Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

If "Meta" becomes the new buzzword for the 21st century marketeers, I want them to drown in the hell that is philosophical black holes that make you question your own humanity.

As a kid I used to be fascinated by philosophy but there is a point at which you question your own existence and wonder what the point of it all is.

You do not even have to be depressed or sad. You can simple deduct that your life is potentially useless so why not stop wasting your breathe?

Religious people do not understand this. They assume predestination and or fate by their chosen deity/deities will save them. Facing the emptiness is not a burden they want to confront.

Either way, the best way to face the emptiness is by accepting it and crack a joke at it. Therefore Monty Python makes more sense than you think.

 

What a load of crap. Sure, all religious people are idiots and are not capable of deep thought. Give me a break….your generalizations expose your inexperience.

 

want to like for this

but dislike for this.

Wish we had the option for multiple, but I guess we end up with net zero

 

I grew up in a religious family and I still have religious friends. Some of them might know what I wrote about. Thing is when you are raised to put faith above reason, well some people stop thinking.

Philosophy, science and religion are very close neighbours. Closer than most people expect. It is simply too bad that most religious people I have met and or been friends with tend to ignore certain issues because of their faith.

Most religious people tend to be kind and helpful. That is my experience. Unfortunately sometimes religious teachings do not allow thoughts or discussions about certain topics. I live in the Netherlands so often times through conversations you would find the limits.

Either way, disagree all you want. Certain things you learn the hard way and carry with you for decades. Just another chink in the armour of dealing with existence.

Should it take 100 years to gain enough experience? 10 years or 20? I do not know. I need a coffee so cheers.

 

Speaking as a Filipino who grew up very strictly Catholic and spent 11 years in a Franciscan school (branch of Catholicism that puts great emphasis on ecological conservatism and almsgiving) and does have some unironic, rather sincere woobly-doobly spiritual beliefs despite being put off by a lot of organised religion:

The fact that there is a great divide between genuine faith and kindness and performative religion ought to be acknowledged as a lot of the grief that many seem to share stems from degrading personal experiences with the latter kind. You know, the kind of people that believe that they are fundamentally superior to others or that hold beliefs that everything is ultimately transactional (i.e. "I'll do this specifically because I fully expect to be reimbursed in due time, be it in this life or whatever else might follow").

 

What goes around….comes around.

 

Honestly I don't see that there's separation of church and state much where I live and that genuinely irks me. Maybe I'd be a full on atheist, or at the very least aggressively against organised religion if it weren't for the fact that I saw sincerity and piety in the Franciscan order growing up.

Not to say I didn't have a few wth moments there, mind. The monks and general faculty were happy to endorse some of our celebrity students (singing competition winners, child actors, political scions, etc) and make sure the school experience was good for them. One of the most deeply ingrained memories I have of the rector at the time (no idea if he's retired yet) is of him in his office, sat at his massive wooden desk smiling gently while listening to who knows what on his iPod. This was one of the first generation iPods at a time when those were absolutely ludicrously priced and expensive portable gear was still very much a special playground, so the fact that he had one was genuinely noteworthy.

Eh, no one's perfect. These were also the people that organised outreach programs and made us spend time with impoverished families (and I mean really destitute folk for whom refrigerators would be a shared, communal luxury) to rub our privileges in our snotty faces. Those memories stick with you, and these aren't even the worst-off people since these are the vetted communities that have an established relationship with the school network.

It's hard not to see the worst-off people though, at least here. Shit makes you wanna cry.

 

I could not agree with you more. Methodological materialism and its philosophical/cultural consequences did not just 'pop!' into existence from the heavens themselves, and neither did the Faith vs. Reason dichotomy that most modern people just assume to be true, self evident, and intractable. Behind these core modern "ideas" - though idea is not strong enough term - are certain metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that everyone knows, or rather feels, but don't usually have the tools/grammar/circumstances to properly examine and question. Most of us are vaguely familiar with the mythical self-story of the Enlightenment, the collapse of realism into nominalism in the high middle ages, the triumph of the pessimistic Augustinian view of man (and the consequent fracturing of reason itself) in the history of the west, but don't know how to connect the dots between these things and our own lived experience in or out of faith and institutionalized religion. The intelligibility of religion/faith/meaning is the "one thing most needful" in this modern age, otherwise we are forever stuck repetitive "crises of meaning", impotant, watching reruns of Monty Python for some kind of relief.

One reason why I like Jordan Peterson is because he really gets how a mechanistic pseudo-Newtonian view of humanity and meaning has gutted our lives, culture, and even our churches. He rightly says that meaning and truth - a truth worth living for - is only found when the reality of what we are (as material beings) is aligned with our head (i.e. our "ideas" and self image) and our heart. There is serious work being done around a reframing and rapprochement between Faith and Reason, God and Science (e.g. Michael Hanby from the top down, John Vervaeke from the bottom up) but much of it is highly technical and difficult even for those lucky enough to have had a broad and real liberal education. Unfortunately, we are in a kind of new "Dark Age", groping our way among the ruins.

