So, the other day I was watching a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, two brilliant people when it comes to psychology and neuroscience. In their conversation, they talked about deriving an "ought" from an "is" and both agreed, apparently, that it was indeed possible to do so. I, however, have my objections in regards to this, particularly because of the axioms necessary to reach this conclusion. An "is" is objectively true regardless of whether an observer exists or not, but an "ought" requires necessarily a subject to observe and interpret a phenomenon, subject, or object in order to be derived from said observation target. In other words, the "ought" is not derived from the target, but from the concept the observer has on the target. Since concepts are interpretations (meaning that usually are subject to the observer's biases) two observers may observe the same "is" but create different concepts. If the "ought" is derived from said interpretations, then the "ought" may, depending of deviations, turn out to be substantially different for both observers and, in order to determine the "right ought" you would need to accept certain axioms as true in order to evaluate the "oughts". That however would require universal acceptance of those axioms, which is simply not the case as these propositions are held as (not-so-evident) self-evident truths.
Now, why am I talking about this subject here? Because these philosophical conundrums are partially responsible for my nihilistic world view. It was these questions, many which do not have real, clear answers that have put a significant dent in my motivations. Being as emotionally distant as I am has effectively pushed me to seek refuge in rationality, but rationality in itself fails to produce a coherent and independent answer. Therefore, I have no option but to look for answers in other places. Yet, so far, there has been no answer, that does not necessitate a large amount of axioms and assumptions, that has made this thing we call existence make any sense.
I am genuinely curious about anyone's opinions in regards the subject in the title, or anything about this post, really. Thank you for reading and I hope you have pleasant day.
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Don't count on reason alone to get you where you need to go. Knowledge does not necessarily require reason. Harris is a proponent of scientism, the view that science is the only way to truth or knowledge.
But this is not true because (1) this is a statement not of science but of philosophy and is therefore self-refuting, and (2) reason and science are not the only forms of knowledge. For example, animals know they need to eat, drink, reproduce and run away when in danger. But they don't arrive at this knowledge by reason. They did not attend classes on nutrition, sex education and self-preservation; they have this knowledge a priori via instinct. Instinct is a form of knowledge because the animals know these things to be true; they can't be just guessing and getting lucky over and over.
Universal acceptance is not required for an "ought" to be true. If that were the case -- if it takes only one person out of 7+ billion to veto the truth of any proposition -- then nothing would be true. It is still the case today that the idea that the Earth is round is not universally accepted. Is it therefore really unclear whether the Earth is round? Like everything else, an ought is either ontologically true or it isn't, independent of what anyone thinks about it.
Nihilism stinks. It's a philosophy that's unlivable once you step away from the dorm room rap session or the lecture hall. It's lethal because the only rational response to it is despair. And it makes perfect sense -- if there is no God. On the other hand, if God does exist and he has infused the entire universe with eternal meaning and purpose and makes moral demands of the creatures he has made in his image, nihilism implodes and everything else falls into place.
A couple of quotes that may help here:
Would it not be strange if a universe with no purpose accidentally created beings -- humans -- who are obsessed with purpose? -- Sir John Templeton
If the universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. Just as, in a universe with no light and therefore no creatures with eyes, we would never have found out it was dark. -- CS Lewis
Not only the Bible but history, science, philosophy and the universe itself are all telling the glory of God. Come out of yourself and taste and see that the Lord is good...
BTW, what's wrong with axioms and assumptions? How can there be anything without a First Cause beyond which you cannot go?
Instinct may be a form of "knowledge" (albeit a rather faulty one), but its origins and functioning can be explained, partially, through existing theories derived from observations with rather testable predictions.
An "ought" is something that is derived from an inference or a deduction, an assumption (often sustained by other unsubstantiated assumptions) about the ideal state something must be in. You cannot derive consistently the same ought without using a frame of reference or guideline, and since both of those require their own set of assumptions and axioms, you get something that often varies considerably from individual to individual as even the interpretation of those frames or guidelines varies.
If you answer all questions with: "God did it", that is obviously going to make things fall into place, as you are using "God" as a wildcard. The thing is, there is not enough evidence that a god exists. Even if a god does exist, there is nothing, beyond the often contradictory claims of religions, that can demonstrate that "morality" is an inherent property of the universe, much less that is "divinely mandated".
As for the quotes: The first one ignores the evolutionary advantages of "purpose" as a concept. "Purpose" is a very useful concept. It allows individuals to focus, persevere in endeavours and achieve feats otherwise impossible. That being said, nothing says it is not a product of our social nature. An observation supporting this would be how often "purpose" is linked to our social experiences. Of course, there are cases where this does not, apparently, apply but these cases are not that common. Most of us derive our "purpose" from our environment or, at the very least, from past interactions that left an impression on us. While sometimes "purpose" can be detrimental to an individual, it is undeniable that it often brings benefits, socially, materially, spiritually, etc.
