Topic: The problem with atheism. - page 30. (Read 38463 times)

I'm curious about how many of you have read the gospels not included in the Bible? When the Roman government produced the official state document we call the Bible, they left out a lot of texts that contradicted official policy. The gospels of Mary, Peter's apocalypse, The Epistle of Barnabas and many other widely known scriptures were cut. I find them fascinating and very telling about the early Christians. Are you familiar with these?

  By the way FinShaggy, I agree with thejoint that the universe is not to equated with god. This has become very trendy in new age circles where people "put intentions out into the universe" because words like "praying" and "god" have been spoiled by fundamentalist christians. This is called the immanence-transcendence debate in theology, and and I think that to define the Supreme as immanent and not transcendent is a serious mistake.

  As for the Most High being referred to as a He, it is impossible for the Truth to have a gender, but language is adapted to describe the phenomenal world, so it is necessary to use parable when speaking about the unspeakable. My own theory is taken from the 99 names/attributes of the Creator. The attributes are often grouped in pairs- the Delayer and the Expediter, the Giver of life and the Causer of death, the First and the Last, Causer of suffering and the Giver of relief, the Exalter and the Humiliator, the Hidden and the Manifest. The masculine quality is the apparent, and this is why is is used in the scriptures. The hidden quality is the feminine. In the Quran the voice of the narrator shifts between He, I, and We in different passages, since the revelation is being narrated by the All Knowing to the Angel Gabriel (the holy spirit). This emphasizes the facts that angels, while having distinct existence, are direct expressions of divine will.

Also as for interest, in my own reading of the bible, which was far from exhaustive, I found six references prohibiting interest, both the taking of and the giving. Interest was illegal in Christian Europe until the 1600's A.D. where people started to question the . This leads me to think that people have been interpreting the Bible to fit their financial agenda rather than trying to apply the wisdom of the texts to their lives. Now people say usury only applies to excessive interest... whatever. There are plenty of ways to get returns on capital without charging interest, and these methods usually help society much more than interest, which provides further evidence to the wisdom and truth of uncorrupted interpretation of the scriptures of the Abrahamic tradition. I also recently read Quranic exegesis which suggested that the phrase "spreading corruption in the land" as in 2:11 (And when it is said to them, "Do not cause corruption on the earth," they say, "We are but reformers.") and other verses as referring, among other things, to the debasing of coins with less valuable metals, or in modern terms "quantitative easing." If you want to find out what happened to the people who practiced this corruption, you can read it yourself.

     I did an exercise with a class once where you draw a scale of consciousness that starts at subatomic particles and extends all the way to galaxies. Then you try to demarcate where consciousness begins and where it ends. Some people said that the lower limit is dogs and the upper limit is whales or other large organisms. Others said that social structures like nations or corporations could be conscious on the upper end, but on the lower level primates and other chimps are conscious, but not dogs and cats. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that on the scale of all that exists, every border you attempt to draw where you say this side is conscious and this side is not is debatable. The zombie argument is that nothing, including ourselves, is conscious, since we are all just automatons trying to reproduce, and the other extreme is that everything, including the earth, stars, galaxies and subatomic particles is conscious. I tended toward the latter conclusion, and it is corroborated by most mystical traditions that have passed the test of time. Maybe this field of consciousness that underlies all phenomena is what Chi, Tao, God, or the Force is referring to.

   Of course if everything is conscious, or everything is consciousness, how to distinguish humans from other animals? I think this is where self comes in. There is an old black and white french movie that is a retelling of the story of Orpheus. In it Death enters into peoples rooms through mirrors. This gave me the idea that the very existence of death depends depends on self reflection, or the ability to conceive of oneself as an self contained entity. It is only when you have a self that death becomes possible. It is only through the self that we have an existence separate to unity. Then the individual consciousness can be perceived as a conscious anomaly rising up from a field of consciousness, and the mental structures in our consciousness that then arise from our individual consciousness develop their own conscious structures, and hence the holographic universe model.

   This puts the first two lines of the Quran in perspective-  the Surah Al Fatiha, or "the opening," begins "Alhamdulilah- Rabbil alamin". This is sometimes translated as All praise and all thanks are due to The God, Ruler of all that exists.  Upon reading up on the etymology of these words, the first word refers to Allah, which is a word that is singular and has no plural. This singular is then referred to as presiding over Al alamin, or all that exists. This al alamin refers to everything that exists- alamin is a word which is plural and has no singular. So the first sentences of the Quran declare the praise to the singular and establish that it is over all that which is plural.

