I'd say that it is illusory to think that a subjective view is not a real view or an inferior view.
There is a culture of epistemic nihilism that I find puzzling, and find myself pushing back more and more these days on ideas of the nature that experience is illusion and that truth is impossible to know.
Yes, this is what I push against all the time consistently in my posts. Experience is empiricism, and experience is subjective. To say "where's your evidence", and then discount experience as evidence because it is subjective is completely disingenuous. What experience is not subjective? Even thinking itself is a subjective experience.
Yes, the subjective view is just one perspective, all perspectives combined into no perspective being objective reality, but that doesn't invalidate the subjective or even subordinate it to any extra-conscious reality that we can never experience except subjectively. It's in here that we live, not out there.
Again, yes, but I'd maybe clarify something. I don't think I'd say the subjective view is just one perspective. All perspectives are subjective in nature. But you have different types of perspectives, or views. You have 1st person perspectives (I), 2nd person perspectives (you), 3rd person perspectives (it), 4th person (pluralistic us), 5th person (self as projection), and even 6th, and 7th person perspectives. Every one of those are subjectively held, even the perspectives of science which aim to be 3rd person perspectives.
I'm thinking of comments like "the self is an illusion" or "in the grand scheme of things, we don't matter" or "all is folly" or "we can never know the essence of anything." What value are such ideas after one has realized that there are other perspectives and considered them?
The thing about these statements is that they can be translated nihilistically, or they can be translated through direct experience to be freeing, which leads into truer, surer, and greater meaning and connection. For me, when I hear "the self is an illusion", that is not only technically accurate, in that the sense of "me" or the individual is literally a construct of the mind, but it can also be recognized as such when an individual moves "beyond" that ego-construct and experiences who they are liberated from that construct.
Note that I said experiences. Just intellectualizing that is not the same thing as actually encountering transcending it. Prior to that, the mind may imagine, "if that's true, then nothing means anything at all!," and you end up with nihilistic philosophies, which both you and I reject.
OK, from the perspective of all of space, yes, we are but an insignificant speck, but that's not the scale at which we live, so why would I give priority to being a speck over having a rich, full, complex life packed with meaning at this scale and from this individual perspective?
This is one of these paradoxical things, that the way up is down, and the way down is up. When we realize how insignificant we are, that humbles our self-inflating egos, trying to make ourselves great in order to deny fear. But then when we release that effort and realize that we are but a spec, but that spec is a shinning, brilliant beautiful diamond, that while it may be only one of a trillion diamonds, it is still a diamond nonetheless, that experience is liberating.
A true story about myself to go with this. I having escaped a fundamentalist church and years later learned about evolution, the realization that humans were not the pinnacle of creation itself, as in the creation narrative of biblical mythology, but was just one branch of many branches, that actually made us more beautiful in my mind. It was a truely, liberating, spiritual moment for me to "see" that perspective.
I remember that moment as one of the most significant moments of my life. It was a milestone moment. It liberated me from this view of a creator God in the way it was taught to me in church. It changed my relationship with that part of myself I was still struggling with. It allowed me to "evolve God", so to speak, through atheism, and into where I am today beyond both theism and atheism.
Religionists and others as well, fear being "insignificant" if they don't see themselves as better than everyone and everything else. But the reality is, the way up is down. That human branch of the tree of evolution is beautiful, as are all the others equally in their own forms. But as we elevate ourselves, we diminish the rest of creation, and in the process we cut ourselves off from the reality of our own natural beauty. The way down, emptying ourselves of our inflated sense of self and realizing we are an equal part of nature, and not above it, elevates us. Life is a gift, and we are all special. All of it.
I see this type of thinking coming from religious teaching, but I doubt it's the only source of it.
It's actually not the source of it. Human hubris is. But our religions, as well as any of our other mythologies about ourselves, has the effect to reinforce and validate that arrogance. I like to say that we create God in our own image, so that God can create us in his. It's a feedback loop system.
So it's really not religion's fault. Religion is simply used to reflect back our own arrogance and sanction it. "God tells me it's okay to rape the earth." But then of course there are those in religion who balk at that view, and they are the ones who create spiritual movements. There is this constant dance between this two competing voices in religions, as well as in culture at large.
In the Abrahamic traditions, one is not to trust his lying eyes. The wisdom of the world with all of its reason and empiricism is foolishness.
That depends how one is viewing such verses. I agree with you in your rejection of the view that you reject. I just don't accept that is the only way it can be read.
Anybody who tells you that the Big Ban or evolution occurred cannot know what they are talking about. Nobody can, because nobody was there. And there are any number of ways to interpret the same evidence and none is more valid than the rest. Materialism is myopia or scientism.
All of this denialism is reflected in other areas of life as well, such as denying that Trump is a pathological liar and believing every word he says is true. This isn't a religion problem. It's a people problem. And you see that people problem in religion as well as many, many other areas of life where people cannot tolerate facts. Global warming comes to mind as well.
This all supports supernaturalism and faith-based thought in general, but I've seen it elsewhere as well. We see it in the dharmic religions with references to ego and dualism both being undesirable conscious states.
That's actually not invalid view on their part. The ego can in fact cause suffering. This is good psychology. Clinging to one's attachments as the source of wellbeing, is not a healthy recipe for living. Again, you seem to see these teachings through a cynical lens, one which I do not feel is supported by what the actual teachings are really about. Of course you have people not understand them and abuse them, but why elevate the lowest common denominators as reflective of the whole? That doesn't seem a very fair or rational thing.
But I've also seen it in other types of freethinkers with wild ideas about the Egyptian pyramids, and also in what I understand to be atheistic, neurodiverse minds that just can't focus or get grounded and who challenge whatever they read in the same way - 'you can't know that' because you aren't omniscient.
I never apply the term freethinkers to neo-atheists. They aren't. Antitheism is not rationally based. It's emotionally biased as much as any religious position is.
But I don't see that as militantism at all.
