Daniel, I very much resent your veiled “Do Not Feed The Troll” rhetoric. That isn’t even fit for the Pit, much less Great Debates. I’m not “baiting” anyone; I’m saying the same things I’ve said for the past several years. If you want me out of here as a personal favor, you need only ask. But calling me a troll simply because I engage in a vigorous debate and defend my position is contemptible. If you want me out because I am not an atheist, I ask you to consider that these kinds of threads, even when addressed specifically to theists or atheists, frequently get postings from a broad range of people from hard atheists to fundamentalist Christians. I responded in good faith directly to posts by Blowero and Voyager, so if you decide to move the goalpost from trollery to hijackery, you will be mistaken. How can a response be a hijack? And to top it all off, my response to Voyager was conciliatory in nature, joining together people of faith and atheists in one group of people who love. I believe that you owe me either an apology or an explanation.
All I’ll say about this meta-hijack, unless you decide to take it to the Pit, is that I didn’t call you a troll.
Daniel
You’re not even acknowledging. There is no bait. There is no rudeness. I pointed out to you that there are a couple dozen definitions for love — everything from sexual attraction to a tennis score. What is jackassed about making a true assertion?
Except that, as I just said in the post you’re quoting from, YOU first raised the issue by demanding evidence for what love IS. Then, when I explained that isness is not a matter of evidence but of ontology, I find you calling my responses “jackassed bait”.
But I said THAT to VOYAGER. See those bipedal things outside your window? Those are — listen carefully — “other people”. I brought nothing up to you whatsoever after your long drawn-out consession about the findings of Dr. Ramachandran.
Definition: Love is the lowest score in tennis. Ontological claim: Love is a many splendored thing.
Repeatedly is not spelled r-u-d-e-l-y. I referred you once to the dictionary. Why didn’t you go look? It is definition number 9 in American Heritage, and definition number 4 in Merriam Webster.
How is it that you know well enough to quote me as saying that love is a (the) spiritual experience, but at the same time can pretend not to know what I meant by love?
That is a complete non sequitur.
I suspected you might pull out that rabbit. If you didn’t mean “necessary”, you shouldn’t have said it. Don’t blame me for what you start.
Then don’t say that I’m laying bait. If you won’t apologize or retract, then just stop.
I am using one and only one meaning for my claims, and I believe you know that — because you’re smart. I also think you’re smart enough to know that my response to you was not intended as any sort of proof or denial of anything. That is why I phrased my assertion as “I think they and I are one”.
I guess at that point, I’d have to ask in what sense they’re insane. If you can function well in all relevant ways, how is your mental illness an illness?
Daniel
Left Hand - My point exactly. If Mom’s behavior hasn’t changed at all, apart from her mentioning a few extreme religious experiences, she’s not insane. It doesn’t matter whether or not the things she’s seeing are real. Unless her ability to function becomes impaired, it’s not really an illness.
Sidenote: I think a lot of people think of hallucinations solely as a symptom of schizophrenia, but it ain’t necessarily so. They can also be a byproduct of migraine headaches or a sign of certain kinds of seizures. Not that Mom is necessarily having either, but it’s important to remember that Sane and Crazy aren’t the only options.
Sure I do. Actually, that is my problem with religion. They will swear that they know The Truth about things that people cannot possibly know. see also repubs.
I guess I should nitpick that I am more agnostic than athiest. But either way, organized religion is no more than lies that one group of people use for power over another.
Hallucinations can also be brought on by foreign substances, as well as extreme physical and mental stress (e.g. “vision quests”, where individuals elicit hallucinations by self-imposed starvation and/or sleep deprivation).
Such shamanistic practices, and the hallucinatory experiences they entail, were and are taken very seriously as forms of spiritual communion.
Other forms of meditation are known to produce altered states of consciousness, in which practitioners feel they experience the numinous.
None of the above involve psychosis, though it’s reasonable to speculate some aspects of psychotic delusions may be related mechanisticsally and phenomenologically to “visions”.
See, this is ironic. You’re sitting here making grand, sweeping generalizations about religion (qualified later with the word “organized”) that simply don’t hold true across the board.
Are there religious people who swear they know The Truth about thigns that people cannot possibly know? Sure there are. But then, there’s you, claiming that organized religion is no more than lies–which is something that, in the previous paragraph, you admitted that you cannot possibly know.
The world is more complicated than that. There are narrowminded religious fools, certainly, but there are narrowminded atheist fools as well. Any time someone claims anything with certainty about metaphysics, I become slightly more suspicious of anything else they say: seems to me that they’re probably talking out their ass.
After all, they, and you, can’t possibly know.
As for hallucinations, heck: it’s real difficult to reach any reasonable conclusions about the universe if you don’t trust the input of your senses. If I saw demons hovering over people’s shoulders, and I hadn’t just smoked a PCP-laced joint, I’d have a real hard time holding onto my atheism, as well. Indeed, my atheism is due in no small part to the fact that I don’t see demons hovering over people’s shoulders: because my idiosyncratic perceptions of the universe do not include supernatural critters, I tend not to believe in them. If my perceptions included them, I’d believe.
