Some contradictions of Spirituality
Standardized Transcendence
Spirituality claims that identically following and repeating the
same ways and actions as have been already followed by millions of
other people in the past, so that anyone (including stupid people)
must be able to do it if just he tries, is the most divinely
wonderful and extraordinary thing ever.
Well, I admit that there is something we can consider wonderful and
extraordinary while it has already been done identically by a
majority of humans. Namely, love and sex. But this rather is an
extraordinary joy, that is something natural.
Logically, what is repeatedly done by large numbers of people since
millenia with no progression, should be considered something selfish
because there is hardly anyone else that it can benefit to. Thus, in
particular (and despite some claims), marital love and sex are
something selfish (unless questions of genetic evolution
are considered).
What would more precisely be absurd, thus, is to give a standardized
action (repeated by millions) with no resulting progression, to be
something of moral value, that is, a value much beyond the actor's
concerns.
In particular, marital love and sex is a high value, but this is
consistent insofar as this is directly and individually
measured and benefited.
The Focus on Intentions, or the Selfish Quest for Capitalizing
Selflessness in One's Deepest Self
Spirituality consists in focusing one's attention and values on
Inner Qualities. That is, on how good and pure can people be in
themselves. Judging actions not in terms of their external
aspects, but on their internal ones.
And assuming that this factor determines everything. Thus
accusing other people that they must be bad-intended and thus bad
in themselves because of how bad the consequences of their actions
turned out to be (or seem in your eyes), refusing to understand
that they could have been well-intended too ; but mocking,
dismissing and not tolerating any criticism to oneself by
considering that oneself is well-intended and therefore any
criticism would be wrong (unfair). Not only in reply to people
that (wrongly) accuse oneself of having been bad-intended, but
also to those who were aware of the good intentions but wanted to
point out something else, that is the understanding of the real
consequences of actions in the external world.
Refusing to understand that the depth of intentions is a
completely different thing from the effective consequences of
actions. Ignoring that the main problems in the world comes from
the fact that most people are well-intended but do the wrong
things because they don't understand the consequences of what they
are doing. Therefore practicing a double standard.
By focusing on the depth of intentions and the deep nature of the
spirit, Spirituality is leading humans to a selfish quest. The
quest for "inner selflessness" where only oneself is responsible
for one's own deep being, assumed to be the whole of life, and
where therefore the whole object of morality (which concerns how
someone can be helpful to someone else) becomes empty.
But, if your intention is to focus your intention into developing
the intention of developing the best intentions, then you are
ultimately only caring about yourself. What is the good of a
purity of intentions whose only purpose is to purify the deepest
self of his author ?
Of course all people will reply : but good intentions lead to
good actions. Sorry, this is technically false. In the real world
and in practice, the best intentions often lead to bad actions
because it goes together with the ignorance of the consequences of
actions (and the ignorance of their ignorance, that is, the
ignorance of the fact that some elaborate, scientific,
nonspiritual understanding of the lowly material realities are
very much needed in order for the effects of actions to match the
intentions)
The Freedom to Choose Slavery by Mistake
It all seems that God holds human freedom as a supreme value.
Problem : he seems to utterly fail at grasping the need of utilitarianism,
i.e. strategical thinking, when pursuing moral values in general, and the
value of giving us freedom in particular.
In my humble conception of the value of freedom, in order for freedom to
be a genuine gift rather than a curse, it needs to come with reliable
information on things : information on where each path is actually leading,
in order for what we happen to choose (our means) to match what we
meaningfully intend to choose (our goals).
But from all what I could hear everywhere on God's way, it all seems that God
did not understand this. Now if I care to explain it to Him, will He understand ?
that is a big question... I only see one hope here : while God failed at that,
there is still a possibility to develop a technology for this purpose, of providing
better information to guide our actions in coherence with our goals. Any web programmer willing to help ?
