Group items tagged attachment - New Culture Library

New Statesman - An interview with Sam Harris - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...science-moral-torture-human

religion atheism science logic rationalism

shared by James Goodman on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached

guess the reason you think that is that for you, despite what certain secularists might say, religion involves making factual claims about the nature of reality.Yeah - I just think that's indisputable, apart from the fact that you can get many people who claim to be religious, but when you push, they are then loath to make any claims about what they actually believe. So there are many believers who are attached to the culture; they're attached to the buildings; they're attached to the art, they want to meet with that particular group - and yet they spend almost no time at all thinking about what, if anything, is true, in the doctrine. That, I would argue is just not really religion. Every religion contains propositional claims about certain events that happen in history, certain events that will happen in the future.
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One reply to that might be to say that that's simply a stipulative definition.Well, there's no other honest reading of the books. Religion may be too broad a category, but if you take what religion means in the West - Judaism, Christianity or Islam - we're talking about some books. The only reason anyone can wake up in the morning thinking that Jesus even existed is because we have the New Testament, right? So you look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible. And if you're going to make the move of saying "well, none of these are really claims, this is just a story, this is just literature," then you're reading the New Testament the way we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then you have no religion of Christianity; you have, at best, mythology. You have art - which is what I think you should have; this is how we should read these books. And certainly some parts of the Bible should qualify as great literature.
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Resilience in mental health: linking psychological and neurobiological perspectives - R... - 0 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

society psychology health mental health resilience

shared by James Goodman on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached

James Goodman on 20 Mar 13

"Secure attachment,"

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"Secure attachment,"</div>

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What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive? - - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...aumatized-kids-to-thrive-56488

children health society kids psychology trauma

shared by James Goodman on 06 May 13 - No Cached

James Goodman on 06 May 13

"Given the emphasis that researchers place on "secure attachment" to a parent, it was striking to me how much kids used the word "family" when they talked about Lincoln. The school made them feel like "part of [a] family," some said. "In a family," one young woman told me, "nobody gets left behind." Sporleder talks the same way: "I'm not shy about saying that we tell our kids we love them," he says. "We're a family. The kids here are getting love and two meals a day.""

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"Given the emphasis that researchers place on "secure attachment" to a parent, it was striking to me how much kids used the word "family" when they talked about Lincoln. The school made them feel like "part of [a] family," some said. "In a family," one young woman told me, "nobody gets left behind." Sporleder talks the same way: "I'm not shy about saying that we tell our kids we love them," he says. "We're a family. The kids here are getting love and two meals a day.""</div>

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The attachment to "Capitalism" - Feministe - 0 views

www.feministe.us/...the-attachment-to-capitalism

society politics

shared by James Goodman on 23 Sep 11 - No Cached

So why do people on the left cling to the idea of “Capitalism” so tenaciously? I don’t believe our only choices are “Capitalism,” “Communism,” or “Socialism.”
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The Near Enemies | UUCA - Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta - 0 views

www.uuca.org/the-near-enemies

buddhism attachment equanimity compassion joy enlightenment

shared by James Goodman on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached

James Goodman on 11 Dec 13

"In the Buddhist tradition, there are four "divine states," four ways of being, described by the Buddha. The states are Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic joy - truly appreciating the joy of another - and equanimity, being at peace. The "divine states" are spiritual states - that is, they are "feeling" states, ways of being that involve the whole person in relation to the whole of reality - persons, creatures, and the earth. As in the meta sutra prayer, "let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world." We begin to approach true maturity as we move toward these states, perhaps by engaging in some spiritual discipline or by having our natural inclinations nurtured by parents, teachers, mentors, or our religious community. If we aspire to what might be thought of as a ?spiritual? life, and if we want to be emotionally mature and healthy, we would want to be truly loving. We would want to be compassionate. We would want to be so content in our own living that we are able to truly share the joy of others. And we would want to be at peace, to experience acceptance in relation to life as it is. In the Buddhist teaching - and in many ways in the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, of Jesus of Nazareth and even of contemporary psychology - each of these spiritual, ideal states has a "Near Enemy." A "near enemy" to these spiritual, emotionally mature, and healthy states is a way of being that masquerades as that spiritual quality. It is an imitation of the spiritual state, but it is a way of being that actually separates us from our selves and others, rather than uniting us."

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"In the Buddhist tradition, there are four "divine states," four ways of being, described by the Buddha. The states are Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic joy - truly appreciating the joy of another - and equanimity, being at peace. The "divine states" are spiritual states - that is, they are "feeling" states, ways of being that involve the whole person in relation to the whole of reality - persons, creatures, and the earth. As in the meta sutra prayer, "let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world." We begin to approach true maturity as we move toward these states, perhaps by engaging in some spiritual discipline or by having our natural inclinations nurtured by parents, teachers, mentors, or our religious community. If we aspire to what might be thought of as a ?spiritual? life, and if we want to be emotionally mature and healthy, we would want to be truly loving. We would want to be compassionate. We would want to be so content in our own living that we are able to truly share the joy of others. And we would want to be at peace, to experience acceptance in relation to life as it is. In the Buddhist teaching - and in many ways in the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, of Jesus of Nazareth and even of contemporary psychology - each of these spiritual, ideal states has a "Near Enemy." A "near enemy" to these spiritual, emotionally mature, and healthy states is a way of being that masquerades as that spiritual quality. It is an imitation of the spiritual state, but it is a way of being that actually separates us from our selves and others, rather than uniting us."</div>

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Happiness, Philosophy and Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ppiness-philosophy-and-science

happiness philosophy psychology society health

shared by James Goodman on 01 Sep 11 - No Cached

But the most powerful challenge concerns the meaning and value of happiness.  Researchers emphasize that when we ask people if they are happy the answers tell us nothing if we don’t know what our respondents mean by “happy.”  One person might mean, “I’m not currently feeling any serious pain”; another, “My life is pretty horrible but I’m reconciled to it”; another, “I’m feeling a lot better than I did yesterday.”  Happiness research requires a clear understanding of the possible meanings of the term.   For example, most researchers distinguish between happiness as a psychological state (for example, feeling overall more pleasure than pain) and happiness as a positive evaluation of your life, even if it has involved more pain than pleasure.  Above all, there is the fundamental question: In which sense, if any, is happiness a proper goal of a human life?
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These issues inevitably lead to philosophical reflection. Empirical surveys can give us a list of the different ideas people have of happiness.  But research has shown that when people achieve their ideas of happiness (marriage, children, wealth, fame), they often are still not happy.  There’s no reason to think that the ideas of happiness we discover by empirical surveys are sufficiently well thought out to lead us to genuine happiness.  For richer and more sensitive conceptions of happiness, we need to turn to philosophers, who, from Plato and Aristotle, through Hume and Mill, to Hegel and Nietzsche, have provided some of the deepest insight into the possible meanings of happiness.
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Even if empirical investigation could discover the full range of possible conceptions of happiness, there would still remain the question of which conception we ought to try to achieve.  Here we have a question of values that empirical inquiry alone is unable to decide without appeal to philosophical thinking.This is not to say that, as Plato thought, we can simply appeal to expert philosophical opinion to tells us how we ought to live. We all need to answer this question for ourselves.  But if philosophy does not have the answers, it does provide tools we need to arrive at answers. If, for example, we are inclined to think that pleasure is the key to happiness, John Stuart Mill shows us how to distinguish between the more sensory and the more intellectual pleasures.  Robert Nozick asks us to consider whether we would choose to attach ourselves to a device that would produce a constant state of intense pleasure, even if we never achieved anything in our lives other than experiencing this pleasure.
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