100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Not Exactly Fun, but Not a Culture War Item
I recently had a negative experience in life that was totally my fault. I did something that made me feel guilty. More severe than, I don't know, "laughing at a fat person falling down" but not at the level of "swindled a business partner." It's something that swam in my head for about a week. I've gotten over it but wanted to share what is to me a fundamentally new feeling that exists, now, because of about three to four solid years of taking faith seriously (in my case, that is the Catholic faith with distinctly Latin Mass features, though not the hardcore RadTrad life).
For all of my young adult and adult life, I understood what guilt was in a very humanist, worldly way. The manner in which I felt guilty when I did certain bad things was to adopt the mindset of the party I had offended. As a toy example, think about spreading a rumor in school. If I did this, "guilt" was the thought experiment of putting myself in the shoes of the subject of the rumor and then going through the (imagined) emotional process of being embarrassed and angry. Would I want that to happen to me? No. A-ha, emotional maturity! I felt guilt as a means of emotive fellow-feeling and a kind of imagined solidarity with the other party.
This is somewhat of a smuggled in consequentialist argument. You can see where it can break down. What if, doing my imagining of the other person, I come to the conclusion that they shouldn't be that embarrassed or that my own culpability is mitigated because, well, everyone else was in on the rumor too? Egotism and self-serving confirmation bias can go a long way towards mitigating those guilty feelings.
An upgrade is the "honor" mode of virtue ethics thinking (not an academic philosopher, but I believe the term deontological describes this? not sure.) I feel guilty because I've broken a code (my virtue ethics) regardless of the pain realized by the other party. Maybe Timmy didn't care that I told everyone he was born with a tail. That's actually secondary to me having violated a permanent, fixed code. This kind of "guilt feeling" expands all the way up to religious rules; the Ten Commandments and so forth.
In my recent experience, however, the feeling of guilt was distinct in kind from both of the previous examples. I felt the guilt in the sense of a wound to something both greater than me yet wholly inclusive of me. That description is a bit wishy washy and abstract, and I certainly wish I had the writing ability to do a better job. As a second attempt, maybe I could say I felt like I had hurt myself in the past, the present, and the future. What I'm getting at without being too trite is to say that I felt like I hurt my soul.
An accurate and artful description of the perception of guilt isn't the point. The point is that I feel like I have a new category of feeling because of (going on) four years of deliberate spiritual practice.
For people who are converting to a formal religion with established prayer practices, there's a lot of repeating of the words and rituals without any perceptible change in things. Just because you say a few rosaries doesn't mean your anxiety goes way. Regular attendance at Mass probably helps you hew closer to the Straight and Narrow path, but you don't get magical peace-and-love powers. Life is still hard. And so a lot of faith practice can atrophy if you're looking for tangible outcomes within your preexisting channels of sense making.
This is one of the first tangible milestones that deliberate faith practice has created a novel change in my overall personal disposition. I can't emphasize enough how this feels like I just discovered color TV or contact lenses. My relationship to the entire nature of this life has a new vector. And for that I am profoundly grateful.
The question to the Motte would be what kind of other practices in life have led to something like this? One that jumps to mind is that people I know who have the brain to do truly high level math (later undergrad level stuff but really grad level math) talk about seeing the world with an added layer. Not that they "know the answer" to things beyond us puny humans, but that there's this added detail and feature to everything. They're excited by even the most banal occurrences.
A more common one is people who develop an advanced capability with foreign languages. They dream in these other languages and also end up having an inner monologue that can "switch" between various languages to some extent. These people sometimes report being able to more specifically appreciate the nuance and details of life.
Curious for shared thoughts.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Good questions laid out with intellectual honesty. I applaud you.
I can't respond to everything due to time constraints. There's a lot here. So, I'll choose one thing -
(1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God.
To me this is a classic mental trap that afflicts a lot of "hard" logic thinkers and rationalists. Note, I'm not saying you're a rationalist here, just pointing it out in general.
By compressing the omnipotence of God to be a kind of first order set theory problem, this argument fails to appreciate the deeper truth. God cannot deceive not be deceived. Well, logically, wouldn't that mean He lacks total omnipotent ability? The answer is no because a deceptive action or will or intent is intrinsically faulty. If you aren't seeking the ultimate Good (God), True (God), and Beautiful (God), you haven't actually committed any action (or will, or intent), you've simple succeeded in deceiving yourself and potentially others (i.e. assisting in sin).
Phrased a little differently, God's apparently "lack" of the ability to deceive is a deception itself - he has total ability to do any and all things. Anything that could be pointed out "outside" of His isn't actual real, doesn't actually exist.
Squaring this circle requires a metaphysical engagement. Staying at the level of propositional logic means trying to use an item within a larger system to explain the system in totality. The analogy I like is "we're a thought inside the brain trying to explain what the mind is."
This is why so many attempts to over "logical-ize" God end up in paradox. "Could God make a boulder so big that even he couldn't move it?" answer: "Yes and no." A paradox! Well, yes, a paradox within the bounded system of logic.
I think this is also why certain theological texts have their own flavor of language. The world "Grace", for example, is tricky to define in a secular vocabulary (and, I'd argue, within the theology of Judaism). Whatever system that language is part of is a better system for analyzing the nature of God. As you've said a few times, however, even the "best" human systems fail to totally conceptualize God. That's dogmatic - we have imperfect knowledge of human which, itself, is a means for us to profess faith and, thus, create the opportunity to experience grace.
One of the tells is in perspective towards the protagonist.
Read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemingway. It's written in the third person, technically, but the omniscient narrator is really just talking about himself - the protagonist. It's about as first person as the third person can get. The "camera," as it were, would be POV. The protagonist (and author) are mostly relating their perspective on and actions within the world. The reflection back to the character himself is minimal, even during passages that are deliberately supposed to be so.
Female authors tend to have the "camera" pointed back at the protagonist in an outside in situation. We see the protagonist in constant relation to the world and the perceptions of others. A common meta-pattern is a paragraph about the protagonist dealing with another character in order to reveal their own traits. A (made up on the spot example); "She had always been independent to a fault. She could remember her own mother saying 'if you always walk alone, you're gonna end up alone!'" I see things like this dropped in all over the place in female writing. A trait, belief, or aspect of a character is only tangible if it came from some sort of interaction with another character or with a kind of "characterization" of the world at large (again, little things -- "She knew men looked at her with a mix of awe and ...") There's no self-directed volition. There has to be an external instantiation first.
And I do think that this reveals some deeper truth about male versus female sense-making. Even when it comes to personal self-knowledge, women place more (though not total) weight on consensus mechanisms. Men can self-define on their own better, however, this can create its own failure mode in terms of failing to appreciate social feedback.
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