[quote=mswasThe issue is that it’s equally unscientific to claim that someone else’s experience is not real. They have had it proven to them, they have seen the evidence, people will have lot of evidence to TELL others about, but they might not be able to produce the evidence.[/quote]
I wouldn’t claim is not that your experience is not “real” in the sense that you had the subjective experience which you describe. I would just point out that you experience is not proof of anything. Lots of people have had convincing subjective experiences of Jesus, Rama, Zeus, Ahura Mazda, talking animals, space aliens, etc. They’re all equally sure that their experiences were “real.” Can you tell me how you know that your own experience is any more “real” than the experiences of those who speak to Krishna or to Elvis?
Did you know that vitually all the classic religious experiences (visions, communion with God, NDE’s, etc.) can be duplicated in a laboratory by stimulating the brain or by drugs? Can you tell us how YOU know that your experience is not purely psychiatric? Unless you can devise a way to distinguish between which experiences are physiological in nature and which ones are actually “real” (in the sense of something genuinely “supernatural,” or “divine” or whatever) then you really don’t have the ability to prove the veracity of those experiences even to yourself. What you’re doing is simply choosing, purely on faith, to accept your experiences as real.
I eagerly await your demonstration, then. In the meantime, allow me dispose of the rest of your post.
No, that’s pretty much entirely incorrect. The force at play in society is belief, the exsistence of which is incontrovertable. The object of that belief is not provable in any objective sense, which is what is most often debated on these boards. No one is arguing that the idea of God is not popular or powerful, only wether or not that idea has any sort of rational (in the non-pejorative sense) basis.
I’m not sure what you mean by “collective consciousness.” I did a quick google search, but the web sites I found seemed a bit skeevy. Can you expound on that a bit?
True to an extent, I suppose. Violent Islamic radicals like Osama bin Laden, for example, have had some pretty profound influence on the shape of American society in the present day. Although I would hesitate to say that they “control” America in any real or valid sense of the word.
What atheist has ever denied that the concept of God exsists? We don’t believe in Christ, but we’re all pretty much agreed on the exsistence of Christians.
If you want to argue for a radical reinterpretation of the concept of the deity, that’s fine, but don’t assume that, just because arguments formulated against the traditional definition of God don’t apply to you new definition, you’ve somehow trumped those arguments. They were created in response to the common belief of God as a discrete supernatural being, incarnated human, and/or sentient motive force. The counter-arguments for God as social metaphor are entirely different, and will largely be made by those who worship a traditional conception of God. Few atheists would argue against God as a metaphor for human understanding, or as a major societal force, because neither of those definitions require that God actually exsist. It only requires that people act like he exsists.
I don’t need evidence to know god is a silly wives’ tale.
The same way I don’t need evidence to know the same thing about satyrs and leprechauns and the tooth fairy.
But some people believe in all those things, plus gods and saviors and devils and ghosts, and ufos and people bending spoons with their minds.
These are the gullible, and they have inherited the Republican party.
The problem is not that people do not believe the evidence of your experience but the conclusions that you draw from it. As you said, it is condescending and unhelpful to deny categorically that a person experienced what he claims to have experienced.
I’ll give you an unusually personal example. I frequently suffer from sleep paralysis. By frequently, I mean at least three or four times per week. You can read the descriptions for yourself on the linked site. Almost all of them apply to me. I get most of the common symptons: hallucinations, fear, and an intense feeling of g-force on my chest. Sometimes I see bright lights, and other times I have vivid and often nightmarish dreams or hallucinations.
I would be extremely irritated if someone categorically denied that I have had these experiences. However, if I contended that I have these episodes because a witch is riding on my back or because I am possessed by a succubus, I would expect to encounter extreme skepticism.
An individual’s direct personal experience is valid insofar as you can trust the person to relate an event honestly. It is not necessarily valid that his experience supports the conclusion he claims it does. This is just an appeal to authority, which the SDMB logic brigade will swiftly inform you is a fallacy.
We don’t. Hence scientists are constantly replicating each other’s work to check just that. If it works once, great. If it works twice, it might just be true.
Perhaps you should think more carefully about what you mean by this. Physics is replete with claims about the existence of particles that cannot be directly observed. The experience of having something “proven” is driven by the standards of the scientific method. In this context, “proof” means acceptance.
