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Wednesday 26 June 2019

Consciousness is consciousness whether you are atheist or monotheist

The question should not be "What is consciousness?" but "What creates consciousness?" or, even more to the point, "Who created our consciousness?" 


Ego is what motivates us to do anything eg feed, fuck, flee, fight etc. 


Jews might call it the Yetzer Hara.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yetzer_hara


The role of the Yetzer Hara

Midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 9:7) states:

Without the evil inclination, no one would father a child, build a house, or make a career.


According to Judaism, God created the universe just to make us wonder at Him. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was a Jew who even as an atheist created a universe in his Foundation series in which only humans existed because he must have subconsciously absorbed this narrative.  https://www.judaismandscience.com/isaac-asimov-two-foundations-and-the-jews/ 


The traditional Jewish view was that God created world and Jews are analogous to His openly adulterous wife that He is stuck with, because to give up on them is to give up on humanity as a whole. The narrative is that Jews were chosen by God to do something for the rest of humanity. (My narrative is that they have been neglecting this duty and I have come to remind and warn them.) This bridal theme is repeated in the Catholic Church which is called the Bride of Christ whose nuns are considered married to Christ.  https://reformjudaism.org/blog/2017/05/25/shavuot-day-god-and-jewish-people-wed


If we believe that the universe was created by God, then our lives our imbued with an enormous sense of purpose, order and wonder. 


If we don't, then we are here because we are here and the universe just happens to be here, making our lives and the purpose of our lives lack meaning.


If we believe the narrative of the Abrahamic God, then we need not spend endless hours unproductively asking ourselves the wrong question and wittering on about epistemological nihilism because we would already be satisfied that God created us and by extension our ego, will, soul, personality etc which are the constituents of our consciousness.


When you compare Jewish wisdom to modern Western philosophy, the former wins hands down because most of Western philosophy is just so stupid, which explains their intellectual superiority, I suppose.

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