Re: Spoilered for talk of religion

fergus <ferguscapewrath@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(Rowland McDonnell) wrote:
fergus <ferguscapewrath@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:
fergus <ferguscapewrath@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

You have to be selective. Pick those whose lives show the sort of
fruit that you would want for yourself.

Umm. Look at everything, learn about the totality of it, that's my
line.

Life's too short for that. There is only a certain amount of looking
we have time to do.

Can't learn about the whole universe, but I've also found out that you
can't learn anything confirmed valid without paying attention to a
really huge spread of stuff.

Life's too long for me. It's unbearable misery and has been for many
years.

[snip]

Making our own maps of a place we haven't been to does lend itself to
getting hopelessly lost! I've tried that in strange towns...

Beats following someone else's map if you ask me - if you do that, you
get much more hopelessly lost, 'cos all the supplied maps are purest
fantasy as far as I can tell.

I disagree. Nobody's map is perfect but they all have some truth in
them. The trick is to tell what's true from what isn't.

But there is no truth. There is only `truth from a certain viewpoint' -
what's true for one person won't be true for another. One person's map
is only valid for that person - if indeed it's even valid then.

The only way that I've heard of that works is making your own map - for
sure it's not merely hard but also perilous: but it's the only way that
works.

It doesn't always work. I'll stick to getting what light I can from
other's experiences.

I don't say that's impossible - it's advisable as it happens - but I do
say that it's a bad idea to use anyone else's map.

I don't think you quite get it. What I'm talking about is failing to
learn how to live, how to interact with people, how to `handle the world
around me', get on with things, complete a task, that sort of thing.

Nothing to do with airy-fairy religious stuff or philosophical stuff at
all.

I had a very seriously dysfunctional upbringing. About the only thing
my parents got right with me was making sure I got plenty of good food
and exercise. I can say a lot of things about my mother, most of them
unflattering, but she was one of the best cooks I've had the pleasure to
be fed by.

I think I see what you are saying. I can see that if you had bad
teachers ( by which I mean everyone who has had an input into your
upbringing ) then you'd feel happier rolling your own.

I never had any damned choice. I was instructed to do so from as far
back as I can recall. I got no support or encouragement or useful
advice from my parents (I've since found out that it was all based on
the assumption that I knew how the world worked and was going to do
something other than what they told me to do - but of course I did not
know, and I also tried to follow their suggestions as if they'd been
given honestly). My parents just threw me in to situations and left me
to sink or swim. I sank. They let me. And all I really learnt at high
school was that the world was a terrible place full of violence and
cruelty that I just had to suffer.

Part of the problem (and I found this out from my mother's sister) is
that me, being Number 1 son, was intended to be raised as a particular
sort of person. My mother had a vision of what I had to be and tried to
force me to meet her vision. All that achieved was lots of arguments
and the utter ruin of any hope I had of having a life.

My education
had huge gaps in it in the learning how to live area which I've been
trying to fill ever since.

Me too. I've failed utterly. I've made no progress for many years.
I'm a shadow of what I was.

The big difference is that if you've got a belief, you've got something
you're emotionally attached to and it can be hard to throw it off. If
you work with gambles, you don't have that emotional attachment so it's
easier to throw off the obsolete ideas. The problem I have is that it's
far too easy for me to change thought patterns, so it's actually very
very hard to get me to change my mind 'cos I cling on to what I *KNOW*
until I *KNOW* that it's wrong (except that it's all done on the basis
of gambling, so it's nothing like as cut-and-dried as that sounds) -
otherwise I'd be living in confusing fog that I couldn't make any sort
of sense out of at all.

I'm not sure the distinction you're making. If I've got you right it
seems that what you are calling knowledge is the same as what I am
calling belief. But I'm not sure.

Not at all. I don't believe in tables and chairs. I don't `know'
anything for sure either. I do gamble that things I identify as chairs
are things that I can use to sit on, for example. Purely functional
gambling, you know? That sort of gamble is a `near 100% gamble' as far
as I'm concerned - but it's not certain, 'cos a certain fraction of
things I identify as chairs will collapse if I lower my backside onto
'em.

Do you /believe/ in chairs?

Rowland.

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