Your first paragraph suggests to me the following scenario: a child grows up with a pedophile for a guardian and is systematically abused, but the child doesn’t know any better because children are instinctively trusting and gullible. Would such abuse be only in the eye of the beholder, or is it possible to be abused even if you don’t realize that that’s what’s happening?
Genesis’s story of Creation mythologizes the Ston Age as a state of paradise, and while the nomadic hunter-gatherers likely had some benefits that civilized people lack, life for people in that long childhood of our species may also have been nasty, brutish, and short.
You allege that my talk of nature as “monstrously indifferent” to our welfare is obfuscatory. But while I can certainly be wrong about anything I say (since philosophy isn’t like math which is either correct or simply erroneous), I’ve argued in some depth for pretty much everything I write now philosophically (because I’ve been working out this worldview in writing for over a decade). Below are two out of many other articles which explain how nature is monstrous.
You lapse into personal attacks and cheap pop psychological diagnoses, which is disappointing. Is it my fault that your thinking here is sloppy? I explained to you the distinctions you failed to make (regarding nature vs supernature). You’re the one with apparently too much ego to admit that you tried to run before you could walk: you spoke of my “arbitrary distinction” without thinking it through, or without realizing that I’ve written thousands of pages covering many aspects of this philosophy.
(See the third and fourth links below where I addressed your point about artificiality and supernature, as far back as 2014. In that older one I show how “The dichotomy between the natural wilderness and artificiality is thus neutral with regard to the deeper question of whether everything is metaphysically or epistemically natural.” So it’s quite false to say I was just stubbornly refusing to admit that you caught me in a self-contradiction. No, it was as I said: I was appealing to distinctions and arguments I made years ago.)
Again, that obviously doesn’t mean I’m infallible. Indeed, much of this philosophy is just storytelling, as I’ve argued (fifth link below), which means it’s subject mainly to aesthetic evaluations. Christianity is a story fit for one kind of reader, while naturalistic, existential cosmicism is fit for another. And I’d argue that on aesthetic, existential, and ethical grounds of intellectual integrity and honour, the latter story and the latter kind of reader are superior.
And you say, “As for objectivity, you give yourself way too much credit.” But I never said I was especially objective. I spoke generally when I said, “If only objectivity and the imaginary detachment from our parochial, personal preoccupations weren't possible. If only we could stay child-like in Eden, naive as a toddler tugging at her mother's skirt…” I was using the royal “we” to speak of the objectivity of people in general, since no one is perfectly rational or irrational. So that was more sloppiness from you, and an excuse for you to stoop to making a personal attack.
The second half of your third paragraph reminds me of the rationales the elites of Christendom must have employed when they justified their torture of heretics and their slaughter of pagans: All non-Christian ways of thinking are subversive in that they undermine “faith, belonging, and true happiness.”
In my view, it’s objectivity and existential maturity which do that. Happiness or contentment is for children and sheep. A grim determination to carry on despite an awareness of unpleasant, sobering truths is for those who have been enlightened by philosophy and experience. And I’m not speaking about me here since my level of maturity isn’t for me to assess, is it? It’s all too easy to deceive ourselves. No, I have in mind my assessments of the big historical picture and of the esoteric traditions of the world’s philosophies and religions which typically undermine the exoteric myths that comfort the masses.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/08/is-nature-beautiful-or-monstrous.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2014/03/artificiality-miracle-hiding-in-plain.html
