So, I'm a Buddhist now.

[Despanan]

[Rip]

oh ok nm then <3

[Rip]

incidentally, i was only talking about what you and i have been talking about not what you and agent have been talking about, but it's cool anyway because i hit my bliss center over lunch and buddha was probably an okay guy..?

[Agent]

Please don't put words in my mouth. I'd rather you not bring me up in this discussion at all.

[Rip]

[Despanan]

[Samurai]

[Despanan]

I blame autocorrect.

[Rip]

Okay so philosophy.

You were offensive because you said that "everyone would be better than they are now with spirituality." We could be "the best Us we could be" with a spiritual belief system of some sort. You DID say this. If you make me go back and use quote boxes I'm going to be cross with you.

You defended this by saying "of course a Buddhist is going to say that everyone would benefit from this". This is exactly the same as Steltek telling us that of course a Jesusfreak is going to say that everyone would benefit from Jesus. This is relying on your newfound religious tenets to support themselves.

I don't know how it could be clearer except with a thought experiment: say SaintCarvin came back tomorrow and started going off about how born-again he suddenly was, and started saying that any religion is good and that we would all be better people with SOME sort of religion, and then went off about the glories of Christ's love and how we're all really Christians at heart we just need to remember His love for us, and we'd all be better people than we are now if we just remembered how great God is in whatever form we want just so long as we did it. I hope you'd be offended by that as a Buddhist and a human being. It's hard to see why you don't see this in yourself now.

But anyway philosophy.

Your buddha was probably a cool guy. Jesus was probably a cool guy. They probably had great ideas. They had a lot of time to sit and think. They had a good cult of personality and good post-mortem PR. Facts added up on top of facts over years and years to result in us talking about both of them right now. But they both came from different cultural backgrounds and different times and different places and these things colored their learnings and their teachings and in the end they were just being human, and nothing is more human than wondering "what's it all about, anyway?" But they didn't have all the data.

In fact, they had very little data.

Mostly they had what we all have and have always had: imaginations.

Now, these days, we still don't have all the data, at least not as regards "what's it all about anyway". We do, however, being human, have a FUCKton upon a fuckTON of data on human beings. We have data on how humans are put together, data on how humans work, data on what it feels like to be human, data on where humans came from, data on how humans evolved, data on how humans think, data on how humans relate to other humans, data about why humans relate to other humans the way they do, data on how humans have thought about themselves, data about how that thought has changed relative to time and place, data about what humans consider important, data about why humans consider themSELVES to be important, and I could go on and on and on.

Being that we all share a vast majority of identical materials that end up consisting the individual "Us"es, and these materials have remained relatively unchanged for the past hundreds of thousands of years, one tends to notice a lot of similarities. Chief among these, to me right now, is the fact that our unique brains have resulted in the first and only creature on this planet to ever wonder "what's it all about anyway" AND to realize that the answer is not forthcoming. The fact that we exist today and are communicating right now is entirely down to the much much much much earlier fact that our species found a way to deal with this, lest we sit huddling in a cave clutching our heads and wondering why the fire was mad at us.

We are ridiculously intelligent social animals who, early on, had to recognize that our intelligence was reflected in the other ape-relatives around us, and the only way to survive each other was to learn to read our own emotions in other people; to figure out when other humans were feeling the same sadness or anger or joy that we were capable of feeling. To humans, everything begins with humanity. We started in the care of our elder humans, and we learned to intuit feeling from watching them. When humans are old enough and their senses are no longer entirely encompassed by their parents, they begin to deal with the world on the exact same level: intuit its intentions. Why does the rain not fall? it must be angry. Why is the harvest bountiful this season? we must have pleased it somehow.

Humans still do this every day. It's almost impossible not to. Is that falling leaf a sign from god that I shouldn't go in to work today? Uh oh, my flight number is 13, better change it. Hey, seven doves, that's the same age as my child in Vermont, I wonder if she's okay right now, I should call her. I was gonna take the job in New York, but I just got a bad feeling in my gut whenever I thought about it, so I think I'm just gonna stay here. Hey baby, what's your sign..?

We evolved to communicate and we seek communication.

We evolved to intuit meaning in every gesture and we seek meaning in everything.

But the more and more data we get, the more and more Occam's Razor descends, and it becomes more and more apparent that simply WANTING some sort of human-like bureaucracy to exist in the cosmos does not make it so. Now, can I say definitively that there is no aetherial being out there watching over us, no great guiding hand, or spiritual recycling system, or a flying spaghetti monster? No, I can't, because I don't have all the data. But I know I'm human, and I know my imagination, and I know it can get carried away when that little brain prostate gets rubbed and I can think for a second that All Is Right And It All Makes Sense...but I also know what it feels like to believe in falsehoods, and I know what the consequences of organized dogma can become, and I can look back at all the human data and realize that there is plenty of room for error here, and that I would personally like more data.

Data seems like such a boring word for it though, so I decide to push my own mental finger toward my spiritual prostate and realize that this "data" I'm so nonchalantly talking over is, literally, the result of a beast of the fields on a lonely rock spinning around an unremarkable star in the literal middle of fucking nowhere who sat down one day and wondered "whats it all about, anyway", and then decided to find out, knowing that not he, nor his children, nor his children's children would ever know for sure, but that the journey they started would end up resulting, at least for today, in me, being exactly me, talking to you who is no one else but you, on a device so far removed from the simple flint hammer that it should make you cry just thinking about it, and right after I'm done I can ignore it all and pretend it's all the result of some bearded white dude who got lonely, and drink fermented grain and laugh and love until I pass out and get hit by a truck, and leave a great little story behind to be added to the physically uncountable chapters that humanity has been writing since we became the first ones to ever try.

I don't really need anything else but what I've got here. It's offensive to me to suggest that anything a human could imagine, with his limited data, could really be better than the ridiculous miracle of chaos that this world already is, because it already fails the most basic and yet hardest test of Existence.

Anyway. philosophy.

tl;dr for cain - titties and booze are miracles

[dexeron]

Yes.