I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

No. I am not spiritual or religious. I'm not always sure what 'spiritual' even means. I ususally understand it as an emotional relationship (connection) humans can have with people, place, memory, beauty, art, the transcendent - pretty much anything.

Morality and values to me are like a code of conduct that we go along with to varying levels of commitment. I have emotional reactions to behaviours and values which are the product of culture, upbringing and probably evolution (our strength is as a social species after all).

I read Kazantzakis and while I found his ideas dramatic (existential authenticity versus societal/religious expectations), they had no impact on me personally.

But I understand that many of us (perhaps you too) grew up in religious cultures which inculcate ways of relating to the world where the spiritual and religious (and even, sometimes, the mystical) jostle for interpretative supremacy. I grew up in a religious tradition (Baptist) but for whatever reason I'm fairly certain I never had a single day of belief in god or anything transcendent. I've never found it necessary to my sense making. That said, I have known a number of very decent religious folk from Aboriginal, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Sikh faiths.

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality - whatever people imagine they are basing their morality upon, they must either interpret god's will or intention (good luck with that) or construct an ethical system based upon theories/values which themselves would seem to be arrived at contingently.

Reply to javi2541997 I'm an anti-supernaturalist. About forty-five years ago, while attending a Jesuit high school, I lost 'my religion'. Since then, for me 'spiritual' means celebrating (i.e. stomping) the blues both ¹aesthetically and ²ethically – ¹never separating joys & sorrows and ²striving to overcome my suffering by reducing the suffering of others. Ergo – to paraphrase Camus – stupidity³ is the only sin without god. :death: :flower:

³(i.e. harmful, and incorrigible misuse of judgment or refusal to think)

Reply to Tom Storm Thank you for your answer, Tom.

I thought about morality and values as a code of conduct too. I even considered religious values, or the belief in believing in X, as a waste of time because those people were brainwashed by dogmas. Nonetheless, thanks to reading Kazantzakis or Kierkegaard, I came up with a different approach. At least, my aim is to understand these values differently. What I fully have as basic premises are: 1. I am deeply concerned about my spirituality, and I think I shall act ethically, (2) but I do not know what a sin is, how to define 'spirit' or 'ethics'; and why I feel rotten when I lied to a person (for example). Therefore, (3) although spirituality depends on religious beliefs, I tend to be in midterm. I want to act ethically as much as possible, but I don't want to be trapped in religious dogmas.

My views on this topic could be seen as contradictory, because I feel 'sins' exist, and they make me think about them. But, on the other hand, I am not sure if the Church is the correct authority to say to me whether I act well or badly.

Quoting Tom Storm

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality

I agree. I think it is not possible to approach ethics in an objective way, even though they are based on different knowledge branches: Philosophy, Theology, Law, Psychology, etc.

Reply to 180 Proof Thank you for your answer 180!

It is interesting to see that you actually lost your religion. This means that, at least, you were religious once. Yet you decided to set up a different approach to ethics and values.
I agree, and I respect your view, but I didn't think about my spirit from an aesthetic perspective... This is a good point. I will think more deeply about this. Maybe that is what I was looking for, but I was blind at this point.

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

I think many people are going through this. I declined confirmation in the Christian church, although my family was not religious and neither was my social milieu so that wasn't regarded as being very important. But I came of age in the 60's and Eastern spirituality was in the air, so that became an influence. Although I was dubious about religion, I became sure that enlightenment was real, and had some vivid epiphanies at quite a young age. I was one of the types who read many spiritual books and later in life made earnest efforts to practice sitting meditation. I sometimes think my engagement with meditation has re-activated a kind of latent religious feeling, although I still can't abide church. Nevertheless, all these questions still weigh on me and I continue to pursue them. I feel I have had some genuine conversion experiences along the way, but they don't add up to deliverance as yet.

Of all those spiritual books I read, some resonated deeply and still stay with me. I have a kind of cross-cultural attitude, I like to think of it as being like 'silk road spirituality' as it involves elements of both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Quoting Tom Storm

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality

I don't think morality is an objective matter. What's that Wittgenstein aphorism? 'Ethics is transcendental'. It comes from something deeper than that. The Christian teaching is that conscience is an innate faculty which discerns what is right, and I'm sure there's something in that.

Overall, I feel the need for what I regard as a cosmic philosophy. That is, human life has cosmic significance - not from the objective viewpoint, which sees us as a kind of cosmic fluke, children of chance. But because rational sentient beings open new horizons of being. The spiritual quest is sometimes said in Eastern lore to be 'realising the true nature' and that is one of the principles that resonates with me.

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

I think certain things are more or less universal. Largely based on experience, behaviours involving misleading, using or abusing other people in some sense tend to lead to either negative feelings or social opprobrium/exclusion, which leads to bad feelings. What those behaviours might be varies perhaps by culture but the fundamental idea is the same, I think, and involves breaches of the ‘golden rule’ that appears in all world religions in one form or another.

More or less because I think people can flout the ‘rules’ and still come out with a full experience of life, thinking of Foucault maybe or other people I know personally. But in general treating others as we wouldn’t like to be treated ourselves can lead to a sense of burden or of having gone against some fundamental idea of good spiritual behaviour.

Reply to javi2541997 I was raised Roman Catholic, educated for twelve years in strict, working class Catholic schools, served as an altar boy for almost ten years and was an "A" student in religious studies throughout. In the light of church history as I studied it, 'God, the bible & the catechism' stopped making sense to me by the age of 15 and I discovered I had no (emotional) need to trust in / hope for mysteries, miracles or magical beings.

As for morals, my intuition has always been that suffering is the universal problem for morality just as illness is the universal problem for medicine (I was raised by a single mother who was nurse). Moral norms, or codes, of conduct are customary rules-of-thumb and, while not "objective", they are universal in applicability – I'd more or less worked that out by the end of high school from taking my first philosophy class as a senior in which I became confident of 'the universality of the problem of suffering' from reading both K?ngz?'s and Hillel's negative^ versions of "The Golden Rule", and Buddha's "Four Noble Truths", and Epicurus' concept of good: "pleasure as absence of pain". It took several more years of study and lived experience before I understood that, in fact, ethics is naturalistic and therefore objective (though you, @Tom Storm & many others don't buy that). And then I began studying Spinoza ... Well, anyway, my modus vivendi after four decades remains:
Quoting 180 Proof

striving to overcome my suffering by reducing the suffering of others

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philosophy/the-negative-and-positive-version-of-the-golden-rule-t16511.html ^

Quoting Wayfarer

Although I was dubious about religion, I became sure that enlightenment was real, and had some vivid epiphanies at quite a young age.

Quoting Wayfarer

I'm aware of Armstrong, that he is author of Materialist Theory of Mind, which has always been anathema to me.

I find that second quote interesting in light of M. Scott Peck's thinking on stages of spiritual growth from The Different Drum.

Of Stage III Peck says:

Skeptic, Individual, questioner, including atheists, agnostics and those scientifically minded who demand a measurable, well researched and logical explanation. Although frequently "nonbelievers," people in Stage III are generally more spiritually developed than many content to remain in Stage II. Although individualistic, they are not the least bit antisocial. To the contrary, they are often deeply involved in and committed to social causes. They make up their own minds about things and are no more likely to believe everything they read in the papers than to believe it is necessary for someone to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior (as opposed to Buddha or Mao or Socrates) in order to be saved. They make loving, intensely dedicated parents. As skeptics they are often scientists, and as such they are again highly submitted to principle. Indeed, what we call the scientific method is a collection of conventions and procedures that have been designed to combat our extraordinary capacity to deceive ourselves in the interest of submission to something higher than our own immediate emotional or intellectual comfort--namely truth. Advanced Stage III men and women are active truth seekers.

Despite being scientifically minded, in many cases even atheists, they are on a higher spiritual level than Stage II, being a required stage of growth to enter into Stage IV. The churches age old dilemma: how to bring people from Stage II to Stage IV, without allowing them to enter Stage III.

I'm curious as to your thoughts on Peck's view.

Reply to wonderer1 :cool: :up:

Quoting javi2541997

I thought about morality and values as a code of conduct too. I even considered religious values, or the belief in believing in X, as a waste of time because those people were brainwashed by dogmas. Nonetheless, thanks to reading Kazantzakis or Kierkegaard, I came up with a different approach. At least, my aim is to understand these values differently. What I fully have as basic premises are: 1. I am deeply concerned about my spirituality, and I think I shall act ethically, (2) but I do not know what a sin is, how to define 'spirit' or 'ethics'; and why I feel rotten when I lied to a person (for example). Therefore, (3) although spirituality depends on religious beliefs, I tend to be in midterm. I want to act ethically as much as possible, but I don't want to be trapped in religious dogmas.

I'm not sure I understand your thinking. You seem to be identifying as a nihilist, yet you also seem to be advocating for some fixed idea of morality and spirituality. Perhaps a part of you still believes in God's judgement? Wouldn't it be better not to worry about any of it and just get on with life?

Reply to javi2541997
"Spirit" is what motivates action, it drives ambition, will, and determination. Adopting a "code of ethics" which you attempt to force yourself to follow, will only stifle your spirit. So a code of ethics is not what you are looking for. What you need is a way of guiding or directing your spirit so that it can maintain its strength.

This means that you need to be able to avoid undue restrictions, those which unnecessarily restrain your spirit. The type of restrictions that you appear to be having difficulty understanding are social restrictions, those presented by other people. Social restrictions, people, are much more difficult to understand and predict than natural restrictions like rivers, mountains, darkness, etc., are. Organized forces like law enforcement are relatively easy to predict, because they are organized, so they're easy to avoid. But individual people are more difficult. Some get insulted or offended easily, and may be vindictive. Some may be deceptive and misleading, seeing you as prey. Some are simply unruly. But that brings us in a circle, back to the question of a code of ethics. The code of ethics obviously cannot contain the free-spirited, the unruly.

My advice would be to look at something like Plato's Republic, how he moves to define "just". It appears to be a matter of doing one's own thing without interfering with others. That allows your spirit to move you freely.

Quoting Wayfarer

Of all those spiritual books I read, some resonated deeply and still stay with me. I have a kind of cross-cultural attitude, I like to think of it as being like 'silk road spirituality' as it involves elements of both Western and Eastern philosophy.

I experienced the same cross-cultural attitude in 2021. I was very focused on how to understand (or put into practice) Western and Eastern thoughts. I read an interesting book: Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture by Nosco, as an intro to my approach. Although it was worthy reading, I felt most of the content remains in the East and I will not have a 100 % experience because I don't live in Japan or Cambodia. I refer to the latter to the fact that it is difficult to find Eastern buildings or communities to put the theory into practice or at least, getting closer. Later on, Kazantzakis appeared in my life, but it is true that I already had Kierkegaard as a background. In the end, these two authors are more suitable for what I find like values or ethics, etc.

Quoting 180 Proof

Well, anyway, my modus vivendi after four decades remains:
striving to overcome my suffering by reducing the suffering of others

Ha! Yes, we've explored this a bit over the years. Your ideas are arrived at philosophically, mine are not. I've also adopted a presupposition along the lines of 'we should not cause suffering and we should minimise it'. But I hold this belief intuitively, perhaps because it pleases me aesthetically. If I had to provide rational justification, I would probably say that I dislike suffering, I don't like seeing people suffer, so if I am in a position to not cause suffering or minimise it, I try to do so. I find this satisfying but I am not a zealot about it.

Quoting 180 Proof

as I studied it, 'God, the bible & the catechism' stopped making sense to me by the age of 15 and I discovered I had no (emotional) need to trust in / hope for mysteries, miracles or magical beings.

Understood. This happens more usually than we tend to think. When I was a kid, I also felt I didn't need to believe in mysteries or hopes.

Quoting 180 Proof

As for morals, my intuition has always been that suffering is the universal problem for morality just like illness is universal problem for medicine (I was raised by a single mother who was nurse).

Interesting. I wonder to what extent Kierkegaard or Dostoviesky inspired you about this.

Quoting 180 Proof

Moral norms, or codes, of conduct are customary rules-of-thumb and, while not "objective", they are universal in applicability –

I disagree and this other important point is why I started this thread. The code of conduct is not universally applied. What we think, in the Western world, as norms and values can be very different in the East. The basic notion of how to act accordingly to ethical principles is still blurred.

Quoting Tom Storm

Wouldn't it be better not to worry about any of it and just get on with life?

True. :sweat:

But this is something I have been experiencing for months. It is not a simple worry that keeps me awake every morning. Sometimes I feel I don't act ethically, but here is when I start to wonder how I can act better. I have already read some books (and threads in this forum) about ethics, and although they are helpful and substantive, I still feel lost. Now, I have a closer approach to Christianity, but only the surface. Yet I am aware that I can sound contradictory about stating that philosophy doesn't fill my ethical notions but religion does, etc. I feel I am trapped in a cage.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover Thanks for your feedback, as you always do, friend.

Firstly, yes, I am trying to establish a forced code of ethics. This happens because I am not aware what the limit and extension is to our actions. And more precisely, when these actions can affect others. I think we somehow agree in a basic and predictable code of conduct, which is reinforced by the law of each country. But I wasn't referring to generic terms, but something which is left to the free will of each person. For example, and maybe this example sounds stupid: I told my mum I went to study at a bookstore. It was a lie because I actually went to see a woman. I feel bad about this childish attitude for two reasons: 1) I lied to my mother (and this is a terrible sin, although this concept is Christian) and 2) I feel ashamed for nothing. I don't trust myself, and I don't reach this level in my life because I am a well aware that I am not behaving ethically. When I end up in a situation where I need lies to confront people or to avoid limitations, it is when I start to worry. I ask myself: Am I a terrible liar? How can I face the truth and not lie to others?

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

My advice would be to look at something like Plato's Republic, how he moves to define "just". It appears to be a matter of doing one's own thing without interfering with others. That allows your spirit to move you freely.

Thanks. I guess Plato is always a great philosopher to take into account.

Quoting javi2541997

I still feel lost. Now, I have a closer approach to Christianity, but only the surface. Yet I am aware that I can sound contradictory about stating that philosophy doesn't fill my ethical notions but religion does, etc. I feel I am trapped in a cage.

It sound to me like you need to find...

Reply to javi2541997

I also grew up outside of any religious background. I would say my father at least was militantly atheist. However, now I attend a non-denominational church about once a month (too far away now with my son to go each week), have a home church otherwise with another family, and go to a Catholic Church on Wednesdays or holidays (of which Catholics have very, very many).

I'm of the opinion that many Christians profoundly misunderstand why people can say they are "spiritual" but have essentially zero interest in Christianity. They tend to think the areligious aren't interested in Christianity for very Christian reasons, e.g. shame over past sins. Because of this, evangelism often targets the emotions primarily, and in so doing it misses the mark. The problem for secular people is more often that Christianity is [I] implausible[/I].

I tend to group the problem into three buckets:

The Scientism Problem: the problem here is that people often think that "the way science says the world is," is incompatible with the existence of a personal God. There are many manifestations of this problem, but the most important seems to be a belief that science says "free will" is impossible, that all our actions are reducible to how little balls of stuff bounce of each other, and that this in turn is incompatible with religious moral teaching and a personal God.

The other way this problem manifest itself is in people thinking that what the Bible says about the world is incompatible with science. This problem is made more acute by the prominence of fundamentalists/literalists, who play an outsized role in public perceptions of Christianity. Even if people know the Bible can be read in ways that do not contradict science, they often assume these are ad hoc rationalizations, modern changes to save the religion from contradiction. In reality though, fundementalism is a [I]modern[/I] movement, and strict literalism was not the norm during most of Church history.

The Plurality Problem: is the problem that, if you have many mutually exclusive claims made by various world religions and different sects, it seems unlikely that any of them are due to real divine revelation. Given the principle of indifference and very many different faiths, we should assign a very low probability to each faith. Another issue here is that of extinct religions now widely seen as mere myth (Greek, Egyptian, Norse, etc.). If these religions were mere myth, why wouldn't other ones be the same way, destined for the same fate?

What are the chances of any one faith or sect getting it right? If the Holy Spirit aids Christians, why do they disagree? Of course, theology addresses precisely this issue. Schism might be seen as a necessary historical process, or as an organic process of differentiation, of different organs within a single body (a body that must learn to rule over itself and become self-moving). But simplicity seems to win out here in the popular imagination, "everyone else has it wrong."

The Exemplar Problem: a major appeal of Christianity is that it offers the promise of transforming the person — freedom from sin, from being ruled over by instinct, appetites, passions, and circumstance — the possibility of deeper, more loving relationships. And yet many seemingly devote people do not seem to have been remade in this way. Indeed, they might seem downright hateful, impulsive, and mean spirited.

But if the faith doesn't result in being reborn in this positive way, then its claims about the workings of the Holy Spirit in the individual come into question.


---

I think these questions can be adequately addressed, but they rarely are. Faith is often described as something you either have or don't, a miracle (the influence of Reformed/Calvinist theology). Churches no longer focus much on the process of metanoia, the changing of the mind, the ascetic disciplines that used to be standard in the Church, etc. In trying to make everything "easier," the ascetic, meditative, contemplative, philosophical, and intellectual traditions of Christianity have been pushed to the fringes.

Christian moral teaching is only going to make sense in the context of a relationship with God. Yet these often get rolled out first, as if it makes any sense for a person raised in a secular environment to feel shame over premarital relations, etc.

You don't start by understanding though. As Saint Augustine puts it, we have faith so that we might understand.

Conversion involves metanoia. One wants to know God and the Good, as all men naturally want to [I]know [/I](Aristotle's opening lines). It is wanting to know what is truly good, not just what seems good, or what others say is good, that allows us to transcend current belief, desire, circumstance, and instinct and become truly self determining (Plato). You can't be free if you're just an effect of other causes.

Christianity is ultimately a religion of freedom. Romans 7 is probably the pound for pound most influential text for the philosophy of free will. There Saint Paul describes how he does what he hates and is ruled over by desire. He is dead in sin, not a biological death, but a death of any true autonomy and personhood. He is only resurrected by Christ, the Logos.

For man can only be free if he knows why he acts, does what he thinks is good, and can know the true good.

Metanoia is generally supported by ascetic practice, a sort of exercise to train the rational part of the soul to rule over the spirited and appetitive parts, to be self-determining. Without these, mentoring relationships, etc. you often end up in a situation where newcomers are immediately turned around to witness without feeling like they have understood what they are witnessing to.

Christians feel uncomfortable engaging with the Scientism Problem and the Plurality Problem. These are generally studiously avoided, rather than grappled with, to the detriment of all involved.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

"Spirit" is what motivates action, it drives ambition, will, and determination. Adopting a "code of ethics" which you attempt to force yourself to follow, will only stifle your spirit. So a code of ethics is not what you are looking for. What you need is a way of guiding or directing your spirit so that it can maintain its strength.

If you adopt a code of ethics because you believe it is truly good behavior and find yourself unable to do what you think is good, how is that freedom? That seems like the opposite of freedom to me.

Freedom has to involve an element of being able to enact what one thinks of as the highest good, not simply being free to fulfill desires. The alcoholic who wants to stop drinking but cannot is deeply unfree in a way, their appetites have come to rule over their intellect.

My advice would be to look at something like Plato's Republic, how he moves to define "just". It appears to be a matter of doing one's own thing without interfering with others. That allows your spirit to move you freely.

I agree with the recommendation, but I think this is very far from what Plato is saying. Consider the Apology. Socrates stirs the people of Athens on to self-knowledge at great personal risk and to his own detriment. He doesn't avoid conflict to "live and let live," but rather tries to push people towards the good and the just.

Plato presents Socrates as a new sort of hero, a moral figure to replace the old Homeric heroes. Socrates is a hero precisely because he strives for justice, and it is clear in Plato's political writings that justice and freedom must ultimately be fulfilled at the level of an entire society and that justice is not relativistic. Since men can take away other men's freedom, and since education and training is necessary to gain freedom, society must be organized in a just way for men to become free and self-moving.

Ethics then is a prerequisite for freedom. The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good.

Quoting Wayfarer

I don't think morality is an objective matter. What's that Wittgenstein aphorism? 'Ethics is transcendental'. It comes from something deeper than that. The Christian teaching is that conscience is an innate faculty which discerns what is right, and I'm sure there's something in that.

Transcendental ethics would posit that moral truths are not contingent upon individual beliefs, cultural norms, or empirical facts, but rather have a universal and objective reality that transcends human understanding. Any way we can demonstrate that this is the case?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good.

Does anyone know what is truly good? I'm assuming you also are putting your hopes on transcendence and Platonic realms?

I was sent to Presbyterian Sunday School as a child. Church at times, though not weekly, thank God. I knew the quotes and all that jazz.

When I was about 10, I saw someone talking about atheism on tv. That was the first time I'd ever heard of it. I just took it for granted that all the stuff I'd been told all my life was established fact. It hadn't occurred to me that others didn't think that. This guy on TV said people only believe in God because they're afraid they'll go to hell for not believing in him. Even then I knew that was not the reason everybody believes. Nevertheless, it made me think about things I'd never thought about before. I knew right then that, if it's not a fact, but belief, then I didn't believe. Nothing resonated with me. I don't feel any of it. Been an atheist since.

If we need to, I suppose we could define spiritual as having to do with the human spirit. I feel awe for many reasons. Scenes of nature; Bach; just the feeling of being alive. I wonder - a human thing - about many things, like consciousness, and try to learn. As it says in some quotes i recently posted, I strive. Is that spiritual? If so then I'm spiritual. It not, no worries.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus You also grew up in a familiar background outside of religion, but you ended up attending a non-denominational church about once a month. Your personal experience gave me a lot of confidence, because I have been wondering whether I should go to attend a church or not. I obviously had to do it in secret, because I guess my family will get disappointed if they know I am tempting to go to a sacred place. Maybe they will feel they did something bad regarding my elementary education, or what is going on with me. In the end, there is not any other place to worry about these concerns...

It is interesting how you pointed out that Christian moral teaching is only going to make sense in the context of a relationship with God. I have always had the same thought until I discovered Nontheist Quakers (also known as nontheist Friends). Although it can sound contradictory at first glance, because this group tends to be tangled into Christian Ethics without necessarily believing in a theistic God or Supreme Being, I think their approach is fascinating.

Their main Web page (https://nontheistfriends.org/) says something very important:

Some of us understand “God” as a symbol of human values and some of us avoid the concept while accepting it as significant to others. We differ greatly in our religious experience and in the meaning we give religious terms

.

I fully agree, and they are, by far, the group I most relate to.

Reply to Tom Storm

Well, I think you have to conceptualize this in terms of the Plato's vertical conception of reality:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

[I]Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)[/I]

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.12

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.

[b]
Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace
[/b]

It's not hard to see the similarities here to St. Paul, e.g. Romans 7.

Hegel expands of this sense of vertical reality in the Logics, showing how true concepts need to unfold from a certain sort of necessity, and the failings of external teleology to truly ground moral teleology. True telos must emerge from within a thing.

There is a "transcedent" Good, but it isn't a sort of spirit realm sitting to the side of the realm of the senses. The question of knowing what is truly good is not absolute then, particularly in later Platonists. One can know and be led by the good to relative degrees, and be more or less self-determining.

Reply to javi2541997

I love the Bible but I don't often engage organized religion in person.

When I was younger I was deeply concerned with morality and ethics and trying to find an objective grounding. As I aged, I found that these religious texts (the Bible, namely) are actually excellent self-help books. "Israel" can be seen as a metaphor for the self, a metaphor for a society, and also of course a history of sorts for the actual Israel. But it's application and relevance is universal.

As I aged my focus shifted away from impersonal ethics to self-improvement/self-actualization. I didn't read the New Testament until I was around 30 (I was raised Jewish) and I realized that the character of Jesus actually makes us more attractive and helps socialize us regardless of religious connotations. I mostly pay attention to what Jesus says (this is how people like Thomas Jefferson read the Bible AFAIK.) I don't mean to preach heresy but until someone can explain the miracles this will be my approach. In any case, if one is truly able to internalize the beliefs and teachings of Jesus I believe one will be fundamentally transformed and I reached that conclusion with zero Christian education.

I love the Old Testament as well. The God character gives divine revelation -- knowledge that humans wouldn't be able to glean either through their own reason or experience. Yet one must believe it if one seeks life. Our own thoughts and beliefs can slowly kill us if left to our own devices. The Old Testament is very much a book concerned with life. It is not about the afterlife. I've found some of the dialogues with God to be extremely helpful.

I believe in God because I have to. It's not a matter of a philosophical proof. I don't hate philosophy (I did major in it after all) but our reason is very limited and impersonal reason often will not help us live well.

Reply to BitconnectCarlos I hadn't a Christian education as well. Although I was born and raised in a Catholic country, my parents never taught religious beliefs and ideas. The Bible (or other sacred texts) has never been in my home. I always attended secular schools, etc. Basically, my parents decided to teach me in this way because it is the correct thing to do, and if I ever decide to believe in something, realizing this belief on my own, without external 'imposing'.
I have to understand them. They were raised in Franco's Spain, and they (and my grandparents) hadn't any possible choice apart from a Catholic educational system. So, they always thought that being raised without religious stimuli was a synonym of freedom.

...Ironically, the youngest person of the generation in my life (me) started to be interested in religious ideas, but it is obvious that I am lost, and I can sound contradictory in my posts.


Quoting BitconnectCarlos

I believe in God because I have to.

