Trish I would say the same about you, and have find your analysis of Straighty “right-on”.  He seems very much in love with his own thinking, I am happy it satisfies him.  I however am not convinced of it’s “truth”.

Thus I too must sign off.

Thanks all.

Archeon,

In our discussions here, you have seemed to be educated, intelligent, thoughtful, patient and a “fair-fighter” of a debater.

Straighty has shown him/herself to be willing to use disreputable techniques of rhetoric [such as ad homimen attacks, twisting a person’s words, false accusations of name-calling].

It is obvious to me that Straighty only wants to win and feel smarter than atheists, and has no actual interest in exchange of thoughts & ideas.

Since I have other, more productive & more amusing things to do with my time, I am signing off from this thread, and turning off its alerts to my mailbox.

Farewell.

“On the one hand you claim that true or false are boolean and thus mired in a classical paradigm, and on the other hand you claim to speak truth to the falsehood of classical thinking.”

This is only one small corner of what is classical and not classical. It is explainable in terms of the special-case nature of physical behavior at this microscopic level of observation. It is not a unifying aspect of physical theory to which we must go in order to get the big picture.

The essential point is that ordinary, everyday observation tends to separate consciousness and matter, not to mention everyday things or objects of perception. Comprehensive physical theories now embrace the widest range of existence of any science, from subatomic to astronomic scales that include meta-meta-galaxies, etc. and do an impressive job of unifying them even at their current level of development. As understanding in this field advances, the superficial separation of consciousness and matter gets very nebulous and highly questionable.

Modern research in theoretical physics is predicated on the premise that all physical phenomena in the entire cosmos can ultimately be explained as fluctuations within a single unified field. So explain this to me:

1) Are you intelligent and conscious?

2) Can you exist outside of this single field?

3) If not, then how can you say intelligence and consciousness are not properties of this single field?

“Just calling something “spiritual” doesn’t make it so.”
- Trish

I can say the same thing about anything. “Just calling something physical doesn’t make it so.” Are you going to say that consciousness is physical? Prove that just like you ask me to prove that God exists.

We know that individual awareness is associated with and dependent on physical states, but prove to me that awareness itself is physical. That means explain to me why we perceive ourselves as aware and not just intelligent machines with no consciousness. Are machines conscious? Is your computer conscious? How about rocks? Can you create consciousness physically in a laboratory?

Can you observe it directly in anyone except yourself? Prove to me that it is physical. If you can’t, then I have just as much right to say you’re off the wall for believing that it is physical as you say I am for accepting the standard understanding of it as spiritual.

You have to arbitrarily redefine the meaning to back yourself up. Aren’t you just “saying” that it’s physical, believing that this makes it so? There are millennia of vocabulary in multiple languages defining the meaning of spirit and its association with consciousness. Aren’t you the one redefining terms?

What atheists don’t seem to get is that they believe in magic. The perception of magic resides in the projection of ignorance. In the nineteenth century, magicians used magnetism and electricity to mystify people who were ignorant concerning that level of nature. Many today deal with high technology with no understanding, and they’re not that different from the audiences of the nineteenth magicians.

You don’t understand consciousness as even more fundamental than space and time, and so you project that it just magically appears from a certain confluence of physical phenomena. That’s magic. It’s the projection of ignorance concerning the existence of awareness as a fundamental property of the cosmos as a whole, just like ignorance of electricity and magnetism created the illusion of magic in the minds of nineteenth century audiences.

Another possibility on the issue of whether spirituality is “real” is this: People could just observe &/or experience perfectly normal aspects of primate behavior [social contact, friendship, awe inspired by beautiful sights like sunsets & autumn landscapes], and label these observations & experiences “spirituality.”

Just calling something “spiritual” doesn’t make it so.

“If spirituality is indeed real, then I think the physical must inevitably point to the spiritual.”

Unless it is not real, in which case “seeing” the physical point to the spiritual is a false observation/assumption/conjecture.

On the one hand you claim that true or false are boolean and thus mired in a classical paradigm, and on the other hand you claim to speak truth to the falsehood of classical thinking.

How electron microscopes actually work, however, is very pertinent here, since a classical view of the world would make it’s development impossible. It is based on the discovery of wave-particle duality. Have you ever heard of this? This is fundamental to any understanding of modern physical theory and the non-classical paradigm that reality actually fits, whatever that may ultimately be.

Classical theory sees light as electromagnetic radiation within a certain range of wavelengths. We can do spectrum analysis of starlight and detect what elements constitute a star based on this classical paradigm for light. However, light is seen by quantum physics as particles called photons. Oddly, any experiment devised to detect one of these properties of light will eliminate observation of the other and vice versa.

Further, electrons, classically regarded as solid little balls whose most usual home is in orbit around an atomic nucleus, also have wave properties. Electron microscopes use the wave property of electrons to “illuminate” microscopic objects using sophisticated electronic techniques and electron “optics”. Their advantage is that their wave property can manifest at much shorter wavelengths than light. The shortest wavelength of visible light is way too long to get the resolution needed to view extremely microscopic phenomena.

