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Religion III: Skeptical Evangelism, Psychedelic Shamanism, and other Religions of Us Hairless Apes


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Yeah I'm not sure what a rational justification would be for deeming the experience a "faith experience" rather than a psychological effect. The human brain is fallible and subject to many cognitive phenomenons like apophenia and hyperactive agency detection plus general illusions/hallucinations. I would probably at least want some kind of independent verification (if it were me with the experience).

There isn't one.

That's why it's based in faith?? I don't have the psych background or the big words to justify that :) I know what faith means.

I guess that's why when some people take psychotropics they might perceive similar things but have different beliefs as to what it really was. For instance, A person dosed on dmt might think that everything around them is just balls of colored energy and the huge ball of "love" they played with for an hour ends up being a cat....One person might say " I saw energy, and everything is made of energy" while a person with different beliefs might say "I saw God in everything and everything is God"

Granted this is a very tame example of a DMT trip but I'm sure you big brains around here get the idea.((I mean that complimentary btw)))

Both have faith in what they saw, they have different ideas about the nature of the trip but what scientist is going to prove exactly what it really was? They can't. They can write alot of big words about what it might be but in no way can anyone be certain.

Datura Inoxia has caused people to smoke phantom cigarettes, talk to dead people, basically have hours of waking dreams...If they perceive their trip to be spiritual and have faith in that they don't need or want to know how they got there. Rationality is a non factor at this point....UNless a clinical explanation is what someone is looking for.

A faith based experience is not rational and can usually be dismissed as psychological, so what happens is people stop talking about it completely...they don't want to be institutionalized or mocked by psychologist. Psychology is not a perfect science, I might not know as much as some folks but I know that. We don't even know enough to properly medicate people who "need" it without a trial-and-error "let's see what works" approach.

Of course It doesn't take psychotropics to have an "experience" I'm just using the example without using the G word too much.

Faith doesn't need proof. Not to the person who has it. To others yes, not for themselves. Isn't that what faith means?? They usually will keep it to themselves after failed attempts of sharing the experience with others.

Psychadelic shamanism could be a topic of this thread but no one is going to share any honest insight to any personal experience in a cold clinical setting...UNLESS maybe they are just "researching" :leer:

Anyway, I hope I made a small amount of sense.

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OAR,

And if I'm in an area where Dodo's used to live would t be more like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker example? Further, what if I don't care to tell the world I saw one? Is my perception of it still irrational?

On the question of what if you don't care to tell the world- I think we're in agreement that one can't expect others to accept one's unverifiable perceptions, I mean to go a step further and say that one should not accept one's own unverifiable perceptions. So, yes, even if you don't care to tell the world it is still irrational.

If you're in an area where Dodos used to live it doesn't make the it more like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker example. I mentioned the specificity of Dodos past habitats to underscore how extraordinary it would be for them to escape observation there for centuries- so extraordinary that we would have to doubt what we thought we knew about observing relatively large land animals confined to small spaces.

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OAR,

I understand where you're coming from even if I don't agree. You, from what I can tell seem to perceive "rational" and "empirical" as coextensive terms. I do not. I see rational thought as perceptions that may or may not be backed by empirical perceptions or evidence.

The lack of empirical evidence does not make your perceptions irrational. Just less trustworthy in the longer term.

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OAR,

I understand where you're coming from even if I don't agree. You, from what I can tell seem to perceive "rational" and "empirical" as coextensive terms. I do not. I see rational thought as perceptions that may or may not be backed by empirical perceptions or evidence.

The lack of empirical evidence does not make your perceptions irrational. Just less trustworthy in the longer term.

Scott: Do you think that there is any situation where it is irrational to trust your perception or inferences?

Because this rational/empirical debate is obscuring the answer to this question for me.

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OAR,

I understand where you're coming from even if I don't agree. You, from what I can tell seem to perceive "rational" and "empirical" as coextensive terms. I do not. I see rational thought as perceptions that may or may not be backed by empirical perceptions or evidence.

The lack of empirical evidence does not make your perceptions irrational. Just less trustworthy in the longer term.

