For former Mormons who became atheists

[_Hermes]

All I mean by the universe being "more real" than my conception of it is that it escapes definitive categorization. When I was a baby, I saw things and had no words to point to them with (and fewer concepts for understanding them myself). The things were still there, even though I did not "understand" them fully or properly. Now that I am grown, I see more than I saw as a baby, and have more concepts that I use more skillfully than I have in the past, but even so reality is bigger than my ability to understand it. I will never create a concept large enough to hold the whole universe (even as little of that as I am capable of experiencing in one lifetime). Some people point to this inability on my part with the word "God" while others prefer to use other words (like "human ignorance" or something similar).

All of us experience more reality than we communicate (to ourselves and others). We necessarily reduce things to caricatures of themselves, call that understanding, and proceed as though it were perfect until reality brings us up short (by failing to live up to our expectations).

[_Hermes]

We do all live by faith, I think. I certainly do. If I wanted to characterize faith universally (in such a way that people everywhere might recognize it in their lives), I would say that faith is the body of experience and "street smarts" we call up when making decisions whose outcome is not guaranteed. We all make bets with the universe, every day, no matter what books we read, what gods we pray to or ignore, etc. Some of our bets pay off, and some don't. There is no perfect betting strategy. There are some that work better than others (the scientific method is preferable for closed contexts in which all the important variables are isolable, I think), but none of them defeats built-in human ignorance (a necessary feature of our temporality and the contingency of all existence as we experience it).

[_Hermes]

Another metaphor occurs to me. Imagine the universe as an infinite landscape that alters itself continually, such that every map we make of it is inadequate. As good as any individual map may be, as much as it may help me orient myself, it will never show me everything that there is. (Even if it did, the result would be chaos and confusion, not meaning, which exists in the absence of total information, not the possession of it.)

[_Hermes]

You can love a child and discipline it, naturally. But the same love (parental bond) that leads you to discipline your child responsibly leads somebody else to treat theirs harshly (or at the very least, in a way that does not conduce to good relations). To love something is inevitably to spend some time being disgusted by it, being angry with it, and generally expressing the negative side of attachment (which is not and never can be an unqualified good).

[_subgenius]

All I mean by the universe being "more real" than my conception of it is that it escapes definitive categorization.

for example?

When I was a baby, I saw things and had no words to point to them with (and fewer concepts for understanding them myself). The things were still there, even though I did not "understand" them fully or properly.

Not sure how having a vocabulary changes anything other than how one communicates. Knowing the "word" for something is not required in order to understand, have knowledge of, or realize that same something.

Now that I am grown, I see more than I saw as a baby, and have more concepts that I use more skillfully than I have in the past, but even so reality is bigger than my ability to understand it.

?

I will never create a concept large enough to hold the whole universe (even as little of that as I am capable of experiencing in one lifetime).

you could always use the concept "universe".

Some people point to this inability on my part with the word "God" while others prefer to use other words (like "human ignorance" or something similar).

fascinating...which people point to that?

All of us experience more reality than we communicate (to ourselves and others).

We necessarily reduce things to caricatures of themselves, call that understanding, and proceed as though it were perfect until reality brings us up short (by failing to live up to our expectations).

I don't buy any of that.
1. I experience something
2. I reduce that experience to a caricature
3. I somehow substitute #1 with #2
4. I become disappointed with what I have at #3 because it is not #1
5. Seemingly i am still aware of #1 in order to be disappointed with #3
OR I start over at #1
at which case #3 is already "reduced" and thus #1 exceeds expectations
UNLESS I mean expand in lieu of reduce at #2
at which case the whole thing seems a rather silly exercise in memory and vocabulary.
or worse
it is a regurgitation of A Critique of Pure Reason
in other words you subscribe to some sort of transcendental view of thinking in perception....etc.
the whole "object with the thing itself" playground

huh?

[_subgenius]

You can love a child and discipline it, naturally. But the same love (parental bond) that leads you to discipline your child responsibly leads somebody else to treat theirs harshly (or at the very least, in a way that does not conduce to good relations). To love something is inevitably to spend some time being disgusted by it, being angry with it, and generally expressing the negative side of attachment (which is not and never can be an unqualified good).

complete Balderdash!

