The irrelevance of God

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Magical Realist, Oct 8, 2013.

  1. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    No I didn't.
    I'm not defending anything. I'm saying that you have made a choice: you choose to believe that your experience was sufficient to enable the discountable rationalisation you now have instead.

    You appear to have placed this experience in the same context as taking hallucinogens, the trip has worn off, now you're "normal" again. You can rationalise the experiences you were having, while affected by some drug, as "imagination".
     
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  3. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    It was a communication not a hallucination. Transparent. Image was gigantic relative to me. The ascended master was helping me at my request. No audio component. Content is personal. Ascended masters are content to let me live my life the way I choose.
     
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  5. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes..everybody alive believes their experience is a sufficient representation of the world to enable rationalization as well as reasoning regarding the validity of various beliefs. If that was all you were asserting, so what? What else besides my experience was I SUPPOSED to be relying on?

    Once again, what is your own experience with theism. And why do you consistenly avoid talking about it from a more credible first-hand pov?

    No I haven't. I have consistently identified my experience of God as delusion not hallucination because I have never had what could be taken as a sensory experience of said being. It was all in my head, as is the case with most theists. Have you ever experienced delusion? It's a powerful thing. Once you get fooled by it it's hard to dismiss it as a mere imaginative flight of fancy.
     
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  7. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Denying the validity of someone's experiences is a form of power grabbing; it is seizing power over that person. That makes it a form of brainwashing.
     
  8. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    LOL. Your experiences are not valid because they are wacko, which means brainwashing or mental disorders have already taken you.
     
  9. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    But you need to add that you personally believe you have sufficient experience of who or what God is. There is no doubt in your mind that you are rationally enabled to doubt what you once believed, and to extend this doubt, since all arguments about God are about a being who lives up in the sky, has a long white beard, carries a large book, speaks in a loud voice, etc.
     
  10. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Once again, what aspect of God did I get wrong? You seem privy to some special information about him that I somehow missed by being a Christian. Something very crucial that I must learn that would win me back over to the flock of theism. Once again, what is your own belief about God? Do you believe in him or not?
     
  11. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Belief in a shared objective reality necessitates a recognition of the existence of delusions and myths and fantasies. It doesn't disempower anyone to take away their fairy tale. It EMpowers them by regrounding them in an objective reality they are thus better enabled to deal with. I wish I had had someone take me aside when I was 14 and tell me my christianity was a bunch of out-of-touch bunk. As it was it was something I had to learn from experience.
     
  12. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Hold on, I have to shut off my bulls**t alarm. Now what were you saying?

    Now I do believe in an objective reality, as a subset of a larger reality. Where does that leave your argument?
     
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Then since not everyone can be right, you have to admit some have gotten it wrong and are deluded as to what this objective reality is. You DO recognize the possibility of delusion and misinformation, don't you?
     
  14. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Then we're all wrong. Everyone one of us. Even the scientific community is incomplete in its understanding of reality. I think that the space-time continuum is is pretty well understood, as is quantum mechanics, and material aspects of the universe. But we don't know where it came from. It's true that the scientific community might be deluded about the Higgs field. I guess they're still working on it. But then again, as invisible and barely detectable as a Higgs field is, it might yet exist.

    When you speak of "delusion & misinformation", what do you mean? Relative to what? To known physics? Is physics complete? Can physics describe the totality of existence? Yes or no?
     
  15. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    You don't have to know all there is to know about something to properly understand it. What is more crucial is to have an ongoing experience of the real so that your subjective spins and idealizations can be corrected and updated. That's what science does. Religion offers no such field of self-correcting feedback because it is dealing in fictional storylines and ancient mythologems. It is a whole construct for NOT dealing with the real, enforcing itself thru fear and shame and the insatiable hope for storybook endings.

    Examples of delusions: that my children are possessed by Satan and must be drowned in the bathtub to save their souls. That the number 27 has special significance in the occurance of my life. That I'm the son of God and all who don't worship me deserve to be tortured in hell. That aliens are communicating with me thru my TV set. ETC etc..
     
  16. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Are you saying I got it right? The long white beard, etc, that's it for you?
     
  17. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I'm asking what part of the theistic premise of an invisible magical being existing did I get wrong. You act as if you know. Why keep me in suspense? Convert me back to theism now with this vital tidbit of information that I somehow overlooked. lol!
     
  18. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the thing that seems apparent to me is that you require a version that you can discount as fantasy. Invisible magical being?
    If God is invisible, why do we spend so much time talking about whether this is true? Why would we bother considering something we can't see? Maybe we can see something, after all.
     
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Continued evasion of my questions doesn't do much for your credibility or genuiness. One more post and I'm done with you. So now God IS visible and I got that wrong about theism? How do you know he's visible? Have you seen him lately? And are you familiar with the divine property of omnipresence--of God being everywhere and therefore of necessity being invisible?
     
  20. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    OK, I agree with you that religions that enforce themselves through fear are very negative. Practionishers of such religions should be bathed in light, in positivity and given new symbols and beliefs that elevate their lives into harmony and order. Spirits do the best they can to do this. It's hard to lift humanity out of its karma and its suffering.

    All of that sounds very negative. I can understand why you have to dis-believe in the existence of a spirit world. But sometimes there are very positive communications that give meaning to people's lives. There are positive spirits who are bathed in the light who want to ease the suffering of humans where it's possible.
     
  21. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    About credibility. I see discussions in this forum revolve around fairly tight constraints on what the word "God" means.

    So I find it's interesting to attempt to discuss this "meaning" with someone. This discussion should not depend, surely, on whether the discussees believe God exists, or otherwise.
    What I'm currently trying to understand, once again, is why someone believes they have enough "evidence" to believe that one or the other is true: God exists, or God does not exist.

    I exist, and you exist. Why does a discussion of "God" have to be about some being who may or may not exist, in some context that may or may not be "capable" of existence, or must be "unphysical", and various sundry objections?
     
  22. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    It isn't evidence that convinces me God doesn't exist. It is the sore lack of it. Just like with other traditionally passed down storybook characters like mermaids, unicorns, blah blah...you know the drill...

    Because God IS such a being as can be truly said of "he may or may not exist". I mean nobody talks about zebras like this because it's universally obvious they exist. God otoh, whatever flavor he may be asserted to come in, is precisely the being who's existence is always in question and therefore requiring unreasoned willpower-driven faith to keep believing in. THAT's why we talk about God like this. He is quite simply nowhere to be found, not even in the world of the most intelligent of theists, who nowadays must resort to some remote ethereal domain beyond spacetime before the Big Bang as the true abode of his missing God.
     
  23. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Jesus Christ! Could you have your underwear wrapped around your ass any tighter?
     

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