binding and Love knows no boundries (Limits maybe but not boundries, and any limits may just be humanistic imposition).
Have you ever planted something to watch it grow? Did you do so with hate and malice? When the seed sprouted were you filled with fear or apathy? I would guess no. Even though you did not create the plant, you decided that it should grow and where and to some extent when. This small act can only be filled with love.
This is not just similar to God’s love, it is God’s love, in fact it is all that God is. Mankind can assign whatever mythology and dogma he wants to try to explain it and rationalize it, humanise it; but when boiled down to the bone it is as simple as Love.
I agree, the Golden Rule is not self contained. However even a masochist knows right from wrong. Denying his pleasure from pain is to deny who he is, to invalidate a defining quality of himself but still he knows others are not like this.
Eventually justice will occur. The masochist hurts other people, other people decide that, if they acted this way they would want to be corrected and thus correct the masochist. When everybody follows the Golden Rule, right and wrong fall into place. If they don’t then there are plenty of medications that can help.
Besides, if a masochist goes around hurting other people wouldn’t he then be a sadist?
Remember this is a human stating these things so your faith is in the human who wrote them and claims to quote another human. The idea of a God comes from a human; it is just who or what we want to believe. Faith doesn’t seek proof, it just accepts.
We tend to believe what helps us, or what we hope is true.
Monavis
I believe it was John who first defined God as love,so your belief is in John and what you were taught. I think it is good to believe that if it helps you, but it doesn’t prove anything to one who thinks of Love as a verb, not a noun.
Monavis
I have written 100’s of thousands of lines of code. Including machine code, assembly code, c language, basic, and FORTRAN on IBM 360 then on INTEL 8048 and up. In certain instances complete rewrites were necessary and beneficial and often times the incremental improvements were the big sales hot button for customers.
You either overcame the doubt the the code change would be an improvement or your boss just told you to do it and you didn’t take any ownership of the change silently doubting your bosses judgment, anyway.
**You **don’t create yourself anew every day but you can if you so choose. We are not talking about the end result (getting to work), we are talking about the process (of living). You would be wise to experience each day as if it was your first day, full of excitement and possibility, and not limit yourself in being ‘just as happy’.
So it sounds good but smells bad. Thank you for acknowledging my posts as sounding good but I conclude that you are not close enough yet to determine if it smells bed.
You have no evidence that there is no follow up! The training teaches you to hear what is being said and crush the automatic behavior to protect your world view. It trains you not to doubt in anything you want to accomplish. It trains you to be creative in the moment.
I have experienced many religions or lack thereof and never doubted for a minute my decision. I have set a goal to be totally free.
You do find out immediately if the coding was bug free , but you don’t find out immediately if it was a worth while endeavor for the precious little time that you have on the planet before you return to deep space.
This in no way answers the question. What is “Love”, that God can “be” it. Are you saying God is an emotion? That God is only an emotion? Because that’s what it seems like you’re saying to me. That’s what Love is to me, an emotion arising from my limbic system. Not really anything I’d call a god, but hey, worship whatever you want.
And no, I’ve only ever planted stuff out of need - I needed a soft lawn for my feet, or I needed tomatoes and herbs to make decent bolognaise. Strictly utilitarian. I reserve my plant love for wild trees that nobody planted.
Sadism and masochism aren’t mutually exclusive. And here you’ve stepped away from your absolutist statement that the Rule, as embodied by Jesus, needs “no other standards or explanations”. It clearly has to filter through human behaviour.
And why should “justice occur”? The masochist is strictly following the Rule - he’s doing unto others what he’d like done to himself. The Rule you delineated *didn’t *say “Do unto others as they would have you do to them”, which would be the more sensible and less explanation-begging variant. It was much more self-referential than that, wherein lies its failing.
I do not understand atheistic doubt. I see it more likely to have religious doubts. If you are religious ,you would have to be blind not to notice thousands of other religions. They all speak with the same certainty. They feel all these other ones are wrong. Is that not a basis of confusion and questioning.? How do you resolve that many religious and caring people will fricassee in hell because they were in the wrong sect?. Some live and die without ever hearing of the only pipeline to salvation. Because of where they were born and raised ,they are doomed. What kind of twisted god would do such a wrong thing?
