On his argument for the existence of a god in The Age of Reason, which consisted of seeing no other cause for the intelligent design of the solar system. Since he was able to cast off his Christian beliefs, I doubt he was emotionally attached to the concept of a deity. Given the lack of a need for one, based on what we know now, I suspect he would abandon it.
I’m asking specifically about why you believe what you believe about prayer, your version of it. As to why, I’m now very curious. You’re description of your belief so far has been fairly vague, almost to the point of avoidance of the question. I simply want to know.
Yes, that is one of the things that prompted me to step in. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to disprove something like that. I try to avoid saying such a thing for that reason. I have a feeling you knew this, and wanted to see what particular form the argument would take, especially given that you denied the poster several means of setting up such an argument. Normally, the claimant is required to provide proof of his claim, not the other way around. Keeping within the spirit of this thread, I decided not to give you a free pass. I read through the links you posted, determined that you did believe in a form of god, and a form of prayer, and set out to discover exactly what it was you believed.
I didn’t ask you to.
I didn’t ask you do to that, either.
Keeping in mind that the viability of prayer is not dependent on me correctly understanding how it works, and keeping in mind also that I am not claiming to know any of the following but rather offer it up as a kind of tentative working-model explanation composed of intuition, theorization, and so forth…
I believe we are on some level cognizant of an immense amount of data, only a small portion of which intrudes upon our consiousness (and even that part is heavily filtered by our little working-models of reality — we see the data vaguely, the schema by which we’ve organized the data and explained it to ourselves more clearly, and the data that doesn’t contribute to the schema rather poorly.
For now, in the spirit of Ockham’s Razor, I will suggest that the avenues by which we are subconsciously cognizant of all that are constituted of normal sensory input. I certainly do not claim any specific knowledge of any other other avenue. (That does not mean that I know that they don’t exist).
What do I think prayer is doing? I think it is focusing a sense of what knowledge or understanding is needed. It obtains a lot of intensity from the emotional drive being poured into the process. In some fashion not transparent to the conscious mind, the result is an assessment of that vast store of data and the formulation of a new schema, theory, reality-model, etc, which the participant then becomes aware of.
That awareness of not an awareness of both product and process, but only of product (suddenly there’s a new understanding, arriving full-blown and fully-formed); it doesn’t tend to be a verbal understanding but rather more often one experienced almost as visual, or at least graphic, diagram-like, with ideas and concepts represented almost as shapes, something that illustrates relationships between things and how they affect and are affected by each other.
Subsequent to the event there tends to come a long protracted period of trying to render it into words, and the words chosen can tend to distort the understanding and get in the way and it can be a frustrating part of the process.
Despite that frustration, there’s generally an excitement, euphoria, I guess from the combo of a new compelling understanding (in the sense that any thing newly understood can be exciting) plus the personal nature of having an understanding that directly ties in and sheds light on matters of high emotional importance to the participant.
Now, back to the self and all that subliminal awareness of all kinds of stuff that doesn’t intrude upon the conscious mind and all that… it’s in one sense “in the mind” but in another sense it is “of the world”; it is, in fact, the entire unabridged library of “self in relation to world”, every bit of that experience as the self has been able to experience it. And not even just the grand repository of all the sensory data, but also the entire library of every thought ever entertained about any of that sensory data, and on the next floor of the library every thought ever entertained about the thoughts about the sensory data, and so on for a very complex and recursive set of thoughts. Including a rather huge batch of thoughts about the self, of course.
If there is a “nature”, an innate set of characteristics, whether of the individual self or of the species of which the individual is a representative, and that “nature” is meaningfully experienced by the self, that’s in the library, too.
If there’s a “nature” of the species which can be experienced by the self as a consequence of interactions with the community and society of other people, a sense of “us”, that’s in there also.