The Pride of Humility, and the Victory given to the Fake, the
Fool and the Hypocrite
The fact is that the Spiritual system of values, especially the
overpraise of humility, logically gives all value to supposed
characters of the Self (that of selflessness), the "being instead
of having", and necessarily makes these values objects of pride
and vanity towards one's deepest person, which is precisely a
program jailed in the wrong values which it pretends to oppose. It
fucks up life, turned into a huge, hopeless game of
self-contradictions, of who-wins-loses, as it feeds and depends on
wrong and misjudging feelings of personal pride and the
necessarily most violently insults (misjudgments) against who
thinks differently (assumed to have a bad heart, etc), which it
pretends to oppose, unlike science which has the safe neutrality
of not being interested in matters of personal judgments dismissed
as irrelevant to its study, but only in impersonal matters of how
things work.
- It brings to a dead end or vicious circle that wastes the
energies of intention over and over again at the expense of any
other fruit; leads to the doom and psychosis of failure, those who
seriously and wisely try to conform their life quest to the
spiritual value of praising and developing the highest
selflessness they can, by making them fail in this quest to
selflessness by the very request to run after it.
- It gives a vain feeling of victory to the fools and hypocrites
who are in fact far away from this goal. Not only the liars
consciously only interested to give an illusion of virtue to the
outside, but also some sincere but foolish people who get the
feeling that they reach selflessness, as they are too foolish
(either naturally or due to spirituality itself) to be able to
grasp how far from this goal they really are.
Some spiritualities more or less avoid the last contradiction, in
the sense that they honestly recognize the goal of their path, to
be a selfish one. It would be a path to individual salvation.
However, such a claim is hardly tenable. Most spiritualities remain
tempted to consider themselves as the heart of selflessness, in
order to seem higher, because selfless goals naturally look "so much
spiritually higher" than selfish ones. But they have to manage the
contradiction between this theoretical principle of selflessness,
necessary for them to see themselves as a "high spiritual value",
and the practical reality their short-sighted actions with mainly
selfish benefits, by their way of pretending that the individuality
of the quest as they define it, and the impossibility to help others
in it, would be a fundamental fact of nature which they deny
responsibility of.
Then, if too seriously giving one's life to spirituality happens to
lead one's life to destruction (deeply and irreversibly missing love
or any other joy of life), it can provoke later reactions of
legitimate anger against spirituality for the harm it created, which
is the perfect excuse for Spiritual Masters to blame their victims
for what they assume to be vices in the heart. Thus, if Spiritual
Masters will find it right to blame you and consider that you
"deserve hell for the badness of your heart" as you indeed appear so
angry, it can be in reality for the very reason that you were so shy
and confident towards them in the first place, and that such anger
is the very last thing on Earth you would have ever naturally
considered, but that you are finally forced to adopt by the
unconceivable but real horror of the fact that Spirituality happened
to persecute your life beyond any possible expectation.The values of the heart...
that cannot tolerate any different view.
I once had a kind of debate with someone who is so fanatical about that reason
is the cause of all evil and cannot help to change the world, and that only spreading
some "values of the heart" can be the way to change the world. I tried to explain that I have a plan to change the world by IT with
the advantage that I only need a few people to work on it, while there are millions
of people who insist on values of the heart and still, despite all their efforts
the world has problems. You know what ?
I have the impression that this person strongly despised me like an evil monster for the crime of
arrogance of having such a plan which would have the very evil advantage of being more efficient than
the only kind of works (those of the heart) which they are fanatical about...
as I pointed out that the values of the heart can be great but
I am sorry I find myself in duty to work at another level as I found myself more useful there,
the level of technology and so on....
I was guilty of the crime of making division between the heart and... the ways to change the world.
Sorry I am not making divisions but distinctions here. Distinction between things I wished could
coexist in peace.
But that unfortunately need to be distinguished from each other in order for things to work well.
I have nothing against people who follow their path with the heart. I never tried to say
they are wrong and need to change their mind or their way of living.
I just wished to be tolerated in my way,
and to say that sorry I am busy and therefore have no time to invest in other people's
ways. But asking the "people of the heart" to tolerate that I may have a different approach to work on,
seems to be too much demanding. I am not the one who divides.
They are the ones who divide and create wars and intolerance, those people who are so
fanatical about the "values of the heart" that they cannot tolerate anyone with different opinions.
Of course there would be less wars if
all people in the world were thinking the same. No need to be a prophet to guess this.