The statement is interesting. I guess you consider it as something to obey. Did you impose this belief yourself? I agree with you. Philosophy is a very reliable tool which helps us to understand ourselves and what is around... But it is not the epitome. I often felt lost when I searched for answers regarding ethics and values. Paradoxically, the philosophers who helped me the most, are at the same time theologians, like Kierkegaard.
I still haven't finished forcing myself to believe in God anyway.

Reply to javi2541997
One element I wonder about a lot is the importance of a creed, as a set of propositions, to establishing practice and ritual.

Unamuno is interesting in that regard because he is angry with the gap between what is most deeply desired and the place we have to look for it. For Kazantzakis, the Shekinah, or presence of God appears in the crucible of struggle. Israel is the one who wrestles with God. Those different expressions are bound up in propositions declaring the ultimate conditions.

But a person's life is a complex problem. The limits of explanation touch upon all who would explain. What do creeds or the rejection of them have to do with us?

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

I'm not spiritual. What I have is a very conflicted relationship with religion, church, and God, who I am fairly certain does not exist.

I like formal religious ceremony; I like the music of the church; I like the social connection which belonging to a congregation can provide; BUT I don't believe in the creed. The first sentence is tolerable: "We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen..." But then it gets into the dicier matter of Jesus' divinity, death, resurrection, and co-existence with God: "For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man." And "On the third day He rose again, in fulfillment of the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.".

Unitarians (something like your non-theistic Quakers) do not believe in the Trinity; there may or may not be God. Jesus was an ordinary man. The Holy Ghost doesn't figure into it at all. No virgin birth, no resurrection, no kingdom. There aren't many unitarians here, but I probably belong more with them than Lutherans or Methodists.

Aside from theology, millions of contemporary people have had very unpleasant experiences with The Church over homosexuality, divorce, abortion, and various other issues. So have I.

Former church members who are now "spiritual" are probably trying to preserve a memory of what they once had in their hands. I can understand that. Their children don't have a memory of church membership, and for some or many of their children, "spirituality" will fade out.

Your situation, Javi, isn't the same as the former church members. Your spirituality appears to be 'de novo'. I wish you every success in developing your own spirituality.

Quoting Paine

One element I wonder about a lot is the importance of a creed, as a set of propositions, to establishing practice and ritual.

I agree. I wasn't thinking of a creed specifically, but now you have explained it, I think this suits what I attempted to explain. I guess some religions (let's say, Christianity, because it is mainly used in the example and the largest by the number of users) set prepositions. Is this similar to a code of conduct? Maybe. But some people would heavily disagree with this point because I read (in some posts) that the Bible is not precisely a book to achieve democratic values, etc.

Quoting Paine

Unamuno is interesting

It is another important thinker regarding this issue, but Spanish philosophers are hardly known by people overall. It cheered me up you actually brought him to this topic. :smile:

Quoting Paine

What do creeds or the rejection of them have to do with us?

Good question. I think they have to do with us, in the sense that ethics and values are subjective. Although those creeds or codes of conduct tend to be objective, a person's life is complex. It is not possible to apply objectively those notions of values in each person equally. It is clear that always leads us to a big debate.

Reply to BC Spirituality is still tangled with religion to me. I can't explain or understand it without any connection with religious creeds. Furthermore, if I extract 'spiritedness' from its creed perspective, it is hardly accepted by philosophers. Most of them see this as a worthless thing. A thing that depends upon religion. I understand your struggle with the Church. I guess all who want to be more critical, and dubious about the set of norms, tend to be against the Church. This is how I was raised. My parents considered the Churches as places where free thinking is not welcomed, and where the fellows are 'fooled' by superstitions and beliefs. Yet I always felt I had a spirit, and I wanted to act following values. Otherwise, I would have felt my 'spirit' was rotten. Philosophy can teach me a lot regarding this, but I discovered that some authors like Kazantzakis or Kierkegaard pointed out interesting views using the Bible...

Quoting BC

Your situation, Javi, isn't the same as the former church members. Your spirituality appears to be 'de novo'

I agree. But this happens to me because I have never had a Christian background in my family. I am not even baptised.

Quoting BC

Jesus was an ordinary man.

This is the 'version' of Jesus I believe in, BC. Not the twisted drawing of the Gospels...

Quoting BC

Unitarians (something like your non-theistic Quakers)

These groups are very interesting. I never get tired of saying they are awesome at trying to understand Christian Ethics separately from believing in God. Amazing.

Quoting javi2541997

I still haven't finished forcing myself to believe in God anyway.

I've read through much of this thread, and it occurs to me that you are putting terms into play that are through and through ambiguous at best, and cry out for clarification. How can you talk about believing in God when the term is so bloated with historical and metaphysical extravagance?

Ask first, what is the essence of religion? How does a term like 'god' have any justification at all? I hold that it does, but you have track it down like anything else to discover what the essence of religion is. Looking for a religious connection without understanding what religious really is at all is going to end in disappointment.

Reply to BC
Just to repeat what I just said, it looks like you are looking for religion in all the wrong places. You must begin and end with the world. The trouble with this lies with the assumptions about the world that inquiry hasn't even touched for most, assumptions that make faith look absurd. Kierkegaard was right about many things, as was Wittgenstein, but I argue they failed to understand religious metaphysics.

Reply to javi2541997
I was thinking of any creed in that a story is given to explain what is happening. How that story plays a part in any account is very various. Those various variations are not just playing out possible meanings within a framework but trying to look at explanation as explanation. That aspect plays an important role in many very different religious interpretations. Therefore, I question the acceptance of the 'religious' as a category that is self-explanatory. It never shows up alone.

Quoting javi2541997

Unamuno is interesting
— Paine

It is another important thinker regarding this issue, but Spanish philosophers are hardly known by people overall. It cheered me up you actually brought him to this topic. :smile:

I find Ortega y Gasset an important counterpoint to Unamuno. A struggle to understand experience.

As an "American", Octavio Paz hits me hard with many of the same questions.

Quoting Tom Storm

Transcendental ethics would posit that moral truths are not contingent upon individual beliefs, cultural norms, or empirical facts, but rather have a universal and objective reality that transcends human understanding. Any way we can demonstrate that this is the case?

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?

Quoting wonderer1

I'm curious as to your thoughts on Peck's view.

Thanks for asking! I find it difficult to map what I said against M Scott Peck's criteria and am a bit puzzled as to what you're asking me.

Armstrong was an advocate of scientific materialism (see Count Timothy's post above on 'the scientism problem'). There are many science writers, and many fields of science, that are not materialist in orientation. I don't see his kind of philosophy as at all well-informed about science so much as expressing a longing for scientific certainty in an intrinsically uncertain subject area. He takes the universality of physics as paradigmatic for knowledge generally.

As for epiphanies, in my experience they were vivid, spontaneous, instantaneous, utterly convincing, and impossible to communicate.

Quoting Wayfarer

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?

W does not put it in those terms. What is shown is separated from what is explained. Is that the last word of what can be explained? Seems like a weird place to stop.

Quoting Wayfarer

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?

Can it even be shown?

Reply to Tom Storm Isn't that what the story of Jesus' life and resurrection was supposed to convey?

Quoting PhilosophyNow

In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: [of] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as ‘the one with the Gospels’. Tolstoy’s book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ’s life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he wrote: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me. Amen.”

Seems an odd quote, as the later Wittgenstein never preached religion, but the article from which it was taken was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association. But it provides a bit more of a gist later in the article:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

Reply to Wayfarer
Point well taken about argument under his terms. But it is presented as a limit to explanation rather than a resolution.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a "transcedent" Good, but it isn't a sort of spirit realm sitting to the side of the realm of the senses. The question of knowing what is truly good is not absolute then, particularly in later Platonists. One can know and be led by the good to relative degrees, and be more or less self-determining.

Thank you for you considered response. While I am mildly interested in why humans find notions of transcendence to be a useful frame, it doesn't work for me.

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

I find this framing purposeless. It appears that we are treating 'good' as something concrete, when it is merely an adjective applied conditionally. How would one make the case that a concept such as good is anything more than a sign we apply to things we approve of (a construction of our practices, language and norms) and that this approval is perspectival?

Quoting javi2541997

I guess all who want to be more critical, and dubious about the set of norms, tend to be against the Church.

And, sometimes, the church is against members who deviate too far from the tenets of the faith.

These days, people are usually not thrown out of main stream churches for disagreements over theology. Back in the 1980s, two theologians studied what active church members in Minnesota actually claim to believe. The results were sometimes very surprising. About 7% of active church participants did not believe in the resurrection, for instance. Were the study, Faith and Ferment, repeated today, it is likely that the results would show decline in belief in basic tenets, like the resurrection,

And, as it happens, nobody is going to get drummed out of a mainline church for not believing this or that tenet.

In the same way, mainline churches are more accepting of homosexuality than they used to be. They may not approve, but they won't stone their gay members. They just won't marry or ordain them (which is the situation in the Methodist Church. The Methodists are splitting the denomination over the issue of homosexuality, letting the least tolerant congregations leave (there is a substantial monetary penalty for leaving, however).

Conservative churches (like Southern Baptists, tend not to be as tolerant as Lutherans or Anglicans. African churches tend to be more conservative than North American congregations.

Quoting javi2541997

I am not even baptised.

Do you think you would benefit by being baptized? In mainline theology, Baptism provides for the erasure of original sin, something cooked up by the early church. Baptism doesn't make you a church member, it makes you part of the body of Christ. It's all very mystical, but you do get wet.

The main problem I have with "spirituality" among the people I have talked with who claim to be "spiritual rather than religious" is that when pressed for details, they are unable to explain -- even generally - what spirituality means to them. I think what a lot of them are doing is "dodging". They don't want to say they are atheists, which has a bitter flavor to them, so they just say they are "spiritual".

There was a popular comedy show in Minneapolis a few decades back titled "Being Atheist Means Never Having to Say You're Lutheran". The title might have been the best part of the show, for all I know. Minnesota is the land of Lutherans.

Quoting Wayfarer

Seems an odd quote, as the later Wittgenstein never preached religion, but the article from which it was taken was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association.

Wittgenstein was an prodigious eccentric who took up and abandoned projects, who knows why he thought the way he did?

There are a few ways to interpret (or make use of) this quote. One is to side with Richard Rorty and maintain that ethics are contingent. The end. But we can use the word transcendental also to refer to the symbolic and metaphorical. We might find some comfort in referring to their transcendental value in a poetic sense. Human beings do inhabit an imaginative, conceptual world where we push around abstracts (e.g., beauty, truth, goodness) in the hope of managing our environment. Our imaginations are key to our identity.

it is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

Either way, how does it help us to promote the notion of ethics as transcendental?

Quoting Astrophel

I hold that it does, but you have track it down like anything else to discover what the essence of religion is.

And what is the essence of religion, which I assume you have tracked down?

Quoting Astrophel

You must begin and end with the world.

I totally agree. This world is all we know, and all we can know, however much we rattle on about God, heaven, hell, etc.

Quoting Astrophel

Kierkegaard was right about many things, as was Wittgenstein, but I argue they failed to understand religious metaphysics.

You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have?

Quoting javi2541997

Spirituality is still tangled with religion to me. I can't explain or understand it without any connection with religious creeds.

More accurately you appear haunted by the religion of your upbringing and culture. It's not as if you are concerned about the spiritual truths found in Islam or Jainism. Seems to me that the position you are in is fairly common - how to be good without religious interpreters telling you what is good. Graham Greene (for instance) wrote entire books about the complex relationship between Catholicism, faith, morality and individual conscience.

Quoting BC

And what is the essence of religion, which I assume you have tracked down?

It's complicated. In short, religion is reducible to the indeterminacy of our ethics and aesthetics. Note how Wittgenstein put these on his list of unmentionables. He knew the reason one could not speak of these is because they have a dimension to their existence which has no place in the facts or state of affairs of the world, and are hence unspeakable. It is not that he wanted to draw the line so as to preserve the dignity of logic. He rather wanted to preserve the profundity of the world, not to have it trivialized by some reduction to mere fact.

But this is just grazes the issue. One has to inquire about the foundational indeterminacy of our existence to discover the essence of religion.

Quoting Wayfarer

You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have?

Yes, I am aware this sounds high minded, but there is nothing to stop one from second guessing philosophers. Everyone does this all the time. Why Witt? Referring to the Tractatus: I find no limits to what can be said at all in the structural features language. Language is entirely open to possibilities. the limitations that do exist have to do with the mundane interpretations we are locked into when we see these as absolutes. Kierkegaard wrote about ethics a lot, in Fear and Trembling and many other places, but one is struck by his model for surpassing ethics with faith, Abraham, who was ready to put the sacrificial knife into Isaac just like that! K argues that such faith is impossible for him, but defensible.at a level beyond his own faith. I argue that K's thinking about ethics fails to understand the metaethical grounding that stands apart from mere principled thinking. I argue that our ethics is grounded in the absolute, and is already part and parcel of divinity. As Witt himself put it (in Culture and Value), the good is divinity

Reply to Tom Storm :up:

Quoting javi2541997

I wonder to what extent Kierkegaard or Dostoviesky inspired you ...

Not at all. I read their writings much later.

The code of conduct is not universally applied.

No doubt. My claim, however, is that, applied or not, 'naturalistic morality' is always applicable wherever and whenever there is needless suffering.

What we think, in the Western world, as norms and values can be very different in the East. The basic notion of how to act accordingly to ethical principles is still blurred.

Reducing suffering is like reducing illness: though the local customs of morality (or public health) vary, the problem confronted is the same for every member of the human species. How can it not be?

Reply to wonderer1 :clap: :smirk:

Quoting Paine

I find Ortega y Gasset an important counterpoint to Unamuno. A struggle to understand experience.

As an "American", Octavio Paz hits me hard with many of the same questions.

:up: :up: Oh yes (decades ago for me, especially Paz).

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

I don't because, in the following sense, I'm neither "spiritual" nor "religious":
Quoting 180 Proof

"Spiritual" means to me haunted by ghosts (and "religious" belonging to a spiritual community). Th[ere] may be proof of feeling haunted, [but] not "proof of ghosts" (i.e. disembodied entities).

Quoting BC

And, sometimes, the church is against members who deviate too far from the tenets of the faith.

Why do they do this? It is one of the main things I have never understood about the Church. I must admit that it is a low democratic institution. The people there are not open to receive not only criticism but a different interpretation of the Bible, even acting with good faith. As I pointed out in the intro of the thread, Kazantzakis was persecuted by the Greek Orthodox Church for many reasons, and they tried to excommunicate him... crazy.

Quoting BC

About 7% of active church participants did not believe in the resurrection, for instance. Were the study, Faith and Ferment, repeated today, it is likely that the results would show decline in belief in basic tenets, like the resurrection,

It is fairly understandable. In my humble opinion, here is when the creed fails to be believable. They try to convince people with fantasies and ideas which were less likely to happen in real life. Furthermore, in those religious institutions, I think it worthwhile studying the teachings in a personal way. I mean, it is obvious that the Gospels were twisted by the apostles, and they wrote (in a metaphorical manner) how to supposedly act in a Christian way. But it is amazing how the Bible is actually a text full of controversy. In another thread, some users claimed that it promotes slavery, etc. I think the best way to understand this sacred book is on my own.

Quoting BC

Do you think you would benefit by being baptized? In mainline theology, Baptism provides for the erasure of original sin, something cooked up by the early church. Baptism doesn't make you a church member, it makes you part of the body of Christ. It's all very mystical, but you do get wet.

This is a good question, indeed. Honestly, I never thought of the consequences of not being baptised, and the 'benefits' of who actually is. I know that baptism doesn't make me a member of the Church. What I attempted to explain is that my familiar context is zero religious. I have never been taught to read the Bible, catechism, go to the Church, etc. Even the weddings were at the Town Hall or judge!
What I know is that baptism is something that a person could end up losing... because the creed reserves the right to excommunicate fellows...

Reply to Astrophel I know I sound ambiguous in this thread, or even contradictory. But that's why I started it. To find other ideas, clarification, and the opinion of the rest of the members.

Quoting Tom Storm

It's not as if you are concerned about the spiritual truths found in Islam or Jainism. Seems to me that the position you are in is fairly common - how to be good without religious interpreters telling you what is good.

Exactly, this is my approach, Tom.

Quoting Tom Storm

Graham Green (for instance) wrote entire books about the complex relationship between Catholicism, faith, morality and individual conscience.

Thanks for the recommendation! :smile:

Reply to javi2541997 I don't think Greene will provide you with succour, just stating that he is there waiting for you. Note also that Sh?saku End? the Japanese (and Catholic) novelist was often described as the Japanese Graham Greene. If Catholicism and personal ethics is important to you Greene's The Power and the Glory may be of interest.

Quoting javi2541997

Why do they do this?

In sum, 'churches' – organized/official cults – are confidence games (i.e. pyramid schemes) and 'heretics' make the grift harder to keep going and harder to keep the suckers in the game. Like any other racket, customers (victims) straying from the authorized script(ure) is bad for business. IMO, the more 'missionary' and corrupt a religion is, the less tolerant of 'heresy' it becomes. Read histories of (e.g.) Catholicism and Islam.

It seems to me that religion often results in a watering down (or obfuscation) of the original teachings of the sage, therefore I have found very little use for it.

If I want to know about Christianity, I want to know what Christ - the sage - had to say. His followers I'm not so interested in.

Sometimes within a religion new people arise who might rightfully be called a sage in their own right, but sages are rare, 'once-in-a-century' type people.

Religion poses a big problem of whose thoughts and additions on the original source material one ought to take seriously, not in the least because the original material often is already of a profound nature and easily misunderstood.

My response to that has been to return to the source material, at which point, what is the point of religion?

Quoting Tzeentch

My response to that has been to return to the source material, at which point, what is the point of religion?

:up:

Quoting Tom Storm

Sh?saku End?

Excellent novelist, indeed. I have a novel by him. It is called 'Scandal' and it is about a Catholic Japanese who suffers because of social context and the repeated sins he committed in the book. By the way, there is a good criticism by Endo in the sense that there is a lot of hypocrisy amongst Japanese citizens and the traditional Japanese values, etc.

Quoting Tom Storm

If Catholicism and personal ethics is important to you Greene's The Power and the Glory may be of interest.

It seems interesting. I think I should buy it in English rather than looking for a proper translation.

Reply to 180 Proof I agree. It is true that the Church maintains a complex hierarchical organisation, non-democratic, and corrupted. Yet, as I said previously, I am not very interested in the role of the Church. If I wanted to get deep into it, I would be disappointed. This is why I struggle with religious faith. It seems to me that 'Christian Ethics and Values' (or whatever we can call it) is kidnapped by the Church, and if someone is interested in how it works, he needs to be part of the creed. Hmm... not my cup of tea indeed. I fully dislike how spirituality depends on them and their 'lectures'.

Quoting Tzeentch

If I want to know about Christianity, I want to know what Christ - the sage - had to say. His followers I'm not so interested in.

Very good point, Tzeentch. But, sadly, the teachings, values and ethics of Jesus only appear in the Gospels, which were twisted and even invented by the apostles...

Reply to javi2541997 One of the early spiritual books I read that impressed me was The Supreme Identity, by Alan Watts. It is an exploration of the relationship between the individual life and the ultimate nature of being, through the perspective of Eastern philosophy particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, but also with references to Christian mysticism.

Watts discusses the notion of identity in a spiritual context, proposing that the true nature of being is not the sense we have of ourselves as a separated ego. Awakening to this fundamental unity, or "supreme identity," reveals that our customary and ingrained sense of division between self and world, self and other, is an illusory state that inevitably brings conflict (the meaning of 'advaita' is 'not divided' or 'non-dual').

That book provided insights into how those teachings can be relevant and transformative in contemporary culture. While It is true that in the years since I read it, I found out that Watts by no means exemplified the kind of life that he was so adept at explaining, nevertheless the idea of 'the supreme identity' really struck me. What is important about it, is that our normal sense of ourselves is based on a false sense of identity - that in reality, we are of a completely different order to what we normally take ourselves to be. And I've come to realise that this is what philosophical spirituality is always trying to convey, but that it's a very difficult thing to convey and to understand. It involves a kind of dying - 'dying to the known' as one of the Eastern teachers put it. (And as it is Easter time, it is probably appropriate to mention that that is also the esoteric meaning of the Cross.)

Reply to Wayfarer Hey, thanks Wafarer, for your book recommendation.

Quoting Wayfarer

And I've come to realise that this is what philosophical spirituality is always trying to convey, but that it's a very difficult thing to convey and to understand

Indeed. This was the main point of starting this thread. I knew I would receive substantial and helpful answers, and that's exactly what happened with the exchanges with the fellows.

Quoting Wayfarer

It is an exploration of the relationship between the individual life and the ultimate nature of being, through the perspective of Eastern philosophy particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, but also with references to Christian mysticism.

Before diving into this complexity, I think I should start to understand the basic teachings of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, but obviously by keeping in mind Christian mysticism. I am aware this could take years. It is a path I am ready to try. I was always an infantile atheist, and I never respected those ideas and beliefs. Now, everything has turned different. I want to be more open-minded on this matter.

Reply to javi2541997 Alan Watts’ books are not a bad starting point. He had his flaws but his prose is excellent and he’s adept at explaining esoteric ideas if you’re looking for introductory books.

Quoting javi2541997

Very good point, Tzeentch. But, sadly, the teachings, values and ethics of Jesus only appear in the Gospels, which were twisted and even invented by the apostles...

From what I understand there is quite a debate within Christian theological circles about the original teachings of Jesus Christ, which I think is the result of people wanting to return to the source material for essentially the reasons we're discussing here.

Anyway, to come back to your original problem;

I think religious faith is not necessary for those who are able to retrace the footsteps of the sage and understand their teachings.

The problem is that due to the profoundity of such teachings, many lack the capability, will or time to fully understand them. Religious faith and religion is the next best thing to actual understanding, or so some may argue.

I'd consider it very natural for the philosophically inclined to find religious faith problematic and to desire the actual understanding.

Quoting javi2541997

It seems to me that 'Christian Ethics and Values' (or whatever we can call it) is kidnapped by the Church.

After all, "the Church" invented "Christian Ethics and Values" which, in effect, "kidnapped" pre-religious, naturalistic morality just like other cults had always done and still do. As Plato's Euthyphro implies: morality and laws cannot follow from the decrees of "God or gods", javi. What do you think makes Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" possible? Ethics (re: eusocial norms of judgment and conduct) and religion (re: cultic paths to salvation/liberation) are independent of each other, even though the latter usually "kidnaps" the former. However, Good is not dependent on "God or gods" and vice versa.

This is why I struggle with religious faith.

Maybe you have an emotional need for "faith" (i.e. magical thinking) but it's the unbelievability – hope for things too good to be true – that is in conflict with your reason and/or lived experience. Maybe you'd benefit from therapy rather than reading about the 'spiritual torments' of others and online discussions like this one ...

Quoting 180 Proof

As Plato's Euthyphro implies: morality and laws cannot follow from the decrees of "God or gods", javi

We create our own values, therefore we are gods, although small.

Quoting bert1

We create our own values, therefore we are gods, although small.

:roll:

Reply to 180 Proof Yeah, who said we're small!?!

Reply to flannel jesus I'm getting larger by the week.

Reply to bert1 some people are gods, some people are blobs

Quoting Tzeentch

From what I understand there is quite a debate within Christian theological circles about the original teachings of Jesus Christ, which I think is the result of people wanting to return to the source material for essentially the reasons we're discussing here.

I know. What I attempted to explain is that we don't have a book or text written by Jesus of Nazareth. There is not a record of that. The extensions of his teachings are located in the Bible. A text that, for better or worse, tries to teach a code of conduct, or basic notion of values/ethics at least.

Quoting Tzeentch

I'd consider it very natural for the philosophically inclined to find religious faith problematic and to desire the actual understanding

True, and I am getting one of these conclusions during the debate of this thread. Honestly, I have never considered the religious faith problematic, but not reliable... If I am not wrong, ethics and values are a set of principles which help us find the correct answer to moral dilemmas. Where is the problem? Well, in most cases, these sets are written or established by creeds. This is why I struggle with religious faith, because I want to understand Christian Ethics objectively. But the cross-cultural interference hit me drastically. I think the understanding of these values depends upon each person. Some would say philosophical teachings are more reliable, others would choose theology instead, etc.

Quoting javi2541997

The statement is interesting. I guess you consider it as something to obey. Did you impose this belief yourself? I agree with you. Philosophy is a very reliable tool which helps us to understand ourselves and what is around... But it is not the epitome. I often felt lost when I searched for answers regarding ethics and values.

I found that the rational inquiry for ethics and values didn't help me understand my own place in the world at all. Even if I did get attached to a new ethical theory, so what? Why do I have to always obey it? What did e.g. utilitarianism tell me about me as a person? Not very much except that I'm basically one ethical unit among many. That's why you get these philosophers who may be very book smart but fail as people and live unhappy lives because they can't function in society or form meaningful relationships.

I believe in God because I find revealed wisdom that is so rare and brilliant within the Bible that I have no term for other than divine revelation. I don't know how ancient people would have reached these conclusions just by themselves especially given we as moderns didn't. It's like recovering lost knowledge. Divine dialogues reveal truths that reason just cannot penetrate yet are necessary for life/a healthy society.
Reply to javi2541997

Quoting 180 Proof

What do you think makes Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" possible? Ethics (re: eusocial norms of judgment and conduct) and religion (re: cultic paths to salvation/liberation) are independent of each other

Good point.

