Quote:
Originally Posted by mr dave
that's a cheap cop out. the difference is that unlike ants, we have the ability to ascribe to personal beliefs. they don't need to be proven or unproven, only respected. don't insult my intelligence and personal mental development by claiming i'm arrogant for wanting personal satisfaction from the strife in my soul and that i achieved it through introspective contemplation and meditation instead of liquor and whores.
your second part is also kind of insulting and bordering on hypocritical. don't be like 'them' here's how to think in instead. whoopee! it's not that a self-founded belief provides one with the secrets of the universe but that it provides one with acceptable answers to all their questions. the big issue i notice with most people is that they're hung up on being right instead of just being, or that they want to give answers to everyone's questions but their own.
it's kind of like CA said, it IS pretty simple. the challenge is bending your ego to let your head wrap itself around the fact that the bigger picture is really just a simple doodle, and in turn none of us are really as complicated or as special as we've all let our ego convince ourselves of in our youth.
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1. A cheap cop out? Get a grip kid. Just because we CAN ascribe to personal beliefs and define ourselves by them doesn't give us an excuse to pull a Richard Dawkins or start up little cults. Such things are evidence of how futile people are, which is why they never amount of anything even in the conventional sense. I don't need liquor and whores to achieve personal satisfaction either, but I also realized somewhere down the line that merely working towards personal satisfaction only brings happiness at a surface level. We need more than that whether you like it or not. For example, investing in another life besides your own.
2. You either misunderstood the purpose of my post or simply missed what I was trying to infer. Personally, I don't care too much about having any questions about the universe because there is no way any answer a human will come up with even a billion years from now will be sufficient to a guy like me, who fully accepts the limitations of the human mind/senses, much less provable to someone like you who can't even grasp something that basic. We assume simplicity because its easy. But since when has that ever been true for anything besides basic cause/effect? People assume simplicity because it hurts their little minds to open up to anything more than that.
3. All we can perceive are observable phenomena, but even rudimentary evidence will show you that there's an infinity of things out there that go beyond the answers we can gain through only observation and measurement. All you have to do is open up a middle school science textbook to see big holes in what people take for granted: electromagnetism and gravity are classified as fundamental forces, but nobody can tell you where they actually came from, much less why they came to be. It's all assumption and arbitrary political points of correctness, and such casts us in a less than flattering light.
3. And this leads me to my last point. Once you understand that even the things you take for granted may not even be fundamental things at all and your living in a time when multiple ridiculously educated scientists are supposing higher planes of reality, can you honestly write off the possibility that supernatural phenomena are merely figments of delusion? Seriously, what do you really know about the world around you besides what you can hold on your hand and what you see on a T.V. screen?
Mr Dave, putting aside whether or not you like my attitude, I'm going to ask you to bend YOUR ego and assume the opposite of what you want me to believe for a minute. That the universe is not a silly, simple doodle, but one groove on the picture frame of something that may not even be a picture to begin with.
People, likewise, are also not nearly as simple and expendable as you wish them to be, and there's far too much going on around us to remain in such a cut-and-dried, generic way of thinking.
In summation, all I want is for people to remain open to complexity and not to take things for granted simply because we can observe it: I'm not trying to convert you to believe in divine stuffz.