Yes, exactly my thinking also. It doesn’t matter what you believe in. Whether you believe in God, or don’t believe, is of no consequence to your life. What is important is that you believe in universal love for all people. Jesus taught that kind of love. It is the important thing.
Thanks, Selene, and yes, I recommend Religion Explained as one of my favourite books of all time.
What? I’m saying I really can do you the courtesy of entertaining the possibility that you are actually right - that God actually exists, that you actually talk to him when you pray, that you will actually go to Heaven, and even that atheism is a “religion” (if we take the word to include philosophies or worldviews).
That you cannot return this courtesy and rationally consider the possibility that there are no gods or afterlives is disappointing. If the reason you cannot even bear to entertain such possibilities is because you feel that doing so would be detrimental to your mental health, that is not just disappointing but tragic, agreed?
kanicbird, you may be right and I wrong. If you were to reply “SentientMeat, you may be right and I wrong”, we will have made great progress. If you feel you cannot reply so, I’d be interested in understanding why not.
And we all know that no true believer would ever kill anyone in the nameof Jesus.
mswas, here is a question for you in response to this statement.
Bob the banker is getting ready to go home for the night. Krystal the heroin addict walks into the bank and shoots Bob (because Bob isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and was alone) then takes all the money and leaves. Krystal then runs out. At the same time Eric is walking home for work. He walks by the bank at the same time that Krystal runs out. Krystal waves the gun at Eric and, seeing the gun he bolts.
Mary, who is driving down the street, sees Eric start running as he passes Krystal. She thinks something odd is going on and calls the police. The police show up and find Bob the Banker dead. Mary is convinced that she a) saw the gun and b) Eric bolted. She also believes that Eric had the gun. She is convinced of this. She tells the police what she believes. The police believe it as well. The police go out and find Eric still running home. They arrest him for murdering Bob and stealing the money. They figure that he ditched the money and gun somewhere.
Jack McCoy, the DA, hears the evidence from Mary and believes that Eric robbed the bank. At this point everyone but Eric and Krystal are convinced that Eric robbed the bank and killed Bob.
The case goes to court. The jury finds that Eric robbed the bank and killed Bob the banker. There is no video from the bank because Bob didn’t think he would ever be robbed.
Eric get sentenced to life in prison.
Does it really matter that he didn’t do it if the Mary, the police, the DA, the judge and the jury believe that he did?
If not, why?
Slee
Lost a post yesterday. I have comments and a couple of questions for SM
I really enjoyed the OP. I came through Christianity , even a brief stint in the priesthood, to a place now where I no longer believe in God, as separate external creator and ruler of the universe.
I can look back at my own attraction to organized religion and belief and understand
how the inner search for meaning and my inner dialog was influenced by my surroundings. Ultimately a commitment to the truth {that will indeed set us free} led me away from religion. I don’t mean that as a put down. I still see religion as a valid and valuable path for lots of people. A hiding place for others.
One very valuable and often overlooked portion of the truth are the things we don’t know. Individuals and groups have to move forward based on what they believe to be true but we can do so with an awareness that we still have much to learn and there are still plenty of mysteries.
My beliefs have boiled down to a commitment to seeking the truth and trying to understand the nature of love. Whatever may or may not happen after this life is irrelevant. It will take care of itself. We have this moment to do the best we can.
The questions; I’ve had several powerful spiritual experiences. My inner voice has been so distinct a few times that it seemed to be another voice speaking to me. I appreciate what you had to say about inner dialog and the usefulness of speaking to some other. I still find it useful even though I recognize it may just be a tool of the mind and spirit.
Insight into others;
when I was a young Christian an older minster spoke to me and others “in the spirit” at a group meeting. IN my church that meant that meant the Holy Spirit , connected to the all knowing God, moved him to bring God’s message to us. It was an incredibly powerful experience with a distinct feeling of a presence in the room, and this stranger spoke to me with great insight into my personality. This type of thing was relativity common in my church although this was my only experience with it. Do you have any thoughts on people’s insight into others?