Quoting 180 Proof

Maybe you have an emotional need for "faith" (i.e. magical thinking) but it's the unbelievability – hope for things too good to be true –

No. I promise I don't have any emotional need to achieve faith. I know I could be hypocritical and cynical if I tried to find out faith somewhere when I didn't even buy the writings of the Gospels. But what can I do? There has to be a path, code of conduct, teaching, behaviour, etc. Which can help to understand the correct way to act. In the latter, my intention is to see ethics objectively. Is there a universal principle of good and bad? What about lying and honesty? Etc.

As I confessed to Metaphysician Undercover, I lied to my parents multiple times. Some would say it is not a big deal because these things usually happen. But I think it is bad anyway, and my soul feels corrupted, or as James Joyce says: engendered by putrefaction.

I think it could be universally accepted that cheating and lying to someone who loves (or respects) you is evil/bad. Even more, when we are talking about relatives.
Dostoevsky uses this dilemma a lot in his novels... 'Crime and Punishment' is a good example. That sordid and unbearable mental and spiritual state when someone is fully aware that he is lying to others and experiences an ethical dilemma with himself...

Reply to Wayfarer

I remember reading Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception & Perennial Philosophy years ago and he comes to a similar conclusions regarding our inherent connectedness. I've heard such ideas before and they're intriguing but I'm not quite sure what the upshot is. Where does one go from there?

Quoting javi2541997

... my intention is to see ethics objectively. Is there a universal principle of good and bad?

Yes. Consider the 'naturalistic morality' I've pointed out already ...
Quoting 180 Proof

Reducing suffering is like reducing illness: though the local customs of morality (or public health) vary, the problem confronted is the same for every member of the human species. How can it not be?

And furthermore:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/892545

What about lying and honesty? Etc.

From the perspective of a 'naturalistic moral agent' one judges whether "lying" or "honesty" reduces needless suffering (right) or fails to reduce needless suffering (wrong) and then one acts accordingly. Practice – learning by trial and error application of this principle (criterion) – gradually improves (habitualizes) moral judgment/conduct.

Quoting javi2541997

Firstly, yes, I am trying to establish a forced code of ethics.

Why? What I tried to relay to you, is that the forced code of ethics is the wrong way. Notice that a central tenet in The Old Testament is The Ten Commandments, then in The New Testament, this is reduced to one principle 'love thy neighbour as thyself' or "The Golden Rule". This marks a huge advancement in moral principles. Instead of a whole list of things "Thou shalt not...", a code of ethics, there is simply one principle of guidance toward how you ought to behave. What is displayed here is a move away from a system consisting of a code of ethics stipulating what you ought not do, toward a virtue ethics directing you to act toward appropriate ends. The virtue ethics provides guidance to motivate good behaviour, instead of the code of ethics which provides rules to deter bad behaviour.

Quoting javi2541997

As I confessed to Metaphysician Undercover, I lied to my parents multiple times. Some would say it is not a big deal because these things usually happen. But I think it is bad anyway, and my soul feels corrupted, or as James Joyce says: engendered by putrefaction.

Confession is a big part Catholicism. It is the first step toward forgiveness, which is the way to bring yourself out from those bad feelings associated with guilt. The first principle, "Love" encourages one to forgive, and forgiving encourages confession. Confession allows one to rid oneself of those bad feelings.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Ethics then is a prerequisite for freedom. The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good.

Sorry Count, but I totally disagree with what you posted. Freedom is clearly prior to ethics, as the reason why ethics is needed. If it was the case, that there was no freedom prior to the existence of ethics, then ethics would never come into existence because there would be no need for ethics, being no freedom to act otherwise, nor even the freedom to create ethics.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

What is displayed here is a move away from a system consisting of a code of ethics stipulating what you ought not do, toward a virtue ethics directing you to act toward appropriate ends. The virtue ethics provides guidance to motivate good behaviour, instead of the code of ethics which provides rules to deter bad behaviour.

Interesting input, friend. I am not attempting to move forward to something, because I haven't started at any point yet. The virtue ethics can serve me as guidance to motivate my good behavior. This sounds great, but again I fall into some questions and doubts. What is it to have a good behavior? What if I have good behavior, but I accidentally lie to my parents once? Etc. Also, I guess that guidance has to be based on basic and universal principles of ethics. Although you clearly distinguished both figures, I think they can overlap because they find the same appropriate end. One motivates good behavior and the other helps to avoid bad acts. Can we use these two at the same time? I think it could be worthwhile with the aim of avoiding a sense of guilt, corruption and putrefaction of my soul.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Confession is a big part Catholicism. It is the first step toward forgiveness, which is the way to bring yourself out from those bad feelings associated with guilt.

I haven't confessed to a priest in my entire life yet. I think this act would prove that I am contradictory, because if I didn't buy the writings of the Gospels, I should not go to a Church to confess myself. What will the priest do, by the way? He would listen and answer generic answers based on the Bible. This is another reason why I struggle with religious faith. It is unfair that sacred temples - like churches - and their members are the only places to confess the redemption of the spirit. I wish we could do this differently...

Do I sound contradictory if I say I believe I have a soul, but I reject the institution where my spirit can be listed?

On the other hand, I wonder whether a person can experience bad feelings if he rejects the existence of spirituality. Because guilt, sins, lies, bad actions, etc., only rot the essence of the spirit. What would be the main point otherwise?

Quoting 180 Proof

From the perspective of a 'naturalistic moral agent' one judges whether "lying" or "honesty" reduces needless suffering (right) or fails to reduce needless suffering (wrong) and then one acts accordingly. Practice – learning by trial and error application of this principle (criterion) – gradually improves (habitualizes) moral judgment/conduct.

Agreed. But... The improvement of moral judgment/conduct needs to affect something, for better or worse. I know those will affect my spirit because I believe I have one. But how would affect you 180 proof, if you reject spirituality? What is the aim or cause of improving my moral judgment according to your beliefs and ideas? You just reduce this to 'needless suffering (right) or fails to reduce needless suffering (wrong)'
Don't you think it could all be deeper than that surface?

Reply to javi2541997 On the one hand, you could spend the rest of your long life sorting out just some of the issues tangled up in the theology and history of Judaism and Christianity -- and it would be quite interesting, but it won't in itself make you a better person.

On the other hand, you could try to apply the summation provided by Jesus: Love one another as I have loved you. (John 13:34) Doing this will make you a better person, whatever else you decide to do in your life.

You have a scholarly bent, and that is a good thing--don't lose it. But when you are looking for meaning in this life, you will find it in your relationships with other people. There's no contradiction here. Practice good scholarship with your books and practice loving kindness with your neighbors.

Reply to BC Cheers, BC. Your comments are always a source of wisdom. Everything seems too big, interesting and unlimited. I know that perhaps getting deeply into Abrahamic religions will not make me a better person, but I am now at a point in my life where I need different ideas. I rejected these issues, and theology precisely, because I always considered them as something to be opposed to. It is unfair because I never really had a good cause or basis to oppose myself to different beliefs. Keep in mind that my intention is not to find a meaningful way to live, but to be alive without the less possible sense of despair, sins, guilt, etc. I know I can get this if I try to be a better person. At least, I started with the basic starting point: I accept I haven't always been a nice person, and I feel my spirit got poisoned by bad manners and unethical behavior.

Quoting BC

Practice good scholarship with your books and practice loving kindness with your neighbors.

I think I always behave kindly towards my neighbors. I say Good Morning when I meet them, and I am not a toxic fellow. I don't cheat on the water counter supply, nor destroy the elevator. I think this is common sense, and it is how every neighbor should behave in the community. This is the best ground for putting my ethical concerns into practice, but my worries go deeper.
I am concerned about abstract problems: lying and its consequences; having sexual desires without limitation; wasting savings on useless stuff when they were there for food or supplies, etc. I don't understand why I shortly act this way sometimes...
What I am aware is that this is bad and it corrupts my soul.

... The first step has already been taken: self-realization.

Quoting BitconnectCarlos

Where does one go from there?

Practice, study, contemplate.

Quoting BC

But when you are looking for meaning in this life, you will find it in your relationships with other people.

You can find it many other places, depending on your dispositions. I think it's reasonable to know this, a head of time, so you don't despair if those relationships are unfulfilling. It took me nearly 30 years to find meaningful relationships - and there is no discernable reason for this. Other things fulfilled me.

Reply to javi2541997

You said: "My basic point is that I always have a deep spiritual concern for morality and values." There are genuine ways to approach this issue philosophically. Spirituality is not a term so irrational that it defies discussion, in fact, it is the kind of thing one finds in the very essence of philosophy once mundane conversations are put on hold and more penetrating inquiry is desired. I am simply pointing out that if you are sincere about this, but you are fed up with with the wishy washy thinking and the equally deplorable dogma of popular religions, and want something substantive and meaningful that is not instantly assailable, then philosophy can accommodate. It does take some work, though. Sincere people are willing to put in the work.

Reply to AmadeusD Certainly there are many meaningful and meaning-giving endeavors which we can undertake. But for better or for worse, we are made by our relationships with other people -- parents and siblings first, then peers, teachers, neighbors, gangs, acquaintances, partners, lovers, etc. There's nothing simple or guaranteed about any relationship. Living in relationship with others can be hard -- maybe impossible with some people.

Quoting BC

But for better or for worse, we are made by our relationships with other people -- parents and siblings first, then peers, teachers, neighbors, gangs, acquaintances, partners, lovers, etc.

While it's probably impossible to reject the underlying idea (that relationships are unavoidable, and carry meaning even if we ignore it) I don't think they 'make' us, any more than our biology does. Which is to say, a lot. LMAO.

Quoting javi2541997

What is it to have a good behavior?

The good behaviour is what comes naturally from the principle of love, as described by BC above. If love is your top priority, you will not act badly. Of course, we are all influenced by a variety of different things though.

Quoting javi2541997

What if I have good behavior, but I accidentally lie to my parents once?

If you lied to your parents, then you allowed something to take higher priority than love of your parents. but that's what I mean when I say we are influenced by a variety of different things.

Quoting javi2541997

I haven't confessed to a priest in my entire life yet. I think this act would prove that I am contradictory, because if I didn't buy the writings of the Gospels, I should not go to a Church to confess myself. What will the priest do, by the way? He would listen and answer generic answers based on the Bible. This is another reason why I struggle with religious faith. It is unfair that sacred temples - like churches - and their members are the only places to confess the redemption of the spirit. I wish we could do this differently...

I as well, believe that you do not need the Church to redeem yourself. The example of Catholic confession was an example of the type of thing which could be done, but it is obviously not the only route to redemption. If you keep in mind that principle of love, described by BC, or a similar principle, you'll find many different ways to redeem yourself.


Quoting javi2541997

I am concerned about abstract problems: lying and its consequences; having sexual desires without limitation; wasting savings on useless stuff when they were there for food or supplies, etc. I don't understand why I shortly act this way sometimes...
What I am aware is that this is bad and it corrupts my soul.

I suggest that you consider these things as habits. Habits, when identified as bad, are difficult to break. The first step, which you've made, is to recognize them as bad. That is the point of confession, you're beyond that now. The next is to move forward with a strategy which will allow your will power to break the bad habit. Different types of people use different types of strategies, and different types of strategies are required for different types of habits. Each bad habit has to be individualized and a plan put in place specifically designed for annihilating it. And make your goals achievable, aiming too high invites failure which is not conducive to mental health. Remember habits are difficult to break, often requiring much time. I like to find many things to do, to occupy my time, (like being here), and this directs my attention away from the influence of the bad habits. In other words, I like to always keep myself busy, because the bad habits never seem to get completely annihilated, they lurk so be aware.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

If love is your top priority, you will not act badly. Of course, we are all influenced by a variety of different things though.

Yes, BC referred to love. I wasn't aware that this could be a motivation for behaving accordingly to values... I guess I have to find out where love is located because I tend to be very sceptical about it.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

If you lied to your parents, then you allowed something to take higher priority than love of your parents. but that's what I mean when I say we are influenced by a variety of different things.

I think you are trying to help me to not feel that bad about myself, and I appreciate your support a lot. The exchanges in this thread are more helpful than my sessions with my therapist, indeed. Nonetheless, I disagree with you in that quote above. I personally believe there should not be anything greater than the love for my parents. I am very influenced by Dostoevsky on this issue. If I allow 'something' to be more important than my respect for them, I am acting both selfishly and negatively. There is no doubt that a person can be influenced by many factors. Some of them could be fear and shame. Shame to tell them the truth, and shame because of the following consequences. But these are just weak arguments. Lying is even worse, and the latter is the main cause of why I sometimes feel I am sinning... and sickening my spirit. I am lucky that my parents always raised me accordingly, and they have never been abusive to me. I don't have any excuse for lying to them.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

In other words, I like to always keep myself busy, because the bad habits never seem to get completely annihilated, they lurk so be aware.

Good advise.

Reply to Astrophel Honestly, I don't get why you doubt whether I am sincere or not on this topic. I personally believe that, if you read my answers, you will notice that I am opening myself (and spirit) to the people here. I hate not being sincere, and therefore I promise I am answering frankly.

Quoting javi2541997

I know those will affect my spirit because I believe I have one. But how would affect you 180 proof, if you reject spirituality?

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking, javi. As a moral naturalist, I believe the "affect" on me has been to help me daily to be a more effective moral agent who is also free of superstitions. :strong:

What is the aim or cause of improving my moral judgment according to your beliefs and ideas?

The "aim or cause" is to develop habits of "moral judgment" (i.e. virtues) in order to help reduce your apparent anxiety at 'inconsistently choosing' to follow rules (i.e. "obey religious commandments"). I assumed I'd made this clear in my previous posts. :confused:

Reply to 180 Proof I understand you better now, 180 proof. I was asking those questions with the aim of receiving new inputs, and I appreciate your feedback on this thread. I thought moral judgement or values were dependent upon the belief in the existence of a soul/spirit... but now, I also take into account your views and opinion. Another perspective to help me to understand.

Nonetheless, I have to be clearer on one specific aspect: I do not have anxiety because of my 'inconsistently choosing' to follow rules, but precisely, because I haven't followed them sometimes. And the consequences of not following a code of conduct, values, virtues, etc. (Whatever if they are religious or not), made me end up in a state of awareness where I feel my soul is rotten. At least, I already accepted this fact, as I confessed to Metaphysician Undercover and BC...

Reply to javi2541997

Quoting Tzeentch

I think religious faith is not necessary for those who are able to retrace the footsteps of the sage and understand their teachings.

I wanted to circle back to this as it makes an important point. Originally this pursuit of 'retracing the footsteps' was very much the practice of ancient philosophy (as Pierre Hadot explains in his books). 'The sage' was regarded as exemplar, one whose conduct and understanding were exemplary, and whom the students, often referred to as disciples, were to emulate and follow. In that respect ancient philosophical schools were more like a religious order than is today's philosophy (a point Hadot also makes).

But there's another factor in respect of religious traditions, and that is the idea of revealed truth or spiritual illumination which provides the liberating understanding that is being sought by the disciple. 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free', said the Biblical Jesus. But it turns out that 'knowing the truth' is a pretty difficult ask. 'Be ye perfect, even as your father in Heaven is perfect', was another commandment. Also daunting, right? We don't know, and we know that we don't know, and we also know that we are sometimes in:

Quoting javi2541997

a state of awareness where I feel my soul is rotten

It may be true that we can reach a state of perfect equanimity, insight and eternal repose, but it seems very hard to square with the reality of the human condition which is typically considerably more fraught. And that is where belief enters the picture, even if, in an ideal existence, it may not be necessary, or it might become superfluous.

Quoting javi2541997

I feel my soul is rotten

Forgive me but this sounds like you need a therapist or priest and I don't think you'll find either here on TPF.

Quoting javi2541997

I think you are trying to help me to not feel that bad about myself, and I appreciate your support a lot. The exchanges in this thread are more helpful than my sessions with my therapist, indeed. Nonetheless, I disagree with you in that quote above. I personally believe there should not be anything greater than the love for my parents.

Didn't you say that you lied to your mom to tell her that you were going to the library when you were really going to see a woman? So, isn't this an instance of something taking higher priority than love for your parents? As much as you say "there should not be anything greater than the love for my parents" you allow that there actually is something greater, and that affects your behaviour accordingly. This is how divisions within oneself arise, conflicting priorities which divide you.

That is the reason for the anxiety you describe, and the reason why you say your soul is rotten. You do not adhere to your own code. You attempt to enforce a code (nothing higher than your parents) which is contrary to your very nature (you seek a woman). Therefore a chasm opens up between your code and your actions. Now, you must either change your code to reflect more truly your nature, or exercise your will power and determination, to enforce your code, and annihilate parts of your nature determined as consisting of bad habits. Otherwise you will be forever torn between your code and your actions, rife with anxiety concerning what you apprehend as your own sins.

Quoting Wayfarer

But there's another factor in respect of religious traditions, and that is the idea of revealed truth or spiritual illumination which provides the liberating understanding that is being sought by the disciple.

True.

Personally, I regard wisdom as a synthesis of rationality, intuition and experience, and therefore as having an element to it that is revealed or essentially esoteric.

I think most of us experience this as we grow older. There are many things that I was taught as a child and never took particularly seriously, until I grew older and those things started to make a lot more sense.


The rational part I had already been told, but the rational part alone was not enough to produce wisdom or understanding.

Therefore, while it may be unsatisfactory to some, it is apparent that one cannot expect to attain spiritual wisdom by relying on rational explanations alone.


All of this is to say, I think wisdom is in essence revealed truth and esoteric in nature.

Sometimes the answer is: "You don't understand, because you're not ready to understand it." - highly unsatisfactory, but nonetheless true sometimes?

Which religion of human origin condemns all human beings from birth?

I suspect that most people have the same mindset as a friend of mine who died two months ago after lingering for twelve years under the slowly debilitating effects of several brain and spinal chord cancers.

Because he was a veteran, he decided that the poem "Invictus" should be read at his funeral. The last stanza reads:

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."

I find it odd that he would choose the fate which was his.

Quoting Wayfarer

It may be true that we can reach a state of perfect equanimity, insight and eternal repose, but it seems very hard to square with the reality of the human condition which is typically considerably more fraught. And that is where belief enters the picture, even if, in an ideal existence, it may not be necessary, or it might become superfluous.

I agree in the sense that it is very difficult to square them in the huge difficulty of the human condition. But why is the belief superfluous to spiritual repose? I see these two are connected. It is true that I can't see which preceded the other. One of the main points of my arguments in this thread is that I actually believe I have a spirit and I want an equanimity in it. If I give up on one of these two sets, the equation is useless.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover Good point, and your comment made me understand myself better. Yes, it is obvious that I am enforcing a code of conduct. If this happens, it is due to a sense of despair. What you consider as 'very nature' (seeking a woman). I experienced it as a tremendous fault, a sin, indecent behaviour. If only I were honest with my parents, I wouldn't have experienced this anxiety. The key element is why I am not more transparent, and here is where the code of conduct and my hypocrisy crash.

When I started this thread, I admitted that I struggle with religious faith and ethics because some of the Bible's content is not reliable because it is written by the Gospels. Nonetheless, I am aware that I have a spirit and the latter started to get rotten because I didn't act accordingly in some actions. Yet this is very new in my life because, in the old version of myself, I never considered it a bad action to lie to my parents. It is something I realised recently. So, this behaviour truly reflected my nature.

For this reason, I think I don't have to change my code but my corrupted nature...

Reply to javi2541997

Of course you are sincere about wanting spiritual understanding. But is it the kind of sincerity that motivates you to make the painful decisions to actually change the way you live and breathe? Could you, for example, start meditating for several hours a day? Now THAT is sincerity! How about difficult philosophical reading?

There are dimensions of the discovery process that in themselves seem to have nothing to do with spirituality, but nevertheless stand as the very constituting basis for what is there in the world that makes the 2question ever arise in the first place. To address such a thing, you must change the questions. Popular religions don't do this because they are dogmatic, which closes inquiry. One must be open to inquiry FIRST. This is the point.

How to do this? One must find the most basic questions about our existence. Whether or not Jesus is our lord and savior, e.g., is not one of these questions, because it assumes what needs to be explained, namely, what is it in the human condition that needs saving? (It is not saying Jesus is NOT the savior, but saying rather that when we speak like this, what are we saying?) What is this about, this terms that are so much in play when religion discussed, terms like redemption, the soul, divinity, holiness, heaven and hell, the glory of God, miracles, eschatology, and so on? And how about their philosophical counterparts: the problem of the good (metaethics), the self (our existence) and the consummation its liberation, the impossible, the purpose found therein? Frankly, the matter gets wickedly difficult because one seeks something so occluded by historical institutions and these have to be argued out of one's thinking. This is why Heidegger is such a bitch to read, for he is trying to take a completely new course of thought that takes the entire history of philosophy and extracts (with emphasis on the Greeks) what survives the reduction to simplicity (primordiality) in the descriptive enterprise of revealing what it means for us to exist.

These ideas are at the very heart of spirituality, and one must understand them. Read Kierkegaard (in some ways worse than Heidegger in Sickness Unto Death or The Concept of Anxiety) and you will find great talent for cutting to the chase, but he is, as Heidegger called him, a religious writer. Regardless, he had read Kant and Hegel thoroughly. It is a discussion that will radically change your thinking and perceiving of the world. You don't have to master all this (the Greeks through Derrida) at all. Just get in the boat and start paddling.

A real test of one's sincerity.

Quoting Astrophel

How about difficult philosophical reading?

Philosophy is difficult per se. I never found a philosopher who wrote his essays or texts with clarity. I guess this is one of the main features of philosophy. Furthermore its difficulty, I haven't limited myself to jumping and reading classic philosophical authors. Kierkegaard is the philosopher (or theologian, according to others) who I read the most, and I even reread some of his works, like 'Fear and Trembling'. I don't attempt to diminish the great quality and quantitative value of philosophy. It is very important, and I am always interested in it. Nonetheless, I have been coming through different perspectives thanks to reading Kazantzakis and Dostoevsky. I hadn't accordingly rated Christian Ethics with sincerity until I read those authors. They changed my view on life, and well, thanks to them, I discovered an important premise in my beliefs: I fully believe I have a spirit (which can be corrupted by bad actions), but I struggle with religious faith/dogmas.

Quoting Astrophel

What is this about, this terms that are so much in play when religion discussed, terms like redemption, the soul, divinity, holiness, heaven and hell, the glory of God, miracles, eschatology, and so on?

It is not necessary to take all those religious concepts are granted and I fully respect the people who don't buy sacred texts and ideas. Due to religious books are always that controversial, I wonder if I can believe I have a spirit without getting tangled in religion or not.

Quoting Astrophel

Read Kierkegaard

I already did. Thanks to him, I started this thread. :smile:

Quoting Astrophel

Frankly, the matter gets wickedly difficult because one seeks something so occluded by historical institutions and these have to be argued out of one's thinking

Exactly. This is one of the main concerns I exchanged with MU. It is unfair that the Church seems to be the only place where my spirit may be heard. Some institutions take natural worries as part of them...

Reply to javi2541997
I was raised Catholic. My experience of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is similar to that of 180 Proof, though my time in Catholic schools was limited to 10 years. I feel rather nostalgic about the Church of my youth. It's an aesthetic fondness related to the ritual and appearance of its ceremony and the physical churches themselves. That was before the Church became bland, at least here in the U.S.

The Church and Christianity in general was and I think still is a remarkable and fascinating hodgepodge of certain ancient pagan philosophical and religious beliefs and Judaism, but I stopped being a believer long ago. I find it hard to believe in any transcendent, creator God, and especially the personal, hectoring, demanding and strangely needy sky-gods of the kind that are worshipped in the West. I find the ancient Stoic view of God compelling--an immanent God which is immersed in Nature, and the active, creative essence of the universe.

Quoting javi2541997

Do you feel the same?

I separate spiritually from morality.

The former's "purpose" is soteriological, or emancipatory. That is, to "lift" one up from/out of secular and mundane attachments, including morality. To use Eliade's term, It belongs to the sacred.

While the latter, morality, involves the secular. It may have as its "purpose" the most functional or "best" version of the secular, but it remains nevertheless secular. To use Eliade's term, It belongs to the profane.

I agree that "religions" have exploited spirituality to "scare" us into accepting that the main purpose of same is to "be good."

However, I believe there can be near perfectly moral atheists according to conventional standards of morality; and, (although more difficult to objectively assess) near perfectly accomplished in spirituality (i.e. enlightened/saved) who do not adhere to any moral laws or structures.

Now, I expect resistance on the second conclusion. It is common to view spiritaul persons as "saintly," and to equate "saintly" with being a good person.

But note, that a spiritual "saint" "mukti" "sage" etc. behaves morally, either
1. Because coincidentally, freedom from the attachment to the profane is also freedom from the same attachments which lead us to immoral choices, or
2. Because they are claiming to be spiritual, an presenting their morality as proof, and are therefore, not spiritual.

I mean, if there is a God, and or a spiritual reality, why would it be restricted by our relative morality? And if you think religious morality is not relative, read the old testament, koran, and Mahabharatas to see how much our religious morality has evolved (improved!), relative to our secular views.

Quoting javi2541997

Philosophy is difficult per se. I never found a philosopher who wrote his essays or texts with clarity. I guess this is one of the main features of philosophy. Furthermore its difficulty, I haven't limited myself to jumping and reading classic philosophical authors. Kierkegaard is the philosopher (or theologian, according to others) who I read the most, and I even reread some of his works, like 'Fear and Trembling'. I don't attempt to diminish the great quality and quantitative value of philosophy. It is very important, and I am always interested in it. Nonetheless, I have been coming through different perspectives thanks to reading Kazantzakis and Dostoevsky. I hadn't accordingly rated Christian Ethics with sincerity until I read those authors. They changed my view on life, and well, thanks to them, I discovered an important premise in my beliefs: I fully believe I have a spirit (which can be corrupted by bad actions), but I struggle with religious faith/dogmas.

Dostoevsky opens the mind to miserable frustrations of reconciling faith with the world. If you read D. then you are already exercising the disillusionment that looks deeper than religion can go. Kierkegaard is a radical philosopher, complaining about the church as an institution, on the one hand, and Hegel on the other, and I take this latter to be most insightful: I would here briefly mention the themes K puts to philosophy. Our existence and its indeterminacy, especially its ethical indeterminacy. This will show up in phenomenological thought (though Kant was a phenomenologist. The true progenitor of this thinking) and is at the heart of the problem I am trying to make clear here: Religion has an essence, and one has to remove one's thinking from the endless narratives, religious, literary or otherwise.

There comes the point at which one simply has to see that reading Dostoevsky or serious literature in general is the beginning, as it announces the question of our existence in the light of metaethics, which is the question we put before all others. The question of why we are born to suffer and die. But the question like this begs other questions, and this is philosophy's job! For the question is not, if you will, primordial, not yet, because the nature of good and evil haven't yet been exposed, and this brings inquiry to the direct encounter with the world, and we leave literature behind, as well as the Greeks, Kant and everyone else (though they raise up later, modified), for all questions lead back to the world, back to what it is we are trying understand: our being-in-the-world. To understand why we are born to suffer and die, we have understand what we mean by these terms, and these term are in-the-world, in our existence. So, what is our existence, I mean, and most emphatically, what is this IN the most direct apprehension of the world? What is missing in familiar even technical scientific thought?

It begins with questions that are embedded in our existence and have to be discovered. It ends with an account that is the most "sincere" possible, which is staying with the world, not allowing contrived thinking and tradition to pull you away from it. One is now a scientist and onto-theology is the study of the way the world presents the need, crisis, and foundation for our existence in the world. Sure, there are sage things said by religious leaders, but these are as a non scientist would think about physics or biology. Heidegger can take on deep into inquiry, into a "disembodied" conception of the self, that is, a self conceived apart from the primacy of scientific physicalism, what can be called scientific metaphysics, which is implicit and pervasive in everyday thinking. Thinking needs to be explicitly liberated.

The most radical approach? Meditation. This is another route. Where Kierkegaard holds that he can never be a knight of faith because he could never truly suspend the ethical as Abraham did, meditation goes further (as yet not as far): meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". Abraham is simply suspended, as are daily affairs, politics, one's personality, everything. Suspended, put out of play, forgotten. All in search of one's true primordial self, which is rapturous.

Quoting javi2541997

It is not necessary to take all those religious concepts are granted and I fully respect the people who don't buy sacred texts and ideas. Due to religious books are always that controversial, I wonder if I can believe I have a spirit without getting tangled in religion or not.

Buying into sacred texts or not doing so is beside the point, I am arguing. It is a matter of going beneath these texts so as to liberate thought from just bad metaphysics. Philosophy is mostly negative, for it spoils belief, throws questions at assumptions that want to be left alone. Nothing survives in popular religion as it is stated from the pulpit. But, heh heh, like a phoenix, out of the ashes of bad metaphysics, there arises, I hold and try to argue, a singular primoridiality. Calling this God just, as Wittgenstein was so aware, works to undo what it IS. Being in love, for example, is irreducible in the the metaphysics of this, in the meta-question, what is love? Same goes for pain. Put a lighted match to you finger---now you are truly IN the world most intimately, no?


Quoting javi2541997

Exactly. This is one of the main concerns I exchanged with MU. It is unfair that the Church seems to be the only place where my spirit may be heard. Some institutions take natural worries as part of them...

The church will give you nonsense and faith. Kierkegaard knew this!! But then, one myth for another, for, for K, science, culture, reason stood entirely outside faith. Faith is the "qualitative movement" that even K couldn't make. But K didn't understand, like Witt (who adored Kierkegaard), that the prohibition against speaking was only a structural delimitation, and is no limitation on content. Divinity no more lies beyond language than this I call my cat. What they didn't get is that the world at the threshold of metaphysics is an open door for discovery.

Reply to Tom Storm

It appears that we are treating 'good' as something concrete, when it is merely an adjective applied conditionally. How would one make the case that a concept such as good is anything more than a sign we apply to things we approve of (a construction of our practices, language and norms) and that this approval is perspectival?

It definitely is treating the Good as something concrete. But Plato thinks he has good reasons for doing this.

Rather then start with considering the existence of "the Good," it might make more sense to start by considering more "concrete" universals, e.g. "square," "red," or "cat." Would something's being square be a "social construct?" No doubt the word "square" is such a construct, but the very existence of such things?

If social constructs don't spring from the aether uncaused, it would seem there must be such things. And generally people are quite accepting of the claim that there are such things as cats, squares, trees, etc.

At first glance, things like "goodness," or "justice" seem more amorphous. However, there are also good reasons for thinking these are not illusions, something wholly created by the mind.

Plato points out one of these reasons during his exchange with Thrasymachus early in The Republic. If justice is just "what is good for people in power," it is still the case that the powerful can be wrong about justice or what is good for them. For example, consider a dictator who raises taxes 50% in order to fund his new palace. The result is a coup and his being imprisoned and tortured while awaiting execution. To both the dictator and others, it is clear that the tax policy was not "a good move." The dictator thought the decision was good at the time, but it was not. Likewise, pouring lead into an elementary school water supply seems to be "bad" for the children in a fairly unambiguous, objective way, regardless of what the person who does it thinks at the time.

So, what is "good" seems to have a certain independence from how people feel at any given moment, making it more than simply a "sign of things we approve of." Our dictator "approved of" his tax policy, yet it would seem odd for us to say that this entails that it must have been a "good" decision for him to make, given it leads to his torture and death. The same applies to dumping lead into the school water supply. Indeed, taken to an extreme, "good" being taken as merely a sign of approval would seem to suggest that we can never be wrong about what is good for us. Yet this does not seem to be the case; we regret our decisions and experience guilt all the time.

Should we instead say that the good for the dictator simply changed, that the tax policy was good when he implemented it, but bad when the coup occured and his opinions about the action changed? Likewise, was starting to use heroin good for heroin addicts until they began to regret it? Or does the IDF's policy in Gaza remain good so long as decision makers think it is good? Etc.

The problem with such a claim is that it slips into an extreme relativism. For why would truth be better the falsehood? It wouldn't. Truth would only be better in cases where we feel it is better, and so our feelings ultimately dictate truth claims. If it falsehood feels better then, at least for that moment, it is better. If our feelings change, the good simply changes.

This simply doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. We all make bad decisions in our lives. It seems silly to say these were good right up until we regret them.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry Count, but I totally disagree with what you posted. Freedom is clearly prior to ethics, as the reason why ethics is needed. If it was the case, that there was no freedom prior to the existence of ethics, then ethics would never come into existence because there would be no need for ethics, being no freedom to act otherwise, nor even the freedom to create ethics.

I really shouldn't have said "prior," especially when trying to present Plato. The two are mutually reinforcing. Ethics is prior to the freedom of the free[I]individual[/I] in some ways. For example, the person who is raised as a slave, without any education, subject to all sorts of abuses, is made less free by those circumstances (even if they might overcome them eventually). The extreme case would be the person who is murdered as a child. Obviously, they never get a chance to develop their freedom.

The just society makes its citizens more free and the citizens who have achieved a higher level of freedom make their society more just, having come to be able to both discover and actualize the Good. There is a sort of circular causality at work here.

Reply to javi2541997

Sorry, to expand briefly on my previous reply.

The corresponding "philosophical" branch for religion (as in thelogy) is metaphysics not ethics or morality. For spirituality, specifically, you might find a sister in existentialisms drive for authenticity.

Yes, morality is a bi-product; but not the essence of spirituality.

The corresponding

Reply to Ciceronianus

I find it hard to believe in any transcendent, creator God, and especially the personal, hectoring, demanding and strangely needy sky-gods of the kind that are worshipped in the West.

Ironically, this is an image of God that is often criticized by the Patristics, some of the big Medieval Latin theologians, and many contemporary Catholic philosophers. The Catholic philosophy space is quite vibrant, and so it's always surprising to me how this doesn't seem to trickle down into the lower levels of religious education.

There seems to be a tendency in religious education, where it even exists in churches, to tend towards "simple is best." I am not sure if this is always helpful for their goals though. It seems to me that precisely what people are hungry for in the "spirituality space," would be these deeper looks at theology and philosophy, along with the sort of intensive practice that was common in the ancient church.

Reply to Ciceronianus Interesting thoughts. I like that you feel nostalgic about its aesthetic vibe, rituals, ceremonies, etc. Churches have always been (and they still are) a place where people feel they belong to. I only disagree with why these sacred places are the ones where I can redeem my spirit or myself. It is true that, thanks to the advancement of technology or other disciplines, each person can express himself freely and feel heard. But let's be honest, I can't go to random places and confess I feel my spirit is sick. I debated this with 180 proof, and he said to me, I should go to either a therapist or a priest... Let's see where I end up with.

Quoting Ciceronianus

The Church and Christianity in general was and I think still is a remarkable and fascinating hodgepodge of certain ancient pagan philosophical and religious beliefs and Judaism, but I stopped being a believer long ago.

It is very remarkable that most of you share the same experience. Everyone started with a good hype, but when time passes by, each person starts to lose the aim of believing in God. Why does this happen? I mean, I understand your reasons, but it is unclear to me why many people end up losing interest in Abrahamic ideas.

Some of your comments concern moral authority. I think researching the Sola Scriptura debate would help clarify.

Reply to ENOAH Hello ENOAH. Nice feedback.

Quoting ENOAH

The former's "purpose" is soteriological, or emancipatory. That is, to "lift" one up from/out of secular and mundane attachments, including morality. To use Eliade's term, It belongs to the sacred.

ENOAH;893209:I agree that "religions" have exploited spirituality to "scare" us into accepting that the main purpose of same is to "be good."

The concept of sacred is sometimes blurred. I knew I would end up in a complex rabbit hole because of the limitless significance of religious concepts and their extension. Nonetheless, I think we can agree that religion (or Abrahamic/Judaism beliefs) and theology are the only branches which actually believe in the existence of a spirit. I want to sound clearer. A theologian would defend that the spirit is a tangible being separated from our body. I also believe there has to be a spirit, but I disagree with religious dogmas. Maybe I sound contradictory, but I want to know where I should look at... I feel my spirit is sick and if I attend meta-ethics they will teach me about principles to motivate better behavior. But where did my spirit go? It is clear that a secular system rejects the existence of a spirit.


Reply to ENOAH Quoting ENOAH

I mean, if there is a God, and or a spiritual reality, why would it be restricted by our relative morality? And if you think religious morality is not relative, read the old testament, koran, and Mahabharatas to see how much our religious morality has evolved (improved!), relative to our secular views.

I haven't denied the relativity of holy books. It is obvious that the interpretation of values and ethics are opened to each person and this proves that ethics can rarely seen objectively. Yet I agree with some users who claim there have to be universal principles or code of conduct which we can rely on. Do you agree with me that lying to our parents is one of the dirtiest things to do? I personally believe this is accepted by all. What comes afterwards, thus, the consequences is very relative. I feel my spirit is rotten after doing so, but others claim to calm down and try to learn the lesso, keep going and find a code according to my nature.


Quoting ENOAH

Yes, morality is a bi-product; but not the essence of spirituality.

Again. If morality is not the essence of spirituality, why do we act accordingly? We establish values, principles, ideas, beliefs, etc, arbitrary not randomly.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem with such a claim is that it slips into an extreme relativism. For why would truth be better the falsehood? It wouldn't. Truth would only be better in cases where we feel it is better, and so our feelings ultimately dictate truth claims. If it falsehood feels better then, at least for that moment, it is better. If our feelings change, the good simply changes.

This simply doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. We all make bad decisions in our lives. It seems silly to say these were good right up until we regret them.

I am open to relativism, so this concern doesn't really bite for me. I suspect that human notions of truth are contingent upon our language, social practices, and historical context. We can talk about intersubjective agreements (consensus) around issues like killing and theft, but I am suspicious and doubtful there is some concrete 'good' that our behavior might correspond to. Intersubjectivity I believe allows people to see issues categorically as being good or bad, true or false, when really what they are seeing is a shared subjectivity, a truth manufactured by agreement.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Likewise, was starting to use heroin good for heroin addicts until they began to regret it?

Interesting you raise this one. The answer might be yes to this. I work in the area of addiction and mental health, so I would often hold a different view to others on this. Hence how we might view any given issue is down to contingent factors. I would say that heroin, while it may harm health, is also one of the reasons why people are able to survive trauma. Heroin (and other drugs) becomes the reason people can cope and endure. So it isn't as simple as saying it is bad. If heroin were legal it would cause less harm than alcohol, for instance. Many of its harms are a product of its illegality. But this is a digression.

Quoting Astrophel

Where Kierkegaard holds that he can never be a knight of faith because he could never truly suspend the ethical as Abraham did, meditation goes further (as yet not as far): meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". Abraham is simply suspended, as are daily affairs, politics, one's personality, everything. Suspended, put out of play, forgotten. All in search of one's true primordial self, which is rapturous.

Good point! And Jesus! God (or whatever deity) blessed his soul for interpreting in such an intelligent way the dilemma of Abraham. If I am not wrong, K admitted he had a lot of admiration for Abraham for suspending the ethical. I read the Spanish version, but looking around the internet I found this interesting commentary:

Quoting Eschatological faith and repetition: Kierkegaard’s Abraham and Job

Abraham “intending the death of his son” on Mount Moriah did not bother most “classical Jewish thinkers, because they never conceived of this act as murder. For them, Isaac was an appendage of the father, and Abraham’s act was one of supreme self-sacrifice.” In other words, in an archaic view according to which Isaac is Abraham’s most prized possession, his willingness to offer Isaac back to the same God who gave Isaac by miracle to his aged wife Sarah is proof of Abraham’s absolute devotion. However foreign this view of children is to us now, it helps remind us that the problems and lessons which Kierkegaard intends us to see in the story of Abraham and Isaac may not be close to those on which ancient Hebrew readers or medieval Jewish scholars focused. Our topic is Kierkegaard’s sense of the story, not the original Akedah itself, however far the implications drawn by his pseudonym Johannes de silentio may be from the true intent of the book of Genesis. And for him, the idea that Abraham might be guilty of attempted or intended (even if forestalled) murder is crucial.

Quoting Astrophel

The church will give you nonsense and faith. Kierkegaard knew this!!

:lol:


Quoting Astrophel

Kierkegaard is a radical philosopher, complaining about the church as an institution, on the one hand, and Hegel on the other,

Kierkegaard didn't want to be a philosopher in the literal sense, and he, in opposition to Hegel, didn't preach Christianity as an illusion. K also considered himself an undoubtedly Lutheran, etc. I personally think Kierkegaard felt more comfortable debating about theology, the Bible and Christian Ethics. He became a philosopher accidentally. I see him as one of the representatives of existentialism. I really like K and I always like to get deeper in his thoughts. I think this has already been discussed here but Kierkegaard, apart from other things, is dialect! He used specific words in Danish which are difficult to translate into our languages, like 'anfægtelse' which means 'spiritual trial'. Kierkegaard shows the anguish inherent to the authentic God-relationship and also the dangerous possibility of the individual imagination's. It is here that Kierkegaard's emphasis upon individual responsibility.

Quoting Tzeentch

Sometimes the answer is: "You don't understand, because you're not ready to understand it." - highly unsatisfactory, but nonetheless true sometimes?

:100:

Quoting javi2541997

why is the belief superfluous to spiritual repose?

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith. That is illustrated in this Buddhist text, which says those who have not known have to take it on conviction, whereas those who know and see would have no doubt or uncertainty:

[quote=Pubbakotthaka Sutta; https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn48/sn48.044.than.html]...Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it [Nibbana] by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. ...[/quote]

Quoting Wayfarer

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith.

The problem with this is there is nothing which can't be justified with such an appeal to faith. I remember sitting down with South African whites in the 1980's (they were sincere Christians). They told me that I didn't understand apartheid and that it was god's will, in fact they had it on faith that apartheid was good and that 'the blacks need it'.

Now while this is clearly racist bullshit, where do we draw the line between a legitimate appeal made to faith and one which is dubious? Could it be that all we have is reason after all?

Do we not have good reason to fear those who claim to 'know' but can only justify this knowledge based on some version of ineffability or transcendence?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Ironically, this is an image of God that is often criticized by the Patristics, some of the big Medieval Latin theologians, and many contemporary Catholic philosophers. The Catholic philosophy space is quite vibrant, and so it's always surprising to me how this doesn't seem to trickle down into the lower levels of religious education.

I know little of the Patristics, though they seem interesting. Christianity, I think, has always had difficulty trying to incorporate pagan philosophy into its doctrine. The effort to do so began, I believe, when the early Christians tried to answer the criticisms of such as Porphyry and Celsus. I think a great part of the difficulty was due to the insistence that Jesus was not only divine, but "one in being with the Father." The more that one claims that God is "the god of the philosophers" the less it's possible to accept Jesus as God, and also that he is the God of the Old Testament.

Quoting Tom Storm

Now while this is clearly racist bullshit, where do we draw the line between a legitimate appeal made to faith and one which is dubious? Could it be that all we have is reason after all?

You also have conscience.

Quoting Wayfarer

You also have conscience.

Consciences are relative. :wink: Pretty sure those South Africans slept well at night with a clear conscience.

Reply to Tom Storm Spoken from the true secularist perspective!

Quoting Wayfarer

Spoken from the true secularist perspective!

Is that an attempt at a slight? As in - 'What would you know, you're a secularist?'

I think my position on faith is fairly robust. What approach do you have to demonstrate which person's faith is correct and which one is not?

Quoting Tom Storm

I think my position on faith is fairly robust. What approach do you have to demonstrate which person's faith is correct and which one is not?

We all have to make a decision. It's quite possible that we'll make a wrong decision, that goes with the territory. I was attempting to address the question of 'why belief?' Many will say that matters of religious faith are only ever a matter of belief, as there's nothing that can be known, they're illusory in principle, but then, the person to whom my comment was addressed does not see it that way. There are many with their minds made up already, I generally won't attempt to change that.

I appreciate how thoughtful you are being, and I feel the earnestness in your tone. So, please note (I acknowledge you probably do anyway) that I am not providing answers with any authority beyond the opinions which have collected in my tiny locus of history. I would only hope that you throw them into your own dialectic and I would be interested in learning what eventually comes out. Anyway, because I'm lazy, I won't keep repeating, "in my humble opinion." I just wanted to clarify that I know I sound like I know. But like you, like everyone, I don't.



Quoting javi2541997

... I feel my spirit is sick and if I attend meta-ethics they will teach me about principles to motivate better behavior

You're right. But not how you think. The meta-ethics will assuredly heal your "spirit," but you are (respectfully) unwittingly using "spirit" when you mean Mind. Your Mind
constructs and carries the burden of your immorality. Morality is a collection of Narrative trials and errors--like precedents in Anglo Common Law--made by billions of Minds, over the one mind, history. So any malaise you think is rooted in your spirit, is. But not as in opposed to Mind. It is Mind.

It is as opposed to what would belong to God, if there is God or the like, (e.g. Brahman or Buddha Nature also works). The malaise you reference is a construct of the Mind. But what belongs to God, that is, the True Spirit of I (humbly) submit, all religions, is our organic being, our Bodies.

You want to heal your Soul? Be ethical, minimize the focus upon the Subject in your Narrative. Be conventional. Belong.

You want to "heal" (I would say, "be") your Real Spirit, the True Consciousness of an organic being aware-ing always in presence, it's feelings and its drives, in pursuit of prosperity and bliss? Just be that organic being. For God's sake Breathe.

Quoting javi2541997

Yet I agree with some users who claim there have to be universal principles or code of conduct which we can rely on. Do you agree with me that lying to our parents is one of the dirtiest things to do? I

Yes. I agree! But I note (remember, with humility and an incessant self doubt) that those codes were written by History, and if God is Real, they have nothing to do with It beyond any arguments that It may have once had an inspirational role.

Quoting javi2541997

. I feel my spirit is rotten after doing so,

I feel that, if the foregoing serves any functions, this one is important. God does not judge you for your admittedly dirty lies. You are judging yourself. Good. Within the context of the rest of us, history. And because your Narrative is ethical, you're firing off Signifiers to release chemicals of anti-bliss (clearly I simplify). So see? The system works. It doesn't have to be religion. You feel bad. Fix it. Apologize and henceforth be honest.

But notwithstanding all scriptural and ecclesiastical claims to the contrary, lightning will not strike you.


Quoting javi2541997

Again. If morality is not the essence of spirituality, why do we act accordingly?

Well, now, given I haven't miscommunicated, you know why I think. Up to you.

Quoting Astrophel

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence".

Sorry Astrophel, annihilation? Would you accept, a rest, vacation, respite? I think I know what you mean, but meditation is a simultaneous turning away from "existence" and turn toward Reality, or True Being.

I think, like Abraham's temporary suspension of the ethical ( specifically the law against infanticide, broadly, "existence," our world) meditation as we are using it here, is a temporary reprieve from our world, which removes its obstructions and allows brief glimpses of Truth. But the world has become the inescapable* default setting for humans in human existence.

*I think there might theoretically be a "meditative" process which might allow one to exist in a permanent state of Truth, hence "annihilating" existence; but, man, is that unlikely.

Have I misunderstood? Intruded?

Quoting Astrophel

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence".

It's a dramatic way of putting it, but I believe this means 'the negation of ego'. 'Not my will but thine', in the Christian idiom. Dying to the self. It is fundamental to religious philosophy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Another passage from the Buddhist texts. 'The Tathagata' is the Buddha (means 'thus gone' or 'gone thus'. 'Reappears' refers to being reborn in some state or other. 'Vaccha' is Vachagotta, a wandering ascetic who personifies the asking of philosophical questions in the early Buddhist texts. )

[quote=Aggi Vachagotta Sutta; https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.072.than.html]Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply."[/quote]

Quoting Wayfarer

We all have to make a decision. It's quite possible that we'll make a wrong decision, that goes with the territory.

:up: True that.

Quoting Wayfarer

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith.

I think that's a good point. To learn requires faith in others, teachers, and all that surrounds you, in the capacity to educate you. Without that faith, knowledge is impossible. But when the desired knowledge is obtained, that faith is no longer necessary.

But this only demonstrates how epistemology is on shaky ground, as knowledge rests on faith.

Quoting javi2541997

Churches have always been (and they still are) a place where people feel they belong to.

It might be better to put it: where some people feel they belong. There are probably just as many people (perhaps more?) who find churches cold, intimidating, unremittingly vulgar or simply unsafe on account of having been abused (or know people abused) by religious clerics and laypeople. Just saying. :wink:

Reply to Tom Storm

I am open to relativism, so this concern doesn't really bite for me.

Some degree of relativism is one thing. Most thoughtful thinkers are relativists in some manner or another, e.g., Aquinas' "all knowledge is received in the manner of the receiver." However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims.

This was the point of the reference to the drug addict. Not that "heroin is an objective bad," but rather that someone whose drug problem has ruined their life can claim, with good warrant, "it was not good for me to begin doing drugs."

Showing that notions of truth are affected by language, social practice, etc. is of course different from showing that they are nothing but social practice, "all the way down." Unfortunately, positivism, a very short lived philosophical movement, has become a sort of ready made strawman such that pulling the rug out from underneath it is made to seem solid grounds for dismissing the concept of truth.

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc. There are some very good studies on the phenomenology of truth, the basic aspects of experience from which the notion emerges. Good metaphysical explanations of truth then need to explain this, to explain this adequately, which is easier said than done.

Quoting ENOAH

The meta-ethics will assuredly heal your "spirit," but you are (respectfully) unwittingly using "spirit" when you mean Mind..

ENOAH;893292:The malaise you reference is a construct of the Mind.

It is another way to approach this issue. Honestly, I haven't thought about my mind once since I started expressing my anxiety in this thread. This is due to the fact that I consider the mind as a part of the problem. When I didn't act accordingly, I ended up with the conclusion that my mind was flawed because it didn't stop me. A big sense of free will which my mind provides drove me to a sense of guilt later on. For me, the mind, it is where rationality is allocated. What I learnt after some experiences was that the mind does not always act ethically. The spirit goes beyond this. Who is the part of my body which suffers from guilt or despair? I am talking about intangible states. Does rationality go to despair or 'sins'? I think not...


Quoting ENOAH

The system works. It doesn't have to be religion. You feel bad. Fix it. Apologize and henceforth be honest.

You are referring to apologise, but I am referring to confess. I can say sorry for not acting accordingly, but will this act heal my spirit? As far as I understand this, confessing only heals the spirit because the latter is sacred, religious, etc. I mean, they are different concepts with different results. Don't you think?

Quoting Tom Storm

It might be better to put it where some people feel they belong. There are probably just as many people (perhaps more?) who find churches cold, intimidating, unremittingly vulgar or simply unsafe on account of having been abused (or know people abused) by religious clerics and laypeople. Just saying. :wink:

You are right, Tom. It is true that churches can be intimidating for some. I will not lie and say every sacred temple is friendly. Here is another big difference between the groups inside Christianity. While Gothic churches are tenebrous, Lutheran churches are friendly, minimalist, transparent, etc. And they give a sense of peace. This is what I felt when I was in Denmark at least. :sweat:

Quoting ENOAH

Sorry Astrophel, annihilation? Would you accept, a rest, vacation, respite? I think I know what you mean, but meditation is a simultaneous turning away from "existence" and turn toward Reality, or True Being.

Here is a question: what is the self? There is the thick theory and the thin theory, as a philosopher might put it (discussing issues like euthanasia or abortion, say). Heidegger's is what you could call a thick theory, meaning a self is a social construct, a historical self, a cultural entity whose existence is the collective body of meanings that circulate through the institutions that fill our interests (obviously there is a lot more to it, but for now...). So a self is this constant going to the grocery store, getting married, gossiping about friends and movies, and on and on. Kierkegaard's great complaint was that even the church had yielded to this, reduced to the rituals, assuring sermons and the entire "finitude" of social possibilities related to this institution. I think when it comes to defining what a self is, this "thick" self is what we have available, I mean, ask who I am, and I will tell you what I do, where I work, that I am married with kids, and so forth. So serious meditation is a method of discovery and liberation FROM this mundane self. The more you turn off these sources of interest, the less they possess you.

Of course, if the idea is simply to live a less stressful life, then fine. But this is not what Gautama Siddhartha had in mind so long ago. I have read the Abhidharma which I understand to be as close to the ancient thoughts as it goes, though I know nothing of Pali and the issues of transliteration that keep me from basic meanings, but anyway, I have read a lot of it, and it is a VERY radical doc.

Quoting ENOAH

I think, like Abraham's temporary suspension of the ethical ( specifically the law against infanticide, broadly, "existence," our world) meditation as we are using it here, is a temporary reprieve from our world, which removes its obstructions and allows brief glimpses of Truth. But the world has become the inescapable* default setting for humans in human existence.

*I think there might theoretically be a "meditative" process which might allow one to exist in a permanent state of Truth, hence "annihilating" existence; but, man, is that unlikely.

Have I misunderstood? Intruded?

Misunderstood, intruded? Of course not. I only come online in the first place so I can hear what others have to say and see how well I can respond. As I see it, this is how we test, modify our thinking.

Is it temporary? And I think Abraham's faith is abiding. Certainly he went back to tending sheep and goats, and thinking in casual and familiar ways, But you're right, he didn't just stand amazed for the rest of his life. But he did likely stand in "divine grace," which is very different from the familiar. This is where I think Kierkegaard went too far. The "movement" to qualitatively affirm the existence of the self is not a movement that cancels ethics, for the body of rules K wants be subsumed under and defeated by God's authority are themselves of God. This is a long argument. It goes to defining the essence of religion and "metaethics" that is, the essence of ethics.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims.

The world ‘relativism’ is a kind of misnomer, isn’t it?
Relative doesn’t have to mean arbitrary. It clearly doesn’t mean this when we are navigating through the reciprocally integrated elements of a system of relations. Within the bounds of our understanding of the nature of the relations between the components of the system, relativism can imply intricacy, intimacy, coherence and intelligibility. It is only when we compare two systems and deem their relation to be incommensurable and arbitrary that relativism dissolves relate into incoherence.

One could argue that the good relativism of intimate correlation only becomes the bad relativism
of arbitrariness and incoherence when we prematurely halt the progress in our understanding of the relatedness of aspects of the human world by forcing them to conform to a true ground or origin. This is the moment when meaningful relation becomes the arbitrariness of the unconditioned absolute. Emotivism is one form of absolutizing, since it treats affectivity as arbitrary beginning. But affectivity doesn’t have to be understood this way. It can instead be linked directly to sense-making , as the expression of the relative success or failure of inteliigibility. Thus, , when we say something felt good or bad, we don’t mean that we were overcome by a fleeting, random bit of meaningless information, but that the events we have been attempting to make sense of either fit neatly into our expectations or were discordant with respect to them.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc.

To know whether the mechanic has fixed your car, you have to know how a car works, not necessarily the details of engine mechanics but how to operate it and the general
principles by which that machine runs. That relational system of knowledge belongs to a wider social network of functional relations that pertains not only to specific knowledge of the car , or motorized machines in general , but many other aspects of culture that ground the intelligibility of ecosystems within which we drive cars.
But this knowledge ecosystem is not its own ground. It is not arbitrary. It evolved from previous ecosystems and those from prior ecosystems of knowledge. The change from one to the next is neither arbitrary and random, nor is it fixed by conformity to pre-existing causal truths, which would be arbitrary also. Rather, the evolving changes in knowledge ecosystems are future oriented, aiming asymptotically at a kind of knowledge that sees all the elements of our world within intercorrelated
relations that are profoundly intimate. So the engine works or it doesn’t, but as our machines evolve with us , what it means to ‘work’ changes in ways that point towards this interconnectness. The capacity to understand the world in this way preceded us , but not the content. No pre-existing causal laws or substantive absolutes of any kind ground knowledge absolutely. This thinking would just keep us from arriving at the relational truths , which are neither invented out of whole cloth nor discovered as ready-made absolute grounds.

Understanding your child is like understanding your car. The superficially question is whether your child lied., but the evolving question is why he needed to lie, what breakdown in understanding made them feel they had to misrepresent their actions. They wanted to avoid punishment, and they will be punished because of a breakdown in the relationship. You make recourse to moral right and wrong, short-circuiting the relational possibilities of understanding by imposing an arbitrary truth.

Reply to javi2541997

I don't think a strict religious adherence could be considered "spiritual", at least insofar as that word means anything. The conscience is often latent. Everyone has a conscience but not all of them are active to the extent that they could be, or they have ossified around this or that practice or teaching or ideology. In my mind the more religious one is, the less spiritual he has become.

The concept of moral development suggests the conscience, that unseen witness to all an individual does, is the individual. It grows, develops, and ages along with him and expresses itself according to what has been learned by his corporeal form as he makes his way through the world and being with others. This includes living and acting through moral dilemmas, or considering morality as our fellows have understood and articulated them.

If one assumes the concept of moral development, I would argue that the lack of progress towards an active moral conscience correlates to the lack of variation in one’s exposure to morality and ethics as practices and principles. In other words, it is the lack of variation in one’s life experience (ie. the trial and error of a moral dilemma, like whether it was right or wrong to lie to your parents), and a lack of variety in the consideration of other moral principles and practices as found in the record of moral literature, that inhibits the growth of the conscience. As a parable, how might the Buddha have come to suggest the middle way or reach enlightenment if he himself hadn't lived through a variety of extremes?

In my mind the development of the conscience requires one to consider all ethical systems, to survey every extreme, maybe even to dabble in practicing them: to sin, to make mistakes, to fail morally, and also to succeed and to do right. It requires one to consider both good and evil, to expose oneself to them, if not to read and learn about them, then to pit them against the armor of one's own conscience.

This sort of trial and error is requisite to spirituality, in my mind, so I consider your own spiritual practice to be superior to that of the religious man. At any rate, if you cannot be wholly good, at the very least be interesting.

Quoting javi2541997

Kierkegaard didn't want to be a philosopher in the literal sense, and he, in opposition to Hegel, didn't preach Christianity as an illusion. K also considered himself an undoubtedly Lutheran, etc. I personally think Kierkegaard felt more comfortable debating about theology, the Bible and Christian Ethics. He became a philosopher accidentally. I see him as one of the representatives of existentialism. I really like K and I always like to get deeper in his thoughts. I think this has already been discussed here but Kierkegaard, apart from other things, is dialect! He used specific words in Danish which are difficult to translate into our languages, like 'anfægtelse' which means 'spiritual trial'. Kierkegaard shows the anguish inherent to the authentic God-relationship and also the dangerous possibility of the individual imagination's. It is here that Kierkegaard's emphasis upon individual responsibility.

I don't think this is all right. Just a few things: He did his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, on Socrates, and he was completely aware of the philosophical issues of his day. He was a "religious writer" but analytic through and through. So I don't think it was accidental. The Concept of Anxiety is written by a very strong academic if with an idiosyncratic style. But on the other hand, he was not a typical dry humorless intellectual. You can see why he loved Socrates so much: irony is the soul of wit. And Luther. Consider what he says here:

The Smalcald Articles expressly teach: hereditary sin is so profound and detestable a corruption in human nature that it cannot be comprehended by human understanding, but must be known and believed from the revelation of the Scriptures. This assertion is perfectly compatible with the explanations, for what comes out in these are less terms of reasoned thinking thinking than the pious feeling (with an ethical intent) that vents its indignation over hereditary sin, takes on the role of accuser, and now, in something like a feminine passion and the intoxication of a girl in love, is concerned only with making sinfulness and its own participation in it more and more detestable, itself included, so that no word is harsh enough to describe the individual’s participation.

Not a very flattering account of Luther regarding his position on original sin. But I haven't read everything he said on Luther, and I am sure he appreciated the 95 theses posted on Wittenberg's door. Luther was a very sincere rebel, as was Kierkegaard.

But yes, K was very disturbed in his struggles with faith, his long nights of inner struggle. Good thing he didn't marry Regina Olsen.

But the idea I was trying to offer is, how does a "deeply spiritual" person proceed? I am certainly not against such a thing, but I think one has to rethink Kierkegaard as a model for spiritual guidance. The existential revolt against Hegel's rationalism puts all eyes on existence, one's personal existence. There is a fascinating discussion of this in phenomenology. I think those like you, committed and in earnest, would do well to read the French post Husserlian movement in theo-ontology. Perhaps read a bit of Jean Luc Marion or Michel Henry. Or Emanuel Levinas, who is devilishly abstruse. But this is the power of language, to open ways to understand the world. Really, Heidegger is a must. Not that he was so "spiritual" but that he takes the entire human existence up in such a new light that it can be breath taking. There is a LOT of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's Being and Time. If you want to see how K's original thinking is laid out in massive exposition that breaks away from tiresome metaphysics, then this is the work to read.

As I read H, I come closer to what I want to understand about human spirituality.

Quoting javi2541997

As far as I understand this, confessing only heals the spirit because the latter is sacred, religious, etc. I mean, they are different concepts with different results. Don't you think?

Yes. I like "confession" for healing the "spirit" more than apologize. You're right. Or repent. Repent and sin no more. If we want to think religiously.

But still I think we are talking about healing one and the same thing. Whether we call it Mind or Spirit. It might be convenient for discourse to think of the Mind as, for e.g., the seat of reason, and the spirit, for e.g., as the seat of the sacred, and thus of guilt and despair. They are not divided, but the same thing.

You suggest that the Spirit alone can be healed by confession. Yet many forms of psychotherapy involve speaking out your mind's issues to a qualified other. As long as it needs healing by apologizing, confessing or repenting it's "sins" we are speaking of the Mind, the psyche, the whole of human consciousness, and not the Truly Spiritual, which is the Organic body uninvolved with such inventions, but rather carrying on with the life God is giving it.

Quoting Astrophel

if the idea is simply to live a less stressful life, then fine. But this is not what Gautama Siddhartha had in mind so long ago.

Totally agree. This is not what Buddha had in mind; i.e. the relief from stress. But he did have in mind that the root of all stress, suffering, is the attachment to this profane, including the Ethical (the universal) etc. But while one might argue that Buddha was calling for the annihilation of this "self" who is so attached, I believe he was calling more for its "recognition," as its annihilation is likely impossible.

Reply to NOS4A2 Hello NOS, thanks for your feedback.

Firstly, spirit means something to me. I understand this concept created a big debate in the thread because I read that most fellows don't give this word the credit it deserves. Some argue it is about the mind, and you claim it is the individual behavior after learning for making mistakes. All of these arguments are perfectly taken to improve my knowledge, but what is the cause of behaving accordingly then? Here is my second point in this thread:

I personally believe that every sin, lie or bad action has consequences. I don't tend to see them as a quick response. I lied to my parents but I learned the lesson and I keep living. No... It goes deeper than that and at least this is how I see it. One person doesn't end up with this anxiety because of just one mistake. It is about very corrupt behavior for a long time. When these actions are repeated, the spirit could be dying, getting rotten, putrefacted. If I didn't feel this way, I think I would be an AI. It is not too easy to learn the lesson, or furthermore, to emerge unscathed.

That is what it is about... Suffering from the anxiety of being aware that I had done terrible things. How can I heal this? Some say to go to a therapist, others to see a priest, etc. The only way is to confess. This action goes deeper than just apologizing.

My intention is not to be wholly good. I just don't want to fail in temptations... If I lied to my parents is due to trying to flirt with a woman. Nature surpassed my innocent spirit. But now I understand this clearly: I haven't taken this into account because I was ignorant about taking care of my spirit! I thought there was no soul! No rotten experience! No corruption of the essence! Because without God everything is permitted' as Dostovesky would say... Well, I would say: Without a spirit, everything is permitted.

Quoting NOS4A2

f one assumes the concept of moral development, I would argue that the lack of progress towards an active moral conscience correlates to the lack of variation in one’s exposure to morality and ethics as practices and principles. In other words, it is the lack of variation in one’s life experience (ie. the trial and error of a moral dilemma, like whether it was right or wrong to lie to your parents), and a lack of variety in the consideration of other moral principles and practices as found in the record of moral literature, that inhibits the growth of the conscience. As a parable, how might the Buddha have come to suggest the middle way or reach enlightenment if he himself hadn't lived through a variety of extremes?

I tend to agree with most of this. But I would just add that it is just a beginning. Certainly, ethics emerges out of a culture full of nuanced thinking and behavior. But there is in this a question of ontology: what IS ethics? This is about the nature of ethics and looks into whether or not there is something about ethics that is absolute. I, for one, am a moral realist, meaning I think that after the incidental features of a society's entanglements, features that are not ethical in themselves, like the rules that settle ethical matters that are spontaneously accepted and in play, are suspended, there is a, call it a residual value-in-being. Case in point: I am ethically prohibited from knocking the old woman down and taking her money. We have laws against this, and we could argue about how the laws might apply, how mitigating circumstances might apply, how analysis that reveals justification might "defeat" the principle prohibiting the action, as so on. But these entanglements conceal the nature of ethics itself for the question is not raised here if there is anything indefeasible about these affairs.

It is commonly accepted that one has a prima facie obligation to obey the law, and generally, to behave decently. But what is decent is a contingent matter, each social world having its own ways of living. But the Real the underpins ethical entanglements and makes ethics what it IS, is value, and by value I mean the good and the bad that generates obligation outside of, logically prior to, the language constructs we use. Remove the dimension of value, and ethics vanishes.

Quoting Astrophel

But yes, K was very disturbed in his struggles with faith, his long nights of inner struggle. Good thing he didn't marry Regina Olsen.

There is an interesting debate about what would have happened to Kierkegaard if he got married to Olsen!


Quoting Astrophel

I am certainly not against such a thing, but I think one has to rethink Kierkegaard as a model for spiritual guidance. The existential revolt against Hegel's rationalism puts all eyes on existence, one's personal existence.

It is a great guidance to feel myself better. But, sadly, I don't always understand Kierkegaard. This is due to my lack of knowledge about religious topics. Thus, th content of the Bible or Christian dilemmas. Being a spectator of K coming from an atheist background is fascinating, but I assume I lack key points that maybe a person with a religious background would have. For example: An atheist background would affect me in the sense of denying the existence of a spirit. Thanks to K, I learned this actually exists, and I can experience a tormenting trial of the soul because I often suspended my ethics.

Quoting ENOAH

as its annihilation is likely impossible.

Buddhists are a strange bunch. I have read of those who are buried alive breathing through straws. There is that story of the sequestered monk asked by an intruding reporter if he was ever lonely, replying, not until you showed up.
Solitude is an extraordinary thing.

Quoting Astrophel

not until you showed up.

:up: :up: :up:

Quoting Astrophel

not until you showed up

While it's likely there was deliberately no logic. If there was, I'd wager this:

While sequestered he was not alone, but with his Body, and thus one with everything.

The reporter reminded him of his Subject (because Subject requires Other) and thus the seeming utter isolation/alienation.

But ultimately, we are utterly not alone; neither in Body where we are one with Nature/Reality, nor in Mind where we are one with History/Maya.

Quoting ENOAH

But still I think we are talking about healing one and the same thing. Whether we call it Mind or Spirit. It might be convenient for discourse to think of the Mind as, for e.g., the seat of reason, and the spirit, for e.g., as the seat of the sacred, and thus of guilt and despair. They are not divided, but the same thing.

This point is very fascinating... Then, according to your argument, the mind can experience the anxiety about not acting accordingly as well. I wonder this because the mind is where the ration is allocated, and the latter helps us to see the problems and ethical dilemmas more objectively...

Quoting ENOAH

You suggest that the Spirit alone can be healed by confession. Yet many forms of psychotherapy involve speaking out your mind's issues to a qualified other. As long as it needs healing by apologizing,

Thank you for your help, understanding and support. But I don't feel I am ready to go into therapy yet. I choose to confess because I feel it is more personal. It is like a redemption with myself.

Quoting javi2541997

I choose to confess because I feel it is more personal. It is like a redemption with myself

Sure! And why not? If it works, it works. I just say, that "it works," is the workings of Mind.

But, ultimately, who am I?

Quoting javi2541997

I personally believe that every sin, lie or bad action has consequences

Why? What demonstration of this do you have? This sounds more like an odd compulsion.

Quoting javi2541997

That is what it is about... Suffering from the anxiety of being aware that I had done terrible things. How can I heal this?

There's nothing to heal. You have chosen to view it like this.

Quoting javi2541997

Because without God everything is permitted' as Dostovesky would say... Well, I would say: Without a spirit, everything is permitted.

But as Zizek points out, believers in god commit unspeakable atrocities in its name. Dostoevsky (if he wrote this) is wrong. It should be: 'If there is a god, then anything is permitted.'

Of course Dostoevsky didn't really put it like this, Sartre did in a paraphrase of Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky the line closest is in The Brothers Karamazov a character asks: “But what will become of men then?” I asked him, “without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?”

Quoting javi2541997

If I lied to my parents is due to trying to flirt with a woman. Nature surpassed my innocent spirit.

I often found it useful to lie to my parents. It made life easier. I have no regrets and now they are dead. Game over. :wink:

Quoting javi2541997

An atheist background would affect me in the sense of denying the existence of a spirit.

What is spirit?

Remember too that some atheists believe in reincarnation, ghosts and other supernatural stories. Atheism is just about the god belief.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

This was the point of the reference to the drug addict. Not that "heroin is an objective bad," but rather that someone whose drug problem has ruined their life can claim, with good warrant, "it was not good for me to begin doing drugs."

And the person for whom the drug has made it possible to continue living by making life bearable has a differnt perspective. I don't think its so easy to avoid from the perspectival nature of most matters.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

There are some very good studies on the phenomenology of truth, the basic aspects of experience from which the notion emerges. Good metaphysical explanations of truth then need to explain this, to explain this adequately, which is easier said than done.

I have no metaphysical explanation of truth. Truth seems to be an abstraction and clearly means quite different things in different contexts.

Quoting Tom Storm

The Brothers Karamazov a character asks: “But what will become of men then?” I asked him, “without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?”

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.)

Why do we need God to cooperate (which is ultimately the drive behind morality)? Do people not see that ultimately matters such as these fall only to their "functionality"?

If we, not God, permit murder, people will die. If we steal, there would be chaos. Etc etc etc.

Quoting Astrophel

But these entanglements conceal the nature of ethics itself for the question is not raised here if there is anything indefeasible about these affairs.

Quoting Astrophel

But the Real the underpins ethical entanglements and makes ethics what it IS, is value, and by value I mean the good and the bad that generates obligation outside of, logically prior to, the language constructs we use.

Asking you authentically, not to set up some argument (sorry, I have learned that some think queries are concealed gotchas):

1. Are you saying there is an ontological "Real" for Morals/Ethics, and that that "Real" is good vs bad? That these are what is indefeasible, or, absolute?

2. Why aren't "good" and "bad" also just "features of a society's entanglements"? Granted, I see that good and bad speak to the pith and substance of ethics. But why isn't Ethics itself, right down to its pith and substance, a functional construct?

Addendum: simplified illustration. In prehistory/prelanguage/preconstruction, X 's mate is killed by Y, X feels the negative feelings which arise from the lost bond. Y might feel the satisfaction of protecting her offspring. Y feels the positive feelings of that. Where is the prehistoric, ontological value? Where does it fall? I say, post history, good and bad were constructed to displace those natural feelings. Only they are ontologically real and prehistoric, because they are organic.

Quoting ENOAH

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.)

Recall that question I asked you about 'biological reductionism'. Here you are deploying that again. The ability of a 'species like us' to understand the fact of mortality, and to understand that there are moral and immoral acts, is what differentiates us from animals. And that difference is not only biological, it is also existential.

You might recall I mentioned Alan Watts' book, The Supreme Identity, earlier in this thread. The 'supreme identity' means realising one's identity as being beyond life and death. I think this is what is mythologised by popular religion, as clearly it is something that seems inconceivable. (There is, however, a 2011 book by an analytical philosopher named Mark Johnson, called Surviving Death, which approaches a similar point but from a more technical and ostensibly naturalistic perspective.)

The problem arises from appealing to Darwinism as a philosophy of life. Darwinism, or more properly, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is not a philosophy of life. It's a biological theory dealing with the origin of species. So viewing existence purely through the lens of Darwinian theory is inevitably reductionist, which is one of the unfortunate characteristics of today's culture. This is why appeals to Darwinism feature so prominently in new atheist polemics from the likes of Dennett and Dawkins - were are gene machines, blindly following a survival program that dictates our existence in the service of survival of the species. It's actually the complete opposite of philosophy.

Here are a couple of opinion pieces which tease out some of the implications - It Ain't Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb, Anything but Human, Richard Polt.

[quote=Richard Polt]I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense.[/quote]

Quoting ENOAH

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.)

I guess it is a vested interest of many religious views to imagine that only the right god/spiritual belief can provide morality. Of course religious folk, just like secular folk, have no access to an objective morality. Morality is always an act of either interpreting or creating what we believe to be right.

Quoting Wayfarer

And that difference is not only biological, it is also existential.

I submit it is not biological, but only exisistential. Does that change anything?

Quoting Wayfarer

viewing existence purely through the lens of Darwinian theory is inevitably reductionist, which is one of the unfortunate characteristics of today's culture.

I presume you have read my various related posts to be claiming that all we really are is a set of feelings and drives. Hence, biological reductionism.

You would be correct, except that, you have either missed, or--and this I admit, is more likely--I have failed to communicate a seemingly subtle, but actually significant variation. I'll do my best (note Real=ultimate truth or reality, universal shared irrespective of species, and not just, as i submit, that reality constructed by that anamolous species, us--I know you are already straining, indulge me):

1. Yes, the Real human organism is the Body with its drives and feelings, plus whatever is our organic aware-ing of that. The reason, "whatever is," is because that's the very "problem" we face as humans. That Real and organic consciousness is displaced so we cannot access it via the mediator/displacer.
2. Call that reductionism if that's what it is. I'm not sure labeling ideas is always helpful but I respect that it can be. But note,
a) I am not suggesting a lump of flesh in any derogatory way, not even dumb flesh. For all we know, that organic aware-ing is, especially for us super sophisticated humans, an ecstatic state of bliss, etc.
b) accept that (only maybe, until recently) the entire history of metaphysics and religion has been our desperate effort to do the opposite: to suppress the flesh and silence Real organic being, for the sake of glorifying the very thing displacing it.
3. My personal query (of course I do not know) is, what am I really? Not the I who is asking, nor the I that I want it to be. I am that Organic body (Descartes confusion was remaining with the I that wants). That is the consciousness I share with the rest of Nature. So what is all this other stuff? This stuff unique to the I who (thinks) hopes it is (real) Real. It is not some Reality occupying the Spiritual realm. Why would it be? Does that not reek of wishful thinking? Ockhams razor. How are our dualistic explanations not overly complex fantasy?
4. Yet there truly seems to be a dualism. What is Mind? Yes, there seems to be one, because there is. Mind is something other than the organism, unique to humans. It exists, but only in the billions of images stored in our memories. And here's where I've already occupied more than my fair share and must end. But though those images exist, they are empty representations. Reality for us, like all beings, is in our magnificent and cherish able nature: matter. Not the Fiction we write. Final note: lest I further confuse into "nihilism". Yes human existence beyond its Organic Truth, is constructed. But so what? It, like the beehive and beaver dam, serves many great (and harmful) functions. Let it be.

As a lame courtesy to this overall post, this ties in because I am suggesting that a "sick" spirit is just maladjusted Narrative which can be corrected narratively. No need to fret. Find your True Spirit by breathing presently. By the self inhabiting Being, and not becoming. Not new age. Philosophy.

Quoting Tom Storm

Morality is always an act of either interpreting or creating what we believe to be right.

:up:

Quoting ENOAH

the entire history of metaphysics and religion has been our desperate effort to do the opposite: to suppress the flesh and silence Real organic being, for the sake of glorifying the very thing displacing it.

