Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

I can safely say that as a child, when Shrek came out and there was that scene where the title character was sliding down a banister or something in Fiona's tower and he hits a bump and his eyes cross, we all thought this was the funniest thing ever.

 

Some pals and I are coming up with human names for non-human Disney characters. For Bugs' Life characters' surnames I suggested Bry-ant, Gr-ant, and Ant-wistle.

 

True thing from writer Michael Prescott:

 

That's pretty much why I don't believe in god. If I can believe in it then it couldn't possibly be god. To quote Wittgenstein from the Tractatus, "That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent."

 

Many of us went through a period in our childhoods when we were virtually made of fart jokes.

 

Those last two posts more or less sum me up. LOL

 

Huh, that’s really interesting! I think I went the other way with it? I wouldn’t want a god I could understand completely either. I believe in God sort of like I believe in mountains. They’re not always visible from where I am, but I’ve experienced mountains. Not the entirety of mountains. Mostly my experience drove home how much of mountains I haven’t experienced, but I’m really quite fine with that.

Personally, I can’t see how anything that exists particularly needs anyone to believe in it, including deities. I mean, it might suck if nobody ever thought of you? But things that exist do so regardless of whether anyone believes in them. I don’t understand dark matter and frankly it sounds awfully sketchy, but I very much doubt anything about its existence hinges upon whether I understand it. It’s not a thought exercise, it’s a thing or it isn’t.

 

Yeah. For me it was mostly a matter of not worrying about it anymore. My fear of getting it wrong started to seem pretty pointless.

 

You are doing dark matter right! Dark matter is a catchall term for "we are p sure there's something there but we don't know what and we don't know how and we don't know why". Once we understand it it'll stop being dark matter and start being the thing that it is.

 

Me: *accidentally pours Way Too Much spearmint oil in my diffuser*
Me: Oops! Well it's okay, it's still relaxing
Rest of family: THE ENTIRETY OF THE HOUSE SMELLS LIKE GUM

 

According to Sunday's Schlock Mercenary, the thing that it is definitely doesn't involve Pokemon.

 

Theologically speaking, I basically don't think there's a God, but also that the universe is so vast and incomprehensible it'd be kinda... presumptuous to say that I am More Correct about God than other people.

Spoiler: I'm just arguing with myself now

But also, like, how many haunted houses turned out to be Carbon Monoxide poisoning, or bad insulation, or sleep paralysis. I'm don't want to say that ghosts definitely don't exist but I'm going to need way more convincing than a badly fitted door popping open.

 

as a Quaker-adjacent Pratchett fan, I think that God is other people.

 

My religious beliefs can be summed up as "every deity is real and they're all terrifying and I don't want their attention, let me just light a candle and think about the stars instead"

 

I agree completely.

Spoiler: religion. heretical?

I’m frankly not sure whether anyone has more meaningful control over belief than they do feelings. You can entertain a feeling or not, but trying to have one you don’t already have or suppress one you do have is likely to end badly before too long. Because feelings aren’t meaningfully under control, they’re morally neutral. It’s not on to judge people for something they can’t really help. I’m really not convinced that belief isn’t like that, because if it were that easy to decide to believe, I can’t account for a large amount of the conversations around religion.

I believe because of a very specific experience I had. It’s completely possible I would interpret it differently if my cultural framework were different, and I’m okay with that. I certainly won’t be telling other people to believe or not. I don’t think anyone should believe because I told them to, even if they could decide to.

Maybe it is some sort of gas leak or what have you. In the end, my experiences only count towards my own idea of what constitutes meeting the burden of proof. It would be awfully presumptuous of me to think I’m definitely more right than any other person who thinks differently than I do.

(And no, I don’t personally believe God condemns people for not believing. If that turns out to be true, I’m going to have to pathetically attempt to have words with God, I guess.)

 

Hope you don't mind if I quote that to my Primrose from time to time because it's exactly how I feel about her. :)

 

This speaks to me a lot where it comes to my religious beliefs, honestly. I cannot pick and choose the sea longing. The sea longing simply is and was from a very young age. Ignoring it does no good because it is a longing that is always at my doorstep. My only choice is to drown. There was never another option nor can I conceive of another option. I thought Buddhism might be it but then I realized that Buddhism could not possibly have ever been it.

Yet I can't put the Buddhism down either entirely because now I am just. Culturally Buddhist. In the same way a lot of other pagans have trouble with deep-seated Christianity fleas getting all over their shit I've got that going on with Buddhism. And I've been coming to terms with the fact that, yeah, I'm just now fundamentally Buddhist to the core. I cannot uproot every last facet of that framework because the very tools of interrogation that I'd use to uproot are themselves Buddhist. So I must accept that the Buddhism is here to stay and work out how it actually affects my other primary religion. The one whose tenants I follow and such.

Anyway, I can't not feel the sea longing. It's there. Could I simply be extremely mentally ill and it's just my epilepsy? Sure. I guess it could theoretically but it doesn't seem that way and trying to deny it is like trying to say that the laptop I'm typing on doesn't exist. Like, yes, I can go through Buddhist knots and argue that it doesn't exist because nothing does given those very rigorous definitions of Absolute Existence. But the laptop is, in this circumstance and for this period, here. And like the laptop the ocean talks to me. It's just a fact of my existence. It definitely won't convince everyone and it doesn't need to really because it is my existence and my experiences.

I used to have dreams of running from a tsunami. They only stopped when I stopped trying to run.