Thread: Any Atheists Here..?

There's something about how some ancient cultures dealt with certain mental disorders, and what they considered to be a disorder. If we want to have a clue why this happened perhaps it'd be a good idea to project ourselves to those times and think about the different aspects of life one should face those days. In some cultures, the presence of god was something not questionable I think:

History of mental disorders - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

-If we were in ancient India, we'd be mentally disordered

Suggested causes included inappropriate diet; disrespect towards the gods, teachers or others; mental shock due to excessive fear or joy; and faulty bodily activity.

Apparently in ancient Americas, it was a little bit different (I think because of their supreme god was the Sun, therefore it was something tangible):

-For the Incas, it was melancholy considered the most important disorder (it's known there was a relation between the way they used to deal with their prisoners of war and this mental disorder for example, to avoid rebellions, they used to send the servants from new conquered lands to work far from their native homes): Mental disorder among the Incas in ancient Peru (just an abstract)

-The Aztecs apparently considered some mental disorders as a gift in stead: 99.02.01: The Aztecs: A Pre-Columbian History

But any person who showed an abnormal mental condition was thought to have received a divine inspiration.

Well - first of all - I don't expect anybody to read what I write or even reply back to every/anything. I take the opportunities to ramble on as I find them! And I'll pick and choose and delay and change the order as well, it's getting too much otherwise. Which is great!! I do it for my own entertainment and for a hormonal empathy kick, if I manage to entertain somebody else or even only from witnessing others seemingly enjoying themselves here, if you wondered!

The subject of mental illness and in this context is an extremely fascinating one, one where I hope I'll have a bit to contribute later on and so I really don't want to disrupt you there! Just jump over me with it if you please for now!

I'll catch up a bit with answering in the meantime:

Originally Posted by LouaiB

Very nice post StephL, but I'd have to disagree with you about the more than machines part.
I do believe we are merely functioning brains, that act like machines. We are programmed, so to speak.
Imagine you are stripped from your senses, logic, thinking, and hormones. What would be left? Sure you'd have consciousness, but without all of the above, it doesn't do any good, if it can do anything at all.
And even though feelings feel so strong and real, they are mere hormones, and they are supposed to feel strong and real so that we would follow them.
I think you meant that you know this, but still like to consider feelings as strong and intimate, and they are, and I do so too. My rational thinking doesn't stop me from enjoying feelings any less.

Thank you - and I think there is a misunderstanding - you are right in principle, we are our brains and body and they follow the laws of physics, full stop. Not only classical but probably also quantum physics, though. We haven't yet gained enough understanding in neuroscience to confidently say, that for example quantum effects don't play into brain-function. And if they did - there might be a back-door for free will - for a system to be in a critical state and then crystallize out triggering unforeseeable "decisions". Maybe - but we really don't know enough!
So. But I can well imagine that there will be artificial intelligences/lifeforms (read: machines) which will have all our capacities and more. I linked through to an essay on "artilects" somewhere here - hypothetical god-like beings who might even be able to physically create universes.
That's why I said "machines as we know them today" - I think that we need to understand the brain much first before having a chance at true AI, though. So I am with you - it is all physics, but maybe more interesting than it looks to us now anyway! This comparison of conscious life to what we have today just doesn't do "us" justice yet - but maybe we will be surpassed by unimaginable extents by our own creations, and it would feel insulting to them to be compared with "mere humans" - the singularity.

Originally Posted by Luoai

Also I suppose law is enough to maintain order, but still, morals are a great backup! Besides empathy, I don't think morals exist. We make them, only like laws for our society and religions.

Empathy is an extremely strong power in us, though. We even know quite a lot about it - the discovery of mirror-neurons and their function has founded the famous Christian golden rule in neuroanatomy - and we know that many higher animals have them, too.

Originally Posted by Luoai

Originally Posted by StephL

my "humanist" and "nature-admiring and -conservationist" etc. attitude is something I ultimately hold because it makes me feel good to do so

It makes me feel good too, but isn't that because of how our parents raised us? They taught us that it is good, and thus we link a relation to it as 'good', and thus when we do it, our happy reward system rewards us. As far as I am concerned, it's just a 'habit', and not a rule to walk through.

I certainly started out with what my mother implanted in my young brain, and some of what I thought, I had gotten over, came round to bite me in the butt again, but I did a lot of the actual consolidation work later on myself. Taking a wide look around on the basis on my "moral sense, reason and strength of character" as Meskhetyw put it, at least I hope so. There are many more factors which play into creating the actual reality of a personal moral system besides conscious activity, though - including evolutionarily installed reward systems. To call it a "habit" fits quite well...

Small children can be incredibly cruel - it is hard to say how much of "morality" really gets installed from external in all of us and very early. It might be totally off topic, but I have to think of how our sculls are already too big for the birth-canal, which can't evolve any wider as far as I know for reasons of hip-stability. Which means that human babies get thrown out of the womb in a very unripe state and so need extensive education for almost everything - maybe including moral compasses and to a larger extent as it intuitively seems.

Originally Posted by Meskhetyw

With regard to humans being machines or spiritual beings; I don't even look at things in this manner. I see what I see, and it is wondrous and curious. Science shows us what it can using it's methods, and we have philosophy for the rest, but "belief" is a problem in any realm. We can always entertain a philosophical idea, but to decide is a mistake in my opinion, and it is important to understand what science "actually says" (facts) and what it does not (what we extrapolate or assume). I am as against religion as I am against the idea that everything is "just this" or "just that" as if these things were insignificant. I think this a reaction derived from disappointment in things not being what people originally want them to be, so now everything is assumed to have lost it's mystery. Not so, in my opinion.

Beautiful post - including what I clipped off and shortly mentioned above!
My question was rather a poetic one - isn't it up to now still an insult to life to compare it with our meagre results at building machinery?
But the question for a "spiritual" or worse "supernatural" essence doesn't even make sense to me.

What if there was something to be found in the soul department? Well - it wouldn't be supernatural any more then. It's only called so, because we can't find valid evidence for it in reality - otherwise science would be very busy going about trying to find out which domain of nature we are dealing with - if we need to find "psychic matter/energy" in physics or something. Richard Feynman approximately said - if there was anything worthy of being taken seriously - thousands of physicists would fall all over it in the hope of Nobel Prizes to come raining down. But that doesn't mean that we won't ever in the future find something, and even if we don't, that also doesn't mean it's impossible - FSM and proving a negative etc. It's just really not bloody likely that there is a soul.

But to go ahead and claim to have the ultimate truth of anything is foolish and often dangerous. And it's not the attitude of a scientist acting within the ethical codex of her profession - not at all. It goes against it's very foundations to leap to closure, propose total certainty. But it is classical for religious people.

I can't quite understand this disdain as well, with which the religious and people of a beyonder persuasion often associate the universe including nature with stuff like "plain reality", "mere matter", "only meat". Reality is so wonderful and fascinating and intricate and beautiful to our brains - it feels quite inadequate to believe one needed an ancient book to be in awe and wonder, or a belief in fairies to enjoy one's garden.
And if somebody comes to accept utter objective meaninglessness - yeah, as you say - disappointment with having been wrong, but also the disillusion concerning the afterlife and existential crisis are on the menu then. So people will have "lost" a bit more than just mystery, something quite essential - even if it was never truthfully theirs in the first place.
We as lucid dreamers should really not complain anyway - we can simulate them fairies!

Originally Posted by balban

I am a bit confused as to why you quoted "ONLY". It seems you are pointing to a change that you noticed. I certainly didn't mean to give that impression. I was trying to make a that point that my desire to be a better person, in all the ways I mentioned, hadn't changed at any point in my life. Further to the point and probably worth mentioning, I don't believe that my particular moral code came from being a Christian and it wasn't until after I walked away from faith that was I able to see that. But really, the end result of me trying to be a better version of myself manifested exactly in the same way in both of these contrasted points, but they were rationalized for completely different reasons; where once I did it because "it's what god expected of me" and now it's because "it's the right thing to do in a functional society". The net gain/loss is 0.

Ah right - misunderstanding then! I inferred this from you wording your moral impetus under religion a bit more passionately than you described it after deconversion, while basically saying the very same thing. So it actually is the very same situation for you - good on you and sorry for "putting thoughts in your head"!
I had experiences of religiosity, where almost all my thinking was centred around doing the very best possible thing morally at any moment, with a backdrop of a feeling of "holy fire" as I said. It was borderline insanity I would say today - but at the same time it was a more morally considerate me, surely.

Originally Posted by balban

I don't believe that it can be said that Christians just lay down and accept suffering as god's plan. That was my own bullshit that I was admitting to. Christians, in particular, do quite a bit to try and ease suffering in the world. However, in the face of failure they are pretty quick to invoke the "god's will" argument to, IMO, sugar coat the hopelessness they see right in front of them. It is a win-win proposition in their thought processes, but the reality is that it changes nothing - the suffering is either relieved by their actions or perpetuates because of the failure. The invocation of the god's will argument is really irrelevant.

No - they don't lay down and look on. Many feel it is their mission to help the underprivileged and suffering - but they never do it just to alleviate the actual problems of people alone. Christians tend to come along with one more problem, if they are not dealing with Christians already - they will tell people that they need to do this and that and at the least believe in Christ in order to be saved, not from their misery, but from unimaginably worse misery in the afterlife.
For a true believer saving a soul from hell will always come before saving a human from injustice, pain and misery. You will hear them say that god especially loves his suffering children, making it almost sound as if that was a good thing, too...

A lot of the charity work worldwide is done by the religious - but that also includes this horrendous bullshit you get when you let people with a completely twisted relation to sexuality influence other people's behaviour when it comes to contraception and protection. What they do is exactly the opposite of what is needed. So is that help then or hindering progress and causing suffering and disease?!
What should be done in many of the crisis-regions of our world is empowering the women. How? Freeing women from chattledom, being constantly pregnant under ugly conditions for starters. And surely not with a misogynist propaganda act with general fearmongering. The Catholics always come to mind first - but I mentioned something in another place, about how American Christians on religious adventure holiday trod off large-scale institutionalized homophobia in Africa - up to Uganda putting a life-sentence on it, after giving up on trying to install the death sentence instead due to international pressure: Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push - The New York Times

Really - I think the world would be better off if these people stayed at home. The world does not need this sort of "help"! Disgusting!
I'm not saying that no good is done by these religious charity missions at all of course. But it does not put my mind at rest to know that they are crawling all over the developing world and putting their shit in more impressionable minds than can be found around the corner - it bothers me.

Originally Posted by balban

I also don't agree that me getting more upset with suffering is necessarily a "good" thing. I pretty much stand by and watch just as helplessly as I did back then. However, my remark was more an acknowledgement that I did lose something in my deconversion... an excuse. And the reason it doesn't "lessen" me, in my own view of myself anyway, was because I didn't really translate the witnessing of said suffering into any kind of action action in either case. So again... the net gain/loss here was 0.

Well yeah. But it's more honest intellectually and for me that constitutes at the least a personal net gain, but of course this need not look so to you.

Originally Posted by balban

Certainly. But this is why I was really careful to mention that it has a lot to do with the goal. Hitchens had an amazing intellect for many things and could wield that knowledge at the drop of a hat. But, I also recognize that he turned a lot of believers off and he was dismissed before he even opened his mouth. So I don't really see the point unless you are an atheist who likes a good shaming (no judgements if that's you). But to what end? Entertainment? If so... fair enough.

Well - I will quote Darkmatters in reply to LouaiB:

I don't mean to be just arguing with you, but this is a good discussion, and it's making me think this through in ways I haven't really done before, though I've always kind of been vaguely aware of it. You're making me develop my ideas more, and I thank you for that.

There. This is also something important, and Hitchens surely was a master of provoking thought, thereby helping people to get to grips with their thoughts, terms and beliefs - providing knowledge, which they might not have searched out on their own, and, and, and.
While these "people" will be mainly the already non-religious in his case, that's absolutely fine - we also count for something and need clarification - and I admit to really enjoying the entertainment-value provided by a bit of intellectual unrest, too! And I don't particularly mind if somebody is made to look stupid in a process, into which he or she entered on their own decision, too.

I have another great panel debate with him - and again the atheist side changed hundreds of minds in the audience in the "right direction". Not he alone, he was one of three and said himself that he was sort of invited as a radical element and went about being - blunt but heartfelt. Didn't harm the notion, I don't think! To stay fair here - both sides gained in numbers, the religious side probably gained some support from the unsure section here, but less than 100, while the notion gained almost 400 votes.

Originally Posted by balban

Don't make me take out the dictionary! Secularism is not just the absences of "something"; it is something with the absence of religion specifically. To that, I'll restate my point... the probability of suffering to occur because of a secular reason, as opposed to a religious one, is more likely. This doesn't, in any way, let religion off the hook; after all, suffering is suffering. However, I feel it is too simple to claim that because some population is religious in an eschatological sense, it is more likely a society (or even better... you) will suffer because of it. I can see why you believe this. But I don't think the numbers are on the side of this belief, IMO.

Well - this is exactly what I meant to say! We have a huge amount of suffering because of secular reasons, always will.
Then we have on top of that, and almost always in entanglement with secular reasons, the specific share that religion adds to the mix.
This share is smaller than the former one - no doubt, if you mean that - fully with you.
Buut - given the baseline nastiness - the religious stuff is an add-on and we would be better off without it.
Even worse - any conflict coming about for secular reasons, say over land, ethnicity or whatever - religion will act upon it as a huge intensifier of force, a multiplicator. You might feel in the right, thinking somebody stole your land, you might even be in the right - but nothing will drive you as strongly as the notion of divine justification. Religious righteousness is an incredibly powerful beast, and I would propose that it worsens all basically purely secular conflicts into which it reaches.

Originally Posted by balban

I purposely didn't answer all the points you brought up. Originally, I did. But man... it was way too f'ing long and I thought my answers to not be relevant to this specific discussion. I am not looking to get banned.

Oh yes please - as said in my last post - I don't expect anything of anybody here. My "replies" often contain stuff which I actually intend for everybody and in general. If I'd come to really want an answer to a specific question - I will most likely make it blue and bold and have a smiley jump up and down next to it or something...

Originally Posted by StephL

Well - first of all - I don't expect anybody to read what I reply or even reply back to every/anything. I take the opportunities to ramble on as I find them! And I'll pick and choose and delay and change the order as well, it's getting too much otherwise. Which is great!! I do it for my own entertainment and for a hormonal empathy kick, if I manage to entertain somebody else or even only from witnessing others seemingly enjoying themselves, if you wondered!



I think, this is a misunderstanding - you are right in principle, we are our brains and body and they follow the laws of physics, full stop. Not only classical but probably also quantum physics, though. We haven't yet gained enough understanding in neuroscience to confidently say, that for example quantum effects don't play into brain-function. And if they did - there might be a back-door for free will - for a system to be in a critical state and then crystallize out triggering unforeseeable "decisions". Maybe - but we really don't know enough!
So. But I can well imagine that there will be artificial intelligences/lifeforms (read: machines) which will have all our capacities and more. I linked through to an essay on "artilects" somewhere here - hypothetical god-like beings who might even be able to physically create universes.
That's why I said "machines as we know them today" - I think that we need to understand the brain (better) first before having a chance at true AI, though.
So I am with you - it is all physics, but maybe more interesting than it looks to us now anyway! This comparison of conscious life to what we have today just doesn't do "us" justice now - but maybe we will be surpassed by unimaginable extents by our own creations, and it would feel insulting to them to be compared with "mere humans" - the singularity.



Empathy is an extremely strong power in us, though - and in many animals, maybe much more than we currently think. We even know quite a lot about it - the discovery of mirror-neurons and their function has founded the famous Christian golden rule in neuroanatomy - and we know that many higher animals have them, too.



I certainly started out with what my mother told me, and some of what I thought I had gotten over bit me in the butt later on, but I did a lot of the actual work later on myself. Taking a wide look around on the basis on my "moral sense, reason and strength of character" as Meskhetyw put it, at least I hope so. And there are many more factors which create the actual reality of a personal moral system - including evolutionarily installed reward systems. And to call it a "habit" fits well in a way...

But then - everybody knows how cruel small children can be - it is hard to say how much of a basic moral construct really gets installed in all of us very soon. It's maybe again something to do with our brains being already too big for the birth-canal, which can't evolve any wider as far as I know for reasons of hip-stability.
So this means human babies get thrown out of the womb in a very un-ripe state and need this extensive education for almost everything - including moral brain compasses. Maybe..

Yes, true.
Quantum physics. One question. Do different states of a molecule affect it's reactions with other molecules? If so, I still think that that wouldn't give a back door to free will, cuz it'll just make chance the factor to what our subconscious decides( study shows that decisions we make are actually always made by our subconscious mind(this also pretty much kills free will), so quantom physics would only add chance and scramble to the subconsciouses decision making. The study is called libet's experiment (so more like experiment)).

Also, I don't think the womb size effects the fetus development, cuz out of all the brain complexity and functions, morals, which are crucial, are the unlucky ones to not fit the bill? Seems far fetched.

