Nated's comments (member since Jul 02, 2007)

Nated's comments from the Banned Books group.

Actually, I was thinking the same thing (though I hate to acknowledge that kind of...intellectual prudery (?)...In a movement that I've grown to so respect)...anyway, I can see how a well meaning feminist would want to shield later generations from the coding in that type of story...but why not snow white then? Why not cinderella? (where a woman becomes 'successful' by being obedient and nonassertive and hoping, one day, for a man to save her. All essentially the same story i think, if you do the power balance sheets along male/female lines.

Wow, egg all over myface...but there is still the unrequested smooching of an unconscious lady, right? I mean, so it was a spinning needle instead of an apple...the prince poisoned the needle, even more direct link...lala, but I imagine your (more relevant) theory is probably close...

Sleeping Beauty ------> Date rape
(she's clearly passed out, the apple was roofied, he paid the witch)

I also agree...Its kind of fraud calling the book by the same title, since once you change a book in the ways that they do, it's not at all the same book. Every part of a novel is essential to what it is. It's a lot less troubling for me if people just read cliff notes or something like that, at least then there isn't the image or fiction of them having read the actual work.

Perhaps I reacted to the 'supermarket' comment in the way I did because it's been used by the fundamentalists a great deal on people of my persuasion, but in the sense that we should, 'fly right' and get on board their little hatewagon...anwyay, I didn't get the humor, but I wasn't that upset, just being a bit touchy, i suppose...anyway...

I do reserve the right to claim that I'm a better christian than some other people, since Christianity is a defined set of rules, which in my interpretation, hate-type fundamentalists are ignoring. Of course, they have exactly the same argument, which is why I don't proselytize, not intentionally anyway...too tough to back up and it is a feeling, not really empirical, and I don't think that's really communicable by argument.

I don't mean to be disrespectful to the atheists in this conversation by talking about the things experienced through spirituality...that kind of "wow, how can you not see it" kind of disprespectful. I'm sure what this is that I feel and experience (partially) through spirituality is perceived by you guys in a different way. I think it's all a question of lenses and contexts. The way Trevor and Alejandro are talking about evolution and the cosmos make sense to me, and I don't think anyone must put God/gods/etc. in there to make it wondrous and viable and respectable, all that.

That god of the gaps thing, Trevor, i agree, is a supremely lazy way of explaining the universe. To me, that divinity shows itself in the amazing complexity of the systems that exist, evolution, space/time, etc., but that is more of an invitation to exploration than a stop sign. I think people employ that gap/science/theology when their curiosity is satisfied/frustrated, to justify their stoppage on the (theoretically) infinite path of scientific inquiry.

I also fully agree that the 'god between the sheets' stuff is an extremely creepy expression. I mean, i do think that everything we do reveals some of that sublimity, but its still what we do...the puppet master concept should be left in the middle ages. Again, part of what makes me in awe of all of this stuff is the way it was set up, like the awe for an amazing experimental demonstration, in which one is impressed by the 'set up' as well as the spectacle of the result displayed, nature is really what makes the impact. What would those creepy priests say about all (probably the majority) the fantastic, non-church sanctioned orgasms going on out there? I wonder...probably Satan, another lazy catch-all.

Well well...the blessing. I dunno, it's a nice thing to say, even if it's meant aggressively (all in how one takes it). It can aggressively assert the existence that you may be denying...I mean, no matter the spirit, they're wishing the favor of what they believe to be an omniscient and omnipotent super being upon you, and that seems to me to be affirmative. Anyway, half the time it's said, in response to sneezes and whatnot (at least in the US), it's just a kind of knee jerk politeness reflex with little real content.

I would just add: "Understanding the mountain of probability is a way to better understand evolution and see where we have climbed up to this point" - for you - I dunno, hard to make absolute value judgments work here, since what brings about understanding in one may not for another. Probability makes me sleepy - maybe my dislike of mathematics and my attraction to narrative is the reason I'm drawn to the side I'm voicing here...I just see the universe more clearly as a novel with characters... ;-P

Yeah, so, let's keep being funny just understand when some of us are reading tired and don't get it...

Trevor, your knowledge of religion in general seems to be limited to 16th century Catholocism. There are nuances, man!

