Spiritual but not religious?

beed84

Megii said:

"Design" in terms of things such as the spider/web example, I can't really go along with. I find the theory of evolution is the best explanation for that, albeit we don't understand the process perfectly, but still... But I may not be understanding what you mean by design properly I realise.

I guess by design I mean that the universe, the earth, animals, humans, work almost too perfectly for them to have just happened, or at least I feel that it is hard to grasp it that way. Part of me believes it would take something, e.g. a higher power (designer) to bring them into fruition and make them work the way they do. For example you can't just trip up and go "oh look, I've just made a car." It takes serious thought and design before a car is made.  As for the theory of evolution, that's a theory I struggle to buy. My humble opinion is we are simply what we are.

In relation to this thread, this superb comic strip by Pablo Stanley has sprung to mind:

http://www.stanleycolors.com/2013/12/life-donuts/

Megii

holnrew said:

That's fair. I just think that intelligence, thoughts and feelings are more advanced than they should be for the natural order of things. That's why we're destroying the planet, have mental illness and other such things. We'll destroy ourselves (and a lot of other things sadly), because it's against the order of things. Star Trek is just a dream. Human nature isn't natural.

All this is IMO of course. I don't mean to state anything as fact. Thanks for making me think though, it's interesting figuring this stuff out.

I wouldn't presume to state anything as fact either - as far as it goes, I don't know what the facts really are - all speculation on my part, and as I implied at the beginning of the thread, I'm aware that I'm kind of coming at things from two sides, which may actually be contradictory. And cheers for engaging, and giving me reason to think more also.

Megii

Winny_Pooh said:

The simplest thing I could say without filling pages is to watch Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. I'm halfway through and he has things pretty much figured out for the most part. He is spiritual (like Jung) but connects the dots of philosophy and religion rather adeptly from the position of rationality.

I will have a look, cheers!

Megii

Chalky said:

holnrew said:

That's fair. I just think that intelligence, thoughts and feelings are more advanced than they should be for the natural order of things. That's why we're destroying the planet, have mental illness and other such things. We'll destroy ourselves (and a lot of other things sadly), because it's against the order of things. Star Trek is just a dream. Human nature isn't natural.

All this is IMO of course. I don't mean to state anything as fact. Thanks for making me think though, it's interesting figuring this stuff out.

One of the biggest things that Darwin did was to demonstrate that there is NO natural order or balance of nature or natural harmony. Nature is "red in tooth and claw". Evolutionary theory has randomness as its essence. Saying Mankind upsets the balance of nature is anti-Darwinian, and is simply replacing the religious God with the spiritual 'Nature'.

Interesting @Chalky, cheers for this - thought provoking stuff.

Megii

beed84 said:

Megii said:

"Design" in terms of things such as the spider/web example, I can't really go along with. I find the theory of evolution is the best explanation for that, albeit we don't understand the process perfectly, but still... But I may not be understanding what you mean by design properly I realise.

I guess by design I mean that the universe, the earth, animals, humans, work almost too perfectly for them to have just happened, or at least I feel that it is hard to grasp it that way. Part of me believes it would take something, e.g. a higher power (designer) to bring them into fruition and make them work the way they do. For example you can't just trip up and go "oh look, I've just made a car." It takes serious thought and design before a car is made.  As for the theory of evolution, that's a theory I struggle to buy. My humble opinion is we are simply what we are.

In relation to this thread, this superb comic strip by Pablo Stanley has sprung to mind:

http://www.stanleycolors.com/2013/12/life-donuts/

Fair enough - you make your position clear, and basically we do fundamentally disagree on evolution. But cheers all the same, and thanks for contributing to the thread. I'll have a look at the comic strip.

PolarityMan

Megii said:

 The colour red for example - I know what I mean by that, and I can visualize it in my head easily, but it's not real. Electromagnetic radiation (whatever that is) of a certain frequency hits the cells in my retina, and that ends up with my brain somehow forming an image with that colour. So it's "in my head" (whatever that means) and not actual reality, and yet it seems so real - I find it very hard to say that "red" is just an illusion. 

