The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

You can choose how you feel. If you choose to feel like rain makes you sad, you'll feel sad when it rains. If you choose to feel happy when it rains, you will feel happy when it rains.

EDIT: Of course, you can't choose how you feel towards everything.

edited 25th Feb '17 8:31:02 AM by Victin

Well...

Well, you certainly can choose to not feel nothing and bottle up your feelings. That doesn't make it a good idea. Which is why I gave a weather-related example, with two responses which weren't bottling up. Sure, people can have strong weather-related emotions, but I assumed it was less likely than having strong emotions regarding other subjects.

Everything is kinda interconnected tho. Barring a "I don't know why, but...", you'd be sad or happy with rain because it reminds you of something. A fun day playing with friends, a bad breakup, that kinda thing.

You can chooses your response to youe memories, productive or destructive, but I don't think you can chooses how to feel.

Indeed you can feel in a certain way about the weather because of memories you may or not consciously remember.

I'm reminded of an episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide in which people hated Mondays for some reason. So, they decided to do things they like on Mondays to improve their day. Eating their favorite food for lunch, wearing their favorite clothes, watching movies, etc. They went out and made their own happy memories.

Now, maybe it's just me, but if you're apathic towards a subject you can always choose how you feel towards it. For example, when a subject has sides A and B (and perhaps more), my knowledge on each side can limit my opinions. One can control how they feel based on their knowledge or lack of thereof regarding the subject. Even if one has, at their disposal, all the pros and cons of each and every side, they can still not have made a decision because they lack a value function that can consider all the good and the bad and return an optimal solution. They can simply choose the value function they want; they can even switch the value function whenever. One can do it consciously or not, rationally or based on whims and moods.

I believe my modus operandi towards life and new things is the lack of emotion. I can't even fathom how I could feel or have an opinion towards what I'm unaware of or what is unknown to me.

edited 25th Feb '17 9:38:53 AM by Victin

With monday, most people hate it because it's the day directly after the weekend. Their brain has to transition from relaxing and having fun back to the tedium of working.

Alright, I'll drop the subtlety. If I believe that hurting people (or myself, as the case may be) will prevent some kind of greater evil, or that it's actually ultimately beneficial to them in some way that they're not aware of yet, and all I have to go on are completely subjective religious experiences, should I do it?

I should note that this is mostly a rhetorical question since I've already made up my mind, and I hope that no one actually says yes, but still...

It does depend on the circumstances. Surgery is built around the concept of harming the body in a controlled fashion that will heal to prevent greater injury or harm in the long term. So the concept is not inherently immoral and kind of has to be addressed on a case by case basis.

That said my personal opinion is that purely subjective experience is a terrible grounds for making such a choice.

@Protagonist 506: I think you're missing the point :|

@Corvidae: As Knightof Lsama pointed out, the concept isn't inherently immoral and should be addressed on a case by case basis.

@Corvidae: In what way am I strawmanning you? I'm genuinely confused because my comment about trusting your intuition, three pages ago, was an attempt to explain my duck analogy, and was not part of my discussion about pantheism with Handle.

But to address your comment, "Intuition" is more or less a subconcious induction- and like any other conclusion it has to be tested in some way before it can be trusted. If your conclusion is about an objective state of affairs, then the proper response is to observe as carefully as possible what happens when you act on it so that you can correct your action if it turns out to be wrong. Recall that intuition is only useful when you lack either the time or the opportunity to deliberately collect all the relevant facts. It's for when circumstances force you to act quickly or blindly. And the next time you find yourself in similar circumstances, you will have some experience upon which to base a better decision.

However, from your comment it seems as if your overall concern is how to distinguish between constructive and destructive feelings. If a person genuinely believes that allowing some harm to occur will result in greater happiness, well, either they are right or they are wrong. There are circumstances in which this might be the right thing to do (triage during a medical emergency, for example), but typically it wouldn't be. If they are wrong, then they are either acting on an extreme misunderstanding or even experiencing a delusion. There may be little that that individual can do on their own to correct their misapprehension. Hopefully someone they trust will intervene. If they survive their experience, they may gain sufficient insight to overcome their destructive feelings and live in a way that is more consistent with their own and other's well being. If the condition is chronic and serious (addictive behaviors, obsessive/compulsive disorder, chronic depression, etc.) then psychotheraputic interventions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may be effective.

Corvidae, I have to admit I'm feeling a little confused about how the discussion arrived at this point. Originally, I was arguing against respecting destructive actions like violent assault, esp. when done for religious or spiritual reasons (I was reacting to Handle's example of Osho). If the universe is in some sense good, and someone claims divine inspiration for doing something bad, then obviously there is something wrong with that person's attempted justification. But, obviously, one needs some standard of good and bad before one can come to such a conclusion. My questions to Handle were intended to determine if his pantheism provides such a standard. His answers seemed to imply not, so I started to ask more questions about it. Then you made your comment about the difference between "amazing" and "reverence", so I started elaborating on that.

But somewhere along the way, I sense that you became angry, and I dont know why.

