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I had, for lack of a better term, a religious experience.
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Jun 10, 2016 05:55
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Annual Prophet posted:My guess is that this is fairly common, actually, though obviously there are different categories of experience that fall into this particular basket. I can't speak as to the commonality of my experience, though I know that theologians (especially Hindu theologians, for some reason) have exhaustively categorized a vast number of what I guess we'll call "mystical" experiences. I'm not sure where I fall on that spectrum; I guess, if people are interested, I could talk about it, though there's not much, in my opinion, to say.
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Jun 10, 2016 15:42
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I would like to contribute but I'm unsure how. I would appreciate some direction.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:08
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Describe the religious experience: what happened, how did you differentiate it from an everyday event or a coincidence, and what about it pointed you toward a particular god, rather than some nebulous cosmic force (assuming that is indeed what you came to believe)? All right; here's where I am. I've tried to write a response to this several times, but each time I have trouble doing it. I mmm. I have previously written a little bit about the subject on this website; I could link you to the relevant post and thread. Unfortunately it is my suspicion that I will be frankly unable to communicate anything worthwhile, and, while I applaud your curiosity and good intentions, I think that it will be impossible for me to give you any sort of useful information. God is not like anything. It has no relationship to anything that can be seen, touched, heard, or thought about; its voice is it's not a voice. I wrote a book, really, is the answer to your question. I wrote a book; it was a bizarre and often painful experience; I abandoned my life and career and undertook a quiet life of manual labor as a result. God is strange, and difficult, and more terrible than can possibly be imagined. As I said, I don't know what I ought to tell you. Is this helpful? Preview edit: the book is not published; only a few people have read it; I have sat on it for years; I am, frankly, unsure what to do with such a thing. It is ferocious. It is alive. Right; sorry; I probably sound crazy. I wanted to be marine biologist, before all this happened; my father hoped I would be a lawyer; as a result of my experience, I ended up being something else.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:51
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Alright, fine, do that. I'm suddenly uncomfortable doing this but I'm going to anyway. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3765559&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 That's the thread; the section that might be relevant to this discussion occurs on page two: If you click that it should take you to the post, which is about the writing of the first book, and which contains some description of how the writing process felt. I realize you're probably looking for something more quantifiable, or a list of arguable reasons. Unfortunately my thinking process is a fundamentally irrational one, and I have no talent for debate. I hope this is a useful contribution; if I can do more, please let me know; otherwise, I'll stop clogging the thread, since people seem more interested in discussing specific points of theology/politics. You may also send me a private message, if you prefer.
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Jun 10, 2016 21:35
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The book was a version of the life of Christ.
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Jun 11, 2016 00:58
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Though I guess the longer answer is that all poetics consists of a series of religious experiences; there are entire theories of poetics which consist of essentially metaphysical assertions. Right; I'm not organizing this very well, but I'm not great at prose. I found out one day that I was a poet; I had never done any form of writing or art before this; poets have an extremely involuntary relationship to their art; there was a Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who argued that there was no such thing as the "art" of poetry at all, since all poetry is written indirectly and involuntarily. This kind of stuff is sort of common knowledge in poetic societies, but living, as we do, in a nonpoetic society, where art and poetry are considered to be basically valueless, it's not necessarily intuitive. Anyway. I perpetually expect to get a lot of flack for this, so I'm doing my best to not be preemptively defensive. But something important to understand about a lot of religious texts (most of the Hebrew Bible, the work of Jesus, Hindu texts, the Koran, for example) is that they're fundamentally poetic, and that without poetic thinking and training they're hard to deal with or understand. People tend to get frustrated with that and to flatten poetry out into prose, theology, and law, but it's important to remember that poetry doesn't uncoil super well, and that people like Jesus (especially Jesus, in particular) are writing in ways that are purposely difficult and often purposely intended to be misunderstood, or to mean a series of things at the same time that won't break down neatly into specific components. I know a lot of you guys are mathematicians and engineers, and that you might find that stuff stupid or frustrating, but it is important. Basically I'm asserting that this stuff is more complex than it appears and that Jesus is tough to understand. I would probably argue that modern Christianity is based on a misunderstanding of Jesus. Though I would further argue that all modern western society is based on misreadings of Jesus, Adam Smith, and Darwin, which is probably a controversial assertion, and one I don't raise often.
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Jun 11, 2016 01:42
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Right, sorry, I'm wandering. My religious experience was the writing of poetry, which is (for all poets) an involuntary experience, and for many of them an explicitly religious one; there's a lot of literature I can point you to to support that assertion if there's interest. It's fundamentally unlike the writing of prose, and it's unlike everything, really. The etymology of the word is purposely generic, and right. Sorry. I'm trying to stay coherent, and to write in an appropriate D&D style, but I'm not very good at it. If anyone wants me to answer questions I could try; I did once have a scientific background also, and I'm educated in politics, economics, and law but my understanding of God is fundamentally bound up in my understanding of poetry, since they happened to me at precisely the same time and it became clear that the one was bound up in the other.
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Jun 11, 2016 01:47
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Who What Now posted:I'd definitely agree that most people misunderstand what Darwin meant by "survival of the fittest". That's absolutely what I was referring to, although, interestingly, Darwin never actually coined that phrase; it was Herbert Spencer, who came after.
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Jun 11, 2016 04:06
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Also blind. And a huge rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 11, 2016 05:07
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"Samson Agonistes" is really good tho.
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Jun 11, 2016 05:07
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Possibly because it's about being blind. And a huge rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 11, 2016 05:08
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Subyng posted:Or do you honestly believe that God is a truth of the universe in the same way that 1+1=2 is a truth of the universe? It'd be this, frankly; the argument being that there are moral laws which inhere in the fabric of the world, like gravity, and, like gravity, they are true whether you believe in them or not. The way in which that ends up being true is, unfortunately, kind of slippery; there's a real desire to flatten out truth into law, when truth is it's thorny and complicated. Contradictory things can be true at the same time; even though that, logically, cannot be the case, it nonetheless is; an example in Christian thinking would be the ever-present tension between God's justice and God's mercy. It's tough. The truth is difficult.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:25
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A lot of rationally-thinking people end up frustrated by the mystical emphasis on paradox, and end up dismissing stuff like Zen koans (for example) as being merely spooky nonsense. The religiously-minded person would respond that these paradoxes are the only possible articulations of a truth which is fundamentally difficult and illogical. It's not that a lot of religion isn't a shell game, or a con; the Marxist critique of religion is a completely valid one. But it's not all bullshit. And the parts that are nonbullshit often end up being the poetry: the actual words of Jesus, for example, or the important parts of the Vedas. "Not that which goes into the mouth defiles a man; but that which comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man." Anyway. I hope that clarifies.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:34
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:54 |
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I think this is the right attitude, and that Jesus would probably have agreed with you. I've probably overstayed my welcome here, eh. Thanks for your tolerance, everyone; it's been a nice thread.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:55
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