   In the same way, when people speak of ego death, which I think is called samadhi in Buddhism, they sometimes describe it as becoming one with the universe, because the ego is the barrier that allows us to view ourselves as separate from the rest of reality. People also commonly describe loss of all sense of the passage of time in states of ego death. Time only becomes real when we perceive it as having definition- and this definition can only be achieved through time having a beginning and and an end. In other words, there can be no time without timelessness. Or the prerequisite of all perception is a beginning and an end, or an alpha and omega if you happen to be using the Greek alphabet. Did anybody else ever play the game Xenogears?

Possibly he suffers from a very immediate point of view.  If he was born a few hundred years ago he'd bring up the flies out of manure observation and claim that they were born from inanimate objects so that proves you don't need God to create life.  +1 to your response to him.  It's like that Futurama episode when Farnsworth discovers the unifying theory of the universe which begets the next questions "why is it that way and not another way"?  Future technology will always be something no one thinks is even possible otherwise it wouldn't be future technology.

is this real life

I wonder if blablahblah has me on ignore...

The bolded snippet is an entirely false statement.  Basically, you are saying "it is the absolute truth that the truth is no one knows the truth."  Not all truth is relative, and to assert so is to immediately contradict yourself.

Don't just throw out cliches without realizing what you're saying.  Most atheists are bandwagoners whose only real rationale for believing no god exists is peer pressure.

Not nearly as limited as you seem to believe.


Sure. In many different ways even, from complexity, to weight, to energy usage, to which parts are linked to which other parts.


The machine that computes is weighs about 1300 to 1400 grams. Asking how much the actual processing weighs is like asking how much does a bitcoin blockchain weighs. It's software/information, being processed by a biological machine.


Less than 80 Watts when dormant, and approximately 100 watts when doing normal everyday activities.


Theoretically, yes. We just don't have the technology yet, due to its complexity. To get a sense of what a brain is, imagine a huge cluster of tiny computers (neurons) all networked together in some specific way, where every packet sent from a source ends up passing through a bunch of other specific computers to its destination. The network cables get moved around as the network develops. So, let's say you want to think of a bear. Instead of just pulling up a data file on bears, a packet gets sent through the system, which passes through computers that store information on topics like: furry, brown, 4 legs, round ears, snout, teeth, claws, forest, dangerous, etc. As the packet travels through the system, it travels through specific network nodes and actives all the things that are related to "bear" that are deemed most important to the concept, allowing us to come to a general concept of a bear. That's how all information and all thought is stored and processed by our brains. In order for us to safely store that consciousness in a freezer, we would have to figure out how to freeze the wet network without the expanding water molecules (water expands when frozen) tearing the network up. We may figure out how to store brains safely without having to freeze them, or freeze them by some other method. As for transplanting, if we are able to scan the network structure and rebuild it from scratch, building a cluster with the same connections, then we can duplicate /transplant consciousness elsewhere. Likewise, if we are able to successfully disconnect and reconnect all the tiny nerve endings between the brain and the spinal column, then we can transplant brains. It's not a question of how, it's a question of do we have the technology.


LOL! Yeah, there is exactly the same amount of evidence as for the operating system running on your computer and the browser you're using to read this.

The truth is no one knows the TRUTH.I think I am an Atheist,but not because i know there is no GOD,but because religion.Religion is the real problem in the entire world.We could have restaurants on the moon by now if there was no religion.Watch Zeitgeist 1 (it is a free movie) for more information about religion 

Saving a lengthy explanation, I think that consciousness is distributed across large swaths of spacetime.  Although I'm saving the lengthy explanation, this idea is foudned upon another idea, the idea of identity as a distributive, syntactic property of any system (in the easiest of conceptual terms, this is similar to how 1 multiplied by any number results in that number, and so 1 is thus analogous to a distributive property of identity).  

Energy, on the other hand, is something that I've been working on for the past few years, and I'm getting close to a point where I'll be ready to submit some models and equations for peer review.  The most interesting of these equations is an equation for Universal energy which I derived in part from Einstein's formula e=mc^2.  A graph of my equation for Universal energy suggests that perception itself is inherently entwined with energy and plays an important role in the distribution of energy among conditional events in the Universe.

On a serious note, I seriously hope that I've been on the right track, because I believe the models and equations give plausibility to zero-point energy systems.

I am sorry are you trying to be "scientific" here or something? Who claimed that our "scientific" understanding of consciousness is something that we weight or it is measured by an "amount" of energy. Can you please pick an intro to neuro science in lament terms  before you post such nonsense. thnx

4th dimension is just time. We are all perfectly capable of experiencing it. Someone who actually exists on that level will just be able to see everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen at the same time. But they won't see the 5th dimension, which is all the other time lines running parallel and intersecting with ours.

Why do you guys say we don't understand what consciousness is? Our understanding of how the brain works is pretty advanced...

