Saturday, October 22, 2016

SICK WORLDVIEWS


It appears that people everywhere on earth are suffering the effects of an  undiagnosed disease we may call sick worldview.  The disease can really be alarming. When two sick worldviews are at war with each other -- as, for example, rationalistic materialism and psychopathic apocalypticism – all hell can break out.  And has.  

People with grand worldviews use their views to justify crimes against humanity, each of course in their own peculiar way, be it flamboyantly barbaric or ignobly hypocritical.  What they have in common is a system of self-deception that permits them to dehumanize and if need be destroy their enemies. History is the charnel house where the victims of other people’s pictures of reality are continually piling up.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Science and Spirituality: An Emerging Vision



The following is a guest post, written by Ed Kelly, colleague and lead editor of two major anthologies that speak to the future of consciousness.


Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (2007)  &
Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (2015).



The rise of modern science has brought with it a host of extraordinary intellectual and practical achievements, but a host of serious and worsening problems as well. Many if not all of these problems seem connected somehow with a deep split that has developed in modern times between science and spirituality. This split itself resulted mainly from the recent ascendance of scientistic secular humanism, a worldview that is anchored in the classical physical science of the late 19th century and profoundly hostile to all things religious, in which it sees only vestiges of our intellectual childhood. This “physicalist” worldview basically holds that reality consists at bottom of tiny bits of solid self-existent stuff moving in accordance with mathematical laws under the influence of fields of force, and that everything else, including our human minds and consciousness, must emerge somehow from that basic stuff. Our everyday understanding of ourselves as effective conscious agents equipped with free will is delusive, because we are in fact nothing more than extremely complicated biological machines. Consciousness and its contents are generated by (or in some mysterious way identical to) neurophysiological processes in the brain, and beliefs about postmortem survival, common to the world’s religious traditions, are therefore also delusive: Biological death is necessarily the end, because without a functioning brain there can be no mind and consciousness, period. On a more cosmic scale, there are no final causes and no transcendent order: The overall scheme of nature is utterly devoid of meaning or purpose.

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