I'm sure that you aren't saying that confidence is always unjustified, but rather that when it is justified and you know it, usually it requires a sort of non-rationalized faith belief to truly internalize it and make it part of your behavior. Perhaps someone who knows about cognitive therapy would disagree and say that it can be done with just telling yourself the confident statements that you know to be true, over and over until that sub-rational brain is forced to believe it. Perhaps when one does that, one is "mythologizing."
Last week I went to the art theater to see "What the Bleep Do We Know? A Quantum Fable." It was entirely possible to leave the film as a healthy rational mystic or a totally screwed-up blind follower of faith healers and the psychic friends network. It seems to have been deliberately designed to not offend those who indulge in harmful spirituality and anti-rationalism. That's what got me on this track. The basic problem that I have with most rational mysticism is that it doesn't take a strong enough stand against its own abuses. It seems to indulge in spiritualistic language and god-talk which is the equivalent of l33t-speak in my opinion. This use of code-language seems to be aiding and abbetting the tendency in society to get these tools working on the wrong problems. So, if I come across as a dogmatic materialist sometimes, it's because I'm fighting back a tide of irrationalism. Talk to me again in a more rational age and I'll agree to use spiritualized language to say secular, non-spiritual things as you and Eric do.
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Re: Fhew. Hope this makes sense.
Date: 2004-10-05 07:30 am (UTC)I'm sure that you aren't saying that confidence is always unjustified, but rather that when it is justified and you know it, usually it requires a sort of non-rationalized faith belief to truly internalize it and make it part of your behavior. Perhaps someone who knows about cognitive therapy would disagree and say that it can be done with just telling yourself the confident statements that you know to be true, over and over until that sub-rational brain is forced to believe it. Perhaps when one does that, one is "mythologizing."
Last week I went to the art theater to see "What the Bleep Do We Know? A Quantum Fable." It was entirely possible to leave the film as a healthy rational mystic or a totally screwed-up blind follower of faith healers and the psychic friends network. It seems to have been deliberately designed to not offend those who indulge in harmful spirituality and anti-rationalism. That's what got me on this track. The basic problem that I have with most rational mysticism is that it doesn't take a strong enough stand against its own abuses. It seems to indulge in spiritualistic language and god-talk which is the equivalent of l33t-speak in my opinion. This use of code-language seems to be aiding and abbetting the tendency in society to get these tools working on the wrong problems. So, if I come across as a dogmatic materialist sometimes, it's because I'm fighting back a tide of irrationalism. Talk to me again in a more rational age and I'll agree to use spiritualized language to say secular, non-spiritual things as you and Eric do.