Science delivers. End of story.
The fact that these people exist does not mean that the beliefs held by those they detract are valid or well-supported. A stopped clock is correct twice per day.
I agree. If God addressed me personally and I was sufficiently confident that it was really God, I’d certainly be a believer. Different people have different threshholds for such confidence judgments. As you have probably guessed, mine is pretty high. I am far more comfortable with the idea of the Void than of a God who can talk to me. I am rather private like that.
Also true. But other than saying, “wow, cool story,” what else is there left to say? I do not tend to find stories of other peoples’ theistic epiphanies very convincing. Should I have mine some day, I will no doubt be overcome by its internal consistency and be a believer just like the rest. It could be awhile before this happens, but hey, all sorts of weird people throughout history have been enlightened. The odds of enlightenment are probably better than me winning the Powerball, so I buy books instead of lotto tickets.
But you could start telling me about Bernoulli’s principle, how a jet engine works, and you could produce some photographs. Absence evidence to the contrary, I’d be willing to accept that you rode in a plane even though I have never observed one.
You’ll have to pry my indolent, self-serving posture of faux skepticisme out of my bourgeois hands.
The typical abduction experience has a sleeping person spirited away by little gray men and taken to some sort of spaceship, where horrible things are done and some device implanted. However no one in the area notices anything, there are no physical traces of abuse, and no such implant is ever found.
And you have no reason to doubt that this actually happened.
Hokay. (I’ve just the bridge joke already.)
Simple - I make predictions based on what I’d expect to see if direct experience is reliable, and see if they come true. Typical waking events do, hallucinations when I’m tired and dreams don’t. Doesn’t prove anything, but it gives me sufficient confidence.
I’ve also lived my life as if there were no god, no spiritual entities. I eat pork and lobster, and eat on Yom Kippur. So far, everything is fine. Sin in that sense has no consequences. However, I note that single drivers who violate the carpool lane get tickets, so, besides feeling it is morally wrong to sneak into the carpool lane, I see real world consequences. So I don’t “sin” that way.
True, but if God existed he should have some sort of measurable impact on the natural, physical world (except for deism.) Certainly the Bible gives examples of this. So I think this argument about god is weaker than it can be. If God had no impact at all, there would be nothing about how to worship or what to do, right?
I realize many theists have retreated to the “can’t demonstrate him” position as first hand evidence for god has gotten scarce, but we don’t have to let them off the hook that easily. It isn’t proof, but it could be enough evidence to be very convincing. Let the guy part the Red Sea again on command and I’d go back to shul in a flash.
You’re confusing the tag “God” for the actual entity “God.” The tag, and the meme, exist of course. We’re saying that there is no evidence that the actual thing exists. The tags “Yoda” “Luke Skywalker” and “Darth Vader” exist, and have had real impact in getting people to ship their money to Skywalker Ranch, but the actual entities don’t exist.
If your position has now become only the meme God exists, you’re an atheist. Welcome to the club, buddy!
Perhaps an ill informed or juvenile question, but since I’m finally a member (proudly stated), I’ll ask: Why do some believers in God insist that there is only one God? If one can have faith in a non-provable entity, why not faith in many?
But it is not some being called God that is affecting my life rather its a collective human belief. I don’t think anyone will deny that the meme of God is real, rather the disagreement is whether the being described in that meme exists. This is a common tactic that I have seen in arguing for the existence of God. You simplify what God is to a point where someone will agree. Normally that comes down to what caused the big bang. From this vague simplistic argreement the person arguing for the existence of God thinks that this has proven that their version of that impedus is correct. Clearly this is not the case and its no different here. Certainly a meme about God exists but that in no way proves that God exists.
An analogous situation would be that of luck. A great deal of people believe in luck and that belief has some appreciable effect on my life. That does not mean that luck exists.
Feelings are irrelevent. Desire is irrelevent. Beliefs are irrelevent. Resistance is Futile. You will power down your weapons and escort us to sector 001.
Your logic is faulty. By definition an atheist does not believe in God and therefor can not believe their existance is being controlled by it.
[quote=mswas]
I don’t buy atheism because the very word atheism has ‘theism’ in it. If the concept of God did not exist, then there wouldn’t be any way to be opposed to it. God exists because it is a powerful meme that is given power by the will of many people, who choose to give it power. In the end it is a metaphor, an attempt to understand the system in which we exist, and a way to understand our ability to affect that system’s form. /QUOTE]
Atheism does not mean opposed to God its literal translation is no belief in God or Gods.
The problem is that what is often a point of contention is the metaphors that one is using to describe their experience. rfgxdm made a great analogy of blue demons pulling things toward the Earth. Now, those blue demons are a fine way to describe gravity. They are not WRONG, they just lack the sufficient detail and consistent description that mathematics might provide for you.
Here’s a metaphor for you. Imagine we are standing at opposite ends of a mini-mall. On my end is a Christian book store. On your end is one of those uber-cool stores that sells all the blinky shit and gyroscopes, models of dinosaur bones and solar system mobiles.
Now I know based on my perspective that the religious book store is far more important, because it is larger, and the building tapers off toward you and is smaller off in the distance. From your perspective, the science store is bigger and more important because it tapers off to be smaller toward me. However, the reality is that both stores are in the same mini-mall are likely to have similar revenues, pay the same rent, and employ the same amount of people, with minor differences, for instance the science store probably has a higher electric bill. Both are attempting to explain the universe works, but people going to both stores will say that the other store is less important than the store they patronize.
Certainly the semantic encoding you choose to use to describe your experience is not one of Succubi. That doesn’t mean if someone described it in their own metaphorical language where succubi were a valid expression, that this description is incorrect.
Here is where the fundamental misunderstanding comes in. For a person who truly believes in God to be stripped of that belief would mean that everything they ever believed was wrong. It would be like removing the keystone from an arch, it all would come tumbling down, the person would not survive the experience. Now imagine if suddenly you found out critical thinking skills were a sham. That your experience of repeated results in a lab was merely an illusion. That one day you woke up from your fantasy as a Nobel prize winning scientist to realize that you lived in Ft. Tryon park. Many people have experience of God, and they are able to verify their results based upon the similar experience that billions of others have had. You are arguing that the experience of the scientist is valid because of the ability to repeat it. If one’s experience cannot be trusted, then what does it matter if it can be repeated?
Proof does mean acceptance. There are many people who accept the existance of God. As I would argue this is more about the (unessential) argument of science vs the humanitie, than it is about truth.
So does God’s Love. ;p
See that condescension assumes that they are a stopped clock. How do you know that scientists are not the stopped clock? Or maybe no one is the stopped clock.
Well, I think you’d find that my view of God is pretty close to that void as well actually. Ten Sephirot for the God of Nothingness and all that.
Well, my problem ain’t with skepticism, it’s with faux skepticism. You rarely make the mistake I am talking about. You don’t assume something to be not true in lieu of evidence, you tend to view it as unproven, which is a perfectly reasonable response. I am more trying to remove hypocrisy from these boards. If people want to argue for rational skepticism, then they should realize that unproven doesn’t mean anything more than unproven. Many people realize that, but many don’t, it’s a source of ignorance that I believe needs to be fought the hardest. I believe people should be taken to task for claiming rationality or skepticism when they are not being rational or skeptical.
Scoffing at people for claiming to have an experience one has had is not rational or skeptical. One should never assume that because one cannot do something that no one can.
That assumes no gaps in my knowledge of physics. What if I can’t adequately explain Bernoulli’s principle, but I know that I flew in an airplane? The essence of proving God is that one would need to know absolutely everything in order to prove it to someone else, as opposed to the flight of an airplane where they only need to know a few things.
You are not one of the faux skeptics to which I refer, rest assured. While I feel that you are too quick to remove the human factor from situations and too quickly fall into a system of aggregates, and I think that hinders your ability to understand things to a certain degree, in the same way my ability to understand your statistics hinders my ability to understand things, I think you take a fairly consistent skeptical approach, and cannot remember a time where you took a solid stance on something for which you had no evidence one way or the other.
It all depends on what your concept of “God” is, as you say. God of the bible is just one possible interpretation. What I was trying to get at in my earlier post about how the definition of God has changed over time is a primary reason to be skeptical about His existence in the first place. We only think of “God” because the concept was handed down to us from our ancestors. They invented the concept to explain what was, to them, unexplainable. We’ve had to modify that concept over time to prevent it from being absurd (in light of what we know about the universe). For example, few today would claim that God is a thrower of lightning bolts. But there are still some things about the world that we simply don’t know.
