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Science Attempts To Explain Heaven
Hugh Pickens writes "Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek about the thesis that heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die. The thesis is based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience. According to a 2000 article by Bruce Greyson in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had an NDE. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details, describing: a tunnel, a light, a gate or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism when, in order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic. 'I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God,' wrote one user of his experience under ketamine. 'Dante said it better,' writes Miller, 'but the vision is astonishingly the same.'"
How did they explain the out-of-body visions experienced by people who were born blind (and then actually saw things when their heart stopped beating)?
Next you'll be trying to tell us God doesn't exist.
And we all 'evolved from apes'.
And the iPad is a game-changer.
http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/jansen1.html, can itself cause a NDE. Geocities is that you?
This doesn't state anything about what happens when you're dead (probably not much), just what happens when you're on the point of death. It doesn't "explain heaven" at all.
All we've discovered here is what cats have known all along: it's comforting to purr when you're dying.
Now we know what Michael Hutchence was going for.
I remember that Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Paralax books mentioned that religious experiences can be triggered by electrical fields as well, kind of a reverse MRI i think? I'm pretty sure that part was based on actual research.
Hmmm, a quick google search turns up this article on reading such experiences with an MRI, but i think there was a way to trigger them too.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Blind people still "see." Brain pathways have simply been remapped so that the "vision" parts of the brain are now associated with other senses.
If you blindfold yourself, and navigate the world by touch, you will still instinctively build a "picture" of the world around you. The spatial cognitive portions of your brain that are usually excited by vision, will come to be associated with touch, or other senses. After years, your neural pathways will remap themselves.
In people who are born blind, those spatial picture generating portions of their brain are still functional, but more closely attuned to nonvisual senses. So they can still "see" in that they generate a spatial impression of the world around them.
They've done experiments with artificial vision systems based on the receptors in your tongue, remapping and training the brain to "see" via your tongue's tactile receptors rather than your eyes.
This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic.
. . . by taking stiff doses of ketamine. You don't want to enter such a difficult level as death without enough experience.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
...comes back to us: the experiences to be had with certain drug-induced states truly widen the minds. Queue the bitter bunch saying "makes it delusional, you mean. bah."
...Doesn't mean that there is no key.
Connie Willis wrote a novel "Passage" about scientific investigation of NDEs. I rate it as the second best book by the best author I know. (Warning: Willis's books generally fall into the categories of 'comedy' or 'tragedy'. Which do you suppose a book about what you experience when you die is going to be?)
In Passage, the protagonists are following a two pronged strategy of interviewing patients who have had NDEs naturally, and simulating them in volunteers by using a drug, while the volunteer is in a brain scanner.
To say more would stray into spoiler territory, so just go out and buy the book and read it.
(For what it is worth, the book which beats "Passage" is "To Say Nothing Of The Dog", a time-travel Victorian farce.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I can't even explain it Philosophically, let alone with science!
I mean, if life is hard here because God gave us Free Will, but Heaven is Perfect with no pain. Doesn't that mean there's no free will there?
And wouldn't that be way worse than life here? Are you really YOU without the ability to make your own choices?
If he lets us keep our freewill, and only lets people in who won't make things bad, than wouldn't that mean a pleasant personality trumps true acts of good? Would you rather have an asshole cop who saves lives every day, or a guy who makes witty comments and makes everyone laugh?
I think real scientists should stay well away from this kinda crap, if you got to research what happens when people die, don't link it to heaven.
It is like "scientist" trying to explain Bible myths. How could Moses have parted the seas, what could have caused the plagues etc.
That is like a bad episode of myth-busters where they test movie stunts. What they do first is try to convince people that a scene in the movie is somehow real and has to follow real world physics and then disprove it... learn to seperate fantasy from reality for Christ damn, for god's sake oh fuck it.
All the happenings in the Bible can be explained very simply if you think of it as a bunch of Fantasy written by people who wanted to create a religion. There is even clear evidence that the Bible is fabricated. Even its followed accept that the New Testament was created from seperate books, edited with some parts and books left out completely. So we know that it is edited. No truly religious person would dare to edit the word of god, so what made the person who edited the new testament decide to think he could do this?
And low and behold, if you think of it as a bad hack job, then suddenly it all makes sense. And we know religions can be entirely fabricated. Scientology anyone?
It is amusing to see a program on trying to explain the story around Moses, when nothing in the historical record mentions this at all. Explain the parting of the red seas, but not why an exodus of slaves was not mentioned in Egyptian records. Now that is science. Up next, myth-busters and the geographic channel examine how a grandmother and a little girl can fit in a wolves stomach whole. Leave your brain at the door.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable.
It also takes away the power of people like the Vatican screwing over the poor for larger cathedrals, and more power of more people. Ever wondered what makes it right for a poor family in Phillipines giving their last Pesos to the church to bury a family member, whilst the Pope sits in a palace that dwarfs any king's palace. Now that's morals for you.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I was in bed in the early morning, I just awoke a couple of minutes before. Without prior warning it felt like all my internal organs started to move up through my trachea. I sensed I was paralyzed, unable to stop it and immediately I felt something like a heart stroke. I thought I had only a few seconds left. In those few seconds everything I had done, still had wanted to do, the implications for my family members went through my head. The brain has an enormous extra capacity when it is needed. I never felt the urge to resist or panicked, just to accept the inevitable. It later turned out my diaphragm had ruptured and my stomach had gone through that hole, collapsing my left lung and displacing my heart by 10 centimeter. It took five years to diagnose correctly.
heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die
I challenge anyone create a testable hypothesis on whether there is a soul or life after death or heaven etc. What this experiment is testing for is a correlation between chemical processes in the brain when a person nears death and the subjective experience of said person. Where does the existence of heaven or supernatural events even come into this? Those are questions that shouldn't come into play when speaking of science. Whether an objective explanation of a subjective experience nullifies the "reality" of it or not is philosophical has nothing to do with the experiment in question. This is a bunch of horseshit.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I think NDE is an endnote of the dying brains ( just as the sound of dying engines are all alike) assuming there's no afterlife. The human mind is very good at creating reality. I once had a NDE after I lost total control of my voice and my muscle which means I can't move a finger of mine. Then I went through this tunnel so fast I felt the dragging of my feet. The decoration of the tunnel is like that of the red bricks screen saver from Windows 3.1 or 95. I didn't see any bright light but I came to a sphere(planet) where I saw massive greenish looking buildings. Our tallest skyscrappers would look thin and skinny in comparison. The people there wore blue uniforms and very discipline in the way they walked. This happened about twenty years ago before I've heard about X-seed or any of the massive buildings that we're planning to build. Thanks for reading.
I've heard about these type of studies for years, and the explanations they pose. The problem is, most of the time when people experience NDE, they, are, um... dead. They have no brain waves and no heart beat. The key item being is NO BRAIN ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY. Science, I love you, but dead men dream no dreams, including about the after life. So please explain to me how a brain that is flat line on the monitor is producing, and i quote you "intense hallucinations"
The problem with science is that they are missing the moral factor
That's no more a problem with science than it is a problem with lollipops, stars, and waterfalls.
And actually, I find that tying ethics with religion is deeply problematic. It leads to failing to question moral teachings brought about by a religion which might in some cases be bad, very bad. You need to examine and think critically and philosophically abour morals and ethics, for yours to actually be moral and ethical.
allowing them to do everything that only hurts us, or destroys our world...Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable.
The dominant religions on this planet teach that there will be a world-ending apocalypse but the faithful will be whisked away to a better place. *That* allows people to destroy our world. Lacking belief in an afterlife makes this world far more precious; a thing that must be protected because there is, as yet, nowhere else for us to go.
I would astonished to hear that religious non-scientific people polluted more than scientific non-religious people; I know of absolutely no evidence of this. This of course excludes the category of scientific-religious and non-scientific-non-religious, which your post also seems to exclude.
This brings me back to your original statement:
Science is religion, today people don't believe in religion anymore, they believe in science...
I'd like you to define "science", because it's not the standard definition. Strictly speaking, if you don't believe in science, you're an extreme moron. Religion is a set of unproven beliefs taken on faith, science is a process that explicitly excludes faith. Science works, that's how we figured out how to make computers, and refrigerators, and so on. It's up to you to figure out if the process of science has lead to conclusions that contradict your religion. I think it does, but you're not necessarily an extreme moron if you disagree.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing science with some set of conclusions from some scientists, but I'm not going to set up straw arguments, I need you to tell me.
People are living worse everyday, no moral anymore, lots of sickness, more struggles, no hope, and still science believes they are god...
People are living better today than they ever have in the history of the Universe, "no moral anymore" is a context-free statement but I can tell you that at least in the US and Canada youth violence is at an all-time low (and, as they say, children are our future), disease is similarly at record low levels for the past several decades, "more struggles" is again ill-defined (there are more people alive than there used to be, so I don't doubt we have more absolute struggles), there's a whole tonne of hope all over the place, and "still science believes they are god" doesn't mean anything at all and is frankly confusing.
Don't these researchers at least look at trip reports from the Internet? Going further one has to question their credentials, their lack of first hand experience with hallucinogenic drugs implies they never really went to university.
If drugs can induce NDEs and indeed some even more fantastical experiences than your basic Im-dead-tunnel-of-light-OMG-aw-crap-im-back fare, this kind of shuts down any proof of a afterlife possibly presented in NDEs. It's at once depressing - oblivion after all - and kind of exciting... I'm going to visit my dealer now.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Didn't anyone tell them not to explain the joke?
Religion tries to explain everything from above. Science tries to explain everything like a couple of blind people touching an elephant. Sometimes they will be close to the truth sometimes they are completely off.
1. Science and religion are trying to explain completely different things (religion tackles moral issues, science tackles the workings of reality). 2. Hence, if I want to know what the elephant looks like, I'll listen to the blind guys. If I want to know where the elephant came from, I'll listen to that other blind guy who goes to the zoo every Sunday.
The problem with science is that they are missing the moral factor, allowing them to do everything that only hurts us, or destroys our world. They are of course doing some good things too, but the question is if those good things outreach the bad things. Looking at our earth, I would say no.
Science does things. It is up to the consciences of the user of science and observer whether science is used for, and whether that use is, good or bad.
Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable.
You're saying that unless there's the fear of consequences in the afterlife, people won't bother doing good in this life. On the contrary: all the rules of law in human history make doing good for your fellow man profitable now.
People are living worse everyday, no moral anymore, lots of sickness, more struggles, no hope, and still science believes they are god...
I don't know whether this is true or false (only way to know the state of the world is via the media, and the media is useless), but if science is the cause, it's only accelerating the inevitable.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
Science makes no claims towards what it is not. Science comes with error bars. Science tells us, "This is exactly how wrong I am." Science takes your pet theory, that really elegant one that you WANT to believe is Truth, and tells you, no, there's no strong correlation. That is the morality of science. When you do an experiment, and determine that your hypothesis is unsupported, you pick a different hypothesis, not a different experiment.
Yes, sometimes scientists seem like they are stumbling about in the dark. They might pick the wrong conclusion. But science is based around revisiting prior assumptions and refining them as you gather more data. What religion has such a mechanism built in? What religion describes how to amend its holy books in the event that they are demonstrated incorrect?
You're right that science takes away beliefs. But it can only harm false beliefs. How could you use science to demonstrate something incorrect? That is the strength of explaining everything from the ground up. There is a strong foundation, not based on strength of faith, but rather on a series of repeatable experiments. If you take issue with how an experiment was done, do it yourself. If you get different results, publish them. The scientific community thrives on that. If you get the same results, know that the truth of the matter has nothing to do with how willing you are to stomach it.
The one thing I will grant you is that the media does a very poor job of representing the scientific process. These scientists did not prove that there is no heaven; they did not set out to, and their experiment is not set up in a way to demonstrate that fact one way or another. What they can demonstrate is that a chemical released by the brain under extreme duress can produce strong hallucinations accompanied by a feeling of the numinous. That's not terribly exciting in and of itself, so the press fancies it up, makes the bold claims that science cannot, and releases it in comprehensible chunks to the public.They have a difficult job, trying to represent incredibly technical work to a public without the background to understand it, and often having to make it entertaining as well. Much is lost in the translation.
This research is probably accurate in explaining near death experiences, however I think that's as far as it goes. If you study religions, the concept of an afterlife varies quite a bit. In non of them is the "white light that is God" mentioned (to my knowledge). If you look at these near death experiences; all the cases appear in relation to where modern medicine has literally brought the person "back from the brink" (that is to say that they were very near to death indeed by modern standards) Certainly, they were not conscious during the experience. How then could primitive man regale his story when it would have lead to actual death while unconscious? More damning to the idea, though, is simply that these depictions are not represented in any of the religions.
What I want to know is how do they deal with the inherent bias of materialistic western science (I suggest there is one).
I'm not saying that Western science is wrong, or invalid (not at all) but that it is inherently materialistic in it's outlook and in the tools it uses to measure things and test them. Is it EVER possible that the methodologies of science (as it now is) could ever validate 'spiritual' experience if it WERE true as a thing in itself, or is there an inherent bias that makes the methods and means of testing such things unfit for purpose: that it would always reduce any spiritual or transcendental experience to a physical, chemical or biological basis (and nothing more)?
Valid question?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Science and morality are not related. Neither are religion and morality, although those with a vested interest in religion try to make it appear so.
Well , i am skeptical towards this "proof" .
It just proves that there is a chemical reactions when you die , which explains the tunnels of light you see when you have a near death experience.
In other words , it explains that this experience itself, is not really heaven , but just a physical reaction . It doesn't say anything about heaven itself.
Slipping shoelaces ?
i'm frustrated that most people who try to talk about transcendence, faith, or "supernatural phenomenons" whatever you want to call it..are the people who had no expirience with it whatsoever and link amazing things like that to organized religion..
:/ ) block any chance of exploring your mind, your self and the world without the standard cultural preconceptions that shape and distort the world as you see it..
:) or take any kind of drug
Well please don't be fooled and realize that organized religion is here to take control of peoples natural urges to expand their consciousness and to pacify them with a preset truth that will for the people that take stuff as its given to them (90% of the population
Science is a great, but a bit to cocky to try and explain things that are in these day surely out of our analytical scope...
So my advice to you is if your proud to be a skeptic then be a true skeptic and try some thing out for yourself.. try meditation, have an out of body experience, take a hallucinogen don't take anybodys word for granted be it scientist or "flake"
Try it for yourself don't pay anybody anything, and dont belive anybody who wants to explain it to you... this is a subjective thing that will help you see the world clearer in many ways... just be in a safe enviroment and with people you love and trust if you're gonna choose the quickest way and drop some acid
The actuall research was related to why people have these weired and wonderful experiences when they almost die. There is also a fare degree of similarity in the experiences, which has made it all the more fascinating. This research posits a possible reason, which is very interesting in my personal view. Any extension of "it explains heaven" is really not relevent to anyone except those that believe this to be a glimpse into an afterlife (the exception being anthropologists, however I think this is flawed as given in my previous post). As to your off topic biblical rant; do some research! There are plenty of reasons to disregard the Christian religion, however "the edited bible" is not one of them. The new testament is textually stable, and has more source material than any other ancient document. It is not on these grounds that you should make your case! If we go down this road, however, be prepared for pages of discussion and plenty of links. Textual criticism is not a light topic!
It also takes away the power of people like the Vatican screwing over the poor for larger cathedrals, and more power of more people.
You don't need to disprove life after death to do that, and if you did (which these experiments did not) they would always find another hole to hide in.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
If NDE's can be explained by chemical reactions, that means there's no evidence for heaven right? And even if we assume heaven exists, there is no longer any reason to believe we actually go there when we die (since obviously you can't be experiencing a NDE and be in heaven at the same time, since the NDE is all in you brains).
Surely this research says something about heaven: it tells us that an NDE is not part of heaven (when previously some people believed it was).
Seriously, stop doing that. Want GPs post to get modded up? Don't post in this discussion (Oh dear! Too late now) and hope you get modpoints in the next few days. Every "Mod up parent" post I see when I have modpoints is one point lost to '-1 Offtopic'.