Well yeah LuoaiB - that wasn't very clever of me - it is rather wishful thinking to try to find a back-door to free will in QM.
To say it more clearly - it's probably bullshit.
I've been reading Wolf Singer and Metzinger and used to not fiddle about with determinism - meaning I usually would have said yes to it. But there goes another example of me (still) being prone to wavering for self-delusional purposes.
The funny thing is that we don't have a choice concerning feeling and acting as if there was free will (approximately what Hitchens said somewhere - him again!).

But what I meant later on wasn't about womb size - it was about that in other species with less big brains and such smaller sculls the young ones often get born into the world at a more ripe state. And that this doesn't work with us, because if the brain would further grow and develop inside the womb - we wouldn't fit through the birth canal any more. And that can't get any wider without other problems. But to draw a connection to morality is really very far-fetched - completely agreed - wasn't meant that seriously in the first place, though!

Just forget about it - officially dropped!

I'm not sure why you're drooping that Steph - everything you said is well known fact. Skull size of newborn humans has reached the limit of pelvic bone opening in adult women, to accommodate a bigger skull the pelvis would need to grow wider which would cause problems with women not being able to stand or walk properly. And as you also said, children don't come into the world with full development of whatever parts of the brain accommodate moral choices - they don't seem capable of understanding that until much later.

Louai, moral development is hardly the only thing that's not complete in children - neither is cognition, memory, spatio-temporal awareness - the conscious mind itself isn't fully formed yet. These things all develop gradually after the child is already out of the womb, so as Steph said human children are born incomplete - their maturation takes many more years. Not like horses who can stand and walk within moments of being born. I completely agree with at least this much of what Steph has said, though I'm not sure what it relates back to or why she's dropping it now.

Originally Posted by StephL

No - they don't lay down and look on. Many feel it is their mission to help the underprivileged and suffering - but they never do it just to alleviate the actual problems of people alone. Christians tend to come along with one more problem, if they are not dealing with Christians already - they will tell people that they need to do this and that and at the least believe in Christ in order to be saved, not from their misery, but from unimaginably worse misery in the afterlife.
For a true believer saving a soul from hell will always come before saving a human from injustice, pain and misery. You will hear them say that god especially loves his suffering children, making it almost sound as if that was a good thing, too...

A lot of the charity work worldwide is done by the religious - but that also includes this horrendous bullshit you get when you let people with a completely twisted relation to sexuality influence other people's behaviour when it comes to contraception and protection. What they do is exactly the opposite of what is needed. So is that help then or hindering progress and causing suffering and disease?!
What should be done in many of the crisis-regions of our world is empowering the women. How? Freeing women from chattledom, being constantly pregnant under ugly conditions for starters. And surely not with a misogynist propaganda act with general fearmongering. The Catholics always come to mind first - but I mentioned something in another place, about how American Christians on religious adventure holiday trod off large-scale institutionalized homophobia in Africa - up to Uganda putting a life-sentence on it, after giving up on trying to install the death sentence instead due to international pressure: Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push - The New York Times

Really - I think the world would be better off if these people stayed at home. The world does not need this sort of "help"! Disgusting!
I'm not saying that no good is done by these religious charity missions at all of course. But it does not put my mind at rest to know that they are crawling all over the developing world and putting their shit in more impressionable minds than can be found around the corner - it bothers me.

I think the meaning of this part of the topic has changed. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about whether or not their attempts at easing the suffering comes at some cost. The original point was that you claimed that Christians, because of their belief, have a mindset that they will simply accept suffering and do little about it. It also seems that you were implying that atheists, freed from blind faith, and their feeling bad about might lead to action.

A quote from your previous post...

And it is a bad thing about religion, leading you have blind faith that ultimately all is good! Believing that all of it would be in god's plan doesn't motivate one to change the world for the better, it doesn't! It also doesn't motivate people to free themselves from oppression and exploitation - it tends to lead to sheepish acceptance of whatever god has put upon you in the hope for a better deal in the afterlife. But that's a cheat - not a deal!!

Getting angry and upset about senseless suffering and cruelty and misery and whatnot is maybe not measurably productive in our cases - in the sense of running out and actually doing something about it - but it could and might!

My response was an attempt to refute this particular quote, not as some kind of an endorsement of how Christians practice their easing of suffering. To restate my point, I believe that Christians, in general, feel much the same about suffering as we do, evidenced by what we do see them do. So what I am taking exception with is your notion that Christians trend more apathetic toward suffering because they think all suffering is good.

From this latest response, you seem to agree with this; however, you are taking exception as to how they go about it. That it totally fair. I will even go as far as to say that I mostly agree with you but I'll leave it at that. I don't know if this thread can support yet another topic of ongoing conversation.

Originally Posted by StephL

But it's more honest intellectually and for me that constitutes at the least a personal net gain, but of course this need not look so to you.

I don't see how not lying to one's self about the meaning of the suffering and the fact that one doesn't do shit about it is even relevant. Whether or not I believed that god willed it, if the action I take is no action, the result is still the same - the suffering continues. So I can feel better about myself that at least I know that I am not motivated to action because... well... just because? Why? I am not lying to myself anymore about my inaction? You must see more in this than I do; I just don't see it.

Originally Posted by StephL

I have another great panel debate with him - and again the atheist side changed hundreds of minds in the audience in the "right direction". Not he alone, he was one of three and said himself that he was sort of invited as a radical element and went about being - blunt but heartfelt. Didn't harm the notion, I don't think! To stay fair here - both sides gained in numbers, the religious side probably gained some support from the unsure section here, but less than 100, while the notion gained almost 400 votes.

You made mention of gains/losses in this context before. I certainly don't mind you pointing at this as some kind of a validation data point. However, I don't really even know what it really means. From what did these minds get changed? Was it a meaningful change or just a "yeah I see your point" moment? Does this mean who the audience thought "won" the debate or real change expressed by the audiences? I get what you are saying, but I just don't draw any great meaning from it. <-- was hard for me to say in this way, but I have a rep to protect.

Originally Posted by StephL

Well - this is exactly what I meant to say! We have a huge amount of suffering because of secular reasons, always will.
Then we have on top of that, and almost always in entanglement with secular reasons, the specific share that religion adds to the mix.
This share is smaller than the former one - no doubt, if you mean that - fully with you.

Buut - given the baseline nastiness - the religious stuff is an add-on and we would be better off without it.
Even worse - any conflict coming about for secular reasons, say over land, ethnicity or whatever - religion will act upon it as a huge intensifier of force, a multiplicator. You might feel in the right, thinking somebody stole your land, you might even be in the right - but nothing will drive you as strongly as the notion of divine justification. Religious righteousness is an incredibly powerful beast, and I would propose that it worsens all basically purely secular conflicts into which it reaches.

I wouldn't disagree with you. But say religion is somehow wiped off the face of the Earth. Do you have faith enough that humanity wouldn't/doesn't use other tools, just as galvanizing, in order to justify their hostilities? Politics; border lines; race; culture; any property that makes one person different from the other is a potential excuse that can/will be used. Religion is just another excuse. It's like we have a sickness and our symptoms are these excuses. We can remove a symptom here or a symptom there, but we are still sick and other symptoms will continue to pop up until we realize that we've only been curing the symptoms. Is it not more pragmatic to go after the disease rather than the symptom? Cure the disease and the symptoms are irrelevant. It's a cheesy analogy, but it's the best I have ATM.

Originally Posted by StephL

Beautiful post - including what I clipped off and shortly mentioned above! My question was rather a poetic one - isn't it up to now still an insult to life to compare it with our meagre results at building machinery? But the question for a "spiritual" or worse "supernatural" essence doesn't even make sense to me.

What if there was something to be found in the soul department? Well - it wouldn't be supernatural any more then. It's only called so, because we can't find valid evidence for it in reality - otherwise science would be very busy going about trying to find out which domain of nature we are dealing with - if we need to find "psychic matter/energy" in physics or something. Richard Feynman approximately said - if there was anything worthy of being taken seriously - thousands of physicists would fall all over it in the hope of Nobel Prizes to come raining down. But that doesn't mean that we won't ever in the future find something, and even if we don't, that also doesn't mean it's impossible - FSM and proving a negative etc. It's just really not bloody likely that there is a soul.

But to go ahead and claim to have the ultimate truth of anything is foolish and often dangerous. And it's not the attitude of a scientist acting within the ethical codex of her profession - not at all. It goes against it's very foundations to leap to closure, propose total certainty. But it is classical for religious people.

