What are your spiritual / religious beliefs (if any)?

Nicker on 29/10/2022 at 02:49

Quote:

You're simply cherry picking.

Seriously? We are talking about religion. How is challenging the magical miracle claims which form the evidentiary basis of every religion, cherry picking?

I don't think you can credibly accuse me of arguing in bad faith when you have moved the goalposts to the literal edge of the universe. Let's stay within human history, ok.

SubvertizingOrg on 29/10/2022 at 08:16

Hi again TTLG!

So glad to see this thread took off the way that it did! Unfortunately for me, my life has been an absolute chaotic nightmare since I started it eight days ago and I never got a chance to put in my own real input until now (which I might could've done in the original post but, ye know, I rather just leave the floor for other people and then jump in when I can). I'm so glad to see that people have already started some conversations related to my own spiritual beliefs and interests and whatnot. Then I also see a lot of shit-chat about the supernatural and the big bang and whatnot but just scrolled through that.

So anyway, after being evicted from my apartment, having hoards of people spying on me, working myself to exhaustion, realizing that I'm Satan in the flesh, and otherwise just inviting every kind of chaos I can into my life, I've finally found time to espouse some of my own real spiritual/religious beliefs and practices and such in a substantive way, so here goes:

First of all, I see Azaran already did a good job of mentioning what I could not amid my life's turmoil regarding the afterlife:

Quote Posted by Azaran

It should be noted that afterlife beliefs were not invented; (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near- death_experience) near death experiences are a very real thing (whether they're evidence of the afterlife, or simple brain chemistry). Now how certain religions embellish, codify, or reinterpret such experiences is a different story.

And indeed, "near-death experiences" (I hate the term actually, as it doesn't describe being near death but rather dying and returning) are in my perfectly accurate eyes veritable proof of the afterlife. There are thousands of near-identical and perfectly recognizable accounts of NDEs out there and only a search away. Virtually all of the accounts are so fundamentally similar that it would take an idiot (IMO) not to acknowledge them collectively as solid evidence of the existence of the afterlife. Every story involves some bodily trauma that causes literal clinical brain death, after which the person experiences a theme which is more-or-less consistent across all accounts. Many of them describe the experience feeling like an eternity or a timeless presence. Almost all describe being pulled into an all-colorful light and being overcome with a sense of perfect peace and transcendental love. Most actually describe being enveloped by darkness before this light, but the darkness feels loving and inviting and caring to them.

There are of course some accounts of NDEs with negative/distressing elements; e.g. some people report witnessing Hell. In one, the person is first told by angels something to the effect of Don't worry, you're going to become one with God's love, but you know too much, so first we have to show you... and then is given a tour of Hell, where he first sees addicts begging for cigarettes and alcohol, then a bunch of grotesque beasts brutally and killing and eating each other, then a myriad of sexual perversions that he "never could have imagined".

One commonality among a certain percentage of NDEs that carries the negative/distressing theme is a feeling of guilt that a person has for their self-percieved wrong-doings, but this theme is always overpowered by a much stronger feeling of the transcendental love and peace/justice/order that I formerly mentioned.

Personally I think this closes the case on the question of the afterlife. "Religious scientists" of the likes of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins will never come around to the idea because in their minds, nothing can exist unless it can be empirically proven. But that's called spiritual stupidity.

Moving on from NDEs...

I cited Gnostic Christianity as one of my primary "religious influences"—actually it's just the core of my religious beliefs essentially. It really makes the most (absolute) sense to me in terms of how I understand the creation of the world and humans, and the concept of God altogether. I have my own copy of the Nag Hammadi Library (a.k.a. the Gnostic Gospels plus *some other shit*) that I read whenever I get a chance. It illuminates things about the life of Jesus Christ that I find far more insightful and enlightening than a vast majority of what text made it into the Bible (and we can thank the arrogance and stupidity of the Catholic Church as well as established religion in general for almost destroying these precious texts).

