Philosophising on the Evo vs Creo debate.

I guess it is a possibility. I don't see why not.An emotional reaction to the idea: it feels suffocating to me think that all is mental.

Yes, abstraction, a fundamental of language. Is it real?lfen

Just associations on my part. This feeling of suffocating might lead you to a perception about what the Buddha meant by duhkka, suffering, samsara. When the whole mental thing collapses then there is vast emptiness and freedom, nirvana, awakening.lfen

I don't think so. Seems like that would be tantamount to saying that whatever idea that pops into our head is real.

What do you mean by the "whole mental thing"?

Yet is has a kind of reality in that it can effect outcomes.The proven ideas about germs vs. unproved ideas about contamination from say people outside our caste can both lead to washing hands which can lead to fewer incidents of some infectious diseases for example.There is what happens, our experience of what happens (sensory experience), and our ideas about what happened, what caused it, what results it might bring, whether what happened was good, bad, neutral, etc. This realm of ideas may be what the believers refers to as spirit but then confuse it with matter/energy happenings. On the other hand emotions are sometimes asserted to be spirit.So what "unreal" is seems to me harder to grasp than what "real" is. I think because it's mental and does have a sort of reality. I mean we can remember it and talk about and it can effect behavious and results.lfen

By mental thing I mean the way in which experience is construed, our everyday sense of being in this elaborate world of experience, knowledge, belief, memory.You said considering the universe to be mental resulted in a feeling of suffocation. That seemed right to me is some sense but that there is also a possiblity that though it is sustained through out most people's life perhaps it's not inevitable. That is what those who experience awakening talk about.But I wouldn't put much more into this, not in this thread anyway. It was just something that occurred to me as I read your post.lfen

I think we are running into some confusion about what the word "real" means (which is normal). And this gets even more confusing if we deny the reality of physicality. It becomes a messy maze, too deep for me.

I think you are saying that the way our experience is construed is false (all is process, there are no individuals, etc--that's the reality).Yes, my emotional preference is for discreetness--that is, clear distinctness between things. I think it's important to register emotional reactions to ideas. It can be a bias. It may be, though I can't see it, that I have an emotional bias against the idea that something can come from nothing since so many posters said it was fine with them.I can recall reading Emerson in graduate school (he was a 'transcendentalist'--at least during his younger years) and my emotional reaction to reading him was extreme suffocation: everything is everything else, he seemed to be saying. I didn't want everything to be everything else. I wanted things to be separated out).

This may be a touch off topic, but I'm not quite sure, since it deals with reality.In the western world, we can deny the existence of everything except for ourselves. In other words, I can deny that I'm actually typing, and that this typing is a real event, but I cannot deny that my mind is "real". Or soul. Whatever it is that makes us tick. Descarte ran into this problem. Actually, 1984 is a perfect excercise in a reality created solely by the mind. For those who've read it, O'Brien basically tells Winston that reality is created by the mind and the Party controls the mind.As to the whole eastern religion sense, they are a touch wierd compared to western thinking, especially in how they view the world. In Buddhism and Hinduism, there is this desire to become one with everything, and everything becomes one. The sound "Om" is the sound of the universe and it means oneness. SO far as I understand it. The evo/creo debate most likely wouldn't occur in an eastern mind set.Reason one is that most of them aren't christians (or muslims or jews). As far as I can tell, all the creo people are christians, and the only reason I can see for them trying to strike down evolution is that they are scared. Scared that science will change the world and make mankind seem so insignificant, when their religion tells them that they are God's special creatures. Scared that their worldview is threatened will be extinguished by science. And scared that science will do away with religion. And their fright is pointless. Last time i checked, science is an objective method for explaining the natural world with natural causes. Nowhere in any accepted theory or law does science say that God does not exist. Of course, it also does not say that God does exist.reason 2 is that they have a totally different worldview, in which they aren't on the pedastal of specialness that western religion puts man on. TO them it does not matter that we share our ancestry with chimps. What is important in their religion is that they come to being at one with everything.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

But the Creostians also speak out against every philosophy under the sun and all other religions - even ones which are most unlikely to cause any threat at all to their own belief.A Christian stands on the inside and calls on all others to come from a myriad of outsides - to the inside. For they know what it is like on the outside themselves. They were all once there. For they themselves came from every philosopy and religion under the sun. Some of mans knowledge comes from His experienceThis message has been edited by iano, 05-May-2006 08:58 PM

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"A Christian is just one beggar telling other beggars where to find bread."

Is that really an emotional bias or perhaps a knower bias. Or would you see them as the same thing?

How you feel is after all how you feel. I don't argue that.
As for myself cherrying seems so much richer than cherry. The concept kills the multilayerd meanings of the process and limits it to a thing. Cherry is still there only it's more than it was not less. I can still appreciate the beauty of a waterfall even while knowing it's an event in the river which is another larger event. I love many of the plays and characters of Shakespeare. Were Mercutio, Romeo, and Juliet real or false? Were the performances in say the Zeffirelli movie version real or false?As I see it when the ego, insisting it is real, models the universe and pushes it's model hard it either falls into a dispair of nihilism or the logical contradictions of mainstream religion.It's not that the ego doesn't exist. It does as a function. It doesn't exist as a permanent thing. It's a function that consciousness identifies with and confuses itself with. It's as if a hand thought it was a fist and then out of anxiety sought reassurrance that it would always be a fist.Non dual teachings push the their model consciously producing paradoxial language but they don't claim their language is correct. Is light a particle or a wave?You are always in a state of infinite regress without noticing it. That is where the optical illusion of the "I" not "eye" is. Anything you point to and say is you is an object to you. You are the subject, the eye looking everywhere but unable to look at itself.It's not that this is an error. It's a function but there are aspects of the function that are so confining as to be painful. The notion of awakening points to a way out. It's as if the hand in the fist begins to tire or cramp and eventually relaxes and opens. It's no longer a fist but it discovers it never was a fist. I suspect you say "but it was a hand". And this is a limit to the analogy particularly in that I used conventional subject predicate noun verb English to express it.Those who have awakened try to express what they discovered themselves to be when they stopped egoing, or fisting but it's not something that can be as easily labeled as a hand, or even spirit or soul. Time I left for work.
lfen

If you mean what I think you mean by "knower bias," there is no such thing, in my view. If I rationally intuit that this cannot be, then there must be a contradiction somewhere in the idea that something comes from nothing. An emotional bias is different. If I like an idea for some reason--say because it makes me feel good about myself--then I may have a tendency to think that idea true even if I have logical doubts. This is what one must guard against.

How can you determine for a fact that some of our knowledge comes from Him? How can you objectively test that hypothesis? Everything I know comes from what I have experienced and logically thought out (also an experience). But how can someone's knowledge come from a supernatural source?All christians were once on the oustside? I would say most start off being a christian. For being a religion that promotes tolerance, they aren't very tolerant in many cases. They speak out against all other philosphies that aren't christian becasue the religion is geared toward self protection, sort of like how all non-muslism are paganistic and must be converted or killed in Islam. ANything not seen as christian becomes a threat to the religion, However, christianity does welcome anyone into the fold and forgives them for their previous beliefs.