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Visual Hallucinations Are a Normal Grief Reaction
Hugh Pickens writes "Vaughn Bell has written an interesting essay at Scientific American about grief hallucinations. This phenomenon is a normal reaction to bereavement that is rarely discussed, although researchers now know that hallucinations are more likely during times of stress. Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. A study by Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. It's not unusual for people who have lost a partner to clearly see or hear the person about the house, and sometimes even converse with them at length. 'Despite the fact that hallucinations are one of the most common reactions to loss, they have barely been investigated and we know little more about them. Like sorrow itself, we seem a little uncomfortable with it, unwilling to broach the subject,' writes Bell. 'We often fall back on the cultural catch all of the "ghost" while the reality is, in many ways, more profound.' "
Yet, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
..they are actually not hallucinating? (I, for one, welcome our dead, elderly, overlords)
The dead only live on in people's memories.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, misfiring braincells are way more profound than the possibility of a life after death and all that it entails.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common
Yes, this is very common, and is usually attributed to the caffeine withdrawal symptoms prior to morning coffee.
Better known as 318230.
For several weeks after a beloved cat of mine died, I swear I saw him out of the corner of my eye a few times! Most of the "hallucinations" were brief glimpses, but one I particularly remember I turned a corner and swear I saw him sitting there. I even said involuntarily "Hi, Prince..." then realized after a few seconds that nothing was there. Pretty creepy, huh? After about a month or so I stopped "seeing" him around. So long, my friend.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
That's quite clearly just a simple glitch in the Matrix.
But that's because the only time I ever lost a friend (you expect to lose grandparents) all the young folk she knew went and dropped acid. It's what she would have wanted...
I'm not trying to start a flamewar (seriously), but I wonder if this is what happened when Jesus' disciples reportedly met with him after his death.
Although that would require multiple people to have similar hallucinations at the same time, since some of the accounts describe Jesus meeting with groups of disciples after his death.
But I see pictures of him every day on my computer's desktop background. Maybe I don't need to hallucinate about him because of that.
He was the coolest. He was given to me as a father's day gift. His name was Dude, and he fit that name perfectly. He was only 4 years old and showed up one morning out of the blue with some kind of brain disorder. I never thought I saw or heard him again, I just cried a lot.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
That in 80% of cases some remnant, some energy of that person was left behind? Just because it happens frequently doesn't mean it is *not* supernatural in nature.
Do they have MRIs of people while they are experiencing a hallucination like this? Something to show the brain is dreaming, and not simply observing?
By the same token, I suppose we can't really prove that there is an observation going on. I've had family members relate to me that they remember a sequence of events, in a very specific way. I remember the same events differently. Either we are people from different dimensions who have slipped between worlds to share this one, or we have altered our own memories to suit what we would have liked to happen. One of these is more consistent with current science. It doesn't guarantee that the other option won't be found to be possible at some point.
You've been living with someone for years, you develop a model of their behavior in your brain. With them there, this helps to predict where they are likely to be, what they said in that indistinct murmur from the other room, how they are likely to react when you say that you're late for the third time this week.
So this model is going to be still running even after they have gone. You "know" that your spouse will be in the living room watching "Strictly Come Dancing" because it's 7pm. So your mental model will fill them in, and as you walk into the room it will take a little time for the model to adjust. Is this the "corner of the eye" effect at work?
OK, so I'm not a clinical psychologist, not even close. But it seems a very plausible model to me.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
I wonder that if your cat was named "The Dude", instead of just "Dude", he'd be the one hallucinating. I think it'd be great to have "The Dude" sleeping in your carpet :)
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
One thing I never understand about certain religions and spiritual beliefs is this importance that's placed on love. Sure, love is a powerful force that we generally consider "good", but love can be quite dark and twisted at times, and certainly hate can easily be just as powerful in terms of what one will accomplish in the name of it, and heck, it can definitely be very rewarding, too.
Why does love get touted around on a pedestal like it's some miracle thing? Seems a little silly to me. Any emotion can be beneficial when used in the appropriate context and detrimental when it isn't. Love is no different, and not particularly worth special praise.
eom
It ties the whole room together!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I seem to remember seeing a really good (although creepy) documentary about this very thing. Ah, here it is.
This guy's the limit!
Do you have any proof for such assertions? The most simple explanation is: we each have one life, it stops when your brain dies. End of story.
Sounds to me like the social equivalent of phantom limb pain: "My other half is gone, but I still feel his/her presence."
I'm also reminded of sensory deprivation -- when deprived of normal sensory input, the mind generates hallucinatory sensations.
-kgj
Truly madly deeply
Non-Linux Penguins ?
If I had a cosy delusion like that, I'd not want to believe in hallucinations either.
and couldnt be anything else.
because, as mankind, we have discovered all secrets of existence up to this point.
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or, when you did, you should have done it controlled, with you waiting on top of him and keeping him in sight at all times.
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Good night, sweet Prince
That would be one cat you would be HONORED to have pee on your rug.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They've barely been investigated because one of the best avenues for investigating them, hallucinogenic drugs, has been actively suppressed. Take the tryptamines for example. Here we have a class of chemicals that are, for the most part, physically harmless, that can be administered in a controlled setting and are all but guaranteed to produce hallucinations. Hell one of them, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is even produced naturally in the human brain. This is the most powerful hallucinogen known to exist, yet we know almost nothing about it or what it's doing there, because (ironically) it's a Schedule I drug. Technically, we're all guilty of possession of a controlled substance.
Whether these things should be legalized is another topic, but at least make it easier for researchers to do legitimate science with them. Just tell me where to sign up.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
it takes time for a soul passed to the other side to adjust to higher frequency and eventually become unperceptible for us.
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Okay, who let Joan Baez on slashdot?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
On the human brain: Large enough to support a vast, fertile imagination, yet still too small to often recognize imagination for what it is.
Obviously there aren't ghosts, so any evidence to their existence must be explained some other way. That's what the scientific method is all about!
I observed this phenomenon with grief over a girlfriend. We broke up after four years together. Afterward, I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye, and my heart would skip a beat. It was always someone else, though.
Another unusual visual phenomenon: when the grief was particularly overwhelming, I started seeing in black-and-white, or at least with muted perception of color.
Since then I have avoided this problem by always breaking up with a girl as soon as things start getting serious. Hey, it works.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I've used my phone as my alarm clock, and the alarm was set to a 'ship siren', a truly fearsome, horribly loud and mean signal.
One morning I just couldn't get myself to wake up.
Then one of the characters in my dream scolded me:
"What the hell are you doing? This is the Fucking Rabid Titanic. These who ignored this signal were found in the morning smeared on the wall over their bed."
woke me up.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
a human is also an entity and a form of energy, in addition to the body mass and the heat it generates.
No, it's not.
physically it should have been impossible for 20 of them to combine and create exponentially higher impact on their environment.
I can't even describe how incredibly wrong and stupid this statement is. By this definition termites must have some sort of "higher energy" (ever seen an African termite nest?).
therefore, philosophically, according to conservation of energy
Good Christ, man. Now you're going to try to co-opt the laws of conservation of energy, despite clearly having no idea what you're talking about? Here, let me explain it to you:
The sun beams energy, in the form of radiation, to Earth.
Plants convert that radiation into chemical energy.
I eat that chemical energy.
I then expend said chemical energy welding a girder to a skyscraper.
