Is Athiesm The Answer?

Argument, debate, discussion, it's all the same to me Alpha, as long as we're not calling each other silly names, and attacking each's character as some do. We'r doing A!!Ok!. Dont ya think?.

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The whole notion of Mysticism, is god, the soul and afterlife. If one were to disprove god, then logically the soul, or an afterlife are less likely to exist.

Godless.

 

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And when people do that, you say "they're having an argument," right?

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It only seems less likely because that is usually the basis for people's belief in the soul. There are many who believe in the soul because they believe in ghosts, reincarnation, stories of psychics, things like that. None of those things would require the existence of God.

 

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Nope! around here it's called "flaming".

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But that's what I've learned been part of sci for 4 years. I've had a few myself.

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But all those things fall under the same premise, mysticism. As identified by Ayn Rand, this is what it reads: What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'"
"To the [mystic], as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness. An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality - or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the [mystic's] epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the [mystic], emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores."

"Since the clash is constant, the [mystic's] solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, 'higher' reality - where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a 'superior' truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, 'inferior,' beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his 'truth' as superior to their own perception of reality."
-From For the New Intellectual

"A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between 'I know' and 'They say,' he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him."

"From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness - and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror."

"When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient superspirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness on others. 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind." Ayn Rand.


http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/mystic.htm

Mysticism is a desease that deterioriates the mind, and it has been doing so for milleniums ever since the development of consciousness by man. Have you ever heard of Julian Jaynes theory?. here's an example of his theory:

Jaynes's central idea is that our modern type of consciousness is a recent development; indeed, that it began no more than 3,000 years ago. In earlier times human mentality was characterized by auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations, in which people heard the voices of the gods speaking to them and telling them what to do. Only when this process became internalized and recognized as coming from within the percipients' own minds did truly modern consciousness begin. The minds of 'preconscious' humans were split in two (the 'bicameral mind'), probably as a result of a dissociation between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Jaynes finds evidence of this in Homer's Iliad, in which the characters continually receive orders and advice from various deities. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.campbell1/essays/skeptic/jaynes.html

Thus and conclusion when man, retreats his mind to hear the voices again to feel the power of his imagination and call it god's wisdom and begins to hear voices or speak in tongues, what he is going through is a mild case or in some cases, a full blown mind desease schizophrenia.

chizophrenic Process, the Emergence of Consciousness in Recent History and Phenomenological Causality: The Significance for Psychotherapy of Julian Jaynes
Wilkinson, Heward
International Journal of Psychotherapy, 1999, March, Vol. 4(1): 49–66
This paper on Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (J. Jaynes, 1990) illustrates the concept of "phenomenological causality," whose affinity to the Buddhist concept of "co-dependendent origination" is also touched on. Jaynes's work is explored through its relevance to schizophrenic experience. He holds that hallucination was a normal aspect of human decision-making in stress situations until around 1200 BC — the bicameral mind. This does not imply a simple equation of schizophrenic experience and hallucination; for originally there was consensual authorization, now lost, of hallucinatory experience of gods and ancestors. Jaynes has 4 main hypotheses: bicamerality (the two modes of mentality); the constitution of consciousness; the dating; and brain localization of the different modes of experience. Consciousness replaces bicameral resort to hallucination in situations of stress; it is constituted through metaphor. Schizophrenic experience transforms bicamerality through the shift in consensuality: as alienation, deconstruction of thinking and language, loss of the 'analog' constitution of normal consciousness and self, a fusion of consciousness, and bicameral modes.

Religion: Is It All In Your Head? Talan, Jamie
Psychology Today, 1998, April, Vol. 31 (2): 9
Vilayanur Ramachandran, M.D., a neurologist, believes that somewhere in the brain's temporal lobes there may be neural circuitry for religious experience; he points to the fact that about 25 percent of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are obsessed with religion. He thinks that these patients' seizures caused damage to the pathway that connects two areas of the brain: the one that recognizes sensory information and the one that gives such information emotional context.

Well that should suffice for now, if it was a bit too much just let me know, I get going and it's just hard to stop!.

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Godless.

 

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I suspect that atheists (and not anti-theists) have something in common - ie, the objective approach I spoke of. Thus we should see that religion is inherent in man. If we were able to convince everyone today of the logic of atheism, religion would reinvent itself tomorrow. Atheists will be a minority for a long time to come, alas. Flames will not help. As an objective thinker I want to see my fellow travellers take a constructive and pragmatic approach to present circumstances. If I start at a humble level it is because mankind, in my opinion, is an arrogant plague on the face of the earth and much of its arrogance is rooted in religion. [I am not a greeny]

 

LOL. You know I thought you might have it together for a second and there you go with "arrogant plague on the face of the earth".

Do you think that's "objective thinking"?

 

I can relate to that!.

That's a contradiction, to objectiveness is it not?. when man is born he is an emptly slate, tabula rasa, nothing can be "inherent". Man needed an explanation that explanation became god, god created earth, god created the cosmos, god made it rain, god makes the sun rise, etc.. For all the ignorance, men had the answer a quick fix, god did it!.

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Gods were the answers back then for what man didn't understand, god is the answer today for things man is to lazy to try and understand.

The meek shall inheret the earth.

man's arrogance comes from consciousness, we are the only creatures upon the face of the earth that can think, and perceive reality not as an animal's sensations but as an itrospective thinking beign. We've got the right to be arrogant!!. It is the desease of mysticism i.e. religion that stagnates human capabilities.

Godless.

 

Code:

Souls, uzw

I cannot believe in the soul, life after death or anything for which I have no evidence. Like the Brights I prefer the natural (as opposed to the supernatural) – see http://www.the-brights.net/ – but I like the term “alpha atheism”.

Code:

Do you think that's "objective thinking"? (mankind is a plague)

Sorry. I wanted to provoke. But please allow me a little thought experiment a la Einstein:
Assume you are an alien life form from outer space with an IQ of 2500 and ten tentacles. Now visit Earth and make a brief report on life there. What would you say about homo sapiens?

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when man is born he is an emptly slate (religion is inherent in man)

Not quite empty, as you Godless, have pointed out. The evidence points to a genic proto-religion in the same way as scientists have found a gene for basic language skills. Let’s discount the genic evidence for a second. I still see that the average guy needs religion. It’s inherent in our arrogance. By this I mean that most people cannot accept that humans are without a special destiny. Religion is reinvented every time someone asks “where do you go when you die?”. Let’s face it, atheism is a bleak propect of little appeal and of little use to most people. We atheists are an aberration.

Code:

we are the only creatures upon the face of the earth that can think (the arrogance of mankind)

Oops! Isn’t this self-assessment and thus flawed? In fact we are really not far beyond the wolf. What is it doing when it howls at the moon? Not praying, surely?

Otrosi:
I like you guys. I want to explore some ideas. (But I have little time.) I see now that a forum is not a question of broadsides – rather of single progressive shots. Here is the first:

Most of us have reached atheism through objective, detached thinking. Thus the principles of atheism are inalienable personal discoveries of each atheist, akin to belief in a creator but arrived at via a different path. In my view this is the thing we have in common – an objective, realistic and pragmatic approach to life. Can we stop rattling our (separate) cages and leverage this common quality to reach additional basic conclusions?

Parting quote:
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian psychoanalyst. The Future of an Illusion, Ch. 8

 

Tentacles? LOL. Okay.

That they are on the crux of designing themselves. Of course it's impossible to say what an IQ of 2500 might think.

 

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It's called an argument. When it gets into mostly namecalling, then it's a flame war (but only on the Internet).

:bugeye: Huh?

PS. Why do you use code tags instead of quote tags?

 

First of all, there's no such gene for basic language skills, it's a learned trait, a baby learns from hearing those around him/her, if you believe such bs scientist theory then this falls under pseudo-science, like for instance psychic abilities, esp, etc.

