Atheism is a religion, because it requires just as much FAITH to BELIEVE in it! You are FUNDAMENTALISTS!

You can’t prove that there is no god, so why are you so sure that there isn’t one? That requires FAITH!

If we came from Monkeys, then why are there still monkeys? My grandpa doesn’t look like a monkey!

Evolution isn’t a fact, it’s only a theory! Why should I believe that theory instead of the one I was taught at church?!

And on that note…

Dunt dun duuh DAAAAHHHH!

!!!!!!!!!MY ATHEIST STORE!!!!!!!!!

Aristotle’s Muse

This is my store. If you’re as irritated by this kind of mindless banter as I am, speak your mind. Maybe wearing an atheist T-shirt won’t change the world, but enough of them just might help.

I believe people who allows themselves to tap into their real (nonlocal) spiritual self are already living in destiny.

you said, “of course gods exist in the minds of those who believe in them.”

i said “i suggest the weight of this statement depends on the degree to which we believe that this is true for everything else, i.e. the degree to which we believe in solipsism”

what i meant how weighty/important this idea is depends on how much you believe that OTHER things also mostly reside in people’s heads.

some things are obvious. e.g. i have no idea what the colour orange looks like to you – all we can do is agree to call a certain range of light wave the name “orange” but your experience of that colour is forever locked in your head.

and then practically speaking, the vast majority of our experiences are locked up inside of us maybe not so much because we can’t explain them but simply because we don’t have the time to communicate them.

but when you and i are at a bloggers meetup together and your pop and my whiskey sit on the same table, do we want to go so far as to say that the table, the whiskey and the pop only exist in our minds, too? that would be solipsism, and if you subscribed to it then your statement that god lives in the minds of those who believe in god would be uninteresting.

which i suggest it is not.

@jan and what about the second part: “i suggest the weight of this statement depends on the degree to which we believe that this is true for everything else, i.e. the degree to which we believe in solipsism”

Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant, so I just skipped that bit.

Jan Karlsbjerg’s last blog post..CSS Naked Day

that almost sounds like the conversation we’re having with nancy. insight is only (or more) possible when there has been immersion.

would that translate into saying that people who have no exeperience with god have no basis on which to talk about it/her/him? what do you think, @jan?

btw evan love your witty ditty: “all generalizations are wrong. “

i also agree that certain types of religiosity are a (mental? intellectual?) problem, just like certain types of political convictions are (mental? intellectual?) problems, in the sense that as soon as you touch the mindset with a bit of rational dialogue, the whole thing crumbles.

but i wouldn’t say that’s always the case.

@jan i agree with you – of course gods exist in the minds of those who believe in them.

Hmm, I’m not sure how we got there, but suddenly agreement appeared: Religiosity is a mental problem affecting a (decreasing) part of the population.

Jan Karlsbjerg’s last blog post..CSS Naked Day

I prefer field-theory to constructivism. Constructivism seems like post-modern waffle and solipsism by another name.

As to Heidegger. I always have the feeling that he is saying something simple and using the most obscure and difficult way to say it.

It seems to me that there is a part of our experience which feels direct and immediate and that there is reflection on this. The trick is that this first kind of experience (which feels direct and immediate) is educatable. What an educated practitioner immediately perceives is quite different to the novice. To recogise this is a long way from validating the po-mo tosh about everything being equally valid (apart from that statement of course! This barely rises to the high school level of philosophy: all generalisations are wrong.).

I am in full agreement that we are social and historical indviduals. I think the implications of this are clear. We can observe quite closely the effect of different kinds of groups on people with similar issues. We can observe the effect of different interventions in the history of these groups. With a set of close observations (say 100 groups – this is only ten people doing one group each a year for ten years) it would be possible to develop some very solidly grounded theory.

Despite the appalling vocabulary in papers such as this it isn’t really that hard. Kuhn (bless his cotton socks) wrote very accessibly.

I’m saying that I think it is time we got on with it.

With regard to the science adequate to god. There is an embarassment of resources from naive testimony to the most dense and esoteric of abstractions.

We could track the experience of those in different groups. Across different traditions. We could track the changes in individuals in groups and on a more solitary path. I don’t think it is hard to see possible approaches.

Evan’s last blog post..Self-Improvement for Dummies.

how about this for bedtime reading: http://www.mythosandlogos.com/janusheadsciencepaper.html

and in the interest of non-elitism, tomorrow morning i’ll translate my first paragraph

To my mind for a modern science to be adequate to this it would need to get beyond the objective/subjective split (if we take god to be in some sense a part of our own experience and the world out there. St Paul spoke of ‘living, moving and having our being’ in god. That is it would need to start from some kind of phenomenology. Ken Wilbur has tried something like this (though his system is pretty standard Buddhist-idealist – I’ve even heard him endorse Descarte’s transcendental ego).

These are some ideas I have about a basic direction to set out in. I hope they make sense.

Evan’s last blog post..Self-Improvement for Dummies.