The nature of knowing and epiphanies;
During a personal crisis I was filled with anguish and unable to sleep and turn of my mind. I prayed for relief from the mental and emotional strain, even if it was just sleep. I had what might be considered a vision or just a dream. In this dream I saw my situation as part of an intricate web of choices conscious and unconscious, and ,that had brought me/us to this place. I understood that whatever was good and real about us, any genuine love, would move on with us even as we parted, and only our attachment to preconceived ideas about what should be were causing such anguish. When I woke up I was in a state of euphoria. Feeling high as if I had taken medication. I was completely at peace and accepting of the events that hours before had caused such pain. I was filled with compassion love and forgiveness as we said goodbye. It was very profound. So much so that a friend who gave me a ride to the bus station asked what was going on? He knew how upset I had been and the struggles I had been going through, yet there I was, in his words. “absolutely glowing”
As a song writer I’ve had those moments where it felt I was tapping into some creative pool, or had a glimpse of some source that I’m always connected to but am too often distracted from. That’s the same feeling I had that morning only even more powerful. It leaves me wondering where knowing and understanding comes from. I wouldn’t call it an external source, but an internal source that is more than just me. I tend to like the analogies of a drop of water and the ocean, or the biblical one of parts of the same body. I believe there’s an essential truth there we still need to explore.
so, Any thoughts on the nature of knowing , understanding and epiphanies?
I’m pretty sure that the Federal Reserve 1) exists, and 2) doesn’t work like you imply. I also don’t think credit works like that. Given these points of dissention, I can’t make much sense of the rest of this post. Particularly the last sentence.
Hi cosmosdan. Many thanks for your kind words. Yes, I remember you from when I used to post here regularly before real life took me away, as it shortly will again, and you then seemed to be a theist as opposed to an atheist. (A quick search reveals this thread – were you a believer then?)
Yes, some people are more insightful than others. But if you’re asking me for an explanation of a seemingly inexplicable level of insight, such that someone else says things they couldn’t possibly know about you, then the predisposition of humans to confirm what they would like to be true is the key to cold reading. Of course, the insightful people you interacted with didn’t deliberately cold-read you, but you may well have been taking a vague statement and reading far more into it because you wanted to share a close bond with that person (a mechanism called “subjective validation”). Add to this the fact that he or she will almost certainly not have been reading you completely cold, but would know enough about you to constitute “warm” reading, and it’s easy to see how powerful this mechanism is.
I too have experienced extremely powerful dreams which did indeed “sort my head out” to a remarkable and dramatic extent. Luckily, I have very rarely felt true despair or mental illness, but I can at least identify and sympathise with an epiphany which brought upon me a much sought after sense of profound peace. And these experiences are qualitatively similar to those I’ve had while meditating, so I feel the explanation stems from the same branch.
Funny, I’m a musician and writer myself too, and I certainly have “manic” periods where my brain seems to fizzle with ideas. But again, I would seek to explain all of this cognitively – a biological computer homing in on optima in the sea of permutations, if you like. And, to me, that is even more wondrous a process than any supernatural or externally sourced alternative.
Pte. Thomas Cole: Why is it us? Why us?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.
I was thinking of that thread when I saw you posting again. I’d say I was then a believer in the process of changing. I’m not sure I’d call myself an atheist now even though I reject the more traditional God concept. I didn’t embrace any particular religion then but I think I was reluctant to reject the God concept completely.
It’s certainly believable that other ministers had a discussion with the man speaking and I can understand that people in a particulaar line of work become more intuitive about others.
I suppose for me the point is that since we can’t know for sure on certain things it’s perfectly okay and human for you , I or anyone to choose a certain path and belief system works for us. The problem arises when one mistakenly decides their own beliefs are threatened by people believing differently, or they feel they have to push others to believe as they do.I have an atheist sister who is one of the most compassionate and considerate people I know. IMO the principles such as the ones you mentioned that appeal to you, are where we can find common ground. It’s perfectly fine to not know or to choose a particular path that seems to work for whatever reasons. for some a religious icon or group may be helpful. For others the principles are strong enough without the trappings.