Hey, look at that, I'm increasing the order of my local universe by utilizing energy provided to me by the sun. No magic needed.
this tells that when a human complex dies, there is some other form of energy released that equals everything that human complex did in his life minus his body mass and heat.
And that tells me that you're so desperate to believe that you'll survive after you're dead that you'll make up basically anything. You know, like Jesus did.
Let me make this simple: when you die, you're dead. Your body decomposes, and the various compounds that make up your corpse enter the food chain. That's it. So make the best of this life. It's the only one you get, and once it's done, it's *done*.
Time and space is an illusion
Lunchtime doubly so
Free Martian Whores!
Or, they're ghosts.
--
make install -not war
This is all under the assumption that there is "something" in us that is energy. Everything we know says it isn't so. You start from an assertion which isn't true, so anything you deduce from it is by definition not true.
If you can prove that there is something else beyond the physical material we are, you're going to get a Nobel prize....
The mind is a wierd thing to live in. I've "seen a ghost" twice in my life. Both were wierd. Neither was explicable.
The first time my oldest was an infant and my youngest wasn't born. We lived in a funny shaped house by a railroad track (we were dirt poor). The (now ex) wife and I had just gone to bed, and both of us saw a thin, very pale woman with long black hair and wearing what looked like a "dressing gown"' from ages past walking past the bedroom door! We thought there was an intruder. We both jumped up, I looking for the intruder and she checking to make sure the baby was alright.
It was extremely strange that we would both have the same hallucination at the same time. We finally decided that we'd seen the ghost of a woman who'd been struck by a train.
The second time I saw a ghost I came to the conclusion that seeing ghosts isn't a hallucination or sight of a disembodied spirit but a wrinkle in the spacetime continuum. The girls were visiting the wife's family in Missouri and I had the house to myself. I was sitting on the toilet, and since I was alone I didn't bother shutting the bathroom door.
I looked up just as a woman wearing contemporary-looking clothing walked up to the door, startled out of her wits as if she'd seen a ghost, as was I, -- and then she vanished.
There is a lot about the physical world that we not only have never investigated, but never expected or suspected.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm no psychologist, but I had a thought as to the cause of this.
When you know someone for a time, you build a little model of them within yourself. It contains every aspect of the person that you have experienced: your expectations of them, the way they sound, the way the act, and, in some cases, the way they smell. You begin to guess what their answer to a particular question might be, or where they will be on Sunday mornings. You could hold whole conversations with this model and expect that the real person would react the same way (this isn't always true, but you expect it is).
Just because the person has past, or left, does not mean that this model has ceased operating. So, for instance, if every Saturday Jane could be found sitting in her rocker in the corner, and she had done this for as long as you could remember, then I wouldn't be surprised that you'd see her there, even if she wasn't. Or, if on Tuesday's, John could be found playing out a game of checkers in the other room, you may hear the pieces hitting the board.
Expectation can have a huge impact on reality.
You're forgetting entropy. Entropy always increases, it is never preserved. Death means an increase of entropy, and there's nothing to suggest that a corresponding decrease (afterlife, etc.) somewhere else is happening. You are right that the total amount of energy (and information) is preserved in death, but after decomposition/cremation it is in a scattered, unrecoverable form.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Good ole Douglas Adams... God rest his soul
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Lunchmeat is definitely an illusion.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I'm sorry I didn't see you behind the car.
What?
That's a load of horseshit, and the fact that you'd make such a claim suggests to me that you have very little contact with people doing actual science. When I was a grad student hanging around the bio department, the folks in the department are some of the cleverest, most engaged individuals you're ever likely to meet, and they're all hungry to dig out new concepts and ideas. Imagine being the guy who creates an entirely new field of study--even if you died penniless and unsung, you'd be a legend. Many, many scientists would be willing to pursue long shots for such an opportunity.
The problem with 99% of the so-called supernatural is that there's not the slightest damn bit of evidence to support new fields of study. There was a lab at Duke University for at least 20-30 years for the study of psi phenomenon like ESP, telepathy, etc. Now, granted, I'm sure they weren't the most highly funded department, but in all the time they were active they never found a damn thing. If these phenomenon were real, wouldn't you expect to see SOMETHING? And if you found solid evidence of some hitherto fantastic phenomenon, wouldn't you trumpet it from the rooftops even if mainstream scientists ignored you? Yet no good evidence seems to exist.
It's a very handy position for the fringe crowd: blame mainstream science for marginalizing your ideas, and if a real scientist does produce data contradicting your claims, just keep clamoring for more money and more research, regardless of how little support you may have for your claims.
Ah yes, this reminds me of the time I was involved in research of this nature. I was asked a series of questions, one of which was "Have you ever had a sexual encouter with a ghost?", to which I replied "Yes, of course, who hasn't?". A moment later I realised she hadn't said goat.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception.
Dammit.
Next thing you know those awful secularists will be claiming that anecdotal stories of "I saw Jesus three days after He died" represent something fundamentally normal about the human experience.
Those damn secularists might suggest that such anecdotes may say more about the grief and mourning of people for a really nice peaceful human guy, than about the magic powers of the dead really really nice peaceful human guy. It's a good thing that no one ever made claims that differed from the early Christian church that ended up dominating the orthodoxy.
And don't even get me started about Elvis. I saw the King with my own eyes the week after he faked his own death, I tell you what.
You can use science to shutdown arguments against life after death all you want, but when it comes down to it, no one knows anything for sure. Science consists of hypotheses based on evidence. Because there can be no evidence regarding life after death, anyone who uses science to mock followers of religion is equally susceptible to the same mockery.
I believe in life after death. I don't care whether you do or not, but that is my belief. Does it matter whether or not I'm right? Probably not, but I believe that its impact on my life is far more significant.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Oh they're not going to like you. My guess is your post will get modded Offtopic or Overrated, or whatever it takes to make it disappear before too many people read it.
need to learn the meaning of "irony".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are we just a figment of a cat's imagination?
But then I realise that this is just pure nonsense - cats don't give a shit.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I couldn't agree more. Life after death, the existence of god, all these questions are outside the realm of science. Which is why you, and everyone else like you, should stop attempting to misuse science (such as the various conservation laws) to "prove" your beliefs. You just end up looking stupid, while misinforming other, more ignorant people in the process.
Grief is now capable of producing a distinct drug like intoxication. As far as I'm concerned mourning and the like should be moved on to the schedule one class of drugs.
There is obviously no medical use for mourning and/or grief, and these intense visual hallucinations could force some one to rob a war widow or rape a war widow.
This could be the most dangerous cycle of all as the stress of being robbed or raped could produce just as strong "dangerous" visuals in the attackee as well as the attacker.
The times they are a changing.
Should have been:
from the who-GHOST-there dept.
bah, undoing misclicked moderation
Your brain is not a computer.
For months after my mom died I used to "see" her out of the corner of my eye in public places. Then I would turn to look and it would just be someone that resembled her (same body type, or hair or shape of the face). I just assumed that it was due to the fact that she was on my mind. Later I started to think about the brain's pattern recognition system. The one that lets us see faces in electrical outlets and the grills of cars. It allows us to get a pretty good sense of something without complete information. And for all of my life whenever I saw someone from a distance, or in poor light or out of the corner of my eye that vaguely resembled my mother it probably was my mother. That shortcut to recognition usually serves us well. Its just that it doesn't turn off instantly when someone dies. Its that flash of pain you get when you remember "oh yeah she's gone" that makes these misidentifications memorable. That being said, when you start having conversations with dead loved ones outside of a dream its time to call in a professional.