Okay, there's no Nuremberg defense for a religious person, and there definitely isn't one for those that fall under the unfortunately vague and maligned term 'spiritual'. That's not a consequence of one's choice of metaphysics, it's a symptom of weakness. Again, I don't understand why the conversation has to go to extremes, as if I am going to go shoot up an abortionist and say 'god made me do it'. Trevor, my point is not that 'everything is spirituality', rather that deciding that one will ignore extra-scientific consideration, ignore the possibility that perhaps we cannot concretely perceive all that is relevant, is not a viable position. I'm not saying that 'nothing is science', i'm saying that science isn't everything. So we seem to agree.

Perhaps I'm not representing my ideas that well, but i mean to argue for plurality here, science and spirituality laughing and running through fields of pretty flowers with a serious understanding of the ecological niches through which they stomp. One thing can be looked at from scientific and spiritual perspectives AT THE SAME TIME, or just one, or neither. I'm not trying to defeat atheism, I'm arguing against a view that excludes the...

Are we starting to carry banners here, Trevor, everybody? I don't want to carry the 'Religion or DEATH!' banner...Does anyone really want to carry the 'Atheism or DEATH!" banner? I mean, that's type of positioning is basically what I want to argue AGAINST.

Okay, I object to your supermarket anger Trevor. I never said that if someone is a part of a religion, that they must be an absolutist believer. What, you want us all to be fundamentalists or atheist? One does not sincerely believe just to get the 'benefit' of being lazy and adopting a 'framework' that one does not have to think about. You're not listening, those that really believe do so because of experiences with and through their religion or spirituality that hold relevance to their lives on every level. Again, here is an argument for sheep when I'm trying to suggest that being a person is what it's all about.

Of course we must pick and choose, at least in Christianity. The Bible has been picked apart and retranslated by so many different people, with so many different world domination agendas that it can hardly be taken literally, word for word. And that's beside the fact that it was put together by Roman academics in the first place, with a specific view to what these four or five guys liked most. So it's been a supermarket from the beginning, we have what we have, and not all of it is real. What would you call it, when you're told to love everybody, but hate these people, what's the solution? You can't do both, so you have to pick, that's why Christians, for instance, don't get a Nuremberg defense. You can't avoid choosing, either way you risk being 'wrong' in the eyes of the 'rules'.

Einstein said this thing about there not being a solution to a problem on the same level of consciousness that created it...Most religions contain paradoxes, because their 'sacred' texts were mostly written by several imperfect humans. So thinking religious people have to shift up from the words of the book and take other factors into consideration. For instance the horrible eternal punishment you seem to suggest that all religious people should set aside for you.

The real question, beyond any argument, that I'm interested in, is where that sense of awe comes from when you think about the infinity of universe, or Keats' youthful genius. I think the answer to that would be a lot more meaningful than any of the stuff I just said above to justify my egos reaction to your post.

Amen Lisa, amen colleen (meant in a non-religious colloquial sense, i assure you, sort of). Anway...the only think i would say is to Lisa, that sometimes the only evidence we have of something issubjective, but I think it's important to have respect for the subjective experience's ability to indicate really relevant things, even parts of 'reality'...for instance, leading into scientific investigation that can produce what we're willing to call 'objective' evidence... I agree with your Jesus lady story...most people I hear talking like that make it harder for me to be in touch with my chosen faith ('bad catholic'). I suppose religion, (should we call it organized spirituality?) is a feature of the world and inherently neutral (morally), meaning it can be used badly or used well...

I think it's a mistake to assume that 'evidence' and 'materialist evidence' mean the same thing. Experiences are also evidence.

It seems that the opinion that the non-scientific does not exist is based on the assumption that materialist science has a monopoly on truth. On what evidence does this belief rest?

Also, I have to say, I really object to the suggestion that all 'religious' people follow a morality blindly, and that it is therefore meaningless. Almost all contempoary concepts of morality share the same tenets with religion. That's not to say they originated there, but the two are mostly the same. So I don't think anyone can claim to have invented their own morality, utterly from scratch, and take full credit for it. At the very best, you pick the majority of your morality from the moral information floating through society, much of which has religious origin. Those personal bits, the things that just 'feel' right, are usually deeply ingrained from childhood. All we get credit for, I think, is the bits we decide to keep. Yes there are lots of sheep, but unless you mean to suggest that some of them are taking part in this discussion, why make such a blanket statement? Remember, we're discussing spirituality as well, people that go out of their way to seek truth in an organized way, mostly not sheep. It's easy to believe any cultural dominant, of which faith in materialist science is one.

