Where do you fit in as a believer or skeptic?

[Randall]

You have proved my expectations of you. So what else is new?

I think your best bet is to get your answers from some 'New Ager' - since your belief system is very rigid that such a thing exists. Happy hunting.

Why did you not just answer the questions? What do you mean by:

• Spiritual
• Spiritual realm
• Physical death

Why should we take your statement as a given? To quote:

• "We understand that every human being experiences the spiritual realms once they die their physical death. That is a given."

They're very straight forward questions. How do you expect people to understand what you're saying if you don't take the time to explain the fundamentals? I'm guessing it's because you don't have any answers that either make sense or are verifiable, at least for the first two questions.

Ufology, there is a saying - from the Bible, no less - about not casting pearls before swine. You do not demonstrate an ability to entertain any thoughts beyond your own world view. You have a very strong filter. It is what it is.

Speaking of religion and Pearls Before Swine:

A Pearls Before Swine Classic​

 

[mike]

So we have an absolute statement of fact

"We understand that every human being experiences the spiritual realms once they die their physical death. That is a given."

But when asked for proof of this claim...............
We get the typical dodge.
The answer is clearly, he cant provide proof of claim, the claim is nonsense.

Skepticism is widely employed in the sciences. Skeptics doubt theories or hypotheses unless they are able to verify them on adequate evidential grounds. The same is true among skeptical inquirers into religion. The skeptic in religion is not dogmatic, nor does he or she reject religious claims a priori; he or she is simply unable to accept the case for God unless it is supported by adequate evidence.
The burden of proof lies upon theists to provide cogent reasons and evidence for their belief that God exists. Faith by itself is hardly sufficient, for faiths collide-in any case, the appeal to faith to support one's creed is irrational in its pretentious claim based on the "will to believe." If it were acceptable to argue in this way, then anyone would be entitled to believe whatever he or she fancied.

Council for Secular Humanism
This

We understand that every human being experiences the spiritual realms once they die their physical death. That is a given

Could just as easily be

We understand that Santa leaves presents under the tree, Santa is real. That is a given

 

[Randall]

So we have an absolute statement of fact

But when asked for proof of this claim...............

We get the typical dodge.

The answer is clearly, he cant provide proof of claim, the claim is nonsense.

It's not like we're unwilling to listen either ( though Rat's fast does sound compelling ). I've had many rather lengthy conversations with people who are at least willing to try to make some sense out of what they believe. I've even taken the time to read through and identify specific issues in Tyger's post that will allow us to get a handle on the issues. Is that not perfectly fair? But let's even be more fair and wait to see if anything materializes. Maybe something will happen.

 

[mike]

Fourth, we are driven to ask: will those who believe in God actually achieve immortality of the soul and eternal salvation as promised?
The first objection of the skeptic to this claim is that the forms of salvation being offered are highly sectarian. The Hebrew Bible promises salvation for the chosen people; the New Testament, the Rapture to those who have faith in Jesus Christ; the Qur'an, heaven to those who accept the will of Allah as transmitted by Muhammad.

In general, these promises are not universal but apply only to those who acquiesce to a specific creed, as interpreted by priests, ministers, rabbis, or mullahs. Bloody wars have been waged to establish the legitimacy of the papacy (between Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy), the priority of Muhammad and the Qur'an, or the authenticity of the Old Testament.

A second objection is that there is insufficient scientific evidence for the claim that the "soul" can exist separate from the body and that it can survive death as a "discarnate" being, and much less for the claim that it can persist throughout eternity. Science points to the fact that the "mind" or "consciousness" is a function of the brain and nervous system and that with the physical death of the body, the "self" or "person" disappears. Thus, the claim that a person's soul can endure forever is supported by no evidence whatever, only by pious hope.

Along the same line, believers have never succeeded in demonstrating the existence of the disembodied souls of any of the billions who went before us. All efforts to communicate with such discarnate entities have been fruitless. Sightings of alleged ghosts have not been corroborated by reliable eyewitness testimony.
The appeal to near-death experiences simply reports the phenomenological experiences of persons who undergo part of the dying process but ultimately do not die. Of course, we never hear from anyone who has truly died by any clinical standard, gone to "the other side" and returned. In any case, these subjective experiences can be explained in terms of natural, psychological, and physiological causes.

Council for Secular Humanism

 

[Tyger]

Why did you not just answer the questions?

