I agree that you've proven this point.
I also have come to appreciate that your responses are emotionally driven, but you shouldn't presume that mine have been. What you choose to characterize as "that awkward engineer thing going on regarding emotion" may be just rational, unimpassioned, "brain-on" thinking.
No, that is exactly what I do mean. Rational, unimpassioned, brain-on thinking is thought that is disembodied from feeling, thinking that is divorced from the awareness of the motivation that drives it, thought that can be driven by any feeling, thought that does not source in love. This is the kind of thought that can think and believe anything, the mad babble of souls that are lost.
What you call unimpassioned is it's exact opposite. It is thought that is nothing bur emotional but the awareness of what feeling is driving is dead. It is the thought driven not by consciousness of love, but the suppression of feelings that can happen when love is absent. This is how cleaver and well intended people can develop the fine honed ideologies that allow things like the Spanish Inquisition and Nazism to thrive. If you do not feel the source of your being you can think anything. This is why it's engineers that give us Chernobyl and hydrogen bombs. All this is rationalized easily by the unconscious mind because it projects a mirror out there of what it is and what it fears, the terror that there are other thinking minds out there who might do first to you what you wish to do to them. And there's all that money to be made to fill up that hole in the soul that only love can fill.
Another problem with that type of mind, of course, is that when presented with truths about itself like these it retreats in defensiveness, self pity, and reflexive attack. It always responds to knowledge that can inform it as personal attack. And again, that is because it lacks the intuition of feeling because there is numbness where love should be.
PS: In the fourth grade I was thinking, designing, and drawing plans for machines that could kill millions and millions of people, many of which were long after independently implemented and exist today and some that haven't seen the light of day. I know very well what it is to think like an engineer.
The motivation is to arrive at an understanding of reality that isn't colored by emotional preferences, desires or "attitude".
Isn't that motivation itself an emotional preference, a desire, or an "attitude"? I realize it sounds like I'm being glib, but I assure you I'm not. I think it is a significant shortcoming of modern academic and intellectual pursuits that those aspects of human experiences are deliberately ignored, when truly controlling for those things is basically impossible.
What if the definition of 'useful' is itself is at its core emotional/aesthetic?I've pretty clearly made a choice (influenced by my emotions) for a "rational, unimpassioned, brain-on" thought process (along the lines of the scientific process) because it seems to be the most useful approach.
It isn't that you should or must rely on your emotions as part of analytic reasoning lest you minimize local or global optimality, no no: it's that you have no choice at all about it and that you think that you are being un-emotional only means that you have the most implicit bias possible.That said, I don't agree that this means I should (or need to) intentionally involve emotions in my objective thought process.
Minimizing the role of emotions means minimizing the role of utility; because an austere look at physical reality will tell you there is no judgement of 'utility' to be found.I also agree that complete emotional control is impossible, but the goal to minimize it makes perfect sense (at least to me)
It isn't that you should or must rely on your emotions as part of analytic reasoning lest you minimize local or global optimality, no no: it's that you have no choice at all about it and that you think that you are being un-emotional only means that you have the most implicit bias possible.
Minimizing the role of emotions means minimizing the role of utility; because an austere look at physical reality will tell you there is no judgement of 'utility' to be found.
The value of testing ideas and falsifying through experimentation is that it allows for a laser like focus on some aesthetic goal.
But the methods for going from theory to hypothesis are a matter of socialization and personal aesthetics tempered by the utility those methods in reaching some aesthetic end: And aesthetics are pathos-logical.
Now, if you find raw knowledge about physical properties beautiful (as do I, and I'm sure most here do) then focus on that through science is a wonderful pursuit. But when we turn that toward understanding the existentials of the human condition we must either assume away everything that is human in said condition or we must drop the assumption that the collection of raw knowledge is in anyway 'value free'.
I was going to caveat evolution; but then even evolution is an aesthetic judgment that perpetuating genetic code (or any particular genetic code) is the utilitarian goal. Though I'll agree it is one that is common to most humanity.I think you're making a big leap here. My austere look at physical reality suggests that "utility" might be unaesthetically, unemotionally defined as a characteristic or action that enhances survival in a Darwinian sense.
The problem is that the existentialism of what it is to be a person is forever entwined with 'objective knowledge'. This isn't to say that there's nothing that's 'real' (we agree if you step in front of a buss it is you or the buss) but rather that any important 'objective' meaning given to anything is subjectively created.I don't see objective reality as being influenced by an individual's personal aesthetic... If this is a reference to existentialism or some other philosophical line of reasoning that is independent from (never intersecting with) objective reality, then I agree that this is outside the bounds of the objective thinking I am trying to describe.
I was going to caveat evolution; but then even evolution is an aesthetic judgment that perpetuating genetic code (or any particular genetic code) is the utilitarian goal. Though I'll agree it is one that is common to most humanity.
Nothing 'objective' about reality can tell you how we should value someone being hit by a buss; only that there was once a biological process and now there is none.
When we agree that there's more to life than alive/dead and replicating then a whole different kind of reasoning is needed to navigate the world.
M: But what you want to do is to agree to disagree with a figment of your imagination. The positions you attribute to me here are not mine. I don't believe in the god you don't believe in either. I have a scientific mind. The God I believe in is the God that is left when everything you believe in is taken away. The funny thing about dying on that cross is that the resurrection only comes when the ego really dies. Don't get me wrong. Some folk find a love of God so strong they actually become Him. They have hearts that radiate his light. Like I said early on in this thread, that can happen when what you pray for is the manifestation of His Will on earth as it is in Heaven.