Since that puts me just a retinal image away from religiosity, I’ve got a real hard time condemning most religious folks as insane.
Daniel
O.K., not gonna even read any more. If you’re going to pretend what you said wasn’t rude, then you are delusional. Had my fill of bait, thanks.
If you perceived rudeness, then I must have been rude. I apologize. I would appreciate an apology from you for accusing me of trolling, not because it is against the rules of the board, but because it is insulting.
Well, it is possible to recognize your hallucinations as hallucinations. I’ve had them intermittently since I was a teenager, and though I thought the first few were evidence of some psychic gift I had, I eventually figured out that hallucinations are more likely. Then again, I’m agnostic and kind of skeptical by nature; if I’d been brought up very religious and remained very religious, I might just have assumed it was the hand of God. I think that’s what the OP’s mom is doing. My default setting is to look for a scientific explanation. Hers is to look for a religious explanation. Hence the different conclusions.
I’m not trying to be cute, but the flip side of hallucinations is denial: if, because of your ideology, you reject the plain facts when they’re in front of your face, that’s gotta be just as crazy as believing hallucinations would be, right?
That is, if I deny that my boss is firing me, because my boss is just a figment of my imagination, well, they might send me away for doing that. Similarly, if there really are spirits who live in the woods and who communicate to me, if I pretend that their voices are just hallucinations, then surely I’m a bit loopy.
If we’re going to equate insanity with being wrong about metaphysics, then we can’t judge anyone as insane until we know what the true metaphysic is.
I’d prefer not to base a judgment of insanity on someone’s conclusions about the nature of the cosmos. Thing is, as I said before, I do believe some people are insane (the dude who feared Debbie Gibson is my archetypal nutcase); I’m just not sure how to define insanity to include him but to exclude myself if there really is a God.
Daniel
Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. Mom isn’t any crazier than I am. It’s in her nature to look for a religious explanation for what she’s seeing and hearing, so that’s what she does. It’s in my nature to look for a medical explanation for what I’m seeing and hearing, so that’s what I’ve done. What I was trying to get at is that it’s different for everyone. Were you to start hearing and seeing things that no one else could see and hear, maybe you’d find a religious explanation. Maybe you’d think you were psychic or blame men in black hats or maybe you’d go for the medical explanation, like I have. But it isn’t impossible to doubt the evidence of your senses. It doesn’t make you necessarily more sane than someone who does believe; it just means you deal with it differently. And depending on the hallucination, it can be important to remind yourself sometimes that what you’re seeing isn’t real. Going by the OP, I don’t think Mom has to worry about that. But it’s different for everyone.
When I was a teenager I strongly believed in the doctrine of continuing revelation, that is to say, if God existed and had conveyed his wishes to humans (which I believed to be the case, I was brought up Christian, and believed that the Bible while not wholly literal, was nonetheless the word of God) that it was logical to assume, and theologically sound to assume that He would continue to do so.
I participated in worship services which involved a state of meditation during which, if moved by the Spirit, people would speak about their direct inspirations from God. As in, right at that moment the Holy Spirit was moving in them. I believed that I experienced that on several occasions.
As an atheist now, I’m sort of shaking my head and slapping my forehead. The experience felt real and it did not make me a lunatic. What it made me, in my opinion, was suggestible. Because the doctrine was backed up by reasoned theological argument, so I believed it not only to be spiritually true, but logically accurate. I thought I had applied critical scrutiny to it. And the other people participating in that service form both also shared their similar experiences, and encouraged me and rewarded me with positive feedback when I spoke up under what I understood to be the inspiration of the Spirit.
Of course, once one loses faith in a God, particularly in any sort of interventionist God, what is one to say about one’s previous experiences of God? What I feel now was that the circumstances (meditation, peer suggestion, and a strong imagination) were enough to produce a sensation that I had a strong desire to believe was spiritual and external in nature.
So, my vote is, Ma is neither necessarily a loony, nor are you necessarily wrong. In my experience it is possible for suggestion (you said other people in her church have and share similar experiences) to mould one’s experiences and expectations, independent of either external stimuli or mental illness. I was not mentally ill when I believed I was inspired directly by God, nor do I now think that I was experiencing a chat with a deity.
I’ve seen your proofs, so I was certainly not claiming this was one. I do want to know what your definition of god is that you think this, and if it is in anyway similar to standard defintions of god. Which was the point of my examples - if you define god in some ways, we must accept the existences of the god of your definition - but this says nothing to the existence of gods besides those described by, as Lenny Bruce said, non-scheduled theologies.
At times like this, I quote Bowie:
*Now Jesus he came in a vision
& offered you redemption from sin.
I’m not saying that I don’t believe you
but are you sure that it really was him?
I’ve been told that it could have been blue cheese
or the meal that we ate down the road.
I’m a young man at odds with the Bible
but I don’t pretend faith never works
when we’re down on our knees
praying at the bus stop.*
“Bus Stop”, tin machine