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Why have people (Atheists) Chosen not to believe in God? Does this give freedom to live life without becoming answerable to anyone?
Many people are atheists because of the way they were brought up or educated, or because they have simply adopted the beliefs of the culture in which they grew up. So someone raised in Communist China is likely to have no belief in God because the education system and culture make being an atheist the natural thing to do.
"Other people are atheists because they just feel that atheism is right." It is on this premise that i am asking this question.
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Mark Meijer 100+
http://i.imgur.com/jNipL.jpg
edward long 100+
Mark Meijer 100+
natasha nikulina 50+
It's funny, really, reading your posts I had the uncanny sense of deja vu, I have been there before, " I know the room, I walked this floor " :)
" The true reality of which the one we experience is a shadow."
It's old age Plato Forms, is it not ? Plus a lot of stuff I have in my head too.So I am on board with this vision.
But...
Correct me if I am wrong, you think that we have no access to truth, just the knowing that it is not possible to know it is the only truth we have .
You can define Truth as opposite to False, but it leaves you empty and confused. I have the feeling that Truth can't be known but can be experienced, momentarily, like a gift.
Maybe it sounds corny, sorry for that. Quantum match : you are not in the process you are process. Mystic metaphor : The knower is the known, the seer is the seen.
I believe it, because it is reinforced with my own experience. Truth is not only undivided within itself, it is not separated from Love and Beauty. Am I preaching ?:) You know, the words are so overabused, we'd better play jazz , verbalizing is tough. :)
I am in favour of holographic image, it makes quantum entanglement a real feature of the universe and proves that we are not totally separated from truth, though what you said about " phenomenal world" is also true. .Mandelbrot set makes our umbilical cord with the Truth almost palpable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ma6cV6fw24&feature=related
Biblical truth : " so above as below " You know what ' aha moment ' is, it can be a glimpse of truth for that very moment, reasonable explanation are later comers. The mind is just a bridge between shapeless and form. Form is never true for nothing has absolute meaning without a whole, it's knowing about not knowing. Again wave/particle duality explains a lot, you can find a verbal match : " Who speaks doesn't know , who knows doesn't speak''
natasha nikulina 50+
And "being in the moment' is a great 'thing' it allows experiencing truth without attachment to imaginary/ false separated self. Eckhart Tolle tries to make it a practical tool, not an elite practice of the few, and i think he is doing a great job.
OK, I think I have a lot of opinions today, sorry.
It's my luck i have no time to continue.:)
Have a nice day !
Frans Kellner 100+
Quote: "I have the feeling that Truth can't be known but can be experienced."
Exactly, and to convey it you need to break the thing in peaces and then there's nothing left to tell.
The moment time breaks in you're out of the experience. To know is to remember but we can only share with those who know.
natasha nikulina 50+
What can i say ?
"... and to convey it you need to break the thing in pieces and then there's nothing left to tell."
Bingo ! :)
I am glad you are back !
Mark Meijer 100+
Eckhart Tolle may give you glimpses, but you will be interpreting that according to your existing belief structure. The point of truth, if there is one, is not to get glimpses without knowing what it means and without addressing untruth. You can't get to the truth if you're still looking at it through a lense made of lies without knowing there even is a lense. We're already doing that all the time ;). You can't get there by osmosis. Wrong knowing can only be remedied by right knowing, which basically amounts to unknowing. But you have to understand why that is. Just dumbing down and stigmatizing thoughts will not get you there.
There is nothing elitist about it, nothing is preventing anyone from doing it, but the fact remains for whatever reason that most don't, nor would they want to. And why should they want to if they are living the life they do want? The only way to get it "to the masses" is by turning it into something it's not.
natasha nikulina 50+
Maybe i am wrong, but there is nothing abstract in Plato ideal forms , they stands for 'isness' of observable forms, there is nothing external , everything is here, but we need something more subtle than biological eyes to see it.
".. it's just that the world isn't the way we experience it "
You preach the converted :).
Though it depends what you mean by 'experience ', it's like consciousness, nobody knows what it is , but who can deny different levels of consciousness ? Flower is conscious where the sun is, we can be conscious of a lot of things or the most advanced can be conscious of no things, of 'no thing, 'nothing'. At the point of 'nothing' experience and consciousness is the same ' thing' . OK, it's just an idea, that came to me right now, while printing. God forbid, i don't insist :)
And there is a point here : "The only way to get it "to the masses" is by turning it into something it's not. "
Generally it's true, maybe it's always true , i don't know. And I don't practice it, I can't go 'in the moment ' at will, maybe i am too cerebral for this, though I think i am not. Actually, I don't practice anything but life, it can give you spontaneous openings, but it's another story :)
Thanks for the conversation !
Mark Meijer 100+
Cultivating presence, or cultivating anything else, can be extremely worthwhile when trying to improve the illusion one lives in. But if you want to find out what is true, you might do better to find out what it is that seemingly keeps pulling you out of the present, and why. You'll find false beliefs (and attachment to them) at the root every time, and fear at the root of those.
That's what Tolle means with the conditioned mind. Attachment to belief is conditioned. Heck, everything is conditioned, the entire illusion and everything in it is conditioned. There's no way around that. But what conditions attachment to belief is fear. And that's what seemingly keeps you out of the present. Get to the fear, go into it, see its senseless futility, and watch it dissipate.
But being cerebral is still a perfect expression of truth, and you don't need to cultivate your way out of it in order to see that. Although of course you may need to find a workable balance as part of the process, which is certainly a challenge for me as well ;). But you wouldn't want to get rid of your faculty of discernment.
All the best.
natasha nikulina 50+
Yes, cultivating ... whatever is cultivated may lead to opposite direction, I guess it's an inner dynamics of any process. Still I am in favour of two-opposites-making-the-whole picture.:) If it is totally irrelevant, what is the balance ?
Everything is conditioned ? Yes, it's a human condition, it's tough, but I like it. Actually i don't have a choice, it's a kind of freedom :)
I think, being in the moment or meditation doesn't obliterate consciousness but highlights it. The thinking, reasoning is secondary in understanding things or 'knowledge' , they are the tool , not the guide.
The whole is prior to a part , seeing, experiencing the whole or I don't know what, I don't have a name for it, you start to find matches everywhere and they are everywhere in different contexts , seemingly not related , but you start to see the bigger picture and , yes it is a 'cerebral' joy ! Faculty of discernment alone makes one just a walking collection of other people's thoughts, maybe wise, but dead.
I've just have seen the video you posted. Yes , I think it's the way it is. I came up with this picture some time ago. In plain language : there is nothing really exists but relationships. I am vigilante, not to let it turn into a strong belief, but no input has shaken it so far. :)
But Alan Watts' story is incomplete, and not quite accurate. It is not the way people become atheist and there is a gap at the very beginning of the story, that's why it sounds as something new . People not always felt isolated or aliens.Take the average medieval man , he didn't question the priority of the Whole he was a part of. The change in perception started somewhere 4, 5 hundreds years ago, with scientific advances, I guess.It is not science which is to blame, but the attitudes it generated.
natasha nikulina 50+
The part gained a kind of independent existence, the doctrine of objectivity got the status of Divinity, a part was studied in isolation from the whole, a man became a machine, assembled from different parts and so it began...And here we are with the urgent necessity to come back to the whole. And science with its quantum revelations is an agent that can give us a new understanding of eternal truths: what comes as one goes out as many and remains one. Nothing has independent existence from everything else. What for us is quantum entanglement or Torsion field , for tribal shaman was simply magic.
I am reminded of a T.S Eliot verse :
...and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
But we are not going round on circles, maybe it's a spiral motion, what we have always known, now we have.So there is an advantage in the crises we are in, actually, we are not in crises, we are crises.
It's a long talk, everything is not simply connected, everything is just one story, and there is nothing off topic in any topic.
But it's pretty late here... please don't take me wrong, i don't state anything, though it may look like a statement, but it is not :)
Thanks !
Mark Meijer 100+
- "Thanks for your response, I appreciate such conversations, it's a dialogue a kind of attempt to think together on line :)"
Thanks, I agree, this is also for my own benefit. This kind of thing also helps me to get my own bullshit straight sothat I can finally pack it up and toss it out the window :P. It's part of my "spiritual practice" (although the word spiritual is even more abused beyond recognition than the word god). So thank you for the opportunity and the feedback.
- "whatever is cultivated may lead to opposite direction"
It simply depends on what direction you want to go. Nothing wrong with cultivating anything, again I think it can be extremely worthwhile. But if truth exists and untruth doesn't, no amount of cultivation will change that.
- "Still I am in favour of two-opposites-making-the-whole picture.:) If it is totally irrelevant, what is the balance ?"
Yes, two seeming opposites are actually an indivisible whole. It's certainly not irrelevant, but opposites are only seeming opposites, as part of the illusion, at its very core. They ARE the illusion, that's what duality means.
Truth and untruth are not like that, because untruth does not exist and truth is not a thing, it is nondual. Of course we're speaking about it now, turning truth and untruth into concepts, and so it may seem as though they're just like any other pair of similarly related concepts. But that only happens as a result of trying to communicate about it. Communication about it is not it, it occurs within it.
- "Everything is conditioned ? Yes, it's a human condition, it's tough, but I like it. Actually i don't have a choice, it's a kind of freedom :)"
Yes :)
Mark Meijer 100+
- "I think, being in the moment or meditation doesn't obliterate consciousness but highlights it. The thinking, reasoning is secondary in understanding things or 'knowledge' , it's a tool , not the guide."
I agree. It's all just a tool, both meditation and reason. Any tool can point towards consciousness or away from it (seemingly), depending on their usage. The thing is simply that so many people don't even really know what they actually want from a tool, and don't know how to apply it. Neither meditation nor reason are easy competences.
- "Faculty of discernment alone makes one just a walking collection of other people's thoughts, maybe wise, but dead."
Right, thoughts are dead and not your own. But your faculty of discernment is what enables you to see that. I'm not talking about verbal thinking, I'm talking about seeing. Seeing is alive, not dead.
- "there is nothing really exists but relationships"
Right, but when you think about it, that's just a clumsy way of saying that there is no true division. Only when we come up with the idea of separated things, do we need to come up with the idea of relationships between them, in order to connect them and make sense of having invented the idea of things. But they were never really separate, that is just an artifact of perception.
So, if we think things exist as such, then we think relationships exist as such, and actually things themselves consist entirely of relationships (because the boundaries we draw to define things and their parts are ultimately arbitrary). But things never really existed as things, that was just a mistaken idea, and so we no longer need the idea of relationships to connect them. There was never anything to connect, because there was never any true division.
That's what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. Your neighbour IS yourself. (I thought you had that in your comment, did you edit it out?)
Mark Meijer 100+
- "But Alan Watts' story is incomplete, and not quite accurate."
All anyone can do is tell a story, and all stories are incomplete and inaccurate. That's yet another reason why no belief is true. Given the way Alan Watts tells his stories, often so simplified that they are obviously only meant to illustrate a point, and never to be taken at face value, I'm fairly sure that he knew he was lieing his ass off ;).
What he often liked to do was just to tell a story in such a way that it served to highlight our own unchallenged stories by way of contrast. It's always always always only contrast that makes anything visible. The point of his stories was not to believe them, but to evaluate your own. It's just another finger pointing at the moon, and all fingers are crooked.
- "It's a long talk, everything is not simply connected, everything is just one story, and there is nothing off topic in any topic."
I agree, there is never any true division... But TED might disagree :P. But as Alan Watts would say, we're all rascals anyway. Woohoo!
- "please don't take me wrong, i don't state anything, though it may look like a statement, but it is not :)"
I understand. It's the same for me. :) We're all just talking to ourselves anyway, in this online interthinking.
Thank you! And good night :)
(and sorry Edward, for all the email notifications you're getting when I reply to Natasha... hope you're enjoying it too though)
natasha nikulina 50+
I'm afraid ' thinking on line together ' doesn't work, alas, in a way it shouldn't . We can't think together without silence ,which is understood, and spontaneity of immediate responses. Still it's an exchange of opinions, I would not call it ' throwing mental bullshit out the window ' though, at least it was not my intention :) Anyway thanks for the attempt., I appreciate it . At least, we were not debating !
I find debates totally useless, they generate a lot of heat and no light. I tried to balance this 'debate' thing with a new genre :)
And talking about balance, could i ask you to ponder this zen koan :
Shuzan held out his short staff and said, "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"
Any thoughts ?
Have a nice day !
Mark Meijer 100+
Cheers