@ Aqueous Id,
Actually, I used God/Old man reference simply to postulate a more scientifically agreeable form of God.
Yes I went off in another direction, interested by the phenomenon of religion, in that it so easily penetrates the vulnerable mind, and seems to overwhelm the natural division between thoughts and feelings.
If Telepathy did prove possible then a Universal consciousness may also be possible that is accessible and controlled and operates within our collective subconsciousnesses, and perhaps what we consider souls may live and make decisions within this substance.
Big if. Atheists wouldn't entertain the last half of that at all, since we consider it antiquated fables. Atheists with an interest in biology might be more likely to take that middle part (consciousness / subconsciousness) and relate it to natural processes related to sensory input and processing in the brain, the autonomic responses, etc., as well as the layering of the brain into lobes that resemble differentiated functions from earlier evolutionary forms. For example, we might note that Cnidaria have the most primitive of nervous systems, only capable of local reflex reactions, worms have primitive ganglia, centralizing the collection and distribution of signals, and from there the brain is seen to evolve from a set of structures that have localized functionality. The spinal cord itself is a highly complex network, highly specialized for transmission and routing, and so on. Eventually we will get to the evolution of the brain in conjunction with the development of specialized behaviors suitable to survival. These behaviors would require specialized processing of sensory stimulus, from which sentience emerges. In other words, it may seem real, but it's probably nothing more (physically) than inordinately complex chemical reactions, functioning primarily as metabolism and signaling.
As for telepathy, it's very strange to me that anyone would actually believe in it, just as many beliefs seem foreign to me.
Going into history and digging out ancient views on god, or even representing how the church portrays it may be misleading to a scientific crowd who wants scientific understanding.
To me the history is one of the best scientific explanations for religion I can think of.
I think god is everything plus maybe a bit more. I also think god has limitations and the earth must abide by natural laws as well. God conceived of material worlds and was able to imagine it and reverse engineer using vibration and aether of our universe and following evolution in many galaxies.
That's a belief that accentuates the link between mystical ideation and paranormal aspects of religion. It has the quality of fable moving toward myth.
According to religion "In the beginning there was word" indicating a sound vibration only or something comparable.
OK that's the second reference to a beginning, in the Greek scripts, but here "word" may not be the correct translation. The word actually used was "Logos", a term having a philosophical meaning to the Stoics, closer to "essence". However, this sentence could be taken to mean the following:
A long time ago, (we believed in) essence, that essence was contemporary with Theos. And (now we say) that God is the same thing as essence. (know this so you will join us as we explain how we have discovered more about God, even though we speak parabolically about essence.)
...and then they launch into the story of John bathing in the wilderness, an idea that makes no sense, so the archaic term "baptizing" is used, and from there it hovers around the story of Jesus.
A preamble like this would be a fitting introduction for the Hellenized Gentiles, who had already been introduced to Stoicism, but were only now about to hear an incredible tale of martyred magician from a foreign conflict (Jews vs Romans). If this is what the author intended, it might be offered to break them in gently, to the idea that they are going to be asked to prostrate themselves to this foreign deity.
ABSURDITY IS THE POINT. Ancient/religious views can be absurd. Notice Jesus and Mohammed, Buddha were human so as to help humanize god.
Probably, though Jesus was either a war martyr, a son of God, or the sun itself (Mithraism) with twelve followers (the Zodiac). But Jesus of the Gnostic version is a flat character, without any persona. Jesus is steeped in Greek references, akin to Socrates -- a teacher with devoted followers who tried in vain to prevent his suicide -- death by drinking from a cup -- wrongly accused of causing disorder and disrespect of customs, but particularly for disbelieving in the conventional gods, opining that there is only one God, etc. I think Alexander's fame gave way to that of Socrates during the Jewish rebellion against Rome, in which many freedom fighters were martyred, and Jesus became a fusion of their tragedy, the suicidal "atheist" Stoic (belief in one god was then atheism) and the confused emerging legend of a king who would liberate Judea from continual occupation and oppression by foreign armies.