The lasers ubiquitous in CD players, bar code scanners, and other such modern technologies were only discovered by means of a deep understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a microscopic order of reality that functions in ways that utterly defy the “common sense” classical view of logic and how the world functions. This level of physical reality defies the Boolean logic of either true or false.

So there are worlds of scientists out there around the world who are essentially clueless about all this, and who function perfectly well within their limited scientific domains nevertheless. That doesn’t mean their world view is philosophically well founded. It is, in point of fact, quite the opposite. Modern cosmologists know this. The rest are barking up the wrong tree.

That’s what I have been trying to communicate. However, although understandably quite typical of humankind at this juncture, I seem to be running into a profound lack of information about the state of cosmological inquiry at this point in human history. The question of whether or not a Supreme Intelligence exists and underlies all physical and non-physical phenomena is a profound cosmological question.

I do not believe it is possible to bring any clarity to such an issue if we are stuck in a classical perspective on the fundamental nature of even physical reality. As I have already indicated, I see the recent and current evolution of advanced scientific research and theory strongly pointing to the spiritual. If spirituality is indeed real, then I think the physical must inevitably point to the spiritual.

But you will never be able to hear, touch, see, taste, or smell it any more than you can gravity. To set this up as a criterion for accepting God as existing or not is to stay stuck in a classical paradigm that at this stage of human evolution is absolutely known to be false. The nicest part is that the reality of the spiritual realm is what we experience every day simply as our own awareness.

Trish, I’m sorry if my “Good grief” insert hurt your feelings. I just get tired of having what I say get all bent out of shape and it’s still happening.

Archeon, you make my point about gravity for me again. You can’t see it; you can’t touch it; you can’t hear, taste, or smell it. It is totally imperceptible in and of itself. Only its effects are observable. You can feel it only if you resist it. In free-fall, you don’t even feel it. I can say the same thing about God. You show me the difference.

Even “primitive” people had the common sense to recognize that “Something” smarter and grander than they were had to have created them and everything around them. We’ve gotten so sophisticated we can’t see the forest for the trees.

I include most religious people in this last category, unfortunately, because their concept of God is typically very superficial and often worse than useless on a practical level, not to mention their lack of personal involvement in really fathoming anything for themselves rather than simply swallowing somebody else’s dogma.

As to the “nineteenth paradigm” comment of mine you address, Archeon, are you and Trish aware of what physicists call classical physics and a classical world view? It died early in the twentieth century and started dying well back into the end of the nineteenth. It is an oxymoron to call anyone a cosmologist who is unaware that atoms and the particles that constitute them cannot be described in classical terms as solid or fields or anything else classical. The electrons classically “orbiting” around an atomic nucleus are more like probability waves. Now how’s THAT for abstraction?

Even chemists are exposed to little that would disabuse them of a classical view of the world, unless they’re in physical chemistry or some aspect of their field that gets them deeper than the molecular level and Bohr’s essentially classical model of the atom. Physics doesn’t have a fully developed model of physical reality and likely will never have one. It just develops models that are ever closer approximations of reality.

The only perfect model of anything is that thing itself. However, there is one thing for sure. We now know that the classical model of the world is bogus. Nevertheless, just like Euclidean geometry, it works well under the special-case, local conditions in which it evolved.

Biologists have even less than chemists that would disabuse them of a classical world view. The smallest stuff they deal with are objects viewed under microscopes. Even electron microscopes, as powerful as they are, still produce images that do not challenge a classical perspective in the mind of a biologist, who would typically have only the vaguest notion of the very non-classical physics underlying how it functions.

Straight,

1.  I do not worship scientists, or gods or anyone or anything.  I do respect the work that scientists do.

2. Insults [and expletives like “good grief"] do not add any strength to an argument or position.

3. There is a difference between “provable” which is basically a mathematical term, and scientific evidence or fact [to use a more or less lay term].

If truth has been distorted how do we know where the truth ends and the lie begins?

If thruth has been distorted how do we know it is the truth?

What is “truth”?  Accepting the idea of an idealized “truth” is in my mind akin to proposing the possibility of objectivity.  The idea that the observer influences that which is observed implies an inherent subjective nature of the universe, and precludes the possiblility of “truth”.

If we can’t observe something, how can we prove it exists?  By observing planets in orbit, and stars in galaxies we see “proof” that the idea of gravity at least explains why things don’t just fly off in random directions.  While we can’t “observe” gravity, we can however observe it’s effects. I can’t “see” heat (infrared radiation) either but when it is -40 outside I can sure feel the effects of it.  I can’t actually “feel” the infrared radiation, I only feel the effects it has on molecules in my skin. 

