From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2001 - 02:12:37 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Samantha and Amara have defended spirituality, synchronicity,
> and (I think) religiosity. I want to get down to the truth
> of what's really going on here.
>
> I had a friend over the course of a couple of decades who
> did the same thing. Despite having some of the deepest
> conversations of my life with him, I never did understand
> why. Perhaps the answer will emerge in this medium. Perhaps
> an answer will emerge if we try.
>
> To me the questions are,
>
> 1. Why do some people gladly debunk what they see as clear
> falsehoods where others, equally skeptical, don't want to?
Because:
a) we don't see them as clear falsehoods;
b) perhaps we don't consider skepticism inherently and
unquestionably true or good for all purposes.
>
> 2. Why do the latter embrace terms, e.g., "spirituality" and
> "synchronicity" overwhelmingly used by people who mean
> things completely different from them?
>
I can point you to literature and people who mean by
spirituality a lot of what I mean by it. There are levels of
spirituality and different aspects just as they are in many
other human enterprises ane conceptual systems. The most common
views are not privileged to define what terms mean.
> About the latter question, there is no shortage of words and
> phrases in English to distinguish shades of belief. Articulate
> people (which these people invariably are) could easily always
> find suitable substitution phrases---but they didn't do so, and
> mostly resist doing so. Why?
>
Becaue what I am speaking of is spiritual in the truest sense I
know and to call it anything else is imho improper. It is also
essential if one is to reclaim spirituality from the worse of
the luddites and from the conceptual shrinking it into something
easily dismissed that too easily misses and disowns what I
believe is important in it.
> Now a semanticist might retort, "because the term in question
> has so many favorable semantic links, that it's very useful
> for the purposes of communication". But if this were the case,
> then you'd see people who use terms like "God", "spirituality",
> and "synchronicity" qualifying their remarks. In other words,
> the terms would always be followed by words like "in the sense
> of...", or "-like", or surrounded by scare-quotes. But it
> doesn't happen. Why? (Apologies to Samantha here: she has
> made it clear that she does have a lot of beliefs that are
> pretty far away from materialism---beliefs not supported by
> any scientific theories.)
>
True. Fortunately, much of life runs along quite well without
being fully explained or even explainable by science.
> So can anyone explain what is going on?
I try. Or at least I do when I think a bit of signal can get
through.
- samantha
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