What makes the Hottentot so hot?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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There are a lot of ongoing epistemological discussions around here, and I suppose that’s not surprising on a philosophy board. We argue about knowledge. We argue about truth. We argue about faith. We argue about evidence. We argue about the scientific method. We argue about meaning. Hell, we even argue about the language that we argue with.

It’s easy to become skeptical, maybe even nihilistic.

And stuck.

Stuck like my Chevy Vega from 25 years ago on any day where the temperature fell to below freezing.

But why do some people get past this? Why is it that some people begin moving again? Why, in other words, do some people, with reasonable, rational, logical minds, educated in philosophy, aware of all the basic arguments, bombarded with all the skepticism and the nihilism, nevertheless believe?

I am beginning to think that there must be something that some believers in God have that non-believers (or agnostics, or skeptics) do not have. There must be some quality that believers possess that makes them willing to leave behind the comfort of the fence, the skeptical middle of the road, and take a step towards something, instead of away from things.

I say this because I know from personal experience that it’s not easy. If you begin to contemplate God’s existence, you open up way more questions than you answer. It’s intimidating. What lies down that road? What happens if you become a true believer? What will become of you, you wonder? And, even more daunting, what will you become?

I held back at one time because of fear. Is anybody here willing to admit the same?

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I hold back partly because of fear, I freely admit. (Fear can be good; it can keep you from doing stupid things.) Mainly I fear being manipulated by an authority that claims to speak in the name of God.

But that’s only half the story. I’m not so much held back as I have no motivation to move forward. I’ve never experienced God, never felt a divine presence in any way. All I have are reports from other people who I suspect are much more credulous than I am.

I believe that the beauty and unity of the world, and the amazing ability of humans to understand this beauty and unity, suggests a divine designer who is kind of like us. I’d like to think that means he would want to talk to us and get to know us. But I don’t see it and I don’t feel it. Nor am I persuaded by reports of the same.

I think Christianity has some fairly persuasive arguments that God really did come down to earth and die for our sake, but there are also arguments against that. It’s hard to sort out. I don’t know much about other religions and their apologetics. Perhaps one day I’ll be persuaded by these arguments, I don’t know…

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Jerry wrote

As I understand it we have one kind of knowledge that comes through learning and our life experience. These are new associations or reshuffling of the things of life and what we call “progress.” Then there is another kind of knowledge that is best described by the saying: “The teaching doesn’t teach you anything new but instead allows you to remember what has been forgotten.” From this perspective knowledge isn’t progress measured in conjunction between yesterday and tomorrow but just the quality of “now” in relation to consciousness. The attraction to consciousness is the deeper emotional attraction to what is higher than ourselves. This is love of a quality we are rarely aware of but I believe Simone Weil to be quite right in valuing this depth of feeling as the real proof of the relativity of “being.”

This is a very valuable observation for me. As aporia pointed out: Mainly I fear being manipulated by an authority that claims to speak in the name of God." Yes, I feel the same. Yet this doesn’t deprive me of belief in the sense of something greater than myself. I’ve come to understand why this inner knowledge of being that must be remembered becomes forgotten and secularized into belief in a particular something rather then allowing a person to open to the deeper experience of meaning itself which inspires belief.

Sometimes a person comes to the point where life itself is found lacking in meaning. A person unconsciously desires to remember and to feel beyond our normal emotional experience. Now the value of knowledge becomes more than what we know but how we understand it: how it relates to the question of meaning we unconsciously feel called to and wish to remember. When a person feels this, all the rationalizations, proofs and refutations itself normal for regular life become secondary to this extraordinary experience of the heart which is completely different from emotional escapism.

A person becomes stuck because the experience has degenerated into imagination so we no longer “need”. Real experiences like the shock of surviving an auto accident again awakens need. The real believer becomes vulnerable and able to experience life in the raw, experience that it is not “I” so as to be attracted to the more subtle pull of higher life. Modern life stresses the importance of distractions from reality making such a commitment to reality easy to avoid. This IMO is why getting unstuck is so rare. It has become to easy to either find fascination with the material or contentment in the escapism of la la land. But, thank goodness, there still is a minority that feel deeply enough to move beyond getting stuck from having been open and vulnerable to the genuine experience of the human condition within all of us and the experiential emotional realization that we are called to something else.

