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Thursday, December 29, 2005

"...it’s going to be very hard for you to get along with other people." Jesus, welcome to my life.

"Question everything, even questions. Then question why you would want to question everything. Then question why you would want to question why."

What I Learned About Religion in 2005 - Pop Occulture:
"1. I don’t know as much as I think I know. And I make mistakes all the time. Recognizing this has allowed me to keep moving forward, rather than stagnate. It’s kept me flexible, open to correction and alternate viewpoints (er, usually anyway).
2. Trying to understand what things mean can become a negative addiction which can become so overwhelming intellectually that it can cut you off from the simple experience of what things actually are.
3. Words are different from things. If you dig down deeply into these relationships, you’re likely to find that the things and the words that represent them are connected on a more or less arbitrary basis. Over time and across cultures, these relationships modulate very drastically.
4. Just as meaning may cut you off from simple experience, words have a tendency to cover up or replace the things they represent. Since these relationships are basically arbitrary, it’s important not to get too wound up in the maze of words. If you have trouble or get frustrated, remember that these aren’t “words,” they are lines and shapes on a screen, which refer to phonetic sounds made by the mouth of a primate, which have arbitrary connections to something totally vague called “meaning” which varies from primate to primate and from herd to herd. For an even better illustration of this, pick any word and repeat it to yourself out loud really fast until it loses meaning and starts to sound really strange. Try it now. “Primate,” “Primate,” “Primate.” primateprimateprimate pri ma tepr imat eprim ate….
5. If numbers 2-4 above are correct (which they may not be, based on number 1), then chances are good that we can’t trust words or meaning too far. We could maybe use them on a provisional basis, but not in any kind of absolute way. Even if we were to make an absolute “factual” statement, such as “All humans are primates,” it’s still just a string # of gibberish syllables assigned an arbitrary value by culture.
6. If assertions that we make are always questionable at a base level, then maybe it’s better to always question them (or maybe not, see number 1 above). What I mean by that is, by phrasing things as questions rather than assertions, we recognize that maybe they aren’t true, or at least maybe not in the way we thought they were...
10. If we are people and we agree that people are things rather than mean things... then this very likely indicates that people don’t actually make sense. Or more broadly, life doesn’t make sense. We do things and things happen but they just are. They don’t, in themselves, mean anything.
11. So where does meaning come from? One possible answer out of many is that meaning is something that we invent or project onto things. And it modulates from person to person across time and across cultures. But where and do we do the inventing or projecting? Many religions, philosophies and occult traditions offer different answers to and ways of exploring the implications of this question. If we can hold all of their answers to be equally true, equally gibberish, both true and gibberish and neither true nor gibberish, then we’re probably getting somewhere. But the question is: where?
12. The reason we have religions, philosophies and other story-systems is that these types of questions are weird and confusing. While we might get a charge out of the uncertainty, it can also be extremely difficult. If you live your life according to the principle that nothing means anything and nothing makes sense, then it’s going to be very hard for you to get along with other people...
18. The term zetetics is a reference to the ancient schools of philosophical skepticism, as opposed to modern scientific skepticism. Scientific skeptics typically question things until they can be proven (or not disproven), whereas philosophical skeptics tend to question whether anything can really ever be proven at all. The philosophical or zetetic mode of skepticism is not well understood or widely known today. People mostly think of scientific skeptics when they think of skepticism at all. Philosophical skepticism, however had a very different goal. The goal was not to find the answer, but to achieve peace of mind."

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