I can't quite understand this disdain as well, with which the religious and people of a beyonder persuasion often associate the universe including nature with stuff like "plain reality", "mere matter", "only meat". Reality is so wonderful and fascinating and intricate and beautiful to our brains - it feels quite inadequate to believe one needed an ancient book to be in awe and wonder, or a belief in fairies to enjoy one's garden.
And if somebody comes to accept utter objective meaninglessness - yeah, as you say - disappointment with having been wrong, but also the disillusion concerning the afterlife and existential crisis are on the menu then. So people will have "lost" a bit more than just mystery, something quite essential - even if it was never truthfully theirs in the first place.
We as lucid dreamers should really not complain anyway - we can simulate them fairies!

I agree 100%. Though you put it better and more unambiguously.

[Introductory text here] sorry gals and guys, I'm making pancakes and don't have much time to get more 'inspiration'. I'm writing this while my kids play with a wooden crocodile pretending it's a dog, and it reminded me that some time ago, one of them named her stuffed bear "dog"...

Originally Posted by StephL

The subject of mental illness and in this context is an extremely fascinating one, one where I hope I'll have a bit to contribute later on and so I really don't want to disrupt you there! Just jump over me with it if you please for now!

Now I'm starting to miss my books on psychopathology that I didn't bring with me because of weight...

I find curious that the first 'serious' book I tried to read was the bible, I was around 8 and I left it a couple of days after I started, because of it was extremely boring. My second attempt of reading a book was Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" because of it was an assignment from the school, I didn't finish it then because of a matter of time. The first book I finished to read just for curiosity was a sort of esoteric book about the secret of the pyramids or something like that, I was around 11 and it was good at that age. Later on, I got my first 'scientific' book because I was into those things about the paranormal phenomena and stuff, and I wanted to know a bit more about dreams. You know, I didn't eat that thing of "If you dream about that it means that" and when I asked Why? There was not a proper answer in the esoteric world. I could say that everything changed about the way I used to see the universe when I first read that book named something like 'The dream and dreams' by Simon Monneret back in the 90's (unfortunately it was a little bit old and didn't touch lucid dreaming otherwise my story perhaps would be way too different, but it was enough then for a start). Now I remember my dad explaining me the absence of god using the laws of thermodynamics, his example was something like if the universe was a clock, there couldn't be an external force to make it start moving...

Anyway, according to the definition of Mental disorder in Wikipedia: Mental disorder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A mental disorder, also called a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a mental or behavioral pattern or anomaly that causes either suffering or an impaired ability to function in ordinary life (disability), and which is not developmentally or socially normative. Mental disorders are generally defined by a combination of how a person feels, acts, thinks or perceives.

There are three disorders that I find significantly related to the topic:

Psychosis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychosis (from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind/soul", and -ωσις -osis, "abnormal condition or derangement") refers to an abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality".

Schizophrenia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Schizophrenia (/ˌskɪtsɵˈfrɛniə/ or /ˌskɪtsɵˈfriːniə/) is a mental disorder often characterized by abnormal social behavior and failure to recognize what is real. Common symptoms include false beliefs, unclear or confused thinking, auditory hallucinations, reduced social engagement and emotional expression, and inactivity. Diagnosis is based on observed behavior and the person's reported experiences.

In that matter, I find it very interesting that the lack of sleep (or voluntary sleep deprivation) may be related to the start of the above mental disorders.

Psychopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychopathy (/saɪˈkɒpəθi/) (or sociopathy /ˈsoʊsiəˌpæθi/) is traditionally defined as a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and disinhibited or bold behavior. It may also be defined as a continuous aspect of personality, representing scores on different personality dimensions found throughout the population in varying combinations.

I find it very interesting to see all those highlighted symptoms seem to be the main characteristic of the self claimed prophets, mediums, etc. Of course everybody presents one or more of those symptoms in certain moments of our life, but apparently these persons build a whole world starting from those because of mere ignorance, what make me suspicious to ask if possibly most of the religious (if not all) leaders could be somehow mentally disassociated from reality because of ignorance?

A close relative had a prominent position in one of those catholic groups which gather to pray and stuff. Sometimes they used to gather in my grandparent's house and I had the opportunity to hear some stories from some of them, then I saw what confirmed somehow what I was wondering. The most remarkable was a woman who was considered 'gifted' and apparently she saw the lord walking in her house among other 'miracles' or things like the famous voices. After some research, I discovered that this woman suffered from insomnia. There were other leaders who had similar experiences, I think they consider these experiences to scale in their pyramid of ranks or something like that. Not taking into account a couple of suicides that took place while I was aware of their activity. I think the following page describes in a bit more detail what I want to say: Prophets, Apostles, and Mental Illness

It's just a start, there's more on the use of drugs and what happened during the middle ages and the witch hunting for example. When they unintentionally consumed a fungus with the rye bread and possibly it has caused massive hallucinations: Salem Witch Trials: The Fungus Theory - Neatorama

Ergot is a fungus that infects rye, a grain more commonly used in past centuries to bake bread than it is today. One of the byproducts present in ergot-infected grain is ergotamine, which is related to LSD

It doesn't surprise me that during shamanic ceremonies for example, it must be consumed some sort of hallucinogenic drug to have contact with the 'other world'.

Talking about the other world, it wouldn't be complete if I don't mention the world of dreams of course. Since the use of certain drugs apparently do nothing more than stimulate already existing regions of the brain which are involved in the production of hallucinations (aka dreams) As I see it, it's not too difficult to find the relation between all the strange stuff that happens in that inner world which 'casually' sounds identical to some of the phenomena described in the vast field of the paranormal experiences, specially that which includes the presence of strange entities. Just as an example I would simply point at false awakenings to show what could have happened when somebody claims to have been visited by angels when he/she was 'about to sleep', etc.

On the subject, I find it very illustrative what @Alyzarin commented in the thread http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-cont...id-dream.html]. The post is a little bit long, but I think it fits here like the piece of a puzzle:

Spoiler for On drugs and perception:

Originally Posted by Alyzarin

Alright, I've been thinking about this, like, all of yesterday afternoon and this morning, and here's what I could come up with lol. Not set in stone by any means yet but this is probably going to be my most solid theory for now. First I'm going to explain why I believe that relatively intense time dilation is possible. I'll be doing this using the experiences that I believe are the ones that can the most consistently provide sensations of significant time dilation, which would be those of hallucinogenic drugs. Then, when I've gotten my point across about that, I'll relate it to dreams. Before I get started though, I do need to cover my views on what consciousness is so that this can make sense.

I personally believe that what we are experiencing at any moment, the point of view that allows us to see the world, is a result of our encoded sensory perceptions being written into memory. This, I feel, is supported pretty well by the fact that it is possible to experience "blackouts", such as on alcohol, benzodiazepines, anticholinergics, and etc., wherein our bodies are able to continue functioning with at least some level of normalcy despite the fact that we won't even experience it. I want to highlight that fact: it's not that you recall experiencing it but just can't remember it, it's literally like it didn't even happen. If you've ever had way too much to drink and hit that point, or taken too high of a dose of alprazolam or something similar at once, you'll know what I mean. It's like you're there having a good time, and then suddenly you're just waking up the next day, despite all the stuff your friends tell you you continued to do after that point. I believe that this simply reflects the fact that these drugs effect the memory systems of the brain more potently than things like motor actions, so even though those things are inhibited, they're still able to function even when things like memory and therefore consciousness fail. I also believe that this idea is supported very well by the fact that the parts of the brain involved in memory are also those involved in hallucinations. When that process of memory recording is significantly altered, it will show through as our minds start to record incorrect information and we see the results as hallucinations. This also ties into the fact that dreams happen when those memory systems are running at very high capacity, so that the reason we experience dreams is because our brain is being stimulated to the point that it's recording memories even in an absence of external information. To me, these things pretty much all but prove it, but I'd also be willing to give more examples if anyone wanted any.

Now, on to the time dilation. I believe that the first major player in this is the speed with which memories are recorded. As I see it, the easiest way to enhance this is to increase the amount of information that your mind is recording all at once, and nowhere does this stand out better than with a psychedelic experience, especially one like DMT. DMT is well-known because a trip from smoking it can easily seem to last hours for many people despite the fact that in reality the trip only lasts about five to ten minutes. This can sound absurd, but I believe that when you piece it together it's entirely logical. Psychedelics work mainly through the 5-HT2A receptor in the brain to create their effects, which I will detail here. First, there's the fact that these receptors in the prefrontal cortex have a facilitatory control over dopamine release from the ventral tegmental area, which is the source of dopamine neurons involved in perception. This means that when they're activated, things that would normally release a set amount of dopamine will release more than normal. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, imagination, learning... anything that normally involves dopamine will be enhanced, which means it will take up more of your focus at once. In addition to this, the dopamine release to the nucleus accumbens, and possibly other parts of the brain as well, will lower your latent inhibition. This is our basic ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli, and it is disrupted in conditions like schizophrenia. What it basically comes down to is that not only will all of your sensations be enhanced, but you'll pick up more of them; things that you normally wouldn't notice, background sounds like white noise or distant sounds, the specific textures of objects in your peripheral vision, smells that you've gotten used to, etc., will all reach the forefront of your perception as if you were paying close attention to them, in addition to the things that actually are right in front of you anyway.