A '-1 whining about modding up or down' moderation would come in handy.
Alcohol is a drug, and after mildly ODing on it I've been known to have long conversations with him via the big white telephone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
QED
If any of it was actually "Word of God", wouldn't he just zap the fake ones out of existence? Or better yet!
Have them start burning when put to the actual "sacred" texts, burning out completely without damaging the "true Word of God".
You know... miracles and that shit.
It's not like Jesus's dad is the bad old god that kicks you out in the desert to wander around it until you finally understand what he is telling you.
He should be a loving god. Not a mindfucking, constantly testing you, teasing god.
For fucks sake - he gave his only son to save our asses. Why not make some paper burn?
You know... if he actually existed instead of being an invention in order to make money and control the masses.
Kinda like Mickey Mouse.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Science is about observing phenomena (at least, the ones that can be observed). If we seem like blind people touching an elephant, that's because that's all we can see, and that's all we can truly know. Beyond that, we really can't take anything else for granted. Especially not based on the words of other blind elephant-feelers.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
> Looking at science, if science was good to humans, ms windows wasn't such a pain to use...
You're free not to use a computer, or to use another operating system.
> We are living in a culture, were we can't live without science, yes you are right, but if you look where it is heading. At the moment it isn't heading in the nice star trek direction... It is more heading in direction of big calamities, terrorism (without science no boms), diseases, war....
Without science no medicine either. Science can cure diseases, and sometimes completely eradicate them (currently only smallpox, but I'm sure we can do it again). Sure, the virus is still held in a few labs somewhere, but it hasn't killed anyone in decades.
> Why wouldn't I have been born without science ??? People have been born for thousands of years without science... Science says we come from apes ? There is even proof we have been walking strait up for millions of years, and still science says we come from apes.
It's quite likely that without science many of your ancestors would have died long before they were old enough to reproduce, but I admit GP made a lousy argument (unless your mother required a C-secion I guess). I don't know about your walking straight example, but the specifics are not really relevant: whenever science discovers it is wrong is becomes MORE accurate, not less.
> so you say science killed Christ, I rather lived without science then...
You claim not to be a christian, so honestly what do you care about some guy who supposedly died 2000 years ago? Besides, it wasn't science that killed him, just people. If the cross hadn't been invented yet, they'd just have beat him to death with a rock. Science merely enabled the particular way they killed him.
> And yes I am using a computer, and use it for work... If there wasn't one, we would live different, doing other stuff. You can't jump from one situation in the other, people are not used to it...
But you ARE free to do other stuff. Go live naked in the woods! You CHOOSE to use the fruits of the very science that you claim to dislike. There is a word for that: hypocrisy.
> The same when you grow up in a big town, you probably don't want to live some where without people, and the same way around.
So what are you trying to say? You don't like science but don't want to live without it? Or that we like science but only because we grew up with it?
> This is a discussion were we can go on for ages, you believe your stuff, I believe mine.
Yes, if only this were science, so we could use objective data to come to a conclusion.
> I just think science makes our lives more complex and slowly destroys our surroundings... Because money is involved, and moral isn't looked at...
Ah! So it's greed, not science, that you oppose?
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I challenge anyone create a testable hypothesis on whether there is a soul or life after death or heaven etc.
But first, I will need a gun and several volunteers.
Step right up folks, don't be shy, this won't hurt a bit and you may get to see god in person.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The experience of heaven in an NDE can be accounted for by chemical actions in the brain? Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat? Only a few on the fringes seriously took NDEs as evidence for heaven, because the possibility of hallucinations was too obvious. So, although this is interesting, don't expect it to have any effect on the views of religionists, because it's actually irrelevant to their beliefs.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It disproves some fundamentalist interpretations of NDEs, yes, but most people who these days have the strong fundamentalist views are as unlikely to accept this proof as they are to accept evolution.
For people who hold philosophy-of-mind views other than the strict dualism of traditional religions, though, it's not as clear what this shows. It shows that something physical happens in the brain when people have near-death experiences, but that in itself isn't too surprising, because something happens in the brain anytime people have any experience: all experiences, sensations, thoughts, plans, feelings, etc., are enacted through some combination of chemical/neuronal/etc. signalling. So it's not actually particularly interesting, philosophically, that someone found a particular one, since we already assume one exists for all sensations, thoughts, and feelings. What exactly that means is trickier. If you were to argue that this means NDEs are "merely physical" and don't correspond to any higher-level concepts at all, would you commit to saying that of all human experiences? It's not impossible, but I find most people balk at it: at most, they'll accept that some mental illnesses are "just brain chemicals" (e.g. "the depression is a chemical imbalance talking, not really you"), but they won't go so far as to admit that the fact that they love their mother, or enjoy steak, is "just brain chemicals" in the same way.
(I personally don't hold to the fully reductionist view; it's not clear to me that even a complete map of neuronal pathways actually resolves all philosophical questions, or renders higher-level concepts obsolete.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It depends on the philosophy you wrap around science. There's a particular kind of scientific rationalism that takes as one of its tenets: anything that cannot be investigated scientifically is obsolete mysticism that must be discarded. You can actually see a lot of that in this Slashdot discussion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Familiarity of this experience to what people like to think of heaven doesn't lead you to any probable guesses as to the validity of the heaven concept?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Don't post in this discussion and hope you get modpoints in the next few days
Every "Mod up parent" post I see when I have modpoints is one point lost to '-1 Offtopic'.
That will be kinda hard this time won't it? What about following your own advice?
Interestingly, one of the study authors at least is taking this the other way. Rather than taking the similarity between NDEs and ketamine experiences as evidence that NDEs aren't spiritual, he's taking it as evidence that ketamine experiences are spiritual, just like NDEs. It's not clear as a whole that explaining NDEs was even the goal: for at least one of them, it seems that explaining ketamine experiences was the goal.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is one occasion where things are up in the air and it will be a long time since science will be able to explain it. Science cannot explain what life is yet, how it happens or how something is alive versus something that isn't, and what that 'something' is that makes us alive, so trying to explain this is well wide of the mark at the moment.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that if you take enough ketamine you will go to heaven.
The problem with science is that they are missing the moral factor, allowing them to do everything that only hurts us, or destroys our world. They are of course doing some good things too, but the question is if those good things outreach the bad things. Looking at our earth, I would say no.
Science shouldn't have morals. Morals are nothing more than someone's opinion on how things should be. Most people do agree on the same morals.
Take for instance the age of consent. It can range anywhere from 9 to 20. Who is right? 9 seems disgusting to me but then people who believe it should be 20 may thing 16 is disgusting.
Is stem research morally wrong? Some think so but would it be morally right to stop something that may save millions of lives? Again some say yes and some say no.
It's pretty sad though that most people need some greater force to tell them to treat people as they want others to treat them. Perhaps humans aren't as advanced as we would like to think.
In my opinion, NDE is nothing more than the lie some very scared folk tell themselves (and then their doctors) to compensate the nothingness they've just been facing (or almost facing. This would explain why almost everyone sees the same thing and also why it's awkwardly familiar of a story for a judeo-christian.
This experiment show a potential, non-supernatural, explanation for why many people have similar NDEs. There are many people that think that since so many people see the same thing when near death, even if those people are not related in any way and have on reason to have seen the same thing, that they must be seeing something external, rather than something created from their own mids. This external place they have seen has been referred to as "heaven".
> As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yes... and by that logic every lightning strike that we don't measure may have been magical and thrown by Thor, and it's just that sometimes lightning is caused by electricity and those are the only ones we've measured.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly. They're free to pump some people full of chemicals that instantly break down ketamine and then almost kill those people (that'd be an interesting if somewhat immoral experiment) and see if any NDE's occured.
> Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat?
Well, I believe there is a lot of evidence that suggests not eating causes those chemical reactions, and no evidence that it is caused by some supernatural afterlife. Obviously we could use chemicals to make someone hungry even if they eat enough... but I fail to see how that proves food doesn't exist.
I agree with most of that, but not as sure about the last part. Sure, there are plenty of objective measures by which "people are living better today than they ever have". But, overall, people are today less satisfied with their lives than they used to be. It's not clear to me that that constitutes progress: if you triple the size of someone's house, give them a big-screen TV, a better doctor, and a new car, and they still are unhappy, it's not clear to me that you have actually improved their lives. In particular, a lot of the social institutions and relationships that used to improve people's quality of life have broken down over the past century or so, which reduces quality of life.
Of course I didn't originate that observation; there's a decent amount of sociological and psychological research roughly organized around the slogan, "everything's amazing but nobody's happy".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" -- Voltaire
also
"A witty saying proves nothing" -- Voltaire
Religion is immoral
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I thought maybe explaining how his post is counterproductive instead of just punishing him would have more effect. Consider it a social experiment...
Besides, I'm not telling the mods what to do, and he is, so I wasn't *really* being a hypocrite, only a little ;)
Wonderful -- leave them with more money for corrupt governments to screw them out of, so those kings (and presidents) can have palaces to rival the Pope's. Result!
Trust me, the poor don't need religion to get screwed over.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
One might add that some people are capable of acting morally without a god-like character telling them what to do, but rather by long-term survival strategy - it really pays off to be nice to others!
Well then, by extension this NDE thesis also shows that if there is no heaven, then there are no ghosts for the ghost buster TV shows. All this regarding paranormal entities people reort must be from a sick brain. The implications of this thesis is mindblowing, or should that be mind dying.
I'm afraid I'm one of the "just brain chemicals" people. In fact it's why I never trust my parents when they say anything positive about me as they don't really have much of a choice in liking me anyway... shut up mom that's just the "my-offspring" chemicals speaking! :p
The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio
[Citation needed]
How about the morals of big hollywood making billions of dollars throwing poor people in jail for copying a movie or a song
Not defending that it's right by me, or the general population, but they don't ooze rubbish about benevolence, and treating one's brother as you wish to be treated and all the rest. Hollywood is a corporation that's out to make money. That's what they claim to be. The church claims to be the representative of god on Earth.
Now tell me this,
If god is so good, then why do his peoples,
Place lightning rods atop of their steeples?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly.
No you're missing the point. The religionists don't have to argue any such dualism. They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine, and it's the ketamine that produces the qualia, the experience. They can argue that the experience can be artificially induced by introducing ketamine, but that says nothing about the supposed "natural" phenomenon.
Absolutely every experience we have come down to chemical actions in the brain. The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience, and it's bad science -- going beyond the observations -- to pretend that it does. The interesting debate here is not about religion at all, it's about the nature of consciousness itself.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That's what they claim to be
No, they don't. And they do ooze rubbish about benevolence.
If god is so good, then why do his peoples
It's a strawman argument. God isn't good. God is God.
This is my sig.
It's the k-hole. The easist way to find the k-hole is k + lots of booze .
The k-hole is a dose high enough to knock you unconscious. Combining k with booze is asking to not wake up again.
I wonder what other hallucinogen cause everyone to have the same basic hallucination.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Josef Mengele would concur.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
- Even if it did make any sort of sense, it's extremely disrespectful and, frankly, anti-scientific to call someone a moron based on their beliefs. You can't be a scientist without an open mind. You can't have an honest discussion without basic respect. In defending Science, please attack the argument and not the person.
I'm inclined to disagree. You can't call someone a moron for not having all the facts, but when someone willfully ignores the entire concept of fact.. Well, political correctness and politeness be damned, "moron" is far to mild a word.
Fortunately, your approval is not required.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There have never been any evidence for "heaven" and there never will be and this article can't prove it or prove against it. There is no need to either.
Though maybe that's what you want to say :D
Yes that's very true -- I agree.
What I experience subjectively as a mind, has an objective correlate in the physical brain. It is "correlated" somewhat loosely for now -- depression and certain chemicals appear together -- but sometimes you can cure depression by doing something mental, like changing beliefs, and sometimes by doing something physical, like changing diet, or maybe sometimes it is a bit of both.
It can be tempting to say that everything is physical, but that leaves a problem. If everything is just matter, just physical, then where is the subjectively experienced "picture" of the world that I'm experiencing? Where is the "inner movie" or the "man in the movie theatre"? If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located? Someone experiences a picture. Even in purely digital SLRs, there is nobody in the camera experiencing the image. The camera doesn't experience anything, it isn't a conscious being.
Yet, being a conscious being, as abstract and etherial as that sounds, being a pure consciousness, can't exist as far as we know without a physical body to be its "correlate".
It seems that both mind and matter arise as two aspects of the same thing, like two sides of a coin.
With that model, the key is that NDEs are "near" death, not actual death. So they never were heaven after incineration of physical body. Actually, as mind and matter are two sides of the coin, then for there to be anything after biological death, then there must continue to exist some form of physical energy afterwards. We don't have the instruments that can measure those "subtle" energies. Imagine if one day we discovered we could measure them, and that "something" was floating or being radiated away after death. Imagine you could detect "something" being beamed to another birth happening somewhere else. I'm not saying that's going to happen, I'm saying that is what it would take to "demonstrate" that one life was somehow linked energetically to another life by reincarnation, if such a thing really exists.
If there really is some kind of higher mind, then there would need to be some kind of energy to be the physical basis for it. Maybe in 1000 years we could detect that kind of stuff. Or maybe it just doesn't exist.
Fortunately, "Heaven" is not a wee bright light that occurs the instant before you die. Read through the Bible, you'll note that God exists outside his Creation. So, you're not going to be able to measure him or prove him by scientific observation.
Furthermore, "[w]e cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Efforts to do so will only generate confusion and disorder." John Boyd
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
The most violent episodes in our history are contributed to religious cults focused on the afterlife...
While it may be true that if you were to take all the murders throughout history that are attributable to religion, they would be far greater than those attributable to "other".
However, most reasonable people would agree that within the last 150 years or so, murders attributable to those who would deny others their beliefs and enforce atheism as a mechanism to further their control over society, have shown themselves to be much more efficient and ruthless murderers than anyone in history.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Josef Mengele agrees with you.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In other words , it explains that this experience itself, is not really heaven , but just a physical reaction . It doesn't say anything about heaven itself.
And seeing as no one has demonstrably "come back" from heaven, only from possibly an overdose to endorphins and suchlike, it's still a hell of a lot more scientific than all this "you must have faith" crap we've been subjected to for the past 2000 years.
There is still not one iota of proof for or against a god or a heaven, anymore than there is proof that Underpants Gnomes really exist ... the difference being, if I said I believe in the Underpants Gnomes, I'd get locked up in a mental asylum, but if I believe in God that's okay.
Only a few on the fringes seriously took NDEs as evidence for heaven, because the possibility of hallucinations was too obvious.
Actually, most people don't think about this kind of thing too seriously, and do assume NDEs are actual connections with God. I don't know if you're aware of this, but normal people don't really sit around and debate their beliefs, they just take them at face value.
So, no, it wasn't just fringes. It may have been the fringes of serious debate, but normal people do believe in this kind of bunk. Because they just don't question it at all.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
What evolutionary advantage do NDE's serve?
How does reducing trauma in the brains of those who are dying aid survival?
At the moment it isn't heading in the nice star trek direction.
You do know that Star Trek is portraying a brainwashed communist society, do you?
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Only time when I have an out of body experience is when after a few shrooms and and a few hits of White Widow and trying to drive....
"Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable."
OR they finally have to pull themselves together and GROW THE FUCK UP and start taking responsibility for the planet instead of just shrugging "there is nothing we can do" - there is something you can do you just can't be bothered to do it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Ketamine being able to give people "NDE" in some cases doesn't disprove or prove heaven.
:) ).
NDEs might be interesting to investigate, but from a scientific perspective claiming it explains Heaven would be stretching things at this point (but might get you more funding
Just because someone messes with your PC and causes it show a "shutdown sequence" screen (or "Blue Screen of Death"[1]) only tells you certain things about your PC.
[1] Of course for humans it's apparently more likely to be "bright tunnel of death".
