Presumably, based upon how people describe the experience. this is not particularly unusual when dealing with the study of human experience, regardless of whether the discipline is psychology, philosophy, sociology, or theology.
lekatt I am shocked, shocked I say, to see you in this thread. In the excitement, I seem to have lost my monocle!
This makes just as much (or little) sense if “spiritual” is replaced by “material”.
Yes.
I myself have had spritual experiences, though not religious ones. There is a difference, at least for me.
I certainly believe people when they say they’ve experienced something they think is an apprehension of a supernatural existence, the numinous, if you will.
The way I see it, there’s ample evidence that such experiences do have a physical manifestation in the brain, that such experiences can be precipitated by exogenous chemicals or other forms of external stimuli acting directly on the cerebral cortex, and that they’re also associated with some disease states, like temporal lobe epilepsy. An endogenous compound called dimethyltriptamine, a product of the pineal gland, can also cause potent hallucinations, and many people administered this chemical under controlled conditions have reported they felt a powerful sense of another presence somehow nearby, something alien or otherwordly, but also profoundly loving. Other hallucinogens like ibogaine or psilocybin can have a similar impact on people, and those experiences can be so life-changing as to allow the recipient to do things as radical as give up debilitating addictions.
It all sounds remarkably like what some people describe during profound spiritual epiphanies.
So, I consider it highly likely there’s a mundane explanation for what feel like encounters with the numinous. Some spiritualists argue that God communicates with us via our normal physiology and biochemistry, and that while some of these experiences could simply be aberrant discharges of the synapses, it cannot be ruled out that they others were meant as a divine communication.
To which I say, of course it can’t be ruled out, because God, as defined, could do anything, and hence literally anything one wants could be ascribed to Him if one chooses to invoke Him as an explanation. That seems to be about as satisfactory a level of agreement I and spirutualists are ever going to get.
But that was kind of my point. Do people describe the two experiences differently? I’m not aware that they do.
There’re some people who say: It’s all in your head, subjective, therefore it’s not real.
Well, then, please point to something that’s is not in your head? The color, the shape, the dimensions, the smell – your whole experience is in your head, even though your teacher says it is objective truth, outside of you.
Same teacher says, and that particular experience they had, is not truth. You say: No, that is not the truth.
So OK, you graduate and fit perfectly in to todays zeitgeist. Nothing wrong with that. Congratulations. But I think if you lived here five hundred years ago, your opinions – based on your experiences of course, and your teacher’s – would fit perfectly within the 1600th century zeitgest; you would say, Amen. And if you lived here a thousand years later, you would fit perfectly into that zeitgest, and would graduate, and laugh at those who lived in the 21th century. “They didn’t know sh+t, eh, teacher?”, all the way to the pub. “That’s right son, they didnt.”
This particular second in history, isn’t the final truth. It’s quite an isolated moment, in time and space of earth’s evolution.
If you haven’t had any spiritual experience, it’s against this particular moment’s zeitgeist to believe anybody had’em.
Essentially, you’re saying: They all fooled themself! I know better!
You won’t belive me, but here comes: You don’t. You don’t know sh+t.
If you test what you sense, but at the same time senses are not reliable, then your tests are not reliable either. Show me where I am wrong.
So, are you arguing for solipsism, or some kind of extreme relativism ? Nonsense, I’m afraid. You can disbelieve in a truck all you want; if you get in it’s way it will crush you just as fast as someone who believes in it. If you have faith in your divinely granted ability to fly and step into the Grand Canyon, you’ll plummet just as fast as I would. As someone once said, reality is what’s left when you aren’t looking. Our perceptions are in our head; the world isn’t.
Not all “zeitgeists” are equal. The 16th century view of the world wasn’t just different; it was inferior. I’m sure ( barring a collapse of civilization ) the worldview in a thousand years will be superior to ours.
Actually, we live in a rather irrational, superstitious period of history. Most people ( IMHO ) seem to believe in mystical experiances. Just look at this thread; even on the relatively rationalistic SDMB there are plenty of believers.
I believe in the facts, science, and logic. There simply is no reason to believe in supernatural forces.
That’s why you use many sorts of tests; that’s why you do it more than once; that’s why many others check your work. Let’s take a look at the record. In a few centuries, the scientific method has produced enormous advances; in thousands of years, revalation has produced nothing. Your beliefs may make you happy, but they are sterile.
Not sure what you mean by “my teacher,” but I certainly won’t argue against the subjective nature of reality. Which is a large part of the reason I reject most notions of the supernatural. We have enough trouble acheiving consensus on the things we can all perceive. To start haggling over the merits of things only perceived by one person strikes me as an exceptional waste of time.
Still not sure where you’re going with this “teacher” stuff. I’ve never taken a class in atheism, or anything.
Well, I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive of them. Folks a thousand years ago were just as smart as folks today. It’s just that knowledge is cumulative across generations, and people a thousand years ago didn’t have as large a database as we have today, and so arrived at many flawed conclusions. I would only hope that, a thousand years hence, the database of human knowledge will have continuted to expand, and the things we take for granted today will be seen as laughable superstitions or terrible barbarities by the people of the future. However, to what extent should the knowledge that we do not have complete knowledge affect the conclusions we draw about the world today? We can still only work with what we know now, not with what we hope we’ll know tomorrow.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but the zeitgeist of this particular moment in America is overwhelmingly superstitious. We are a resoundingly Christian and increasingly fundamentalist nation. To not believe in the supernatural in 21st century America is to move against the national zeistgeist in a profound, and often dangerous, manner.