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
So in bereavement, suddenly you're deprived of the actual stimulus. But that doesn't mean that the brain is going to let those circuits sit idle. No... the moment any unknown stimulus comes in, it's going to try to match it to the "wife" circuit. And if the "wife" circuit triggers better than anything else, then that's what I'm going to see.
In other words, we don't see things as they are; we see them as we interpret them.
So I suspect that this is just a case of the bereaved person mistaking a cat streaking around the house for their spouse. Or a bird in the air, etc.
Which doesn't mean that I don't believe in the human soul, and heaven and hell. But I don't think this is it. There's a better, simpler explaination at hand, and one that matches my occasional experience even nowadays, when I'm not bereaved.
"Laura, is that you out there?" ... oh no, sorry. It's just my son's friend.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Hey, you are out of your mind! I never wrote this comment, you are hallucinating my post.
As a matter of fact, I don't even exist, and neither does Slashdot. Get real, do you think the comments you see here could be anything but a figment of your sick imagination?
Aaah... what do they teach in schools these days?
It sounds like both you, and the poster somewhere above who had a problem with religous marketing departments, have made up your mind about the possibility of evidence, a priori.
So therefore, there is no need to consider any evidence at all.
That sounds quite similar to the "science" that Asimov introduced in his Foundation series, in which scientists of the dying Empire has concluded "the scientific method involves looking at historical records, and deciding for yourself what is true."
Asimov's subtle point was that that ain't science. Might I point out that neither is your scientific method.
The scientific method is observation, followed by experimentation, followed by theory to explain the experimentation and make as-yet unobserved predictions, followed by the repeatable experiment to test the theory. It has a partial basis in philosophy, but does not expand as wide as philosophy, and therefore will not be able to conclude certain truths, though they are truths.
So science is very useful within its limited range. Of course, for most human purposes in our very limited current society, science is useful. But philosphy is less useful over a much wider range.
Oh, and by the way, scientifical is not a word. It's intellectualizationabilizing-speak. Such usage is a way of pointing out that your opinions are much smarter than they are. Or, if you will, that you have no humility.
So... let me suggest, if you want to approach truth, try a little of that humility. Realize that you don't have all the answers, that you aren't the be-all end-all of anything, and that others -- including religions -- do sometimes have answers that are righter than yours.
Then, as part of that humility, set yourself not to deny truth when it confronts you. In other words, don't discount evidence just because it doesn't fit your preferred world view. Then be willing to learn.
Finally, let me say that I have found Christianity to be right on, including having experiences in things that scientifical people would say don't happen -- even when it happened in front of them. But I have also found that certain experiences of sin blind one to truth. That is, innocence is more humble, and more open to truth, than experience. Those who eat the apple think their eyes are opened. But that very day, their eyes become closed.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Everything we know says it isn't so.
unbelievable. what is that 'everything' ? like conservation of energy ? like dewey larson's physics ?
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If these are actually encounters with ghosts of the departed, then it should be possible to prove (in a scientifically non-rigorous way) that the ghost is not a hallucination, provided that the ghost can convey some information to the living that could not be known any other way, but could later be proved.
For example:
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment. But if it happened to you and you knew it wasn't a hoax, it'd be pretty convincing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That's a load of horseshit, and the fact that you'd make such a claim suggests to me that you have very little contact with people doing actual science. When I was a grad student hanging around the bio department, the folks in the department are some of the cleverest, most engaged individuals you're ever likely to meet, and they're all hungry to dig out new concepts and ideas. Imagine being the guy who creates an entirely new field of study--even if you died penniless and unsung, you'd be a legend. Many, many scientists would be willing to pursue long shots for such an opportunity.
and the fact that you are posting above paragraph suggests that you are an individual that talks with half assed opinions and knowledge.
your bio dept folks are open to new ideas WITHIN the boundaries that modern scholastic church of academia defined. just like how churchmen of 16th century were open to many ideas WITHIN the boundaries catholic church defined. anyone who suggested anything that went out of untold borders, got tagged as heretic back then, and today, 'kook'.
read some science history for god's sakes.
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The problem with 99% of the so-called supernatural is that there's not the slightest damn bit of evidence to support new fields of study.
evident that you dont know anything about the supernatural you are criticizing and debunking. there are loads of observations, but all of them are refused and discarded, and the undeniable ones are just ignored.
There was a lab at Duke University for at least 20-30 years for the study of psi phenomenon like ESP, telepathy, etc. Now, granted, I'm sure they weren't the most highly funded department, but in all the time they were active they never found a damn thing. If these phenomenon were real, wouldn't you expect to see SOMETHING? And if you found solid evidence of some hitherto fantastic phenomenon, wouldn't you trumpet it from the rooftops even if mainstream scientists ignored you? Yet no good evidence seems to exist.
no you cant observe ANYthing in a lab, before you have a basic understanding of the mechanism you are trying to observe, and have the right tools for it.
its simple - its just like some person setting up a quantum physics lab back in 1850. you know that something is there, you know that it has to be something, but you dont have either the knowledge to make controlled experiment and even manifest the phenomenon, or even the tools to do it. before you make a breakthrough and at least catch a usable clue, you wont be accomplishing anything with that kind of lab. but, you cant do even that with the constant state of denial and despise in current scholastic academia.
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I see lots of investments being buried these days. What would I hallucinate about then?
or, should I say, what's with izzy stevens still having hallucinations of denny?
well, I guess it's a good way for the writers to get back at katherine heigl for her comments about them: make her look crazy so they can write her off the show.
Here's a thought experiment on how to test whether these are hallucinations or ghosts: lie to some people that their family member has died with an elaborate hoax (fake body, send the family member on vacation, etc.) See if the person "hallucinates" or not. If yes, then that's consistent with "ghosts" being all in the mind. If not... Of course this particular experiment would be grossly unethical to implement, but maybe similar experiments would get at it. Do relatives that go on long vacations or to war etc. prompt hallucinations?
...You know, like Jesus did....
What Jesus said and did is still remembered by millions of Christians almost 2000 years later. Who will remember what you did and said and wrote right here on Slashdot even only 20 years from now? Who will even know that you existed 100 years from now? If they know, would they care? Will they build huge cathedrals and other memorials in your honor?
The biblical record claims that Jesus came back from the dead in a new resurrection life. We read that eyewitnesses saw him and interacted with him. No other religious leader has ever even made the claim of having conquered death.
It boils down to this: either you are correct or Jesus is.
All theory is gray
What Jesus said and did is still remembered by millions of Christians almost 2000 years later.
I'm not sure what your point is. Notoriety doesn't equate to correctness. Billions of people throughout this planet believe remarkably irrational things, but their beliefs are still that: irrational.
As for the rest of your post, there's not much to say. If you actually believe the Bible is inerrant, or that it wasn't written by human beings decades after those events supposedly happened, then there's no point arguing, as you've already rejected rational, fact-based thinking.
Incidentally, I'm not going to argue whether my particular set of beliefs is correct. They may not be, for all I know. But I *do* know that neither Jesus nor the GP have evidence for their wild-ass claims (and in this particular case, the GP has made claims that are, plain and simply, flat out wrong based on existing facts), and as we all know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As long as he's not the one making the bed warm.