Mohammad seems to be a variation on Jesus, again flat, with local influences of the Arabian lore thrown in, more revered than pitied, and not nearly as magical in powers, an idea which probably was not as appealing to them as some of their own alchemy. Siddhartha is enigmatic, of human birth yet gaining ascendancy that is either Godhead or nothingness, or both. From another perspective, Buddha is merely a model of the human mind, as it interacts with supernal forces of good and evil, seen in the symbology of this in the mandala that hangs behind the Dalai Lama's chair. But there is a clear perception of Buddha arising from humble (albeit wealthy) human origins. Most likely the Greek incursion beyond Parthia brought this idea to Palestine on their trek back to Macedonia. Jesus's human origins may have simply evolved from tales of Greek soldiers in Palestine who had encountered Buddhists, relating the story, told east of Parthia, that a mere mortal achieved perfection simply by controlling his own mind.
When I think of humanism I think of the Renaissance more than these icons. I also think that the anthropomorphism of a legendary Super Being is more like animism, giving human aspects to natural objects, than it is in direct relation to the idea of a Personal God. I think that idea was evolving in the 1st-2nd c. in Judea, converging in a central school of thought that carried it like a banner, by a process closer to confirmation bias (God must love me, otherwise I don't believe in myself). Islam seems closer to Gnosticism in the flat character of Mohammad, with considerable xenophobia and ill will, probably inherited from the Nestorians (Christian heretics banished to places where Islam took root) who would be more likely to drag along some Gnostic ideas (God is by default cruel, appeal to him, and win mercy and benevolence) into the mix.
If we look from a scientific perspective though there is possibilities.
I think science repudiates beliefs in paranormal causality, in the sensible universe. Beyond that, it would still appear that laws and properties are still at work, rather than thoughts and feelings, as the paranormal view would tend to infer.
I understand that viewpoint of how skeptics view creation of religion, and I also think storms, tsunamis, solar eclipses, etc,. were viewed as disapproving gods, but that may not be entirely the case.
Wherever superstition trails off, myth allows ideology creep. Someone had a nightmare or ate a slightly toxic plant, dreamed up a spectacular story, and it got thrown into the mix. Another person simply couldn't repeat it accurately and made up more pieces. In Beowulf, the monster, Grendel, seems to only show up when everyone's drunk. Morning in the mead-hall meant waking up and finding half of the army dismembered. And our champion is indirectly referred to as Jesus. His pursuit of the monster to her lair was suicidal, but necessary to save all men. This is how oral tradition works, leading to ritual, and law, fusing the aggregate into doctrine.
Perhaps rain dances did yield rain, or group prayers did bring about timely rescues, or a reverse in a dying condition. Miraculous events may have all been by chance, but perhaps collective mind power can influence environments.
That would be magic, the hallmark of religion.
There is NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION to decide absolutely that telepathy and a collective consciousness does not exist except in the FANTASIES OF SKEPTICS.
There's abundant evidence that none of that will happen any more than the sun will refuse to shine upon command, or that I can tele-transmit to you a cool new guitar chord I'm using, or that we can self-levitate to relieve back ailments. This is probably the level of scrutiny that would apply to questions of epistemology with regard to telepathy.
In my last post I said,...because I have seen telepathy work, and it even works well. I gave examples in my last post. It is simple.
The difficulty this poses for me in responding to you is that hearing voices is well known in science to have a discernible cause.