*Most people call natural phenomena such as various survival and mating behaviors "instinct". But "instinct" is a mystical term that does not exist in humans or in animals. The term "instinct" implies inborn or innate knowledge, which is a false notion. The use of "instinct" to explain behavior is to explain nothing. Moreover, the "instinct" explanation closes further investigation into that which is not yet understood or known. "Instinct" is a mystical, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific term. For, accepting that catchall term as an explanation precludes further intellectual and scientific efforts to discover the reasons for various behaviors. Accepting "instinct" as an explanation for any human behavior constitutes accepting the mystical concept that knowledge can be inborn or innately acquired without the self-efforts required for acquiring all knowledge. Likewise, all living species function through definable, understandable biological actions and reactions, not through undefinable, mystical "instincts". To explain anything as "instinct" is a default to the mystic's desire for automatic, inborn, effortless knowledge.
http://www.neo-tech.com/neotech/advantages/advantage57.html

A (Q) from star-treck? LOL, this is a big assumption really I stick more to reality, if aliens from outer-spase reached earth then there's two possibilities, 1. they broke down on the way to elsewere, 2. they've come to take over or live among us, cause their planet has been destroyed by natural phenomenon.

Think about it, how much does it cost us just to go to the moon? An advaced race of aliens would have to have a prety damn good reason for leaving their home planet other than just observation of inferiror beigns, on the virge of "nuclear threshold." The time when a civilized society reaches the technological means to destroy themselves or strive forward. I don't believe aliens have ever visited earth.

True that! I'm just screwing with ya Alpha, don't take it literally!

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Godless.

 

Main Entry: in·stinct
Pronunciation: 'in-"sti[ng](k)t
Function: noun
1 : a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason
2 : behavior that is mediated by reactions below the conscious level

Source: Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary


I think "instinct" in the sense you described is slang.

 

Thanks for the tip about quotes. But I can't let that one go unanswered because I strive hard to be factual. You may enjoy some of the latest literature on the human genome (I like Matt Ridley's Genome - 1999, but it is now slightly out of date). Said gene is in fact on chromosome 7 but interacts with others on 11.

Parting quote:
"The tabula of human nature was never rasa." W. D. Hamilton

 

Does anyone know why I have "ads by Google" in my post and how to "cast them out". Is Google fighting atheism?

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yep, it's a little known fact, google is a Sikh. I believe yahoo is budhist but I'm not positive and MSN is a satanist of course but we all know that.

seriously though, as a free forum they get income from google's ad service. It scans the text of a thread and shows "applicable" ads. It's not very smart though so sometimes they are way off. They only show under the first post of the thread, and no you can't get rid of them (actually, I'm not sure but I think if you pay for use the ads go away).

 

Well thanks for the tip Fab, I'll look into it, I'm more of psychologist type, so this should be very interesting.

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Godless.

 

This site uses advertisements. If you don't want to see the ads, read this post.

 

I agree, Alpha. There's a thread in the Site feedback on this topic,
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=38142

There wasn't much reaction, so I think very few care or even notice that the "ads" are often propaganda from nonprofits that oppose your posted point of view.

But regarding the topic of atheism... these discussions are usually from the Western point of view, the point of view of the rational mind, where dualistic thinking reigns supreme. Atheism in my opinion is an outgrowth, or a form of Judeo-Christian religious thought. Both are dualistic views of reality; whether it's the structure of science explaining what is "out there" or it's a religious faith explaining what's "out there", both are similar, in that they maintain the separateness of ego - the cornerstone of our culture.

 

This is a fascinating subject. Although Christianity is a religion that focuses on the condition of the individual (more than on the interests of society or the state), I perceive that the Western version is strongly influenced by the pragmatic Roman approach to their state religion. This is most likely the cause of its great success [don't shoot me

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] as a religion.

However, I would not be quick to place atheism in the same framework. From my point of view, atheists are probably born sceptics of above average intelligence who have personally discovered that religion "has no clothes". The atheist worldview* does not stem from a quest to find "answers", whether scientific or otherwise. It is simply the result of letting go, casting off or rejecting the religious view. After all atheism is null, empty - a bleak and cheerless land - devoid of almost all content. [The word "almost" hides many things though]

* In present society where atheists are the exception.

 

Actually I was referring more to the psychological, or spiritual, if you will, aspects of the Western ego-centric world view. Point being that Judeo-Christians and athiests have more in common than they might imagine; they both require a firmly dualistic view of reality. Both would struggle mightily to fathom the mindset of, for example, a Zen Buddhist.

 

I've often told Christians and some Catholics this; for example, both the Atheists, and Christians are seeker of truth, though the Christians believes that they have found theirs and the atheists, is often out to discredit them.

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Godless.