Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Shtita wrote:What you call a state of awareness, I have personally found to be a state of denial. The refusal to let go of the brainwashing we get from childhood about God. Since childhood, most people we look up to believe in God. That tells us that there must be a God since all these people we admire and look up to believe in God. The problem is that most people suffer from the inability to let go of that psychological crutch and as a result transfer the same psychological baggage to the next generation.
It seems unquestionable that religious positions - in a large degree if the truth be told - are attempts to re-inhabit an 'ancient position' which has been decimated. Here we would have to speak about the way that old religionists support an intuition about God's existence (which I would not deny but see no reason why not to look into it and question it) through symbolical forms which are held in the imagination - the imagination: that place in man where he imagines his world. A great deal of focus is required to understand man's conceptual structure and how it 'reflects' (to use a common metaphor) a reality but is not itself Reality. To understand man in general, and man-as-man, requires an examination of this, man's most important capability.
There is indeed such a thing as 'brainwashing' and it is strongly evident in numerous settings. The hard, strict, inflexible religious positions which are held to by religious zealots is a real thing. It can certainly be examined and spoken about. Yet too there is political brainwashing, and social brainwashing, ideological brainwashing, and also efforts to invade, gain a foothold in, and seek leverage in man's inner (imagined, sentimental) conceptual world. If we are going to refer to a specific religious brainwashing, we need overall to examine 'brainwashing' as a function of modern society. We would have to include public relations and propaganda, social situation and coercion, and many other things. Additionally, we would have to be willing to examine the far opposite of 'religious brainwashing' by examining the philosophical or religious mind at its best, and in its best circumstance. I find that numerous of the English philosophers/religionists of the same school as Willey to carry the whole thing off very admirably. These are men who have carefully studied intellectual history, who have mastered numerous languages, who are well-apprised by scientific method and influence, and who in no sense shirk the task of examining their religious understanding. So, what this means is that though there is indeed a low end, there is also a high end.
It must also be said, I think, that the low end tends to remain the low end. Meaning, there is a class of men who is not interested in gaining the higher ground. To all appearances they will remain, even when given the opportunity, at a lower level of use of their conceptual faculties. These men if the structure of religious life is taken from them, or significantly disrupted and undermined, will simply transfer their allegiance, as it were, to some other structure or form. Sport-obsession, political-obsession, sexual-obsession, etc. It is unwise to refer to the lower denominator in these conversations.
Just look at the words you have used: "an attempt to quantify an unquantifiable." How can you ever attempt to quantify that which is unquantifiable? It IS unquantifiable. So there can only be belief.
You are admitting that there is something 'unquantifiable'. What occurs *here*, in this existence, is and will forever be the source of mystery and wonder. Yet there is a way to deaden oneself to that awareness. To speak about that, to arrive at some understanding of how this deadening occurs, is relevant to these conversations. In this sense we are 'brainwashed' by our social structures to learn to see our reality as quotidian, non-spectacular. Often people rebel against the vision-structure that dominates perception. They seek to break through a veil, to break the spell of 'dreaming man' and to gain for themselves an opening in their perception-structure to a new, a different, and a more vitalising Vision of the world, of life, and of reality.
I suggest to you that whatever your particular vision or understanding is of 'atheism', it certainly feels to me one that lacks imagination, creativity, spark, and does not in itself communicate wonder, openness, new ways to assemble the 'stories' of perception, and seems overall to function like a damper. In bad circumstances, under some level of 'regime' (say at a university or in some cultural setting) it could very well function authoritatively as authoritarianism. I refer to Obvious Leo (and Vege-Taxi hopped on this ride as well) and the beginning of a position that describes those who have religious outlook as mentally ill, as requiring intervention by psychological authority to control the deviation.
