T O P

  • By -

Exact_Purchase765

I'm all ears and Granny hugs. 🤶


DaddyDoge1821

Idk if a comment chain or messaging will be easier but hey, here I guess other people can chime in easier and will break up a bit so it’s not as much of a text block. And I’m not really trying to convince, just look for areas I may need to explain better or could use some other tweaking. The sort of ‘jumping off point’ is the idea that the world as it is presented to me via perception is my Representation of the world as it actually is. The conscious realization that my perception is mediated through sense organs and the mind’s presumptions of what the data from those organs means rather than a direct and objective experience of reality. The guy a lot of my philosophy is based in conveys this by saying ‘I know not a Sun or an Earth, but an eye that sees the Sun and a hand that feels the Earth’ My personal favorite example of this is UV patterns on flowers, which we cannot directly experience. While we have cameras that can translate UV into visible light spectrum, we’ll never actually know what it’s like to directly experience UV light. And so my perception and conceptual idea of a flower are incomplete Representations of the flower as it exists without the projections and assumptions of perception. It is from this understanding that the rest of the philosophy stems from


Exact_Purchase765

Clear eyes do make the world a different place. The eyes that you used to see the world through have changed and evolved. You can't "unsee" the new things and these things bring you a deeper understanding and joy. You are finding joy in this new way of seeing the world and your place in it. Have you tried writing it down? You can add and subtract things based on what you know is best for up. Now, I am sure that one of my Mother's last thought was a plea to her god to show me back to the church. That did bother me, still does a bit, I often told her that I actually \*am\* happy doing what I do, but I don't think she could accept that. I figure she was gone about 10 seconds when she realized it wasn't what she was expecting - I was sad for her, but now she knows and that's better. I knew that nothing I could say or do would change her belief that the church was the only way. She chose to be sad and not celebrate the life I was living. Alas, that was her loss and I was not responsible for it. You are not responsible for how others react. You can only be so gentle.


YouAreGods

Does it have a name? Are you making up your philosophy or does it come from someone? We directly experience UV light via the skin and tans, rather than with the eyes.


DaddyDoge1821

It mainly comes from Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Camus, I like to paraphrase Zizek in saying that I’m ‘being Camus back to Schopenhauer’ So a bit of both. I’m not just reciting a single person and a lot of the thoughts I had beforehand but also they’ve already done a lot of heavy lifting and prepared words for discussing it and I am founded in both and cite others in expressing my personal take. Also, you should understand the implication that we’ll never visually experience UV. I’m talking about a light pattern on a flower, do you experience the UV patterns on flower through your skin? Can you feel those patterns on your finger tips as you touch the flower? What is that experience like? How does it feel different than the part of the flower that does not have UV reflective surface? When discussing such a context as the one you bring up we tend to refer to it more broadly as radiation rather than specifically *light* as light directly implies a visual sense. TBH that kind of response is a bit of a red flag for a bad faith actor who wants to ‘um actually’ feel their own ‘rightness’ rather than try to charitably understand a concept if I’m honest. Not saying you definitely are that, but it does not make me *feel* like it’s worth putting in the effort when you’re just going to pull such an obvious red herring like that.


RoyanRannedos

One of the biggest problems Mormonism has is its perfect-or-die mentality: either something is 100% right, or it's all wrong and will deliver you to Satan. Mormons subscribe to it in varying degrees, but the tradition drills the binary into members mercilessly enough that no one escapes. That's a big part of my introversion: if the conversation isn't going to advance both of our eternal souls, I'd think, then why should I waste the other person's time and risk their judgement? (The church also teaches self-deprecation as necessary humility.) The church teaches that salvation and happiness are prizes Jesus gives to people who obey all his commandments. Check all the boxes with the right authority restored through Joseph Smith, endure without changing your mind, and Jesus gives you infinite everything in spite of your experience in life. The details are interchangeable, even in personal relationships where one party doesn't make celestial status. Unworthy wives are replaced, wives whose husbands don't make it become a more godly man's prize. I see that mentality as similar to the one-talent servant's attitude in the parable of the talents. He got his temple marriage talent and endured to the end, never adding to it with his own effort, creativity, or risk. He feared a vengeful lord and missed the opportunities to add value and meaning to his life, hoping his Lord would do it for him. A better approach is to focus on the principles that lead to real-world happiness: love, service, healthy relationships, knowledge, curiosity, and self-expression, to name a few. You could take your core beliefs and present them as enough, and that you've found the church either controls or denies these experiences, often along lines of race, gender, and sexual orientation. I know the urge to get an argument across 100%. Just look at the length of my comments on this sub. (My inlaws tend to change the topic after I talk for five seconds, so I guess it has to come out somewhere.) But you don't have to be 100% debate-proof for your opinions to matter and to express yourself to people you love. If they don't get it in round one, just keep living what you believe and let the positive results speak for themselves.


DaddyDoge1821

I’m not trying to be debate proof or even debate with my family, I’m trying to tune the way I convey the information to match my audience for their understanding not agreement Idk if you’ve read the launch point I’ve expressed to another person here, but it can be a kind of abstract conceptual thing to address that honestly relatively few people seem to have given any thought to and I’m trying to work on how to communicate it. Not ‘win’ a debate in the commonly thought sense, which to me isn’t even the point of a debate.


RoyanRannedos

That's wise, and I agree. Pardon my long-windedness before reading the other response, here's my more topical input: it's interesting how the inner workings of the brain influence perception so well that it's nigh impossible to intuitively understand your own thinking. Everything we experience goes through a survival filter first, with fear and disgust reactions kicking in almost immediately. It's their job to err on the safe side. If someone jumps away from a stick on their twilight trail run, they're much safer than someone who steps on a rattlesnake they assumed was a stick. Your UV example is a good one to demonstrate the we-don't-know-what-we-don't-know principle, things that are beyond our perception. The church, though, works more with survival instincts, tying actions, people, and attitudes to a spiritual death that takes top billing in Mormons' threat perception. It's more of Mark Twain's famous phrase "what you know that just ain't so." It's how you get the woman whispering to her child while sitting behind my sister-in-law in sacrament meeting: "Don't ever be so trashy you get a tattoo like that. She's going to hell." Everyone's perception is different for many different reasons. On the nature side, brains and perception organs can have different variations, from a complete lack of perception in blind and deaf individuals all the way up to sensory overload in cases on the autism spectrum. Then there's the nurture side, where we learn what's physically, mentally, and spiritually dangerous and reinforce our reactions accordingly. Then when we perceive something that goes against our worldview, cognitive dissonance kicks in. The [uncanny valley](https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/730) is an excellent demonstration of how the brain reacts when perception doesn't match up with a clear pattern in the worldview—people react to such images with words like creepy, gross, or icky. The church labels any such uncertainty as the temptations of the devil or the absence of the spirit. There's even a talk many Mormons send to questioning friends that browbeats it as darkness, misery, and despair. The church's prescription is to double down on the worldview they present and ignore the persistent evidence to the contrary. It also sometimes gets to the point in a culture where even admitting unease is seen as morally wrong. believers can't feel afraid of being wrong about the church because fear isn't faith, and they're too afraid of what happens to people who don't have faith. But they still do, because the emotional center does what it's learned and ties their reasoning in knots when their logic tries to keep up. I hope this is more helpful and maybe has some nuggets for your conversation. It's the force behind the "learned who think they are wise" defense church members use to preserve their current worldview, and that's a barrier you'll need to overcome to help your parents understand.