the.oracle
There is no happiness - only pleasure or pain.
★★★★
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2022
- Posts
- 1,319
I'll eventually reply to your objections, but you're making too many assumptions about me, and misrepresenting/misundestanding the majority of my arguments and reasoning. I wasn't raised in a religious background, I actually studied it on my own, after first studying a lot of metaphysics and other stuff, studying religion was something that I got into much later in life, not just particular religions but comparative religion, history of religion and epistemology. I think you're conflating the contentious necessity for humans to socialize with the supposed necessity for religion, like any rationalization for living is some kind of religion. You're not actually providing any definition of "religion" that can be distinguished from any other mode of thought. You're implying that because humans reason and don't simply live based on fulfilling instinctual needs, that any kind of thought/reasoning is a "religion". What's the difference between reason and religion, then? Of course we can all achive our basic natural needs, that's what humans and animals do, we're pushed towards survival and reproduction by our own nature. You're just implying that searching for a "higher end" is something innate and necessary for humans when it certainly isn't so, coping with the reality of social existence can be "religious" or not, to me the difference between those is making metaphysical suppositions (including that "higher ends" of humanity are somehow more noble, englightening or "sacred" than the satisfaction of our hunger, tiredness, hornyness, etc) or simply accepting the "trivial" reality of being a living organism. I don't know how fulfilling/conforming to social abstractions could be more "meaningful" than satisfying objective and quantifiable needs of the human body. Ernst Becker actually hits the spot with his analogy that it's all just fear of death - we're coping with the fact that, despite being "reasonable" beings unlike other "animals", we are also just the same as them, we're born, we have to feed ourselves, rest, we coom, we reproduce, and our bodies start to slowly decompose, and we end up dying. Most people simply cannot fathom this "meaningless" sense of existence. Even those who realize that have to cope, because we still live, as you said, in a post-hunter-gatherer society, the more our basic natural needs are easily fulfilled, the more we act because we "want" to, not because we "need" to (mere survival), this gives space/time for us to face this "boredom" of being alive with no such "higher purpose". Anyways, I'll eventually write a worthy and point-by-point reply. We can also talk in private or another thread because we're straying to much from the topic of this thread.To me these are just other "religions". They are masturbatory activities with which we cope with the pain that we inevitably suffer from as a result of being embedded in a society. I do not see how we can escape this.
I do not think that you can do anything on your own. Our survival requires us to interact with the surrounding society constantly. To me, "individualism", is just another religion that masquerades as an anti-religion. You cannot really be an individual in ways that matter (because you would die). therefore you have to content yourself with pretending you are an individual by vociferously demanding the right to change your pronouns or your gender, or any other trifles. That is the only kind of "individualism" that is feasible.
- You cannot achieve your "own basic natural needs", because you are not a Chimpanzee.
- You have to cope, like the rest of humanity has done for at least the last 500 000 years.
- I think you must have considered religion from too narrow a perspective (which is often the case with "religious" people). I was raised an atheist. This forced me to realize that whatever my parents taught me was also a religion, and that everybody has one, either explicit or implicit.