If we want to define “God” as “the unknowable”, that would be fine with me. For instance, right now we don’t know what the origin of the universe was, or even if there was an origin. Let’s just call that “God”, at least until we are able to know what the origin was. If it turns out that the origin is simply beyond the comprehension of the human brain (ie, it is unknowable) then it might as well be “God” (ie, supernatural) since we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. If it turns out to knowable, then we just push the definition back further in time and space (or whatever is left).
To a certain degree, I’ve always been in the club. I just want the dumbasses to know that they are dumbasses so that they may begin to progress.
What I am tired of is having almost an inability to discuss such issues with people because they decide their cognitive dissonance is really important to them.
What I believe in a nutshell is that I am God, I am the supreme overlord of the universe, everything that exists is an extension of me. That Erek Tinker aka mswas is an identifier of a particular perspective through which I view myself, just as Voyager or Maeglin are others.
I like to view Erek Tinker as a “window washer”, in otherwords what Erek Tinker is attempting to accomplish is squeegying the dogma away from people’s eyes so that they may see me for what I truly am. This benefits Erek Tinker in that it makes the viewpoints of others more reliable if they can come to a consistent communications pattern. I as Erek Tinker believe that the problem in society is a matter of signal/noise ratio, and that all social ills are merely logistical difficulties. One of the biggest sticking points is the issue of “God”. A certain part of the populace does not wish to give up their idea of God, because it is a valid interpretation of the universe, nor should they. Another part of society has a different philisophical language where God is not a part of their semantics. However, rather than attempt to come to an understanding of what this word which some use and others have a distaste for actually means, they would rather argue about whether or not the word should be used at all.
All atheist/theist arguments boiled down without exception comes to “Nuh uh, Uh huh, Nuh uh, Uh Huh.” and I would like to see more nuance applied rather than taking this all or nothing approach. For instance, no matter how many times it is said that people don’t believe the bearded man in the sky approach, it is constantly thrust upon people to believe. I don’t believe in the bearded man in the sky approach, and I also don’t believe that it is the “Traditional” approach, as there are quite a few “traditions”. I don’t like the Bearded Man in the sky approach because I feel it is inherently mysoginistic.
You see me arguing against atheists in this forum because of the candor of this forum. If I were on a Christian forum you and I would probably be more aligned and be arguing against their dogma. So in this forum, I argue against what I see as a faux rationalist/skeptical approach. There are many things that I think are inadequately addressed and summarily dismissed.
You easily dismiss UFOs, other dismiss that the Pineal Gland is a sensory organ. They dismiss psychic phenomena, and oftentimes think that an explanation debunks it. The greatest of these is saying that because a religious experience can be reproduced with drugs, that it is therefore only a biochemical accident, as though a valid religious experience wouldn’t have a biochemical component. I am smoked DMT which is produced by the Pineal Gland, which is supposed to bring on a near death experience. It was quite a religious experience, and I have since smoked DMT as a sacrament. There was a biochemical component that is easily measured, but that doesn’t make it an invalid religious experience.
One of the central themes of the UFO mythology is that the aliens are far more technologically advanced than we are. Perhaps we cannot find the implant because we are looking for the wrong thing? Perhaps they implanted something, got what they needed and removed the implant, and they have a technology for putting tissue back together in a way that modern medicine, which is primitive by comparison cannot detect. I am willing to believe that a far more technologically advanced race than us can exist.
The one thing observable results takes out of the equation is experience. The observer never knows the experience of the thing they are observing. They are looking from the outside. I think this is a major fallacy, and needs to be addressed. It is the attempt to use science to diminish the validity of people’s experience that I have an issue with. Science as a gathering of knowledge is perfectly acceptable to me.
Noctolator refers to me as a radical skeptic. The reason for this is that I don’t believe anything is true. I believe that the entire universe is simply what we will it to be. I don’t believe in individuals, only the singularity, all things are one, everything else is aesthetics, artistic creation. The rules are the way they are, including Gravity, because I have willed them to be so.
