Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy

[Love]

I also think that, assuming Jesus was a real person, a lot of the things he taught were good things. But I think they were already good things: not good just because he taught them.
I work 'goodness' into my life, and a lot of people I know see that. I just don't understand why you must ascribe that label to yourself when it's not conventional Christianity.
Whether or not you believe it's original Christianity, couldn't you do all this without that and show that what people believe Christianity to be - is not necessary?

To me, you just sound like a 'good' atheist - not a Christian.

Well, I guess. At the end of the day "Christianity" is only a label; it is my personal experience that I value, not labels. I used to be a "good" atheist, but as I have stated in my writings on this thread, I now believe that Jesus experienced "God" in his consciousness; God being the primary source of love, morality and truth. It does sound extremely counter intuitive, obviously absurd to atheists, but it's what I believe to be true.

I am trying to work out what God actually is because I certainly do not believe that him/her/it is an omnipotent and omniscient being, but I do believe that it is omnipresent and is probably the driving force behind nature, like a panentheistic entity. It feels like a universal consciousness that can probably be experienced more intensely through the use of psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, mescaline, mushrooms and LSD.

[Joel]

I also think that, assuming Jesus was a real person, a lot of the things he taught were good things. But I think they were already good things: not good just because he taught them.
I work 'goodness' into my life, and a lot of people I know see that. I just don't understand why you must ascribe that label to yourself when it's not conventional Christianity.
Whether or not you believe it's original Christianity, couldn't you do all this without that and show that what people believe Christianity to be - is not necessary?

To me, you just sound like a 'good' atheist - not a Christian.

Well, I guess. At the end of the day "Christianity" is only a label; it is my personal experience that I value, not labels. I used to be a "good" atheist, but as I have stated in my writings on this thread, I now believe that Jesus experienced "God" in his consciousness; God being the primary source of love, morality and truth. It does sound extremely counter intuitive, obviously absurd to atheists, but it's what I believe to be true.

I am trying to work out what God actually is because I certainly do not believe that him/her/it is an omnipotent and omniscient being, but I do believe that it is omnipresent and is probably the driving force behind nature, like a panentheistic entity. It feels like a universal consciousness that can probably be experienced more intensely through the use of psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, mescaline, mushrooms and LSD.

Well okay. Good luck on your... Journey?

[Rayaan]

It feels like a universal consciousness that can probably be experienced more intensely through the use of psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, mescaline, mushrooms and LSD.

But, earlier, you were saying that the only way to experience God is to transcend our sensory perceptions, but don't psychedelic drugs actually increase your sensory perception, i.e. to such an extent that it even distorts them? And do you suggest that people should take those drugs?

Some of the physiological effects:

"First, sensory perceptions become especially brilliant and intense. Normally unnoticed aspects of the environment capture the attention; ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time and acquire new depths of significance. Esthetic responses are greatly heightened: colors seem more intense, textures richer, contours sharpened, music more emotionally profound, the spatial arrangements of objects more meaningful. People may feel keener awareness of their bodies or sense changes in the appearance and feeling of body parts. Depth perception is often heightened and perspective distorted; inanimate objects take on expressions, and synesthesia (hearing colors, seeing sounds, etc.) is common. Time may seem to slow down enormously as more and more passing events claim the attention, or it may stop entirely, giving place to an eternal present. When the eyes are closed, fantastically vivid images appear: first geometrical forms and then landscapes, buildings, animate beings, and symbolic objects."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic...al_effects


Welcome to the forum, btw.

[LastPoet]

Carefull Rayaan you are not a true christian™... Oh wait

[Rayaan]

[Creed of Heresy]

I have researched Christian theology and, indeed, the history of Christianity. As I have repeated on a number of occasions, I am not interested in religious dogma, scripture (The Bible is absolute nonsense to me) or anything of that nature; I would certainly be considered a heretic by many orthodox adherents. I am much more concerned with Jesus as a historical figure, his consciousness and, indeed, the remarkable impact he had on those around him. Whilst reading the writings from Alister McGrath about theology, I was quite surprised to discover the actual evolution of early Christianity in the first few centuries after the Roman Empire adopted it as its official religion. From what I have read about the actual historical (not theological) teachings of Jesus, he did not preach anything about original sin or redemptive sacrifice; the core messages were very simple: "love" and "charity". Original sin and dying our sins (which I think are grotesque ideas), were superfluous ideas grafted on to the embryonic dogmatic system of Roman Catholicism.

I think many people do not understand how revolutionary the ideas that Jesus taught (love each other and be charitable) were at the time. Human beings were treated like cattle during that period, and I truly believe that Jesus and his ideas literally transformed civilisation.

I think the most amazing thing a person can do is to be selfless and to be kind, loving and charitable to others. I think the people who do this kind thing are vastly more impressive than those who are self-serving. I am working on being more charitable and loving towards others; I do my bit, but I could do more.

I'm going to bring up a quote by C.S. Lewis of all people...

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

He's got a point there. Your faith in the "historical" Jesus is just as unfounded as you claim that those of faith in the bible are. The stories about him are rife with him very clearly not giving anyone the choice to believe in him as any kind of moral, mortal teacher. And indeed, Jesus' many so-called "deeds" are actually pretty fucking malicious if you really read the biblical "accounts" of him.

Never mind that there is no contemporary accounts of anything regarding Jesus to provide any kind of historical proof of Jesus, and that what so-called accounts exist were supposedly written 60 years after the events in which they happened by a bunch of dudes in their late 80s in a time without modern medicine. Do please tell me how many 80-year-olds you know of who have absolutely perfect, crystal-clear memories, and who are not even slightly senile, and then consider that the ones who are are living in this modern age of medicine and scientific understandings of nutrition. The gospel writers were not.

And ideas of human decency and equality actually did exist at the time. The Romans are not known for being the greatest civilization in history for nothing. They were a war-faring civilization, yes, but they were also just, disciplined, and civilized people, with laws and systems that most the developed world bases itself on. Christianity turned the Roman Empire from a society where to be Roman was to be equal to all Romans, to a religious empire that would later instigate the Crusades, the bloodiest and most pointless conflict that the world had seen up to that point, and would go from a civilization that shared and espoused knowledge and philosophy and learning into a close-minded, ignorant society of bigots, witch-burning zealots, and censorship of scientific inquiry.

What "good" did Jesus do to culture that you are talking about, exactly? You keep saying it, but you aren't showing any examples. Are you referring to charity? Or morality? Because both of those existed long before Jesus supposedly existed, and continue to exist in the modern day in individuals who are non-religious in the form of secular-humanists. Jesus had nothing new to say on morality whatsoever. Whatever he said was shit that had been said by others hundreds of years or even millenia earlier.

[Love]

How did your atheism progress to existential nihilism? What would the belief in (or lack thereof) any god have to say on the matter? IOW, I think that -something else- probably led to this...although I have to admit..this is starting to sound like a pastors script to me.

I understand some people on this forum are concerned about intellectual dishonesty. Therefore, I would just like to clarify that I am not a philosopher, theologian, mathematician, physicist or a psychopharmacologist. My specialist area is computer science/IT, and I simply have a passing interest in all of the above topics. Although I do go very deep into the topics that I enjoy studying, so maybe this is why it comes across as though I am acting as an authority in any of the aforementioned disciplines.

As regards your question about existential nihilism, I just don't see any other way around it. In the grand scheme of things, human beings are small organisms (in comparison with earth), earth is an infinitesimal piece of matter in a tiny solar system, in a small galaxy, in a gargantuan universe. According to contemporary biological and cosmological theories, all species will eventually be extinct, and our universe will ultimately perish. To me, these ideas just seem to make life devoid of any real meaning, and that the human species is no more significant than bacteria, a cabbage or a cauliflower, for example.

I want to make it clear that my new found belief system is not a cowardly emotional reaction to not being able to handle this atheistic and nihilistic worldview; it is much more about a full intellectual reflection of the way things are. It may very well be the case that I am simply wrong and mistaken; however, it just makes far more sense to me that there is a special purpose for the existence of human subjective consciousness, love and morality (other than biological survival). I find it very difficult to believe that human subjective consciousness simply emerged as the result of outlandishly complex biochemistry via the process of evolution by natural selection. I feel that there is far more to it than this simplistic naturalistic explanation.