Machiavelli's seeming thesis:

A solid counter-argument:

There's a difference between using cognitive shortcuts that are based on previous experiences and can be objectively verified even if you don't have the opportunity at the moment, and on relying on religious feelings in situations where no previous experiences or objective tests are available at all.

I might have used the word "intuition" a bit too liberally, but it should be obvious by now that I'm focusing on the latter. I'm not a robot. (Yet.)

This far we're on the same page. But if this "greater happiness" won't actually happen until everyone involved has died and ended up in some hypothetical afterlife, how do you tell the difference?

"If there's no way to know for sure, we are forced to rely on intuition."

[Even if our intuition tells us depressing or harmful things?]

"In that case I don't believe it works like it should."

[Should I trust it anyway?]

"Yes, you have no other choice."

[What if it makes me do destructive things?]

"You shouldn't do destructive things for religious reasons."

I'm oversimplifying, but this process has been kind of frustrating.

You can always go the Hume route:

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" - David Hume

So how would one describe pantheism in terms of ducks?

Everything is duck. Embrace and contemplate duck in all forms. Realize and accept your duckness.

(4X) To be honest, the answer to your question is common sense. If you can't trust your intuition and it's indeed can be kinda unreliable, trust your common sense. If it turns out that you also can't trust your common sense either, I guess that is what families and friends are for. If that is also not working, I guess psychiatrist? I mean if you reach this point, you clearly need some serious help.

"Common sense isn't that common." - Someone, somewhere, probably.

We are all naught but the cells of a great cosmic duck.

edited 26th Feb '17 9:58:19 AM by Elfive

We are duckdust. All our triumphs and all our tragedies, all our dreams and all our fears, all our sound and all our fury, are confined on this pale blue duck.

@Corvidae: "But if this "greater happiness" won't actually happen until everyone involved has died and ended up in some hypothetical afterlife, how do you tell the difference? "

You draw the line when the belief in question starts to cause objective harm. But I'm having a little difficulty parsing this statement. It doesn't come from any mainstream religious doctrine that I'm aware of, so I presume this must be a description of an experience that some hypothetical person might be having, in other words, someone is laboring under the delusion that no one can be happy until everyone is dead. You appear to be trying to point out what you think is a logical contradiction if my view is taken to it's hypothetical extreme. Is that correct?

If it is correct, then this person is suffering from a harmful delusion. I covered that in my post above. If the question is whether or not an individual should believe their own delusions, then my answer is that they may not have any other choice. The brain is our tool for discerning reality, but not everyone's brain works equally effectively. If the brain itself is producing invalid results, that person may be unable to transcend it. To say otherwise is to cast aspersions on all those who suffer from some sort of mental illness, yet are unable to overcome their difficulties on their own. If a person is acting in a way that appears to threaten harm to themselves or others, then the community has an obligation to intervene. That may be the only solution.

In any case, I have not noticed that my own intuitions have caused any harm, either to myself or anyone else. So I think I'm safe.

edited 26th Feb '17 12:32:03 PM by DeMarquis

So... would "No objective harm without objectively confirmed benefits" or something similar be a good principle to go by?

That's a bit extreme. I was referring to beliefs along the lines of "burning heretics saves them from hell", "self-flagellating absolves you of your sins" or "my god will reward me for oppressing this group of people" and so on. You don't necessarily need to have mental issues to believe something like that.

Not yet. I'm mostly just trying to understand it.

Act on, not "believe", but close enough.

If you're saying that you'd (want to, in your current state of mental health) stop acting on them if they did cause harm, regardless of any perceived benefits, we're still on the same side of things.

You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's ducks all the way down.

Seriously, what the duck? Ducking auto correct. Ah just duck it.

...All this talk about ducks is making me hungry.

@Corvidae: I object to anything that physically harms people for any reason other than self-defense. And I object to self-harm because it isn't healthy. And I don't think God wants anyone to suffer. The idea that pain is somehow morally cleansing is pretty lunatic fringe nowadays.

But regardless, "No objective harm without objectively confirmed benefits" seems pretty good, although I would add that preventing further harm is a benefit. You cant be allowed to impose your feelings on other people by force, just because you believe them, because pretty obviously you are violating their feelings and desires. An individual may be convinced that their neighbor is Satan and should be killed, but the rest of us aren't obligated to respect that. One's right to express one's beliefs stops when it affects other people.

Self-harm is trickier, because people have the right to make their own decisions, but the same rule applies in a general sense- even if a person is convinced that self-harm is necessary, unless they have a terminal illness or are in some kind of untreatable pain, the benefits aren't going to outweigh the costs. When that happens, the rest of us have some obligation to intervene somehow, if we can.

So while there may be no way to refute an intuition about something that isn't even supposed to exist in a material sense, when a set of beliefs have objective consequences for people, then society has the responsibility to ensure that no one's rights are violated.

And if it's a social institution thats doing it, then it's protest time.

Oh, and if my intuitive feelings ever cause harm to people, I hope that someone will intervene to prevent it.

Now, there are some deeper philosophical issues that are left to discuss (how do you calculate "benefits" and "costs" given that I'm not a utilitarian). But I'll let this stand as a statement of general principle.

edited 26th Feb '17 7:50:50 PM by DeMarquis