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Hello to the new kalpa of hatposting. I am a Buddhist; I would say "Tendai" in particular after extensive reading and consideration, though between being in the US and this whole plague thing I have not been able to get out and join a community.  I will also share the Buddhism thread link: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3914597 - the OP by our own Paramemetic is a really excellent introduction to many core ideas.
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Jan 14, 2021 03:28
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I agree with that, but then why follow the Christian faith in particular? Why not UU, or deism, paganism? Just personal preference? I worry that, because I consider human attempts to comprehend the Divine to be inherently doomed to fail, you cannot make any meaningful statements about the Divine. It becomes like those centrists that say because both sides "have problems" they're both equally bad, and everything becomes a blurred mess with nothing defined.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:17
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White Coke posted:Learning how new Biblical Literalism is was one of the things that brought me back to Christianity. I wasn't raised as a Biblical Literalist, but I didn't have the knowledge to respond with anything more than "The Bible isn't meant to be taken literally" when people pointed out scientific errors or contradictions. My favorite story is when I was doing a year at a small Catholic university and while walking around I heard someone who was declaiming with great vigor that he was a Christian TO THE CORE!!! while I was walking past - not addressing me, of course. I paused, because they seemed to be a pause, and I said to him: "You're a Christian, deep down?" He affirmed that he was. I asked if I could have his coat.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:40
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HopperUK posted:It's hard to explain internal events to folk isn't it? I was just thinking about one of the very few what I'd term 'religious experiences' I've had and it boils down to 'I saw a very beautiful cloud' but it feels like there aren't words in English to explain what actually happened.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:07
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Josef bugman posted:I think it would be fairer to simply understand that you don't believe and to reconcile yourself to it, instead of to aim at it continually when you are, in effect, lying about it. The latter probably depends on your particular sect, although to quote Shinran Shonin who was dealing with the question of 'if we say Amida's name and go to the pure land for sure, why not do crimes and engage in lusts and defilements right now since we're going there anyway?' of 'Do not develop a taste for poison, just because there is an antidote.'
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Jan 19, 2021 01:27
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We can do nested quotes now?? Truly a blessing from St. Ofyospos
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Jan 19, 2021 02:46
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Josef bugman posted:If you don't hold that belief to start with though it seems... not "unreasonable" but also not exactly "fair" to pray. It seems more like "I know that this is right action so I am doing this in expectation that this will stand me in good stead" as opposed to "I am doing this based on what I know to be true". On the second topic, it seems as if you are seeking for a philosophy that states: No, there is no forgiveness; if you have done wrong, you are wrong forever, and there are no amends to be made. Is this accurate? I have a hard time thinking of any particular religion that makes this assertion, at least about the standard-issue crimes and misdemeanors most people are likely to encounter or perform vs. big ticket things like murdering your parents. On the sub-topic of crime, violations: what is the purpose of justice? Why must there be punishment at all? In my view, in the very long and absolute run everyone is going to experience the fruit of what they have created, both good and bad, one way or another. So the divine or supernatural has very little to do with it. But I do not think justice is created through punishment, although it is in the toolbox, so to speak. I would say the reason you keep encountering self-help literature is probably that this is a road well trod by people who are suffering very badly in particular ways associated with outcomes people do not want to have happen.