 

Religion is frequently looked down on in modern society but there’s not really much difference between modern religion (e.g. wokeism) and it’s more aged relatives. They’re basically just moral frameworks that their adherents use to guide their behavior, it’s just that the modern one doesn’t think it’s a religion and so is becoming the defacto state religion. Hand in glove is scientism where adherence to accepted orthodoxy (“trust the science!”) is paramount rather than science being a quest for the truth where everything can and should be questioned.

 

Read more Wordsworth

 

The pilgrim asks the old monk "what is it you do in this monastery?". He replies "We fall down, we get up, we fall down, we get up, we fall down..."

To add to what purr1n said, a useful measure of authenticity, indeed the definition itself, is whether something is lived. Faith (and meaning) when reduced to mere moralism, particularly when based on propositional and/or legal coherency, is a sure sign of a shallowness (in experience, congruency with reality, etc.). All authentic faiths have a moral "structure" and prescription, but that is not primary - it's based on other things and always bears in mind its own epistemic and created limits. Wokeism in particular and western society in general, now that it is authentically post-Christian, is more of a symptom of an underlying crises of meaning and restlessness. Classical Liberalism, as critical as I am of it, is far more authentic/real/true to the human condition and I think we are starting to see CL's pushback against wokeism (e.g. in the school boards and elsewhere). I am starting to become more confident that soon enough, maybe even just a few years, Wokeism will look as garish as a 1970's shag carpet.

 

As a kid I was so deep into my own philosophical ego-existentialism I was even writing poetry about it.

I'm so glad social media wasn't a thing back then and I have long burned all my papers from that era.

 

I have kept the papers but they live buried where I don't even have easy access to them for pure cringe. I hold on to memorabilia though.

Yeah, second chances count for a lot nowadays. It's far from easy to do away with biases but that's integral to the good practise of religion... at least as far as I can tell. Whether as a tool to serve a function or a genuine path towards something approaching a meaningful comprehension, never let it be said that religion doesn't have power in either direction. Power's risky though and you certainly get the Joel Osteen, milk the sheep for profit types here, but this is why smaller parishes are often the more beautiful without all the ostentatious gold paint and intricate statues of saints to distract from contemplation.

Or heck, maybe interpretative visions do more to aid contemplation than to distract from it. No clue, haven't really done a survey to determine which of either is the more valid.

Hah nah I totally get that, it falls more in line with how I think now but at the time the order was making such a deal about detachment from material things being an ideal worth pursuing that it almost felt like he was absconding under the absconce (there's a confusing pair of words for ya).

Church music has a special place in my heart, which is why I like listening to (recordings of) Russian oktavists in echoey chambers. Might have shared this story before but there was a time when I was in high school following an enactment of the Living Rosary (basically a very performative rendition of a common series of prayers) when a large chunk of the student body and faculty went to the attached parish for what might have been a full mass, or at least a culmination of the ceremony. The choir'd started singing this one popular tune which was par for the course, but then when the refrain kicked in everyone in attendance seemed to have suddenly found their voices and were projecting at the top of their lungs.

Sure it's more than probable that very few of the people there were good singers, but things sort of average out when enough people approximate the melody.

I enjoy telling stories even if they can be an absolute shambles at times in terms of syntax or structure, but I don't think I'll ever be able to fully convey how it felt being there in that moment, maybe a couple hundred-odd voices in a moderately large church singing with enough intensity to make it seem like the foundations of the church itself were singing and the tiled tops of the roofs playing tinkling accompaniment.

Don't think it bears pontificating to present company how powerful music can be, eh?

 

I've had friends ask me the same thing, and I tell them that while context is more important I'm generally not offended by the term. However, the term itself just sounds weird. Maybe it's because it's too many syllables that don't roll off the tongue, or it's just so outdated. Even if someone were to try to use that in a slanderous way against me, my first reaction would be to wonder what kind of weirdo even still uses language like that.

 

Somewhere in my parent's basement I just know mom must have kept box of my old school stuff and there's some notebook filled with enough cringe to make my lips reverse pucker all the way down to my nethers.

 

It wasn’t ever intended as an epithet per se (it basically just means the East) it’s just that it’s a term from a bygone era where racism was more prevalent, or at least more open, so it brings up memories of that for some people. The etymology here is pretty good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient

The best case against it is that it was never a term the people who lived there chose for themselves and now we basically use more general geographic terms for everyone.

 

Oh, for god's sake!

Not that I have one. And if there is one I do not subscribe to what I consider a supreme arrogance of thinking that it has any interest in me. Flat earthers is a joke, right? Yet there are such people. Too many. But not as many as those who still place earth and humanity at the centre of the universe, and mostly, people don't get around to laughing at them. But it is just as funny/weird.

I find it really hard to even address points for, against, about, religion. Like I live on a different planet. Oh! That means I don't actually have a place in this conversation. OK bye bye!

(I'm not a materialist; I believe in lots of things that material science does not. That's another story(ies))