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RE: Personal experience
August 16, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Experiencing an absence of something once experienced I would lump under longing and is in fact experiencing absence. It is not however experiencing nothing. Muscles have memory and If I sit in one place for 5 days and stand up I will distinctly feel what it was like to sit, but not sit. I will feel the absence of the chair, because my muscles are expecting to feel the chair. That correlates to the topic if there's some form of genealogical memory that could predispose us to deity worship, but it still doesn't support the "I experience nothing" statements.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
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Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 6:23 pm
No one has ever returned from a personal experience with god with any new information. Why? Surely god would have given someone, something of value or something we did not know. Instead nothing, silence, indifference to our plight and our need for knowledge. Instead the only gains we have made is through our own hard work and application of critical methods and thinking. The one thing he could do to verify a personal experience he refuses to do. All this is much more likely assuming atheism is true. Is it asking to much for just 1 of the billions of encounters people have had with god would have yielded something useful to us or new to us?
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Why a sequel? Ok, I'm sure all of those experiences have given the individual something of value since (the Christian) God is a personal God. It's usefulness should then only applied to the subjective nature of the experience, unless it's testimony for belief. Testimony is useful as indicative evidence if rationale and credible. If you're going to get into likelihoods, if the majority of the experiences are similar to the point they don't offer any new information, wouldn't it be more likely that culminating these experience would lead credence to the event? You can't of course prove that they're not entirely rationalizations, but I think they lend credence to something after life along with other evidence.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 7:49 pm
(This post was last modified: August 16, 2010 at 7:50 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(August 16, 2010 at 6:23 pm)Captain Scarlet Wrote: No one has ever returned from a personal experience with god with any new information. Why? Surely god would have given someone, something of value or something we did not know. Instead nothing, silence, indifference to our plight and our need for knowledge. Instead the only gains we have made is through our own hard work and application of critical methods and thinking. The one thing he could do to verify a personal experience he refuses to do. All this is much more likely assuming atheism is true. Is it asking to much for just 1 of the billions of encounters people have had with god would have yielded something useful to us or new to us? Indeed,
This isn't different from predictions of future events and messages from beyond the veil as all points are extremely vague and no one can say for certain what actually happened except that it wasn't insignificant to the point to where even the eyewitness him or herself has to 'interpret' what has happened.
Honestly, UFO encounters are more consistent across eyewitness accounts, often more than a single eye-witness for a single event, and vastly more credible in the cases that aren't outright falsified or hoaxes. (I'm not even joking.)
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 7:58 pm
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...58706.html
Quote:A Texas woman who stoned two of her children to death and seriously injured a third on Mother's Day last year told psychiatrists she was driven to kill by a message from God and that she was sure they would rise again from the dead.
Jurors in the trial of 39-year-old Deanna Laney watched a gruelling video-tape made just days after the murders in which she told a prison psychologist, Phillip Resnick, that she felt she had no choice but to bludgeon her children.
"I felt like I obeyed God and I believe there will be good out of this," she explained in the interview, looking wide-eyed and sometimes smiling. "I feel like he will reveal his power and they will be raised up. They will become alive again."
As George Carlin said: "Why does god always tell people to kill someone? Why doesn't he ever say 'go take a shit on the salad bar at Wendy's?"
Why indeed?[/quote]
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Check this one min:
"Clarence Butterfield, 57, said he found his daughter Rebekah dead when he returned home from running errands on Dec. 26, 2006, and put her in the freezer because he thought no one would believe his innocence.
"It was kind of stressful to walk in and see your daughter dead," he said. "I didn't know what to do."
Butterfield also said he hoped she would be resurrected and planned to hold on to the body for at least seven years."
The coroner has concluded she died from suffocation in the Freezer...
Source: Stuff.co.nz
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RE: Personal experience
August 16, 2010 at 9:14 pm
I thought the point was more the experience of everything devoid of philosophical influence such as appreciating the beauty of nature for itself > it's own complexity as understood by empirical evidence.
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 16, 2010 at 10:07 pm
(August 16, 2010 at 6:23 pm)Captain Scarlet Wrote: No one has ever returned from a personal experience with god with any new information. Why? Surely god would have given someone, something of value or something we did not know. Instead nothing, silence, indifference to our plight and our need for knowledge. Instead the only gains we have made is through our own hard work and application of critical methods and thinking. The one thing he could do to verify a personal experience he refuses to do. All this is much more likely assuming atheism is true. Is it asking to much for just 1 of the billions of encounters people have had with god would have yielded something useful to us or new to us? I think you're looking in the wrong place for knowledge. God never was about the attainment of knowledge. Scientific endeavour, however, is.
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RE: Personal experience
August 17, 2010 at 1:33 am
And that is a good point, it also though isn't experiencing nothing which is a contradiction.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
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RE: Personal experience II - the sequel
August 17, 2010 at 3:18 am
Ok frodo but then 2 questions spring to mind:
1) why has he bothered passing on any knowledge. Accordingly to biblical sources he directly authored at least 10 of the 613 laws and directly inspired the creation story, taught Noah how to build an ark or in the new testament told parables imprating knowledge. We don't know his method but one would assume personal experiences in humans or similar. So why stop there.
2) however you don't seem to be literalist to any great degree. So the more fundamental point is "what is god for?". If he won't tell us anything useful; Clean energy, perpetual motion or something similar. Nothing that eliminates suffering just something to protect his creation and bring more humans to him. He has no value to humans if he won't help us or at least help us anymore.
The above only make sense to me if one assumes atheism is true.
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