I don’t need to believe in anything supernatural but I don’t need to dismiss the possibility either. Of course supernatural only means something we haven’t explained yet. Ultimately it’s reality. The known and unknown.
The wonder for me that remains a mystery is where this knowing comes from. Is it just there inside us, all of it? I don’t see it as some different, other, source but perhaps more as something we are innately connected to and by. In that sense I don’t see it as necessarily contained solely within this physical form. Then again, I realize I simply don’t know.
Regardless, the way in which it is expressed is in interaction through our every day lives and what we value that is expressed in our choices. On that level believers and non believers live the same lives.
I don’t suppose you’d care to explain why my entire hypothesis is utterly contrary to reality.
I’ve already answered that in bits and pieces, but I’ll give a comprehensive answer here. In many cases, I can’t question the veracity of the experimental evidence that you’ve provided because you haven’t provided any. For example, on “cooperation is a stable strategy”, your link is a Wikipedia page. Where’s the experimental evidence? On the Fernyhough paper about AVH, I’m still wading through it, but I haven’t seen any experimental evidence yet. On “coalitional psychology is also universal to human societies” your evidence is the Tooby and Cosmides paper, which starts by saying “Coalitional aggression evolved because it allowed participants in such coalitions to promote their fitness by gaining access to disputed reproduction enhancing resources that would otherwise be denied to them.” Then it does little to back this up, and what little there is comes almost exclusively from referencing other papers by the same authors. (Besides which, the paper is absurd. The authors find it to be a “major puzzle” that animals do not adopt the same complicated alliances for warfare that humans do. Any child could solve this major puzzle by pointing out that animals are much stupider than humans, the same reason why animals don’t read Shakespeare, build nuclear reactors, or form coalition governments.)
As for what experimental evidence you do offer, I find it largely irrelevant. You say that in glossalalia, speakers use the same sounds as in their native languages. I find that perfectly reasonable. I’d be highly surprised if they didn’t. So what? Sarah Palin’s book is written with the same 26 letters as Catch 22, but that doesn’t tell us anything about their relationship or relative worth. I don’t judge books by the letters they use, but rather by their contents. So why would I judge speech by the sounds it employs? Similarly your article on “Synchrony and Cooperation” says that college students who march in step with each other or listen to O, Canada! perform more cooperatively in a game-theory type experiment. Fascinating, but when you refer back to it as an explanation of group religious experiences, I don’t see any relationship at all. As for TLE, I’ve already explained that the description of it provided by Ramachandran is nearly the opposite of what mystics actually experienced in the cases that you’re invoking TLE to explain. (Also, I could point you to a study mentioned in Dr. Beauregaard’s book which analyzes whether historical figures who have been diagnosed with TLE actually have symptoms that match the disease. They don’t. I apologize for not giving the citation right now, but I’ve loaned my copy of the book to a student.)
You say that you began as a believer and, as you learned more, you gradually became an atheist. I began as an atheist and as I learned more, I gradually move towards Christianity. I don’t doubt your description of your life. But if it’s really true, you should have some idea of the experiences persons like me undergo as we learn that everything we were raised with was false. What you posit in this thread (and others) is pretty close to what I believed during my teenage years. Then I reached my 20’s and I grew out of it, as did most other people I know. Doubtlessly I would have found the paper by Wiltermuth and Heath fascinating at age 16. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that if I wanted to understand the human race, I might try reading less about what small groups of non-representative people did in highly arbitrary and contrived situations that bore no relationship to normal human behavior. Instead, I started reading more about what normal people actually do in normal situations. I see very little reason to reverse that change.
I never referred to an EEG readings on Buddhist monks. I referred to the research of Dr. Benson.
