Hi Dan,
> Dan: > I am in no hurry; no worry. > Good. > Dan: > As the Copleston book shows, the Victorians were staunchly religious. > They really believed in God and spirit and soul. Make no mistake. It > was demanded of them. Yes.. and no. They believed in reason and rationality, these were the gods by which the Victorians oriented their lives. There was a lot of religious questioning at the time and a great deal of freedom to be atheistic or anti-theistic even. It was a time of explosive intellectual questioning and everything came under that keen analytical gaze, especially religious superstition. So I'm unsure what you mean by "was demanded of them". There were also those thinkers, poets and philosophers who foresaw the dangers of over-intellectualism. Who in their own way, warned against the same spiritual vacuum that ZAMM pointed out - what was down the road for technocratic man. So it was a fascinating period, and full of some of the finest thinking and innovation that the human race has produced. Your glib encapsulation "staunchly religious" conveys an idea of modern fundamentalist fanatics, who think that the solution to our values-vacuum is to return to those people and do things their way. This is very wrong and such people are kind of stupid, and these I think of as "staunchly religious" so your epithet applied to the Victorians doesn't ring very true to me. It sounds like a sorta unthought out cliche. Have you read much of the Victorians? Fascinating people, really. Dan: > Starting from that point of view precludes any > possibility of viewing reality outside of religious notions. In my > opinion, they were spouting nonsense, pure and simple. Unless of > course someone believes in that nonsense. > John: The quintessential Victorian monument is the Titanic - the queen of her age. "God himself couldn't sink this ship" as the essential Victorian sentiment of the time. "God" was for old ladies and superstitious simpletons. Man's power - intellectual understanding of the world - is the true Victorian "God". And lots of people believe that nonsense, even today. Dan: > Yes but to compare Native American culture with the Victorians is a > stretch. Not even in the same ballpark, I'd say. > John: Again, a vehemently disagree. The American character is largely a synthesis of those two influences, and you don't have synthesis where there is no affinity. One thing they both shared, was an idea of a supreme being and spiritual reality. As did the Greeks and just about every culture you can name. The Victorians were the first society I can think of, to actually work at killing off the idea of deity. And today people think of them as "staunchly religious" is kinda ironic. Dan: > Well, ruach is a Hebrew word that literally means both wind and god. > It has to do with a kind of vitalizing force... the wind of god > brooded over chaos in the creation story to bring forth life. John: Ok, now yer talkin'. Dan: > It is a > what, not a who, however. > > John: Now see, that's a choice too. Like I choose to treat my dog more as a who than a what, but to ask what he ultimately is, beyond my conception of him sorta makes the whole exercise ridiculous. We choose to view a who, because we need a who. We choose to view a what, because it suits us to. I get that. A lot. Dan: > Now, they may have been talking Dynamic Quality! But not the > Victorians with their spirit and soul. Sorry. > > John: See, "Victorians" is too broad a brush to wipe out a whole generation. Some were, some weren't. You have to dig down a bit to find out which is which. Like everything. Dan: I don't think it is a good thing to conflate god and Dynamic Quality, > which you seem to be doing here, hence my discomfort with spirit and > soul as used in Copleston. It is nonsense. > > John: Well that's a tricky one, Dan, to answer. Because there is a sort of three-fold aspect of what I think when you say "God". I'm conditioned along certain symbolic representative lines, and it's not really God the Father that I conflate with DQ, it's the Holy Spirit, and see, that's a whole 'nother problem because what THAT is, is a complete mystery even to people who say they believe in the Bible, so just simply conflating God and DQ, no, I don't do that. One man's nonsense, another man's treasure. Hey, you gotta have some kind of mythic conceptualization of it all in order to think about the whole enchilada. Dan: > I am not indoctrinated, sorry. Never been a church-goer. Never studied > religion, christian or otherwise. I did read the bible as a teenager > and actually memorized a good deal of it but that was on account of > reading