From: "anartax...@yahoo.com" <anartax...@yahoo.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 9:32 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Studying the numinous
This reply is specifically for Judy, not Turq or Salyavin. Alas she cannot honestly reply, as it would break her word. That is not saying she is dishonest, please note. We all have honesty glitches, part of the human condition. This reply is also specifically for Anartaxius, and is *not* to be used as a springboard for Judy Stein to use it as an opportunity to reply to him while still pretending to keep her word about never replying to Anartaxius until he apologizes for some imagined past affront. :-) That said -- and directed solely to Anartaxius -- well said. It's nice to see that *someone* here can actually express their thoughts about theism and post-theism, and in their own words. without relying on the Cliff Notes version of thinkers they probably have never even read. I agree with many of his words, and don't have much to say about the few I disagree with, for the simple reason that Anartaxius merely states what he believes, as opposed to trying to make other people believe it. That's the crux of the issue IMO. I have many close friends who are believers in God. My favorite singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn is a strong believer in God. I love him because we share a love of Wonder, even though we express it in different ways. Me, I don't believe in any real concept of God. If I did, I would have to consider Him/Her/It a psychopathic thug. But I get along with my believer friends, and we have wonderful times and conversations together because no one is trying to *sell* anything to anyone else. It isn't what one believes. *Whatever* one believes is OK in my book, as long as they don't try to sell it to me or try to force me into arguing about it when I don't feel in the least like arguing, especially about something as meaningless as beliefs. The minute someone *does* attempt to force that, they have IMO crossed a line, and have become nothing more than a potential subject of laughter and ridicule. My friends never cross that line; that is why they remain my friends, and admirable. Those who cross that line will never earn anything but my derision and my laughter, in this lifetime or any other. Generally I am not interested in Theism. I'm a post-Theist, the theist part being early childhood conditioning, which fortunately was neither intense nor carried out with any verve, thus my mind escaped. I do not care for the word God, primarily because it has so many variable and cultural connotations, which make it 'slippery' as vehicle for explanation. If one thinks dualistically about reality, then there is always more than one being, for example, me and the world, or me and God. As long as there is any sense of separation, then being is divided. Those whose consciousness is embodied cannot think any other way. The theistic argument that God is not a being but just being I do not have an argument with. I think currently that being = consciousness = God, the latter in that most abstract sense. But most people do not use the word that way. When God is being in this way, you are the same, as Jesus said 'not made out of flesh and blood but out of God'. But most people are not going to get that idea of being if you use the word God because it will pull in all sorts of cultural and individualised conditioning which in the mind creates 'a being', not abstract non-thing being. The so-called spiritual path is basically just the process of retraining the mind and larger experience to de-localise and de-centralise the appreciation of consciousness. Consciousness makes experience possible, you never experience consciousness, it is what makes experience possible, it is what experiences. In older language it is 'the light of life' which is saying the same thing isomorphically transformed. Consciousness unlocalised and decentred is equally everywhere, the very things of experience. It is equally at every point along the data path of perception, it makes the data points 'visible'. You do not look for it in the human head. What you find there are sensors and an interpretive processor, the mind. Consciousness makes the sensors and the interpretive processing experience-able. All you will find in the head is machinery. You do not have consciousness, it has 'you', what you think you are. Being is eternal but not in the sense of time. Everything has being like this, the most obvious thing in the world, everything is this being. It is trivial and so in one's face it is never seen or understood. As Vashitha said, all this talk about creation and who created the world is for the purpose of writing and expounding scriptures, but it is not true. But the human mind, thinking, works sequentially, and so it sees things as a process with beginnings, middles, and endings. The Big Bang Theory is an example of this, and that is a great practical way to look at the universe, but if you want fulfilment there has to be the experience of everything, mind, body, environment, as all the same being, everything collectively together, the 'uncarved block' as the Taoists say. Unity. Not you in unity, just unity. No 'you' is required. Delocalisatin and decentralisation of consciousness transforms the appreciation of the concept of 'self', and it does not matter if you capitalise 'self' or not. It is just a story, a narrative with the tag 'self' attached to it. You do not have a relationship with being, for it is just what you are, once the 'you' gets dropped off the map as a convenient fiction. To find out if this is real or not, there is no evidence except the experience. There is no proof, no argument can show this. When people talk about it in one way or another, if what they say has a resonance with you, then it sets up a spark inside, and then the search to find out if that particular manner of expression is somehow real begins. No guarantee of success. If it does not resonate, it will appear as total nonsense, because it is not like something, not like anything, so an argument will never convince. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote : Yet another atheist wannabe who simply cannot lower himself to reading enough philosophy to realize the incoherence of one of his fundamental premises, or that the purported evidentiary problems of theism as confronted by science that he blabs on about so pompously are in fact nonexistent. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Hell if I know what a divinity is. I just copied the definition of 'numinous' from the Google search results for 'define:numinous'. I was discussing the nature of informed belief, that is belief based on evidence rather than simply an idea one has in the mind. I was not discussing anything about atheism. Without evidence, there is no case to be made, so arguments for and against are empty. One can argue that Sherlock Holmes smoked a Meerschaum pipe, but the evidence in the illustrations of the stories as originally published indicate he did not, but Sherlock Holmes never existed in reality as a real person, so what one is really arguing about here is not about Sherlock Holmes and his pipe, but the content of the text and illustrations in the stories about a fictional character called 'Sherlock Holmes'. So the argument concerning Mr Holmes is not about a reality but an illusion purporting to be a reality, the actual reality in this case being printed text and illustrations in The Strand Magazine (1891–1950, United Kingdom). The definition of 'divinity' (noun) from the same Google source is 'the state or quality of being divine', and 'a divinity' would then be 'something that has the state or quality of being divine', which seems to imply there could be more than one something that has those characteristics. A saint might be considered divine. Zeus could be considered divine and therefore a divinity. So could Apollo, or Jehovah. Maybe I could be divine. Maybe you could be divine, though there seems to be a preponderance of opinion here that would not likely be the case. It is not incoherent to say 'I just believe in one less divinity than you do'. That is just a statement, a proposition. Some people believe in many divinities, some in just one, some in none. A proposition by itself is not an argument, just a statement that may or may not have truth value, which cannot be affirmed or denied on the basis of the proposition itself. Coherence depends on how a particular proposition aligns logically with other propositions, and aligns with what the proposition(s) point to, if in fact they point to something outside themselves, for if they do not, it is an empty argument, much ado about nothing. In mentioning enlightenment, that particular discipline investigates subjectively the nature of sensory experience and its relationship to thought, and the interpretation by thought of the nature of experience, whether in fact thought can represent 'truth' or is simply a distortion of 'truth', or even whether there really is anything or state that could be thought of as 'truth', that is, whether the word 'truth' has any meaningful correlate that is real. A friend of mine was recently sued for delinquent payment of rent. This was not true, as my friend brought evidence of the fact to court, but the person bringing the suit came to court without any evidence whatsoever, but managed to convince the court — the judge and the person suing being white and my friend, black, to a 90 day stay, so that evidence could be brought — the argument: 'I did not think (the defendant) would show up'. The case was thrown out by a higher judge on the basis that no evidence was brought, and the lower judge showed prejudice in not dismissing the case. This is the situation between non-believers and believers of the religious kind, there are arguments but evidence is unconvincing or absent in spite of the sophistication of the pleading or polemic of the claims being made. Science takes a practical tack in such instances, no evidence, no case. This gets rid of the nutters, so one can focus on actual stuff, but occasionally there are examples of the baby being thrown out with the bath water, but in time the mistake may be rectified. 'Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.' — source unknown ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote : Exactly what is "a divinity"? This is where atheists, especially those with pretensions to scientific understanding but who are deficient in philosophy, tend to get all tangled up and become incoherent, saying things like "I just believe in one less divinity than you do." ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : nu·mi·nous = having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity. Exactly what is a strong religious quality? Exactly what is a spiritual quality? How do these two qualities indicate or suggest the presence of a divinity? If something is indicated or suggested, is that any reason to assume that something is actually there if it has not been directly seen, directly experienced. All that has to be done is demonstrate, unequivocally, what it is that one wants others to see, then you have a reason to define and investigate what that is. It is not necessary to investigate or define what does not exist, since one will never come across a concrete demonstration. One can imagine all sorts of things mentally, but never be able to show that those things exist, and as such, all such ideas are equivalent in that there is no proof, and no possibility of proof that such things have an existence independent of thought. There is reason to believe that what we call an elephant exists, even if we do not know what it is or have a name for it, it can be experienced through the senses, at some point it can be defined, observed, argued about. There is a problem when the subject matter at hand is empty, but is presumed to be real, such as invisible formless gods, or enlightenment. With gods, we have to presume they exist, and are somehow different from us. With enlightenment, there is the problem that it really does not exist, but we think it does. In this case the spiritual path shows us that the idea of enlightenment was an illusion, that what we were seeking was in fact just what we always were, not some new thing we have never experienced before. But it cannot be proved by argument, one just has to be crazy enough to attempt to resolve the issue. In the rarefied atmosphere of abstract theology, if we think that union with the god of one's imagination is the equivalent of enlightenment, then I suspect there will be a real disappointment because at the end of the road, the thing you have to give up is your idea of what that god is.