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Jan 19, 2021 12:08
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Josef bugman posted:The purpose of justice is restitution and the creation of something better. If there is no justice or no punishment then there is no consequence for wrong action. If you allow for people to do wrong action and then be happy, thrive and grow stronger then there is no such thing as wrong action. I disagree with your sentiment that the fact that you can do bad things, and then appear to benefit from them and not suffer those downsides in the immediate perceptible time horizons, means that there is no such thing as a wrong action. However, I can reconcile this through the concept of rebirths, and if you are looking solely at an individual's current incarnated form you will get situations like this. However, I think this is arbitrary - it would be equally arbitrary to say "if they aren't convicted within a week of the crime, there ain't no justice." It's just a question of the time horizon. As for why to forgive yourself, my argument is: Doing something wrong, and suffering from it, are two separate things. Mechanisms and routes for forgiveness, especially over things which are simply impossible to rectify, allow you to reduce this suffering, this anguish. Suffering is suffering, wherever it is situated. This does not mean that wrong action should not be rectified; forgiveness is for resolving what is left over after rectification is attempted, or when it is impossible - for instance, if I have an argument with my brother and curse him out, and before I see him again he dies in a car accident. I would not be able to make amends for my cruel words to my brother in any kind of objective way. He's dead! I can perhaps use this as a brutal interior lesson in learning the importance of right speech. But I will never be able to apologize to my brother - even when he is reborn he won't be the same fellow. So in this example (and I'm sure you can think of many others in that general vein), seeking forgiveness or its experience would be eminently valuable. I think it is also valuable if your own forgiveness is sought and you are able to grant it.
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Jan 19, 2021 13:04
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Josef bugman posted:Yes. That is what I am going for and that is fine. It isn't really fine and that is why I am continually discussing it on the internet, but still. And yeah, it is a difference but I would like to ask, in absolute honesty why we should forgive ourselves. I think it's okay to forgive other people but I can't fully wrap my head round the idea of forgiving oneself. To me, suffering in the strict sense of "what my religion addresses" is far more "interior negative feelings" than, for instance, "ow, that pan sure was hot, I won't do that again." I do not think it would be possible for you to have done anything in this life or any other to be deserving of some kind of indefinite punishment, interior or otherwise, and I do not think it would be somehow therapeutic, either for you personally, or as a general rule ("in theory, everyone shouldn't suffer, but in practice it is good if everyone is constantly tormented to make sure they keep their noses clean.") And at least on the level of the interior landscape, that is much of the purpose of forgiveness. As in my example: At a certain point, beating yourself up is accomplishing absolutely zero possible beneficial effects, even the tiny slim rope of "I won't do THAT again!," and is only increasing the amount of suffering in the world. The critique of the universe as somehow being wrong or unsatisfactory here is hypothetically interesting if one allows for a Designer or Creator who somehow did something "wrong." (Personally I don't think that is the case.) However, it also seems irrelevant to the specific point of suffering.
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Jan 19, 2021 20:05
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Josef bugman posted:It's more wanting a defined end point for it and knowing that, through being human, there is going to be an urge to judge myself by the softest possible criteria it therefore behoves the person doing it to assume the harshest possible criteria. We all tend to forgive ourselves too easily for our faults and the pain we cause others, to attempt to explain away our actions through ignorance as opposed to malice. This seems to create immense suffering for people who are reflective and sensitive while casting them as needing to provide care and support to others - and people who are not as reflective, or as sensitive, for whatever reason, will thus receive comfort and consideration, while not suffering the interiorized penalties. Is this justice? You have just recreated the current state of affairs that you deplore, but on an emotional level, where the good (to a general broad affinity proximation) experience guilt and suffering forever, and the bad (also to a general approximation) suffer no penalty other than their own conscience, which presumably they lack, while being able to benefit from other people's support and care.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:38
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HopperUK posted:Forgetting and forgiving are not at ALL the same thing though. I think you're right in that if we hurt someone, it's not a bad thing that we feel bad about it. But we shouldn't torment ourselves forever. That sucks and does no good.
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Jan 20, 2021 01:24
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Josef bugman posted:If it's a personal choice that person has made, isn't it? The alternative of forgiving oneself seems wrong in a way that I have difficulty articulating. It feels, trying to describe the word here, unjustifiable maybe? I would say that carrying all this stuff around does have bad consequences, even though I know you mean it as a joke. It takes away joy in life. It has quantifiable health effects from stress and so on. It can burden and confine your ability to engage in right action, because the right action today may have some resemblance to what was wrong action in another context. This is independent of my general point of, "actually, suffering is bad."
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Jan 20, 2021 01:45
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Josef bugman posted:It has consequences for you. It has no consequence for others.
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Jan 20, 2021 02:23
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Josef bugman posted:Both if possible! But social if it's one or the other. You could train people to not pay attention to the interior states of others. This already happens to some extent. I don't think it needs to be encouraged or facilitated any further. Those suffering great interior distress already move heaven and earth to conceal it, in many or most cases, because they do not want to be a bother. This is exhausting, and therefore their other actions are weaker and less focused, and they are more likely to succumb to various temptations and negative outcomes because they have expended their effort on attempting to conceal their interior suffering from others. In terms of social effects, it is mostly the small things writ large, as well as this tending to cultivate a poor outlook and probably causing compassion to wither rather than bloom.
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Jan 20, 2021 03:04
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Josef bugman posted:I think it's necessary to not pay too much attention to the suffering we see all around us, otherwise we'd all go completely bananas. In response to the bolded bit I am unsure that that happens, least of all I am wondering what temptations or negative outcomes there could be. I do not think that you can except yourself from compassion. Did you have thoughts about the other downsides of this exercise? The profound waste of immense amounts of human energy and suffering for absolutely nothing except perhaps some nebulous motivational benefit stands out to me almost as much as the direct facts of suffering. I suppose it is a boon to consumer spending, though! e: To make a yard-sale quality parable about it, I would say compassion is like muscles, as are many other virtues. Your ability to develop them may have limits but ultimately you need regular exercise, and perhaps focused, deliberate exercise if you want BIG RESULTS. If you approach physical training with an attitude of "I want to get big arms," that can likely be done, but if you approach physical training with "I definitely don't want to develop my left calf," you are at best going to spend a lot of time working around your left calf, and may not get much result at all. In my view, it is one thing to not emphasize your compassion upon yourself, or even to question that kind of an attitude as a primary focus. But it is another to adamantly set that part of the universe aside. Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 19:56
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Bilirubin posted:This a million times this.
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Jan 21, 2021 09:18
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Josef bugman posted:But what if it's not. Sure it might appear to be a small thing to you at one point, but upon re-examining it we find out that it was in fact a huge mistake that we now cannot undo? e: The above was a rhetorical question. Anyway, if I get you right your basic theories on why interior suffering is desirable are as follows: It helps you learn better behavior; you have no right to the interior experience of forgiveness; and there seems to be a third one which I would appreciate if you could articulate more clearly, because it seems to be along the lines of 'stop trying to help people in some situations, despite my other general statements in favor of helping people.' Leaving the third one aside because I do not fully encompass it and so I have been mentally interpreting it as, essentially, a plea for comfort (or perhaps confirmation of negative feelings): There may be a whisker of truth to the first statement. In my religious perspective we run into a minor issue often, where the English term "suffering" is used to refer to a different range of phenomena that Buddhism is addressing. In this perspective, suffering includes the feelings that come when considering the inevitable end of a good thing or situation (and thus grasping for it, to try to hold on), as well as the generalized dissatisfaction with the inevitable imperfection of life. I suspect, to some extent, that I am coming off as saying "all non-positive sensations are bad." This is not quite the case, although I would not say that they are "good" either - they just "are." An immediate stab of guilt or other response, based on cultivated awareness that was just not powerful enough to prevent you from doing the thing in the meantime - or realizing that a negative condition has come into existence even if it was not your will (someone takes offense at something you did, due to misunderstanding you can perceive) - is part of the unsatisfactoriness of reality, but you can decide how to face it from there. The bad condition would be if you cannot resolve this feeling, and it becomes a recurring source of suffering, another arrow embedded in your flesh. Eventually it may be impossible to do so, and beyond the acknowledgement that "yeah, I erred there," it has no utility. As for a right to the interior experience of forgiveness, I do not think "right" enters into it. "Right" suggests some kind of cosmic ledger or enforcer which I do not think exists, other than the laws of karma, which are more like the laws of gravity than something legislated in Universe Congress. If the interior experience of forgiveness would address suffering without severe side-effects or tending to guide against right action, I see no reason not to embrace it. Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 19:49
