The level of psychological peace and freedom rewarded through religion is proportionate to the measure of ignorance one is willing to volunteer.
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Like the slogan from the book 1984…“ignorance is strength”?
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I’d argue that religion bestows peace at the expense of freedom. If you’re willing to climb into a claustrophobic intellectual box and just not think forbidden thoughts nor remark on forbidden topics, then it absolves you from wrestling with complex moral questions, from being self-aware or introspective, from being challenged by different ways of thinking and/or being, from being tolerant around people whose values are “too different”, etc. Indeed it produces a learned helplessness around such activities.
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Beautifully put, @mordant.
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Depends on the religion. Buddhism designates ignorance as the cause of suffering. Freedom from suffering is defined by the elimination of ignorance. Meditation, if done correctly, doesn’t lead to ignorance or blind faith in deity or belief system.
Oversimplification, and just plain wrong, discovering your spouse is a cheating cunt may cure your ignorance, it does not end your suffering, learning you have cancer may cure your ignorance of that fact, it does not end your suffering, Counter examples being this easy to cite suggest this claim is nonsense.
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First of all, my wife is not a cheating cunt. I don’t know where you got that information.
Secondly, the ignorance ended in Buddhism is specific. It pertains to ignorance regarding the four noble truths.
- Life is suffering
- The cause of suffering is craving
- The end of craving is the end of suffering
- The path leading to the end of craving is the noble 8 fold path
To wit: right view; right thought; right action; right speech; right livelihood; right effort; right Mindfulness; right concentration
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The possessive pronoun was a general and plural example, not aimed directly at anyone.
Goal post are being moved but I’ll play along.
This is false equivalence, life can involve suffering, but they’re not the same thing.
There are myriad causes, and cravings can be satisfied without suffering.
Then it need not cause suffering, craving some chocolate, problem solved eat some.
I see a claim, I see no evidence, and cravings can be satisfied without this of course. This seems like a religion creating something it then tries to sell itself as the cure for.
Subjective.
FYI the Germans have a word for the pain of the realisation that the real world is never going to match our ideal notions of it.
Weltschmerz (German for “world-pain”) is a literary and philosophical concept describing a deep melancholy, pessimism, and weariness arising from the realization that the physical world can never satisfy the mind’s longing for an ideal state, often felt acutely due to the world’s suffering, injustice, and imperfections.
No religion is required.
Thanks, I sprayed coffee all over my keyboard…
From my experience, religion allows acceptance of the world without accountability. Along with being omniscient, God is also supposed to be the one with the plan…ergo, a Christian can always tote out “it’s God’s plan” and walk away with clean hands.
I can see where people find peace in that…externalization does that…
Well. Clearly you were implying something.
Can I move the goal posts again? Here is what he actually says.
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
That’s fine. It’s mentioned in the context of rebirth, thus immediately discarded as non-sense by you.
The idea here is that certain types of craving result in the renewal of suffering. Craving cigarettes for example will eventually result in cancer. And the cessation of such craving may extend your life or afford you a better quality of life. The craving spoke of by the Buddha does not necessarily refer to food, although renewed existence and eating share a commonality. The idea is that freedom from negative addiction is the end of suffering.
Perhaps. But it uses the standard ancient Indian model of diagnoses, etiology, prognosis, treatment. So, it isn’t surprising it looks that way. Suffering is approached as an illness for which Nirvana is the cure. The Buddha was very practical. It’s no wonder that many see Buddhism as a Philosophy as well as a Religion.
So what? Did you think that curing existential suffering would be anything other than subjective?
This is actually a very profound statement.
When someone becomes addicted to drugs, then this person does give up his or her freedom in exchange for peace.
If I’m a heroin addict, then everything is peaceful when I’m using . . . and I’m a slave to the chemical when I’m straight.
I wonder if this reasoning is a part of why Karl Marx claimed that “ . . . religion is the opiate of the masses . . . “
Great post.
Nope, it was a plural hypothetical used to illustrate the fact tgat the assertion “curing ignorance” or gaining knowledge, ends suffering, is not universally true.
They’re all false equivalences.
Tautologically redundant platitudes.
Not necessarily, again these sweeping platitudes seem to be oversimplyfying.
Define, then objectively evidence whatever you mean by rebirth, though if past attempts are apropos, then yes this is likely nonsense or woo woo superstition.
Goal posts duly moved, my point was the statement was an inaccurate oversimplification, adding qualifiers changes the claim.
Then the Buddha should try and word his superstition raving less sloppily.
Another claim.
Except suffering, if you want to simplify it accurately can be separated into two distinct categories, necessary and unnecessary. Though this might involve subjective claims again.
Where did I make or,agree with such an absurd claim as suffering can be cured? We can try and avoid causing, and where possible try to prevent unnecessary suffering, topic me this would seem to produce a more comfortable or satisfactory existence generally, but I don’t need religious platitudes to see this, in fact they generally don’t help.