Well, not quite. What I'm trying to say, perhaps poorly, is that when we're confronted with extraordinary experiences we're confronted with competing experiential claims- basically, doubt this extraordinary thing we perceived is real as we perceived it vs. doubt otherwise experienced reality, where everything else we know is verifiable according to the normal rules. I think it's more rational to doubt our extraordinary perception (particularly when there are verifiable observed explanations for extraordinary perceptions) than it is to believe our extraordinary perception which conflicts with verifiable reality according to the normal rules.

I don't think rationality and empirical are coextensive terms because I think there are rational arguments for the existence of God (not compelling, in my opinion, but rational), but they're rational because they don't rely on experience. Once we enter the realm of experience I think there's a clear rational argument for preferring doubt of extraordinary experience over doubt of experienced verifiable reality according to the normal rules.

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Castel,

Sure if I'm drunk or otherwise impaired my perceptions aren't particularly reliable. However, if I'm not why shouldn't I trust my eyes and ears if I see an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in Congree National Park?

OAR,

Okay, I really do see where you are coming from.

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Castel,

Sure if I'm drunk or otherwise impaired my perceptions aren't particularly reliable. However, if I'm not why shouldn't I trust my eyes and ears if I see an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in Congree National Park?

Depends on the situation. It isn't just obvious impairment that matters. There's the issue of your ability to make judgements (I certainly don't know what an Ivory Billed Woodpecker looks like), or which judgements are more "rational". Then there's the matter of the claim being made, and the sort of experience. It's not a quick hop from" seeing X bird" to "all experience and judgement (that isn't obviously a result of impairment from alcohol or the like) can be trusted".

Obviously YMMV on just where the line is. Just wanted to make sure that we were on the same page here.

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OAR,

I understand where you're coming from even if I don't agree. You, from what I can tell seem to perceive "rational" and "empirical" as coextensive terms. I do not. I see rational thought as perceptions that may or may not be backed by empirical perceptions or evidence.

rational and empirical are clearly not coextensive and someone who thinks this should do a little homework before talking about "evidence" etc.

maths is rational, some basic logics is the fundament of what we think of as "rational" and both are not empirical at all. As I pointed out in the other thread, traditional theistic arguments claim to be (roughly) on the same side of rational as maths and logics are! Of course this is hard to swallow, because most of us have been raised in a different way of thinking.

But in most cases to demand empirical evidence of the kind one would expect for some physical or biological claim is just a complete misunderstanding of arguments for the existence of god.

(There are some "god of the gaps" arguments, but they are relatively recent (compared to more than two millenia of philosophical theism) and comparably weak.)

The other misunderstanding concerns private religious experience. Obviously this is also very different from "public experience" used in empirical sciences. It is admittedly private and can hardly be used to convince someone who has not had the experience. But this does not mean that the person who had the experience should doubt it. If lots of evidence are against you in a criminal case, but you are certain that you took a walk in the woods at the time of the murder (unfortunately noone witnessed it), should the objective evidence that is there for everyone to see trump the certainty you did not commit the crime even for yourself?

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This is probably self-explanatory, but here goes. If you have a conception of a divine entity, what is its gender? If you have no conception of a real divine entity, what is the ethnographic meaning of a divine gender? If you say that the divine has no gender, does that mean the highest ideal for the human is to transcend gender? ( to transcend = to gloss over?) Does a dual-gender deity like Shiva reinforce gender stereotypes by the designations of male and female aspects?




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I try to think of God as beyond gender, when I admit to God's existence at all, but it's hard to escape the cultural programming I grew up with, of God as a male, and often as a bearded old white guy.


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The gods and goddesses from the various pantheons (Greek, Norse, etc.) have well-defined genders with the meanings thereof derived from the culture. Despite His pronoun being masculine and the word itself being masculine in languages such as Russian and Spanish (which give words an innate gender), the monotheistic God from Judaism, Christianity and Islam doesn't have a gender in the original sense of the word. He can create sentient life not merely without a mate, but without anything whatsoever except for Himself to begin with.



As to whether we should try to emulate that... if we were able to, then yes, but it's way, way beyond us so there's no real point to trying it right now.


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I try to think of God as beyond gender, when I admit to God's existence at all, but it's hard to escape the cultural programming I grew up with, of God as a male, and often as a bearded old white guy.

