I agree that mystical events are real. I had a whole bunch in my younger years, thanks to the illegal pharmecutical industry.

As an athiest, I also have meditated for long periods of time, and have had experiences related to the chemical (naturally, this time, I'm too old for that other stuff!) reactions in my brain. The difference is that I know them for what they are, and I do not assign them to a pooka or other imaginary spiritual friend.

They are cool when they happen. Just enjoy the ride without making up a story about it.

(March 21, 2013 at 1:14 am)jstrodel Wrote: You are using mental health terminology to advance your movement. You don't have one bit of evidence that I am suffering at all, but that won't stop you, because you don't care about evidence, you care about advancing atheism.

I do have "one bit of evidence" that you are hallucinating: your own rambling posts about how you experience god. As I already explained, people who are mentally ill or otherwise not in their right mind will talk to, hear, and even see things that aren't there. This is well known and documented. Many people suffering from such maladies will insist that they're fine. This is well known and documented. Parts of your reply to me display the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia, which is a well known and documented illness.

What is not well known and documented is people who actually talk to and see god. Therefore, the weight of evidence leads me to a logical conclusion: you are in the throes of some mental problem, and are hallucinating.

(March 21, 2013 at 3:54 am)jstrodel Wrote: re: junkies - relevant how - fear. I don't feel any fear or insecurity in posting here. I was correcting your false pop psychology.

You misunderstood me. I never said that you're insecure in posting here, I meant in life.

Quote:and the thing that I fear now really is intellectual culture and intellectual arrogance, the same arrogance that proudly proclaims that it can build nuclear weapons and at the same time demands that everyone accept that its culture is a universal norm for assessing all truth claims, whether they have anything to do with their culture of weapon making or not.

Now how did that quote about splinter and beams in your eye go..?

Quote:Because intellectuals are so foolish they don't deserve a response in their own language.

I might go out on a limb here, but I think you're not even able to give me a response in my first or second language (without Google translate, that is).

Quote:If intellectual culture is so superior, why do they make nuclear weapons? That seems like an inferior culture to me.

Do you honestly think that the biggest part of research and discoveries are made for martial purposes? No, it's the greed that drives certain individuals to apply findings into weaponry. And what kind of people wages war the most? The religious.

Quote:I think that baby talk is superior to intellectual culture in a lot of ways.

I highly doubt you think at all at some times..

Quote:I have never seen a baby build a nuclear weapon and then argue that anyone who did not accept his methods of understanding the world was was a fool.

Just check TEGH's thread for childish misconceptions out, and we'll see just how silly a child can be.

Quote:Obviously there is a clear connection between the post styles.

Obviously. You're cuckoo!

(March 19, 2013 at 1:25 pm)jstrodel Wrote: To believe in God is to laugh at what men consider great.

But to laugh at what men consider great does not mean you believe in god.

(March 19, 2013 at 1:25 pm)jstrodel Wrote: An atheist is someone that takes his culturally constructed world very, very seriously.

This is just a strawman that your own biases have convinced you is real. How about we try to have a discussion about what an atheist actually is instead of your own fantastical belief of what one is?

(March 19, 2013 at 1:25 pm)jstrodel Wrote: It is not surprising that you would be offended.

Ha ha. Offended? Only a tiny, credulous mind would be offended by such nonsensical drivel. I was saying that I only felt pity, because you thought you were actually saying something deep and insightful. All of your snarky replies, projections of your inadequacies, and insistence that an atheist conform to your own misconceptions, however, has erased any lingering pity I felt.

(March 21, 2013 at 4:01 am)jstrodel Wrote: I can promise you, and swear 100%, with everything that I am, that I have experienced mystical events that do not require an interpretation, that there is no other possible interpretation other than believing that a supernatural event happens, although that does not confirm all the details of the theological interpretation (such as that the source was the God of theism).

And I don't doubt you truly believe all that. It's still not proof of anything except that you believe all that.

Quote:There is no confirmation bias associated with reporting on sense experience directly, it is only at the point of interpretation in which confirmation bias can enter.

Senses are tools used by the brain to interpret stimuli. There are countless opportunities for bias to enter, and all it takes is a single instance.

In this case you have interpreted some kind of event to be communication from a God you already knew about because you spent your entire life living in a culture where that God is either the primary deity people worship or one of the most important ones.

My one issue (actually, I have several, but this is one I've brought up and you've ignored)....

If my Muslim friend says he had a vision of Allah, is he lying? There's nothing less believable about him than you. And if he isn't lying, then how can you have a vision of your God and him have a vision of his? It means that if there is something (notice the 'if'), it's not Yaheweh or Allah.

(March 21, 2013 at 5:32 pm)CleanShavenJesus Wrote: My one issue (actually, I have several, but this is one I've brought up and you've ignored)....

If my Muslim friend says he had a vision of Allah, is he lying? There's nothing less believable about him than you. And if he isn't lying, then how can you have a vision of your God and him have a vision of his? It means that if there is something (notice the 'if'), it's not Yaheweh or Allah.

Sorry, I have missed your posts.

People could have a vision that is a real vision, but the spirit that is responsible for the vision does not necessarily define God. The Bible describes many different spirits that go forth and reveal different things to people, such as Pharoah's sorcerers and people who tell fortunes. It does not say that these spirits are imagined or that people don't have the experiences, it simply says that the spirits are not from God.