As for whether what Lorber said was what scientists of him time believe, I think we’re at an impasse. You’re apparently content to quote things like the Wikipedia page about Dalton, which says the exact opposite of what it claims you said. (Perhaps you were hoping that I wouldn’t bother to read it. If so, better luck next time.) On issues like the age of the earth, you just try to slip around the fact that what he proclaimed about the duration of primitive humanity was not in line with was believed at the time. As for the dual wave-particle nature of light, I don’t think you’re going to try to push quantum theory back to the mid 19th century. Your insistence that he sounds “vague” is an insistence; I think he sounds quite specific, and if every author today could be so specific it would be a big improvement. As for the attempts to drag up some incorrect statements in his writings, I can only say that if he was right many times and also wrong sometimes, he’s doing much better than some of the sources you quote.
You’re the one who’s always proud of how things can be tested and replicated. Do you think this claim that it’s possible to survive twelve years on a daily communion wafer and sip of wine meets those standards? (Not to mention that in Neumann’s case it was thirty-eight years.) Are you aware of how small the wafer is, and how nutritionally empty? And what about the fact that the doctors who carefully recorded her blood pressure, breath rate, body temperature, and so forth, all reported that she was clearly not starving to death?
I think the difference is that depending on the specifics of our lives and our personal make up, timing, our emotional leanings and needs, we draw different conclusions from events. Nothing wrong with that. As humans we vary. It’s just that feelings of being certain can easily have something to do with what we want to be true, especially in areas where there are few facts to deal with.
It’s interesting that you chose to address what you call normal human behavior.
So have I. After a history of Christianity and an extended period of no religious affiliation I rediscovered my spiritual side. I began by asking questions about what was true or potentially true and studying Christianity and other religions. At that point the existence of God was assumed to be true. I also operated on the premise that most of the world religions reflected different cultures search for God. It occurred to me that normal humans would have different visions of God because of their various cultures and backgrounds. It seemed likely to me that none were the correct religion but all were a reflection of what normal people do. Take some meaningful event and build a mythology around it. I found value in many of the principles that were repeated in different religions but also saw the normal people’s tendency to build and cling to mythology and tradition and to at times elevate those traditions and the mythology above the value of the principles.
I’ve grown more aware of the things we believe but can’t really know and think the real life application of those principles is more important and more beneficial than the details of doctrine that we can’t really know.
I have experience on both sides of the peer-reviewer/reviewed divide, and your hypothesis is simply outright false for any half-decent journal in which the reviewer actually gets paid. There may be third-rate journals in which your hypothesis is partially true, but these wouldn’t (and don’t) last long in the highly competitive journal market. “Internationally respected journal” does not mean “glorified blog”.
Experiment #1 referenced in OP
Experiment #2 referenced in OP
Experiment #3 referenced in OP
Experiment #4 referenced in OP
Experiment #5 referenced in OP
Experiment #6 referenced in OP
The page describes the competition organised by John Maynard Smith in which competitors were invited to submit a ‘pet’ strategy to a computer ‘environment’ to determine their fitness over billions or trillions of interactions: default co-operation (in which one defects only immediately encountering defection, or “tit-for-tat”) was not just a strong competitor, it was arguably the strongest (the even more tolerant “tit-for-two-tats” is apparently very slightly better), as he set forth in a seminal paper in Nature 246: 15-18 in 1973. (Subscription only – you say you have ‘students’: does your academic institution allow you to access Nature? If not, you’ll understand why I don’t reference the subscription-only papers themselves and must settle for freely available summaries of them.) Experimental observations in real natural habitats, among vampire bats, primates, fish, birds, insects and almost every clade of creature, thereafter returned experimental confirmations of this model theory. Your favourite popular science writer Dickie Dawkins describes the evidence in many of his books – which do you own (other than The God Delusion)?
Again, the experimental data itself is generally locked up in the appendices of the subscription-only papers it references. So when it says, for example, that “advances in brain-imaging techniques have meant that researchers have been able to study AVHs in vivo, at the very moment that the subject is experiencing them (e.g. Shergill, Brammer, Williams, Murray, & McGuire, 2000)” do you question whether this experiment didn’t take place? That the subjects didn’t actually report what Fernyhough says they did? If so, I can only suggest that you send the author a polite email asking for the data itself.