If the idea of the divine is the highest human ideal, then by saying God is beyond gender, does it mean that humans should aspire to be beyond gender?

@Ser Scott - which is it, no gender or all genders? If it's the latter, I could see calling god "she" just because it sort of resounds simultaneously in the mind with the unspoken but previously repeated "he".

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I have a hard time believing that God has a gender, and if there is in fact a God (which I personally believe), the concept of it having a gender is clearly born out of human perceptions and biases. I mean, what would God need a gender for, anyway?


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The gods and goddesses from the various pantheons (Greek, Norse, etc.) have well-defined genders with the meanings thereof derived from the culture. Despite His pronoun being masculine and the word itself being masculine in languages such as Russian and Spanish (which give words an innate gender), the monotheistic God from Judaism, Christianity and Islam doesn't have a gender in the original sense of the word. He can create sentient life not merely without a mate, but without anything whatsoever except for Himself to begin with.

As to whether we should try to emulate that... if we were able to, then yes, but it's way, way beyond us so there's no real point to trying it right now.

I think the Christian God's gender goes beyond a default pronoun- certainly "The Father" is a term used frequently, and his old-testament tantrums are meant to echo such stern paternal admonishments as hitting your kid with a heavy stick.

From an evolutionary perspective, the role of gender came a couple of billion years after asexual propogation. If the Universe has a consciousness, you could call the Big Bang a form of asexual propogation as a singularity pinches off one universe to explode into a new one, but perhaps the black hole bursting forth new life could also seem vaginal, a Big Birth. Though the doggedly phalocentric could still call the Big Bang ejaculatory...

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Yes there is more to theology than god of the gaps. I'm not saying otherwise.

It does seem though - much like TP's post a few pages back referring to Zeus - that some Christians have turned their conceptions of God into a god-of-the-gaps. I'm not sure if it was always so. Theists may have inadvertently turned their conception of God into such a gap-filling construction as a result of trying to protect "God" from the encroachment of the sciences, but in so doing, placed God into opposition against science. I almost wonder if Christian theology would be better off not by arguing God's necessary existence but in arguing for its redundancy. Panentheism arguably serves a similar function by arguing both God's immanence within the material world, albeit partially transcendent to "creation." Evidence for "God" would still be problematic for theists, but that will always be true.

I doubt theism will die, even in Euro-America though it may experience a fad decline, but it will change, and I'm certainly curious as to what the future face of Christianity and theism will be.

Na, I'm pretty sure I get it. There are tons of christians who believe lots of different things. I don't think there's a misconception there. There are still predominant Christian views on various things, I don't feel the need to add the caveat "well, actually there are many Christian variants who have differing beliefs and within those variants there are different churches who have differing beliefs and within those churches there are different people who have differing beliefs, so what I've just said is not necessarily representative of every Christian ever."

You don't need that lengthy of a qualifier. Just a "Christians who believe _____" here or a "this strain of Christian thought" there or even simply "some Christians."

Have you read like the first paragraph of The God Delusion?

Years ago, but I don't have it memorized or on my night stand as if it were my bible.

No.

Dawkins is indeed authoritative on the issue. He's not always right. And neither is he the only authoritative figure for atheism. In these regards the attempt to call Dawkins the new atheist pope falls apart.

I'm not comfortable calling Dawkins "authoritative," though he is certainly an authority for some. It strikes me as too dogmatic.

Don't know why that link won't work for me. :(

I guess my ideology is that laws be based on a secular/non-religious system and that people who follow a more strict faith/religion impose their own morals on themselves and leave the rest of us alone.

I agree, though in some regards, you can't avoid a certain degree of imposition of an ideology upon others who follow a different moral system or set of secular/religious values.

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all'y'all too new agey. if the text says he, that's fairly unambiguous.

Yahweh is gendered masculine in the grammar, but there can be a queerness to Yahweh even in the texts. Modern theology among liberal Christianity tends to either refer to God with multiple pronouns. Sometimes "she" is reserved for the Holy Spirit, while it is sometimes used for God as well. Even if Christians regard God as genderless, there seems to be an assumed "male as the androgynous default," which I believe Judith Butler has discussed in the context of a wider non-religious phenomenon.

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