@Indrid-Cold said in My new world view:
@pe7erpark3r Thanx for the reply fella. I mean, I should stress that I agree 100% with the vibe of your thinking.
@pe7erpark3r said in My new world view:
He created us so He could give His own life, to save us from ourselves. It really is a beautiful story – at least in my head it looks like that
...it's just that the execution of the whole affair is just a total head-scratcher to me. Pray allow me to elaborate on my grievances. The best-case-scenario, that I can see, is a kind of cosmic inside job. This supposedly loving relationship between God and Man (and it's so cool that you see it like that), in my mind, runs like this: God is a corrupt exec in a county council. He's handing out contracts for some kind of public service deal, and He really wants to give it to his best mate, Mankind. But to avoid the accusation of nepotism or favouritism, He deliberately fakes some examples of other people's work, but makes them subtly, subtly rubbish, so that when the spending watchdog reviews the audit, nothing will look amiss. And just to spell out the analogy: the rubbishy fake contract proposals are any section of Mankind which Mankind Himself would agree is blatantly rubbish, if only he stopped to think about it.
So God awards the lucrative public service gig to Mankind, He hands it right over and gives Mankind a kind of smirking, knowing wink. And later, maybe boozing it up down Stringfellows, Mankind says to God, "Oh, just out of interest, let's have a look at some of those fake proposals you drew up". And God just hands him reams, and reams, and, reams, and reams. Like, the densest documents that've ever been written. And Mankind is like, "WTF, G? Why did you go into so much detail?"
You see what I'm saying? Consciousness is a hell of a thing: I'm no fan of the human race, but just as a matter of good grace and solidarity, it's necessary for me to believe that everyone is conscious, even the most rubbish people you can imagine. One way or another, God is being unfair to a lot of people. Either He's lying to us that rubbish people are conscious and deserve our sense of human solidarity, or He's dishonouring the very idea of consciousness by giving people apparently very sophisticated minds, but they always, ALWAYS fall completely short of seeing that. y'know, capitalism is hell, laziness is evil, Gogglebox deserves to exist, etc.
I mean, you were right to mention free will, but I don't think it applies here. I'm talking about being-and-nothingness absolutes, and raw concepts. Existential self-determination doesn't come into it. Eh?
Maybe I should elaborate a bit... I've drawn up my metaphor for God and His relation to his creation... I haven't drawn my image of mankind.
You know that consciousness is not the same as intelligence at all right? Consciousness is simply your ability to perceive, to perceive what is happening around you visually and with your senses, and to perceive your emotions, and to perceive your thoughts. It is not necessary to think consciousness as that which "acts", consciousness might as well be something very passive, e.g. your thoughts happening to you, necessarily, logically or illogically/irrationally. Consciousness does not automatically make you the actor, the self-realizing entity. But it does make you an entity, somebody able to feel, somebody able to be someone else's counterpart.
So to be quite clear, I do not think that intelligence is what makes you you. Robots can be intelligent, but they cannot be conscious – at this point in time, and in all likelyhood never – it is not the same thing.
So, to be quite fair, I actually don't really think, that we do have this kind of freedom, the freedom of self-realization. I mean just look at yourself, your biological sex, you hair color, your accent, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you see the world... you have not created that, you have not done that. You are not a completely free entity realizing itself to whatever it wants. And when you make decisions, you are also not realizing anything new actually, you tend to do what you always do, and you tend to do what you like. If you like green, you'll wear green sweaters. But was it a conscious decision, that you like green? No, it was not. You are not deciding this, and certainly not consciously. This too is something that happens to your consciousness, that you only perceive.
Now... I've drawn an image of human beings that seem to be puppets, biological robots, just consciously experiencing all that must happen, all they must do because the future is based on the past and on random chance. And let me say this very clearly: if the world was a purely materialistic, this depressing world would be reality. I do not see a way around that honestly. Do you? Can you see a loophole into which human freedom could enter in a purely materialistic world?
Well there is one loophole... that there is something like spirit. That the world is made up of more than matter. That there is a reality in which you can decide without your decision having any cause other than yourself. This is freedom, this is the only way in which freedom can exist. And I don't think I'm mistaken about it, I really think that every materialist who believes in human freedom, has either a different definition of that term, or he has not thought this through properly.
I believe this freedom exists, I believe that the world has a spiritual nature, that is behind all material nature. But what is spiritual freedom? It certainly is not the choice wether you like green, or wether you like chocolate icecream, or wether you prefer a woman's body with a beautiful face over a woman who has curves. This obviously is innate.
Gosh yeah, there are lots and lots of parts missing, for you to understand my how I can think the way I think. I'm only starting to see that.
So let's continue. I believe the world is not made up of freely choosing individuals. I think most of the things we perceive as choices, are not actually choices, but results of choices that came beforehand. I think that the producer of Gogglebox did not consciously decide to create gogglebox. Quite in contrast he made some moral choice beforehand that drove her to do this. And not only this, it is not his own personal choice that lead to the creation of gogglebox, it is the sum of collective choices of all mankind that had this terrible outcome.
You get me? You do evil, Comrade Dmitri does evil, Tania Alexander also does evil, and makes herself a tool for evil, and thus – due to all this evil – gogglebox becomes a reality. It is not a conscious stupid choice to create gogglebox... that is only the surface, that is as what it appears. But below the surface is the spiritual reality. If you do good, you become an instrument of goodness, if you do bad, you become an instrument of evil. Your conscious choices are not in fact conscious choices. And they are not free choices. However your spritual choices, those are the real ones, those are the free choices.
And of course it is hard to get a grip on what those spiritual choices really are, because spirit is not something that can be understood by the mind. The mind is what thinks, what concludes, and maybe even the place where the emotions sit. But the mind is not the entity that makes the free choices. The place of the choices is not a thinking, logical entity. The place of the choices is the soul... something the mind can never understand, nor has to understand. The soul is not a thinking entity. The soul is a knowing entity. It knows that it does evil, or it could not be called evil.
And what we see acted out in the world, seem like lots of stupid conscious choices, lots of lack of mind. But that is not the case. The truth is, we see the results of many spiritual, many moral and evil choices of many many souls. Choices that are free precisely because they have no cause. And those choices make people instruments of good or evil. Not their free conscious decisions, a thing that does not exist as people define it, but their free, spiritual, moral choices, that are not based on logic, but simply on the soul's knowledge of good and bad, the soul's connection to God.
I think that the whole state of the world, is the result of our collective evil choices and of giving evil power over us.
Have you gotten a glimpse how I am able to think that humanity is responsible for the mess it is in, and that God loves us? I guess I haven't been able to see the parallel between my thinking and the "mind-hive" idea you brought up before. Now I do. I set a few outside parameters a bit different than you, but there is certainly a similarity don't you think?
