Science And Religion Aren't Friends

[Antlerman]

I exist as a collection of cells. I live, I screw, I get old, I get sick, I die, I become worm food.

 

Agreed.

 

but...

 

Why so much fervor in telling people they are wrong, deluded, or idiots when all of it will be forgotten anyway? Why even bother presenting your views since they are nothing more than pulses of electricity and chemical fluctuations? Doesn't all of this take important time (a limited resource for us meat bags) away from eating, sleeping, screwing and shitting?

Because the belief in such nonsense is an enemy of rational thought. The snake oil salesmen screw people over with false hope while lining their pockets. They are no different that a priest begging for money to spread their mind virus. And that is what this thread is about. Religion and science are enemies.

The question was: "Why even bother presenting your views since they are nothing more than pulses of electricity and chemical fluctuations?"

 

The fact that you have such passion shows that beliefs are important. You elevate the value of rational thought. You are more than eating, shitting, and dying. Right?

 

 

Now expand that thought.........

[Vixentrox]

I exist as a collection of cells. I live, I screw, I get old, I get sick, I die, I become worm food.

 

Agreed.

 

but...

 

Why so much fervor in telling people they are wrong, deluded, or idiots when all of it will be forgotten anyway? Why even bother presenting your views since they are nothing more than pulses of electricity and chemical fluctuations? Doesn't all of this take important time (a limited resource for us meat bags) away from eating, sleeping, screwing and shitting?

Because the belief in such nonsense is an enemy of rational thought. The snake oil salesmen screw people over with false hope while lining their pockets. They are no different that a priest begging for money to spread their mind virus. And that is what this thread is about. Religion and science are enemies.

The question was: "Why even bother presenting your views since they are nothing more than pulses of electricity and chemical fluctuations?"

 

The fact that you have such passion shows that beliefs are important. You elevate the value of rational thought. You are more than eating, shitting, and dying. Right?

 

 

Now expand that thought.........

Because it fills the time. Gives me something to do. Outside of this forum I live and let live. And yes of course I more than the sum of my parts but there is not a damn thing "mystical" about it.

[Antlerman]

Because it fills the time. Gives me something to do. Outside of this forum I live and let live. And yes of course I more than the sum of my parts but there is not a damn thing "mystical" about it.

You are either so mentally/emotionally blocked that my entire post you didn't address about disassociation is dead on the money, or you're just a troll.

 

In either case anything you say in any of these discussions is not coming from any sort of understanding or any genuine degree of effort to try to understand and dialog - very, very much like the Christian's we all know. You just repeat the same, discredited blather about "mystical", of which you have no understanding. Let's all just leave it at this, you don't care to dialog, you just feel a compulsion to attack anything outside your views without regard to genuine intellectual integrity, and therefore it's probably safe for every member of the site to simply ignore you. OK?

[Vixentrox]

Because it fills the time. Gives me something to do. Outside of this forum I live and let live. And yes of course I more than the sum of my parts but there is not a damn thing "mystical" about it.

You are either so mentally/emotionally blocked that my entire post you didn't address about disassociation is dead on the money, or you're just a troll.

 

In either case anything you say in any of these discussions is not coming from any sort of understanding or any genuine degree of effort to try to understand and dialog - very, very much like the Christian's we all know. You just repeat the same, discredited blather about "mystical", of which you have no understanding. Let's all just leave it at this, you don't care to dialog, you just feel a compulsion to attack anything outside your views without regard to intellectual integrity, and therefore it's probably safe for every member of the site to simply ignore you. OK?

I am going to respond to your previous long post when I am not so distracted, probably at work tonight.

[Antlerman]

 

I am going to respond to your previous long post when I am not so distracted, probably at work tonight.

Here's to hoping it will show some genuine effort.

[Vixentrox]

 

I am going to respond to your previous long post when I am not so distracted, probably at work tonight.

Here's to hoping it will show some genuine effort.

I know it's ironic...I concentrate more and am less distracted when posting at work. Your last long post came in close to shift change so haven't had time to digest it it and think of responses. It's a lot to take in.

