Keith and Ryan return to discuss The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist — a work exploring the “divided brain” and its consequences. They examine the distinct ways the left and right hemispheres interpret the world, and how an overdominance...
In any instance of paradoxical assertions, one of two things is happening. Either the contradictions between the assertions are merely apparent and would be resolved upon a more adequate understanding of the matter at hand or the contradictions are genuine, in which case there must be an error in one of the assertions.
Genuine contradictions are impossible. To believe that there could actually be contradictory realities is to be irrational.
Mr. Poe White, your left-brain is showing! But I must confess, the same idea went through my head. I know contradictions are bad and irrational while paradoxes are fascinating and cool yet to me they look the same.
I passionately want White nations to survive and escape the dire predicament they are in today. But we can't return to the old religion. It's gone for good. It was always nonsense and now this has become utterly plain.
I will never believe in anything supernatural. Please don’t ask me to. Despite its massive downside, I am grateful to the Enlightenment for freeing my mind and many other people’s minds from the absurd nonsense at the heart of all supernatural religions. The bottom line for me: gods, souls, angels, demons, disembodied spirits of all sorts and any other supernatural entities or forces do not exist.
I insist on the unvarnished honest truth. Nothing else will satisfy. Facts are for facing. Live not by lies.
Not only is it predicated on fantastical nonsense, Christianity is a progeny of the Judaic national religion and, despite incorporating considerable European influence, has always remained deeply imbued with Judaic mentality. The implantation of Judaic thinking into our own thought world has done us harm.
Whenever Bo Winegard, who I like a lot and admire, publishes on the Aporia website one of his calls to view religion, not as truth, but as poetry and myth I find myself flummoxed. As poetry it is inferior to almost anything in a decent anthology. As myth it is beaten into a cocked hat by Greek and Norse myth. So if it's not true and we can be 99% sure it isn't, what's the point? To cherry pick the good bits: hope of heaven, death is not really death, reunion with old friends and family, the feeling of belonging to a community etc.? Yet all the while you have to force yourself to forget that the whole lot is obviously nonsense.
Trying to resurrect religion because it would be useful for religion to be a vital force again is a project which is doomed to fail. You can't choose what you actually believe in. You don't choose your authentic beliefs; they choose you.
I posted a 2000 word comment to Jared Taylor's recent American Renaissance article "What God(s) for the White Man?" which I titled "AN ATHEIST MATERIALIST’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A NON-THEOLOGICAL RELIGION". My above comment was part of the opening of this much longer comment which goes into detail about what kind of religious-like spiritual life might still be possible without belief in anything supernatural. I would love for there to be some religion-like cultural institution with beliefs, values and fellowship like a religion but without any supernatural content so that I could sincerely believe in the institution's worldview.
Jared or whoever edits the comments deleted my comment. I can still see my comment but apparently no one else can. It was probably my criticism of Judaic influence on Christianity that triggered him to censor me.
I completely agree and I will read your longer comment on the AR website.
Many years ago I read Alain de Botton's book 'Religion for Atheists' and it made so little impact on me that it has sunk without a trace from my memory.
My problem with trying to find or create a 'religion' for atheists is that it is precisely the miracles: the water into wine, David slaying Goliath, a virgin birth, a boulder being rolled back and a resurrection happening etc. etc. that appeals to most people, including me. Without those completely unbelievable bits to spice it up the Bible is just a very tedious tome. And I do see the attraction of those unbelievable bits, just as I see the attraction in a wardrobe into a Winter World, a boy wizard who can battle with evil and tiny people living under the floorboards. But those stories are for children and for dreams.
If you are right that we don't choose the things we genuinely believe but they choose us, then I suspect that everything I'm ever going to believe I already do. There's no real reason why an atheists' religion, with all the supernaturalism discarded and the wholesome community spirit bit left in, does not already exist. Yet since it doesn't, I'm left wondering why. We shouldn't have to purposefully manufacture a belief in an atheistic spirituality, just as we don't have to for gravity or sexual evolution.