If you actually believe the Bible is inerrant, or that it wasn't written by human beings decades after those events supposedly happened, then there's no point arguing, as you've already rejected rational, fact-based thinking.
Paul claimed that, when his books were written, one could go find eyewitnesses who would validate his claims. This would be difficult to claim if the eyewitnesses did not in fact exist, and likewise difficult to claim if the book claimed to have been written when the eyewitnesses were alive but nobody had seen the book or heard of it before.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I've had one hallucination, without any grief or drugs. I think stress is enough.
I was kayaking nears rocks, surfing very high waves, lost my kayak, and spent 15 minutes in the surf, hitting rocks multiple times. I got out, retrieved my kayak, launched, and paddled to a place where I could relax... then I had a pretty long and elaborate hallucination.
It involved three-four deities (Tangra, Athena, Poseidon and the Lady) and the appropriate sacrifices I should perform for my pretty damn miraculous survival. I'm an atheist, and I cannot help but think that this is how religions get started.
No good deed goes unpunished...
The grieved-for party doesn't even have to be dead for this to occur. I distinctly remember waking up one morning after breaking up with a long-term (4yrs) girlfriend and hearing her cooking breakfast, feeling the warm depression in the bed where she had slept, and "remembering" her climbing over me to go to the kitchen. The illusion was so vivid that I actually smelled bacon cooking and called out to ask her when her flight had got in (she had been living in another country at the time of the break up). When I went into the kitchen and saw nobody there, the sounds and smells of cooking immediately stopped, and I was hit with the most profound sense of grief I had ever experienced. I actually became suddenly convinced that she had passed away and somehow come to say "goodbye."
And get this- when I called her up and explained that I didn't want to bother her but I had had a very weird experience and just wanted to make sure she was OK, she told me that she had had a very similar experience. She was at a video store about to pick up a video, and without thinking she held it up for approval to someone across the room. She had somehow convinced herself it was me (in fact, it turned out to be someone who looked very similar). Not quite as profound, but still we both experienced the effect described in the article.
Unfortunately due to presence of an ocean and most of two continents between us, this did not lead to awesome reunited-and-it-feels-so-good nookie. It did, however, take much of the sting of a very bitter break-up away.
I've noticed a similar effect learning foreign languages... when I came back from Japan, every conversation I half-heard in the background sounded like Japanese until I got close enough to make out what was being said. When I got back from Argentina, everything sounded Spanish.
So even after our loved ones are gone, our minds keep them on as specters. On the one hand, as many have mentioned, this would seem to indicate that a lot of what we see in our moved ones is probably built out of assumptions and memory... we see and hear them around us because we expect to do so.
But it also makes me wonder how much of ourselves we "store" in these relationships. The image of an elderly person having a conversation with a dead spouse is striking, because it makes us wonder: what if those conversations are just the way that person thinks?
Plato wrote long, long after his master Socrates had died, but he kept on Socrates as a protagonist in all his dialogues. What if Socrates wasn't a memory to Plato, or even a character, but rather an essential part of the way he thought about the world?
You can use science to shutdown arguments against life after death all you want, but when it comes down to it, no one knows anything for sure.
Tell you what. There's a one million dollar prize offered (good for a couple years yet) by www.jref.org if you can substantially demonstrate a paranormal phenomenon. So, all you have to do is use the belief in life after death to gain some kind of useful knowledge that couldn't have been obtained otherwise.
What's that, you say? Doesn't work that way? Belief in afterlife yields no useful knowledge? Nothing at all? No real clues to murders, family tragedies? No hints on where Jimmy Hoffa's buried? Hmmm. Sounds like a bit of a wank-off, then.
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
If your brain was REALLY good at making shortcuts, it'd skip all that and use the only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear" ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Paul claimed that, when his books were written, one could go find eyewitnesses who would validate his claims.
So Paul was a lying sack of shit (or the authors of the Bible were). I'm not sure how that proves anything.
This would be difficult to claim if the eyewitnesses did not in fact exist, and likewise difficult to claim if the book claimed to have been written when the eyewitnesses were alive but nobody had seen the book or heard of it before.
Uhh, why? If thousands of sheeple are willing to believe, who'se going to listen to the lone voice that points out that, no, things didn't actually happen that way?
Hell, if such miraculous things *did* happen, I would've expected that there's be some corroborating evidence in sources outside of the Christian community. I mean, a dude coming back to life seems like a pretty huge event. And yet, there's nothing. Interesting, that...
I can't understand why people think there's something illogical about religion:
What I find interesting is that people who will run Linux because it's The Right Thing To Do (TM) and spurn Microsoft because it is evil will, in a strident display of cognitive dissonance, dismiss those who believe in God, in right and wrong, etc... as somehow uninformed or illogical. Could it be that believers are simply applying the same principles to their lives as a whole? That is, they desire to be ethical and honest, and to do the right thing. It seems like if one would attend a University to expand one's capacity for thought, it would be only logical to attend a church, to believe in a God, in order to expand one's capacity for virtue.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Or maybe, what they're measuring is that there really are ghosts, and they're common.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Uhh, yeah, there could be evidence of life after death. Spirits could come back to where they visit, they could talk to use through the radio, they could write messages in the cloud, they could enter our bodies and become a part of us. These all sound stupid, but there are plenty of ways that the afterlife could be proven to us. The fact is, there isn't.
Science consists of hypotheses based on evidence. Because there can be no evidence regarding life after death, anyone who uses science to mock followers of religion is equally susceptible to the same mockery.
You must have failed logic class. If what you said is true, then everything ever imagined must exist or science shouldn't exist. Invisible space unicorns exist! Since you can't prove their existence, you can't use science to ridicule people that believe in them! Do you see how crazy that sounds? Your concept that "there can be no evidence" is false. There can be evidence, there just isn't any, so from a science perspective...yeah, sorry, no life after death.
Quite frankly, I firmly am for people believing whatever they want. If you want to believe in life after death because of your religion, good for you. The problem comes from the fact that you get this information from an old, many times translated and rewritten book. This book gets interpreted for you so that you start wars, hate and discriminate against different types of people, and basically make the lives of so many other people miserable. So fine, believe what you want, but don't shove your beliefs down other's throats. (not that you are doing it here, but when you run away from facts and truth in favor of believe, a lot of people historically have suffered and died)
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Ooohh! Oohh! I know this one!
Batman! It's Batman, right? It's gotta be.
Psh. Everyone knows that when the dead rise, you call Ash. He can usually be found in housewares.
sudo eat my shorts
If you don't have the knowledge to experiment, the equipment to manifest the phenomenon, or even a useful clue, then what exactly do you have besides your personal desire to find something? The early quantum physicists didn't start out with some wishy-washy, intangible sense that 'something' was amiss--they started out with hard data that didn't fit their models. Like Rutherford shooting shooting alpha particles at gold foil--the existing theory said one thing would happen, but what he saw was inconsistent. Any other scientist operating under comparable conditions could do the same work and get the same results. Around this anomaly a new model of the atom was built. But most fringe science can't do that--they don't have data, they have anecdotes. And I'm sure you'll bleat about all the data being ignored by mainstream scientists, but guess what: if your data is compelling, people will pay attention to you, even if your theory sucks. The fact that nobody is interested in psi-crap is because it fails to generate any worthwhile data worth digging into more deeply. It has nothing to do with academic oppression and everything to do with failure to put out.
I mean, a dude coming back to life seems like a pretty huge event. And yet, there's nothing. Interesting, that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection
"Centuries before the time of Jesus Christ the nations annually celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Mithra, and other gods" [1]. A cyclic dying-and-rising god motif was prevalent throughout ancient Mesopotamian and classical literature and practice (eg in Syrian and Greek worship of Adonis; Egyptian worship of Osiris; the Babylonian story of Tammuz; rural religious belief in the Corn King).
See? Christians are just worshiping the wrong person. Silly people.
when deprived of normal sensory input, the mind generates hallucinatory sensations.
This explains my imaginary girlfriend.
LOL!
-kgj
but all of them are refused and discarded, and the undeniable ones are just ignored.
The undeniable ones are denied, eh? The reason this evidence is being ignored is because either it is garbage or doesn't actually prove what is claimed.
(Or maybe I'm just not nuts enough yet. Yikes.)
"You will be. You will be."
- Yoda
-kgj
Lucidity is pretty simple, two major components, awareness and emotional control. Lucidity is sort of a base marker for a persons personal evolution. One must be aware what is occuring around them and not blinded by their thoughts. This allows the person to realize they're dreaming. Any sort of emotional outburst will break the lucidity, hence amount of emotional control dictates how long the session of lucidity.
> he only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear"
Better than that one is ...
"Whatever you think is best."
Your wife will think you actually care about her opinions. [I got that one from my soon-to-be brother-in-law days before I was married.]
1) There's no scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death.
Data exists independently of theory. The data in this case is a shitload of first-person accounts coming from all of recorded history. Are they all lies? If they're hallucinations, what's the mechanism that produces them? What about hallucinations that provide the subject with valid, verifiable information about real-world events the subject didn't know and couldn't have known to begin with?
Real scientists see data that doesn't fit any known theory as a chance to do good science. Maybe the data gets invalidated. Maybe the data when looked at within the right perspective does fit a known theory. Maybe the data requires new theory to explain it. Perhaps it's possible to do controlled experiments to get new data.
Science is the search. The attempt to explain things using dogma and to say that if it doesn't fit your dogma, it can't exist is religion, not science. No matter what you call your beliefs. When you try mixing religion and science, you get misbegotten abortions like Creationism.
Most of today's "cutting-edge" theories are going to be as outdated as "phlogiston chemistry" a century from now and college students will be asking each other 'how could anyone with a functioning brain believe that bullshit?', making your assertion that modern scientific theory is a complete explanation of everything "not even wrong". If it were really true, we could shut down scientific research on the basis that what we know is a complete description of the universe and all that's left to do is engineering R&D to transform what we know into what we can do.
know that some will invoke traditions and culture,
The only tradition I need to use to debunk your bullshit is the tradition of science itself.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm sorry, but nobody alive today remembers what Jesus said or did. A lot of people remember what they read about Jesus saying and doing. But the same could be said about Frodo, or Harry Potter.
The credence of billions is no more proof that Jesus did any of this stuff than my own lack of belief is proof against.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
....A lot of people remember what they read about Jesus saying and doing...
There are written records of the history of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Martin Luther, Plato, Socrates, the various Roman Emperors, Jesus Christ and on back into ancient history. Do you also disbelieve all historical records? There are also archeological records and the fossils record of life. ALL of them, without exception cannot be PROVED. No recorded evidence of the past can be proved, only BELIEVED or not. Even in a court of law, nothing of the past crime is ever proved. All that is ever done is to present evidence. The testimony of live witnesses is only one form of evidence. Often, there are also written records involved as well.
The Bible is a written record of actual eye witnesses to the events recorded therein. These written records should be accorded the same treatment as any written record of the past would be. In a court of law, a witness is assumed to be telling the truth, unless it can be established that the witness is lying. In human oral and written testimony, there will ALWAYS be a degree of variability. When several people are true eyewitnesses of an accident, for example, their testimony will vary a little depending from which vantage point they saw the event. One way to tell if there is collusion of witnesses, is if their stories match too closely. There is such a degree of human variability in the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ, that gives these witnesses written testimony a high degree of credibility and truthfulness. There is no reason to doubt the written record of the Bible any more than any and all other records of history. Most of us have never seen a person com back from the dead, but that by itself is no reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses.
Before mankind invented modern detectors of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles, anyone speaking of their existence and reality would have been doubted on the same grounds. Nobody had ever perceived the existence of these very real physical realities, but they have always existed. Why then doubt that life can and does continue after the physical tent, our bodies cease to function?
If God personally showed up in front of you in human form and gave you a letter, how would you have Him authenticate His person and writing? What evidence would convince you of the truth of the letter and its author?
All theory is gray
Maybe consciousness is what happens when you build a world simulator using some aspects of quantum computing (for the massive parallelization with finite resources ), and then get it to recursively (and infinitely?) simulate itself and the world.
:)
;). Or also "Nope, that's not it".
Where at the singularity/infinity is that "weirdness".
I disagree with the popular concept of "I think therefore I am". You don't really have to think to experience the "I am" phenomenon - whether in language or in pictures or in sensation. Hellen Keller was self-aware before she was taught symbols/language. Language makes it easier to store, recall, process and transmit thoughts - it quantizes them. If you learn another language it is easier to realize there can be thoughts that language has no words for.
The internal monologue is not the awareness itself, anymore than the characters being typed on our screens are. The monologue allows the actual "awareness" to go "yes that's the word/symbol I was thinking of" - even though it wasn't exactly thinking of it before
To me it is interesting that God in Genesis 3 says "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" in response when asked for his name.
....the nations annually celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Mithra, and other gods....
The big difference is that Jesus was fully human and lived and died as a human. He alone demonstrated His power over death, showing that He was also God. What gives the resurrection account such credibility is that even Jesus' closest followers initially refused to believe the first accounts of those who said they saw the resurrects Jesus. Thomas refused to believe what the others were telling Him until he met the risen Christ a week later.
Before the resurrection Jesus disciples were scared that the same governmental authorities that executed Jesus would come after them. It took quite a bit of effort by Jesus to finally convince a bunch of skeptical disciples that he was really alive. Once convinced of the fact that Jesus was indeed alive, they defied their Jewish Supreme Court as well as the Roman Government when commanded by the authorities to shut up and stop spreading that resurrection story. Can you imagine the courage it would take today, to defy Congress, the President and the Supreme Court, (the entire government of their day) all at once, openly, to their face, for a fable or a lie?
All theory is gray
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Certainly nothing can be proven beyond all doubt. But there's a big difference between something fairly straightforward being demonstrated through a diverse set of evidence and an extraordinary event being demonstrated by a single work of what most people consider to be fiction.
You keep harping on this "eyewitness" thing, and I simply cannot understand why. There's essentially no evidence that these people even existed, much less that they're telling the truth. People generally do not rise from the dead. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there is none.
Most of us have never seen a person com back from the dead, but that by itself is no reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses.
How foolish! That is every reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses! If something happens which never happened before and which never happened again and which goes against essentially every known fact that we have, you better bet that I'm going to doubt the testimony of four guys who decided to start worshipping a Jewish carpenter. If four guys came running up to you and said that they had just seen an alien that looks exactly like Jane Fonda, am I not allowed to doubt them just because they supposedly saw it with their own eyes? That's not how the world works, my friend!
