Posted on 05/16/2007 6:54:51 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
I am so sorry. I am not trying to insult you at all. I do NOT equate your history you laid out as equivalent to Torquemada. I used that bloody, profane murderer as an illustration of how a person might, in fact, profess to be sincere, but sincerely WRONG.
I don't know you, and you have been nothing but polite to me here, so I have no reason at all to deliberately insult you. Please accept my sincere apologies.
Looking back, I can see how the quick quip could be taken as hateful and vicious. I do apologize.
You mentioned that "once again" I have insulted you. I hope that there are not other examples lurking above?
It doesn’t matter IMHO. They are all subjective.
it means alot of em are wrong. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Original sin and all that.
The Wright Bros had a motorcycle shop and they had birds in the yard. Revelation! They put wings on a motorcycle. Whether the revelation was true or false is not yet known but it is working at the moment.
They are probably all wrong somewhere or other. But, at least they are working on it.
The guests at the wedding come from someplace ... 30,000 sects you say? Wow!
I find God everywhere, including the library and laboratory. With apologies to Dawkins, I was not aware He had been either banished from the laboratory or left Himself without witness there. He has not done so in any other place on earth.
LOL!!! Common descent -- from what??? :^)
I don’t know myself. That is what I have heard lately more than once, but things being the way they are it might be somebody’s guess and others are just repeating. Still, I would guess something in the thousands.
Actually I think Leary's argument might have legs. I would think it of great interest to science to find out. To use my friend hosepipe's analogy of the rider and the donkey, the rider would be mind, and the donkey would be brain. Since mind -- consciousness -- has its seat in the physical brain, it would be interesting to see how alterations in the brain state affect the mind. This would seem to be especially interesting in view of Alzheimer's disease, the cause and progression of which seem to be poorly understood.
I can't imagine that the federal government's various health institutes haven't looked into the matter of how these "psychedelic" compounds alter brain states, and how cognition is affected thereby. I just figure they have, in a big way. What is surprising is how little about their findings has reached the public. I've always wondered about that.
I guess their answer was: Throw Timothy into the slammer.
What is less clear to me is how psychotropic drugs could challenge the epistemological basis of western culture. Please share your thoughts with me?
Thank you so much for writing, DreamsofPolycarp!
They have reached public awareness and even FR and continue to do so. Caffeine included.
p.s.: I find the Witnesses to be perfectly lovely people. They still come to see me every now and then. And then we get to have an “ecumenical moment,” based on a reading from Scripture.
It has been shown that electromagnetic stimuli can ‘induce’ similar phenomena as found in near death experiences. Some have taken this to mean that phenomena such as the ‘tunnel of light’ and the ‘being of light’ are constructs purely of brain eletromagnetic origin. That doesn’t follow though because electromagnetic stimulation may in fact open the ‘channels’ by which the phenomena occur, meaning the tunnel and the Being of Light may infact be real and the lab stimulation only institutes the phenomenological awareness. It is something interesting to be studied, IMHO.
Not only did my mother have Alzheimers, I have worked for many many years with mainly and exclusively Alzheimers patients...I have taken care of them, and observed them...and many of them do indeed have hallucinations, some very happy hallucinations, some very sad and frightening hallucinations...Most of those that I have cared for are in late stage Alzheimers, many of them completely bedridden, with their minds practically gone...an ugly disease for sure...
Because Alzheimers patients are so fragile anyway, often depending on what stage they are in, I just accept that what they are seeing, and hearing and experiencing, tho not being seen or heard, or experienced by me, are nonetheless as real as can be to them...and their health and happiness is what I have always been concerned with..too many people want to tell Alzheimers patients that what they are experiencing is not real, that it is imaginary...that only sets them back even further...for me, allowing them to have their hallucinations, and yet be there for them, when these occur, and assure them that I will keep them safe and sound, is the best I can do for them...should I ever get flip with one of them, and treat their hallucinations as if they were just fairy tales, would do a great disservice to them....
I have always been concerned with taking care of these patients in their daily lives, and concerned with their immediate needs and wishes..I have seen the devastation that Alzheimers brings to these fine folks and their families...I wish there were something that could be done for them, and hope that eventually modern medicine and modern medical technology will someday come up with some answers and some very good treatments and possible cures...
