A bit of a crisis

[Feck]

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
A.E Crowley

Doubt everything especially your own opinions and feelings .

[Psi Wavefunction]

I'm not even talking about the twisted hypocrisy I have been guilty of, for which there isn't any excuse - that is a side issue; something I was conscious of to a degree...it's the rest: the unsteadiness of everything - my thinking is like a game of Twister. I get a firm and solid shape, then I have to move a leg over to a blue spot, then my next move has me thrown off balance and landing in a heap. And it happens all the fucking time.

Dev, my mind is in a game of Twister about fairly straightforward stuff like various subfields of science I happen to b involved in. And the deeper I go, the more twisted and uncertain it gets. You guys know how cells work, how evolution works, how life evolved on earth, how it's organised, etc. After a bit of training, I can safely say that I know none of that!

Stuff like morality and philosophy are much less concrete, and thus subject to even more fuzzy twisted-ness. If we can get fuzzy about how some well-studied cell mechanism works, then we can't really expect much from the moral compass, or lack thereof. Especially since morality is essentially a post hoc justification of innate gut feelings (see works from Marc Hauser, Jonathan Haidt), then you can't expect much logic or sanity or consistency from it!

What makes you one step ahead of many others is that you recognise that. Most people seem to ignore their own irrationality, especially those who profess to be "rational" all over. Yeah right... The brain evolved, and thus doesn't actually have to make much sense... and it doesn't, with all these multiple contradictory modules fighting each other within it (eg. agentless striving-for-objectivity model of the physical world, contrasted with the agent-oriented dualistic approach to the social world -- we don't use the same reasoning when talking about rocks moving, sheep moving, and people moving. We use biologically different parts of the brain for those, and they're inherently contradictory!)

Anyway just my 0.02$...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Good place for me to offer my apology regarding this of issue. I've never been religious, so the awareness of a transition from "warm and fuzzy" to "hard cold reality" never happened for me. I am thus ill-equipped to understand the problem faced by those of you who have. Your road has definitely been harder for me. "There can be no courage without fear."

[M]

Accept that your heart is in the right place and that you head is all over the place. That'll work fine!

I think the opposite is true. Admittedly people like me and Dev are clearly basket cases, we have an idea of what the truth is but our hearts are hard to please.

[Hermit]

Devogue, I sympathise with you.

Your quandary is very ordinary. To one degree or another all of us suffer from the tensions arising between what we know intellectually and what we regard as our gut feeling. For instance, I bet that you see nothing inherently evil or disgusting about the naked body, but I dare say that you too have "naked dreams" that cause much anxiety. Your vocifereously expressed objection to the wearing of pyjamas in public is an example of enculturated prejudice (i.e. emotional stuff). It reminded me of my father's dislike of a former Premier of Victoria, Rupert Hamer. The dislike was based on the fact that he saw Hamer giving a speech while not wearing a tie. That was a sign of the Premier's disrespect for his electorate as far as my father was concerned.

If you want comfort and peace, learn to see the superficial trappings of dress code, the religious sanctions against sexuality, the lazy condemnation of what you may call the dregs of society and so on for what they are, and conceive of each human being as potentially godlike but stymied by our social mores. The way I see you, your other options are to either "find God" or top yourself.

[The Curious Squid]

I always find your tendency to self analyse admirable Dev, if more people tried to understand and better themselves as you do maybe we'd all find it easier to know what's what.

[AshtonBlack]

Meh, grow up, ya big girleman. *









*Kidding!

[floppit]

I remember that thread about sin - Are you a Sinner? or something, it made me think of my own hypocrisy and times where I've opted for comfortable over the effort of thinking things through. I reckon it's part of being human and for me it's the bit that lets me understand when other people do it so it still has some worth.