This is how psychedelics enhance the regular sensory data you're already getting, but there's so much more than that going on too. In addition to all of that, 5-HT2A receptors exist on their own pretty densely in several sensory areas of the brain, and this is why psychedelics can cause hallucinatory sensory perceptions to overlap the regular ones. The most easily noticeable of these is there effect on the visual cortex, which is responsible for things like tracers, light and color distortions and intensifications, visual feedback errors, fractal patterns, wave-like distortions in the integrity of 3D space, and, in higher doses, total loss of normal visual function stretching into the perceptions of objects twisting, bending, morphing, and self-perpetuating at impossible angles and dimensions. These are by far the easiest changes to comprehend (and that's really saying something), but keep in mind that these kinds of chaotic alterations will be happening to your other senses as well, though I would say usually a little less intensely than with the visuals, but it's still some pretty heavy stuff. Now, what you have to remember, is that these changes are happening in the raw sensory areas. As far as your brain is concerned, there is no difference between these drug-induced signals and ones that would come from actually seeing these things in the external world, which is why they seem as real as actual perceptions at the time. However, where that is significant is that the brain will also be releasing dopamine from these senses in addition to the regular ones. That means that everything I said before, about your regular senses becoming intensified from facilitating the ventral tegmental area will apply to these as well. But it doesn't stop there. 5-HT2A receptors also exist in the parts of the brain that are significant the the proper integration of sensory information as it travels from its raw format to be used to create the world we before us. Because of this, not only is the information further altered, but sensations such as synesthesia can begin to occur, or senses blending together. This means that not only are all these heavy, heavy sensory signals being used to construct their own sense, but your other senses well.

On top of everything else, psychedelics also stimulate the areas of the brain involved in focus and memory. Because of this they are also directly hallucinogenic, and in high enough doses can cause out-of-body experiences and full dream sequences. These areas of the brain actually cause complex visions by working together with areas of the brain involved in higher visual processing functions, not those specifically for just receiving raw information, but for recognizing things like faces, bodies, letters and words, numbers, familiar environments, and etc. Normally, when we dream, these areas are being activated by these memory centers and nothing else, since areas such as the visual cortex are silent, which allows for recreating relatively normal scenes. However, since these sensory areas are actually even more active than when we're sober and awake when we're on psychedelics, both the input from them and from those centers will be blended together. And just to add insult to injury, 5-HT2A receptors exist in those areas of the brain as well, which means there will be a third, totally unique set of information coming into them that will unite with the other two to form the massively chaotic worlds that psychedelics can bring us to. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in a DMT breakthrough, which is basically like being in an incomprehensible alien landscape that seems even more "real" than the real world.

So like I said, my main idea for how to cause time dilation is to increase the amount of information you're taking in at once. This reflects my aforementioned view that our perception of time is the measurement of the measurement of change; the amount of these measurements that we are writing into memory all at once makes time slow down the higher it gets simply because we are perceiving a larger amount of information in a shorter amount of time, but to us we must still understand this information at what feels like a normal pace, which makes the rest of time seem slower by comparison. So if you've been paying attention, you can probably tell where this is going. There's never going to be any other time in your life when your brain is handling such an absurd amount of sensory information as it is in a psychedelic experience. Given all this, if my theory about how our perception of time works is correct, it seems considerably more plausible to me that an experience which only lasts a few minutes could feel like a few hours. However, that is putting it on the very light side of things, and many people claim experiences that last much longer. However, a DMT breakthrough is simply like an intense psychedelic dream, which I believe is only scratching the surface. All psychedelics, DMT included, can take it a step further than that to what many people refer to as a divine unification with the universal unconsciousness, the Godhead, ego death, or whatever you want to call it. For what it's worth, I've heard of this happening in dreams both lucid and non-lucid before as well, but it wouldn't be on top of all of this sensory information. What's significant about it is that at this point people begin to describe feeling as though they take up infinite space, or are processing an infinite amount of information, and coupled with delusions of grandeur and reference could reasonably be why there are perceptions of speaking to or becoming God. As far as I'm concerned here, these "infinite" perceptions may be simply more along the lines of... for example, trying to imagine having a quantity of an item represented by a number with a hundred thousand digits. It's something that is definitely finite, but is so large as to be completely incomprehensible by any human mind no matter what they do. Given that amount of stimulation that all of these different areas of the brain involved in perception are receiving at the same time, I could definitely see it being the same kind of thing. But of course, where it matters is that fact that the amount of information being processed can seem infinite. If that process is intimately tied to our perception of time, then couldn't that logically seem infinite too in the same scenario?

Before I move on to the next thing, I'd like to make one last point about something. This is a concept which I'd like to call "retrograde" time dilation. On psychedelics, and other drugs, there is an effect where altered or disrupted memory storage makes it seem like a much longer time has passed since the last thing you remember than actually has. I personally believe that this mostly occurs because memories seem more fleeting. On a high dose of a psychedelic, this can become so intense that things that happened moments ago can seem almost like a different lifetime. I would wager that this also plays a pretty important role in the perception of how long these experiences feel.

So, at this point I feel safe in thinking that it's possible for the brain to reach these "infinite" experiences. However, this is obviously not an option when it comes to dreams, because there's no way you could have that unbelievable sensory overload while in a regular dream. So the next thing I have to ask myself is, how exactly is the brain convincing itself of these things downstream, and can this process be activated in the absence of all that sensory data? To make clearer what I mean, take this for example. When glutamate is released and activates metabotropic glutamate 1 receptors in the hippocampus, it induces the synthesis and release of endocannabinoids which then activate CB1 receptors and cause downstream cannabinoid effects. That means that those effects are a direct result of glutamatergic activity. However, if you actually directly activate CB1 receptors through some other method, the easiest to explain being through a drug like THC, then the levels of glutamate drops and glutamatergic activity lowers. But this doesn't stop that CB1 activity from being activated anyway, so in some ways your mind can think that the same kind of thing is happening that would from activation of those glutamate receptors, even though it isn't. By this logic, I ask myself if it's possible for the brain to be pushed to the same amount of processing power through some other method.

The first thing I had to consider was the way that adrenaline rushes cause time dilation. They do increase your focus on your surroundings, but they also begin to cut out subjectively unnecessary data such as color. While following that train of thought, I arrived at dissociatives. See, people throw the word infinite around a lot with psychedelics, but whenever I hear it generally what I take it to mean is just that it felt too long for them to measure. But when I hear someone say something like "I was tripping for a thousand years.", then I know they mean business. This is the kind of thing I hear with dissociatives, like salvia and DXM, and many people claim that dissociatives are much more intense than psychedelics. The way they work though is more often than not the exact opposite. Psychedelics enhance your sensory perceptions, whereas dissociatives dull them. I've often heard people relate the experiences by saying that psychedelics show you what it's like to be everything, while dissociatives show you what it's like to be nothing. But despite this, it's a nothingness in the form of an infinite void. So if a seemingly infinite amount of space is perceived, could it not be somehow related to the space that psychedelics bring you to, regardless of what else is going on at the same time? The connection with the adrenaline rush would be that in both of these cases, the amount of processing power given to our surroundings is increased while the actual amount of data used to construct them slowly decreases. An adrenaline rush is not going to take you so far as to become redundant, since it does require you to still be able to interact with at least some of your environment, but drugs are not limited in the same way. Furthermore, dissociatives do cause hallucinations, which means that they must be altering the same memory and perception centers of the brain as psychedelics in some way. However, because on a dissociatives concept such as identity and sources such as external information shrink to nothing, the amount of energy that would be required to record the experiences should logically decrease by quite a bit.

The thing I think I can most easily relate this to is being bored. They say time flies when you're having fun, right? But when you're bored, it just drags on all day. I personally feel that this could be because you're not significantly changing the amount of processing power the brain uses there, but you are changing the amount of information it needs to store. Because of that the memories can be written quickly and more efficiently, which I believe means that your perception of time will lengthen. So in that way, you could apply the same logic to psychedelics and dissociatives. They both take you up to an "infinite" space, but one of them requires an incredibly higher amount of information to write in all at once, so the brain does still have to cut back a little bit on how quickly it can work it all in. But without all that extra junk data to pay attention to, it's able to divert even more power to that memory system. Another thing about dissociatives too is that they disrupt memory storage even more strongly than psychedelics, so that retrograde time dilation I mentioned could be even more significant here.