Back in the day I was a regular commenter on Richard Dawkins website and the avowals from other atheist commenters who, if they were to believed, spent most of their days gazing in awe at the vastness and magnificence of the universe through the Hubble telescope, started to get on my nerves. There was a determination to jack themselves up into this religious-style awe that just didn't ring true for me. All of which suggests that while beliefs choose people like you and me, others are quite willing to pick and choose as convenience and comfort dictate.
I am an atheist because I am a monistic materialist and the notion of a god (or soul or any other disembodied spirit) is incompatible with monistic materialism.
Minds or spirits are nothing other than streams of sentience (synonyms: qualia streams, what conscious experiences are like in the first person). Pure experience, mind, qualia etc. cannot exist floating free of physical substance. They can only occur as “epiphenomena” or “supervenient” accompaniments of physical events involving the molecules which constitute the neurons which, in turn, constitute physical brains. There can’t be any mind without a brain to generate it. Indeed, the mind is literally part of the physical brain. It simply can’t be observed non-introspectively in the third person. Other minds are unobservable.
The ancient notion, long been seen as simple common sense, that physical matter is “dead,” i.e. insentient and inert, is mistaken. It has become plain to me that the obvious solution to the Mind-Body Problem of academic Philosophy of Mind is that physical matter not only immanently generates motive forces (the gravity and electromagnetism of current physics), it also immanently generates sentience. Physical matter is inherently at least potentially sentient. There are (so far wholly unknown) laws of what might be called qualic physics describing the contents of the qualia streams generated by various particular physical events.
My working hypothesis is that experiences/qualia are generated by energy flows, or perhaps merely changes in energy flows analogous to Faraday’s Law (according to which changes in magnetic flux through the space contained by a loop of wire generate a current in the wire whereas an unchanging magnetic flux will not). Perhaps the changes in electromagnetic energy flux due to currents coursing through our neurons are what generate our consciousness, just as the currents in a computer monitor generate the images on the screen. Cut off the current and the picture faces to black. Likewise with us, cut off the currents flowing through our brains and our consciousness ceases.
I have found that a sense of sublimity and wonder is inspired by the following philosophical realizations:
Noumenal space must be infinite. For how could empty space be bounded? Even if there were nothing substantial outside the boundary there would still have to at least be empty space outside the boundary. Boundaries have to have an outside as well as an inside.
Time can have neither beginning nor end. For otherwise there would need to have been a moment when the miracle of ex nihilo creation had occurred. The ad nihilo destruction of substance would be equally miraculous.
There is an ineradicable residuum of mystery to existence. How is it that anything exists at all? How is it that consciousness exists? Or that there be experiences such as the color green or the sound of the wind blowing in a storm? Or pleasure and pain? These questions remain as mysterious and unanswerable for materialists as for theists. These realities present themselves as inexplicable brute facts.
The realization that there is an ineluctable fate which cannot be avoided or altered the slightest bit, and which is nothing more than the unfoldment of the states of the universe according to the deterministic materialist (merely descriptive, not legislative) real laws of physics, likewise is conducive to a sense of sublimity.
Deterministic materialism may provide a rather austere and not especially comforting view of reality but it is an intellectually satisfying one. Finding an explanation of reality that holds up to scrutiny provides a sense of inner peace (at least it has for me).
I'm afraid contemplating the miracle that anything at all exists just doesn't do it for me. Had I been born into nothingness then things might be different. However I was born into this world of stuff and sensual appearances and since these are the only things I've ever known, I take them all for granted. This is why it gets on my nerves when I hear someone say, 'But look at the beauty of a flower!' Have they never seen one before? Haven't they, after years of living around flowers, ever got used to the way they look? To me that almost looks like a mental illness.
Okay, occasionally if I read something by someone who has taken several steps back so as to take a panoramic view of it all and then I am sometimes jolted out of my complaisance for a few seconds and think, 'yes, it is kind of strange' and then I move on and the old familiarity of things envelopbes me again, just as it should with a brain that reacts to change rather than sameness.
