[extropy-chat] Faculty X

[Jeff Medina]

Dirk said:
> Some people have experienced the mystical, and some haven't.

Some people have decided to claim their neurological glitches and
unusual sensations as "mystical" experiences, and some haven't.

Dirk said:
> I consider those that haven't to be deficient in the same way a
> psychopath is deficient, and it really annoys me to hear them bleating
> on about 'irrationality' etc when they know fuck all of which they
> speak. It's like trying to explain to a blind man that colour is more
> than a brail readout of wavelength on a spectrometer.

What, if anything, do you think differentiates this BS of yours from a
fundamentalist Christian who says "You atheists and Asatru
technopagans know fuck all about the Truth of Christ! You just haven't
experienced him in your heart yet like I have."

In "God and the Philosophers", one of the essayists claims her reason
for being a Catholic is the awe she feels when looking upon a grand
mountain range. This breed of "argument from mystical experience" is
worthless, in both her and your case.

Dirk said:
> statement. If we are advocating scrapping 'mystical experience' as
> deficient and irrational why don't we go the whole hog and get rid of
> conscience, love, empathy, emotion in general and other similarly
> irrational hangovers.

Because *feeling* isn't what we have a problem with. It's the bullshit
interpretation of some of them as implicative of something
"higher"/mystical/supernatural that's idiotic.

Dirk said:
> Maybe our resident militant atheists should think twice about sneering
> at those who are not like them and have a wider event horizon. The
> logical endpoint of that line of thought is particularly ugly and will
> certainly do Transhumanism no favours.

What you imply as the logical endpoint actually isn't. So no problem
-- religionists are still wrong. (The "I'm superior to you!" nonsense
should be dropped, too. If you get an error in your math homework and
I try to explain the right answer, is that some sort of character flaw
or "superiority complex"? Of course not. It's positive, if anything.
That's the only sense in which atheists - as far as I'm concerned -
should be critical of religionists.)