Cosmic Justice?

[greylorn]

It still remains for you to refute the following propositions:

1. The more we have the more we want.
2. The more we want the more frustrated we become.
3. The more selfish we are the more we alienate others.
4. The more we alienate others the more isolated we become.
5. The more isolated we become the more miserable we are.
6. When we care about others we forget ourselves.
7. When we forget ourselves we are liberated from ourselves.
8. Others cannot love us unless we are lovable in some way.
9. The only way to be lovable is to be a loving person.

Tony,
That’s way too long to fit on my tombstone.

Why would I want to refute that material? So far as I can tell, it is mostly true.

However I can certainly quibble with some of those principles, based upon personal and social experiences.

1. The more we have the more we want.
   
   That depends upon the item. For example, I have three separate sets of aftermarket parts in my body. I really do not want more. Trust me.
2. The more we want the more frustrated we become.
   
   Not my style. If I want something I’ll go out and buy it, or if it cannot be bought, maybe talk someone out of it. If I cannot afford it, or cannot get it, I stop wanting it. By way of example, a fourth wife comes to mind.
3. The more selfish we are the more we alienate others.
   
   That depends entirely upon one’s style. Obama and his wife are two of the most selfish people on the planet, yet have millions of supporters. I’ve personally known several similarly narcissistic people who have developed an engaging social style, and attract people like flies.
   
   It is actually quite easy to alienate people by giving them things they’ve not earned. They will resent you for it and insult you behind your back, but they won’t call you selfish until you stop the freebies.
4. The more we alienate others the more isolated we become.
   
   A few years ago I’d have thought that to be true. I’ve put myself in forced isolation because I could not abide my obnoxious neighbors. My isolation came first, and proved to be a good thing.
5. The more isolated we become the more miserable we are.
   
   That is only true if we depend upon the presence of others for our personal sense of self-worth, as nearly everyone seems to do.

I find it much better to restrict my social contacts to the few people with whom I can share ideas, and also trust. In the last two years I’ve had only one visitor. That happened because his daughter wanted to watch last year’s Superbowl, and they have no TV. So I invited her over, bought soda and pizza. When she had to cancel at the last minute, her father filled in, proving to be a great Green Bay Packer supporter and enjoying his first pro football game. I had a great time too.

My door mat reads, Oh siht, it’s you again., mainly to amuse the local sheriff’s deputy.

1. When we care about others we forget ourselves.
   
   That tends to be true, but I’ve found that when someone needs caring for, I should be looking out for what they’re trying to get.
2. When we forget ourselves we are liberated from ourselves.
   
   I would have supposed that to be true before doing past-life regression work for friends and a few others. I was amazed at how powerfully some painful and emotional experiences from a forgotten self can adversely affect someone.

I was able to effect the needed liberation, but only by getting them back in touch with a previous self and the circumstances causing the pain they carried along.

You can argue that a different body is a different self. However, I believe in the continuity of the soul, and regard it, not a body, as the true self.

1. Others cannot love us unless we are lovable in some way.
   
   That’s probably true, but too often their version of being lovable means kissing their posteriors. That gets old in a hurry.
2. The only way to be lovable is to be a loving person.
   
   Totally untrue. People are more attracted to appearance and style than to inner values. Women often cannot love a man who is not handsome, wealthy, or powerful. And yes, there are many definitions of “love.” Most of them apply to emotional feedback, which is entirely brain-based and always shallow.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

ThinkingSapien;8178381:

tobias;8177406:

What I do not understand is how anyone can not believe in a creator when there is any justice at all in the world. ’

If you want to know ask some non-believers why it is that they don’t believe. Most of the non-believers I know (including myself) were believers of some religion at some point in life until experiences or information eroded that belief away.So how do you, as a nonbeliever, explain justice and the pursuit of it in a world that is violent to the notion of justice?

I can’t say that I viewed the world as being violent to the notion of justice. There are a lot of behaviours that may be associated with seeking justice. There’s a person feeling remorse that seeks to compensate victims, there’s the person or people seeking revenge for having been wronged or empathizing with some one that may have been wronged, and so on. When something bad happens to someone that is thought to have performed a punishable act some will label that as justice from the universe (or your deity of preference). In general I take that as a statement that the bad event has brought some satisfaction to the person that labeled it as “justice.” If bad things only happened to people that did bad things then I might see it as form of justice/fairness/balance.

But bad things also happen to people that didn’t provoke them. Some which hold a belief of justice from the universe also conclude that bad things only happened because they were provoked. There is no lack of examples when natural disaster occurs. Some examples of things said from this stance are “New Orleans was a den of sin and that’s why it was hit by a hurricane” or “The tornadoes in the mid-west we because America hasn’t outlawed homosexuality” (side note: I don’t see homosexuality as being immoral, but the the people that said the above do) and so one. There were statements about the Tsunami in Japan and a few earthquakes over the past few years too.

Perhaps if you explained how your experience and/or knowledge has ‘eroded’ faith away for you I could understand how one denies deity in the face of justice.

The use of the word “denies” here may cause some one to think that my stance is something other than what it is. Usually when I see the word “deny” it is associated with a person that mentally holds on position but declares another, such as some one that knows that he or she has performed a criminal act but declares no involvement. Rephrasing your instatement above with an expression that better matches a description of my stance you get “Perhaps if you explained how your experience and/or knowledge has ‘eroded’ faith away for you I could understand ho one does not believe in the existence of Yahweh in the face of justice.”

