Categories or Degrees of Existence (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 11:36 (5240 days ago) @ Tim

Tim imagines one bug telling another that there are humans, while others laugh at him. 
If you care to scroll back to the thread An Analogy, you will find a little poem posted on Friday 23 October 2009 at 11.19, which may give you a chuckle.-You have extended my observation about materialists minimizing the problem of complexity to a general human tendency towards simplification, e.g. reducing multiple gods to one. You are right. It is said that even the many Hindu gods are in fact simply aspects of the one supreme being (Brahma). You also relate this principle to "Functional Reality" and capitalism. On an earlier thread we discussed the reductive manner in which we use language to kid ourselves that we understand phenomena which in fact are a total mystery to us. A typical example is our identification of mental faculties such as consciousness, the unconscious, reason, memory etc. Most people will assume that the terms actually explain the process, whereas in fact we haven't a clue how any of these areas of our mental activity work. 95% of the universe is unknown to us, so we call this "dark matter" and "dark energy", and we use the terms as if they actually meant something. "God" is probably the best example of all. No matter what name you give him, it is just a word to denote something unknowable. Perhaps this is the only way we can deceive ourselves into thinking we have a grasp of ultimate realities.-Your thought/behaviour acronym of SOLACE does indeed sound like a petty "cool" way of organizing priorities. Like George I enjoy puzzles, and you set me off on the trail of more general lifestyle priorities, though I'm going to cheat by making this plural as I have two indispensable Ss. How about Science, Orderliness, Love, Art (= the arts), Cash, Empathy, Sport? -As regards your feeling that if there is a God, it's not the God of the established religions, yes, we agree. But most religions may have a central core of truth in them, since there is certainly some kind of life force responsible for our existence. I include religions which we in the West arrogantly label primitive (why should a totem pole be seen as more primitive than a cross, or a dance as more primitive than the Eucharist?). I don't see much difference between venerating Jehovah, Allah, the Earth Diver or Mother Nature. What irks me is the arrogance of those who claim to know the precise nature of that life force and are intolerant of those who do not share their subjective vision of the worlds we know and don't know. This group ranges from religious to atheistic fundamentalists. -I hope you managed to recapture your neighbour's cow.