I mean im all for believing it anything to shut up the extremest religionists...
I'd like to laugh at how ironic this statement is, but I get the feeling you're serious about what you said...
> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
> The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience
The chemical reaction itself does not. The circumstances surrounding it do. If you were to inject me with some chemical that makes me feel hungry, the chemical reaction may be indistinguishable from 'real' hunger, but we both know why and how. If we would only measure my brain to see if I was hungry and conclude on that basis that I need to eat more, we would be wrong (although in any other situation we'd probably be correct), but if we measure the whole thing (you injecting me, my brain getting hungry) we would understand that while the experience of hunger is real, the conclusion I would be tempted to make ('I need to eat!') would be wrong.
With NDEs, the same thing. Measuring ketamine in the brain of someone having an NDE doesn't prove the experience isn't real, but finding out the mechanism whereby the brain, when in the circumstances associated with dying, produces/releases ketamine would (assuming those circumstances also have a non-supernatural explanation). If you have an exact chain of events that lead to an NDE, and nowhere in that chain it says *heavenly magic triggers X*, that pretty much proves NDEs are unrelated to the afterlife (if any).
Take as an example, adultery. (defined loosely as a person in a committed relationship cheating)
The application of the scientific method would show if there was harm done by adultery. Also if there was harm done by faithfulness. Science could tell you what is greater.
Another example is smoking around babies. Is second-hand smoking bad for baby's health? Does it convey benefits?
Drinking or drug use while pregnant? ditto.
As to religion* and morals, from the attitude of the 'faithful,' religion, by exposition, has the right to define right and wrong. (Note, I am not arguing that is correct 'morally' or not, just that is part of the definition of religion)
Also, most religions that teach 'Heaven,' teach 'God as Creator'. So following that exposition, pappa knows best.
So here is where religion and science can meet. A scientist can take the moral tenets of a religion and test their rightness or wrongness (are they harmful or not) i.e. Adultery or 'Love thy Neighbor' or 'Kill the Infidel'
So, what do you think of that argument?
*Religion defined as 'a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.')
I'll go there right after you explain to me why I should believe this ancient book of yours, why all the other old books are not true, and why I should support a system that thinks it's okay to throw people in a lake of fire.
Wow, some random college girl writes a thesis, now there's proof.
This is hardly anything new. Suggested reading, author Dr. John Lilly.( The original Altered Statesman, upon whom the movie Altered States was based)
Truthfully there is a lot in between dying or dropping hallucinogens and other perceived dimensions that goes unexplained, except of course to the profoundly religious,profoundly non religious and of course "reliable" press like Newsweek or the National Enquirer.
There are a fair amount of questions about consciousness, perceived soul, other dimensions, creation, chemistry, physiology and more to be accounted for before some patchy explanation covers the subject.
But on the bright side of things, I'm glad Lisa probably got her degree, and some notoriety which will get her a nice career somewhere. Now athiesti can claim proof and argue with Jehovahs Witness in coffeeshops. But, as far as science goes this is a small step sideways and back just a little as this will be proclaimed either truth or garbage by an ignorant public.
We could use much much more research. Unfortunately this is still the dark ages and hallucinogenic research is still taboo to a superstitious nanny government.
My advise? Go score some LSD,not the blotter crap, and do a bit of research on your own. You might not get answers or answers you want, but gosh...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
But I reckon they only assume NDE's are encounters with God and Heaven because they already believe in God and Heaven, which is what I meant by they don't take NDE's as evidence of Heaven.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If NDE's can be explained by chemical reactions, that means there's no evidence for heaven right?
An atheist would grab an opportunity and say RIGHT! A christian would grab an opportunity and slam science.
A scientist with a properly neutral perspective will tell you there are too many questions left unanswered.
Timothy Leary would tell you " stick out your tongue".
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No, you are wrong. Science can answer moral questions, as Sam Harris eloquently argues in his latest TED speech
Not only that, but scientific thinking is arguably the best way to think about morals. What makes us and others around us happy? What decreases suffering both ours and that of others?
Surely, those are questions that have factual answers and some approaches will be better and some worse at promoting wellbeing and decreasing suffering. This puts moral questions squarely into the realm of science.
Again, watch the Sam Harris video for a much clearer and brutally honest talk on the topic of science and morality.
Some hold that morals are guidelines that prevent harm and do good for others and self. As such, science and morality are interrelated.
Take as an example, adultery. (defined loosely as a person in a committed relationship cheating)
The application of the scientific method would show if there was harm done by adultery. Also if there was harm done by faithfulness. Science could tell you what is greater.
Another example is smoking around babies. Is second-hand smoking bad for baby's health? Does it convey benefits?
Drinking or drug use while pregnant? ditto.
You're describing Consequentialism which, while one of the main forms of Ethics and (I believe) currently the most popular one, isn't the only one either.
So here is where religion and science can meet. A scientist can take the moral tenets of a religion and test their rightness or wrongness (are they harmful or not) i.e. Adultery or 'Love thy Neighbor' or 'Kill the Infidel'
So, what do you think of that argument?
It's not absolute by virtue of Consequentialism not being absolute. So, you can show that a particular tenet of a particular religion is ethically wrong for your own set of beliefs, but you can't show that it's wrong for everybody else which is what I believe you wanted.
Oversimplified analogy: buying chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla would be wrong for me, as I find vanilla has a much better taste, but that doesn't mean my brother is wrong in getting chocolate for himself.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Mescaline tends to lead to geometric imagery and mushrooms tend to lead to a feeling of connectedness.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Alcohol is a drug, and after mildly ODing on it I've been known to have long conversations with him via the big white telephone.
Mac is adding a texting feature to the ithrone
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Nonsense. It explains all those "God sent me back because HE wasn't ready to take me home yet" so-called experiences as just artifacts of the brain under extreme distress. And it's not like heaven would be a paradise - for one thing, it would be full of boring, nosy, uptight, self-righteus busybodies. For another, worshiping anything for eternity is not my idea of a good job. It would be pure hell over the long term to anyone with an IQ over that of thawing ice.
Anything too stupid to be said is sung-- Voltaire
We can expect to hear more on this thesis on American Idol soon.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
In any case, explaining the mechanism of NDE doesn't eliminate the possibility of something existing for our consciousness beyond the death of the physical body.
But once you explain away NDEs then the only thing in favour of an afterlife is wishful thinking. There is absolutely nothing else that you can point to as evidence for any heaven.
I've read through about half the posts on this lengthy thread, and I'm disappointed with the caliber of slashdot thinking.
(Okay, no surprise there! But still...)
People here are not recognizing that if there is any kind of afterlife state, the transition from the universe of everyday physics into that state is going to be similar to the experience of an observer accelerating toward the speed of light, or another observer dropping into a black hole. Among other things, time dilation is a reasonable expectation. So what we might observe from the outside of the experience may be entirely different from the experience of the person going through the "moment of death".
Connie Willis does a good job of exploring this in her novel Passage. Anyone interested in the changes of point of view that occur at those places where one is about to exit the known universe (approaching black holes, approaching the speed of light, approaching death) should check out this book. (The book is strongly based on the research into NDEs that are the subject of this slashdot story).
Willis needs almost 600 pages to talk about this. I won't pretend to be able to summarize her work. Her book can help a person shed preconceptions they did not even know they had, and become open to new points of view, and that is not easy stuff to handle (for either the author or the reader).
Will
Heaven (or whatever you want to call it) is a HIGHLY subjective place. Your idea of what it is an my idea of what it is could be very different. Who is right?
Heaven is a construct of the mind. If it exists (which in my opinion it doesn't), then it is nothing like what people think it is.
~X~
~X~
Unlike the Pope, he and his political party send their dark agents throughout the empire to confiscate the savings...
Uhmmm, Catholics still pass the basket and collect tithes, supposed to be 10% of your net.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
> No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
If there was no magic involved, then surely an argument could be made that anyone who uses high amounts of ketamine experiences heaven? Would injecting someone (even 'evil' people) with ketamine just before they die ensure they go to heaven? Do people who are unable to produce enough ketamine have no afterlife, or do they go to hell?
cannot verify a system whose cycles are larger than a human life span
That's what record-keeping is for.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
> Since our experience of the world is due to chemical reactions as well, does this mean that the world doesn't exist either?
Maybe, but if we are unable to notice the difference between a 'real' world and the illusion that we live in, there's little we can do about it. So we might as well assume the world is real and act accordingly, we don't have anything to lose.
Religious people tend to define their world based on beliefs. The word "believe" has a different, special meaning to them. Nothing is more natural to religious people than to think we "believe" in Science the way they "believe" in religion. Their belief is based on faith, which ultimately comes from authority - the Pope, bishop, shaman as interpreters of some ultimate authority that emanates from the divine - a book or the stars or whatever. They find it natural to transfer that to us and they think we take our beliefs from the authority of some fuzzy hierarchy revolving around Academia.
And yet there is a growing amount of religious people for whom Science (big S) is a religion. They call themselves atheists, but they aren't like rational philosopher atheists, instead they're "dig my heels in the sand, I'll believe what this scientist says even though I don't understand it because I don't like the religion I grew up with" type of atheists. There's no skepticism, no logic. The rational folk on both sides of the theist/atheist fence have to come to a point where we recognize that a certain portion of the population is mostly irrational, and that they'll blindly accept whatever view seems to be predominant.
Your understanding of science, and probably of religion, is... flawed. Science is the antithesis of religion, superstition, and all other things that require an unquestioning belief. Science, on the other hand, demands that we question every assumption and that, wherever we can, seek to disprove those assumptions which we have to date found to be reliable. By what twisted logic could you possibly suggest that the two are in any way similar?
As for morality, the most moral people I know are atheists. That's not to say that all atheists are moral, but those who are, become that way out of a deep regard for the notion of doing what is right because it is right. I contrast this with those whose moral compass is driven by fear of retribution. The concept of sin and punishment might modify behavior, but it most certainly does not make people more "moral".
Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable.
No it doesn't. Secular groups like Humanists believe in making the world better for the sake of future generations. Humanists don't believe in holy wars, or prostrating yourself before some figurehead who claims to speak for some magical cloud people. They believe in the progress and sustainability of the human species.
That's more than I can say for mainstream religions.
~X~
~X~
"Heaven produces ketamine" is not the same statement as "Ketamine produces heaven".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Not even that. Imagine we are all walking in broad daylight with a blindfold over the eyes. When we die the blindfold is lifted and we are to see the light. Now imagine somebody comes up with a chemical that renders the blindfold transparent for a while. Does it invalidate the reality of the light, or of the experience you get when you die?
To me there are two strong arguments that side towards the reality of what people report from their NDEs:
1 - A majority of NDE experiencers from very different age and cultural groups seem to concur on a number of common features, which would probably not be the case if these were all pure subjective hallucinations;
2 - Most remember and report an awarness and lucidity better than ordinary daily awareness, let alone what you experience during dreams. So if they all say that they definitely were more conscious, aware and basically "cold-headed" than ever, and that what they experienced was definitely real, who am I to simply sweep aside their testimony and declare these were only dreams and halucinations? This looks to me as simple denial of an annoying fact that doesn't fit into someone's simplistic worldview.
From my understanding there are two worlds, matter and spirit. Spirit is clearly distinct from matter and still does exist; for instance pain does exist, we all know that, however pain can not be reduced to a change in the concentration of some chemical neuro-transmitter in a certain spot in the brain; these are only molecules, and molecules being moved from one spot to another do not "hurt", they do not feel or create pain. However pain is felt by something and exists somehow, just as vision, taste, etc, and love, sadness, and thoughts exist, onnly not in the physical world.
Matter is governed by the laws of physics, with physical dimensions, the time arrow, etc. Spirit is not governed by these laws, hence perhaps the recurring claim by NDErs that "time was non-existent during the experience"; hence also the fact that heaven is not "inside" or "outside" or "somewhere", just as a feeling is not somewhere. It's just not of the physical world. However spirit is governed by other laws of its own (karma? divine justice? You tell me.)
Spirit interfere with matter through the channel of a living organism. Spirit gives inert matter the momentum to grow, evolve and go in a meaningful direction. This is the spirit clothing the lilies that's mentioned in the scriptures. A clone of myself that I would build to the molecule with the appropriate technology would go nowhere, and feel nothing, it would only be a lukewarm soft dummy, in fact totally indiscernable from a fresh corpse. It would lack the spirit, blowed into the clay like the scriptures say (the old guys who wrote those books some times ago where perhaps not total morons you know, they - our grandfathers - may even have an interesting message towards their turbulent sons).
What I would really like is to hear the testimony of some intelligent, well-educated guy about his NDE, not more dull bullshit about GOD IS LOVE! AND LOVE IS LIFE! AND GOD IS LIFE!!111 with plenty uncalled for exclamation marks. I would love somebody with a decent mathematical background to come back from an NDE with an intelligible description of the topology of it all. I would do it if it did not require willingly smashing my head or taking hazardous drugs or generally speaking putting my life or health at risk.
Incorrect.
There is no reason to explain or prove something that doesn't exist....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Really .. then you need to talk to the minister that spoke at a funeral I was at on Friday, because he claims that the moment one dies they simultaneously arrive in heaven.
.. you guys can't even agree on whether or not to eat meat on Friday, or whether abortion is murder.
One of you needs to get your story straight. Of course, with over 1,900 different Christian sects, it's hard for me to even believe something like a standard set of 'Christian values' even exists. Heck
When all you Christians can get together and agree on just what Christianity is, instead of just claiming that 'your' Christianity is the only right one, let me know so I'll know which 'Christian' church to go visit.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Did this god of Abraham come to you personally and tell you all this or did you get those rules from a book... like the wikipedia article you link to suggests? As for the other link, I won't bother disproving those logical arguments as I'm sure that's been done a hundred times (I almost stopped reading when I noticed the page started with the man that gave us the stupidity that is known as Pascal's Wager...) and we'll both end up throwing URLs at eachother. Agree to disagree?
Peace upon you, too.
Now tell me this, If god is so good, then why do his peoples, Place lightning rods atop of their steeples?
You may want to reconsider the view that "God is good", and consider that he may just be the guy on both sides.
You have it backwards. Religion is about belief and morals. The church is what is not moral and so forth. When there is a building with people who go into it and a person who directs them then you have an organization. Said organization with people needs guidance as a group so you have a control. Where there is opportunity for control you have a chance to seize power. That power is easy to corrupt to serve the hungers of man. Individual religious beliefs however are very moral. Individual moral choices take strength of character and happen inside you. Often to stick to your beliefs you must sacrifice and show self discipline. However, get a group together and pretty soon its other things that get sacrificed. Like people (Aztec) or other religions (See Spanish inquisition). You may wish to see the fact that religions played a key factor in creating a social contract that is deep programmed (not easily changeable) and was used to define order in a sort of pre-courthouse 'law'. Borders in the history of humanity have been drawn by the groupings of religions. Now we have grown up and have courts and laws written outside the scope of the religious cannon.
You yourself said ketamine (or the mechanism that produces ketamine) could be the mechanism that god uses (I assume you mean the mechanism would bring us to heaven, else I think we can conclude that NDEs are unrelated to heaven?). How would triggering that mechanism (possible if it is nonmagical) not bring a person to heaven?
And what if we find that the the mechanism that triggers the ketamine is, let's say, lack of oxygen, would you conclude that heaven produces hypoxia? What if we find the hypoxia is caused by lack of circulation and/or breathing? Would we conclude those things are caused by heaven? The whole thing sounds absurd to me.
Which just proves there are morons on both sides of the argument. Not particularly surprising, that.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
But no-one actually forces you to make that tithe. They can pass the basket every Sunday for the rest of my life (if I still were going to church), but nothing requires me to drop a dime into it.
Unlike, say, the feds.
Note that I just did my taxes, so I'm feeling a bit annoyed on the subject of taxes right at this moment.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yea, sorry but this one falls outside the realm of science and religion. That is why we have Philosophy to referee these things.
Living in Chile
And that's the reason why Christianity never really caught on among the native Americans. For they already had a paradise waiting for them full of women and sex.