I don't do the whole 'moral' thing anymore - I think it is a knot that never really gets untangled, it also makes me think of drawing conclusions about whole people rather than actions and I'm more comfortable judging an action than a person. Perhaps it's because of the religious context, for morality there is always a religious context at some level. I can't fully explain why, at least not beyond it having always had a different context but using and thinking with 'ethics' as the central word makes a big difference to me. Someone shopping in their PJs would be much less likely to trigger in me a sense that they were unethical to do so, I'd still find it odd, but not unethical. If a teacher taught in their underpants I would find it unethical, for a start they'd have digressed from what they agreed when employed (presumably!) and secondly it has the potential, enough potential, to misuse both the position of trust and of power that teachers have.

I first came across ethics in terms of work, unlike morality it has a more pragmatic and considerate base for me, it's less about dictates and more about consideration. Even knowing from the outset that I cannot perfectly define or live by 'good' ethics I believe that there's a certain duty to still consider them, think about them and at least attempt to reflect a thought out ethical approach to life. That last bit I think is even more important where any person works for the state, especially when decisions about other people are involved, but not just people who earn public money, anyone who has power, whether over employees or their own kids I think has a certain duty not to just let themselves off the hook by way of saying it's too hard and that any conclusion is arrogance (not talking about this thread).

Anyway - the short version is that I think morality has had it's day - I want to see an ethical world, that's what I want to live in.

[JimC]

I can remember my father, who was clearly an atheist although he was never specific about it, shaking his head ruefully and saying he had some envy for those with faith, who could find a comfort in hard times denied to the non-believers...

Rueful as he may have been, he could never summon up enough personal delusion to achieve this protection from life's slings and arrows.

We are destined for cold comfort farm, but the converse to pain without healing is a bracing glimpse of the universe, unadorned by wish fulfillment...

[devogue]

I'm not even talking about the twisted hypocrisy I have been guilty of, for which there isn't any excuse - that is a side issue; something I was conscious of to a degree...it's the rest: the unsteadiness of everything - my thinking is like a game of Twister. I get a firm and solid shape, then I have to move a leg over to a blue spot, then my next move has me thrown off balance and landing in a heap. And it happens all the fucking time.

Dev, my mind is in a game of Twister about fairly straightforward stuff like various subfields of science I happen to b involved in. And the deeper I go, the more twisted and uncertain it gets. You guys know how cells work, how evolution works, how life evolved on earth, how it's organised, etc. After a bit of training, I can safely say that I know none of that!

Stuff like morality and philosophy are much less concrete, and thus subject to even more fuzzy twisted-ness. If we can get fuzzy about how some well-studied cell mechanism works, then we can't really expect much from the moral compass, or lack thereof. Especially since morality is essentially a post hoc justification of innate gut feelings (see works from Marc Hauser, Jonathan Haidt), then you can't expect much logic or sanity or consistency from it!

What makes you one step ahead of many others is that you recognise that. Most people seem to ignore their own irrationality, especially those who profess to be "rational" all over. Yeah right... The brain evolved, and thus doesn't actually have to make much sense... and it doesn't, with all these multiple contradictory modules fighting each other within it (eg. agentless striving-for-objectivity model of the physical world, contrasted with the agent-oriented dualistic approach to the social world -- we don't use the same reasoning when talking about rocks moving, sheep moving, and people moving. We use biologically different parts of the brain for those, and they're inherently contradictory!)

Anyway just my 0.02$...

Okay - I am aware of my irrationality. Now that I am I wish I wasn't. I wish I was an unquestioning theist sometimes.

[AshtonBlack]

I'd rather be closer to the truth than happy. (my £0.02)

[FBM]

Seems to me that everyone's values and reactions are products of their society, culture, times, nurturing, etc. Nobody is raised in a vacuum. Switching from theism to atheism doesn't automatically negate all that behavioral conditioning and wipe the slate clean. As for me, I simply try to keep an eye on myself, and when I see myself responding to a situation in a way that contradicts my worldview, I change the behavior. It usually takes some repetition, depending on how deeply ingrained the conditioned response is.

There's no place in my philosophy for guilt or self-reproach, tho. I didn't choose the conditions that resulted in my behavior.