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This is the concern, about the instincts of reproduction, survival, draws to physical pleasure and repulsions to discomfort.... the spiritual person tends to assume the materialist is without tools to rein those in with.
Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
This is where everyone is wrong. This is what the idealist infers would happen to him when he imagines a world with out his precious ideals. He believes that without a soul, without an afterlife and without God, we are essentially worthless meat sacks; and that anyone who is a materialist must be implying such a cop out. This is simply untrue. To think that something is worthless enough to have it destroyed and stolen from is the result of another ideal— namely that we are worthless meat sacks. No one believes that except those who see themselves as worthless meat sacks, so they invent such ideas as souls, the afterlife and God, merely so they can stand the sight of themselves.
To destroy a real living thing to gain a brief state of comfort involves a denial of the physical, a denial of life, and a striving for an ideal.
The modern definition of materialism is wrong. It doesn't involve greed, violence, anarchy or nihilism in the slightest.
Yes, this idealistic presumption made by many spiritual seekers is that the lower body is bad and the upper body is good. They tend to be sex-negative and even body-negative because desire is felt in the lower or vital center of the body-mind and is associated with so-called animal instincts.
Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
Great words, and nicely put together.
This is the concern, about the instincts of reproduction, survival, draws to physical pleasure and repulsions to discomfort.... the spiritual person tends to assume the materialist is without tools to rein those in with.
This is the crux of the "matter", isn't it? It is an assumption that all morality is created by only the "spiritual". But we cannot find this being true anywhere.
Originally posted by NewAgeMan
Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
Only those who fear death create and employ such fictions.
If you had any idea how weak that argument is, you wouldn't have made it.
Edit: Here's a paradigm shifting POV (from the atheist perspective) you might want to consider with regards to intelligent design and creative intentionality from a first/last cause or by a Creative Agency aka God.
Starts here, but continues for a few posts.
Superintelligent Design in Earth-Moon-Sun Configuration
And that's just for starters.
Originally posted by NewAgeMan
reply to post by LesMisanthrope
Reductionistic materialist monism is a dead paradigm, but it's ignorance remains in the worldview of many, but it's so frustrating to see and so entrenched.
I offered more to support my argument. You offer nothing but what amounts to insults for those like me who can think outside the box.
You're is a trained ignorance, but in your assurance that you are right, it's willful blindness.
I don't think there's any way to enlighten inform, or illuminate your worldview to include other possibilities than that you are mere a thing in a universe of things devoid of intentionality or purpose. How sad.
Here is where I believe the offending "materialist insult" might have first originated or even helped served to inspire the OP of this thread.
You're is a trained ignorance, but in your assurance that you are right, it's willful blindness.
I don't think there's any way to enlighten inform, or illuminate your worldview to include other possibilities than that you are mere a thing in a universe of things devoid of intentionality or purpose. How sad.
So the alternative argument which embraces the Spirit and the Creative Intent, does not in fact argue against or attempt to insult the materialist, but instead is only insulted by the notion that it's the only way to look at the world and it's causes and effect, from A-Z.
The kind of materialism that most are indoctrinated into actually removes us from our true place in the creation, and reduces us to mere "things" in a universe of things without purpose, meaning or significance.
Boy You come up with some heavy stuff a lot.
Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
reply to post by rickymouse
Boy You come up with some heavy stuff a lot.
What are you really trying to say?
Ok I think I came across at least one of the cruxes of this problem.
If all that exists in this universe, reality, or any universe or the totality of reality is a physical mass. Then there really is no logical, rational, or acceptable, or easily understandable argument as to why and how this physical inanimate dumb mass is capable of doing the things it can do and does, and is formed and functioned in the relatively sophisticated manner it is. Imho.
Quantum mechanics tells us that without a conscious observer, there would be no reality.
Surely we can all to some extent be labeled as materialistic because that forms the reality that we quite literally feel. But in the end it is my mind that registers the items I hold dear to my heart, the taste of the food in my mouth, and the overwhelming feeling of love. Is it not relevant that both the material and the mental/spiritual are bound together in a contract of exchange between materials and the mind that perceives those materials.
I can only ask this question to validate my argument and I do so in the humblest way possible. Are thoughts that manifest within an organic material construction they by product of materialism itself or the very basis for materialism to exist.
Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
Quantum mechanics doesn't say this. It is a theory put forth by a few physicists and biologists—most of it pure speculation. Luckily we do not exist on the quantum scale.