The second quote can apply to literally any concept as it relies on a dichotomised view of the world, but conveniently ignores, or minimises, the creative capacity of humans (rather ironic, coming from someone who spent a good portion of his life making up stuff). The quote implies that one cannot imagine the absence of something if that something doesn't exists in the first place. This however is not completely true, as things can exist in our imagination, ergo their absence can, too, exist there. In a sense, "meaning" exists, as a product of a being with sufficient intelligence processing information. However, to then make the logic jump from that to "therefore, the universe has an universal "meaning"" is simply not good reasoning. Meaning exists because there is an observer, and that "meaning" can vary from observer to observer. It is far from universal. Meaning is a potential property, not an inherent one.
The problem is not with axioms and assumptions by themselves, but rather the kind of axioms and assumptions that need to be accepted in order to prove something true. This is particularly evident when we talk about moral issues, many which are seldom as black or white as one may initially think.
I took the liberty of reading your profile and especially your intro "Hi Everybody" post. Have you been diagnosed with anhedonia? If yes, it sounds like it's not much fun, figuratively and literally!
But to brass tacks:
Its (instinct's) origins and functioning can be explained, partially, through existing theories derived from observations with rather testable predictions.
What does that have to do with my point that animals didn't acquire this knowledge in a classroom but were instead born with it -- and therefore it is a different kind of knowledge?
And what's faulty about instincts as a form of knowledge? They seem to work very well for what they were intended.
An "ought" is something that is derived from an inference or a deduction...(etc)
This is just a reductionist view of morality, an attempt to explain it away into nothingness. The basic oughts remain very consistent in every time and culture and all the sniping by skeptics to the contrary about trivial things like which side of the road you drive on or whether you take your shoes off before entering someone else's house in various countries is just a smokescreen.
This consistency is a clue -- not outright proof, mind you, but a clue (more on that below) -- that oughts have their origin in something other than accidents of matter and energy. Here is another one: there has never been a culture that said there was nothing beyond the physical world. Even the Communists with their dialectical materialism smuggle in some sort of metaphysical source for their view that history inevitably moves in a certain way. (If not, then what exactly is guiding history? Ohm's Law? The strong nuclear force? Cosmic background radiation? What do subatomic particles have to say about the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or whether you should poison your grandmother's coffee to get your hands on her property? If there is no God, this is all you're left with to call the shots.)
On that note I see a tendency on your part to reject as evidence any piece of evidence that doesn't in and of itself prove what the evidence seems to point to. That is to misunderstand evidence. Separate pieces of evidence -- clues -- separately may not prove anything but cumulatively they can often come very close. (I say come very close because there is no formal rigorous proof of anything in this world outside of mathematics.) Contrary to your assertion that I am making a God Of The Gaps argument, I am building a cumulative case and I haven't even gotten warmed up. For now I'm just focusing on what I see as holes in your arguments.
As for the quotes: The first one ignores the evolutionary advantages of "purpose" as a concept. "Purpose" is a very useful concept. It allows individuals to focus, persevere in endeavours and achieve feats otherwise impossible.
If you are a nihilist, there is no such thing as 'useful'. 'Purpose' in the context of nihilism allows individuals only to focus and persevere in digging holes in the ground and filling them up again because that's what everything we do is reduced to. Materialism reduces us all to just one big contradiction in which everyone expresses great concern for humanity as a whole, gives emotional speeches about the sacredness of each human life, yet insists on a naturalistic worldview that gives us not only no reason to think any of that is true but plenty to think it's false.
Also, that something may have some sort of evolutionary advantage doesn't preclude the possibility of divine guidance. Explaining the function of an internal combustion engine via the laws of physics doesn't mean no-one built the engine.
While sometimes "purpose" can be detrimental to an individual, it is undeniable that it often brings benefits, socially, materially, spiritually, etc.
If there is no such thing as spirit, how can anyone benefit 'spiritually' from anything? And once again, in the nihilist worldview, how can there even be such a thing as benefiting? At times you smuggle in some non-nihilistic, dare I say non-atheistic, ideas like this into your reasoning. What does it matter if anyone benefits from anything? Unless human life actually has value after all and therefore it is important that there really are things to benefit from...?
The second quote can apply to literally any concept as it relies on a dichotomised view of the world, but conveniently ignores, or minimises, the creative capacity of humans.
Someone born blind does not know what darkness (or light) is and never will in this world. The creative capacity of humans to imagine things doesn't change that. If you are blind and you walk from a lit room to a dark one, you would not know the dark one was dark -- or that the lit room was lit. If you were born blind, you wouldn't even have a clue what the difference was. If the whole human species had no eyes, there wouldn't even be anyone who would even be able to try to explain it to you. It would never occur to any of us. So yes, if the universe has no meaning, we would not know it.
And if we are going to reduce meaning to just a self-referential game of personal taste and make-believe, then meaning itself doesn't have any meaning. Therefore your claim above that there is no evidence of God's existence is also meaningless. I could just say that it means something to me that God exists, therefore he really, ontologically does, so shut up. But that's obviously silly because the truth of God's existence remains to be determined on grounds other than our own little games of self-referential make-believe. In other words, meaning must exist outside our heads before it can exist inside our heads because you can't 'create your own meaning' any more than a ship can create its own ocean. The ocean had to exist first before man ever considered the idea of a ship -- before a ship could have meaning.
Also I think it's kind of a cheap shot at CS Lewis to reduce him to a guy who largely made things up. He was an atheist til he was 30. He was a combat veteran from WW1 wounded in the trenches in France and an air raid warden in WW2 where lucky him, he got to revisit the experience of seeing human remains smeared all over the place. He was a don at Oxford, a literary historian by training and taught and wrote many books on the subject. He wrote much more non-fiction than fiction.
My point here is not that therefore we should automatically believe everything Lewis said or wrote -- it would be silly to treat anyone outside of the Trinity that way and Lewis himself would say so. I mean only that you shouldn't take the man so lightly.
The problem is not with axioms and assumptions by themselves, but rather the kind of axioms and assumptions that need to be accepted in order to prove something true.
There is nothing that can be accepted as true without an axiom or assumption of some kind or other as a foundation for it, so what 'kind' of axioms/assumptions are you talking about?
The reason why I brought up "instinct" is because you are using the claim that knowledge can come outside of science and rationality (which is true), to then conclude that science and rationality are somewhat insufficient to explain things. While it is true that a good portion of animal behaviours are instinctual, that does not rule out the emergence of such behaviours being a product of causality. Even a good deal of human actions are performed on "auto-pilot", that however does not necessarily mean that the process that concluded (perhaps even subconsciously) that that is the way an specific action is to be performed is either "spontaneous" or "ordained". Maybe there are biological factors at play, like brain structure or chemical composition, genetics, epigenetics, etc. , that makes an individual conclude this. We know that certain disorders, such as depression, can make structural changes in the brain. What I am trying to say is that there could be a perfectly rational explanation for the emergence of "instinct".
As for what is wrong with "instinct", there are countless examples of this in the animal kingdom, such as moths being attracted to bright sources, flies clashing constantly with a closed window, and so on. "Instinct" is not a bad source of knowledge but, it isn't that great either.
Morality, its origin and the discrepancies that arise from culture to culture can be very well explained by taking a look at "traditions" as a concept. A tradition is a behaviour that gets passed across generations. There may have been an original reason to engage in the behaviour, but often, the reason gets forgotten and all that is left is the behaviour. The reason could be from a personal preference (very common occurrence on the ancient times) to just associating auspicious or inauspicious events with a determinate practice. There are some cases in which the individual that starts the tradition purposely obscures the reason for the tradition or outright even makes a new one.
Morality is very similar to this, with the added component of acting as primary guideline on which to establish the rules of engagement in a society. Rules that, depending on several factors, including particular needs of a society, tend to differ. You may see some consistency in these rules as a clue to morality's "objective" nature, I see it as human beings trying to solve the issues that arise from their gregarious nature and coming to similar (not necessarily equal) conclusions.
Humans believing that something is true does not necessarily make it so. Spirituality could very well be a biproduct of our mental process, or it could be something entirely different, it is rather telling that there seems to be a link between alterations of perception and spiritual experiences though. This would suggest that, at the very least, these two are tacitly related. Either way, spirituality has been evolutionarily advantageous and could be yet another reason for the proliferation of our species. Same with morality. There are all sorts of consequences of poisoning your grandma, from societal and legal, to even emotional. These consequences can act as the deterrents. As for why they do, that can be explained through natural selection. Not saying that this is the correct explanation, but it is one that requires the least amount of assumptions.
Yes, I can see that you are building a cumulative case. However, your supporting arguments presuppose your conclusion. You are tailoring your arguments to your conclusion and not the other way around, which, for someone that is sceptical of your position, makes it very hard to begin to evaluate the claim in question. It acts very much as a "God of the Gaps".
"Use", or is lack of, are conclusions product of a contextual analysis. Also, you seem to misunderstand me. I am not arguing for the non-existence of "purpose", but rather of the non-objective nature of it. Purpose exists for those who believe in it, as it influences them and their actions, but it is not something inherent of something. In fact, "something" can have different "purposes", some unintended by the creator of said something, when applicable. Purpose is an invention, just as meaning. It is something that allows us to interact more efficiently with our environment. In a sense, it is the result of us trying to make sense out of causality.
As for why is something important? Because the individual deems it so. In the grand scheme of things, nothing suggest that there is significance in the phenomenon of life, beyond our own beliefs of there being so. It is not purely rational, but that belief keeps humans from extinguishing, so it will most likely continue, regardless whether it is correct or incorrect.
Humans create all manners of concepts, ideas and worlds. Humans also imagine things that are not there and, sometimes act upon those thoughts. While it is difficult to imagine something with little to no frame of reference, it is not impossible. Furthermore, something such as "meaning" is not that hard to conceive as humans tend to look for patterns, and "meaning" facilitates doing so. Comparing "meaning" (a mental concept) to "light" is disingenuous. One only materialises via an actor, while the other affects things without the need of an actor.
The claims I made have a "meaning" to me. They also have a different "meaning", or not at all, to you. I may have a different interpretation, or even emotional response to yours. Once more, I do not refute the existence of meaning but the claim that it is "infused" in everything. Meaning is mostly, if not wholly contextual, and it is bestowed through a mental process.
Oh, it was never my intention to belittle C.S. Lewis. My point was that I find rather ironic that someone as creative as him could not fathom the possibility of people creating a mental structure such as "meaning". Humans are a very creative species, and have been around from quite some time now so it is not implausible that they could create something as useful as "meaning". It could also be how the human brain works. We do not know yet.
The kind of assumptions I refer to are the unfalsifiable ones and, as for the axioms, those that could be very well substituted with others with minimal, or no impact at all. The kind of claims religions seem to make about the world and the nature of reality often fit into this category.
Your first paragraph still goes off on a tangent about how instinct happens that has nothing to do with my point that instinct is a form of knowledge that is not rational. I also stand by my statement that this helps show that science and rationality are not the only way to truth. Scientism is wrong for this reason and the one I stated before, which is that because scientism cannot be proven scientifically (this would require omniscience), it is not a statement of science but of philosophy, the human endeavor that scientism proponent Stephen Hawking declared "dead" not long before he passed.
As for instinct being not that great a form of knowledge, compared to what? Scientists frequently bump into windows and are attracted dangerously to light sources. The flies and moths are still with us.
Humans believing that something is true does not necessarily make it so.
True but I never made that claim. This is just another clue. Any sort of consistent behavior observed in the animal kingdom is immediately snatched up by biologists as a clue that something is afoot. But humans gravitating over the millenia toward the idea that there is something beyond the physical world is a priori poo-pooed as just socio-cultural drift. That the implications are unacceptable to some in academia couldn't possibly have anything to do with it.
Yes, I can see that you are building a cumulative case. However, your supporting arguments presuppose your conclusion. You are tailoring your arguments to your conclusion and not the other way around, which, for someone that is sceptical of your position, makes it very hard to begin to evaluate the claim in question. It acts very much as a "God of the Gaps".
Here you make only an assertion without offering any example or evidence for it. At least for now I will have to chalk it up to Atheism of the Gaps. As for me tailoring my arguments to my conclusions, pot meet kettle.
Spirituality could very well be a biproduct of our mental process, or it could be something entirely different, it is rather telling that there seems to be a link between alterations of perception and spiritual experiences though.
It should be self-evident that there can be no spirituality without spirit, just like you can't have saltiness without salt.
There are all sorts of consequences of poisoning your grandma, from societal and legal, to even emotional. These consequences can act as the deterrents.
This is a truism. It's also irrelevant to the point I was making about Communism as a philosophy being inadvertently (to its embarassment as it claims to be a form of materialism) supernatural.
Also, you seem to misunderstand me. I am not arguing for the non-existence of "purpose", but rather of the non-objective nature of it.
You seem to misunderstand me. I didn't say you are arguing for the non-existence of purpose; on the contrary, from what you've said you seem to think it is a perfectly fine thing. I said only that the disappearance of purpose is an unavoidable casualty of nihilism (and, I would now add, of atheism/naturalism/materialism as well) but that you don't seem to be aware of that. But even here, even though you seem to think purpose is a perfectly fine thing, like almost everything else we've discussed about human existence, you turn around suck the life out of it by explaining it away as some sort of sociological mirage.
