People such as yourself (and younger me) foolishly believe that you can teach most people philosophy. Most people do not have the intellect, inclination, or patience to understand philosophy, whereas we think nothing of it and find it fascinating. We're blinded by our high intelligence.
I can't really refute that, but I wanted to share the shorthand I started using: that such people that have no capacity for self-improvement or a desire to question the world aren't really on the level of "human", they are merely "people".
I have already conceded that many people desire the authority and guidance present in religion. Others simply don't give a damn about anything greater than the present moment. I'm not convinced they're all hopeless, but I do try to rearrange my expectations in understanding the difference.
I think that the intelligent have been irresponsible and petulant in their pursuit of destroying religion merely for the triumph of reason over dogma.
They should have stood up an alternate religion. But they wanted to keep their hands clean, and so the progressives and post modernists got there instead and planted new seeds in the field the gnostics had just finished burning.
I have spent twenty five years looking for a religion that has the spine stand up to these people. Only one I've seen is Islam, and I refuse to walk that way, it's a cure that's worse than the cancer.
We need someone willing to do what Joseph Smith did, but in a Kekistani way.
It's not me. I'm not a prophet. I could say the words but I don't have the qualities of leadership, the force of personality, to make the words stick.
That's a fair assessment. The destruction/weakening or religion was a sort of gleeful pursuit for a while. Most participants may have truly meant well.
It reminds me of some of the summaries I've read of Nietzsche's work. From what I understand, he tried to address how a man (if not society altogether) could move on in life after religion is no longer an option. I'm a little embarassed that I have yet to actually read the related work, because I keep finding opportunities to use it in discussion here.
And yeah, totally agree on leadership. Would make things so much smoother. But I think about it sometimes and wonder what it'd take for us to accept some dude as a leader - not so much that he may lack qualities, as that we're all perhaps very jaded about opportunists, scammers, and controlled opposition. Would a new leader need to overcome that himself, or would the leader actually require that we're ready to accept him? I'd hope for the former, and that excludes me from the running because it's far beyond my ability.
But I think about it sometimes and wonder what it'd take for us to accept some dude as a leader
Oh I think we've already seen that.
One of the things I'm very glad about for having played EVE Online is that it taught me a lot about how cults of personality work. TheMittani. Milo. Trump. Jordan Peterson. John Brown. Hitler. Jesus. Moses.
Its all a lot like television wrestling. People want to believe in someone. They want that someone to stand up and fight back.
They don't have to be virtuous. They don't even have to be genuine.
They just can't be proven to be ingenuine... while they're alive. And that's the tricky part.
If Jordan Peterson had come out of his drug coma and said he'd encountered god, had a revelation and wrote new scripture, whether he actually believes he did or doesn't, I believe he could have become the largest North American religion over night.
The trouble is, it's beneath him and people like him to do it.
And that's the real problem. That the smartest people are not willing to bear a little guilt over lying for the greater good. They'll lie about all kinds of things for themselves, but the libertarian intellectual sees the SJW's mind games, playing religious prophet, as beneath them. Enlightenment fanatics who haven't gotten the memo that the SJWs are a few pages ahead of them... that social justice is the destination of the enlightenment.
Religion is philosophy for dummies.
People such as yourself (and younger me) foolishly believe that you can teach most people philosophy. Most people do not have the intellect, inclination, or patience to understand philosophy, whereas we think nothing of it and find it fascinating. We're blinded by our high intelligence.
I can't really refute that, but I wanted to share the shorthand I started using: that such people that have no capacity for self-improvement or a desire to question the world aren't really on the level of "human", they are merely "people".
I have already conceded that many people desire the authority and guidance present in religion. Others simply don't give a damn about anything greater than the present moment. I'm not convinced they're all hopeless, but I do try to rearrange my expectations in understanding the difference.
See, I'm a little more cynical than that.
I think that the intelligent have been irresponsible and petulant in their pursuit of destroying religion merely for the triumph of reason over dogma.
They should have stood up an alternate religion. But they wanted to keep their hands clean, and so the progressives and post modernists got there instead and planted new seeds in the field the gnostics had just finished burning.
I have spent twenty five years looking for a religion that has the spine stand up to these people. Only one I've seen is Islam, and I refuse to walk that way, it's a cure that's worse than the cancer.
We need someone willing to do what Joseph Smith did, but in a Kekistani way.
It's not me. I'm not a prophet. I could say the words but I don't have the qualities of leadership, the force of personality, to make the words stick.
That's a fair assessment. The destruction/weakening or religion was a sort of gleeful pursuit for a while. Most participants may have truly meant well.
It reminds me of some of the summaries I've read of Nietzsche's work. From what I understand, he tried to address how a man (if not society altogether) could move on in life after religion is no longer an option. I'm a little embarassed that I have yet to actually read the related work, because I keep finding opportunities to use it in discussion here.
And yeah, totally agree on leadership. Would make things so much smoother. But I think about it sometimes and wonder what it'd take for us to accept some dude as a leader - not so much that he may lack qualities, as that we're all perhaps very jaded about opportunists, scammers, and controlled opposition. Would a new leader need to overcome that himself, or would the leader actually require that we're ready to accept him? I'd hope for the former, and that excludes me from the running because it's far beyond my ability.
Oh I think we've already seen that.
One of the things I'm very glad about for having played EVE Online is that it taught me a lot about how cults of personality work. TheMittani. Milo. Trump. Jordan Peterson. John Brown. Hitler. Jesus. Moses.
Its all a lot like television wrestling. People want to believe in someone. They want that someone to stand up and fight back.
They don't have to be virtuous. They don't even have to be genuine.
They just can't be proven to be ingenuine... while they're alive. And that's the tricky part.
If Jordan Peterson had come out of his drug coma and said he'd encountered god, had a revelation and wrote new scripture, whether he actually believes he did or doesn't, I believe he could have become the largest North American religion over night.
The trouble is, it's beneath him and people like him to do it.
And that's the real problem. That the smartest people are not willing to bear a little guilt over lying for the greater good. They'll lie about all kinds of things for themselves, but the libertarian intellectual sees the SJW's mind games, playing religious prophet, as beneath them. Enlightenment fanatics who haven't gotten the memo that the SJWs are a few pages ahead of them... that social justice is the destination of the enlightenment.