Re: Bataille: inner experience (honest experience) is atheistic

[FartheadOgre]

Total bullshit! How's that for a linguistic expression?

[redliterocket4]

Higher stages must come from an inner depth of some kind. From your own ability to transcend yourself.

And I'm pretty sure the only safe place to dance in the Christian world is hell.

[trerrunus]

i'm an atheist because dead things aren't living, and i am very much alive.

i definitely don't worship anything in the sense of intentionally worshiping or systematically worshipping. I hold life very dear.

there is also a dismissal of techne as something lived in bataille, and me.

i genuinely don't understand any kind of prayer that isn't intentional or deliberate - deliberated =) this sort of thing makes me an atheist.

[redliterocket4]

I don't think you get any knowledge from getting rid of desire either. The cessation of desire would include the desire to know. As far as an ideal state of mind goes, I think the real goal is to enter a higher stage, not just to pass through some temporary states.

[redliterocket4]

What is the difference between a dead thing and a living thing? I think an immediate prayer would only be possible for someone with faith, or a higher immediacy of some kind. If you don't take yourself seriously enough to be genuine when you are praying then you probably shouldn't be praying. I personally haven't prayed since I was 4 or 5 years old. I stopped the day after I first realized I was going to die.

[trerrunus]

where does a "higher" stage come from?

a dead thing is not subject of time.

i do not believe in any sort of regulation of prayer that it must be...i actually would prefer an honest-childish religion to a truthful-serious one. I wouldn't worship a god that couldn't dance.

[trerrunus]

buddhism: i do not feel that knowledge comes through the cessation of desire and pain. I do not feel that there is an ideal state of mind, but rather states of mind. I do not feel contemplation reveals any inner truths about living, but only a type of truth.

hinduism is very theistic, insofar as any generalizations can be made about that multi-religion, the upanishades' veil of maya is too onto-theological for me.

[redliterocket4]

but buddhist/hindu mystics would see the doctrine of reincarnation as being a metaphor for the connected and mutually arising nature of all sentient beings right now, in this life. so its not that you incarnate into another body form after you die, its that you are already one with all creatures that exist even now, in this life. your suffering is there suffering, and vice versa.

[redliterocket4]

as far as reincarnation goes, like any religion there is an esoteric understanding and a folk understanding of what it actually refers to. the folk understanding is supernatural, in the sense that it suggests you'll come back as a rat in the next life if you are not compassionate in this life. this way of thinking of reincarnation makes it seem just as implausible as any theistic afterlife story.

[davisher2]

My problem with buddhism and hinduism is with twoflod: #1 the concept of reincarnation does not seem plausible to me, though I'm not sure I have definite reasons for this. I suppose it seems too supernatural, too much like a human creation. #2 The goal of reaching a sepcific mental state through meditation also seems arbitrary, and I choose not to make this my goal. Other than that, I can understand the attraction towards these eastern ways of thinking.

[bijosn]

William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience

read this...youtube does not allow links to be posted, you can get it from gutenburg and...

[redliterocket4]

I've read some excerpts from it... including the chapter on mysticism. James' pragmatism leads him to accept that religious experience might furnish some kind of truth, though it seems that he personally never had such an experience. A lot of what James had to say concerning consciousness has been ignored by mainstream psychology, which just shows how worthless it (academic psych.) has become. The field was more advanced 100 years ago than it is today.

[bijosn]

thanks for the info...i have only read a bit of it...it seemed related to the topic in a way.

mainstream psychology is mostly influenced by freud, i dont agree with a lot of freuds ideas....then again psychology is not an exact science.

[redliterocket4]

Freud was attempting to be naturalistic in his explanations and I think his psychology is the only one that fits with the materialist scientific worldview. But even so most of my psych. professors don't take Freud very seriously anymore. I guess because none of his theories are falsifiable.

[bijosn]

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving yourself. At the end of the day, do we ever have certainty that rationalising is the tool with which to seek the answers. With our limited perception and understanding all we can can know is what is within the limits of our abilities. All this philsophy is it just a method to escape our fear of uncertainty and chaos...is it just a way to systemise and secure our world.