= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SarahC comments on Rationality quotes: May 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (288)
Right, and this is what I was used to as well, though I wasn't familiar with that quote. ("Bog" is handy. I like that.)
As for the "glory" -- yes, I've felt it too. Exactly, exactly the same way. "The world is sufficient." But that sense of joy can't be enough to keep you going, because sometimes the world is horrible, and it is not sufficient, not for me, not as long as I have the capacity to love people and worry for them. Joy is there, but it's not the whole story.
Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
I also think my own break with religion started with an emotional experience, or perhaps the experience just broke the dam of all the mental incoherence I have piled up under the carpet. I saw pics from Haiti of medical workers piling up children's bodies; I 'knew' then that if god exists he does not give a crap about things I care about; I was never 'religious' enough to think that me and my children are any 'better' than what I saw in front of me. The rest was a trivial exercise in comparison (mostly historical research and some logic).
In general the problem with religion that it's a web of beliefs, and people cannot extricate themselves one strand at a time, the strands simply tend to regrow (though weaker, I think). You need a powerful emotional experience to pull enough threads all at once.
Incidentally, this is a big benefit on the something to protect emphasis here.
You probably know this, but Bog is the Russian (similar in other Slavic languages) word for God.
Funny, of course I know it - Russian was my first language, but somehow I parsed it as being a whimsical made up word; I knew I was out of practice, but not this much!
The exact opposite happened to me: I read a bunch of sci fi, and since very few of the authors I read were religious, I was essentially getting an atheistic worldview through books. That conflicted with my religious beliefs, and God lost.