For Pete's sake - you've got to be kidding me!

Try figuring it out for yourself, ufology. I've left a breadcrumb trail. The answer is there - but you can't 'hear' it, because as you yourself admitted, you're not about understanding anything that you are afraid of. Your ears are closed. Your mind is closed. If after everything I've said you can't connect the dots, what is one to say more? It's like teaching math - some people honestly believe that one learns math from a teacher. One doesn't. One rises to the concepts by an internal act of apprehension.

I know you are fond of definitions so I just googled one up for you: apprehension - the faculty or act of apprehending, especially intuitive understanding; perception on a direct and immediate level.

It is by acts of apprehension that higher thinking advances.

To say one more time: this is not about words or convincing anyone of anything. It's about personal experience. Give it a go. It's not an intellectual game of beliefs. It's about traveling down that road where there are no authorities to consult or rail against. No excuses. You must do it on your own.

Unless this is a game - is it fun? For sure there is an active and very vocal posting group here who hold very strongly to their anti-religious views - or anti-spiritual views - or anti-whatever it is that is going on. [I am not a stand-in for every religious/spiritual/alternative thinker you have ever come across or been raised with.] It's as though buzzing around someone who advocates a particular-seemingly-similar paradigm to-one-you-encountered-before can be 'beaten back' by incessant heckling. Is the buzzing fun? Does it work? Do you learn anything from this behavior? Because you know what they say about doing the same thing over-and-over expecting different results......

Instead of a free-flowing discourse on all matter of possibilities here - one finds a very dogmatic this-is-the-way-it-is-not. Fascinating for sure to find such on such a chat site but very disappointing, too. I can bet that many people who find their way here decide it's not worth it to spend precious time posting their hard-won perspectives only to be called a 'your ilk' - which I have been and when I asked what that meant, I was never answered. Or to have pretty decently written prose called gobble-dee-gook. So there you go. I do know when to quit - when my time is being wasted.

Anyway, good luck to you. One day maybe you'll make the decision to start learning about this world - rather than the one that you believe is there. I can promise you that taking the route of penetrating the real world - in all it's variations and levels - is the greatest adventure there is. IMO, of course.

 

[Randall]

For Pete's sake - you've got to be kidding me!

Try figuring it out for yourself, ufology. I've left a breadcrumb trail. The answer is there - but you can't 'hear' it, because as you yourself admitted, you're not about understanding anything that you are afraid of. Your ears are closed. Your mind is closed. If after everything I've said you can't connect the dots, what is one to say more? It's like teaching math - some people honestly believe that one learns math from a teacher. One doesn't. One rises to the concepts by an internal act of apprehension.

I know you are fond of definitions so I just googled one up for you: apprehension - the faculty or act of apprehending, especially intuitive understanding; perception on a direct and immediate level.

It is by acts of apprehension that higher thinking advances.

To say one more time: this is not about words or convincing anyone of anything. It's about personal experience. Give it a go. It's not an intellectual game of beliefs. It's about traveling down that road where there are no authorities to consult or rail against. No excuses. You must do it on your own.

Unless this is a game - is it fun? For sure there is an active and very vocal posting group here who hold very strongly to their anti-religious views - or anti-spiritual views - or anti-whatever it is that is going on. [I am not a stand-in for every religious/spiritual/alternative thinker you have ever come across or been raised with.] It's as though buzzing around someone who advocates a particular-seemingly-similar paradigm to-one-you-encountered-before can be 'beaten back' by incessant heckling. Is the buzzing fun? Does it work? Do you learn anything from this behavior? Because you know what they say about doing the same thing over-and-over expecting different results......

Instead of a free-flowing discourse on all matter of possibilities here - one finds a very dogmatic this-is-the-way-it-is-not. Fascinating for sure to find such on such a chat site but very disappointing, too. I can bet that many people who find their way here decide it's not worth it to spend precious time posting their hard-won perspectives only to be called a 'your ilk' - which I have been and when I asked what that meant, I was never answered. Or to have pretty decently written prose called gobble-dee-gook. So there you go. I do know when to quit - when my time is being wasted.

Anyway, good luck to you. One day maybe you'll make the decision to start learning about this world - rather than the one that you believe is there. I can promise you that taking the route of penetrating the real world - in all it's variations and levels - is the greatest adventure there is. IMO, of course.

