fuck off
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Most users ever online was 1086 on Mon Jul 01, 2024 9:03 am
Now that was funny.the only excuse i can think of for Ant acting like such an ass all the time is that he is actively being mauled by a chimpanzee while he's responding to us.
I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.johnson1010 wrote:atheists are not necessarily materialists.
I have. Not an atheist who is still into religion, though there are some religions which do not include a god, but more along the lines of people who reject the existence of god but still believe in a variety of weird things.I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.
The point being people arrive at atheism through a variety of reasons, some of them purely emotional. People might reject gods based on the activities of religion, yet still believe in all kinds of supernatural things like ghosts, the afterlife, psychic powers, and "sacred geometry".Among the six fundamental Astika schools of Hindu philosophy, the Samkhya do not accept God and the early Mimamsa also rejected the notion of God.[11] Samkhya lacks the notion of a 'higher being' that is the ground of all existence. It proposes a thoroughly dualistic understanding of the cosmos, in which two parallel realities Purusha, the spiritual and Prakriti, the physical coexist and the aim of life is the gaining of liberating Self-knowledge of the Purusha. Here, no God (better stated theos) is present, yet Ultimate Reality in the form of the Purusha exists.
gah!The immateriality of ideas accounts for their marvelous ability to shape-shift according to whims and deliberations and alterations in the environment. Your saying that ideas are material is the same as denying that human subjectivity is a controlling force in the social manifestation of ideas. There is a material source for all brain activity, but that doesn't mean that materiality is a property of language or the ideas expressed by language.
Robert, your "science" is bogus. It just so happens "pre-scientific and obsolete" theism has produced bicameral holistic consciousness that used both brain hemispheres for acquiring knowledge of the universe. Your idea that everything can be measured is the idea that's obsolete. You're really stuck in that same place many atheists were stuck a few decades ago when they claimed "love" is non-existent, it was an imaginary condition and they cited as proof the lack of sustainability of most love relationships, i.e., people get bored and stop imagining love for their partners. There was no such thing as "love" according to these materialists. Then "love" becomes measurable in the human brain/body system so now love is OK, it's a materialistic worldly phenomena. But God and spiritual consciousness? Uh-uh. Can't be measured. Doesn't exist.Robert Tulip wrote:I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.johnson1010 wrote:atheists are not necessarily materialists.
Science has not discovered anything other than matter. The basic problem with conventional theism is its assertion that there is something other than matter (ie God) that causes the universe to exist. That idea is pre-scientific and obsolete.
The problem in the recognition that language and ideas are fundamentally material in origin is that our ability to communicate is a very highly refined and complex form of matter. The material nature of ideas can be as hard to get your head around as the scale of galaxies and atoms, the replication of DNA or the age of the universe.
I can't imagine anyone saying love is non existent, but I can imagine them saying that it's out of reach of of scientific measurement. The feeling of love is likely produced by a chemical reaction in the brain. It was an evolutionary advantage for a male and female to bond and produce offspring. This doesn't make it any less meaningful. My love for my wife is very real, and it doesn't matter to me that it's probably something that can (theoretically) be explained in material terms.sonoman wrote:. . . a few decades ago when they claimed "love" is non-existent, it was an imaginary condition and they cited as proof the lack of sustainability of most love relationships, i.e., people get bored and stop imagining love for their partners. There was no such thing as "love" according to these materialists. Then "love" becomes measurable in the human brain/body system so now love is OK, it's a materialistic worldly phenomena. But God and spiritual consciousness? Uh-uh. Can't be measured. Doesn't exist.
For "cosmic consciousness" or traditional ideas about mysticism, one could theoretically attribute the mindset to brain chemistry. But that explanation utterly fails to explain religious epiphanies that follow definite spiritual themes. You can't get psycho-active brain molecules to "inspire" a whole set of religious ideas that follow set patterns established by prior religious visionaries like yourself. Something else is at work. And oh, yes, personal experience of spiritual phenomena can be expressed without resorting to metaphors when spiritual energy and information comes this way, the old fashioned Jewish prophesy way. It isn't Eastern religious consciousness but Near Eastern carrying a definite set of religious instructions whereas the Eastern Way is to quiet the mind and let the world unfold in the mind as it is with no conflict between self and others or between self and environment. It would be a good philosophy except that it kills the creative urge that is never satisfied with the way things are but wants, desires, to change it. And that's your Near Eastern religious mindset that seeks Eutopia, a better world, whereas the Eastern religious mindset seeks to empty the conflicted mind and let it be. One produces bliss consciousness at the expense of social advancement and the other produces social advancement at the expense of personal conflict. You'd think there would be a middle way. And there is, once you let God lead and self attuned to one's destined role in the cosmic Drama. Or Comedy, or Tragedy, depending on what role your playing in what Script.geo wrote:I can't imagine anyone saying love is non existent, but I can imagine them saying that it's out of reach of of scientific measurement. The feeling of love is likely produced by a chemical reaction in the brain. It was an evolutionary advantage for a male and female to bond and produce offspring. This doesn't make it any less meaningful. My love for my wife is very real, and it doesn't matter to me that it's probably something that can (theoretically) be explained in material terms.sonoman wrote:. . . a few decades ago when they claimed "love" is non-existent, it was an imaginary condition and they cited as proof the lack of sustainability of most love relationships, i.e., people get bored and stop imagining love for their partners. There was no such thing as "love" according to these materialists. Then "love" becomes measurable in the human brain/body system so now love is OK, it's a materialistic worldly phenomena. But God and spiritual consciousness? Uh-uh. Can't be measured. Doesn't exist.
Many of us do feel the presence of a "cosmic consciousness" or "oneness with the universe" or "God" or whatever you want to call it. This seems to be a universal feeling that gets interpreted differently, an interpretation that is formed by culture and language. The fact that there are so many religions in the world attests to the fact that we interpret this feeling in very different ways.
Why wouldn't this feeling also be a chemical reaction in the brain, an evolutionary adaptation like the love we feel for another human being?
The feeling of "cosmic consciousness" is no less meaningful if it can be explained in materialistic terms, in my opinion. Personally, I attribute this feeling (yes, even an atheist can feel emotions!) to a connection with nature. That's why learning about evolution is a quasi-spiritual experience for me. But I fully recognize that for many others the feeling of "cosmic consciousness" is more supernatural-based. For the sake of argument, let's accept that whatever this feeling is comes to all of us in very unique, personal ways that can only really be described in poetic or metaphoric terms.