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Fixdpin
Trad climber
Porterville,CA
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It is not logical to believe in God. But, it is reasonable if you have ever believed in the Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, the Devil, Tarot cards,good luck, bad luck, saying "Bless you" after someone sneezes, or almost anything else that many of us believe in as we grow up.
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illusiondweller
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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Jan,
Oh most certainly do I believe in that I would be a product of what my culture would bestow me, without a doubt. But here in America, the "melting pot" of the world we have access to all beliefs, including those that you already mentioned. So, what culture did I grow up with? Yes, I was raised with a "Prodestant" (whatever that means) upbringing, till I was about (4) years old and had the Christian God pretty much in the center of my culture (although living my own life and nobody elses but my own). But, as I became a married man, I married a Buddhist from Bangkok, Thailand. I traveled there as well. Did I become a Buddhist? No, but I decided to learn the basics of her cultural religion to better understand where she was coming from hoping that it would help the relationship out. While I was there, I trekked in Nepal as well and learned a bit of the Hindu religion and Anamism (very little). I am unfortunately divorced from her now and whether our cultural difference had anything to do with that, I may never know.
I then was baptized a Mormon in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yep, and thought I was going to marry a schizophrenic woman there (I'm not kidding about the schizophrenia!). Thank God, that didn't work! I then met my current wife, a Catholic, and attended Mass with her regularly. Was I searching? Yep.
I then ended up in jail secondary to an addiction to sex, think what you will. I, fortunately, found a Christ centered addictions program (http://www.reformu.com/); that is changing my life, my spouses life and my five year old's life. I'm sure it's indirectly changing more people than I know, including my twenty five year old son's (atheist) and my twenty one year old daughter's (agnostic) lives as well (from my first marriage). Do I still have a issue with my addiction, most certainly.
But like I said before, there is no other book in this world that put's it's reputation on the line and lays claim with 100% certainty and accuracy what that Bible does! There can only be one Truth Jan, there can't be two, nor three. There must be only one. The Bible says, "I am the truth..." I now have my answer and if I can share what I now know to a Buddhist, to a Muslim, a Taoist, etc., or to those in India or Nepal I will. This is what Jesus did and not only did this but died the death of the cross for you Jan, for me and for all others, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." - John 3:16 KJV
My heart goes out to you Jan and I don't mean that in a sorrowful way but in a very loving sense.
Glory to God
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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illusiondweller-
Thanks for your openness and honesty. I wish you success in your current battles and future endeavors. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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All due respect to those non-Christians in India and elsewhere but after living with "what worked for them" they will end up in hell, spending eternity without Jesus Christ.
--------
I'm thinking that some part of you must already be in hell to think as much.
JL
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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ah, hell.
everyone thinks hell is a hot place, but if you read dante's inferno (yea, what does an italian know?), the very bottom of hell, reserved for the worst sins of all, is a frozen lake in which the devil itself is frozen. (the devil's underlings are the ones in red tights and pitchforks. i wonder if they suffer).
anyway, the devil has the three worst sinners in history in its mouth. can you guess who they might be? this was long before adolph hitler, joseph stalin and richard cheney came along. (does cheney still have a chance to save his soul?)
these three bad guys are brutus, cassius and judas iscariot. the worst sin of all, in dante's mind, is betrayal.
i find it interesting that michelangelo buonarotti, with whose work i'm sure everyone is familiar, sculpted a little-know bust of brutus. as a footnote, michelangelo, dante and niccolo machiavelli were all florentine democrats, passionate about the rule of the people, and all frustrated about that in their lifetimes, leading to great productivity in other realms. brutus, for michelangelo, was as noble a hero as you can imagine.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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okay, here's my second post in a row. if i do a third, you can feel free to ignore that one.
that elaine pagels lecture i mentioned had to do with the recently discovered gospel of judas. this is a bit of early christian literature supposedly written by judas himself in repentence for his role in the arrest of jesus. dante, eat your heart out.
the apocryphal gospel i really like is called the infant gospel of jesus. jesus is playing around with the kids on the block and, being just a kid himself, loses his temper and kills them all in a fit of divine opprobrium. then he realizes what he has done, thinks better of it, and brings them all back to life. everyone lives happily ever after. until each of them dies, of course.
these two gospels appear to be contemporaneous with "the big four" which made it into the king james bible via emperor constantine. these four were chosen because, basically, it makes christianity a more reasonable and administrable religion. think roman umpire. but you will find echoes of all the matthew-mark-luke-john material in the many apocryphal gospels, and the one they really tried to stamp out, because it offered a much less administrable version of christianity, was the gospel of thomas.
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mynameismud
climber
backseat
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It seems ultimately there are choices. To believe or not to believe and what to believe in. I have probably been on every side of the fence. True fanatical believer to non-believer. Almost always though was the lingering question, how do I know I am right.
As many do, I turned to science, I turned to writings and I turned to what I considered scholars. For me a break through occurred sitting at a test bench starring at a bunch of numbers coming from a bunch of test equipment and listening to two guys talk about religion.
One say's the inevitable. I prefer to believe in science. For me that was an epiphany. At that time I sat and stared at all these numbers and wave forms and I realized that no matter what track a person takes, that track is their belief.
There isn't a piece of test equipment out there that can prove or disprove the existence of God or what ever name is used. Ultimately, God, no God, it is what a person chooses to believe.
I do not think anyone can say, if you believe or do not believe, this or that will happen since we really do not know. Some truths we seem to have, others are based on what we think are truths.
The writings, the scholars, they have answers, but not all. By definition all are flawed.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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dr. F:
if you know anything about supersymmetry (advanced physics, a school of thought in debate with the string theorists), you might consider that the actions of quarks are the synapses of the divine brain. mathematics is a universal. logic is too. divinity, if it exists, will exist at this level. abstract mathematics, in its way, has a rather spiritual aspect to it.
dr. F, you've admitted that you have a soul. brace yourself for the stampede of those who will now try to save it. i suggest y'all take it to private e-mails.
doc, i should like to point out that you have exceeded the three-in-a-row limit suggested earlier, but i've read them all anyway. not much else to do this morning waiting for my wife to get ready so's we can go to sunday morning service (haha--at the best breakfast joint in the known universe).
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mynameismud
climber
backseat
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Definitively, there is not anyway to know this. It may seem logical. But, there is not anyway to know if that is true. Unless, that is what you believe.
>>divinity, if it exists, will exist at this level
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WBraun
climber
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Belief does not make it true.
The material body is the covering of the soul.
The soul is not the body.
A crude example:
The clothe you cover your body with is not you.
The clothe you cover your body is reflective of your consciousness.
A climber covers his body with clothing that works for his/her environment due to the consciousness the he or she is a climber.
Due to poor fund of knowledge and material attachment one "thinks" it is the body.
Material body consciousness is the root mistake of the soul.
Without understanding the soul correctly everything else will be subjected to defect.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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pa asks:
1."What we perceive is different from what we sense".
How does that happen?
Actually the NYTimes today reviewed a book, and the review makes at least part of the point that I was getting at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Bloom-t.html
Our perception of what we sense is heavily filtered by the neural network we use to process the information from our senses. In the case that is the title of the aforementioned book The Invisible Gorilla a rather dramatic demonstration of this fact is probably familiar to a lot of you. I'll spare describing it again, I've actually seen the video and fallen into the same perceptual trap, quite astounding (though I knew the point of the demonstration, in this case "not seeing is believing" as it were).
Now there is no doubt that the sensors in the eye that detect the scene are reporting scene correctly (though more on that later), the audience, asked to pay attention to something else in the scene fails to detect something very obvious. Our "perception" of reality is absent pieces of that reality.
Easily explained, the brain cannot process all the information, and the perceptual behavior prioritizes its attention. It is the very point of the fallibility of human witness. This is the stock and trade of "illusion artists."
Now this perceptual filter is not a trivial thing, it actually makes the universe "the way it is" in an odd sense. For instance, our senses are full of "holes." Your eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve connects to the retina. So by all rights you'd think you'd "see" that blind spot. It turns out you don't perceive that blind spot, you "perceive" a continuous field of view, which is what is an excellent description of the scene. But your brain doesn't waste any effort "filling in" the holes, which is what I was taught as a kid, it simply ignores the holes.
Similar things happen with all the other senses.
Most interestingly to me was Oliver Sachs' description of a patient in his book Awakenings in which he observes a patient scratching his nose over the period of a day, slowed down by the chemical imbalance in his brain. Sachs isn't completely clear about this instance, he does state that in order for him to figure out what was going on, he took a sequence of pictures which revealed the action... at any rate, he was able to ask the patient to remember that activity, the patient having been administered L-DOPA, which temporarily corrected the chemical imbalance. The patient was aware that he had scratched his nose, but to him the perception of time was normal, he didn't know that it had taken him all day to do it.
There are a number of anecdotes, and a tremendous field of study both "academic" and practical, regarding the limitations of human perception. This is not a controversial subject.
Simply put, we don't perceive what we sense.
2."The mind is probably a complex phenomena".
Probably?
Like perception, we don't have a really good idea of the elements of "mind" and "consciousness" and the tendency is to believe it's complex because the simpler elements are not understood. Largo will accuse me of being a reductionist, and I'll admit to being one.
But let's take an example... how does the moths and butterflies navigate continental migrations? Such a simple animal, we understand in detail what the elemental parts of the butterfly are, we may actually know how many cells are included in its nervous system.
It has been described to me, by some scientists, as clear indications of "divine intervention" yet the actual mechanisms this simple organism uses have been studied, in a reductionist manner, in detail. See for instance the Science article http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;325/5948/1700
Reduced to a behavioral response to environmental stimulus in a fascinatingly clever adaptation, the complexity of the human act of navigating from, say from Mariposa to Michoacán it would be easy to infer that butterfly navigation is a complex phenomena, but the complexity is not in the evolutionary solution, but in the process, and even there the process, evolution, is relatively straight forward to describe, what is complex is the actual history of this particular evolutionary path.
My guess is that the phenomena of "mind" and "consciousness" could very well be explained in much simpler terms than we currently think possible. However, I hold out the chance that I am wrong, and that it is a complex phenomena... in the end, explainable by those reductionist techniques that Largo finds so inadequate.
3."Certainly our consciousness seems to be unique. The reason that it is probably has to do with the irrelevance of consciousness to survival".
Could you explain that some more?
Evolutionary convergence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_convergence is the observed phenomena of the "same" biological traits being acquired by organisms of different, and unrelated, evolutionary lineages. Photoreception is an example, many different kinds of "eyes" to take advantage of the information provided by "sight."
My speculation about consciousness is that were it as important as sight in evolution, there would be more of it around. We don't think there is...
...however that in itself leads to an interesting supposition. Let's suppose that consciousness does provide a survival advantage. Then we might infer that it exists in many animals (and plants?). The fact that we don't recognize it could be because we actually don't know what it is.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Largo wrote:
Many religious ideas are products of the mind, as you say, but probably just as many are interpretations or evaluations of spiritual experiences people have had or heard about which in and of themselves (the experiences) are not thoughts.
I think this is a source of our disagreement and my misunderstanding your point. To me, anything that happens to us, which we articulate, is a "thought," where I may accept a larger set of things as "thoughts" then you.
The exercise of achieving a state of "thoughtlessness" is relatively commonly described (though less commonly achieved) part of meditation practice. Even if you believe you achieve it what does it have to do with objective reality? It might awaken your own experience to a world beyond your perception, but that is not a big deal to someone practicing science. In fact, I'd say that as a scientist you don't have to have that sort of experience to understand how different the world is from the way we perceive it.
Would such an experience make for better scientists? not in terms of doing better science.
Can the ideas of modern physics help in our understanding of the world beyond our perceptual chatter? perhaps, but the probably don't help in our understanding of consciousness, the analogies are far from precise, and many of them are just not applicable.
The picture Largo paints of the "roiling vacuum" is compelling, but it is taken from quantum field theory, perturbative field theory which we know is an approximation that describes nature in very well defined regime. The idea of a complex vacuum is a modern concept, it's exact nature is unknown, but not in a mystical way, in a very pragmatic, quantitative way.
This has been discussed for quite some time in physics, related to the issues of the Cosmological Constant Einstein inferred as necessary to explain the static universe, the prevailing cosmological paradigm of the early 20th century. Steve Weinberg addressed the issue of the size of the cosmological constant using modern understanding of the vacuum, in a 1989 paper in Review of Modern Physics 61, 1 (1989). By the best techniques available, his estimate exceeded the observed experimental value by 120 orders of magnitude (powers of ten).
Whatever else this means, to a physicist it is saying there is some physics we are missing in the picture Largo so poetically paints of "bursts of particle anti-particle creation and destruction."
Thus my skepticism on the usefulness of those analogies to consciousness and thought.
Rather, thought and consciousness are attributes of the evolution of our behavior, behavior necessary for our survival as a species, and behavior inherited in our evolutionary lineage. To argue that there is some mystical or spiritual source of this behavior you'd have to explain the evolution of the mystical and spiritual, and where it happens elsewhere among our evolutionary relatives. This evolutionary development is notoriously "messy" with bits and pieces of inherited attributes appropriated for other functions, layered and mixed to address some evolutionary challenge, difficult to unfold.
Perhaps this is being too reductionist?
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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doc, there is profuse evidence of continuation of consciousness and personality after death, but you have to open your mind to the paranormal. i didn't pay much attention to it myself until i had some of it fall in my lap.
and no, werner, you don't fit god into these things right away, but learn a little patience, lad. most of the jibberish i hear is from physics dilletantes. you have to pay dues to get into physics, and i don't pretend to have done so, but those who have report things that are very, very interesting, especially to this debate.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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ed hartouni, two very long posts in a row. you're treading in thin ice. will try to read it all--later.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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The problem is an epistemological one with regard to the mysterious nature of existence, god.
All religions assume a kind of existence beyond the forms of sensibility.
Our separation from corporeal matter is a function of the very structure of sensual perception. We cannot in the Kantian sense “know” the “thing in itself.”
It is the fallibility of “knowing” that allows us to embrace a leap of intuition and faith and journey into the realm of a spiritual life.
But like the forms of sensibility, the structure of intuition does not allow certainty either, ultimately we still find ourselves separated from any ineluctable reality.
Unfortunately, our intuition like our sensual knowledge seduces with the illusion of knowing and we become perfectly certain of what we cannot be sure of.
Religions have always created anthropomorphic, psychological metaphors that really represent what is grave and constant in our lives.
Even a cursory examination of religious belief systems reveals perfect similarities. Life after death, the virgin birth, the journey into hell and return, the state of perfection in original creation, all of these stories have been told over and over again in countless cultural contexts with only the thinnest of local inflections.
The similarity or syncrety of religious belief systems seems to argue against the absolute reality of any one system.
The great genius of some religions was to take these traditional metaphors (that in their own way certainly enrich our lives) and turn them into historical realities. The consequences have not always been edifying.
So instead of seeing the virgin birth as a metaphor for the birth the spiritual life in the individual,
we are asked to accept it as an historical fact taking place in Bethlehem sometime in the first century.
All significant life experiences are universal: birth, death, dis-engagement into adulthood, old age. Dealing with these universal gravities has created similar systems of reconciliation, but reconciliation does not solve the mystery.
We cannot be certain if God is or is not or even what God is and it seems particularly tragic to impose our metaphors turned historical realities on others.
Know thy metaphor. And if you want reconciliation to existence remember this:
“…for it is only as an aesthetic experience that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
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pa
climber
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Mr. Hartouni, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
On point #1, I was just making sure I wasn't misunderstanding you...and yes, I agree, perception can indeed be selective.
On the other points, as well as those you address to Mr. Largo, I am afraid I am still questing...perhaps you are too.
"My speculation about consciousness is that were it as important as sight in evolution, there would be more of it around. We don't think there is...
However, that in itself leads to an interesting supposition. Let's suppose that consciousness does provide a survival advantage, then we might infer that it exists in many animals (and plants?). The fact that we don't recognize it could be because we actually don't know what it is".
"Thought and consciousness are attributes of evolution of our behavior, behavior necessary for our survival as a species".
Is it my faulty brain, or is there a contradiction in those two statements?
I suppose a definition of consciousness would be in order, if I had one.
Is consciousness a product of perception or is perception a product of consciousness?
What else, besides perception, is involved in consciousness?
Intuition? Logic? Memory? Experience? Imagination? How reliable/accurate...objective, are any of those?
WB often reminds us that we are not bodies with consciousness, but consciousness with bodies. Is that the same consciousness you refer to, as a scientist?
Obviously, there are different levels of consciousness...that of a cockroach and that of a tree and that of Mr. Illusiondweller and that of Mahatma Ghandi.
You speak of survival as the primary impulse to evolution...the evidence we "perceive" certainly points in that direction.
But is it? Or, should I ask, evolution of what? The physical body or the consciousness bit?
Because, if it is consciousness that is, or should be, evolving, perhaps instead of survival, we should be speaking of manifestation...which could change our priorities: beauty might become more important than possession...
Just mentally speculating...too hot to be outside and missing my mate.
Please share more of your thoughts, if you are so inclined.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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gobee, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE learn to say it in your own words.
the devil can cut and paste scripture to his purpose.
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go-B
climber
In God We Trust
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Mark 3:25, And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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and christianity has how many divisions? you're probably right, it isn't standing very well.
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Tony B:
doc, there is profuse evidence of continuation of consciousness and personality after death, but you have to open your mind to the paranormal. i didn't pay much attention to it myself until i had some of it fall in my lap.
Do tell.
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