Religous debates and questions

Glad you prodded this thread Lance- its reminded me I need to finish writing the next bit of my piece on the historical Jesus (hope youve had a read), its a little overdue but should be up by the end of the day (its the heat you know, just cant concentrate )

And to give you something to chew on I'm more or less agnostic- but I also believe that the purpose of life is to enrich awareness. That awareness is not just a property of life but a process in itself and that the maturing of a living thing 'improves' the awareness which at the point of death is released back to its source, improved by the expericience.

I'm a little simpler in my beliefs.

I think that we are only able to think of these things because we have evolved the ability too and that evolution is what has put us top of the pecking order... simple survival of the fittest. I don't think that our consciousness is any more than that of an animal in terms of where it comes from and where it ends up. The point in life being the basic survive and reproduce.

I find it funny that a lot of people that believe in an afterlife make it sound like those of us that dont are missing a little something. I am quite content with the life/death cycle. As far as I am concerned I wont know about it when I get there and I know that I will one day... just the way it is.

To clarify one thing... these are my beliefs and I am not for an instant saying that this is factually the case. If the human race survives long enough, I am sure that one day we really will know these answers but that it is a very long way off!

I don't think that our consciousness is any more than that of an animal in terms of where it comes from and where it ends up.- Lance

Nor do I- I said awareness, not human awareness. I dont think there is anything special in our awareness, its an animal preator awareness, just in awareness arising in the first place.

I cant make my mind up. Part of me thinks we are just walking meat, with superior self awareness than say a dog, and when we die thats it. But another part of me senses weird shit going on, you know stuff like, destiny, strange premonitions, spooks, dreams and odd stuff you cant easily explain with science and biology. I dont think we go to heaven or anything, but I think there is something Other, what this Other is I have no idea, I dont know if it comes from us, as in chemistry in the brain, or from outside us, but I feel it, and have stories to tell of it.

I too have similar views Mrs Figg. My own past experiences, particularly in my youth with psychotropic plants, were not just youthful high spirits but a delibrate attempt to experience and therefore better undertsand awareness and how it operates. I learnt controlled dreaming for the same purpose and my direct experience is that the awareness one has in dreams and other induced states is quite a seperate thing from the awareness we utilise day to day. And that states induced by drugs are chaotic and beyond control but states induced naturally such as in dreaming one can learn to excerice and direct control over- although its off a differnt nature than everyday control of awareness.
And I too have my tales to tell but lets here your Tales of Power Mrs Figg.

well I dont know about Power but this tale is odd, and I cant explain it. This is one of the least spooky of my various tales. ok I used to live in Manchester before I moved abroad, and after I lived there I moved around a lot doing various study courses, one in Newcastle and one in Oxford, anyway to cut a long story short it was a long time since I went back home, I would only go back to see my relatives. and one day while shopping in Manchester I casually decided to go to an optician to get my eyes tested. Anyway walking past an opticians I had seen maybe 5 years prior I walked in, and downstairs in a basement level were the testing offices. It was a large empty room with one big empty desk in the middle. I was alone waiting for the optician, and the receptionist came to take my details and make a card out. I said I was a previous patient, I told her my name. She looked down on the desk, and there was my old card just sitting there on the empty table. She looked at it and looked at me, and went a funny colour. She checked my address, yup it was my old card, just sitting there waiting for me.

Im curious Mrs Figg- what happened next? Or immediately before for that matter? What made you decide to go get your eyes tested right then?

well before I was just going in on the spur of the moment, and nothing happened afterwards I just had my eyes tested, the receptionist looked at me like I was a witch or something spooky and backed away pretty quick, but nothing came of it, it was just random weirdness. maybe.

your turn

Come back from a 3-day holiday, and find discussion of a topic that has long fascinated me: why our minds seem to be strongly attracted to the mystical. This is linked to why, for example, we may enjoy Tolkien so much even though we know it's not true. ( Should I run and hide now before the fundamentalist horde catches me? )

Anyway, I think there are ingrained interpersonal dynamics that override reason. It's more important for us as a species to feel bonding than to be 100% rational about whether any such metaphysical connections really exist.

halfwise wrote: It's more important for us as a species to feel bonding than to be 100% rational about whether any such metaphysical connections really exist.

... which is probably wise considering that what's called rationality is a disturbingly flawed artificial construct.