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Josef bugman posted:Could you provide a bit of a quote about the third bit, as I am unsure too! You can still have morality without accepting some kind of cosmic law-giver created this law. Morality is ultimately what sentient beings do to other sentient beings; what shall that thing be? What effects do some actions create, that we can observe? What effects do other actions create? In this case, I believe that you are importing a punishment-based approach to things, saying that it is good to whip and scold and contain and abuse, which is at odds with both the observed and incomplete evidence we can see in our mortal lives and a fairly reliable strain in ethical teaching, extending beyond the Buddha and his students. Also, "I can't say it is doing me any ill," this one I can quote you on: Josef bugman posted:This is what me posting is. I am not entirely joking. I sometimes don't leave the house or talk to anyone because "this" is safe. I understand the dril tweet you are citing, but I think the point you make there is fatuous. I do not think the dril tweet makes a strong supporting argument for your own personal misery. e: The general question of how to consider utility is a much grander question and I do not have a lot of like, deep bench of citations to make here. However, we can look at the fruit of the actions, or of analogous action. Police states are not therapeutic; people generally do not derive benefit from being imprisoned, particularly in abusive prisons; people do not learn a lesson from being executed by the state. If these methods do not bear fruit for the reform of criminals (and a burglar or a murderer is a criminal even if a non-violent drug offender is not), why would they bear fruit for others? Should we all report to prison immediately, for its immense moral value, that we will be punished, even for things we may have forgotten? Nessus fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 21:26
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Josef bugman posted:That's fair, will try and work it out. I mean if we don't believe our interpretation of reality is true, we'd stop wouldn't we. I think it comes down to defining and realising that I am not other people. That difference or separation means that others are/can be worthy because they are not me. I'm me, and my choices are crappy ones. On the topic of morality being a matter of popular vote, I don't follow. Some things kind of actually are, but these are "matters of custom," which may well be brutally important for individuals but are to some extent due to the local consensus, which can be changed. Some things, such as harming others, are harmful for reasons external to local traditions. I don't follow your example, and it reads to me as "Well, I'm uniquely depraved and need to be punished, but other people are okay." Most people are parsing this as depressive self-talk, because it sounds exactly like depressive self-talk. Violence and harm to others is, I think, always bad; but sometimes it is a justifiable bad based on the specific conditions. The fact that an action could in some cases be both bad and good, in different avenues, is part of the complexity of life. I think that feelings along the lines of, "I should go to prison forever," are not true and accurate perceptions. I hesitate to speculate on their root causes in your particular case, but whatever they are - even if you like, blew up your entire family and their kitten rehabilitation facility when you ere a teenager - nothing is worthy, in my view, of punishment that lasts forever. In the words of Prince, that's a mighty long time.
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Jan 21, 2021 22:31
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White Coke posted:I find it comforting to learn that every generation of Christians going back to the first has had people predicting that the world is definitely going to end in their life times. I wonder if they also had people who thought that they could decode the scriptures to get things like winning lottery ticket numbers.
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Jan 21, 2021 23:25
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Josef bugman posted:No. Things are either good or bad. Other factors may eventually inform if something is good or bad, but those are the only two options. Anything else is introducing complexity for the sake of doing the old thing of "Well I want to do this, but I can't justify it, let me think up some way in which it becomes justifiable". No-one in a story or in real life has ever really agreed with the idea that morality is subjective and not been, at bare minimum, a bit of an arse. You can't go "We are not so different you and I" without falling into Bond Villain solipsism.
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Jan 21, 2021 23:45
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Josef bugman posted:That isn't morally complex though! Things are either good or bad, depending on when, but that doesn't mean that the binary state does not exist for either of those things. Plus any attempt to justify oneself is inherently suspect! You wouldn't trust someone on trial just because they said "honest guv" at the end of what they were saying! You probably could sell a lot of copies of a book with something like "God: the Ultimate Police Commissioner" though. You might have to get a ghost-writer to include bible citations...