What personally draws me so close to Gnostic Christianity is the emphasis on the importance of knowledge rather than repentance. I live in search of knowledge, knowing myself especially, rather than worrying about what kind of bad things I've done in my blindness and what I think I "deserve".

Lastly on Gnosticism, I really do believe in this idea of a demiurge god creator of this world (known in the texts as Yaldabaoth) who was Himself a creation of Sophia, an Aeon of the true God (also referred to as the Monad in the Gnostic texts). In the Gnostic mythology, the feminine Aeon Sophia broke off of the (genderless) Monad to create a god in the likeness of it, unknowingly creating an ignorant, arrogant god known as Yaldabaoth, who then would create the material world in His recklessness. Sophia would then see that the material world Yaldabaoth created was evil and that her own creation, Yaldabaoth, was an atrocity. In the mythology, she repented and was granted a lesser place in Heaven.

And then there's Buddhism of course. But I don't treat Buddhism so much as a religion, it's a spiritual philosophy IMO. And as mentioned in the original post, it was the spiritual philosophy of Jesus, essentially (IMO). What draws me most to Buddhism is such principles and values as: being grounded in reality/embracing reality; being present in the moment; the fact that life is suffering... I'm also keen on the Buddhist understanding of sexual perversion: it is not evil or wrong in any way—it is only the obsession that leads to harm being done. To put it in other words, sexual perversion is not inherently evil, but it does create a strong tendency towards obsession, which then becomes the problem.

Aaaaaaannnd it seems like I've finally wrapped up this post. Wish my luck you lovelies @ TTLG because, as stated in the begining of this post: LIFE FOR MARK EMINGER HAS JUST BEEN A REAL ROLLERCOASTER AS OF LATE <3

Azaran on 29/10/2022 at 10:39

Quote Posted by SubvertizingOrg

Lastly on Gnosticism, I really do believe in this idea of a demiurge god creator of this world (known in the texts as Yaldabaoth) who was Himself a creation of Sophia, an Aeon of the true God (also referred to as the Monad in the Gnostic texts). In the Gnostic mythology, the feminine Aeon Sophia broke off of the (genderless) Monad to create a god in the likeness of it, unknowingly creating an ignorant, arrogant god known as Yaldabaoth, who then would create the material world in His recklessness. Sophia would then see that the material world Yaldabaoth created was evil and that her own creation, Yaldabaoth, was an atrocity. In the mythology, she repented and was granted a lesser place in Heaven

You'd probably like "The Key: Sethian Gnosticism in the postmodern world"

(https://www.amazon.com/Key-Sethian-Gnosticism-postmodern-world/dp/8299824370/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1MATW34A8IBAD&keywords=the+key+rune+Odegaard&qid=1667039659&sprefix=the+key+rune+odegaard+%2Caps%2C221&sr=8-1)

He breaks down Sethian Gnostic myth, and presents the Demiurge as a two sided coin. The severe Old Testament god who imposes strict tenets on his followers, and the Satan tempter figure are one and the same, enslaving mankind in different ways (fear and pleasure)

Nicker on 29/10/2022 at 18:44

NDE are very poor evidence of an afterlife because everybody who has reported one, lived. They did not "die and return", they lived through a highly traumatic life experience and (drum roll) survived. Living people have nothing credible to report about what comes after death because we cannot say, with any certainty, that they died, even for a moment. To assert otherwise is wishful thinking. They certainly do not "close the case". Not by a long shot.

NDEs are a semantic slight of hand. Simply by adding the word death, an entire and unfounded mythos was invented. If NDEs had been labeled differently, as Metabolic Shutdown Syndrome, or as the Vegetative Hallucination Effect, then afterlife speculations would have had no air or fuel from them.

The common, subjective experiences people have, only require a living body. They neither require an afterlife nor do they provide any sort of slam-dunk evidence of the hereafter. To leap from a human brain, generating sensations while powering down, to the life eternal is an imposition of human desire, not a logical conclusion. It's a failure to apply Occam's Razor writ large. It's just lazy thinking ( and when I say thinking I mean, a general lack of ).

Quote:

"Religious scientists" of the likes of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins will never come around to the idea because in their minds, nothing can exist unless it can be empirically proven.

WTF is a """Religious Scientist""" and who put the quotes around the term to suggest it is some sort of objective label and not just a nugget of name calling? Is that your effort at poisoning the well, Subvert?

Please explain why anyone should accept supernatural claims when, not only do you have no credible evidence to support them but that they contradict everything which we reliably do know about reality?

"But that's called spiritual stupidity." I like the title but I think you have assigned it to the wrong people.

Taylor on 29/10/2022 at 20:40

Wow. When I first read the title I thought this would be either a peaceful share of our views and beliefs, or turn into a heated argument between followers of different religions.
It's a bit disappointing in my opinion, you turned this more into a religion vs. science argument mostly based on cosmology instead (By the Nine, couldn't you just choose a topic that can be followed by everyday people without a degree in some sort of advanced physics stuff?) :)
NDEs at least can be somewhat understood without digging deeper into the topic. Clearly we don't know if during an NDE people experience an actual something, or it's just how it feels when a huge amount of dopamine, serotonine and other neurotransmitters are released without control and our neurons are collectively dying.

Religion is a collective of beliefs, which is in my opinion a personal thing, and everyone's own religion is somewhat different of their "official" religion. The point of religion is, that it can't really be proven. If that happens, it will become more like a fact.
The religion of a person, as well as a religion of a church/etc. can somewhat change or evolve over time, but it's more dogmatic and permanent on a church level.
As that, religion is less tolerant to change and raising questions and usually does change if it's utterly necessary (unless the possibility of change/uncertainty is a law of said religion). Since you can't really identify, how an event, miracle or vision usually hundreds of years (if not more) ago really happened, if happened at all, a disagreement in these can often lead to schisms. (though schisms and forming new religions often were just a question of who should hold the power, and theological arguments were mainly used as tool to prove, who is the right person to be in charge)

Science is a collective of facts and theories. Sometimes things we considered facts are proven false, while theories are usually treated even more flexibly. However, unlike religion, if you can get a decent claim that "N" fact is false and you can actually prove it, then it might turn out "N" is actually false and it will affect science in general.
Theories are closer to religion, however becoming a fanatical follower of a theory kind of changes it into a sorta religion and disqualifies it from science (since treating a theory true as a fact, that can in fact turn out to be false is going against the rules of science and being scientific).

I think there is no point in clashing religious beliefs and scientific (mostly) theories in the topic of the big bang theory. It was as event believed to be happening 13.7 billions of years ago. So at best we could gather only indirect data thus hardly find a 100% proven scientific fact about how did it happen.
Especially since the criteria to consider something proven means the experiment can be freely replicated -- and you cannot replicate the event that sort of brought us into existence.
Here science is more like a "try to guess the truth by using all the data and evidence we manage to collect". However these small "truths" can change as often as one changes underwears since we can gather some new stuff anytime that puts all of it into a whole new and different aspect.

Back to the topic:
I consider myself mostly a secular christian (or a heretic really :cheeky:)
Many of us have had some sort of experiences that could be supernatural. A strange dream, a vision, whatever.
There's simply no way to prove it was an actual spirit that just talked to you, or it was only a hallucination or a dream your brain made up.
I believe some sort of supernatural exists, I believe some them are actually supernatural events where it was real - sort of. Not necessarily those that are claimed by one or more religions to be real. Of course I have no way to prove or disprove any of them, so it's purely my belief.

