Freedom of Religion

[Abracadabra]

The critical error in your argument is that your spirituality should be the result of reality, not a way to fake it.

What you are arguing is that if a person can imagine the world in a particular way, then it is not unreasonable for him to believe in it under the guise of spirituality.

Even if that world cannot be shown to be true, even if the very possible existence of that world contradicts what we know, it is still okay to believe in it.

WHOA!

Where did I ever suggest any such nonsense? That's utter baloney.

You have totally misunderstood my position. I didn't mean that you should create a fantasy that flies in the face of what is already known to be true!

If I made a mistake it was the mistake of assuming that you'd already be at least that intelligent.

No, the fantasy you imagine for a spiritual world must at least be plausible with everything that you already know to be true. Absolutely!

I personally can create such an imagined spiritual world. If others have trouble doing that, I can only guess that they lack imagination.

As long as I can keep it plausible then it must necessarily remain within the world of possibility and that's all I require.

If I can imagine a plausible spiritual essence to reality, then it can't be ruled out. And that's sufficient grounds to believe that such a scenario is within the realm of possibility.

The mistake is, here you are telling someone that it is okay to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. That it is okay to believe that the world he imagined exists and at the same time, believe that its existence is impossible. Or even worse, that it is okay to let of of belief in the real world in favor of an imaginary one.

No, I've never told anyone any such thing. Where did you come up with that? Clearly you are jumping to grossly incorrect conclusions about my thoughts and position on things.

I said to be creative and imagine fantasies (but I confess I should have been more specific and said to imagine Plausible Fantasies.

I just assumed that intelligent people would know better than to imagine implausible fantasies.

Shame on me!

That is not spirituality. That is religion and there can be no more efficient way to murder a man's spirit than that.

Well I'm in total agreement with you on that taking into consideration your misunderstanding of what I was attempting to propose.

I guess I owe you an apology for not taking the time to be more clear about the fact that I was speaking of only 'plausible' fantasies.

I accept full responsibility for not being more clear. I just assumed that any intelligent person would know that an implausible fantasy would be a total waste of time.

Sorry for the assumption on my part.

I do sincerely apologize for that and wish I had been more clear from the outset. I thank you for bringing this to my attention. From here on out when I speak of imagining spiritual fantasies I'll be sure to include the adjective "plausible fantasies" to be crystal clear in what I'm attempting to convey.

So I do thank you very much for bringing this to my attention.

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I would say

Spirituality is the ability to imagine beyond the restrictions of reason

Would have been the spot to point out. It's where the last shreds of credibility dumped out of the conversation for me.

Well, again, I confess that I'm a sloppy writer, and I assume far too much of my readers.

What I was thinking in my mind when I wrote that was actually Quantum Physics. In other words when we look at the behavior of the Quantum World we see behavior that is indeed "unreasonable" to us.

No one to date has been able to make "reasonable sense" of the quantum world.

So when I'm speaking about going beyond the restrictions of "reason" I'm speaking within this context.

In other words, in the quantum world there can be "spooky action at a distance". Or instantaneous "complementarity" at a distance if you prefer.

But however you label it, it goes beyond anything that we deem to be "reasonable" yet it's a scientifically observed fact that it occurs.

Well, gee whiz, if we have already established via science that the true nature of reality can indeed exhibit "unreasonable" behavior, then why should we restrict the behavior of a spiritual world to be any more 'reasonable' than that?

So again, sloppy communication on my part, but the things I'm proposing are all at least as sound as what we already scientifically know about the true nature of reality (which isn't a whole lot actually)

Once you move into a spiritual world completely you certainly would no longer be restricted by the physics of spacetime.

That should be a given!

So YES, we should expect a spiritual world to be "unreasonable" in terms of spacetime physics. Absolutely. That's the whole idea of what a spiritual world should be.

If you had to restrict it to only what is 'reasonable' within a physical spacetime universe, then it would hardly be a 'spiritual world'.

You'd just be forcing yourself back into a secular (almost Newtonian) box.