'Entire history', eh?

Reply to Wayfarer Ha! Whatever

Reply to ENOAH 'Whatever' sounds about right.

Quoting Wayfarer

Entire history', eh?

Ok, I guess I was being dismissive. Why specifically do you question that statement. Maybe you take issue with "entire" history. Clearly I should be more careful. But let's say you accept the folly of my choice of words and treat it as hyperbole, do you not think a lot of metaphysics/religion have focused upon "Spirit" at the expense of the Body?

Quoting ENOAH

do you not think a lot of metaphysics/religion have focused upon "Spirit" at the expense of the Body?

That's Nietszche, isn't it? "Twilight of the Idols". He outlines the history of the idea of the "ideal world" and declares its final dissolution into mere fable. He posits that the notion of an ultimate, ideal, or "true" world beyond our physical reality is not only fictitious but also detrimental to our appreciation and understanding of lived reality. But I don't think it's the only way of seeing it. (Besides, I've never quite understood the idolisation of Nietszche in modern culture. It seems ironic to me.)

My reading of the history is completely different. The dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, is post-Cartesian, in particular. It was Descartes' philosophy that gives rise to the 'ghost in the machine' which typified the modern period. I think the genuinely transformative spirituality of pre-modern cultures is something completely different to that. That is why I often refer to the non-dualism characteristic of Indian and Chinese cultures.

Here's my sweeping claim. That there is a real 'dimension of value'. It is neither a social construct, nor a matter of opinion, nor a matter of biological adaptation. H. Sapiens - recall, 'sapiens' meant 'wise' athough that is nowadays dubious - is capable of discerning that domain of value. That is Plato's 'idea of the Good' among other examples. We are able to discern it, but it takes certain qualities of character and intellect to be able to do that. And that the advent of modernity represents the loss of the sense of that domain or dimension, in the transition to the flatland of scientific materialism, where the only values are pragmatic and utilitarian. That conviction is what makes me a generically religious thinker.

Quoting Wayfarer

That's Nietszche, isn't it? "Twilight of the Idols". He outlines the history of the idea of the "ideal world" and declares its final dissolution into mere fable. He posits that the notion of an ultimate, ideal, or "true" world beyond our physical reality is not only fictitious but also detrimental to our appreciation and understanding of lived reality. But I don't think it's the only way of seeing it. (Besides, I've never quite understood the idolisation of Neitszche in modern culture. It seems ironic to me.)

Oh wow! Thanks. Truth is, I've read Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil more than anything. But I appreciate that reference. No doubt exactly that has contributed to the hypotheses I'm considering.

Quoting Wayfarer

It was Descartes' philosophy that gives rise to the 'ghost in the machine' which typified the modern period.

That's what I'd say.

Quoting Wayfarer

That is why I often refer to the non-dualism characteristic of Indian and Chinese cultures.

I'm with you. For me Advaita and particularly Cha'an out of the Mahayana.

Quoting Wayfarer

That is Plato's 'idea of the Good' among other examples. We are able to discern it, but it takes certain qualities of character and intellect to be able to do that.

And here, God, I want to just stop so we continue on the same page. But I have a question. Then, where do we find that Good in our process of discerning if not 1) by ultimately constructing it, or 2) locating it prefab in memory, or 3) a combination of 1 and 2, I.e. revising what has already been input prefab from history?

Is it by anamnesis? Noumena? Does matter (I.e. the universe) really have these "ideas" which we glorify as x y z imbued/embedded/enmeshed/entangled/endowed in it? How? Isn't it way simpler to think that as Language evolved, so did an autonomous system of signifiers coding experience but not of it is real. As in Maya and Samsara unreal. All that is Real is Brahman or Buddha Nature, and ironically we tap into that by being a human being, that animal which shares its nature with the rest of Nature.

I would be very interested in hearing otherwise. I respect your reasoning, know even that there is a way I can be persuaded, but until then I'm fixated on this Narrative among Narratives.

Quoting ENOAH

Then, where do we find that Good in our process of discerning if not 1) by ultimately constructing it, or 2) locating it prefab in memory, or 3) a combination of 1 and 2, I.e. revising what has already been input prefab from history?

Good question. 'Locating it pre-fab in memory' is a bit facile, though. We have proclivities, innate abilities - which is not to say 'innate ideas' - and we also have archetypes (which I learned about from Jung, but which I think go back much further.)

Quoting ENOAH

All that is Real is Brahman or Buddha Nature, and ironically we tap into that by being a human being, that animal which shares its nature with the rest of Nature.

You toss these phrases out very casually, as if they're slogans, but I would say that does convey the gist of my view. We are able discern 'the Good' due to that innate capacity (arguably what Christian doctrine also means by 'conscience'.) Yes, we evolved just as biological science says (although the details are constantly changing) but at a certain evolutionary threshhold, then the horizons of being widen, so to speak, and we are acquire these capacities. And notice, even if they are acquired by way of evolutionary development, I maintain that through them, we transcend the biological, in other words, we are no longer simply biological beings (which again in Christian doctrine of the unfortunate doctrine that animals lack souls, something which I don't accept.)

(Interesting point from Advaita - 'viveka', ?????, 'to discern', means 'to know what is essence and what is not essence (saar and asaar), duty and non-duty properly' - Wikipedia. It is also the root of the name of Swami Vivekananda with whom I presume you are familiar.)

Quoting Wayfarer

Locating it pre-fab in memory' is a bit facile, though

Fair enough. Me again being foolish with my choice of words. Not self deprecating; acknowledging how frustrating that must be for people who make it their vocation to trade words with artful precision.

Quoting Wayfarer

innate abilities - which is not to say 'innate ideas' - and we also have archetypes

...and what are these abilities/archetypes if not the evolution of a system of Language etc.? Innate, but whence? I submit, part of that dynamic system of images input into memory over time, and structured and restructured to best fit that individual's Narrative.

Quoting Wayfarer

You toss these phrases out very casually, as if they're slogans,

Guilty. Ditto above. I do not mean that the hypotheses I am entertaining relating to Mind is in any way definable as the original Sanskrit terms. There is an unorthodox method to my recklessness, and I acknowledge its flaws and dangers. No need to elaborate. Suffice it to say, just as Nietzsche has found its way into the hypotheses, so, strangely enough, have Vedanta, Mahayana, and Zazen specifically. Any word I text was already written differently by a mind before or around me. But I am too reckless in my expressions.

Quoting Wayfarer

we are no longer simply biological beings

Ok. Me too. But I say the beyond biological is ultimately empty, leaving the biological as Real.

Quoting Wayfarer

to discern', means 'to know what is essence and what is not essence

Hmm. Do you think then, Advaita too, assumes this discernment is an ability inherent in us? But, for advaita there is ultimately only essence (warning: I am taking liberties with "essence". For advaita there is only Brahman which is Existence Consciousness Bliss, "ecb" and thats what im relating to essence). And discerning is ultimately only discerning that. And discerning that would require turning away from the illusions of Maya (or what I am liberally referring to as the constructions of Mind) and being "awakened" to that Truth as Atman, I.e. that you are that "ecb"--you know, sat cit ananda-- and nothing but. So...that sounds a lot like the human animal unburdened by attachment to minds constructions. One can still relish in the Fiction, just know that you are not that Fiction. You are ecb.

Quoting Tom Storm

Either way, how does it help us to promote the notion of ethics as transcendental?

I think this is an important question. I don't think it helps us at all to think of ethics as transcendental. I don't think ethics is transcendental except in its connection to aesthetics. Beauty is transcendental, and virtue ethics seems to connect virtues with what is generally attractive to humans. Courage is attractive, cowardice is not. Kindness is attractive, cruelty is not. Consideration of others is attractive, disregard of others is not, And so on.

On the other hand, we could ask why these things are attractive, and we might give pragmatic reasons for their attractiveness. The virtues promote social harmony and the vices (those that consist in behavior towards others at least) may lead to social discord. Actions may be kind (the idea of which I imagine as deriving from being conceived as appropriate towards one's own kind) or vicious (a characterization I imagine as relating to the word 'vice').

[Quoting Janus

This seems to be an important question to me. I don't think it helps us at all to think of ethics as transcendental. I don't think ethics is transcendental except in its connection to aesthetics. Beauty is transcendental, and virtue ethics seems to connect virtues with what is generally attractive to humans. Courage is attractive, cowardice is not. Kindness is attractive, cruelty is not. Consideration of others is attractive, disregard of others is not, And so on.

That's interesting. I haven't thought of virtue ethics this way, but it makes sense. I often find myself using aesthetics as prism for viewing much of my experince.

Quoting Janus

On the other hand, we could ask why these things are attractive, and we might give pragmatic reasons for their attractiveness. The virtues promote social harmony and the vices (those that consist in behavior towards others at least) may lead to social discord.

Yes, and that seems like a reasonable next step. Thanks.

Do you subscribe to virtue ethics yourself?

Much of this would seem to be perspectival, 'virtue' perhaps being somewhat rubbery.

Quoting Astrophel

He knew the reason one could not speak of these is because they have a dimension to their existence which has no place in the facts or state of affairs of the world, and are hence unspeakable. It is not that he wanted to draw the line so as to preserve the dignity of logic. He rather wanted to preserve the profundity of the world, not to have it trivialized by some reduction to mere fact.

"to preserve the profundity of the world" by "world" you don't mean..

"which has no place in the facts or state of affairs of the world" you don't mean that world do you?

You mean the "they" and the "these" in "reason one could not speak of these is because they have a dimension to their existence which has no place"

So you mean W told us not to "speak" of these things, not to preserve the dignity of logic, but to preserve the profundity of these things which are before/beyond both speaking and logic. Right?

... I agree.

And yet...

Quoting Astrophel

I argue that our ethics is grounded in the absolute, and is already part and parcel of divinity. As Witt himself put it (in Culture and Value), the good is divinity

Maybe I did misinterpret

Quoting Tom Storm

Do you subscribe to virtue ethics yourself?

Much of this would seem to be perspectival, 'virtue' perhaps being somewhat rubbery.

I do tend to think of what are generally considered to be the main virtues as desirable. I mean I find that I don't want to associate too closely with those who seem to be cowardly, deceitful, inconsiderate, dishonest, unreliable, duplicitous, devious, self-serving and so on.

Quoting Tzeentch

If I want to know about Christianity, I want to know what Christ - the sage - had to say.

If you eliminate the redacted bits,

Love your enemies
Turn the other cheek
It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out of their speech
The sabbath was made for humans, not humans made for the sabbath
If you want to follow me, renounce even your families
Don't point to the sliver in your brothers eye ignoring the log in your own
My God why have you forgotten me

That's what I think.

Quoting Wayfarer

It's a dramatic way of putting it, but I believe this means 'the negation of ego'. 'Not my will but thine', in the Christian idiom. Dying to the self. It is fundamental to religious philosophy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Another passage from the Buddhist texts. 'The Tathagata' is the Buddha (means 'thus gone' or 'gone thus'. 'Reappears' refers to being reborn in some state or other. 'Vaccha' is Vachagotta, a wandering ascetic who personifies the asking of philosophical questions in the early Buddhist texts. )

Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply."
— Aggi Vachagotta Sutta

Interesting to see how language falls apart when these threshold experiences call for expression. But it is not language as such that is at fault. Rather, it is that something new has manifested, and the shared vocabularies we have can't respond because they haven't yet achieved intersubjective agreement as other things have. A step further, our inherited structured experiencing of the world, something that issues from language itself, prohibits such things. Perhaps you will find what Derrida says here interesting:

“The system of “hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak” through the phonic substance which presents itself as the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier-has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc.”

The idea here is that this monolog/dialog of one speaking to oneself, which we call thinking, has a prohibitive structure of its own. Talking about Foucault and Beckett, see the way Antoaneta Dontcheva puts it:

Headed toward death, writes Foucault, ”language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.” (Foucault, 1977, p.54) And Beckett gave birth to its own image.

As I see it, the Tathagata emerges when this identity in mirrors, that is, this speaking that is spoken in its own constitutive delimitation that is the "I" of me, is suspended. The question that presses upon this is one of identity, the identity of one's agency as a self. Does one have such a thing when the language lights go out? See, finally, the way Beckett's Molloy, dying, grasps for "life" as death vanquishes his living self:

[i]‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I
must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215)[/i]

When language ceases, the self ceases, that is, the self of everyday living constructed in a social world. Meditation, the kind dedicated and rigorous, makes a truly radical move toward the death of agency. Unless, there is something that underlies this "room of mirrors" reality that speaks what it IS.

I am convinced there is. Very much so. But this goes into argument that are not demonstrable in a language. It gets interesting when one sees that even where language is self annihilating, as in the expression you mention above, language understands this. I mean I, you, others who think along these lines, understand this, albeit as a profound mystery, and so the such delimitations perhaps are not so delimiting? Wittgenstein's Tractatus is notoriously self contradictory for just this reason. But remember, I say, even in this discussion about the nature of language, we are still facing language's own indeterminacy. I have no idea, really, of what language is. It is buried in metaphysics. As am I.

Quoting ENOAH

1. Are you saying there is an ontological "Real" for Morals/Ethics, and that that "Real" is good vs bad? That these are what is indefeasible, or, absolute?

2. Why aren't "good" and "bad" also just "features of a society's entanglements"? Granted, I see that good and bad speak to the pith and substance of ethics. But why isn't Ethics itself, right down to its pith and substance, a functional construct?

Because of the good and the bad. Take an ethical case, one particularly striking to make the point. I am given the choice, either torture an innocent child for a minute, or else a thousand children will be tortured for hours and hours. the principle of utility is clearly applicable here, and I should choose the lesser evil. But then, note how this works compared to a case of mere contingency, as with a bad sofa or a bad knife: a bad knife is bad because it is dull, poorly balanced, etc. But what if the knife is for Macbeth? Well then, what is good is now bad, because we don't want anyone to get hurt. This is how contingency works. There is no absolute standard dictating what good knives are. But the torturing of the child, this is in no way undone or even mitigated by the choice of utility. Indeed, there is nothing that can mitigate this, and this is the point. It isimpossible for the the pain to be other than bad, even when contextualized to make it the preferred ethical choice. The bad is indefeasibly bad.

And the good as well can be argued like this. We don't notice this because all of our ethical decisions are entangled in a world of facts and the complexity they impose on our thinking. But when the value-essence is abstracted from these complexities, we discover a dimension to ethics that cannot be undone. We expect this kind of apodicticity in logic, of course. But certainly not existentially!

This is NOT to say there is some Platonic "form of the good and bad" that resides in "ultimate reality". It is merely being descriptive of the world.

Quoting ENOAH

So you mean W told us not to "speak" of these things, not to preserve the dignity of logic, but to preserve the profundity of these things which are before/beyond both speaking and logic. Right?

Yeah. I think this right. Gotta have a lot of respect for a person who insisted on going to the front lines in WWI because he wanted to know what it meant to face death. He was no armchair philosopher. His brothers, three of them, committed suicide. This was a genius endowed as well as passionate family of people. Loved Beethoven. Hated the idea of trivializing such a thing in a philosophical thesis. Value is unspeakable.

Quoting Janus

I mean I find that I don't want to associate too closely with those who seem to be cowardly, deceitful, inconsiderate, dishonest, unreliable, duplicitous, devious, self-serving and so on.

Oh, I get that. But isn't it interesting that from the perspective of many deceitful, dishonest and devious people, they are courageous and enlightened. And even their 'allies' (for want of a better word) will see courage where you and I might see self-serving. That's what I mean.

Reply to ENOAH Reply to Astrophel :chin: (bows out.)

Quoting Wayfarer

That is Plato's 'idea of the Good' among other examples. We are able to discern it, but it takes certain qualities of character and intellect to be able to do that.

I think that for Plato the true good is beyond human apprehension, just like the Christians say that God is beyond the capacity of human understanding. Not even the most well-educated philosopher can claim to understand it. So we really are not able to discern the good, and this is why discussion about the good always turns into a matter of subjective opinion. Furthermore, the pragmatic and utilitarian values of scientific materialism, which you refer to, are only allowed to gain supremacy because of this deficiency in the capacity of human beings to actually discern the true nature of "the good".

Quoting Astrophel

But when the value-essence is abstracted from these complexities, we discover a dimension to ethics that cannot be undone. We expect this kind of apodicticity in logic, of course. But certainly not existentially!

That was, firstly, an excellent explanation. And secondly, to my surprise, persuasive in changing my thinking.

There remains an overhanging question which might seem a nuisance, but which you might also be equipped to nip right off.

True, killing the child is bad, no way around it. Brilliant. But could it be that that does not illustrate that the Ethical/Moral isn't entirely a human construction(s), nor that there is an inherent to the Universe, and absolute Ethical/Moral? But rather, the universal antipathy to killing a child is seated in our organic natures. Sure, our morality was constructed on the Foundations of the first dozen times we began re-presenting that organic drive/anti-drive against infanticide. But the universal and absolute--which, you sold me, I totally agree--antipathy is Nature in this particular case, not Ethics.


Quoting Astrophel

Gotta have a lot of respect for a person who insisted on going to the front lines in WWI because he wanted to know what it meant to face death.

Totally. Based upon that info above, and how you interpreted "whereof one cannot speak..." I'm going to read some W. Sounds like he has (without "my" knowing it) already infiltrated my Narrative and configured my thoughts.

Quoting Astrophel

they haven't yet achieved intersubjective agreement as other things have

I was reading some of your other responses to posts and this came up to illustrate a prior query.

I'd say the antipathy to infanticide needn't acquire intersubjective agreement because, unlike most of what we think of as morality, and I submit, Morality proper (whatever that might turn out to be), said antipathy is already universal in that it is natural.

In all respects, I'm finding your two cents valuable.

Quoting Tom Storm

Why? What demonstration of this do you have? This sounds more like an odd compulsion.

My only demonstration is experience. Whenever I behaved unethically, I felt bad afterwards. But, beyond just my anxiety, it is obvious that my decisions caused a negative impact on the receiver. That's for granted. Sometimes, I deserve the lack of confidence some people have in me.

Quoting Tom Storm

Dostoevsky (if he wrote this) is wrong. It should be: 'If there is a god, then anything is permitted.' Of course Dostoevsky didn't really put it like this
...

I promise Dostoyevski wrote it in the way and sense I quoted above. It is is written in the Karamazov Brothers. I think the phrase actually appears as it is written, but maybe the translation differs. I remember the phrase when Ivan and Smerdyakov had the wish for the death of their own father.

Smerdyakov claims that Ivan was complicit in the murder by telling Smerdyakov when he would be leaving Fyodor Pavlovich's house, and more importantly by instilling in Smerdyakov the belief that, in a world without God, "everything is permitted.

Quoting Tom Storm

What is spirit?

Good question, Tom. I am writing a lot of posts about the spirit, but I haven't defined it yet! For me, spirit is the representation of ourselves in the intangible world.

Quoting ENOAH

Sure! And why not? If it works, it works. I just say, that "it works," is the workings of Mind.

OK, whatever... maybe the spirit and the mind are more tangled than I used to think.

Quoting javi2541997

maybe the spirit and the mind are more tangled than I used to think.

some more than others :lol:

Reply to Tom Storm That's an interesting counterpoint. Do you think there is a fact of the matter as to whether people are cowardly or courageous, honest or deceitful, and so on, or is it just opinion all the way down?

Reply to Janus Not sure. I guess courage, honesty, etc, are always relative to some criteria of value and a perspective. I think we all tend to imagine that our own take on this is correct. I had a chat with an American friend of my father who said that in his view Trump is one of the most courageous, virtuous men in America right now. Now our take on this will obviously be that this is absurd. But he made his case rationally. I just think his reasoning was bogus.

Reply to Tom Storm

And the person for whom the drug has made it possible to continue living by making life bearable has a differnt perspective. I don't think its so easy to avoid from the perspectival nature of most matters

Ok, but this is really missing the point. Saying "different things can be good or bad for different," people doesn't even require perspectivism, let alone the claim that "good" reduces to simply "I prefer."

If "good" is just equivalent with "I prefer," then people can never be wrong about what is good for them. This seems ridiculous, because we all have memories of times we preferred to do stupid things that were bad for us. E.g. if someone spends a bunch of money on a health supplement that does nothing for them except give them liver failure, are we going to say: "the supplement was good for them at the time they took it because they felt it was good at that moment?"

Such a claim seems to make it so that introspection is impossible. People can't ever look back at their own lives and make meaningful practical or moral judgements if good and bad is simply current emotion.

Reply to Janus

Do you think there is a fact of the matter as to whether people are cowardly or courageous, honest or deceitful, and so on, or is it just opinion all the way down?

IMO, this is a tricky question, because the post-Enlightenment mode of seeing the virtues wants to have it that all the virtues are the same, always and everywhere, for "all rational agents." But I believe this is a deeply flawed way to looking at the virtues.

It is like asking "what are the social differences between men and women simpliciter, without reference to any particular culture?" The question is interminable because men and women don't exist outside of societies and social practices. We might as well ask how lungs work without reference to any surrounding atmosphere.

The virtues exist within a social/historical context. Particularly, they are formalized in "practices," which define an internal good/telos for a given practice. For example, take chess. Chess is a social practice. Its rules and what it means "to be a good chess player," are social constructs.

Yet it would seem mighty strange to say that "there is no truth about who is a better chess player," if I play Gary Kasperov 100 times, and lose swiftly in each game. But this is what the extreme relativist ends up committed to, because of the assumption is that "if something is a social practice it is entirely relative." Because chess is "just a social construct," we end up with weird claims, like "any Chess player is equally good at chess as Barry Kasperov."

Because of this, people often move to a sort of naive, static formalism. Something like: "someone is good at chess just in case they win most of their games." But this fails too. I could beat Kasperov if I cheated and used a chess computer. Yet successfully cheating would not make me a "good chess player." Being a good chess player means playing good games of chess. Someone who plays top players and losses all their games might demonstrate better chess aptitude than someone who wins all their games against novices. In a practice, the good/telos is defined internally (although not arbitrarily, even in Chess the rules evolved to make games fair and interesting).

The same is true of less morally trivial practices. In many cultures, there are strong ideas about what makes one a "good doctor." There is "bedside manner," etc. Being a doctor is a social construct, but it does not follow that my two year old son is equally as good of a doctor as the head of surgery at Mass General because medicine in a social practice.

Medicine clearly isn't "social practice all the way down," however, even if it always exists as a social practice. There can be a truth about what helps or harms a patient irrespective of current practice, and these facts can in turn be used to redefine and reform the practice.


When you read the Iliad, it is clear that Homer's characters are not confused about who is showing virtue and who is showing vice. People are confused about the virtues today because they want to apply them outside of any context. This simply doesn't make sense.

You can critique practices from an internal frame, showing how current practice fails to fulfill the telos of the practice, or from an external frame. However, you can't critique practices "from nowhere." Relativism often makes its hay by conflating the relativity of social practices with relativity within practices, which seems plausible if one is stuck in the Enlightenment mode of thinking of virtues in terms of "universal absolute goods," but reveals itself to be ridiculous when Kasparov is made to be just as good of a chess player as a toddler.


Reply to Tom Storm

I had a chat with an American friend of my father who said that in his view Trump is one of the most courageous, virtuous men in America right now. Now our take on this will obviously be that this is absurd. But he made his case rationally. I just think his reasoning was bogus.

I think this combines multiple issues. Disagreements about Trump often center around disagreements about facts. E.g., "he didn't actually do x, y, and z, those are lies created by deep state RINOs in Trump's cabinet," etc. People widely agree that it would be bad for Trump to have called America's war dead "suckers," they just don't degree that it happened.

One thing to note is that people can hold contradictory beliefs, or a practice can evolve such that it contradicts its own purposes. For example, during the Civil Rights movement, many critiques of the Jim Crow system was that it was in contradiction with the principles enshrined in the Constitution (an internal critique). The evolution of practices is contingent, but it isn't entirely arbitrary. Hegel makes a pretty good case for such contradictions motivating practice/norm evolution, and how practices and norms evolve is guided by human goals and purposes.

Quoting javi2541997

It is a great guidance to feel myself better. But, sadly, I don't always understand Kierkegaard. This is due to my lack of knowledge about religious topics. Thus, th content of the Bible or Christian dilemmas. Being a spectator of K coming from an atheist background is fascinating, but I assume I lack key points that maybe a person with a religious background would have. For example: An atheist background would affect me in the sense of denying the existence of a spirit. Thanks to K, I learned this actually exists, and I can experience a tormenting trial of the soul because I often suspended my ethics.

No, to be honest. I don't think it is the lack of a religous orientation. If anything, this is an advantage. His most serious work is not about this at all. Have you read The Concept of Anxiety, A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin? Idiosyncratic and a very difficult work to take in. It was for me. But Kierkegaard was responding to Hegel. One has to read Hegel. I haven't read the entire Phenomenology of Spirit, but perhaps soon I'l take a month off from reality and do it justice. Of course, Hegel was responding to Kant. Now, the Critique of Pure Reason is a must.
It is not the case that K was so religiously bound that one had to know the bible and the story of Abraham and Christian metaphysics to understand him. He really was a very disciplined philosopher. A genius, and too clever for clarity. I suspect your trouble with K is the same trouble others have with him: they haven't read what K read and can't figure out what he is talking about. He assumes the reader knows! Everybody in his time that would read him, had read Hegel, who was all the rage. As to the existence of spirit, do you think religious people understand what spirit is? Of course not. K analyzes the self through the story in Genesis about Adam and Eve and the Garden, etc. See the very intro how he lays his critical review of how badly historical authorities have dealt with this. As you read, you see it has almost nothing to do with scriptures or belief. It is purely analytical.

