Sure, it is a mainstream epistemology. If you can’t prove that I am wrong,then I am right.You hold other positions to a much higher standard than your own. Now you haven’t verbalized it, quite though almost, that way. But you function in the world as if that is the case.
Which is why I used the word default. I would argue that one should hold one’s own views to at least as high a standard as one expects someone else’s position. I have not seen you present a good case and it seemed like you conceded a lot of things, including but not limited to a toll on the body and the lack of further returns on insight. And when I wrote about ‘your philosophy’ in regard to this - which is a kind of hedonism, though there were other types of support also brought forward - I referred to it as not necessarily verbally put out. IOW I don’t think you have really organized you various justifications for drug use, but they function as a philosophy but become at least somewhat clearer in reaction to challenge.
What you, like most people - iow mainstream epistemology - are doing is holding to a position unless some other position meets standards your own position, so far, does not meet. It may be common - re: ‘the way pretty much anyone thinks’, but this does not make it a solid epistemological position. And perhaps not the best way to arrive at how to treat yourself. IOW if you frame a discussion as should I accept your authority, it evades the issue of whether you should accept your own authority and the philosophical positions underpinning it. It doesn’t matter if I and others do not convince you, if you own beliefs laid out in front of you don’t convince you, and, as I think is likely, are even less convincing than what some others say. I am suggesting that the way you frame the debate serves to maintain/bias your status quo not based on the validity of your position.
If they are not good for you, it seems deducible that you would be better off without them. Unless you see only bad options, and including them in your life is less bad. I have seen nothing to indicate how you would know this. Or how you would know what you have said: people who do not use drugs can we almost rule out their contacting God. That seems like talking out of your ass to me. If you want to make the onus mine. That I must prove to you that you can reach god without drugs, you are skipping how unsupporting this belief of yours is, regardless of my rhetorical skills and knowledge. As one example.
If you experiment on yourself, as a single person trial study, there are lots of problems getting good results. Since your subjective judgments (which must be central) are being affected by the drugs. And how you experience outside of the drug trial tests, is what I mean in particular. And then the sample of your research is limited.
NO, it is not. It is extremely radically pro-drug in a way society never has been before. Certainly some authorities disagree with some of your drug choices. But overall the control and manipulation of the emotional body via drugs is nearly universally accepted, it is marketed and run by soem of the most powerful corporations in the world beaming their ideas about life into brains everywhere as we speak. Pharma with its psychotropics, Alcohol and especially beer, tobaccoo and the various caffeine products - and while these latter may seem mild to most people, it is a motor in current forms of capitalism. I extend ‘drug use’ or the pattern of suppression of emotions even further than this to all sorts of activities - certainly gaming and wireless tech use are clear and easy examples where extreme addictions mirror those of literal drug users - that suppress and manipulate the emotions. Your positions are mainstream in being hedonistic, skeptical about getting what you want from non-technological interventions into your own brain chemistry and the implicit acceptance of control and manipulation of emotions. Just because some of the drugs you do are not the mainstream accepted ones, does not make your position less mainstream. Philosophically you are much more in the mainstream than me. But as you (I think) and I (I’m sure) and also Uccisore have pointed out an accusation of being mainstream is substanceless as far as the issue at hand. The more important issue is whether the conclusion has been reached independently or dependently and if so on what.
You are being an authority by putting forward your sense of what reality is. You are being an authority with me and anyone reading. And, re the above, a specific point say about illegal drug X may go against mainstream, your philosophical positions justifiying use of the illegal drug are mainstream and conventional. (and we are not even dealing with the fact that today we have many many subcultures and in many of these, especially for younger men, occasional use of drugs legal or otherwise is seen as fun and those who do not engage in it are less fun, not cool. It’s no longer the fifties where a single mainstream rules most of North American society. I think you are getting mileage from couching this as you as non-mainstream, me as mainstream that does nto match reality.
AS far as the should. AGain, if you that you want to do drugs, that’s it. I will not tell you you should not. If you tell me I do drugs because reality is X. (drugs to this, without drugs this is less likely, this can happen, that cannot iow ontology cause effect so on) I am going to disagree with you based on what I see as reality.
If you can only take that as He is telling me I should not do drugs, you are missing context and me. If I thought your justifications were correct, I would not be disagreeing. Your priorities might be different from me so whatever costs benefits I see are not mine to shove on you. But once you tell me I do X because X, Y Z are true, my disagreement does not mean I think you should not do X.
As far as contact with God, I suppose if that was the entire goal - a very short term contact - I would have less objections, since that would be your goal. But if some kind of relationship and ongoing connection is the goal, then I maintain my position as fully as presented earlier. Sure, you might connect with someone on ecstasy or peyote or whatever and then develop a romantic relationship that works after word. 1) I do not think the connections involve the whole person - which is why the connection is dependent on the drug, that particular whole person has trouble doing it otherwise. 2) I think one has to relearn all that intimacy 3) I think it is actually harder afterward when drugs have made the connection. And I have seen not a single long term relationship built on that way of meeting another person. And I have seen a lot of that kind of Hello. So when I consider other relationships, like say to God, I think the same problems apply. It is not a good way to form an ongoing relationship with the whole of you. Of course this may, as said, not be part of the goal. If single, once in while intense, experiences as exceptions are the goal, my objections are less strong. I realized I had assumed something there.
I want to take a break from this for a while. It’s been really good for me, but frankly this opening and the way the disagreement keeps getting framed by you is something that would need to change for me to want to go on. And I guess I sense that for me at least some unconscious mulling would be useful. Let it percolate.
Gargle only.