[Lord Privy Seal]

Love:

Just to make sure I'm understanding your position correctly: Your answer to my first question (asking what the basis is for your progressive Christianity) could be summarized as "the teachings of the historical Jesus according to scholars like Dr. McGrath, and your direct mystical experience of something malevolent (a Devil?), and of (what you consider to be) God." Your answer to my second question (why bother with the Bible?) is "Actually, I don't." Your answer to my third question (on what basis can you pick out the "nice" parts and discard the "mean" parts of the Bible/Jesus' teachings as portrayed therein) would be "I don't--because I don't follow the Bible in the first place" and/or "I take seriously the parts that NT scholars (Prof. McGrath, et. al.) think are what the historical Jesus taught." Is that a fairly accurate summation of your position?

Please could you clarify what you mean in question four?

Let me try to restate it: what consequences can we anticipate finding in reality if your god exists that we would not find if he/she/it doesn't exist (or vice versa)? Example: physicists searching for the Higgs boson were able to work out among themselves the range of properties they expected it to have, and what sort of experiments would produce results that would indicate that it did exist (and what sort of results, e.g. decay products those would be). They could agree in advance that the presence or absence of those results would indicate the presence or absence of the Higgs boson. In short, they agreed on an answer to the question, "what would reality look like if it had Higgs bosons in it?" then set out to see if reality actually looked that way.

In the case of your god, you have defined it as "a panentheistic transcendent consciousness." If it is panentheistic and transcendent and conscious, it should have access to knowledge we do not have (yet)--unless it doesn't have memory or something. If such an entity exists and you or anyone else can communicate with it with any sort of reliability, you could, for example, ask it to tell you about something a space probe is likely to encounter fairly soon that we don't have lots of information about (such as what the Curiosity rover might find over the next rise or whatever). Then you could post its answer before the probe makes the observation. If by doing so you could predict a new scientific surprise, you would provide evidence that would increase the probability of your god's existence. Then we'd have to devise tests to rule out other alternatives (maybe you're just psychic ). Other ways to pursue this avenue of testing: ask your god to provide novel information about history that will be subject to future testing, such as information about the area/culture a new archaeological dig is investigating. Physics or mathematics could also work, if it knows more about these than we do. Post its answers in advance, then you and skeptical observers could test them.

If your god cannot demonstrate knowledge of anything you don't know or couldn't come up with by ordinary human means, like reading New Age literature (case in point: Neale Donald Walsh and his "Conversations With God"), then it is behaving like a creature of your own mind rather than a transcendent panenetheistic consciousness.

Would you agree that this sort of test would falsify your belief in your god if the results came out negative? If not, can you think of some other kind of test whose results would come out one way if you're correct, and another way if we are?

It is my contention that human consciousness, including love, is beyond the scope of reason.

How could you know this, without some kind of total, infallible knowledge of what the scope of reason is? If I went back in time and asked Aristotle about what the far side of the Moon looked like he would likely answer (quite reasonably, within the context of his knowledge) that only the gods could know or reveal such things, that the far side of the Moon was beyond the scope of reason and human ken. And yet...we have pictures.

There is a very interesting speculation that the brain is actually a receiver of consciousness as opposed to being the generator of such. The philosophy of mind is extremely complex and is something that I am presently reading about.

The "brain-as-receiver" model seems problematic to me for several reasons:

1) It doesn't really provide any explanation for what consciousness is or how it works (other than that it's "out there" "somewhere" transmitting to brains somehow).

2) It has no additional explanatory power vis a vis the "brain-as-generator of conscious" model, AFAIK.

3) It's less parsimonious, as it requires a number of additional hypotheses: Consciousness exists outside of brains, presumably composed of something other than energy/matter. Consciousness somehow sends and receives data to and from brains--how does "consciousness-stuff" (whatever it is) interact with energy-matter in the brain to trigger neuron firing, neuroplasticity, etc.? If consciousness can see without eyes (i.e. if NDE's are veridical), why would there be eyes in the first place? How could anyone be blind? How could disembodied consciousness (such as during an NDE/OBE) absorb light energy without this being visible to others? To see light, it would have to interact with light, and conservation of energy means that light would have to give energy to "consciousness-stuff" to trigger a sight response in it. Light passing through "consciousness-stuff" would be fainter, or perhaps red-shifted after giving energy to the "c-stuff." Where does "c-stuff" get its energy? "Transmission" that causes responses in energy/matter in the brain requires energy. How does it "transmit" it? How does it store information (memory)?