My first encounter with weirdness happened when I was a child. I was about 5 or 6 at the time. Odd things occasionally happend in our house- the first I can remember clearly was when the family went on a day out. When we returned every window in the house was flung wide open. The door was locked, nothing inside had been disturbed. Just every window wide open- I've asked my parents and if it was a prank they never found out.
That is the first odd thing I remember the main one however was even stranger. I shared a room with my older brother (he was 2 years older than me) and as a child I was scared of the dark so whenever someone came up the stairs from downstairs and walked past our bedroom (and you could hear people walking by very clearly) I used to call out and ask 'whose there?'.
This one night my Dad was out (at the pub of course being a good Scotsdad) and my mum was downstairs watching tv.
My brother and I were in our beds in our shared room and we heard someone come up the stairs. I called out 'whose there?' as normal but got no reply. The footsteps just walked right by.
I called out again. There was no reply. The footsteps got to the end of the hall, stopped and then started to come back again. This time my brother called out. Stll no reply, just the footsteps.
This continued for a few minutes as our fear increased, the footsteps would approach the door until thy were right outside it, then retreat again to the far end of the hall and we never got an answer.
Eventually my brother, in an act of bravery, opened the door when the footsteps were at their furthest away sounding and shoved me through it into the hall.
Starnage thing is, and I have tried very hard, but I cannot recollect what I saw in the hall if anything. But what I did was to run like the wind down the stairs in a pancik into the arms of my shocked mother.
She did what all good parents would do, told me it was a dream and then came up the starirs, put all the lights on and showed us there was no one there and that all the rooms were definetly empty.
This of course only made it worse as then we knew it was a ghost!
I've spoken to my brother about it since and he remembers it but just dismisses it as childhood stuff- I have never been quite so sure- I have a very clear recollection of most of it, and its not like we didnt both hear the footsepts and its not like it didnt last a while.
And as I say thats only the first of the wird things Ive encountered over life.

(For the record I dont believe in ghosts)

I have never seen anything on the 'ghost' front.

The only weird things I have ever seen are:

• In the garden on a summer evening lokoing at a nice clear sky with my then girlfriend. I noticed a flash... very distant one and pointed out to the GF that it is what I saw and both looking at the same piece of sky, we saw a slow moving, distant streak followed by a further light start moving away from where the first streak was heading.
  
• Second one was in town with my friend, heard a funny 'whooshing noise' overhead, looked up and saw a white light going overhead. Funny thing about the light was that there was a second white light moving around it, like it was barrell rolling over and under. Was an od thing too see
  

David H wrote:

halfwise wrote: It's more important for us as a species to feel bonding than to be 100% rational about whether any such metaphysical connections really exist.

... which is probably wise considering that what's called rationality is a disturbingly flawed artificial construct.

would you care to elaborate on the disturbing flaws?

ok heres another spooky tale.
My parents house has a pretty good atmosphere I always felt safe there, as opposed to many other buildings that I literally refuse to enter ever again because they 'feel' bad. Anyway the only part of the house that felt strange was on the landing from the top of the main stairs to the upper rooms. There I always felt not scared but spooked like you feel some one behind you and your hackles rise, goosebumps that kind of caper. It turns out that there was a possible disappearance in the house going back to before the 2WW. The people who lived in my parents house before them had neighbours who were friends of the Mosleys the infamous English fascists, Mosley I belived lived in Manchester, anyway the two families were all friends in the 30s and 40s before the War and one time the Moselys asked this family to put up a young visitor, a German man, he was staying in what would become my bedroom many years later, of all places, and he would go out every day to take 'photos' of the docks and army barracks. He was obviously a spy, but one day he disappeared into thin air, the old lady who lived in our house before us, told the neighbours that he went missing in our house after some soldiers turned up and screams were heard. I reckon its him at the top of the landing.

halfwise wrote:
would you care to elaborate on the disturbing flaws?

I was afraid somebody might ask that. I can't think how to quickly dissect rational thought without it starting looking like your quantum physics thread of Petty's dissection of the Gospels, both of which I'm enjoying but I'm not quite ready to make that commitment....

If you're not familiar with logical positivism (Wittgenstein, Burtrand Russell and those guys) you should look it up. It's fascinating, particularly in it's failure.

In the later 19th and early 20th century there was an epic effort to make rational thought rigorous, specifically purifying it of all metapysics. Symbolic logic was invented to take the ambiguity out of language. It was part of that same hubris you were referring to in your intro to quantum mechanics where it was believe that everything could and soon would be known.... Until the battle starting being lost on every front! Whether it was Heisenburg or Goedel, all disciplines started "proving" that the unknowable was a necessary and integral part of the world.

Every good mathematical library has a beautiful leather bound set of "Principia Mathematica" by Burtrad Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most monumental efforts ever published, and it's never opened. What was supposed to have been the foundation and touchstone for all rational thought turned out to be a simple dead end.

Personally, I believe that "reason", "rational thought", "logic" etc. are just attempts to describe algorithms that work well within the architecture of the human brain. They're powerful tools for understanding infinitely complex systems in simple terms, but to believe that everything can be compressed and twisted to fit our simple algorithms is arrogant.

Ghost stories.... OK first I'll say that I see no reason to believe or disbelieve in ghosts.

A few years ago I stopped in Idaho to climb Borah Peak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borah_Peak , the highest in Idaho. You drive through a large sheep pasture and park in a large open lot at the base of the trail. I had slept in my car the night before so I could start hiking before first light.

I move pretty quickly on a good trail, so I was slightly surprised a few hours later when I became aware that another climber was behind me. He slowly closed the distance between us, and eventually joined me when I was taking a short rest. We chatted a bit and I offered to let him lead, but he said no, he'd just follow me. We talked about many things. He was between jobs, going to visit family, had rented a car, what climbs he'd done....all just as normal as you could want, but he would never take the lead, which is unusual, and he was asking me questions that made it increasingly clear that he was depending on my judgment.