The problem is that, no matter whether you like it or not, there are people with
different opinions, therefore the question is whether different people can coexist in
peace even though they have different opinions. As for me I don't have the impression
of having problem with people having other opinions as long as it does not lead to any harm
(unfortunately, wrong opinions may also result in harm in some cases... anyway there
is a problem here no matter whether you wish to tolerate them or not... but...). Now for the cases
of less rational people for whom differences of opinions may lead to kind of bad feelings
despite the lack of evidence of harmfulness of the other's view, do people of the heart have the
solution to that ? If they do, then maybe, they should start applying that solution
to themselves first. No, I mean, really.
Not just by spamming other people with the tyrannical obligation to abandon all their current ideas
and to join the exclusive belief that the only way to change the world
is by changing oneself first.
Humanly Accessible Humanly Inaccessible Truths
A truth that directly concerns human life, especially if it is very
important, should be accessible and thus provable by reason and
observation, eventually through some hard work, with no need to take
refuge if faith and trust requests.
Indeed, what has no effect on observations, is also (logically) of
hardly any consequence on human life. Except that when there is an
effect from some cause and it is observed, it can be hard to check
the connection (correlation...) with its cause. To be meaningfully
reported, effects do not only need to be observed but also
sufficiently analyzed (for example with statistical studies) to
distinguish them from other interpretations. So anything effective
is observable even if the observational verification requires a lot
of careful work. But religions deny the relevance of such a work and
put forward instead some undefinable factors such as purity of heart
or grace of God... criteria that have the convenience that it is
always possible to claim and belief absolutely anything about them
baselessly in order to conveniently dismiss any disagreement,
whenever they find it... more humble to dismiss this way the
research and testimony of others in order to please to what they see
as (their) "God" in such or such circumstance.
A possible excuse of spirituality, is when they claim to deal with
not human life but afterlife, and the way in which human life will
affect afterlife. But such claims are therefore unfalsifiable
(especially if not directly suggested by a systematic and impartial
record of NDE testimonies). And if they are unfalsifiable, they
should be honestly recognized as such. Or, do they deal with logical
necessity on these matters ? If they deal with logical necessities
then they should admit them as such, and develop systematic study of
logic and rationality. Claims which are neither logically necessary
nor based on observation, are mere speculation and should be
regarded as such.
Whether they are to deal with accessible or inaccessible realities,
spiritualities are fond of speaking about transcendental forms of
knowledge, that is, knowledge not accessible (or at least not
provable) by direct reason, but that requires either some form of
miraculous method to be discovered, or a Word from God to specify
what is true to humans that would have no other means to guess it.
Question: are these things only hardly
acessible, or radically
inaccessible by the scientific method (careful human logic +
observation) ? If they are just hardly accessible questions, like
the question of the existence of the Higgs boson, then we just need
to set up teams of experts to set up the question in rational and
verifiable ways, with no need to depend on assumed miraculous
sources of these truths.
But the "radically inaccessible by reason" nature of some assumed
truths, cannot be consistent with a proper ability to discern
whether a given doctrine is indeed from God (for the case of
theological spiritualities) or transcendentally assessed by any
human means (for the case of agnostic spiritualities like Buddhism),
as is required by its institutionalization (installation and
propagation by the general public).
But if these truths are radically inaccessible or unverifiable by
careful human methods, then, how can anyone pretend to get the proof
that a given doctrine is indeed valid, based on higher sources as it
claims to be ?
They believe that it is well-founded, because... they feel it in
their heart and trust God to not let them in mistake... (themselves,
yes, precisely personally, their own little person that is located
at the center of the humility of the universe...)
In fact they also insist that the perceptions of those absolutely
inaccessible realities, are at the same time trivially accessible to
all; they even cannot consider any possibility of difficulty here,
since it would be a blasphemy to suspect God of not letting His will
and wisdom stay beyond the immediate reach of anyone "truly"
searching (especially if they also believe that anyone not getting
it properly will go to hell) where the question or measure of the
authenticity of the search is itself undefinable and possible
subject of continuous redefinitions and baseless speculations...
therefore, since they observe their own sincerity but cannot measure
that of others, for the sake of avoiding the sin of blasphemy
(accusing God of not revealing himself to good other people) they
obviously have to assume that anyone thinking otherwise is a villain
bastard not truly searching for the truth of God.
