Nick_A wrote: ↑Sun Jun 19, 2022 8:04 pmNow that man has become sophisticated, philosophy has been replaced by entertainment. Who needs wisdom anymore with such high quality entertainment available to enable self justification to replace the need for "objective meaning". Progress.
It is I think a more complex problem. The essence of the Christian path, and most religious paths about which I am aware, involve different forms of renunciation. The notion is that if a lower element is renounced that higher elements can be realized. In the Christian scheme (and this is also true in Vedanta and Buddhism) the purpose of renunciation is to attain something higher and ultimately life in a world beyond.
Freud still spoke of resisting sexual pleasure in order to sublimate sexual energy to higher purposes. He believed that through sublimation civilization was built. It is a question of use of energy.
If in Christian metaphysics the core idea is that *the Earth* and 'earthly things' need to be resisted then the sacrifice of such 'lower pleasures' makes sense because higher attainments and higher pleasures can then be realized.
But if the entire Christian metaphysical picture is no longer seen to apply -- no other world or higher world that is the ultimate point of striving -- and if life is merely or solely a material and biological process, then the entire dynamic shifts radically. And the term 'radically' must be emphasized.
This is what in fact happened. Instead of life and life's processes being understood at their core as metaphysical, and vertical, they were redefined as solely horizontal. So both hell and heaven disappeared -- they could no longer be taken seriously. What is left? Only life on this plane, and a life without a defined metaphysics in any sense similar to the metaphysical systems of yore. In that plane, and on this plane, God does not exist. Since 'God' is a very intricate and utterly metaphysical idea.
So let's extend this fact -- the fact about how people think and perceive today (what they believe) -- to the present conversation and its denizens. Quite literally, if you (in the widest plural sense of you) do not believe in Jesus Christ as a metaphysical agent and as an expression of a metaphysical understanding, then he is simply a sage-like man who either had delusions of grandeur or had such delusions laid over him. And if you (in the same wide sense) believe that then you show that you are an outcome of the
deconversion from one metaphysics to another non-metaphysics.
So at that point you might just as well drop the entire set of balls. Stop juggling!
Once the metaphysics is collapsed the entire system becomes more or less untenable. It is at that point -- let us imagine the classical Everyman as our subject -- that Man (Occidental man let's say) has to
redefine life and meaning
entirely. The ramifications are extraordinary and they are far more complex than a given person lets on.
So what will the Everyman do now that he is once and finally simply a temporary biological event in a totally meaningless world, a world without any of the former dimensionality it had? The answer is pretty simple: he must seek entertainment. You have to occupy yourself with something, right? There is nothing to achieve on those former and now understood to be unreal 'upper dimensions' and there is no reason to resist or limit yourself in respect to what were formerly described as 'lower' and 'earthly pleasures', so Everyman necessarily restructures his life according to a new model. And therefore
a whole world is created for him.
What I desire to understand better is how each denizen in this present conversation actually organizes his perception about
Reality in respect to the immense shift in metaphysics that has and is taking place.