But because of my need to see thing as natural processes without Supernatural Beings to believe in, I had to discover this the hard way. I know the truth not because I believe, but because I experienced it by it happening to me. The weird part, though, is there was nothing I did or could have planned to do to cause it. I guess, then, I do believe in Grace.
I agree, that argument can and has been reasonably made by evolutionary psychologists. I don't agree with them, but they agree with them and that's good enough for them.You make a fair point, but I'm not sure this is as black and white as you suggest. An argument can be made that our tribal/societal natures along with the distress and sense of loss we feel after losing someone are tied back to our subconscious (instinctual) concerns over how our survival is affected.
I respect that.Frankly, I wouldn't enjoy pursuing this line of argument any further.
Believe it or not, what I described as your beliefs was based on what I gleaned from your previous posts. I wouldn't call them figments of my imagination, although they may be misinterpretations of what you meant.
What you say here about discovering your truth the hard way makes me wonder if you think it's possible for you to convincingly convey it through a discussion like this. Perhaps I'll just have to experience something like the shaft of light that knocked Paul off his ass onto his ass. While we're waiting for that to happen, we will continue to disagree regardless of whether or not you agree.
correction to what I posted earlier.
You can go against God's Will however His Plan is unbreakable because it is already known since the beginning of time.
correction to what I posted earlier.
You can go against God's Will however His Plan is unbreakable because it is already known since the beginning of time.
Exactly. Which means prayer is pointless because it doesn't change a thing. It also proves free will is an illusion.
Yeah if you pray, you're basically going against His Will, in other words you're saying your own limited mortal knowledge is somehow greater than His Divine Plan, Which He Thought Of In His Divineness While Dreaming Up The Universe.
If you are praying for the future, that makes sense
If you are praying to acknowledge the past; it is different.
Prayer makes a person feel good - which is the point of religion - to pass problems onto someone/thing else.
To me religion exists because it has to. With the invention and evolution of language man gained that power to reason and lost the capacity just to be. With language we learned to think of ourselves as evil. You could say we developed a bad attitude toward our own potential but invented instead a method, the world of ideas, on which to project what we used to be, a Being out of time with an infinite capacity to love. What we could no longer be we turned into a graven image, an ideal, one that promises us we can have real being again if we are real.
In other words religion is the natural act of health projected by the sick. It exists only because what it promises to achieve is our real potential. God created us in His image because we created Him in ours and we would have never created him if He weren't real. You don't project what can't be achieved. For Christians Jesus was the proof of that.
So the real purpose of prayer, in my opinion, is to flip a switch, to turn back on our capacity to love. There is this thing called God who loves us like we were meant to love ourselves and can't. God becomes more and more real the more one loves as He does. This is the power and the glory. Man did not fall by actions but by believing in lies, the lie that the self is worthless.
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How?? Are you more powerful than God? When it is your will versus God's will, how is it that God's will loses?You can go against God's Will...
Yes, I understand that. Unfortunately, I lost my Christian faith as a youth when I began to search for meaning. I was alone in my faith and knew nothing. I had no Christian teachers, much less ones with profound understanding who might have answered my questions satisfactorily. Thus, I have come to understand Christian faith indirectly and from a distance from the point of view of my own understanding. Thus, while you probably think of God as something out there I believe that God is only found within. For me then whether there is a God out there is unknowable to me. All I know is that the suffering I went through by the loss of my faith ended suddenly in a curious event, some kind of flash of insight or jump in perspective.
For me then, the folk I feel most comfortable trying to reach about what I see aren't religious folk who have what I think is a better way to offer, but folk who, like me, have come not to believe or never have believed.
So what I do them is interpret religion from my perspective, try to understand it philosophically or rationally as a psychological phenomenon. So here is my take on your words which, because you have a better way to see things, I hope you will ignore. I will state them for others who like me aren't people of faith:
DC: This acknowledgement of our own depravity and allowing of God to intervene to change us my no means of our own (as our means are depraved) is the heart of Christianity.
M: This is true from my perspective because we identify ourselves as the ego. The ego is the defense we had to create to suppress the traumatic events we have all been through that caused us to feel that we are the worst in the world. It is a mask we can't take off without remembering. It is our armor and out denial and the cause of our separation from out true selves, or awareness and unity with God. It is our hell and our suffering because it was built by fear. It is arrogance and pride and certainty, the false creation of an alternate self worth, a self worth of pretense because our real feelings about ourselves are self hate.
DC: This is why Christians start off explaining that YOU are evil and in need of salvation, they are explaining that THEY are evil. The problem, of course, is that misapplication of this become self-hate-inducing instead of liberation from self hate by the grace of God.
M: And Christians are right about this. The ego can't die of it's on volition. It plays an endless series of games. It keeps inventing reasons why we are really OK, that we now have the truth, that we have changed, and on and on and on. We are our own worst enemy. We do not want to feel our own self contempt. We do not want to open our hearts to Gods love or our own self acceptance because we were destroyed in that state. To love is to die all over again.
And here the Christian has the advantage. It is terribly difficult but more easily possible for a person who hates himself to imagine that a Supreme Being who loves all of us maximally and the same might actually really love him, than that worthless piece of shit he feels himself to be to love him. Just about anything is more possible than that. There is a tremendous advantage to having the perspective that God is out there because in here there is only the feeling of worthlessness and self loathing. Furthermore, there is not the slightest way to tell if the God that actually is within isn't also out there because the eye with which we can see God is the same one with which He sees us and it is impossible to tell where that eye is. I know there is this great love thingi that can happen to anybody. I just marvel and the hows and wheres and whys of it all. It is mystery itself. Awesome, so to speak.