Re: TECH: re'enai and the emotion classifiers (long)

[Art Protin <protin@USL.COM>]

Lojbab says:

> Most if not all people have their religious beliefs defined by
> their cultural/religious backgrounds.  Being "spiritual" is
> generally seen by both them and by others in terms of how they
> deal with and relate to their background.  This doesn't mean
> that a few people don't actively go out and investigate a range
> of religions, and some may actually learn enough about them to
> meaningfully choose a religious tradition other than their own
> as a basis for their spiritual/religious ideas and expression.

I ask: is "spiritual" a code word for a lojban concept that is
being explained here or does lojbab have a significantly different
notion about what the word means in English?

While I would relate "religion" to the concept expressed,
"spiritual" means only a portion of religion plus things
beyond religion.  Religion is a structured system of beliefs,
values, ... that affect the way people deal with aspects of
life.  Spiritual describes a class of experiences, that are
very personal, very subjective, that may have to be dealt
with, and maybe not be adequately addressed by religion.

I have observed many incidents where the spiritual experiences
of individuals where rejected-before-hand by their respective
religions.  In most cases, the seeming conflict between religion
and experience was not only not addressed, it was not even
acknowledged.  Religion you know, spiritual events you experienced.

He also says:

> Specifically atheism as most identify it is a rejection of the
> Judeo-Christian religious tradition, usually with no effort to
> replace it by anything else.  In some cases, it is replaced by
> a secularism, a materialism, or humanism, which in itself becomes
> a form of spiritual or perhaps political expression (I have wondered
> whether we don't need to add 'political' as a 7th category to the
> rVV set, that seldom really fits in with any of the others, and
> IS indeed a form of expression - a separate issue, though [re'u
> is available if anyone thinks this worthwhile]).  Most often,
> though, atheism is merely a rejection of spirituality and rather
> a thoughtless one at that.

While this may be the most frequent misunderstanding of the term,
I reject the cultural bias and denounce the ignorance that this
"definition" embodies.

Atheism is the religious belief that God does not exist.

His ramblings on agnosticism are not worth quoting here.

Agnosticism is the absence of belief or the belief that
the answers to religious questions such as "Does God exist?"
are unknowable.

When he gets to the part about lojban
"social/mental/emotional/physical/sexual series",
he again make sense until he says:

> Spirituality is an exception, I think, in that it has traditional
> means of expression that have manifested themselves linguistically
> (Amen!) and this is at least one reason why we didn't immediately
> recognize it as one of the basic 5 categories, moving it to re'e
> from .e'e when we found a needed non-categorical attitude label to
> assign the latter to (I believe this was proposed by Eric Raymond
> - and was one of the first, or even THE first of changes to the
> language to originate from Lojban List discussion).

Sorry, but to limit the expression of spiritual experience to those
terms already defined by religion is leave language permanently
biases by the dictatorship of the established religions.

> Most people who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics are
> going to rarely find themselves expressing a non-neutral 'spiritual'
> scale.  They don't identify in themselves a need to express spiritually.

While it won't be frequent nor regular, I expect it will happen to
most at sometime or another.


While most of the types of experiences, of which I am aware,
have names in parapsychology and ESP, they have been discussed
by most people I know in a different framework.

Samples:

The feelings that one gets walking an ancient battlefield.

The feeling that one gets in a "haunted" house.

The feeling that accompanies/is a premonition.

(I had expected this list would be longer, but I find I
can not express well the sensation or its role.)

    thank you all,
    Arthur Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@usl.com>
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