What's there not to like about religion and faith? They fill people with very strong pleasurable feelings of connectedness to God and to one's cultural heritage.
Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon
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What's there not to like about religion and faith? They fill people with very strong pleasurable feelings of connectedness to God and to one's cultural heritage.
I posted something, but it got caught in the moderator queue. Are you kidding me man? The cultural heritage of religion is dominated by torture, anti-science, genocide, racism, and slavery. Heroin also produces strong pleasurable feelings, but like religion, it's rooted in something false. Perhaps without the promise of an after-life paradise, people would be forced to create a paradise here on Earth.
Exactly my point! You are disgusted by religion, by God. I can even see your nose wrinkle. You should ask God or Jesus, when you die, if you get a chance to meet them. You should ask why religions turned out that way?
Not by God, just religion, God isn't real. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Religion emphasizes faith, which denigrates our own intellect. That's why religions make stupid choices. They also, due to faith, make it easy for someone with a political agenda to claim religiosity in order to justify a lust for power. That's why so many criminals become priests. You forgot to list all the many thousands of extinct Gods that people no longer remember. Why do you disbelieve in all of those?
Wrong, it's simple lack of belief. Try again.
Or people disbelieve it because it doesn't make sense to them. There are many reasons for being atheist.
It's odd that you highlighting the point I was making, yet missed it entirely. Religion is tied to the society that believes it. It is not universal. Concepts that religions share may be, but not specifics. So when someone has a vision that is religious, it will be one that pulls from their religious background.
If there was something else out there, it would not be dependent on what the person believes. Unless the afterlife and gods and such are pulling a fast one, aka Job: A Comedy of Justice, in which case that would be quite interesting to find out. But using Occam's razor, the simple explanation is that these are the individual's mind trying to make sense of what happened to it either at the point of failing, or at the point of revival. That we can simulate the same experiences many ways by tampering with the brain chemically or physically suggests there's nothing more to it than that.
I think that Christians are wrong when they say there is only one path to finding God. If that is true, then religion is not universal. According to these NDE experiences, one's experience is dependent upon the nature of one's relationship to God (whatever God is). I am not convinced that God has to be the personal God that Christians expect. According to spiritualists, God is Infinite Consciousness. According to the line, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spiritualism,
Spirit is the prime element of reality.
That is such a broad generalization that there is no reason to accept it's validity.
Every time I have tried to make the argument that wave-functions are describing the aether, in which the aether is "spirit", I get shouted down by the moderators because I can't pull God out of a hat. For that reason, intellectuals have no choice but to disbelieve in God because the scientific authority demands it. Not because of absence of observation. A very large percentage of the population does experience God, but are mislead by the scientific authority.
So they see what they expect to see. That's what I was pointing out. An atheist could not think there's a god, but if they have a sense of dying, they could imagine such a thing, and yes, maybe change their mind. Doesn't give validity to there being a god though.
People are spiritual and/or religious. There's a case to say that we're wired for it. But that again, doesn't make the existence of god or heaven or afterlife any more real.
As for being mislead by the "scientific authority", hey, the facts are the facts. If an idea can't hold up to objective scrutiny, maybe it should be reconsidered.
Some people experience God, some people do not. God is not an act of triviality, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat. That's the problem with intellectuals. Intellectuals have to reduce everything to meaninglessness and to dust. God is neither of those things. Experiencing God is a profound life changing experience. So when you say that God is not valid, that's like a blind man dismissing the importance of vision. I've never detected a Higgs particle, so, from my point of view, the Higgs particle has no validity and does not exist.
If you know any physics at all, then you know about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I've said this over and over, and the intellectuals either avoid this issue, or engage in a bullshit argument. Wave-functions are not physically tangible things. They are some degree of information content/predictability mixed with some amount of mystery/uncertainty. It's not my fault that intellectuals refuse to see that the wave-function describes the aether, it describes spirit. There is no proof because that would convert the whole wave-function into information content (which the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle disallows). It is plainly obvious that the whole of existence is not information content because the Uncertainty Principle prevents that. So either you have eyes to see how the spirit interacts with the quantum/atomic/molecular/physical universe, or you are blind to the spirit. If you're blind, there is nothing I can do for you.
The fact is that every one of you dodged dodged dodged avoided the data. You didn't want to read it. There is a good reason why. Because if you read it, and you truly considered the possiblity that you had a soul, then your paradigm would shift dramatically. Your eyes would open and you would see a reality vastly larger than what you are comfortable with. So what do good intellectuals do? They throw out the data. They throw out 3500 near death experience reports. Then they make up some half-ass zombie brain hypothesis that clinically dead brains can work just as good as healthy brains.
You have to do this to protect your rational paradigm.
Unlike what the Christians tell you, according to the data, atheists don't go to hell. They get access to a temple or library with unlimited access to knowledge. Knowledge was important to them when they were alive, and so it goes on...
Cool. Rock on.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say they "think" they experienced God? Without being omniscient themselves, how can they be sure? And wasn't it true that in the past, large numbers of people thought they experienced proof of different Gods, or other irrational cultural beliefs?
I mean, most Koreans think that sleeping with a fan on will kill you, that's why electric fans in S. Korea all come with timers.
According to the data,
So maybe you have a point. God could mean that an NDE experiencer saw a divine being or a being of light.http://near-death.com/experiences/evidence06.html said:
Uh, ...how did we go from near death experiences to electric fans that kill people?
Even atheists live in a religious culture in America. Dreams are made of the images and concepts we experience in life. How do you know that our unconscious hallucinations represent anything real?
It's not clear how it makes sense to talk about having a soul, given that the soul is to be considered something important.
Being a soul is a different matter.
Thank God it's us who are blind, instead of you!
You split that hair a little too close for me. I can't tell if you're a Christian or an atheist. Sorry.:shrug: