Why cannot human evolution be seen as a spiritual journey? Is there still a science vs religion bias among current intellectuals?
Gandhi notes the inevitable failure of evil throughout history. Currently, we exist in a period of sore transition. It is not wishful thinking to believe this too shall pass. It’s a fact of history. Evolution is creative, and the creativity is toward the good of all beings.
What does “the good of all being” mean? Better survivability with less suffering? Has progress brought us out of physical struggle eras into this emotional struggle era that may be caused from unfulfilled spiritual hunger? Can we speak freely about spiritual hunger when science denies spirit, soul which I call the ‘energy of consciousness?’
Energy of consciousness may just be another name for the drive of the human spirit. The main obstacle between a marriage of science and religion is the belief, by some scientists, that evolution is without purpose. But it is simply a belief. The purpose of this thread is to suggest that there is more than fortuity behind the progress of humanity. History has shown such a progress.
Spiritual hunger is an evident experience, regardless of what names you give it. And there is no real internal need devoid of an external supply of what meets that need.
See Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.
2020 may be a horrible time for many, but its ravages do not negate the progress humans have made throughout history–progress in relief from suffering as well as in relief from toxic ideas. The future of humanity may rest on how many of us are able to recognize that we each are interdependent parts of an ecosystem.
We are our brother’s keeper.
The only problem I have with Pinker’s rosy view of progress is that it does not include indigenous people, many of whom have progressive notions about man’s place on Earth; e.g. “We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. This we know Earth does not belong to us we belong to Earth.”—Chief Seattle.
“Why cannot human evolution be seen as a spiritual journey?”
Because believing so is a magnificent distraction from very real, very material struggle.
Metaphysical talk amounts to two things only; gross conceptual confusion or deliberate attempts to obfuscate explanations for physical phenomena.
Based on my own exchanges with Christians [progressive or otherwise], this won’t reach him. Why? Because spiritual journeys of their sort provide them with two things that material struggles never can: a moral script to fall back on revolving around, “what would Jesus do?” [either this or that], and a leap of faith that encompasses immortality and salvation [with a Bible to confirm it].
And even to the extent one can embrace a material struggle that revolves around a political ideology like Marxism…with a “manifesto” that provides at least some semblance of “the right thing to do”…there’s still oblivion.
On the other hand, with political fonts like Marxism at least “I” is not fractured and fragmented.
Nothing, alas, gets much bleaker than my own frame of mind.
Well, given my own entirely unique “set of circumstances” anyway.
Metaphysics is a continuation of physics, not some false conceptions about the nature of matter and the human struggle in and of matter. Parts of the material continuum do not conflict, they evolve. The reality is, of course, the whole in which both physics and metaphysics describe experienced reality.
Iamb, I am not involved in the fundamentalist Christianity you accuse me of harboring. My thoughts are a marriage of science and religion based on the belief that evolution has a purpose, that is to reunite the parts where they are seen as separate in minds. In reality there is plenitude–an ultimate variety comprising one thing. I would not support such a belief had I not experienced the Whole physically, mentally and spiritually. The trinity of human being is being, becoming and belonging. It is in our recognition of belonging that we find the precursors of ethics. That art thou. What you rail against is a part of you.
Are there any thinkers here who are not anti-religion atheists?
Again, my own interest in religion and physics and metaphysics pertains to the part that, however any particular individual views them intertwined, they become crucial in regard to the behaviors that they choose on this side of the grave…as that pertains to the fate they imagine for “I” on the other side of the grave.
In other words, not nearly so much in “intellectual/spiritual contraptions” like yours above. My own concerns pertain to the lives that we live. Lives that often come into dispute over conflicting value judgments derived from all of the many different spiritual paths embraced by any number of different religious denominations.
Even within Christianity alone: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_denomination
In fact, here – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian … n#Taxonomy – Progressive Christianity is not even mentioned.
Then the part where anyone who is trekking along any of these spiritual paths makes the attempt to move beyond their more or less blind faith to actually demonstrating instead why what they believe in their head is in fact true for all rational and virtuous human beings.
