Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon

Engell79 said:
They are neither...:eek:

Good or Evil only exists for one race Homo sapiens for any other earth beeing the concept is of no importance.
The concept is by default individual, as it reflects the individual moral, ethics and belifes or non-belifs.
Sicence can there for not tell you something is good, neither can it tell u something is evil...Things just are what they are....
You belive ppl are Evil, wich is an individual statement of your crude generalisation of an entire race.:cool:
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That means I can kill you or anybody in the world than who cares? Than I should kill scientists, religious and spiritual people, those who believe in the existence of afterlife and in God's existence, because there is no good, evil moral ethics, or whatever is man-made...
Since you said there no good or evil tell me the one reason why shouldn't I do it?
So, why shouldn't you kill me or everyone else that I mentioned? After all there is no good or evil in the real world, humans obviously had to create those terms otherwise we would all kill each other...
Do you see the point here?
If moral doesn't exist why don't we just kill ourselves? Of course humans invented moral and ethics, but if you want to be civilized, you had to create those terms and follow them and tell to someone they don't exist, otherwise people would kill each other in whatever country.
Saying people are evil doesn't have anything with my belief, it has to do with my experience with other people, and experience to see if the people are good or bad, is more like a scientific research.
 
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Gravage said:
That means I can kill you or anybody in the world than who cares?
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People care, of course. They don't like getting killed and don't like having family members killed. You don't need a God to explain a lack of desire to die.
Besides, watch Discovery Channel. Many animals do kill rather indiscriminately and God isn't impinging on their sense of Absolute Morality.
Gravage said:
Since you said there no good or evil tell me the one reason why shouldn't I do it?
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Groups of people opposed to getting murdered will hunt you down after you've killed a few people, tie you up and kill you.
Gravage said:
So, why shouldn't you kill me or everyone else that I mentioned? After all there is no good or evil in the real world, humans obviously had to create those terms otherwise we would all kill each other...
Do you see the point here?
If moral doesn't exist why don't we just kill ourselves? Of course humans invented moral and ethics, but if you want to be civilized, you had to create those terms and follow them and tell to someone they don't exist, otherwise people would kill each other in whatever country.
Saying people are evil doesn't have anything with my belief, it has to do with my experience with other people, and experience to see if the people are good or bad, is more like a scientific research.
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Have you not noticed? People are running around killing people. Usually, they do so in Gods name.
 
Gravage said:
The problem with science is that they do not accept them as something that should considered. science has yet to prove that nothing of alternatives is effective or non-effective.
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There is actually nothing at all wrong with science. Science is merely the word we use to describe human reasoning and wisdom. What you really mean is, the rational mind rejects the fallacy that a mind can exist outside of a functional brain. The statement that this is not proven is false. You're merely rejecting the proof along with the science that offers it.
 
Gravage said:
That means I can kill you or anybody in the world than who cares? Than I should kill scientists, religious and spiritual people, those who believe in the existence of afterlife and in God's existence, because there is no good, evil moral ethics, or whatever is man-made...
Since you said there no good or evil tell me the one reason why shouldn't I do it?
So, why shouldn't you kill me or everyone else that I mentioned? After all there is no good or evil in the real world, humans obviously had to create those terms otherwise we would all kill each other...
Do you see the point here?
If moral doesn't exist why don't we just kill ourselves? Of course humans invented moral and ethics, but if you want to be civilized, you had to create those terms and follow them and tell to someone they don't exist, otherwise people would kill each other in whatever country.
Saying people are evil doesn't have anything with my belief, it has to do with my experience with other people, and experience to see if the people are good or bad, is more like a scientific research.
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There is no benefit to killing people without cause to do so.

I'm not saying that no animal EVER kills for revenge or sport, but it's rare enough that we take notice of it when it does. Domestic cats often kill with no intention to eat, but there is debate as to whether or not they intended to kill the victim. My cats have always seemed disappointed when a bird dies or something. It's as if they thought it was a toy that suddenly stopped working. but until they learn to talk we will never know what goes through their mind when they do that.

Neverfly also made a good point, Humans are going around killing each other.
 
Neverfly said:
Many animals do kill rather indiscriminately and God isn't impinging on their sense of Absolute Morality.
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The doctrine of Abrahamism (the overwhelmingly dominant set of religions in the West, including Christianity and Judaism, and recently Islam and Rastafarianism) teaches that humans are the only species of animal to possess a "soul." Without a soul the myriad other animals are defined as not having free will (no more than for an organism of the other five kingdoms--plants, fungi, algae, bacteria and archaea) and therefore the concept of morality is meaningless for them. Their actions are predetermined by God and the appearance of making "decisions" is an illusion.

People are running around killing people. Usually, they do so in God's name.
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As I have often noted, religion is an impediment to the advance of civilization. The essence of civilization is for humans to transcend our Stone Age instinct to only care for and depend on our own "pack" of a few dozen extended family members we've known since birth. Religions (at least the Abrahamic ones that very nearly dominate the globe) reinforce the differences among our various communities and thwart this transcendence. With a few notable exceptions, these religions tend to instill in their members a conviction that they are just a teeny-weeny bit better than the rest of us. This superiority is manifested clearly in their directive to convert all of us from our religions (or no religion) to theirs, in order to save our souls, or at the very least to clear up the errors in our interpretation of the words of God, Jesus, Mohammed, Ras Tafari or Joseph Smith.

So even when they're not trying to kill each other (and catch us in the crossfire when they're not actively trying to wipe us irreligious people off the planet), they regard each other with a barely-concealed disdain that makes it nearly impossible to regard each other as pack-mates in a single worldwide civilization.
 
Gravage said:
That means I can kill you or anybody in the world than who cares? Than I should kill scientists, religious and spiritual people, those who believe in the existence of afterlife and in God's existence, because there is no good, evil moral ethics, or whatever is man-made...
Since you said there no good or evil tell me the one reason why shouldn't I do it?
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You are a scary dude. I am an atheist and a misanthrope, and I don't think about killing people. If I were a moderator here I would be contacting your ISP an telling them to inform your local law enforcement to be aware of your instability.
 
Cheezle said:
You are a scary dude. I am an atheist and a misanthrope, and I don't think about killing people. If I were a moderator here I would be contacting your ISP an telling them to inform your local law enforcement to be aware of your instability.
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Fortunately we moderators are selected for our paranormal ability to see into the members' heads and realize when they are just talking trash.

Oh crap. I just admitted to believing in supernatural phenomena. Now I'll have to pull out my Ouija board and put a hex on everyone who read that post.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Fortunately we moderators are selected for our paranormal ability to see into the members' heads and realize when they are just talking trash.

Oh crap. I just admitted to believing in supernatural phenomena. Now I'll have to pull out my Ouija board and put a hex on everyone who read that post.
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Your call. If you are wrong, somebody may die. The guy seems suicidal if not homicidal. Granted, no direct threats. But as I say, your call.
 
Oh, ok. So somebody may die.

7 billion people in this world, one offs himself because he couldn't handle it.

Well there's a loss. So what, was he going to cure cancer or something?
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
The reason we help other people is that over the past twelve thousand years we have learned that helping other people enriches our own lives.
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Mhm, to the point of pathological altruism.


Description
The benefits of altruism and empathy are obvious. These qualities are so highly regarded and embedded in both secular and religious societies that it seems almost heretical to suggest they can cause harm. Like most good things, however, altruism can be distorted or taken to an unhealthy extreme. Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy.

Pathologies of empathy, for example, may trigger depression as well as the burnout seen in healthcare professionals. The selflessness of patients with eating abnormalities forms an important aspect of those disorders. Hyperempathy - an excess of concern for what others think and how they feel - helps explain popular but poorly defined concepts such as codependency. In fact, pathological altruism, in the form of an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one's own needs, may underpin some personality disorders.

Pathologies of altruism and empathy not only underlie health issues, but also a disparate slew of humankind's most troubled features, including genocide, suicide bombing, self-righteous political partisanship, and ineffective philanthropic and social programs that ultimately worsen the situations they are meant to aid. Pathological Altruism is a groundbreaking new book - the first to explore the negative aspects of altruism and empathy, seemingly uniformly positive traits. The contributing authors provide a scientific, social, and cultural foundation for the subject of pathological altruism, creating a new field of inquiry. Each author's approach points to one disturbing truth: what we value so much, the altruistic "good" side of human nature, can also have a dark side that we ignore at our peril.

Pathological Altruism
Edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan and David Sloan Wilson
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What is even scarier is that a person can easily get accused of mental and moral deficiency if they don't exhibit what is actually pathological altruism.
 
I do find the evolution of emotions very interesting. The happiness function is thought to be only a means to an end. The evolutionary puppet master doesn’t seem to care about our level of happiness, only that it inadvertently serves the principle goal.