And on this:

1) The distortion of truth is an ancient ploy of those who wish to exploit others by using the power inherent in truth, but bent and distorted to serve their evil purposes. It is the very power of truth that makes this evil trick so effective.

An even more evil trick is to present a truth as a distortion of truth, and attempting to subsitute a falsehood as the real undistorted truth in it’s place.  This I would say is the bible, and the faiths associated with it - Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

2) The distortion of truth is not an indictment of the truth it distorts. To conclude that it is constitutes a severe distortion in itself.

I don’t understand? This is a self evident truism.  But I suggest this, the ease with which a so called truth is distorted to evil purposes, can be a clue to it’s value as “truth”.

“The important thing to bear in mind is that it is totally and utterly naive to pretend that everything in the natural world or the cosmos that is provable must be directly accessible to the senses. That kind of world view was already obsolete among serious thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century. It is essentially a nineteenth-century perspective.”

Which “serious” thinkers?  This an expession of opinion, not fact.  Everything new, is not neccessarily “right”.  Unless we can observe (this is the term for “directly accessible to our senses) how can we know that something exists or that something is happening?  What proof exists other than the observable?  Are you suggesting, that one can observe and not prove, or prove and not observe?  Even “thought” experiments rely on a “virtual” or “implied” reality in which observations take place.

The theory of electromagnetism is also a 19th century idea, as is the theory of radioactive decay, even Einsteins theories are “essentially” 19th century.  Almost everything we have talked about here is 19th century - what exactly has the 20th century developed?  I guess it is time for some 21st century ideas.......better not use any old ideas as a starting point, must create something new and original out of nothing.

Even Eistein’s and Hawking’s theoretical musings are being put to the “experimental” test, where direct observation of the material world attempts to assertain the actual “truth” of the theories.

Trish, I didn’t say that using the senses is obsolete, did I now? Good grief! Why don’t you go back and read what I actually did say. It might be a really productive exercise to focus on noticing what peopel actually said every once in a while.

But not EVERYTHING that is provable is so by direct sensory perception. This is especially true in the most successful theoretical discipline in science, namely physics. Biologists cannot be said to fall in the same category, for example, because they do not deal with the weird world underlying matter and energy. That is very abstract. And Einstein explicitly used Gedankenexperimenten, which is German for “thought experiments”.

Most scientists do laboratory research and theorize over physically sensible data. This is vastly different from the subtle levels that physical theory deals with, and unfortunately most scientists who are not physicists unfortunately are still stuck in an essentially nineteenth century paradigm (and we’re talking some major, world-class scientific figures here).

Richard Feynman of Feynman diagram fame stated that his tour of world universities revealed that even among university physicists few were more than glorified lab technicians and cookbook engineers, unable to think deeply, insightfully, and creatively even in their own field. It was clear he was rather disgusted with the situation.

So please don’t talk to me about world famous scientists if you want to use them as examples of up-to-date cosmologists. Most are anything but and their philosophical speculations often reveal it only too clearly! I would suggest that you quit worshiping such human rigidity as the ultimate intelligence in the universe.

“The important thing to bear in mind is that it is totally and utterly naive to pretend that everything in the natural world or the cosmos that is provable must be directly accessible to the senses. That kind of world view was already obsolete among serious thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century.” - straight talk

I’m sorry, but I personally know quite a few scientists - some that have world renown - and not one of them think the idea of using our senses [included with our senses are aids from lenses to electron microscopes] is obsolete.  In fact, I can’t think of any of them would consider “information” gained *without* the use of senses to qualify as science.  If that viewpoint is “19th century” then the 20-21st centuries must be a dark-ages backslide into prescientific superstition.

Also, there is a difference between “serious thinkers” and actual, working scientists.  Someone can be serious, do a lot of thinking, and still be producing fiction. [Sigmund Freud comes to mind] Procedures like “thought experiments” went out of style in science centuries ago.

“Straighties ideas are intriguing,....”
- Archeon of Thrace

The important thing to bear in mind is that it is totally and utterly naive to pretend that everything in the natural world or the cosmos that is provable must be directly accessible to the senses. That kind of world view was already obsolete among serious thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century. It is essentially a nineteenth-century perspective.

Archeon and Trish, I’ve said it before here and I’ll say it again:

1) The distortion of truth is an ancient ploy of those who wish to exploit others by using the power inherent in truth, but bent and distorted to serve their evil purposes. It is the very power of truth that makes this evil trick so effective.

2) The distortion of truth is not an indictment of the truth it distorts. To conclude that it is constitutes a severe distortion in itself.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Archeon,

I would defend your right to cheer Falwell’s death, your right to hate him [I do too] and your right not to care about the people who loved him.  I just can’t claim to feel what I don’t feel.  Sorry, maybe I’m just too much of a softie.

