Yeah…Riiiiiiiight.
UMmmm, joekoba, what beliefs do I have? Or ; What beliefs do you see?
[b]
Ahh thats cold Standard. Joekoba made a heart felt religious statement. Wether one agrees with it or not, at least see the passion within. It is not wrong to love and to say love for a heartfelt belief. Nor can one logically chuff at such passion. Beliefs are passionate things and beliefs in gods are the most passionate of all.
Disagree with ways and existance but, chuffing and dismissing passion is cold and wrong.[/b]
I think everyone chooses their beliefs; it depends on how you define “a choice.” I think it’s the instance in which your preference is made apparent or realized. You liked broccoli more than carrots before you chose broccoli over carrots and your understanding of logic was set in place before you chose a side in an argument. Faith may be the result of emotional predisposition and adopted worldviews, but it’s still a choice.
(That said, you can’t honestly disbelieve and believe at the same time, so your hypothetical statement is still nonsensical.)
Ahhh, see to me that is not belief that is ethics, durn sweet social manners. Never liked someone chuffing another’s heart. Kind of reminds me of kicking babies, pups and kittens.
Beliefs are one thing, emotions are another. Chuff beliefs, but, don’t bully a person’s heart.
I disagree. We don’t choose our beliefs. We accept our beliefs. We become persuaded, for whatever reason, that something is true, and on that basis we believe it. It’s never a choice. It is never the case where we simply choose to believe whatever we want to believe is true. It’s always the case that what we are persuaded or convinced is true is what we believe.
Belief is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for truth. Truth, however, is a sufficient condition for belief. If we become convinced that something is true, then we believe it. We have no choice about the matter.
If you sincerely believe that the earth is a sphere, then this means that you are convinced that the proposition “The earth is a sphere” is true. At this point, then, you are not free to simply choose to believe that the earth is a cube. You will have to become persuaded by evidence or argument that it is. And if you do become convinced that it is a cube, then you cannot simply decide to choose to believe that it is not.
Even the children that are taken to church/synagogue/mosque by their parents?
Rubbish.
Beliefs are pressed upon us? (I applaud the selective passive voice there.) If I am persuaded to think something, I then want to think it; if I didn’t really want to think it, why would I? Mental coercion?
You don’t just “become” convinced. You think, contemplate, and understand actively, not some outside force.
This is what I meant when I said we understand “choice” differently. When I say “choice” I do not mean whim. When I say “freedom” I do not mean absence of control. I mean the individual who chooses, the individual who is free, does so, and is so, by his/her own power; one is not forced into motion by some other. You can’t force someone else’s mind just by presenting evidence or argument.
“Belief” isn’t like “habit.” A child may take on a belief in association with parental love or pressure, but it isn’t going to be a belief in its own right just because of that association. At best, it will just be taken for granted out of repetition, not understood to be true, until there is a choice to believe; the idea has to be actively addressed to be held as true. Otherwise the “believer” wouldn’t need to know what it is he/she “believes.”
By loving god if you mean loving myself, in seeing myself as god I’m cool with that.
Bullshit, you don’t even know God without a bible. What kind of God needs a bible to show who he is?
Seek the Dionysian spirit and you will feel the spirit of God!
No one can deny me the feeling of God!
No bible can denounce what I have felt. And it is the feeling of art, music and the viewing of reality in fresh ways that makes me a disciple of Schopenhauer in this aesthetic world, it is God who uplifts me into the state of happiness far beyond your will to reason and beyond this earth!
(´scuse el delay)
Lets consider a number of points.
First, one unstettling possibility is that life generally offers more negative triggers (NTs). Also, these NTs could generate more intense (or maybe voracious is a better word) emotions… not great news.
Now, you said we may more readily accept negative displays of feeling. Supposing NTs are more typical, we would more easily identify with rage or hate-inducing scenarios, feelings and outbursts. As stated above, NTs may be more common. They may also be more intense: were this the case, equally or more intense behaviour in response to positive triggers (PTs) would seem inappropriate, or worthy of complaint from others. Perhaps positive emotions are inherently less intense, on the surface/body at least. While convinced PTs may be less common, I´m not convinced that they are less intense.
Either way, each has their own notion of what they deem appropriate reactions to particular circumstances, feelings or beliefs.
A further unsettling implication, which you outlined, is that people are indifferent to or enjoy seeing others in anger or distress, and conversely that people dislike seeing people happy!
