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te_alset t1_j49iqt9 wrote

Philosophy has always been important. Religion is about control. Don’t believe me? How about our mythical sky wizards battle it out and cause a thunderstorm

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Fortkes t1_j49tkhr wrote

I think religion was invented so we don't go crazy with existential dread. But sure, later it definitely got 'militarized' which is just another form of false security.

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[deleted] t1_j49x53f wrote

Eh. Glossing over a lot with this:

So many people talking about here about religion who've never had a significant positive spiritual experience in their lives.

When you experience it, you know it, and you understand it as different. It's like your perspective shifts, and then you understand that religion isn't even about death or existentialism. The silly dogmatic conservative nonsense basically evaporates, and people who use religion to enforce their will end up seeming like silly empty-minded fools.

I am technically agnostic and know it can technically be my brain. I can never disregard that logical possibility because I am ultimately logical. I do not believe that you can arrive at this place through logic alone - it is only through experience that it can be understood.

There is a reason that both Ludwig Wittgenstein and John von Neumann - two exceptionally intelligent but also exceptionally rational, concise, skeptical cogent minds died believing in God. But it's not the raging thunderbolt throwing old testament God, exactly. It's more like "that which originates all reality, which is also everything contained within reality, and is therefore also being."

Just to toss something in.

I'm really curious to see how this goes with AI. Part of me is worried that overly rational people will just assume that morality can be programmed into an AI without this sort of spirituality (and I do think this is a naïve pursuit - without spirituality, the root of everything is just nihilism, truly, and I say that as a literal former nihilist - the highest form of actualization in the framework of nihilism is power).

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