Christianity

[Harbal]

I guess what Nick wants is for European culture to forgo reason and embrace religious awe.

I don't think I've ever felt awe in my entire life, so that probably explains why he's not getting through to me.

Religious awe is a thing although most people nowadays feel awe not from religious devotions but from places like mountain tops, coral reefs, great cathedrals, starry skies, and from works of art , and from the actions of certain people.

I really don't think encouraging people to exist in a constant state of heightened emotion will make the world a better place. In fact, I think just the opposite. I think getting people to have more appreciation for the mundane would be a better idea, and the world would probably be a safer place as well.

[Immanuel Can]

[In outrageous French accent] "I frown my brow in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries...etc."

Holy Grail?

But of course.

Well spotted, Bruce.

[Belinda]

I guess what Nick wants is for European culture to forgo reason and embrace religious awe.

I don't think I've ever felt awe in my entire life, so that probably explains why he's not getting through to me.

Religious awe is a thing although most people nowadays feel awe not from religious devotions but from places like mountain tops, coral reefs, great cathedrals, starry skies, and from works of art , and from the actions of certain people.

I really don't think encouraging people to exist in a constant state of heightened emotion will make the world a better place. In fact, I think just the opposite. I think getting people to have more appreciation for the mundane would be a better idea, and the world would probably be a safer place as well.

Harbal, you are funny ! I'm laughing at the picture of all these people emoting too much and too often.

I just looked up awe on the Thesaurus and there's a lot of synonyms some of which you may have felt. E.g. admiration, terror, and so forth.

[Harbal]

Harbal, you are funny ! I'm laughing at the picture of all these people emoting too much and too often.

Well can you imagine what it would be like if we had Everyman carrying on like that?

[henry quirk]

Well spotted, Bruce.

I had to look that one up...

1 No poofters.
2 No member of the faculty is to maltreat the "Abos" in any way whatsoever—if there's anyone watching.
3 No poofters.
4 I don't want to catch anyone not drinking in their room after lights out.
5 No poofters.
6 There is no rule six.
7 No poofters.

[Nick_A]

Conscience, like the forms, always existed. Morals always change while conscience remains constant as do the forms. If true, how much faith do you put in moral and ethical systems?

I share a fundamental agreement with you that I express when referring to metaphysical ideas that always must have existed, and are just as real as all other created forms that have manifested in our world and in our universe. They are part-and-parcel of ourselves and I also agree that they have to be 'uncovered' and 'rediscovered' on an inner plane.

But unlike you I do not negate, nor diminish in relevance and importance, the vehicles that purvey the knowledge or the admonitions that prod people, and us, to make that discovery. There has to be 'levels' where knowledge is brought into the world. I refer to that (in the Occidental sense) as our paideia. But every culture has a paideia.

I do not know if I would say that I place faith in a moral or ethical system. It would be similar to asking what I thought of our jurisprudential system. It is only as good as it is. But when you consider it in relation to what does not exist it is certainly very good.

Have you ever thought about feral children? Children that are separated from human culture and do not acquire even language? There is a definite relationship between our 'conscience' and our culture -- despite the fact that it is possible, conceptually, to separate them.

The concept 'conscience' always existed and will always exist, I agree. But one has to pay equal attention to the ways and means through which *it* (and all that ramifies from it) become manifest.

Obviously only a rare few are capable of opening to experience their conscience making paidea a necessity to maintain order. Of course the value of paidea serving as indoctrination is open to debate. That is why the older I get the more I realize that since the Great Beast is as it is, everything must continue as it is reacting to natural and cosmic influences much like any other Beast.

Hope to minimize the harmful effects of the human condition rests with the influence of conscious individuals. But the reality is that the world is losing them to the fascination with technology and the imagination it produces.

What is a person to do when they realize they are a part of the human condition reacting mechanically as they have been conditioned to do?

“There do exist enquiring minds, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him.” ~ G. I. Gurdjieff

"Who Am I"? The great question. How can a person approach the question with the sincerity it deserves rather then seeking for self justification through imagination?

[Nick_A]

I guess what Nick wants is for European culture to forgo reason and embrace religious awe.

I don't think I've ever felt awe in my entire life, so that probably explains why he's not getting through to me.

Religious awe is a thing although most people nowadays feel awe not from religious devotions but from places like mountain tops, coral reefs, great cathedrals, starry skies, and from works of art , and from the actions of certain people.

I really don't think encouraging people to exist in a constant state of heightened emotion will make the world a better place. In fact, I think just the opposite. I think getting people to have more appreciation for the mundane would be a better idea, and the world would probably be a safer place as well.

Do you respect Einstein's observation of religious awe or is it just a waste of time?

The scientists’ religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

[henry quirk]

Post it here in this thread.

