How often do you think about god?

UK SPD wrote:Who'd have thought people would have so much to say about such a small word?

You could say that's why there's so much to say about it. It doesn't say much on its own. It evokes other things instead.

muaddib wrote:So if you wanted to think of them as an ordering, in terms of reliability and precision: science > art > religion ... but if you need to push out to the limits of experience, and you're judging things on terms of scope and holism, the ordering flips. For one, I think that pretty well explains why people almost always become more religious when pushed to their limits.

I just interpret differently the fact that some people reached out for religion in times of crisis, I interpret it as a mean to cope. I am curious about comparisons at baseline: emotionally healthy non religious person vs emotionally healthy religious person, what is the added value of religion to the religious person's life ?

My gut feeling is that they would be equally happy with a sense of purpose, religion being one of the ways to go about this sense of purpose ...

There's a related concept to this though, which I still haven't entirely wrapped my head around. The idea is that if you look at how this dynamic plays out historically across societies, the religion actually comes first. Even as art, science, and politics may contradict religion on the surface at times, they are all ultimately born from that religion and sort of a grand "working-out the contradictions and questions" of the religion's premises. I guess the mechanism is that the religion sort of lays down the boundaries of a society's world-view, and all other intellectual activity happens within those limits, but like I said, this is something I'm fuzzy on.

If we're talking grand scheme of things, I feel like art, science and politics are independent from religion from the start but that religion put a claim on them. It is my impression that the science of discourses such as scholastics or Kalam attempted to keep philosophy confined to the boundaries of religion but became obsolete when philosophy became able to accommodate art, science and politics.

muaddib wrote:

ElephantEyes wrote:Thank you for this reply muaddib. Maybe Im cynical but Im not sure most people think about it as much as you seem to give them credit for.

My impression is that most are religious for emotional reasons. If they think about it, its confirmation bias stuff to justify it to themselves even more than their emotions do.

Of course for scholars or Theologians that wouldnt apply so Im not including them.

Maybe Im cynical or overgeneralizing or have just known too many overly emotional non analytical people.

Actually, I agree with you, and that's why I mentioned the sensibilities. I think those are really the key and the level most people participate in religion on. If someone decided to become more analytical about it though, I think the theology and mythos do sort of organically follow.

ElephantEyes wrote:I think religion was born of the need to find explanations for mysteries and somehow at some point got conflated with the emotional needs to soothe anxiety re death and unpredictable life events, then control and social order got involved. It probably became more complex as human societies grew from small bands to huge civilizations. The bigger the society the more its about control and order and less about mysticism.

I'd mostly agree with that take on things, but I think I differ on a couple points. The first is that while religion definitely developed more and more of an element of social control (you could say it's even in the etymology of the word), I wouldn't entirely see that as a bad thing. It's often abused, like all things where power comes into play, but I guess I've become more skeptical that what it replaced was inherently better.

The other conclusion that I've come to is that mysticism actually may be one of the later developments in religion. I am using the term mysticism in a technical way though, which is maybe very different from what a lot of people associate the usual English word with. It's totally separate from what you'd probably consider superstition; I use it to describe any sound, systematic approach to studying and developing inner reality. So for example, I think you could definitely use the term for parts of Western existentialism and phenomenology.

ElephantEyes wrote:Well I prefer to learn about genies, myself. Its an aspect of Islam which is fascinating to me although I know it can be very frightening and taboo to talk about also, so apologies if I have offended any Muslims reading.

naps wrote:I'm a fan of trashy horror novels from the 70's/80's, and while it's not exactly an academic source, there's a novel called "The Djinn" by Graham Masterdon, which is about a guy who becomes involved with a family heirloom that contains a genie. It's very vivid and creepy, despite being a bit goofy, and it really stuck in my head. Until I first read it, my idea of genies had been limited to "I Dream of Jeannie", and I found it fascinating to discover how sordid and violent ancient genie mythology actually was.

