Why is Cheerskep still angry over his early disillusionment with religion. Did the religious dogma teach hate and bigotry? Perhaps the answer is the coincidence of the onset of religious fervor -- around age ten or so -- with growing up and first becoming aware of real life evils. About religion itself, I can't understand why people blame religion for the excess of evil in the world. Just as words have no inherent meaning so neither does any religion have inherent truth. Evil, however we name it, is always a result of individual actions and choices, coerced or not. We don't need religion to be moral but religion can help provide coherence to moral sensibility, as can other social institutions. No religion can prove God or truth except by relying on belief.
For most people in our time, belief is regarded as something separate from scientific knowledge. But for me, belief is inherent in every moment of consciousness: I must believe that I can experience before I can experience, even in scientific terms. Ordinary logic alone, (together with neuroscience), seems to justify that we cannot do anything at all, think anything, remember anything, without an a-priori assumption or belief that can't be proved independently. If belief is essential to the merest bit of consciousness why should it be so foreign to big ideas? Existence itself, and I mean material existence, can't be apprehended without belief. So why deny belief when entering the metaphysical domain? That's why I have no argument against faith and belief. Accepting our reliance on belief is not the same, however, as accepting the existence of God or of believing that there is an afterlife or salvation or any of listed benefits of a religion insurance policy. God may or may not exist and may or may not care about us or any life. Like Pascal, I am more or less inclined to go along with the presumed existence of a caring God or a religion because I can't disprove it and it's better and more positive to imagine the benefits than it is to deny them. I take the feel-good pragmatic approach as the most plausible way to make the most of life. The Stoics had a way of discounting the fear of death and their presumption of no afterlife by comparing death, the end of life, to the state before life. What was it like before we were born? That's what it is after we die, the Stoics argued. Nothing at all. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose. That was their belief. That's not a bad idea. It eliminates the need for a spiritual Supreme Court and all the lawyers attending it. I like to recall Thoreau's wonderful comment on his deathbed: He was asked if he had made his peace with God to which he replied, "I'm not aware that we had quarreled". wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, September 11, 2011 1:32:57 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetics, intellect, high intelligence, and sensibility. In a message dated 9/11/11 11:06:46 AM, [email protected] writes: > Fine. But keep in mind it's called nihilism. It's essentially a give-up > approach, an abandonment of the quest for truth as good and truth as > always > true. > > I can't dispute that my epistemic positions brings with them a loss of many reassuring verities. As did the departure of the religious faith of my youth. But, curiously, it does not leave me with no convictions. It's not entirely unlike my surety that I find the taste of sour milk or the smell of rotten eggs to be repelling. Questions of "proof" don't enter into it. We can ask questions of "why" or "how", though. Why do certain great creators cause in me "aesthetic experiences"? Why did I, despite being brought up in the Boston Irish world of long ago which held bigoted views of Jews, blacks, and just about every similar "class", hate from the first moment what it seemed Hitler, American rednecks, and other "bad guys" were doing? I was a petty thief until I was fourteen; I got caught, and the shame I felt was a turning point in my life. How come I felt shame and got "saved"? Other kids simply got angry, and went on to become major criminals. My point is that, even when I could not show why or how, the feelings, appetites, affections, revulsions have been intense. Similarly, an unmooring thought like "words have associations but do not have meanings" does not at all make me feel nihilistic. A question like "Why are we here?" seems misguided to me. I don't think there is a "purpose" we are here, but that does not cause me to have none of those appetites and revulsions. And because I do have them I am actively driven every day. Those ongoing appetites and revulsions give my life all the "purpose" it needs.