We socialists are doing quite well thank you. As for Stalin, he had a very weird view on "science" which included executing any scientist he didn't like, promoting useless research into the paranormal and laughable agricultural methods that basically led to their agriculture dropping so low Russia had to import food for the first time in history. China OTOH had to struggle to fight of imperialism while dealing with sanctions and what not but seems to be doing quite well now, better than democratic India even.
The ability to record an actual death experience is the centerpiece of Brainstorm, a classic science fiction movie from the 80s, starring Natalie Wood (in her last screen role, I believe) as the user experience designer, Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher as the idealistic genius scientists, and Cliff Robertson as the entrepreneur. They invent a way to record brain activity, and then play back the experience so the user feels he or she has actually done it themselves. They make a "demo tape" of riding a roller coaster, hang-gliding, riding on horseback, eating great food, having sex, etc. When the chief scientist has a heart attack, she records her slow, agonizing death in an unforgettable scene. Whenever anyone plays it back, the shock starts to kill them, too.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I can't stand organized religion and certainly don't believe in the existence of a "heaven" (I consider myself a "mystical agnostic" and suspect that all existence is an infinitely vast, infinitely dimensional, omniscient metaverse and every one of us - including all life throughout space and time - are manifestations/embodiments of this - for lack of a better word - "God") but this "research" strikes me as ideologically motivated...
The stimuli in this case are the chemicals, and they ALTER what people accept as reality.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Half of all native Americans are women. Are you implying that native American women are all lesbians?
Or that paradise isn't open to native American women - just native American men? If native American men are like other men, the women will be too busy trying to teach them how to change the toilet paper roll instead of leaving one lonely square on it so that it's "someone else's turn", and pick their dirty underwear and used towels up off the floor.
I mean that religionists could argue that ketamine is the mechanism God uses to produce the experience of heaven in the physical body (which, if the religionists are mainstream Christian, they may argue that the spirit will soon be leaving anyway, so this is just a transitional experience). There are also chemical processes that produce the experience I have of sitting in a room typing this message whilst listening to a French world music internet radio station -- or, if you are a religionist, that God uses to give me the experience of sitting in a room etc. The experiences are not 100% dependable. If I've recently taken a hallucinogen then the physical sensations I receive might not be produced by by external physical environment, but the resulting chemical processes in the brain would have to match those produced by the actual experience of sitting in a room etc, because those chemical processes are what the experience is (unless you're a dualist and you believe that it is some sort of a ghost in the machine that has the experiences). If I've recently had ketamine administered then my experience of heaven may not be produced by a "real" experience of heaven (the materialist will be sure they are not), but if a "real" experience of heaven exists for the material body (and if we're still looking from a materialist perspective) then it will be the same chemical processes as a "fake" one.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
> If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located?
If I cut open my computer (and don't die of electrocution), I can't find any of my pictures in there either. I'm going to come up with the revolutionary hypothesis that sometimes when you open something up and submit it to a visual inspection, you can't immediately figure out how it works. That doesn't mean the inner workings will forever be a mystery, and it doesn't even mean they are complex, it just means you're doing it wrong.
Fair enough, it seems I misunderstood you :)
The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio, just a lot of old stuff that frankly isn't worth very much.
The Vatican itself is estimated to have assets of between $1.5 to $15 billion.
If you consider the Vatican to be the head of a multinational corporation, and include all worldwide assets of the Roman Catholic Church, some estimate they have close to $100 BILLION in money, property and other assets. And think how much of that is tax-free.
This website contains no CSS formatting: delusions of living in 1995 may ensue.
I don't know. My own belief is that you go to the Cat Mother, sort of a feline Gaia. She lives near the Great Food Bowl, and you get to see all your previous pets there too. And the end of days, you are judged by how you treated all living things. She knows if you've been bad or good. If you qualify, unlimited pet treats forever. If you don't, well, let's just say that you get to go to the lawyer planet where you will be treated to endless lawsuits and court trials with no escape...ever.
To find out how to qualify, go to your local shelter today and see if a cat will chose you to be part of its entourage. If so, you are in like Flint, if not...well, you need to work on adjusting your behavior a bit until you do qualify.
Well, a few days ago, I had a dream where my father and I had a conversation with Bill Gates (*really*) [1]. When I woke up I thought "What a cool dream, what brought that about?" I put it down to having watched the TED conference presentation by Bill a few months ago, articles I have read about his house (where the conversation took place) a few years ago and the general separation (2-3 degrees) that I have from him [2]. I can contrast this "memory" (which might better be called a synthetic pseudo-experience) with a ~17 year old memory of a diner at Larry Ellison's house that included Steve Jobs and others. The advantage of the 2nd "memory" is that there were sufficient additional people present and external evidence (I probably have the charge records of flying from Seattle to S.F. and have the email exchanges setting up the diner) so that I have a relatively high confidence that the diner really took place in physical reality rather than just the reality of thoughts bouncing around in my head [3].
So, are NDE "real"? Quite probably for some people, particularly those who may have spent a significant fraction of their lives participating in or holding on to a particular perception of "reality". Are they "significant"? Perhaps only if you use them constructively in the remainder of your life. Otherwise I'd tend to place them in the same category as my conversation with Bill.
1. Over the last few years my dreams have become more complex and my ability to recall them seems to be increasing. I tend to put this down to some combination of possible mental changes from a variety of drugs, natural aging and simply having the time to sleep more than other periods of my life.
2. My ability to "make stuff up" to fill in the blanks in dreams amazes me. I put it down to the fact that I've lived 50+ years in a relatively fixed framework (non-changing laws of physics, relatively "normal" people around me, etc.) so the reality that my brain "expects" is pretty fixed. If I could harness the ability of my brain to "make up good (borderline plausible) stories" for my dreams in my waking reality I'd be a famous fiction author.
3. Generally speaking acting on the basis of the validity of the external reality rather than the internal reality saves me the trouble of having someone come and bail out of jail the next time I encounter Bill and nonchalantly walk up to him saying "Yo Bill, what's happenin?".
Any true religion would happily COOPERATE with science.
Any religion that shuns science is shunning the creative mind that God gave us.
I became agnostic just a little while back. Despite this, if I could go back to believing in some sort of higher entity/afterlife, I would. It's comforting, and I don't begrudge people that sort of comfort. The only thing I begrudge is the manipulation factor that accompanies religion, but that doesn't seem to be 100% across the board. I have a feeling that we're seeing a temporary increase in fundamentalism, but that too shall soon pass. That said, I have looked at some reports of NDEs, and I've read that even very young children have had very mature visions while clinically dead, which makes me wonder if there are still some variables which we aren't accounting for. Also unexplained is the characteristic "hovering" associated with NDEs, where clinically dead or comatose individuals report details of medical procedures from impossible angles.
Regardless of one's views on supernatural experiences, religion, or life after death, the arguments presented in the linked article must be rejected, because they are illogical, and very embarrasingly so for their authors, and also for their publishers.
In essence, they argue from the premise that the mere fact that a perception of having an experience can be triggered by an artificial stimulus to the brain, implies that the experience itself is never caused by anything in objective reality, and is entirely a product of subjective internal biochemical processes. But that conclusion doesn't follow logically, at all.
For example, we know that visual hallucinations can be triggered by artificial stimuli, but from that observation, it does not follow that light does not exist, and that those of us who claim to see things, such as this text on the screen, must be imagining it.
We also know from experiments conducted by electrically stimulating the brains of patients undergoing brain surgery, that vivid memories of childhood experiences can be evoked, having such clarity and vividness that they seem to the patient as if they were happening right then and there on the operating table, at the time of the experiment. But from these observations it does not follow that those experiences never really took place at all, or that the persons claiming to have had those childhood experiences were merely hallucinating when they were four years old, and thought that they were playing with their father.
How do you explain people who were born blind?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
They used to, you know. If the church is no longer demanding a tax from you, you have the rise of secular governance to thank.
Of course, that secular government imposes taxes of its own. If you want to play the game of living in an industrialized civilization that creates and defends "property", you've got to pay the ante. TANSTAAFL.
Some perspective might reduce the annoyance: American tax rates are near historically low levels, and are lower than those in comparable nations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No, it would only insure they are stuck in a k-hole. Ketamine is not the actual substance released in your brain, it is an animal anesthesia that also causes hallucinations. It is just been proven to cause a similar experience in your brain as a NDE. So the actual drug ketmaine has nothing to do with our brains, NDEs, or the existence of heaven.
I would hate to think that only the stupid raver kids could get into heaven - if it really does exist.
"But this one goes to 11!"
You call these logical? This is a joke right? It's complete nonsense that doesn't prove anything.
1- All things move but something must have started moving first. That thing is god. No reasons given. IT JUST IS. Doesn't sounds very logical to me. I mean I guess you could be calling the big bang "god", but that's not exactly proof of some higher intelligence of deity.
2 - Same as the first except this time it's about making stuff instead of moving. Again it ignores a whole lot of what we know about the universe.
3 - Makes a bad assumption with no proof about how the universe works to back up its second illogical point.
4 - Announces a new measurement for "goodness". The God measurement. I'm not quite sure how this works. Maybe if you're a good person you're said to be 5 gods good and if you kill someone you're -1 gods.
5 -Not even sure what the fuck this is talking about. Far too abstract for my tastes.
If this is the best you can do at proving the existence of a god then I submit this as evidence that proves god doesn't exist. This is totally pathetic.
This is a pretty cold thing to throw out on Easter. Have some respect for other people's beliefs even if you don't agree with them or even follow a spiritual path.
Though not for religious purposes, but to aggregate the orgasm at jacking off while strangling them selves:
"When the brain is deprived of oxygen, it induces a lucid, semi-hallucinogenic state called hypoxia. Combined with orgasm, the rush is said to be no less powerful than cocaine, and highly addictive" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_asphyxiation
It explains why people thought up the idea of heaven. It doesn't explain heaven because religion has nothing to do with science.
But those aren't the primary moral questions. The primary moral question is, "why should I give a fsck what makes others around me happy, or what decreases the suffering of others?"
Science doesn't give us "shoulds". It tells us "do A and B will probably be the result, while if you do X you'll get Y," but it can't tell us whether B or Y is "better". You could conclude that if we do A, we'll destroy the biosphere and the human race will be extinct in 200 years, while if we do X, taxes would have to go up 1%, but science can't tell you whether the extinction of all life on the planet more complicated than a bacterium is "better" than a higher tax bill. The question is outside its domain.
Supernatural ethical systems tell us that some divine judge is going to spank us if we do A and give us candy if we do X, so we'd better do X. Given the lack of evidence for the existence of such a divine judge, much less evidence of what its desires are, rational, intelligent, educated people reject supernaturalist ethical systems.
There are many ethical systems that are not supernaturalist: utilitarianism, contractualism, or rights theories, to name a couple. But each of these ultimately rests on some set of intuitions or assumption -- ethical axioms, if you will.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Perhaps you are confusing the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries), with the Enlightenment (17th and 18th century)?
Um, just who is this "head of the liberal movement" of whom you speak? Surely you're not talking about our moderately conservative President?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Science works, that's how we figured out how to make computers, and refrigerators, and so on.
Actually, no. Science is how we figured out that evaporation has a cooling effect; the development of a refrigerator was a matter of invention and engineering. (James Harrison, who made the first practical refrigerator was an engineer but not strictly speaking a scientist). It is one of the rhetorical cheats of these discussions that "anything positive" gets retrospectively attributed as being science -- the rhetorical argument going: "everything good" is attributed as "science" (by widening my definition of science -- eg, to just personally testing if something works), thus "science" is everything good; I'm going to label whatever you say as "non-science" (by re-narrowing my definition of science -- eg, to require full peer-reviewed publication), thus whatever you say is not "everything good" and must be wrong-headed and vile.
The grandparent post's claim that "science is a religion" is to an extent true -- in that non-scientists often treat it as such. There is a popular belief without evidence that "eventually science will solve every problem". There is a popular belief counter to the evidence that "everything science says is True" when that is emphatically not the case (eg, JJ Thomson rightfully remains a hero of science even though his plum pudding model was wrong). There is an unrealistic idolisation of humanity on the grounds of our "great scientific achievements", when we're still pretty much as feeble, week, and transient as we ever were, just with a few more gadgets around the place, and more of us surviving to our (still very brief) hundred-odd years of life.
You're speaking more of Agnostics, who openly declare that they are idiots. It's not uncommon for things to exist that we simply do not understand.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Calling religion "fantasy" is a poor way of putting it, as it implies that it is "made up" and would have no existence without someone dreaming it up. In theory, this could be true, but it doesn't have to be. Consequently, by using that terminology, you are implying that you know it is fantastic, which you don't.
Just because you can't see or prove something exists, does not mean it has no objective reality beyond your senses. All we get to decide is whether we place credence in that we are told exists beyond our actual senses. For instance, I accept a computer chip works because there are tiny transistors which manipulate electricity in the desired manner. However, there is no way I can tell that this is actually the case without busting out my CPU and examining it. Now, I have no reason to believe that I couldn't do this, and if I had sufficient experience and resources, I could probably prove it.
Unfortunately, I will never have the resources, experience or time to prove everything that I accept as true scientifically. If I were to then use your definition, I would have to call call most the explanations for today's technical achievements "fantasy". This is certainly not the way to think about anything if you want to get anywhere.
What religion bases itself on is an unprovable hypothesis. This makes the scientific method useless in answering questions about it, but it doesn't mean that what we cannot prove or disprove scientifically is imaginary. You are free to believe it is fictional, but you are on the same ground that the religious people are when they say that it isn't fictional. Neither of you can prove it, so you're just going to circle around each other with logic based on differing sets of accepted laws. That doesn't help anything or anybody.
Where have my mod points gone for the last several months now??!
The point being is that the morals come from the human or the society rather than from science.
And science will always offend someone because it will always go against someone's beliefs. If we catered to the most backwards members of society we the only medicine we would probably have are leeches and cutting holes in people to drain the bad stuff.
"There is an unrealistic idolisation of humanity on the grounds of our "great scientific achievements", when we're still pretty much as feeble, week, and transient as we ever were, just with a few more gadgets around the place, and more of us surviving to our (still very brief) hundred-odd years of life."
What metric are you using to determine this? Human beings could exterminate all life on this planet if we wanted to. We can launch rockets into space. We can make fire. We can build methods of locomotion unseen in the natural world. We exterminated the scourge of small pox. We have effectively tripled our lifespan. We have built machines that burn with the power of the stars. Our computers rival those found in nature as does the beauty of our art forms. Our achievements make the Gods of the ancient world seem petty and pathetic.
We may be violent and cruel and at times evil beyond comparison, but damn are we marvellous by any of the standards we have devised. What are we to idolise if not that which is good in humankind? Should we pray to small sky daddies whose pathetic notions of grandeur seem to extend only to concern for our sexual conduct? For all it's faults the wonder that is the human race is more worthy of praise than and idolisation than any deity.
Actually, at least some people have turned to religion after experiencing an NDE, because it "showed" them the existence of God.
The world isn't divided in Believers and Atheists; there's plenty of people who could probably be described as "agnostics", because they don't have strong feelings towards neither option. To them, an experience like that can be life changing.
Dilbert RSS feed
Trust, but verify.
"Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable."
Said the Anonymous Coward.
Also, funny how rampant grammatical errors are an excellent clue towards the quality of one's argument. Feel free to get out of the Dark Ages at any time, man.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'm sure the millions of dead would agree with you.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh yeah?? Well my particular flavor of Christianity says that your particular flavor of Christianity is wrong! I should know, I spent 18 years with them and they say that when you die, that is your judgment day, the day it is determined if you go to heaven or hell (or in yet other flavors, there's the third option of purgatory).
Flamebait aside, you cannot claim your particular flavor is right any more than I can claim the particular flavor I used to be associated with is right. So please, stop passing off beliefs as fact.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The computer screen in front of you is all in your brain. The concept of science is all in your brain. EVERYTHING is all in your brain. It doesn't prove or disprove the existence of anything. It seems that no one who posts on Slashdot has studied even a modicum of philosophy! Plato and his cave anyone? Descartes?
