Francisco Ayala , theistic evolutionist, finds that the believer need a god for ultimate meaning and to overcome dread. I find that our transitory meanings suffice and that one should consult a counselor to overcone dread . The believer desires ultimate meaning, eternal love and a future state from a god whereas we find our own meanins and earthly love suffices and do not need a future state.
What makes you tick? Do you need an outside force to get you gong? Spouse, boss,God? Do you agree with Dr. Ayala and Augustine that we must rest in God’s bosom as the argument from angst alleges and/or do you rely on the argument from happiness for Him?
I suggest Dr. Robert Price’s “The Reason-Driven Life” and Dr. Albert Ellis’s" The Myth of Self-Esteem."
Must you walk with Yeshua?
Note the signature statement below about life,please! 
I tick fine with transitory meaning.
Indeed, for meaning to be alive, I believe it must be transitory.
When meaning is no longer transitory, it has reached its end. Ends are dead.
And new beginnings are but entrances into further transition.
Tick, tick, tick!! 
Oughtist, friend, thanks. 
Yes to that Sally Field life! 
How could eternal life make this more worthwhile? Were there such, then the problem of Heaven would appear. 
Arguments about Him-that square circle and presumptions for that more abundant life also go with this thread. :-"
Hey SG,
Gotta ask, what’s the “Sally Field life”? 
Oughtist, that reference comes from her in the commercial saying she has one body and one life; she says nothing about that supposed future state, however.
Please check out my other threads and contribute to them. I hope thereby to further the dialogue on His existence and related matters.These threads are for everybody to do that.Others should come her and enjoy participating in the dialogue! :-"
Good will and blessings to all!
Thanks for the invite, SG, though I do find that as a general rule I tend to participate in only one of a particular person’s threads at a time.
Don’t know why.
But, since I’m here, and given that it seems directly relevant to the issue of “how we tick,” I’m naturally curious about your signature (on your avatar’d identity) as to your cortical issues… how so, if you don’t mind?
FYI about me: I’m non-cataplexic narcoleptic (loads of rem but no deep sleep) and teach adolescents with severe autism, so I’m at least somewhat in the loop experientially…
Oughtist, then you’re the very person to understand and appreciate my schizotypy and double depression With the former, I have attention, learning and memory problems; the latter impacts them. My cortical defects involved themselves somehow, Also, with the former came “terminal” shyness and paranoia.My therapy controls then now. =D> What is fantastic is that I am a naturalist, when all others with schizotypal personality disorder embrace what my Facebook friend Dr. Paul Kurtz calls “The Transcendent Temptation,” the paranormal and the supernatural. Nay, no weird beliefs for me! I’m no alien abductee! 
Also, the problem makes for my baroque style, and I suspect my mistyping. Thanks to my spell check - and I’m a good speller otherwise- it is easier to proof-read. I like complicated sentences and- otherwise.
This disorder, along with schizoid disorder, is a shadow form of schizophrenia.I hope that people will give more attention to it. I think that it should receive as much attention as autism. I don’t know if we make half the numbers as autistics, but this is a disabling disorder. I now receive a VA pension for my military service of thirteen months.The disorder kept me from fulfilling my voluntary service.
One of my purposes reflects my problems- letting others know that having a disorder is no shame and to encourage help for mental health.
Have you heard of this disorder before?
I address now to others, please help to take away the stigma of mental disorders and please support mental health.
I put in about the defects in the signature to keep people from attacking me as a few do. 
Oughtist, thanks. Thanks for contributing!
Thanks for the explanation, SG. Yes, I’m marginally aware of the general condition, and am not myself unfamiliar with the experience of psychosis (though it’s been a fair while, and for me it was very much a bender into the supernatural). I’d be interested in your opinion on a thread I started in Religion: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=169951 It has relations to the schizophrenic side of the human equation. (hmm, I seem to find myself flogging that thread around recently… don’t mean to suggest I’m convinced by the position it posits, though I do find it intriguing.)
Do you have any account for why you developed your “naturalist” perspective, as I certainly agree it’s atypical of the general condition you live through.
