Isn't Everyone Right?

Over this past year I've had a surge of interest in everything. The more I read, the more it seems everything points in the same direction. Since my son was born three years ago with multiple handicaps my question as it what it means to be human has grown and grown. He's healthy enough, but has moderate to severe mental retardation (or, as they tell me, it's politically correct to use the term, globally developmentally delayed). He's also deaf and not yet walking. However, he's the most serene person. without a want. You take a toy away, he simply finds another without complaint. He has no attachments to objects. Not walking seems to mostly be a lack of motivation. "Why bother to walk when I can get around just fine thank you."

It's something to behold. Buddhist monks meditate for hours on a mountain top to be where he is every minute of everyday. So, where is he? Seems he's neither here nor there. Stuck somewhere in between. Like a part of him is stuck in the place we all come from. The void if you will. Not a cold heartless void, but a very peaceful one. I've been working with developmentally handicapped adults this past year. All kinds of disabilities. Some born that way, others have been in accidents. All present, yet not. For some, being human is very painful. their physical brains and bodies malformed. So, they are trapped in constant agony. All we can do is try to comfort them. Others are blissfully unaware, and I sometimes envy them.

Humans are sort of boring if you ask me. Aerial pictures of cities confirm that. Insects. Ants we are. Spend time with someone who's reality and perceptions are not anything like we see - now that's interesting. My son loves to play with light (and wall trim for some reason) he'll be occupied for hours. While some might see nothing at all interesting in that. I do. Seems as a species we are growing to a very simplified state of being. Of course it will take eons of technology and thinking to get there. To a place were we just exist without ties. Where the "I" has dwindled away.

So, this past year the inevitable question came. "What's going on here". Why are we here? I delved into reading physics and cosmology. It caused a spiritual awakening. I suppose a big part of me wanted science to just give me the cold dead answer to the universe. Just put it all to bed. But it just awakened me. Completely stirred me up. Without compromising my atheistic viewpoint.

Science led me to an interest in religious text. so I delved into the various books. the different beliefs. I could do this objectively. As the study (use the term lightly, as I just really ride the coat tails of the scientists) of physics has thrown every ill conceived belief I thought I had out the window.

While it was enjoyable and insightful reading, the messages are still relevant today. Looking backwards will never be the way to go seems to me. People lose themselves in texts thousands of years old, looking for the answer to life. Seems counterproductive. It's needed knowledge, we have it, learned from it, collected it in our database. It's just stepping stone.

It dawned on me that everyone is right. they're all right. Getting to the fundamentals of all religions. They all have the right idea. There's something much bigger than you, so get over yourself. We get stuck in our tiny egotistical selves and it's a prison. Everything I've read, science included, tells us this.

God for me is "Good Ordally Direction". The word doesn't bother me. Others hate using it at all because of the connotations. I guess I'm classified as atheist. I do like Buddhist ideals. However, I have no interest in any full set of ideals that tries to have it all figured out. I revel in the fact that it's totally unattainable knowledge. However, I believe the various religious texts have one thing right, A set of fundamental ideas to live a peaceful life as much as we can. It's us humans that screwed up the simple message.

What I love about science is that all it does is lead us to bigger and bigger questions. The "theory of everything" M-theory, F-theory. Where did the membranes come from in the first place? I love how it answers big questions. But only "seems" to. It feeds me soul. Putting god is a father figure shaped box does not. But it's very essence, is the same thing. Much bigger than us.

Seems to me, the next spiritual wave, will be brought on by a physicist. I think as a species, we'll advance right through religion as we know it. At least I'd like to think we will. I wish I could be around that day. Sometimes I get wrapped up in myself, but all I have to do is read up on all the big questions science asks to be lifted from it. The comfort of being teeny, insignificant. It's peaceful. but not in the way that I wouldn't want to exist. The fact that I do, and that I'm totally insignificant, is very comforting.

Anyway, thanks for reading my babble. I guess I'd rather write here than in a journal as a journal won't write back and humble me like I need to be.

Keep posting. Work out the questions that you have. Some here may have the same ones.

If you get to far on one side or the other, or if you have an agenda, someone will let you know.

This post has been edited by orestis on Jan 1 2010, 11:44 PM

I disagree. When the development of human thought lead to philosophy, we started to understand our circumstances and existence much better; religion (as in the monotheisms) came along and screwed it up. Humanity would be better without its existence and ridiculous impositions.

Physfan

An excellent, well-thought and well-written first post is something very rare in this place. I have long looked to the self-actualized peacefulness of developmentally challenged humans with great awe. I always appreciate any short achievement of such well-centered happiness in my existence.

I fear your awakening and hunger for an answer on one hand because I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't feel that way. But at the same time, I (almost) envy that you have a close reminder that perhaps those "big" questions have their own discreet time and a place to be considered.

Walking through life with a constant awareness of how miserably we humans still treat other humans isn't a simple thing. With the added knowledge of the barbarous, brutal and despicable acts throughout our ancestor's histories heaped onto today's reality, the question "why" becomes the pinnacle of my thoughts.

All that said though, those of us with capable reasoning must commit ourselves to not become forlorn but instead stand up and be counted. If that means in some areas we must be intransigent, then we must be. There are few (if any) absolute truths in our existence, so when reason overwhelms, it's banner must be flown. So unfortunately, everyone isn't right.

Fortunately, everyone isn't right.

In fact, some people are so trivially wrong, Godwin's law enshrines the basic unfairness of comparing the perceived wrongness of others with these canonical examples of wrong.

Are you aware that literally every polytheistic or atheistic civilization that has ever existed commited more acts of murder and genocide on a regular basis, than even the worst spectacle among "monotheistic" civilizations?


Atheist communist Soviet Union killed at least 100 MILLION of its own citizens.

Then we can't even fathom the spectacle that was Rome (or Greece before them,) nor the complete animal barbarism of Assyria, Persia, or Babylon.


No friend, atheism has a far worse track record than any form of monotheism, even from a purely objective viewpoint.

The Soviets butchered twice as many of their own citizens domestically as a matter of POLICY, than the total world casualties from WWII.

It's a given that anyone possesses the capacity to do evil, but only religion can try to justify doing evil as the "will of god." I wouldn't suggest that religion causes genocide to happen, but what it does do is allow people to do evil with a clear conscience. A-religious evil is just as common, but it isn't justified through religion.

Stalin was a horrible person, but that doesn't implicate the people of the Soviet Union the way that the people of Nazi Germany were implicated in allowing the Holocaust. Hell, they ELECTED Hitler.

Get off your high horse. Every time you watch an action movie, you are no better than Romans in the Colosseum.

That's some convenient amnesia. Let's look at examples of religion (or lack thereof) used to justify atrocities:
Crusades + The Inquisition + Muslim conquest of India + Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism + The Holocaust > Chinese conquest of Tibet ?

The idea of an atheistic country is a very recent one, and in both cases the populace still believed in their native religion (Buddhism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity)

That wasn't justified by atheism, that was a political move to silence dissidents.

Most religions I know of recognize suffering as an inevitable aspect of embodied/material life. Attachment, sin, temptation, insatiable desire, etc. are all forms of suffering that spiritualities attempt to mitigate through cognitive-emotional control in various forms.

"Blissful unawareness or ignorance" is a contradiction, because it describes an inherent tension between what one knows and what they don't know but presume is available for knowing. A truly unaware or ignorant person is unaware of their ignorance as well, and is therefore not really "ignorant" from their own perspective. Rather, they know all they know and are learning more each moment. They are on a trajectory past their horizon.

Truly ignorant people suffer because they experience a gap between where they are going, cognitively, and where they are currently. They experience their own ignorance through awareness of the frontiers of their knowledge and the simultaneous awareness of their resistance to progressing toward those frontiers. This tension can be resolved by "acquiescing to the tao" of one's own exploratory learning process. Understanding one's own experience of ignorance/unawareness may be part of this. People suffer because they are aware of ignorance and because they think that they can magically become unaware of it in pursuit of bliss, which only leads to further repression of known-yet-avoided potential knowledge.

One has to become acceptant of the light in the tunnel as something that will never be reached, but whose evasiveness must not become a source of anxiety. You will always have a certain sense of ignorance, but the only way to resolve the suffering caused by it is to resist denying it and pursue knowledge with the awareness that your ignorance will ultimately persist indefinitely in some form or other.

You're body, mind, and spirit are not the same as your ego. They are your vessels for "getting over yourself." They are your interface with everything that is much bigger and much smaller than you, because the access to all those things ultimately comes through your own sensory inputs and cognitive-synthetic capabilities. Imagining oneself small in relation to something bigger is itself probably the biggest ego trip of all. It is the dream of self-disappearance in order to become more invisible and therefore more powerful that those more visible.

True self-denial is not denial at all but rather self-acceptance, mindfulness, and detachment. One must exist materially and visibly while trying to somewhat detach from the things, ideas, and ego that one identifies with oneself. This doesn't mean abandoning oneself or one's ego in flight, because that only leads to re-attachment to new identities. It means becoming the immanence of existence and seeking spiritual transcendence in the variability of semi-detachments and re-attachments possible while maintaining ethical mindfulness toward self and others.

The point of "God" is not putting him in a "father figure shaped box." The point of putting him in a father figure shape box is to create a cognitive interface for men to live theological wisdom and metaphysical creativity. The point of science is not to transcend bigger and bigger questions and theories by seeking origins or essences, but to become aware that the essence of science is to posit and process such questions and that the grandness of a theory has little to do with what it purports to describe and explain and more to do with how it functions within the cognitive apparatus of the thinker.

Putting theory in perspective is far preferable to trying to submit one's perspective to a particular theory. This doesn't mean that its bad or dangerous to engage and apply theories rigorously, and do good science. It means that doing so with a mindfulness that theory itself is a system of cognitive representation, instead of falling out of tentative belief in the objects of knowledge presumed in the theory, frees your mind to think in broader ways.

