Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: SusanofO
Aswad: That was a wonderful post!
Thank you. :)
quote:
I too think the Earth plane, and living here is "Purgatory". I believe this is as bad as it ever gets. I am not too sure about reincarnation, though, or how many times before (if any) I may have been on Earth (or incarnated on perhaps another planet), for the same reasons you stated, being in "Purgatory".
I'm not sure that it's necessarily as "bad" as it get, for some definition of bad, but that's a topic for another time, I guess. Apart from that, I'm not saying that it definitely has to be this way, I'm just forwarding a theory. I stand behind the rest of the stuff as well, about what the faith is about, what the religious organizations are missing, the relevance to me as a Dom, and so forth.
quote:
I recently read a book that proposed that all souls choose at which time they will incarnate (be born), and where, and with whom (family, relatives, etc) depending on what specifically they think their soul wants to accomplish (or make up for, as in the "Purgatory" idea), before they actually incarnate as a physical being.
I doubt that this is the case. While it may be that a soul can "aim" in a sense, and that it may be choosing an environment that will be more likely to provide a life that it will benefit from, we really have very little to go on, even if you take the scriptures at face value. And given free will, you can't really predict how a life will go.
quote:
I thought that was kind of an interesting idea, and would explain why some seem to suffer more than others (they chose it before they were born, to "purify" their own soul, even though that may seem totally weird, it could be possible, IMO).
This just seems wrong to me. It serves no other purposes than consoling some of the sufferers, and justifying deflection of responsibility. It also makes a mockery of free will, IMO, as it completely neglects the idea that people make decisions that affect other people. This theory can be used to justify just about anything, making it a null argument, that is, it doesn't change or affect anything.
Several cultures have justified cruelty to others by saying that it is their destiny, karma or what-have-you; that, somehow, they have chosen to suffer, or have sinned in some way that they are unaware of and cannot be aware of. For instance, the casteless in India; if a soul being born into a living hell is considered justified, then you can just treat any arbitrary group of people the way you like from birth, as the souls that shouldn't be experiencing this stuff will be born elsewhere.
With regards to deflecting responsibility, denying causuality and ignoring free will, this is kind of along the lines of one group of Wiccans that claimed that a particular car accident was karma, when the fact is that the kids driving the car were so drunk it's a wonder they could find the steering wheel, much less see it. It demeans their ability to choose, and also deflects responsibility for their decisions, as well as being completely irrelevant to life due to making no other assertion than "everything is what it is, and it is so for the reason that it must be so". I'll point out that this is something the driver did frequently: alcohol, drugs and driving. So in my opinion, this wasn't karma catching up with him, it was the consequences of his choices. If anything, he has a guardian angel, 'cause he got off with being landed in a wheelchair.
quote:
But this book said that when people are born, that they forget eveything they planned out, they would do while they are here - or else their plan would not be much of a challenge (like knowing the end of a story, or a movie before it ends), and if they knew all of that before-hand, and did not lose consciousness of it when they were born, then their soul would not have as much of a chance to grow while they were executing that plan while here, living their lives.
Quite apart from the fact that interactions with others are unpredictable in the presence of free will, I prefer to see it as their knowledge being inapplicable in the physical plane, making it so that they need to "fuse" with a physical form to become a whole being.
What they experience on this level doesn't (at least not usually) carry over to any other level in the form of memories, much like some drug trips (no, not speaking from experience) don't carry over to the regular state of mind; and, equivalently, we don't (at least not usually) get access to their memories from the other levels.
Essentially, it is the transforming process that life is that leaves a lasting imprint on them, not the experiences that drive this process. They need to live these lives, not act out some therapeutic puppet play. And the compound being has the free will to act as it will in our world, rather than it being a matter of the soul following a script it wrote for itself with the physical being as nothing more than a sock puppet.
quote:
This idea wasn't attached to a specific religion, it kind of transcended the whole "religion" area, actually, and seemed more of a "spiritual" idea. It didn't eliminate the idea of free will, because it said that peope "map out" the general things they think they need to do while they are here, but still have choice as far as exactly how they implement those "spiritual goals" while they are here (the "details").
All "true" religions transcend religion. That is to say that religion is a dogma that contains guidelines for the "masses" to follow, while spirituality is for the "enlightened" to experience and, if able to, share.
That said, I still think the idea makes a mockery of the idea of free will. A painter may not have all the tools he would like, but a painting he makes for himself is still his own painting, his own work. However, a comissioned work that has to adhere to specific requirements will just be the comissioned work, regardless of the tools, even if it also bears a bit of the artist's personal "touch". It isn't his own composition. The tools in this context are what life gives you, the hand that you've been dealt.
It's like the old saying "free to choose from their alternatives", with the difference being that in a world with free will, you can walk away from all those alternatives and take the consequences of doing so. To explain, if the general lines of my life are already set and I cannot do anything other than filling in the blanks, I can only choose between the choices someone has provided for me. However, back to the physical, if someone tells me that they will shoot me if I don't do XYZ, I can still tell them to sod off, and take the bullet for doing so. I can't do that if the general lines are laid out.
quote:
It did say there are souls who choose evil, and never have any intent to do much if anything, that is "spirtually progressive" while here, and may work even against others' progress in that regard, but said it is next to impossible to tell who these people really are (for instance, more than a few folks, world-wide, are wrongly convicted, and sent to prison, sometimes for life, as one example).
I'm a moral relativist. I don't believe in "good" and "evil" in any meaningful sense. To me, evil means intentionally going against your own values and morality for no other reason than a kind of mirror to what altruism is in the context of conventional "good". And few people do that, not among regular psychopaths and not even among serial killers.
In almost all cases, people have a point of view that justifies their actions in their minds. Just like some people feel that the death penalty can be justified because their reasons are somehow "better" than those of the people they punish, so also did the person who committed the crime feel justified in commiting it, in most cases. To go against your own morality causes cognitive dissonance.
Also, breaking your own morality intentionally pretty much follows the three-strike rule: the first time it hurts, the second time it's hard, the third time it's natural. Combine this with an understanding of the effects of cognitive dissonance and stuff like Kohlberg's stages of moral development, and you can pretty quickly piece together the reason for things like the findings of the Milgram experiments, child soldiers, WW2 atrocities, etc...
This also explains how the completely ordinary people involved in the Nanking massacre could find themselves accepting the thought that "We're out of pork, but we have lots of Chinese women here, so we'll eat them instead", or how they can entertain themselves by tearing foetuses from wombs and "playing" with them. They were not "evil" people in any meaningful sense, although their actions certainly were "bad"; in fact, they were acting in accordance with their moral wiring, which was inadequate to dealing with the situation.
According to Kohlberg's theory, which I abstract to a moral relativist framework, an advance to the next stage of development occurs when cognitive dissonance appears due to a conflict between two moral pathways yielding different imperatives, or one moral pathway conflicting with another priority cognition, and the current moral stage is inadequate to resolve the conflict, while the next stage is adequate. Skipping stages does not occur, in this theory. And repeat exposure to a dissonance without reinforcing it, will tear it down, as we know from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is what the three-strike rule is about. And in some situations, there is no way to advance to the next stage without desensitization happening first.
In these situations, that may be beyond individual control, unless a conscious choice is made to defy morality, something that is evil in any internally meaningful sense of the word, the moral choice will become to do things normally considered "evil" by the majority of western civilization. Hence, their morality supports, and indeed causes their "immoral" actions. Consider levels 3 and 4, for instance... (Wikipedia might be helpful in explaining; beyond the scope of this post.)
quote:
Or, even if a prisoner is rightfully convicted, and did the crime, maybe doing a really bad crime to begin with, was some kind of "spiritual test" for that person, and they need to overcome a particular happening.
There are ways to overcome almost any barrier without actually committing the act, and this is known in some occult theories as iconoclasm, the casting down of idols, something that is frequently done to "free" oneself from moral imperatives, without discarding the underlying principles of these imperatives, so that one will make a conscious choice to act morally, rather than being bound to do so by conditioning. If we humans could come up with it, I'm pretty sure souls, to the extent that they are sentient and intelligent, can do so too.
quote:
Or - maybe some criminal is actually supposed to actually be helping another soul along their "spiritual path" while they are here, and so posed a "test" for them, by committing some crime against them - but it said it is very hard to tell if that is the case (or not).
By this theory, the victims of Ted Bundy either chose to be his victims without knowing it, or they needed it, or they deserved it. I cannot find a meaningful way to integrate that point of view into my life, and certainly not into my faith.
quote:
And so the book said - people should try to combat what they perceive as evil, but also be very, very careful, about judging anyone's overall life and complete motives, because in the grand scheme of things, it could be next to impossible to ever know what those are, unless you are actually God.
To observe something in its entirety requires being seperate from it, which precludes interaction by the very nature of observation vs interaction (uncertainty principle). If you are inside something, you are part of it; if you are outside, you are not. Quite simply put, if G*d is omniscient, he cannot also be omnipotent, at least not in any remotely rational framework.
Humans can only deal with things locally; we don't have the capacity for anything else. It follows that we must act locally, based on the information available to us, and cannot be expected to act better than what this allows for. This is kind of intrinsic to the nature of experience, I think, that the immediacy of experience derives from this locality.
quote:
I suppose I won't find out if it's true until I physically die, but it is kind an intriguing (to me) set of thoughts.
You never know. Some people believe that we can gain enlightenment without death, or even achieve unity with the soul.
|
RE: Does God exist in your world? - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread