I don’t disagree that those results (and others as well) feel wrong, while many will not. I am just pointing out that the particular probabilistic argument offered was not enough to support this; that argument was fallacious, its conclusion actually resting on further assumptions.
I based it on evidence. 
I mean that belief systems affect our choices and our actions which has an effect on the objective material world. Right?
God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Great Spirit, Zeus, Jesus, Mohamed, the title doesn’t matter. The condition of the spirit is what matters and that is reflected in actions. In the NT Jesus refers to this as the fruit of the spirit and specifically comments that if people profess to worship God but don’t reflect it in their actions then they are spouting empty words. He goes further to say those whose actions reflect the fruit of the spirit may not even realize their actions are spiritual. The true desires and priorities of the inner person is revealed in our actions and that’s what is relevant.
Well, it’s not my intention to rekindle arguments that have been rehashed here a thousand times. I’d say contacting us is one thing, us listening and taking the necessary action is another. I think I understand your position on that.
Whatever the reality of our nature and consciousness is, is the truth that is consistent for all of us. IMHO.
What about those who worship Set? Loki? Eris? What of the fruits of their spirit?
Aren’t the axioms of science and math constructed to help us function effectively within objective reality? Religion , with all it’s problems, has served the same purpose.
How do you intellectually decide what is good or bad, moral or immoral? How do you intellectually decide what your ethics are and whether they are correct or need adjustment?
If you *feel * inclined toward belief in God, can it be intellectually honest to explore the possibility knowing that science doesn’t really address the issue?
Can we intellectually understand the nature of love, compassion, or resentment, and hatred?
No it isn’t hard to comprehend. It just isn’t relevant because it uses your own personal definition of what the soul is or should be.
Even looking at consciousness outside of religion we know we have conscious thoughts and emotions and subconscious thoughts and feelings. For you to say alcohol affects someone personality is not completely accurate is it? Intellectually speaking?
No
Evidently you missed the part where I said the title doesn’t matter. It’s the section you quoted.
OKay, this is funny
- There are not axioms in science. (For the dozenth time, though not the dozenth in response to you. So if you hear me beating my head against the wall over here, it’s not your fault.)
Okay, with that behind us: The discoveries of science teach us about the world and universe around us, which does have the effect of making us function more effectively in objective reality. It does this with a remarkable and demonstrable effectiveness.
Most religion claims to serve the purpose of making us function better in, well, mostly some theorized non-material spiritual afterlife world. At this point I think you’d agree with me that it’s a little tough to assess how well ‘religion in general’ has done at getting anybody into heaven…
I think that you’re trying to make the argument that religion has [historically had] value because of the fact that many religions have codified sociological rules into them, many of which are good for preserving the religion and a few of which have turned out to be good for preserving a society in general at some level above total anarchy. Myself I don’t see that that’s relevent to this discussion.
I make such decisions with my mind. We’ll take a moment to note that my mind includes my emotions, but is not ruled by them; and for decisions about what’s good and bad/moral and immoral/ethical and unethical, I try to keep my emotions out of it as much as possible because emotions tend to be a blindered and unmeasured reaction to things, as opposed to the more nuanced analysis of an intellectual approach. (There’s a reason that “Appeal to Emotion” is a rhetorical fallacy, after all.)
If I felt inclined towards belief in God, I’d 1) recognize that belief is a horse that’s difficult to reign in towards any objective, so I shouldn’t feel too embarrassed by my religious speculations, but I’d also 2) recognize at an intellectual level that science sort of does address the issue, particularly with regard to the claims of established religions. (Which I’m aware that you aren’t a member of.)
And I intellectually understand the nature of love, compassion, resentment, and hatred. Don’t you?
My personal definition is only that a soul is supposedly a non-physical something which includes significant aspects of the mind and personality and which is associated with each individual. I think this covers every version of the soul except possibly for some variants used in reincarnation-based religions (which may not include the mind or personality as part of the soul), so I’m fairly sure I’m covered as far as a western audience is concerned. Perhaps you should give up mind-reading.
And yes, I believe that alcohol effects the mind and personality. You never heard of an angry drunk? Or drinking to forget? Do you not believe that alcohol effects speed and clarity of thought and reaction time?
Right. If the soul is not physical then none of its internal functions can be physically effected by alcohol. So, what functions of human behavior do you think the human soul manages?
(Heh, spirit gum.)
Perhaps it would be better to speak of science’s “rules of inference” than its “axioms”. Which probably relates to your mention above of separating “science” from “the scientific method”. I wasn’t sure exactly what distinction you were drawing there; could you clarify?
(Sorry to keep sniping from the sidelines at such trivial points. On the main discussion, I don’t really have anything more to say than “Yeah, boo to religion! And hooray for science!”)
I merely meant that the scientific method is itself a set of rules and methods which are axiomatically defined as being “scientific” - if you try and operate under different rules, what you are doing is “unscientific”, regardless of the correctness or accuracy of the results. This is different from the body of discovered scientific knowledge, which holds nothing as being arbitrarily or axiomatically true.
And yeah, I’ve become hypersensitive to the term ‘axioms of science’ in this discussion - I think that “scientific rules of inference” or “scientific method” are safer and more correct terms to use - though they don’t actually parallel the ‘axioms of religion’ we’ve been discussing since the rules of inference aren’t assertions of objective truth beyond “this be scientific”.
Thanks for this qualifier. You’re correct and it was sloppy wording on my part. Fundamentals of science would have been better.
I’d agree with that. There’s no way to know. I disagree that religion is intended to teach us how to function better in a spirit world. Although an afterlife is one of the major components it’s not the only one. It’s about personal growth and a better life right here and right now. The growth of the inner person reflects in society and makes a better world in general.
Aside from a heavenly reward religion also teaches moral lessons that affect our daily lives. Yes, there have been well documented failures and there’s also philosophy as an alternative to religion. Still, IMO religion is a reflection of man’s desire to understand and improve his quality of life here on earth. Not only through a relationship with God but also by having a better understanding of his relationship with the world and his fellow man.
I do think there needs to be a balance of emotions and intellect but we’re not Vulcans. Here the lines get unclear to me but I’m not sure the intellect can tell us what is right , wrong, good or bad. Even young children have a sense of right and wrong on some instinctual level and that seems to be more feeling related. I think our intellect can analyze the results of our actions and try to discern which path leads to the best results but then we get into the question is what results do we desire and why?
I agree that something cannot be religiously or spiritually true, and scientifically false. There are more than a couple of beliefs that applies to.
Well no. I understand the basic description and what they are described to be. Again, Spock understood them intellectually, but denied feeling them. To truly understand we need to experience them and even strive to experience them , or not to, depending on which we’re talking about.
No mind reading involved. I just don’t think your conclusion that alcohol should affect the soul because it affects the personality has a foundation in actual beliefs, or at least none that I’m aware of.
Lots of drugs can affect aspects of our thought process and emotional impulses. I was thinking alcohol simply reveals an aspect of our personality {perhaps a subconscious one} that is normally repressed. That doesn’t strike me as an actual change in personality. I act differently when I’m mad and impatient than I do when I’m relaxed and happy. Is that two different personalities?
Regardless, it simply doesn’t relate to the concept of soul IMO.
IMHO the soul is our connection to the spiritual. We choose whether we focus on the physical or the spiritual and the varying degrees of each.
No prob.
I’m only personally familiar with variants on the christian religions, but what little I know about other religions agrees - if these religions have any intent or direction at all (aside from gouging their followers for contributions), it’s all about the afterlife. Ofttimes they tell you to be nice to your brother; occasionally they tell you to kill him, but they always use the promise/threat of the afterlife and/or your spiritual state to goad you into action.