Start a new thread? Okay, I'll start a new thread.

*

Have you read Democracy in America?

Many moons ago. I prefer Bastiat's The Law.

*

what do you think of the Tocqueville references? And Hofstadter?

One is just the public airing of someone's prejudices. The other two are on the money (Bastiat said it better, though...and with fewer words).

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=32456

[Immanuel Can]

Well spotted, Bruce.

I had to look that one up...

1 No poofters.
2 No member of the faculty is to maltreat the "Abos" in any way whatsoever—if there's anyone watching.
3 No poofters.
4 I don't want to catch anyone not drinking in their room after lights out.
5 No poofters.
6 There is no rule six.
7 No poofters.

Yep, that's it. Well done.

♭ "EEEEEEEmanuel Kant..." ♬♪

[Dubious]

And you yourself are enigmatic -- deliberately so it seems to me.

On this site, I'm sure you would be the only one who thinks so.

And in this sense you especially have an anti-metaphysical stance in which you are highly invested. That is I gather why you hold *poetic allusion* is such contempt. It can refer to nothing: "poetry usually being one BIG lie". Yet you have qualified it, carefully, with the word 'usually'. Which keeps an escape hatch, or a secret corridor open, through which you can if need be smuggle in some 'thus-and-such'. Nicely strategic!

Nothing strategic about it. I say "usually" because nothing is ever absolute in human terms. It wasn't meant to be a back door through which I can exit or enter from based on whatever disposition which suits me at the moment.

And in this sense you especially have an anti-metaphysical stance in which you are highly invested.

Such investments are shallow belonging to oneself only based on whatever means it was invoked within oneself. It's the kind of investement you can't distribute to anyone if that should be its purpose. Also, too much of a "metaphysical stance" is prone to yield too much distortion in its wake. It's a complex of mental holograms existing in those regions which have no relation to anything real. Pie in the sky is not equal to the one baking in the oven.

So if I am to answer your *question* I am agreeing to try to make an assault on a fortified wall that you have established and which you are invested in. Under what circumstances would you even allow that wall to be razed? The wall cannot be razed! It must stand!

There are no "walls"; they have long ceased to be or at most exist as any historical ruin would. The reason for that eroison, walls impede observation which yields its own independent kind of response to all questions of what is. Those who have walled themselves in their own mental Bastille are certain of theirs; must I mention names?

So if I am to answer your *question* I am agreeing to try to make an assault on a fortified wall that you have established and which you are invested in. Under what circumstances would you even allow that wall to be razed? The wall cannot be razed! It must stand!

There isn't much in the old metaphysics which interest me. Let there be a new meta-physic worth pondering with a "renovated mind" instead of forever reading old newspapers trying to extract what may reasonably equate to some instance of a palpable, objective truth...which there is but in reverse.

Obviously, and to stretch a common metaphor, if I make reference to such a thing (the metaphysical) I have placed one of the goalposts in the playing field to an area and zone outside of the commonly conceived -- and even to a degree to the conceptual. And this explains, I think, why you will in no way allow such a 'trick'. And of course you will hunker down within your fortifications and allow no breech.

Who do you think I am? IC! No fortress is impregnable unless its defences depend on a psychosis to maintain it thus.

I am not really interested in convincing you of anything of course -- so much of this present thread is ridiculous given the fact that we cannot agree and we do not share a platform of agreement (one of my primary assertions). So the alternative presents itself: it is best, then, to simply try to state as clearly as possible why we disagree. To present it in such a way that it is plain and not obscured.

It was never a matter of convincing anyone directly but analytically purveying a subject or some aspect of existence and simply seeing what we can see instead of over-inflating it by a too luxuriant imagination...and once again, wishful thinking that there must be some actual, inviolable objective truth out there to be discovered by way of books and authors of all kinds only to resolve in more useless speculation. I regard this type of literature as a fictional romance with the metaphysical which is often quite brilliantly expounded as a true love story with the abstract...a continuation of the Eternal Feminine drawing us on.

Wordsworth had the right idea in this little ditty...

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

So that, by way of explanation, gives a sense about why I reject with an almost violent adamancy Immanuel Can's entire Christian platform. Ah, but I am implicated in my own condemnation because, in numerous senses, I seek to defend something in it that is worthy of defense. It places me in a strange conflict. And the conflict is something I live. It is more than intellectual.

No offense, but your attempted intellectualization of IC's platform is somewhat nauseating. What's to defend in a view that believes in Adam and Eve; that Jesus died for our sins starting with them; that he resurrected from the dead offering eternity to all who believe in him. You can tell that story to children in grade school, as was told to me, but any intelligent child will outgrow such a heap of absurdity. It may just take a little bit longer than believing in Santa Claus. But really! What's your conflict here?