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“I am beginning to think that there must be something that some believers in God have that non-believers (or agnostics, or skeptics) do not have.”

Well, it’s the tendency toward a psychotic thought process for one (fact).

Also, what possessed you to use the word “Hottentot” for the title of your thread? That is an old-time racist term for black people.

Another triumph.

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Hi, Nick.

Yes, it’s certainly become easy to to find fascination with the material, but I’m wondering if there might be more at work here. Because it’s easy, we reach a sort of comfort zone, don’t we? And it’s a scary thought to contemplate moving away from the material into the spiritual. Moving from known to unknown. Worse, the material is so apparent, and materialism so rampant, that it becomes easy to blend into it, become a part of it, gathering our strength from the sheer numbers of the like-minded.

Breaking away is hard. And, ironically, it can be lonely. You can’t take that journey with anybody else. You must go it alone. Until, that is, one day when you realize you were never alone.

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Well, it could be that He “talks” to us through the beauty and unity of which you speak, via the “amazing ability of humans to understand.” If you listen with that idea as a possibility, interesting things happen. You may begin to see and feel the things you’re currently not seeing or feeling. I don’t know. I can’t begin to suggest my personal observations are anything tantamount to an argument. I just know that it’s an uncomfortable first step. You have to surrender that which you think you know and move towards something you don’t know.

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Jerry,

Well I think that’s just it. You see throughout all these brilliant arguments, no one has ever in the history of mankind proven the existence or non existence of God one way or the other. And so one is left with the choice. To believe is to take that leap of faith and many have taken that leap into theism. Some have jumped in and stayed in because what they have discovered has convinced them that they are on the right side of the fence, that there is indeed a God that exists. I don’t know what it is but whenever I stray from the belief of God’s existence, I know that I am lying to myself. The most intelligent people in the world cannot prove his non existence to me, they can only suggest that is is possible that he does not exist. That alone does not satisfy me. If you are really unsure, it’s probably best to ask God to show himself to you. I figure if he exists, he will.

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Hi Jerry

This comfort zone is defined in one way or another by all the ancient traditions initiating with a conscious source as “sleep” The need for individuality and the experience of oneself is very frightening. This is why it so often turns into escapism and courses teaching escapism have become so rampant.

This acquiring of identity from a group through sleep is the hold of the “Great Beast” and breaking away requires experiencing its spiritual inadequacy and the essential need to do so. It is the need of the “black sheep.”

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And of course what’s interesting, Nick, and ironic, is that most seem to think that a move towards spirituality is actually a move away from their identity.

That’s what stopped me for the longest time.

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Hi Jerry

But that is what it is and why it is so frightening. When someone asks another “Who are you,” it begins with a name and as the conversation proceeds it moves into family, profession etc. that define or form our identity for ourselves To consider that we may not really be these things but actually the beginning of what can be more, requires abandoning the security of this level of identity for an acknowledgement of emptiness with potential. We become more a person of the world rather than a mixture of labels.

This is why I do not believe it can be forced. It is a stage a person must reach when you begin to “feel” in the deeper meaning that there must be something more to “identity”. It allows one to become open.

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For me it’s faith. First there is faith that you will find something, so you step outside of yourself because the present limitations are unacceptable as a life. So you move from the known to the unknowable because you have faith, faith in something that is known and exists within you and within you is a map, that reveals the path exactly toward that where you need/know to go. It is like walking on the edge of a cliff and knowing that if you jump off you will fly, you have no way of knowing that you will fly but it is your very nature to fly - so you leap with courage and purity of heart. Faith is a symbiotic relationship between you yourself and the thing you have faith in. It is not only that you have faith in the unknowable, but that the unknowable has faith in you.

[Incidentally Ad, Hottentots are an African tribe. They do actually exist. It’s not a racist term, not in Africa anyway.]

A

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Exactly.

(Once again, as usual, LA demonstrates her eloquence).

And, just in case Ad is still scratching his head over the title and thinking racism:

Cowardly Lion: What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the “ape” in apricot? What have they got that I ain’t got?
Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman: Courage!
Cowardly Lion: You can say that again! Huh?

–The Wizard of Oz, 1939

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Hi Jerry

Here is where I believe one must be very careful. We do not have purity of heart so for us it becomes meaningless. Emotional faith is blind for us and at best leads to escapism and turning in circles but at its worst leads to a damaging cult mentality.

