No, that’s my response to your previous post in where you assert that an individual would be better served by reading John S Mill.
I was stating that the reason people turn to the resources in which they do for spirituality is because society has shown them that this is how a person accesses spirituality if they so want to be spiritual.
If you don’t want people to seek the Christian’s bible and cherry pick it under the same name, while denying most of its contents, and instead turn to philosophy for spiritual enrichment, then we would need to have society show people how works of philosophy or even a common novel are capable of being adhered to in full capacity of spiritual impact and adoration as otherwise is experienced when people interact with their spirituality through such texts as the Christian’s bible.
You cannot gain spirituality from a book. You have only to contemplate the content of your mind and heart.
I suggested Mill for rational arguments for moral lessons. You should give him a try. There are few better intellectuals that established the best aspects of the social revolutions of the 20thC.
If you prefer Jesus or Mohammed then I can only hope that you realise that their day is done.
I think you have mistaken me.
I’m not a theist; I’m an atheist (apatheist, or transtheist to be specific).
I was speaking of the sociology of the events, not about me personally.
We can talk about how irrational it may seem, but people do actively seek the familiar religious tomes for spiritual evocation.
They do this because society teaches everyone that this is the only access point for spiritual evocations.
To change that, we would have to have society teach a different method of accessing spiritual evocation than people are accustomed to now.
It is not suffice to simply state that people are irrational if change is the interest.
What I meant by the “novel” was finding spiritual evocation in anything.
If society held that spirituality was like finding inspiration, then even a novel or beach could be sought after for spiritual evocation and imbuement.
Society, however, does not offer these alternatives.
Instead, society pigeon holds spirituality to exclusively being bound up in established religious texts and dogma’s; as such, as odd as it may seem, condemning cherry picking works against the atheist’s interest for the aggregate tone of society.
I’ll assume that this was directed at me, though you have not quoted me.
My words do not give you warrant to think I’ve mistaken you for a Theist.
I think society offers much more than dry religious texts; maybe that’s how they play it in the frozen North, but in the UK we have Art , museums, Theatre - I could go on.
Cherry picking is not a problem for the open-minded atheist. It is only a problem when one’s moral behaviour is linked to the promise of salvation, and the myth of eternal life.
Cherry picking when it results in rational argument for the instigation of laws and the policy of governments. Ethics is a science in itself.
OK, but doesn’t the adherent to a proposition define the assertion of what leads to salvation and eternal life?
It seems that only a literalist holding of a given canon and dogma package who was in the midst of cherry picking could be at fault of what you are describing as a problem, for if the individual is, say, Bahai in adherence, then there would be no real imperative to view a literal iteration of such a claim, and cherry picking would be the default for the faith.
But I could demand that beheading a British soldier was the route to salvation. That does not make it right or desirable, nor acceptable.
In a word where each religious person has license to believe any nonsense and claim it as gods law I think we have a serious problem. And although many religions are subdued under the weight of rationalism and enlightenment, this sort of irrational faith based nonsense is immanent in the system of the 3 main religions non of which are anti-thetical to violence and persecution of disbelievers.
But that’s a value judgement of their morality, and not a reason that any given individual who isn’t a collective literalist of a given canon cannot claim themselves to be (in this case) “Christian”.
All you really stated was that, regardless of what their name or right to claim in name, you are mostly generally offended by their moralities.
I make no apology for criticising the public beheading of a off duty soldier on the streets of London.
Such practices are inherent in any system which claims divine right via the irrational cherry picking of scriptures; that goes for “justified” murder, right down to homophobia, sexism, and any other moral code that restricts and imposes upon the freedom of others.
That’s all well and fine; I’m not asking you to apologize.
I was saying that regardless of how fowl we made hold any given belief set; there isn’t any stipulation that an individual must be rigidly applying a literal and extremist method of adherence to be classified as their belief label; they may quite well cherry pick - regardless if they are crazy or sane; peaceful or violent; admirable or disgusting.
I don’t understand, I’m sorry (I’m not too good at implied subjects).
Are you asking what I do in general, or what “we” do in Alaska regarding the tangent of discussion?
Oh, well…currently I work for GCI (Alaska cable/inet/local phone/cell provider) working as a Lead in technical support (sort of like being a moderator, oddly enough, lol).
Before that I was in the Army, before that I was a vagabond, before that I was…too many things to list, but it ranges from living with Greek Orthodox monks to making indie films.
Most of my time not at work is spent with my two daughters and my wife (and my female cat…I’m surrounded by estrogen ).
Aside from that, I spend my free time toggling between writing poetry, music, painting, drawing, graphics art, consuming as many documentaries as I can, studying Levant region (and generally Middle Eastern) anthropology (this is one of my favorite hobbies), studying neurology, dabble mildly in physics (mostly I just like following along; I’m not good at math to the degree one needs to properly engage actively in physics), and working on my philosophical work that I call (at the moment anyway), “Modular Spiritual Philosophy” (a concept that focuses on attempting to employ spiritual practices without accepting any theological constructs, but instead attaching an individual’s own personal philosophies on life and building an array of meaningful representational artwork to it).
And of course, I watch my fair share of television: quick rundown of my tv consumption is:
Documentaries (love my neurology, history and geological documentaries)
Game of Thrones
Fringe (still working through the final season. shhhh!)
House of Cards (via net flix)
Elementary
Castle
Defiance
Re-watching Star Trek Next Generation
(just finished all) Poirot
And I think that’s about it at the moment.
I’m not much of an outdoors kind of person, so Alaska’s great outdoors is somewhat lost on me; especially since I don’t appreciate the cold during the Fall and Winter months (go figure, a guy who grew up in Alaska doesn’t like the primary things Alaska offers, lol).
I have a friend that lives in Palmer. Next door to Wasilla. He hasn’t met Sarah, but has friends that know her personally. So it’s not a stretch that Jayson in Wasilla would know Sarah Palin. It’s a small town. Prolly everybody knows everybody. And to ask is not abuse.
Wasilla isn’t small enough to know everyone; it’s a population of 60,000+ and climbing (it was around 20 to 30 thousand at the turn of the century; Anchorage running out of housing space caused a population boom. About half of our population commutes to Anchorage for work).
But no, I don’t know Palin.
I’m also not a very good “Alaskan” in the sense of hard-core republican (the stereotype for this area [which isn’t exactly accurate, but meh]). I’m more someone that makes more sense to live in Oregon or Washington.
I never really knew Palin that much politically either; she was barely in office here before she jumped to the big stage and started talking crazy; I wouldn’t be comfortable around someone like her.
I also hate Wasilla; this isn’t my homeland. This is a wasteland, like some strange transplant from the middle of Arizona into Alaska and some trees tossed in for camouflage.
I’m from Kodiak originally, so my concept of what a beautiful place looks like are pretty spoiled.
BTW - Wiki puts the population of Wasilla at just over 7,000 … but does say that it’s : “part of the Anchorage metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 364,701.”
).
…