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FilthIncarnate posted:I had, for lack of a better term, a religious experience. My guess is that this is fairly common, actually, though obviously there are different categories of experience that fall into this particular basket.
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Jun 10, 2016 13:58
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This is picking up obliquely on an earlier point, but I suspect (or would speculate; this is grounded in my own interactions rather than studies) that for most people what's described as faith is in fact grounded in experience. They experience community, calm, consolation, catharsis, transcendence, feelings of self worth from ethical behavior and meaning. These experiences are certainly bound up with the sacred texts and dogmatic commitments they are related to, but I don't think the typical parishioner, for example, comes into the church, not having a background in the religion, in order to pursue science or history as they might do coming into MIT or Berkeley. The more typical story is probably something more like: come in (or come back) a broken, suffering person, do the recommended things (pray, meditate, act in a less egocentric manner, participate in group activities), then see if you come out a better or happier person; if yes, have faith that what you read / heard is true.
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Jun 11, 2016 17:31
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Who What Now posted:To paraphrase Mark Twain, you didn't exist for billions of years before your birth and it didn't bother you one bit, so why should it bother you after death? I'm guessing Twain read some Diogenes. Not that I fully buy his perspective, since being born and existing does change the game a bit.
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Jun 13, 2016 21:39
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I mean, heck, I was raised Episcopalian and still have a fondness for the sect, but I felt something in a very specific branch of shakta Hinduism and was moved to convert to it. Which one? Not the same thing, but I really dug The Narada Bhakti Sutra. (eta: The Yoga Sutras, the Gita and the Upanishads are also pretty great.) Red Dad Redemption fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 13, 2016 21:41
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Well, yes, but looking at our lives we can say, for example, "I love my family, with all their quirky weirdness; and it saddens me to think that that experience of love and togetherness is a finite one, even if after it ends I won't be around to lament its finitude." The argument certainly has some force, I just personally don't see it as a complete answer to concerns about death.
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Jun 13, 2016 21:58
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:I think it's not so much that the feeling is hard to describe but that it shows itself in a multiplicity of world religions. The salient question is, "how do you know that this feeling leads to the real God when that same feeling in others is apparently leading them to the wrong God?" Of course, I don't know for sure that "other religions go to hell" is part of your theology, so do you care to expand on this any? Some people take the view that the experience, strange and ineffable as it is, is the heart of the matter, with the rest secondary - potentially useful (e.g., metaphor), potentially not (e.g., cultural accretion). Huxley, for example, had that perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Perennial-Philosophy-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061724947
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Jun 14, 2016 20:42
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Ytlaya posted:This isn't to say it's wrong for religious people to try and persuade others; it's only natural for them to do so. It's more the idea that you must be wrong if you don't agree with their argument, rather than accepting that maybe you aren't being persuasive enough. They probably shouldn't (in most cases) even be using words as a tool of persuasion. As the quote attributed to St. Francis puts it "Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary." Or, more prosaically (but to the same effect), "[a]ll the Friars . . . should preach by their deeds." A shared experience would, of course, be even better (imagine two people arguing about the flavor of ketchup where either (i) one of them had never tasted it, or (ii) neither had).
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Jun 15, 2016 02:25
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Who What Now posted:The issue with promoting your religion through your actions is that there's nothing unique a believer can do that a secular person can't do also. So if I can have the same kind of love and compassion for my fellow man as you, why would I need to go to the extra trouble of adopting beliefs that don't actually add anything of value (that I can tell)? For a lot of people there's something fairly powerful about living your beliefs (at least if they are about, for example, compassion and love), and it's sufficiently uncommon that it's noteworthy and inspiring when you see it, whether the person is an MSF physician or Pope Francis washing the feet of convicts and members of other faiths. You might conclude that the person is simply an extraordinary individual, and that would presumably be correct most of the time. But you might also think that perhaps the person's conduct was itself inspired or informed by something, something that might be worth further investigation, or that it is simply worthwhile as an end in itself. Those are pretty good reasons to preach through conduct both for the person doing the preaching and for the person on the receiving end. Can selfless action (or a commitment to or propensity for that) comprise or give rise to religious experience, standing alone? Karma yoga sadhakas would probably say yes; personally I think it's more commonly a necessary or facilitating condition rather than sufficient in and of itself. Is there the possibility of religious experience beyond selfless action? I would suggest yes (and that there's therefore something else potentially of value worth considering). But you'd have to see for yourself. Most people are disinclined to do so, and there's obviously nothing wrong with that. Does that require a particular doctrine or adopting a new set of beliefs? I would suggest no, though I guess many would differ with me.
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Jun 15, 2016 04:26
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Sri Ramakrishna's branch, more or less. I only follow the post-him actual movement very loosely, but his (English-translated) sermons really made an impression on me that Christian arguments had never quite managed. Wow that's great! I visited the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center in NYC back when I lived there, and it made a strong impression. Wound up getting most of Vivekananda's books, and I still have The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna more or less on my nightstand. Wish I'd had the opportunity to pursue it more fully. Do you practice as part of a group or on your own? If the former how do you find the group dynamics / teachers?
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Jun 15, 2016 05:14
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DoctorWhat posted:What I don't understand is why people make the leap from a faith in a higher power (which I can very much understand) to trusting that a specific text represents that higher power's will accurately. Probably most people go in the other direction, though: they start with a particular text, experience the higher power (i.e., have some sort of religious experience, sense of added meaning or calm, etc.) by means of it, and conclude that it must be on the right track. Combine that with monotheism (only one of these texts can be correct, and it looks like mine is, so the others must be wrong), and a propensity to conformity of belief among groups, and it seems like a fairly natural outcome (which obviously is not to say it's a correct outcome). If by accurate you are thinking of something more than the view that a particular faith is correct relative to others, for example literalism or fundamentalism, then, while that probably results from some of the same causes, it's much harder to understand, given the clearly metaphorical nature of many religious texts, factual inconsistencies, differences between religious and scientific / historical texts, etc. Without looking up the statistics, I'd also guess it's fairly uncommon (in percentage terms; I'm sure in absolute numbers there are a hell of a lot of fundamentalists).
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Jun 19, 2016 03:16
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Reveilled posted:Like Rorac I was deliberately vague about God in my posts because I felt going to deep into which God would just invite ridicule, but I too follow a god from a classical pantheon, because I'm a Discordian. I'm not really a classical pagan because I don't follow any of the other Greco-Roman gods, but after soul-searching a lot on the nature of God I found I couldn't reconcile the problem of evil with an omni-benevolent God, nor could I credibly believe that an omnipotent, omniscient God would even bother to make a universe. you really should have waited for page 23 to post this 
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Jul 7, 2016 07:13
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Jesterea posted:My belief in God stems from a mix of fear and validation. I fear the alternative(s) and feel continually rewarded by my faith. Check out The Seven Storey Mountain (and after that, if you like it, New Seeds of Contemplation). I'd recommend both to almost anyone, but from what you said, I think you'd really like them.
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Jul 8, 2016 23:48
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This may not be the thread we need (or want) but I guess it is the thread we deserve. 
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Jul 13, 2016 21:30
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 04:57 |
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:I recognize that people have powerfully transformative experiences under the aegis of their respective religion, but I am proposing - based on the evidence of it happening in multiple religious contexts, as well as some non-religious ones - that it can't be used to prove the exclusive truth of any doctrine. Agreed, though if, to investigate the nature of such experiences, you undertake the practices that lead to them happening in multiple religious contexts, you might wind up with a better intuitive sense of what religious metahphors (and religious texts generally) are getting at across various traditions.
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Jul 16, 2016 07:37
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