I think there are important differences between the recent coming-out of atheists, and their proud treatises of nonbelief, and fundamentalist religion.  First, I haven’t seen any atheists standing in public parks or on street corners handing out flyers, yelling their beliefs to people walking by, or trying to get any government office/department/entity to publicly affirm the lack of God [which is not the same as trying to get the government to stop affirming belief in God/Yahweh/Jesus, or even supporing “civic religion” with a bland form of deity that seems to be a stripped-down K car version of Yahweh.

I think the main reason we atheists are being accused of being “fundamentalist-like” or too strident, is that just saying publicly that one doesn’t believe in gods or superpowers [whether of supernatural beings or prophets or psychics], and that one does not expect to survive bodily death so jibes with observable reality and so conflicts with the claims of religion and spirituality [organized or not] that it shocks the believers so severely that they react as if their position were under actual attack.

Trish, I do however celebrate the passing of Falwell.  Why? First I don’t give a dam that someone may have loved him - this is not an important point.  Second he did so much damage, and was personally responcible for the killings of abortion doctors and the beating of homosexuals.  Third he was a fascist lying charletan who stole for the very people he claimed to help.  Fourth he could not and did not believe the shit he preached, he was a hypocrite

I will state here again, I cheered when I heard the fat pig was dead.  I chuckled that the “rapture” was not for him, he died alone in his office and was found lying on the floor - good.

I put him in the same class of people as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the worlds demagogues.

Straighties ideas are intriguing, but they don’t hav much to do with the issue of religion vis-a-vis the church, christianity, judaism, and islam. They are ideas (straighties) best discussed with some good wine, maybe a good cuban cigar, after a good meal.  It might also be a good idea to interject a bit of humour now and then.

In anycase this thread is based on an article about how neo-atheism is the new “fundamentalism” of the non-believers.  I reject this characterisation.  Indeed I say, there is only the old atheism - the one that says religion is crap, and god is an illusion created to control men by making them afraid to die.  The religiou-zealots are simply not use too people taking them on by using the very religion they are selling.

It’s like Hitchens said, the only place left were bigotry, hate, mysogny, etc are still fair is when someone says: “it’s part of my faith”.  When an atheist says, “NO!” to that, we are accused of religious intolerance.  But let me ask this, is intolerance of intolerance really intolerance?

My dad always asks: “Where do you get your strange ideas about the bible/god/christianity?” When I say, it comes direct from the bible, people like Falwel and and the pope, and the general unkindness and intolerance religion inflicts upon people.  He says: “you are just interpreting it wrong”.  When some ass says lesbians, feminists, atheists, gays are what caused god to strike at the USA on 911, I say I am not.  I say I have pegged religion correctly - that it is a tool and weapon of enslavement, subjugation, injustice, and inequity.

Now we move on to Abrahamic scripture and religion per your request, Archeon. I do go to church. I pray, I worship, both privately and in religious services.

Why? Since I believe consciousness and intelligence are hierarchal I believe that God is therefore (surprise, surprise!) conscious and intelligent. I believe His creation is fundamentally beautiful. I enjoy life. Shouldn’t we ideally enjoy life? So why do some suffer? Why are some lives just downright miserable from start to finish?

I believe we evolve from primitive forms both physically and spiritually. I believe that whatever happens to us is simply part of a much bigger picture that represents evolution, just as planets cannot evolve from first generation stars, but must await supernova explosions in first generation giants to form the heavy elements, then planets can evolve around second and later generation stars. There is violence in this process. There is locally apparent chaos, but cosmically it serves an ultimate purpose that is exciting, beautiful, and fulfilling. The cosmos finally manifests locally as humankind or humanoid life on other planets so it can turn around and look at itself. Wow!...the ultimate reward of recursive process.

I don’t wish to enter into the specifics of how I think this all works out. I’ll just say that you have to believe in the continuity of life, consciousness, and spiritual evolution for any of this to make sense. Let’s leave it at that.

As to ancient scripture, even in terms of my perspective on a Supreme Intelligence, it follows that such an intelligent, conscious, ultimate being would be omniscient, omnipotent, and would be the Father and Mother, the ultimate Progenitor of us all and as such, we are His/Her children. S/He loves us.

I agree that much of scripture is provincial and chauvinistic in the extreme. However, as I’ve stated earlier, once a human being experiences his own consciousness repeatedly in its simplest, purest manifestation, free of focus on any object of perception, but left alone in a state of completely silent, peaceful alertness, aware only of itself, that human being is changed forever. It is the highest form of bliss and fulfillment I believe a human being can experience.

I believe it is an experience that reflects locally the nature of that single field that fluctuates to generate all physical phenomena. It is the purest, highest, most abstract yet personally palpable state of human fulfillment, yet it does not distract from practical life. On the contrary, it drives it, fulfills it, and fills it with meaning.

This experience then enables us to recognize in others that same recognition. I don’t care that the ancient scriptures came from primitive cultures. The eastern spiritual paths use all kinds of weird imagery and mythology, at least in western terms, to convey their points. But their polytheistic pantheon of gods is viewed by their own sages merely as a natural means by which to communicate metaphorically the nature of the hierarchy of intelligence and consciousness to which I referred scientifically.