In contrast, the brain-as-generator model fits observations (damage to the brain damages the consciousness, etc.) at least as well as the brain-as-receiver model, and provides a plausible explanation of how consciousness actually works, as information processing by brain structures (neurons, and perhaps glial cells and microtubules). We have existence proofs of energy/matter structures capable of processing information without that faculty being "broadcast" to them from outside: computers, mechanical calculators. An abacus can compute, and store information (just don't shake it or knock it over! ). Even if we don't yet know exactly how neural firings etc. produce the qualia of love or "chocolate sundae--yum!" the "generator" model offers a path of inquiry that has already proven to be fruitful in the study of cognitive neuroscience. The "receiver" model just kicks the can down the road to "wherever the consciousness-transmitters are." It can't tell us how qualia work either, and it doesn't even offer us a potential way to find out.

So, barring some striking new evidence that fits the "transmitter" model and doesn't fit the "generator" model, the "generator" model is superior as an explanation of consciousness and path of investigation in search of more/better answers.

However, I often think very deeply about these topics, and my view on atheism inevitably progressed to a worldview of existential nihilism, in that: (1) the universe is devoid of purpose or meaning; it simply exists (2) life is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things. All that really exists is, as Richard Dawkins would say, "blind pitiless indifference".

The "blind pitiless indifference" of the Cosmos in general is still a fact whether or not any deities exist. Just ask the dinosaurs. Or anyone who has a child with leukemia. I do not see how gods change the situation. If a god or goddess shows up and says, "Behold! The meaning and purpose of your lives is to [spread the Gospel and convert/kill the heathens!] [be excellent to each other!] [colonize the solar system and spread to the stars!] [insert preferred meaning/purpose here]!" all that does is give us the deity's opinion. And what about the deity? A monotheistic god in particular has no deity of its own to tell it what the meaning and purpose of its life is, provide it with moral guidance, etc. It's an atheist! Again, this is just kicking the can down the road, not providing actual answers to existential questions.

Furthermore, it's possible for atheist worldviews to have views of meaning/purpose of life and morality/ethics without "inevitably" resulting in nihilist despair. We are at least as capable of creating these things (if no inherent or objective answers can be derived from the nature of Universe in some way) as deities are.

I am much more concerned with Jesus as a historical figure, his consciousness and, indeed, the remarkable impact he had on those around him.

The historical Jesus (if such a person existed) didn't have much effect on those around him. The Gospels portray him frequently arguing with literate individuals ("scribes and Pharisees"), yet none of these people considered him remarkable enough to write about, even in opposition. Philo of Alexandria, who was interested in Judean religious movements, lived in the region and had acquaintances in Judea, and was himself a proponent of religious views similar in many ways to those attributed to Jesus, did not make a note of him.

The great spread and influence of Christianity is the result of the energetic proselytizing of Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, who never met Jesus, but only had an ecstatic vision of a heavenly being. The Jesus of the authentic Pauline epistles is a fully deified celestial figure that has little or nothing to do with "the man from Galilee." The "red-letter Bible" teachings of Jesus (or even the very idea that Jesus taught crowds in Judea) are absent from Paul's letters, even when they could have been cited to clinch Paul's arguments.

Furthermore, the answer to the question of who the historical Jesus was and what he taught is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as far as scholarship is concerned. Is he a proto-hippie social reformer? A Cynic sage? A Jewish dynast and would-be king (Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty)? An Essene/fundamentalist rebel against the Roman Empire (Eisenmann, James, the Brother of Jesus), a failed apocalyptic prophet (Erhman, Did Jesus Exist?)? A magician and/or faith-healer? Etc., etc..

Or was "he" more like what we now call a "channeled entity," a divine intermediary ("Logos") and/or Mystery School god-man who never lived on Earth as a human (Hebrews 8:4), but "spoke" through visionaries like Paul and/or esoteric readings of the Hebrew Scriptures (Carrier, Price, Doherty)?

As the basis for a world-view, Jesus is a classic "house built on sand."

