Spiritual but not religious?

Megii

earwighoney said:

Megii said:

Question - basically what's it all about please - life, the universe.. ?

Answer - Having a wank. 

There has to be more, surely?  

octatonic

Megii said:

earwighoney said:

Megii said:

Question - basically what's it all about please - life, the universe.. ?

Answer - Having a wank. 

There has to be more, surely?  

See 'edging'.

HAL9000

42

You can thank me later

earwighoney

Megii said:

earwighoney said:

Megii said:

Question - basically what's it all about please - life, the universe.. ?

Answer - Having a wank. 

There has to be more, surely?  

No. 

holnrew

Nah, everything is broken down to chemicals, molecules, atoms, sub atomic particles and quarks. It's all a big nothing

Megii

@octatonic (and anyone else that's interested) you mentioned Sam Harris, I mentioned Max Tegmark, and then I found this:

Megii

holnrew said:

Nah, everything is broken down to chemicals, molecules, atoms, sub atomic particles and quarks. It's all a big nothing

And yet surely, there is some kind of something - we don't know what it is really, but the fact that we are talking about this surely means that's true...

beed84

I'd consider myself to be either a torn atheist or an open-minded spiritualist. I don't believe there is a god per se; however, I find it hard to believe that this complex universe happened by accident. Even if there were no life on earth, no planets, no nothing, the fact that there is a vast amount of space for everything to fit in anyway is striking - everything requires space to exist and it just so happens we have it.

Another view on wondrous design is the spider. How a little creature can spin beautiful webs that happen to withstand rough weather and catch the food that it lives on is hard to take as coincidence. To me that is design in spades.

I do appreciate the Taoist approach (more of a way of being that an belief system), which is simply "The Way", that is going along with life, appreciating how things are and not trying to fight it. To me, it's more productive than trying to figure out why we are here. Although it does provide good discussion, evidently.

Roland

Descartes said "If God didn't exist then man would have to create him", by which I understand him to mean "many people have an underlying need for a god concept in their lives". 

Looking at it a slightly different way, we are comfortable when something resonates with our underlying values and beliefs ....

.Megii said:

 it seems that our brains create a kind of  image of reality, but we don't know what reality really is ... and that ends up with my brain somehow forming an image with that colour. So it's "in my head" 

.... or thoughts.

To my mind spirituality is being aware of these resonances. Whether you interpret them as supernatural beings, or "just the way the brain works", or something in between, is up to you. 

Roland

beed84 said:

I'd consider myself to be either a torn atheist or an open-minded spiritualist. I don't believe there is a god per se; however, I find it hard to believe that this complex universe happened by accident.

Isn't that the Goldilocks Syndrome? We don't know any other universe, so it's difficult to conceptualise one, but that doesn't mean that our is a priori unique

Drew_TNBD

And no-one said it was an accident either.

TheBlueWolf

Roland said:

Descartes said "If God didn't exist then man would have to create him", by which I understand him to mean "many people have an underlying need for a god concept in their lives". 

Looking at it a slightly different way, we are comfortable when something resonates with our underlying values and beliefs ....

.Megii said:

 it seems that our brains create a kind of  image of reality, but we don't know what reality really is ... and that ends up with my brain somehow forming an image with that colour. So it's "in my head" 

.... or thoughts.

To my mind spirituality is being aware of these resonances. Whether you interpret them as supernatural beings, or "just the way the brain works", or something in between, is up to you. 

@Roland that's an interesting quote from Descartes.

I think it's pretty accurate that my belief system requires a God or some other similar entity. It's my way of attempting to quantify things that I've observed but don't have any solid evidence to explain it with. 

Drew_TNBD

I don't need a god. At one point in my life I did need Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible though.

Megii

beed84 said:

I'd consider myself to be either a torn atheist or an open-minded spiritualist. I don't believe there is a god per se; however, I find it hard to believe that this complex universe happened by accident. Even if there were no life on earth, no planets, no nothing, the fact that there is a vast amount of space for everything to fit in anyway is striking - everything requires space to exist and it just so happens we have it.

Another view on wondrous design is the spider. How a little creature can spin beautiful webs that happen to withstand rough weather and catch the food that it lives on is hard to take as coincidence. To me that is design in spades.

I do appreciate the Taoist approach (more of a way of being that an belief system), which is simply "The Way", that is going along with life, appreciating how things are and not trying to fight it. To me, it's more productive than trying to figure out why we are here. Although it does provide good discussion, evidently.

I used to be quite interested in Taoism, and still have a few books on the subject. I have to agree it daft to try to think about a reason why we are here, at least in terms of our existence having any kind of "purpose" that we are meant to fulfill. Maybe a better way of putting it is to ask just how it is that we are here.

"Design" in terms of things such as the spider/web example, I can't really go along with. I find the theory of evolution is the best explanation for that, albeit we don't understand the process perfectly, but still... But I may not be understanding what you mean by design properly I realise.

Space - what is it? What is time, what is matter, what is energy? All things that physicists have got better at describing with mathematics over the years, but beyond that, what actually are these things? Maybe that's even a meaningless question, and at the root of it all, there is just maths, and nothing else (see Max Tegmark).

holnrew

Animals with the intelligence we have were inevitable, but we're kind of an aberration of nature because we think we're separate from and better than it. But what we're made of has existed before, as plants and animals and chances are every one of us has breathed the same molecule of oxygen. Thoughts, feelings... They're just biological programming and have no real meaning except to ourselves. Enjoy life by all means, make everything of it you can because it's all we have. But at the end of the day we're part of a bigger picture. There's no plan as such but there's a system, a natural order and I find it beautiful and inspiring.

Megii

holnrew said:

Animals with the intelligence we have were inevitable, but we're kind of an aberration of nature because we think we're separate from and better than it. But what we're made of has existed before, as plants and animals and chances are every one of us has breathed the same molecule of oxygen. Thoughts, feelings... They're just biological programming and have no real meaning except to ourselves. Enjoy life by all means, make everything of it you can because it's all we have. But at the end of the day we're part of a bigger picture. There's no plan as such but there's a system, a natural order and I find it beautiful and inspiring.

I tend to agree with all of this, except for the "Thoughts, feelings... They're just biological programming..." bit - I think it's easy to say things like that, but it doesn't really explain their very real existence to us ourselves. I find Dan Dennett's "conciousness is an illusion" stuff unsatisfactory in a similar way.

Drew_TNBD

holnrew said:

Animals with the intelligence we have were inevitable, but we're kind of an aberration of nature because we think we're separate from and better than it. But what we're made of has existed before, as plants and animals and chances are every one of us has breathed the same molecule of oxygen. Thoughts, feelings... They're just biological programming and have no real meaning except to ourselves. Enjoy life by all means, make everything of it you can because it's all we have. But at the end of the day we're part of a bigger picture. There's no plan as such but there's a system, a natural order and I find it beautiful and inspiring.

What a load of old wobbly bollocks.

holnrew

That's fair. I just think that intelligence, thoughts and feelings are more advanced than they should be for the natural order of things. That's why we're destroying the planet, have mental illness and other such things. We'll destroy ourselves (and a lot of other things sadly), because it's against the order of things. Star Trek is just a dream. Human nature isn't natural.

All this is IMO of course. I don't mean to state anything as fact. Thanks for making me think though, it's interesting figuring this stuff out.

Winny_Pooh

The simplest thing I could say without filling pages is to watch Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. I'm halfway through and he has things pretty much figured out for the most part. He is spiritual (like Jung) but connects the dots of philosophy and religion rather adeptly from the position of rationality.

Chalky

holnrew said:

That's fair. I just think that intelligence, thoughts and feelings are more advanced than they should be for the natural order of things. That's why we're destroying the planet, have mental illness and other such things. We'll destroy ourselves (and a lot of other things sadly), because it's against the order of things. Star Trek is just a dream. Human nature isn't natural.

All this is IMO of course. I don't mean to state anything as fact. Thanks for making me think though, it's interesting figuring this stuff out.

One of the biggest things that Darwin did was to demonstrate that there is NO natural order or balance of nature or natural harmony. Nature is "red in tooth and claw". Evolutionary theory has randomness as its essence. Saying Mankind upsets the balance of nature is anti-Darwinian, and is simply replacing the religious God with the spiritual 'Nature'.