Now, one supposes that this might theoretically be a scam, designed to deliberately use the afterlife as a blunt instrument to control and perhaps improve human behavior. However this supposes a secret mastermind; and if all the different religions are supposedly in on the scheme, a secret cabal running a global conspiracy spanning centuries. For some reason I find this implausible, which forces me to assume that the various religions’ goals are what they state them to be, which is nigh-uniformly centered around the afterlife and not mortal life. If you have evidence indicating that these religions don’t mean what they seem to be saying, feel free to present it.
Sure, religions often teach us what to do in our daily lives - what else would they do?
And, quite certainly, religions tended to incorporate what little sociological awareness existed at the time of their founding. A lot of religions make a fair try at controlling the entire lives of their believers, so you expect to see the kitchen sink thrown in there. And one presumes that the religions that were truly terrible to believers would be more likely to erode their member base than to attract converts (generally speaking), so it’s not surprising that the major religions today encourage their believers to mostly get along with one another.
But I still feel unconvinced that concern for mortal welfare was a significant factor in the crafting and application of most of these religions. Most of them are still mostly worried about the God concept and associated threats and promises than anything else.
Well, I never said I was successful at keeping the emotions out of it - only that I try to. I seem to be a better person when I succeed - though that may just mean I have nasty emotions.
The intellect is excellent at telling us what’s right and wrong, good and bad - at least one gets past the juvenile “I’m the center of the universe” stage. Once one recognizes that other people are people too and that what happens to another person could happen to you, you’ve got pretty much all you need to intellectually construct a pretty decent moral system.
And, you’ve known different kids than I have. All the little kids I’ve known are completely without a moral sense, are completely selfish, and are frankly conniving little bastards out for whatever they can get - unless and until their parents or other authority figures stop them and train them towards other behavior (or they train themselves through imitation and play). Maybe you know kids who pop out of the womb with enlightened moral awareness, but I haven’t met any like that. They are emotionally driven though - more’s the pity (usually).
Uh, you lost me.
Hmm. Perhaps you’ve never tried to intellectually understand them. I know it took me a month or so of pondering before I really understood “love”; as a real thing, not just a word or platitude. (The others are simpler, mostly - reactions to threat and the intinct of empathy, mostly).
All the christians I know believe that your soul will retain your full identity, memory, and personality after you die. Presuming that the soul is not created at the moment of death (which, I assure you, they presume) the soul is in the body while we live. Have you got two totally separate minds in there, brain and soul, duking it out constantly? Of course not - and if you did your living mind wouldn’t match your afterlife mind, so that wouldn’t match the beliefs. No, they believe that the soul is the wellspring of mind and personality and all that.
So: founded in actual beliefs.
IMO opinion it relates directly, because changing the gears of your soul so that another layer can be revealed is still altering it, which a merely physical chemical could not do to an invulnerable nonphysical soul.
And, no, that’s not two different personalities, of course. It’s two different modes of the same personality. And if something can physically force you from one mode to another, it shows that the modes are based in something which can be physically effected. That is, something physical.
The brain.
IMHO I don’t have a soul at all. Would that explain why I don’t seem to have a connection to some magical central consciousness vibe thingy?
I don’t deny that the afterlife is a component and I find it easy to believe that for certain sects and denominations it may be the prime focus. I’m just saying it’s not the only component of religion and the ones I’m familiar with focus on personal growth in the here and now. From the Community of Christ mission page.
I would expect more traditional Christian churches to believe and promote salvation through JC and eternal life but many of them also stress the need for positive effort in the here and now.
<snip>
I’ve seen oppressive religion and it infuriates me. I’ve also been given hope in continued growth within religion.
There’s do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and then there’s do unto others before they do it unto you. I don’t see that as an intellectual choice. no matter YMMV
I’ve spent some time discerning what I believe to be love vs all the things we often call love and I’d say my intellect was involved in that discernment process. We just view things differently. I see it as a balance between emotion and intellect.