[Antlerman]

 

I am going to respond to your previous long post when I am not so distracted, probably at work tonight.

Here's to hoping it will show some genuine effort.

I know it's ironic...I concentrate more and am less distracted when posting at work. Your last long post came in close to shift change so haven't had time to digest it it and think of responses. It's a lot to take in.

Fair enough. Just be sincere beyond the rhetoric and show a desire to understand. I'm pretty easy if I see that.

[Legion]

I think Antlerman hit it Vixen. You seem to be saying in effect, "There is only the objective world." But I say if you want to examine yourself then close your eyes and breathe.

And then what? ...

Well, I can tell you one technique I have tried, but not extensively. I try to simply observe my own thoughts and emotions as they move through my mind. But I also try not to judge them. I've not really gotten past this stage however, because it's very difficult for me not to judge these things. But I suspect that once I become more adept at not labelling every thought and emotion as either good or bad then I will be better prepared to see patterns in my own mind.

[Deva]

I think Antlerman hit it Vixen. You seem to be saying in effect, "There is only the objective world." But I say if you want to examine yourself then close your eyes and breathe.

And then what? ...

Well, I can tell you one technique I have tried, but not extensively. I try to simply observe my own thoughts and emotions as they move through my mind. But I also try not to judge them. I've not really gotten past this stage however, because it's very difficult for me not to judge these things. But I suspect that once I become more adept at not labelling every thought and emotion as either good or bad then I will be better prepared to see patterns in my own mind.

 

That's exactly what I am trying to do. I think it helps in sort of intangible ways. I still have problems, but maybe they don't seem so huge? I have learned some techniques from Tibetan Buddhism that I use when my thought start getting repetitive and cycling. I am not going to go into it too much for obvious reasons.

[Antlerman]

I am not going to go into it too much for obvious reasons.

You mean like someone calling you an idiot, or something for being different?

[Vixentrox]

I am not going to go into it too much for obvious reasons.

You mean like someone calling you an idiot, or something for being different?

I gave Buddhism a try for a couple years after ditching Christianity. Was useless. Just like being in a church. Temples gilt with gold, monks begging for money, trinkets galore for sale. In other words, the typical horseshit that one would expect from a religion. Nothing mystical, nothing magical, and a whole lot of the same crap one would expect out of a religion.

[Vixentrox]

I'm just guessing but I doubt that most people that buy into mystical stuff actually believe in it as firmly true as any Christian believes in thier idiot faith.

Actually it has nothing to do with the objects of their faith. The literalness that people take them at is strictly a developmental issue. As in the spectrum of human society, you have those who are fundamentally concrete thinkers, and then you have those who think in more abstract and conceptual ways, as one example. It really doesn't matter what they believe, but how they approach them.

 

Children think in mythological terms at a certain stage of development. The world is controlled and affected by powerful god-like beings: their parents. But eventually that child becomes aware that the world is affected by them as well and that how they imagined their parents as super-beings was a stage of thought when they were younger - a stage of thought necessary for the child to build upon to the next stage of perception.

 

So Vix, do you go around as an adult and point your finger at people's children who look at the world that way and say, "Idiots!"? More on this in a moment....

 

And YOU sound like a Christian. What's a Christard often say, "Athesim is a religion; science is a religion."

There is a difference in how a Christian might say that and use that as a criticism of Atheism, and what I would in calling it that. They fail to turn the spotlight equally on themselves and recognize the nature of what religion is and how they and the religious atheists (to qualify I don't mean all atheists) are actually just two manifestations of the same thing.

 

I'm going to be started a topic on What is Religion?, which will explain better than I can in a short paragraph here. Suffice to say, my criticism of you is your fundamentalist thinking, and whatever clothes you put on it, Christian, Scientism, Islamism, etc, it's the same underlying personality. No transformation. Just another mask on the same underlying dysfunction.

 

And you are the one, assuming you are an ex-christian, that has replaced one set of unprovable beliefs for another set.