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Jan 22, 2021 00:54
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HopperUK posted:You're a loose cannon, God, but you get results! And then the sequel, of course, "he said he only needed three."
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Jan 22, 2021 01:15
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Keromaru5 posted:But as far as trial metaphors go, it's worth remembering that forgiveness and permission are not the same thing. Forgiveness means you acknowledge what happened, but are willing to let it go. It does not mean you approve of it. This is something that infests every argument about the death penalty. "I don't think x deserves to die." "But he killed 6 people." "I know, but killing him would be wrong." "But he killed 6 people." "I'm not saying that wasn't wrong, just that this is also wrong." "But--"
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Jan 22, 2021 01:45
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Josef bugman posted:Hey, take that back! I have an unhealthy way of thinking about myself. My other opinions are fine.  Are you trying to be an Internet Circumcellion or something here?
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Jan 22, 2021 02:19
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White Coke posted:Murder is an interesting example because we do consider it okay under certain circumstances. Self defense is acceptable, and we tend to distinguish murder by various degrees of severity so we acknowledge that accidentally hitting and killing someone with your car is different than putting a bomb in theirs. We also generally consider it acceptable for some people to kill as part of their profession, soldiers and police officers.
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Jan 22, 2021 04:38
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zonohedron posted:(I am very convinced that Hell exists, in part because it makes our choices in this life meaningful, but primarily because we were created from nothing - everything that was created, was created from nothing - so when we put created things, especially our own selves, above God, we're choosing nothing rather than He Who Is. When we die, we get what we asked for: either an experience of perfect existence with no unrealized potential, nothing taken away or obscured (that is, seeing the One whose constant action is be-ing, face to face), or experiencing nothing at all except our own self and its hollowness. Some of us will still be clinging to some nothingness when we die, so (metaphorically) our fingers will have to be pried away from the nothingness; that's Purgatory, and if you don't think "prying fingers off something" sufficiently describes the suffering that some saints have associated with Purgatory, you've never pried a toddler's fingers off anything.) It's funny because as I have mentioned in the past, the fairest system seems to be the Mormon proposal, where everyone is raised at the last judgment and gets all of their questions answered by patient angels and/or Jesus until they are fully satisfied, and only THEN can they make the fully informed, pressure-free decision if they want to go to Hell or be annihilated, I forget which. I don't think Satan gets this privilege, but to be fair Satan seems to know what he was up to.
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Jan 22, 2021 20:19
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Shaddak posted:I've been following various iterations of this thread for a few years now. I primarily just lurk here for the good vibes, and good discussions. I was raised as a Christian Scientist but, I'm currently a non-believer and, have been for close to 25 years.
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Jan 23, 2021 05:23
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I think some of the "belief in science" is because there has been the relentless framing for a lot of people of "do you believe in But that's then the binary they've created: you choose one or another, or both, even if the choice is essentially meaningless and logically incoherent.
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Jan 23, 2021 06:17
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Siivola posted:If you hit the edit (on desktop) or cog (mobile) button next to the invite link field, you should be able to set it to never expire. The Christianity Cinematic Universe.
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Jan 23, 2021 23:38
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I’m actually surprised Dante made that all up, since I was under the impression the older churches have built up a pretty detailed cosmology of angels and such.
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Night10194 posted:Please, the term is heterodoxy! And it is everywhere. I remember hearing a piece of particularly detailed trivia here from a Catholic. One might well hope and pray, and believe, that God will take everyone to Heaven, and that nobody will be in Hell except maybe Satan. But you have to allow for the possibility to be in line with the Catholic perspective. Similarly, you don't have to believe that witchcraft is active, common, or anything like a reasonable explanation of phenomena observed now, but you have to admit the theoretical possibility.