Then read those papers as well, duh. (Stephen Pinker summarises their surprising experimental findings on p.517 of “How the Mind Works” which I can type out for you if you’re interested). In any case, I explicitly referenced Sherif’s ‘Robber’s Cave’ experiment and a Dutch study which demonstrate the power of coalitional prejudice based on utterly arbitrary divisions. Here is another fascinating example in which groups are divided based solely on their preference for Klee or Kandinsky.
Yet some animals (like ants and chimps) do form complex alliances, and thus your statement that it is simply a function of intelligence, which even you admit is absurdly childish, fails utterly.
If you wanted to judge explanations for that speech, that’s why. It seemed to me that the speech was a foreign language, which would be miraculous given my knowledge of the speakers. But the experiment shows that it was actually their own language ‘randomised’. No external source of the words was necessary (though still possible, I suppose.)
Yes, you’re right, this experiment only serves to demonstrate that there is such a thing as “cognitive effervescence” but does not have the subjects literally entering a ritual trance or the like. In my story, I wondered whether I needed the collective ritual to enter the trance (like in numerous anthropological studies of trance singers), but ultimately discovered that I personally didn’t: Collective effervescence is therefore less important to my experiences, though might be very important to others.
Again, I repeat, you seem to think that TLE means seizures or nothing, such that if there is no record of seizures, TLE cannot be relevant in any way.
Everything? No, not me. Like I explained to ToeJam, I still consider important lessons from my religious upbringing to be valid. I just felt I was filtering out important facts and strong arguments solely because they conflicted with what I wanted to believe. If anything, it was learning about confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance which finally led me to accept a much lower probability of there being a god or an afterlife.
Well, here you really are showing your ignorance of how psychological experiments are conducted. You see, the experimenters generally do everything they reasonably can to ensure that the randomly chosen subjects don’t know they’re being tested, and that the test involves everyday situations that everyone is familiar with. (Often, the real test is “masked” by a dummy task.) I put it to you that you yourself are seeking some reason to dismiss results from such experiments which clash with your beliefs.
And how does this experiment demonstrate evidence for any kind of external entity?
What, that Dalton proposed ever smaller components decades before Lorber, with Dalton himself just furthering the atomic hypothesis of Leucippus and Democritus, such that further components are hardly revolutionary? Yes, I’m content to point these things out.
As a majority view? Maybe, but only just, and the consensus was changing rapidly after the discovery of Neanderthals from 1829 onwards. Darwin wasn’t revolutionary for saying mankind was old, but that it descended from animals.
No, but even ancient Greeks thought light was made of particles.
Some incorrect statements?? ITR, have you read any of The Great Gospel of John you’re quoting from?? The guy is writing his own version of the Gospel of John, WITH HIMSELF AS JESUS!
I must ask you for an explicit yes or no to the following question, which I will highlight so anyone can see if you try to dodge it:
ITR, do you believe The Great Gospel of John was divinely inspired?
Of course it would be a miracle if a wafer and some wine comprised her entire daily intake, but such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence that that really was all she ate. And if the doctors weighed her and found she weighed just 33 kilos, that is evidence enough that she was dangerously malnourished.
Out of curiosity, I’ve finally read the Great Gospel of John. To me, it reads so palpably like a commentary (styled as a first-person account) (see especially the opening chapters. those about the Sermon on the Mount and the closing ones about the then-present) combined with fictive extrapolations of the given text that I can’t imagine how anyone reads it otherwise.
Since this thread seems to be drawing to a close, I thought I might set forth some conclusions. Thanks to all who have contributed here, especially ITR, who I feel has engaged here with admirable commitment, reading dense citations and offering interesting counter-examples in return.
If there is one strawman still standing, however, it is this: Experiments on neuropathological phenomena in mentally ill people tell us a lot about experiences those people call religious, so religious people are obviously all a bit mentally ill. I would like to burn this strawman here and now. Schizophrenics and epileptics are useful subjects in studying external voices and ‘cosmic’ epiphanies because the massive activity (or conspicuous inactivity) they show in certain areas of the brain during such an episode is so patently manifest. But the key point is that heightened activity in those same brain regions is also apparent in mentally healthy people, many of whom also attribute religious significance to these episodes even though their activity (or inactivity) is nowhere near so extreme as in their pathological counterparts.
