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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24892)	9/13/1998 4:03:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

>>> What we live is our imagination.... Take anything your mind can imagine and deconstruct it. At each moment let the question "Why?" lead you on to more fundamental levels of understanding. You will eventually reach a place where you can reduce no further, and cannot answer "Why?" nor even "How?" At this stillpoint one stands at the threshold of the concept of a Creator. Our senses and minds cannot carry us beyond this threshold. In the face of our ultimate ignorance, only an open, humble heart and faith can gain us any ground.<<< Rick, it gains you no ground whatever. The question "Why?"or "How?" does not go away because you wrap all your previous Whys and Hows up in a bundle, call it "The Answer: An External Supernatural Entity I call Creator." The bundling and labeling process is merely a way of comfortingly fooling yourself. The question "Creator-- Huh? Why? Who? Wherefrom? Howcome?" occur naturally, and disappear for you only because you choose at that point to chloroform them. You call it "creating a belief system," and my point is that that is exactly what it is. A self-created "system" you like believing in, and since it's easier to believe something if you can convince yourself it is true, you make the leap from the acknowledgment that you have created this belief system, to the declaration that the beliefs contained in it are..."true!" Consciousness is a strange phenomenon, and the human drive to "make sense" of its environment makes the industry of generating competing "truths" a thriving one. There is something in the human mind that enables each member of each clan that generates a system that makes its clan, specifically, feel comfortable and comforted, to feel certain, entirely certain, that their belief system provides the answers to the Whys and the Hows. Example of One Single Teeny Weeny Root Belief (Item of Faith) Justifying the Predatory Activities of an Entire Cultural Group, the Indo-Europeans, About 5000 Years Ago: ...The utter conviction that the Creator, at the origin of things, had presented all the cattle in the world to the Indo-Europeans, thusly making it comfortable and reasonable for them to attempt to get all the cattle "back" from representatives of other belief systems, who had self-evidently come by them dishonestly! This notion, a single item in a "belief system," was a driving force in the relationships between the Indo-Europeans and their neighbors, who took exception to this God-given truth, for thousands of years. One can certainly see why this belief felt absolutely correct to your average Indo-European, in that it provided a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for many Whys, Hows, Oughts, and Howcomes.

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24892)	9/14/1998 3:28:00 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Rick, Using your line of reasoning, anything that I can imagine to exist must be just as valid as your imagined creator, therefore the Easter Bunny and Santa exist. Show me that this is not so. The definition of the term solid is still valid on the macroscopic level. We do not live at the atomic level, so the spaces between atoms need not concern us in defining a solid. Can you insert your hand into a solid piece of wood? Del

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24892)	9/20/1998 12:13:00 AM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

<n order to "make sense" of reality, our minds process the raw data of our experiences, and in doing so create belief systems.> Rick, in my opinion this is not the way it usually happens. Rather, parents start talking about God to their babies, teaching them to pray, taking them to Sunday school, reading them children's Bible stories. A quick trip to any bookstore, religious or secular, reveals a whole lot of material geared to teaching small children the religious beliefs of their parents. My child does not believe in God. The raw data gets processed, but does not turn into beliefs, but stays pretty real. She is not cynical or jaded; she simply does not believe in otherworldly or magical explanations of stuff. Since there is a large minority of people who do not ever feel the need of belief systems, I would have to say that your statement is true sometimes, but certainly not always.