I only rewrite code when it is so screwed up that it is faster and cheaper to do from scratch. If someone is that screwed up, then re-creating his life might be a good thing. Most of us, luckily, are not.
That was a joke son, and you totally misinterpreted “just as happy.” Believe it or not, many people don’t feel the need to create ourselves every day, what we got is pretty good. In fact, since so much of our personality is genetically based, I doubt that the re-creation would work very well in most cases.
Got data in a peer-reviewed journal that this training and stuff actually does any good? If not, it is rubbish until proven otherwise. Every charlatan and quack has a coterie of convinced believers surrounding him, but a few anecdotes about this particular type of cosmic debris changing ones life doesn’t add up to anything real. If you’ve coded in real machine language, like I have, you are probably old enough to have seen wave after wave of self help methods get popular and then crash. Time for a bit of skepticism.
Even my abandonment of religion wasn’t creating myself anew, and I know too much about our genes and environment to think that I or anyone can be “totally free.” Free of what? The ability to critically reason? No thanks.
You should read some Dijkstra. You or I or anyone never knows if our code is bug free, all I know after it gives me a Bronx cheer is that it has at least one bug, one place where I screwed up. As for being worthwhile, I get paid way too much to do things like coding little things in support of my research, and I have a damn good time doing it. I’ll be coding for fun even after I retire.
http://www.moretolifehuntsville.org/SEE_info/
No time now to reply further. Check back
So who says Love is just an emotion and nothing more? Who’s to say that love does not exist outside of the human experience? Some creatures, like swans, mate for life, is that Love? Is it an emotion? Perhaps an instinct? Other creatures founder and die when their mate dies. Is this just a feeling? Just a feeling that kills? Here we have a “feeling” that gives and takes life and transcends the human experience, sounds like a pretty damn strong feeling. To accept this concept as God makes more sense to me than to accept a humaniod entity lounging on some cloud formation somewhere.
And you are right, all human experience has to be filtered through all other human experience so nothing can truly stand alone. The Golden Rule as a value stands on it’s own merits but in practical application is filtered down along with everything else. I just think that it is a noble yet ultimately unattainable goal to attempt to retain the purity of values as they pass through a sieve of experience into reality. Sure, even the most steadfast values will become somewhat diluted in practice but it is good to try to keep them as pure as possible.
Yes, justice does occur. As socially unacceptable filters through society it loses some if it’s purity. The sane S&M’s values toward hurting and being hurt are diluted by societal constraint. The sociopath’s values are not diluted but his behaviors are recognised and access to his source of pleasure becomes limited as he is alienated (or eventually incarcerated, whether physically or chemically).
Fortunately there are not so many “true” sociopath’s out there, just confused individuals with a twisted system of values whose values are quite maliable. If the values of the pseudosociopath are ductile, then were they truly values to begin with?
I do
Never said that - I’m pretty sure animals experience emotions - within their capacities, of course
No
Don’t think so
Pretty sure it is, yes.
Cite?
Nothing “just” about it
Like I said, whatever floats anybody’s boat. But to redefine God as an emotional experience, however powerful, is to play semantic games and muddy the waters of discourse.IMO.
That wasn’t how I read the “needs no explanation”
These are two contradictory statements in one sentence.
I don’t ascribe any purity to notional values, it’s entirely in their enactment that they attain same.
To what end? I say, if a value system is flawed, drop it for one that works.
For Leopold II? If it only occurs intermittently, it’s not any system of justice I’d grace with the name.
…which it only ever theoretically, “ideally” had. That’s not real purity.
All he has to do is find the like-minded.
Yes, but I don’t know what relevance Sociopathic behaviour has to the Golden Rule.
Didn’t you earlier agree that all values are filtered through society’s net? Doesn’t this mean that all values are ductile, and as likely to not be “true”, (whatever that means)? How can you distinguish the pseudosociopath from the normal based purely on the ductility of values?
Just let the feeling of wonder wash over you–revel in it. These meaningless evolutionary creations we call our bodies have spines to tingle and hairs to raise you know.
The first two quotations are from a book, which is not peer reviewed and often not all that reliable. Even technical books aren’t as well reviewed as papers.
The third quote is from a peer reviewed paper, I’d guess, but does not support the efficacy of anything. Malcolm Gladwell wrote of much the same stuff in the non-peer reviewed Blink.
And the charts are nice, but no reference is given to any paper. If you were measuring the results of a seminar, you’d need a control group who got no training and one which got training in a different methodology.
At an old job I had the wonderful opportunity to be involved with “change consultants” who spouted some of the same nonsense I see here. The entire management team went to multiple meetings where we visualized the future and all that stuff. It ended when the consultants disagreed with our VP. They were out on their asses soon afterward. Change resulting from this - 0.
Lib, I think your post is accurate. Man simply is. The fact that he IS appreciated by other men does not mean he EXISTS to be appreciated by others. There is no point to posting, other than for our individual reasons.
Pot. Kettle.
:rolleyes:
Also, you really seem to be having trouble linking to the post you’re tying to get. Please try again, third time’s the charm.
Someday when you’ve tired yourself of your weak and useless ideology, you’ll come around, when you’re ready.
[I should note that I’m just trying to turn your silly notions back on you, I don’t actually think you’ll ever come around, because you are, it would seem, unwilling to combat your ignorance.]
Personally I think you’re more apt for a belief system like my own.
I never understood atheists that are so sure about the absence of God. What if there was a god who said, “BOOM!” and started the big bang and has done nothing else? It’s possible.
I think one thing that drives a lot of people to atheism is a reaction to modern religion. That I can understand. I think of organized religion to be a farce. Yet I am more of an agnostic than anything else. I can never prove or disprove god, so how can I really know?
I am more of a strictly scientific kind of guy. I believe in what is proven by science. Everything else fits into the category of “I’ll consider it but won’t believe until it’s been proven.” I don’t see anything wrong with this at all. I don’t have to believe in fairy-tales, nor do I have to think that we’re alone. Because there is no evidence, does it mean that something doesn’t exist? I think not. We have no evidence of parallel universes, yet a lot of people believe in them. Would any man of science be willing to say, “parallel universes do not exist,” because of a lack of evidence? I doubt it, because people are open to the unknown.
So I say, let’s continue to treat the unknown with the respect it deserves, and have science keep pushing at the boundaries. Just because a lot of religion is stupid, doesn’t mean we have to throw out the entire premise alltogether.
For all we know, we’re living in a computer simulation. Our entire universe was created by some kid on his home computer. Wouldn’t this kid be God? I can’t think of any reason for him not to be. If we were living in a computer simulation there is no way we’d ever know.
Atheism is good in that it inspires a logical and detached viewpoint, but to know that there is no god, requires just as much belief to know that there is one.
It’s just as “possible” that the universe is the poop of a passing twenty dimensional bird. The problem is, there’s zero evidence for a God, just as there is zero evidence for the bird. There’s zero evidence that either is even possible. So there’s no way to choose between the two, or between them and a near infinite number of other random ideas. Therefore, the rational default assumption is that there’s no God. That’s the way we think about almost everything, because it’s the practical way to think about things; nobody goes around claiming that we should keep our mind open about photons being tiny goblins, despite there being no way to get that close a look at them.
This is just another example of religion getting special treatment.
Quite a few would say that we should assume that they don’t exist since there’s no evidence for them. And it’s a poor analogy for God anyway; parallel universes ( of at least some types ) don’t violate physical laws; God does. And unlike God, we have have proof that universes CAN exist, since we live in one.
Why not ? Why should religion get any more respect than any other superstition ?
No, it doesn’t. The logical default is, or should be disbelief; there’s no evidence for God, or the possibility of a God; what evidence we have leans against there being a God; it violates the way we normally reason to take God seriously - an example of religion getting special treatment; and there’s simply no rational reason to believe in a God. It’s simply a self indulgent fantasy, with no reason to be taken seriously than any other random fantasy; less than many, in fact.