Now one of the reasons I like traveling solo is so I'm not responsible for others if I take a risk and misjudge, so I was getting increasingly interested in ditching this guy, but I couldn't shake him. Finally we came to a place called "chicken-out ridge" an exposed bit of bare rock and scree before the final scramble to the summit. It was a sunny day and I was in a t-shirt, but there were clouds building on the other side of the valley. I probably would have gone on if I'd been alone or this guy had been less dependent, but it just felt increasingly creepy, so I listened to my internal voice and told him I didn't feel the need to go all the way today, and I'd be turning around now.

He changed then. He tried to persuade me. He almost begged me to go on with him. When I continued to refuse, he made me promise to wait for him for at least 15 minutes while he crossed the ridge in case he wanted to come back too. So I sat down, and he scrambled up the scree slope toward the ridge alone.

Within 30 seconds of him leaving me, a freezing wind came up the draw, the cloud bank from the other side of the valley started racing across, blocking the sun, and fog started forming all around me. I put on what few extra clothes I had and huddled down on the exposed rocky slope, watching the trail on the far side of the ridge for the man to appear.......but he never did.

I was shivering badly from the cold, and the creepy feeling had built to an internal scream, but I waited every second of the promised 15 minutes. Then I started scrambling down the mountain as fast as my legs would carry me. I made it back down to my car in about an hour and a half without a stop, running when the trail permitted it.

When I got to the foot of the trail, there was my car. Alone in a large open field.

Without my even thinking what I was doing, my hands reached down and built a small cairn of stones. I still don't know why, but it felt better then.

I thought you might be referring to the Principia Mathematica and it's ilk. The final statement that all our much vaunted logical systems may be incapable of describing a far richer and more complex reality I think has been proven true many times, but I'm not sure it's related to the Achilles heel of mathematics. Roger Penrose wrote a book called 'the Emperor's New Clothes' that tried to relate Goedel's theorem to quantum mechanics, though I remember being unconvinced. I will probably go back and reread it because it had the best explanation of Goedel's theorem I've ever seen.

David's story posted as I was posting my reply to his previous one.

I seem to remember a number of eery things like this happening to me, but my memory filters them out because they don't fit into my world view. It's not that I don't like them or don't believe they happen, it's just that they may perturb me too much if I keep them around. I accept that I may be too narrow minded to see the world the way it really is, but once it's classified as fiction the blockage is removed and I can recall the finest minutia of LoTR, with particular enjoyment of the mystical elements. Just the way my mind works.

Great tales folks.
David if I was to cast a Casteneda styled eye over your tale it sounds like a classic encounter with an Ally.
The very concept of them has fascinated me since I first heard of the concept (on a documentray about South American Shamans-then later in reading Casteneda).
In which case you had an encounter with an inorganic being- an entity without any organic components but still alive as it is in possession of awareness- the usual reaction to meeting one is a growing sensation of severe discomfort and a sense something is just wrong (apprently its a reaction to the alien energy that make them up- but they are not aliens- they live here on earth always have).
Not I'm saying I actually believe this, but a few things in my life mean I have never been able to entirely discount it either. The idea that there could be some other form of life on the planet so seperated by the barriers of perception from us that we just dont normally see each other does not seem impossible to me- afterall there are lots of things we know are there that without sophisticated instruments we otherwise would have no clue to exisiting at all.

Ally has never produced feelings of severe discomfort in me......

The plural is allies if that helps!

ok how about this one.
When i was six years old my grandparents took me to Gawsworth House in Cheshire, a manor house from the tudor period the black and white ones or timber beams, it was a lovely Summer day, I remember it vividly because we were travelling in my grandads Bentley an old one with leather seats and a walnut dashboard and silver RAC badges on the front bumper, it was a lovely cherry colour and I loved being in it. So we got to the house and we went in, by all accounts I started screaming to be let out. I dont remember but my mum later told me what happened. I had forgotton all this, and many years later one sunny Summer day with my first hubby we went for a day trip to Gawsworth Hall. We got to the car park near the Hall, happy and relaxed, and I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of dread, a feeling of menace and unpleasantness. I didnt want to go, but because I felt guilty I did go in the house, it felt wrong, especially outside near the lake. I found out later its one of the most haunted places in England specially outside near the lake.

To put a rationale view on that one Mrs Figg- I could postuate that whatever set you off screaming as a child created an association between those feelings and the location- and upon returning there as an adult it triggered the forgotten childhood experience resulting in the feelings you describe.
Not saying thats right, just offering it up as a plausible explanation.

halfwise wrote:I thought you might be referring to the Principia Mathematica and it's ilk. The final statement that all our much vaunted logical systems may be incapable of describing a far richer and more complex reality I think has been proven true many times, but I'm not sure it's related to the Achilles heel of mathematics.

I'm not sure I agree with the "Achilles heel of mathematics". Rather I think this was a major discovery of the negative kind which pushed later 20th century mathematics in cool new directions.

But back to rational thought. Do you think of it as having universal rules, or as it often appears, can each person have their own rules, picking and choosing at will?