For me there is no inner peace in arriving at a comprehensive world view that holds up to scrutiny, though I suppose it would cure the chronic itch to solve an annoying mystery. When I imagine inner peace it comes not from settling on a world view that I feel I could defend but from a feeling of belonging, of being 'home' and in exactly the place I was always meant to be.
I disagree that 'the color green or the sound of the wind blowing in a storm' 'or 'pleasure and pain' are 'as mysterious and unanswerable for materialists as for theists'. I think biology, physics and evolutionary theory can explain them all well enough. Sure, why there is anything at all remains a mystery, but that's a different question entirely.
Clearly you have thought a lot more about all this than I have and also your knowledge of science exceeds mine by a mile and I'm simply not in a position to adjudicate on the Mind-Body Problem or qualia streams. All I do know is that religion looks to me like wishful thinking, something I'm very familiar with from having been on Earth for 67 years.
By the way, it's curious that the moderators at AR made your post only visible to you. That's a bit disturbing. For all I know, every comment I have ever made might only be visible to me! Rather than them taking exception to some comment you made about Judaic influence on Christianity, I think it more likely that they thought your 2,000-word comment was simply too long, perhaps even longer than the original article!
"it's curious that the moderators at AR made your post only visible to you. That's a bit disturbing. For all I know, every comment I have ever made might only be visible to me!"
When AR deletes your comment, it is still visible to you and will have the word "deleted" in red type appear at the top right hand corner of your comment. Also, there will be no "reply" button at the bottom as appears in comments which are accepted.
"Rather than them taking exception to some comment you made about Judaic influence on Christianity, I think it more likely that they thought your 2,000-word comment was simply too long"
I rewrote my comment removing all mention of Jews and Christianity and slightly trimmed the comment down to 1800 words and resubmitted it. The tone was polite throughout. It was also deleted. Maybe it was too long as you suggest. Or maybe my frank atheism put the moderator off. Go figure.
"I'm afraid contemplating the miracle that anything at all exists just doesn't do it for me."
It appears to be a fact of human nature that it is not possible to sustain the state of mind of awe and wonder indefinitely. No matter how fundamentally mysterious some entity or event is, it will come to seem "old hat." "Familiarity breeds contempt," as the old saying goes. It is human nature to spend most of our time in a state of "everydayness" as Heidegger would put it.
"inner peace...comes...from a feeling of belonging, of being 'home' and in exactly the place I was always meant to be."
It is too much to expect of an explanation of the world that it be enough in of itself to satisfy people's needs. I agree that feeling at home in the part of the world you inhabit is what is most conducive to inner peace. Feeling at home in the world depends more on your relationships with the people you live among and the nature of the social system than it does on religious or philosophical beliefs. But it isn't possible for me to feel fully at home if the people around me believe (or pretend to believe) in obvious nonsense.
There is a powerful drive in me to get to the actual truth of things. (Perhaps I am unusual in this respect?) Yes, I need to feel that I belong among the people I live among, but I also need to be able to see and speak truth. I can't pretend to believe in absurd doctrines.
"biology, physics and evolutionary theory can explain [the experiences of color, sound, pleasure and pain] all well enough."
Actually, they don't even begin to explain the experiences. All the explanations of evolutionary biology presuppose the existence of the qualia, i.e. experiences in the first person or "the way it feels from the inside," which is not to be confused with third person observable phenomena like sound waves in the air or observable bodily behavior.
To take an example, Darwinian selection nicely explains why eyesight might spread through a population once it arises somehow. But it doesn't begin to explain how there can exist such a thing as eyesight in the first place.
The mysteries remain, even if they have an air of everydayness about them and no longer elicit a subjective sense of wonder.
"religion looks to me like wishful thinking"
And to me as well.
The bottom line for me is that, though I very much want the sort of fellowship that has traditionally been associated with religions, I don't want any supernatural religion or equally false and nonsensical secular ideology (like Marxism or today's Wokeism) either. Live not by lies.