Let us temporarily agree to call the ordinary everyday utility-machine that you and I inhabit the “vital body”. Let us take an introspective excursion into the things this vital body communicates to us as we know ourselves. There are many things here, but is not one of the highest among them that short-lived sensation of shock, being-shaken-to-the-core, astounded and rapturously transfixed that the vital body sometimes “reports”? They say that heartfelt wishes made on the peak of such a vital experience always without exception come true, and each knows intuitively that this is so, but is cautious (and with good reason) and therefore unconsciously does everything to avoid peaking the vital body in this way.
Have you read that book about Ieesus? It portrays some simple fisher-people who have by some accident encountered Him. At no time did any of them think to approach the Master for remedies against cough, or workplace depression due to long hours spent on the fish-boat, or elixirs to set the grumpy wife straight. These people, you see, met a Master - and with their own two eyes and their own ears they saw and heard a god-like man. The involuntary sensation of vital-body rapture in such cases is mighty and registers as all-consuming happiness merely to be in His presence. Even animals experience the same, there is nothing premeditated or faith-based to it. The fishermen did not call upon Him to improve their lives and make them happier, let us just recognize that. They CAST THEIR LIVES AWAY UTTERLY - as unnecessary, unfulfilling and stupid, by comparison with just following and listening to Him speak.
Who, after reading that book and at least in small part reliving the experience of these simple fishermen, would still mull over the question: “Is religion profitable for me, will it improve my life and psychological well-being, and above all, can it help against the grumpy wife?”. These are very much false notions, used by snake-oil salesmen of religion: “Jesus™, the magic tincture against all ails, and especially the venereal afflictions”. So what if there is no shortage of them, these salesmen? Must you therefore fail to see that greatest of all opportunities that is being offered here - to grab some little crumbs and left-overs from the Bible to experience for yourself what a meeting with the Master would have been like?
Unfortunately WL, none of us ever has this experience with meeting an authentic master, so we are left to take other’s word for it. That being said, the accounts of the fishermen in the Bible are not terribly elaborate, well written, or filled with deep introspective details or secret magikal revelations that would peak our interest some 2000 years later. They are really pretty dull and short, when you think about how much detail and intimate dialogue could have been included.
Most of us, even if we would have done the same as the fishermen, nevertheless must remain skeptical absent a personal experience with such a powerful spitirual force. And there is nothing wrong with this skepticism; we would be justified in believing the experience of meeting such masters for ourselves, sure, but we are also justified in believing our everyday experiences of never coming into contact with anyone remotely like them. Those of us with some level of personal knowledge and experience sufficient to infer the existence of these ones, remain hopeful and possess a degree of faith . . . those without such knowledge or experiences have no rational choice but to doubt them, and for good reason. We all just live different lives, thats all.
No one should be expected to react against anything but his own personal experiences, regardless of what is actually true or not. And really, it is irrational and indeed harmful and a sign of a pathology to passionately or deeply believe in anything which one has not had personal experience with, even if in fact it is actually true. Accidental knowledge is still ignorance.
Very well, Mr. Man. In that case, I submit that justified ignorance is still ignorance. How now? Where are we now?
You have very logically performed the ritual of justification for the ignorance of the many. In response to an invitation from yours truly to see and experience for yourself. Based on this irrational procession of events, I have a suspicion that you meant to tell me that you are justified in not caring, whatever the situation, since after all no one is responsible for their own lowly nature and lack of arousing life-experiences.
Even supposing that the writings of Paul and his Jews don’t satisfy your high demands as far as stylistics and content, you shouldn’t forget that an immense amount of literature of the same kind is available to you today (quite unlike the situation of ages prior). The incomparable Bhagavad Gita, Koran, Zoorastrian Avesta and others are there for your perusal, and close study will show you that they all address the same exact subject.
I add to the list of “unfortunate” non-sequitorial grooves that your needle currently traverses the generalized notion that psychosis is bad, and health is good. There is something you’ve failed to consider here, namely psychosis organized (triggered) deliberately - as a desperate means to an end. Consider, would the game be worth it? Utter madness, clinical psychopathology, as a means to bridge the unbridgeable gap that you described so well: between today’s degenerate rationalistic life and man’s highest aspiration & potential. Particularly, if it had a chance of working! Now, if you’ve done as I asked, you will never judge the idiotic fervor of the religious quite so unanimously a bad thing.