Assuming I am an ex-Christian? Wow. I think a better term for me might be to say I am a post-Christian, or former Christian. I understand the nature of what that system was about, just as I came to see as an atheist following that. I see it now as correct for where I am to no longer define myself as what I'm not. I do recognize however the validity to do so, and the need to do so as part of the process of differentiation. But now that I'm free, I prefer to define what I am now. I'm formerly a Christian, and formerly atheist, just as I was formerly a student, and now I am a worker. I am on my path, as it were.

 

You are right about the placebo effect of course. But you could get the same thing out of a pile of dog crap if someone was able to convince a weak minded person of its healing properties. "Take this magikal dog crap and smear it on you three times a day. The dog spirit infused into this pile of feces will heal your ills." Magic crystal, dog crap. No difference beyond a crystal looks cooler and doesn't stink.

You fail to grasp what I say. Again what I sense in all of this is you trying desperately to hate the symbols - symbolically. You're right, it doesn't matter what the objects are, but it's about what it draws out in people. You're issue it seems is you still see the objects as the ends in and of themselves. You are still thinking of them the same way, just upside down now. This is why I say you are still a Christian in your thinking, just flipped over. Same coin, opposite side. "They're sacred!/They're crap!", never examining the world beyond those two blind variables.

 

 

I think Antlerman hit it Vixen. You seem to be saying in effect, "There is only the objective world." But I say if you want to examine yourself then close your eyes and breathe.

And then what? Chemical reactions happen, electrical impulses occur. It may be rather complex and amazing how everything all works together but it is NOT mystical. Mystical stuff is nothing more than a "god of the gaps" re-packaged.

You have no understanding of what you attack. You are attacking what is in your imagination, what they are to you, and seem incapable of seeing or considering anything beyond that.

 

Here's what I see. I mentioned differentiation. That is a process of growth that is moving from one level to the next. We begin fused with that level of thinking for example, that mode of perception, that developmental stage. The world operates like this for us. It is reality and functions as reality for us at that stage of growth.

 

Imagine the difference between a five year old and a twelve year old. As we move from one stage to the next, we may need to push against that former skin to get out. "I am not a child anymore". We begin to define ourselves as 'not a child' in order to reinforce what is beginning to emerge in us, yet what is itself not yet fully developed, not yet fully defined, not yet fully individuated. We are not yet a young teen, yet no longer fully a child.

 

This is a process of growth, and as we emerge now fully differentiated our perspectives of the past themselves take on a new light of higher understanding. Additionally our perceptions of ourselves today take a new depth and dimension, having gained that experience. We interact with the world around us now at a higher, more complex, more nuanced level. We are maturing, becoming more functional and higher and higher level in our growth. This is a normal part of development, which follow the same stages of evolution itself.

 

However, something can go awry in that process of differentiation. We can get stuck or twist off into some other form that becomes dysfunctional. Differentiation goes off into disassociation, and a pathology develops. We become neither what we were, nor what we needed to become in order to function and continue to grow. Something like that can manifest itself in them lashing out at the world around them both to the past, the present, and the future, in an act of inner anguish coming from a deep dysfunction that occurred on the way differentiating from one stage to the next.

 

For people like me, for those members here of this site who frame an understanding of their post-Christian, newly individuated selves in the world, in terms of transcendental thoughts or symbols are not doing so because we are functioning on the level of a child anymore. I see fully matured individuals who see the world in non-theistic terms in very much a positive light as well. There are many ways to look at the world. It is not an issue of this dogma or that domga - God or no-God, that defines any of this for me. They are all ways to approach the world that is about building on the sense of self we have come into, up from and out of our childhood. For me, taking that sense of self and developing it in an internal exercise has great and powerful value that manifests itself in attitudes, actions, and health.

 

What I sense in you is disassociation. Your sense of self is lost in these definitions, or rather is symbolized in these expressions of vitriol. You define yourself against them, rather than having defined yourself outside them and can now look at them safely, and in a more mature and enlightened way. I respect and support and value the need for people to be angry, to push against what they were and those who try to hold them back from their becoming. That is natural and healthy. But you wish to attack us members who embrace the higher in non-materialist ways as though we were identical to the children who believe their parents control the world itself. You seem stuck, and not in a process of differentiation.

