2008年9月26日金曜日

Soul

"She was talking about talking about how she doesn't eat animals and she kept arguing about how she thought animals had souls. I said I don't think I have a soul. Her talking about animals having personalities equals them having souls is such bullshit."

I agree. Having emotion, sympathy, and personality does not mean you have a soul.


Science is a perspective.

I feel like you can look at like that but that brain that you have that believes in that is governed by science. Natural laws. Yes, I do believe that science is a perspective out of a multitude but at the same time I can't help but believe that because of its fundamental nature...the fact that it can describe everything on a very basic level makes it almost like the underlying perspective to all other perspectives. You can pick the other perspectives but they'll always be influenced directly or indirectly by science. As soon as you choose another perspective, the other one(s) float out of existence. Observation is key, I suppose. 

Mathematicians would argue that math is the ultimate underlying perspective. Perhaps that is true.

For me, it's hard to see science as just a perspective you CAN choose from. I feel a lot of the time that it's the only one. If you don't see it that way, I feel like you're uneducated or you just don't know much about science. 

Morals...

Evolutionary SCIENCE can explain why we have the morals we do. MORALS, VIRTUE, etc...all of these realms that were previously thought to be scientifically unexplainable.

Love...

There's a lot of scientific study on love. Just because it can be explained scientifically does not make it any worse or better. Some people act like science tries to water down love. I have problems with that. 
Christians are the general public in America.

They say that anyone who is not a Christian is unhappy or a bad person or is really in need of something because of something missing or wrong in their souls.

If the general public is saying this, then people living in those areas that are not Christians might really be unhappy or incontent. It might seem like something is wrong with their souls.

What happens after that is that people caught in the middle of worldviews hears what the Christians have to say and then look at all of the non-Christians and see that they're always pissed or incontent because the Christians won't get off their backs so some people decide "Well the Christians must be right because look at all of these bad, incontent, frustrated people. There must be something wrong with their souls." If so, some might turn to Christianity because of that.


Part of my culture shock was seeing happy people in Japan that were not Christian. Fucking normal people with no Christian baggage. As a kid in America, you see that Christians have a lot of the same baggage (without really identifying that it is, indeed, baggage) and you start to make assumptions about THE HUMAN SOUL IN GENERAL. Even non-Christians have Christian baggage in America because of the huge influence of the religion overall. When I came to Japan and started to talk to people about this kind of stuff, it became very apparent that this kind of thing is not a "God-sized hole in your heart" as Christians like to say it is nor is it some general problem with people's souls. It is something that is very much dependent on culture and religion. 

Christians believe that there is one God so there is one set of rules. Because of these spiritual and/or cosmic rules, everyone's "soul problems" are the same. 

After coming to Japan, I had to rethink that entirely. It's a very tightly woven but vicious spiritual circle in America. It can change your perceptions.

Sometimes, I still wonder what people think in Japan about spirituality. I think it's very much a role here but in what capacity? If you read this blog, you know my views on Christianity by now but I feel like at least Christianity had an answer...even if it was a wrong one. It had a very specific answer to spiritual things. Japanese people don't even seem to care to search for anything too specific when it comes to stuff like that. A lot of the people I've met are basically agnostic. They feel like they can't understand such things so they don't even try. It's not even a fight to be specific at that point, it feels like giving up before even getting to the basics. 

It might just FEEL agnostic to me because how can one get close to Christianity as far as being specific without becoming dogmatic or ridiculous? Or just supposing too much? Maybe I'm just used to people having something to bring to the table...even though I usually disagree with whatever that is.




0 件のコメント: