[robbedpeter]

Embracing the full range of experience available to you, and using tools to achieve those states is intrinsically human. There's nothing superior or desirable about not using chemical tools to alter your state, and it's silly to think that way. Teetotalling is masochism.

You might not like changing from your baseline, but maybe you don't like blue or purple and prefer red cars. You don't have to like everything, and not everything has to be to your taste.

[rayiner]

> Embracing the full range of experience available to you, and using tools to achieve those states is intrinsically human.

No that's a very post 1960s European/American thing. For most of the rest of the world, it's all about doing what you're supposed to do.

[browserman]

The idea that there is one "thing you are supposed to do" that defines human experience is ironically a pretty modern reactionary mindset. They were smoking cannabis in ancient Scythia - it's "what you were supposed to do".

[rayiner]

Tell me where in the Bible or Quran it tells you to “embrace the full range of experiences?” Let’s throw anything Confucius wrote for good measure.

[browserman]

How on earth do any of those texts have any ability to inform our idea of 'what it is to be human' compared to the actual weight of evidence of what humans have been doing since the dawn of history? What a bizarre non-sequitur!

[rayiner]

They’re evidence, from a large cross section of the world, of what humans have been doing since the dawn of the written record. Nearly everyone spent their lives working, eating, raising children, and fighting. That’s what an American shares with people in a Bangladeshi village. That’s what makes you human.

[browserman]

Yes - and whenever those people could, from the dawn of history, they were also getting drunk, high, and tripping balls.