No.  You don't need to hear from me or anyone else what consciousness is.  You can know it absolutely right now, in the direct sense.  The 'activity' that you're talking about are the effects of consciousness.  If I intend to move my arm and do so, you don't point to my arm and say, "see, consciousness."  This is evidence of consciousness.  And while you look to the frontal lobe, or perhaps more generally, the brain, to try and 'find' consciousness, all you are really looking at are more effects or "evidence" of consciousness (evidence means "that which is apparent").

You can know consciousness directly or indirectly.  To know something indirectly is the approach utilized, for example, by the scientific method.  Utilizing this approach, you can only refine your theories with increasing accuracy up to, but neither meeting nor surpassing, a threshold of absolute knowledge.  To know something directly requires an absolute lack of evidence, and in fact, a lack of ratio (again, ratio is the root word of rationale).  You can do this anytime you like.  I'm just letting you know that there's another way to learn about things, one where you aren't trying to find certain things to help explain something else.

Or, phrased another way, there's a difference between knowing something and knowing about something.  You can find all the evidence you want and you'll just know 'about' consciousness.  The difference between knowing something vs. knowing about something is like the difference between going outside and feeling the sun's warmth vs. looking at a thermometer and saying it's 100 degrees.

That is not an explanation of what consciousness is. Yes it is a "fail before you start kind of thing" but only if you don't care to actually ever find out, and are ok with accepting your own or other people's guesses. I am not.

Consciousness is the difference between an involuntary, and voluntary action.

Breathing, a "non conscious" task that we preform without thinking about it. Even when my brother was in a coma, they looked for signs of breathing. And heart beat, they don't care if your heart is beating, but that is a non conscious task.

Fighting. You don't just make a fist and put it in someone's face, you may do it "naturally" but you don't do it "non consciously"

We know that conscious activity is preformed mainly in the frontal lobe of the brain, but we still don't know what it really is. One day we will know though.

I'm sorry to hear about that experience :\  My thoughts and prayers sincerely go out to you.

To respond otherwise, I think that thinking about consciousness in terms of its "consistency" is sort of a "fail before you start" kind of thing.  I mean, I know consciousness...don't you?  Consciousness is directly evident at all times through experience,  It's a true no-brainer.  You can't really say much else about it.  You want consciousness?  Bam, in your face.

People need to just sit, take a breath, and just 'be' for a second.  It will teach you a lot.  I think if more people did this they would understand that some truths are just always there, and to deny them is, in my honest opinion, is a global form of insanity.

Thank you. I still don't feel like it's real, and I have to tell him I love him sometimes because I don't want to never talk to him again. I just never thought anything like this would happen.

Sorry for your loss FinShaggy.  That must have been really hard.  For what it is worth, my prayers are with you and your family and may you find some peace and comfort as time goes on.

Death is just electricity. My 11 year brother died 3 months ago, and he was still there even though he couldn't breath, or feel things. He was there for 2 days, then his head went cold. His brain didn't have any more oxygen. His body was still pumping blood, but his brain was too swollen to accept it. He still had electricity in his body, we all have a little electricity. That is how our hormones move, that is how our nerves operate, that is how our muscles do what they do. And once there is no oxygen feeding it, it goes out. Like a fire.

Like I said in option 3, maybe he is in the "4th dimension" or something. But that's just theories. I don't know what happens, and no one knows what consciousness consists of.

What dies?  Your body?  Are you your body?  When I (subject) perceive my body (object), am I the body?  If I (subject) perceive a tree (object), am I the tree?

It seems that one or both of two things is/are true:  1)  You are your body, and thus you are also a tree and everything else (i.e. you are 'one' with everything, for simplistic phrasing, and subject is the same as object), and/or 2) you are not your body whatsoever and you are absolutely different from it, somehow so different from it that you can't even share with it a relationship of absolute difference.

If #1 is true, then that means you are also 'one' with, or the same as, every instance of a death or dead person you've ever observed.  But yet you're still here...  If #2 is true then please explain to me what the fuck you are, and then describe the death of such a thing. 

The point I'm making is that I question some of your assumptions implicated by your beliefs.

I think "eternity" works like this:

1. You die, you decompose, you become word food, you become fertilizer, you become energy via grass, you become a mouse that eats the grass, you become a bird that eats the mouse, etc (but you don't get to "control" the animal, your energy is just allowing it to exist).

2. Your ideas last forever along with some on and offline content, and things you said to people will always be remembered

3a. This is a theory. But I think when we die, we are no where. There is nothing. We are completely happy... And we wonder why we ever cared about anything on this planet.

3b. We enter the 4th dimension, and live with length, width, height AND a dimension we could never comprehend. With creatures that have been here around us all along, but were invisible to us as we can't see the 4th dimension.