Jesus refers to the faith of the centurion in Matthew 8 as of a high quality and John in 1 John 4 speaks of testing the spirits. They refer to faith of a quality beyond emotional faith which is not blind.

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I guess the reverse is probably true.

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Well we’d have to ask liquidangel, who introduced the term “purity of heart,” but my thinking is that she meant an open and sincere heart and, perhaps, a resolute one at that.

(Maybe we need to bring the Tin Man into this thing…)

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There is no such thing as a seperation of thinking and feeling. To deny ‘purity of heart’ is to miss the point entirely. It isn’t about the perceptions colored by feelings, but the intent through which feelings are filtered. Sensing through honesty and sincerity is as valid as anything of mind. Perhaps even more so. Together, mind and heart, xin, is awareness. To pre-suppose that purity of heart is not possible may be true for the individual who has allowed mind to ignore the senses as a valid part of knowing, but to project that upon others is deterministic and leads one into intellectual elitism.

To suggest that our ability to have emotion cannot be a part of genuine faith is a bold statement indeed. To define anything we sense with emotion as mere escapism is to attempt to seperate us from ourselves. It is the tail trying to wag half the dog. Can the mind be allowed to suppress feelings? Yes, It happens all too frequently. But the result is an individual alienated from self as well as their fellows.

JT

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I see it differently and am not embaraased to admit it. Thinking, feeling, and the physical are separate functions that are connected in the human organism either consciously which is extremely rare or through imagination and habit. It is really far more complex but beyond this thread.

What normally sustains intent? Egotism. To try and sustain intent for purposes other than profit or self justification is not so easy.

Jerry was writing about contemplating God and how psychologically intimidating it is. It is much easier then to say “I am God” or “one with God” and avoid this intimidation. So it is not enough to say “intent” but if this intent furthers or denies ones spiritual aim.

One doesn’t sense with honesty and sincerity. One senses either mechanically or with attention. If one senses with attention it is without deception. It is the experience of the sensation.

If one desires to include the emotional element it would be necessary to distinguish the difference between sensing and feeling as for example the difference between feeling and sensing cold. Only then could you really know when they become complimentary or deny each other.

Xin, as I understand it, is the emotional mind in contrast with yi or the logical mind. This is the highest part the entire complex of our earthly emotions but we rarely are in this emotional state. Normally we live in mechanical negative emotional states. It is not that purity of heart is not possible, it is just that it requires tremendous conscious impartial sincere efforts to free oneself of the dominance of useless negative emotion to open inner space to experience a higher quality of emotion and real human feeling. This is extremely difficult. If you want to call the recognition of this extreme rarity intellectual elitism, I plead guilty.

Faith as a developed human attribute, and not in something, doesn’t deny lower emotions, it puts them into perspective and within the experience of “presence.” When we fall back into the influence of negative emotion, presence is lost and we are once again “normal” for the Great Beast.

Emotion by itself is not escapism. There are many quite normal animal emotions having nothing to do with escapism. Escapism is allowing emotional and intellectual imagination to replace the vulnerability of inviting the conscious experience of oneself. This vulnerability is very intimidating making it so much easier to enjoy imagination, When a person is truly vulnerable and open, the mind doesn’t suppress feelings. To the contrary it allows for the experience of real feeling in place of defensive negative emotions.

The separation is the real from the illusory and it is intimidating since we rely so heavily on image and imagined self importance. Our difficulty is how much we are in the control of this self deception. Becoming aware of the human condition and real feeling does tend to alienate one from others desiring to retain the status quo. Quantity of friends may diminish but it is made up for in quality natural for sharing within the diminished need to sustain image.

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I think we understand each other Jerry.

(“Now I know I have a heart… 'cause it’s breaking.” - Tin Man)

A

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Ah, a new term. Negative emotion. I don’t recall suggesting any emotion as negative, particularly in the understanding of honesty and sincerity.

As for intellectual elitism, that’s reserved for those who attempt to ascribe ‘negative emotion’ and ‘corrupt ego’ onto others. One may question themselves, but to pass judgement on the spiritual sincerity of others is the height of…

JT

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Nick,

By your words it is clear to me that you haven’t a clue what I am talking about. Never mind, we are all engaged in our own processes.

A