For mashugenah
For those not on xullrae's journal, I have been involved in a lengthy discussion with mashugenah over there. As the original post has now become very buried, and I consider it rude to keep banging on under someone else's journal (and forcing them to watch the car crash), I have attempted to move the discussion here so only those of us concerned need to play with it. I have copied the tail end of the relevant part of the thread over here for context, and added my reply as the first comment (please excuse the crude formatting, and the slight edit of one entry so the word order actually makes sense).
mashugenah
To continue the chain of questions... what is love, what is happiness, what is honour? I cannot exactly articulate any of those things, shall I scratch them from the list of activities I might wish to pursue? Simply put, I would say that "spiritual side" is the capacity for recognising and exploring all of those things, and their kin. It is the recognition that there is more to your life than how much you earned, and how many grams of cocaine you can snort in one go. It is the contemplation of life beyond the physical in virtually any form. Modern secular Western society is very bad at this. If you can't put a price tag on it, and itemize it on a spreadsheet, it has no existance?
msavigear
"To continue the chain of questions... what is love, what is happiness, what is honour?"
They are all reactions in one's brain chemistry, behaviour brought about by a combination of evolutionary pressure and social conditioning. Since you ask.
Your answers suggests one's spiritual side is the capacity to ignore this naturalist approach and add some bizarre sky fairy to the equation?
mashugenah
I love the way you're trying to restructure my comment with emotionally loaded words as if that makes a difference. :)
We can play the same game with brain chemistry as we played with chemical reactions. At some point you're just going to have to say "it just does, alright, stop asking all these annoying questions!" And at that point you're going on faith that we'll eventually strip back another layer of scientific obfuscation and get one step closer to having All The Answers (tm).
But, if you look at my definition of spiritual and the arguments flowing from it, you'll note that I don't actually mention "god" or a supreme being of any kind. My line is about an awareness of alternate modes of living, with an emphasis on rejecting pure capitalism as the basis for life.
Am I being inconsistent? I don't think so, merely attacking (there's an emotive word for you) pure hard-line athiesm on two fronts rather than one only.
msavigear
I'm not using emotionally loaded words, I'm removing the handwaving.
Your assertion that "eventually something completely without precedent or evidential support might just happen" is spurious even without the fact that the weight of historical evidence points to the fact that we just made god up.
Every time you open a box of Cheerios, you might just find the shrunken head of William Shatner. You can't possibly say "no, this won't happen" until you have opened every box of Cheerios that ever existed or will ever exist. Yes, there is actually a chance of some macabre incident such that it could actually happen one day, but I think we can agree that it is so improbable that we can file it under "not going to occur".
I'm not even going into the alternate modes of living thing as I totally fail to see the relevance.
mashugenah
I'm not using emotionally loaded words, I'm removing the handwaving.
Your answers suggests one's spiritual side is the capacity to ignore this naturalist approach and add some bizarre sky fairy to the equation?
"naturalist" has a strong connotation of, well, natural and right. Proper if you like.
"Bizarre" is just the opposite, compounded by "sky fairy".
Come on, you're not seriously trying to argue that these aren't emotionally loaded terms in which to put the question?
Your assertion that "eventually something completely without precedent or evidential support might just happen" is spurious even without the fact that the weight of historical evidence points to the fact that we just made god up.
Again, you're trying to re-phrase what I actually said to spin it into an emotionally unbalanced argument. I don't like it when people do that, especially when you could actually just directly quote me.
Moreover, you're trying to not respond to my core argument by saying "it's just silly". There are quite a lot of other arguments challenging the very fundamental basis of the universe going back to Renee des Cartes' "I think, therefore I am." That's an even better argument than mine, because it challenges your capability of verifying your life experience in any way.
Now, that's hardly a popular argument either. And people intuitively go "nah, that's just wrong"... but it's all just intuition. In point of fact, as a scientific type, I'd be worried about the difficulty people are having reconciling Quantum Theory and the two Relativities... a lot of the world makes sense, but sufficiently much doesn't that I think there's room for doubt.
You obviously disagree, but so far your argument has been to try and just make mine sound silly by paraphrasing it.
