And just because you think you have experienced God doesn’t mean he does exist. You could be self deluded and utterly wrong.
In fact, that’s by far the most likely possibility.
Will you please stop misusing the “L” word. It gives me a headache when you do it and you are making the baby Aristotle cry.
I disagree with you here. It’s not deceptive for lekatt or kanicbird to participate in this thread just because they are not going to have their minds changed. Neither of them has asked for proof that god doesn’t exist, at least in this thread. Their participation here might be entirely pointless and based on ignorant presumptions about science and rational thought, but I don’t see intent to deceive.
This is a made-up distinction.
There is no “story.” And science doesn’t define reality. It’s an effort to understand it.
The sad thing is you really do think that science sat down one morning, declared “materialism is all there is!”, and has been staunchly disregarding evidence left and right ever since.
Science (being done by humans) is heavily populated by theists and always has been. Science was forced to backtrack to materialism because the claims of spiritualism never stand up to scrutiny. If ghosts really existed, scientists wouldn’t dismiss them - they’d study them. And get rich. Both from the fame and using them to power automobiles: win-win!
Unfortunately, the spiritualists are blowing smoke and mirrors, and we’re stuck resorting to fossil fuels. Which is a blasted shame because if we have to burn dead things it’d be much better if the exhaust was ephemeral.
My participation is this thread is because I love to debate. As for your question, it is not answerable, it is like most of your posts against mine, designed to insult.
Just to focus the thread a little more, I did not intend to start a discussion about the existence of God, but about “ghosts” as explanations for observed phenomena.
Even by your standards, that is a pretty pathetic effort.
We wait for them to tell us about what they experienced before judging, obviously. For example, you went to bed one night, fell asleep, had vivid experience inconsistent with corporeal reality as you know it, and then awakened back in normal reality. Or so your website says.
Having accumulated the account of the events, we list the possibilities.
- You spontaneously died in your sleep, your spirit went a-wandering, your spirit was sent back, and the spontaneous damage that killed you was magically repaired.
- You slept and had a dream.
Then we assess the likelihood of each possibility.
- Highly irregular and improbable, by statistics alone.
- Extremely probable; everybody sleeps and dreams.
Then we draw a conclusion:
Conclusion: The more probable outcome is more probable.
Then we offer a test:
Hey lekatt - you got spirit guides who know everything, right? What two movies did I watch last night? Surely God knows. Go on, make a believer out of me.
Not true. materialism was adopted by science in the 1960’s, how it was decided is unknown to me. Science was heavily populated by theist up to that time. Since science has been teaching its materialism to children in school we have a lot more atheist scientists.
There are over a hundred scientists at over a dozen universities now studying near death experiences which show that consciousness is not local to the brain and can exist after the body and brain are dead. That research is showing real evidence of the spiritual nature of man. So all scientists have not abandoned a spiritual dimension.
Then science has never proved that spirituality does not exist, never. What is a shame is the denial of this research. But in the end this spiritual research will win, because it is real evidence, going up against a bunch of theories.
Sorry about that-I blame the Tullamore Dew.
I haven’t had any yet.
Your post is insulting, and proves your lack of knowledge about my personal experiences. Intelligent people realize they can not know the inner most personal experiences of others and act accordingly. You are being most irrational not to mention totally wrong about my experiences.
He’s right. Ghosts and gods can be lumped generically into “the supernatural,” but we’ve done the god debate a thousand times. Let’s confine this discussion to ghosts and spirits more specifically.
Nope. When it comes to your experiences with ghosts he pretty much nailed it, according to your own blog. You went to bed, either you saw a supernatural entity or you dreamed you saw a supernatural entity, then you woke up fine and dandy.
Which part of my post, specifically, was insulting?
Cite? On the date of this alleged changeover, and what did scientists teach prior to then?
I’m just gonna take your keys and call you a cab, okay? Or you can walk home. No driving, though.
He’s probably right that there are over a hundred scientists and/or people who call themselves “scientists” who now or previously have looked into the notion that ghosts might truck around. There might even be that many who think the things are real; it’s a big planet after all. Similarly, many of these folks will actually have day jobs in education and actually work, possibly in the sciences, at some of the thousands of universities out there.
Though I’m still not with him about scientists having been immaterialists or whatever prior to the 60s.
Please cite real evidence of the spiritual nature of man derived from the study of near death experiences. I assume the cited work would define ‘spiritual nature of man’, and the methodology used to obtain this evidence.
Oh ghod.
We’ve done the NDE thing… well, to death, actually. I’m not going to let this turn into yet another useless go-round on near death experiences. I’ll allow the mention of NDEs as far as they (allegedly) support the idea of humans having a spiritual existence of some kind, but I’m not going to allow this to turn into another debate on NDEs, whether they are real, and what the cites do or don’t mean. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. If anybody wants to watch that, they should start a new thread.