The paragraphs about meaning are just more reduction of the concept of meaning to a purely subjective game of make-believe to make the universe revolve around oneself. Humans being very creative doesn't mean someone born blind can find some creative way of knowing what light and darkness are. I know it's a sort of secular blasphemy but there really are limits even to our imagination, even when we're trying to get rid of God. We're starting to go around in circles on meaning so unless you have something new to throw into the mix about it, it's probably best to skip it and focus on other stuff.
Axioms by their nature are not falsifiable. If they were, they wouldn't be axioms.
I will give the old atheists like Nietzsche and others credit where it's due -- they were willing to face the consequences of their beliefs and follow them where they led. By way of contrast, the modern atheists (secular humanists and the like, called "soft atheists" derisively by "hard" ones like Peter Singer et al) are a study in contradictions for convenience. They crow about the indomitable human spirit while denying there even is such a thing as spirit. They extoll "useful" things like purpose and meaning because they help humanity to survive while denying that humanity itself has any purpose or meaning -- and thus any reason to survive. They declare every human life to be of infinite value while insisting that every human being is nothing more than an accidental collection of atoms of no more value than any other collection of atoms. They clamor for freedom and human rights while reducing every human being to a helpless sockpuppet of evolution and determinism. No wonder everyone has their faces buried in their cel phones with social media and avatar games and has no time for real people. The social climate and its undergirding philosophies are just too confusing.
There was a soldier on a mission driving his jeep down a dark road. He saw in the middle of the road a lantern on a pile of rocks and had to stop. He asked a local man what the lantern was there for. The local said it was so drivers could see the pile of rocks and be able to stop in time. When he asked why the pile of rocks was there, the local said "so it can hold the lantern higher so you can see it better". When the soldier replied that it seemed to him that neither the rocks nor the lantern needed to be there at all, the local man disappeared.
"Scientism"... I do not think "science", or rationality for that matter can give us reliable answers all the time. At most, they can give us approximations and, in many cases and for various reasons, those approximations turn out not to be accurate. Science, in regards to these kinds of topics is more of an attempt to create models that would allow us to make reliable predictions about how things behave or came to be. The scientific method, just like purpose and meaning could very well may be, is a tool that has helped us navigate the uncertainties of life. It is yet another method, although one that allows for easier translating, and conveying, of results than other methods to obtain knowledge, but it is not, nor I would imply to it to be the only reliable method, much less, the only method to produce knowledge.
As for my objections towards instinct being a good source of knowledge, I would argue that, because of the way the knowledge is obtained, it is much harder to modify a behaviour already expressed, even if said behaviour may be detrimental to the organism itself. Instinct is fantastic when it works, but disastrous when it doesn't.
That consistency in behaviours could very well be a product of adaptation. It is only a clue if you presuppose meaning in the current state things are organised at the moment. It would also explain the pitfalls these behaviours occasionally fall into.
You were arguing about how every philosophy has metaphysical elements. I pointed out that even if this is true, that doesn't mean that "spirit" exists anywhere beyond the minds of those that believe in it. In this regard, spirituality can exist as a consequence of that belief.
"Purpose" is not necessarily a casualty of nihilism, nor of atheism and so on, but the claim that it is objective and inherent may very well be.
As I responded earlier, comparing "meaning" to light is disingenuous. It is not even an apple to oranges comparison. Human imagination has its limits of course, but going to pattern recognition to meaning, for example, is not the same as imagining something that is fundamentally a pillar of our known universe without any frame of reference. Meaning, beyond its impact, is not that complex of an idea.
My objection in regards to those axioms is not their non-falsifiable nature, which is a given, but how substituting them by other axioms that are substantially different, makes little to zero impact in anything derived from it. The vagueness of these axioms renders a good portion of the conclusions derived from them from rather inconsistent, to even incoherent and contradictory.
Belief is a powerful thing. It doesn't help that the human brain has a hard time distinguishing between what it experiences, remembers or imagines. The human brain is very susceptible to falling to illusions and then using those illusions to fill gaps, construct and reconstruct their views in regard to a phenomenon or idea. "Purpose" and "meaning" may just be so. It just happens that they are really useful constructs. I am not a humanist, nor I think every life has infinitely valuable. A life is as valuable as those that have some kind of relation to it deem so. Of course, I recognise what that line of thinking leads to, so it is better to act as if every life has infinite value. Setting aside personal feelings though, I do not think things have an inherent value. Entities give things value, but there doesn't seem to be a "default" value, so to speak. I recognise the usefulness of humanist concepts, but there is a difference between what I think should be, and what it actually is, or seems to be. It doesn't matter whether "purpose", "meaning" and "value" are inherent or not. It is in our best interest to believe so. As for why is that so? Because of the same thing that has many of us coming to this page in the first place: Emotions.
Pardon my delay in responding, as you can see, I've been sparring a bit with fauxartist. But it looks, at least for the moment, that she has had it with me so I'll get back with you soon as time permits...
As much as I have enjoyed reading your response, which again made me think. I have to say, ending it with a finite comment about about God was kind of a let-down, especially the gender specificity of thinking God is a He or a She. My beliefs are my own, and I don't share them often because wars are still fought over what faith someone is. It sort of defeats the 'cellular memory' thing about animals having 'instinct', when mentioning the Bible as the only reference to truth, that's your truth, others have their own beliefs. So to refer to the posters' negativity being related to their dormitory banter is interesting, and a moot point in a sense. Yes Nihilism is ultimately a life or existence without hope or meaning... but when the majority of people today dealing with disease, poverty, war, and hopelessness for a future. You can kind of understand that mindset, even though it's not mine. Being an Art and Science major in college, I got to see the extremes of philosophies on the meaning of life, truth, and existence...my truth is my own truth, and no one else's.
A finite comment about God? What would an infinite comment be? I'm not sure either of us has that much time.
I don't see how the existence of God defeats the possibility of cellular memory. If he could create the universe out of nothing, then it would be nothing for him to give animals cellular memory.
On whether God is male or female: Jesus referred to him as the Father and not in a condescending pat-us-on-the-head, we'll straighten you out on this out later way. Does this mean God the Father has physical male genitalia? Of course not. But there is so much more to maleness and masculinity then just plumbing and chromosomes, which is also the case with femaleness and femininity. They are sacred things. Jesus insisted that there is something very Fatherly about God the Father in that way that won't yield to modern political demands or intellectual fads that go so far as to deny there even is such a thing as male and female.
I'm not sure where you're going with your comments on nihilism, unless you're just expressing sympathy for those who are in that state of mind, in which case, who can argue with that?
But we are now commenting in a cyber-room in which presumably everyone suffers from some sort of mental illness. I'm no exception, nearly ate a pistol back in '94. Yet we're not being overrun with nihilists in the true sense. No-one still in here, no matter how bad shape we're in, really believes that life is meaningless and hopeless or they would already be dead by their own hand. As I said earlier, it's an unlivable philosophy and I mean literally because the only rational response to it is utter despair -- which is a terminal illness.
However, utter despair is not the only rational response to war, poverty, etc. I can recall seeing some graffiti in LA once that said "Poor But Happy". There are people in terrible situations with mental illness in here, in hospital wards with terminal diseases, even people in war zones who refuse to have anything but a positive outlook. And they do wonders. No-one has to be a nihilist because the good news is that nihilism isn't the truth.
Speaking of which, as for the my truth/your truth thing, I really don't mean to be flippant but try that with your bank. Whatever the subject is, there is only the truth. We may or may not have access to it but it is there regardless. As the title of a Pat Metheny composition puts it: "The Truth Will Always Be".
Believe it or not, I am very well-read on the Bible, some Torah, some Koran, and many books of Lao Tzu Plato. Socrates, Druidism, and Eleanor Roosevelt, etc. So thank you on your add infinite item mansplaining of each topic, but again... religion and converting people to your beliefs have no place here. Single-minded beliefs exclude many of our members who are from all around the world with may beliefs and some are atheist. It's more important to be inclusive than exclusive when your on a site for people with anxiety and depression. I'm sure there are many venues you can preach your beliefs, but many here have mental injury thanks to religious rhetoric being weaponized as a punishment or excuse to abuse them, or an excuse to exclude them... so it's probably better to just stay on point... my bad for engaging in this post.
After reading your first post, I took the liberty of checking your profile. If you are a victim of child abuse, you have my very deepest sympathies. When I was little, we lived next door to a couple that would beat their kids at the drop of a hat. I wasn't the victim but hearing the kids scream and cry scarred me a bit too. How I wished that I was full grown so I could go over and pound on those parents! I often think the reason I haven't witnessed any child beatings since becoming an adult is because God knows I will do something about it and end up in jail. If you were pounded on, I wish I could have been there to step in for you.
Were your parents what you would call religious fanatics who would scream Bible verses at you as they whipped you for spilling a couple of drops of milk or something like that? If so I apologize on behalf of all Christianity for whatever that's worth! It is very un-Christian to say the least.