The fact that the brain generates our experience of reality + the fact that the brain is mutable says nothing about existence or nonexistence.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
FINALLY someone here who gets it!
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I'm kind of surprised to see someone bringing up Aquinas' arguments as relevant to a modern discussion about the existence of god. Usually someone smart enough to be aware of them also knows that anyone with even the slightest exposure to philosophy or formal reasoning has probably, at least once, shredded one or more of those arguments as an exercise. Tearing them apart is about one step up the difficulty ladder from identifying elementary errors in false syllogisms.
Further explanation on 4 & 5:
4 is basically "see that tree with green leaves? Now imagine the greenest thing. That thing is god". You may replace green and greenest with any quality.
OK, that's not quite fair; it's more like "now imagine the tree-est thing". He's essentially saying that Plato's forms are god.
5 is just a very old form of the entropy argument. Drop a cup, it breaks; drop pieces of a cup, they don't form a whole cup. This might not be so silly an argument except for all the things we've learned about how molecules can self-arrange in high energy environments (Earth, that is).
To be replaced by the likes of Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et. al.
And by et. al., you mean who?
George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Ron Paul? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Ronald Reagan?
All just as much part of the government as the three you mentioned above.
Or are you and all of the so-called "anti-gubmint" posters here really just having a hissy fit because your guy didn't win the election?
Where was all of this outrage in the last 8 years? You know, the recent period when civil rights -really- were usurped by the Feds.
Fucking crybaby hipocrites...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
It's not absolute by virtue of Consequentialism not being absolute. So, you can show that a particular tenet of a particular religion is ethically wrong for your own set of beliefs, but you can't show that it's wrong for everybody else which is what I believe you wanted.
Oversimplified analogy: buying chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla would be wrong for me, as I find vanilla has a much better taste, but that doesn't mean my brother is wrong in getting chocolate for himself.
I think what could fix this would be an answer as to whether right and wrong are objective or subjective properties. In your example of ice cream flavors, that is clearly a subjective taste. If you could show that right and wrong are purely objective then the GPs post holds some good merit, but if right and wrong are subjective (a real possibility) then your counter wins out.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
You take the blue pill, you go back to your normal life and live as you always believed. If you take the red pill, a Christian will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I once had a signature.
SLLT
(Strategic Lightning Limitation Treaty)
Why don't you ask him personally what the Book of Revelation says about judgment day? You're putting word into his mouth and use this to contrast our difference. I don't think this is fair.
I once had a signature.
See Relevation chapter 20.
I once had a signature.
Sorry, "Revelation" chapter 20. I typed too quickly.
I once had a signature.
Calling religion "fantasy" is a poor way of putting it, as it implies that it is "made up" and would have no existence without someone dreaming it up.
That pretty much defines religion. Its all made up fantasy that you can either believe in, or not. But don't pretend there is ANY verifiable truth.
Just because you can't see or prove something exists, does not mean it has no objective reality beyond your senses.
I agree there are lots of things we don't know about or understand, but until its proven to exist its still fantasy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hope you feel warm and fuzzy about your blissful feline Gaia.
I once had a signature.
The complete and utter lack of logic in this thread is the sort of drivel that arises whenever one attempts to discuss the intersection of science and religion. You've got religious zealots who want to believe that every scientific phenomenon explains their religion, and atheistic ones who want to believe that every single shred fights against religion.
The religious don't actually have to make any argument regarding ketamine in order to validate or invalidate views on heaven, because only the fringes ever thought that NDEs had anything to do with it. Even if this thesis were more widespread, the argument that ketamine can produce a similar experience is irrelevant. I could knock someone out and put them on a stage set designed to look like the pearly gates as well. Additionally, the Thor bit is absurd because we have a complete model of what lightning looks like, and it has nothing to do with Thor. This sort of argument is ridiculous, and only serves to make the person positing it feel more intelligent.
Are you saying millions of dead agrees with me that Russia's agricultural policy failed and that China had to struggle with imperialism or did you mean to imply something else?
While certainly not conclusive, it puts the lie to the assertion that "there is no evidence of an after-life."
http://www.nderf.org/evidence_afterlife.htm ...
BTW, the author of the study referenced by the Newsweek story had this to say:
'I am no longer as opposed to spritual explanations of these phenomena as this article would appear to suggest. Over the past two years (it is quite some time since I wrote it) I have moved more towards the views put forward by John Lilly and Stan Grof. Namely, that drugs and psychological disciplines such as meditation and yoga may render certain 'states' more accessible. The complication then becomes in defining just what we mean by 'states' and where they are located, if indeed location is an appropriate term at all. But the apparent emphasis on matter over mind contained within this particular article no longer accurately represents my attitudes. My forthcoming book 'Ketamine' will consider mystical issues from quite a different perspective, and will give a much stronger voice to those who see drugs as just another door to a space, and not as actually producing that space'.
This is like saying that although I live outside my computer, I am irrelevant to the lives of the Sims living in it.
I could never enter their world in person, and maybe I will just watch them and let them live their entire lives on autopilot without any input. But for them, my whims are absolute. Get in the shower! Go have a snack! My power increases if I get a trainer to alter them more directly.
If they displease me I am totally building an unescapable maze house around them while they sleep ("For the love of God, Montressor!"), or pulling out the pool ladder while they swim. Does their code have anything where they feel a rush of hormones and peacefulness as they die? > : -)>
Maybe I will play the game as a benevolent guide, helping them meet their needs and finding love and progressing through their career. But nothing in the game says I have to do that. I'm just as free to make their lives a living hell for my amusement.
What is really interesting is, what if a Sim somehow achieved sentience? They somehow reverse engineered that they were in a program, figured out their linear address in RAM and so forth, realized I was watching. What if they looked directly at the screen and addressed me by my user name, begging for me to sypmathize with and help them?
That would probably be akward. But it could also be touching. Would they ask me to help guide their life, or butt out and live it the best they could? Could the Sim who figured out s/he was a program convince has family and neighbors or would s/he just be seen as insane? Would they become a Prophet? Would they end up nailed to a SimCross for being too insane? Maybe they could ask the user to open up their code and change the WillDieIfThisOld{76) variable to 100,000 or something. Then the NDE hormones wouldn't be needed!
There's probably a good movie in this somewhere.
No, those are primary moral questions. Because the happiness of others is directly related to the wellbeing of the society as a whole and the stability and the wellbeing of the society as a whole is clearly the catalyst of our own wellbeing. Morality needn't be more complicated than that (though the term is loaded with religious bullshit).
In addition to that, we are programmed to care about others. This is a simple matter of nature. I have no interest to talk about exceptions or to discuss why our chemistry works the way it does, but the matter of fact is that most people care about their fellow human beings.
Again, this is simply in addition to the first point, which places our concern for our own wellbeing above that of others. We, are, as you say selfish beings. But we are also reasonable and intelligent beings.
As far as science not being able to tell us what is better. This is patently wrong. "Better" simply means better at producing our wellbeing and that of others. Any other argument relating somehow to some morality of the entire universe and/or unconscious matter is clearly ludicrous. Only people in funny hats need be concerned with the opinion of the universe, the rest of us can be content with providing a better society for ourselves.
Now, the question you propose is in reality very simple to answer within this framework of wellbeing for myself and others, like yourself. We both know that the extinction of the human race will not make ourselves or our children happier, or even existent for that matter. It is only when you attempt to think of morality as somehow applying to the entire universe where things become obtuse.
So again, within the framework of providing wellbeing for conscious beings (and we know our level of concern scales with the level of consciousness a being exhibits), these question simply become question like "Will destroying the entire human race be conductive of a happy society".
Well Mr. Slippery, now that I've thought about it, no, I think it will not.
I am not sure which position you are trying to support. I won't disagree, but since most of us are programmers, I thought I'd just mention... When you accept a) that the universe is mathematical in nature and that you are nothing more than an abstract formula that exists of its own accord, and b) that all the experiences, spiritual or otherwise, of a mind are the result of a mere computation, you will come to terms with your own immortality.
I am a 'random religionist' and given the hate for christians and other people of faith here I am posting AC. So if you are experiencing a "near" death experience - you have not been to heaven yet. No one who experiences actual heaven will be in a position of communicate it back to us. The have stepped past that threshold.
Second. I think that theology should be taught independently of morality. Some things can be reasoned to be good or bad without getting God involved, and metaphysical discussions need not be concerned with right or wrong. Plus, such an arrangement would be far more ecumenical. Atheists can never stamp out religion no matter how good their arguments, so this sort of arrangement would really be good for everybody.
I wonder what other hallucinogen cause everyone to have the same basic hallucination.
I've never tried it myself, but from what I've read DMT causes a number of specific visual hallucinations that are remarkably similar among most users.
Also it should be noted, the most widely used drugs classified as "hallucinogens" (LSD, psilocybe mushrooms, peyote/mescaline, MDMA) do not really produce proper hallucinations, and are often now referred to as entheogens.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
but I pray there ain't no hell..."
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Ron Paul? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Ronald Reagan?
Please don't lump Ron Paul in with the rest of those guys...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Albert Eintsein on the need for *both* science and religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Also, while you would be right to say some things are better than in the past, many things are not. Rampant vitamin D deficiency from too much time indoors (and listening to dermatologists) is contributing to all sorts of health problems like cancer, heart disease, and even increasing autism.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Depression from lack of community (something not valued by modern economists) is widespread.
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Herbert Shelton, who from the 1920s advocated sunlight, better diet, and occasional fasting as proven ways for good health, was hit with endless lawsuits and harrasment from medical professionals:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
Our entire society has become locked in pleasure traps associated with supernomal stimuli, manipulated by advertisers to destroy children for profit:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
Sure, we have neat iPads now. What does it matter if the kids are all obese and depressed?
The mainstream USA is in a death spiral as a society because it refuses to acknowledge things like the irony of using the tools of abundance like robotics, AI, material science, and so on to build weapons of destruction like nuclear millsiles and killer robot drones, rather than use the same tech to create abundance for all and have a basic income. Likewise, our society is unable to admit the declining value fo most human labor and the need for a rethink of our economics like a basic income. Renewable energy like solar thermal, geothermal, and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear for decades when you factor in the external costs of war, pollution, health costs, and risks, but our society refuses to price those costs in. I could go on about many other issues (like how organic agriculture is cheaper when looking at all the costs including soil depletion and oil, singple payer health care being way cheaper, and so on). Still, there are hopeful signs here and there, so our society may yet heal itself -- but such a society might not be recognizable to many in the USA today.
So, while you have some points, the poster you are replying too makes many good ones too. As Albert Einstein says in the link at the top, science can tell us what is, maybe some of what was, and matbe even some of what could be, but science can't tell us what *should* be. That is a realm beyond science, to set our goals and the patterns we choose to preserve or strive for. Unfortunately, too often science gets misused to claim it is telling what should be. (Economists often do that with claimed mathematical precision.)
To understand another aspect of how academic science is a cult in a sense, with conservative politics woven throughout is, see Jeff Schmidt on how all professio
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well said. I agree but it does depend on how you define deity or god. Not being a man of religion I tend to think of god as being the pattern of everything in the universe. The universe itself is a living, breathing entity, the scale and complexity of which the human mind cannot begin to understand. Man's achievements don't hold a candle to the invention of the cosmos.
I'd say a k-hole feels a lot more like hell.
If we had any brains we would put together that the Dempublicans and Republicrats are pretty much the same run around each time. If we feel we must have a two party system, we need to quit inviting them to the party.
They both screw the economy and start wars, but Al Gore is the reason it takes two flushes to get a turd out of the house.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Well at least with religion you only get dirty looks for not droppin in the plate, I understand.
But with my Catholic friends stories, you might as well be taxed.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I'm relating that between breakdown from heat, fingering from heads and no quality control to speak of, it is by far better to get a drop of liquid LSD on your tongue that try to figure out if it is going to take 5-9 chunks of blotter to trip you for the weekend. Not to mention the price of a hit on paper has skyrocketed about 1000% in the last decade.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I'd suggest that the reason such a comparison seems so one sided is because one is comparing two things of very different character. One would not say that Citizen Cane was better than Fermat's last theorem or vice versa. The notion of comparing the two just seems odd.
Here to character of the comparison is akin to saying that "Automatic for the People" is superior to "Night Swimming". The notion of comparing an album to a song strikes me as very strange as well.
Furthermore a collection of sentient entities created the cultural, social and scientific achievements of human kind. If the universe itself is a mind, then what has it achieved? It cannot do anything because it is everything. I do not get credit for the blood flowing my veins or the growth of my hair. If the universe is everything then every one of its 'achievements' is nothing more impressive than the beating of it's heart or the digestion of it's food.
A god who created a universe would be impressive indeed. Yet I see no evidence to suggest such an entity exists and plenty of compelling reasons to think otherwise.
It doesn't say anything about heaven itself.
Quite right. But then again, if 'proof' were a valid criterion in religion, nothing would say anything about heaven :p. It does say a LOT about the 'evidence' that people present to 'prove' the existence of heaven. Wanna believe in heaven? - go for it. Just don't do anything as inane as attempting to justify it rationally (as so many people are wont to do).
It's rather amusing how the descriptions of heaven have had to be upgraded every generation (and in the process made more vague and abstract) as reality catches up by making life on earth better and better. Heaven for a second century man would probably have been close to living on modern day Earth - even in a third world slum. Heaven for a second century noblewoman would have been close to living in any western country after the middle ages as an ordinary woman.
You are, unfortunately correct. However, I for one am satisfied to see the ground that the religs stand on shrink steadily, though asymptotically to nothing. I won't begrudge them that last minuscule standing space as long as I have the rest of reality to call home ;-).
;-)
Note also that as a practical matter, irrationality provides a substantial incentive for people who embody rationality. It scares me sometimes, but we owe a great deal to the religs for pointing out exactly what needs to be looked at. They're like the guys with the flags on golf courses
I agree that such comparisons are strange at best, but you're making them too when you compare humans to deities or your digestive system to the matter of the universe. It's a necessary part of the debate.
The universe being a mind doesn't mean that achievements within it cannot be attributed to itself. If you figured out how to reach inside your brain and make a modificiation I would consider that an achievement. The scale of the universe makes any actions taken by it that much more impressive.
What's the matter? Did my comment hit a bit close to home?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"We socialists are doing quite well thank you"
In spite of the millions of dead or because of the millions of dead?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that you are being called a moron because you believe in an afterlife. I doubt many posters actually subscribe to such a simplistic view and those that do are frankly, well, morons.
Your post seems to suggest leaving you to believe what you want to believe. This is a public forum in which people debate. That is what they do here. Preaching isn't unpopular because it is annoying, it is unpopular because it isn't actually a form of debate or persuasion. When you are called a moron it isn't preaching. It is mockery. It will often be preceded or followed by an argument whose purpose is the elucidate precisely why someone is wholly unimpressed with your assertion. This is a recognised, if admittedly unsophisticated, form of debate.
People tend to resort to mockery in debate when a position is so absurd that pointing out it's flaws becomes a ridiculously long exercise. For example I would guess you believe in an after life because it is somewhat cryptically mentioned in a self contradictory book which claims to describe a supremely divine being who for some reason seems to tolerate child sacrifice and who, after a really odd personality change, decides that his grand plan should include having himself killed by the occupying government of a bunch of rebellious illiterate desert peasants and then coming back to life wounds and all before ascending to heaven. Or some variant there of.
How are we supposed to treat such a belief in a serious manner? What level of respect is appropriate for such assertions? It may not be the best or most eloquent form of debate in the world, but seriously, what do you expect?
If you aren't interested in debate, that is fine, you don't have to be here. If you are attempting to change the prevailing viewpoint as to what is considered civilised discourse that is also okay. At present my understanding is that the social norms here extend to a degree of mockery. Personally I prefer long winded expositions of the faults in others positions even if following a snappy one liner with the suggestion that ones opponent is mentally deficient can be wholly more satisfying.
I would however suggest that there is no moral equivalence between believers who come and interrupt genuine debate with preaching and non-believers who add flavour to on going debate with colourful dialogue.
You do realise that the parent was modded down because their views were unclearly expressed and demonstrably wrong right?
They were modded down because almost everyone reading it could come up with better arguments for the case they are making than they do, regardless of if they agree with them or not.
Heck watch I will do it for them. The following is not my viewpoint. I do not agree with it, I think it is bullhonky.
-----
Science results in the advancement of material capability. It enables us to build bigger bombs and better light bulbs. One of the main assumptions of the modern secular outlook is that this will result in greater quality of life. This is actually not the case. Improvements with material capability often inversely correlate with these factors.
Religion is an effort to advance the spiritual capability of a society. We need to move beyond trying to make people happier by building them a better X-box and instead work towards a better spiritual existence.
Religion is tradition and tradition is accumulated knowledge. The more rabid elements of our secular society are building a world-view around the notion that material advancement is all that matters and disregarding the wealth of knowledge that lies locked away in religious understanding. Worse than this many of the wish to expunge this collective wisdom from the zeitgeist entirely.
This is clearly a foolhardy endeavour.
-----
I think the above few paragraphs are entirely crap by the way. I don't agree with anything I say in them. But it still a better argument that the one the OP presented for the strengths of religion and the weaknesses of a naturalistic secular outlook.
Ah yes but I'm comparing humans to deities for dramatic effect. Those deities (Zeus, Thor, YHWH) do not exist, and so have achieved nothing. Whatever is being compared I think we can agree that the bottom rung of any scale is not doing anything, at least in terms of impressiveness.
These deities are also highly anthropomorphised making comparisons to people possible if admittedly still a little awkward.
I can reach inside my brain and modify it. Just the other day I learnt about modes of locomotion in bipeds. Heck my brain isn't even the size of an entire universe. I see where you are coming from, and 'impressiveness' is subjective anyway so your opinion of what is or is not impressive is no more or less valid than my own. However if I am forced to make such a comparison I would have to say I remain wholly unimpressed by the achievements of the universe compared with those of human kind.
Note also that as a practical matter, irrationality provides a substantial incentive for people who embody rationality. It scares me sometimes, but we owe a great deal to the religs for pointing out exactly what needs to be looked at. They're like the guys with the flags on golf courses ;-)
I suspect you're wrong there. The religionists' ground has been pretty thoroughly examined over the centuries, and there's little new to be gained there. Most religionists are using arguments that have already been thoroughly debunked. There are a few who are not irrational, but the form of religion that they end up with is not one that is any real problem to other rationalists (although the reasons that a rational religion can exist might be disturbing to some). All of that is very familiar ground. What needs to be looked at is whatever nobody is looking at, the unnoticed and untested assumptions. That's where the interesting stuff will be. They are very hard to spot, though,so most people don't even bother looking.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Not defending that it's right by me, or the general population, but they don't ooze rubbish about benevolence, and treating one's brother as you wish to be treated and all the rest. Hollywood is a corporation that's out to make money. That's what they claim to be.
Yeah, that's why films like "Avatar" and "Precious" were hailed as containing valuable moral, ethical and spiritual messages for the general public.
I wrote a lengthy and well thought out reply, but /. will not let me post it. Aarrgh.
I agree in principle with you about the limits of consequentialism. I thank you for the link.
But really most would consider respect for free will part of good morals.
So, you can show that a particular tenet of a particular religion is ethically wrong for your own set of beliefs, but you can't show that it's wrong for everybody else which is what I believe you wanted.
Let's take Eternal Hellfire as an example. Within Christendom it is the fate of all non-believers. Now how does that teaching affect the faithful? Non-believers? Science should be able to tell us. What about the 'Golden Rule'? More harm than good? Same.
Yes, but will destroying 60% of the human race be conductive of a happy society? Does having 50% of a society REALLY happy, and 50% being less happy count as a happy society? Is there even an absolute value of happy for a society, or are you just claiming that it isn't OK for some people to be happier than others?
A happy society is definitely not an absolute definer of morality, and even if it was, a happy society is virtually impossible to define.
First, I don't ask him personally because I don't give a shit. You said that 'Contrary to what popular media would have you believe, you don't go to heaven right away after you die.'. Well .. this minister said the very words I stated, the words 'the very second' was in his little sermon, I did not put them in his mouth. So that Christian seems to not agree with you.
.. when all Christians can get together and figure out which sect is right .. please let the rest of us know so we can know what a Christian believes. Until then, I will just have to assume that none of you really know what you are talking about. Heck .. you guys can't even agree on how old the universe is within a few orders of magnitude. Is it 6,000 years old, or 13 billion. At least scientists are only maybe one order of magnitude off ... they have a much close agreement on scientific theories than does the Christian community on religious beliefs.
So you are either not a Christian, or one of you is wrong. It is apparent that at least two Christians do not agree when one goes to heaven. Just like all those Christian sects disagree on so many other things.
So
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
No, I seriously wonder. Are you truly anti-government or just a sore loser?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
What metric are you using to determine this? Human beings could exterminate all life on this planet if we wanted to. We can launch rockets into space. We can make fire. We can build methods of locomotion unseen in the natural world. We exterminated the scourge of small pox. We have effectively tripled our lifespan. We have built machines that burn with the power of the stars. Our computers rival those found in nature as does the beauty of our art forms. Our achievements make the Gods of the ancient world seem petty and pathetic.
Actually no -- we've vastly increased the number of people who reach that lifespan (no longer do most people pop their clogs from disease and malnutrition in their twenties and thirties), but the eldest members of society have been living to approximately the same age since Roman times. Strictly speaking, the biggest factor has been stopping dumping our faeces into our drinking water so fewer of us die from cholera and dysentery.
We can launch small rockets into very nearby space by bankrupting ourselves. We're as yet unable to fling stars into space, and with no likelihood of being able to do so. We could exterminate all life on the planet, but we can create neither new planets nor entirely new forms of life (though we can tweak the ones that are already here in tiny ways with genetic engineering). We do not in fact build machines "that burn with the power of the stars", but machines that burn with less than one billionth of the power of a single star because that is all we can handle and in any case we can't access the material to do more. That is somewhat less than the creation of the universe itself -- "the [alleged] achievements of the gods of the ancient world", to use your own comparison. We just big-note ourselves as if we were doing something much more grandiose than that, just as you have in your post above.
When you are trying to compare humanity to deity you are comparing the concept of scratching around to find out if a Higgs boson exists to the concept of saying "let there be bosons" and they are.
but damn are we marvellous by any of the standards we have devised
So we give ourselves an A by lowering the pass mark. Big deal. Earthworms are pretty good by their own standards too.
What are we to idolise if not that which is good in humankind?
You belie your need to worship and idolise something. If you choose not to believe in a god that is up to you. But when people try to ascribe humanity as "god", they inevitably have to lessen their definition of "god". And that smacks of desperation and mere egotism.
What makes us and others around us happy?
We can't assume that. Big breasts in my face make me happy, if you don't like women, they will not make you happy.
Adam Mapa has talked about how he likes being on the receiving end of anal copulation. While I can't say definitively, I do not believe that I would be happy if I were to find myself in that position.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
As much as it may pain you to hear it, Rep. Ron Paul is as much a part of the Government as Pelosi et. al..
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I'm sorry, I meant Alec Mapa, not Adam...
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I want that Ketamine. Sounds like a great way to spend an afternoon. But only some of us get to find out if heaven is real or not. There is a cross involved!
That minister at the funeral just said what he had to say because it was a trendy thing to say in order to appease you secular people. Who doesn't like euphemisms? He probably depends on giving euphemism for a living, that poor guy. You, on the other hand, are just waiting to see Christians fight each other and pull each other's teeth off. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's not going to happen.
I don't see why people having disagreement is going to put you off from learning about a subject. Scientists sometimes have disagreement about major theories (e.g. string theory), and this is just the way science can make progress. Does that prevent you from learning about science? Lawyers and even judges sometimes interpret legal code differently, but does that mean you should tear down the legal system? Not a chance.
If disagreement is your excuse, I don't think I want to waste my time with you.
I once had a signature.
Josef Mengele agrees with you.
Josef Mengele didn't do any scientifically valid or useful experiments - he did it all "just for fun", in a way largely similar to how small children tear wings and legs off insects "to see what happens" - so it's not a valid example. He didn't do science.
(Which is not to say that you're wrong, just saying that you need something else to back your position.)
I see one good thing coming out of this study: at last, we can have a true, honest-to-God religion that not just promises paradise, but actually delivers it!
We can use wellbeing instead of happiness and we don't need to define a level of absolute wellbeing. This is unnecessary. It is enough if know which decisions/states will lead to more wellbeing than others.
Science can tell you that putting lead oxide in paint will make it a very bright white, and science can tell you that putting lead paint on toys will give children brain damage, but science cannot tell you whether or not you should put lead paint on children's toys.
Science provides understanding, science can give you options, science helps you make predictions, and sometimes those predictions make it obvious what you should do, but science itself never tells you what to do. Lead gives children brain damage, that is a simple, neutral, objective, scientific fact. The choice not to give children brain damage is an obvious, but non-science, preference. Science informs, but it cannot chose. Science does not have preferences.
The application of the scientific method would show if there was harm done by adultery. Also if there was harm done by faithfulness. Science could tell you what is greater. Another example is smoking around babies. Is second-hand smoking bad for baby's health? Does it convey benefits?
Science can help you measure things and predict things, but science itself does not define things as harm or benefit. We define what we dislike as a harm, and we define what we like as a benefit. And it's almost always the case that every alternative combines a mixture of harms and benefits, and only we place relative weights on what we consider more important.
Science is extremely useful, including in relation to moral considerations. Ill informed moral reasoning is generally poor moral reasoning. However it always seems to lead to all sorts of problems when people assert science makes moral judgments. And interestingly, it seems to me that error rarely comes from people on the "science side". It seems to me that it usually comes from people who dislike certain scientific facts, people who come to obvious moral conclusions based on that science, and because they dislike those obvious implications they resist the science and they think they hear science making a moral assertion they disagree with.
To take a concrete example, there are people with a strong moral opposition to pornography. They want to eliminate or criminalize pornography because they believe it to be harmful. They want to eliminate pornography in order to reduce the incidence of rape and other sex crimes. And then they hear about scientific studies of countries that have criminalized or decriminalized pornography that show that rape and other sex crime rates consistently DECREASE when pornography is legalized and available, and that rape and other sex crimes consistently INCREASE when pornography is criminalized and generally unavailable in a society. They then often make the mistake of claiming science is pushing a moral position on the subject. It is pretty universally obvious to consider rape to be harm, and to the extent that is used as a sole basis for moral good and moral bad it leads to an obvious implication that the availability of pornography would be a moral good. Of course nothing in life has a single effect, and nothing in life can validly be morally judged on the basis of a solitary factor. If one accepts that reducing rape is a good thing, then the evidence shows that pornography is at a minimum a mixed issue, and that pronography would only be morally bad if there are one or more harms that outweigh that benefit. However some people don't reason that far - they have a dogmatic position that pornography is evil, so they simply deny the problematical evidence. They are dogmatically right, pornography is a dogmatically pure evil, and anything that conflicts with that is automatically false. The information must be false, and it must be coming from evil people. They then make the technically correct statement that science has no business making moral assertions, but they are incorrect in believing science is making a moral judgment. They "hear" science making moral assertions, but morality is actually only coming in to it when people draw obvious-but-non-scientific implications based on that neutral
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I thin you need to recalibrate your sarcasm detector :) Notice how the word 'proof' was put in scare quotes? He was casting derision on this story.
The author of the post was himself an "extremest religionist" engaging a bad parody of the evils of atheism.
And considering it was written by a religionist, I find it a bit ironic that you found it ironic :D
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I see what you're saying but I think you misunderstand me. It is not that I think the religs' ground is worthy of examination or that I think anything new will be gained there. It's simply that their very existence provides an emotional incentive for debunkers to do their work. While there is an infinite number of things a scientist could look into, the actual number of things is quite short considering the constraints he/she faces (funding, interest, etc.) Religion and the few dark spots on the map it represents provides an emotional incentive to try to find scientific explanations for phenomena. Now, the value in debunking such things is negligible but consider the collateral gain in knowledge as a result (in this very story for example).
If NDEs had existed but religs (and a LOT of new age flakes) hadn't made such a big deal over them in terms of supporting their beliefs using them, how much importance would it have gained? Would these researchers have been quite so interested in this problem? Now we know something more about brain chemistry. Scientific explanations of previously religious phenomena do little to bring rationality to the world, but the gain in knowledge is tremendous. I've always been a fan of using an irrelevant emotional response as raw fuel to drive me in an intellectually important but not as emotionally exciting direction.
This is probably a weak example. A better one is in psychology (why people believe weird things) or in evolutionary biology (why does humanity have the religion bug so firmly entrenched within it?).
I know these seem like weak arguments. Like I said, this is not all I have to say but I have a really hard time articulating this particular feeling I have about the utility of the existence of religion (if not religion itself) to science. I think it's crucial though. Almost like irrationality needs to be present in the world so that people can escape it and grow stronger as a result. I would be truly sad to see it disappear entirely (though it won't happen for millennia more, if ever), if only for the same reason we store the smallpox virus.
In spite of. Thought that was obvious. I know my country is not without sin, for instance we tried to forcefully assimilate our natives - fortunately we failed - and after WW2 we put half-German children into what were essentially rape camps. Both acts we regret and we're now actively promoting native culture and language in an attempt to undo the damage of the last one hundred years.
Such a pity that there's no way for humans to record their observations in a permanent, or at least long lasting, form. Or for events to leave physical traces that could be examined more than 70 (three score and ten, right?) years later.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Rateth ye, upon a scayle of I (devilish) to X (most excellent):
I Thine hovel:
II Thine Lorde (ye competence thereof):
III Thine Lorde (ye compassion thereof):
IV Thine sustenance (ye quantity):
V Thine sustenance (ye quality):
VI Thine bodilly parasites:
Return this parchement before ye XXth day after lente to be entered in ye prize draw! Thou couldst winneth 7ral groats!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is completely incorrect.
One, religion does not restrict itself to morals and does impinge upon explaining reality - Adam's rib, four elephants on a turtle and so on.
Two, there's an entire body of philosophy that considers morals without any reference to magic ghosts, bearded men in the sky etc etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know these seem like weak arguments. Like I said, this is not all I have to say but I have a really hard time articulating this particular feeling I have about the utility of the existence of religion (if not religion itself) to science. I think it's crucial though.
It looks like the 3rd and 4th parts of Mill's argument in "On Liberty", for freedom of opintion and expression of opinion:
We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
But how do you prove the scientific method? You can't prove it using the scientific method, since that would be begging the question.
Not that I'm going to lose any sleep gazing at my navel over this; whenever I need to debug some software or fix a machine it always serves me well.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
then Hell is just pain in your ass?
That's the only way you can conclude it, true. However, as you said yourself a few posts back:
This is, perhaps, the most important point. If NDEs were never seriously considered as evidence for "heaven" (beyond the fringes), then evidence that NDEs are brain chemistry does not constitute evidence against "heaven".
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Again I ask what metric are you using to declare human kind pathetic? You belittle the vast achievements of our species with technicalities. Do you think it matters to the child who was cured with penicillin that they will only get to live to be the same age as a very old Roman citizen? Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind? Do you have any evidence for something capable of creating new life? I've never encountered such a being. You refer to our quest to understand the nature of the universe as "scratching around looking for the Higgs boson", is there any creature you know of that even has a concept of the Higgs boson? The gods of the ancient world certainly didn't, heck some of them cant even get the value of Pi right.
