Question of the week

[meganlynnangela]

I have decided to now feature a weekly question for discussion in my livejournal. Please answer and make this fun.

How would you describe your own spirituality?

Comments

[meganlynnangela]

I think the part of this that most interests me is that you describe yourself as a "baby Christian." Why is that?

These dead people described it much better than I could...

[azelmaroark]

This:

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

--Wordsworth

And this:

“Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the sufferings of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer-in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive

Re: These dead people described it much better than I could...

[meganlynnangela]

I've seen the name Ayn Rand before, but who is that? I LOVE that quote. LOVE it. very thought-provoking. The first part really hits home because it's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately. If everyone in my field could accomplish what we set out to do, we would work ourselves out of a job. I've so largely come to define myself as a "social worker" that my identity is in danger of hinging itself on other people suffering. YIKES! that's not good.

These are beautiful quotes and I'm really glad you shared.

Re: These dead people described it much better than I could...

[tiwonge]

I despise Ayn Rand's philosophy. In it, there is nothing more important than the self. (And, to her, nothing more important than herself--something that she exploited to form cult-like status among her followers.) The self is more important than the community, and any attempt to try to help the less fortunate is wrong. I don't know if you're reading that first paragraph correctly, but she says that to be altruistic is to be sadistic--one wants to see others suffer so that one can help them. The creator, the individual, the ego, should be concerned with creating, and not with helping others. Somehow, she says, this philosophy will eventually eliminate everything wrong in the world. It is, to me, about as anti-Christian as you can get

Re: These dead people described it much better than I could...

[azelmaroark]

^ Hee, I wasn't too surprised to find this comment. =) Ayn Rand tends to make religious people mad, which is why I decided not to elaborate because there's really no way either of us can reach an understanding on things like this.

I do, however, respectfully want to point out that I think you've misrepresented Objectivists here. Not deliberately, but in the same way that it's impossible for me to completely represent Christianity with 100% accuracy (gives me great pain in my writing, believe me; I wish I could). You're right in that Rand's definition of altruism is indeed very bad, but most of these words undergo pretty stiff paradigm shifts, like "selfless" vs "selfish" (the former meaning, in Objectivist thought, literally "without a self," which surely doesn't seem to be the way most people think of it). Anyway, what I really want to clarify is that the vast, vast majority of Objectivists I know are certainly very concerned with helping others, myself included. I'm actually the president of one of my campus's largest

[medievalwombat]

I would describe my spirituality as postmodern and individual, but increasingly communal. Its roots are in celtic catholicism, stripped of its roman and judaic elements. I was taught as a child, by my catholic mother, to pray to the Lord and the Lady, meaning Jesus and Mary, but echoing a pagan past that came long before them. In the last few years I've increasingly realised that the things about catholicism that didn't make sense to me were the things added by two thousand years of roman re-interpretation of pagan ideas, filtered through the almost offensive teachings of St. Paul. While the things that did make sense were those elements of the religion of my ancestors which subversively wove themselves into the ideas of catholicism when it was forced upon them so many years ago