To truly feel at home with the people around me, I need them to stop believing in nonsense. More is needed though: social solidarity expressed as mutual aid, cooperation, fairness, honesty and trustworthiness. This is especially hard to come by these days.
I think the actual fix is predicated on an economic reconstruction of the right kind.
"There was a determination to jack themselves up into this religious-style awe that just didn't ring true "
I know what you mean. This sort of thing is cringe. It wouldn't work for me either. Authentic awe arises unbidden sometimes (but not always) in quiet moments of philosophic reflection.
In my Amren comment I provided a general characterization of religion:
Religions have three components:
(1) a view of what reality is (ontology);
(2) a value system (ethics);
(3) shared communal practices (ritual).
Furthermore, these three components have three typical attributes:
(1) the view of reality typically induces a sense of sublimity and wonder;
(2) the ethics typically involves social solidarity and mutual aid;
(3) the communal practices are typically imbued with an aesthetic quality widely felt by practitioners.
My hope is that someday a materialist ontology will become widely accepted as the commonsense view (as theism and animism had been before). This would provide the ontology. But what of the value system?
My hope here is for a nature affirming and race affirming value system passionately felt and resolutely practiced, predicated on a naturalistic materialist ontology.
The fundamental value would be preservation of Earth’s natural ecosphere largely as it has evolved on its own. This includes the preservation of wilderness and wild species. Above all, it includes the preservation of Homo sapiens as it has naturally evolved and the preservation of its racial varieties including, of course, our own White race.
I reject the humanist view of humanity as something radically separate and superior to the natural world. Rather, I see humanity as part of nature, and specifically part of the naturally evolved Earth ecosystem: "Not Man Apart" (as Robinson Jeffers poetically put it).
Of essential importance, I reject Transhumanism as a grave existential threat to naturally evolved humanity as well as other species. If we care about preserving our race then we must surely be opposed to Transhumanism. Nor will our race survive if the Earth ecosphere is degraded seriously enough. Commitment to ecological stewardship is an integral part of a logically coherent racial nationalism.
Rather than embracing a project of Transhumanist transformation of the human organism, the sound nationalist project would be to aim at cultivating the maximum of health and strength of our naturally evolved organism and content ourselves to remain within the limits of our naturally evolved form. A conservative practice of eugenics which encourages the natural procreation of our biologically soundest “alpha” specimens makes eminent good sense. Eugenic projects involving genetic engineering as in the movie "Gattaca" would be techno-hubristic folly.
I just looked up how to become more right-brained and some suggestions were:
1. Sign your name any which way! - Does that rather negate the point of signing?
2. Unstructured movement and dance - So, like you have celebral palsy or are an aficionado of 'expressive dance'. In my Junior School we had to do 'Music and Movement' and our teacher instructed us to just express ourselves. I found I had nothing to express in dance.
3. Toss in the kitchen sink! - I'm assuming this doesn't mean what I think it means.
Absolutely brilliant and fascinating. I want more of this kind of thing.
The one thing I would have liked to learn is who the right-brain equivalents of today's left-brain Ashkenazi Jews are. Filipino nurses? Sub-Saharan Africans? People of IQs below 80? I need a good role model before I can get on board with jetisoning my materialistic/reductionistic ways of thinking.
What makes me think it's possible to change in my case is that I never used to be like this. In fact I held out for nearly 30 years before finally caving, which is when I 'got myself educated' and started thinking and saying the things you're supposed to think and say. Before 30 I never read a newspaper, never watched the news, never read non-fiction and never passed an exam. I was as analytical as a barnacle and happier than now.
I didn't understand your comment. Was it related to the topic of left-brain v right-brain or just a random thought? If I had to guess, I'd say it was churned out by one of those text generating machines which, by the law of averages, occasionally produce something profound-sounding.
44:40 "Learn to accept paradox."
In any instance of paradoxical assertions, one of two things is happening. Either the contradictions between the assertions are merely apparent and would be resolved upon a more adequate understanding of the matter at hand or the contradictions are genuine, in which case there must be an error in one of the assertions.
