I guess making decisions is easier for some than it is for others… some decisions taking longer to arrive at than others, dictating how a person would go about making them all. We can break our decisions-to-make down and then compartmentalise them, in order to enable us to prioritise them. The mind as a filing cabinet and To Do list… just like many here like to label, some prefer to compartmentalise.
Is there always a context (which you seem to think needs to exist) before we ‘do’ anything… so a reactive, rather than active, process. I’m sure we do both…
What are those “internal and external” factors – existential variables – that go into creating a particular “I” when confronted with conflicting goods such that one’s religious values kick in in order to make distinctions between moral/enlightened behavior here and now as that then becomes translated into a frame of mind revolving around that which these “spiritual” paths are said to bring into fruition on the other side of the grave.
You and the Buddhists will either bring this down to Earth in terms of your own behaviors in particular sets of circumstances or you will continue to make me the problem for insisting that this is where it makes the most sense for these discussions to go.
Not every decision we make has to be a moral dilemma… I guess you could say that religion does indeed guide some’s life and every day decisions, like what we eat and drink etc., but then that becomes known as a trusted way of life. I, for instance, cannot eat fermented foods… even though they’re all the rage at the moment, so that would dictate where and what I eat, and so somewhat alienating me from those that can, in a short and then over a longer-term period of time… leading to the diversification and divergence of those different types, who can and cannot eat fermented foods.
So, in a discussion in which we are exchanging views on a particularly contentious set of conflicting goods, you can note how I am indecisive and possessed by my thoughts. And I can note how “I” [both yours and mine] seem more embedded subjectively/existentially in dasein than in some definitive conclusions that religion or philosophy or science might provide us.
Choose the context yourself. Otherwise how are we not just wasting each other’s time?
I said: “I, for instance, cannot eat fermented foods… even though they’re all the rage at the moment, so that would dictate where and what I eat, and so somewhat alienating me from those that can, in a short and then over a longer-term period of time… leading to the diversification and divergence of those different types, who can and cannot eat fermented foods.”
That’s my long-term existential-crisis… having had to change my eating habits and social behaviour, in order to accommodate a dilemma I had become faced with over the years. Now that my ‘alien’ need has started to become more commonplace, the ‘need‘ is now one of humour than contention… towards my kind. Food… being just one of many defining factors, that forms our current Self.
You want to find me a new mantra and I want to explore how moral and political mantras themselves are derived existentially from the arguments I make in my signature treads. As opposed to one of hundreds and hundreds of spiritual paths out there, the adherents of which basically argue “repeat after me and you will choose the right things to do here and now in order to attain immortality and salvation there and then.”
And you also claim to have read my signature threads.
Okay, let’s start with the OP on this one: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
Note behaviors that you have chosen of late given your moral and political value judgments here and now and note how the argument I make here is not applicable to you.
Then I will note my own reaction to these behaviors given the points I make in the OP.
This, I will reply to separately.