Many spiritualities carefully turn around this question by relying
on loopholes like assumed facts (miracles) disregarding their lack
of verification, or blackmail (emergency of self-salvation that lets
no time to honestly examine the question; culpabilization of doubt
towards the Word of God).
The Duty To Be Always Satisfied With What Nature Gave Humans But
Not With Human Nature
Religions teach people to be always satisfied with what they
have, thus discouraging any work for progress there by the means
of science and technology. But they do everything to despise human
nature, to make humans guilty of anyone of their thoughts, guilty
of any legitimate doubts and any natural desires, to say it would
be wrong to not be happy of being in the shit. They say that the
shit is good, while the only real evil, against which we should
strive all our life, is the evil of being unsatisfied with the
shit, as if this unsatisfaction itself was its own cause, while
the shit that it is unsatisfied of, wasn't any problem.
Moreover, many religious people also say that science is
worthless because it can "only" succeed to understand 99.99999% of
the world, and this knowledge remains ridiculously worthless and
something equivalent to total ignorance, for the only reason that
it is not as good as 100%. On the other hand, based on blind
faith, they see it much wiser to worship total ignorance as
equivalent to the best wisdom and divine knowledge.
What can I say ? This is just wronger
than wrong.
A matter of human needs, or a matter of divine will above them ?
Religions find a lot of their motivation in the need of humans,
to get the feeling, even by mistake, that they are following a way
that is... beyond any influence of their own needs and risks of
human mistake.
When criticized, religious people usually express shock and
complain being insulted, but it remains ambiguous whether it is an
insult against them, as individuals, or an insult against their
God. Politically they have to pretend that it is a personal insult
to them as individuals, that it hurts their sensitivity. However
(unless they really are heavily, awfully irritable people) their
deep hidden conviction is that they consider it as an insult not
to them but to their "God", or, equivalently, an insult to the
thing that they confuse with God, that is, their chosen Bible and
the claim that their Bible is from God (see irritability).
But the real fact is that their main personal enemy, which
insults most badly their own feelings, their own needs, their own
thoughts and possible research and discovery paths, does not
consist in what opposes their main religious conviction; but on
the contrary, it consists in their own conviction itself (which
actually does not come from their own person, thought and
research, but from the unfortunate circumstance of the influence
and brainwashing they received from previous believers).
Because this conviction precisely consists in the idea that they
must dedicate their life to continuously denigrate (dismiss, fight
against) themselves, their own thoughts and understandings, their
own perceptions, their own feelings and their own needs, explained
away as trials and diabolic tricks (or expressions of personal
rebellion against God when reported by disbelievers) whenever it
appears to challenge what was assumed to be the divine revelation.
Still they do not stop insisting in diverse public speeches, when
preaching to naive people, that the main reason why people should
convert is that it is what they most need, and that all the
miseries and lack of fulfillment of human needs would be caused by
disbelief, that is, the lack of surrender of humans to this...
giving up of all consideration to their needs, thoughts and
experiences... and
then once someone gave up his life and needs and then fell into
misery and destruction of his life contrary to promises, the
holy preachers either pretend to never have promised anything,
or accuse the complaining person of being an evil bastard that
failed to fully give give up his needs, or of having obviously
followed a wrong path by wrong people, no matter what this path
could actually be...
Of course we should distinguish between personal need and
collective need: it would be morally right to give up the
satisfaction of one's personal needs to better serve the need of
others. However, beyond the call for this abstract principle that
is so easy to mention as long as it remains a vain mix of words
for nothing, if you check their real behavior more closely, you
will notice that this nice principle has nothing to do with the
real deal that religious people are actually trying to make.
