How about my comparrison to Bush, do you think his faith is an emotional one, or is it somehow stage managed?

When I talk about the issue of marriage with my married friends we inevitably end by saying the same thing, the grass is always greener on the other side. Now I read from those quotes that old man Socrates was saying the same thing so long ago – I LOVE THAT! Or I’m freaked out by it, I don’t know.

That Kartika you wear around your neck sounds cool. Have you read Emerson’s essay on illusion, or shall I say his essay on “cut the bullshit?”

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/illusion.html

a couple of excerpts:

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.”

“Life is an ecstasy.”

From Montaigne Among the Moderns” by Dudley M. Marchi

[Montaigne believed] ….”the skeptical temperment should be maintained only temporarily towards the formulation of solid judgements [ quoting Montaigne] ‘Every superior mind will pass through this domain of equilibration’, ( Montaigne, IV, 171- emphasis added) Emerson’s casualness toward his appropration of Montaigne is thus related to Montaigne’s attitude toward his own auctoritates. Emerson relied on Montaigne but only to help him arrive at his own intellectual independence…..”

So skepticim is an essential tool to keep us from making judgements so solid that they block our vision, no longer keep us fresh with the present.

Emerson’s essay Montaigne, or The Skeptic is here:
http://www.emersoncentral.com/montaigne.htm

(quotes from the above)
“But I see plainly, he [the skeptic] says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,- why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off theories of society, religion and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus*(28) is? Why think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.”

This from Emerson to Nother:

“Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which any thing more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates, to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, that “whether he should choose one or not, he would repent it.”

I have read that one of the reasons that Bush was so popular or got elected was that people warmed to his apparently simple strength, his belief in God. This is very powerful, and it should be considered. They wrote that people will warm to this simple strength or at least the appearance of strength and the associated leadership. Now I have no truck in Bush, and am only dabbling again in religion. I am not even going to start listing why… But I was fascinated by this overall idea.

And then I saw it in action, I was watching the late late show one night
http://www.rte.ie/tv/latelate/20060512.html (an Irish LONG running TV show) and Michael Baigent a Dan brown apologist was on to debate (read.. publicise) the DAVINCI CODE, and on queue the RC church rolled out some theologians to counterpoint the facts. Anyway a funny thing happened that night and one of he theologians was delayed at the airport or something, and in his place Fr Phonsie Cullinan, a hip sort of college/university priest took his place. Well in my opinion Fr. Cullinane stole the show, a simple man with very strong beliefs just stood up and said ‘I love my God and I don’t like the way you are talking about him’ The argument might sound childish but believe me it was stunning to see, there was no logical argument or rational one, just I love my God and you are saying bad things about him.

I was impressed and though I dislike Bush – I got it,

See in this, the information age, people are no longer AS impressed with quotations and research and scripture. There is something very appealing in somebody being brave enough to stand up and say, this is what I believe……

Sutter, I like your offering at 6:04 pm, Nov.28th. I agree with it, although I wouldn’t call it a ‘belief’ but a value. I will post why on my blog and link it to here.

I have a reaction to the show, and it belongs here, not on my offsite blog.

Chris said that “skepticism can become a belief”. (Oh, boy. Here it comes…)
He said (in paraphrase) that skepticism is also a process of evaluation (“a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgment” – Wikipedia). That’s correct.
But is skepticsim a belief, too? Can it “become a belief”?

Ask yourself whether this statement offers the lightest, faintest lick of wisdom:
“I believe in gullibility.”
Can you “believe in” a characterization of human credulity? If so, can you explain to me what the heck it means to “believe in” it? ‘Cos it’s Greek to me.

Let’s try two more:
“I believe in cautious driving.”
Now try recklessness: “I believe in driving without wearing seatbelts.”

Are these beliefs, or behaviors? Are they beliefs, or assertions of behavioral preferences? Are preferences “mental acceptances or convictions in the truth or actuality of something”? (American Heritage Dictionary; see: What does belief mean?)

