Inquisition
Dec. 2nd, 2021 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
degringolade
Post-Impressionism / Vincent van Gogh/ Landscape with House and Ploughman
Got rest from the late shift on Tuesday, feeling better overall. I am no longer the young man who worked the graveyard shift at the SLC Detox and then put on my running shoes to run up to the U. for a shower and my classes. Graveyard wipes me out and it takes a day to get back to being human.
Been pondering a comment from yesterday’s post. (Hat Tip to CheFXH)
The idea that the scientific establishment could possibly be as rotten as the Curia has shaken me. But then again, everything seems to be corrupt nowadays; I can't think of an institution in which I longer have any sort of faith.
To read this comment and to think about the processes that our society has been going through for the last couple of years, I think that one needs to sit down and look at the nature of any society. Not the specific characteristics of ours, but the structure and purpose of the rather vague concept of “society” itself.
I am coming to the conclusion that the greatest myth of our current society is that the society is in place to support the dreams and the visions of the individuals whose aggregate make up the polis. Not meaning to be blunt, but I have been searching around a lot lately and I can find no evidence that this was ever the case.
I tend to believe in God(s), maybe this is irrational, but there you go. I can’t say that I am of any particular faith, but I have a hunch that there is something out there, out of the realm of the observed. I tend to agree with Terry Pratchett
On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.
Additional Reading
(Translation by H.P. Blavatsky)
GOD, GRAVITY AND INSTINCT
Date: 2021-12-02 07:33 pm (UTC)One problem with this approach is that that the explanations may have ended for a good reason - because the wrong path to understanding was taken, and if so, what people end up doing, is inventing reasons to continue heading down the wrong path.
A word can be used to name something even when nobody knows what the thing is.
People imagine that a God created and runs the universe, but nobody can imagine how. Ask science this: what makes a fox weigh 29.5 pounds? The answer is gravity. Does anybody know what gravity is? In fact, no; nobody knows what gravity fundamentally is – humans know only how it acts.
A word like God is invented when there are no more explanations; so, something is invented and given a name like gravity, or will, or instinct. All these words are invented so that people can continue explaining.
Is there is a difference between words from science like “gravity” or “instinct”, and a word like God?
The only difference I can think of is hierarchy. In other words, God must be responsible for gravity and instinct.
“There is something out there” - that causes gravity and instinct. Instinct is another word from science, and it is used to explain hunger and pain. What is hunger? What is pain? Why do all people and animals on earth instinctively judge these perceptions to be forms of punishment – meaning something to avoid? Is the instinct that makes hunger punishment the factor that motivates people and animals to care about everything else they are able to perceive from the world? Maybe so, but what is “instinct”?
Wherever the explanations end, no matter the subject, humans either train themselves to be satisfied with thinking within the realm of what humans can know, or they break up into groups of individuals who believe the same things about “what is out there”. In modern capitalist culture, the former approach is associated with being a loser.
I believe it is wrong to say that believing “there is something out there” is irrational; in fact, I think it is the opposite of irrational. An animal that lacks rationality could never think of such a thing. This is why animals have yet to fight a religious war, at least not as far as I know.