I am trying to work out what God actually is because I certainly do not believe that him/her/it is an omnipotent and omniscient being, but I do believe that it is omnipresent and is probably the driving force behind nature, like a panentheistic entity. It feels like a universal consciousness that can probably be experienced more intensely through the use of psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, mescaline, mushrooms and LSD.

Well, this is interesting. At least, this approach offers the virtue of repeatability under controlled conditions. I have done a lot of reading (and a little experimentation *cough*) in this area. So far, the realm of psychedelic experience is IMO "the last, best hope" for a serious challenge to my current world view. Unfortunately our ability to systematically and scientifically explore this terrain is severely constrained at the present time. However, the "trip reports" I'm aware of vary quite a bit, and not all of them support monotheism, or even necessarily "theism" as commonly understood.

[thesummerqueen]

I missed some of this conversation. For a funny and easily digestible discussion on external agents for consciousness vs internal, the Monster Talk podcast did an episode with neurologist Steven Novella. They couch it in a discussion of ghosts, which the Novella gang did many investigations on.

---

It was called “Getting Into the Spirit of Things"

[Love]

He's got a point there. Your faith in the "historical" Jesus is just as unfounded as you claim that those of faith in the bible are. The stories about him are rife with him very clearly not giving anyone the choice to believe in him as any kind of moral, mortal teacher. And indeed, Jesus' many so-called "deeds" are actually pretty fucking malicious if you really read the biblical "accounts" of him.

Never mind that there is no contemporary accounts of anything regarding Jesus to provide any kind of historical proof of Jesus, and that what so-called accounts exist were supposedly written 60 years after the events in which they happened by a bunch of dudes in their late 80s in a time without modern medicine. Do please tell me how many 80-year-olds you know of who have absolutely perfect, crystal-clear memories, and who are not even slightly senile, and then consider that the ones who are are living in this modern age of medicine and scientific understandings of nutrition. The gospel writers were not.

And ideas of human decency and equality actually did exist at the time. The Romans are not known for being the greatest civilization in history for nothing. They were a war-faring civilization, yes, but they were also just, disciplined, and civilized people, with laws and systems that most the developed world bases itself on. Christianity turned the Roman Empire from a society where to be Roman was to be equal to all Romans, to a religious empire that would later instigate the Crusades, the bloodiest and most pointless conflict that the world had seen up to that point, and would go from a civilization that shared and espoused knowledge and philosophy and learning into a close-minded, ignorant society of bigots, witch-burning zealots, and censorship of scientific inquiry.

What "good" did Jesus do to culture that you are talking about, exactly? You keep saying it, but you aren't showing any examples. Are you referring to charity? Or morality? Because both of those existed long before Jesus supposedly existed, and continue to exist in the modern day in individuals who are non-religious in the form of secular-humanists. Jesus had nothing new to say on morality whatsoever. Whatever he said was shit that had been said by others hundreds of years or even millenia earlier.

I recommend the following book by John Shelby Spong: (redacted). Download link provided.

I have a lot of time and respect for Spong because the standards of historical evidence he requires is very much in line with my own. For example, he works very closely with a multitude of PhD scholars who have written peer reviewed journals on the historicity of Jesus. Spong also rejects many of the core ideas that I reject, such as creationism, original sin, literal interpretation of the Bible, prayer, redemptive sacrifice et cetera. Like me, he is much more concerned with the life and consciousness of Jesus.

It seems that you're still skeptical as to whether Jesus actually existed. There is a massive amount of academic historical evidence that he did exist, and even Dawkins eventually conceded this point in his interview with John Lennox.

As regards your query about Jesus' influence on human thinking. I think what is most striking to me is the profound impact he had on those around him. He was obviously outrageously charismatic in that the people around him felt that something of decisive importance had taken place whilst being in his presence; it completely transformed the way they perceived reality. Also, it would be interesting to ascertain where you received your information about the the Roman Empire being a civilised society because from what I have read on the subject, it was, on the whole, an extremely barbaric and brutal society in which acts of infanticide took place regularly; human life was viewed as expendable. Also, early Christianity did catalyse the emergence of hospitals and charities (as we perceive them in the modern era).

Also, another good description by Spong on how I perceive God:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XL8LvaJ9Rc.