So, now we arrive at dreams. During a dream, particularly a lucid dream, the mind tries to recreate a relatively normal perception of self-identity. The brain does shut out external sensory perceptions while dreaming too, but not completely and it still invokes more normal sensory processing methods than would be used on a dissociative. Obviously, the ideal goal is to try to construct a realistic simulation of reality. Because of these things, the normal dream state sort of lies in between the psychedelic and dissociative experiences, not necessarily too much or too little sensory information or rational thought processing. Focus is also normally lowered in dreams as we all know, it takes becoming lucid even just to bring it up to normal levels. These things conspire to make time flow much more normal compared to waking life than a hallucinogenic experience would be. However, I do think there are some things to consider. First of all, as anyone who's ever had to wake up every day at the same time knows, the brain is pretty damn good at keeping time. For this reason I find studies such as the one by LaBerge which measure dream time to mean very little in terms of concrete information. Could it not simply be that dream time flows differently until we divert enough attention to accurately measuring it? This relates to what Sageous said about just ignoring it, but I am taking it in a different direction. My next thought is that even though things are more normal in a dream than in a trip, they're still not completely there. Activity of the memory areas are still high, and no matter how much you think you're perceiving in a dream, it's not nearly as much as you would be while awake. Signals from your physical body will be absent, as will many things in your environment that you're not directly paying attention to. Your brain can use shortcuts to create these things, whereas while awake it would need to pay much closer attention to what was going on. Because of things like this I don't think it's entirely absurd to suggest that the dreaming brain is writing memories more easily than the waking one would be.

As I said before, I feel that the ability to dilate time in an internally-generated world would be much higher than in the waking world. This is because no matter how quickly you're registering what's going on while awake, your body and the things happening around you are occurring at the same speed, which causes things like slow motion. This need not necessarily be true in the brain, as it's quite possibly that in addition to encoding experiences faster it may be creating them faster as well, as I do think that the two are intimately connected. If that was the case, you could genuinely be experiencing things at a normal pace despite the fact that they're happening faster than normal. Furthermore, I have to ask myself, if that is the case, how easily these factors can be changed both by default in a dream and by methods like dream control. For instance, if it was possible to normalize time by paying attention it, then would it be possible to shift it in the other direction as well? I remember reading a time dilation dream control method once, here on DV I believe, that involved sitting in a white void and watching a clock tick seconds by and imagining them happening slower than normal. If it did work that way, wouldn't that seem like an entirely logical way of changing it? Especially since the void would cut out even more detail, allowing your mind to focus more heavily on that. And if it's possible as a method of dream control then surely it can happen without it too, even if it wasn't likely to happen often. And of course, lastly there is the fact that memory storage is inhibited in dreams compared to normal, which could account for a retrograde effect in dreams as well.

Anyway, this post has already gotten incredibly long and I'm afraid that because I've typed so much I may have missed some of my points, or that I would if I continued to type more, so I'm going to stop now. But this is pretty much what I'm working with as far as time dilation goes right now.

If god exists, it must be in our dreams...

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I'm not sure why you're drooping that Steph - everything you said is well known fact. Skull size of newborn humans has reached the limit of pelvic bone opening in adult women, to accommodate a bigger skull the pelvis would need to grow wider which would cause problems with women not being able to stand or walk properly. And as you also said, children don't come into the world with full development of whatever parts of the brain accommodate moral choices - they don't seem capable of understanding that until much later.

Louai, moral development is hardly the only thing that's not complete in children - neither is cognition, memory, spatio-temporal awareness - the conscious mind itself isn't fully formed yet. These things all develop gradually after the child is already out of the womb, so as Steph said human children are born incomplete - their maturation takes many more years. Not like horses who can stand and walk within moments of being born. I completely agree with at least this much of what Steph has said, though I'm not sure what it relates back to or why she's dropping it now.

It sounded so defensive because I brought up this QM/free will thing, and that's really highly probably bullshit, which I know, but it keeps rumbling about in the back of my mind - I need to look into it seriously finally before mentioning it again. And true - what I said about sculls etc. is all factual, but I would say there is not much of a point in bringing it up, besides me telling stories...
But thank you anyway!

Originally Posted by Meskhetyw

I agree 100%. Though you put it better and more unambiguously.

Sorry for rambling so much - it's hot here and I just don't feel like pruning it down to half the words, which would be good theoretically, I know...

Originally Posted by balban

I think the meaning of this part of the topic has changed. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about whether or not their attempts at easing the suffering comes at some cost. The original point was that you claimed that Christians, because of their belief, have a mindset that they will simply accept suffering and do little about it. It also seems that you were implying that atheists, freed from blind faith, and their feeling bad about might lead to action.

A quote from your previous post...

And it is a bad thing about religion, leading you have blind faith that ultimately all is good! Believing that all of it would be in god's plan doesn't motivate one to change the world for the better, it doesn't! It also doesn't motivate people to free themselves from oppression and exploitation - it tends to lead to sheepish acceptance of whatever god has put upon you in the hope for a better deal in the afterlife. But that's a cheat - not a deal!!

Getting angry and upset about senseless suffering and cruelty and misery and whatnot is maybe not measurably productive in our cases - in the sense of running out and actually doing something about it - but it could and might!

My response was an attempt to refute this particular quote, not as some kind of an endorsement of how Christians practice their easing of suffering. To restate my point, I believe that Christians, in general, feel much the same about suffering as we do, evidenced by what we do see them do. So what I am taking exception with is your notion that Christians trend more apathetic toward suffering because they think all suffering is good.

From this latest response, you seem to agree with this; however, you are taking exception as to how they go about it. That it totally fair. I will even go as far as to say that I mostly agree with you but I'll leave it at that. I don't know if this thread can support yet another topic of ongoing conversation.

I wonder why I wrote it so in the first place - yes - you did refute my "claim" and I veered off into how that can look in practice instead of clearly acknowledging it first. It still strikes me as weird, this whole system. But I'm having a hard time here to express, what I mean exactly - I've been already throwing a post away from yesterday and I wonder if I get it better this time. Basically I don't understand the bigger picture of the Christian moral framework.

On the one hand you need to believe that god knows what he is doing, that there will be divine justice for all of us anyway after death, and the rewards in the afterlife will be so high, that they can completely redeem any suffering somebody went through on earth, if she deserves it. So theoretically you could just leave it be. But on the other hand it's all about you finding god's plan for you personally and put it into practice, and those plans often entail alleviating the suffering of others. Which feels very good anyway, while watching suffering feels bad to all of us because of empathy. But ultimately it looks more like a game to me, the plan fulfilling, the whole set-up of reality, I can't help it. Your goal then is not primarily to achieve something, but to give your very best and to not ever give up. To keep coming no matter will be superior to giving one's unbelieving best, but later on giving up in frustration. If the work is actually justifiable, that is, but let's say it is.
Looking at it cynically and from another angle, I could say that there needs to be evil in the world just so that you can "play" out your fee will. That would be a pretty ghastly outlook, though. I have to think of Christian determinism now, of which I have no idea at all - only the suspicion that it would get even more convoluted under that premise..?

What about the devil? Maybe he could theoretically justify "the game"? I want to ask you and anybody having this knowledge, I probably once knew and forgot it. How is it - when and how is god supposed to have created the angels? How is it possible for one of his creations, if they are, to wage war with god? Is this maybe purposefully tolerated by god, this conflict? Did he even set it up? It must have started before the garden Eden - the snake was Satan, wasn't it?
Is there not a Lilith stalking about, too?
Also - isn't hell rather an institution god makes use of in order to punish? But he isn't in control of the facility himself? Entities will come pouring out for wargames, and we know that already, but have to go through it anyway? Do you need to be saved from the devil, or from the guilt of original sin or both?
Man - I have no idea, as you can see - please help me sort my head out here a bit!

You made mention of gains/losses in this context before. I certainly don't mind you pointing at this as some kind of a validation data point. However, I don't really even know what it really means. From what did these minds get changed? Was it a meaningful change or just a "yeah I see your point" moment? Does this mean who the audience thought "won" the debate or real change expressed by the audiences? I get what you are saying, but I just don't draw any great meaning from it. <-- was hard for me to say in this way, but I have a rep to protect.

I do my existential nihilistic best to draw some meaning from these numbers, yepp! Of course I have no idea about what made these people change their voting behaviour. All of what you mentioned up to someone feeling very clever and voting undecided/contra only to officially count as gained vote later on for what she should have voted for in the first place. I wonder why you are so much in doubt about the potential to change a mind by debate in general, though - I know it didn't work for you, maybe couldn't ever have worked - but I really believe that it can and does, even if that's the minority of switched voters in this case, who come to see this debate as one step of the way to a real change of mind, not only about who did a better job at arguing, but also ultimately about question number one in my eyes: Is it true?