Lisa, you seem frustrated by the suggestion that atheism is a belief, I don't understand.

What about that scientific maxim: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"? In the same sense that there is no scientific evidence for the presence of a god or gods, there is not scientific evidence that there isn't one or some. Science simply does not address this area of human experience.

When I say that atheism is a belief, my point is that it seems to me that atheism is a decision to 'believe' that anything that is not supported by scientific evidence does not exist.

The belief element seems to enter on the decision of the primacy of the kind of materialist fact with which science occupies itself. The scientific method does not indicate that things it has not discovered do not exist, it merely states, according to it's own rules, that there is no scientific evidence for it. Belief comes in when we extrapolate that because there is no scientific evidence, there is no existence.

For most of human history there was no evidence of the existence of dinosaurs, but that did not mean that they did not exist. Science has been driven often by belief in unproven hypotheses. Perhaps I don't 'believe' in the accuracy of the plum pudding concept of matter and the atom, though I can't prove it's not true, just evidence seems to me to line up with another structure. So I put up a screen of gold and shoot alpha particles at it, and then I have proof that atoms contain empty space...

Why then, do some people vigorously insist that lack of evidence is evidence of non-existence?

As I have said before, people that believe in the 'supernatural' do not generally do so out of whimsy. There is evidence, experiences, that lead to belief of all kinds. The incredible productivity that has been brought forth with the scientific method is the root of belief in the value of scientific fact.

Similarly, there is usually evidence to support an individual's belief in gods, etc. The issue is that this evidence is not accessible to materialist investigation. When a monk, say, has transcendent experience in meditation there is no direct evidence left over that can be accessed by materialist science, there is not material. But there is evidence in the memory of the monk, and memory is accepted as evidence in courts of law and in social passage of information.

The development of meditation techniques, especially in easter 'religious' traditions, has been carried out according to the scientific method, but with a wider field of acceptable evidence to accommodate the ephemeral nature of the consciousness, which is what such investigation is concerned with. In this way techniques have been developed which are much more powerful than any one monk could have come up with alone, have been developed and passed down over generations. It was done with trial, error, and extrapolation from evidence, which is all part of the scientific method.

The strength of materialist science is that it gives us unprecedented ability to influence our physical environment. This is not, however evidence that there is nothing else worth considering, merely that we can get by very well without anything else.

That's funny to me, that some religious people are offended by the term 'fundamentalist' being applied to atheists. Hah, I have only ever heard it used as a pejorative. Sort of like a synonym for 'narrow-minded', except with an added connotation of proselytizing.

I suppose we do drift into this colloquial realm when we apply the term to atheists, but still, I think the suggestion of closed-mindedness is the operative term in that case. Anyway, it doesn't seem like there are any of those here (in this discussion) since we're all speaking civilly still, hehe.

Trevor, i really like that stamp collecting thing, not collecting stamps is one of my favorite hobbies too. Sometimes I spend hours walking around, doing productive things and not collecting stamps.

But seriously, i suppose atheism is a position on religion, rather than a properly religious position. But then again, it is a belief in a certain state of the metaphysical (that it does not contain a God). So I can see why people are tempted to say it's a religious position. But you're right in that a lot of what makes a religion a religion is the ethics and ceremony and stories...which are not a part of atheism necessarily. But someone can still be a bastard about it, though this is true for any idea people have had, probably even stamp collecting.

You know, atheism is usually spoken about in reference to Christianity. I wonder what the interaction is in other religious traditions...Hinduism is interesting in that it's Gods also represent various purified essences, like Kali and destruction/rebirth. It seems that even if one didn't believe in the big many armed lady, one could still meditate on this concept, and basically could still be said to be 'praying to Kali', or meditating to her anyway...Christianity is different (and Islam) in that it insists on there being a physical/historical cast of characters.

But I don't know that much about hinduism.