Our bodies are objectively observable, but our consciousness and intelligence are only observable subjectively. I teach voice. I use modern acoustical theory and vocal anatomy to inform my teaching, but I also use subjective language and imagery as indispensable to teaching my art. Likewise, I accept traditional ritual and metaphor as complementary to my experiences in the evolution of consciousness. I am tolerant of the local dissonances, because they ultimately resolve beautifully into a lovely, harmonious whole.

That others don’t get it or understand what they’re doing; that they allow themselves to be manipulated by those who abuse the religious authority wrongly imputed to them by their followers is too bad, but it doesn’t take away the essential truth at the core, or take away my fulfillment in participating.

Without going into more detail about their proposed solutions to the “what time was it when time began” problem, I merely wish to say that 90% of reality is not perceptible to the sense and the rest is made of “stuff” that is not perceptible to the sense. To request proof of anything truly fundamental in terms of the infamous “show-me-I’m-from-Missouri mindset, has long been understood by physicists as misguided.

From all we do understand about the nature of reality, a primary, cosmically comprehensive consciousness and intelligence that functions as the source and maintainer of all physical phenomena could never manifest itself directly to the senses. Physics long ago, way, wa-a-a-a-y back, concluded that sensory perception represents an extremely superficial level of reality. To think of cosmically fundamental “anything” as subject to proof in terms of direct sensory perception is simply naive. No serious modern cosmologist worthy of the name, atheist or not, would ever propose such a thing.

Gute Nacht, oder guten Tag, mein lieber Herr Archeon. You do very well and you have all the slack you want. Forgive my hasty judgment, please. I hope you’ll forgive that I got tired of people whose first language is indeed English calling me an idiot and an unoriginal copycat for what I believe while demonstrating high levels of torpidity in our conversation. I just got fed up with it.

I know you want to change the subject a bit, and I will comply, but your response invites for me another clarification of my view. As to observability, I have already mentioned that we don’t observe gravity, but only its effects. Gravity is very fundamental. Space and time are also. I’ve pointed out that while we feel we know what space and time are, we can’t define either one without going around in circles.

That’s the nature of anything truly fundamental. That’s why the things you ask theists to prove to you cannot comply with any criteria for proof in terms of a God we can perceive with the senses. The idea of proof of anything strictly in these terms exists only on an extremely superficial and primitive level of current scientific investigation and thought.

Einstein’s General Relativity equates gravity and acceleration. Acceleration is nothing but a variation in the time rate of change in spatial position with respect to some reference point in space-time. It doesn’t even require objects. He then further explained gravity as a curve in four-dimensional space-time geometry.

For a lot of scientists, that was pretty abstract and weird stuff. He took a major chunk of physical reality and boiled it down to space-time geometry, which from a “common-sense” perspective is just bending around “nothingness” to get “somethingness”, namely gravity, which we can’t see, but which nonetheless has a powerful effect on what we can indeed see and feel.

Despite its weird abstraction, his theory represents a great advance. At macroscopic levels of existence (astronomical levels) it predicts relationships between events, etc. a lot better than “common-sense” Newtonian physics.

Now here’s the crux of this point:

Virtually all current research in theoretical physics is based on the premise that every local event, chunk of matter, or phenomenon of any kind is nothing more than a fluctuation in one single, abstract unified field. This field has space, time, and every other component of physical existence implicit within its abstract nature, yet it is one single field. This line of thought led to the “big bang” theory of the origin of the cosmos. This theory is also weird from a “common sense” viewpoint, since it states that the entire universe sprang forth from the violent explosion of a single particle called a “singularity”. This is totally abstract, since it has no position in space and time because its existence transcends both. It’s more fundamental.

There is the further cosmological question of when this happened. Physicists have long disliked the idea of a beginning of time, since it begs the self-contradictory question of what time it was when time began.

(I’ll have to continue this in a new comment.)

Archeon,

I’m glad to see you agree that scriptures are flawed and clergy are harmful to society & individuals.  But I see no more social or intellectual value in the sort of mix-&-match theology that Straighty proposes than I do in more conventional forms.  I don’t think Straighty is in touch with any being other than Straighty. 

Trying to reinvent religion or spirituality [with or without scriptural ingredients] takes effort and attention that could be expended pursuing actual truth, or enjoying the pleasure that we have only too brief an opportunity to taste.

Another sad thing about the pursuit of non-material values or experiences, is that those who do tend to follow the position of more conventional religious people/organizations/writings in devaluing the actual pleasures of the physical world [and I don’t just mean coarse pleasures like sex&drugs;&rock;&roll;, I also mean love, learning, sharing, achievement, etc.].  This whole quest for “something more” decreases the pleasure of the pleasures the seeker does experience, and convinces the seeker to avoid further pleasures in favor of attempting to contact/experience the unreal [interesting how people who chase unreal spiritual experiences are appalled when unbelievers take drugs to experience things the drug-user knows to be unreal and temporary].