My story is not physical abuse but benign neglect. My mother says I almost never cried and because my two brothers were normal with their crying, I got forgotten at times as an infant and toddler. (She's racked with guilt about it to this day.) You can probably imagine the long term effects that would have so I won't belabor it. Just to make it clear that I too have mental illness -- GAD, dysthymia, spikes of severe depression. I'm not some Hollywood stereotype of a street evangelist who dropped in just to torment the denizens of a support group, I'm in the river floating helpless downstream with everyone else in here. Please don't forget that.
All that said, the original poster wanted to talk not about his mental illness but about ought and is -- say again, not about mental illness and his struggles with it, about ought and is. Philosophy, in other words. I took him up on it. So far, though we both clearly disagree strongly about many things, he has had no problem with it and even seems to be enjoying the sparring. Likewise I have no problem with him laying out his disagreement with me. He has not been the least bit rude or condescending so I can't complain.
You jumped in without invitation. Now don't get me wrong -- I had and have no problem with that, I'll take on all comers and you are still welcome to participate in this conversation as far as I'm concerned. I suspect MetallicGradient is with me on that. But to jump in and expect us to Nerf the conversation to suit your tender sensibilities is a bridge too far.
In addition to the childhood trauma and resulting mood disorder that have you floating downriver with us, I think you may have spent too much time in a college environment. Over the past 30-40 years, colleges, especially in the liberal arts departments, have largely abandoned the idea that spirited but respectful debate is the way to get to the truth and that everyone who enters the arena of ideas should therefore develop some thick skin. Instead, they have gone the opposite direction, teaching hypersensitivity, personal hostility, shouting down and shutting down debate, character assassination, vandalism, ostracization and depriving people of their livelihood, and sometimes even violence as the way to respond to anyone with an opposing viewpoint. This kind of environment preys on the mental state of folks like you and me and does far more damage to us than just bumping into someone who voices a different view; it encourages the mentally fragile to be even more fragile. Using mentally ill students (and students generally) this way is reprehensible.
If you do want to continue with us, you are free to accuse me of "mansplaining" all you like. I'm a big boy, I can take it. Just be prepared to defend your "womansplaining". If you want to decry my exclusiveness, be prepared to confront your own exclusiveness. If you're going to complain about people being victims of weaponized religion, be prepared to be made aware that there are people who have been victimized by weaponized secularism, especially if they are older and emigrated from Eastern Bloc countries -- or experienced the above-described hostile college environments. Atheism and hostility toward religion may be the default position of this site but it will not be in this conversation.
In short, you are free to respectfully force me to defend my views but I am likewise free to respectfully force you to defend yours.
But you will not be allowed to come in here and critique what I said and then wrap yourself in the flag of my truth/your truth to avoid having your words and ideas critiqued in turn. We will have free and open debate. Respectful, yes, but free and open. This is life in the arena of ideas, you are a full-grown woman, deal with it. Heads I Win/Tails You Lose has no place here.
When you post something in a public forum, there is no 'You jumped in without invitation'. If you want to have a private conversation with another, do it in PM. I also don't abide by the need to develop 'thick skin'... that statement just kinda doesn't fit in here where most are very thin-skinned and sensitive, and that's not a negative in my book, it shows the ability to have empathy and be sympathetic. Your ability to spin is remarkable and impressive to say the least, so I'll say this: there is no 'win or lose' my friend... it's not a game here, it's survival, and is supposed to be a safe place... so if you choose to 'we' a conversation... maybe email or PM so that no one else will comment. And yeah...is's condescending to exclude other members in an open forum. But... personally I don't care like some others here might. Happy Trails...
I was once told by a politician that 'you can baffle um with B.S., wrap it in red cellophane ... and somebody will buy it.'
I didn't say it was a private conversation and -- I repeat -- you were and are still welcome. Anyone is. (As CS Lewis once said, how many times must a man say something before he is safe from being accused of saying the opposite?) But you don't get to jump in and say 'you can't mention God, you can't say this, you can't say that', when you have two people talking about it alone who have no problem with these words and ideas you want to ban. You are brimming over with exclusivity.
In your demands for sympathy or empathy from me, it appears you have made no effort to show any for what might trigger me or make me feel 'unsafe' -- or MetalGradient for that matter. Maybe I'm sensitive to the thinly veiled Christo-phobic language you have already used. Maybe I have a complex about women worming their way into pre-existing situations and then acting as if they were there first and trying to change all the rules. I could have all kinds of potential triggers for all you know; but so far, while ordering me to walk on eggshells, you're kicking me with steeltoe boots. But that's what they teach in college -- to demand empathy and sensitivity but never give it. The whole world must agree with me about everything and those who fail to comply are being exclusive and triggering me and they will be cancelled.
Your ability to spin is remarkable and impressive to say the least...
This is an assertion given without evidence so I'll have to let it pass til you offer an example.