Until we're not. Homicide is a striking example. I do agree that we are all metazoans at the core, suffering from every kind of psychic ideation, from fantasy to delusion. Still, I would prefer to fantasize about the perfect guitar sound than to experience voices or the severe delusions of schizophrenia. Saying we are one appeals to the social nature of the beast, a pack of (where are you--Australia?) --how about dingos-- a pack of dingos somehow feels united, some kind of sense of oneness. But so it seems with the monocytes in the Volvox colony (a spherical cluster of cells that live cooperatively, giving the appearance of an integrated individual). Oneness can be purely a physical phenomenon, biologically realized by chemical releases. At our core we are nothing more than dense colonies of cooperative cells, organized functionally into tissues, organs and systems, with a hierarchy of mental and autonomic functions riding on top. My millionth hair follicle cares not one whit about your billionth neuron. This is all pure ideation, built on top of language, culture and artifacts of cooperative society. It need not have anything at a to do with physical reality because we dream it, we imagine it, and exists exclusively in our minds as our personal virtual reality. I suppose we are the same in that regard.
Everything you see, hear, touch is not real.
That would require a new dictionary, or another branch into epistemology.
Our mindscreate our environments based constant "telepathic" communication with each other.
You mean you imagine this is how things work. Whatever is created in the mind is virtual. I can imagine an ice cream truck, but the real deal is full of good stuff to eat. I can imagine savoring it, but the sense experience is quite another thing. Then there's sexual ideation vs the real deal. That's also indisputably distinct.
If there are 4 different people eating dinner together, each person has their own unique perspective of the turkey.
It exists in everyones mind based on how they expect it to look collectively and also tinted from their own expectations. Some say Coppenhagen says consciousness causes collapse, I say Expectation causes collapse.
You went from turkey to stoner thoughts in 0.3 seconds. You just merged the sensible world, the quantum world and the psyche in a way that's hard to handle. I guess I can safely say I kind of wish things to be connected in some explainable fashion, but I doubt that they are. I'm pretty sure all of this would have been discovered before I took my first science class, since so much knowledge and investigation has preceded me. Also, since I had to work so hard just to learn a few atoms about the world, I would like to believe that my work was not in vain, that I attach meaning to the world. That, however eludes me. Living in the world can be as mechanical as bees buzzing in a hive.
The overall and bottom line is
- Nobody can prove telepathy does not exist, and earnest psychic experiments will always yield better than chance (prove me wrong) so there is continuous probability that telepathy does exist.
I would agree that it appears to exist only in the minds of those who believe it.
This means that some unknown Aether may exist that we cannot yet measure where thoughts can "live", transfer, and make collective decisions unbeknownst to our physical selves.
I think the more accurate interpretation is that some people believe in metaphysical happenings because the events and the rationale for the events exist in their minds, but this evidently has nothing to do with the extrinsic reality. The transfer of thoughts within the brain, at least at the atomic level, is recognized as action potentials (biological electromagnetic pulses). The propagation of brain waves to the outside world doesn't correlate with natural law, because the waves are too weak to affect anything. Besides, the brain doesn't appear to be affected by externally produced waves at all.
This collective consciousness might be the God we speak of but on a Universal scale and perhaps a bit more than the sum of all parts.
That would sound a little more palatable if the connection to superstition, myth, fable and legend could be extracted. They leave a bad taste in the mouths of atheists, while science relegates religious ideas to pseudoscience at best, and to hoaxes. The idea of a collective consciousness doesn't have a basis in fact that could attract scientific inquiry. It actually falls better in the realm of science fiction than science.
Anybody wishing to write off telepathy or god is being unscientific as there is not enough information at this point in time.
If being scientific depended on having enough information, the pursuit of science would be in a state of perpetual paralysis. Don't forget science is also highly experimental, also inhabited by eccentrics, independent thinkers, risk takers and artisans. People haul off and do things because it came to them in a dream that carbon granules vibrating by speech would make an modulated electric current that could transmit voice down a wire; they just didn't know at first that they needed to scream to develop enough amplitude to transmit a detectable signal. Discovery can be both awe-inspiring, giving a sense of oneness and connection to nature, as well as sobering. It tends to make us shy away from ideas that were already proved wrong. In the case of the literal interpretation of the Bible, it has long been proven false. All other ideas that proceeds from that false premise need to be swept aside if we are to move on to the next discovery. Move on, Science says.