Another thing I think is harmful, even in the most quiet & unmissionary individual pursuit of spirituality is that belief in noncorporal superbeings who interact with people or events on earth also takes the satisfaction out of accomplishments.  If God/god/spirit/superstraighty/whatever gives a human help in reaching a goal, then one wouldn’t deserve to enjoy a feeling of accomplishment.  I think this sort of destruction of deserved pride in one’s useful acts drives the kind of nihilism we see in believers of whatever brand who think the end of earth is something to look forward to, or who destroy themselves in the name of religion.  This would explain the earth-isn’t-enough attitude of the sorts of nonpoor, educated, healthy young men who executed the 9/11 plot.

On the use of the term “neoatheist” - I never use it myself, and suspect it’s an invention of people who are not unbelievers.  Re-naming the other side without their consent is a popular way to try to undercut the oppposition’s position.

P.S. I think you are right about how awful Falwell was, but I don’t celebrate the death of him or anyone else for two reasons: 1. he has now permanently lost the opportunity to realize that he was wrong about earth/life after death/social policy/punishment of children/etc/etc/etc.  2. however much we hate him & everything he stands for, there are people who did love him [family/friends/secretary?], and they are sad right now.  Plus, his departure hasn’t exactly taken the wind out of the sails of the hideous movement he spawned.

Trish I agree whole heartedly.

We also have this problem of those who claim to have the powerfull “spiritual” experience (Falwell, Graham, et-al) clouding the issue.  These Elmer Gantry types who make grand pronouncements, who are infact Nazi’s in not as nice uniforms.  Yes for the catholics, I include the pope, the cardinals, priests, and bishops in this class of charletans.

What I don’t understand is why atheists, who finally have had enough of standing quietly by are called neo-theists (this is a blatant attempt to paint us with the same negativity that neo-conservative has as a term).  While criminal charletan assholes like Falwel disparage our characters while eating caviar in private jets giving interviews by satphone and all the while paying for it with money donated by poor widows and pensioners hoping to earn a few browny points with the really big asshole in the sky.

I abosolutely agree that once we understand we are mortal, with afinite time here, to live, breath, feel, love, have sex, eat, shit even, then we begin to have fear that it will all one day end.  In many ways, we are trained to have this fear.  It starts with the childeren, we instill them with insecurity and fear almost from day one.  We ly about god, the easter bunny, and santa.  We even lie and tell them we love each of our childeren equally - you don’t think they see through that immediately?  Childeren don’t love their brothers and sisters or each of their parents equally, so why would they believe that lie?  Because we tell them lies, we breed insecurity and a need for certainty.  Insecurity and a need for certaintly and abosolutes are a bad combination when we then present them with messiahs and prophets.

Thus we have nations that fear for their survival and are willing to oppress their neighbours for resources.

Ok I am going off on a tangent here......

Why is being sure in ones lack of belief seen as aggressive towards religion?

If the religious loudmouths are on the barricades agains homosexuality (hey mr. evangelist if you don’t want to suck dick, don’t), against same sex marriage (hey mr. graham if you don’t want to marry a man, don’t), against choice (hey mrs. christian if you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one) then those of us who do believe in freedom, choice, liberty, and the right to be left alone will have to say something.

The Falwells, Robertsons, Grahams, for all their eloquent (yeh right) speaches on religious freedom, don’t really want any.  They want a autocratic theocracy where THEY decide who gets to do what, and who gets to stick what where in whom.

Now Straighty’s talk of the metapyhsical possiblilities about god/consiousness/spirituality are fine intellectually, and indeed are far more romantic than the silly theologies of abraham and moses.  But they will fail to grab the limited imagination of the average citizen (person), for it relies to heavily on making a personal commitment to THINKING about the nature of being.  It relies to heavily on questioning how we KNOW what we know.  In short it requires us to exercise freewill, and to be ready to accept our conclusions even if they don’t reinforce our preconceptions.

Most will toss the evidence, and keep the preconceptions.  Most already have, which explains the rise of fundamentalist evangelical christianiy, and fundamentalist jihadist islam, and settler judaism.

Archeon,

Scripture aside, I think that what people identify as god/gods is an amalgam of powerful, but normal emotions; experiences that they hope will support their deep hope that they will survive the death of their bodies; and social experiences that they have learned to label as “spiritual.” Thrown in with this is a belief [usually taught by religions &/or scriptures] that people who classify these emotions, experiences & hopes as “god” or “spiritual” are somehow morally superior to those who accept that these are perfectly normal, earthly experiences of verbal, social primates.

Powerful does not equal supernatural.  Believing in things that you can’t prove are real is no basis for a system of morality [props to Python].  Being convinced of things that you can’t prove are real doesn’t make one a better or smarter person than those who accept that there is no evidence that we do anything more than rot after we die.

