San Francisco?
Less dangerous than Jenny McCarthy, although that’s probably down to chance more than anything else.
Unless Shirley MacLoon has an antivaccine history I don’t know about, of course.
That is sort of what gnana says. You can read about it here. It will be more along the lines of, “There is no everybody, there is only the Self.” This view rejects “otherness” I guess you could say, so that “I” is never distinct from any other thing, resulting in the view that the only thing that exists is a single being, various manifestations to the contrary being a sort of illusion though still of course retaining a kind of secondary reality.
One could say it urges people to treat each other better, since anything one does one does to to oneself. But it doesn’t seem to have caught on if ya know what I mean.
Correct! (Regarding your understanding, not a comment about whether it’s true or not.)
If you believe that life in a body is simply a vehicle for experience for the spirit/soul, then judgment falls away; pain, sorrow, violence… the only way any of these ideas mean anything at all is in the context of being alive in a physical form. Spirit cannot be raped, murdered, tortured, starved, humiliated, etc. Only a being of flesh can experience those things, making life itself truly Shakespeare’s stage and all the men and women merely players. Spirits taking on roles to experience and to help others experience. And when the play is over, everyone returns to a state of being where the only effect of whatever suffering they have endured in life (or inflicted) has been to enrich and enlighten the spirit. Nothing is actually good or bad, it just is, and what appears to be good or bad to our fleshly selves is merely balance.
Maclaine’s questions/comments about creation are bound to make people angry and defensive without this context, context which is rarely included in any discussion of the idea that we may have a great deal more choice, power and control over the circumstances and events of our lives than most of us believe. Including the context isn’t going to make people agree or accept any of it any more readily, but perhaps it can mitigate the rage that often arises around any suggestion that any person’s “negative” experience is one they have chosen themselves.
Catholicism. Catholics don’t need to check their brains at the door to believe in God, they simply believe that God created evolution, because they realize that denying the fact of evolution is ignorant. The Catholic view is that God set everything up and now just lets it play out how it will. At least that’s my understanding. (My mom was a Catholic.)
You’ve never heard of liberal Protestantism? (The larger groups being the Episocpal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the American Baptist Church, the United Methodist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, tho those also have their conservative congregations, and many other smaller groups.) And then there is Unitarianism, whose members range from non-theist to neo-Pagan and even some Christians.
Oh yeah, and there are also plenty of New Agers, Neo-Pagans, and other types of Reincarnationists who cringe whenever Shirley MacLaine opens her mouth.
So Shirely MacLaine is still batshit crazy huh? Whodathunkit.
Dear god that is a disgusting philosophy.
I don’t see it as intrinsically disgusting… It’s a rotten philosophy to those of us who believe that the body and bodily experiences are meaningful. It’s an incorrect philosophy to those of us who don’t believe in “spirit” at all.
(I also see it as slightly dangerous, as it could lead people to ignore worldly matters and concentrate too much on the spiritual world. This is the same objection many of us have to all varieties of “Pie in the sky when you die” religious beliefs.)
In it’s own way, it’s beyond “disgusting.” Just as the behavior of the wasp that lays eggs inside a paralyzed victim is beyond “disgusting.” We, brought up with our human views of right and wrong, are squicked out over it, but it’s just nature doing natural things.
The same might be true of the view of spirit as explained by Stoid. It feels wrong to us, because we have views that are contrary to it. But suppose it were true: it wouldn’t really be disgusting, but actually vaguely comforting. We live, we suffer, we rejoice, we die…and some immortal part of us learns from it.
Again, what’s disgusting is the idea that The Holocaust is not a ghastly episode in human evil, but just some kind of business as usual. That’s the danger of this philosophy. It leads to a disconnect between us and our moral responsibilities. But it’s only disgusting if you believe in moral responsibilities in the first place, and some spiritualists apparently don’t.
She used to be one of my favorite actresses, but from now on, I won’t be wasting any time watching her. She has poisoned any enjoyment I could ever receive from her performances. Now, when I think of her, all I can picture is a ditch in Auschwitz, filled with rotting corpses. The insanity responsible for such atrocities is no different than her own. And when she finally dies, she won’t be getting any “R.I.P.” from me.
Many times, apparently.
It ought to be enough that we endure you.
Apparently many more than just the two of them.
The thing that’s disgusting is the idea that moral responsibility doesn’t exist and that you can use that to justify horrific acts.
It doesn’t really. Certainly not necessarily. Buddhism doesn’t teach morality but coincidentally suggested best practices often line up with what many would consider acting morally. Plenty of moral based religions have been used to justify horrific acts too.
I agree it’s disgusting…but that’s because I believe in moral responsibility.
There’s a kind of circularity here, in that we’re depending on what we already believe to define what is disgusting or not.
As I noted, in nature, “horrible” acts are commonplace, and there is no “moral responsibility.” The little bird falls from its nest, and is devoured, still alive, by ants. Is that immoral? To you and me, yes. To the ants? Not at all.
The meta- step I am exploring is: what if there really are spirits that outlive our bodies? If that were true, then universal morality might exist, and it might be different from what we believe in.
Honestly and truly, I agree with you. Moral responsibility is a good thing, and Shirley MacLaine is a loon (“Ohwhatalooniam.”) But this can’t be demonstrated from first principles. It depends on an assumption, one that pretty much defines modern Enlightened morality.
Torture is bad, not because God said so, nor because Pastor Bob said so, nor because the Golden Rule says so, but, ultimately, on the basis of an appeal to authority: because the code of ethics to which we subscribe says so. We can’t escape the circularity.
Except that isn’t the philosophy I described.
Yes.
It’s important to explore where the code of ethics came from, though: it isn’t arbitrary. It is a code that evolved from actual conduct that humans either engaged in or avoided because it was useful to their collective survival.
This pat evopsych explanation for the origin of morality and religion isn’t supported by anything but handwaving. In fact, there are many religious behaviors that clearly work against “collective survival,” an obvious example relevant to MacLaine’s reincarnation bullshit being the belief that changing the horrible conditions in which the mass of Indians and Southeast Asians live is against the cosmic order which ordained those conditions as punishment for past transgressions.
Not really. There are many examples of animal species in nature forming packs for survival. They tend to not kill each other indiscriminately. This, in most basic form, is an evolutionary moral code, is it not?
Why should human evolution be immune to similarly evolved psychological morality?
A few Buddhists I’ve known seem to think this is actually the case. They’re not horrible murderers or anything, just incredibly self-centred users of people who act like they’re better than everyone else.
I actually prefer the Church of England or other very mild sects of Christianity more than Buddhism these days. The songs are better too.