ElephantEyes wrote:I tried to talk to some Muslim friends about genies and they always get really scared and secretive and refuse to talk about it. Warn me to stay away. Of course a curious kitten like me just gets more intrigued though. Why the mystery and fear? They really believe beyond any doubt these powerful malevolent interdimensional beings exist. The veracity of their convictions convince me something is there. I want to know more but this knowledge is guarded and hidden.

So like naps was talking about, I don't think that devout Muslims see the jinn as an esoteric mystery so much as the folklore explanation for a lot of dangerous and evil forces. A lot of the jinn are equivalent to Western Christianity's image of devils and demons, and IIUC, in the Islamic human origin story, Satan himself isn't an angel that totally rebels against God, but a jinni that parts ways with God because he sees Adam and mankind as usurpers of the jinn's position in the world.

Unlike demons in Western folklore though, the jinn are not only mortal, but they have free will so there are also good jinn (who are usually described as beautiful and work more like fairy guardians in Islamic folk stories). Another interesting thing about it is that the Muslims integrated the old Greek ideas of chemical substance into their notions of supernatural beings. Since the angels are immortal, like the heavenly bodies in Aristotle, they're made of light and quintessence, which also means they're incorruptible and can't act out of harmony with God's will. The jinn OTOH are made out of fire and air, while humanity and natural beings were made out of earth and water, so they're all made out of corruptible elements, mortal, but also subject to chance and free will.

I could be wrong, but if you keep expressing a lot of interest in the jinn, people with a Muslim upbringing might just start wondering if you're their version of a witch Which is dangerous around fundamentalists, but otherwise, I imagine the reaction would be similar to a typical Western Christian's reaction to Wiccans. The relatively devout Muslims might get uncomfortable and start worrying about your stability but not attack you. And the more casual Muslims might find it a bit odd and endearing at the same time. One of the funny things about meeting people from the Middle-East is learning how rampant things like astrology and charms are in the culture, despite the fundamentalists' obsession with stamping it out.

I could mention more; I think there is a valid idea behind all the allegory of the jinn, but I'll save that for another post.

MalvaBlue wrote:

naps wrote:It seems to me that many people follow their religion out of a sense of duty; if not to continue the teachings they were brought up with since childhood, then out of a need to be spiritually connected.

I think most people follow their religion because it's a great substitute for a sense of meaning and connection (with fellow humans) through a minimalistic/simplistic formula.

I won't disagree with any of that; I've just come to view that maybe religion actually has more solid things beyond that to offer to anyone that wants to go deeper.

MalvaBlue wrote:The other way to experience meaning is to dig deep in your own psyche, and it's going to be dirty and messy, and not always rewarding so most people won't do this.

This is largely what I have in mind when I use the word "mysticism." The problem I came across first-hand though is that without something else, the meaning I came to through this route alone was cut off from the world. Sort of like when you added "fellow humans" in parentheses above, I used to think of that as just a minor detail, but the past few years have led me to suspect more and more that it might be the major issue.

Similar to demons yes, but different. I think the Christian idea of demons are being that work for the darkside attempting to sway people from the path leading towards Christ/Heaven? Im not sure.

I think Muslins view jinn as similar to people, free will as you said, made of smokeless fire though, and existing on another dimension where they cant be seen by humans unless the jinn allows it. They can see us though. Jinn have full lives like people, families, emotions, drives, motivations, etc. Some good and some evil, like humans can be. Humans and jinn can form relationships and fall in love etc.

I feel Im divulging something personal but its relevant and interesting. I cant help it. A Muslim friend told me his mother was stalked by a jinn her whole life. The jinn fell in love with her and sabatoged her relationships. She had several stillborn children and her husband died early. My friend was only surviving child. A witch doctor diagnosed it as jinn harassment.

