nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Oh, please, this thread is not even slightly insulting, it's just typical. It's full of the typical Zhaoisms everyone's accustomed to at this point.

The other time you mention I was getting harrassed by you in every thread I posted in, even those that had nothing to do with your pet topic. And since the moderators didn't really want to do anything about it, I decided it wasn't worth it to continue posting here until you grew up for second and realized you were being ridiculous.

i was born and raised in China, which did give me access to a reality which is different from the modern world.

China IS the modern world.

you can call it "exoticizing the other" if you want to. makes not the slightest of differences to me or the people who get it and appreciate it.

If it makes no difference to you, why do you go on these periodic rants where you have to insult or put down anyone who doesn't believe in your nebulous version of spirituality (which you still haven't defined, really, or explained, or proved how you 'practice' this and the rest of everyone else doesn't)? It always seems to follow on the heels of a few successful science threads, here.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
i never said africa. when describing the close connection with a spirit world, i was mainly thinking of indonesia, thailand, india, and china where i was born and raised. so there is no "exoticizing" anything. i am praising the merits of "non-rational" or "meta-rational" ways of life, and the richness of experience it affords.

I think it's EXTREMELY condescending to call these ways "irrational". The medicine men of indigenous American tribes use "rational" treatments, including herbal ones that are still in some respects or to some extent used today. The things these people believe MAKE SENSE TO THEM. They are "rational" to them. They are not making up things that seem irrational in order to imbue the world with a more "magical" and "spiritual" dimension. In fact, just the opposite. They made up stories to make sense of the world as they encountered it through sense experience, empirically. Spirituality and ritual magic WERE 'science', in this sense of the term, before the significant findings of industrial and technological revolutions changed the face of science forever.

As for "condescending and hostile": I have avoided being condescending or hostile in this thread Zhao, but you sure have been, over and over. You started the thread with a bunch of arrogant, condescending, and hostile proclamations. Take a look at your own posts, for crying out loud.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think nomad could well be onto something about zhao's upbringing and its effects on his view of science - I've had similar thoughts in this direction myself.

Also, zhao is presenting a very rosy picture of what it's like to live in a world dominated by spirits and unseen forces, rather hand-picking a selection of cliches about spending every day spellbound in childlike wonder...let's not forget the kids ostracised from birth or even killed straight away because of a physical abnormality that must mean they're 'cursed', or the entire African village I read about where every inhabitant is a 'witch' and therefore forbidden from living among 'normal' people, or kids beaten almost (and sometimes actually) to death because they are 'possessed'...in other words, superstition doesn't have to be codified into a large organised religion to have a very negative effect on people's lives. Animist superstitions, upstart syncretic cults and so on can be bad too.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I think nomad could well be onto something about zhao's upbringing and its effects on his view of science - I've had similar thoughts in this direction myself.

Also, zhao is presenting a very rosy picture of what it's like to live in a world dominated by spirits and unseen forces, rather hand-picking a selection of cliches about spending every day spellbound in childlike wonder...let's not forget the kids ostracised from birth or even killed straight away because of a physical abnormality that must mean they're 'cursed', or the entire African village I read about where every inhabitant is a 'witch' and therefore forbidden from living among 'normal' people, or kids beaten almost (and sometimes actually) to death because they are 'possessed'...in other words, superstition doesn't have to be codified into a large organised religion to have a very negative effect on people's lives. Animist superstitions, upstart syncretic cults and so on can be bad too.


my friend's first memory is of being chased by animists dressed as trees who were trying to kill his father.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Also, zhao is presenting a very rosy picture of what it's like to live in a world dominated by spirits and unseen forces, rather hand-picking a selection of cliches about spending every day spellbound in childlike wonder...let's not forget the kids ostracised from birth or even killed straight away because of a physical abnormality that must mean they're 'cursed', or the entire African village I read about where every inhabitant is a 'witch' and therefore forbidden from living among 'normal' people, or kids beaten almost (and sometimes actually) to death because they are 'possessed'...in other words, superstition doesn't have to be codified into a large organised religion to have a very negative effect on people's lives. Animist superstitions, upstart syncretic cults and so on can be bad too.

Padraig's example was good, I thought--sex with virgins cures AIDS. I'd add to it the other common practice, though: "sex with" (actually, rape of) infants to cure men with AIDS in sub-saharan Africa.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
Mate saying things like

and i feel sorry for those who don't realize that it does.

what you lot are responding to is the fucked up consumerist corrupted version of "faith", "superstition", and "spirituality", and you mistakenly think that that is all there is. pity.

you people will likely continue ignore what I'm saying

makes you sounds conceited, self-regarding, smug and presumptions and generally somebody who people flee from at parties. You may well say that doesn't bother you - fair enough.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Padraig's example was good, I thought--sex with virgins cures AIDS. I'd add to it the other common practice, though: "sex with" (actually, rape of) infants to cure men with AIDS in sub-saharan Africa.

yeah - this is v v common in South Africa, from what I've heard.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
Padraig's example was good, I thought--sex with virgins cures AIDS. I'd add to it the other common practice, though: "sex with" (actually, rape of) infants to cure men with AIDS in sub-saharan Africa.

Exactly there are loads. Not to mention some of these delightful, spiritual and poetic non-rational places may have lashings of various forms of bigotry, lack of religious freedom, homophobia etc.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Exactly there are loads. Not to mention some of these delightful, spiritual and poetic non-rational places may have lashings of various forms of bigotry, lack of religious freedom, homophobia etc.

