What the God debate is really about

[Whateverist]

During my time of following Christianty, I felt like my prayer life was as essential as food and water. I actually viewed my faith at that time as being built on objective truth. Until I learned it wasn't.

Thanks for posting this; it brings back some memories for me. Some of them good.

To add, going with what you're saying here and the theme of the thread, my perception of things back then, was my truth. And so I wonder. Is our perception of life, "our" truth? And is it wrong for want of a better word, to live in two worlds, simultaneously? A physical world and a spiritual one? For me, once I realized religion is built on deception and non truths, I couldn't perceive it as my own personal truth anymore.

"Is it wrong for want of a better word, to live in two worlds, simultaneously? A physical world and a spiritual one?" I don't think it's wrong and some people seem to manage it. If you substitute "subjective" for "spiritual" then I think we all live in both a subjective world and the physical world.

I think there is value in being open to something larger than your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is subject to the filtering of the unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is only one organ of your total self, it isn't the whole show. Far from it. The conscious mind has tremendous responsibilities but it doesn't have all the power. Perhaps it is like an executive officer, given lots of latitude but ultimately subject to being over ruled. The conscious mind has to take into account the wants and needs of all the stake holders which make up the totality of oneself. Do a good job of that and you may experience more lucidity and joie de vie. Screw it up and you can find yourself swimming up river with very little satisfaction for your trouble.

I believe that the gods people commune with feedback on and are animated by aspects of the unconscious mind. This can be a useful and satisfying device for balancing the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self. Of course, if one overloads the prayer interface with loads of dogma it will probably be less useful. To make the whole enterprise more compatible with living in the modern world all one need do is insert the words "as if". It is "as if" I commune with God in prayer; it is "as if" is seek God's guidance; it "as if" I feel God's approval, etc.

[*Deidre*]

Not to get side tracked but your "title" next to your username, whateverist...you are a Gnostic?
You know, I've often wondered...honestly often...if Christian zealots hadn't stifled the early Gnostics (killed many of them), where might that faith be?

Anyway, I just noticed that.

[Whateverist]

Naw, just me trying to be funny. I was a Christian too but that didn't last past elementary school. My parents were Methodists. I never read the bible and we stopped attending church before I started school. I got off easy.

[MindForgedManacle]

I agree that consciousness is a complex phenomena, but on another level, consciousness is also very simple: It is simply our subjective state of awareness.

Stating something simply does not make that something simple. Particles are vibrations in quantum fields. Simple statement; what it actually means is not.

Now when you wrote: "... this self-organization can bring about complex phenomena, not that it is ontologically fundamental," that made me think, but what about the self-organization? Don't you think that this "self-organization" is just as complex as consciousness itself? Or do you think that the self-organization becomes more and more complex over time?

In the bit you quoted of me, I was referring to consciousness not being ontologically fundamental just because you state it simply.

Anyway, the self-organization is just an emergent outcome of the interaction of many things. Basically, if you have several class of things which interact, and each member of that class of thing behaves in the same way, some sort of organization appears to be inevitable. We see this in our universe via entropy. The reason why there are complex things is simply a result of statistics: There are inumerably more ways to be disordered than to be ordered. The Big Bang appears to have been a change from a comparitively more ordered state via inflation, and hence more complex arrangements of matter ONLY became possible as the total entropy increased. It's just a statistically necessary thing.

If you think that the self-organization becomes more complex over time, then I could argue that all the complexity that it produces is already encoded within the self-organizing principle from the very beginning, which refutes the idea that the complexity of our consciousness is merely "emergent."

There's no self-organizing principle, self-organization and complexity are simply necessary given the statistical fact that there are exponential orders of magnitude more ways to be disordered than to be ordered. If you really want to get a look into this, I recommend the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll. He's done numerous talks/lectures on this, namely entropy and how it is the culprit of the arrow of time and the emergence of complexity, videos of which you can find on YouTube by searching his name. He also has a book on it as well.

[Mudhammam]

Whateverist and Deidre, I think we should also keep in mind that what we're discussing here are only the metaphysical presumptions both atheists and theists are to some extent forced to make at the very bottom level of reasoning, or as their called, "first principles." What religion does from there is try to blur the lines between our subjective philosophies and objective facts about the world. Once they begin making claims about gods interacting in the world, having specific desires or plans for our species, etc., they can only argue that this extends beyond their own unsubstantiated (to everyone else) opinion, that is, their subjective experiences (which in my opinion don't account for jack in the domain of knowledge, i.e. public information that we are all privy to) by meeting the reasonable demand of empirical evidence... to which there is none.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Not to get side tracked but your "title" next to your username, whateverist...you are a Gnostic?
You know, I've often wondered...honestly often...if Christian zealots hadn't stifled the early Gnostics (killed many of them), where might that faith be?

