I feel for teenagers and their tragedies. They don't have enough experience under their belt yet to know it is all survivable. It is truly amazing what we can survive.
Believing in God - Challenge
by jgnat 153 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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rip van winkle
Hi jgnat- I just sent you a PM!
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King Solomon
My apologies, jgnat, for not keeping up.
Frankly, it's quite easy to get lost in all the minor sub-points here (which could easily become their own threads), as like most on-line forum "debates", it quickly grows unmanagable when it becomes unclear of why we even went down a particular rabbit hole detour, in the first place...
Let me start from page one, and see where we're at, to catch up. :)
EDIT: even starting back at page one, even one individual response raises a ton of questions that should be evaluated and questioned before moving on to another; we're hopelessly mired in shot-gunning, otherwise. :(
For example, Fernando said:
Yes, I do believe transcending ourself, the physical, and the here-and-now can activate our superconsciousness allowing us to tap into hidden, inspiring, healing and awesome powers.
Conversely materialism and self-centredness can be enormously deleterious.
I'd question, what is "superconsciousness"? Where does it come from? How does one know they ARE "superconscious"?
Where's the assumption that self-centeredness and materialism is deleterious coming from? Would the example of materialism of Native tribes from jgnat's own BC (with their competitive potlatch ceremonies) support that?
I see you tried to break down points....
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jgnat
If I challenged you to think along new lines, KS, I have accomplished what I set out to do.
Regarding experience and resiliency,
"Fairy tales don't teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed" - G K. Chesterton
Perhaps the stories we tell our children are to give them a model to follow in the absence of experience. If David can slay his Giant, maybe I can too.
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King Solomon
This is a DENSE thread, with much more ideas per page than most.
I'd say this topic should be expanded into multiple threads, all united in a series called "Benefits of Believing in God", where each point raised here could become it's own spin-off thread: eg "Benefits of Belief in God: #1 Gives a Sense of Belonging", etc.
In other words, this thread serves as a GREAT brain-storming session for OTHER spin-off threads that are LIMITED to a fuller examination of each point, rather than the shot-gunning approach.
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jgnat
That's me, the brainstorm queen. I'd rather kill the "God as a Comfort" thread before it is even born. The theme I am most interested in is the concept of a higher being might inspire us to live larger than ourselves.
Believing in God for a sense of belonging to me is more about joining an established religion, and the conventions and comfort that go along with that.
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still thinking
Soft&Gentle, your post reminded me of something David Mills wrote...
Christians view their own emotions as miraculous confirmation of God's immediate presence.
In reality, emotions derived from religious belief prove only that christians do hold certain beliefs, intense beliefs to which they generate intense emotional responses. The more deeply held the beliefs, the more deeply felt are the resulting emotions. Religion inspired emotions do not prove, however, that the religious beliefs themselves are true. Take, for example, a friend of mine who recieved a telphone call one evening from the State Lottery commission. She learned that here entry had been selected at random from the drewing barrel and that she had won a spot on the televised final guaranteeing $2,500, with potential winnings of up to $50,000! Needless to say, my friend was elated, telephoning everyone in the neighborhood about her unexpected good fortune. Her emotions were intense because her beliefs were intense: she was going to be on TV and might even win a small fortune!
Sadly, though, my friend's feelings of euphoria proved nothing about good fortune because, as she soon learned, the phone call from the Lottery Commission had been a tasteless hoax, perpetrated by a bored teenager. My friend had not been selected for the TV finals; she had won nothing. Her initial feelings of euphoria, therefore, proved only tht she believed she had won. Even though intense and overwhelming, her internal emotions proved literally nothing about external reality. If my friend had concluded that her emotions proved that she was a lottery winner, then she would have been wrong.
Christians fall victim to this identical error of logic when they percieve their own emotions to be proof of God's existence. Emotions derived from religious belief prove merely that individuals do hold their beliefs religiously. However dramatic, comforting or disturbing they may be, our religion inspired emotions do not prove that the belief is true, any more than my friends euphoria proved that she was a lottery winner.
Nonetheless, most christians egoistically imagine that their own inner feelings are somehow more authentic and more God-inspired than the feelings of people who hold different religious beliefs. Meanwhile, adherents of these other religions similarly maintain that their inner feelings prove thier religious beliefs to be true.