More important to me than the numbers in this respect is what I wanted to express with quoting Darkmatters - namely that for example Hitchens can indeed be a source of inspiration and input with which to crystallize and sort out one's own thoughts and ideas, compare them, refine them.
I can almost hear you say it - and it's right, too - what this means is that I watch a debate and afterwards I am even more firmly atheist than before...
And so it might go for most really religious people listening - but why then, if it really systematically only hardens one's own position - why then the numbers?
Maybe one notion is simply better than the other, not only better argued for? This is the second such thing I watched - I don't even know if it's unusual that both sides gain numbers?
Whatever - we will not agree on this, I can't see it - lets simply say that I enjoy watching these things, believe that I learn something and indulge in a bit of schadenfreude, too!

I wouldn't disagree with you. But say religion is somehow wiped off the face of the Earth. Do you have faith enough that humanity wouldn't/doesn't use other tools, just as galvanizing, in order to justify their hostilities? Politics; border lines; race; culture; any property that makes one person different from the other is a potential excuse that can/will be used. Religion is just another excuse. It's like we have a sickness and our symptoms are these excuses. We can remove a symptom here or a symptom there, but we are still sick and other symptoms will continue to pop up until we realize that we've only been curing the symptoms. Is it not more pragmatic to go after the disease rather than the symptom? Cure the disease and the symptoms are irrelevant. It's a cheesy analogy, but it's the best I have ATM.

I actually do have quite some faith in humanity - delusional or not - I try to nurture it, it seems harmless enough with positive potential to me.
Another excuse? Hm - rather another source, another artificial concept along which's lines people separate into opposing fractions. But I see your point - another symptom of a sort of "tribal warfare disease", remnant from evolution for a life in groups of a certain upper limit in numbers.
You may well be right in that the net-suffering would actually stay the same. But religion is special, you can't simply substitute it with any of these or something not "transcendental" and reap in the same sort of fervour. This notion of something absolute, all-powerful beyond human direct experience, beyond practical questioning and the claim to know what the will of the divine is - that's a different category than these other motives. You have a vastly stronger power base, if you refer to having the key to eternal life in bliss and to eternal torture after death as opposed to just wielding worldly threats and promises. Once you believe the claims - you will obey, how could you not? But what if you don't believe in an afterlife at all - would you be swayed as easily to give your life for a war - any war, religious or not? I don't think so...


Anyway, these are all considerations as to the utility, dangers, effects and side-effects and theoretical framework. What ultimately counts for me is:
IT IS NOT TRUE!

But I'd love to get some overview of how the god/devil affair came about and how it is supposed to influence our reality!?


Edit: The psychiatric connotations are not forgotten - we have all the time in the world after all and I feel it's going to be work to follow up on it - but I hope I will eventually! Not only about how psychosis and religion do quite nicely together - I want to look into these supposed negative effects of losing religion/beyonder persuasions as well, maybe finding the opposite..? And looking into what you guys posted of course!

Just coming from the balcony having had a nice session of sun-worship with bubbly wine and strawberries with cream - that's my excuse for doing this post!

Originally Posted by StephL

What if there was something to be found in the soul department? ... It's just really not bloody likely that there is a soul ... Hitchens can indeed be a source of inspiration and input with which to crystallize and sort out one's own thoughts and ideas, compare them, refine them.

...and/or one disagrees with him constructively of course...

Listening to Hitchens in the background, I came to rethink the affair with the term "soul" or spirit. He spoke from my heart there, whatever that might mean. About how materialism doesn't necessarily mean reductionism, and that dismissing the word "soul" would impoverish human expression. Everybody knows what you mean, if you say of a city that it is soulless, that it can be meaningful to express something like the outcome of severe abuse with soul-destroying. Same with the word evil - somebody who tortures and kills others not for any purpose, but because she enjoys it would best be described as evil, and I tend to agree.
I didn't quote - just approximately what I remember...

Reductionism - puuuh, I feel there is a lot to check up on with Wikipedia coming for me with these philosophical terms... :sleepysteph:

Don't mind me and continue your conversation, just putting my "atheism" story up here.

Normal "raised catholic" thing for me, guess I never took that stuff seriously as I simply stopped believing when I was still a kid and didn't identify with catholics; didn't last long however, some BS from the media and me being still a kid felt like I could die at any moment, so out of fear for death started to believe again because... I don't know, death! And then I was a teen and started to question those beliefs again, knew why I choose to believe and didn't like that my reasoning had nothing to back it up other than fear, so finally let go of that notion for good and properly face my fear of death and learnt to fear life/death equally =D

Heey Hukif!!

So sweet you really showed up here! Means a lot to me!
May gravity be always on your side!

:pillowfight:




Afterthought: I guess "soul" is too supernaturally loaded after all, I will rather keep trying to do without it - spirit - well - as in the spirit of things, surely! Evil - got to think on that...

Wow this thread grew quickly! I feel sad since i'm to lazy to read all of the good posts

Yeah - I'm pretty much blown away by the resonance we're getting here, I truly am. Initially I was afraid if anybody turns up besides maybe a handful of people of whom I did expect it. I'll do a count once in a while, but I guess we transcended the 20! Then I thought - will we have something to talk about? And now balban was even wondering if the thread could "support yet another topic of ongoing conversation"!
Now I'm only hoping for some female attendance and wondering, if not one or the other religious or beyonder person might feel like inputting as well - or even debating!


I'll take the chance to bring something up, which Sageous said somewhere else. I had to think of it last night - if you're still with us and fancy it - correct/refine/whatever me here!
It went in etwa (approximately) like this: If you truly believe in creationism for example - why bother with evidence and scientific thinking at all to justify it?
Your story basically works by fiat anyway and you are prepared to deny vast quantities of evidence about the the age of the earth and universe.
What about it? Is the whole scientific community wrong in exactly these respects that touch on the bible-story, but they are usually so correct, that they put men on the moon? All a conspiracy? Or was it put there by Satan to confuse people maybe - that would make coherent sense, actually, while the other possibilities are really hard to believe, are they not?
Once you talk about natural laws getting suspended in order to defend the truth of an ancient story - despite all the evidence to the contrary - you really shouldn't fixate on evidence or open a museum and ramble on about dinosaur bones, that's ridiculous - stay true to yourself!

You could just as well propose that we and everything were all created one heartbeat ago - nobody can say, that she could be sure, it is not so.
It could be so - it really could - take the example of us being in a simulation - it might be easier to start the simulation from scratch like with a big bang and evolution, but somebody sufficiently sophisticated on the controls of the simulation, say an alien looking back on millions of years of evolution more than we (seem to) do, or an "artilect" post-singularity - they could maybe just create the situation as it is right now by fiat. With all our memories programmed in. I very much agree on the possibility in principle - but how can one be realistic about the probabilities of such a scenario?
I don't quite like the idea that it is much more probable to be in a simulation than in physical reality, maybe because I don't understand it - who brought that up - Alric maybe?

Ahhh... I just have to thank you for giving this opportunity, because of I finally found a place where I was able to put all the related stuff that I use to write in the comment box whenever I find one of those "say amen", "praise Jesus" or "the pope is great", etc. posts in some of my friend's walls, and hesitated to press 'Enter', leaving them alone with their beliefs. Who am I to screw their delusions anyway? It's up to them to realize. After all, the information is spread everywhere and if they find it, it should be because they started to question it, and that's the way it works I think. Of course, if someone tries to convince me... I praise the devil

Definitively, Box! But it needs to be spread out even more!! Problem really is what to do about education - abolish religious schools? Not religious education - but faith-specific schools, maybe? These also aggravate social segregation along religious lines right from the start.

Mmh - how about some beautiful, homosexual and un-Christian soul music from Ireland (is it? I guess it is). I just heard it on the radio and I really like it, including the video:

In a blasphemes case of injustice....I, dutchraptor.....Living in Ireland....cannot watch the irish music video because the uploader did not make it available to my country.....
Now what kind of shite is that.
Listened to the song about 1000 times but never to the lyrics, damn it's actually pretty cool, especially for a still largely catholic country. Shows that the youth here don't actually give a crap about Christianity anymore, they follow it purely because of habit. I give it 50 years before Catholicism is properly removed from our society.

On that note, it is shocking how often catholic members are asked for opinions in our society, the media milks it because it know it will cause controversy. People want abortion, the church has to blather their ancient ways all over them. People want drug decriminalization, the church comes and spews it's nonsense some more. Some guy can't stage a concert in the capital, oh let's ask the church what they think.

