RE: Spirituality as an atheist?
December 16, 2015 at 12:55 am
(This post was last modified: December 16, 2015 at 2:48 am by Reflex.)
(December 15, 2015 at 10:50 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Firstly, the feelings aroused by cancer diagnoses are certainly explicable using language. My son's mother, a breast-cancer survivor, has over the years given eloquent voice to her feelings.
As to what I attribute as the source of the ineffable -- the truly ineffable, not your thoughtless tossed-off example -- I'd say it is because the language we speak doesn't possess the words to express the feeling in question accurately. That is, after all, the crux of the problem, and it needs no deeper attribution, you obvious longing notwithstanding.
Finally, you clearly misunderstood my point: The spiritual is a result of the ineffable, not the other way around, in my view.
Firstly, I'm happy for your son's mother, but I am not so eloquent as to voice my feelings in a way others can relate to -- and I'm a cancer survivor twice over.
I agree with respect to the limitations of language, which is why the language of religion is largely allegorical rather than univocal. Nevertheless, logic isn't reduced to impotency because of it.
Finally, that the spiritual is a result of the ineffable may very well be true, but attributing it to (ineffable) mechanism or chance, which are the only logical alternatives to it's source or cause being something personal (i.e., God), has logical consequences which are spelled out by Alan Watts in Behold the Spirit.*
*Behold the Spirit was one of Watts' earliest works. His ideas were refined in later works, but never in a way that stands in contradiction to this earlier work.
(December 15, 2015 at 10:24 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote: Spirituality is the kind of escapism which allows its practitioners to feel not only good about themselves but better than others. Not a fan.
If that's true for theists, then it is also true for atheists like Tyson.