The gods of the ancient world achieved nothing but death and destruction. As a meme the notion of the divine has inspired man to little more than unleashing cruelty and violence upon the world. The crusades, the dark ages, the fall of the Islamic empires, the protestant-catholic wars, the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent and in the middle east. These are the achievements of the gods. I've seen no evidence to suggest that these gods ever flung a star into space or created a new form of life. All they seem capable of is destruction.
I don't believe we need to worship or idolise something, but if we are going to worship and idolise something it should be that which is noble in the human animal, not that which has inspired our worst excesses. You accuse me of desperation and egotism because I redefine a god to the actual effect of the concept. The real achievements of human kind are vastly superior to those of any god if we confine ourselves to those things both beings have demonstrably achieved. You call this redefining "god" and an act of desperation, I call it giving credit where it is due.
We carry a memory of our experience of the womb until we die.
I've seen it go from $1 to over $20 here. Tabs are almost never seen. What's with the greed?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Are you saying that science is completely amoral?
I had not really thought of it that way. I guess you are right in that the people doing Science are the ones who follow ethics, even doctors will not provide treatment if patient does not want. But science just informs how the kidneys have failed to continue to function. (and how to dialysis)
I agree totally with your second point that this sort of thing generally fails when it gets in the real world. For instance, on NPR a few months ago, there was an economist who was saying that America should spend its way out of the recession. A woman called in and said she was happy as she was now, that being spending on necessities and small homemade gifts for friends and family. The economist said 'She's found the secret for personal happiness, but we can't all do that or the economy will collapse!'
So, not only will people object to science, and there can be bad science, but also science can inform in such a way that the issue is not clear. I personally like this statement, "We have no studies that show that proposed correlation/causation." Meaning many times, 'we haven't studied it.' (Or it was a wash, otherwise the answer would be, "studies show that not to be the case")But that is not clear, I think, to many people. They are lead to believe that studies positively show there is no correlation/causation.
Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind?
I don't; I demand it of the concept of deity. The entire point of having a word "deity" is to mean something beyond that which humans can achieve, just as "supernatural" does not mean "natural". And historically "deity" and "god" is entirely linked to beliefs about creation. That's not a question of whether you believe such a thing exists but a straightforward matter of language. As I say, if you wish not to believe in a god that is up to you. But that is no reason to abuse the language so you can pretend that humanity is one.
In any case, if you go back and read my original post, I pointed out that some do indeed treat science as a religion by elevating man's achievements as deity. In your case, that is quite literally true by your own declaration. So not only are your rantings and railings against god and religion off-topic, but so too is this whole debate about whether you are "right" to elevate man as deity, so I'll leave it there. Feel free to have the last word if you wish to reply.
But, overall, people are today less satisfied with their lives than they used to be.
I am not so sure. This may simply be the tendency people have to remember what is good and forget what is bad. We all do it. Try this: with no distractions, make a serious effort to remember some particularly happy period of your life. Start with why you think it was so happy. Then remember surrounding events and the general feel of those days. Most often and if you're honest and barring marginal cases, you will come up with a history that's not particularly worse or better than it is today. Depending on how old you are this may be easier or harder to do. Bottom line is, every generation remembers the "good old times." The usual explanation is that during the good old times they were young. Of course life seems more fun and more interesting.
My personal example: the bottom half of the eighties. I still smile when I think of those times. I forged friendships that last to this day. I used to spend days and nights with my best friends doing exactly what we wanted. I found love for the first time. If I think hard about then however I know there were infinite boring hours sitting in classrooms, there was having to beg my parents for money, there was homework and tests and bullies and rejection and anguish. The first love thing felt wonderful but actually meant putting something as stable as a sixteen year old girl in charge of my health and happiness.
My conclusion is, it was really not a very happy time. But I still feel like it was the best time ever...
Nice. I think that certainly is part of it. The last paragraph is particularly poignant in light of an argument I was involved in a few days ago on here about how even scientific fact can become just another dogma to be followed unless a person actually works out a theorem himself/herself or at the very least watches someone else do this in detail.
;-). As a wise webcomic artist once wrote - 'Science is limited by its refusal to make stuff up. That's what gives religion its edge'. That's an edge I gladly forfeit.
I was arguing then about the necessity of mathematics as well as empirical evidence as the two pillars of real science. I can see now how that naturally extends to the third paragraph you quoted above. It is clearly no accident that a PhD candidate's rite of passage is the thesis defense. It is also why scientific ideas get stronger and more robust over time - this merciless yet dispassionate attack from within that tempers the steel as only a trial by fire can (mangled metaphor alert! - but it's 5am so the grammar gods forgive).
In a sense then, I guess what I was trying to articulate (now that you've given me the framework to think about it), is that religion, while it may have nothing meaningful to say about Nature, plays a crucial role in being the constant opposition. It keeps us honest (though that is not its purpose) - an important thing when you consider how tempting it is for science to lie for the good of humanity.
To drag another analogy into the fray, it is science's sparring partner with the added twist that it's got a horseshoe in its glove. While that may hurt from time to time, it provides us a greater incentive to make sure the punch doesn't land
I am anti-asshole.
Unfortunately, this covers the majority of government officials throughout history.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So I'll put you down as sore loser, then (since you only mentioned Dems...).
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
No you can't. Well being is a subjective state. That also doesn't answer the other questions. You are just doing as most people through history have done, and believing that your version of morality is the one true morality, and dismissing the obvious holes in your explanation for why.
You've got religious zealots who want to believe that every scientific phenomenon explains their religion, and atheistic ones who want to believe that every single shred fights against religion.
And then you've got the straw men making zealots who like to polarise the debate into two unrealistic extremes, and then show how superior they are by deciding to fence-sit.
The religious don't actually have to make any argument regarding ketamine in order to validate or invalidate views on heaven, because only the fringes ever thought that NDEs had anything to do with it.
Yes, but saying "Only the fringes ever tried to argue with a scrap of evidence, and everyone else believed it without any evidence at all" is hardly a ringing endorsement for their position!
Obviously we could use chemicals to make someone hungry even if they eat enough... but I fail to see how that proves food doesn't exist.
It doesn't. If we were to use food as an analogy for this, what we'd basically have is this:
We can inject this chemical into your brain, and it will make you feel hungry. Since this works, even if you've just finished a seven course meal, then we can conclude that hunger is caused by this chemical, not a lack of food.
Therefore, "real" hunger does not exist.
Obviously, this is stupid, as hunger in this case would have more than one cause: the chemical, and actually being hungry.
The fact that we can simulate NDE visions with chemical injections in no way confirms or denies the reality of the heaven experience of an actual NDE.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Heck .. you guys can't even agree on whether or not to eat meat on Friday, or whether abortion is murder.
I'm sure you must have something to back this up, so I'm going to ask. This is a legitimate question, as I really don't know.
What Christian denomination/sect/whatever believes that eating meat on Friday is not allowed, and which one doesn't think abortion is murder?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
An agnostic is someone who claims we don't know or can't know about God - it's not mutually exclusive with atheism (or indeed theism), nor does it mean they don't have strong feelings. Someone who doesn't care wouldn't identify as agnostic in the first place - apatheism may be a better term for them.
Scientists resolve disagreements by coming up with experiments to test them. Legal disputes are resolved with reason and evidence.
How do religious people resolve their disagreements on religion?
Any true religion would happily COOPERATE with science.
Any religion that shuns science is shunning the creative mind that God gave us.
As a Christian myself, I say "Right on!"
It's when science becomes fundamentalist religion itself that it becomes a problem.
See a lot of the posts in this thread about "We can now explain this, so it proves heaven doesn't exist."
Bullshit.
It just proves that we can simulate similar visions with drugs.
As has been stated, you pretty much cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God/heaven/hell/Allah/Thor/Odin/Gum, so it's up to you what you want to believe.
Do you believe that science will eventually come up with all the answers? It certainly doesn't have them yet. Maybe it will, but that belief in an unpredictable future is as unfounded in science as any Christian tenet, so don't try to pretend you have a purely scientific mind when you say stuff like this.
Is belief in God scientific? No. Is there evidence one way or another that such a being exists? Yes, but it's not conclusive either way. There's evidence, but no proof, and your interpretation of it, and how much importance you give to any individual piece of evidence really depends on what you already believe.
Evolutionists will take fossil evidence of humans embedded in ancient coal as the faked work of a crackpot religious nut trying to prove evolution wrong.
Creationists will take evidence of NDE-like hallucinations caused by drugs and say "So what? That proves nothing."
This argument will go on forever, until we're all dead and we've found out for ourselves.
Until then, everybody who calls the other side names just sounds childish, and it doesn't advance your cause at all.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I think you're misreading. No one's saying that the same one thing makes everyone happy. It just means that we can use science to investigate what things make people happy. The fact that some people like one thing and another people like another doesn't change that, it just means you need to research more than a single person.
for one thing, it would be full of boring, nosy, uptight, self-righteus busybodies.
Only if you think an alien coming to Earth and saying "Take me to your leader" would have good reason to believe that everyone on the planet acts like George Bush.....
The boring, nosy, uptight, self-righteous busybodies are just politicians in the Church, who try to control everything they don't like.
Nowhere in the Bible, and I assume most other religious books, does it say "Shove your nose into other's business."
There are passages about caring for neighbours and such that have been perverted into "If you're doing something wrong, I have a right to come in and tell you how evil you are."
But the people who do this never seem to remember the passage that says "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
Nowhere does it say "If you're a Christian, you can lord (no pun intended) it over everyone else, and brag about how good you are."
In fact, it says a lot of places that you are to place others above yourself. The self-righteous people aren't doing this, and they're just using their religion (not faith) as a social one-upping stepping stone.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You can't prove a negative.
If you're as scientific as your post implies, you'd know that.
The only thing you can prove is that you can't prove (yet) that it exists.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
This year's sore loser is next year's winner.
I guess after 8 years of being a sore loser yourself, you are entitle to strut around a bit.
Congratulations, your asshole is in office now. In 2012, my asshole will be there.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I guess you never read it. Matthew 10:34-36
Setting people against their own flesh and blood, and their neighbors as well, has to qualify as "shoving your nose into others' business."
It's also immoral as all heck ... but then again, Jesus also thought it was more important to fight over money (the temple) than slavery - nowhere did he say "Owning people is wrong, you stupid sh*ts!"
We see the same thing today, with the Pope moving pedophile priests to other parishes (where they then re-offend) because exposing them and punishing them will turn people away, reducing the $$$. More important to fleece the flock than to protect it.
Not a slam against your country, which ever it is.
That was over a generation ago and very few, if any are left from those days. I don't subscribe to the idea of "sins of the fathers".
The slam was against the ideology that was the engine for these things.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Throughout human history, there was a time when scientific disputes were not resolved by experiments but by mud-slinging and discrediting. There was a time when legal disputes were resolved by violence, brutality, and war. Civilization has advanced as people become more literate, as a result of religion-backed education. Don't forget that prominent universities all started as theology schools and have religious roots (University of Paris, University of Oxford, Harvard University, Boston University, etc.)
Certainly, still not all scientific disputes are resolved by experiments, and not all legal disputes are resolved by reason and evidence. Since you are talking about ideals here, I'll tell you that, religious disagreement, ideally, is resolved by a shared common love of God, and to love one another as brothers and sisters.
I once had a signature.
When people advocate the scientific method, they aren't advocating "mud-slinging and discrediting", they are advocating the scientific method, so that's just a straw man.
That people used "mud-slinging and discrediting" in the past isn't an argument against the scientific method, nor is it an argument in favour of religion. But yes, I was asking for ideals - to rephrase my question slightly, it would be: Which methods do religious people use to resolve their disagreements on religion, which you would advocate?
To which you give the answer: "is resolved by a shared common love of God, and to love one another as brothers and sisters."
To which I reply: what on earth does that mean?
Person A makes the claim that Jesus resulted from a virgin birth, person B disagrees. How do they resolve the difference? I know how I'd advocate resolving it - through science, evidence, and reason; just like any other claim made about the real world. How does "loving God and each other" help us here?
Don't forget that prominent universities all started as theology schools and have religious roots
What has this got to do with anything? Even if it was true, it doesn't make religious claims correct. Nor does it answer my question.
Human beings could exterminate all life on this planet if we wanted to.
I think you're underestimating just how resilient life is. Could we make it unlivable for us and many other creatures? Certainly. However, I seriously doubt we have the capacity to destroy ALL life on this planet.
Just being nit-picky...
Bzzt....not accurate.
.. those laws could be wrong. But until they are show to be wrong, and until there is a reason for heaven to exist, it doesn't really matter. So it's existence is not relevant to my daily life. Nor my death. It's no more than wishful thinking or a fairytale.
One can demonstrate the unlikelihood that something exists. I can't prove flying pink unicorns don't exist, but I can demonstrate that based on evolutionary findings and the necessary wingspan needed for a horse to fly that it is highly unlikely.
It is also highly unlikely that heaven exists. The very narration of Genesis violates the laws of thermodynamics (something from nothing). If heaven does exist, where does it get it's energy?? Where is the energy that keeps a soul going?? 'Where' is heaven?? What physical proof is there that such a thing exists at all, anecdotal evidence is not acceptable, plenty of people have seen pink elephants. Where is the necessary energy that this so called 'god' thing gets to manipulate matter and energy. How is it channeled.
So, while I can't prove that god or heaven doesn't exist, I can argue that there is no need for it in order to explain the universe around us, and that the very nature of heaven as defined by the priests violate the laws of physics as we know it.
Sure
I might as well believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Catholics abstained from eating meat on Fridays in order to fast (or at least they used to, that might have changed). Jew don't eat pork, and while not Christian, they do share a common bond in the Old testement and Christians are always touting the ten commandments, which is an old testament story. Mormons abstain from alcohol, caffeine and refined sugar for religions reasons.
.. at least some Christians seem to believe that abortion is not murder. A quick Google search turned up this minister and the The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. They seem to feel that abortion isn't murder, and they claim to be Christian. Or is there some committee that has to approve Christian values???
Since only 50% of this country is anti-abortion, and approximately 80% call themselves Christian
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
We could build one of these and in principle make it big enough to kill all life on earth. Why we would want to is beyond me but we could. I'm not saying that for certain a large enough Cobalt bomb would definitely kill all life on earth, but it is conceivable.
In the UK, there's still the issue of glebe land and Chancel Repair liability - large amounts of land that the Church of England has the right to make the owners pay for repairs to churches, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, as a result of some medieval law. I myself paid £100 for insurance to cover the risk of bankruptcy.
I rather lived without science then
If you'd rather that, then feel free to get off the computer...
We are living in a culture, were we can't live without science, yes you are right, but if you look where it is heading. At the moment it isn't heading in the nice star trek direction... It is more heading in direction of big calamities, terrorism (without science no boms), diseases, war....
For terrorism and war, modern times are still far less violent than at any time in the past. Yes, you might not have had the tiny chance of dying in a terrorist attack, but you'd have been far more likely to have just been mugged by a random person. And something as simple as a broken leg would most likely be the end of you.
As for diseases, life expectancy is far longer today. You seriously think diseases are worse?
Because money is involved, and moral isn't looked at
Feel free to go back to bartering. What morals are these?
No one is doing that - having sex is good, but I wouldn't say I'm doing science. But that hardly means that religious people are right when they are claiming there are other ways to life than science.
"Science" also has a narrower meaning, whereby we only mean biology, physics, chemistry, and other things are labelled invention, engineering, history, archaeology and so on, but that's just playing word games and swapping the definitions. All of these things are still things that use reason, evidence and logic; they are based on scientific evidence and testing. If someone says "Oh, but a detective uses crime-solving skills, that's not 'science'", that doesn't support the claim that science is like religion, or that religion is another way to find answers.
The grandparent post's claim that "science is a religion" is to an extent true -- in that non-scientists often treat it as such.
So in other words, it's not true. Yes, some people misunderstand science too - that's hardly an argument if favour of religion.
There is a popular belief without evidence that "eventually science will solve every problem".
Evidence of this? Some people might believe this, but I suspect they also acknowledge that this is very much a matter of philosophy, and it's not really clear who might be right.