Before mankind invented modern detectors of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles, anyone speaking of their existence and reality would have been doubted on the same grounds. Nobody had ever perceived the existence of these very real physical realities, but they have always existed. Why then doubt that life can and does continue after the physical tent, our bodies cease to function?
You are seriously confused as to the function and purpose of doubt. You are absolutely right that the existence and reality of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles would have been doubted. And correctly so. A proposition without evidence deserves doubt. This doubt does not become incorrect just because the proposition in question happens to be true. Doubt is how you discover this truth.
If God personally showed up in front of you in human form and gave you a letter, how would you have Him authenticate His person and writing? What evidence would convince you of the truth of the letter and its author?
If an all-powerful God appeared before me then the proof is easy. He is all powerful, after all, so I can just ask him to come up with a proof which will convince me beyond all doubt. I don't need to come up with it myself!
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
...And correctly so...
So if you doubt the existence of something, such as electromagnetic radiation or life after death, then these cease to exist or be true? You may BELIEVE they don't exist, but they still could be there.
(...I don't need to come up with it myself!...)
I guess a better way to ask the question would be: If you get a communication from someone, some stranger to you, what evidence will you accept that this message really came from that particular person? How can the content and the source of a communication be authenticated? What if the communication does claim that it is from God, but He didn't leave His phone number or email address? Is there a way that the message itself could convince you that it is truly from God? What could there be in the message content that would convince you "beyond all doubt"?
All theory is gray
or maybe we'll argue on the merits. You, and your ideology, are not victims here.
mod up for an insightful second point regarding the fact that we can't always measure what we don't understand. Mod back down for ridiculous claim that any "undeniable" observations of the supernatural exist. Why would any scientist want to discard legitimate evidence of astounding phenomena? (drug company trials not withstanding)
a human is also an entity and a form of energy, in addition to the body mass and the heat it generates.
No, it's not.
How do you know it's not ? Have you seen the truth ? Nobody knows the truth, but one thing is certain, we are more than our physical body, or at least what we observer as our physical body. Maybe you will see it too one day. Some might describe it as a soul, some as energy that floats in the universe. Science and physics can't explain everything, as they are only OUR understanding of things.
GeoKone.NET
My father is a WWII vet who raised a family of 10 on a modest salary by being hard-nosed, no-nonsense, practical realist. So one day (when I was a kid), he's blowing his top because SOMEONE was messing in his dresser drawer! His box of cards was opened, and a prayer card that he had saved since he was a kid was standing up on top. The prayer card was from a wake for a childhood friend who had killed himself as a kid. My father kept in touch with the family through the annual Christmas card exchange. Nobody fessed up to rifleing through his drawer (a capital offense). Then later that same evening he gets a call from the family with the bad news that the childhood friend's father (same name) had passed the night before. Please explain that.
Be heard || Be herd
Like David Koresh and his followers did?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...Like David Koresh and his followers did?...
Except that we read in the Biblical record that Jesus followers did not try to kill nor advocate killing those who opposed them. Jesus doesn't tell His followers to kill themselves, such as happened in the Jonestown and Khoutek Comet incidents. Jesus represents life, not death.
All theory is gray
Nobody knows the truth, but one thing is certain, we are more than our physical body
So... nobody knows the truth... but your silly superstition is true.
Uhuh.
On the bright side, I think you might have actually topped the OP on the comment stupidity meter by actively contradicting yourself within the very same sentence. Congratulations!
Is there a way that the message itself could convince you that it is truly from God?
Well that's trivially easy. God should just do something that blatantly contradicts our laws of physics. Like, say, bring my dead grandfather back to life. See? Easy, simple proof that, at minimum, the resurrection of Jesus and the existence of God are possible (obviously not certain, but *far* more likely).
'course, it'll never happen because, let's face it, like the virgin birth story, the resurrection story was either made up on the spot, or invented after the fact. But it'd be pretty impressive if it did.
Of course, it helps if you can do math in your head without writing anything down :)
If I could just visualize a sheet of paper better, I wouldn't have that problem... ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
(read the bible passage about mana. Moses was eating shrooms when he talked to God...oh wait I can't say that or I'll upset all masses of dummies)
Right, mushrooms growing in the desert.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
"I can't describe him to you, but he was wearing an orange shirt" isn't a contradiction, and neither is GP's statement. Just because he's selected a subset of possibilities and said "the truth exists within this subset" doesn't mean he's claiming to have identified the truth.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
So if you doubt the existence of something, such as electromagnetic radiation or life after death, then these cease to exist or be true? You may BELIEVE they don't exist, but they still could be there.
Where did I ever say that they cease to exist or be true? Please, respond to what I say, not to things you imagine I think.
Of course doubt has no bearing on existence. My point is simply that doubt is what you should hold in the absence of evidence. That you might end up doubting something which is true is of no consequence. If there is no evidence for subatomic particles, you should doubt their existence. If there is no evidence that Jesus H. Christ rose from the dead, you should doubt that.
I guess a better way to ask the question would be: If you get a communication from someone, some stranger to you, what evidence will you accept that this message really came from that particular person? How can the content and the source of a communication be authenticated?
This is easy. Before they die, they give me a sealed envelope containing a large random number. When they communicate with me after their demise, they tell me the number. I then open the envelope and compare. If they match, then I have shown that it was really them to a high degree of confidence. If they don't, I imagined it or the guy was fucking with me.
What if the communication does claim that it is from God, but He didn't leave His phone number or email address? Is there a way that the message itself could convince you that it is truly from God? What could there be in the message content that would convince you "beyond all doubt"?
Again, if an all-powerful God wants to convince me that he's talking to me, he'll figure out a way, I don't need to do it for him. Certainly a variant of the envelope trick would do it. If he tells me that there's an envelope taped to the bottom of my desk with a particular random number in it, that shows that either it's an all-powerful God or some prankster who knows how to get into my house without leaving traces. Further similar acts could gradually rule out the prankster.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Bah, you're picking nits. Either "nobody knows the truth" is accurate, or "one thing is certain... blah blah blah" is accurate. You can't have it both ways.
Not long after my Grandfather died, my Grandmother walked in to her living room and freaked out because she swore she saw him sitting in his favorite recliner. It freaked her out so bad that she ended up giving the recliner away.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
No, I'm not. You're claiming that, because no one knows the complete truth, nobody can make statements about what that truth might or might not include. That's incorrect.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
No, I'm not. You're claiming that, because no one knows the complete truth, nobody can make statements about what that truth might or might not include. That's incorrect.
How is that incorrect? The poster made these two claims: a) that know one can know "the truth" regarding the existence of the "soul", and b) they know "the truth" regarding the existence of the "soul". Those two statements are in diametric opposition to one another.
Fundamentally, the problem is this: I hold the positive belief that the human being is simply a biological machine. The original poster pointed out that, hey, no one knows the truth. And that's true. There is neither evidence for, nor against, my position. But the poster then made an equally baseless, absolute claim: that the human being has a "soul" of some kind. This belief comes into direct conflict with their previously stated claim: that no one can know which of these claims is true.
Ultimately, I think this just highlights a bit of cognitive dissonance. They attempt to buttress their irrational beliefs by stating that, well, know one can really say one way or the other. Well, except that their beliefs are correct, of course.
How is that incorrect? The poster made these two claims: a) that know one can know "the truth" regarding the existence of the "soul", and b) they know "the truth" regarding the existence of the "soul". Those two statements are in diametric opposition to one another.
No they didn't. They just narrowed it down. Further, they went on to say "Some might describe it as a soul, some as energy that floats in the universe." In other words, they still don't "know the truth"... they're just making a statement about it.
I'm not arguing that anyone's right or wrong, I'm just saying that your parsing of that claim isn't logically valid. You're making an "either/or" from something that isn't.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
..If he tells me that there's an envelope taped to the bottom of my desk with a particular random number in it,..
That random number trick would be good, but not indicate that God was behind it. Like you said, someone could have placed that there without your knowledge.
One day you come home and find a copy of the Bible, that was not there before, in your living room. You also find a slip of paper in front of the Bible telling you that this book is God's message to you. You are instructed to look on the inside back cover. You look there and find 10 rows of two digit numbers in 5 sets each. He included a brief personal message there which tells you that God wants to bless you financially and anyone you choose. To that end He wrote that these numbers represent the next 10 power-ball lottery draws starting with the next scheduled draw.
You are puzzled, but very skeptical, and decide to laugh it off and let the deadline to buy a ticket pass. When the numbers are announced for the first draw, you realize that the first set of numbers matches exactly those drawn. You groan a little or maybe a lot, but immediately trot down and enter the lottery with the second set of numbers. You can hardly wait for the next draw. It finally happens and to your amazement, all numbers match exactly. You win say 24 million. Now you are beginning to wonder, could those other numbers be possibly right also? You enter again and sure enough all the numbers are correct again and you win two lotteries in a row. Surely you think, that is the end of your lucky streak. Still just for fun you buy a ticket and enter the third set of numbers given to you by the writer claiming to be God. The numbers are announced and match again. By now the lottery authorities are very suspicious of you and refuse to pay you again. Still, you don't tell anyone of that message supposedly from God. Instead, you call a trusted friend or relative and tell him/her the next set of numbers. Knowing that you are the only person that has ever won three lotteries in a row, they eagerly enter. Sure enough they win the next lottery draw. You repeat this with others you like and they all win successively on rest of the the numbers you supplied them, as written down in the message in the back of that Bible.
Would you read the rest of the Bible carefully to see what else God has to communicate to you?
All theory is gray
That would be pretty good, although I would entertain very carefully the possibility that I had gone insane and was imagining the whole thing, or that some extremely elaborate conspiracy was playing with me. But at that point I'd be more willing to believe in a deity than a conspiracy, because I really don't think that large conspiracies can exist, whereas I simply don't see any evidence for deities.
I don't see why an all-powerful God would do something so bizarre and intricate, though. All he would have to do would be to slightly tweak my brain so as to make me believe, or if he didn't want to screw with my brain, just make page #10 of my brand new mystery bible show exactly what I'm thinking when I read it.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
...I don't see why an all-powerful God would do something so bizarre and intricate, though...
According to the Biblical record, God exists outside of our time-space universe. We experience time as a line stretching from past through the present moment into the future. He sees all time, as a whole. If you can imagine watching a parade near a street corner, you will see the participants in the parade come around the corner, pass in front of you and then disappear around another corner further down the parade route. The people in an aircraft will see the entire parade route from before the units join the parade until after they disband at the end.
God alone sees time from an eternal perspective. He tells us in the Bible that He knew each of us before we came to be. Of all measurements scientists have learned to make, time can be measured more accurately and with higher resolution than any other physical quantity. Yet it is truly ironic for us modern humans, scientifically minded as we like to see ourselves, that the exact nature of time is just as much a mystery as it was centuries ago. Despite satellites and super-computers even predicting the weather is hit and miss.
In order to authenticate His message, the Bible, He has given accurate predictions of events long before they happened. Many of these are now history to us, but a large number are yet future to our place in time. The odds of all of the events foretold in the Bible actually happening are FAR more remote than winning the lottery 10 times in a row. Anyone who truly wants to find out if this is true can make a study of these events foretold. Some of these events have happened in the last century and some are happening today. Some are on the horizon.
(...so as to make me believe...)
If your computer suddenly flashed a message on the screen "I love you --__your name__", would you think that your computer truly loves you? Probably not!. You see, if God had programmed that into your brain, it could not be love. He gave you the ability to WANT to love him and some other humans, -- or not. He also gave you the ability to believe -- or not, based on evidence He supplies. In the end, if a person does not WANT to believe, he/she will not. My faith in God is not blind faith, but it is based on sufficient evidence, both Biblical and personal. If you truly WANT to believe, ask God to give evidence personal to you. Tell Him that you have severe doubts He even exists, but are willing to accept personal evidence that He is there and loves you.
All theory is gray
"But they are starting to fade away ;)"
And I see I have been modded down again, because some child wasn't mature enough to be a moderate. Sad place this site has become :-/
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Oh please, the bible's "predictions" are about as good as Nostradamus's. That is, they are so vague that you can twist them into meaning just about anything. If you dispute this, then I'd like you to point out three examples where it predicted a precise historical event, with names, places, and dates, and not just some poemy wishwash that could be interpreted a thousand different ways.
As for a god not wanting to reprogram me, why doesn't he do anything else to show that he's here either? Yeah, yeah, it's all supposed to be about faith, so he can't prove that he exists. Except that this notion is also compatible with the idea that there is no god, which is a considerably simpler explanation for the facts at hand.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
...then I'd like you to point out three examples where it predicted a precise historical event....
OK, Here is the first one from the account in the life of Jesus. Centuries before it happened, two very specific, unambiguous statements were written down. One is the exact amount of money involved in the betrayal of Jesus. The other is what could be done with the money.
Prediction:
Zec 11:12 And I said to them, If it is good, give My price; and if not, let it go. So they weighed My price thirty pieces of silver.
Zec 11:13 And Jehovah said to me, Throw it to the potter, the magnificent price at which I was valued by them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of Jehovah.
Fulfillment:
Mat 26:14 Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests.
Mat 26:15 And he said to them, What will you give me, and I will betray Him to you? And they appointed to him thirty pieces of silver.
Mat 26:16 And from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.
Mat 27:3 Then he who had betrayed Him, seeing that He was condemned, sorrowing, Judas returned the thirty pieces of silver again to the chief priests and elders,
Mat 27:4 saying, I have sinned, betraying innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? You see to that.
Mat 27:5 And he threw the pieces of silver down in the temple and departed. And he went and hanged himself.
Mat 27:6 And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.
Mat 27:7 And they took counsel and bought the potter's field with them, to bury strangers in.
Mat 27:8 Therefore that field was called, The Field of Blood, to this day.
Mat 27:9 Then that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of Him who had been priced, whom they of the children of Israel valued,
Mat 27:10 and gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me."
It is interesting, that Matthew got the prophecy right, but got mixed up about the prophet that wrote it down.
One of the many prophecies concerning Israel has found the beginnings of its fulfillment in our time. The people of Israel were first dragged off to Babylon, that part of the world now call Iraq. After 70 years, some of them were allowed to return to their homeland. They were however no longer a sovereign nation, but we're subjected by various other powers. The last power they were subject to once the Roman Empire which ruled some until 70AD. As Jesus had predicted about 30 years before, Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Roman legions and the and habitants of the land were dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. The nation of Israel ceased to exist. Yet, as prophesied, they were reborn as a sovereign state in 1948.
