A Look At Philosophy....

I've lately been drawn again and again to the subject of philosophy. For someone who's whole world more or less revolves around questions, I'm surprised I've never really ever taken a closer look at philosophy until now. As I thought about philosophy the Great Divine made an interesting point. That Philosophy is the science of asking questions which can only be answered by divinity. Philosophy is really a process, a process of asking questions that reveal new questions. The answer is never the ultimate goal, the answer is more a key to new questions and if you take the process far enough you always run into questions that can only be answered by divinity (my mother is great at this: "have you seen your brother?", "did you talk to him?", "what did he say?", "a new job?", "do they give him benefits?", "what kind?" and so on. Until I feel ready to throttle her, of course she usually hits upon the really important questions near the end and you get used to the interrogations after awhile and I can see the validity in them). Its often enough the middle ground between science and spiritualism, dabbling in both and reconciling the two often enough.

I like to think of it as a process of refining. You refine your questions until you reach the questions that really matter, those that deal with things way beyond our ability to grasp or understand. It also helps you get a grip, gives you perspective by making you remember that you are just one person in billions. Wikipedia describes it thusly: "Though no single definition of philosophy is uncontroversial, and the field has historically expanded and changed depending upon what kinds of questions were interesting or relevant in a given era, it is generally agreed that philosophy is a method, rather than a set of claims, propositions, or theories. Its investigations are based upon rational thinking, striving to make no unexamined assumptions and no leaps based on faith or pure analogy."

Its all part of something I like to call mind vs magic. The idea that there are 2 extremes, the extreme of the mind being someone that thinks logically and once they run up on something that can't be explained through science or logic doesn't turn to spirituality or divinity to explain it but comes up with some excuse or simply accepts it as a phenomenon and nothing else and then they put their faith in science to one day explain it away. The extreme of magic is no less dangerous, spirituality, religion, superstition. This person holds on to belief systems without first examining each question carefully against his beliefs, so like the person who operates purely from the mind state they often hold beliefs incongruous with one another, they throw away the ideas of logic and reasoning thinking them dangerous weapons that undermine faith.

I have a mantra that I like to use "balance in all things". I think its a good mantra to have and does a good job of explaining who I am and the way I am. Often I find that I will take an opposite stance to something that is being discussed, ala the devils advocate. Its just part of the way I am, I think that both sides of an argument should be present in order for people to have an open and honest discussion of something. Interestingly enough even when something that I agree with comes up I will take the subject and slant it, come at it from another angle almost undermine the argument just to be sure that some other side to the argument is present. Shadraq can attest to this as we had a discussion about the wording for one of his polls he did on his blog.

This also explains the way I see this argument. I think that the "mind" and "magic" should be used together, that you should have beliefs and a system of beliefs in things greater than yourself but you should also use the mind to think logically about any questions which arise, weighing them against your belief system. There are some things that can't be explained by the mind and those often must be taken on blind faith, but there are also things which can be examined through use of logic and reasoning and you should examine things in that way (the previous discussion of pentagrams being a prime example of this). This way your not left with an incongruous belief system, going around killing people because they are suspected of witchcraft...