I agree, but I think sometimes we give theists a pass in this area. When we ask many of them for evidence of God’s existence, they respond with the unknowable bit. They then turn around and claim that this unknowable god has very specific rules about our sex life. Deists are consistent about this, as are fundamentalists who keep on claiming that there is evidence. (Delusional, yes, but consistent.)
Religion is fine as an answer to the why we are here question - I don’t buy it, but I see how some people do. As an answer to the how we live our lives question, not so much.
My interpretation of what deity means is not a radical reinterpretation. The assumption that what Americans are exposed to as the meaning has nothing to do with what the interpretation has been throughout history, it is just one of many.
In fact if you delve even shallowly into mysticism, all stable definitions of God are false idols, as God is not reduceable.
Try understanding a singularity capable of comprehending itself that has no opposite. It’s kind of like how 1 and 0 are opposites, representing on and off. God is neither 1 nor 0 but more akin to ‘interger’.
My God thinks you should fuck all the time, do lots of drugs, drive fast cars, colonize every celestial body you are capable of colonizing, talk to Saturn, walk on Neptune, and if you get so lucky, deflower Athena.
Let’s rephrase that: You cannot hunt or search for Pigs With Wings. You cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch Pigs With Wings. You cannot know Pigs With Wings. We exist because of Pigs With Wings. Pigs With Wings just ARE.
But they aren’t. We can imagine that they exist, but they don’t. A concept of God can be a particularly pleasant thing to imagine. Nice Daddy and/or Mommy up there in the sky! If you can get others to have the pleasant imaginings along with you, you’ve got a religion!
As children, we might also have imagined that, “Teddy Bear is REAL, and he can talk! He LOVES me!” That wasn’t true, either.
It is a believer’s responsibility to define god well enough so that we know what we are talking about. It is true that many atheists begin with the Western definition, but they almost universally revise the semantics to be in line with whatever it is the theist believes - assuming that there is something clear enough to understand. I have a vague idea of what you mean by this “I am God” stuff, but certainly do not understand how it translates into beliefs or actions. I believe I am a fluke of the universe myself.
Lots of people do believe in the bearded man in the sky. I can only lack belief in whatever god someone presents to me. The bearded guy who created the world in six days 6,000 years ago I can pretty much disprove. A creator god who set the universe in motion and then disappeared I can’t disprove, but can lack belief in because I don’t see the evidence or the point. (I think Why is a crooked letter.) Your version of god I tentatively withhold belief in until I see if there even can be evidence for or against. I’m sure there are lots of gods I’ve never even heard of - I don’t believe in them by default. I’m not alone in this approach. If this is all or nothing, what isn’t? Just believing by default. Didn’t the Red King believe three impossible things before breakfast? Not me.
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I don’t easily dismiss UFOs - I have lots of UFO books, and I came close to believing in them when I was a teenager. But the UFOers made all sorts of claims that never came true. Adamski said his contactees described Venus - they were wrong, and so was he. Roswell is well explained. The aliens people see track the media view of them. Plus, in the 1890s people saw airships (piloted by people) in much the same way they see UFOs today. Nothing there, and nothing here now.
I’d be happy to see a reference to a peer reviewed scientific journal showing the pineal gland senses anything. Until then …
There is a difference between a biochemical effect as the side effect of a religious experience, and a biochemical cause of a religious experience. We cry tears when we are sad, as a side effect, but inducing tears from peeling an onion does not make us sad. See the difference?
Me too. In fact I think it extremely likely that they do exist. I don’t even think it impossible for them to have visited. I think it highly unlikely that they have visited in the past few centuries because of lack of evidence.
If they do visit, it will either be obvious or if they don’t want us to know we won’t. UFOers want us to believe that they are both advanced and incompetent - and that no one in the government would leak this. I’d rather believe in Peter Pan myself than believe the government is leak-proof.
Science does accept the internal validity of the experience. Sleep paralysis is accepted, and happens, and no one is doubting the claims of anyone about what they experienced. What we are doubting is that it maps into an external event the person thought he experienced. A man in the desert sees the oasis in the distance, and we accept it, but we also know that it isn’t there. Isn’t the illusion a more plausible explanation of what he sees than that an advance alien race put down the oasis and plucked it away before he got there? But this is what you are basically proposing happens. Our minds play cool tricks on us, and understanding why and how is interesting, but we don’t need to believe our hallucinations to accept that they occur.