Of course it's your own problem, as long as you live in a place that allows religious freedom. Buyer beware applies doubly to religious/spiritual cults.
What responsibility do relig./spirit. organizations have toward failed aspirants?
- Thread starter wynn
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I never got that impression.
People who are into religion/spirituality never struck me as having some fundamental doubts which they would then compensate for with belief despite a lack of evidence.
To me, people who are into religion/spirituality always appear certain about what they profess to believe.
That's what religious faith is. If they had evidence, they wouldn't call it faith. Of course they don't have doubts. Because they have faith. Faith is fundamentally opposed to doubt and skepticism.
The attitude of caveat emptor trivializes religion/spirituality.
It makes chosing a religious/spiritual path no different from choosing a pair of shoes.
On the contrary, it emphasizes the role of the individual and their freedom to deicide their own path.
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Exactly, and if you realize that, you don't need some lame "spiritual" organization.
Wrong. My approach:
1. Rules out the possibility of empirically determining "one true religion" whether one may exist or not.
2. (Define "personalist".)
3. Treats religion/spirituality as objectively unverifiable in truth value, without necessarily discounting a possible higher truth value.
4. All individuals can accept responsibility for the entirety of their own search for truth.
I've never been "burnt by religion/spirituality" in the least. So why did you end up feeling less responsible for your own decisions?
Yes, I can, and I have already explained how to logically reconcile an omnipotent god's will with individual free will.
Um, that was my point.
Then they don't need help if they do not require an external source for insperational motivational. They are content with their own realities,( which is far more realistic than religious mentallity) I appauld all free thinkers and fighters of the religous tyrants.
So your point was that placebos, since they have no inherent efficacy, should all be done away with, regardless of any non-inherent/individual-dependent efficacy?
Would you suggest the same of all forms of placebos?
Say more. What are the implications of that?
As opposed to objectivist.
In general, in a personalist system, God is an entity that thinks, feels and wills; and the individual entity (ie. you and me) is also an entity that thinks, feels and wills.
How can you ascertain that higher truth value, if you treat religion/spirituality as objectively unverifiable in truth value?
Since in that search, they are not alone, but interact with other people, and do not have epistemic autonomy, the above is not realistic.
I wouldn't phrase it that way.
Once I reflect on the thoughts and desires that I have, and consider that they are sourced or otherwise related to other people in one way or another, I cannot exclusively claim them to be "me" or "mine" anymore, and thus cannot take full responsibility for them.
What other people say and do to me and what happens to me affects me, I remember it, I consider it, but it is not within the bounds of my exclusive responsibility. It can't be, because I didn't do or originate those things.
The psychological theory of the locus of control is an idealistic abstraction that does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. As I mentioned earlier with Spidergoat - In an ordinary sense, individualism is not problematic. But when we investigate it and try to pin down what exactly the "I" and "my desires" are, things get moot.
From what I recall, you're operating with a model in which you see a person holistically in a sense, similarly as mainstream psychological theories do (ie. an entity consisting of body and mind, which can be further analyzed only neurobiologically, but not philosophically).
But there are Hindu approaches in which a person's body, their mind and their ordinary sense of self are considered to be God's energies which the person mistakenly identifies with.
In these approaches, an individual entity has free will, but it pertains only to decisions/actions that are about God, while all other decisions/actions are a matter of karmic determinism.
Again:
One can't say
Everything that happens happens by God's will.
and then say
My choice of religion is mine alone.
and then still think one is being consistent.
"My choice of religion" is one of those things in Everything that happens happens by God's will and as such cannot be mine alone.
The question is whether one can freely choose an approach like that - an approach that contextualizes one's own choice and freedom.
It seems that there are religious/spiritual paths which, given the content they teach, cannot be chosen, at least not from the ordinary metareligious/metaspiritual framework (but it seems they can be adhered to, even if not chosen).
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Without a "spiritual" organization (whether it be lame or not), one couldn't have realized that to begin with.
Not true. Some people are capable of figuring things out for themselves. (Which came first, the enlightened person or the spiritual organization?)
Nobody grows up in a vacuum.
Nobody "figures things out for themselves."
We all directly or indirectly rely on countless other people and their input in order to "figure things out."
Just because someone who seems to have "figured things out" isn't formally a member of an organization, doesn't mean that they have "figured things out for themselves."
Doesn't answer the question, which came first - the spiritual organization or the enlightened individual?
You made this claim, did you not?
It's fairly obvious that someone had to start the first spiritual organization... (I'll leave you to put 2 & 2 together.)
Answer it in any framework you like, or don't asnwer it. Makes no difference to me. I was just pointing out your contradiction to you.