You can introduce any damn thing you want with, “I believe,” and it automatically earns a moment of respect from its recipients. Try these:
“I believe in brotherhood.”
“I believe in music.”
“I believe in breathing.”
“I believe in Ethiopian coffee.”
“I believe in eating brownies.”
“I believe in lighting matches while standing over spilled gasoline.”
“I believe in treetops.”
“I believe in coffee-drinking treetops that drop brownies onto the ground for the hungry foxes. To keep them from the chickens. Because the Elf-king-god pities the poor, slow-thinking chickens.”
“I believe I don’t have to substantiate my beliefs.”

That final one is the more than merely the only valid statement of that nonet with any operative currency among the world’s billions of believers—it’s also the only one of that list that isn’t (grammatically correct) nonsense.
You can say you “believe in” something, but that doesn’t automatically elevate from the realm of nonsense. You can easily compose grammatically correct nonsense: “I believe in Greek Elves,” but the correctness of the construction confers no legitimacy to the assertion. (Oh yeah? Sez you! They hang out playing backgammon in cypress trees! I seen ‘em!)

How about: “I believe in proper grammar.” What does that mean? That it exists? That you disbelieve in improper grammar?
How about: “I value proper grammar.”
Now that I can understand. (I also value improper grammar!)

Grammar, practically speaking, is a means of articulation: a method. Snowshoeing is a method of wintertime travel. Does this make a lick of sense: “I believe in showshoeing”?

Skepticism is a method of evaluation (“of intellectual caution and suspended judgment” – Wikipedia). It’s no more a ‘belief’ than is snowshoeing.

Can you value skepticism? (Or music, or eating brownies, or Ethiopian coffee, or brotherhood…)
Yup. And you can recommend skepticism as a method that yields better results than gullibility.
But “believing in” it makes no more sense than “believing in” skiing, “believing in” walking carefully on ice, “believing in” driving a truck, or even “believing in” bodily functions.

We use belief all too often as a sloppy synonym for all manner of non-beliefs. I wrote above in this thread that I don’t “believe in” human equality but that I value it. I’ve recently found the time to explain how human equality isn’t eligible for belief – no matter how much I wish it could be – here: What does it mean to ‘value’ human equality?

The reason I seem obsessed with this topic is because I plause – from ample available evidence – that our uncritical, ‘no evidence necessary’ use of ‘belief’ implicitly awards unwarranted credibility to abominable and barbaric ‘beliefs’: beliefs responsible for the misery and deaths of countless innocents. Bob Herbert wrote yesterday in The New York Times
(quote)
In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’”
(unquote)
When we bloggers, radio hosts, or ordinary citizens conflate values, preferences, and, most especially, desires that the putative supernatural be ‘true’ while only ‘hidden’ from our senses, instead of incredible, we are, like it or not, complicit in the practice of stoning or butchering adolescent girls for the simple ‘crime’ of having hormones. We are complicit in genital mutilation, and for bombs exploded among innocent civilians, etc.

Ask yourself: Is reevaluating the way my sloppy comprehension of belief—i.e., what’s eligible for the surrender of credulity and what isn’t—worth the time and trouble?
Is the perpetuation and non-disturbance of my dearest beliefs more important than the lives of, say, Pashtun girls? Or of Israeli or Palestinian civilians? Or even of the factually baseless ‘education’ of the children of American fundamentalists, who, if only they had access to credible education, might someday fashion or discover a substance or method that helps humankind?

Despite appreciating some of the hour’s Brian Green segment, I’ve got to give a carefully considered “thumbs down” to this hour of ROS. It made no distinction between beliefs, values, preferences, or plain old-fashioned wishes.
It consistently and egregiously conflated the entire lot of them. (I sincerely hope it was nothing more than unintentional intellectual carelessness.) And the only beneficiaries of that gaff are the purveyors of unsubstantiated, unverifiable, and – by the standards of modern science – naturally incredible beliefs – the very kinds of beliefs that kill women and girls in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Utah.

Please question your beliefs. Question even what it means to believe. People are suffering and dying as a direct consequence or our blasé, uncritical acceptance of these concepts.