[_Res Ipsa]

You can love a child and discipline it, naturally. But the same love (parental bond) that leads you to discipline your child responsibly leads somebody else to treat theirs harshly (or at the very least, in a way that does not conduce to good relations). To love something is inevitably to spend some time being disgusted by it, being angry with it, and generally expressing the negative side of attachment (which is not and never can be an unqualified good).

complete Balderdash!

I'm having a hard time following. Can we back up to your original statements about the relationship between love and hate?

Love exists only a few moments away from hatred, which is its other face (not its categorical opposite: love and hatred turn into and inspire each other all the time; the categorical opposite of love/hatred is apathy or indifference).

It seems to me you are saying that both love and hate have a necessary condition: not-apathy. But I don't think that gets you to opposite sides of the same coin. Couldn't not-apathy be a necessary condition for a whole lot of other feelings toward another? Also, how do you get to love/hate being somehow necessarily connected from the fact that they have a common necessary condition?

Maybe it's helpful to cast what you describe as "parental bond" as not-apathy rather than love. The existence of not-apathy would then enable both love and hate, but not necessarily require one or both. Then, for each specific instance of behavior, we can talk about love or hate as motivation, but not necessarily both at the same time.

[Guest]

I think Kant is right about many things (e.g. we come hardwired to appreciate certain things as real). I am necessarily stuck living with my own perceptions of reality, which are inherently faulty (as I discover when I rely on them where they are unreliable). While there are ways of correcting my perception (methods of reasoning that improve perception akin to the way glasses improve eyesight), these ways do not make it possible for me to perceive things "perfectly" (beyond the horizon imposed by my humanity, which is inherently incapable of understanding total reality, in my experience).

The problem with concepts like "universe" and "God" is that they are hard to talk about meaningfully. If I do a lot of legwork, I can ask and even answer some meaningful questions about the universe/God, questions like these: is it contracting? is it expanding? does it exist in time and/or outside time? These questions are not useless, but they don't really get to the heart of what I want to know in order to live and be happy. I want to know whether the universe/God is kind. I want to know whether the universe/God is cruel. I want to know how the universe/God relates to me (whether its interaction with me is regular or normative in some way). I want to know how to get rid of evil. These questions are very useful, but the answers don't generalize well (since I don't experience reality/the universe/God the same way other people do). Life (reality, the universe, God) is both kind and cruel to me (and to others whom I observe). It is both regular (such that I can reap what I sow) and not (such that sometimes my crop dies randomly). Life (reality, the universe, God) does not lay itself bare to me, or to anyone else I have met, such that we understand it fundamentally: its processes are mostly hidden; even when we do a lot of legwork to uncover them, what we see inside nature's black box is not really useful in answering the questions I have (e.g. how do we get rid of evil? shove it out the front door and it comes in through the back).

Maybe I stumble across some antibiotic that helps me combat a terrible disease. A great evil is overcome (for a while). Then resistant strains of the disease emerge and my new treatment is worse than useless: it has created an even more virulent form of the original evil. Or maybe I succeed in eradicating the original disease entirely, only to realize that that disease played a valuable role in maintaining ecological stability (that I have hopelessly disrupted). Good is evil, sometimes. Love is hatred. Life is death. I cannot see any way around this. But it is certainly possible that I am just a blind man stumbling where those with eyes walk purposefully.

[_Hermes]

Brad, I would call love and hate two manifestations of attachment. Attachment is an unavoidable part of life, I think, and it naturally manifests as both love (what we call it when we like it) and hate (what we call it when we don't).

[_Hermes]

Evidence that the universe is more real than my perceptions accumulates all the time, for example when I perceive that my foot is 5 inches from the stair I am ascending and it turns out it is only 2 (and I fall down). We are always making bets with the universe (including when we invest in a particular education or real estate) and losing (when there suddenly is no market for our skills or the value of our property drops through the floor).