Then where does it come from? Your own internal, intuitive sense? My point about timeless truths, is that we know them when we hear them, and we understand them because they resonate with something inside of us. That "something" we have learned to hear, listen to, cultivate, nurture, and trust.
You had written, "What speaks to your heart? What resonates as timeless truth, vs. cultural artifacts?" and I responded, "My answers to that do not come from books or the experiences of others."
My reasoning faculty applied to evidence tells me what is true. Reason applied to the intuition of my conscience tells me what things are good and right. I live, I have experiences, I find some satisfying and others unpleasant, I try to understand what causes them and how to nurture the desirable ones while minimizing the undesirable ones, and I accumulate a set of beliefs that comprise a worldview that I use to navigate life to moderate experience. When I hear others express opinions similar to mine, I recognize that.
I think a better way to view this is as a matter of emotional and spiritual maturity.
I had written, "People capable of making intellectual and moral judgments decide for themselves what is true, what is right, and what is good." If ancients agreed with some of my conclusions, then great. If they don't, it's the same as when contemporaries have different opinions.
If we have this Wisdom, the the value you of seeing that you find this same thing in ancient times, is to only go to show that it has withstood the test of time and is universally, transcultually, true. It is a timeless human truth, in other words, as opposed to a modern scientific discovery.
OK. You find more value there than I do. I still don't have a sense for what you do with that information or why you call it valuable to you.
In both cases, it is not a critical rational intellectual mind that tells you its value to you. It is the subjective, intuitive, inner dimension of our own natures that do.
Agreed. The analytical faculty has one purpose - to tell us what is true about the world using information accumulated through the senses. How we feel about it varies from individual to individual. And it is that affective addition that determines the quality of our conscious experience. Does it make us feel frightened or secure? Do we experience beauty or repulsion. Are we enjoying the weather or scattering for shelter. Do we feel connected to our environment and neighbors or alienated. None of that is rational. None is solved or calculated. It is discovered.
This has been my approach to navigating life. What is true about the world, how does it work, and what circumstances are desirable so that the knowledge of how things work and what outcomes can be expected in various circumstances can be applied to curating and managing that conscious experience. The life we aim for is generally the one where we feel safe, secure, loved, have leisure and freedom from want, anxiety, fear, loneliness, regret, shame and the like. We don't come to that knowledge except through trial-and-error, which means making mistakes and learning from them (empiricism).
This arrangement has been likened to a horse and rider, the bristling horse representing the irrational passions (affect) and the rider being the rational (cognitive) element that manages directs them. Which of the two of these makes life worth living? It's both working in tandem. No rider, and one lives fast and dies young foolishly or winds up in prison or physically broken, hurting himself and others along the way for his mindlessness. No horse, and the rider just rolls over and dies. The absence of passion - whether boredom or the anhedonia of major depression - is often followed by a lack of will to live, and in extreme cases, suicide.
This is the mental state many "soft thinkers" - the people who implore others to loosen their myopic criteria for belief - envision for the strict empiricist, who tells his critic that he leaves the passions out of his analysis of how things are. This person hears that he leaves the passions out of his life experience. Here that is in its extreme form - atheists have no more inner life than a Roomba mindlessly bumping into walls:
The State is a fiction, created by the mind as an abstraction of ideas. That then becomes materialized in the forms of physical realities as things like infrastructure.
OK, but what's your point? The commonest motive behind arguments like these is that God is real despite being undetectable. Most commonly, we are asked if one can hold or weigh love. If that's where we're going, my answer is that abstractions derived from experience are different from imagined ideas that often have no external referent. Both are ideas, but one is empirically based, and the other faith-based.
When we start to understand concepts like this, then talking about faith and belief in God, becomes a whole lot more interesting, than trying to think of God as a "being", like an elusive Yeti hiding in the mountains. God is much more akin to a "thought" than a creature outside of us.
I've noticed a trend in theistic thought to modify gods in the way you are suggesting that is essentially returning them to symbols of nature where they began. The first order of business is to reinject the sacred into nature. The Abrahamic religions have turned it into a person with messages and orders that doesn't even live in our world, has a big torture pit ready for rebels, and intends to destroy our world. What we are seeing is more and more that God is not a person, but a principle or a source. Hell isn't a place full of monsters, but a separation from this principle. People want to be known as spiritual, not religious. There is a tendency to go from the Abrahamic religions to the pagan or Dharmic alternatives.
