World of Wheels, the new Smoki Tygre Album will be set for release this weekend with tentative party plans for Saturday night.
It's 4:30 in the morning and Im just finishing up work on the world of wheels for the night. Thought Id raise an issue for discussion In the meantime:
Richard Dawkins is a prominent thinker. Ive followed and admired his theory of MEMES. However I find his new book and the movemement behind it as a little scary.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's observation that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."
I tend to favor the other side:
transcendentalism:
Among Transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition,.
Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the individual and divine messages.
Another alternative meaning for transcendentalism is the classical philosophy that God transcends the manifest world. As John Scotus Erigena put it to Frankish king Charles the Bald in the year 840 A.D., "We do not know what God is. God himself doesn't know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."
The Transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human. Immanuel Kant had called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects.
(immanuel Kant can't keep up with socrates and the seven dwarves)
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
World Of Wheels
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4 comments:
I read Dawkins' book early last year, and it didn't really stick with me. It had a very fundamentalist kind of flavour, and I dislike fundamentalism of most kinds.
I had a good online discussion about religion once, and one of the participants held a view very close to mine. Something he had to say on it: " I'm a realist. I'm a scientist. I'm an atheist agnostic: I don't believe in a god, but I know I can't prove nonexistence. I believe that faith is not a virtue. I am a skeptic of all things, including skepticism. I strive to understand the understanding of understanding. I hold only one fundamental axiom: that reality is something limitless which we should strive to understand in a limited context."
If someone KNOWS that they CANNOT know something (as Dawkins must), it becomes very difficult to make a sound argument.
We can all agree on the obviously negative side of religion (suicide bombings), but that is neither here nor there on the question of IS THERE A GOD.
How do you mean,
faith is not a virtue?
Well, those weren't my words, I was quoting someone else. I guess that I would take it to mean: never seek to eliminate all doubt. But I suppose it depends what you mean by "faith".
here's my take ~> dawkins is spiritually ill + deeply unaware. unable to recognize his own fundamentalism, unable to see how his grasping for certainty is the very same problem he's condemning in the "religious." dawkins has no respect for the mysteries, he's caught up in the colossal arrogance of the modern mind as richard tarnas describes:
"the modern mind experiences a fundamental division between a subjective human self and an objective external world. apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious. whatever beauty and value that human beings may perceive in the universe, that universe is in itself mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. it is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values. the world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose. for these are human realities, and the modern mind believes that to project what is human onto the non-human is a basic epistemological fallacy. the world is devoid of any meaning that does not derive ultimately from human consciousness. from the modern perspective, the primal person conflates and confuses inner and outer and thus lives in a state of continuous magical delusion, in an anthropomorphically distorted world, a world speciously filled with the human psyches' own subjective meaning. for the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness."
- richard tarnas, cosmos and psyche: intimations of a new world view
and that disenchantment is really not a good situation, for us and for the anima mundi
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