I know there are various beliefs and teachings so I won’t dispute that. I can only speak for my own and what I’m familiar with.
I don’t dispute that behavior can be altered by chemicals. Done a few experiments in that regard myself 
It’s a valid question and opinion but since there is so much we don’t know there’s no solid conclusion IMO.
For which of the examples you gave is belief in god fundamental. Improvement in the here and now is fine, which is why so many self-help books get sold, but it hardly seems the main reason religions exist, at least in the past. I’d expect most Christians would say eternal salvation is far more important than worldly improvement. (The bunco artists sometimes sell both.) Perhaps god belief is sold as the impetus for this improvement, but unless they claim direct intervention by god, is this any different from the impetus coming from an ideal, oneself, or a charismatic leader?
Lenny Bruce talked about Jews so Reformed that they’re ashamed they’re Jewish. Might some of these theists be so reformed (and intelligent ) that deep down inside they’re not quite theists?
Hmm, you’ve presented some relatively new sects and groups that state that they put mortal community in the forefront; I must incorporate this information.
(tick tick tick tick -ping! )
I still firmly believe that religion was not originally developed as a venue for improving community interaction; I’m quite sure it was developed with the intent of improving one’s relationship with the gods (at least enough to get them to quit with the lightning strikes and natural disasters), and that it then evolved into a complete focus on the hereafter, as soon as people decided that they could have a place in the hereafter. That there are a few small and splinter groups that are backing off from the heavenly rhetoric may, or may not, be encouraging; I still suspect that they’re massively outnumbered by adherents to the old-fashioned “heaven or bust!” religions though.
Hovever I do concede that you have provided evidence that, when either of us says that “religion has this intent” or “religion has that intent”, as though religion was a monolithic entity (which has intents?) - either way, we’re both wrong.
I see religion as a sucker’s game that drains people of their time, money and resources - that’s what infuriates me, if I dwell on it. While growth towards less oppressive variants of that might be nice, we’re still talking about something that’s started out to be very bad and is gradually (in places) becoming less bad in some ways. Myself I’d prefer to see the formation of new social groups unencumbered by the religious baggage, so they can at least start from neutral and then work towards the positive from there.
I’m confused - both of those are intellectual choices, in that they’re articulated strategies of interaction. The equivalent emotional reactions would be empathy and suspicion, but if you rely purely on your emotions you won’t pick between them - at any point you ether feel compassion or suspicion, and you’d just react with blind accordance. On the other hand if you’ve intellectually selected one of those plans of behavior, you override your base emotional reactions to some degree with your plan (for good or ill, but equivalently intellectually).
So I’m fairly sure I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
Love is an emotion. Deciding how you will react to this emotion, whether to encourage it or temper it or act on it or conceal it, is an (optional) intellectual process. I think the world is better when people don’t omit the intellectual steps.
Even if those intellectual steps cause them not to react to their emotions in an instinctual/‘honest’ way. Wasn’t that what we were talking about? Intellectual honesty vs. “Emotional Honesty”? Something like that? I’m confused
So what’s your own? I’m willing to entertain discussions under other people’s pardigms.
Of course, I think you’ve already stated that you believe it’s nonphysical, so that would put it out of reach of chemical reactions…so does it not contain the mind, memory, or personality?
I do know that you can’t push a rock if you can’t touch a rock. If a soul is outside the reach (direct and indirect) of chemical swills we soak our skulls in, then the fact that the chemical swills can alter our personality shows that our personality isn’t in a soul. I think that that’s a pretty solid conclusion there, IMnsHO.
I was responding to the assertion that it’s *all * about the after life and that mortal welfare is not a significant concern. The concept of eternal life as some sort of spiritual being is certainly a major part of most religions. I was pointing out that for several million believers, how we live this mortal life and what positive fruit our lives bare,is directly related to living a spiritual life.