Just because people cannot yet prove telepathy exists does not mean it is not a possible future science.
Again, the problem is that the unbiased observer reads confirmation bias and/or hearing voices into this. Both are well known pitfalls.
Occam's razor tells us the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is likely the correct choice, and in the case of explaining continuous and worldwide religions throughout the world the one choice free of assumptions is that God does exist.
Occam's Razor may may be helpful in process-of-elimination scenarios, like looking for the lowest complexity in an organizational scenario, or finding the least path of resistance to a given outcome, but it's not going to help the unbiased observer, particularly the Atheist, who views religion as an ancient invention founded in superstition, myth, legend and fables, to explain phenomena for which no science then existed, now obsoleted by existing science and rendered moot. The "religious experience" would then be deemed as a fantasy or dream-like state, and telepathy would appear to lie somewhere between that condition and the more severe condition of hearing voices. More than Occam's Razor is the inability of unbiased observers to replicate the experiment. This has more to do with science than anything else. If tests are not repeatable, there's little or no foundation for pursuing the idea. We push on, onward towards more stable theories that would fill our days even if we were all working collectively toward a common goal.
"We are all the exact same thing and God is simply the sum of all parts plus a bit more.". I think that says it as succinctly and elegantly as it can be put and comes from Seth.
As soon as you say that name, I can't help but reflect on the clay tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Try asking god for something small like a Parking space, coffee, blue feather, or anything and then forget about it. Don't be afraid to think small or large or guilty for using gods time as you are also a part of god (in his image), and you can help will these items into existence with your own intuitive divine creation powers we all possess.
So far the only repeatable creative powers are confined to the sensible world. Mozart can create in your mind some vague sense of a theme being hounded by a curious variation, and it will intrigue you if you have the ear for it. But without discounting the brilliance of his creative energy, I can say with certainty that he never caused the sun to actually stop shining. Even if his Requiem invokes such an image, I will never lose contact with the heat and light of the sun as long as I am awake and sane. I can intuit the imagery of sound, or the emotional message of an oil painting by a Dutch Master, or any of many impressions conveyed by artists, just as words of a poet convey very complex ideas, far removed from the complexity of a mundane newspaper article. All of these things stimulate ideas in us, recollections, empathy -- a whole suite of thoughts and feelings. But so does sleeping, dreaming. So does smoking a Doobie. The question then, is what do we do with the useless thoughts and feelings, that are spontaneous or induced out of a chemical imbalance or even an actual disorder of some kind? The unbiased observer would generally say: chunk 'em and move on. There's huge wonderful world out there, and it's real, and waiting to be discovered.
My version of god is more in tune with beliefs in Prana, Chi (qi), Ka, Orone, cosmoc, Yin/Yang. The public by large does not really recognize Universal consciousness as their one god. This may be because of Ancient views. However all religions fit my belief systems.
Most of what you listed sounds ancient to me. I wonder how any of the founders of those ideologies might respond to a grand tour of the Hubble archives, or a synopsis of work at places like LHC and CERNE, or (for God's sake; and I mean that literally) a full unedited manuscript of Darwin's Origin of the Species. The methods by which things are believed to be true and found to be true are quite pragmatic, so many an ancient philosopher ought to have enjoyed stumbling onto science and moving on, as it were, to that higher plane of consciousness associated with discovery.
All religions require
a) Prayer or asking for something.
b) Faith/Expectancy the outcome will be as you want.
c) Karma. Sometimes self sacrifice (time lighting a candle, killing a chicken) helps for serious matters.
D) Be thankful. Most religions endorse thankfullness (saying grace,du'a, etc.)
e) repetition. The key to daily affirmations is repetition. Many religions use "prayer beads for this purpose".