Instead :
- They continuously insist that the main expectable benefit of
faith is a purely personal one, and that nobody can
significantly bring any help to anybody else. That you have to
save yourself by faith and that nobody can help you. That you
should try to contribute to the salvation of others but give up
any expectation of being really helpful, as it will ultimately
depend not on you but on things beyond your control : other's
"free choice" and the grace of God. That faith is the one thing
that brings the best satisfaction of one's own soul in a
strictly personal manner, and that any failure to get this
satisfaction is anyway one's purely personal fault that nobody
can ever help or be responsible for;
- If you look seriously (rationally) at the fruits of religions
in the world, you will see that all these dedicated efforts by
millions of people to give their life to follow God's will and
serve the needs of others instead of their own... finally did
not bring any significant contributions to help the world out of
misery. So, if we might have naively seen a legitimate need to
give God a chance of bringing His wisdom and providence for
ultimate collective results better than what we could have made
by our own plans, we must a posteriori conclude that it does not
work like this, as the world did not receive the visit of such a
divine Providence, that could not have failed to occur if it
ever was possible, since so many people were so carefully
willing to follow God's Will if only He could express it to
them. Thus, any idea that such a surrender of personal need by
religious methods might ever serve long-term or collective
needs, is an obvious failure; and given these facts, still
letting people naively expect such purpose, and see it anyhow
selfless to surrender immediate personal needs by religious
methods as if it could actually serve more global purposes and
collective needs of humanity, is a damn lie (a selfish form of
selflessness, as mentioned above)
See the contrast with the unholy work of science and technology :
Science and technology finally succeed to satisfy many human
needs, but this is only a large-scale, collective consequence. At
each step, the motivation is rather impersonal : it is about
understanding how the universe works. It is not about satisfying
your immediate needs and following your immediate impressions, It
is not about what you will need for going to heaven either.
Neither is it about obsessively fighting against yourself, against
your own needs and against your own feelings. It is just not about
yourself. It is neither sexy to your feelings, nor to the
satisfaction of having the holy goodness to obsessively fight
against them just because your feelings would be a sin against
which you have to obsessively fight in order to reach holiness.
Instead, science has a completely different logic, it is developed
on a different level. So you have to give up your cherished care
for the "being" and the deep souls, and start analyzing instead
some boring, impersonal, lowly material stuff about the universe
outside you, that may not look so sexy at first.
Still it is about very real things, which may eventually turn turn
out to be extremely helpful to humanity in the long term. And it
is also wonderful for the deep understanding it gives, and the
greatness of the universe it describes.
A socially organized belief in the impossibility of social
organization
Religion is the most remarkably organized social structure,
whose purpose is to indoctrinate people into the idea that there is
no sense in expecting the world to be anything else than the
disorganized sum of the individuals making it up, so that there is
no other solution to society's ills than to blame human nature, both
for creating these ills and for any idea of being unsatisfied with
the results and of trying to solve them in any other way than this
self-blame and "caring to change oneself first as the best way to
change society", as if this method hadn't proved itself vain from
the lack of results of the works of millions of people who already
tried to follow that "lesson of how to change the world".
As if it wasn't insane to keep trying the same method (more
precisely, the method of obsessively denying any possibility of a
method) over and over again and expecting it to bring a different
result.
The need of teachers paradox
Of 2 things one :
- either someone is naturally able to guide himself in life to
understand what he needs to understand of life and take the
right decisions (at least as good as it is effectively possible
to find out among available methods to search for this
information, for his personal concern)
- or he needs a teacher to guide him.
The problem is : if he is not naturally able to guide himself
without teacher, then how likely is he to discern (guide himself to)
the right teacher ? And by which method ? Based on reputation ? But
what can a teacher's reputation be based on ? Those able to guide
themselves without teachers aren't naturally interested with the
question; those who needed a teacher may form an opinion based on
what could be taught to them; but if they got a wrong teaching then
they may form a wrong opinion as well about which teacher may be
good, thus giving good reputations to wrong teachers. Because, while
indeed some wrong teachings aren't able to (fallaciously) defend
themselves (in the eyes of ignorant people) despite their falsity or
baselessness (infalsifiability), some are; they propagate themselves
in society based on this malicious quality of fooling people enough
to not let them discern their falsity.
Unfortunately, many people in the world would need a teacher to
guide them; but for this very reason they happened to be attracted
to the wrong teachers, by lack of a proper social mechanism to
select the right ones. They may have faith that if they are sincere
in their search for guidance then God wouldn't abandon them to the
wrong teaching. However this is actually not humility but pride,
assuming their sincerity as higher than that of others, while the
fact is, God actually abandoned many very sincere and dedicated
people to follow diverse teachings which are mutually incompatible
in their universal claims and therefore cannot all be right.
See another
page commenting on the same topic.
Related : the need of a Bible
If people cannot properly guide themselves, the idea that a divinely revealed
Bible is needed to guide them suffers the same incoherence as above stated,
at least under the circumstances which currently apply (the lack of objective,
compelling evidence of its divine inspiration).
Namely, if people did not naturally
know what God wants of them, then how could they correctly discern which book is
indeed divinely revealed or inspired for this purpose ? The whole project of trying to cure
our ignorance by picking a book and expecting it to be from God cannot bring us any
closer to the goal of reliability, by lack of ways to reliably confirm the divine origin of this
"revelation". But if people naturally had enough divine wisdom or inspiration to discern
this correctly, then they would not need a Bible anymore ; moreover, in the case a Bible
could still be useful for some matters of convenience, they could also get
the inspiration to correct and develop this Bible (without splitting into competing cults
as they would have the ability to recognize and/or argue the validity of each others
revelation) instead of just keeping the same one exactly to the letter but continuously
disputing its interpretations.
Related : the contradiction of claiming to "have no teaching"
Someone wrote me "Now i am reading the writings of Robert Adams. His writings feel
to me subtly. He's a very rational guy but makes a difference in relative and absolute terms
and gives methods. He says that he is not a teacher, that he hasn't a teaching, that he as
a person doesn't exist, that there isn't a universe only consciousness and that even that is
only a word to say it".
My reply :
So he says the opposite of what he does, that is, he is making
absolute nonsense and expects people to be fanatics of it.
In my opinion : people not having anything to teach just need to shut up.
Related : the contradiction of "not forcing one's teaching onto others"
commented there
in the paragraph about the "Buddhist method". Problems : even if some people following mystical techniques
"found something" there that is somehow valuable, who can really:
- Compare the worthiness of these achievements, with what could have been achieved
otherwise by dedicating efforts in other fields (in ways that need to be investigated), especially
scientific and technological works (the precise things which spiritualities are usually proud of
departing from);
- Discern who are the people that may actually be better off following mystical
paths, as opposed to people who may accidentally stumble on invitations for such
spiritual quests but who would be unsuccessful there, at least in the sense that their different
personality makes the dedication of their efforts in the mystical quest less fruitful to them than
a dedication of their efforts in other directions ? Why don't "spiritual teachers" have
more often the honesty of providing the reference to opposite views like mine to prevent
such accidents, for the sake of what I would call true freedom, that is, freedom
from the dictatorship of chance (the possibly harmful constrain of stumbling by
accident on "invitations" to follow "spiritual paths" and having the misfortune of feeling
obliged to go that way due to accidental ignorance of the presence of opposite arguments) ?
So what kind of teaching or non-teaching do I offer instead, you may ask
I make many discoveries, moreover I am libertarian so I
strongly believe that most people are very different from each other
with very different needs so that not one way can fit all. Still I am
not telling the bullshit of pretending I have nothing to teach. I do
have teachings but at a higher level, that is, of interest:
NOT for these animals of spirituality just caring for their own person
and how they should or need to think, feel or live, just obsessed about
their need to change themselves into being more and more obsessed
about measuring the selflessness contained and capitalized into the navel
of their own self, how they need to change themselves first, and finally that
way never going beyond that: just perpetually sticking into the obsession of
only looking at themselves in a mirror and how they need to change
themselves into more and more of the same self-changingness.
BUT for people interested to understand the universe and how the world works
beyond their own person, and which actions objectively need to be accomplished in
order for this planet to become a more decent world to live in. Actions that not
all people can accomplish, but my point, which clearly departs from all spiritual teachings,
is that, for a number of important things beyond the sense that people may
naturally find in life without teacher, the question of what needs to be accomplished
should be the first master question; then the question of who can be suitable to accomplish
each needed mission should come second. So then if someone who knows about a task that
needs to be done finds someone suitable to do it, there may need to be a teaching
of what is this task and how to make it. But that teaching is not a gift, anything that someone
needs to learn. It is about a problem of the world which needs a task to be made, and this
task needs to find someone to make it
(so, an existential need, not a universal one).
However I must admit, I also do think that a good course of
mathematics can be amazing thing, and that it needs to be written as a number of
people (don't ask me who is that !) need the opportunity to learn such things which they
could not discover by their own means, for just the same reason that people may need
to hear good music which they would not have been able to compose by themselves.
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