This person also told me he caught a mermaid while fishing so its possible he was trolling me but he always seemed very serious and earnest while relating these stories. Maybe my mind is too open or I just want to believe but Im willing to suspend disbelief long enough to consider the possibilities. Why not? There are lots of unexplained and unsolved and unexplainable things.

naps wrote:

ElephantEyes wrote:I tried to talk to some Muslim friends about genies and they always get really scared and secretive and refuse to talk about it. Warn me to stay away. Of course a curious kitten like me just gets more intrigued though. Why the mystery and fear? They really believe beyond any doubt these powerful malevolent interdimensional beings exist. The veracity of their convictions convince me something is there. I want to know more but this knowledge is guarded and hidden.

Oh please you're the person who said a TY video about faeries "seemed legit". But if that's your take on the legend, that book should scare the hell out of you. I'm gonna look for my copy and re-read it, it's been decades since I've done so.

^ She's pretty.

MalvaBlue wrote:

muaddib wrote:So if you wanted to think of them as an ordering, in terms of reliability and precision: science > art > religion ... but if you need to push out to the limits of experience, and you're judging things on terms of scope and holism, the ordering flips. For one, I think that pretty well explains why people almost always become more religious when pushed to their limits.

I just interpret differently the fact that some people reached out for religion in times of crisis, I interpret it as a mean to cope.

Agreed, but I would say that there's still a question behind that. Why is it that religion is such an effective way of coping? Now, I'll admit that simplifying how one sees the world could be a big part of it, especially because simple living in other ways seems to have a similar effect (minimalism, being in the present, manual labor, etc.) But that suggests to me that the way religion simplifies isn't entirely arbitrary; it reflects reality in subtle ways.

MalvaBlue wrote:I am curious about comparisons at baseline: emotionally healthy non religious person vs emotionally healthy religious person, what is the added value of religion to the religious person's life ?

So that would be an interesting comparison, and I don't know if I've seen it. What I have seen are statistics of the converse, where the average non-religious person is compared to the average religious person, and it seems pretty consistent that the religious people tend to report being happier overall. Apparently, it can get messier on measures of specific emotions like anxiety or pessimism though. Also, I've seen some statistics saying that if you factor out social-connectedness, which correlates with religiousness, most of the happiness effect of religion disappears.

MalvaBlue wrote:My gut feeling is that they would be equally happy with a sense of purpose, religion being one of the ways to go about this sense of purpose ...

Actually, I'm pretty sympathetic with what you wrote here, largely because I'm very cagey about the way religion usually engulfs the individual. In spite of that though, I've become pessimistic that a robust sense of purpose can exist without becoming effectively religious. Think of all the -isms and scientific holy-grails people have chased, especially in the past couple centuries. I'm particularly fond of existentialism, which seems to be what you're advocating, but I think we have to admit that even that has largely failed. The creation of new values ex nihilo by the individual just doesn't seem to work; all you get is a surreal, isolated reflection of what the world put into you.

MalvaBlue wrote:

muaddib wrote:Even as art, science, and politics may contradict religion on the surface at times, they are all ultimately born from that religion and sort of a grand "working-out the contradictions and questions" of the religion's premises. I guess the mechanism is that the religion sort of lays down the boundaries of a society's world-view, and all other intellectual activity happens within those limits, but like I said, this is something I'm fuzzy on.

If we're talking grand scheme of things, I feel like art, science and politics are independent from religion from the start but that religion put a claim on them. It is my impression that the science of discourses such as scholastics or Kalam attempted to keep philosophy confined to the boundaries of religion but became obsolete when philosophy became able to accommodate art, science and politics.

While you're right that the medieval apologetics were meant to engage with other ideas while staying within the religion, I need to clarify some what I meant about looking at the big picture. Pretty much, I'm not just thinking of the past 500 years in the Abrahamic religions, but across different civilizations over several thousand years. So you have to distinguish between the "culminating" religions (like Catholicism or late Islam) and the "generating" religions (the early ones the other ideas spring out of).

Again, this is something I'm fuzzy on (so my explanation may sound weird and very hypothetical), but I think the idea is that when a culture is young, there aren't really well-defined, private values or specialization. The community identifies the "best" things with their religion. Art, which tries to make the most beautiful things, is religious art; the best scientific explanations, which approach the truest things, are religious ones. As society becomes more complex, people specialize, individualism becomes more prevalent in one form or another, and different pursuits diverge. At every step though, as each generation works with the mental structures left to them, there's a degree of continuity leading back to the religion that it all grew out of.