I'm totally with you Lisa, unless the 'evil as part our genetic fabric' thing is a reference to the human predisposition to assign categorical moral labels. It's true, people later accused of evil are generally supported by base of people that believe they are doing good, so the question of whether an action is evil is usually one decided by the winners of conflicts to discredit their defeated adversaries. Also, that kind of absolutism is, to me, in the same area as fundamentalism. It's a similar refusal to see human reality as complicated and uncertain. Human psychology is far from simple, and our interaction with the world just lays a further level of complexity. That's not to say that some things don't strike me personally as evil, but I try to recognize that judgment is a part of the problem, not the solution.

Some things seem fundamentally wrong to me, like, as Salma said, this mass killing by Buddhists. However, there's something disturbing to me about the assertion that we can define what someone else is, judge them by standards they may not hold, based on a remote assessment of the situation, especially with such a flawed/biased media machine as our eyes.

Salma, what about the Shaolin monks? They historically train deadly skills, and they have fought and killed as an organization...do you see a distinction?

Well, sure it's pointless if the 'goal' of the conversation is conversion. But I don't think we have to worry about that, right? I don't think any of us are really proselytizing here. This seems more like a series of attempts to reach understanding. I think this discussion is fantastic precisely because it doesn't seem like anyone's attempting to convince. We're speaking candidly and respectfully and demystifying each other, which seems like a rare thing in these considerations these days.

Also, re: 'real' buddhists. It's problematic. Maybe they devote their whole lives to being buddhist. It's the same with the intolerant Christian fundamentalists in the States that oppose abortion but support the death penalty. I like to say that they're not 'real' Christians...but what are they then? If these bloodthirsty Sri Lankans aren't buddhists, what are they then?

Thanks Lisa and Alejandro.

The information of faith's place in the brain is not, i think what offends people.

Any debate or conversation of this sort is charged with hostility from the beginning (Why is that continually so?). When one brings up physical aspects of the transcendental, 'believers' often instantly see it as a challenge of the "See! This explains it, it's all JUST chemistry" kind. Which Lisa is very right in pointing out is not true. We see, the understanding of the chemical/physical signature of sight does not indicate that there is not a thing being looked at, no one ever takes information on the neurology of sight to mean that. Clearly there is an expectation of insult.

People who believe in various transrational/metaphysical things are keyed already to be offended by two things, i think. 1) A consciousness of their own weakness of 'faith', which many of them have been taught is a terribly bad trait, and which they want to cover with a loud mouth in favor of what they at best half believe (or with furious legislation that actually thwarts the deeper meaning of their faith, as is common in the US). 2)The long history/tradition of mutual antagonism between 'reason' and 'belief' in the West, which is now perpetuated by both sides to some extent, though not universally (the Vatican now accepts most of evolution and it's not hard to find a scientist that has some kind of faith/belief).

Basically, everyone expects to be disrespected and told they are wrong/ignorant, so it's hard for anyone to listen to what's being said, rather than what they think will be said. And there's this need to shoot down the opposition (often personally), like a bear growling over a kill. The irony is that the bear growls because the kill can be stolen, but if one really has faith/belief it can only be given up, never stolen, so there need be no hostility. The same is true for one convinced of the validity of science.

However, as is clear in US culture, both sides seem to feel they are being threatened with extinction, and that the other side is utterly secure. This seems to me to suggest that this is more a problem of psychology for the 'combatants', rather than an actual theoretical conflict, especially since science as a system is very open to possibility and almost never closes one off.

(People of the Jerry Falwell orientation certainly make things much worse by encouraging this feeling of crisis in their flocks in order to keep them listening and paying furiously to a 'war effort'. People contribute more when there's a crisis, but they also rarely achieve reflection. Which is supposed to be a cornerstone of Christianity.)

And it all gets so personal because people often have deep personal vulnerabilities invested in their choice of belief, on either side. The ego is certainly involved, and that's usually not helpful for listening.

I imagine the whole problem started because of the church's ignorance and hostility towards western science in it's earliest development. Only in western culture is this divide so charged with antagonism, so it makes sense that it would be linked to our particular history. Boo to the guys who locked up Gallileo.

Alejandro: do you think you could provide a link to that article?

I agree the word 'spirituality' is loaded. I'm not a big fan of the New-Age scene myself. But it is, however, the best commonly known word (that i could think of) for that feeling I was talking about. And I'm reluctant to let concede it.

I think you're dead-on, Trevor, with that comparison to aesthetics. When I've experienced moving works of art, there has sometimes been a sense of profundity. Somethign felt to be beautifully in view but with much meaningful beyond sight. Fascination, wonderment, etc. And that's very much what I've experienced religious or spiritual moments to be like. They're not that common, but it's a very similar 'deep' or expansive feeling, a lot like successful meditation.

I think you're also right on the link. A lot of religion/spirituality is about beauty, trying to approach a certain beauty/love that one feels at these moments of connection, or opening. I imagine that religions have worked to try and communicate the religious experience through aesthetics, and many individuals have tried to convey the feeling through their works. There is a lot of famous talk about the 'spark of the divine' and such stuff. And various churches have tried to regulate aesthetics, which shows that they feel it's powerful and related, and want that power for themselves alone.

I think most people make this leap of faith based on strong feelings, it's generally not blind. Blindness often follows in a religious org., but the two are separate. It's not that someone just told people to believe and they decided that they would, for the hell of it. They're deeply personal feelings though, and not generally based on easily expressible concepts, especially for someone with little academic training, and especially when argument is implied. Of course, the task of expressing one's belief is made much more difficult by pop/marketing religion and the language of the New Agers, which for many has attached this idea of insincere/trivial hippieness to spiritual language. But it feels a lot like intuition.

Besides, any scientific hypothesis is based on a leap of faith taken before investigation begins. Most scientists continue to believe their hypothesis until proven wrong, though they don't have 'proof'. People have devoted their lives to hypotheses they can't prove. Darwin travelled immense distances and risked ostracism. The allegory to a religious/spiritual belief is obvious. The evidence concerned is simply of a different kind.

A teacher once told me that prayer is talking to the divine, and that meditation is listening to it. I'm sure this includes all meditation, definitely that done in scientific inquiry, since it's all being quiet and trying to connect to something more profound (Truth/God/Gravity/Drosophila genetics and what they mean for Genetics in general :]

I don't think so.
Seems like they'd be all about that one.
(He does read the Bible to the hooker, right? And she converts to JEEZUSism and gives up her sinful ways? Goes out to raise money for Jerry Falwell?)

Lisa, I take your point about religion, organized religion, prodding people to violence. But I think that has more to do with leadership and politics than the message of the religion.

I think it's important, talking about this stuff, to maintain a difference between spirituality (independent type religious-ish beliefs), and obedience to a religious hierarchy and community structure. I believe that most muslims would say that blowing people up is not in the spirit of their religion, though it has proven an effective tool for some of the power structures that exist in a Muslim context. Just as the Crusades did for Medieval Christian Europe, though they were clearly against the spirit of the 'love thy neighbor' thing.

I should have been more specific and said that most of the backing for human unity on a large scale has come from 'religious' and philosophical thought. You're right that the institutions have a mixed record at best.

At the same time, i think the atheist group needs more definition. Are we speaking abut atheism as an exclusive belief in materialist/scientific explanations? Or is there room for a person of atheist persuasion to feel a transcendent or interconnecting force, the stuff that's often referred to as spirituality?

Maybe the biggest mistake is allying ourselves to belief groups as if what we believe will never change. After all, the thing I find most infuriating about religious fundamentalism is the relentless closure of minds that it engineers. It's one thing to know what we believe is true at a given moment, but entirely another to say that the felt truth coincides exactly with Reality, that we will never see more because no more exists, the proof of this being that we haven't seen it.

sorry if that's excessive, i should have found a more concise way...

in taoist philosophy, the point of the 'light/dark' idea is that in a world composed of human perceptions of what is 'light' and what is 'dark', the existence of one term always creates the other. So when we see something as light, or tall...we automatically create the concept of short or dark. When we see violence, we create a characteristic of peace that we will see in other things, but it's all relative and arbitrary.

for instance: the suburbs may be less likely to provide violent death by mugging, but they are far more likely to house individuals that make management decisions robbing thousands of their livelihoods or support the blood soaked diamond industry. So a lot depends on what you mean by violence.

i agree with the point made that the source of everything we see as violence is the 'us' 'them' dichotomy, whether it crops up politically or religiously (ideologically in both cases). there could be no violence if we were all awake to our unity (not that that's an easy thing to get to, not that i have realized it) - the point here is that neither organized religion nor the institutions of science really promote this idea, therefore, neither one, in general, can prevent violence. (In response to the idea that science is only a force for peace, i submit the scientific creation of modern assault rifle and the rationalism of the nazi and khmer rouge holocausts.)