EDIT: Of course, this being an open post, anyone might weigh in at any time. Therefore reserve the following rights:
(a) To only respond to mashugenah directly unless I can find the time to do otherwise.
(b) To close the thread when I believe it has outlived its usefulness to me (though I will endaeavour not to cut off mashugenah should he be in mid-flow.
mashugenah
To continue the chain of questions... what is love, what is happiness, what is honour? I cannot exactly articulate any of those things, shall I scratch them from the list of activities I might wish to pursue? Simply put, I would say that "spiritual side" is the capacity for recognising and exploring all of those things, and their kin. It is the recognition that there is more to your life than how much you earned, and how many grams of cocaine you can snort in one go. It is the contemplation of life beyond the physical in virtually any form. Modern secular Western society is very bad at this. If you can't put a price tag on it, and itemize it on a spreadsheet, it has no existance?
msavigear
"To continue the chain of questions... what is love, what is happiness, what is honour?"
They are all reactions in one's brain chemistry, behaviour brought about by a combination of evolutionary pressure and social conditioning. Since you ask.
Your answers suggests one's spiritual side is the capacity to ignore this naturalist approach and add some bizarre sky fairy to the equation?
mashugenah
I love the way you're trying to restructure my comment with emotionally loaded words as if that makes a difference. :)
We can play the same game with brain chemistry as we played with chemical reactions. At some point you're just going to have to say "it just does, alright, stop asking all these annoying questions!" And at that point you're going on faith that we'll eventually strip back another layer of scientific obfuscation and get one step closer to having All The Answers (tm).
But, if you look at my definition of spiritual and the arguments flowing from it, you'll note that I don't actually mention "god" or a supreme being of any kind. My line is about an awareness of alternate modes of living, with an emphasis on rejecting pure capitalism as the basis for life.
Am I being inconsistent? I don't think so, merely attacking (there's an emotive word for you) pure hard-line athiesm on two fronts rather than one only.
msavigear
I'm not using emotionally loaded words, I'm removing the handwaving.
Your assertion that "eventually something completely without precedent or evidential support might just happen" is spurious even without the fact that the weight of historical evidence points to the fact that we just made god up.
Every time you open a box of Cheerios, you might just find the shrunken head of William Shatner. You can't possibly say "no, this won't happen" until you have opened every box of Cheerios that ever existed or will ever exist. Yes, there is actually a chance of some macabre incident such that it could actually happen one day, but I think we can agree that it is so improbable that we can file it under "not going to occur".
I'm not even going into the alternate modes of living thing as I totally fail to see the relevance.
mashugenah
I'm not using emotionally loaded words, I'm removing the handwaving.
Your answers suggests one's spiritual side is the capacity to ignore this naturalist approach and add some bizarre sky fairy to the equation?
"naturalist" has a strong connotation of, well, natural and right. Proper if you like.
"Bizarre" is just the opposite, compounded by "sky fairy".
Come on, you're not seriously trying to argue that these aren't emotionally loaded terms in which to put the question?
Your assertion that "eventually something completely without precedent or evidential support might just happen" is spurious even without the fact that the weight of historical evidence points to the fact that we just made god up.
Again, you're trying to re-phrase what I actually said to spin it into an emotionally unbalanced argument. I don't like it when people do that, especially when you could actually just directly quote me.
Moreover, you're trying to not respond to my core argument by saying "it's just silly". There are quite a lot of other arguments challenging the very fundamental basis of the universe going back to Renee des Cartes' "I think, therefore I am." That's an even better argument than mine, because it challenges your capability of verifying your life experience in any way.
Now, that's hardly a popular argument either. And people intuitively go "nah, that's just wrong"... but it's all just intuition. In point of fact, as a scientific type, I'd be worried about the difficulty people are having reconciling Quantum Theory and the two Relativities... a lot of the world makes sense, but sufficiently much doesn't that I think there's room for doubt.
You obviously disagree, but so far your argument has been to try and just make mine sound silly by paraphrasing it.
EDIT: Of course, this being an open post, anyone might weigh in at any time. Therefore reserve the following rights:
(a) To only respond to mashugenah directly unless I can find the time to do otherwise.
(b) To close the thread when I believe it has outlived its usefulness to me (though I will endaeavour not to cut off mashugenah should he be in mid-flow.