There is a popular belief counter to the evidence that "everything science says is True"
Evidence of this popular belief? Science isn't a person - it doesn't "say" anything.
And yet there is a growing amount of religious people for whom Science (big S) is a religion. They call themselves atheists ... "I'll believe what this scientist says even though I don't understand it because I don't like the religion I grew up with"
Go on, give me an example of such a person.
Sure, there might happen to exist some people, but it is wrong to attribute this to atheism - the fact that they're an atheist is no more relevant than them having a beard; and plenty of theists who misuse science exist also.
No one is claiming that all atheists are rational. After all, there are people who don't believe in god, but also believe in the supernatural, homeopathy, and so on. They're atheists, and they're irrational. But so? This is not an argument against atheism; nor is it an argument in favour of theism. Saying that there exist other forms of irrationality is not an argument in favour of being irrational!
I'm not sure what your point was? Just because some people misunderstand science doesn't mean that the OP and others fall into this category.
The rational folk on both sides of the theist
Aha, here we have it - let's slip in the card that, because some atheists are irrational, we can suggest that it's only some theists that are irrational, and therefore some theists are rational. Well firstly, that's a logical fallacy. Secondly, I disagree that belief in god is based on reason.
That's what Ockham's Razor is for.
One could postulate for any given observed event and it's (non-supernatural) cause, that the said cause is simply the mechanism by which a deity causes that observed event. For example, one might postulate that God causes arrows to fly when fired. The non-supernatural explanation is that the tension on the bowstring accelerates the arrow. This could be explained as the mechanism by which God causes arrows to fly.
But such an explanation is not parsimonious. It has an extra assumption (I.E., that God is affecting arrows) which is not necessary to explain the observation. A sufficiently broad and abstract notion of God encompasses everything and explains exactly nothing (as per the deistic viewpoint). It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis). That the ketamine simply causes a hallucination (as many other chemicals can do) is a much simpler explanation, and, as such, more likely to be correct.
I will note that the problem of induction (I.e., any induction can be definitively refuted but not definitively confirmed) means that nothing can ever completely rule out supernatural involvement in anything. This experiment only shows that heaven is not necessary to explain NDE's. But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition); it just doesn't accomplish anything.
That's Rick Strassman's book. Funny thing about it, not only was his study astonishingly flawed it doesn't even support the conclusions he reaches in his book.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Science and religion are trying to explain completely different things (religion tackles moral issues, science tackles the workings of reality).
Whilst the OP is clearly wrong, I wouldn't say that religion "tackles" moral issues either - certainly not in the same sense that science gives us answers. It asserts a moral code. But then, many religions make assertions about the workings of reality too (how the universe started, how the earth and humans came to be, claims about Jesus etc). In both cases, I'm not sure I'm going to trust mere assertions very much.
The problem with science is that they are missing the moral factor
"They"? Science isn't a thing. Assuming you meant scientists, then your claim is simply wrong anyway.
Science shouldn't have morals - it's a thing. Scientists should have morals. If you understand the difference between things, and people, this debate may come a bit clearer to you.
Incidentally, Josef Mengele may well have argued his belief that what he was doing was "moral". It isn't an issue of "having morals", the issue is what those morals are.
That's what Ockham's Razor is for.
Occam's razor is a dogma that not everybody accepts. Certainly most of the scientific community doesn't, because it leads directly to solipsism ("no reality" is more parsimonious than "one reality").
It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis).
As I said earlier, that interpretation of NDE's seems usually to be based on a prior belief in heaven (for whatever reason). If one has a prior belief in heaven and finds a process at death that gives one an experience of approaching heaven then i think there is the ground for a hypothesis that they are related.
But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition);
No it doesn't, it means that we can't explain it naturalistically by definition.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
To drag another analogy into the fray, it is science's sparring partner with the added twist that it's got a horseshoe in its glove.
I think philosophy is a better sparring partner than religion, because that's one of its tasks -- to challenge assumptions and to tighten up reasoning (ok, two of its tasks). Religion is an actual opponent (or at least much of religion is an opponent for much of science).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
My point is simple. You are confusing what people did in the past with what people are doing now (with regard to science and law), and even for the current standard, people aren't following your ideals consistently. Therefore, why should you be expecting religious people to do any better?
Furthermore, it is not the faith itself at fault. When people of faith disagree with each other, that's because people have confusion about their faith from time to time. It is perfectly normal. Similarly, I do not find flaw with scientific method, but I do find flaw with people who claim to apply scientific method but did so incompetently, or maliciously in a misleading way.
Science is incomplete. I'll give you an example outside of religious context. If you restrict crime conviction to only facts proven by science, you might end up not being able to prosecute many cases. Case in point, if one of the identical twins commits a crime, both are given immunity because DNA identification of forensics science cannot prove which one of the twins did it beyond reasonable doubt.
I will gladly leave you alone if you only want to believe in things that are scientifically proven. You just have to understand science has limitation. But given the way you hail science to be the complete truth, I'm not confident you understand that.
I once had a signature.
"I don't want to have to buy a batman costume..."
As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And rightfully so. Without the prospect of a beer volcano, how many would lose the will to live ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Not even we Brits like our beer that warm. Now, a beer river, on the other hand...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I think philosophy is a better sparring partner than religion, because that's one of its tasks -- to challenge assumptions and to tighten up reasoning (ok, two of its tasks).
True. I just hope the postmodern school (Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense was as depressing as it was funny) will eventually fade away to the obscurity it deserves and some actual philosophers start doing this job again. You know? We expect this kind of crap from the religs. It hurts when the philosophers start going mad hatter on you :(. I recall the joy of reading Spinoza, Leibniz and even Descartes and feeling that these were men who actually yearned to understand the world around them. The postmodern hack writing exudes the "I couldn't give a good goddamn about reality" stink that never leads to any any new understanding.
"Postmodernism" is a very broad label. Yes, some stuff labelled postmodernism is rubbish, but some postmodernists are dealing with real issues that modernism swept under the carpet. Many postmodernists are intensely concerned about reality, and are deeply troubled by the problems they have identified with the modernist perception of reality. As far as I can see, postmodernism gets a bad rap because we've had time to forget all the dross that was produced in the name of modernism, and only remember the good stuff. Postmodernism is still going on, so we've not done that filtering yet.
I think it's also fair to say that postmodernism is particularly challenging for those with a strong commitment to the scientific worldview, because some elements of postmodernism have challenged the more extreme claims made of what science can achieve.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Ouch.
I honestly had no idea about the abortion thing.
I can't imagine anybody who actually understands Christian principles saying that abortion is OK.
To me, that's about as screwy as Bill Gates publicly claiming that Linux is the best operating system ever.
As for the Jew/pork/ten commandments thing.....
No, Jews don't eat pork, because it's "unclean." Linking Christianity and Judaism simply by saying that both share the ten commandments, though, is pretty tenuous, at best. I don't know of any Christian who thinks we need to follow all the Old Testament laws. I'm sure they exist, but the whole point of Christianity is that we discard the law for a relationship with Christ, so a legalistic view of the Old Testament is not strictly Christian.
Similarly, anybody who claims to be Christian and pounds on the ten commandments doesn't quite get it.
Either that, or they're using the law as that social one-upmanship, which again, is not at all Christian.
If you want to get really technical on legalistic views, eating any meat at all isn't allowed, as before the flood in Genesis, it wasn't permitted.
That's not to say we're supposed to violate the law willy nilly, but the priorities are completely different.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I guess you never read it. Matthew 10:34-36
Setting people against their own flesh and blood, and their neighbors as well, has to qualify as "shoving your nose into others' business."
What? That doesn't say "shove your nose into others' business" even if you take it out of context. What it says is that if you aim to be righteous, and follow Jesus' teachings, then your own family could very well fight against you.
It's also immoral as all heck ... but then again, Jesus also thought it was more important to fight over money (the temple) than slavery - nowhere did he say "Owning people is wrong, you stupid sh*ts!"
"Love your neighbour as yourself."
Considering the societal values in the time that was said, a neighbour was considered to be not just the guy who lives next door, or a couple of doors down. A neighbour could live on the other side of the city, be a completely different social caste, and someone you've never actually met. Basically, it meant everyone around you.
Loving everyone around you the way you love yourself pretty much nukes from orbit the whole idea of owning a person, doesn't it?
We see the same thing today, with the Pope moving pedophile priests to other parishes (where they then re-offend) because exposing them and punishing them will turn people away, reducing the $$$. More important to fleece the flock than to protect it.
And that practice is not defended by the majority of Christians. Not even the majority of Catholics. There are plenty of comments on /. about anecdotal evidence not being meaningful.
Well, just because it's very public and messy, doesn't make it any less anecdotal. The pope, and a dozen or so PervyPriests don't make statistics. They make data points. And they are the outliers, by far.
It makes the news for the same reason any other "Think fo the Children!!1!!!!" situation does. Is it horrible? Sure. But that doesn't mean that the church as a whole supports it, either Catholic or Protestant.
And considering that most Protestants think the Catholic church is a bunch of wankers anyway, then you've got to realize they don't stand for Christianity as a whole. Maybe their own little warped view of it.
There are people who'll take any dogma, law, policy, or what have you, and twist it to their own ends. Politicians, business leaders, police, you name it. Why when it happens in a church, do you cast that same view over the entire body of people?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You don't need a sword if you don't shove your beliefs in other peoples faces over and over again. The "Great Commission" was exactly that. We're tired of all the religious BS, which is why atheism is now the fastest-growing belief in the US.
Watching the fundies burn themselves over and over again in the political arena has been a real slice ...
Religion is stupid and foolish. It is based on "belief", not facts. Egro, the people who believe, despite a total absence of facts, are also stupid and/or foolish. All of them. Every single one.
Wow.
Just, wow.
That post is so full of misunderstanding, I don't even know where to begin.
For a start, demonstrating the unlikelihood of something does not prove that it doesn't exist. So my statement still stands.
Now, heaven and Genesis violate the laws of thermodynamics? Huh? You think heaven is on some other planet somewhere?
We've already proven mathematically that alternative dimensions and alternative universes could exist, that very likely don't use the same laws of physics that we have.
So why does heaven, by its very nature immaterial, have to exist within our own universe's rigid physical laws?
You've got to stop to consider:
The person who wrote Genesis lived in a very simple time, with barely a concept of what time and space were.
Yet, somehow, they managed to come up with a God, heaven, and hell, all of which existed outside this time and space, and their God created this time and space.
That is not something that was possible to just imagine at the time. We can imagine warp drive now because we know things like the speed of light, and E=mc2, and all that. But think about somebody 1000 years ago, trying to imagine a method to travel faster than the speed of light.
I think Douglas Adams (an evolutionist, BTW) said it best:
"Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all,...."
1000 years ago it would have been impossible to imagine warp drive, because nobody knew light traveled, or that it was impossible to travel faster than it in our universe. But some guy writing 5000 years ago somehow managed to pull multiple universes out of his hat?
They didn't have the benefit of any scientific research into the nature of the universe, yet somehow managed to realize that there was a place "outside" the universe.
We've only just managed to come up with that (and a bunch of other realizations) scientifically in the last half century.
Yet you can't imagine heaven as being anything more exotic than a colony on Mars.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
"You don't agree with me, therefore you're an idiot."
I think my 3 year old could come up with a better argument than that.
Having said that, atheism is still a religion. Fanatical evolutionism is a religion. Your belief that there is no God is religion.
You don't see it as religion, because you define religion as anything that's taken on faith, with the addendum of "except what you believe."
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Don't compound your stupidity. Oops, too late.
Beliefs that are not only not supported by the evidence, but contradicted by the evidence, are stupid. Religion is stupid.
Your attempt to confabulate atheism with religion is also stupid, and intellectually dishonest.
I "believe" what the facts tell me - that is not the same as your crock-pot religion (because christianity is just the latest mish-mash of beliefs thrown into the stew pot and left to sit. It's not like humans didn't have many other fables for thousands of years before the old and new testaments were made up)..
(Quotes don't change the meaning here...) There are good arguments for and against Atheism (or Agnosticism), but calling other belief-systems "stupid and foolish" merely for being belief-systems &mdash is not one of them...
Mirror... Look in the mirror!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think it's also fair to say that postmodernism is particularly challenging for those with a strong commitment to the scientific worldview, because some elements of postmodernism have challenged the more extreme claims made of what science can achieve.
Challenging them is all very well, but in the end doesn't really matter because in the scientific worldview, Nature is the final arbiter in the matter. From that point of view, everything speculative (which includes a lot of observational physics as opposed to experimental physics) can only be provisionally taken as 'correct'. There is therefore a fundamental difference between the 'correctness' of a theory as verified by experiments with control over the subject matter vs. ones that occur naturally (supernovae for instance) and that we observe indirectly in a manner that requires us to use certain other theories to perform the measurement. Strangely enough, it is true also of collider experiments. Consider how much physics goes into merely deducing the trajectories of particles in such experiments. If you're trying to look for exotic particles under extreme conditions where you expect known theories to break down, does it still make sense to use the standard model to calculate trajectories and energies? It's not as bad as all that of course, since there are iterative ways to do things and self-consistency checks and so on but you the dilemma.
:p Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Anyway, I ramble. What I really wanted was to ask you for recommended reading in 'sensible postmodernism' where they seriously tackle the issues you touched upon (instead of wallowing in mindless techno-babble a la Deepak Chopra - or Sokal's cretins). The terrain is packed with nonsense and I would rather not step in it more than I have to
I "believe" what the facts tell me
You mean like the facts of evolutionist Stanley Miller's experiment in 1953? And how it basically proves that amino acids can only be created in a rigidly controlled environment, and certainly not by chance on a primordial earth?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Challenging them is all very well, but in the end doesn't really matter because in the scientific worldview, Nature is the final arbiter in the matter.
But you recognise that that's only true of the scientific viewpoint. There are other viewpoints, but presumably you think that the scientific viewpoint is more "valid" in some way than those other viewpoints -- but how are you going to argue that? Not from science, because that would be a circular argument. Also, even within modernism there was a recognition that even if Nature is the final arbiter, we often can't be sure what the actual arbitration is. What is the actual relationship between perception and reality? There's a danger there of collapsing into "mindless techno-babble", true, but there's a real and tricky issue to be faced.
Anyway, I ramble. What I really wanted was to ask you for recommended reading in 'sensible postmodernism' where they seriously tackle the issues you touched upon
Rambling relevantly, because you're leading into the sorts of issues that some postmodernists address.
Some postmodernists you should read about, rather than reading directly, because a lot of them distort and subvert language -- for good reason, but unless you realise what's going on it's all too easy to miss the point (Derrida is a particularly extreme case). But if you want a postmodernist writing about the philosophy of science in a way that is pretty clear and accessible (to geeks at least -- he gets quite formal) you could do a lot worse than reading Karl Popper. Most scientists get on very well with him ("falsifiability" is his idea), even if he does argue that the boundary between science and metaphysics can only ever be a social construct :-)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Want to try again?
I'd kill for mod points about now. Best post I've read all week.
Well being is hardly subjective. The reason why you insist the argument is subjective is because you're trying to simply put it away in that box of 'subjective morality' you created long ago and never thought about again. Things are changing though. Simply think of how simple it is to know that life in the west results in more well being then life in, say, Zimbabwe. I'm sure you can think of many reasons why this is so. These reasons such as economy, health, education, legal system etc are all factual and hence in the domain of science. We can look at these and decide which ones are more conductive to well being and which are not. The same is true for veiling women or beating children in school. These behaviors can be looked at scientifically and we can know if they lead to more or to less happy people. We can know this for a fact. This is all that matters.
This huge box called subjective morality in which failed philosophers have historically thrown all attempts to look at morality scientifically, is about to be taken apart. It's about time too. You can think for yourself and be at the beginning of the wave, or you can parrot what you've been taught until everyone else around you figures it out first. Your choice.
The Sam Harris TED video I posted earlier will explain everything I said much more eloquently and with much greater clarity, for anyone who wants to listen, btw.