Subject: Re: music as a process of religion
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Fri Jan 07 2000 - 08:27:41 EST
In a message dated 1/7/00 12:41:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, shok@netcom.com
writes:
<< No matter how you slice it, all of the above are social constructs. If
you were raised by wolves, you would have no concept of God or
religion. And you wouldn't care. >>
Of course you know that in any form of philosophical discourse dictionary
definitions are irrelevant. They just reflect the commonly accepted usages
for a word in English, and not the concept as it has been understood across
different times and cultures.
But you still don't account for the existence of the social construct. Since
socities are made up of individuals, how is it that every society comes up
with some form of religion even though, according to your account, no
specific individual would ever think of it?
It seems impossible to me.
Now, in a contradictory fashion, you do later account for the existence of
religion in the individual:
<<The fear of death, coupled
with our inability to understand where we and our Universe came from,
incited the formation of religion/mythology, the Big Watchful Daddy in
the Sky belief, and the I'll-Never-Die-'Cause-There's-Life-After-Death
belief.>>
I think you need to unmuddle your thinking a little bit :)
Next, since you are an atheist and, it seems, by extension, an
antisupernaturalist (there are different forms of theism), you also need to
account for the data you yourself have presented:
Since our minds are (within your construct) limited to nature and a product
of nature, then hadn't it occurred to you that religion -- the development of
a belief in the supernatural -- MUST then be natural, since humanity has so
consistently (across almost all, if not all, times and cultures) developed
some ideas of some kind about the supernatural?
In other words, if only the natural exists, then all that exists must be
natural. You can't complain about the existence of anything as being
"unnatural" because it exists as a part of nature.
And if our minds are somehow, on some level, separate from or apart from
nature, haven't you just admitted to the existence of either the sub or
supernatural?
I don't think you understand your own philosophy very well. But don't worry,
I've never met a thoroughly rational atheist in my life.
Jim
P.S. Within atheism, why should the individual male care about how women are
treated? Again, the only consistent thinkers I've ever come across are
Egoists, and their philosophy breaks down at the very end -- where it
contemplates the role of reason.
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