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King Solomon
NC said:
So yes. I fall back on faith too, in a sense. Faith in my own abilities and strength, and my long history with myself that proves I can get things done, I can work through problems, I can be creative, sometimes I can't make things go the way I want them to, and sometimes I surpass all that I hoped for. I so much prefer the me of today. The me that is internally strong and able and does not have to reach outward for something I'm lacking. It's all in here---with me---and always was. Kind of like the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion.
NC is on the tapping into "God as a source of strength" element.
Another good example is a child who is convinced they cannot ride a bike without training wheels, but eventually realizes that they are no longer using them, and don't NEED them. Perhaps it's a matter of building up confidence, where like NC says, eventually some people realize that "Hey, I, and only ME, did that!" And they realize that if they did it once, they likely could do it again sans help from anyone. And THAT is personal empowerment, taking responsibility for one's own fate.
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King Solomon
jgnat said:
How much of art is original, and how much is simply a re-telling of ancient patterns?
With art, both in music and in paintings, there are known patterns or rules. I am going to resort to yet another Ted video:
Benjamin Zander, the transformative power of classical music
He explains how a student progresses from learning the notes, to short patterns, to phrases, to the piece as a whole. I had a most transformative experience listening to his performance, as I felt profound sadness exactly where he predicted. You could say we have deconstructed the whys and wherefores of the audience reaction, and a skillful artist can evoke those feelings in others at will. The deconstruction is the rational part. The playing of the phrases is the inexpressible part.The good musicians are critically aware of how the audience reacts, and plays on their emotions as easily as they play their instrument. Good musicians and composers carefully build the song in a way to mazimize the impact of the chorus, just like a good comedian knows how to tell a joke to deliver the punch-line, etc. Some people "got it" and some don't.
In pop music, young music listeners have grown increasingly bored and impatient, not wanting to wait for the emotional pay-off of the "hook" (chorus), such that pop music producers have a saying that represents the typical listeners attitude, "don't bore us, get to the chorus!" This is seen by analyzing pop music today vs 30 years ago, where a typical song form was:
intro verse verse bridge chorsus
Today it's more like:
short-intro verse short-bridge chorus
The example that comes to mind is that Kelly Clarkson song, "Since Youve Been Gone", which gets to the chorus in under 40 seconds:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7UrFYvl5TE
I have a similar experience when I complete a piece of artwork. I spent hours and hours under my teacher’s supervision, learning to see. Along with that came the mechanical dexterity to transfer what I see to canvas. I am the mistress of a single large brush, honing it to a point where needed, and gobbing great swaths elsewhere. My brush dances, and is no longer a barrier to the creative process. There are colors. There are colors within colors. Light and shade do their own magical dance.
One comes up and asks how to mix for flesh tones? I stare at her wondering if she has been listening, looking? There are dozens of colors for our flesh. Even the back of our hand is roadmap. Blue-green tracery just under the skin. A light tan. The deep shadows between the fingers.
She wants a formula, to give her a reliable result.
But the rules don’t matter a whit if you have not learned to see the dance.Yup.
The old saying in music (esp jazz, where improvisation is a valued skill) is that you have to learn the rules of music so well that you can forget them.
Great musicians will learn to break the rules, but know how to justify their seeming rule-breaking musically right afterwards.
Hard to explain, but a jazz musician will play a riff/motif in the completely wrong key to build tension, but then will justify it by shifting to the "proper" key that explains why they played what they played. In other words, on paper they WERE breaking the rules by playing notes that were not in the chord, but temporarily suspended the rules for a greater effect.
(I remember a music teacher who said another way to cover a mistake was to repeat it, as if to say, "I MEANT to do that!" Obviously a questionable strategy, depending on how obvious the mistake was!)
Yes, in art there are conventions that are followed, a re-telling of ancient patterns that people recognize and reliably respond to. I maintain, though, that codifying the conventions is never enough. The best art comes in the flow.
Just remembering that there is no objective "bests" in art, as that's a subjective value judgment, where the determination of what is beautiful IS in the eye of the beholder.
Something I referred to earlier was the dependence of artists to their senses of perception, esp their eyes. I've had a few patients who developed cataracts over the years, and failed to account for how it may have effected their use of color as a result. After they had cataracts removed, some were shocked to see just how biased their color selections had become, as cataracts filter out sensitivity to some colors, and they over-compensate as a result.
There's a book called "Eye of the Artist" that examines how some of great artists in history MAY have been influenced by ocular disease which may play a role in their impressionist works. Interesting stuff, as it high-lights how variable perception really is....
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jgnat
When it comes to art and pattern, I think we are singing the same song. About ocular disease and how it affected artists, I think Monet is an obvious example.
