I have decided that I love nature…I love science…and I love the spiritual life…
how has this come about…
my understanding of nature and science has led me to a spiritual life…
I just felt like sharing my happiness…
it is good to have a new awareness and then sharing it. You did a good thing.
Kropotkin
thank you peter k…
actually the more I understand the nature of evolution the more spiritual I become…
Do we decide to love nature or science or come to the awareness/realization that we love it?
But perhaps it was your Spirit which lead the way for you…not the other way around.
But I could be wrong. But I don’t think that we can be drawn to something which is not already a part of us.
no you are partly right…
I have studied and taught about the nature of things[matter,energy,life,space,time]… and understanding nature has brought me closer and connected to nature…
Yes, you are right too…it’s almost the same as when we love a person…the more time we spend around them, the more we know them and understand them, the more we can love them. The more we experience something or someone, the more of an inner experience we have of them and the more we come to know our hidden selves.
It’s like this with nature and the elements to me.
arc ----you have said you are agnostic…can you say more about this in reference to the nature of things…
There was a time when I believed that there was a god and that that god was as i was raised to believe and as I came to experience on my own through my intelligence and my own subjective inner awareness…despite that there were those moments growing up when my intellect and reason fought my emotions and belief. For the most part, it was something I simply took for granted without questioning where the experience might be coming from or questioning though there was the occasion “…but do I really believe?”
But for quite some time now I have come to realize that I do not wish to believe in something which I cannot really prove or see for myself, or which has not already been more or less proven, despite the fact that there may be evidence for such a belief. That evidence could point to an entirely different thing.
I have for the most part come to feel that if I cannot know a thing, I choose not to so much deny its existence, but to question and to doubt its existence. I am more comfortable with that That, for me, does not preclude that there is nothing which passes for god or for some first cause or however people choose to describe it. I simply don’t know but I don’t want to believe.
For myself, I’ve come to realize how easy it is for us to fall into belief simply because others have those beliefs and because it makes us feel more comfortable or less alone or because some want to force those beliefs on us because it makes them feel more comfortable. Aside from the god thing, we see what we see and we don’t allow ourselves to question what might be hidden or to question why we act and behave as we do, why we think as we do, what dynamics or demons (non-supernatural) lie within us which we are incapable of understanding because we are afraid to “look” and therefore, incapable of letting go of and changing patterns of our existence. We lie to ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously, and then we are unable to find the truth - to see the truth. We’re afraid to.
I don’t know which came first, the agnosticism or the skeptism but I’ve come to question a lot, to want to question a lot when it comes to my beliefs/thinking/feeling in whatever area of my life, instead of simply falling into some kind of fanciful notion about myself or for instance my relationships with people. I really do intuit that the truth does set us free. We may not like having to give up this or that judgment or sense of what is really there, what this or that really is, but for me, it’s most important to come to the truth of it or at least to shed more light on it. And I have also found that when we are really able to do this, to strive for this, at times we do not lose the meaning of something but more meaning can become clearer about something. But I’m an apprentice here but reality is far more important to me than simply believing or thinking that I know because others seem to know. Belief to me has almost become anathema but i suppose that is only because I see the danger which comes of it in the wrong hands and because for many, it’s akin to living in the matrix…my own hands included.
Perhaps none of that answered your inquiry.
I’m not sure, Arc, how you’re using the words ‘prove’ and ‘know,’ so correct me if I’m wrong, but when I read this my mind translates this into, “If I can’t be completely 100% certain that a statement is true, I won’t believe it is true.” Is that what you mean?
No, that’s really not what I mean. Insofar as the god concept is concerned, the existence of god for me cannot actually be proven either way. We either believe, which is not proof, or we disbelieve, which is also not proof for the non-existence of god.
The only time when I might “experience” a percentage on a scale of 1-10 is when I am for instance sitting in nature or looking up at the stars and actually thinking of the possibility of a god existing. There are times then when my inner experience or intuition or what have you might appear to move me closer to the possibility of one existing but there is another part of me which I am aware of at the same time which knows that what I am thinking and experiencing proves nothing. It’s just a beautiful mysterious moment to me. It’s just that the Universe at large is capable of opening up possibilities to us but it is no proof for me.
Scientifically speaking, there are things which we cannot be completely certain of but because there is vast knowledge there and because of what has been proven, I don’t have to be a skeptic or disbelieve.
So then when you say ‘prove’, you don’t mean ‘show to be 100% certain,’ you just mean ‘show to be probably true,’ is that right? Is that how you’re using the word proof? I’m just trying to put what you’re saying into words that I would understand, I’m not trying to grill you or prove you wrong.
When I say prove, I mean show me the evidence, physical or experimental, so that I can know, within reason, that something is real, actually exists.I don’t need 100% proof. Science doesn’t work that way, does it? If you describe a tree to me and I’ve never seen one, until you bring me to that tree, I will not know. And in knowing, I need no belief.
If you can’t do that, then it’s just belief or speculation.
And you’re using the word ‘know’, again, to not mean ‘100% certain’ but just ‘reasonably certain’, right? Like, idk, if we had to quantify, you might say you know something if you think it’s 99.5% likely to be true?
Just trying to clarify because, for me (and most people, I think), even knowing something is still a ‘belief’. In fact, the most common definition of knowledge is ‘justified true belief’ – so, by the most common definition, all knowledge is also belief. But you seem to be using the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ differently – as if beliefs and knowledge aren’t entirely non-overlapping things (like at the end of your last post, when you say ‘it’s just belief’ as opposed to knowledge).
I don’t have a particular problem with you using the words that way, of course, I’m just trying to parse what you’re saying, and it might also be good for you to know that most people consider ‘knowldge’ and ‘belief’ to be not-completely-separate categories – knowledge being a subcategory of belief. And some people also only limit knowledge to ‘100% probability’ beliefs.
Spiritual over religious any day…