[p2p-research] Free flipper! argues scientist

[Michel Bauwens]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Ted Smith <teddks at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 16:45 +0700, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> > the kind of atheism that destroys our connection and participation
> > with the natural world
>
> Who is qualified to say what is "natural" and what is not? Is there a
> way for natural beings such as humans to take action in such a way that
> is not participation in the natural world? What is the nature of this
> "connection"; how is it formed or maintained, and what effect does it
> have on the endpoints? Where are the endpoints?
>

man is of course not separate from nature, and interprets nature, but at the
same time, this will strongly infuence the actions towards the biosphere and
its beings, so the nature of the participation will be very different
whether you are a native seeing  yourself in a sea of living beings on which
you are co-dependent, or treating animals and nature as dominion, or as
objects ..


>
> >
> > it's simply part of human experience, and there is no obligation to go
> > into it (like art and music, the life of the spirit is an option), but
> > I do have the problem with those that are aggressively against it, and
> > cannot make the finer distinctions between religious belief, religious
> > power institutions, spiritual experiences, and bodymind technologies,
>
> I don't see the distinction you're making between "religious belief" and
> "spiritual experiences". Presumably, religious belief is a subset of
> spiritual experiences, where spiritual experiences are any experiences
> involving some sort of extra-natural majick-y phenomena.
>

If you can't make the distinction between belief and experience, I can't
really help you, it's pretty basic to human experience ... religious belief
is not a subset of spiritual experience, or vice versa, but they are
obviously correlated, because we can't experience without framing

you can belief without having spiritual experiences; you can experience
without explicitly endorsing a religious theory, belief or institution;
obviously, your beliefs and framework will influence the experience; say you
practice zen meditation or vipassana, your experience will definitely be
steered by the tradition which helps you do this, but there are other ways,
like cooperative inquiry, which can make the experience more independent of
the presuppositions of the various traditions



> It seems to me that I am one of these atheists that you are
> "critiquing". I certainly do not see irrational, evidence-agnostic "life
> systems" like most New Age or imported Eastern beliefs as a part of
> "human experience" that is to be desired. I certainly have my own
> reasons for my opinions, as you do for yours, but I don't see how my
> opinions are in any way misaligned with the desire for a peer-to-peer
> society. It seems to me that you're implying this; is this indeed the
> case? If so, why?
>


my argument is that there is a specific form of atheism, which developed in
the 19th century, which is strongly co-related to a total vision of the
universe, and co-extensive with the development of capitalism and
industrialism, and a definite vision of nature as an object of knowledge and
exploitation

but I don't think that is necessarily an obstacle to favouring human peer to
peer systems,

as I stated many times, people from very different and opposing metaphysical
presuppositions will have a common preference for p2p systems, but the
limitations of the viewpoint may lead to applying p2p principles in limited
areas

for example a authoritarian personality structured believer in
fundamentalist christianity, may be open to a p2p-based mutual health
support system; a libertarian may favour open source, etc..

the key is to seek common ground above and beyond those differences

I can live with your atheism (for all practical purposes, I'm one myself),
and I can live with my conservative buddhist wife, and I can talk to a
catholic distributionist, and a libertarian mutualist ..

Michel

>
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