If people want to stay in their home and muse on the existence of fairies or giant worms or whatever I honestly don't care, they're wasting their lives but thats their choice.
If they want to bore other people with it and inflict their nuttery on other people thats where it becomes a problem.
I am incurious about what bizarre and nonsensical fantasies people hold in their heads, if that makes me a weirdo then great I'm a weirdo.
but that's hardly what anyone is talking about when they mention spiritualism, or the possible consolations of religion/philosophy, are they? why do you focus on the silliest and most inane aspects? and not, you know, the actual human stuff?
you seem to conflate spirituality with magic and superstition, and little else. i think you've read too many fantasy novels and not enough theology.
The meaning of spirituality has developed and expanded over time, and various connotations can be found alongside each other.[1][2][3][note 1] Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man",[note 2] oriented at "the image of God"[4][5] as exemplified by the founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward the Holy Spirit[6] and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include mental aspects of life.[7] In modern times, the term both spread to other religious traditions[8] and broadened to refer to a wider range of experience, including a range of esoteric traditions and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a sacred dimension[9] and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live",[10][11] often in a context separate from organized religious institutions.[12] This may involve belief in a supernatural realm beyond the ordinarily observable world,[13] personal growth,[14] a quest for an ultimate or sacred meaning,[15] religious experience,[16] or an encounter with one's own "inner dimension."[17]
Seems they're thoroughly conflated already, I didn't need to do anything.
Anyway, its all complete bollocks. The best thing the average person can do is accept their life is meaningless and stop boring people. Egotists like yourself can't handle the idea that they don't matter - thats the real tragedy.
Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a sacred dimension[9] and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live",[10][11] often in a context separate from organized religious institutions.[12] This may involve belief in a supernatural realm beyond the ordinarily observable world,[13] personal growth,[14] a quest for an ultimate or sacred meaning,[15] religious experience,[16] or an encounter with one's own "inner dimension."[17]
errr precisely. where's the fairies and thinking about angels?
i'm fine accepting i don't matter. you seemingly missed the point that everyone has to construct an identity and give their life a narrative. you have done so also, and consider yourself very smug about it too, evidently. the point being that some religious wisdom and extra-scientific thinking can help to enrich people's lives, their sense of self and their sense of meaning.
the verifiable scientific 'truth' of such stuff is besides the point, taken pragmatically (william james wrote many good things on religious thinking). we tell ourselves, believe (and deceive) ourselves as to many untrue and even absurd things in order to get by in life – you are not exempt from this either. it's human.
you don't have to tell me that 'life is meaningless and accept it'. every 14 year old who first encounters sartre or nietzsche knows that. that's literally emo-teenager existentialism. the real important matter is what we choose to nominate for meaningfulness, to put in place of 'fate' or 'god's will' or whatnot. and your whole scientific naturalist, i-only-consider-the-rational take that 'the universe is just seething chaos and void slowly cooling down to a perfectly ordered heat death' is just a self-fancying-adult version of the same existentialist posturing. you really are a superior chap to confront the physical reality with such bravery!!!
the position that strikes me as the most true and authentic, as well as the most humane, is to admit that irrationally is 'baked in' to the human hardware and is as much a part of our total experience, the 'truth' of life as such, as scientific knowledge. you seem to regard irrationality as a character flaw or something that must be eradicated. i think you can only repress or suppress it, for it to irrupt into life elsewhere. the irrationality is in here with us. hume, again, said that all of the operations of the intellect are subservient to the passions.
you don't have a very nuanced or interesting take on this discussion. i am really shocked.
and you don't need to be away with the fairies to believe that observable reality isn't the total absolute capital-T truth of everything. speak to an astrophysicist or quantum physicist.
'science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.' - noted warhammer 40k enthusiast, max planck.
except things aren't 'made' of 'things' at the lowest quantum level at all, but nevermind chap. can't expect a lathe operator to know everything, i guess.
Yes, at the quantum level they're made of god's nose-scrapings held together with force-fields created by Celestials and dependent for energy on the power of prayer.
i am not claiming that god is hiding in quantum physics. i mentioned it because the 'observable reality' we take for granted using our sense-perceptions and notion of 'objective reality' is actually very, very different at that scale – and furthermore cannot even be properly 'observed' via said sense-perceptions and instruments. our entire understanding of the quantum world is probabilistic. so things are definitely not 'made of things' at the root level, which rather gives the lie to the fact that anything super- or supra- 'natural' must be, by default, complete bunkum. our grasp on the 'natural' world itself is not transcendent and absolute; we have a perspective and a scale.
i am saying that religious thinking is not necessarily incommensurate with scientific thinking. you don't have to be a hard-nosed scientific positivist or a credulous hippie talking about celestials and force-fields.
astrophysicists hypothesize freely about 'parallel universes' and other dimensions beyond our own in 3D space along a continuum of time. that's very far away from the scientific method, of empirical measurement, of testable hypotheses. is this so incommensurate with the type of speculative thinking entertained by medieval logicians and theologians about god and the nature of the universe?
many very, very smarts scientists have religious faith, or allow some room for 'spiritual' aspects to their life. are they dupes or hacks?
The simple fact is we can't see past the singularity and we're never going to know why the universe exists or why anything really happens. Maybe photons have a conscious and have figured this out.
People can believe what they want, its boring and I don't care.
Dilbert, a proponent of the pseudosciences is hardly in a position to throw haughty shade at religions and spirituality. Maybe even a step below, being the worst of both worlds.
What pseudosciences have I proponed? I don't remember proponing a single one.
Trumpian denialism. Wearing people down with sheer, befuddling obstinance. I can't believe you're not one of his biggest fans.
