111–120 of 201 posts
If you believe things, you will feel righteousness when they are (or are perceived to be) challenged.
The better question is: why do we believe what we believe? And why have these beliefs done so much harm?
I wonder what the author's thoughts are on "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. It mentions many clear refutes backed up by history to the idea of how bad it is for humans to be "addicted to righteousness". For example, individuals have not and do not live by themselves in a vacuum as only selfish. We are also very group-ish, and it is the righteousness or norm…
Do you think the vaccinated feel righteous when they condemn the unvaccinated?
Does the author want us to just be spineless bags of jelly, waiting for death? He cuts down the idea of "fixing ourselves" and says righteousness is a dangerous addiction. Of course you can't "fix yourself", there is no point to any of this, but you have to believe something while you are here, you have to have some righteousness or you will be run over.
This was ended by the Peace of Westphalia, when nations decided that there is no right religion, and that everybody loses if they fight righteousness wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
But then a different kind of righteousness appeared, we are the righteousness people (nazi), or we are the righteousness kind of leadership (communism vs capitalism).
I would question the author's casual belief that a so-called "righteous" attitude , where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group. This is a huge leap and I personally don't believe there is any such necessity: > Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, li…
As opposed to her mind being liberated and enlightened if she would watch CNN instead.
"For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." - The apostle Paul's letter to Rome. (ESV Bible, Romans 10:4)
The good news: "Jesus Christ has already accomplished the purpose for which the law was given. As a result, all who believe in him are made right with God." (NLT Bible, Romans 10:5)
Seriously look at this guy. He opposes the self-righteous religious people, powerfully helps people in need, has zero pride, was so humble he was willing to die for a crime he didn't even commit. Not even good guy Greg would go that far. Bible says what I have to do to be right is just point to Jesus and agree that he's a better man than I'll ever be.
Does the author want us to just be spineless bags of jelly, waiting for death? He cuts down the idea of "fixing ourselves" and says righteousness is a dangerous addiction. Of course you can't "fix yourself", there is no point to any of this, but you have to believe something while you are here, you have to have some righteousness or you will be run over.
Terms can be tricky with this subject. My interpretation is this:
* "righteousness" is the goal/ideal
* "self-righteousness" is the trap that is so easy to fall into (the addiction)
The problem is that this distinction is rarely made, IOW the word "righteous" gets all the negative connotation of "self-righteous" and confuses people who really pay attention to words.
> AS A SOBER ADDICT... I wish we would drop this terminology and self-consciousness. While I understand the term is intended as a self-reminder that it's easy to slip back into addictive patterns of behavior, the perpetual self-description of "addict" surely cannot be healthy for the person or society. The addict-for-life mentality is similar to the seed of cancel culture. Once you do $BAD_THING, you're a ${BAD_THING…
However in the many years since I have had more exposure to AA and other recovery programs and I've discovered that while there are other programs (such as SMART recovery) that take drastically different approaches, in practice AA is really the only program with a significant success rate.
I known people that entered a recovery program, "got better", and moved on with their lives successfully and I know people that first got started with AA 25+ years ago and still attend meetings at least weekly today. Not to gatekeep addiction but I think the people from this first group are not "real" addicts in some sense, and for those people you are probably right and continuous self-labeling would be harmful.
But for the people from that second group, I think it's true -- there's literally no hope that they will ever live a happy health life outside of a program that keeps their focus on their addiction/recovery every day. Any significant loss of focus will result in an immediate and precipitous downward spiral. For these people "sober addict" isn't something that's damaging their self perception, it's something that's improving it, because they're comparing it to the only other option they have which is "active addict".
This is the natural consequence of killing God, as Nietzsche observed. Without an objective basis, there's no objective truth about what's valuable, right, or good. But we desperately want to be right, so we ignore what God says is right and invent our own version. "For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." - The apostle Paul's le…
This is the natural consequence of killing God, as Nietzsche observed. Without an objective basis, there's no objective truth about what's valuable, right, or good. But we desperately want to be right, so we ignore what God says is right and invent our own version. "For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." - The apostle Paul's le…
Even if you go off a text like the Bible, there is no objective interpretation of what it means.
>has zero pride, was so humble
Jesus literally claimed to be the son of God. That's about as arrogant as you can get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. "addiction"…
Opiate addiction results in a higher concentration of opiate receptors on many cell surfaces. Possible down-regulation of endogenous endorphin production may also occur, as I recall. The result of removing the exogenous opiates is thus a very painful experience as the endorphin/receptor ratio is destabilized. This also seems to play a role in alcohol addiction as alcohol use has opiate-like co-effects[1] [1] https://…
I'd argue that since we do have dopamine/seretonin driven reward systems, anything that modifies a physiological expression of the neuro-chemical lifecycle from pre-exposure to post-exposure (whether that be density of receptors, abundance of neurotransmitter, some yet unknown neurochemical expression), then that substance can cause addiction.
Video games could do this, just not as dramatically as heroin, but given that modern day life is basically just a hamster wheel of our neurochemical systems, anything has the potential to be addictive as defined above, it all depends on where on the spectrum of addiction said substance lies.