No, what I’m saying is, “I’ve looked at the data, and I have concluded that it does not support the exsistence of the supernatural.” This is no more nor any less arrogant than to say, “I’ve look at the data, and it does support the exsistence of the supernatural,” to say nothing of “I’ve looked at the data, and it supports the exsistence of the Christian/Muslim/Hindu/whatever concept of the supernatural.”
Neither do you. Neither does anyone else. That’s why we’re still arguing about this crap, even after ten thousand years or more.
I get it and I agree. In studying a lot of different religions I came to see that many shared the same beliefs and allowed the terminology to seperate them. Such as, many Christians don’t like the term Karma but when you quote the Bible and say “you reap what you sow” they’re okay. On the SDMB I discovered that terminology also seperates believers and agnostics and atheists. Occasionaly we’re talking about the same thing become tangled up in the process of word choice when describing it. Why? If I say I had a spiritual experience and you want to describe it as emotional experience or a chemical process of the brain so what? Is there any reason to be combative or over that? The qualifier “spiritual” in front of the word experience has nothing that can be proved or disproved. It’s simply the qualifier of choice.
Yep. I can, like, totally resonate with that, man! 
It’s when we go from “spiritual” to “spirit” that the real debate begins.
I mostly agree with John Mace, but the problem I have with people calling things “spiritual” is the implied reference to some sort of spirit. I find it mildly insulting to humanity and our amazing brains to suggest that something more than our physical selves is necessary for us to appreciate a sunset. I don’t understand why people feel the need to give credit to unseen forces for the amazing things we’re capable of doing.
What you refer to as irrational and superstious or mystical experiences are people trying to explain things they don’t understand. In many cases it’s something science cannot explain as well.
I wonder about your objection to the term supernatural. Do you prefer “Unexplained at this point in time”? I am often frustrated by zealots who ignore the plain evidence before them in order to cling to outdated traditions but when it comes to things that are not explained and that cannot be tested, I con’t figure out the objection to words like supernatural or spiritual.
True spiritual seeking and science are both attempts to discover the truth. There are many areas where your vaunted tests are just not applicable and we still need to decide what we believe is the truth.
Your argument is moot. If the senses are unreliable it doesn’t matter how many people are involved or how much checking is done. The results will still be unreliable. Its the common sense logic of if your foundation is faulty everything built upon it is also faulty.
As for slamming my beliefs – you are not qualified to do so. If you haven’t experienced you don’t know squat.
Why make up explanations? Calling something supernatural is like saying, “I know a cause, or at least the general nature of a cause, and it is not part of nature.” Calling it unexplained simply says we don’t know.
But before I go too far on that line… what kinds of things do you think are worth attempting to explain through the word “supernatural”?
There has been good evidence that we can live without our brains for decades.
Most people believe the reason we can do such amazing things is that we are part of a greater unseen intelligence sometimes called God.
I would say that perhaps it is something more than our physical selves. “Spirit” is just a word. In the spirit of friendship, or brotherhood. If I understand your objection I think I agree. What bothers me is when religious people insist on refering to God as a spirit that is somewhere out there,in a place seperate from us. And then there’s that whole, we are so undeserving and rotten and anything really positive has to be credited to this same being who is out there somewhere. When I think of spirit and spirituality as being an intergral part of our humanity and that mysterious something that connects us as living beings, then it doesn’t seem insulting.
If I say, “in the spirit of friendship,” I mean in the emotion and with the intention of friendship; for friendship. I don’t need to imagine some invisible force connecting me to my fellow human beings. Why do we need more than our ability to be sensitive and vicariously experience feelings, thoughts, and experiences of other human beings, along with an ability to communicate, to have the connection you see as mysterious? Why give credit to that invisible and presumed-to-be non-physical force, when our physical brains (and their actions) can explain the connection? Relying on that force still seems insulting to me.
**Der Thris ** said: “So, are you arguing for solipsism, or some kind of extreme relativism?”
No, certainly I do not, and I really don’t understand how you can interpret my post as such – do you and I have the same understanding of the term ‘solipsism’? My view of the world and my part of it is quite the opposite of solipsism.
**
Miller** said: “it’s just that knowledge is cumulative across generations,”
That is not necessarily the truth. If you would be right, Nazi ideologists would be 100% right 1940, for instance. If they would’ve won the war, would you argue that banning Dalí and Picasso would be the result of a sort of cumulative knowledge across generations?
What is truth this particular morning – whether it’d be the charactiristics of the jew or of the ghost – isnt’t necessarily scientific truth. Probably it’s anything but ‘scientific’. Though scientific research – needless to say, hopefully – is invaluable, the conclusions of it might be political or idealogical or just plain zeitgeist or nonsense or whatever.
You’ll find the “scientific truth” you looking for; whether you’re a christian or an atheist.
Point is, if everybody everywhere around the world always had – or could have, as far as we can judge – similar experiences… dismissing this as some faulty brain function… that’s not scientific, that’s stupid.
(And that has nothing to do with the bottomless stupidity of the christian church the last thousand years. We’re talking experience, not religion.)