What Does All This Mean?
It is clear that the meaning of the understanding of these phenomena are easily explained in detail through well-understood neurological processes in the brain. What are widely regarded as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm can easily be explained by the material, the mundane. So in the light of that reality, what does the religionist have to say?
Those who have communicated their interpretations to me say that they remain unconvinced that this means any new. I disagree. For most who write to me regarding my essays about the reality of a metaphysical universe, I have but one thing to say: your most powerful, persuasive evidence, namely your own powerful, personal experience, can now be easily and rationally explained, in all its features. No metaphysical explanation is necessary. Because no metaphysical explanation is required to explain your experience, your “evidence” is no longer evidence of anything metaphysical.
Please also read (it’s a very short one-page story by Carl Sagan): http://www.users.qwest.net/~jcosta3/article_dragon.htm
I don’t know for SURE that He exists. If I did, it would be ordinary mundane knowledge. If my faith is wrong, and there is no God or Devil or survival of consciousness after death, there will be no ultimate vindication of my silly stupid faith. I’ll just cease to exist. I’ll have lived my life according to certain principles that didn’t make any worldly sense. There will be no ultimate reward or punishment, no reckoning, no answering of long-unanswered questions. If death is truly the end, so be it.
But if death isn’t the end, and I live my life as a follower of Christ, and all my hopes and desires and and expectations are utterly vindicated …
If it turns out the the atheists were always right, nobody gets to gloat in the stillness of the grave, where dirt and worm have their claim.
I don’t think that is the case at all. Let’s drop the zealots and fundamentalists for a moment, and I’ll wager that if you talk to someone who takes their spiritual development seriously you will find someone who works very hard and would probably find it much easier to give up than to continue on. Case in point is this thread. The overwhelming reaction is dismissive. The assumption is that the topic is settled matter. I think it would be more beneficial for the two sides to listen to each other and even if you don’t agree, acknoweldge that you just don’t know enough about this Universe to claim such finality that your side is absolutely the final word. In their reaction to the opposition, atheists can be as entrenched as the religious fundamentalist they love to bash.
Huh. Your turn now: Are you trolling or have you not been reading what’s being said to you? Nobody here is “dismissing” anything. I can point out multiple instances where people are acknowledging that nobody knows and that no side is absolutely the final word.
What atheists are saying is that there is no positive evidence to suggest that the theistic belief is correct, especially when other more plausible explanations exist. Again, please read the dragon story I just linked by Carl Sagan to get a better sense of the position.
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I’m not ‘escaping’ from anything at all, and I am certainly not uncomfortable with not knowing everything there is to know about the universe.
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Got any other sweeping, bigoted statements you’d like to make?
What if we are both wrong and the ancient Egyptians were right? Then we wouldn’t be prepared with our incantations that would enable us to be of equal moral weight as Ma’at. As a result we both would be committed to the flames of oblivion…
Ok, you got me there. I’d have to stipulate an external cause that we can’t measure or otherwise establish outside of the person having the experience stating that it occured. I understand why this will be diffcult for you to accept, given that by definition if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. I can see why you would think I’m being delusional if I claim the experience is anything other than an artifact of how my brain works. If I claim the event that occured, an event that gave me an experience of an infinit peace and tranquility, an experience of infinit love, while that might sound nice, it is not related to anything measurable and therefore can be categorized as something unrelated to an external reality outside of my brain; it must be a self induced experience.
Simply put, whatever the goal of their spiritual belief is. For most of us it would be learning about the causes of suffering and then learning how to bring about the cessation of suffering in ourselves. But that is a very general goal. After the ecstacy comes the laundry.
Yes I am spelling challenged. I don’t determine anything, I experience it and that is how I describe the experience. Just like my spelling, language isn’t a perfect instrument for describing the world, and my experiences in it. It is an approximation, I guess.