Short of that, I make the presumption that they believe what they do given what I construe to be the “psychology of objectivism” here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
Which is why, from my own frame of mind, you almost always steer the discussion here back up into a world of words:
I ask myself: What on Earth does any of this have to do with the parts that I aim to steer discussions of God and religion towards: morality here and now, immortality there and then.
Take this “Whole” that you have experienced and describe it in more detail as it relates to the life that you live. In particular when that life comes into contact with others who embrace moral or spiritual values at odds with your own. Why your path and not theirs?
And then the part that is of special interest to me: after we die.
What do you claim to know about this part and how on earth are you able to demonstrate to me and others why you believe it to in fact be the case.
Why don’t you start a new thread in which you make it clear that only those who are not anti-religion atheists are welcome to participate. I can promise you that I will abide by your wishes. And apart from a few Kids here who abide by nothing other than their own often infantile need to ejaculate tantrums, I’m sure all the rest of the members here will respect your wishes in turn.
I’m an omnist in my own way.
That means there is some good in every religion.
But that means that there is some good in all human works. Sometimes at least.
This thread is sufficient. I believe I have stated my philosophy of progressive Christianity both as metaphysical position and as an existential awareness. I do not need to keep repeating it even when someone like you claims not to understand it or repeats only your philosophic response again and again ad nauseum. You seem to expect of me some mental contraption that does neglect what you see as the given human condition. You would not believe Spong’s exegesis of Christianity if it is to have a future. Why should you see anything I have to report about spirituality as other than something to argue about or something absurd in your philosophy?
Thanks. That makes spiritual sense.
The spiritual experience: one way to describe it is the feeling you get when exposed to beautiful Natural settings. (See my poem “Belonging”.) It is also the feeling you get when two or more people are gathered in one accord. It is the exuberance of young lambs frolicking in the meadows. It is the state of discovery of something good or beautiful. It is the only type of feeling that comes from empathy and compassion. It is what makes human life bearable.
Religion is the kindergarten of spirituality.
Philosophy is an attempt to make sense of existence in and of matter.
Spiritual philosophy provides this sense. It is the a message of belonging which ameliorates the pain of being and becoming.
And, as I have stated, this – practically – can mean almost anything until it is brought down to earth and described/examined both substantively and substantially in regard to the life that one lives in a world where there are countless religious and secular paths available to us in regard to morality and immortality.
You have yours, it comforts and consoles you. You think what you do “in your head” and that’s enough. And, indeed, it is considerably more appealing than that which I am “here and now” still unable to think myself out of.
And that will always be the bottom line of course. Only, in a philosophy forum, one might hope to go a little deeper in exploring why we think some things and not others.
Now, this…this brings you closer to the Stooges here. The problem becomes me more than the ad nauseum groots that I dispense over and over and over.
Again, this is where you are most comfortable, in my view. Posting general description spiritual contraptions and exchanging them with folks like Dan.
It’s a frame of mind that I was once able to sustain myself.
But then it’s back to what I still don’t really understand about myself in this:
He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles
But, who really knows, it’s not altogether impossible that one day something that you or one of the other religionists post might actually manage to yank me up out of the hole I have dug myself into. And philosophically no less!
Or, sure, I manage instead to yank you or them down into it: empathy. Either way it’s an improvement on the way things are now for me.
I am not a religionist.
Iamb.
It may be that a sense of former stability afforded by your once comforting beliefs is luring you back to its time in your life. You may see a return to that time as a necessary prerequisite for healing a spirit broken by exposure to particular and general suffering. You can’t get back what you have moved beyond. If you truly wish to heal by taking a spiritual path, you will realize that there are no stops or returns on a living road.
Ridiculing the religious and harboring a stuck focus on the foibles of people are scapegoats preventing you from pressing on in your spiritual quest. Recognize you are evolving toward recognition of your belonging in a whole. It’s free; and it involves a trajectory of amelioration for the human condition. It’s your choice–evolve or die.