Can you prove otherwise?
It’s painfully evident that it’s true. What works for one person doesn’t work for another. Even among believers, they cherry-pick it to death so that even folks of the same denomination can’t agree on what’s real, what is merely an illustration, what was actually meant by the words, or even what the words “heaven” and “hell” are supposed to mean.
We’re all alone in the world when it comes to interpreting the influences of each of our lives. There is no “shared” experience, even among people who experience the same influence at the same time. Each one will be affected by it in their own way. For instance, It’s impossible for you and I to “process” the viewing of a sunset in exactly the same way. If there was a universal “Truth”, it would already be known by all.
JThunder & Stratocaster: When Cosmo says “arbitrary,” he means “a matter of opinion,” not “picked for no good reason.” Maybe Jesus is the son of God who died for our sins, but no mortal’s going to prove it objectively in this lifetime.
Special bonus, no extra charge: When I say “truth,” I mean “something true, provable or not.” For “objectively proven truth,” I say “fact.”
Group hug? (Jesus would want it that way. 
)
intention: Wikipedia says that Phelps has been denounced by just about every other Christian denomination. The well-known voice of tolerance, Jerry Falwell, called him a “first-class nut,” and his neighbors use his church’s sign for target practice.
Stratocaster, thanks for the response. A citation would have been nice.
I don’t find the RCC and the WBC agree on a whole lot … except the shining beacon of light, their common bond of humanity and love, which is their shared belief that FAGS ARE EVIL … I have not found a single quote from a Catholic condemning Westboro for that. Might be one, but I haven’t seen it. (But then, I haven’t yet found an RCC quote condemning them for anything …)
Did I say or do I believe nobody criticized the Westboro Baptist Church? No, I was just describing the searches I made, and their results. I described the results I did find.
Rather than laughing at my weak google-fu, I invite you, like JThunder, to point me to some citations of churches criticizing the WBC. To date, nobody has posted a single one, Catholic or otherwise. JThunder says it’s been happening on a “routine” basis, but he hasn’t produce a single cite yet. I’ve looked and haven’t found one to date. You comment on my inability to find them, but you haven’t produced one either. I’m beginning to think there’s a pattern here …
w.
There seems to be a lot of that going around. As stated by that great philosopher earlier in the thread:
Time for another lap, apparently.
And here’s something pretty interesting–a possible scientific and provable basis for belief in religion. Apparently those with decreased function of the right parietal lobe are more likely to experience spirituality.
From the article:
So I guess my question on this would be–to those of you who follow religion, should it prove factual that your experience of spirituality is wholly or predominantly a matter of how a certain part of your brain functions, and that the function can be altered to remove the feeling of “transcendence” (which is a major reward component of religious experience) would that make you value your choice of belonging to a religion less? Or would you welcome a drug that depresses right parietal activity in order to deepen and strengthen that spiritual connection? Would the idea of “God In A Pill” offend or excite you? Taking it quite a bit further, how would you feel if your church found a way to saturate the air inside the church with right parietal suppressants in order to foster a more transcendent feeling in the congregation during the services? Would that seem fair to you?
Yeah, it’s a bit of a hijack but it is new information that bridges the cognitive gap between theist and atheist rather handily…
I’m afraid if I concede that one more time, I might pull a muscle.
I’ll buy that.
Jesus was a fist-bump kind of guy. It’s a well-known fact.
I’m not mocking you. I’m assuming you missed the cite just before your post from coffeecat? I’m not going to find you a cite–he has been denounced, frankly, by just about everyone and every organization.
He is absolutely cartoonish in his vileness, and he is an extremely easy target for scorn and ridicule. I’m not aware of a single mainstream individual or organization who has supported the nut. If my lack of a cite means you’ll continue believing we’re all in the same brotherhood, so be it. Phelps is a nut case of astounding dimensions–EVERYONE has distanced themselves from this jerk. Actually, it is a little funny that anyone thinks otherwise (sorry)…
Interesting. I accept that we experience all things, including the spiritual, through our physical bodies. If someone isolates the functions that facilitates the spiritual (or anger, or love, or truthfulness, or whatever) that won’t mean that these functions aren’t “real.” I read a similar article years ago, so forgive my memory (and paraphrase), but the researcher said that the ability to isolate such brain functions doesn’t invalidate (or validate) the spiritual; if they likewise found the brain function that permits us to taste apple pie, that doesn’t mean apple pie is an illusion.
I agree. He’s so far off the beam that I refuse to consider him in discussions of religion. However, he’s at the top of my list when discussing things like psychopaths and nutcases.
Agreed!
