[lit-ideas] Re: True believers

I'll start with a light moment from that Hitchens/Fry discussion about "blasphemy" discussion that Simon pointed to on Monday:

Hitchens said [roughly]

A buddhist walks up to a hotdog stand and says "make me one with everything"
He pays for it with a ten dollar bill and waits for his money back.
The vendor says "sorry, but change has to come from the inside".

US: What a prescient subject line, Mike. I've been thinking for the last two days that there might be something salvageable out of this predictable back and forth. How could we all, intelligent people that we are, continually interpret all events to match our world view? I marvel at Lawrence's ability to look at the same news stories I look at and find in them, support for his world view. Perhaps he is equally in awe of my ability to do that. It seems somehow akin to religious faith, which no facts can budge. How did it get this way? What furnace are our world views created in that they are made of such tough stuff?
What would it take to make us change? Could we change?

I'm always amazed at how there is this inevitable predictability to most of our discussions in here. But... I also find myself agreeing with almost everybody on something. That is to say, while there are some sort of 'types' at work, each of us is quite different. Our collection of "world views" as Ursula calls them are each of them, a collection of beliefs/opinions/conclusions that we have each gathered over our lives. And, in a small way, this list is part of my life.

If I look at my intellectual/spiritual makeup today and compare it to that of 9 years ago -- when this whole listserv odyssey began -- I can see that some of my views and attitudes have been undoubtedly molded or at least influenced by things that have been written in our various fora.

I think the key is to at least respect your opposition so that you can try to understand what it is to be them. I'll give you one example of what I mean. I've always wondered about people of faith -- why/how etc. as I've said here -- but over the past couple of years, after repeated inquiries and discussions, I've softened my once overly pugnacious question "why would any intelligent person be religious" to a more diplomatic sentiment "I wonder what it's like to be religious and what piece of us does such a belief serve to fill?" This is a direct result of Phil Enns and Robert Paul replying to me in ways that both surprised me and made me change my tack. I could mention other instances, but won't bore you. This is an effort to assure Mike that there are some "results".

It seems to me that too often, the list gets political -- and I'm not talking a discussion about any nations' politics, I'm talking about list politics. People seem to have agendas and as Ursula notes, they generally won't budge, only continually re-write the same arguments while furiously sticking to their general theses. This is a bit disappointing and as Mike wrote -- probably only half-facetiously -- we might as well just send in signed, but otherwise blank emails sometimes, because in many ways things have become a bit predictable.

Still, to this day I've never put anyone on filter/kill and try to read every single post in any thread that catches my interest. It may be 'just a group' but I think it DOES affect the way some of us lead our lives, even if in very small ways.

becoming more one,
Paul






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Paul Stone
pas@xxxxxxxx
Kingsville, ON, Canada 

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