But you'd also have to look at the ways in which colonialism encouraged and exacerbated some of these things, and simultaneously destroyed some very forward-thinking social and political practices in, for example, Africa.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
Mate saying things like

and i feel sorry for those who don't realize that it does.

what you lot are responding to is the fucked up consumerist corrupted version of "faith", "superstition", and "spirituality", and you mistakenly think that that is all there is. pity.

you people will likely continue ignore what I'm saying

makes you sounds conceited, self-regarding, smug and presumptions and generally somebody who people flee from at parties. You may well say that doesn't bother you - fair enough.

OK here is something more constructive (and I'm not taking the piss, genuinely interested).

I have an athsist outlook on the world as outlined by Mr Tea and I agree 100% with his first post. I'm not a scientist.

How practically, in real terms can I move more towards the model you describe. I mean real stuff that will improve my life, not just abstracts.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
But you'd also have to look at the ways in which colonialism encouraged and exacerbated some of these things, and simultaneously destroyed some very forward-thinking social and political practices in, for example, Africa.

You could of course do that yes. I'm just saying that painting a dreamland is childish.

But i think, as an example, India would still have homophobia had it not been colonised. Happy to be proven wrong though.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
But you'd also have to look at the ways in which colonialism encouraged and exacerbated some of these things, and simultaneously destroyed some very forward-thinking social and political practices in, for example, Africa.

Yeah, there's a word for this...syncretism? Can't remember. Basically, it's a term for when colonialists come in and make the indigenous situation far worse than it was before. Happened in Thailand with the prostitution situation, in Australia when the Brits came storming back in and declared all of the second, third, and fourth wives of the indigenous folks "prostitutes", etc.

Most of us have discussed the idea with Zhao that agriculture stratified society in ways it hadn't been before. Most of us in this forum generally agree with this, even if we don't adhere to a strict Zhaoist version of events (which is a spiritualist extrapolation or appropriation of Jared Diamond's work). What more does he want? Everyone to bow down and say he is lord and master of the universe and everything he says is law?

I mean, he says he's not going to "reduce" this discussion to one about personal history and unresolved childhood conflicts, yet he stomps into numerous threads and declares everyone who disagrees with his New Ageism some kind of brainwashed drone who must have been raised in a Richard Dawkins worshipping moonie cult.
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
You could of course do that yes. I'm just saying that painting a dreamland is childish.

But i think, as an example, India would still have homophobia had it not been colonised. Happy to be proven wrong though.

There are all sorts of homophobic cultures pre-Europe. Judaism, for one.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
You could of course do that yes. I'm just saying that painting a dreamland is childish.

But i think, as an example, India would still have homophobia had it not been colonised. Happy to be proven wrong though.

I agree, dreamlands don't exist. But the extent to which slavery and then colonialism set African peoples against each other is of huge importance, as is the re-writing of history that expunged forward-thinking practices in certain parts of Africa (henceforth treated as monolithic) from history.

Don't know enough about the history of homophobia in India. but I don't think it's controversial to point out the impact of Church teachings on feelings in Jamaica towards homosexuality, to take an exampel that has of course featured many times on these pages.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
I agree, dreamlands don't exist. But the extent to which slavery and then colonialism set African peoples against each other is of huge importance, as is the re-writing of history that expunged forward-thinking practices in certain parts of Africa (henceforth treated as monolithic) from history.

Don't know enough about the history of homophobia in India. but I don't think it's controversial to point out the impact of Church teachings on feelings in Jamaica towards homosexuality, to take an exampel that has of course featured many times on these pages.

Yep for sure on both points.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Yeah, there's a word for this...syncretism? Can't remember. Basically, it's a term for when colonialists come in and make the indigenous situation far worse than it was before. Happened in Thailand with the prostitution situation, in Australia when the Brits came storming back in and declared all of the second, third, and fourth wives of the indigenous folks "prostitutes", etc.

Syncretism - "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous." Hm, guess it depends whether syncretism includes enforced fusion.

One example that sticks in my mind is how the Dahomey (I think) had more equal (if different) social roles for women int eh 16th century than many European countries several centuries later. Once it became a full-on raiding and slaving state, this all went to shit.

Anyways, upshot is that ideas about African societies' 'different ways of doing things' partly come from a rewriting of history by Europeans.
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
Coincidentally I went to a place in Benin (which is modern day Dahomey right?) which was a Catholic church mixed with a snake temple! It was great! Massive religious syncretism there.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Syncretism - "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous." Hm, guess it depends whether syncretism includes enforced fusion.

One example that sticks in my mind is how the Dahomey (I think) had more equal (if different) social roles for women int eh 16th century than many European countries several centuries later. Once it became a full-on raiding and slaving state, this all went to shit.

Anyways, upshot is that ideas about African societies' 'different ways of doing things' partly come from a rewriting of history by Europeans.

I think I'm reaching for another word that sounds similar...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
when i said it's rich life i did not say without social ills and many kinds of superstition is without very obvious and commonly known horrible consequences such as the virgin cure for AIDS.

that would be absurd.

what i AM saying is that the spirit dimension ALSO enriches life in many ways. which is a neglected area in common place anti-superstition progressive discourse.

pop culture reference point, don't Miyazaki cartoons give you a sense of wonder? those are adaptaions of ancient stories of ghost cities, demons and dragons, very similar to, because it is derivitive of, many tales i heard as a child -- and that is the China i mean, as modern as it is today, even after communism's attempts to wipe it out, much older sensibilities still survive there, and in some areas such as the humanities, saturate it.

saw an exhibition of indonesian spirit world artifacts like masks and such, and reading about them and their place in an entire world view, and it was so fascinating...
 
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