Quote:
Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot  Personally, no.
Neither did I believe you, when you claimed that Angela's philosophy of emotional wellbeing encourages people to be alcoholic. I saw instantly that you were just twisting her words, in your usual style.
Hahaahaaa! What else is new. |
But you have this all the wrong way round. I'll try to explain the point as though you actually didn't understand it.
First of all, this was a philosophical argument, which requires an understanding of reasoning. Angela shared an opinion that her feeling good indicated that her philosophy, her world view, i.e. using the Law of Attraction, was sound.
(I apologise, Angela, if in the course of this argument, I misrepresent your view, and would be happy to be corrected. We might actually make more headway if you and I discussed the point.)
Simplifying, then, she seemed to be saying: I am happy, therefore my worldview must be, or is likely to be, philosophically sound.
Like Descartes' "I think therefore I am", Angela, to me, appeared to be making the argument "I am happy, therefore I'm right (in my general view of life)". Now, of course, I may have taken the wrong meaning from her words, but I don't think anyone except an imbecile could not see how such a meaning could be construed from them. I certainly was not twisting her words.
Now, I wanted to express my opinion that I saw a logical flaw in the above, that we cannot take our happiness as indicating that we have a correct worldview. Perhaps I should have just said that and no more. I gave a bad example, since alcoholism is a condition that develops over time with the use of alcohol. It would have been better to say "One can be happy because one is drunk, but when one is drunk he does not see things clearly." On that point, as you have demonstrated, we are in agreement, although somehow you managed to pretend that I was making the opposite point, encouraging young people to become alcoholic. That interpretation requires such a long stretch of the imagination that I can only assume it was a pathetic pretense on your part, and that it was you who deliberately twisted words, which is not doing your credibility much good at all. Either that or you made a genuine mistake, which, if it was, was a particularly stupid one, and all your juice drinking and meditation isn't having the desired effect on your clarity of mind.
So let us forget alcoholism; it was a very poor example. Imbibing a chemical of any kind would be a bad example, although if I had chosen one, it would have been better to say ecstacy. The main weakness was that drug effects are temporary and, as I think Angela was pointing out in her response, have downsides!
Here's another direction altogether (because this is quite an important point and I'd like it to be understood):
A Creationist, Fundamental Christian, a Moslem, a Hindu, a Sikh, or any other believer in God may feel that their happiness indicates that they must have the right idea about reality, yet those ideas, at least in rather a lot of significant details, will be different. Prayer, the support of a community, the belief in redemption or reincarnation or the opportunity to free oneself from reincarnation, having clear moral guidelines, any of these can increase a person's happiness, yet the beliefs may be completely different and, logically, some of them must be wrong.
An atheist may feel happy to have avoided such 'nonsense' and realised that the world is physical matter devoid of spirit, the human mind an emergent phenomenon. Happy atheists, happy believers, someone must be wrong.
It would seem that most people who are happy can be expected to think that they see the world correctly, and this belief may contributes to their happiness, yet, since there are clearly very many different such philosophies, many of them must be wrong (unless, of course, we allow for the magical simultaneity of realities, which may be part of the LoA).
This last point raises the possibility that in arguing rationally about reality and how we think about it, I may be talking past you and your kin, who seem to believe that thought is superior to reality and moulds it. It would seem that if the ideas of an objective world and logical reasoning about it are thrown out, you must have no place arguing anything anymore. You would need only to believe whatever you believe, and reality will toe the line. You demonstrate your expertise in the LoA in your responses to me.
It is in order to argue logically against what I see as a circular and potentially damaging mindset that I bother to post here at all. You like to interpret this as me arrogantly trying to 'save' people, but it seems no more arrogant than posting to support LoA, or encouraging people to vote Democrat, or sharing any opinion online.
Now, I hope there is no longer any confusion about what I was trying to say, ALG. I accept that I may not have said it very well. Incidentally, I never got back to you about the NDE link. I see that indeed you did post it in response to someone else mentioning the subject. My apologies. I missed it the first time round.
I would offer a counter-argument to Angela's: in many cases it seems that illusion, rather than truth, contributes to people's happiness, that discovering our illusions can be very painful, and that people habitually resist discovering them, or deny the truth, for just that reason. An early response to my first posts here - I forget from whom - was to warn me of the dangers (unspecified) of taking away people's illusions too readily.