Black holes may really exist, but someone who brackets their existence as a construct of theory, first and foremost, is more likely to generate radical discoveries about them than someone with a fixed perception of them based on (subconscious) adherence to a theoretical model as if it was a direct window to empirical observations.

Physics, other sciences, and spirituality are always influencing each other. Sometimes one or another variant will go far in exploring a ground-breaking direction and the knowledge innovations that come out of it will inspire others to re-think and/or inject new energy into work they are doing. I think people are often unaware of how individual their spirituality is, even when they are subscribing to fairly orthodox schools of science and religion. Ultimately what they truly perceive and experience at a deep level is a synthesis of divergent schools of thought and experiences they have come in contact with.

Don't believe that you are small or insignificant. You are the one with the power to act from your position in the universe. If you get overcome by size and power differentials, you are doing nothing except wasting the power you have, or rather using your power to dwarf yourself in your own mind is counterproductive. Don't focus on the size of your ego, but rather on the power of your mind-body to go beyond serving your ego. You can go beyond seeking the father's approval to becoming the father yourself.

No, they just humble you through peer review and by putting you in a long, energy-expensive process of planning and editing your work to fit their specifications and expectations. You can humble yourself just as easily by publishing online and submitting to public critique, as you say, but at least by doing it this way your ideas are more immediately accessible, with less barriers to access as their are to academic articles and books - although there is always the problem of generating income for intellectual work.

1) An action movie typically has ACTORS or animations who don't actually harm one another.

2) Movies often tell a story or deal with moral issues or questions for the purpose of learning, even when the primary motivator is sales for intertainment.*

3) The people in the colosseum and other "mock battles" were either brainwashed or forced against their will to fight to the death...for real...this is a FAR stretch from any form of legal entertainment in modern America. Even when we consider Boxing or UFC, those sports are 100% voluntary, and the referees and doctors often stop the fight for the fighter's safety, even when he was willing to continue. This is precisely the OPPOSITE of the Roman Colosseum, where the loser would have been executed for attempting to flee the competition...

I am not amnesiac, but you basicly make my argument for me. If you take all the worst "religioius" things that have ever been done by christians, jews and muslims combined, it would still be a mere blip compared to Chinese or Soviet attrocities.

The crusades was also, at least initially, a retaliatory response through self preservation, because if they hadn't counter-attacked, at least initially, the Muslims would have eventually invaded again anyway.

==

I admit I have been disturbed by a recent trend both in "professional wrestling" and in blockbuster movies to "root for the bad guy". For example, I was quite shocked by the fact that many people seemed to almost applaud or root for the Joker in the Dark Knight movie, even though he is perhaps one of the most wicked villains ever concieved.

The Romans wanted realistic violence. Same goal, different technology.

The Romans re-enacted famous battles, just like most of our "epic" movies do.

I'm not saying that the Roman system was just, I'm just saying that crowds like realistic violence, then and now.

Well, it would seem that way when you lie about the "100 million" killed in the USSR. Please give a source for that number. I'm seeing numbers closer to 1.2 million; not good, but certainly not as bad as the Crusades.

WOW, what a pack of lies. The pope declared a crusade because the Holy Land was in the hands of heathens. There was a Moorish conquest underway in Spain, but those aren't the same people. Morocco isn't Palestine.

Way to rewrite history.

Source? Make it a good one ...

This post has been edited by uaafanblog on Jan 15 2010, 10:36 PM

I thought the figure was estimated to be approximately 30 million.

But that might mean that secular murder vs. religious murder is close to a tie. Such a realistic claim wouldn't suit the rest of the hyperbole.

Yeah.. I've got to say that the posts by Quantum can be best described, from an historical perspective, as a pack of lies.

I am writing my phd on the crusades, the first one specifically. Do you really want to try to pass off that blatant crap here?

The crusades were in no way a defensive action, unless you want to consider that they were going to defend the Byzantine empire. However, though the Byzantines at first thought that this was their goal, they soon learned otherwise... much to their dismay. The people who went on the first crusade knew warfare... they lived it and loved it. They were not brave defenders but warlords in the truest sense. Urban II's call to crusade served as a great excuse. In fact, the more religious the people during the crusade, the worst the atrocities were. The warlords were just in it for land and gold... the religious set were there to exterminate the enemies of Christ. And I do mean exterminate. When Jerusalem was taken, even though some of the Lords tried to protect a number of important muslims and their retinue, for ransom of course, they could not. The soldiery, in a religious frenzy, killed everyone everywhere. There are accounts of the Temple of Solomon being filled with blood past the ankles of the soldiers. Didn't matter if you were Muslim, Jewish, Byzantine, when the city was taken it was run, hide or die.


You talk about Rome as though it was unusually cruel. It was more organized but hardly different in it's love of violence from any other civilization.

In fact that is what makes the modern atrocities larger in number is simply the number of people alive and the efficiency of modern weapons. The crusades were just as barbaric as the Russian purges, but there were less people and they had to use swords.

People are people.