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Do clever people outsmart themselves?

dann said:
I know what you mean, but unfortunately feeling sorry for people who cut themselves off from a profound sense of joy is what Christians often say when they pity atheists.
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I've analogized it in the past this way:

I love my wife and she makes me happy. I'd be profoundly unhappy if I lost her. Therefor everyone who isn't married to my wife is profoundly unhappy.

It's a failure to understand, or at least to admit, that other people could find fulfillment in other things than you do. This is reinforced by the indoctrination that Jesus is the only way to fulfillment. So if they see people who aren't devoted to their beliefs they have to tell themselves that they pity those poor, miserable wretches. And if those poor, miserable wretches indicate that they are actually quite happy without Jesus, they have to inform those people that they are, in fact, poor, miserable wretches who cannot possibly be happy.

I suspect there's a sort of natural selection in religious beliefs, too. A religion doctrine that responded to alternative bases of fulfillment with, "that's cool - whatever works for you", is going to be less internally reinforced than one that refuses to acknowledge any other valid way of finding satisfaction.
 
Fear is a powerful driving force. I doubt anyone is completely without fear of something.

Back when it was food, shelter and some reasonable protection from predator species we didn't care about any god. We feared the tigers in the rustling tall grass and worse the unseen tigers.
Even if it really was hedge hogs. Better safe than sorry.

Once we had controlled the tigers and the bears, we could defeat them and food was plenty, shelter secure the next tiers of fears set in. Will there be enough rain for our crops? Will the cattle breed successfully?
For lack of mundane knowledge we created new gods to help us. We knew how to appease them. When our knowledge surpassed those gods we forgot about them.

And now in times of plenty for many humans, living free of primal fears , we worry about the purpose and meaning of life?

Live it, chase a dream. Build a business, climb a mountain, learn to knit.... It's what WE make of it. Does it really matter if a soccer team takes a championship? Not to most who don't play on that team. But if that photo of the team with the trophy defines your greatest moment by god we gonna do anything to make it happen. Even pray.

It doesn't matter few care, it's that you cared. Whatever the objective was.
 
zooterkin said:
You must be reading a different forum from me.
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Iain M. Banks wrote a novel about a civilization that spanned "five galaxies."

For the first few chapters, I was tempted to drop the book, simply because the distance between galaxies is too great for the premise to be plausible to me, even in a setting with hyperdrive.

Then it turned out that the setting was actually five civilizations in a single galaxy, but with sufficiently different evolutionary histories and resource requirements that they mostly didn't interact with each other. They'd gravitate to different star systems with different radiation profiles and resource mixes, and mostly stay out of each other's way.

Every so often, there'd be an incident that required two or more of the civilizations to meet somewhere neutral, overcome each other's essential inscrutability, and hammer out some sort of mutually agreeable arrangement.
 
theprestige said:
Iain M. Banks wrote a novel about a civilization that spanned "five galaxies."

For the first few chapters, I was tempted to drop the book, simply because the distance between galaxies is too great for the premise to be plausible to me, even in a setting with hyperdrive.
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That seems an odd failure of imagination. You can imagine a thing, FTL travel, and can accept it functions, but merely increasing the degree of the thing to "much faster" makes it too implausible? It's not a new thing you're being asked to accept, it's a thing you already accept magnified to a greater degree.

I can imagine a cow, and then a much larger cow. That's not the same as being asked to imagine a cow, then imagine a werxelpretylinoblox.
 
theprestige said:
Iain M. Banks wrote a novel about a civilization that spanned "five galaxies."

For the first few chapters, I was tempted to drop the book, simply because the distance between galaxies is too great for the premise to be plausible to me, even in a setting with hyperdrive.

Then it turned out that the setting was actually five civilizations in a single galaxy, but with sufficiently different evolutionary histories and resource requirements that they mostly didn't interact with each other. They'd gravitate to different star systems with different radiation profiles and resource mixes, and mostly stay out of each other's way.

Every so often, there'd be an incident that required two or more of the civilizations to meet somewhere neutral, overcome each other's essential inscrutability, and hammer out some sort of mutually agreeable arrangement.
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Cool story, bro, as I believe the youngsters say. I imagine you're trying to say that we're seeing different subsets of the forum. Maybe so, but you may be forgetting that I don't get to choose which parts of the forum I get to visit, due to my role I get to see most of it, and most of the reported posts too. Maybe you should look at a wider selection of the sub-forums than you currently do, or else do more careful analysis on the posts you do read.

How are you gauging unhappiness? And the hate?
 
theprestige said:
Because.

I do.

Being unhappy means not being happy.

Pretty much.
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On the off chance you're even slightly sincere, I'll clarify: hatred is the opposite of love, it's not the opposite of happiness. Hatred and love are how a person reacts to outside objects, the people and things one hates or loves. Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind, and don't require particular reactions to or even the existence of outside objects. I can be happy alone in my house. I cannot hate something without that something existing (or at least believed by me to exist). This seems to me to indicate the separateness of these two things, which being separate allow for existence in any combination. So we can be happy while hating something, be happy while not hating anything, be unhappy while hating something, and be unhappy while not hating anything.

I'll accept that one can't be happy while undergoing what one hates, but that's only temporary. Most people hate getting dental work but that doesn't mean they're unhappy when not in the chair.
 
TragicMonkey said:
On the off chance you're even slightly sincere, I'll clarify: hatred is the opposite of love, it's not the opposite of happiness. Hatred and love are how a person reacts to outside objects, the people and things one hates or loves. Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind, and don't require particular reactions to or even the existence of outside objects. I can be happy alone in my house. I cannot hate something without that something existing (or at least believed by me to exist). This seems to me to indicate the separateness of these two things, which being separate allow for existence in any combination. So we can be happy while hating something, be happy while not hating anything, be unhappy while hating something, and be unhappy while not hating anything.

