(no subject)

[proximoception]

The thing I hate most about religion is how, when you scratch adherents, you find at the bottom some kind of misguided existentialist defense.

I don't want to live in a world where...If there is no God then nothing means...I refuse to believe that there isn't something out...

A. You have the power to lie but not the right. Keep desire and belief separate.
B. Everything means, and that is clearly the problem you're having.
C. Quit moving the "something" bar. Anything you've ever called something is something.

Creating meaning by an act of will is no cooler when there's precedent either. Q. How can everyone throughout all history be wrong? A. Have you examined All History lately?

At least it makes me feel...

It stops you feeling more.

Comments

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

I haven't really thought about this much, but I like your formulations of the problem.

Modal verbs are troublesome, and with that I'll excuse my inability to accept A and your last two answers. It seems people define these words idiosyncratically especially to allow some gap in which their faith/religion/dogma/whatever may lodge.

Which leaves B & C, which I like for how they bring in the decentered/autopoietic/emergent view. The funny thing to me is that some people use that emergence itself as an argument for god, simply by attaching that name to the phenomenon. The same problem permeates cognitive science: so many people are unaware that the very way they structure the questions presumes dualism. It's all or nothing, not all-except or nothing-and-yet. And for practical purpuses, "all" (the real all) and "nothing" turn out to be pretty much equivalent answers.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm not trying to argue logically so much as through reminders. I think we're all living the same kind of life, and anything we erect on top of it respects the terrain or falls--or makes the terrain fall. The right to force up a wall against logic and information using modal statements is what I'm denying, in all of these. Things left out are unaccounted for, because accounting for them kills your invisible, impossible architecture.

Fixed meanings are reliable repeated distinctions, to me. Get enough of these and you indeed have a "center," though never the strawman continental philosophers set up to attack empiricists and one another. The center is the point of lowest ground, hence at the mercy of waters.

Though by "everything meaning" I wasn't thinking of the awfulness of uncontrolled ubiquitous emergence, but of specific pains and pressures. People who become religious, rather than being raised into it, need to be reminded of that especially. You did it after he died, after they laughed at you, after the headaches started. Once in the God sac you identify these as the ways God got at you, the bitemarks of the Hound of Heaven. Outside the sac it looks like you closed your eyes to stop seeing red.

The cognitive science remarks interest me, though I'm sure I don't fully know what you mean. A version of the determinism debate? Your thoughts are just these motions in your flowy brain, they say, but saying it makes the brain motions something in words, causing further motions in themselves and hearers causing further words etc.(?) Actually why bring words into it. You look at your own EEG as it's happening and think about it, and think about your brain which is thinking about your EEG which is thinking about your thoughts. A monism curving back on itself to sense its own shape = a dualism?

For my money, if you're in a place where you can use "all" and "nothing" as more than local summaries or metaphors, you've taken a wrong turn.