 

Why is that?

So...lot of stuff here.

 

You talk about people devloping, views changing as they get older. Very true. Nothing mystical AT ALL about this. One doesn't mature then all of a sudden get in touch with etheral planes and start witnessing spirtits and magic as true. So no, I don't point at a child and think them an idiot. But adults are supposed to have grown past childish nonsense. Adults are supposed to be to the point where they can see the world around them as it is, not as they wish it to be with fairies and magic rocks and mystical herbs.

 

What you say about the symbols makes no sense. They either have a special property or they do not. It is a bianry solution. The magic rocks are magic or they are not. If they are magic they will be magic for everyone. Placebo effect aside if they are not magical then they will not be magic for anyone. If they are magical then it should be provable to science.

 

I am attacking what is beyond my imagination? No, I am attacking a belief set that IS nothing more than imagination. You claim that people are defining their post-Christian selves with "transcendental thoughts or symbols are not doing so because we are functioning on the level of a child anymore." I disagree. You are looking for the make-believe to give some sort of meaning to your life. I have gone well past the need of the make-believe; you apperntly have not. It seems to me YOU are the ones stuck with the childish need for magic and wonder and things being more than you are. I have my own sense of self. I do not need mystical junk in any form to define myself. I have outgrown that need.

[Guest Valk0010]

I don't think, outside of truth claims like say like the ark existed or humans evolved(the more academic-historical aspects of religion), that science and religion contradict or are enemies. Science maybe able to say what fires in the brain during a relgious experience, but science can't give the brain chemistry meaning to you. You have to do that, some use religion.

 

The only way I can see to prevent pure nihilism is to value even the most obsure thing. If your just a creature, you got to attach more to your own life then just being neuron's. I don't see that as a life worth living personally. I think even people that say, that don't make mystical outta the natural value things in the same way. Its just the one that allows the mysticial is more refined about, and make it more of a sport almost then the one that just used the natural.

 

Shouldn't religion be about exploration?

[Deva]

I am not going to go into it too much for obvious reasons.

You mean like someone calling you an idiot, or something for being different?

 

 

Yes, that's right.

[Legion]

Vixen I, for one, am not suggesting that you embrace magical mystery hoo-doo. But I do think your insistence that only the objective world exists is untenable. Even science, which strives to understand nature, cannot be shed of the subjective world because an understanding of a natural system is a relation between the objective world and the subjective mind. Science makes this relation explicit in the modelling relation. Measurement is a transduction between the phenomena of a natural system (an objective thing) and the propositions in a language (a subjective thing). Prediction is basially the reverse of this process whereby a subjective thing is projected onto the natural world.

[Vixentrox]

Vixen I, for one, am not suggesting that you embrace magical mystery hoo-doo. But I do think your insistence that only the objective world exists is untenable. Even science, which strives to understand nature, cannot be shed of the subjective world because an understanding of a natural system is a relation between the objective world and the subjective mind. Science makes this relation explicit in the modelling relation. Measurement is a transduction between the phenomena of a natural system (an objective thing) and the propositions in a language (a subjective thing). Prediction is basially the reverse of this process whereby a subjective thing is projected onto the natural world.

Sure, science is influenced by the subjective because people can look at the same set of data and draw different conclusions, if there is room to draw a different conclusion. AGW is a fine example. However,there is NOTHING mystical about it. Maybe there is a problem with the language then? I see mystism as magical thinking, spirit worlds beyond this dimension, rocks and twigs bestowing something sacred, yogis going without food for a year and performing levitation. None of it is proven by science, none of it is more than a fairy tale.

[Rev R]

Still no explanation of why one's electrical impulses and chemical fluctuations are any better than another.

 

Rational thought, science, and mathematics all have exactly the same basis as religion and mysticism under a strict reductionist model. It's all just blips in the brain goop.

[Vixentrox]

Still no explanation of why one's electrical impulses and chemical fluctuations are any better than another.

