On Jan 18, 5:32 pm, Lee <[email protected]> wrote: > So I have been away for a week(damn me am the only IT bod in the world > without Internet access at home,this is NOT the question) and when I > come back i see all sorts of rows and arguments and I guess what can > only be described as 'bad bood'
It's probably me, in some mysterious way (unless this sort of thing happens a lot here, which I don't get the impression it does). I only joined a few days ago, and already I've been ranted at by two people, and threatened with a ban by at least two moderators if I persist in responding to my, er, critics I wonder if I'm a Jonah. I probably carry a dark cloud, an emotional microclimate, around with me. Perhaps I'll soon be thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale, so you won't have to worry, and Minds Eye will no longer be the eye of a storm.. > Do we really choose to have faith in God's existance though? Can we > literaly choose what we wish to belive or not? > Lets try it, please try to choose to belive that God exists and let us > know what happens. > I suspect that I can no more choose not to belive in God than I have > chossen the opposite.' > > Am I right? Rather like one's sexual preferance, is it true that one > can choose to belive in God or not? Interesting. Pragmatism, and Pascal's wager, and Existentialist self- creation and Nietzschean transvaluation of values, or whatever (I'm bluffing), have a lot to be said for them, no doubt, but not by me. I'll stick to what I know, and try for once to be brief. I'll just give what I think are a few examples, from my own (superficially quiet but inwardly wildly disordered) life, of what I think you are talking about. (1) I could choose to feel guilty about my sexuality and gender identity confusion, but, insofar as I am able, I choose not to, I choose to make this aspect of me a part of my identity, even if it feels worthless and evil and mad. (2) I could choose to believe that the reason I have failed to develop a career as a mathematician is that I am inherently incapable of understanding the subject, and never had a genuine vocation for it in the first place, but I choose to persist grimly in renewing my acquaintance with it, even if I hate it and am bored and uninspired and cannot understand why it was ever important to me. (3) I could choose to believe that the enormous, overwhelming, almost universal social pressure to accept some everyday social construction of reality (and morality) as real reality (and true morality) is right and good and true. But, like Bartleby, and as far as I am able, I "prefer not to". I have learned this the hard way, because for most of my life I really believed I was totally mistaken about everything, and I subjected myself slavishly to the social consensus around me, thinking there was nowhere else to turn, other than my own self, in which (whom) I had utterly lost faith. But I don't think these are really arbitrary choices, and, insofar as I understand them (which is not much), I am not with Pascal, William James, Nietzsche, or Sartre. I'm a realist; and the reality I believe in might also be known by the name "God". Or might not. (It is most certainly not what the vast majority of people mean by "God".) Finally, may I ask you a question? What do you mean when you apparently assert, casually and in passing, that sexual preference is a free choice? (I don't want to argue with you until I know what you mean, and in any case, there are bound to be plenty of other people to argue about it, and I can perhaps shut up for the rest of the day and get some rest!) (Did I say I would be brief? I'm afraid 'ME' seems to be a lot about 'me' at the moment! Please at least partially blame the two people who have chosen to focus aggressively on my personality, and to accuse me of being some former member of Minds Eye, returning in false disguise to plague the group as a troll! I have no idea what's happening, and I am more than a little punch-drunk from it all.)
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