Real World Philospohy

[Kamog]

Happiness, sadness, and the other emotions are all part of life and I feel that it is important that we experience both joy and sadness. Of course, nobody is happy 100% of the time. The 'negative' emotions like anger and sadness aren't in themselves negative; we need to experience them. What is positive or negative is how we choose to act on those feelings. The feelings are part of the life experience, and if we suppress our emotions and always feel neutral, we aren't living life to the fullest. Having said that, it is unhealthy to spend long periods of time feeling anger or hate, and not letting go of the emotion. I guess we need to feel the anger or sadness, but we also need to let go of it after we have experienced and felt it.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

well, i feel that there are emotions, or at least Versions of emotions which are completly bad and which one should try not to feel. although some of that, at least, is circumstance and strength. for example, enjoying say, computer games is good. enjoying them to the point where the restrict your ability to live a full life is bad. and that doesn't take into account the computer games themselves. i can see nothing good in GTA, for example. and for an emotion that's entirely bad, how about the urge to kill?

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Circular logic is logic but not valid logic. Proof must stand on its own, or it is no longer proof.

Yes, what he said. You can not proove something with circular logic! It is a major pitfall that is used to show proofs as being invalid (such as any alleged proof about pretty much anything relating to the truth of a religion... ).

i can see nothing good in GTA

Then you are not looking hard enough. It allows people to live out such actions in fantasy, mitigating some potential desire to go out and live them out in reality. EVERYONE without exception has many fantasies about doing illegal stuff (a lot of them might well happen in your subconscious, especially while asleep, but they are still there). Expressing them in a video game is preferable to expressing them in reality, eh?

[ November 25, 2003, 06:52: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Then you are not looking hard enough. It allows people to live out such actions in fantasy, mitigating some potential desire to go out and live them out in reality. EVERYONE without exception has many fantasies about doing illegal stuff (a lot of them might well happen in your subconscious, especially while asleep, but they are still there). Expressing them in a video game is preferable to expressing them in reality, eh?

having a bad temper, i know there's been times when going onto half-life and virtually blowing something to pieces has helped. at the same time, those times are few and far between. most of the time, what helps is calming myself. so, i can't see much good there, and, as is perhaps more correct, in most cases, for most people, most of the time, it's bad. children shouldn't play it, those with criminal tendency's and not enough self control shouldn't play it and i really don't see the point for the average person.

[Kamog]

Well, every emotion must have some useful purpose, or else why would we have them?
...
OK, I'm assuming that emotions have to have a purpose, and that purpose is helpful in some way. I suppose that it doesn't necessarily have to be that way...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

well, yes. as a challenge.

you know, Atrocities, someone could take your arguement to mean that if someone asked if they have a tail, that means they have a tail.

[ November 25, 2003, 08:16: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[deccan]

Narf,

A note: you haven't provided any rational arguments for believing the things that you do, and I haven't provided any for believing the things that I do as well. I don't think either of us expects to be able to convince the other to change his views, and so that's not the point of my Posts to you.

The point, for me at least, is to be able to better understand your emotional attachment to your religion, why it's personally comforting to you and why it makes sense to you, while on the other hand, I feel like recounting why most forms of organized religion seem so instinctively abhorrent to me.

It would be better if you had read "Living in Sin" in its entirety, especially the afterword by the author that explains how he'd always had a love-hate relationship with Catholicism and even pleads that he's written a novel that he thinks presents Catholicism in a rather sympathetic light. So, please don't think of this as your typical anti-Christian story. Instead, this is a story by someone who is truly in awe of the potential power of religion to fulfill the spiritual needs of people, while being perpetually frustrated by the gulf between religion and reality.

I happen to believe that "Living in Sin" captures quite well the imaginary scenario of an Old Testament style god existing in the world. God sets down rules yes, and the narrator of the story knowingly breaks them, partly because those rules don't seem to make sense to him (and of course, in Catholicism, God's rules don't need to make sense to humans, they only have to make sense to God and humans must accept that), because he thinks that bending those rules doesn't seem to cause any harm and of course, because the flesh is simply weak. Like me, he also deeply resents the thought that God gave humans free will solely for the purpose of being able to freely choose to worship God and sees that as a kind of anachronism.

In the story, God punishes sinners in clear, undeniable ways, though not in such a way that makes God seem like a mechanistic, automatic force, and the punishments are always personal and appropriate. In the story, the narrator expected that the punishment for having a child out of wedlock would be a deformed or retarded child, and is relieved when the child is physically okay. But then he finds out that the child is born to be a prophet, the living voice of God on Earth, utterly pure, powerful and inhuman, and in some ways that is an even worse punishment for the narrator.

My questions are: are you a Mormon mainly because you believe that the "hows" that it teaches are true, or mainly because the values and truths of Mormonism are comforting to you (or "feel right" to you)? If the latter, then which truths and values, and why those? If you truly believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God who has a specific purpose for you personally, have you ever, even once, felt resentful of that, or felt yourself running out of "elbow room" to create and define values and purposes for yourself?

I'll detail some of my own feelings and attitudes in a later post.