somewhere that Hemingway did the same to better his writing. > I've also read the Gita and the Koran and checked out the Book of > Morman (God, what a load). > > John: Well, I'd put a broader understanding of what I mean by indoctrinated. We're all indoctrinated to an extent, and ideas about religion are just as much a result of our indoctrination as absorbing those ideas from the womb as truth. I've never been much of a church goer either, but I've gone enough to understand how it drives people. But like you, it's mostly just driven me away. It really wasn't till Deep Ecology Philosophy that I started having more sympathy for religious conceptualizations. Dan: > For the record, the ghosts that RMP speaks of in ZMM have to do with > social and intellectual patterns of value, not spirits or the soul. In > fact, he equates the theory(s) of gravity with those ghosts. > > John: Exactly! And the way I understand spirit, is that equate it with those things also - intellectual patterns such as the theory of gravity. Software. Programmatic information, rather than some substance. Spiritual reality includes all areas of knowledge and wonder, ghosts. spirit. I mean geez, can't the meaning of a word be shifted from the exact spelling of your expectation? If Spirit as they were talking about, is the same as DQ as he's talking about. Spirit, apart from the dogmatic theories of any particular sect - that which drives the creation of ideas about gods and angels and sprites - THAT spirit IS DQ - the generator of the mythos. Two terms which end up meaning the same thing in essence. Dan: > As I've told you before, I am not a philosopher and have done no > formal studies. I would be interested in going over the Copleston > annotations to further the MOQ, however. > > John: It's a very enjoyable process. Analytic philosophy isn't really necessary, its written as a commentary upon the ideas of a philosophologist - Copleston, in his reading and analysis of British Idealism of the Victorian period. There's a lot that RMP finds agreeable and good, and like you, he's put off by the religious construction of the thought, but if nothing else I think the whole passage is valuable as an illustration of other great thinkers who overcame the S/O paradigm in their thought. >> Dan: > >> We both have a choice and have no choice, at the same time. That is > >> what the MOQ is telling us. > > > > > > > > John: > > > > That doesn't satisfy me at all. Logical contradictions are not very > > useful. Philosophically -wise. > > Dan: > It is not a logical contradiction. To the extent we follow static > quality, we have no choice. To the extent we follow Dynamic Quality, > we are free. Where is the contradiction? > > John: The contradiction is at "at the same time". We can only do one at a time. We can either follow DQ, or sq. Thus we are either free or trapped, by our choice. Choice is fundamental. Dan: > Yes, co-fundamental works. We need both Dynamic Quality and static > quality. Quality (if we're talking Dynamic Quality/static quality as I > assume we are) is both free and determined. It is not synonymous with > free will however. > > John: I don't see how you can separate it and still remain logical. By free will, I simply mean the ability to choose. I don't see how you can separate Quality from the ability to choose. When there is no choice, there is no betterness. If you want to avoid the synonymous labeling, then you'll have to come up with a functional difference or way to divide them. Dan: > As I told Ham, you are missing the point of the hot stove experiment. > Moving off the hot stove isn't an intellectual decision. That comes > later. Your 3-stove analogy completely missed that point and I cannot > see that you've grasped it yet. > > John: Well, that's because you persistently refuse to get MY point. There's no such thing as a "hot stove experiment". There is actual people involved with actual stoves and their reactions are all over the map, as varied as the people themselves. Some even intellectualize. Heck, some people intellectualize EVERYTHING dan, I should know, I'm one of 'em. I'd intellectualize myself off a hot stove, probably. So it's no conclusive proof of anything, especially not of anything as important as the fundamentalness of intellect. I thought I really explained this, but I can see that you haven't grasped it yet. > > > > > Thanks for your patience, Dan. > > You're welcome, and thank you for yours as well. > > Oh no need to thank me. I enjoy conversation or I wouldn't be here. I just wish I had more opportunity sometimes... John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