Of course, Dawkins supports the idea that selfish genes do give rise to cooperative behavior. Although, managing competitive mechanisms is difficult, but as David Buss points out in his paper, “The Evolution of Happiness,” evolutionist have identified one of the key conditions that promote cooperation, and that is shared fate.

Buddha12 quoted C.P. Snow earlier in the poetry section.

...the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Religion, too, provides a shared fate. Although, only for a select group. It promotes the “us and them” mentality. It unites and divides us, but we should all prefer mysteries over myths and miracles.

Like Neverfly, I’m like a kid in a candy store when outdoors. I love it. Awhile back, I was curious as to why, and came across a section in a Savanna hypothesis, which I found intriguing.

Neverfly said:
This is me; I enjoy being out alone in the wilderness. I like to be silent and unheard walking through the woods but don't really have a desire to sneak up on anything. Just prefer to go unseen. I enjoy forests (Damn near chose forestry as a career) and mountains. Don't enjoy deserts, so much.
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Savanna-Hypothesis
Humans lived the most time of their evolutionary past in the savannas of tropical Africa (the nowadays presumed site of human origins). Therefore our aesthetic answers to landscapes should be influenced by environmental key-features we also find in the savanna. The less experience an individual has with the environment it is actually living in, the more it should prefer savanna-like landscapes.

"Research on landscape preferences strongly indicates that savanna-like environments are consistently better liked than other environments (see reviews in Balling and Falk, 1982; Ulrich, 1983, 1986). In the only direct test of preferences for the different biomes, BALLING & FALK (1982) hypothesized that humans have an innate preference for savanna-like environments that arises from their long evolutionary history on the savannas of East Africa.

They argued that an "innate predisposition" for the savanna should be more likely to be revealed in children than in adults because adults are likely to have had experience living in biomes other than savannas. Their study included six age groups (8, 11, 15, 18, 35, and 70 or over).

Interestingly, the desert was the last liked environment for all age groups; and two slides of the savanna during the dry season also received lower ratings than the greener savanna settings. Because none of the respondents in the Balling and Falk study had ever been in tropical savannas, the authors postulate a developmental pattern, with innately programmed responses that are later modified by experience in particular settings ( in this case, the deciduous woods of the eastern U.S.). "
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spidergoat said:
Praise be to Victor Stenger for telling it like it is:
Not Dead Experiences (NDEs)
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Excellent cite, excellent source to separate the wheat from the chaff. I can almost imagine a world in which Stenger's principles of ascertaining truth from facts could become integrated into any school curriculum, in any of the units that cover critical thinking skills. I would think that most kids would probably zoom through any such material, as it mostly utilizes common sense and logic. The rest, the ones who've been indoctrinated into various kinds of hocus-pocus, could benefit from having to grapple with Stenger's unassailable honesty, accuracy and simplicity. In a way I feel like this kind of training is as fundamental to preparing young people for basic life skills as any topic in literacy is.
 
Gravage said:
That means I can kill you or anybody in the world than who cares? Than I should kill scientists, religious and spiritual people, those who believe in the existence of afterlife and in God's existence, because there is no good, evil moral ethics, or whatever is man-made... Since you said there no good or evil tell me the one reason why shouldn't I do it?
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Once again, your conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

If you are truly opposed to all things man-made, you would certainly need to reject religion. You could similarly reject science, but -- unlike religion, and of course with due diligence -- you could reconstruct many of the most important foundations of science (reinventing the wheel and so on) on your own. This should help you arrive at a landing zone back on earth.

Ascertaining truth, in fact, often relies heavily on cooperation and corroboration that helps people remain objective. There's nothing inherently bad about it. You need only surrender some excessive self reliance and the illusion of being so right while demonstrably being so very wrong.

But jumping from the naive fantasies that religious ideation entails, to the other extreme--fantasies of violence? At some point bells should be going off in your head.
 
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wynn said:
So far, it hasn't been explained how a person can find satisfaction in things that are subject to decay and perishing. Claims have been made that such satisfaction is possible, but nobody worked out the details.
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I think the following quote from POTC best sums up the answer to your question.
There's something to knowing the exact shape of the world and one's place in it, don't you agree?-LORD CUTLER BECKETT
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Note to MODERATOR: Let me get this straight. If a Surgeon says something then it is allowable in the science threads, but if some random priest says it then this would be sent to the religious threads? I could even see it in the psychiatry sections as some posts deal with chemical reactions in the brain that might cause seemingly valid and realistic hallucinations.
 
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