Beliefs are to humans as operating systems are to computers. They are the basis of all criteria that we use to navigate thru life. They (we) decide for us what is true or false, right or wrong. They decide what beliefs (beliefs about beliefs) we retain and what beliefs we refine or discard. All conscious incoming information is filtered thru the lens of our belief system. That which agrees with our preconceptions further reinforces those beliefs. That which does not comport with those beliefs is usually ignored or rejected out of hand filtered (admitted or rejected) in direct proportion to how strongly a belief is held. The things that challenge our beliefs are the opportunities to expand our horizons and alter our views. It appears to me that conventional wisdom (commonly held beliefs) is almost always the direct opposite of the underlying mechanism of reality and existence that informs the CW but that is my belief and I see reality thru that lens.

Again beliefs are concepts that each of us thinks are true and we also believe that it’s true that many things that are believed by others are not true. Unless one personally empirically verifies by proper scientific method the truth or falsity of any proposition, one is forced to accept on faith (belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence) that another’s methodologies and conclusions are correct – you have only their assertion (and possibly others’) that there is logical proof or material evidence for whatever) – if the assertion comports with your preconceived notions you are less likely to challenge or examine the methodologies – or even care (I knew >/i> t would be so!) Even if one has performed the test correctly, one may jump to the wrong conclusion or misunderstand the results and it is faith (belief) in oneself that confirms the conclusion.

Jazzman

I believe:

…God is the greatest fictional character

…Social freedom should be absolute and economic freedom severely restricted

…CEREBUS is at once the greatest graphic novel of all time AND possessed of the most misguided, wrongheaded theme in all of literature

…Humanity is not alone in the universe BUT that the universe is so old and so big that we might as well be alone

…sex is no big deal BUT human touch is supremely important

…conservatives outnumber liberals because it’s easier

…all stories are true

…life will go on even if we don’t.

Perhaps I need to reconsider my posting or my motives behind it, but I would disagree that Alan Moore needs to reconsider his point. Far from it: after all, he, though not a Christian fundamentalist (he is in fact a kind of Kabbalist) is not demonizing religious folk but defending the imagination.

Now, maybe I was demonizing religious folk (it wouldn’t be my first time taking a stab at it) but at the time I thought I was stating a basic philosophical difference between an imaginative mindset and a carved-in-stone mindset.

Nothing could be further from the truth than to say that all stories are true?

Nay, nay. Details, facts (as understood by faulty human brains), opinions: these are all capable of being falsified or proven. But stories … stories are only in our heads. However based upon reality (or not) they are, stories are a function of the human imagination, and within our imagination (if nowhere else) all fictions come to life, and are true.

That’s why I love stories, love fiction, and like to read and write fantasy (and other, “straight” fiction if you will): because, in my head, they live.

To quote another, rather better-known author:

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
–Stephen King

I believe in the importance of embracing complexity. Our world cannot be reduced to easy heuristics, or schemas, or simplifications. Our world is too deeply inflected by history, geography, ethnicity, and other contingencies to be susceptible to such reductionism, and our efforts to so reduce it almost invariably end in failure. Thus, as others have noted above, “belief” is dangerous, if it is inflexible. Belief in complexity is in some sense a meta-belief: A belief in the nature of belief itself. Specifically, it is the view that belief must be inherently dialectical: It must at once influence one’s organization of otherwise unrelated facts and events (else it is not belief at all, but merely pure empiricism), but also must be influenced by those facts and events (else it becomes brittle dogma). We succeed only when our “beliefs” recognize their own limitations. In this sense, belief in complexity is at root a form of humanism: Grand theories won’t work, because things are too complicated, and we must endeavor every day to deal with the messy facts on the ground, and be willing to adapt accordingly.

I note that as I see it, Radio Open Source is itself founded on the same belief.

As I said, not elegant, but neither is complexity itself.

http://www.fondationbrigittebardot.fr/site/homepage.php?Id=2

as she appeared – and – right thought

As a “Born Again Buddhist” what I like about my adopted – I even hesitate to call it a “religion” – I call it a practice, is that it does not require any great leaps of faith but requires a careful examination of reality. Yet, I do believe, based on observation, that pursuit of this practice will make my life better. It already has, mostly through gaining familiarity with the workings of my own mind. The Buddha arrived at four noble truths. They were not revealed truths (no handed down stone tablets) but were based on his observations of life and his own mind. The four noble truths are: 1) That life involves suffering, 2) That there is a cause of that suffering – attachment and delusion, 3) There is a way to end suffering, and 4) The way to end suffering is found in practice of the Eightfold, or Nobel Way path (Right Understanding, Right Though, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration). That is Buddhism in a nutshell, something to cultivate over a lifetime, (or many lifetimes though I can’t say I am convinced regarding reincarnation but I wouldn’t rule it out). To me Buddhism is a sane and realistic approach to living. I wear a small silver Kartika, a Tibetan ritual cutting tool, around my neck. The Kartika is used to symbolically cut away illusion. I call it my “cut the bullshit” symbol.