If reality itself has “a nature”, any kind of underlying essence of which the individual self could become aware — a rather formidably abstract thing, that, but perhaps the entirety of the laws of physics understood as if they were the expresson of a “personality” — if such a thing is possible, consider that to be in the library, too.
I don’t find it unreasonable to point to the last three mini-paragraphs and say “these are simply awkward ways of saying that the individual will have sensory input and a history of opinions and thougths pertaining to self, to species, and to ‘life the universe and everything’, all of which are among the individual’s mental experiences”. You may do so. You need not get all mystical if it doesn’t hit you as something to get mystical about.
The OP is the one who made the claim, so he needs to be the one to supply the proof. Since he has advanced his claim with no evidence, I take it you have dismissed it and are now a theist?
The atheist’s atheist? What does that mean? Or were you wanting to say “the atheist’s atheist’s atheist”? That I would understand. I didn’t know that Quentin Smith was such a household name that he would immediately be recognizable to any american atheist. Was everyone here familiar with him already?
By the way, what was your very first post here? Was it about something very important to you? Does that apply to all posters or just me? I am an atheist but not a ranting raving atheist, if that makes you any happier.
It sounds like you believe in the
Akashic Record.
I’m sounding a bit like a broken record here, but you still haven’t stated why you believe in this. What evidence convinced you that it was real?
Due to a series of events over the last couple of weeks, Liberal initially challenged your presence. When the conditions surrounding your new presence on the board were recast in a less suspicious light, he offered an olive branch to amend for his initial suspicion by noting his respect for the choice of username. There is no reason to turn his comments into some sort of “Should I take offense?” response.
Let’s not turn that into some sort of ongoing challenge.
If you’d like to exchange pleasantries about persons you admire or how posters have begun their sojourn on the SDMB, please take it to MPSIMS, otherwise, let’s stick to the topic of the thread rather than engaging in more personal observations.
I’m sorry if I come across as appallingly dense, and I’m really not trying to duck the question, either, but I just can’t make any sense of the question. WTF do you mean why do I believe in this and believe it’s real? Exactly precisely which “it” are we referring to here?
If (as I keep thinking) you’re asking “Why do you believe that there exists a process such as you’ve described”…? Umm, because I’ve engaged in it!?!, what do you think?? Surely I wasn’t unclear about that?!
As with all things, it’s a belief tempered with an awareness that I might be wrong. Beginning with total solipsism and spiraling down to specific misconstruals of this specific experience or my memory thereof, the entirety of my life could be a silly dream, or I could be way scrambled in the upstairs-circuits department (I do, after all, have a psych dx of paranoid schizophrenia; that’s pretty damn close to Delusions-R-Us), or I could have wanted an answer so badly that I delude myself into thinking I’ve got some, and continue propping up the illusion over the years by continually managing to convince myself that the answers continue to make sense, or the answers could make some degree of sense but I did not “arrive at them” via the described process but instead by remembering them as they were written in a book I read that I forgot that I read, etc etc etc ad infinitum.
But within the mortal limits of my ability to reality-test, none of that seems to be the case, so, at leaste in the provisional sense of any skeptic’s belief, I believe that what I think I experienced was in fact experienced by me.
Meanwhile, thanks for the link. It sounds similar to the Jungian archetype thingie and “ancestral memory” and other such things. Not quite the kind of thing I was asserting, but within a penumbra of “things I don’t actively disbelieve in”, I guess.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?ex=1301461200&en=4acf338be4900000&ei=5088 The only study I ever heard of says prayer does not work. They were wasting their time . It is illogical.
The ‘it’ I’m referring to is is your whole, um, theology I guess, if it fits. That which you have been describing to us. The whole prayer + god + whatever else thing.
Normally, if someone holds a view, they have a reason to hold it. I hold the view that the Holocaust happened because I’ve read about it in books that I trust, heard about it from people that I trust, etc. If I go to the remains of the concentration camps I will have further evidence to back up my view. The evidence that the Holocaust happened came first, and then my conclusion, based on the evidence, that it happened.
