Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 966 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#641

Post by mgh2 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #233

100% atheism. Was raised some kind of protestant I forget which one, and derived tremendous spiritual and psychological relief when I realized all of that was absolute nonsense at the age of 9. I knew I was gay at the time and wouldn't come out until I was 18 or so, but my life just got a lot easier when I removed religion completely. I also recall discovering increased moral agency -- as a Christian I had been taugh…

A curious and investigative approach https://trendguardian.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c...

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#642

Post by ___q »

stelonix wrote: post #66
mam4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not physical damage to doing it that often ? Ive done it twice in a row 3 years ago and it was fine but i was wondering that b.c. in the community i did that they were literally giving it to children starting 3 y.o.

I have been taking it for the past 7 years, sometimes a couple times a month, sometimes more, and have zero physical damage from it. It's pretty common in indigenous communities or other ayahuasca centers to give it to children, yeah. No records of anything bad happening to them. In the church I attend, there's people who have been taking it for the past 28 years with no issues at all.

This post should have an asterisk. It is not risk free, a primary concern being drug-to-drug interactions. That said, a lethal dose is 10-20x what is typically administered.

> Adverse health effects may occur from casual use of ayahuasca, particularly when serotonergic substances are used in conjunction. [1]

The heightened sense of internal reality for DMT users is mostly due to its interaction with the visual cortex.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20170810122337/https://www.iceer...

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#643

Post by chernevik »

omarfarooq wrote: post #609
xupybd wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus was God in flesh. So God the father is separate but connected. ( I'm a little under qualified to describe the exact nature of the Holy Trinity) So God the father has always been looking over creation. After Jesus ascended to heaven the Holy Spirit was sent to help the church in place of Jesus her on earth. Jesus was God in flesh so he purposely limited himself to experience all that we experience, to suffer all…

> Jesus was God in flesh so he purposely limited himself to experience all that we experience, to suffer all that we suffer. There is nothing that He can't empathize with. This implies that God is incapable of fully knowing the experience of humans without becoming human, hence God is not omniscient; since now his omniscience is contingent on becoming contingent.

No. God already understood the human experience. He became human to prove to us, beyond all doubt, that He does understand.

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#644

Post by SwiftyBug »

omarfarooq wrote: post #609
xupybd wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus was God in flesh. So God the father is separate but connected. ( I'm a little under qualified to describe the exact nature of the Holy Trinity) So God the father has always been looking over creation. After Jesus ascended to heaven the Holy Spirit was sent to help the church in place of Jesus her on earth. Jesus was God in flesh so he purposely limited himself to experience all that we experience, to suffer all…

> Jesus was God in flesh so he purposely limited himself to experience all that we experience, to suffer all that we suffer. There is nothing that He can't empathize with. This implies that God is incapable of fully knowing the experience of humans without becoming human, hence God is not omniscient; since now his omniscience is contingent on becoming contingent.

You don't even need to get that far to reach the conclusion that God is not omniscient. This is Genesis 8-10: 8) Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9) But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”. 10) He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”.

Adam and Eve hid behind some trees and God didn't know where they were. It makes no sense for an omniscient being to ask anyone "where are you".

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#645

Post by chernevik »

autopilot23 wrote: post #442
icytrumpet wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother forgiving yourself if morality is just a human construct and there is no judgment in the afterlife?

Why even bother "trying to live a good life" if "a good life" is just a human construct and there is no judgement on that in the afterlife? By your assumptions, every atheist should just, like, die or at best, live a meaningless life.

Because compassion/sympathy/empathy are human qualities, and thus one can want to live in ways that (at a minimum) do not harm others, and perhaps to live in ways that help others.

I am Catholic, but the morality of an atheist is no surprise to me.

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#646

Post by namero999 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #220

I took the long, long road to end up back where I started: Mere Christianity. I've felt the presence of God in the world my whole life, but the way the right wing media lied to me about global warming and other things had me re-evaluate what else I could be misinformed about, so I kept and open mind and studied a ton of religions including: Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Daoism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and some light reading o…

Mind if I'll drop an email? It resonated.

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#647

Post by fjabre »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #551
fjabre wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly doesnt mean believing in nothing.

Does belief in nothing equal not believing in something?

No. The answer is in the question.

Reality is subjective, you will get what you believe.

In one sense you are right because ultimately reality can only be expressed in the negative. It is not in the class of perceivable objects.

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#648

Post by defgeneric »

fjabre wrote: post #630
defgeneric wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Etymologically, spirit originally seems to have meant something like breath or life (hence "aspirated"). The reification of that sense into an otherworldly Being is a later development. So maybe there's some room for an atheist to be "spiritual" in the simple sense that one would contemplate the significance or meaning of being or existing. The only assertion that atheism makes is a negative one--namely, that the the…

They may contemplate as they wish but their minds can only take them so far. They will remain closed to the possibility of true spirituality because ultimately they believe only in material things and they take themselves to be the real thing, and the Spirit to be more or less a dream. Sure they may have some interesting experiences but often they turn away from these experiences and dismiss them as no more real than…

Your argument is with materialism or rationalism, not atheism per se. Atheism is the rejection of theism. There are many varieties of theism but they're pretty well defined (by the theists themselves, even painstakingly so).

Re: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

#650

Post by omarfarooq »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #644
omarfarooq wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jesus was God in flesh so he purposely limited himself to experience all that we experience, to suffer all that we suffer. There is nothing that He can't empathize with. This implies that God is incapable of fully knowing the experience of humans without becoming human, hence God is not omniscient; since now his omniscience is contingent on becoming contingent.

You don't even need to get that far to reach the conclusion that God is not omniscient. This is Genesis 8-10: 8) Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9) But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”. 10) He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I wa…

While I get your point, that seems to me to be obviously a rhetorical question posed to give Adam and his wife an opportunity to explain what they're up to.
Post reply on HN