Also the Bible says that some spirits are more evil than others. Because spirits do not come from God, does not mean that everything that they say is false. I believe the different religions of the world are different spirits that have gone into the world and revealed similar things to Christianity and they are intact because they are related to the blessings of God.

(March 21, 2013 at 8:00 pm)jstrodel Wrote: Sorry, I have missed your posts.

People could have a vision that is a real vision, but the spirit that is responsible for the vision does not necessarily define God. The Bible describes many different spirits that go forth and reveal different things to people, such as Pharoah's sorcerers and people who tell fortunes. It does not say that these spirits are imagined or that people don't have the experiences, it simply says that the spirits are not from God.

Also the Bible says that some spirits are more evil than others. Because spirits do not come from God, does not mean that everything that they say is false. I believe the different religions of the world are different spirits that have gone into the world and revealed similar things to Christianity and they are intact because they are related to the blessings of God.

That isn't what he asked you, so I'll put the question to you a little differently.

Imagine that you are an unwashed heathen like me, who has no dog in the fight. Imagine that you met someone who had precisely the same experience you claim to have had with Yahweh, the sole creator of the universe. Imagine, also, that you meet a Muslim, who has precisely the same experience you claim to have, only he says that his came from Allah, the sole creator of the universe.

How can you tell which one is right, if either of them are?

Quote:And I don't doubt you truly believe all that. It's still not proof of anything except that you believe all that.

It is different from a religious belief. It is a testimony, no different from a description of something that happened at a crime scene. You have no evidence that it is biased in anyway, and your theorizing about my motivations serves to ground your skepticism no more than my theorizing about your a priori commitment atheism ground my rejection of your beliefs. It is an empty claim.

Quote:Senses are tools used by the brain to interpret stimuli. There are countless opportunities for bias to enter, and all it takes is a single instance.

In this case you have interpreted some kind of event to be communication from a God you already knew about because you spent your entire life living in a culture where that God is either the primary deity people worship or one of the most important ones.

You keep using the terms "interpreted". In many cases the experience of the supernatural has nothing to do with interpretation. You misunderstand the nature of the experience. It is not of the nature of a belief or interpretation, it is more like a person who saw someone steal something from 3 feet away and the person next to them saw the same thing and they both took photographs and took them to a judge. You misunderstand the certainty and clarity of spiritual experience. It is not even a matter of someone who was at a crime scene who saw an experience directly and was sure that his perception of the events did not bias the perception.

The things I have experienced have been confirmed by multiple people all around me experiencing the same exact thing. Much of it has been written down and confirmed by others.

There is no interpretation involved in something like this.

You reject the experience probably because you will not treat a spiritual experience as having an equal testimony as normal testimony. In fact, you will not even give it the weight of 1/1000th of a percent. If you saw 1000 independent testimonies of people who directly claimed to have experienced the spiritual world, you would not entertain the possibility that it could be real.

This is all based on your argument that the material world is probably all that exists. You can't prove this, but you will hold on to this to the degree that you will give no weight to a common experience of human beings.

This is what it means to be closed minded and prejudiced. Saul Kripke, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century called materialism "a prejudice". He is right.

The materialist is not a free thinker. He will always believe materialism, despite not having a shred of evidence to disprove spiritual entities other than a study which is inconclusive. He will not seek out for instance the charismatic movement to see whether spiritual things exist. The reason is that the materialist doesn't really care whether materialism is true, he cares about the ideology of materialism and its political and social implications.

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(March 21, 2013 at 8:11 pm)Ryantology Wrote: That isn't what he asked you, so I'll put the question to you a little differently.

Imagine that you are an unwashed heathen like me, who has no dog in the fight. Imagine that you met someone who had precisely the same experience you claim to have had with Yahweh, the sole creator of the universe. Imagine, also, that you meet a Muslim, who has precisely the same experience you claim to have, only he says that his came from Allah, the sole creator of the universe.

How can you tell which one is right, if either of them are?

You can't tell based only on that. But religious experience is not intended to prove the existence of God, only to demand that honest people seek God for themselves and consider carefully whether the experience is true, and how that would impact the most important questions in life. Of course this is what it demands of honest people.

I do not expect to prove to you that my experiences are legitimate, but I can prove that an honest person who desire to know the truth should at least take seriously the question of whether they are authentic in a much more serious way than just listening to the people. I say this because of the widespread acceptance of spirituality and its continued importance, even through the supposedly wiser modern times when people expected it would disappear as a superstition. Faith in the miraculous remains, in the most rationalistic quarters of the most educated countries in the world. People continue to describe miraculous experiences, they are not caused by ignorance of science or primitive desire to explain phenomenon that are unknown to them.

The supernatural is a part of being human, and the person who relegates the study of the supernatural to the level of the study of UFO's or Scientology imposes a massive prejudice over their lens of history which eclipses some of the greatest and wisest human beings who accepted the reality of the spiritual world.

You are trying to bolster your position by claiming anyone that dismisses the supernatural as prejudiced and implying they are not "honest people." You have no idea how much people have explored the supernatural, yet you feel confident in claiming that anyone who doesn't believe in the supernatural hasn't.

How can you dare call materialists prejudiced with a straight face? Do you not have any mirrors where you live?