I'll accept that one can't be happy while undergoing what one hates, but that's only temporary. Most people hate getting dental work but that doesn't mean they're unhappy when not in the chair.
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If dental work is on their mind, and they're experiencing hatred, they're not happy.

If the things you hate are on your mind a lot, then you are not a happy person.

If you spend a lot of time expressing or indulging your hatreds, then you are not a happy person.

Further, I would say that someone who harbors a hatred of Jews (for example) is probably not a happy person. Harboring such hatreds, nurturing them, expressing them, are not the symptoms of a content and happy life.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Why? I don't see a direct connection between happiness and absence of hatred. How would it work? Adolf hates the Jews, so he must be unhappy?
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Anyone who's seen a roving pack of ten-year-old girls chanting "CRY BABY CRY... CRY BABY CRY" at another child has seen how gleefully people can express hatred.
 
theprestige said:
If dental work is on their mind, and they're experiencing hatred, they're not happy.

If the things you hate are on your mind a lot, then you are not a happy person.

If you spend a lot of time expressing or indulging your hatreds, then you are not a happy person.

Further, I would say that someone who harbors a hatred of Jews (for example) is probably not a happy person. Harboring such hatreds, nurturing them, expressing them, are not the symptoms of a content and happy life.
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So what does this have to do with the forum?

At any rate, this appears to be hijacking the thread, and should probably be moved elsewhere?
 
Scorpion said:
I know a lot of people on this forum are very clever, and might be described as intellectuals, but does that mean they cannot understand wisdom that is available to simple people. I think it was probably the Buddha who said,
"the mind is the great slayer of the real".
If there is a God he would hardly make it impossible to realize him without a high functioning intellect. Most religious people accept their beliefs on faith not by reasoning. Religious doctrines may serve only to pacify the mind so that a person can open their heart to spiritual experiences. It may not matter if the doctrine is absolutely true. A simple person of faith can experience much comfort and inner peace from believing in doctrines that sharper intellects find fault with.
So I put it to the forum that you may be outsmarting yourselves.
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Sounds like a bull **** excuse to me. Faith is a con. It is straight up gullibility. You just have to believe. Stop using your mind. Just trust our horse **** story.

Is there anything that faith couldn't be used for to believe? And if that is true, couldn't you use faith and be wrong just as easy as you could be right? In fact, I'd argue that if used faith to believe most things, you'd end up believing a lot of stupid things.

Faith is not a pathway to truth. The question for each of us is do we want to believe what is true or what is comforting? No question, a lie can sometimes be comforting. Would you want your doctor to tell you that you have a deadly illness or not? I can see why some people wouldn't want to know.

Beliefs have consequences not just for the believer, but for everyone. Parents disown their children and vice versa because of their religious beliefs. I know parents who wouldn't take their son to a doctor and their son died as a result. Catholics have been entrusting their children to priests only to see some of their children become molested. Your donations to your church could be used for campaign against gays or birth control. Or you could strap a bomb to your chest. Or fly jets into buildings.
 
Foster Zygote said:
At any rate, this appears to be hijacking the thread, and should probably be moved elsewhere?
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The thread was started with ulterior motives. Can we even hijack something that the OP never intended to discuss?

If anything the "Are smart people happy" discussion is more in line with what the OP was pretending the topic was supposed to be then what he obviously wants the topic to be.
 
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acbytesla said:
Sounds like a bull **** excuse to me. Faith is a con. It is straight up gullibility. You just have to believe. Stop using your mind. Just trust our horse **** story.

Is there anything that faith couldn't be used for to believe? And if that is true, couldn't you use faith and be wrong just as easy as you could be right? In fact, I'd argue that if used faith to believe most things, you'd end up believing a lot of stupid things.

Faith is not a pathway to truth. The question for each of us is do we want to believe what is true or what is comforting? No question, a lie can sometimes be comforting. Would you want your doctor to tell you that you have a deadly illness or not? I can see why some people wouldn't want to know.

Beliefs have consequences not just for the believer, but for everyone. Parents disown their children and vice versa because of their religious beliefs. I know parents who wouldn't take their son to a doctor and their son died as a result. Catholics have been entrusting their children to priests only to see some of their children become molested. Your donations to your church could be used for campaign against gays or birth control. Or you could strap a bomb to your chest. Or fly jets into buildings.
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Since it seems we cannot know for certain if there is a God by reasoning, we are only left with faith. It may be that there is a God and we, the human race, at our present level of evolution have constructed many myths about him that are not the truth.
It may be that many people of faith are misguided in their understanding of God even if there is one. I think we have seen religions evolve through history, and we no longer pray to a God of war like the Romans.
I am aware of occult and theosophical doctrines, and what can loosely be described as new age beliefs.
These seem to me to be progressive and moving away from the God of wrath of the Bible or Islam.
Maybe we just need a better God. That better God may even appeal to the intellect.
 
theprestige said:
If dental work is on their mind, and they're experiencing hatred, they're not happy.

If the things you hate are on your mind a lot, then you are not a happy person.

If you spend a lot of time expressing or indulging your hatreds, then you are not a happy person.

Further, I would say that someone who harbors a hatred of Jews (for example) is probably not a happy person. Harboring such hatreds, nurturing them, expressing them, are not the symptoms of a content and happy life.
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Have you not seen the joy at a Trump rally?

Do you not think that they are gleeful when they chant "lock her up" or "send them back"?

I think they find great joy in their hatred. It is their bond, it is what brings them together to celebrate.
 
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