Hopefully with a better understanding of the mind, and a better understanding of how the mind actually does work, perhaps future generations wont have to face the horror that Alzheimers is...until that time comes tho, having hallucinations will become a part of many Alzheimers patients lives...
Me too. I sit them down, ask if they will read a quick scripture reading with me ( I am usually busy), and ask if I can pray with them. I pray that God will remove the hardness of all of our hearts, and grant a true spiritual awakening within us, make us cling to the free grace offered to us in God, who is the only Savior, offered in Christ on the cross, and help us to repent of the lie that anything we can do will please him, so that we will, both now and on the day of final judgment, trust in the righteousness of Jesus alone to save us from eternal damnation in Hell. Then we read John 3, and I ask them if they have experienced the new birth of the Spirit, are indwelt by Him and know the reality of the Holy Spirit living within them, applying the benefits of the death and righteousness of the risen Christ. Sometimes they leave IMMEDIATELY, sometimes we have a good talk, and sometimes (rarely) they will allow me to pray before they leave. They are PEOPLE MADE IN GOD'S IMAGE, not automatons. Scriptures and prayer, Scriptures and prayer. Get involved in a longwinded talk on some abstract Russellite doctrine and you make enemies. Talk about Christ and his mighty power and who knows what might happen?
'Twas waiting for such a remark.
One of the issues that comes up is the ansatz of equal a priori probabilities, that one must 'suspend judgement' in order to avoid bias and presumably maximize one's chances of arriving at a correct interpretation.
And this is all well and good, with a mechanistic, even a chaotic (tho' impersonal) system.
But once will, motive, and intentions come in...
and you are in the realm of trust, faith, and belief...
There are scoundrels and charlatans among those professing to teach Christ as much as among 'spiritualists'...
so too, why not among the spirits themselves (if they exist, which was granted for the sake of argument)
Cheers!
You forgot taxes!
...this IS Free Republic, after all!
Cheers!
No logically consistent, reproducible way.
Because such experiences are inherently personal.
Cheers!
In principle this applies to all sensory-mediated experience.
Cheers!
Late to the thread as usual.
What does the part in bold refer to? Did I miss something upthread?
Ear horn firmly in place, sonny. :-o ??
Cheers!
By what method, under which circumstances, and to what level of confidence?
Blanket statements can give rise to carelessness.
Cheers!
1. Do you consider that to be necessary and sufficient evidence of the truth of your current religio-philosophical holdings, or were you merely dangling them back in Dr. Ecklenberg's face once he mentioned them?
2. Is the statement even true? Given your apparent attempts to "de-proselytize" people who claim to be members of a faith community to which you once belonged, apparently you feel that your current life is NOT equally enjoyable to before, but more so--or you would not be trying to spread your current beliefs.
2.b. BTW, your own testimony to your own fulfillment is just as subjective as the faith experiences of others, which you apparently reject. But you earlier seemed to be saying that equal a priori probabilities among religious experience necessitate the use of the null hypothesis, in order to avoid error. Why do your feelings *against* faith suddenly become exempt? They are just as subjective as the feelings you rail against.
Cheers!
Tell that to the Rev. Al Gore and his Church of Climatology. :-P
Cheers!
There's more to it than that, as I have posted before.
Consider the following site.
It belongs a practicing MD pathologist in Kansas City, who among other opinions, relates the history of a patient who had a near-death experience on the operating table. There are two aspects of the incident which render it immune to the usual skeptical explanations.
1) The patient, when recounting what he went through, expressed surprise at the shape of his own heart, which he had expected to be the shape of a Valentine's heart.
2) The patient accurately described physical details of the operating theater which were out of his physical line of sight had he been awake but unable to move due to anaesthesia.
The site is here.
Lots of *very* interesting stuff if you go back to the homepage.
Cheers!
Well thank you. I actually started a writing project to compile a book of unusual NDEs of children. Got a few stories from folks but not enough to form a book for publication ... I was researching for another novel then and generated the little web offering on stem cells and cloning linked at http://weneedtalk.blogspot.com , but that’s grist for another mill.
