we are not hard-wired to pursue our eventual destruction…we are wired in the the brain for individual survival and species survival…things dont look good but we are hard wired for survival…
Survival of a disease, survival of one mass at the cost of allot of other species of life, survival of religion, survival of anyone and everyone no matter how crappy and disgenic they are.
I have to disagree… “if it feels good it is good” is a horrible way to measure well-being… if you only eat what tastes good, more often than not you end up fat and die young, if you only do what feels good, most people won’t go to work in the morning… Rationality plays a HUGE role in our well-being… stories, movies, music, art… all these forms of expression and entertainment are JUST that… a way to deal with reality even an escape from it when reality isn’t quite as we would like it. That can be healthy, if it keeps us from slashing our wrists, and it allows our stress levels to drop if only for a few moments, or provides a much needed adventure, brain teaser, emotional experience, or whatever else it is we don’t get enough of in our day to day lives. But It can also be horrible if we forget to come back to reality.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that religion is the only possible motivation for suicide bombing… but it is ONE possible motivation… and I was pointing out that for every person motivated to do something healthy… another was motivated or driven to do something bad. Introducing more religion into society is not a cure… it’s a gamble at best.
Hell look at the most religious countries in the world… they are not doing better! In fact it looks like they are doing allot worse. Even the wealthy ones.
OK, I have phrased what I meant too loosely. First of all, if you ask somebody about their well-being, they won’t weigh up rationally the various positive things they do against the negative. If they feel good, they will express well-being (something I regularly have to do with my patients/residents).
Secondly, if people feel good about doing something, even if we have to overcome our laziness, they will do it and be pleased for having done it, even if, in the case of exercise, they feel tired afterwards – they realise that their recovery is faster and that they are better off for exercise overall.
Thirdly, whether it is the mindfulness practise of Kabat Zinn and others, the Spectrum of Dean Ornish, the Planetree project or numerous other aspects, medicine is discovering the “feel-good” aspect of recovery. They are encouraging the use of imagination, symbols, nature, allegorical stories, chanting, singing and dancing, but also smell, touch etc. to enhance health recovery – not as an escape.
Well here we see one reason for our dissonance – the wealthy religious countries are those who are most removed from the things I am talking about, even though we are rediscovering them. Secondly, if the religion you assume I am promoting is that which you see today, or the bad aspects you have filtered out of history, you overlook the fact that your view isn’t representative of the whole and it definitely doesn’t represent the revision of the impact of religious practise on health. We even have university hospitals with large sections where “alternative medicine” is being practised, such as Ayurveda and TCM.
The biggest problem that we have with our view of such subjects is the fact that we fail to take into account how much life has changed, even in the west, over the last sixty and more years. Even I, at 60, can remember a more peaceful life-style, where neighbours just knocked on the door and entered, where people mutually looked after their kids, watching out for harm. It was a time when you could actually hear the church bell sounding off the next half hour. These aspects may not have been in the middle of society (like fitness-centres today) but they accompanied people through the day. We have lost more than we know in our “brave new world”.
Bob, once again, you strike a similar cord in my personal philosophy:
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Furthermore, outside of my personal spiritual philosophy, almost everything that I work on in the systemic examination of human spirituality in ‘Modular Spirituality’ is for the pursuit of much of your interest in spiritual fitness that you discuss above.
This is still a rather large work in progress.
My take on the concept of trinity is that all human knowing has biological precedents. The Eden story persists because it is a discription of the human brain’s evolving. The garden (Brain) included a trinity of Adam, Eve and Serpent, which can be described as prefrontal cortex, midbrain and brain base. The garden brain included the tree of Life and evolved into the knowledge of good and evil.
Freud used a similar trinity to describe id, ego and superego or snake, Eve and Adam.
And just why are 3s so attractive? Trinities go way back. I’d say the aha moment came like the first discovery of the wheel … prolly earlier, when making tables were discovered … and it took at least three legs to make them stand. Just a wild guess about mankind’s obsession and fixation with triads. Threes stand up. Ones and twos don’t.
Because they represent God’s triune nature so aptly. 
Here you go,
Maybe it’s because we are broken into three different types of a person in our brain (see above diagram)?
From where do we get that God is triune?
Divine revelation.
Logical necessity to truncate two additional things that came up that ended up with theological imperatives to not just be access points to their god, but also part of their god.
Basically, they (as a society) walked themselves into a corner whereby there were three tugs of authority: the access to their god (holy spirit, and the admission of it), Jesus (divine savior), and their god.
This resulted in the, primarily, four contending ideas of Trinitarianism, Adoptionism, Sabellianism, and Arianism.
Trinitarianism won the day…well…in one Orthodox branch (that being the eventual “Holy Roman Empire” branch).
Jesus as divine savior is probably well enough understood as to why that became an imperative.
Why the “holy spirit” was because there needed to be an access point for gaining this divine access, and it couldn’t be “because you’re Hebrew” because they weren’t, so the logic followed (more or less) that god wouldn’t be restricted to only Hebrews, but to any who devoted themselves to the divine way et. al., and that produced the holy spirit flourishing as a theological idea (from pretty early on even before all the Bishops actually).
And so this produced the need to figure out the relationship between these three things, and etc… ended up with what we have today over lots of pretty nasty arguments and heretic name calling.
I was just making the point that for this kind of question, the assumption you start with pretty much determine the conclusion you arrive at.
I’m having a hard time following your sentence accurately.
Could you offer me an example?
I’m just saying that evolutionary explanations tend to flow from naturalistic assumptions and revelatory explanations from judeo-christian-islamic assumptions.
do you guys believe in a triune god…what do you personally believe…
But–doesn’t the latter owe to the former? Isn’t the latter grounded in the former?
ier—do you personally believe in a triune god…
Yes. It’s a natural extrapolation from my trinite psyche.
ier----which do you think is more important-------belief or behavior