You often suspend your ethics? Errrr, that doesn't sound so good.

Quoting ENOAH

While it's likely there was deliberately no logic. If there was, I'd wager this:

While sequestered he was not alone, but with his Body, and thus one with everything.

The reporter reminded him of his Subject (because Subject requires Other) and thus the seeming utter isolation/alienation.

But ultimately, we are utterly not alone; neither in Body where we are one with Nature/Reality, nor in Mind where we are one with History/Maya.

Well, let's not forget the presence of divinity, a metaphysical term that refers to love. As a term, it is woefully inadequate, for it has a lot of connotative baggage associated with it. This is one the the remedies of meditation: it is "reductive" in that is suspend the familiar language that would otherwise dominate the understanding. 'Love" is far worse, so bound up in romantic squabbles and other BS. But the experience of love is happiness, and happiness is not about anything. It is about nothing. It has no object. True, love is generally about the significant other, but the feeling one has while in it is an unqualified happiness, at least until the inevitable heartbreak. One walks on air. Love has to be liberated from language and culture to be understood for what it is.

Reply to Astrophel
I share your high regard for the Concept of Anxiety. The work is a part of K's conversation (and argument) with Hegel. As model of personal development, it focuses upon the crisis of adolescence and the perils of becoming a 'single individual'.

This is done in the context of establishing the religious as giving the possibility for the psychological. But it also gives an account of good parenting that speaks to the immediate circumstances of such development. That quality of observation makes me think of Ortega y Gasset saying:

Meditations on Quixote:Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.

The problem is that due to the profoundity of such teachings, many lack the capability, will or time to fully understand them. Religious faith and religion is the next best thing to actual understanding, or so some may argue.

Reply to Tzeentch

Jesus holds strong positions about various Jewish-religious-scriptural debates so if you don’t have a background into that subject or if you’re not familiar with the old testament then one won’t be able to properly contextualize/understand the logic (or lack thereof) behind Jesus’s positions.

I found Philosophy to be of very little use in understanding Jesus. A knowledge of literature will help one much more. As will historical knowledge. His followers/disciples will shed light on his teachings and aid in understanding. Yes it is written that Jesus is the divine logos but I haven’t been able to make much of this.

Quoting Astrophel

You often suspend your ethics? Errrr, that doesn't sound so good.

I know Astrophel. :sad:

That's the main point of my concern in this thread. Back in the day, I wasn't aware I was suspending the ethics to achieve ephemeral pleasures, but I did it now. It was not pride but ignorance. At least, I am very aware that I didn't act with purpose or deliberately.
Thanks to this exchange, I am getting to the conclusion that, although I often acted wrongly, and my spirit started to get dirty, I realize I can start to clean it up by proceeding with confession.
If I didn't expose myself on this site, I would suffer from deep anxiety. Don't take my wrong, I suffer a lot in my daily life, or as I call it, the physical/tangible world. I don't usually trust people, I am a reserved person and my opinions or concerns don't usually go out of my mind...
Why does this happen? Well, I already expressed myself and I think I did it clearly. Due to my corrupt actions, I feel fear and anxiety about being rejected.

If I hadn't been honest with my parents (who are the most sacred), how do I know I would not act in the same way with the rest of the people? I usually feel I deserve to be 'ghosted' by the rest, etc. It is scary how all of this is only in myself (or inner me). That sordid feeling that the spirit is dying. Well, I am happy to know I am at this point now. Better later than never. Imagine how many unethical acts I would have done without realizing this problem.

Will there be a trial of the soul after all?

Quoting ENOAH

True, killing the child is bad, no way around it. Brilliant. But could it be that that does not illustrate that the Ethical/Moral isn't entirely a human construction(s), nor that there is an inherent to the Universe, and absolute Ethical/Moral? But rather, the universal antipathy to killing a child is seated in our organic natures. Sure, our morality was constructed on the Foundations of the first dozen times we began re-presenting that organic drive/anti-drive against infanticide. But the universal and absolute--which, you sold me, I totally agree--antipathy is Nature in this particular case, not Ethics.

Well, you'd have to put aside ideas like our organic nature, as well as any naturalistic assumptions about the world. It's not that these are not true, but that the one thing that demonstrates the validity of moral realism is the phenomenon itself, not the historical, evolutionary, scientific framework we are so used to putting things in as a kind of default explanatory setting. One simply stands before the world and examines the presupposed underpinnings that general knowledge claims never notice. So, without going into paragraphs about this, just consider: there you are, and you put your finger into a flame and keep it there, just to be a good scientist and observe pain objectively. You are not interested in how the nerves deliver signals to neurochemistry, or the evolutionary advantages of having such a system, or the evolutionary psychology that might find young life most precious. All of these are important ways to interpret the world, but here, we are isolating the phenomenon as a distinct classificatory distinction not at all unlike what, say, a geologist does when she describes a sample of quartz, first looking to the distinguishing qualities, then aligning them with the standard model.

So the first order of business is simple description: what IS pain, examined like this? All other classificatory modes in abeyance. Observe your finger. The burning finger, the destruction of tissue, the auto-response to pull away, and so on, but none of this quite exhausts the phenomenon before you. Something more than the empirical observations is there, in the pain. One needs no convincing of this, and it is a confusion to insist on such a thing, for this classification is the moral dimension of pain: the bad. The Bad defies reduction to or references to other things. It is a stand alone quality you witness. A "presence" that is descriptively singular and irreducible. And it cannot mitigated of interpreted away.

Quoting javi2541997

Will there be a trial of the soul after all?

Far be it for me to be father confessor. But I can say with considerable thought behind it, that many of the things we are told are taboo are just historical contrivances. One rule in my book: do no harm. Okay, two: pursue love, and peace and all those lovely passé hippie values. Outside of that, there is the structure of behavior norms held by a consensus, and there you are in the middle.

You know, be careful!

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok, but this is really missing the point. Saying "different things can be good or bad for different," people doesn't even require perspectivism, let alone the claim that "good" reduces to simply "I prefer."

Your example of heroin didn't make your point for you. That's all I am saying. There are a range of interpretations or perspectives available to us about this (and so many human behaviours) that I hasten to apply terms like good or bad or harmful or harmless to them.

Other than that I’m not really sure I’m arguing for anything in particular, just skeptical about what seems to me to be a reification of ‘good’.

On the broader question of relativism, what I wrote was that I am 'open to it' which is not the same as saying that I am an absolute relativist and that 'I prefer' is the only frame. I agree that some things can be demonstrated to be harmful to health or harmful to human flourishing.

My problem is that this doesn't necessarily imply any oughts or ought nots (other than pragmatically) and I have not heard a convincing argument addressing why we should consider a reification like 'the good' to be more than a pragmatic notion tied to how we achieve our goals.

I've been dipping into some of David Wong's work - he defends moral relativism, but frankly I lack the time or patience to get into this in depth.

Reply to Astrophel

Thank you for your response. Fair enough, very convincing within the context in which you framed it (properly).

Quoting javi2541997

Will there be a trial of the soul after all?

Bear in mind, one possible derivation of the word 'sin' was 'to miss the mark'.

Quoting Astrophel

So the first order of business is simple description: what IS pain, examined like this?

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

[quote=What is Emptiness?; https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/NobleStrategy/Section0013.html] Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in.[/quote]

See also this wikipedia entry on Buddhism and phenomenology containing this quote from Husserl:

Complete linguistic analysis of the Buddhist canonical writings provides us with a perfect opportunity of becoming acquainted with this means of seeing the world which is completely opposite of our European manner of observation, of setting ourselves in its perspective, and of making its dynamic results truly comprehensive through experience and understanding. For us, for anyone, who lives in this time of the collapse of our own exploited, decadent culture and has had a look around to see where spiritual purity and truth, where joyous mastery of the world manifests itself, this manner of seeing means a great adventure. That Buddhism - insofar as it speaks to us from pure original sources - is a religio-ethical discipline for spiritual purification and fulfillment of the highest stature - conceived of and dedicated to an inner result of a vigorous and unparalleled, elevated frame of mind, will soon become clear to every reader who devotes themselves to the work. Buddhism is comparable only with the highest form of the philosophy and religious spirit of our European culture. It is now our task to utilize this (to us) completely new Indian spiritual discipline which has been revitalized and strengthened by the contrast.

.Quoting javi2541997

Will there be a trial of the soul after all?

Aren't you inflicting one upon yourself right now?

A question that occurred to me: Given the same act, do you find it easier to forgive it in others than in yourself?

For context: I'm neither spiritual nor religious, so I probably can't fully understand what you're going through.

Quoting Wayfarer

Bear in mind, one possible derivation of the word 'sin' was 'to miss the mark'.

Right. It is a softer way to see it.

Reply to javi2541997 Is it, though? What I took from it, was the sense of ‘misunderstanding the point of being alive.’ It works as a religious metaphor but also as a philosophical one.

Quoting Dawnstorm

Aren't you inflicting one upon yourself right now?

No! I don't think so. There is nothing here which causes me infliction. It is completely otherwise. I think it is good to open myself to others in this thread.

Quoting Dawnstorm

Given the same act, do you find it easier to forgive it in others than in yourself?

Indeed. Why does this happen? Well, because when a person (like me) is used to acting in a mask constantly, it is not that difficult to keep acting in the same way. OK. I say sorry to the ones I lied to. But how do I know I will not lie again? This is where the problem arises. I don't want to cause that bad behaviour as part of my 'nature'. At the moment, the only solution to this issue is redeeming myself. To start, finally assuming that acting badly has its consequences and there will be a trial to my spirit after all.

Quoting Dawnstorm

I'm neither spiritual nor religious, so I probably can't fully understand what you're going through.

Hmm... Didn't you ever feel anxiety for not acting accordingly to values and ethics?

Reply to Wayfarer It is indeed a good metaphor! I understand what you took from it. Well, everything can be a lesson, don't you think? Even the bitterest consequences of our actions.

If I am not wrong, that quote assumes the sense of being alive is making wrong choices perpetually. There is not anything bad with this, until we pass some limits though. It is not the same as making mistakes for being ignorant than for acting deliberately.

Reply to javi2541997 It means falling short or not reaching the goal. It is said to be the etymological origin of the word 'sin' (although that is contested.) Nevertheless I see it as a useful interpretation.

Quoting javi2541997

No! I don't think so. There is nothing here which causes me infliction. It is completely otherwise. I think it is good to open myself to others in this thread.

I didn't mean only right here in this thread. More like: at this point in your life, you're worrying a lot about this topic, and from a non-spiritual perspective such as mine this looks like the extent of what spiritual trial might be. Judge, jury and defendant in one person, only the defendant isn't much interested in defense.

It's this soul stuff I don't properly understand, though, so I'm likely wrong. So:

Quoting javi2541997

Hmm... Didn't you ever feel anxiety for not acting accordingly to values and ethics?

To the extent that I have a conscience, sure. But there's no blight on my soul, nor a soul to begin with, in my world view. The worst anxieties I experience are for the future: when all the choices realistically open to me seem equally bad. After the fact, it's usually more a kind of shame. I sort of imagine that's the origin of Japanese seuppuku: cutting yourself open from the soft tissue in the belly upwards: that's where I start to feel the shame in extreme cases. (Though knowing Japanese culture it's probably more a show of determination - cutting yourself there hurts a lot.) Anxiety is more chest-centred for me.

Quoting javi2541997

Indeed. Why does this happen? Well, because when a person (like me) is used to acting in a mask constantly, it is not that difficult to keep acting in the same way. OK. I say sorry to the ones I lied to. But how do I know I will not lie again? This is where the problem arises. I don't want to cause that bad behaviour as part of my 'nature'. At the moment, the only solution to this issue is redeeming myself. To start, finally assuming that acting badly has its consequences and there will be a trial to my spirit after all.

It's about what you do from now on out, then, right? Or do I misunderstand?

This does sound plausible: forgiving yourself too easily can lead to letting yourself go, which in turn makes all that self-examination seem more like a sort of gambit, or self-pity. You do need the motivation to better yourself, and forgiving yourself too easily can get in the way of this. There's no such problem when it comes to others (or, on second thought, there may be: forgive them too easily and you enable their bad habits maybe?)

Not sure I understood you correctly, here. I'm not sure what difference a "soul" makes. I never had much use for the concept of "sin", for example. Shintoist kegare seems more useful: less judgemental, but also a bit of... too afraid of the world maybe?

For me it's all just a muddle of what I think I should do (which I often don't know), what I think my most selfish aspects want to do (which I often don't quite know either), and what I think I'm mostly likely to do (which is the easiest to predict), and how I think about all of that (not too well, since I tend towards pessimism - luckily my pessimism is tempered by my cynicism). I just sort of muddle through all that on day by day basis until one day I'm gone.

Quoting Wayfarer

It is said to be the etymological origin of the word 'sin'

Ah! Interesting, thanks for that Wayfarer. It is a pleasure to learn something new. :smile:

Quoting Dawnstorm

you're worrying a lot about this topic, and from a non-spiritual perspective such as mine this looks like the extent of what spiritual trial might be. Judge, jury and defendant in one person, only the defendant isn't much interested in defense.

It's this soul stuff I don't properly understand, though, so I'm likely wrong. So:

A trial of the soul is a concept used by Kierkegaard. Precisely, K talks about 'Anfaestgalse' a Danish word which there is a big debate on what really means. I have the Spanish version, and it is translated as 'anxiety', but I found some English papers and the authors translated it as 'trial of the soul'. Approaching the main topic of this thread, I wonder if, after behaving badly or unethically, there would be a trial about my soul. I mean, is there a cause and effect? It is obvious that in the tangible or real world there are a lot of consequences. People stop trusting me and I lack confidence and I suffer from anxiety. But I want to dive deeper into this matter. Afterwards, is there a possibility that our spirit will experience a trial because of our actions? By the way, I am not referring to karma.


Quoting Dawnstorm

I'm not sure what difference a "soul" makes. I never had much use for the concept of "sin", for example.

Because sins, bad actions, unethical behaviour, lying, etc, Have to affect someone or something. Don't you think? I believe those affect the vitality of the spirit.


Quoting Dawnstorm

too afraid of the world maybe?

Yes, frankly.

Quoting javi2541997

A trial of the soul is a concept used by Kierkegaard. Precisely, K talks about 'Anfaestgalse' a Danish word which there is a big debate on what really means. I have the Spanish version, and it is translated as 'anxiety', but I found some English papers and the authors translated it as 'trial of the soul'. Approaching the main topic of this thread, I wonder if, after behaving badly or unethically, there would be a trial about my soul. I mean, is there a cause and effect? It is obvious that in the tangible or real world there are a lot of consequences. People stop trusting me and I lack confidence and I suffer from anxiety. But I want to dive deeper into this matter. Afterwards, is there a possibility that our spirit will experience a trial because of our actions? By the way, I am not referring to karma.

I've tried to look up what Kierkegaard said on the topic, but... it's impenetrable answers to impenetrable questions. I really need to go back a few steps if I'm even to hope to know what he's talking about. What I read felt like gibberish, I'm sorry to say. I'm not sure I have the time and inclination to dive that deep, though. (Note: I'm not saying that Kierkegaard is gibberish; I'm saying my current understanding of Kierkegaard is gibberish.)

Also: google doesn't know "anfaestgalse". My mothertongue's German, and the word doesn't sound very Germanic either. Some sort of typo? Anxiety, according to one source I found, would have been "angest", which makes sense as it's cognate with English (and German) "angst". I didn't find any reference to "trial of the soul" (after very superficial googling, mind you), but I did find "spiritual trial", which may or may not be an alternate translation; I didn't find the Danish word, though.

In any case, I'm unsure how much solving the language puzzle would help me; no idea how similar Danish and German are, and how much my intuition might mislead me.

Quoting javi2541997

Because sins, bad actions, unethical behaviour, lying, etc, Have to affect someone or something. Don't you think? I believe those affect the vitality of the spirit.

Well, yes, lying affects relationships. But I feel like I can analyse or think about this without any reference to the soul.

Say you're freshly in love, and the person you're in love with cooks a dish for you that you hate (it's no the cooking but the main ingredient). You can't bring yourself to admit this and successfully pretend that it's delicisious. The lie will set expectations for the further relationship. Now you may have to eat food you hate or admit to lying in addition to telling the uncomfortable truth. The more often you repeat the lie, the more involved this becomes. And there's a good chance that the truth will come out in a rather unpleasant situation; like when you're fighting one time. I can imagine that a situation like can feel in a way that could be described as a "taint in a soul" or something like that, but for me this would just be a short cut for something more complex - but all there is is actions, expectations, relationships and things like this. I can't go from there to a trial of the "soul". There's nothing coherent enough so that it can be tried. Or tainted. There's just the flow of my daily conduct and its outward connections into social situations, sometimes good, sometimes bad, often neither, always a muddle. I live, I sometimes fret about it, and then I live no more. That's about the whole of it for me.

Quoting javi2541997

It is said to be the etymological origin of the word 'sin'
— Wayfarer

Ah! Interesting, thanks for that Wayfarer. It is a pleasure to learn something new. :smile:

What Wayfarer also points to is that Christianity (like most faiths) can be made to argue anything at all - it's in the interpretation you choose which may have nothing to do with what the religion may in fact stand for or have originally intended. Many people torture themselves here on earth out of fear of the judgements of god and a self-created violation of holy order.

Quoting Dawnstorm

Also: google doesn't know "anfaestgalse". My mothertongue's German, and the word doesn't sound very Germanic either. Some sort of typo?

Firstly, I am sorry because I didn't write the word correctly. The word is correctly written in this way: 'anfægtelse'

I think I haven't expressed myself clearly, but I will explain my concern again:

Context: Kierkegaard, in his work Fear and Trembling, discussed the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham during the Binding of Isaac.

K presents this problemata about contradiction and anxiety with three different questions open to debate or discuss:

A) Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?
B) Is there an absolute duty to God?
C) Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, From Eliezer, and from Isaac?

In the book, and the answers to those questions, Kierkegaard states: During three days and three nights, Abraham suffered from 'anfægtelse', because doubt was set in motion. Abraham had to choose between the ethical requirements of his surroundings and what he regarded as his absolute duty to God.

This anxiety experienced by Abraham is described by K as anfægtelse. My Spanish edition translated it as anxiety as well. But I found English works which translated it as 'trial of the soul'

This is very interesting...

What did K actually feel like? Anxiety at the moment or what could come afterwards?

Quoting Tom Storm

What Wayfarer also points to is that Christianity (like most faiths) can be made to argue anything at all

I agree.

Quoting Tom Storm

it's in the interpretation you choose which may have nothing to do with what the religion may in fact stand for or have originally intended.

And that's why I struggle with religious faith! :smile:

Quoting javi2541997

Thanks to this exchange, I am getting to the conclusion that, although I often acted wrongly, and my spirit started to get dirty, I realize I can start to clean it up by proceeding with confession.

Although this might be the part of the process which makes you feel good, confident, courageous, etc., the act of confession might also be said to be the easiest part of the process. The confession helps to isolate and identify the problems of character which inhere within, but now the real effort is to tackle those bad habits. Strategy is required.

I suggest you identify the weaknesses within the bad habits themselves, which might provide you with a place to gain a foothold in the struggle against them. Often, the bad habits are arranged hierarchically so that you might identify a foundation which can be blasted out, dropping the rest like dominoes. This might require a hierarchy of good objectives. The good objectives will inevitably break the foundational bad habit through number, multiplicity. Many small good habits are required to take the time away from the one large bad habit. The foundational bad habit, although it's effectively the worst bad habit because it supports the others, may actually be the easiest one to break, because nothing supports it other than your material composition. That's why medication may be very effective toward curbing many bad habits.

Quoting Wayfarer

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in.
— What is Emptiness?

It's very interesting that "emptiness" is the descriptive term often associated with depression in psychology. I think that what Buddhism demonstrates to us here, is that this position, what in the west is known as being down, empty, gives us a very unique perspective where there is only one direction, up. The Buddhist perspective explained here describes all these negatives which we associate with being down, or being empty, as artificial, created by the stories and world-views which we use to situate ourselves within 'the world'. To complete the emptiness, or depression, to bring it to its absolute end, requires removing the situation which produced it in the first place.

These are the features which have forced us down, and may hold us down within the emptiness of depression, the stories and world-views which we have used to make sense of the world in the first place. But these can only hold us down if we allow them to, by clinging to them. Once we recognize that they are in fact what has forced us down, and that they only have the capacity to hold us down because we hold onto to them, then we can release them and find true freedom.

Quoting Paine

As model of personal development, it focuses upon the crisis of adolescence and the perils of becoming a 'single individual'.

You mean how the child emerges from innocence and in receiving the world's language and culture, the "sin" of the race, discovers freedom and guilt. Very Freudian (who had read Kierkegaard). If the father is God, this imposes a metaphysical commandment which has as its principal injunction the having "no gods before me" and "no idols" kind of thing. And so, the knight of faith lives the mundane life (Fear and Trembling) but in the "light" of the father, in all things.

On becoming a single individual: Kierkegaard's is an interesting analysis about the genesis of morality (not that I think of things like this so much, but it is important the way it contributed to Freud's famous psycho-metaphysics):

K first points out that it cannot be the case that Adam could at once be innocent and know the difference between good and evil. Of course, the story says Adam is first innocent, but then how is guilt at all possible if the prohibition is meaningless simply because Adam has not yet learned of its nature? This will come after the disobedience. Prior to this, all Adam has is authoritative compliance. So the impulse to bite the apple is the first act of true freedom, and, alas, discovery of consequences. Adam is a child. But then: the whole concept rests with, begins with, the assumption of a commandment, one that insists Adam obey commandments. Adam first has to have this belief in place, but this belief is not fixed and is fragile, assailable, for Adam does have the option to disobey, which is freedom, an essential condition of our existence..

The child first is born into a kind of animalistic servitude to its own desires, and this innocence is challenged by the commandment, which is disobeyed (probably the first sin is concupiscence. What Eve really gives Adam is lust). Eden is the infants crib, a place of polymorphous sexual perversity, as Freud thought of it, in which there is a feeling of absolute power, the breast comes at one's insistence, as does relief from all discomfort.

The apple is a symbol of freedom and the discovery of anxiety and guilt and sin. Later, the apple will become the sin of the race---- the expansion of culture such that it rules one's desires and drives one away from the father. This is sublimation, and so what we call civilized living Kierkegaard calls inherited sin, this erection of social institutions and indulgences that displaces the father's commandments.

Something like that.

Quoting Wayfarer

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in.

You know, I agree with this. The trouble comes in several places, but the one that stands out for me is agency. Though there is "no thought whether there is anything behind things," that refers to explicit thought. In the familiarity of the world there is history that constitutes this sense of things, and that constitutes my "I". I am not like an infant for whom there really is not world at all, just a private localized and limited environment. It is culture and language that takes time to imprint a foundation, so to speak, and when this interpretative "nothing" meets some thing, the thing not just loses whatever might be behind, but very ground for familiarity itself. In other words, when I am comfortable just sitting doing nothing, the world is still held within the grasp of memory.

To me this is not to question the meanings that rise up in a liberated state. Quite the opposite: It suggests that the enculturation that is always already there, in the perceptual event, tacitly telling me that everything is such and such and so and so and no need for alarm, and really, makes this moment possible (because an infant, unenculturated and pure, cannot meditate, or do yoga of any kind) does not stand as an obstacle at all, but is necessary for encountering the world as a singular agency. The "I" that is a social construct is ALSO a construct for liberation and enlightenment.

One, perhaps, likes to think that serious meditation is a true negation of the self, but this is, I would argue, mistaken.

Quoting Astrophel

One, perhaps, likes to think that serious meditation is a true negation of the self, but this is, I would argue, mistaken.

Oh. I thought that was what you meant by

Quoting Astrophel

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence".

Quoting Astrophel

serious meditation is a method of discovery and liberation FROM this mundane self.

But, never mind. I was only trying to discover some common ground between phenomenology and Buddhist Studies.


Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

It's very interesting that "emptiness" is the descriptive term often associated with depression in psychology.

Also entirely mistaken, perhaps you might read the article in full (although I won't argue the point).

Quoting Wayfarer

But, never mind. I was only trying to discover some common ground between phenomenology and Buddhist Studies.

There is the self and then there is the "self". One is the everyday self, and this suspended in meditation, and I think this is likely not in dispute by anyone. What is an issue is the nature of the "I" that endures the suspension. I can't make sense of this, but so what. I do know that there are intimations that emerge when one does this push the question into metaphysics, what I call good metaphysics, "The Cloud of Unknowing" kind of metaphysics. There is an extraordinary affirmation in this.

Quoting Wayfarer

Also entirely mistaken, perhaps you might read the article in full (although I won't argue the point).

I don't think there is much to mistake with a word like "emptiness". There isn't a whole lot of ambiguity associated with that word. So, I think you're best off not to try to argue the point.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover ‘Emptiness’ is the English translation. The actual term is sunnata (??nyat?).

Reply to Wayfarer
And is it not translated as "emptiness" for a reason?

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover As often, because there is no direct equivalent for many terms in the Buddhist lexicon, and vice versa. There are no direct translations for karma, dharma, bodhi, Vijñ?na and many other terms, nor direct Buddhist equivalents for words like ‘spiritual’. In any case, the article makes it perfectly clear that ‘emptiness’ has nothing whatever to do with depressive states.

