The Debt We Owe to Christian Mathematicians and Logicians

[youkrst]

i can only think of one appropriate reply to ants last post...

fuck off

[johnson1010]

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.

Then it would be reasonable to carry such saltiness onto the forum.

[Chris OConnor]

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.

Now that was funny.

[Robert Tulip]

atheists are not necessarily materialists.

I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.

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.

[DWill]

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.

[johnson1010]

RT,

I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.

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.

It is a strange juggle.

But for instance:

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.

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".

So it isn't always the case that an atheist is an atheist because they believe the physical world is all there is in existence. (or maybe i don't have a handle on what you meant by "materialist")

[johnson1010]

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.

gah!

Philosophy!!

I've never had a lot of patience for the kind of hair splitting that always seems to go down in philosophy. I don't think there's anything other than the natural world, and i think if anything is to actually exist then it must have some properties by which it could be examined, but i don't think i'm a materialist according to what i read on wikipedia.

[sonoman]

atheists are not necessarily materialists.

I have never encountered an atheist who is not a materialist.

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.

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.

I've experienced the state called "maya" in which our normally perceived reality becomes revealed as a set stage where as Shakespeare said we all are actors acting out a grand Play that was Scripted from beginning to end. I was in this consciousness state for three days and by the end of it my memory is that I could predict what the people I was talking to were going to say. Because I "knew" the Script part they were acting out in their life. It's so complex to describe how Everything, and I mean everything, is orchestrated to keep reminding people about these basic moral lessons about life that they need to learn. But everyone's got layers and layers of cultural filters and who knows what that keep our brains from recognizing the ques, which come as synchronicity experiences, those wildly noticeable Signs God puts up in people's lives who are on their Paths, each one tailor made for their particular set of ethical problems to work out. For secular people, the synchronicity events are just curiosities of fate, no particular "mystery instruction" going on. And for atheists, they "explain" the synchronicity events away as "easy explainable by random chance presenting at any single time millions of random possibilities, any two or more of which "explains" synchronicity happenings. But to those who have them who are aware that the Spirit of God "talks", instructs, guides, us through such experiences, the atheist write-off is like the apophenia crap "explanation". These are like kindergarten pictures of our experiences and don't begin to explain the complex interaction going on between the individual and "Other", that other reality atheists cannot see because they refuse to, locked into a paradigm that refuses to recognize the huge human record of spiritual experiencing of a different dimension than can't be put literally to hand. You can only reach it through your mind and only then when your ready to perceive. I wasn't conscious I was ready to perceive spiritual reality until it happened but now that I know it exists and is a truer guide to overall human life and future prospects than I got from just my materialistic mindset I had for decades before my meeting with God. I know how you look at that word over there on the left but it's for real once you experience spiritual energy and information transmission coming into you.

I was a hard case atheist actually because of my antagonism towards Christianity especially, but I had no use for the Hindu hawkers and American wannabes either. So God smites me with this three day "lifting the Veil" deal, the three days of non-stop synchronicity experiences and their mental impact on me that was very much like that you can see in the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" where a computerized world synthesizer genius creates a sub-world that's so authentic seeming it fools the created people in it, and then discovers his world is a sub-world too, and there's more above the level above. Matrix has a similar idea going. Anyway, it's a real shock, a 9. pointer on the mental rickter and it's after effects formed the bases of my belief in the reality of a created Universe, one following a script that is usually undetectable by the players acting in it except here and there the Scriptwriters have written in these Signs, quecards kinda, that some actors realize is applying to their lives outside the theater, the Script follows them home and into their daily life the next day, and the next, and the next, and Jeezus, what is going on here? Paul's three day report is metaphorically so similar to mine, his blindness equaling the Veil of reality, it mixes me up. Like John the Baptist and my spiritual visions do also--because I don't think those guys were real. They're characters in a Story. We all know that Script. Yet I'm not a character in a story except this weird Donkey Odie one, I'm real. And I did ritual baptisms following spiritual instructions in a religious vision. Strange pagan instructions at that. But with quite astonishing because so unexpected results in the real world.

I'm going in a few weeks on a trip where I hope to meet with this woman who contacted me, a Northern Cheyenne, who's a glass sculptor and had this vision of healing power of a ankh she'd made that happened at dawn. So she was looking up information about ankhs on Google and ran across my Vision of Christ Josephine in which the ankh plays a prominent role--as do Northern Cheyenne. She was quite blown away and tried contacting the author, me, of the Josephine vision and did. So now I have another indicator of real spiritual energy in this second major religious vision given to me to act out in real life. Like the Paxcalibur vision, the Josephine vision too mixes religious symbols together that don't normally have anything to do with each other. I mean how often does one hear of a hippie peace sign sword named after a pagan mythical king end up being honored by hundreds of devout Nazarean Christians during their most holy day event? This is not your parent's religions. I don't know what the end result will really be. I only have great hope in positive changes occurring as we all get focused on a world uniting goal: creating God unconsciously by most but consciously by those spiritually aware by all of us furthering humanitarian consciousness and behavior throughout humanity. When we evolve human beings into humane beings we are on our way to the Elohim where we began and where we'll end. Gnosis. Snake-swallowing its tail. Mobius Strip, Klein Bottle, Nth but not really because there's another dimension outside the Scripted one. The World to Come. Awake and Arise! Go forth and hug a zombie for Christ sake. Or your partner or boss, could be one and same.

[geo]

. . . 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.

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.

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.

[sonoman]

. . . 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.

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.

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.

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.