Out of all the hypotheticals you could have used …
You’ve missed the point.
“Tautologically redundant”? Bit of an oxymoron isn’t that?
The religion isn’t for everyone. Nor is the philosophy. Which is why there isn’t an element in the religion which seeks to convert people.
The eternal skeptic strikes again.
Anyhow, nice chatting with you again, Sheldon. I’m not getting paid to bang my head against a wall on my day off, so I’ll take my business elsewhere.
Not interested in seeing the goal posts moved thanks.
That’s my point, that I making about your assertions, that they represent false equivalences.
No, all tautologies involve a redundant repetition, by definition.
Agreed, anyone prepared and able to critically examine those platitudes will see through them.
So no definition and no evidence then, hmmm. I am not sure scepticism is even necessary in that case.
Was kidding the whole time, chap. I know you wouldn’t say such a thing.
Uh. Yeah. They’re functional truths about the nature of suffering. I’m aware that not every aspect of “aging” (for example) “is” suffering. Aging brings suffering; implies suffering; entails suffering - for lack of a better word is suffering. So too with sickness, etcetera.
Which is why “tautologically redundant” is a tautology in and of itself. Rather ironic, if you ask me.
It doesn’t inspire faith in you?
Definition: the survival of consciousness beyond the death of the brain and body.
Evidence: consciousness is believed by some to exist beyond the confines of the brain. For example the idea that person A at location A has a different consciousness than person B at location B is a misnomer. In fact person A can easily determine for their self that their incorrect identity of self with consciousness is due to a spatial bias. Many people, like Sam Harris for example, have determined for themselves that the self is an illusion played on their biology by consciousness. Consciousness turns out to be a fundamental, irreducible aspect of reality. As such it cannot be destroyed. As such our experience of it being in the centre of our brain is just an illusion. Since it is the basis of our experience, it only goes to show that we exist after death along with consciousness - as points of reference within the universe.
That’s not evidence ratty, that’s an opinion, a belief…as you said yourself, in short; “some people believe.”
Some people believe in the existence of the Purple People Eater, does not make the PPE an objective reality.
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What better way to test the nature of consciousness than by the opinion(s) of conscious beings? Some of these opinions may be false or trivial. Others may be insightful and profound. The ultimate nature of consciousness is revealed by conscious beings, in their awakenings and by their testimony and explanations - as far as I can tell anyway.
Oh ratty, an opinion is not evidence, a belief is not evidence of that imagined reality. Indeed many of your posts betray a lack of grounding in reality.
You are arguing against yourself.
No they were false equivalences, if those religious claims had qualifiers maybe they would have been true, life is suffering is platitude, it is not necessarily true, the two things are not the same. Life can sometimes involve suffering is true, but it doesn’t work as religious rhetoric.
Well there you go, my point exactly.
You said it was an oxymoron, not a tautology, and it’s not a tautology either as not all redundancy in a sentence need necessarily involve a tautology, note the order is tautologically redundant, if I had said a redundant tautology then yes this would have been a tautology.
If you mean religious faith, then nothing inspires this in me, as I see no value in such bias in arriving at the truth.
That’s a subjective unevidenced belief?
If one of them dies and their consciousness disappears, and the others; consciousness continues, this is evidence that it is not. Also it would be easy to test the unevidenced claim for shared consciousness, if it real why isn’t this paradigm shifting news in the public domain?
Another subjective opinion?
Three more unevidenced claims, you can’t support an unevidenced claim with more unevidenced claims. This is the very definition of circular reasoning.
Except we have countless examples of exactly that happening when people die, in every single instance in fact human consciousness disappears when the brain dies. .
Another unevidenced claim, with a hint of word salad. There is plenty of objective evidence that our consciousness is an emergent property of, and wholly reliant on, a functioning brain, there is none that it can exist independently of that functioning brain.
Blimey. Don’t let the Buddhists find out about this!
Yeah! Mine too. We’re in agreement, then?
I meant “hyperbole”
Well, I’ll take that as authentic fact, then.
Neither did the Buddha.
It’s evidenced by experience. Subjective maybe. However, I don’t see any type of belief which is not subjecive in nature. Feel free to name one. Or two.
Have you not heard Sam Harris speak about it extensively? If Sam Harris can’t shift the paradigm in the public domain, who can? There aren’t enough people who are ready to listen.
Like all opinions and beliefs, it is subjective, yes.
The evidence is in experience. Like having an orgasm. You wouldn’t know what an orgasm was unless you’d had one. And you wouldn’t be able to describe it to a person unless you’d had one. And yet it’s a completely subjective experience. One which we agree about the nature of with one another.
Where’s the evidence of that?
There’s plenty of evidence on the quantum level that consciousness can have effects on matter outside the confines of the brain - thus making it at the very least “somewhat” independent of the human brain.