 

Rational thought, science, and mathematics all have exactly the same basis as religion and mysticism under a strict reductionist model. It's all just blips in the brain goop.

Rational thought, math, science can provide hard core measurable facts that are useful. Mystical thinking produces dream catchers, magic rocks, silly thoughts of reincarnation, Bible god.

[Antlerman]

You talk about people devloping, views changing as they get older. Very true. Nothing mystical AT ALL about this.

Not claiming it is.

 

One doesn't mature then all of a sudden get in touch with etheral planes and start witnessing spirtits and magic as true.

Actually, you're wrong on that account. A child going through early development does mature this way (early pre-operational, 2-4 years of age). The stage of childhood development that comes after magical thinking (what you falsely and inaccurately describe as mysticism by the way), becomes magic-mythical thinking (late pre-operational 4-7 years of age). The world is artificialist and animistic: the clouds move because God moves them. This is how you imagine people like me or the other mature members of this site think.

 

Before I continue I want to point something out. Anyone at a particular stage of development will recognize how people at their own level or stage think. They can also recognize how those at earlier stages before theirs think, and to them it seems utterly silly, or idiotic, or whatever epithet you prefer to use in the many, endless assailings of your previous stage you were leaving.

 

But here's the other thing. Someone at say rung four on a ladder looking out at the world can only imagine the world from that level, that height, as well as remembering it at the early rungs because he looked at the world from rung three before. He cannot however, it is impossible for him, to know what it looks like from rung eight or twelve or rung thirty-two because he has never been there. All he can do is extrapolate his own past experience and imagine what it must look like to them up there. It is all foreign, nebulous, and strange, even outright inconceivable. This is what my signature below means. "What we are, that only can we see".

 

Everything you imagine I think, come from you looking at the level immediately below you. You imagine that people like me sound like that, so we must be that, simply because you lack any true frame of reference beyond that experience. Any other frame of reference is non-existent in your world. And you seem to have a strong need to have it not exist so you can feel safe that you have now arrived. The world is black, the world is white, and now for you, you're really, truly right. And all else must be rejected, burned at the stake as it were.

 

The next stage of development following this, the next rung that exists, is concrete operational. It is the stage where a child is beginning to be able to take the role of another and imagine the world through eyes not their own. It is still laced with the colorings of the early stage, though more advanced and evolving into less egocentric states. Instead of being about ME!, it's about the group. It's more sociocentric in nature, yet still expressed in symbolic, mythical languages, anthropocentric in tone. This is the mythical to mythic-rational stage of thinking is. This is where we are beginning to mature, moving towards a greater, more inclusive worldview from higher rungs on the ladder, yet still immature comparatively speaking.

 

Following this is the formal operational stage. At this stage the ability to take the role of another gets kicked up a number of notches where they can now hold many such 'other person' perspectives and understand them relationally. (Something I see you failing to do in these discussions). The egocentric, sociocentric (group-centric), anthropocentric thinking of early stages begins to fade back into an awareness of a greater whole and our roles within that, no one thing being ultimately privileged in the system.

 

Failures to properly emerge into any one of these levels as we grow through the process of differentiation and integration will result in a dissociation, a pathology. This will manifest itself as an identity crisis in the individual. I touched on this in my last post.

 

And there are stages beyond these in development, moving further and further out away from the tunnel-vision of early egocentricism to sociocentricsm, to worldcentricism, to beyond. It's in those much later stages that you imagine looks just like the world of magic rocks and fairies you just left behind. I can assure, no such thing exists there. But to you, it only looks all magical and mysterious because you have no frame of reference.

 

So no, I don't point at a child and think them an idiot. But adults are supposed to have grown past childish nonsense.

Which is why I'm trying to provoke you to more mature thought. You seem rather stuck. The difference is I don't feel a need to call you an idiot.

 

Adults are supposed to be to the point where they can see the world around them as it is, not as they wish it to be with fairies and magic rocks and mystical herbs.