-WL
Hi WL,
Though I am a flabby Atheist myself, I would try to take consolation in your invitation to ecstatic experience, except that by the same accounts you give to establish the thought, it would seem that such moments of rapture occur only via the whim and good graces of God himself, and not by our asking for them. Why not, then, instead take Paul as my model and wait for the scales to be removed from my eyes for me? Or do my good labors unseen on the seashore of mundane materialist employment until a messiah happens to walk up and wow me?
Otherwise I’m left with but the deflated cassock and surplus of my previous high hopes, having been well raised as an altar boy in a religious home and lovingly pumped with the notion that Jesus would eventually induce His presence in my faithful and sincere soul… But my soul is bagged out and that, dear friend, is where I’m at.
Friend! Jokes aside, you secretly call out to me as to a physician, suffer then the pinpricks accompanying my probe into your-self. Oughtist, Atheist, former Christianist, Philosophist - need we continue the endless list of Ist-marasmus? Has it ever occured to you that your impoverished and breathless state is directly the consequence of ferrying an overwhelming number of these parasitical intellectual forms on your back? Put another way, the habit of identifying your-self with any “-Ist” form is a way of clothing oneself where one ought stand naked, a form of lying and insincerity, a worthless socialite practice. All of these things are forbidden as they cause the wilting and death of the “heart” of self.
No exaltation will be available until you have something to exalt. Exalting an ISM, that veritable love-making with a golem of your own creation, as you well know, merely leaves you tired out and empty. Let there be someone in you to love wisdom, someone naked, sincere, and free.
Take consolation in not imagining impossible exstatic experiences for which we have no use. My “invitation” never called to such, proposing only to permit ourselves a tiny taste - among any of the crumbs and leftovers we are able to comfortably reach. That experience alone will cause a long lasting immunity to snake-oil salesmen, as we will no longer be swayed by the primitive motives they use to advertise their wares, but stare intently in the opposite direction, squinting and wiping away the tears from our eyes, from time to time.
“Only now, for the first time, I understand what we have been destroying.”
-WL
I know, I know, everybody’s talkin’ bout bag-ism, shag-ism, ism-ism…
All I am saying, is I feel it’s a much more worthy goal to occupy oneself with one’s everyday life, seek to attempt to do good, and not have one’s mind entangled in the contests of celestial cat calls. If I may flog you with a favorite quote of mine:
Perhaps Apatheism would be a better moniker. In any case, I’d be happy to be slapped in the face with divine merriment and wonder. I’m just not going to go out of my way any more to manipulate the Heavens to serve me in that regard.
Let us agreeably define “better” as a complete absence of ISMs and “best” as an absence of self-identification with any thing. This way clarity is obtained.
-WL
…ok. But can we keep some -ians and -ists? If we’re too clear, there won’t be anything to see!! 
On the contrary, it’s no small success if one can see first-hand (without the conventional horror-induced blindness) that there is nothing to see, and consequently that there is no good to seek to attempt.
Whilst a puppet still executes its jerky movements under control of the theatre’s puppetmaster, it may seem to us observers like it is alive. It may seem to us that taking the scissors to the puppetmaster’s strings causes the puppet’s fall and death. But in reality, if the puppet itself was alive to begin with, then the fall will be the prelude of the first part of its authentic autonomous existence.
Look at them! They are “Walking with Yeshua”, “finding peace” and who knows what else! How much of our philosophy, too, is still only theatre, needs for audiences and wants to be paid.
-WL
Hey, what’s wrong with theatre? And what’s this about seeing a fist-hand? Ouch!
Seems to me we can’t simply dismiss the play, the crowd, and the coin too out of hand. What else is the whole image of walking with the god crowd but a show of payment received? But then again, I’m a soulless cloth amphibian with a fist up my butt, so I might be missing something here. 
If clarity leads to seeing nothing, then is not obscurity equally auspicious? 
Hey WL,
Just curious, given your spiritual bent, why you would enmesh authenticity with autonomy? This plays also to the issue of rejecting “isms”, insofar as a plausible reason as to why one might be an “ist” is to demonstrate one’s connection to a community of thought.
The likes of crazy frogs notwithstanding ( 
), is the magical meaning of the autonomous Pinnochio sustained by the fact that he worships the blue fairy or that he simply gets to re-dispose his autonomy by connecting with others by means of his own contrivances? 