Originality < Attained Truth

"It is as difficult to appropriate anothers thoughts as it is to invent your own."
-Emerson

There is no shame in referencing another who has made fine points.

Subscribing to a god requires motive. As does any action. The man in this video points out a few motives that people like to used as an explanation in defense of their un-defendable belief in a god.

The deist would not believe that a god would add value to their lives. This may be why many individuals who choose to believe in god are uncomfortable with the stance of a deist. It removes all arguments, flawed as they are, to believe. What motivates a deist; peer pressure, too proud to change, sentimentality, saving social face... its hard to say.

For this deist it is probably a little of all of those. Still the choice is made to believe. I will have to take time to contemplate my own motives and perhaps make an exhaustive list of all my personal non sequiturs so that they may be hewn down by infallible logic.

No more originality

I feel like every topic I wish to expound has already been explained in depth with more eloquence and clarity than I am capable. So until I stumble on an idea to which I can add value, I will just highlight others ability to do so.

Honesty

Honesty

Impecably stated, simply put-- Devulgances, confessions, antics, and wispered secrets are what I have long believed to be me. The volnerability one exposes in this type of autobiographical nakedness is trusted to very few. Personal perception dictates the individual reality each of us subscribe to. Acknowledging that we each live in alternate precieved realities causes experiencing many perspectives to become priceless. Only through edifying disscussion can perspectives be shared, through biographical nakedness the perspective comes to life. The self proclaimed bare trueth can't be trusted, on account of people projecting and revieling only a trueth that creates the image of themselves they desire to be presieved by others. I have not projected my desiered image deliberatly in a few relationships. Very few.   

Over the past year I have devulged all of my true-self to my closest companions. My personal shortcomings have recieved critasizm. Naturally. As well it seams my failures have been recieved with more dissapointment to others than to myself. Others develop expectations for the people within their perseption. I'll use religion as one example in a sea of ether self-prescribed or peer-prescribed expectations. As a religius individual expectations to always perform in the prescribed behavior of the religion is inevitable. The expectations gone unmet that peers have projected onto me have let the projecting peers down.  The peers in my life who's expectations have not been met seam offended. Recognizing my perception of reality will never be perfect I understand I may not see this precieved disstain for my past for what the reality of the reaction is. 

The reaction, the words, they poison me. Honesty was going to set me free and instead has bound me to acts I will never do again. Acts that in my mind are now not WHO I am but part of the path that got me WHERE I am. The words "who" and "where" are in no way synonamiss. 

If my failure hurts you I will stop hurting you by removing myself from your circle of perception. If my failure provides justification and reassurance that your own shortcomings need not be considered or addressed causing you feelings of relief from a just guilt, I will stop inablaling you and remove myself from your circle of perception. When my attendance in your circle of perception causes hurt or allows for justification my attendance is creating a reality that is not conducive to self-realization.

I recognize a few of my faults and respectully understand there are many I have yet to realize. One I have realized is my inability to spell many symple words. The effort required to learn to spell them seams like a wast of time. Which exposes another shortcoming of mine: slothfulness. If you have snickered and recieved some feeling of satisfaction while finding my spelling errors in these few paragraphs then you are exactly who this letter is directed to. I wish to be encuraged with respect, not made a fool of or taunted for my imperfections. I'm quite accomplished at achieving both those things on my own, no assistance required.

Seeking companions who will encuraged one to do and be better is behavior that will lead to personal progress and success. Spending time with those who degrade and dissable ones character is self-destructive. 

One may read this and begin to pick out the imperfections of my logic successfully convincing themselves that I have errored in my dessission. This type of justification via critasizm is the behavior I have been referring to and stands as further evadence in support of my choice to distance myself from your circle of perception. 

Fair well dear friends

Reading

We are reading Kurt Vonneguts player piano. Join us. We will be reading all of his novels.

My painting and comment on Mikes post

Out Of The Ocean Into The Knowledge Of Good And Evil
54" by 40" Oil on canvas


I think Mike made some great points.

Miracles are nether faith building or believable (by definition they can't be posable). I would go as far as to say it makes the witness to the miracle look even less credible than if they had not rehearsed the story at all.

Any how, I choose to believe in God and I choose to believe in revelation. At the same time I recognize it is not real unless proven. So admittedly I believe in a story about one type of God among many stories of many types of gods, and my choice to believe it is not based in any type of scientific process or miraculous experience.

of miracles summary

okay, as a really late response to most of the religious posts, i have an interjection. i'm not going to pretend to be educated in philosophy and to have just stumbled across this in my elaborate quest for understanding. so, david hume wrote "an enquiry concerning human understanding" and within focuses on miracles.

many of his ideas have been kicking around in my head but not fully developed and as well structured as his but... we receive miracles from the testimony of other. as such, we should treat them as second hand and be critical of them. when we analyze things we use evidence to prove them. when we have evidence for two sides we use the dominating one. when miracles are inserted into this we find the two sides being the testimony of witnesses vs the laws of nature. both sides are founded in experience. for miracles to be the victor they must have the testimony more dominating then the contradiction of the laws of nature. he then gives four reasons for not believing.

1 there are not enough people of trust that support the testimony to prove it true. 2 man is infatuated with wonder and mystery and has the tendency to reject the consistent history for gratification. 3 those who believe and perpetuate miracle are of ignorant consciences. and my favorite 4 anyone of one faith rejects other faiths miracles because of their opposition in theology. therefore miracles disprove miracles.

keep in mind this is just a regurgitation so i might be missing pivotal premisses. in response to these i am of experience to agree with hume. while serving a 2 year mission in canada i developed some rough versions of these concepts. jackD has some very intriguing ideas on this concept as well. I ran into people almost every day that would tell me they were of a certain faith and that they had seen an angle or god had spoken to them. i have recently decided that i won't believe something until i can reproduce the experience myself. that's obviously flawed but i use variance depending on the circumstances. there is way too much to get into about this article but i do want to quote a section.

"With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality: he may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause: or even where this delusion has not place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of mankind in any other circumstances; and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgement to canvass his evidence: what judgement they have, they renounce by principle, in these sublime and mysterious subjects: or if they were ever so willing to employ it, passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence: and his impudence overpowers their credulity."

i often wonder as to what promotes religionist to believe and preach what they do. for my personal experience of full dedication to christianity for two years, after being on the fence my entire life previous, and not getting one portion of evidence following. don't misunderstand. i'm approaching the theology and general "truth" of any religion. as i read this the only thing that was going through my head is the leaders of the mormon church.

so i thought about the extraction, which is available online legally free here, and realized this can be a criticism of man made religion . religion is the belief in the unnatural. man tends to need to explain the unknown. man also tends to enjoy the gratification of embellishing ideas. as hume closes he mentions that he believes as man becomes more sophisticated we will move on beyond these primitive ideals and realize the logic and experience are the only trustworthy beliefs.

"Hume asserts that no testimony can ever count as a probability, let alone a proof, of the existence of miracles. All testimony in favor of miracles is based in experience, and this same experience opposes this testimony with contrary testimony and with the laws of nature. While God may be all-powerful and could contradict the laws of nature, we cannot ascribe any attributes or actions to him except for those that experience teaches us."-sparknotes (too much to care to summarize myself)

if nature hasn't done it, god hasn't willed it, and man never experienced it.