The development of our worldviews follow the same patterns as childhood development. Magical, magic-mythic, mythic, mythic-rational, rational, etc in society follows the same patterns. You are an adult, yet your worldview is just emerging from the magic and mythic stages. Neither me, nor Deva, nor many other members here are thinking in the mythic or pre-mythic stages. But that doesn't appear to you yet. "What we are, that only can we see."

 

What you say about the symbols makes no sense.

And this is where you totally fail to begin to understand pretty much anything I'm saying. For just a tiny little scratch of the surface start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics and here: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

 

An early reference to some of my thoughts from years ago on this can be found here: http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?/topic/15020-language-truth-god-and-humanity/page__view__findpost__p__258319

 

Then of course read anything by Joseph Campbell.

 

It seems no wonder that you chide at things you have no frame of reference to. It would seem better for you to sit back and becoming the learner, rather than the witch-hunter.

 

They either have a special property or they do not. It is a bianry solution.

No it is not a binary equation. Read those references above.

 

If they are magic they will be magic for everyone.

A crude example for you: Does the national flag of Hungary inspire you with pride of nation? How about the American flag? Does that?

 

You are looking for the make-believe to give some sort of meaning to your life.

Life is simply presenting itself, and I am responding. I do have a desire to know and understand it's nature, but this is no exercise of fear, trying to salve over some dread lack of meaning. Meaning is abundantly present. It is a desire to embrace it, breath it, become it.

 

These are hardly the expressions of believing in magic rocks and fairies. Are they?

 

It seems to me YOU are the ones stuck with the childish need for magic and wonder and things being more than you are.

What we are, that only can we see. I understand your thoughts. You don't mine.

 

I have my own sense of self.

Then why such endless vitriol? Why the inability to see the world through other eyes?

[Rev R]

Rational thought, math, science can provide hard core measurable facts that are useful.

 

It has also produced the ability to generate enough destructive force to obliterate all life on this planet. I think we can agree that only the most depraved find any use of this. Then again that is just chemical fluctuations and only a deluded idiot would attach any meaning to it.

[Phanta]

You talk about people devloping, views changing as they get older. Very true. Nothing mystical AT ALL about this. One doesn't mature then all of a sudden get in touch with etheral planes and start witnessing spirtits and magic as true. So no, I don't point at a child and think them an idiot. But adults are supposed to have grown past childish nonsense. Adults are supposed to be to the point where they can see the world around them as it is, not as they wish it to be with fairies and magic rocks and mystical herbs.

 

A majority of adults engage in magical thinking throughout their lives. This is reality. The world around you as it is, not as you wish it to be.

 

Phanta

[Deva]

I am not going to go into it too much for obvious reasons.

You mean like someone calling you an idiot, or something for being different?

I gave Buddhism a try for a couple years after ditching Christianity. Was useless. Just like being in a church. Temples gilt with gold, monks begging for money, trinkets galore for sale. In other words, the typical horseshit that one would expect from a religion. Nothing mystical, nothing magical, and a whole lot of the same crap one would expect out of a religion.

 

OK, I understand it was useless to you. We all get that. What I find harder to understand is your continued denagration of those of us who do find something in it more than "trinkets galore for sale and horseshit". What is with the continued attacks? Maybe we do find the trinkets and stuff is offensive but the teaching and practice itself opens up possibilities for mental transformation for the betterment of us in ways you honestly seem incapable of grasping. "Nothing mystical, nothing magical" - please speak for yourself. I follow it for a reason, its just not a good enough one for you.

[Antlerman]

"

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

"

 

Albert Einstein

 

 

[Legion]

A-man I have that quote as saying...

 

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

[Antlerman]

A-man I have that quote as saying...

 

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

There are numerous other quotes that have it as I quoted, one of which is dictionary.com which I directly cited as a source reference in the hyperlink I attached to his name, killjoy.

 

In either case, the meaning is strongly there.

 

P.S. The full reference of the exact quote as in my post: Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-born U.S. theoretical physicist. quoted in Einstein: His Life and Times, ch. 12, sct. 5, Philipp Frank (1947).