Re: ex-christian.net
Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:51 pm
So, are you saying we live in "God's" ground school and live life taking our hits and learning our lessons to give us the ability to live in peace in the next life?
"Should" is a word freighted with heavy baggage. We should be guided by shoulds when it is a question of not doing damage to others: not stealing, slandering, heedlessly seducing. Our activity to enhance the lives of others, and to foster a collective, community life, is for the sake of the quality of life that can be achieved.Lawrence wrote:Then you believe our collective activity should be like the communists claim. All for the good of the party.
The next life is lived by our descendants. As well, the complex energy of the soul is something with durability that we cannot explain in a simple empirical way. The whole bundle of memories and influences and identity surrounding a person can be seen as producing a persistent existence past the physical, even if the simple myths of personal immortality are not accurate.Harry Marks wrote:I don't believe in the next life in any descriptive sense.
My view is that all the stories of the Gospels are parables, not to be taken literally. The most vivid afterlife stories are the parables of Dives and Lazarus, and the Last Judgement.Harry Marks wrote: Interestingly, there is modern scholarship that questions whether Jesus thought of an afterlife.
The meaning of eternal life (αἰώνιον - aionion) can be seen from this verse out of the Last Judgement, seen in the interlinear version that directly compares the original Greek with a literal English translation word by word. “[The careless] will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matt 25:46)Harry Marks wrote: It depends on how certain key phrases are translated, including the one for "eternal life". Apparently the term we know as "eternal life" actually refers to life that is timeless in quality rather than endless in extent.
The word ‘telos’ (purpose) is highly controversial due to the simplistic and stupid restriction of it to the debate about intentional design in creation. The untrue idea from conventional young earth creationists is that God somehow magically designed all creatures with a teleological purpose that operates in some supernatural way, separate to the observed processes of natural biological evolution. That old false metaphysics is a simplistic 'flat earth' model, meaning it extrapolates from naïve experience without taking into account any scientific knowledge. Traditional simple teleology of creation is just a distraction from any genuine philosophical and theological effort to find a sense of purpose in life.Harry Marks wrote: There is some good thinking going on that encourages those of us who are religious to think in terms of such language expressing "telos" or purpose, rather than being descriptive.
The purpose or telos of life can be seen in the moral value of complexity. Complexity is a scientific idea in the theory of evolution that observes how stable evolving systems gradually adapt with ever greater depth to their ecological niche. All the genetic factors of cumulative adaptation constantly push on the doors of available mutation. The doors which open, reflecting natural causal possibility, allow organisms to sustain a more complex genetic code.Harry Marks wrote: What is life for?
Care, concern, connection, relationship, these have all been corrupted as the ground of identity and morality by the prevailing attitudes of American Individualism. This pervasive way of thought has infected the whole globe, through its seductive imperial roots in the highly traumatised and ignorant philosophy of British Empiricism.Harry Marks wrote: To learn to regard others as being necessary to our sense of self.
Serving others is an important moral principle, but has to be placed in the context of the good of the whole, which creates highly complex moral dilemmas regarding the consequences and principles of rival actions. For example, the tension between caring for your own children versus other valuable moral actions.Harry Marks wrote:To learn to give ourselves over to the welfare of another, or others, in the same way parents devote themselves to the welfare of their children.
“Nourishment of souls” is certainly a high moral goal. How personal prosperity can be a means to this end is again a challenging vision, putting economics at the focus of morality. Market capitalism can provide the talents and resources needed to create wealth and skills for distribution to those who lack the advantages of others, but only if both government and civil society focus on the enabling environment for this goal, through a combination of moral or spiritual guidance and formal regulation.Harry Marks wrote: To get lost in this pursuit to an extent that one's own advantage or gain is seen only as a means, not as an end, with the nourishment of souls being the only end that achieves a certain quality of aliveness that leaves the ordinary in the dust.
Having a stake in the future through the continuity of our personal genetic code with the river of time touches deep instinctive psychological impulses that have a rational foundation in our moral care for the good of the future.Harry Marks wrote: A non-Christian expressed to his wife "I used to find it incredible that anyone would risk their own life to save another person's child. Now that we have a child, I not only understand it, I can't imagine not taking that risk." If you have been a parent, you probably understand. It just means so much more than ordinary life, than the choice of what to watch on Netflix or which car to buy.
scrumfish wrote:I scrolled through a whole bunch of well meaning shit. Dude...divorce sucks. That is all.
Don't know about you, but I'm starving for hugs with covid and all. There's a lady in our church who just hugs everybody, very naturally. I don't know how she does it, but she is also one of those people who are really good at learning names, so I figure people just mean a lot to her. Maybe we all glow when she looks at us, or something, I don't know. But I know I miss seeing her.scrumfish wrote:Oh, are we supposed to hug or something now?
Well, I'm interested if you want to make it clearer. I am pretty surprised to hear that there are 7 basic worldviews, and even more that they are mutually exclusive (since so much overlaps between, say, Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism) so probably I don't have a very good grasp on what you are expressing.Lawrence wrote:My point, which obviously has not been made clear is, humans have let their "governments" set the goals of life for their nation. Those goals have been derived from the 7 basic world, mutually exclusive, views.We leave it off on the side as an observation about occasional moments of clarity, rather than thinking how to build it into our ways of living. Pretty sad when we are willing to let the advertising industry tell us what makes life better.
It strikes me that most of the worldviews that must be believed are already pretty much outmoded. The picture they are meant to provide, of how life works and how it should be lived, still functions pretty well. But when we get into more detailed, practical questions like "how do you know that the institution of property is good?" or "how should we treat kids who are having trouble learning because they live with high levels of chronic stress at home?" that come up when we try to pursue our values, well, the traditional worldviews are framed in old-fashioned, pre-scientific, right-brain imagery. That's one reason it's easy to dismiss them as devoid of facts.Lawrence wrote: All of the world views must be "believed" to be true but in fact have not one scintilla of fact upon which to base their opinions.
I would like to hear more about your views on this. I have long taken it as a critical landmark of thinking that an effort to force others to see values my way is futile by definition (if they claim to value something because they have been pressured, then they don't really value them, do they?). That has a lot of implications, including that if I think the world would be a better place if everyone thought about something a certain way (cue the Global Warming warnings) then I should try to persuade them of that. They still might not choose it, but at least they would understand that there are respectable reasons to think that way.Lawrence wrote: Thus, we are meandering around through life trying to figure out the "true" meaning of life and frantically moving from one false promise to the next in desperation and in our pride we claim the view we are holding is the "true and accurate" fact of life and with our mindless arrogance believe we have authority to force our beliefs on all who believe differently.
Hopeless? On my bad days, maybe. But since most people I know are genuinely interested in making the world a better place, there seems to be a lot of room for common ground to be found. What do you see as a path forward?Lawrence wrote:It seems hopeless we can all come together with a working model of moving toward a common goal but if we realize we are all on this planet and we all have the same destiny, maybe, just maybe, we can.