We've been here before. You say something that is unscientific, we say "wow, look at the resident scientist," you repeat the same unscientific thing oblivious to correction and reference, and then the process maybe starts all over again after 16 hours.
Think how much time spent on religion and pondering spirituality could have been spent on something useful.
The powerpuff girl or whatever movie drove you to tears you said, while she was floating in space. Are you not even interested in why? How could human thought possibly be an uninteresting topic if you were so affected by something so shallow and commercial?
We've been here before. You say something that is unscientific, we say "wow, look at the resident scientist," you repeat the same unscientific thing oblivious to correction and reference, and then the process maybe starts all over again after 16 hours.
No I don't.
The powerpuff girl or whatever movie drove you to tears you said, while she was floating in space. Are you not even interested in why?
Not really no.
How could human thought possibly be an uninteresting topic if you were so affected by something so shallow and commercial?
literally no one is saying this? i just outlined above in my large post the criticisms of the inductive method, as part of the philosophy of science. i cited popper, hume and kuhn, and didn't once make recourse to 'that's god, folks!' my point is, precisely, that there are evidently epistemological/logical limitations to what science can provably 'know'. not just in terms of cause-effect but in terms of inductive logic generally; there's still an admissible possibility of things in reality occurring 'outside' of science's purview, of being extra- or supra-scientific.
and why are you obsessed with 'the singularity'? as if all spiritual considerations are about origins or god-creators? i don't think a vast tract of 'spiritual' (or irrational or extra-scientific, take your pick) thinking is concerned with these questions at all. i don't care how the universe started, or if it was initiated by a giant sentient ball of gas with a superiority complex or a greek god on a mountainside, it would really mean very little to me and how i choose to live, experience and value things in my own life.
again, i really don't think having an interest in spiritual matters, whatever form they may take, is incompatible with the practice of science.
you don't have to tell us you think it's boring: i think we got that. but why is anyone who is interested in greater self-knowledge, or in greater meaning in their lives, a 'mad man' or a 'coward' or a 'fool'? many greater minds than yours have pursued these questions – sometimes in addition to a highly successful scientific career.
your line is continually one of a naive scientific naturalism. 'all scientists should be atheists and anyone who gives credence to religious thinking is an idiot or a fool'. this is inane. many huge thinkers have seriously considered this question far beyond your lame assumptions of a know-all scientific frame of mind. newton? descartes? galileo? pascal? or, more recently and more appositely, freeman dyson? robert neumann? max planck? eugene wigner, the godfather of quantum physics?
i'm not making lame appeals to their authority to claim spirituality is 'real' or religion is 'correct': just that some high-power intellects seem to have different opinions to your own, which perhaps should check your hasty assumptions about 'science being correct and all else being gibberish'. scientific knowledge has limits; and for giving meaning and direction to our own lives, the spiritual tradition has plenty of great sources.
Scientists have long been associated with religion’s decline around the world. But little data permit analysis of the religiosity of scientists or their perceptions of the science-faith interface. Here we present the first ever survey data from biologists and physicists in eight regions around the world—France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, countries and regions selected because they exhibit differing degrees of religiosity, varying levels of scientific infrastructure, and unique relationships between religious and state institutions (N = 9,422). The data collection includes biologists and physicists at all career stages from elite and non-elite universities and research institutes. We uncovered that in most of the national contexts studied, scientists are indeed more secular—in terms of beliefs and practices—than those in their respective general populations, although in four of the regional contexts, over half of scientists see themselves as religious. And surprisingly, scientists do not think science is in conflict with religion. Instead, most see religion and science as operating in separate spheres.
We've been here before. You say something that is unscientific, we say "wow, look at the resident scientist," you repeat the same unscientific thing oblivious to correction and reference, and then the process maybe starts all over again after 16 hours.
No I don't.
You really do tho.
The powerpuff girl or whatever movie drove you to tears you said, while she was floating in space. Are you not even interested in why?
Not really no.
How could human thought possibly be an uninteresting topic if you were so affected by something so shallow and commercial?
Don't know and don't care.
Anyway, why is mythology (cited in the pet thread), spirituality, religion, philosophy, history, etc. a waste of everyone's time, but things like performance target shooting springs shipped from the US to Australia (or a movie about a comic book girl who flies to space, or a bizarre film adaptation of an embarrassing stage play) not?
Maybe I'll write a book 'Dilbert's Road to Marvel' and 'The Infinity War Saga: How it Explains Everything and Gives Meaning to Our Otherwise Dismal Lives"
many people are libidinally and emotionally invested in the marvel universe and superhero claptrap as a substitute/transfer for what would previously have been invested in religion or other myths. that's a pretty common take on their contemporary popularity: they're modern myths for american/western audiences. in any case, there's clearly some element of social ritual involved when all those star wars geeks go to the cinema together and spend weeks/months afterwards endlessly arguing and talking about it. it's a great collective catharsis and does much for that group's identity and its formation.
the fact you take such pleasure in them and become so involved in them suggests you're not immune to 'unscientific' thinking yourself. surely a man of science and good counsel would recognize they are productions of industrial studios, high-tech illusions and dramatic spectacles, generated for the sole purpose of extracting profit?
audiences for drama and fiction exercise a 'suspension of disbelief': people searching or considering spiritual matters can alternatively suspend their disbelief, also, or be skeptical and doubting. doubt and skepticism are integral parts of many religious communities and the way they practice their faith, just as much as credulous devotion and 'suspension of disbelief' is for others.
How could someone be so dismissive of the human psyche as a topic, yet be interested in the singularity? Technological singularity by the way, a thing itself mired in skepticism from scientists and engineers over the fanciful way it is sometimes presented.
