All the arguments about mystery aside, the first few paragraphs seem to be from a completely different post about the Sacred Experience instead if Religious Foo.
I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It’s what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; {...}
Leading up to:
Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.
Which is something I would strongly agree with. In my view, what this is saying is that the association of something being sacred is something that can only be created by the individual and is a private emotion, not something that can be conveyed as-is. Sure, you are able to describe it, but you should not expect the other party to have that same emotion.
The other side of that would be that while an arbitrary number of people can regard the same thing sacred, but only by their own (subconcious) choice, not by being told that something is sacred. Standing in the Hagia Sophia may be a sacred thing or just cause admiration for the architects. Neither of those should be discarded, since it’s about emotional response, not reasoning for anything.
Something that’s reproducibly inducing that experience for me would be this video. You may try it (Big Screens help), and it may or may not do anything to you (besides impressively displaying scientific results; this is space, after all). I can’t do anything about that, it’s an individual experience. And regarding solitude… what could be more solitary than this very perspective from high above an entire planet?
I do realize that what I’m saying here sounds like “there’s something that defies Rationality”, but that what I’m trying to say. The idea is that it is a fragment of neural activity (and nothing more) that is something to be aware of, since it is something possibly affecting judgement. Apart from that, I don’t see any actual reason for rational argument on this topic and also not for considering it evidence for anything by itself.
All the arguments about mystery aside, the first few paragraphs seem to be from a completely different post about the Sacred Experience instead if Religious Foo.
Leading up to:
Which is something I would strongly agree with. In my view, what this is saying is that the association of something being sacred is something that can only be created by the individual and is a private emotion, not something that can be conveyed as-is. Sure, you are able to describe it, but you should not expect the other party to have that same emotion. The other side of that would be that while an arbitrary number of people can regard the same thing sacred, but only by their own (subconcious) choice, not by being told that something is sacred. Standing in the Hagia Sophia may be a sacred thing or just cause admiration for the architects. Neither of those should be discarded, since it’s about emotional response, not reasoning for anything.
Something that’s reproducibly inducing that experience for me would be this video. You may try it (Big Screens help), and it may or may not do anything to you (besides impressively displaying scientific results; this is space, after all). I can’t do anything about that, it’s an individual experience. And regarding solitude… what could be more solitary than this very perspective from high above an entire planet?
I do realize that what I’m saying here sounds like “there’s something that defies Rationality”, but that what I’m trying to say. The idea is that it is a fragment of neural activity (and nothing more) that is something to be aware of, since it is something possibly affecting judgement. Apart from that, I don’t see any actual reason for rational argument on this topic and also not for considering it evidence for anything by itself.