There have been comparisons made between ??nyat? and the epoch? of Husserl, and also Pyrrho’s ‘suspension of judgement about what is not evident’ - about not reading things into the raw material of experience but learning to see ‘things as they are’. I thought I noticed a resonance between this and some of the remarks made by @Astrophel but perhaps I was mistaken.

If…you can adopt the emptiness mode—by not acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves—you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or possessing. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the subtlest events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of “I” and “mine” are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can then drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that’s totally free.

Quoting Wayfarer

As often, because there is no direct equivalent for many terms in the Buddhist lexicon, and vice versa. There are no direct translations for karma, dharma, bodhi, Vijñ?na and many other terms, nor direct Buddhist equivalents for words like ‘spiritual’. In any case, the article makes it perfectly clear that ‘emptiness’ has nothing whatever to do with depressive states.

The page on "emptiness" which you referred, seems to confirm what I said. Both forms of emptiness are associated with the relationship between a person's feelings, and one's thoughts, the stories or world-views which are employed to deal with one's feelings. The difference appears to be that the Buddhist sunnata mode is an intentional suppression, while the other is an unintentional depression. Each appears to result in a similar condition, described as "emptiness". But the intentional emptiness is manageable, controlled and conditioned, being consciously intended, and therefore may be utilized toward one's well-being, while the other form of emptiness is not manageable and is therefore most likely detrimental toward one's well-being.

Quoting Wayfarer

There have been comparisons made between ??nyat? and the epoch? of Husserl, and also Pyrrho’s ‘suspension of judgement about what is not evident’ - about not reading things into the raw material of experience but learning to see ‘things as they are’. I thought I noticed a resonance between this and some of the remarks made by Astrophel but perhaps I was mistaken.

The problem I see, is that experience is always preconditioned by thought, so there is no such thing as "the raw material of experience", which would be the feelings, or sensations, without any associated thought. A large portion of thought is so deep into the subconscious level, being purely habitual, learned at a very young age, that it is not even apparent to the conscious mind. So what the conscious mind takes "the raw material of experience" to be, is something which has already been affected by thought which the conscious mind has simply not taken into account, being composed of very rapid actions and reactions in the borderline area between conscious and subconscious.

In other words, there is no such thing as seeing "things as they are", without reading things into the perceptions, because things are already read into the perceptions by the time the conscious mind attempts disassociate the stories and world-view from the raw material which provides for perception. This is why we hit the bottom, the dead end which you called emptiness. The attempt to find one's "self" is stymied and we must face the reality of the fruitlessness. We, or "I", as a self-conscious living being, or self-conscious living beings, are helpless in any attempt to get down to any lower level of separating the raw material from the conditioning stories or world-views, because it becomes very evident that complete separation is utterly impossible, and the venture is doomed to failure. This leaves us empty, and forces upon us the need to salvage whatever freedom we can, from this dreadful situation which reveals that the freedom we so desire is inescapably hindered, and so we proceed accordingly. In western religions this is recognized as the soul being united to, and hindered by, the body.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

A large portion of thought is so deep into the subconscious level, being purely habitual, learned at a very young age, that it is not even apparent to the conscious mind.

This is something meditators, yogis and even some philosophers understand thoroughly, of course.

Reply to Astrophel
I see how Kierkegaard's argument is using the biblical accounts to build a sort of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" model of an individual. But the emphasis upon the limits of psychology in the text place it very far from the theory of drives in Freud.

There is, in Kierkegaard, a move against the role of sex as a measure of sinfulness as depicted in the language of Paul.

Quoting Wayfarer

This is something meditators, yogis and even some philosophers understand thoroughly, of course.

That's why I am arguing that the result of meditation, "emptiness" is described in the same way as the result of depression, as "emptiness". It takes one (intentionally in meditation) to the limits of one's freedom. What I think, is that the difference is that unlike depression where the limit to freedom, and consequent emptiness, is forced upon the person unintentionally, and unknowingly, from the other side, as a sort of enclosure, in meditation the limit is approached, and emptiness produced, willingly and knowingly, as a learning experience, therefore it is manageable.

Depression is quite common, yet very disruptive, and sometimes a highly disturbing mental illness. If a person practises the art of managing the condition, "emptiness", this could prove to be very useful in preventing the occurrence of the unintentional form, where the emptiness is forced upon one from the other side.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover Do you think the kind of emptiness in depression is really that comparable to the emptiness of meditation? They feel like entirely different things to me. I'd wager most people suffering from the emptiness of depression WISH they could have the emptiness of meditation.

Quoting flannel jesus

Do you think the kind of emptiness in depression is really that comparable to the emptiness of meditation? They feel like entirely different things to me. I'd wager most people suffering from the emptiness of depression WISH they could have the emptiness of meditation.

Yes I do, and what I pointed to, is that I believe that with practise and effort, one could substitute the emptiness of depression with the emptiness of meditation. So if you suffer depression, and WISH that you could have the emptiness of meditation instead of the emptiness of depression, then with the required will power, determination, and effort, your wish might be granted.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-meditation-helps-with-depression

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover seems like you're agreeing with me that they're substantially different enough for a depressed person to want that. Which is good, I think you're right, there are different enough for that.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover I guess what I'm saying is, the difference between depression and meditative emptiness isn't only that one is voluntary and one is forced, there's more differences than that.

Meditative emptiness is about not thinking. Depressed people think a lot. They think, I'm bored, this sucks, this isn't satisfying, I'm lonely, nothing is fulfilling, etc. The kind of emptiness that depressed people feel isn't a lack of thought - depression would be a lot more bearable for more people if it were.

Reply to javi2541997

Just bear in mind that the protean nature of religious belief is not unique. You'll see the same thing in scientific articles and public health datasets being mustered to prove anti-vaccine arguments, or in the endless debates over public education (e.g., is offering optional advanced mathematics classes in high school good, or an engine structural racism, etc.)

That people can disagree wildly on things doesn't necessarily entail that knowledge is impossible. This is true even when there isn't consensus. We'd hardly say that there is no truth of the matter as to what makes for a good or bad education, simply because there is a large diversity of opinions in the education policy space, or that there can never be an adequate explanation of consciousness just because we currently lack one and are left with a wide diversity of opinions.

From a theological perspective, such diversity is often seen as necessary for the progress of human understanding in the same way a plurality of political movements is required for the historical development of political institutions. E.g., modern liberal democracy only has universal education, restrictions on child labor, rights to unionize, pension/health systems, etc. today because it faced the challenge of socialism and was forced to sublate it, making key socialist policies part of itself. A similar phenomena would seem to be at work in the parallel strands of faith.

Or this is at least the explanation some theologians take, e.g. it's sort of the explanation of plurality laid out in the current catechism of the Catholic Church (rather than, we are right, everyone else is wrong).

Quoting flannel jesus

Which is good, I think you're right, there are different enough for that.

Yes, I described how I believe they differ. The one is intentional, therefore manageable, educational, and helpful in confronting the very real limits to one's freedom. The other consists of the very real limits to one's freedom imposing upon the person in an unwanted, unmanageable way. So the same "emptiness" is approached from two different ways. The one is a peaceful, confident, courageous approach, while the other is an anxious fearful non-approach, as it is instead imposed.

Quoting flannel jesus

Depressed people think a lot. They think, I'm bored, this sucks, this isn't satisfying, I'm lonely, nothing is fulfilling, etc. The kind of emptiness that depressed people feel isn't a lack of thought - depression would be a lot more bearable for more people if it were.

The thinking itself is not the emptiness of depression. The emptiness is the feeling associated with the hopelessness of the thought. Yet the thought continues despite the hopelessness created by the feeling of emptiness. The feeling ought to end the thought in hopeless emptiness, but it does not, so the feeling of emptiness is required to increase in order to confront the hopelessness of the thought. So, just like meditation, the emptiness is the end of the thought. But in meditation the end is properly achieved because it is a trained practise, while in depression the end cannot be achieved because the emptiness is the product of hopelessness of the thought.

It's just a feature of the two different ways that the emptiness may be induced, intentionally and unintentionally. The unintentional requires the hopeless thought as catalyst, the intentional produces the emptiness without the catalyst.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus I agree with your post, Timothy. But I don't know what to say. My aim is not to argue about a specific religious branch. I am fully aware that religious belief is not unique, and I have even already discussed this in another thread, where some users started to rant about the bad 'influence' of Christianity due to the Spanish empire. And then, I asked them: what kind of Christian group are you referring to? Because it is obvious that there are a lot of distinctions between Catholics and Protestants, for instance.

Nonetheless, I think I will keep learning more about Christianity from a personal perspective. It is the main religion - and custom - where I live. I am not bother to understand different religious perspectives. It will be interesting, but I am not ready yet.

Look how many exchanges and debate Kierkegaard produces! More than 200 replies have this thread, when we are 'only' discussing spirituality from a Christian Ethics view...

Quoting Wayfarer

There have been comparisons made between ??nyat? and the epoch? of Husserl,

I think of sunyata as an absence of knowledge claims in the perceptual event, knowledge that is "always already" in normal experience, and is the essence of existential illusion. But then, it is IN knowledge claims that one is a person at all in-the-world. What is revealed in putting explicit knowledge to rest, if you will, is a revelation, and this, too, is received by the understanding which is what constitutes "normal experience". One could have a deeply profound meditation in which all mean appearances fall away. Now, what just happened? Now this self that has been transcended in the sublime experience is called upon to explain the very thing that could only be shown by its own annihilation.

What is a knowledge claim? This is important. It is pragmatic and forward looking. It is TIME. The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time. To cancel an attachment is to relax the desire that attempts to create a future in the image of the desire, again, so to speak. Sin, in Kierkegaard's terms and my interpretation, is time (the sins of the race, that is, the cultural/historical body of institutions that constitute our world).

Husserl's epoche has this trajectory, leading us to an absolute intimation of being. It is essentially apophatic, like the Upanishad's neti neti, annihilating assumptions that are always in place when we see the world in familiar ways. What is canceled is time itself, not the abstract concept of time, one thing following another in some apriori quantitative model, but existential time, the right now in a room with lamps and coffee cups ALL of which are familiar and prima facie holding the world in place. This living structure of existence is time, the knowing of all these things being essentially anticipations confirmed in the mere recognition. To me, this cuts directly to the chase of the issue of Eastern spiritual illusion, or maya: holding this cup right before my eyes, feeling its warmth, its weight--then notice when the mind is cleared in radical meditation, how time evaporates as the anticipatory "veil" falls away.

Knowledge is forward looking, and so, knowledge is time. But to experience AT ALL, even profoundly, time cannot be altogether dismissed in explaining what a spiritual experience IS. Even as time slips into nullity, this is done in "metaphysical" time. Our finitude IS noumenal., something Kant missed in the deduction (a long but fascinating argument there).

Reply to Wayfarer

Just to add: illusion and time, these are the same. Time is anticipation, a "not yet" at the ready when one sees an object, and when the object is confirmed, it too is confirmed in a "not yet," that grasps to fill the future with the same, and it is what defines normalcy. It is a living presence IN the object of awareness, this dynamic knowledge claim. I hold that Eastern enlightenment and liberation is all about what stands in the perceptual moment telling me it is a cup, a rose. It is temporally existentially dynamic, not spatially inert, as scientific physicalism/naturalism tells us. Meditation literally stops time, anticipation, the "not yet" of the vacuum of a future unmade. Time is karma, not an abstraction. Time designates all of the passions, desires, etc., in the anticipatory moment. One's desires are flung forward in the "not yet".

Quoting Astrophel

Meditation literally stops time...

:roll:

Quoting flannel jesus

Meditative emptiness is about not thinking

spot on.

Quoting Astrophel

The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time.

This resonates strongly with Krishnamurti, who's books I read ardently in my twenties. One of them is called 'The Ending of Time' and it's a theme that's always present in his talks. He says that the observer IS the past, that freedom from thought is 'freedom from the known'. A few weeks back, I enrolled in an online seminar run out of Ojai, which was to run over the next two years, comprising recordings of his talks and an online discussion group. But I cancelled my enrollment, for the same reason I stopped reading his books decades ago. I felt that I understand what he's saying, but I can't find my way into it. He would say, meditation is never the effort to meditate. I've got a quote from him on my homepage 'It is the truth that liberates you, not your effort to be free'. But all I know of meditation is the attempt to meditate (which incidentally I stopped making four years ago.)

That's why something about your posts communicates this same understanding, even if it's one that I've never managed to get.

The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something.

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much.

Quoting Wayfarer

This resonates strongly with Krishnamurti, who's books I read ardently in my twenties. One of them is called 'The Ending of Time' and it's a theme that's always present in his talks. He says that the observer IS the past, that freedom from thought is 'freedom from the known'. A few weeks back, I enrolled in an online seminar run out of Ojai, which was to run over the next two years, comprising recordings of his talks and an online discussion group. But I cancelled my enrollment, for the same reason I stopped reading his books decades ago. I felt that I understand what he's saying, but I can't find my way into it. He would say, meditation is never the effort to meditate. I've got a quote from him on my homepage 'It is the truth that liberates you, not your effort to be free'. But all I know of meditation is the attempt to meditate (which incidentally I stopped making four years ago.)

There are other yogas. Jnana yoga is also very effective if it cuts through the mass of presuppositions that rule our thinking in a default way. As I see it, the strongest pillar of dogmatic insistence is physicalism. You might not agree, but I argue, once one sees that any of the varieties physicalism or materialism and their counterpart, idealism, is simply the worst and most inhibiting metaphysics that we all carry around with us, and it is carried with an implicit unbreakable faith. It is a reduction to dust, as Michel Henry says.

Consciousness conceives first, is ontologically first in any conception. You might want to give Henry a listen on youtube at Michel Henry By Steven Delay. One has to put aside the Christian orientation. It really doesn't matter. But he is worth it.

Quoting Astrophel

You might not agree, but I argue, once one sees that any of the varieties physicalism or materialism and their counterpart, idealism, is simply the worst and most inhibiting metaphysics that we all carry around with us, and it is carried with an implicit unbreakable faith. It is a reduction to dust, as Michel Henry says.

Agree that physicalism is the presiding and destructive myth of modernity, but not in the least that idealism is merely a 'counterpart' to, or dialectical projection of, physicalism. I've been introduced to Michel Henri on this forum and read part of his essay Barbarism, which is an an exact diagnosis of eliminative materialism.

[quote=SEP, Michel Henry;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/michel-henry/#CritContCultBarb]The inversion of culture in “barbarism” means that within a particular socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation (i.e. concealment) of the bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to Henry, who echoes Husserl’s analysis in Crisis, such an inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological developments.

Insofar as it relies on objectification, the “Galilean principle” is directly opposed to Henry’s philosophy of immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture. Although “the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as it seems”, the line separating culture from “barbarism” is crossed when science is transformed into scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only through the objectively measurable and quantifiable.[/quote]

The clearest statement of this form of barbarism is Daniel Dennett. But I've been arguing against philosophical or scientific materialism here since day one so it's not news to me.

Quoting Wayfarer

The clearest statement of this form of barbarism is Daniel Dennett. But I've been arguing against philosophical or scientific materialism here since day one so it's not news to me.

But I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does. I read his, or read through it, Consciousness Explained. Dennett It does a good job of showing me what I am up against. I know this thinking, we all do, just not as well as he does. We grew up with it, this common sense that assumes science is basic. Our familiarity is called public education. This is why phenomenology is so hard: such thinking as Dennett's has to be "read out of" like a child reads of other lands and discovers there is so much more out there. But I haven't read Dennett on barbarism, and likely will not, even though he may have interesting things to say.

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist, for no one made a stronger case for the kind of thing Henry argues for: the more appearing, the more being. What is being? It is affective-ontology. What if I asked what nirvana is? We would still have as an implicit premise that it is just an emotion that issues from material being, but has no being of its own. This is the hard part, this freeing being from implicit materialism (always there, trivializing existence) for this is a thesis that makes experience derivative. But meditation and its apophatic "method," that is, the method of negating common sense which is our everyday world, turns this entirely on its head. Nirvana (affectivity) IS Being, it is the essence of being, not derivative of anything. Affectivity is the ontological foundation. The materialist assumption is constructed OUT of this, just as all of our thoughts and ideas.

At any rate, I get rather up on my high horse when Dennett comes mind.

Quoting Astrophel

I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does.

Of course he doesn't! What I'm saying is, Henry's description of 'barbarism' applies to, is exemplified by, Daniel Dennett's 'eliminative materialism'. In other words, in those terms, Daniel Dennett is indeed an exponent of a barbarous philosophy. Dennett, and the other materialist philosophers, are what Henry has in mind with his criticism. They're barbarians!

Quoting Astrophel

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist

That is the point I was labouring a couple of pages back, which you seemed not to notice. I even included a passage from Husserl to this very point.

Is there something the matter with my prose style? Am I being obscure?

Quoting Paine

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much.

I think this taboo on speaking is overplayed, and yet, not played enough. One can speak anything, its just that there has to be a shared experience. You could report to me that you had an excellent meditation or insight, and all crude meanings vanished revealing something profound and beautiful . Words like profound and beautiful are common, as in, that was a profound chess move, but in the context of Eastern enlightenment, we think of something else because this region of thought is contextualized with a greater sense of the mystery of existence. Even as I use terms 'mystery' and 'existence' I take your thoughts and sense of things INTO a world of orientation that makes sense. This is the point: talking like this doesn't degrade the essence of this weird, marginal way to encounter the world.

When we use language, we almost always are talking about mundane things, and it is this that has to be put aside. Brings the whole matter into familiar contexts where it doesn't belong.

Quoting Wayfarer

Is there something the matter with my prose style? Am I being obscure?

No, no. Sorry about that. I did forget previous things mentioned.

Reply to Astrophel Don't worry about it! It's turning out to be a very interesting discussion.

Reply to Astrophel
I was not thinking of the speaking as taboo. Zhuangzi confronts the categorical quality of Confucian expression but does not reject what it is trying to do. Confucius appears as a teacher in the work.

On a practical level, the training leads to a change or not. Perhaps a way to read Zhuangzi is to look at the problem of reporting success and failure. Those words are highly leveraged properties.

Quoting Paine

The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something.

There is an uncanny space that opens up when the chatter stops for some people. While for others, most, it is simply the same old perceptual encounter with the world. This space deserves analysis, the rigorous kind that discovers the structure of consciousness itself.

On Zhuangzi. Consider this passage:

......whether you point to a little stalk or a great pillar, a leper or the beautiful Hsi-shih, things ribald and shady or things grotesque and strange, the Way makes them all into one. Their dividedness is their completeness; their complete­ness is their impairment. No thing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into one again. Only the man of far­ reaching vision knows how to make them into one. So he has no use [for categories], but relegates all to the constant. The constant is the useful; the useful is the passable; the passable is the successful; and with success, all is accomplished. He relies upon this alone, relies upon it and does not know he is doing so. This is called the Way.

The point of this is to show how language makes issues out of thin air, dividing the world (categorical thinking) that is an original pragmatic singularity. Human discontentment lies with this false sense of a world divided. Further on, the matter is spelled out in clarity:

[i]There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is tiny[/i]

There is in this, something definitive and is, of course, not definitive at all: Definitive because the final wisdom clears the playing field, and yet not definitive because the act of doing this is itself categorical since all language and meaning is categorical: words divide the world.

Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language.

So my interest in this "space" can be approached here. It is where one's existence and the existence of the world is realized by "the person of far reaching vision" is released from the grip of language. But what is THIS about? There is a LOT to "say" about this, paradoxically. Or is it a paradox? For language and its "distance" from the the palpable, pragmatic (the "constant" is "useful" says Chuangtzu) world are themselves IN this world and allow us to realized this very thesis. The tao is conceived in language! How does this work? Language itself, and its categories, must also be of the tao, not apart from it, perhaps it most essential feature. To reject categorical thinking occurs in categorical thinking.

Thought is not to be simply suspended. My thoughts say language is the greatest expression of our existence. It is "useful" to have a more penetrating view.

Quoting Astrophel

Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language

For Derrida language, understood in its broadest sense, is the text, and text means context. His famous dictum, there is nothing outside the text, doesnt mean nothing outside language understood as a formal symbol system, but nothing outside of some context or other. Put differently, there is no world outside language if we understand language as context.

Reply to Astrophel
I can follow your description of what is happening but the attempt to bring another to be more skillful is its own thing. The truth or falsity of that is not a general idea. It might even be stupid, in many ways.

Reply to Joshs

And yet, here we are, existing out of context, notwithstanding the context of saying this. There is in this, some elusive and profound affirmation that has nothing do to with context, though as with all things, nothing stops it from being categorized. God could appear in actuality, some entirely novel insight into eternity, and if this were shared, we could talk about it all day. All this about things language cannot say I think is overplayed. Language is an empty vessel.

Quoting Astrophel

God could appear in actuality

Christians believe that this happened already, with the Incarnation.

Reply to Astrophel Quoting Astrophel

And yet, here we are, existing out of context, notwithstanding the context of saying this. There is in this, some elusive and profound affirmation that has nothing do to with context, though as with all things, nothing stops it from being categorized

For Derrida an element of meaning, an ‘identity’, can only be what it is by relying on something absolutely foreign to it and outside of it. But this outside doesn’t sit alongside an inside of meaning but inhabits it , belongs to the inside itself.

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.”

The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into
the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

The repetition of this very slight difference dividing self-identity from itself produces a self and a world that returns to itself from its future the same differently, every moment. Is this what you mean by ‘existing out of context’?

Quoting Joshs

For Derrida an element of meaning, an ‘identity’, can only be what it is by relying on something absolutely foreign to it and outside of it. But this outside doesn’t sit alongside an inside of meaning but inhabits it , belongs to the inside itself.

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.”

I am reminded of Zeno's paradox of the arrow never arriving at its target. The iterable "moment" itself analytically reducible to constitutive iterability, thereby rendering the iteration an endless a never ending cycle. I want to be Diogenes and walk across the floor and then consider the matter refuted. But as I see it, there is only one thing that can make it all the ways across the room, and that is value-in-being (as I call it, grasping for the right way).

This not sitting "outside" and "along side" is to me, extremely insightful, for the silence of meditative gelassenheit, if you will, shows that what one seeks, in this pursuit of a profounder wisdom than thought can think, has been there all along, in the eye that "sees" the seeing, the cogito that thinks the cogito.

And the repetition in the discover of the "repetition" as Derrida lays it out, is itself thereby annihilated. There is in this what in Zen is called satori, a jolting realization.

Quoting javi2541997

religious faith and groups usually tend to make me wonder about a lot of questions rather than give me answers.
This makes me struggle to understand religion...

There is not much to understand but that religious 'faith' is a wish or a hope that 'God' exists and the rest is the dishonor of acting, saying, and preaching as if 'God' exists, and then layering more 'truths' upon unto many myth-takes.

Their ingrained beliefs the priests’ duly preach,
As if notions were truth and fact to teach.
Oh, cleric, repent; at least say, ‘Have faith’;
Since, of unknowns ne’er shown none can e’er reach.

To be honest a cleric or a believer might ever only refer to the maybe/perhaps/hoped for 'God' instead of the misleading/unethical 'God is true' proclamation.

Quoting PoeticUniverse

To be honest a cleric or a believer might ever only refer to the maybe/perhaps/hoped for 'God' instead of the misleading/unethical 'God is true' proclamation.

Well, if someone is a true believer, I think he gives God's existence for granted. When a believer thinks that, perhaps, there is a possibility of the existence of God, they start to experience anxiety, or more specific, a crisis of faith. Some battle doubts about the veracity of the Christian faith itself (“Does God truly exist?” or “Does another religion or belief system more truly reveal the nature of ultimate reality?”)

On the other hand, why do you claim it is unethical to state 'God is true'. I agree that proclamation could be fallacious or misleading. Yet desiring 'God is true' doesn't make unethical behaviour for a believer. It could be unethical to believe in Christianity, and act against the principles of this dogma. For example, no giving credit to God's mercy when a believer is put in dilemmas or not following Christian ethical principles, such as moral code, standards, behaviours, conscience, values, rules of conduct, etc.

Quoting javi2541997

why do you claim it is unethical to state 'God is true'

More so when they teach/preach it to others.

Quoting Wayfarer

Is it, though? What I took from it, was the sense of ‘misunderstanding the point of being alive.’ It works as a religious metaphor but also as a philosophical one.

I cannot think of a single philosophy that advocates the idea that there is just one point to being alive, unless you mean living itself (as opposed to being caught up in silly ideas or failing to reach one's potential, however the latter might be conceived). None of this has anything necessarily to do with religion. Religion is only necessary for those who cannot, or don't wish to, think for themselves.

Quoting Janus

I cannot think of a single philosophy that advocates the idea that there is just one point to being alive, unless you mean living itself (as opposed to being caught up in silly ideas or failing to reach one's potential, however the latter might be conceived). None of this has anything necessarily to do with religion. Religion is only necessary for those who cannot, or don't wish to, think for themselves.

Is it? Is there a possibility to think for ourselves? Or are we influenced by external ideas and dogmas? Religion is not the only system which induces people to behave in a concrete way or conduct. If I were able to think by myself, what would be the point of establishing basic principles of morality and ethics? Every of us needs to be taught to the 'right' way. It doesn't matter if it is secular, religious, philosophical, civil...