Real World Philospohy

[Fyron]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
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.

I think you missed the point... it is not about living down a temper or anything like that, it is about expressing subconscious desires in a harmless way (as is playing SE4 and blowing up billions of people, subjugating billions of others, sending whole crews of people off to their deahts, etc.).

[gregebowman]

I know playing computer and video games does having a soothing effect on me. I don't really have a temper (I let my wife have hers, though), but a good game of SEIV or Civ or SimCity or any of the multitude of "god" games out there does perk me up. I haven't really like arcade-type games since I was a young teen and they first started coming out. GTA and Half-life and other gorefest games just don't appeal to me. I might play the occassional game when I happen to be in a place that has them, like this past Saturday when I was Chuck E. Cheese for my son's birthday party.

[Atrocities]

I used to enjoy playing Tribes for hours on in as my escape from reality. Sitting in a good place picking off players who thought they were good snipers or trying to steal our flag. Ohhhhhh the hours I would spend base raping and killing my opponents. God how I miss the good old days before the game became deluted with cheaters, hackers, and buggy mods. When all the old players played it was like a party on line every night, and most of the day. It is hard to let go of the good things in life that had brought you so much fullfilment.

To bad real life isn't more like Web Life.

[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.

[Loser]

I prefer the 'wins' in RL over the virtual ones. And the losses aren't too bad. People really have a lot less to lose than they think.

[Fyron]

So you prefer the wins of stealing cars, murdering people, etc. in RL to the virtual ones?

[Loser]

umm... yes?

While RL 'wins' like talking to strangers, having a clean house, hitting on a girl, or nailing a job interview would seem trivial if you set them in the virtual world, they are nonetheless more satisfying.

And RL provides 'wins' that the virtual world just can't compare with, like owning a house, getting the girl, or talking your way into the job of your dreams.

So yeah, Real Life all he way.

[Fyron]

I think you too missed the whole point...

[Loser]

eh?

Go ahead and try again.

[Fyron]

The point was that such video games allow subconcious desires (that EVERY human being has...) to be expressed in a non-harmful way, rather than a harmful way in the real world. It is just like playing cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or other such games as a child. Incidentally, that is why such games are so popular. There was never anything about living in a virtual world over a real one or anything of that nature.

[ November 26, 2003, 19:10: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]