My view is that what rouses disapproval is the type of trigger itself. While conceding love and hate may generate equal levels of intensity, attributing feelings of intensity (regardless of whether it´s love or hate) to concepts as subtle and abstract as life, and particularly God, is bordering on delusional (in proportion to the intensity of the reaction).
I may love my wife, my music and, if a little shallow, my car. Likewise I may hate a relative´s murderer and, if a little silly, the weather. On the other hand to speak of life and God with equal or more passion is for me absurd. This is because the potential intensity must diminish to the extent one departs from particulars. The most abstract and general and thus vague and indeterminable concepts seem inappropraite to elicit such intensity.
As for abstract ideas like “injustice” and “poverty” I grant one could feel equally hateful or loving towards them. Yet crucially these must depend on knowledge of particular examples from which they are abstracted. “Life” is an exceptional case, as particular examples are in a strange sense obviously available! Most appropriately I´d urge “lovers” of life to rename themselves as stern “appreciators”!
God, however, is by definition the very antithesis of the particular or concrete, hence my incredulity.
Let me know what you think.
I see you accused me of chuffing at a person´s heart. Why should this be worse than chuffing at the head? Is there really a difference anyway? I think the two are inextricably linked to the extent where defending one above the other is unwarranted: to see why refer back to (the end of) my last reply to you in the “Guilt” thread:
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … sc&start=0
So explain God without the bible you worship.
God does not need to be worshiped, he is God and above our petty minds to comprehend his totality.
God is joy, happiness, elation all of those words to describe the elevated sense of purity and love. A category for god is non-existant. He simply IS. To recognize Him one must feel these emotions and then you will know.
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil still lies within the framework of good and evil. He was a pessimist and the heart he did have was wasted on isolation. Is genius greater than love? He certainly chose the wrong path as a human. By choosing his genius his health deteriorated to nothingness without hope, love, and he lead a life that Tolstoy would condemn. Simplicity of life is the path of righteousness. To live in harmony with God’s work is to live in peace, comfort and security in knowing he exists within each of us.
Reason brings selfishness. Love to be loved and happiness will follow… and selflessness.
s.
This is what i believe but with the feeling of God. Your belief of my disbelief is what is holding you back from truly knowing God. An argument for God would displace faith, replacing faith with fact cannot be done because this would conflict with the mystery of God, the mystery of the unknown. Feelings resonate and we seem to know why these feelings arise, through biological explanations, however feelings can only be felt, our mental faculties are not trained to know the immensity of God’s presence. You feel and do not know God. And this makes me uniformed and ignorant? I feel and know god. There is no delusion only atheistic tendencies to cold-hearted rationale.
Passion is rarely used by those moderate skeptics that do more questioning than living through God. Their passion is replaced by reason and reason alone. Pure unconditional passion is of the Dionysian spirit anything less is suboptimal.
Love life is good for skeptics but they love little because they do not want to know more than love of life…and that is the love of God.
Firstly I´m not convinced reason brings selfishness, especially when considering the immorality of babies which is brought into check when they develop reason. Plus if one love´s to be loved how is that selflessness? Isn´t one depending on others loving them?
So in this paragraph you say:
“Your belief of my disbelief is what is holding you back from truly knowing God” and “I feel and know god.”
Yet you also say:
“replacing faith with fact cannot be done because this would conflict with the mystery of God, the mystery of the unknown”.
If this God is so unknowable, how can you even know He´s there, let alone truly know Him?
Also, it seems as though you use “feelings” and science´s supposed inability to adequately explain them in order to account for the presence of God. How could science truly “explain” feelings in the sense you demand? Along your reasoning, you cannot “prove” other people´s feelings or even consciousness (solipsism). It is such demanding epistemology which leads people to posit more radical explanations, i.e. that God is needed for us to feel.
I could just as easily say because I reason, which, like feeling, is a mark of the mental, that God must be “there”. But I don´t. Similarly, I don´t think you should with feelings. I like using reason, but it´s hardly mutually exclusive of feeling. Moreover, if feeling is simply synonymous with your “living through God” (as you have already implied), one does not have to believe in God in order to feel. Thus, wrong or not, their lives will not suffer in quality of happiness, and you are then unable to accuse us of being cold or selfish or whatever.
How exactly do they vary?
I have had to think about that last question. I hope you don’t mind the delay.you bring up some valid points that I needed to ponder in this thread and in guilt.