@mike : Well I guess we got our answer, which is once again no answer. I guess we either have to ask no questions, expect no answers, and drink the Cool Aid or our "ears are closed" and our "mind is closed". I also don't know where Tyger got the idea that I'm, "not about understanding anything that I'm afraid of". Where did that come from? And what's the point of all the rhetoric ( again ), when simply answering the questions I asked would be sufficient? Maybe it's some kind of avoidance coping and the fear Tyger is talking about is some kind of projection reaction? Perhaps unraveling all these concepts will lead to an inescapable conclusion that Tyger can't face? I'm certainly not afraid to explore these issues. If it turns out that I'm wrong, then great. I've learned something new and I'm one step closer to the truth. So let's try this one more time. We'll go with just one single sentence consisting of two questions:

Q: What do you mean by a spiritual realm, and why should we take it for granted that anyone experiences it when they die?

 

[Randall]

... Of course, we never hear from anyone who has truly died by any clinical standard, gone to "the other side" and returned. In any case, these subjective experiences can be explained in terms of natural, psychological, and physiological causes ...

Well actually, there have been people who have been declared "clinically dead" who have been revived and then report having had a NDE. The problem with these reports is that "clinical death" isn't relevant to the issue. So long as someone can be revived, then their brain is once again functioning and they can report whatever memory they want. They may even believe it's true. But as of yet, there's insufficient evidence to believe NDEs represent real time perceptions of being transported into an afterlife reality. Of particular note are the numerous failed attempts of those who experience OOBEs as part of the transition, to identify specific test patterns used to test these kinds of claims. So it's not that I dispute that people have these experiences. I believe some people do. Just like I believe some people see what they believe to be ghosts. But what those experiences actually represent is the point of contention. Why should we be so invested in any particular interpretation that we're certain we know the answer?

 

[mike]

Well actually, there have been people who have been declared "clinically dead" who have been revived and then report having had a NDE. The problem with these reports is that "clinical death" isn't relevant to the issue. So long as someone can be revived, then their brain is once again functioning and they can report whatever memory they want. They may even believe it's true. But as of yet, there's insufficient evidence to believe NDEs represent real time perceptions of being transported into an afterlife reality. Of particular note are the numerous failed attempts of those who experience OOBEs as part of the transition, to identify specific test patterns used to test these kinds of claims. So it's not that I dispute that people have these experiences. I believe some people do. Just like I believe some people see what they believe to be ghosts. But what those experiences actually represent is the point of contention.

True, but ultimately they did not actually die, since they lived to tell their of their experiences

 

[mike]

@mike : Well I guess we got our answer, which is once again no answer. I guess we either have to ask no questions, expect no answers, and drink the Cool Aid or our "ears are closed" and our "mind is closed". I also don't know where Tyger got the idea that I'm, "not about understanding anything that I'm afraid of". Where did that come from? And what's the point of all the rhetoric ( again ), when simply answering the questions I asked would be sufficient? Maybe it's some kind of avoidance coping and the fear Tyger is talking about is some kind of projection reaction? Perhaps unraveling all these concepts will lead to an inescapable conclusion that Tyger can't face? I'm certainly not afraid to explore these issues. If it turns out that I'm wrong, then great. I've learned something new and I'm one step closer to the truth. So let's try this one more time. We'll go with just one single sentence consisting of two questions:

Q: What do you mean by a spiritual realm, and why should we take it for granted that anyone experiences it when they die?

He cannot give you an answer, if he could he would have done so and fixed our little red wagons with the evidence but good.

To support the claim we require evidence in the form of verifiable facts, he has none. He has faith, nothing more.

It is in fact quite typical that if enough people of their religious persuasion agreee on a matter of faith, it becomes (in their minds at least) a defacto fact.
But this is a mistake, collective faith doesnt magically become fact by this process.

No matter how many millions of children believe in Santa, reindeer pulled sleighs dont fly.

These claims again are uncorroborated by objective eyewitnesses. They are rather promulgated by propagandists of the various faith traditions that have been inflicted on societies and enforced by entrenched ecclesiastical authorities and political powers. They are supported by customs and traditions buried for millennia by the sands of time and institutional inertia. They are simply assumed to be true without question.

The ancient documents alleging God's existence are preliterate, prephilosophical, and, in any case, unconfirmed by scientific inquiry. They are often eloquent literary expressions of existential moral poetry, but they are unverified by archeological evidence or careful historical investigation. Moreover, they contradict each other in their claims for authenticity and legitimacy.

