AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Religion is good. Eh. Conversion. In the prolouge, addresses the question of how the two hosts get along despite the different faiths. Or acknowledges it at least.
Arousing of the Bodhi Mind "how does one come to be religious"
Ugh, Ross Douthat Oh well. "for people who find themselves stranded ins ecular modernity"
Trashing the new atheists. Boring. Never quite got the new atheists because there was nothing new about them.
ref to Real Presences, I have that and should (re?)read it.
JFM: Catholicism made him freer
I think the default model here is: modernism is constraining and stultifying because it excludes the spiritual. Most everyone in modernity feels this and is looking around for Something Else, with the exception of the dull-witted materialists like the New Atheists.
Nothing wrong with this story except it doesn't match my experience at all. I've always been close to the cold heart of computational materialism (in multiple senses, I try not to brag about being.a student of Marvin Minsky but I don't hide it either). But looking out for that Something Extra, from drugs or hippies or buddhists or whatever. I'm hardly alone in this, the whole postrat world is basically that.
"imprisonment in a very narrove field of consciousness" of modernism Secular materialist NYT crossworrd puzzle...it is a reliugion but a relition of the self, prometheanism...but you can't do this on your own. JFM prefers religion to spirituality because of this.
PF hates the phrase "making meaning". OK that's odd. From the secular, immanent-frame position..."the meaning of life is your pursuit of that meaning, what you make of it". More than any one person can shoulder. Not that easy to be a god (don't tell SB). Asking everyone to be Atlas.
I am totally on the other side of this. existentialists, like it or not.
Buber, there has to be a You bigger than I (not sure if I buy that interp of Buber)
Rather than a conversion I feel like I am slowly grasping the nature of life. Letting it in. Not by practice exactly, although that would help.
Also: Alan Moore intellectual wow – realize atheism is a type error.
It's pretty remarkable that these guys have vastly different religions (Catholicism and Zen Buddhism) but seem to be pretty sure that they both serve the same function, both put you in touch with the same thing. Why that feels weird to me, I don't know, surely the unity of religion is not a new idea. But it is still a controversial one I think? (I want to ask Chapman but PF is just as much a committed Buddhist)
Modernism as a dead end, religion as an add-on.
Patrick Curry, modernism as a movement within religion (sounds a bit more on point). Modernism is revolutionary.... iconoclastic, resembles protestantism...modernists felt free to ignore the past... tradition identified with ignorance etc. Permanent revolution....
Playing chess with yourself. (Hah another application for Severance). Chess as a finite game (I think he's confusing Carse's notion with something else, but never mind). Playing chess with a compuiter isn't real because its not an infinite mind (hm disagree)
Long digression on Wagner and Siegfried and free will. Wotan can only create thralls, not creatures with free will. The Room Full of Mirrors problem. Solipsism.
You don't capture the truth with a proposition. What you do is you develop propositions that are vectored to a truth that is infinitely distant.
Not sure why I want to argue with this...
To Discord
Very thought-provoking episode, stirred many thoughts and feelings, I'm still trying to sort them out. I'm surprised you didn't mention Jeffrey Kripal's The Flip which is all about conversions, I know its come up before.
You make me want to defend poor old modernity. Everybody hates modernity these days, it hates itself. So dry and drained of juice, all that marvelous technology perverted into tools of oppression. Killed God and now it wonders why the world sucks.
POP let this go, I am not sure my simplistic version of their version of modernity is that accurate.
Really want you guys to fight. Not really, but I've wondered at the tension or lack of it. Zen Buddhism and Catholicism have rather different worldviews, you are both fairly serious about your faiths, yet there's no conflict. This is remarkable. I wonder if my models of faith are oversimplificed, and if I understood better what they meant I would see there is in reality no conflict, that they are two paths towards the same destination.