Though I would not say that you, Sthita, seem to desire such an eventuality, it is a real issue, and these ideas are floating around. In this sense those who hold to 'religious imagination' and those who seek *experience* of divinity in the life they live, seek to break away from controlling structure in the mental sphere. I am certainly suggesting that some part of this present conversation, polarised in mind-numbing circularity, takes the shape it does because *we* resist aspects of modern mechanism in thinking. This of course should be brought out and spoken of in a wide-ranging and fair conversation.
You say many people "get it" today. What happens when they "get it"? What changes for them? What purpose does "getting it" serve? Those who get it still suffer from the same problems that those who do not "get it" do. They get angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, happy exactly like those that "don't get it" among the believers do. People like me who "don't get it" still are happy, live fulfilled lives, spend time with our children, live honorable lives, do charity, work for the betterment of humanity and the society around us. I don't see any difference in the believer me and the non-believer me. Both are exactly the same. The only difference I see is that I see happiness and a good life as independent of the belief in God.
You are ignorant of a huge and wide social and literary history that has been going on for 300 years. If you desire to talk about the 'religious imagination' and what it does/can do (to put it grossly), I'd suggest references to Shakespeare's imagined constructions. Let's suppose that you wanted to speak about 'religious remorse' or the power of the an element of retributionary conscience that arises in man: Macbeth. Or an inner scenario of seeing into the hubristic mind that undergoes a terrifyingly difficult transformational process brought on by its own self and attitude: King Lear. Or a way of understanding how temptation at the most inner levels, at fundamental levels inside of a person and out of the grip and reach (in this sense) of the mundane and mechanical world: Othello. There are hundreds if not
THOUSANDS of examples that could be cited, and here, on this darling forum peopled by philsophically illiterate nit-wits, no one is there to hear! Why is this? What has happened to the inner man here? Should it begin to dawn on you 'what has happened', you will begin to grasp and possibly with some alarm what concerns me and others, and why these issues have importance for us.
If you look overall at the effort on this forum of the atheist crowd, it is a destructive and narrowing effort based in coercion and authoritarianism. If you cannot see what I am referring to, I don't know if I can help much in that process. There is so much more that can be said about all of this, and there is no one home to have the conversation. You definitely earn a B+ (even a begrudged A-) simply because you stick with the conversation and with argument of some level.
I am okay even if God exists. I have no problem if tomorrow it turns out that you were right and I am wrong and God actually exists. Even after that fact is clear to me, nothing in my life will change. I will carry on exactly as I am doing now because the principles and the code of honour which I have arrived at are my own conclusions and based on my own convictions. They are completely independent of and have nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God.
Existence exists. And this is outside of any possibility of your encapsulation. I suggest a fuller opening to that fact as the place all of us must start from. But you will need to remember that I am calling for a total and new relationship to the Question. I am suggesting that we cannot, now, visualise what a remodelled existential platform is or will be. We cannot because it is still forming. Again, all of this is part of a larger, a wider, a more important conversation, and yet here people are fighting the battle against the religionist of their own 'imagined world'. I suggest reading the article Inglorious posted from The Guardian. It provides a platform of understanding what must be avoided and transcended.
However, I am okay even if God does not exist. If tomorrow it turns out that I am right and you are wrong, nothing will change for me again. I will carry on exactly as I am carrying on right now. Can you say the same?
This is non-intelligent. You are stuck in an argument with your own category. I do not think that Inglorious is stuck in nor interested in that category or in enacting as a character the role you have sketched for him. I will leave him to make his own statements and will simply say that you have no idea at all what another man's process is or has been in regard to these things. For you, God did not ever really *exist* and you seem to speak to an unreal shadow, a figment of your imagination that you describe as being your 'religiousness' of previous times. This is shallow. Your understanding has only functioned at the most shallow level but you want to peg this on others. This is all fairly typical for, in the end, we are battling the demons of our own imagination. But there is a way around this and out of the boring circularity: To begin to enquire about other men's experience. To begin to look into the literary material - reflecting inner experience - out of which our *world* has been constructed (Occidental world I mean principally).
You are solidly and obviously an
ignorant man in these areas.