The ancient faith that God is a person has not been corroborated by the historical record. Such conceptions of God are anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, reading into the universe human predilections and feelings. "If lions had gods they would be lionlike in character," said Xenophon. Thus, human Gods are an extrapolation of human hopes and aspirations, fanciful tales of imaginative fiction.

But the mechanism of assuming a thing to be true without question, could apply to any and all claims.
Its not a very sensible way to decode and decipher reality, You could not in any way, shape or form categorise it as a forensic "tool".

To "drill down" one needs a drill, blind faith wont even scratch the surface.....................

 

[mike]

The burden of proof lies upon theists to provide cogent reasons and evidence for their belief that God exists. Faith by itself is hardly sufficient, for faiths collide-in any case, the appeal to faith to support one's creed is irrational in its pretentious claim based on the "will to believe." If it were acceptable to argue in this way, then anyone would be entitled to believe whatever he or she fancied.

The skeptic thus requires evidence and reasons for a hypothesis or belief before it is accepted. Always open to inquiry, skeptical inquirers are prepared to change their beliefs in the light of new evidence or arguments. They will not accept appeals to authority or faith, custom or tradition, intuition or mysticism, reports of miracles or uncorroborated revelations. Skeptical inquirers are willing to suspend judgment about questions for which there is insufficient evidence. Skeptics are in that sense genuinely agnostic, in that they view the question as still open, though they remain unbelievers in proposals for which they think theists offer insufficient evidence and invalid arguments. Hence, they regard the existence of any god as highly improbable.

"Skepticism," as a coherent philosophical and scientific posture, has always dealt with religious questions, and it professed to find little scientific or philosophical justification for belief in God. Philosophers in the ancient world such as Pyrrho, Cratylus, Sextus Empiricus, and Carneades questioned metaphysical and theological claims. Modern philosophers, including Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, have drawn heavily on classical skepticism in developing their scientific outlook. Many found the "God question" unintelligible; modern science could proceed only by rejecting occult claims as vacuous, as was done by Galileo and other working scientists-and also by latter-day authors such as Freud and Marx, Russell and Dewey, Sartre and Heidegger, Popper and Hook, Crick and Watson, Bunge, and Wilson.

The expression "a skeptic about religious claims" is more appropriate in my opinion than the term atheist, for it emphasizes inquiry. The concept of inquiry contains an important constructive component, for inquiry leads to scientific wisdom-human understanding of our place in the cosmos and the ever-increasing fund of human knowledge.

 

[Randall]

He cannot give you an answer, if he could he would have done so and fixed our little red wagons with the evidence but good ...

I don't sense any hostility from Tyger. Maybe there's some mitigating circumstances that we're not seeing.

@Tyger, I'm sure what you're saying all seems to make sense to you, even if you can't explain it to the rest of us. Maybe there is some magical realm we are somehow transported to after our deaths. Simply because I question that belief doesn't mean that you have to. Perhaps I mistakenly assumed that because you were posting your thoughts on a discussion forum, that you were open to discussing the issue rather than simply editorializing. However, If you're just saying that you believe what you believe and that's that, end of story, then fine, live and let live. It's not like you're advocating forced submission to some religion or ritual sacrifices or anything wacko like that. Believe in whatever "spiritual realms" and afterlives makes you happy.

@mike, In the meantime how about you and I carry on looking for the truth? I haven't seen much new on that front lately. Have you? The computational model was gaining traction until this dubious claim about scientists having actually discovered the Higgs Boson hit the news. What do you make of that?

 

[mike]

Quick answer since Doctor who is about to start down here

The discovery of the Higgs Boson particle proved Standard Theory. If the graviton were discovered, and if a particle such as that can be observed to get sucked into another dimension, M Theory will be proved (these experiments are being carried out in Europe and America at Hadron Calliders). According to Stephen Hawking, M Theory doesn't prove or disprove the existence of God but makes God unnecessary
I'd be more interested in seeing M theory proved, than standard theory. All it did was confirm what weve long suspected anyway

In regards to the computational model, if you are refering to the simulation argument

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
Then i dont think the discovery of HBP, affects it really. It would simply be a (newly discovered) part of the simulation

 

[trainedobserver]

Ah, TrainedObserver - tisn't that simple. ...

That was a non-answer.

Let's start at the beginning if we could. Please define for the sake of the discussion, your use of the words spirit and spiritual.

 

[Goggs Mackay]

Best of luck Trained.

 

[trainedobserver]

Best of luck Trained.

Ha, ha. I should have read the other responses before I chimed in! Yes, the fundamental question is what is meant by spirit and the spiritual realms. What are we actually talking about? I was a "believer" for decades and never received an acceptable explanation of those terms.

It was only after I lost my "faith" that I was able to arrive at a very rudimentary understanding of how the limitations of human perception and cognition precipitate a belief in "other plains of existence" and so forth. The irony is that we are constructed in such a way that our perceptual apparatus presents a limited spectrum model of the world and ourselves in it (an illusion created from our own substance) that is naively mistaken for the real world it represents. (Which brings to mind the self-awareness test of recognizing oneself in a mirror. Are you aware that you are looking at only yourself right now?) What we mistake as the "physical world" is actually ourselves and the real world in which our bodies actually exist takes on the characteristics of what is often referred to as the "spiritual realm." Invisible, intangible, infinite, silent and decidedly non-physical. The quantum world might be another term for it.

My problem arises in those who tell me they can breach the gulf and supercede their design limitations to bring back actionable intelligence from "spiritual realms." The information is never anything that couldn't be produced by the human imagination and it is seldom of any practical real world value although you could consider those things art and worthy of study in how they spotlight the human condition. That's why I have to ask for examples. Maybe there is something or someone else to be considered, but I need something to go on.

 

[Michael Allen]

What does it mean for someone to say they "believe" something? I seriously doubt it means anything else than one's own reactionary attitude toward their own thoughts. Try believing that you can think something without believing and you fall back into the trap. When you "believe" you are simply placing a tag on something in your head and then writing off any further attempts to dissuade your thoughts otherwise. But you wouldn't place such a tag on something if you didn't doubt your thinking in the first place, because it would never occur to you to 'believe' something when 'thinking so-and-so' was sufficient. In other words, it is this initial lack of confidence for which the phenomenon of "belief" takes root--without which you wouldn't have the need to place tags on your own thoughts. Faith--or belief-- is the notion that one's own attitudes about their thoughts are a sufficient justification for the same--a brain attempting to pull itself together by its own bootstraps but instead hangs itself in a tight web.

 

[Randall]

What does it mean for someone to say they "believe" something? I seriously doubt it means anything else than one's own reactionary attitude toward their own thoughts. Try believing that you can think something without believing and you fall back into the trap. When you "believe" you are simply placing a tag on something in your head and then writing off any further attempts to dissuade your thoughts otherwise. But you wouldn't place such a tag on something if you didn't doubt your thinking in the first place, because it would never occur to you to 'believe' something when 'thinking so-and-so' was sufficient. In other words, it is this initial lack of confidence for which the phenomenon of "belief" takes root--without which you wouldn't have the need to place tags on your own thoughts. Faith--or belief-- is the notion that one's own attitudes about their thoughts are a sufficient justification for the same--a brain attempting to pull itself together by its own bootstraps but instead hangs itself in a tight web.

What does it mean for someone to say they "believe" ...
I'm A Believer - Smash Mouth Version

Original version by the Monkees here

​

 

[Randall]

What does it mean for someone to say they "believe" something?

More seriously, I'd say that when someone says they believe something, it's virtually the same as saying they think that something is true. Whether or not that is actually the case is another matter.

 

[boomerang]

I had the dubious pleasure of spending one year of my college career at a very right wing religious university. (The vagaries of clueless youth) I recall a friend of mine, a Japanese exchange student who had a large sectarian target on his back and had no idea why. Various Fundies in the dorm would spend hours "witnessing" to this poor guy, who listened with almost infinite patience and politeness. I doubt much actual communication took place. But I do recall one memorable exchange that, I think , gets at the core of a key difference in philosophical viewpoints. On the Christian side: the repeated message that conversion had everything to do with soul and nothing to do with the mind. Don't try to think it out, he was repeatedly, told. My friend's retort, pointing to his head: "But you tell me this with your head". I don't recall an effective comeback.

 

[Michael Allen]

"Heart", "mind", "soul", "head", "brain", ... whatever, etc., you're a DNA meat survival machine that thinks.