I think that behaving in an ethical way, with no expectation of post-physical rewards, is the only way that a human can demonstrate morality.  Those who conform their behavior in expectation of reward/punishment after death may increase the domestic tranquility, but their behavior is essentially selfish, not moral.

Trish, I think you and I are in agreement about the valuelessness of organized religion.  We agree that the texts of the judeo-christians is basically trash.  I surmise from this that the koran (I have read so portions of it) is also worthless crap.

If I examine x number of faiths find them all to be logically contradictory and voilating all reason, I can assume that religion y (islam) is also false.

The “god” that Straighty speaks of is, I think unrelated to the god you find in this world’s, or at least the USA’s churches.  Here you will only find Falwel’s god, the god of greed, hate, lust, deception, subjugation, and enslavement.

God does not live in the vatican, or Canterberry Cathedral, he does not live in Mecca, or on some sacred mountain, he does not even live in the hearts of men (or women).  He is a fiction created by men.

The entity, or consiousness, or energy or awareness of Straighty is not this god.  The term god is so loaded that it is best we leave it to discribe the supreme being of revealed religions.

Here’s an example from my life of an event that I could take as evidence of survival after death:  A friend of mine died around the time I met my husband, but before he & I were close.  Years later, after I hadn’t thought of my friend for years, my husband woke me up one morning and asked if I had a friend named Drew.  He dreamed that he’d answered a knock on the door, and Drew told him, “Take care of Trish.” As Drew walked away he disintegrated into a collection of sparkly, colored lights, starting from the head & going down his body.  When hubby told me the dream, I told him Drew was dead.

The request to “take care of Trish” and the colored lights reflected aspects of our friendship.  I thought that appearing to someone he’d never met and sharing with that person images [for lack of a better word] that the person couldn’t have known would be a remarkably clever way for Drew to demonstrate his survival. 

I told it to a mutual friend of Drew & me, who was extremely impressed with the dream as evidence of contact.

So why am I not convinced by this that there is an afterlife?  1. No physical evidence. There’s nothing to show anyone that would cause a scientist to conclude there is survival after death – or even as a starting point for an investigation.  2. It wasn’t an event, only words.  Hubby could have made it up.  A cruel hubby could read a wife’s diaries to find something to claim to have dreamed to impress/frighten/convert her.  3. I could have said more about Drew than we remembered.  4. The dream could have come from things hubby knows about me.  5. Hubby had met Drew’s roommate.

Belief such an experience is proof can be reinforced by the responses of others told about it.  The people told could be responding to the conviction of the person telling or the credibility they usually give to that person.  Those told may already believe in nonphysical beings, and accept it as further evidence of what they already believe.  The person telling the experience can increase their estimation of the evidence value of the experience because of the reactions of others. 

It’s important that surviving death is dearly hoped by many.  The more someone wants to believe something, the weaker the evidence they’ll accept as support of that belief.  That’s why science demands experiments, recording observations, peer review, double-blind tests, etc.

I later tested responses to a dream that could be taken as evidence of post-life existence:  After the unexpected death of a friend, I dreamed he appeared & said, “Hey, how you doing?  I replied, “Fine, how are you?” He said, “You know I can’t tell you that.” Then I woke up.  Friends who believed in nonphysical existence spoke as if they thought I believed I’d actually had contact with this friend.  Even though I didn’t believe I’d had contact – only a dream – I found myself feeling excitement in response to people’s reactions to my report of this dream.

Archeon & Straighty, My point about scripture is this - if there were an omniscient being running the show, why would he/she/it allow such a batch of misunderstandings, untruths & cruelty to be spewed in his/her/its name?  I used the Bible because it is the scripture Americans are most familiar with - the sacred texts of every civilization/religion are all full of similar flaws.[I also used Lord of the Rings as an example, and i don’t claim that anyone on this strand believes those books are scared] Also, Straighty, you remarked earlier in this strand that you do attend church, so I concluded you find some value in their position, which churches claim to trace back to the Bible.  Just think of this one example:  An all-knowing creator of the universe watching healthy humans torment people who were already suffering from physical diseases caused by germs.  Healthy people have told sick people that they deserve their sickness as punishment for sins, or were given disease as a “test” or to teach them a lesson.  Healthy humans have exiled sick people to punish them for the sins that led to their illnesses. The healthy humans not only do these things, they support them by referring to scriptures they claim were written &/or inspired divinely by this all-knowing creator.  If that all-knowing creator had the power to communicate with humans [even if only a few humans], would not that creator’s *not* telling humans that diseases are almost always caused by germs [or accidents or birth defects] be at minimum a cruel omission?  It’s not just people in bible-based religions, or only pre-modern people who have treated sick people as if they brought it upon themselves.