Division/violence is an entrained response in us, because we are animals and because animals know, cellularly, that we need food and water and mates and that there aren't enough of those things to go around. Any authority structure always ends up us and them, as does any division like a country, or at least in the vast majority of cases through history.

Communism was a great idea, i think, but it was always implemented us and them and always got locked in with a major authoritarianism. Capitalist democracy may seem nicer, but it just sends its violence beyond its borders with colonialism or unmitigated capitalism like the US with, say Chile/Iraq, or the British with China during the Opium wars (wow, a war fought to preserve the right to sell drugs, basically they were working on the same motivation as the crips, bigger and with a navy)

Anyway, the most influential force in favor of the idea of human unity has always been religion and philosophy. Those same ideas can be found through scientific inquiry, but the avenue is rarely explored and can only go so far before it needs to rely on values science cannot process, things our brains process as feelings and intuitions.

Simply relying on 'facts' cannot help us with unity because people decide what a 'fact' is and they are generally bent to look like they mean whatever those presenting them want them to say - a situation that any US citizen trying to find out about the world through the media can certainly attest to.

So we can't rely on organizations and we can't rely solely on facts, so we have to find something else...some other level through which to see. Standard Western science doesn't process the data for any level other than the material so we have to be open to something else as well

I read a criticism of Dawkins book that talked about levels of view...and how science is the most useful tool we have for looking at the material level of the universe. But it continued that we crave answers to questions of meaning and we try to find peace in spite of our apparent material separation, and we feel things for which there are no satisfying materialist answers, so we need to be open to more than one frame of reference... Dawkins seems to deny the existence/validity of these others frames...

My feeling is that Dawkin's view of religious people contains the same contempt and division that a drives a fundamentalist. So it's current non-violence is contingent on violence not being a useful tool for it. And who's to say that insulting the heritage of most of the world is less meaningful as violence than throwing a man in jail. They both create/increase division and thus increase violence.

So, my imperfect approach to the problems posed was to leave the organization of my religion, which was not in tune with it's message of peace...and hang on to the good/unifying/peaceful parts...(which in Christianity are very much the center of the literature, despite the actions of the powerful and fearful and stupid members representing it) - so the two options talked about, fundamentalism and atheism, did not offer me any satisfaction.

This is not to say that one has to believe in a god to get work with 'higher' questions...But it seems that a choice to believe that all the answers lie in materialist fact is indeed a faith decision, one has faith in materialist science despite it's inability to prove it's own validity according to it's own principles. But i have faith in science...

Interestingly, Taoist philosophy is ahteist and has a lot of access to these other areas, and it's protoscientific, so it's got something for both sides of the debate - not that i'm proselytizing, just a suggestion for all y'all's further inquiry

Dawkins seems like just another fundamentalist to me, as intolerant as the forces he 'fights'...

Like a person with no sense of smell saying that it's unnecessary to smell and that no one should ever make decisions based on it.

He's making the same decision that fundamentalist christians and muslims (hindu, satanists, etc.). He's certainly not helping the world become any safer by saying that religion is dangerous. All that trouble in Turkey was cause by a combination of popular/gov't religious intolerance and Dawkins' disrespect and intolerance.

Because it is a disrespectful and intolerant stance he takes, though that doesn't mean we should ban it. I mean, if you have faith then it should be immune to Dawkins' criticism (which are based on a different thought system, like criticising literary studies because it doesnt' make algebraic sense). If one is faithful, it's really based on personal belief on feelings, and not on a power structure that can be threatened by a book.

So that's a good thing about it, you can see who's not worth following by finding the people that react to Dawkins' work with fear and hatred and all those things their faiths supposedly should keep them away from.

Whatever it was, it probably had something to do with the ability to inspire that you found. I think banning is generally exercised, consciously or not, in an effort to control the audience, to keep them from being inspired in one way or another. It's closing doors for people, or trying to tell them they're dangerous.

I suppose it could have been the anti-totalitarian section towards the end, where they fight that 'central intelligence' thing, that thinks for all the people on the plane, or something, I'm thinking of the right book, right?