Gregory's Server
@TruthSandwich @lednabm Yep. I can see them now. You seem to be pretty insistent that everyone look at the world the way you do.
Does worship require personification? You claim it does. I don’t see it that way.
But even if it does, is personifying nature dumb? You say it is. I don’t see it that way.
From a solipsistic viewpoint, all I can know is what I think and perceive. From that perspective, I need to choose which experiences that seem to be caused by external stimuli are produced by persons and which are not.
Having never met you, I choose to believe that the words I see attached to your name on my phone are utterances from a person, and not a large-language model. I choose to personify “Truth Sandwich”. Are you human? It would be difficult for me to know for sure, but I give you the benefit of the doubt.
I have spent the last dozen years in a close daily friendship relationship with an organic being who looks nothing like me, is incapable of speech, but who responds in many of the same ways as people do. I personify my dog because it pleases me to believe that he has an emotional reality similar to my own, albeit likely simpler.
So how about “nature”? Is that a person? I don’t experience it that way, but nature is such a huge and nebulous concept. On the other hand, there are certainly trees that I have had decades-long relationships with that are as meaningful to me as those with some human friends. I personify those trees because in their company I have learned much about myself and the world, in the same way that my relationship with family and friends has taught me much about being human.
In all of these cases, I choose to relate to non-human beings in ways that some people restrict to entities of their own species or gender or skin color or nationality.
You don’t need to do the same of course. My point was merely that you may find it unproductive from a human and social point of view to walk around telling people that their way of looking at the world is “dumb”. It isn’t going to make you friends of the human sort, and is unlikely to advance anyone’s knowledge or understanding.
@bhawthorne @TruthSandwich You raise interesting points, but I think on it all depends on how strict you want to define the word worship, as I've said.