Comment by angoragoats
2 months ago
> Faith has a way of providing inner peace and grounding.
The fact that people can believe things via “faith” that have no empirical basis in reality scares me. It certainly doesn’t provide any inner peace or grounding to me.
Humans are animals. Spiritual animals.
As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
> Humans are animals. Spiritual animals.
I have no idea what “spiritual” means in this context, so until you can clearly define that, my position is: no, we’re just animals.
> As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
“it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man's impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances"
Eliade, Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1984
Now, while Eliade’s word is not final, I think it touches on your question of what spiritual means in the context of mankind. Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.
Eliade is a great read for a number of reasons but the best reason is because he can be read from an atheistic or religious perspective and his passages are no less revelatory. If you want to believe that there is no purpose to existing that is fine, I wouldn’t recommend it, but that is fine. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity and by that nature alone deserves serious and legitimate thought and preservation.
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> I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
I didn't say existing, but persisting. This is kind of the basis of the point I was making. Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting, as do most people - otherwise we would see more people deciding to stop living once they have come to the conclusion they have no fundamental purpose.
As to the point of humans being "just animals", you are correct; we are the only "just animals" that have spiritual religion as an emergent property of our species. Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.
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