Genuine contradictions are impossible. To believe that there could actually be contradictory realities is to be irrational.
Mr. Poe White, your left-brain is showing! But I must confess, the same idea went through my head. I know contradictions are bad and irrational while paradoxes are fascinating and cool yet to me they look the same.
I passionately want White nations to survive and escape the dire predicament they are in today. But we can't return to the old religion. It's gone for good. It was always nonsense and now this has become utterly plain.
I will never believe in anything supernatural. Please don’t ask me to. Despite its massive downside, I am grateful to the Enlightenment for freeing my mind and many other people’s minds from the absurd nonsense at the heart of all supernatural religions. The bottom line for me: gods, souls, angels, demons, disembodied spirits of all sorts and any other supernatural entities or forces do not exist.
I insist on the unvarnished honest truth. Nothing else will satisfy. Facts are for facing. Live not by lies.
Not only is it predicated on fantastical nonsense, Christianity is a progeny of the Judaic national religion and, despite incorporating considerable European influence, has always remained deeply imbued with Judaic mentality. The implantation of Judaic thinking into our own thought world has done us harm.
We need a new path going forward.
Whenever Bo Winegard, who I like a lot and admire, publishes on the Aporia website one of his calls to view religion, not as truth, but as poetry and myth I find myself flummoxed. As poetry it is inferior to almost anything in a decent anthology. As myth it is beaten into a cocked hat by Greek and Norse myth. So if it's not true and we can be 99% sure it isn't, what's the point? To cherry pick the good bits: hope of heaven, death is not really death, reunion with old friends and family, the feeling of belonging to a community etc.? Yet all the while you have to force yourself to forget that the whole lot is obviously nonsense.
Trying to resurrect religion because it would be useful for religion to be a vital force again is a project which is doomed to fail. You can't choose what you actually believe in. You don't choose your authentic beliefs; they choose you.
I posted a 2000 word comment to Jared Taylor's recent American Renaissance article "What God(s) for the White Man?" which I titled "AN ATHEIST MATERIALIST’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A NON-THEOLOGICAL RELIGION". My above comment was part of the opening of this much longer comment which goes into detail about what kind of religious-like spiritual life might still be possible without belief in anything supernatural. I would love for there to be some religion-like cultural institution with beliefs, values and fellowship like a religion but without any supernatural content so that I could sincerely believe in the institution's worldview.
Perhaps you'd find it interesting. Last time I checked it was still at the top of the comment section. https://www.amren.com/features/2026/04/what-gods-for-the-white-man
Nope, I couldn't find it. Were you posting under a different name? Either way, it wasn't at the top (or anywhere else I could see).
Jared or whoever edits the comments deleted my comment. I can still see my comment but apparently no one else can. It was probably my criticism of Judaic influence on Christianity that triggered him to censor me.
I completely agree and I will read your longer comment on the AR website.
Many years ago I read Alain de Botton's book 'Religion for Atheists' and it made so little impact on me that it has sunk without a trace from my memory.
My problem with trying to find or create a 'religion' for atheists is that it is precisely the miracles: the water into wine, David slaying Goliath, a virgin birth, a boulder being rolled back and a resurrection happening etc. etc. that appeals to most people, including me. Without those completely unbelievable bits to spice it up the Bible is just a very tedious tome. And I do see the attraction of those unbelievable bits, just as I see the attraction in a wardrobe into a Winter World, a boy wizard who can battle with evil and tiny people living under the floorboards. But those stories are for children and for dreams.
If you are right that we don't choose the things we genuinely believe but they choose us, then I suspect that everything I'm ever going to believe I already do. There's no real reason why an atheists' religion, with all the supernaturalism discarded and the wholesome community spirit bit left in, does not already exist. Yet since it doesn't, I'm left wondering why. We shouldn't have to purposefully manufacture a belief in an atheistic spirituality, just as we don't have to for gravity or sexual evolution.
Back in the day I was a regular commenter on Richard Dawkins website and the avowals from other atheist commenters who, if they were to believed, spent most of their days gazing in awe at the vastness and magnificence of the universe through the Hubble telescope, started to get on my nerves. There was a determination to jack themselves up into this religious-style awe that just didn't ring true for me. All of which suggests that while beliefs choose people like you and me, others are quite willing to pick and choose as convenience and comfort dictate.
Right, over to the AR site.
My ontological worldview in brief:
I am an atheist because I am a monistic materialist and the notion of a god (or soul or any other disembodied spirit) is incompatible with monistic materialism.
Minds or spirits are nothing other than streams of sentience (synonyms: qualia streams, what conscious experiences are like in the first person). Pure experience, mind, qualia etc. cannot exist floating free of physical substance. They can only occur as “epiphenomena” or “supervenient” accompaniments of physical events involving the molecules which constitute the neurons which, in turn, constitute physical brains. There can’t be any mind without a brain to generate it. Indeed, the mind is literally part of the physical brain. It simply can’t be observed non-introspectively in the third person. Other minds are unobservable.
The ancient notion, long been seen as simple common sense, that physical matter is “dead,” i.e. insentient and inert, is mistaken. It has become plain to me that the obvious solution to the Mind-Body Problem of academic Philosophy of Mind is that physical matter not only immanently generates motive forces (the gravity and electromagnetism of current physics), it also immanently generates sentience. Physical matter is inherently at least potentially sentient. There are (so far wholly unknown) laws of what might be called qualic physics describing the contents of the qualia streams generated by various particular physical events.
My working hypothesis is that experiences/qualia are generated by energy flows, or perhaps merely changes in energy flows analogous to Faraday’s Law (according to which changes in magnetic flux through the space contained by a loop of wire generate a current in the wire whereas an unchanging magnetic flux will not). Perhaps the changes in electromagnetic energy flux due to currents coursing through our neurons are what generate our consciousness, just as the currents in a computer monitor generate the images on the screen. Cut off the current and the picture faces to black. Likewise with us, cut off the currents flowing through our brains and our consciousness ceases.
I have found that a sense of sublimity and wonder is inspired by the following philosophical realizations:
Noumenal space must be infinite. For how could empty space be bounded? Even if there were nothing substantial outside the boundary there would still have to at least be empty space outside the boundary. Boundaries have to have an outside as well as an inside.
Time can have neither beginning nor end. For otherwise there would need to have been a moment when the miracle of ex nihilo creation had occurred. The ad nihilo destruction of substance would be equally miraculous.
There is an ineradicable residuum of mystery to existence. How is it that anything exists at all? How is it that consciousness exists? Or that there be experiences such as the color green or the sound of the wind blowing in a storm? Or pleasure and pain? These questions remain as mysterious and unanswerable for materialists as for theists. These realities present themselves as inexplicable brute facts.
The realization that there is an ineluctable fate which cannot be avoided or altered the slightest bit, and which is nothing more than the unfoldment of the states of the universe according to the deterministic materialist (merely descriptive, not legislative) real laws of physics, likewise is conducive to a sense of sublimity.
Deterministic materialism may provide a rather austere and not especially comforting view of reality but it is an intellectually satisfying one. Finding an explanation of reality that holds up to scrutiny provides a sense of inner peace (at least it has for me).
I'm afraid contemplating the miracle that anything at all exists just doesn't do it for me. Had I been born into nothingness then things might be different. However I was born into this world of stuff and sensual appearances and since these are the only things I've ever known, I take them all for granted. This is why it gets on my nerves when I hear someone say, 'But look at the beauty of a flower!' Have they never seen one before? Haven't they, after years of living around flowers, ever got used to the way they look? To me that almost looks like a mental illness.
Okay, occasionally if I read something by someone who has taken several steps back so as to take a panoramic view of it all and then I am sometimes jolted out of my complaisance for a few seconds and think, 'yes, it is kind of strange' and then I move on and the old familiarity of things envelopbes me again, just as it should with a brain that reacts to change rather than sameness.
For me there is no inner peace in arriving at a comprehensive world view that holds up to scrutiny, though I suppose it would cure the chronic itch to solve an annoying mystery. When I imagine inner peace it comes not from settling on a world view that I feel I could defend but from a feeling of belonging, of being 'home' and in exactly the place I was always meant to be.
I disagree that 'the color green or the sound of the wind blowing in a storm' 'or 'pleasure and pain' are 'as mysterious and unanswerable for materialists as for theists'. I think biology, physics and evolutionary theory can explain them all well enough. Sure, why there is anything at all remains a mystery, but that's a different question entirely.
Clearly you have thought a lot more about all this than I have and also your knowledge of science exceeds mine by a mile and I'm simply not in a position to adjudicate on the Mind-Body Problem or qualia streams. All I do know is that religion looks to me like wishful thinking, something I'm very familiar with from having been on Earth for 67 years.
By the way, it's curious that the moderators at AR made your post only visible to you. That's a bit disturbing. For all I know, every comment I have ever made might only be visible to me! Rather than them taking exception to some comment you made about Judaic influence on Christianity, I think it more likely that they thought your 2,000-word comment was simply too long, perhaps even longer than the original article!
"it's curious that the moderators at AR made your post only visible to you. That's a bit disturbing. For all I know, every comment I have ever made might only be visible to me!"
When AR deletes your comment, it is still visible to you and will have the word "deleted" in red type appear at the top right hand corner of your comment. Also, there will be no "reply" button at the bottom as appears in comments which are accepted.
"Rather than them taking exception to some comment you made about Judaic influence on Christianity, I think it more likely that they thought your 2,000-word comment was simply too long"
I rewrote my comment removing all mention of Jews and Christianity and slightly trimmed the comment down to 1800 words and resubmitted it. The tone was polite throughout. It was also deleted. Maybe it was too long as you suggest. Or maybe my frank atheism put the moderator off. Go figure.
"I'm afraid contemplating the miracle that anything at all exists just doesn't do it for me."
It appears to be a fact of human nature that it is not possible to sustain the state of mind of awe and wonder indefinitely. No matter how fundamentally mysterious some entity or event is, it will come to seem "old hat." "Familiarity breeds contempt," as the old saying goes. It is human nature to spend most of our time in a state of "everydayness" as Heidegger would put it.
"inner peace...comes...from a feeling of belonging, of being 'home' and in exactly the place I was always meant to be."
It is too much to expect of an explanation of the world that it be enough in of itself to satisfy people's needs. I agree that feeling at home in the part of the world you inhabit is what is most conducive to inner peace. Feeling at home in the world depends more on your relationships with the people you live among and the nature of the social system than it does on religious or philosophical beliefs. But it isn't possible for me to feel fully at home if the people around me believe (or pretend to believe) in obvious nonsense.
There is a powerful drive in me to get to the actual truth of things. (Perhaps I am unusual in this respect?) Yes, I need to feel that I belong among the people I live among, but I also need to be able to see and speak truth. I can't pretend to believe in absurd doctrines.
"biology, physics and evolutionary theory can explain [the experiences of color, sound, pleasure and pain] all well enough."
Actually, they don't even begin to explain the experiences. All the explanations of evolutionary biology presuppose the existence of the qualia, i.e. experiences in the first person or "the way it feels from the inside," which is not to be confused with third person observable phenomena like sound waves in the air or observable bodily behavior.
To take an example, Darwinian selection nicely explains why eyesight might spread through a population once it arises somehow. But it doesn't begin to explain how there can exist such a thing as eyesight in the first place.
The mysteries remain, even if they have an air of everydayness about them and no longer elicit a subjective sense of wonder.
"religion looks to me like wishful thinking"
And to me as well.
The bottom line for me is that, though I very much want the sort of fellowship that has traditionally been associated with religions, I don't want any supernatural religion or equally false and nonsensical secular ideology (like Marxism or today's Wokeism) either. Live not by lies.
To truly feel at home with the people around me, I need them to stop believing in nonsense. More is needed though: social solidarity expressed as mutual aid, cooperation, fairness, honesty and trustworthiness. This is especially hard to come by these days.
I think the actual fix is predicated on an economic reconstruction of the right kind.
"There was a determination to jack themselves up into this religious-style awe that just didn't ring true "
I know what you mean. This sort of thing is cringe. It wouldn't work for me either. Authentic awe arises unbidden sometimes (but not always) in quiet moments of philosophic reflection.
In my Amren comment I provided a general characterization of religion:
Religions have three components:
(1) a view of what reality is (ontology);
(2) a value system (ethics);
(3) shared communal practices (ritual).
Furthermore, these three components have three typical attributes:
(1) the view of reality typically induces a sense of sublimity and wonder;
(2) the ethics typically involves social solidarity and mutual aid;
(3) the communal practices are typically imbued with an aesthetic quality widely felt by practitioners.
My hope is that someday a materialist ontology will become widely accepted as the commonsense view (as theism and animism had been before). This would provide the ontology. But what of the value system?
My hope here is for a nature affirming and race affirming value system passionately felt and resolutely practiced, predicated on a naturalistic materialist ontology.
The fundamental value would be preservation of Earth’s natural ecosphere largely as it has evolved on its own. This includes the preservation of wilderness and wild species. Above all, it includes the preservation of Homo sapiens as it has naturally evolved and the preservation of its racial varieties including, of course, our own White race.
I reject the humanist view of humanity as something radically separate and superior to the natural world. Rather, I see humanity as part of nature, and specifically part of the naturally evolved Earth ecosystem: "Not Man Apart" (as Robinson Jeffers poetically put it).
Of essential importance, I reject Transhumanism as a grave existential threat to naturally evolved humanity as well as other species. If we care about preserving our race then we must surely be opposed to Transhumanism. Nor will our race survive if the Earth ecosphere is degraded seriously enough. Commitment to ecological stewardship is an integral part of a logically coherent racial nationalism.
Rather than embracing a project of Transhumanist transformation of the human organism, the sound nationalist project would be to aim at cultivating the maximum of health and strength of our naturally evolved organism and content ourselves to remain within the limits of our naturally evolved form. A conservative practice of eugenics which encourages the natural procreation of our biologically soundest “alpha” specimens makes eminent good sense. Eugenic projects involving genetic engineering as in the movie "Gattaca" would be techno-hubristic folly.
My hopes summed up:
(1) RESOLUTE PRESERVATION OF THE NATURAL EARTH;
(2) ETHNORACIAL NATIONALISM;
(3) NATURALISTIC MATERIALIST WORLDVIEW.
Make cousin marriage great again! 😅
I just looked up how to become more right-brained and some suggestions were:
1. Sign your name any which way! - Does that rather negate the point of signing?
2. Unstructured movement and dance - So, like you have celebral palsy or are an aficionado of 'expressive dance'. In my Junior School we had to do 'Music and Movement' and our teacher instructed us to just express ourselves. I found I had nothing to express in dance.
3. Toss in the kitchen sink! - I'm assuming this doesn't mean what I think it means.
Absolutely brilliant and fascinating. I want more of this kind of thing.
The one thing I would have liked to learn is who the right-brain equivalents of today's left-brain Ashkenazi Jews are. Filipino nurses? Sub-Saharan Africans? People of IQs below 80? I need a good role model before I can get on board with jetisoning my materialistic/reductionistic ways of thinking.
What makes me think it's possible to change in my case is that I never used to be like this. In fact I held out for nearly 30 years before finally caving, which is when I 'got myself educated' and started thinking and saying the things you're supposed to think and say. Before 30 I never read a newspaper, never watched the news, never read non-fiction and never passed an exam. I was as analytical as a barnacle and happier than now.
I didn't understand your comment. Was it related to the topic of left-brain v right-brain or just a random thought? If I had to guess, I'd say it was churned out by one of those text generating machines which, by the law of averages, occasionally produce something profound-sounding.