So if we're talking about Modern civilization that grew up in post-migration Europe, you actually wouldn't look at the Christian superstrate that Rome managed to bring the new nations under, but the old Germanic paganism. Wacky as it sounds (and yes, it sounds wacky to me even as I discuss it), you can start seeing hints of Modern ideas in retrospect. A similar idea applies to Islamic science if you look for it in what we do know of religion under the Achaemenid empire. Presumably the other high cultures would show something similar, but even if there are some kind of records for their earlier religion, I don't know enough about them to get into details. Art is a little trickier too because I think the continuity is in the technique and aesthetics, not necessarily subject matter.

Anyways, with that in mind, while it's definitely tried, I'd say Modern philosophy really hasn't subsumed art, science, or politics. That's partly because while people have tried to base all those other ideas on one Modern philosophical system or another, I don't know of a single one that's actually succeeded in the long-run. In the end, the Modern world mostly seems to work in spite of Modern philosophy, through lots of people simply doing their own thing regardless of whatever philosophy is popular at the time. Plus there's some solid footing provided by input from the older cultures.

Another reason is that AFAIK, none of the older cultures really viewed most Modern philosophy as particularly threatening or beyond accommodation. It was always the West's material power and people's tendency to follow it that was seen as the challenge (think how quickly communism collapsed as an idea once the Soviet Union fell).

ElephantEyes wrote:I feel Im divulging something personal but its relevant and interesting. I cant help it. A Muslim friend told me his mother was stalked by a jinn her whole life. The jinn fell in love with her and sabotaged her relationships. She had several stillborn children and her husband died early. My friend was only surviving child. A witch doctor diagnosed it as jinn harassment.

Yes, that sounds like the kind of thing people might talk about. Apparently, the evil eye is another thing people are really superstitious about in the Middle-East.

Now, weird as it sounds, I do think there's something to the psychological notion that mental conditions (not always bad) can be seen as a sort of possession. Not for the superstitious ideas of exorcism, which never seem to end well, but I feel sometimes like one of modern psychology's big weaknesses is that it treats conditions like mechanistic problems (push the right buttons and flip a switch, and your mind will start working again). But if the mind is unpredictable enough to give at least the appearance of free-will, and the pathology doesn't have a physical origin, would it really be that crazy to see the pathology as having a will of its own?

ElephantEyes wrote:Why not? There are lots of unexplained and unsolved and unexplainable things.

Haha, I agree with keeping a somewhat open mind... plus I was just thinking about how I really should be Fox Mulder for Halloween one year

Muaddib, I'm swamped at the moment, but I will answer when I have more free time.

Never, I'm an atheist.

I don’t believe in any gods, never have, and I used to be very hostile towards religion (the Abrahamic religions in particular) because I don’t respect placing faith above science. But, as I’ve grown and studied secularisation and irreligion, my hostility has dulled significantly. I’m more indifferent towards the idea of God now – it’s organised religion I dislike.

The only hobby I really have is reading about scepticism and irreligion in history, from the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the 18th and 19th centuries, and of course, in the present day. Evidently, for all the evil organised religion has orchestrated, individual believers in a god or gods can be perfectly reasonable people – so I don’t judge anymore. In belief in a god brings you comfort, have at it. You’re certainly not alone in the endeavour.

I think about god often.
Many times I feel that I am god too.
So really when I think about god, I am thinking about myself.

I think about myself every now and then. Not too much though because if I think too much I get hungry.

I've been told in my day to day life that I am very self absorbed. On here I can be more honest about it and say I am quite thoroughly completely self centered.

I don't see how others arn't as well.

I suppose I just think I can see myself more clearly and don't see the point of blinding my own eyes with prideful humility when it comes to introspection.

I've stopped believing in God, or wondering if there is one.
I wish I could pray, though.