For example, the Auditory Verbal Hallucination paper referenced experiments in which patients were asked to ‘speak’ a phrase in their head with their ‘own’ voice while their brains were scanned. Then they were asked to speak the same phrase in their head using someone else’s voice, eg. their mother’s: activity in a specific brain region was found to decrease significantly in the second case. Then their brains were scanned while they were having an episode in which they felt they were hearing external voices in their heads, and the inactivity in this same, precise region was even more conspicuous. But the reason the paper was so relevant in this thread was because of its focus on mentally healthy people, showing how activity levels in this region fluctuate in all of us, such that hearing an ‘inner voice’ is perfectly normal, whether you attribute it to an actual external source or not.
In the other example, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy is a debilitating condition in which a ‘firestorm’ of activity in certain brain regions can cause unconsciousness, after which the subject often reports a religious or mystical experience of overwhelming profundity. But what the experiment on expert vs novice meditators showed was, again, that merely heightened levels of activity in mentally healthy, non-epileptic people caused those people to report strong feelings of cosmic salience as well, whether they invoked an external source or not.
Both cases were my efforts to highlight important, pertinent experiments on religiously-interpreted experiences in mentally healthy people. One cannot simply wave away AVHs or TLE as being irrelevant to religious or mystical figures, present or past, just because they didn’t have actual seizures or schizophrenia.
It was also interesting to see the tack taken by ITR here. I was perhaps expecting him to focus on more ‘subtle’ aspects of religious experience that he himself could identify with. Instead, he surprisingly went the other way, offering very dramatic experiences from Jakob Lorber (a schoolteacher famous for his mystical writings in the 1850’s) and Alexandrina Da Costa (a Portuguese mystic who died in 1955), both of whom he felt produced credible evidence of outright miracles. While I’m always happy to discuss cases like these, someone unfamiliar with the case would always have a hard time being convinced that a miracle had occurred since anecdotal evidence can always be mistaken, innocently or otherwise. In Da Costa’s case, proving that she didn’t eat anything other than a small wafer per day would be as difficult as demonstrating that faries don’t live in your garden, but extraordinary claims of miraculous survival unfortunately require such strong evidence in order to be convincing. In Lorber’s case, well, vague prognostications can always be interpreted more specifically in hindsight, and it is conversely extremely difficult to convince someone who believes in the prognosticator how vague the claims really are, as five minutes of conversation with someone who routinely follows their horoscope will show.
Indeed, if people in the 19th and 20th centuries produced miracles, surely some of the nearly 7 billion alive today should too? An actual miracle-worker should be able to do something statistically remarkable in full view of scientists (and, more importantly, expert scam-artists), yet nobody who claims such powers ever seems prepared to subject them to controlled tests, even though a Nobel Prize and the JREF’s $1m are there for the taking. This is perhaps why even thoughtful theists like ITR are a little reluctant to point at current miracles since it is so clearly the domain of misguided woo-woos next to whom one would be uncomfortable sitting so far out on the limb. Historical miracles, on the other hand, allow one to filter out such concerns more easily because so few people at the time demanded such rigour to ensure that innocent mistakes or downright fraud were eliminated as explanations.
Ultimately, the quote from this thread I find most valuable is this one:
This is an extraordinarily brave thing to say, and I commend ITR for his courage. I at least know now that ITR considers the natural explanations I propose for religious experiences to be feasible alternatives to the supernatural explanations whose truth I myself entertain the possibility of. The exact value of “feasible” is highly debatable, of course, but it seems that my atheistic worldview and the scientific explanations on which it rests are no longer ludicrous to him, such that he is unlikely to mischaracterise my position badly in future.
To be honest, that’s all I ever wanted here. Many thanks.
and like that … pfoof …he’s gone.