The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #143452 Message #3315109
Posted By: Little Hawk
29-Feb-12 - 11:06 AM
Thread Name: BS: Dawkins attacked for ancestors' faults
Subject: RE: BS: Dawkins attacked for ancestors' faults
Righto. Thanks, Les and Steve. I can well understand Dawkin's frustration over the man who was trying to determine which kind of fig leaf it might have been that Eve resorted to to cover herself!
I had the same frustrated reaction to the strange myths presented to me on the one occasion I went to Sunday School (at around age 6?). I came home and complained to my mother about it, saying, "They're telling all these crazy stories there that can't possibly be true!"...so she never sent me there again. That was my one and only encounter with traditional organized religion during my entire childhood and adolescence, since my parents were atheists. My natural inclination was to do what Dawkins suggests: look for evidence and use reason to interpret that evidence.
That is still my inclination when it comes to all forms of sense-perceptible phenomena (whether detectable through our normal 5 senses...or with the aid of technological machinery of some kind...such as a microscope, etc.).
And then there is spiritual inquiry. For that I have to go inside myself, because it's a matter of being aware of and using consciousness...observing and understanding one's own emotions and mental states...mastering one's own strength's and weaknesses, etc. I cannot do that in terms of the 5 senses. I have to do it through working with my own conscious awareness of what's going on inside my own consciousness. That's what I would term the spiritual aspect of life. I don't look for it through any kind of outer evidence...I look for it within consciousness itself. That's the inner experience of life. Dawkins (I would gather) is seeking truth through examining the outer, observable phemomena. I'm seeking it through examining the inner states of my own being. That puts us on different paths of inquiry, but it doesn't make either one of us "wrong". We're just focused on different matters, that's all.