Here I agree with you: Christianity is a conglomeration of a wide range of different ideas, views, interpretations and also 'existential praxes' that came to be focused by culture-molding power into a foundational system that allowed Europe to come into existence. At that level it is crude and brutal. But isn't that true if any 'foundation' is thought about? You have to dig in the ground with a specific violence in order to create a foundation. And building in this sense is a raw and crude action. But then you look at, say, the 'architectural marvel' and see that the initial brutality has allowed for a final achievement to take shape and form. It is a bit of a paradox. The crudest form of the metaphor is 'to make an omelette you have to break eggs'.

Europe was created first and foremost by an intra-cultural transformation lasting for centuries. Crude and brutal it certainly was having also destroyed artifacts which didn't conform to any of its current status quo periods. Let's not get too romantic about how great these achievements were despite these paradoxes. We have no way of knowing how great western civilization could have been had Jesus simply died and not been historically resurrected by Paul. Ancient science, supplanted instead by rank superstition, was far more advanced and advancing than assumed by most people.

The gospel stories were written as personalized propaganda pieces meant to gain adherents of Jesus's life and childhood which they could not possibly have known about. Paul never mentioned any of these "distinctive" details in his letters.

If a definition were insisted on for me it resembles a dreamlike influx of an anti-gravitational force lifting one's default mental plateaus into far higher regions like standing at the base of a mountain and feeling transported to its summit. At its most intense, spirituality is experienced as a hyper compression of time in which all questions in that moment cease, becoming silent and superfluous...the mental compression of time limiting all such limitations.

See, that is why I always wondered if you'd ever taken mushrooms!

Please allow me these occasional rhetorical flourishes but is it really that unintelligible to you? I often think in metaphors which has long been an ineradicable habit. Would it be easier if I made the expression shorter thus: If a definition were insisted on for me it resembles a dreamlike influx lifting one's default mental plateaus into far higher regions like standing at the base of a mountain and feeling transported to its summit.

How's that? Still no good?

Religion is for the gullible obeying the rules of their masters whereas philosophy remains a discussion, an inquiry into things independent of any assumed reality status...a universal religion where any salvation offered resides in thought alone upon whose base religion itself is dependent upon.

How thoroughly ungenerous of you. Do you have any contact at all with *average people*? Do you every once in a while float down from your anti-gravitational height and pop out of compressed time to appear before the masses to give them any useful advice?
I am joking with you of course. I see things in terms of levels. The lower levels exist. They have basic needs. They also have 'unruly appetites' that require restraint (through force and also through education -- often the same).

I prefer the heights looking down on people seeing how much they enjoy making life miserable for each other.

Unlike Zarathustra coming down from his mountain, I don't consider it my job to offer any unasked for advice; besides, I'm sometimes in need of it myself; in that hope all I can say is "woe is me"!

Indeed lower levels exist who have basic needs. But as usual those lower levels persist happy in the fulfillment of their needs which also includes a vehement defense of all their prejudices, logic being the most dispensable ingredient in that endeavor.

-------------------

Anything of this length could only have happened on my day off.

Henry, as you know made a new thread on The Law by Frédéric Bastiat. I suggest that would be a lot more interesting than anything either of us said here...being much less metaphysical and of greater concern in consequence.

[Harbal]

Do you respect Einstein's observation of religious awe or is it just a waste of time?

I don't know what Einstein's observation was. Besides, I don't see the world through Einstein's eyes, or Simone Weil's eyes, or Plato's; I can only see it through my own.

Edit: I've just noticed that you quoted Einstein's observation. We all make observation's Nick, we don't need to steal someone else's.

[Dontaskme]

I don't see the world through Einstein's eyes, or Simone Weil's eyes, or Plato's; I can only see it through my own.

And that's all you will ever know, what you see through your own viewfinder.



Q: What is an idea?

A: I've no idea.

Philosophy is the artificial ressurection of what is actually dead.

Take no notice of the little blue smurf behind the veil.

[Belinda]

Harbal, you are funny ! I'm laughing at the picture of all these people emoting too much and too often.

Well can you imagine what it would be like if we had Everyman carrying on like that?

That surely would frighten the horses and make the household staff unruly.

[henry quirk]

Well spotted, Bruce.

I had to look that one up...

1 No poofters.
2 No member of the faculty is to maltreat the "Abos" in any way whatsoever—if there's anyone watching.
3 No poofters.
4 I don't want to catch anyone not drinking in their room after lights out.
5 No poofters.
6 There is no rule six.
7 No poofters.

Yep, that's it. Well done.

♭ "EEEEEEEmanuel Kant..." ♬♪

C'mon, everybody! Sing!

[henry quirk]

Henry, as you know made a new thread on The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

I made that one in March of '21. It was the first step in a project that never got off the ground.