How about somebody a bit less cartoonish? How about oh, say, Rick Warren? Pretty mainstream, I’d say, yet he’s pretty serious about how much he don’t dig the gay people. He doesn’t believe gay people should be allowed in his church.
So is there widespread denunciation of Pastor Warren as well?
I dunno. How did we get on this tangent again?
Yes, but the difference is that we can all agree on what apple pie actually is, we can find recipes and ingredients for it and we can each individually create an apple pie–the same cannot be said for a god, though. A closer analogy would be finding a brain function that lets one taste “blue,” since no consensus on synesthesia has been arrived at. An apple pie can be experienced in many different ways–you don’t have to taste it to know it’s there. You can smell it, you can touch it, you can see it, you can hear the noise it makes when you drop it–the apple pie is real. What is “blue” when you get away from vision? What does “blue” taste like, feel like, sound like? What is god when it isn’t a “feeling?” What does a god look like, taste like, sound like, smell like?
It seems to me that if this brain function is established to be in control of the feeling of spiritual transcendence then it would be more accurate to say that individuals are creating gods in their own minds, rather than experiencing something entirely outside of themselves.
Just felt like bagging on Warren, partially because Westboro’s way too easy! 
No, you’re begging the question. See coffeecat’s definitions: because something can’t be objectively proven doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It merely means we can’t objectively prove it.
And we can’t all agree what apple pie is. How do we know such a thing exists at all? How do we know it’s not a trick of our senses? The only think I know for sure, frankly, is that I am thinking right now. The existence of your thoughts are the only things you can know conclusively either (assuming you actually exist–are you trying to trick me? ;))…
See now, as useful a tool as the reductio ad absurdum can be I think we can agree that it’s much more possible to come to an agreement on what we all think of as “apple pie,” including a range of differences and variations that still allow the item in question to qualify as such than we can do the same for the term “god.” As for our relative existences I’m willing to believe in you if you’ll believe in me–just in the interests of continuing to have this conversation, don’tcha know. Otherwise it’s all just wanking and as fun as that can be in the proper context I don’t think a thread about it would go to eight pages absent something really unusual happening, ya think?*
I am genuinely curious to know, though, what your personal feelings would be if you discovered that the reason you felt spiritual transcendence was vulnerable to manipulation at will by entities outside yourself, and more specifically to find that such manipulation had taken place. I think I’d feel incredibly angry and betrayed, but then again I suspect that I have enough right parietal lobe activity to push me over into the category of “solipsist” so I’m not a good yardstick… 
*You know, like somebody dying with their own balls on their chin or something…
Um … well … while the Wikipedia site says
coffeecat, thank you for attempting to provide a citation showing that other church leaders publicly disapprove of Westboro Baptist Church. You are ahead of everyone else in that regard.
Unfortunately, like so many Wikipedia entries, when one looks at the underlying reference [18], you find that it doesn’t say what is claimed. In this case, the reference doesn’t even use the word “denounced”, and other than saying that Jerry Falwell doesn’t like Phelps one bit, I can’t find a single statement in that reference from a church leader condemning what the WBC is doing.
Still waiting for cites …
I’m sorry we seem to be bypassing each other on the highway to understanding. No, I don’t mean something as casual as “I guess I just like it” without much thought but ultimately, even after soul searching and study and prayer, and time invested, the religion or belief system we decide fits us best comes down to “It works for me” which is not that different from, I just like it. It fits the definition of arbitrary because even after thought and study, it’s still a matter of personnel preference.
A religion might be selected because they have a better band on Sunday, or because their teachings speak deeply to your heart. Granted , one seems more arbitrary than the other but they both qualify.
IMHO I’d say, yes, religious beliefs are arbitrary but not often the casual whim brand. I’m afraid that includes yours and mine, IMHO.
I’ll come out of the closet: I’m a Spinozist who uses Judaism as a symbolic system for getting close to God. (I think that puts me somewhere between Conservative and heretic.) I believe God is the universe thinking to Itself. (Himself?) I have no problem with the Science Daily study. The perception of God is related to decreased activity in the part of the brain dealing with perception of self? So we’d know God all the time if we weren’t so self centered and hung up on our own ego? And since love involves the lowering of ego boundaries, God is love, or at least closely related to it? Why don’t religions ever point these things out! 
Do you really think that Wikipedia didn’t just screw up on a footnote, but pulled the denunciation statement out of the air, and Jerry Falwell is a lone voice of tolerance crying in the wilderness? :rolleyes: Oh, ok; I have to go food shopping right now, but http://www.dogchurch.org/ may give you some leads.