I am part of the world. I have values. And I act on them. I have a say in the way the world becomes.
The human orientation in the world is necessarily prescriptive. People value and want to navigate the world in a manner consistent with their valuations. But people often act as if they have no values of their own. They recite the values and expectations of others and play along. They say “Society expects x…men are not allowed to do y…z is the way the world is.” What is truly weak is to ignore, discount, or give up on one’s own valuations and the power to evaluate.
I would like more people to embrace their religion; not the religion they belong to. The religion of life, instead, that comes from being them. ~Jayson
I don’t care what religion you belong to, I care about your spirituality. I care about your personal orientation toward life, existence, and meaning itself. Your religion doesn’t tell me that, nor should it. If you discount your own personal experience and pass over in silence allowing the words and experiences of others to displace your own, you may as well be committing suicide. Spiritual suicide.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~Oscar Wilde
Acceptance of the way things are to the exclusion of one’s values – displacement of self with affected identity – is impotency. It is to become like a facsimile, a forwarding address, a soulless pantomime.
Any religion are usually preached by humans who will natually variate the interpetation, some will preach agression, pacifism, miracles and other weird things.
How would you secrue a uniform and pure teacing?
How would you prevent money mongers exploiting the naive people, who will put away their medicine when they are “healed and cured”? The statistics speaks about 40% fatalaties of christians each year.
I’m not interested in the mechanics of organized religion. This thread is about the struggle for authenticity. To answer your question, I suppose I would teach the significance of spirituality and valuation over religion (by which I mean religion en mass).
Yes OP may be your teaching, but it’s very unclear, unspecific and doesn’t really teach anything than good intend, which all other religions do so much better. Yet so many other religions fails at being modern.
If any religion will do, then there will be room for fanatism such as Satanism, Al Queda with Sharia, and worst we will turn back to medival superstition. With sharia no music, dance or other luxuary goods.
Your suggestion seems unthoughtful and will unlock Pandora’s Box, reintroducing all the bad things about religion that has been put down by science.
It was the clearest expression I could put down. You are free to discuss and ask questions if you don’t understand.
Submission to group identities like Satanism or Sharia Islam is at odds with the ideal of individual spirituality – personal orientation toward life, existence, and meaning itself – that I am striving for.
Pandora’s box is already open. The scientific method is based on certain values and assumptions itself and has no final authority on what is Good.
If you could change any, small aspect of the world we live in, then what would that small aspect be?
Like change your physiology, find a girlfriend, bring back a loved one to life, kill somebody you dislike, get a million dollars, give a million dollars, what?
What is one example of something you would change, if you could change it.
And a struggle it is, if almost everybody is trying to convince you otherwise.
As i’m sure you know, some philosophers develloped techniques for this, to aid you in making your view more consistent. Kierkegaard had something to say about this, and so does Nietzsche : Nihilistic devaluation of objective values and morals, Perspective viewing instead of the objective view from nowhere…
Most of the changes you listed are already well within my power. The only one that would truly take a miracle is bringing back the dead.
I’m kind of at a loss… there’s nothing that immediately comes to mind. It would be awesome to explore outer space, which I will almost certainly never have the chance to do in my life. My cousin was born with arthritis and will probably never make it to 40. It would be wonderful to cure him.
What are you thinking, upf? I would consider self-determinism only tangential to my thoughts on authenticity. But I’m curious about what you’re seeing.
Nice quote, but if that were applied universally what are we mimicking?
You could have the set of all items [being mimicked], and we could be sharing them such that each of us are different mixes of one another. You still have to create* them and make changes to them in order to have advanced and changed.
Our thoughts and personalities are thus shared?
We are all actors and we take on characters blended from others we come across, we then make that into partially or completely distinct personas. Once achieved we can then create* and the circle is complete.
But it doesn’t apply universally… the point is that most people take on the values and thinking of the few people who stand on their own authentic values and thinking.
Oscar Wilde was speaking about everyone, even if we took our values from a reasonably closed group [family, culture etc] each part of that group extends to another set of people and eventually other groups.
Otherwise its simply a derogatory statement concerning authenticity, and its all situational, so there are no special individuals. Some people claim things to be their own but I’d suggest everything is shared to some degree.
The ingredients [information set] which compose authenticity are universal at least to everything the whole of humanity thinks about, no?
I do however think authenticity a worthy value to aim at.
Not sure what you mean about groups extending into other groups… but the Wilde quotation is not a universal. It would have begun with All instead of Most and I would think that Oscar Wilde chose his words with care. I think everyone can aim for authenticity, yes. And I’m not trying to judge most people or anything here, I’m just setting down my values and ideals.
You got one set of people in Wilde’s quote who are ‘authentic’ and another who mimic them = ‘everyone’ as I was thinking of it.
Anyways, groups extend into other groups because for a start families do, my sisters family extends into her husbands and his into others in a binary fashion all over the world ~ as we all have a common ancestor. I think virtually any circle of people would extend so.
totally possible that i’m misreading you - but you seem concerned with the origin of peoples’ values - i read you as saying that in order for a self to be authentic, one’s values ought be self-determined. if you just let circumstance dictate to you what your values are then you are being inauthentic - or something to that effect, no?
I would say that circumstance is an important part of how we come to our values. But so is thinking for oneself and trying to articulate in one’s own words what is good and meaningful. Popular slogans and political parties and religions whitewash unique and varied points of view. They have their uses, but they also use people.
It’s kindof hard to sum it up in one post, and possibly more revealing then i want to be. Authenticity isn’t necessary about being dead honest . But, i’ll give it a try…
At times i used to have that paralysing self-consciousness too that you described in that other post. Part of the problem was looking to much to the outside(from the inside, comparing memories, if that makes sense) - to the world and other people - for some objective standard i had to model my behaviour too.
But of course there isn’t one standard, so after cycling through a lot of different ones, i ended up pretty confused… that’s about the time it really starts to affect my life. The upside is, decisions get a lot more straightforward then. And from there i managed to form some rudimentary hierarchy of values.
In actuality, it is nowhere near as linear as i described here, it’s not a one time enlightment, it’s a proces over many ups and downs. Some philosophy can help to expediate this proces, i think, to help you think more clearly, and think avenues of thought through to the end.
Circumstances play a role, sure… but can never be the whole story.
People can, and do react differently to the same circumstances, even if it isn’t consciously. Self-determinism doesn’t have to be conscious determinism.
And the circumstances themselves can be chosen to some extent. If you refrain from chosing them where you can, that is also a choice.
To the extend that circumstances force you to act a certain way, it seizes to be a question of values (or authenticity) because there is no choice.
I don’t think authenticity is a really good word for it, but i’d say it is having the courage to act on your values where you can. Inauthenticity is lying to yourself.
. But, i’ll give it a try…