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Jan 23, 2021 23:54
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Shaddak posted:I'm going to have to say yes to both of these. Now, I don't know enough about the founding of the sect to know if this was intentional. I definitely get the impression, though, that Eddy borrowed a lot of old ideas. As far as gnostic influence in modern Christianity goes, I'm not sure. I've never read of another modern sect with similar ideas.
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Jan 24, 2021 00:17
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Fritz the Horse posted:edit: I should also add my field involves processes that occur on geologic timescales which again, not falsifiable in any reasonable sense. Like I can confidently state that the cooler climate of the Cenozoic era we live in is largely due to silicate weathering of the Himalaya uplift which started ~60-70 million years ago. Just lol falsifying things which occur on a timescale of "tens of millions of years"
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Jan 24, 2021 10:20
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Captain von Trapp posted:Fundamental disagreements about the deepest parts of the human experience are likely to be hurtful and alienating from time to time. This thread has been able to handle those disagreements in a pretty genial live-and-let-live way. Why not continue? If it's too intense for some, there's always every other thread on the forums.
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Jan 25, 2021 05:42
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White Coke posted:An argument I've see pop up is: religious experiences can be caused by drugs like LSD, or by medical conditions like schizophrenia, so therefore any and all religious phenomena are explicable by these means and therefore "untrue". I don't know the people in specific so I can't speculate as to motive. I think that if you are not religious, or associate religious experience with bad experiences, an explanation which dismisses the religious experience in this manner would be very appealing. It would dismiss the topic entirely, to the intensity that you prefer, whether it be "this is all founded in the artistic expression of people who we would now consider mentally ill" to "everyone who subscribes to a religious philosophy or otherwise identifies thus is either insane, weak-willed enough to obey the insane, or both." I do not think that you can so easily dismiss what I guess you could call the religious inclination. It is part of human psychology, if you want to be strictly materialistic about it. I think it is often suppressed, or is channeled into negative forms. I regularly get irritated at English-language Buddhism discussions because (e: English speaking, typically white) people seem to need to have a ritual structure around engaging with the dharma in order to get over their own hang-ups. Nessus fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 05:34
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PantlessBadger posted:I'm in the same spot, in that if someone really wants to know what "I" think about an issue, they can look it up in the Book of Common Prayer/St. Augustine or the Catechism of the Catholic Church/St. Thomas (for 99% of things, and see the BCP for the odd things that differ). Most folks here, at least going back to the first and following iterations of this thread, weren't particularly interested in that. I suppose it might be that in more recent iterations of the thread there is a wider audience.
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Jan 27, 2021 06:04
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I can't speak for the Lourdes water, but it is a mighty thing that the great negative event of a premature and sudden death is now also the site of great positive events, such as your own healing. Give thanks to that person and post honorably in their name.
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Jan 30, 2021 08:14
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Valiantman posted:Fake edit: I really like Miracles by Newsboys, too. It is a good take on which miracles really matter.
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Jan 31, 2021 23:37
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White Coke posted:Can't say that I have.
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Feb 1, 2021 04:40
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White Coke posted:What is double predestination? And can people speak to what predestination actually is instead of just “rich people will go to heaven because God makes them rich because he likes them”? Predestination is basically the idea that since God knows everything that will happen, He also knows whether or not you will go to Heaven or Hell before you were even born (as this is a thing that can be known, and definitionally God knows everything). Double predestination is I believe the specific idea that God affirmatively sends you to Hell, as opposed to "allows it to happen, and could prevent it, but has opted not to for various reasons." (The various reasons are the subject of other theological debates.) I do not think the concept itself rests on the economic status of the saved person. I presume the theory is that if God has chosen you to go to Heaven, he likes you, and will therefore do nice things for you, as you are his little pogchamp, as opposed to that guy over there, who is damned to Hell and can only seek surcease at the dog temple. I do not believe that this is an orthodox theological view, although I imagine it is preached by many grifters.
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Feb 3, 2021 23:24
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