 

You're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia. But of course the truly weird thing is that I jsut ready the thread about synthaesia where someone also was talking about qualia. Which could be a spooky coincidence or could be further evidence to support solipsism.

Sambostar

Roland said:

beed84 said:

I'd consider myself to be either a torn atheist or an open-minded spiritualist. I don't believe there is a god per se; however, I find it hard to believe that this complex universe happened by accident.

Isn't that the Goldilocks Syndrome? We don't know any other universe, so it's difficult to conceptualise one, but that doesn't mean that our is a priori unique

Racist feckin bastard.

Sambostar

A lot of big talkers with theories but no one can conceptualise space nor infinity.  May as well get drunk as far as I can tell for all the consequence and difference it makes.  Take us back to the stone age.

Megii

PolarityMan said:

Megii said:

 The colour red for example - I know what I mean by that, and I can visualize it in my head easily, but it's not real. Electromagnetic radiation (whatever that is) of a certain frequency hits the cells in my retina, and that ends up with my brain somehow forming an image with that colour. So it's "in my head" (whatever that means) and not actual reality, and yet it seems so real - I find it very hard to say that "red" is just an illusion. 

 

You're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia. But of course the truly weird thing is that I jsut ready the thread about synthaesia where someone also was talking about qualia. Which could be a spooky coincidence or could be further evidence to support solipsism.

Qualia - yes, well spotted - I have been interested in this area of philosophy, and the various viewpoints around the hard question of conciousness. I can't really think of a good way to to refute solipsism, but I just don't accept it, and I prefer to believe that you do exist. As to the spooky coincidences - I would say it's a big world, and chances are that such things will happen here and there all the time, even if rare on an individual level - they may seem spooky to the individual experiencing them, but how you interpret such things doesn't have to be in that "supernatural" way, and nor does it have to imply solipsism. But that's just me...  

CabbageCat

I have never been religious but I used to be a bit spiritual since it was kind of alternative-cool. Nowadays I'm neither. Both are "silliness" for want of a better word. They are (probably) just us projecting our internal complexities onto the world.

Megii

CabbageCat said:

I have never been religious but I used to be a bit spiritual since it was kind of alternative-cool. Nowadays I'm neither. Both are "silliness" for want of a better word. They are (probably) just us projecting our internal complexities onto the world.

I know how you feel @CabbageCat, and a lot of the "spiritual" or "New Age" talk out there seems irrational and full of wishful thinking to me as well (and I say this having once had a bit of a spiritual phase myself when a bit younger). But I would tend to say those internal complexities are actually a component of the world/universe, as indeed we all are.

quarky

Megii said:

But at the same time, I am a musician (albeit just semi-pro) and dare I say I consider myself a kind of artist. As regards music, both listened to and created, I'm concerned with atmosphere, mood, feeling... all these kind of things. The world seems full of stuff - places and events - that resonate with me in that way.

The whole question of reality is interesting. I was going to suggest that rather than spirituality, you look at philosophy, but it looks like you already do. I guess the question is, which philosophers? The whole question of existence and reality has been a fundamental part of that for thousands of years, but if you go back too far, it seems more about word play. Come forward too close to the present time, and it is more about the world we are in (rather than questions about how and the why it is).

To me, I think we have to accept that we may "feel" something towards an object/event but that doesn't mean anything other than that. Our brain has a reaction, which could be due to prior external influences, or something developed independently. It doesn't actually have to have anything at all to do with the external object/event though, besides it just being the trigger. I think there are plenty of reasons why this happens (which I won't go into on this post in case I am barking up the wrong tree).

Sporky

beed84 said:

I guess by design I mean that the universe, the earth, animals, humans, work almost too perfectly for them to have just happened

They didn't just happen. Over billions of years tiny changes happened in genomes. Changes in the environment either favoured or opposed those changes, so after billions of years you end up with what look like awfully sophisticated "designs".

Then you look at the human appendix. What's that for? We don't use it - it's just a liability. But all mammals have it.

Then you look at the human vs the squid eye. If it was all designed, why do we have a blind spot and they don't? Why are our retinal cells the wrong way around? No competent designer would do that. The only positive of the blind spot is finding out it's there and making peoples' heads disappear by looking slightly away from them with the other eye covered.