I think a big part of religion right from the beginning was influencing the uneducated masses. I read through Leviticus a few years ago and it seemed obvious to me that most of “gods laws” were about directing the tribe by telling them “It’s not us guys, God says so” Now that society has changed and mere survival isn’t as much of an issue the focus has changed. Then there’s the social position of the religious leaders to consider.
I would point out that Jesus focused quite a bit on our social interaction, helping the needy, forgiveness, breaking down social barriers of tribe and gender. That was 2000 years ago. IMO it was those men who constructed the religion around and about him that took the focus off the social and personal growth aspect and made it about worshiping the icon. As people have become more educated they’ve been able to consider his words on a more personal level. Buddha taught similar aspects of our social interaction 500 years before Jesus, although you might consider Buddhism a hybrid of philosophy and religion since they don’t worship god in the traditional sense.
I’ve been out of mainstream Christianity for some time so I’d have to admit I have no idea what the “average Christian” believes about the details we’ve been discussing.
Would there be any real humans in such an organization? I’m to independent to join a group but I can understand the desire to be a part of one. There is a certain comfort and power when people gather together.
I see your point and I think you’re right. I’ll have to ponder this some to clarify it for myself. The question that seems important to me is what causes a person to choose one of these two different approaches of empathy and suspicion. Environment? Personal experience?
It’s about deciding what is or isn’t love, and the nature of the emotion moving us. It’s deciding what the boundaries of love are? You’ve given me food for thought about how our intellectual process plays in this. My thanks.
No time now. I’m preparing for vacation 
I’m sure the subject will come up again. But, yes, I don’t believe the soul is physical. I’m uncertain of it’s exact relationship to the physical body, our memory and the chemical reactions in our brain. I recently read a description of it as the sun {our soul} reflected in a mirror {our body} rather than actually dwelling inside us {which sure sounds physical} I don’t dwell on it much because I don’t think those details are all that relevant to the here and now. it will all reveal itself, {or not} when the time comes.
How we care for the mirror would certainly affect the quality of it’s reflective abilities.
Well, I was trying to be nice and not say outright that religion is a tool to brainwash and manipulate the masses…but yeah, that was happening too. Even so, I think the focus they used to do that was mostly an afterlife focus - heaven and hell are bigger, scarier carrots and sticks than anything in mortal life can be.
And while Jesus proposed a much more socally friendly worldview than anything seen in the bible to that point, it always seemed to me that he was saying to do all that because it was good for you in the afterlife. Last shall be first and first shall be last, and all that. (This may be another debate though.)
Whereas I’m surrounded by them*. 
- A mainstream variant of them, anyway.
Actually I think it would all be robots and dimestore mannequins; we have standards to maintain here you know.
I’m far too antisocial to join any such group myself; however my point was that if we were going to have people gathering in groups anyway, and then lauding the groups for their any social advancement, it’d be better if the people did their gathering in groups that aren’t tainted by the rather non-advanced social state that most religions seem to start with. (Given that that’s not going to happen, it was somewhat of an abstract statement, I admit.)
both of those and mood and personality too, I’m sure. Plus of course most people don’t pick a universal rule and stick with it thereafter - we’re a situational lot when it comes to our behavior, we humans.
You’re welcome!
You know, I’ve heard this sort of argument before, as well as the equivalent ‘messed up transmitter’ argument, and they really don’t fly for me. They might if the effects of all chemicals were just things like loss of coordination, blurry vision, clumsiness, and blacking out. Stuff like that could be effectively explained by a muddied interface.
But that’s not all chemicals do to people. Caffeine makes a person more alert - how is that an effect of a muddied mirror? And going back to liquor, while it largely looks like a case of tangled puppet string, that doesn’t really account for the loss of inhibition, which is a tweak to the actual personality. And then you throw in the medicines prescribed to correct things like depression and bipolar disorder, and the dirty mirror/muddied interface theory just completely collapses. Such changes in personality and behavior, resulting in a perhaps more organized and clear personality, cannot honestly be attributed to a distortion.