I wouldn't agree with that per se but I get your point. My take is that today religious people want to flee from that kind of model, and, above all, not to be pigeonholed into rote ritual. To me it's immaterial. The only question I would ask is how that person might apply their mind if not dissuaded from the discipline to move on and dig deeper. If I were a worry wart I might spend my days bothered by the fact that every minute a person dies somewhere who might have discovered the cure for whatever will eventually kill me; that they were deterred from a huge contribution of some kind, merely because they were persuaded (by some kind of ideology) to apply their talents to some other cause than saving me when my time comes.
Lately people have been discussing "The Secret" movie, and law of attraction. This operates on all of the above principles as well. How does this lady get her goal accomplished simply by obsessing on the thought?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0wYxh-akZs
I was taken aback that you linked me to Oprah. I vaguely remember this. While she was going on about her theory, myeye fell on this:
alexmichael01 1 month ago
Don't be fooled by this. The New Age spirituality movement is just a clever way of capturing and controlling people who are 'too smart' to believe in the old religions. Mix in a little truth with the lies and people will make mental allowances for the inconsistencies. All mental constructs restrict your mind and limit your potential. They are control mechanisms. Abandon them all and live free
Then I noticed you had said
How does this lady get her goal accomplished simply by obsessing on the thought? and the answer is: that no causal nexus has been established, you just assumed it to be so by the mere proximity and peculiarity of the stated events. You can revisit this scenario by removing some of the bias. For example, instead of Oprah, let's take poor Joe the Plumber, and instead of the romantic scenario of getting a lead role in great film of political and social import, suppose poor Joe is wishing every day that the kids will stop cramming paper towels down into the toilets, in hopes to flood the school and get a day off to go to the ball game. Suppose Joe believes exactly as you do, in divine powers and telepathy, etc. and wishes and wishes for this to come true, and one day he gets called into the principal's office to learn that paper towels have been banned and from now on the kids will use electric hand dryers. Joe may have a religious experience, a dual to the one Oprah had. Does it mean his prayers are in the causal nexus of the consequence? This might be easier to ascertain, if we could see the superintendent's ledger, under the heading "Reason For Inventory Change", the words "50% cost reduction with hand dryers." Similarly, suppose you were a fly on the wall in Spielberg's office the day his talent scout calls Oprah to audition for the role. Suppose five minutes before the call the scout gets a call from Michael Jackson, informing him that Oprah really, really loved the book and is obsessed with playing in its dramatic rendition, and oh, by the way, she's a budding star who you've just have to see to believe. This is the problem with ascertaining causality. Science won't let us make leaps of faith to the same extent you will make them in your ideology--especially when it comes to supernatural powers that are not repeatable, which overturn the laws of nature. That level of deviation is buffeted by the mountains of evidence that say it's specious. There's where you want to apply scrutiny and be consistent in your application of testing facts. But the neutral observer would quickly dismiss Joe's conclusion as fallacious. It may be harder for you to do the same with Oprah's conclusion, because it's surrounded by the magic of being rich and famous and getting a gig in a landmark film. But the physical world doesn't process that. It's purely psychological in nature.
If you want something like a certain job visualize yourself working there and do affirmations like "I work at suchnsuch", for an hour plus everyday. Do this for any goal. I have seen it work miracles. Serious. You poor skeptics
No one doubts the importance of determination and working hard to get what you want. But no game is being played with people's desires, that correlates to the sensible world in any measurable or repeatable fashion. However, every day people do report things that they are certain of which exist only in their minds. By the preponderance of evidence, science has no choice but to relegate that to human error rather than to concede to it as a violation of natural law. I wouldn't characterize such scientists as poor skeptics. I would certainly say that science requires a healthy amount of skepticism, Oprah's determination-- but only to get the bottom of facts, and a lot of help, in the form of education and access to the vast works by discoverers that preceded us, and from their inspiration that we are better off by chunking some of the old ideas that never panned out, and by moving on to the discoveries that lay ahead of us.
