Metal Reviews

Sauce please? Buddhism with human sacrifices is not Buddhism.



Equating Judaism with Zionism is as racist as comparing Islam and terrorism.

And neither of these, assuming they're true which is debatable, come anywhere near the harm done by the crusades, let alone everything else that Catholicism has been responsible for.

Did Dead Machine just reply to me using bits and pieces lifted from his holy texts?

When I was younger I would sometimes attend the high mass in the local church. My parents are ordinary secular humanists/atheists like most people in this country and therefore never brought me up religiously nor encouraged me to do it or even attended mass themselves. I had my own motivations: Towards the end of the mass there would be the opportunity to attend the altar and receive communion – through the transubstantiation performed by the priest: The body of Christ. When this opportunity came I would go to the altar and receive my little piece of consecrated host, but I didn't eat it. I kept it in my mouth and after the communion when I found my seat again, I would quietly spit out the little piece of host in a napkin. When the mass was over, it was time to perform the real ritual of the day. I would now produce the little piece of host, which I kept wrapped in the napkin, from my pocket and spit on it, urinate on it and blaspheme and desecrate it in every way I could imagine. The ritual abuse ended by feeding the host to a pet rabbit in the garden of a nearby house. These little rituals of defiling the body of Christ are what indirectly led to my own personal epiphany and opened the gates to the inner sanctum where the truth of godhood is found.

What atheists and followers of the abrahamic religions alike don't understand is that it takes sacrifice, thought, knowledge and devotion to achieve anything spiritual. It doesn't come dropping in by itself just by accepting a doctrine. Without seeking and trying to break the borders of your own understanding and blind idiosyncratic dogma you can never accomplish anything besides buying a cheap self-righteous identification with a group. Both parties are guilty of this and that is why both their doctrines are false and will never lead them to any kind of understanding besides from accepting a set of more or less flexible dictated norms. You have only to look at the discussion between Dead Machine and Frigid to acknowledge how stuck they are in their relative doctrines and how little it will do for them besides having something to argue over. Quoting a holy book as your personal opinion is pathetic.

My goodness. Do you still do this?

Atheism is not a doctrine, it is merely the reneging of established doctrines as being false. I don't seek spirituality through atheism. That's my own personal journey, and not combined in any way with ethical or metaphysical claims. This is why I hate the term "atheism", it sounds like a fucking religion. I prefer to call myself "non-superstitious".

The difference between me and DM is that all the evidence in the world could point towards the incorrectness of Islam, he would not change his mind. If the overwhelming amount of evidence, however, did point towards the correctness of Islam, I would change my mind.

You kind of proved his point there by not just going "holyshityoudidWHAT".

What would his point be? That I'm trapped in a doctrine? That I need to identify with a group? I do none of this.

I don't care if he pissed on communion crackers; I'd have loved to see the reactions of Christians who actually believed that it was truly the body of Christ.

That resumes my thoughts exactly. And, imo, spirituality can go to hell.

Yeah, me too. "Atheism" to me means rejecting the very concept of the unexplainable. What I mean is, nothing should be off limits (i.e. left to faith): humankind should consider everything as potentially within our understanding. And the only things we should positively believe are things we can establish ourselves using our rationality.

Rio, would you consider yourself a positivist?

Not really. Positivism to me means the belief that you can apply the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences, which I don't think is true. The two are completely different, IMO, and trying to use the same methodological approach is a big mistake.

Is that a complaint with induction or the falsification method?

More goes on in society than can be empirically tested for and so we need theoretical guidance. We have to begin enquiries about society from a starting point of being sensitised to certain concepts. (e.g. if you're a Marxist, class conflict. if you're a Weberian or a neo-liberal, the "rational choice" of the individual). These theories can never be falsified in the same way as a scientific theory, partly because they are often based on intangible factors like ethics, and partly because society is simply too complex to do so.

Of course, the problem is that now you are looking at bias creeping in. So you do have to test theories, but I think you have to do it through their explanatory power, rather than passing tests of falsifiability (if that's a word?). e.g. Does Marx's theory best chime with our observations of reality or does Milton Friedman's? This can never be established in a truly scientific way, but instead relies on the judgement of individuals who themselves are biased by their experiences and values.

I'm not a relativist and I do think that there are objective truths out there about society. But if we actually want a holistic view of society as a system, with inherent contradictions or even inherent harmonies, we need to use our own theoretical reasoning rather than a supposedly "objective" scientific method.

Yeah I thought I was communicating with god when I got schizophrenia to.

When I see something that makes me believe, I'll believe, until then I'm indifferent and the fact that I was brought to church for the first 15 years of my life angers me because now that's embedded in my thought process.

But what if it became possible to scientifically observe and analyze, or to insert into a scientific context, these heretofore intangible factors? Ethics, for example, probably have a biological source, we just don't know how to discover it yet, although memetics are working on it.

But how do we know ethics has a biological source? I would be tempted to say exactly the opposite. i.e. my ethics come almost entirely from external sources- things I see on the news that make a lasting impression, the way I am raised by my parents... etc. If ethics came about internally, then we can't explain how they have changed so much over the years.

I mean, I would say that individual ethics and society are in constant interraction. They both shape eachother, and in every single case the two intersect in a different way depending on personal internal prejudices (if such things even exist) and environment. You can't detect reciprocal relationships like that scientifically.

But what if we could establish a causal connection between biological factors that determine our humanity and the basis for the development of our ethics? For example, I read a piece some time ago promoting the idea that morality is relative to the way human beings experience pain and suffering. Since these have scientific (neurological) bases, it would be possible to establish a scientific way of measuring and perhaps even defining ethics.

If that happened then we would have to rethink massive sections of social science anyway, because so much of it based on the notion that our beliefs are conditioned externally by our environments rather than internally by our biology.

The question would still remain, though, what caused the pain and suffering in the first place? It is amazing how much a Marxist and a staunch conservative will agree on a lot of the time. Both, for example, may well accept that capitalism necessitates the "alienation" of the worker from the products of his or her labour. But only the Marxist problematises this; for the conservative it may well be simply a problem to be dealt with by individuals experiencing it. So, even if "facts" can be established, ethical stances on facts produce radically different positions. So even if we could find out what causes ethics, ethical difference would still remain and cause divisions.

Interesting, I hadn't thought it that far through. The problem for me is how do we establish absolute rules if ethics is subject to cultural variations? How do we tell Muslims, for example, that female genital mutilation is bad, if they can use cultural context as an excuse?

Well, the answer is that we can't use cultural context as an excuse. We use it only as an explanation. I agree that certain pratices are objectively immoral.

Of course, for a lot of Marxists (not necessarily me, although I have a lot of sympathy with this view) culture itself is a mere product of the underlying productive relationships in society. So, a capitalist society depends on atomization of its members and them perceiving themselves as a self-interested individual willing to work in exchange for an individual wage. Thus, religious forms such as Protestantism begin to assume prominence, with their emphasis on personal austerity and individual responsibility etc. And culturally, we get the emergence of art that might reduce everything back to a small family unit, rather than any type of class consciousness, for example. (This is the case in virtually every hollywood film, for example).

The point is, if you see society- culture, economics, religion etc- as being closely linked to eachother, then you really struggle with positivism, because by its nature it tries to isolate individual variables rather than a big picture.