...so I'll say this: there is no 'win or lose' my friend... it's not a game here, it's survival, and is supposed to be a safe place...
No. Absolutely false. There is winning and losing every minute of every day, 25 and 8, and 366 days a year. Especially -- say again, especially -- in a place like this! Survival itself is a game, but with very high stakes. You endured child abuse and who knows what else; I came perilously close to eating a gun 28 years ago, and I still have spikes of severe anxiety and depression that must be fought off. I have to be alert every minute to my trains of thought, even my facial expressions and posture, and there are days when it feels like trying to bench press an aircraft carrier. Once or twice a month I have to have a massive tears-and-snot session when I'm alone to relieve the tension. BUT...we're both still standing. And these are not just wins but major victories. Even though we have big sore spots, this is paradoxically part of how we develop thicker skin to win more victories and keep going forward so we can offer advice and effective help to those coming behind us who are having a hard time. So I implore you to please develop thicker skin; the life of a fellow sufferer coming behind you may well depend on you doing so!
Better ideas must win too; they lose at everyone's peril. The only way to find out the best ideas is to pit them against each other; compare them; test them. Let the proponents of each idea make the case for them and let others critique them. It does no good to put a postmodern halo on every idea as if everything could be equally true. That's mental malpractice and quackery, like me saying Trazadone works for every form of mental illness and if you disagree with me, you're being exclusive and hurting my feelings. If someone's feelings do get hurt, oh well. If the best ideas don't win out, all of humanity is in greater danger.
Yes, this site is primarily about support and sympathy but if you take the time to click on my profile, you'll see that most of my posts are about just that, especially tips and ideas for coping skills, medications I've tried that might help, etc. There may be a very brief mention of God or a bible verse but nothing more, unless someone engages me on the topic.
But if this site allows people to expound their atheist/agnostic philosophy as a way of offering tips to others about how to make it through the day -- and it does quite a bit without comment or controversy -- then me mentioning God here and there shouldn't be a problem either. I would never tell atheists they can't mention their atheism; I should be accorded the same courtesy, even from you. But if I don't get it, I won't cry and I certainly won't tell you that you can't say this or that. Feel free to call me insensitive and exclusivist and anything else you like. I'll just continue to tell you passionately but respectfully why I disagree.
But get it all in quick because I fully expect to be kicked out of here sooner or later anyway because the default position of this site does seem to be that mentioning atheism/agnosticism, peppered with the occasional shot at religion, is okay, while mentioning God is somehow controversial. I'm surprised I've lasted this long.
So before that happens, I want re-emphasize that I really do have nothing but the greatest sympathy for you about what happened to you as a child and its aftermath, whatever form the abuse took. I wish you only the very best. On that note, I hope you'll take this in the spirit in which it's intended but Jesus is real, alive and well, and does love you, no matter how it looks, and so your suffering, terrible as it has been and probably still is, even if it continues to your last breath as I expect mine to, does not have to be in vain.
But the cost of my sympathy for you can't be me censoring myself in a conversation with someone else.
On further review I regret the part about saying I might have a complex about women worming their way in and acting as if they got there first. It was uncalled for sarcasm and un-Christlike that only raises the temperature so I ask your forgiveness.
I would have sent this PM but (a) I figured you would think it creepy and stalky, and (b) when the sin is public, the apology should be also.
Well, thank you for your very astute trip down memory lane for me back to my days in college philosophy. I took Greek and Eastern philosophy in conjunction with courses in psychology way back in the day, and it's basically the same questions asked today, since some tribal Shaman looked up into the stars wondering if that's where the spirit went after death, and was there something beyond death.
I had to look up Nihilism again,:
A philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.
Indeed these questions are nothing new. Perhaps the presentation has varied a little due to what we have discovered, but ultimately, when one questions enough one's inner motivations, it is not difficult to reach where these mysteries lie. Perhaps these questions do not have a natural answer, or the answer varies from interpretation to interpretation. It could also be that they are the "wrong" questions to be asked. In any case, these thoughts have robbed me of more than a couple nights of rest and will continue to, possibly, of many more down the line.
My solution to anxiety is to get busy, for me it's art or research.
I try and find balance of all things, either if I'm ruminating on the colors and shading to be using on certain projects... or the addition of multimedia in my abstracts.
I do a lot of philosophical thinking when approaching a painting that is one of my 'story board' collection of milestone influences in my life, and it allows me to think about the diversity and history of styles and new ideas to deal with new media.
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Mum is shielding but I think it's taking it's toll.
Consistently ignored in group conversations
I need to express this *possible trigger warning*
how to talk to family and friends about depression
Feeling embarrassed and ashamed