Jer 29:14 And I will be found by you, says Jehovah; and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places where I have driven you, says Jehovah. And I will bring you again into the place from where I caused you to be exiled.
Consider the city of Jerusalem. It has a population of less than three quarters of a million, has no harbor or other important attributes of the world's great cities. Even so, what other city is there in the world today, where a zoning change, needed to build some apartments, becomes a threat to world peace? Here is what God tells us about this town:
Zec 12:2 Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling to all the peoples all around, and it shall also be against Judah in the siege against Jerusalem.
Zec 12:3 And in that day I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all peoples. All who lift it shall be slashed, and all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it.
A few miles to the north is valley of Megiddo, where the battle of Armageddon, part of the last war of humanity will be fought. This prophecy is being fulfilled in par
All theory is gray
I'm going to take your three examples out of order, for a specific rhetorical purpose. Here are my thoughts:
2) The destruction of the Temple and the founding of Israel. This is the strongest example of your three and it's why I want to discuss it first. However it's still not even remotely convincing to me.
The destruction of the Temple should have been pretty obvious to anyone under Roman rule. Those Romans didn't screw around, and the Jews weren't about to stop rebelling, so the outcome was pretty much inevitable. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but this just makes it an act of bettter-than-average perception.
The founding of a country at the location of Israel is also pretty much a given. The prophecy is self-fulfilling. Israel was founded precisely because it was promised to "God's people". If this prophecy weren't there then it wouldn't have happened.
3) Armageddon. Essentially everything here is future tense. You can't use a "prediction" that hasn't come true yet just because you really think it will.
1) Prediction of Jesus's betrayal. I saved the best for last. You're looking at a prection in the Bible which describes other events that take place in the Bible. I'm not sure if you realize just how ridiculous this is for an outsider. For me, the Bible is about as holy and factual as, say, Macbeth.
To me, the fact that the Book of Zechariah predicts details later described in the Book of Matthew is just as much a proof that the Christian god exists as the fact that the witches at the beginning of Macbeth predict details later described at the end of Macbeth is proof that witchcraft works. That is to say, none at all, because they are works of fiction, albeit based on historical events.
That you even think this prophecy is worth mentioning or will somehow bolter your case with me makes me think that you don't even really believe my position is legitimate. You are, from what I can tell, completely unable to realize where I'm coming from. You think that the Bible describes literal truth and, not only that (which would be a reasonable position for a religious person to hold!), you can't even conceive of someone not thinking that the Bible describes literal truth. Obviously from our discussion you are able to entertain this idea, but you apparently don't really grasp what it actually means.
To restate: to me, Jesus Christ is a fictional character. As a fictional character, Jesus may well be based on a historical person, just as Macbeth was, but just like Macbeth, the fictional character of Jesus Christ is distinct from the actual person that it is based on.
As I have said before, in the end, you have to want to believe the evidence. It comes down to this: A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
It has nothing to do with belief. I am perfectly willing to come to any conclusions which come from evidence I discover or which is given to me. But so far you haven't given me any evidence for your position at all. The best you can come up with is circular reasoning in which you prove your faith by relying on tenets of that faith. That sort of thing simply isn't going to make me change my mind, and it has nothing to do with wanting to "believe the evidence".
Let me give you some examples of a prediction that I could believe. They must be specific and also of a nature that they can't be self-fulfilling. A description of the location of lost, buried treasure dating from before the prediction would do it. Predicting the Shoemaker-Levy comet's impact on Jupiter would be a very good one. Predicting any comet which has a long enough period not to be predictable through simple astronomy would do it. Predicting the exact time and place of a major earthquake, for example the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, would be a very good piece of evidence. Scientific facts that were undiscovered at the time would be pretty good too, such as the fact that organisms are composed of enormo
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
The evidence that the Bible gives for Jesus rising from the dead is that people saw him and conversed with him after his execution. This makes it sound like the people in the bible were hallucinating.
No, I will not work for your startup
....that a central fixture of Christianity was faith, that is belief without evidence....
There is a lot of internal evidence of prophecy in the Bible, but you seem to dismiss it out of hand. The Bible is not a book that was put together in a few months or a few years by a single human being. Its scripts were put down over time span of about 1500 years by at least 40 different writers. Even so, it has a remarkable consistency.
If you are really interested in evidence for the truth of the Christian gospel, you may take the time to read the article and the following link:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/jesus/greenleaf.html
The author of this article, was a legal scholar, one of the founders of the Harvard Law school. Before reading the above article, you may want to check out the credentials of this man as given in the link below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Greenleaf
(...Scientific facts that were undiscovered at the time would be pretty good too...)
Most scholars agree that the book of Job is the oldest of the collection of books we now call the Bible. In chapters 38-42 God talks to Job, giving him a science quiz. In the 5000 years or so since job lived, humans have discovered the answers to many of these questions. Even so, there are a number of questions that are still as unanswered today as they were back then. When these questions among many gives a scientific insight into modern astronomical knowledge. In chapter 38:31 God asked Job: "Can you bind the bands of the Pleiades, or loosen the cords of Orion?" These two constellations happen to be gravitationally linked together, while all others simply appear that way in the sky from the viewpoint of the earth.
Earlier in the book, in chapter 26:7 we read He stretches out the north over the empty place, and He hung the earth on nothing. How did Job know this, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the wise and educated to this day? If you have not ever read this book, or have not read it recently, you might do so. If you do not have the time or inclination for this, you might review the rather good Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job
All theory is gray
I'm sorry, but you simply cannot claim "consistency" as proof of divine intervention. Tolkein was pretty consistent too. Considering that he's supposedly all-powerful, I would expect the Christain god to be more consistent than he already is. The Bible as it stands contradicts itself in many places.
One thing I do not believe in is credentials. I do not give special standing to a person simply because he has a piece of paper. I'm afraid I don't have time to thoroughly read your link, but I skimmed it and could not find any mention of evidence which did not rest on the assumption that the contents of the Bible are already true. If I have missed some convincing, objective, external evidence perhaps you could point it out.
Your discussion of the Book of Job is bizarre. It took me thirty seconds to punch up the Wikipedia article on the Orion constellation and discover that the distances to the various stars involved range from 240 light-years to 1300 light-years. This is most emphatically not a structure which is gravitationally bound.
Yes, Pleiades is gravitationally bound, but so what? Some vaguely suggestive imagery that just happens to coincide with how the actual cluster is structured is not particularly convincing. Especially when the other one is completely wrong.
I really don't understand why you accept such vague nonsense. "He hung the Earth on nothing" could mean practically anything. If this god really wanted to prove that he knew stuff others didn't, why not simply come right out and say "The Earth is a sphere that rests in space, suspended by nothing, resting on nothing."? Or he could say something like, "Although it appears to be instantaneous, the speed of light is actually roughly equal to one billion cubits in a single heartbeat." Why make us guess and speculate and twist words to divine their meaning? It just makes no sense. A good prediction should be understandable before it comes to pass, after all, so discovering that the Earth really is "hung on nothing" and then going back and deciding that, hey, Job got it right after all is doing things entirely backwards.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.