Try this on for size
As we have distinguished triggers emotions and thoughts/ideas
Lets distguish the ability to control.
We already have, on emotions, distinguished we can control them to a point. Not completely and sometimes not even nearly and then sometimes not at all. It all depends upon the triggers Right?
But what about thoughts and ideas. Words and sentences that we utter or write after an emotion? Can we have complete control or more control over them then our emotions. Do we?
Yes. I say yes for several reasons. while emotions are natural to us, our thoughts words and ideas have to form. Even though it takes the merest second it still must form. It is the forming of the thought that gives us time to stop it or form it differently. We all know the mother proverb: Think before you speak. Ever have your mom give you the evil eye when you are about to burst out with words after an emotional trigger? Yep we have the time to control our thoughts. LOL Well at least according to Moms we do. They seem to think that there is a significant difference. Are they wrong? No. Mom’s don’t try to stop the outward appearance of emotion they just try to get you to slow your thoughts down and control them better.
So for me chuffing at emotions is different than chuffing at thought/ideas or words. The more capable you are of controlling a thing then you need to accept that responsibility of controlling it.
And if a thing is not easily controlled then patience and understanding needs to be used.
If you hand a kid an RC plane and tell them to perfectly control it even though they have never been around one, Is that not an unreasonable expectation? Would it not be the same for an adult too? To get angry if they crash it would be a wrong thing would it not? To even berate them a little would be wrong would it not? Even though you just saw them trash your expensive plane.
Now hand that plane to someone who wins competitions with RCs. You would be justified up to a point for getting upset if they crash it. You may even want to clock them ,since they are expensive. they accpeted the responsibility of it and they have the experience to control it, they did not.
Child or adult they had an ability to not crash.
We can control thoughts far better than emotions. So chuffing can be acceptable for thoughts ideas and words but, not emotional.
If a person is expressing emotion of a thing through words, that should be accepted and tolerated. If they are just expressing ideas and thoughts about that thing through words well that can be chuffed at.
This thread began with expressing emotions over religion. Not expressing ideas or thoughts about religion. See the differences? If not maybe I can try something else.
It´s all good, in your own time.
Once again you got me thinking, so here´s what I came up with.
We do to an extent have autonomy to select our own descriptive labels of feelings (e.g. this feeling seems like love, and so I must call it). But once we have assigned a particular label, it´s as if our feelings must then strive to match what we understand that label to mean, as though once we´ve decided on the label, the feeling has less flexibility. I guess this demonstrates the power of language over thought, especially as a shared phenomenon to which all our feelings slot in with.
We have a feeling then we search for a label. We have control to search for the best description, however much it is in reality tainted by other factors. By this I mean internal considerations, e.g. self-deceit, self-reassurance, etc.
Anyway, as for controlling our thoughts in the sense of watching what we say: One can no doubt alter their words to suit their context or purpose, e.g. tact, praise, manipulation, etc. These pertain to the external, the acts.
Perhaps the request to slow down one´s thoughts is simply the age-old lesson of not showing what´s really beneath the surface (a lesson for the external (acts) but not necessarily the internal (thoughts)). It´s as though no-one should be themselves, and everybody, if they want to get the most out of other people, they are best off constructing a permanent facade which only ever operates/responds with regard to context and utility, as opposed to pure honest description of the self and its feelings.
Given its prevalence I cannot help but worry about the eerie undertones of all speech, even right now!
The down-side of this is of course living in a social world of paranoia, estrangement, isolation and mistrust. On the plus-side such inhibiting structures of the self, such barriers, when broken in relationships over time through trust and intimacy, the notion and emotion of love is possible. So perhaps the phenomenon of love arises from the exceptions between individuals where the usual facade breaks down. Would love be so special, or even exist, if there were no such facades?
For this reason I think love can only reasonably be said to be triggered by individuals with whom we can converse: the more intimate the dialogue, the deeper the love. “Ha!” the ´lover´ of God will say, “Who knows us better than God?” True, God may “know” us better than anyone. Yet, supposing this were true, such “love” did not arise by way of the same (and I think essential) unravelling process; in fact it is the exact opposite, given God´s so-called omnipotence. If a genius scientist taps into my brain and discovers all, it should hardly be said that therefore I love him. “But I have a dialogue with Him”, the “lover” could retort. For sure, I´ll never know this weren´t the case. But if it were, again: the omnipotence of God would render this process/relationship disanalogous with the “unravelling” I take to be an essential element of love. I´d be eager to hear of lovers of God whether they do indeed have a dialogue, if it´s necessary for their love, their own notion of how such love arises, and how it compares with love between people, etc, etc.
Now on to your point about responsibility increasing with control: I don´t think anyone could disagree with this. However, I think we differ on the level of control we give feelings, thoughts and acts.
The plane example you used spoke of actions. I agree that only the capable driver should be blamed, as he could have prevented the plane from crashing. What I don´t agree with is the level of control given to thoughts. So for me the driver could not be blamed for wanting to crash the plane, he could only be blamed for actually crashing it. I don´t believe we are in much control of what we think, but can control the actions/words which arise thereafter. (Although, perhaps this is just my deterministic inclination stopping sort of action.)
I´m even tempted to say we control both emotions and thought to a limited and near-equal extent, whereas the acts which result can be controlled almost entirely.
Speaking of the poster, joekoba, if he/she genuinely feels that way, I should indeed not chuff. But considering what I´ve said above, I need to ask whether he/she is actually speaking without the normal motives and intentions people have when speaking, i.e. are they motive-free, and thus accurate, descriptions of his/her feelings. Perhaps the form of communication (mass-public) led me to presume otherwise. Maybe such a presumption is simply overly cynical.
Before these questions, however, the love joekoba speaks of must first be proved as on at least an equal footing with the typical meaning of the word!
Nevertheless I think you´re right in saying how a person´s expression of emotion should be accepted without contempt, whereas expressing ideas and thoughts can be. I agree because only the latter should be subject to rationality.
And yes, I see the difference between feelings and ideas about religion. While I cannot deny joekoba´s feelings, my claim is that his/her subsequent articulation of the sources or triggers behind them is grossly misguided, and, with reflection, can be proved as unreasonable and thus revisable; in other words, that the articulation of feeling has gone seriously awry, leading to overly fanciful explanations.
Let me know your thoughts.
So you dont beleive in bibles, -----Bravo-----, I agree that bibles have nothing to do with God nor are they at all necessary to know him.
You have dug deep into this I agree with what you say.
As per the flexibility I would say there are degrees which overlap with other emotional degrees. Yes once labeled, that emotion stays within a parameter. But really have you ever had just one emotion at one time? If you think about it they can overlap and occur.
Lets take the positive emotions Love, happiness, amusement
These break down into degrees, Love has love, fondness, like, caring,acceptance. Happiness has happiness, joy, pleasant. Amusement has it own breakdowns and there are degrees with labels existing that I did not list.
All of these labeled degrees mix and match with each occurance.
If you love you can be pretty sure you feel degrees of the other positive emotions thrown in. At the time of that emotion.
But see Love really for me is not just an emotion I had a whole argument on a thread somtime back that it is a sense. …Oh that will go off in another direction LOL lets stick with this one for now. I will have to dig that thread up for you to look at I think you would find it interesting. I don’t expect agreement at all but, it does give you more to chew on. there is another thread too I will PM you with both.
Emotions are so tangled together that it feels like one most of the time because of the dominance of one particular emotion,
I do think each person can be predisposed to having certain dominant emotions. Positive or negative.
As per the facade LOL I could not agree more. I do look at your description and I see the control of a hunter, a manipulation, of self preservation, control and prey. We like to pretend we are civilized at times even though we are in a primal mode, thus a reason for the facade.
I am not by any means saying this is true for all but, it does fit in a general sense.
A question arises in all of this that perhaps needs to be answered I for one am not sure of the answer.
Is expression an act? meaning; If one expresses emotion through words or behavior is that only expression or is there more to it? Such as thought.
What should reaction or action be done from another persons standpoint?
Is this where the facade should or does stay or break down?
Example: crimes of passion. or verbal emotional wording done that incite pure emotion in others bu,t it is not planned just spur of the moment.
I am not sure how to put the question, maybe you can glean enough to interpret more. I know I am not wording it right, but, right now I am at a loss to set it to a more clear way.
And yes A question to joekoba would be apropriate. And very much needed.
LOL, Another question. Have you ever questioned someones emotions and they attack? You are innocent of insult but, they see it as insult? I have always found that to be an interesting reaction, because I have felt it, and really was at a loss to explain why when LOL, “sanity returned”