Anyway, I just noticed that.

It would value knowledge instead of blocking it. The dark ages would never have happened. The inquisition would never have happened.

Scientists would be held in high regard by the religious. Churches would encourage scientific education instead of rejecting it.

We'd have less money-grubbing evangelists, because people would reject them philosophically.

Education would be funded more than the military. Ignorant hatemongers would be outcasts instead of preachers and spokes holes.

[Whateverist]

Whateverist and Deidre, I think we should also keep in mind that what we're discussing here are only the metaphysical presumptions both atheists and theists are to some extent forced to make at the very bottom level of reasoning, or as their called, "first principles." What religion does from there is try to blur the lines between our subjective philosophies and objective facts about the world. Once they begin making claims about gods interacting in the world, having specific desires or plans for our species, etc., they can only argue that this extends beyond their own unsubstantiated (to everyone else) opinion, that is, their subjective experiences (which in my opinion don't account for jack in the domain of knowledge, i.e. public information that we are all privy to) by meeting the reasonable demand of empirical evidence... to which there is none.

Oh I agree. The move to the bible is entirely unwarranted. All the institutionalized dogma is bullshit and undermines or contaminates whatever good might otherwise come from belief in something beyond oneself.

[*Deidre*]

Not to get side tracked but your "title" next to your username, whateverist...you are a Gnostic?
You know, I've often wondered...honestly often...if Christian zealots hadn't stifled the early Gnostics (killed many of them), where might that faith be?

Anyway, I just noticed that.

It would value knowledge instead of blocking it. The dark ages would never have happened. The inquisition would never have happened.

Scientists would be held in high regard by the religious. Churches would encourage scientific education instead of rejecting it.

We'd have less money-grubbing evangelists, because people would reject them philosophically.

Education would be funded more than the military. Ignorant hatemongers would be outcasts instead of preachers and spokes holes.

As far as 'religion' goes, Gnosticism doesn't sound half bad. I do believe you're right with all you say here. So sad, indeed.

whateverist, thanks for your reply, in clarifying that you are NOT a Gnostic. lol Sorry, the whole humor thing went right over my head with that one. :p

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Whateverist and Deidre, I think we should also keep in mind that what we're discussing here are only the metaphysical presumptions both atheists and theists are to some extent forced to make at the very bottom level of reasoning, or as their called, "first principles." What religion does from there is try to blur the lines between our subjective philosophies and objective facts about the world. Once they begin making claims about gods interacting in the world, having specific desires or plans for our species, etc., they can only argue that this extends beyond their own unsubstantiated (to everyone else) opinion, that is, their subjective experiences (which in my opinion don't account for jack in the domain of knowledge, i.e. public information that we are all privy to) by meeting the reasonable demand of empirical evidence... to which there is none.

Yup, agree.
Thing is, why should a debate be cheapened to accepting sources that in my opinion, are not secularly acceptable in terms of their objectivity?

Debates between ''believers'' and non-believers however, never really turn out to be productive. The reason being that religion is based on faith. Faith is based on hope, on a belief in things unseen providing that hope. Faith is largely based on hunches, and feelings, and fear. It's not based on facts. Not many religious people in general, have followed their faith based on coming to some reasonable conclusion due to overwhelming facts. lol It's not like scientific theories. You learn about a theory, and what supports it, and then see how scientists have drawn their conclusions. No feelings are involved, just straight facts, applying logic and reasoning.

So, to debate a Christian as the title of the thread here states, is really going to be a frustrating effort in futility on the part of the atheist/agnostic, for they will be applying logic and reasoning to refute something that isn't arrived at through logic and reasoning. Doh!

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Holy cow, I thought I was in the 'debate a Christian' thread, thus my reply above, there. haha I guess my reply sorta fits here too, hehe.

The threads are all blurring together, now.

[Neo-Scholastic]

@MFM – Please correct me if I am wrong, but your position sounds like the idea that an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters will eventually write Macbeth, Borges’s Library of Babel, or similar metaphors based on the idea that an infinite universe will eventually exhaust all possibilities. I get the sense that you believe order can be explained by local patterns, like long runs of ‘heads’, within an infinity series of coin tosses. In response to this, Rayaan might say that you only get a series of head or tails from someone flipping a 2-sided coin.*

*As opposed to a mysterious 1-sided coin.

[Whateverist]

whateverist, thanks for your reply, in clarifying that you are NOT a Gnostic. lol Sorry, the whole humor thing went right over my head with that one. :p

That's alright. My wife often says the trouble with my humor is it isn't funny. (That is about the funniest thing she says.)