As for “other” ways of knowing there is a “supreme” being, when a human feels they’ve had an encounter with a non-physical being, what evidence does that person, or the rest of us, have that this is a true encounter and not a hallucination?  To the person experiencing a hallucination, what they see is indistinguishable from normal experience.  Otherwise, such an experience is a daydream or a fantasy.

Straighty, I was not saying that consiousness and awareness are not hierarchical.  I was merely pointing out that applying the evidence of the observable on the unknown or un-observable is not 100% reliable. Granted, if the all that is observed demostrates order that is hierarchical, it would a plausible and reasonable conclusion that the other things are too.

Now that we have at least come to somekind of consensus on the “meta” questions.  What is your opinion about the validity or even neccessity of the (for the sake of simplicity, we will deal with the other theologies in time) abrahamic faiths?  Setting aside for the moment the previously discussed larger issues regarding the metaphysical questions of being, existance, objectivity vs subjectivity etc.

Do you find within the source texts of these faiths evidence of truth?  I would argue that, what ever small bits of truth there are to be found, they are tainted and negated by all the (for the lack of a better word) untruths.  Any claims to be valuable life guides is negated by for example, the keeping of slaves, poligamy, beating of wives and childeren, the divine sanction of war and genocide, etc. described and condoned in the texts.

Furthermore the religions men have created based on these texts (or did the religions create the texts?) have a long history of abuses and excesses.  This inspite of and often because of the words in the texts.

Now the universe may well have a “meta-consiousness”, of which my consiosness may be a part (granted, a tiny infinitly small part).  This consiousness I would say has little, and probably nothing to do with the “god” of the bible, torah, or koran.  I for one would say, the biblical abrahamic god, the god that has a personal relationship with me or/and you, the god that listens to my prayers, the god the intercedes on a person’s or nation’s behalf, this god is a fiction and utter fabrication.

Your discription of the meta-consiouness as permeating everything, being everywhere, is far more intellectually and “spiritually” satisfying than the childish petulant vengeful silly biblical god and his need to constantly micromanage the universe.

(as for some of the gramatical structures, and spelling I use, please grant me some leeway, as English is not my first language - German is.)

Good, Archeon. Thank you! Now we can have a productive conversation, or at least a coherent one. I agree with most of what you say. We all empirically experience our own consciousness and intelligence. (I also assume we all do from personal experience and we tell each other that we do. Science calls this empirical evidence confirmed by replicability.) This, I believe, has to be the most universally experienced , generalizable, and well replicated empirical evidence known to humankind.

Given that we all do, then we know at the very least that consciousness and intelligence is somehow associated with our physical existence. We know that our physical states affect the quality of our consciousness and the efficacy of our intelligence.

I find it theoretically highly inconsistent, uneconomical, and not at all compelling to notice that physical structure is hierarchical and then assume that the consciousness and intelligence we find associated with our little part of that structure in our own experience is not, simply because it is not as immediately evident locally. This last little fact follows naturally from the nature and relative size of the larger systems of which we are a part. Why should we expect the intelligence implicit in the structure of a galaxy that may have evolved human-level intelligence elsewhere to talk to us?

If you can offer a compelling argument that assuming that consciousness and intelligence are not hierarchical while the physical world is is both rationally and intuitively compelling, my hat will be off to you or anyone else who can.

Yes I agree Straighty.  Yet I do not accept that the god of the bible is the god you propose.  I do not accept that the writers of the bible were remotely sophisticated enough to think about the nature being in the terms you propose.

The abrahamic faiths are founded on the musings of simple sheep and cattle herders. Their conclusions about the nature of the world based on their obesrvations were false. (the “firmament” that Trish spoke of is but one example) They produced a theology the is hateful, racist, and bigoted.  This can be demonstrated as I have previously pointed out in this thread, by simply examining the texts.  The texts contain logical and factual errors that cast doubt upon the veracity of the other parts.

You god, Straighty may well exist.  I can’t know or prove one way or the other.  That I and presumably you (I assume that you do because I have) have awareness and consiousness, and because the other parts of the world are ordered in hierarchies, that awareness is too, is in my mind “jumping” to conclusions.  However, I accept this as a plausible theory of existance.

I also accept that this “universal” consiousness could always have existed and will always exist. Yet I am compeled to ask, does this “god” resemble the biblical god in anyway?  or any god worshiped by any faith on earth?  I would say not.

As I have said before, I do not ask the beleivers to prove that “a” god exists, only that “the” god of the bible, torah, koran, or other holy text exists.  This they cannot do.  Yet I can show, and many others have shown, that the texts used to “prove” god, are not consistent, and are internally logically contradictory.

Trish, why do you keep harping on assumptions about what I believe that are not relevant to my points? The scriptures “that I value so much” are full of chauvinistic viewpoints that I do not share with them. You keep avoiding the issue that is important to me, and that is the existence of a Supreme Intelligence.

That has nothing to do necessarily with the scriptures to which you refer, so what̵