So what I’m asking you is: what reasons did you have, prior to your conclusion, that what you described to us is the way things work? What convinced you that this was real?
Prayer. I wanted to understand things in this topic area and engaged in the process of prayer, from which answers came.
That + ~25 of it withstanding subsequent questioning and evaluation and continuing to make sense.
EDIT: 25 of it = 25 years of it.
EDIT: Oh, and as far as trying prayer in the first place, I did not believe in the efficacy thereof prior to it working, so much as held the opinion that it sure would be convenient and nice if it worked that way. But I was quite afraid that I was going to find out that that alone was the reason the ‘legend’ persisted: that it was emotionally convenient to believe that you could ‘pray to God and get answers & help’ etc; I was not willing to believe something I did not know (self-deception, believe what feels reassuring, etc) but I wasn’t willing to write it off without a serious try either.
Interesting to note that in a thread in which people are digressing with asides about the meaning of prayer (how much does that have to do with the OP?) and every other subject, Tomndeb has chosen to “call down” (read: harass) his favourite whipping boy!
The prayer test again? Please. We’ve gone over this before.
I don’t suppose you bothered to check and see if there were any other tests done?
Yes, the thread has gone off in a different direction. However, my post that you challenged was the 4th in this thread and pertained directly to the OP. Your post requesting that I prove the existance of leprechans had nothing to do with the fact that I was challenging the OP to prove his assertion that there is no god. As you have said (countless times), he who makes the assertion bears the burden of proving it.
He who asserts must prove, yes, but you cannot prove a negative except in very limited spatial circumstances. For example, if we agree on the definition and size of “a full-grown African elephant” I think we can effectively prove that there is no such creature in my coffee cup, using scales, volume measurements and just visual inspection.
But “he who asserts must prove” is an aphorism. If one person says God or Leprechauns exist, then logic requires that that person bring forth proof of that assertion. You cannot make an argument saying that those who deny the existence of God or Leprechauns must bring proof of their nonexistence.
Refusal to believe in the existence of God or Leprechauns until proof of their existence is produced is the natural default position. This is an understood corollary of the aphorism “He who asserts must prove.”
So, since I have now qualified what I mean by “He who asserts must prove”, I guess it is time for Tomndeb to jump in and tell me I am changing my position, yadda, yadda!
By the way, Tomndeb, since I have come to the conclusion that SD is a bloody waste of time and since I have decided to get a life, and since my one-year subscription ends soon, how do I ensure that it is not automatically renewed? Could you direct me? I am certain you will be more than happy to se the back of me, so it is in your interest to do so. 
Very well, but the bottom line is that you’re challenging me on an assertion that was not made in this thread.
First, you are not my favorite anything.
Second, you were not called down by a Mod for hijacking but by a poster for making a really dumb claim in which you asserted the tired old burden of proof line while reversing who made the assertion that bore the burden.
Now, if you wish to whine about other posters’ behavior (rather than participating in the discussion), take it to the Pit.
If you fail to give the SDMB money, the SDMB will fail to extend your posting privileges. So easy, anyone can do it.
As to whether I will enjoy seeing you go, you give yourself far too much credit as an irritant. Cleaning up errors of fact and logic behind messy posters, like cleaning up small pudlles of melted snow behind messy visitors, is just part of the job.
Have a nice life.
Just to remind you, here is the OP from our banned friend
He did imply that belief in God was an unfounded superstition, and by capitalizing God he clearly meant the Western God. It is conceivable that god could exist, but western religions are still unfounded. Certainly if Judaism is the true religion, Christianity is unfounded.
In post #4, your first, you brought up the “prove there is no god” strawman, immediately after a post saying, correctly, that God is unfalsifiable.
So don’t go playing all innocent on us. Your post had nothing to do with the OP, and was a knee jerk reaction at an OP not even directed at you.