Apathy: Encyclopedia II - Apathy - Apathy in common and religious terms

Apathy - Apathy in common and religious terms

Contrary to common belief, clinical diagnosis of "apathy" does not indicate laziness — but in common use the correlation is rather direct. In religious doctrine, slothfulness is considered to be a sin which leads to further disassociation with life and prescience — in this context, to be substantially disassociated is to be "in hell" which is to say 'in a state where the spirit or soul is destroyed or otherwise in a state of destruction.'

The concept of disassociation is controversial — in the practice of many Eastern religions, for example, an advanced meditative state has aspects of extreme detachment — though the religion and ritual of meditation is believed to provide proper grounding such as to properly recover from the detachment and to benefit from its experience. Hence some critics view ascetics or saints as striving for a level of "apathy", which theologians prefer to call disassociation or detachment.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Apathy in common and religious terms", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki