Ataraxia wrote:Wise decision in my view.Unidian wrote:
... I resigned because I've decided over the years that I have no interest in religion of any kind, and due to the realization that saying "Nature is God" is the same as saying "mu."
And yet, funnily enough, "mu" is a religious word.
Unidian's words don't have any meaning here, really. If a person uses "mu" to mean the same as "Nature is God", then that is his prerogative. It's his own creation. It doesn't have any wider implications than that.
In any case, it is a odd thing to resign from a pantheist society on the grounds of rejecting religion and deciding to associate Nature with a religious word like "mu".
Who is he talking about, I wonder? He is certainly not referring to wise folk.Ataraxia wrote:Arguments over 'who knows the REAL Tao' always remind me of a favorutie bit from 'Beyond Good and Evil.'
9
Do you want to live “according to nature� O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature — extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown — imagine this indifference itself as a power — how could you live in accordance with this indifference?* Living — isn’t that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn’t living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative “live according to nature†basically means what amounts to “live according to life†— why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
— The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be “in accordance with the stoa,†and you’d like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it — as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you’re no long capable of seeing nature as anything else — and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires you with the lunatic hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves — Stoicism is self-tyranny — nature also allows herself to be tyrannized. Is the Stoic then not a part of nature? . . . .
But this is an ancient eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics is still happening today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image....
-