The lowering levels of Christianity is absolutely the best thing that ever happened for us. It has caused nothing but trouble, the pagan laws of the true Irish may have been tribal but contained incredibly sophisticated elements and trains of thought that were unfortunately dropped with the multiple invasions of Ireland.

Perhaps to give an idea of what it did to us. The pagan Irish used to worship trees, and used them efficiently. Then came the English and Spanish needing them for their religious missions and 95% of Ireland's historic forests where removed. This is so unknown by most people these days that people think that Ireland was always a fairly barren country.

Wow! Thank you dutchraptor for this reality check!! The video shows a young homosexual couple and religious violence, not nice, the latter, but shame you can't watch it! It's a beautiful song, even without paying close attention to the lyrics, let alone watching the video, isn't it? That was what first captured me - but I initially thought it would be gospel - except I heard: "I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife..."

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

Shows that the youth here don't actually give a crap about Christianity anymore, they follow it purely because of habit.

It shows a much more serious aspect in combination with the video! Do you really think it is actually unavailable in Ireland for reasons of religious "respect"?
It's pretty crucial to interpreting the text, though - reminds me of cartoons, this does - even if it's about copy-right in the end!

It's the goddess of love who is meant with "she" in the very beginning before it's the Catholic church I would say, but the lovers are male.
Since I edit like the devil anyway - here goes:

Spoiler for lyrics of 'Take Me To Church':

My lover's got humor
She's the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody's disapproval
I should've worshiped her sooner
If the Heavens ever did speak
She's the last true mouth piece
Every Sunday's getting more bleak
A fresh poison each week
We were born sick, you heard them say it
My church offers no absolution
She tells me 'worship in the bedroom'
The only heaven I'll be sent to
Is when I'm alone with you
I was born sick, but I love it
Command me to be well

Amen (x3)

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

If I'm a pagan of the good times
My lover's the sunlight
To keep the goddess on my side
She demands a sacrifice
To drain the whole sea
Get something shiny
Something meaty for the main course
That's a fine looking high horse
What you got in the stable?
We've a lot of starving faithful
That looks tasty
That looks plenty
This is hungry work

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Offer me my deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Offer me my deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

No masters or kings when the ritual begins
There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin
In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene
Only then I am human
Only then I am clean

Amen (x3)

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good god, let me give you my life

Had to look what others think - call me anal, guys, go ahead, but I don't subscribe to Freud: Hozier - Take Me to Church Lyrics | SongMeanings
I found this honestly after writing the above, that was just a starting scratch anyway, but I won't read all of this now...

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I'm not sure why you're drooping that Steph - everything you said is well known fact. Skull size of newborn humans has reached the limit of pelvic bone opening in adult women, to accommodate a bigger skull the pelvis would need to grow wider which would cause problems with women not being able to stand or walk properly. And as you also said, children don't come into the world with full development of whatever parts of the brain accommodate moral choices - they don't seem capable of understanding that until much later.

Louai, moral development is hardly the only thing that's not complete in children - neither is cognition, memory, spatio-temporal awareness - the conscious mind itself isn't fully formed yet. These things all develop gradually after the child is already out of the womb, so as Steph said human children are born incomplete - their maturation takes many more years. Not like horses who can stand and walk within moments of being born. I completely agree with at least this much of what Steph has said, though I'm not sure what it relates back to or why she's dropping it now.

That might be the case, but still, most of our morals today are taught to us. The rest are partially with us when we are born, and develop while we develop to a certain age.

This fact only allows us to assume that natural morals are developed through growth, and not fully there after birth.

So I still think that most morals today are taught to us, and are not natural morals. The natural ones that come with us after birth and develop through a certain age are like killing for no reason is bad.

So skull size and womb size are important factors, but only play a role in how much time is needed for the natural morals to form, not whether taught morals are actually lately developed morals(which I think they aren't).

I pretty much agree with box77 on this one steph, they(creationists) should try to get to conclusions on their own. The best thing we can do is sow the seeds of doubt and hope for the best.

Exactly, Luoai! That's what I was trying to get at! While I would say that what develops biologically is not a moral code per se, like "don't kill without reason", but rather only this fuzzy empathy/reward/punishment/hormones/neurotransmitter complex from which we consciously and hopefully rationally distil the codex.
By the way - it's not true that animals only kill for food or defence/attack when it comes to territory/mating - grown-up cats play with prey and kill it even without eating the result for example.

Originally Posted by HeWhoShapes

I pretty much agree with box77 on this one steph, they(creationists) should try to get to conclusions on their own. The best thing we can do is sow the seeds of doubt and hope for the best.

I would fully agree with you, if it was about Germany where almost nobody among the younger and even the older population holds such silly beliefs - but the numbers I read about America and the power and money being wielded in the name of these - it just simply concerns me, if people are sufficiently exposed to the respective information to get inspired and motivated to think it through on their own and go on searching. So the more output, the better - and broadly findable - but not forced upon people, surely. Sowing seeds - yes, that's the way - but where to sow them? What can you pro-actively do with grown-ups anyway? Not much up to pissing them off good and proper.

But they can do a lot to children, and at the very least the state should stand way back in this, should avoid children being separated and indoctrinated in faith schools without even coming across other children from a different religious or even non-religious background. That's the least they deserve from a secular state. I believe it is so hard to reason with grown-ups because of early and very efficient brain-washing. You can't influence what people do at home anyway, unless it's something illegally abusive. But I would find it great if there wasn't even faith-specific religious education at all in publicly funded schools, let alone compulsory, but instead an ethics class like we had it, a huge part of which was comparative religious studies. If you have that at school right from the start - adapted to the age of course - there would be something enabling a kid to take a properly informed and critical look at what is put upon her in terms of home-education. Or at least start in high-school - but why not tell them even earlier that there is more than what their parents believe?
Ah - because it would come across as "war on Christianity"...
Opportunity to post this one:




To try and illuminate the psychiatry angle will indeed be work, me thinks, and I don't want to sprout any BS. It looks like there is even a serious lack in proper studies, controlled for community aspects for example.
Ah - but I'll check out what you guys posted in that respect real sooon now and go about replying - somehow my procrastination-bacillus kicked in with it...

Originally Posted by StephL

Exactly, Luoai! That's what I was trying to get at! While I would say that what develops biologically is not a moral code per se, like "don't kill without reason", but rather only this fuzzy empathy/reward/punishment/hormones/neurotransmitter complex from which we consciously and hopefully rationally distil the codex.

Yes, very well put!

I still wonder though. Are all the codex gained through life experience and parental guide, or do some of them develop naturally, like instinctively?
Any ideas Steph and Darkmatters?

Some animals kill without a rational reason?! How come? This makes me wonder.

Well you can't really do much with adults instead of arguing, as for kids it's really hard because the parents will always want a religous education(depending on the parents though, some will rather sending the child to a religous secondary school instead) and it's really hard to force them to a secular because they will claim their freedom of religion is being harmed(which to an extent it is).


And that girl is really cute, though it kinda makes me uneasy because she might be indoctrinated to science which is better than religion, but still indoctrination. BUT she's so cute!!!

Originally Posted by StephL

By the way - it's not true that animals only kill for food or defence/attack when it comes to territory/mating - grown-up cats play with prey and kill it even without eating the result for example.

That's one of the reasons why I don't hesitate to press enter and throw the bomb when I see things spread on the web trying to 'humanize' some animals pretending to give them feelings like they were humans. Perhaps it's a little bit off-topic but I have to say, it was the pic of a cat next to some death kitties. The story told something about a mother and her babies and some evil guys who did that in front of her and bla bla bla. As you say, it was actually the pic of a male cat who killed the kitties the same as a lion would kill the cubs from the replaced one in order to start his own offspring fast.
It's known that rabbits for example, you must not touch the newborn because of the mother will reject them to death, she simply won't recognize them anymore as hers, and why did she not adopt the new ones which actually are the same but with a different smell?

When talking about morals, if I take the ancient society of the Incas as example. The 3 basic moral rules that they used to grow their society didn't include not killing, they even used to sacrifice kids to the mountains, what was something normal in those times. I don't get which could be those natural morals?

About education, I studied in a catholic school lead by nuns, what they got with their indoctrination, was a perfect satanist . Most of my friends didn't take religion seriously because religious people tend to make religion really boring for a kid (it doesn't matter how hard they try). Perhaps it would be a good idea to let them do it, because kids always question things, and the more you try to repress kids, the more they will look to get free. I don't know, it's obvious some creationist people is looking to isolate kids from the scientific point of view, and as I see it, all what they will got is nothing but the opposite.