I’ve given some views of justive above. So I’ll talk about the bible and Yahweh. Let’s stick with the concept of justice/balance/fairness.

While the bible has some excellent demonstrations of compassion and love it also has stories that range from odd to atrocious. Instead of finding these stories examples of justice they came across as antithetical to it. Just to name a few: I can’t find any justifications for killing infants or making parents eat their children. It also came across as unfair that a pharoh received plagues after Abraham deceived him about Sarah being unmarried. I did ask questions about this trying to reconcile it as an example of God as an example of perfect love and fairness; humans that act in such mysterious ways are likely to be hated and killed. I can’t remember all the replies I got back, beyond “God can do what ever he wants” (duh!).

On a more personal note I can’t say I was ever able to reconcile the god of perfect love against the pathway through which Christianity entered my family. I had been Christian from child indoctrination. My parents were Christian for the same reason. I doesn’t take much thought to figure out that people often inherit their religion from their family and/or culture. And I couldn’t find tradition as having much weight for justifying a belief. The inheritance of the religion from ancestors doesn’t go back forever. History shows that the deity of perfect love was injected into the culture through invasive people that enforced “the word” with torture and death and then used it as a means of maintaining control. At the very least I found a belief acquired through that pathway to be one that demands reconsideration (though this was not the only thing motivating reconsideration). That reconsideration went on for close to a decade and I can’t say I was able to find justification for holding it as true. During the time I still considered myself a Christian. It wasn’t until an incident where some one tried to use an assumed allegiance to Christianity to try to sway me to purchase something from them that I realized that it wasn’t a belief that I held any more. Shortly after that I got a lot of experience in observing in-group/out-group behaviours.

My experience tells me that your experience of someone with a the genetic condition you described of lacking a protien thus inhibiting muscle growth was the main force of erosion of your faith, and not acquired information.

I know of genetic diseases but my family and I are not afflicted with such diseases.

But then that’s just a stab in the dark, perhaps you and your loved ones have been unscathed by the injustice of entropy. This is not meant to sound harsh, just realistic

My life and the life of my siblings has over all been relatively good. That’s not to say we haven’t experienced our own set of challenges. But as far as I know we haven’t experienced anything that would be worthy of pity. My parents had more challenges when they were growing up, but like us I consider them unscarred.

 

[tonyrey]

Tony,
That’s way too long to fit on my tombstone.

Why would I want to refute that material? So far as I can tell, it is mostly true.

However I can certainly quibble with some of those principles, based upon personal and social experiences.

1. The more we have the more we want.
   
   That depends upon the item. For example, I have three separate sets of aftermarket parts in my body. I really do not want more. Trust me.
2. The more we want the more frustrated we become.
   
   Not my style. If I want something I’ll go out and buy it, or if it cannot be bought, maybe talk someone out of it. If I cannot afford it, or cannot get it, I stop wanting it. By way of example, a fourth wife comes to mind.
3. The more selfish we are the more we alienate others.
   
   That depends entirely upon one’s style. Obama and his wife are two of the most selfish people on the planet, yet have millions of supporters. I’ve personally known several similarly narcissistic people who have developed an engaging social style, and attract people like flies.
   
   It is actually quite easy to alienate people by giving them things they’ve not earned. They will resent you for it and insult you behind your back, but they won’t call you selfish until you stop the freebies.
4. The more we alienate others the more isolated we become.
   
   A few years ago I’d have thought that to be true. I’ve put myself in forced isolation because I could not abide my obnoxious neighbors. My isolation came first, and proved to be a good thing.
5. The more isolated we become the more miserable we are.
   
   That is only true if we depend upon the presence of others for our personal sense of self-worth, as nearly everyone seems to do.

I find it much better to restrict my social contacts to the few people with whom I can share ideas, and also trust. In the last two years I’ve had only one visitor. That happened because his daughter wanted to watch last year’s Superbowl, and they have no TV. So I invited her over, bought soda and pizza. When she had to cancel at the last minute, her father filled in, proving to be a great Green Bay Packer supporter and enjoying his first pro football game. I had a great time too.

My door mat reads, Oh siht, it’s you again., mainly to amuse the local sheriff’s deputy.

1. When we care about others we forget ourselves.
   
   That tends to be true, but I’ve found that when someone needs caring for, I should be looking out for what they’re trying to get.
2. When we forget ourselves we are liberated from ourselves.
   
   I would have supposed that to be true before doing past-life regression work for friends and a few others. I was amazed at how powerfully some painful and emotional experiences from a forgotten self can adversely affect someone.

I was able to effect the needed liberation, but only by getting them back in touch with a previous self and the circumstances causing the pain they carried along.

You can argue that a different body is a different self. However, I believe in the continuity of the soul, and regard it, not a body, as the true self.

1. Others cannot love us unless we are lovable in some way.
   
   That’s probably true, but too often their version of being lovable means kissing their posteriors. That gets old in a hurry.
2. The only way to be lovable is to be a loving person.
   
   Totally untrue. People are more attracted to appearance and style than to inner values. Women often cannot love a man who is not handsome, wealthy, or powerful. And yes, there are many definitions of “love.” Most of them apply to emotional feedback, which is entirely brain-based and always shallow.

“Totally untrue” seems inconsistent with “more” and “often” but who cares when you agree that my points are mostly true and you believe in the soul? One of your redeeming features is your sense of humour which belies your chosen moniker. Even if you are grey you are neither forlorn nor lovelorn… and one more instance of cosmic justice…