Went to the link, but didn’t readily find a link to a home page or the story of the surgical NDE.
Note that some of the main arguments pro- and con- within this thread are also summarized. Cheers!
If you were a woman, I’d say you’re a big tease ... one paragraph, third hand. Piffle on ya, I was all hyped up for a real good story, like the little girl who ‘saw’ the red sneaker outside and on the roof below the operating theater. Now THAT was story!
Thanks for the kind ping.
Cheers!
The sneaker story was from a doctor, an anesthetist who knew the sleeper who did the case.
Truly, we are all different. The spiritual experience of one is not always like the next.
God is like a Master Artist to me and He has many colors on His palette.
Last year, our cousin graduated to heaven. She had been declining with Alzheimer's though she died of something else.
As she declined with the disease, her mind seemed to recall things increasingly further back in her life. Even when she couldn't remember most of the recent events or who we were - she'd recall obscure, tiny details from her youth very clearly (according to her sister.)
I'm curious whether other patients have had this exerience, as if all the knowledge accumulated in one's life rests such that perhaps a disease (or drug) might bring it to active memory.
Do we ever really "forget?"
you: 'Twas waiting for such a remark.
One of the issues that comes up is the ansatz of equal a priori probabilities, that one must 'suspend judgement' in order to avoid bias and presumably maximize one's chances of arriving at a correct interpretation.
Indeed, reasoning a divine revelation would be anthropomorphizing God.
Certainly the prophets didn't question the authenticity of, conjecture about or attempt to rationalize the revelations they received. Nor do we.
That first divine revelation all Christians share - that Jesus Christ is Lord - is absolutely stunning. We don't sit back and wonder whether it was a figment of our imagination, something we ate, etc.
The tests of the spirits I mentioned in post 394 apply to messengers (whether mortal or not) - and what they have to say. They are God's own authentications so that we will know whether to give those spirits any heed at all:
The messenger must display all of the fruits of the Spirit (good tree/good fruit Matt 7, Gal 5): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.
The message must agree with the whole of Scripture (Berean test, Acts 17)
I’m so sorry I have not been here to be more involved with this fascinating conversation, but thank you so much for every single ping. I am in participating in prayer with you even if I’m not posting!
I was attempting to demonstrate the *inadequacy* of empirical methods to deal with divine revelation, or with the possibility of anything 'personal' (as opposed to the purely mechanicalor chemical).
The personal involves *getting to know* and/or *trust* -- which may or may not be justified, but which remain 'subjective'.
And the problem which ahayes and coyote *apparently* have is that empiricism is so good at reducing errors (when used as directedTM) that they are unwilling to put it aside as a methodolgy, even where its use is 'inappropriate' (in a square peg, round hole typeof way).
The problem is that given the typical 'rationalistic' (to use the vernacular) approach, none of the claims of the supernatural, from whatever source, pass the smell test. And one cannot bias one's thinking in favor of one holy book or another, and remain consistent.
The thinking seems to be more or less, "Well, at least this way I won't get taken in." And at first blush that seems right. But they forget that there are false negatives as well as false positives.
"OK, then, well, how do you tell the difference between religions?"
You CAN'T -- not in advance of choosing, and even afterwards, you can't get the same type of confidence, nor the same *reproducibility* of results, that one strives for within the sciences.
The confusion on the part of the empiricist at this point is to say "Oh, well. Bullshit alert. Charlatans *always* say, don't question, only believe. But *I* know better, I'll poke holes in everything, because *I* saw through it."
And it is in fact true that there have been, still are, and presumably will continue to be vast numbers of frauds.
But the reason (according to Christianity) that the demand for trust is made, is not for the easier hoodwinking of the already easily deluded, but in order to engender a certain type of relationship between the Creator and a fallen creature.
And the second error made by the empiricists is that in their attempts to avoid 'argument from authority' and 'scholasticism' (both of which *should be* avoided in logical argument and in scientific inquiry), they pass up on useful knowledge about God and Man, in favor of simplified models. And when the simplified models don't hold up to experience, rather than refine the model, they decide that the whole 'concept' of God is incorrect -- because their original models are so *obviously* self-evident, they *can't* be mistaken.
But the simplistic theism is *precisely where* the models go wrong, since many of the assumptions contradict Christian theology.
(And so it goes in a circle -- the skeptic would be 'in good faith' perfectly willing to entertain theology *if* theological concepts could be empirically tested to systematically weed out the good from the bad theology. But since they cannot, and since the methods for systematic inquiry borrowed from the sciences would tend to eliminate most deities and the supernatural equally, the null hypothesis demands that the whole kit and kaboodle get throw n out.)
Cheers!
You sound manifestly impressed by this reasoning. There is no such thing as pure empiricism. It has its virtues, but when it is the sole methodology, out goes a lot more than just holy books. You’d be done with literature, too. And history. And politics.
You may not remember, but I’ve “taken agin you” due to your snide assumptions. It’s impossible to have a conversation with you without your continually insinuating that I’m lying. I do Christians the courtesy to assume that their opinions are what they state they are, I find it annoying and frankly intriguing that the same courtesy is not returned to me.
Please do not address me again. And if you feel the need to read my mind while talking about me behind my back to another poster, don’t do me the favor of giving me a courtesy ping, just remove my name from your post and say “some people”.
Thank you.
There have been some interesting studies done (referenced somewhere!) about people who are undergoing brain surgery being prodded with electrodes. It seems that the mild current "brings back" memories in vivid detail, including tastes, smells, and particularities that would "never" have been possible. It seems that we are messy filers. We don't forget the data, we just forget where we filed it.
For those of us who are believers, the thought of a complete and exhaustive resuscitation of "who we are" on the final day, by simply recovering all our activities in thought, word and deed is interesting, if speculative.
Here are my “two cents:”
To the empiricist, all knowledge comes from sensory perception and reasoning.
If he holds a concept of God, and even if he has received that definitive divine revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord, he will nevertheless insist that God must comply with his own ability to comprehend Him.
On principle, whether he realizes it or not, He rejects the Spiritual insight that God’s ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts. He always anthropomorphizes God.
For instance, he would insist that God must comply with Aristotlean laws of logic, such as the Law of the Excluded Middle. Which is to say, in his mind God cannot speak two things which are to him mutually exclusive, e.g. do not kill, kill these. He will either reject such revelations in Scripture or seek to reconcile them by his own reasoning.
IMHO, some theologies look like pretzels because of this tendency to value sensory perception and reasoning above God's revelations.
Likewise, he would insist that God must comply with the physical laws and most especially causality, i.e. cause>effect. In his timeline oriented mind, God could not say that He hates Esau and loves Jacob before either of them were born.
That doesn’t mean the empiricist is a lost cause, however. Like doubting Thomas, the empiricist will always have a tendency to put himself above God by demanding physical or logical proofs. He is an idol worshipper and the idol is himself.
But if God reveals Himself to him, as Jesus did to doubting Thomas - he'll know. Doubting Thomas was an apostle, too. And God favored Job as well by revealing Himself to him even though he had deigned to judge Him (chapters 38 to 42.)
In his Christian walk, he’d be more like Martha in the story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42) – cumbered about much serving, missing that good part which came so effortlessly to Mary. The physical doing would be more comforting to him than the spiritual being. In that respect, he would tend to be Spiritually unplugged - but not without hope if he takes in the full counsel of Romans 8 so that he will understand that he can let go and let God.
Thank you oh so very much for your insights on memory! It would be very helpful if medical science could facilitate recall - for patients suffering from memory loss or mental problems, investigations, etc.
Amen. Beautifully put.
"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." -- Galatians 6:14
No ape or monkey(or any other animal, insect or plant) ever yet has shown signs of "worship" or anything like that.. Sooo, your saying that man evolved to a place/species that sought after "GOD".. MAN evolved to seek after God?.. For most do and have through out history..
Thats quite a "concept" Boopie.. Man evolved to seek after God.. Books could be written about that.. Darwin MISSED his biggest revelation.. Life force evolves to seek its source.. If, true, of course..
LOL DreamsofPolycarp!!! Isn't that the truth!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.