Gretanut strikes again
The Nickhead is not finished yet and his pace is accelerating. I suspect you may have given him a new goal in life. He is highly impressionable and prone to parroting (he always parrots my barbs) so I expect him to be right on board with the idea of owning an endless thread. Publicity! Notoriety! Influence! Nicky's dream!! The next Simone Weil!!! Watch this space (or not).
It should be an endless thread. It is an essential struggle. As previously quoted:
IN a recent work, Henri Nouwen emphasizes the essence of spirituality in a most succinct fashion: “To whom do we belong? This is the core question of the spiritual life. Do we belong to the world, its worries, its people and its endless chain of urgencies and emergencies, or do we belong to God and God’s people.”
If another person joins in the discussion willing and able to participate as one of God’s people, it really could be meaningful. Gretanut, F4 and others will defend belonging to and glorifying the World and hopefully another and me the perspective of the people of God.
o the Nickhead, you and I and most others here are like Chalmers's philosophical zombies - with only physical sensations and abstracted thoughts, but no actual sense of inner experience or depth of emotion or empathy. He does not believe that any of us are fully human - only himself and a few other similarly enlightened superior souls.
Yes, to be alive as a human being is to be awake. You prefer to argue in your sleep
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? - Thoreau, Walden
Also, apparently, we are all engaged in supporting The Great Beast - society at large - and betraying individuals and individualism for conformity. This of course is a strawman based on blinkered B&W thinking, lacking any nuance or sense of continua.
Yes, the Great Beast is your God and its kingdom is Plato’s cave – the ultimate evolution of human consciousness for the secularist.
The same applies to his accusations of spirit-killing education. The public education system is paid for by the many so its aims are for the many (not for power-hungry theocrats). So the aim is to produce productive units for the economy rather than individual building of character. In the past schools were more focused on the person (and in some cases, brainwashing) but many - and fair - complaints made by parents about ideological biases one way or another resulted in the "character shaping" aspects of the public education system being withdrawn and delegated back to families.
Yes, the aim of education for secularism is “to produce productive units for the economy rather than individual building of character.” This requires the young enduring metaphysical repression so as to forever deny the questions of their hearts. Their meaning and purpose is to serve the Beast as productive units for the economy. They are things – atoms of the Beast, lacking any feeling for the objective questions their hearts once called them to. Now they have matured and know they belong to the Great Beast and secular intolerance will make sure they never forget it.