I think it is very sweet of you to acknowledge the beauty in older women.

(I’m teasing you as I imagine you are referring to BB as she appareled in the movie God Made Woman none-the-less I’m sure you will be a blessing to the real woman who does find you)

(As a side note, I believe our Concord sage would have done well to eliminate the limiting pronouns “man” and “he” from those beautiful words).”

Ha! Nother now believes in censoring Emerson.

Why don’t you rewrite his work and take out all references to the specific and substitute indeterminate ones instead.

He goes on to point out that even if a given story isn’t true for you personally, it is true for someone. Only by remembering this am I capable of living on the same planet as fundamentalists … though I doubt if they are capable of living on the same planet as me, for their own philosophy differs in that, for them, all stories with the exception of their personal favorite are false.

I also believe the act of kissing your lovers lips and face should be improvised like a jazz solo; I believe Satchmo’s solos on the trumpet are a manifestation of his all encompassing smile; and the most precious smiles happen in moments of wordless chuckles that linger after a shared laugh among friends and family.

I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson when he writes, man “cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

(As a side note, I believe our Concord sage would have done well to eliminate the limiting pronouns “man” and “he” from those beautiful words).

The playwright August Wilson said the five themes that run through all his plays are honor, love, beauty, betrayal, and duty. This is what I believe about those themes; love – is an earnest exchange of vulnerability; honor – is a gift a person gives to themself; beauty – floats somewhere between Bridget Bardot and the sun drenched Fall foliage of Vermont; betrayal – is that menacing noise outside my window, but it’s also the darkness inside my basement; duty – is my humble payment to the piper.

EXISTENCE IS FORGIVEN by Joshua Hendrickson

Forgive the tree for
Feeding clothing sheltering
It knew not its crime

Forgive the sky for
Thundering angry words of
Gods who never speak

Forgive the soul for
Reflecting itself. It has
No understanding

For we cannot help
But accept the fantasy
Of reality:

Gods and souls and words
And worlds do not exist.
I do not write this.

This is from the New York Times Review of Pynchon’s new novel:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Schillinger.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print

“In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print. One of the novel’s idées fixes is that mysterious agents are trying to send messages to individuals and to humanity at large in surprising ways: through bloody detonations of shells or dynamite I.E.D.’s (think of this as percussive Morse code that explodes into shrapnel as it’s received); a tornado nicknamed Thorvald that students attempt to communicate with by telegraph; garrulous whirls of ball lightning; coal gas (people wear special headsets to interpret the fumes and hang upside down to inhale messages through their stoves); and massive explosions on the level of the Tunguska Event or Hiroshima, which may be the footprints of angels, communicating through murder on a cataclysmic scale. In a singularly disturbing imaginative leap, he seems to make a ghoulish association with the gas chambers of the Holocaust. “Suppose the Gentleman B.,” one character observes, “is not a simple terrorist but an angel, in the early sense of ‘messenger,’ and in the fateful cloud he brings, despite the insupportable smell, the corrosive suffocation, lies a message?” By this logic, mass death could be one of the agents that increasingly seek to communicate with the world, like an insistently ringing hotline. What does mass death want to tell us? That “acute suicidal mania” is justified. You might want to leave the phone off the hook.”

What struck me in this passage, besides, the bizarre nature of the belief, is how unoriginal this silly notion was. Vonnegut had already broached this idea in a number of his fantastic (in both senses of the term) novels.

Goody gumdrops, Hurley.

Ok, I’ll let you pretend that you knew it by heart, I’ll pretend to believe you. How is that?

But then you have sworn to tune me out.

I should be so lucky.