Why does the giraffe have the nerve that goes from its brain to its larynx go all the way down its neck, around one of the major blood vessels of the heart, and all the way back up - nearly 5m of nerve to go about 30cm? Because that's the path it takes in fish and in all mammals, but as the giraffe's neck got longer over millions of years that basic routing didn't change.

Intelligent design doesn't explain all the weird inefficiencies in how living beings are.

Drew_TNBD

Science is the only thing that has saved millions of lives. Religion hasn't done that, and spirituality hasn't done that.

GO SCIENCE WOOO HOOOO!!!

Drew_TNBD

fretmeister said:

Chalky said:

By definition, science is not real. Its only a set of constructs and models, some of which are very accurate and some less so.

Trying to reconcile science with your life experience is like trying to explain a wank using algebra. So try this experiment - follow @fretmeister's advice, then, using only standard notation, describe it....

pp
p
f
ff
rall
fffffffffffffff

You are David Carradine and ICM£5.

4114Effects

Drew_TNBD said:

Science is the only thing that has saved millions of lives. Religion hasn't done that, and spirituality hasn't done that.

GO SCIENCE WOOO HOOOO!!!

That's very true. Religion hasn't saved any lives. Nor has spirituality. Then again, science hasn't saved any lives either. People have saved plenty though, using science. It's a bit like saying guns have killed millions of people. 

I'm not even sure if I have a point. I just like to join in and try sound "debatey" every now and again.

Drew_TNBD

Cirrus

Oh man, I love these kind of discussions. Not that anyone has the answers, just interesting to see different takes on the question.

When I think about spirituality, I see religion as a totally man-made construct, a load of myths and legends codified and given organisation and infrastructure by people. So I totally dismiss it as irrelevant to the question of spirituality. 

I don't see spirituality as fundamentally at odds with science. We have this that the universe we exist in has, like, 10 dimensions of which we can (for the most part) get our heads around 3, maybe 4 if you want to count time. Except we don't really understand time otherwise kids wouldn't think they're going to live forever and we can't do anything with it anyway other than tumble forwards through it as surely as if we were flung off the ISS in a random direction.

Then we have the minor issue that we can't observe or interact with most of the universe. Almost 70% of it is dark energy, 25% of it is dark matter, which leaves about 5% of the whole universe that we have a chance of seeing, most of which is beyond the light horizon anyway so we'll never have a clue what is going on out there. And every second, 65 billion neutrinos pass through every square centimeter on the earth - that's approx. the area of your thumbnail.

I find that stuff staggering. I would love to know the answers to questions like "why does anything exist?", "what is consciousness?" "What happened before the big bang?" etc, but we're terribly limited animals and even with our big brains there's a limit to our understanding and we can't think beyond the senses we posses, which to my mind are wholly inadequate for the job of actually comprehending the universe we're in.

dtr

Just the word "spiritual" is usually enough to convince me that I'm about to hear a sales pitch from a woo merchant, or am talking to someone with no intellectual curiosity (of the kind who buys shit from woo merchants).

Back when religion was the dominant form of political coercion there was an interest in dissing existence as base, shitty and depressing and the promised neverland as where all the wonderful stuff was, because it got people to do as they were told.

I don't buy into the religious thing, and certainly not the insistence on some alternate magical wonderland.  That just leaves actual existence as the only place all the wonder can be, and I'm happy with that.  The more I learn about the universe the more wonderful and weird and full of boundless possibility it seems.  The idea of grabbing a bunch of that strangeness and mystery and walling it off in some disconnected repository for woo (like, the realm of spirituality, man!) strikes me as the worst alternative - it does away with the comforting certainties of religion while retaining the insistence that the universe is fundamentally shitty and base, and all the good stuff is somewhere else.  Usually behind a paywall (buy my book, crystal, lucky heather, sweat lodge retreat with biodynamic yogurt enema, etc).

goat

If there are larger forces at play its so far beyond our current comprehension theres no point banging your head against the wall trying to figure it out. Best plan IMO is to get humanity spread out a bit so a catastrophe on Earth wont end the species and maybe we'll get a grasp on it in a few millenia. Also, if at all possible, dont be a dick.