Also I believe some sort of afterlife exists. What? I don't know. But I simply can't imagine nonexistence. I can't imagine how or what would I feel if I were dead and my conscious would simply cease to be. It is also related to spiritual experiences which could be real and there's no way to tell (other than belief) if there anything behind them, or always just coincidences and our minds playing tricks on us.
Of course there are also no dead people to ask how being dead looks like :cheeky:

My god belief is something like God created the law of physics and then let things work out themselves. Also the way he(?) might interact with the world is through the random events. By random I mean those that are actually random, which is something that supposedly happens in particle physics. Not the sort of random where probably there is some unknown non-random factor that we don't know thus we think it's random (e.g. often animals/people are choosing seemingly randomly, but usually there is some blurred logic or reasoning behind). Of course every random can turn out to be influenced by some unknown non-random factors we don't know (let's exclude possible divines), so all of this I wrote here might be just gibberish instead of a belief or a theory of some sort.
Well... this was random :joke:

Harvester on 30/10/2022 at 00:07

I think the people in this thread are right about the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of the supernatural or a deity. People have a lot of anecdotes about supernatural stuff or religious experiences, but those can't be scientifically proven to be true. But for me, being among Christians all my life, it's more about the sheer number of ‘anecdotes', both by strangers and people I know and trust, that, combined, are very convincing to me.

As for NDE's, they might not be scientific proof of an afterlife, but I've not heard a scientific explanation either on why they happen and why they're all so similar and in many cases even life-changing, of people feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and meeting loved ones. If it's just hallucinations, you'd expect there to be more variation, similar to drug-induced hallucinations which are vastly different from each other. But they all report more or less the same things, many overwhelmingly positive experiences (what you might think a ‘heaven' is like) and a minority of negative experiences (what you might think a ‘hell' is like). My father had a book from the library from a scientist who had an NDE, I think he was a neurologist, and he researched the subject and created a paper and then a book, and the Lancet took it seriously enough to publish it. I get why people don't think it's credible evidence of an afterlife, but then I'd like to see a more scientific explanation of why they happen and why the experiences are as they are and why they're so similar for most people.

And there's just so many reported supernatural experiences. Years ago I've lurked a while on the Something Awful forums and they had whole threads devoted to them, and trust me, most of the people there are atheists, but they still experienced stuff they couldn't explain. Even Tocky, who is a staunch atheist and despises religion, has told us in his story thread of such an experience happening to him and his wife. The sheer number of people reporting such things is staggering, not just online but I know some of those people, who are not Christians, personally, and I know them well enough to know they're not taking the piss with me.

As I said, I've been among Christians my whole life and I also read a Christian newspaper and magazine. Most of the paper is just regular national and international news and opinions, but the paper and magazine have a lot of interviews with Christians and it happens quite frequently that they talk about their experiences with God. And I've heard of countless experiences first-hand that people have shared with me. Sure, some of them have been pulling my leg, doubtless, but I cannot believe all of those people or even a majority of them were lying to my face or delusional or plain crazy, I know many of these people very well and trust some of them with my life.

I've been to a Christian conference once and I've heard people speaking in tongues right next to me, with the most joyous expression on their faces, like they were ecstatic with happiness. I've read that this is just ‘the speech center of the brain gone wild'. Again, not scientific evidence of God existing, I agree. But then 1) why does this happen, what's the scientific explanation for being religious being able to make the speech center going wild. And 2) why are the language patterns of that ‘tongue-speak' so similar if it's just the speech center gone wild? It sounds like an actual language instead of just gibberish and I've heard a ‘session' often begins with the same couple of words. I can't speak Turkish or Hebrew but I know what those languages sound like and I can distinguish them from random gibberish or other languages like Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. If it's just the speech center gone wild (and again, why does this happen) you'd expect it to be more random and be different for each person.

I suffered from depression for years and once I was on the verge of despair and didn't know what to do, and I prayed and pleaded to God for help. That night I dreamt of a Bible verse, not the actual verse itself but the book, chapter and verse number came to me in a dream. Not going to tell you which verse it is, that's too personal. I looked it up when I woke and it pertained directly to my situation and I used it to make a fresh start and things started to improve for me after that. Of course I know the Bible pretty well but I don't know if you say like 1 Kings 4: 5 what the verse is (of course I know John 3:16 and such but the verse in question is nowhere near famous enough to remember it like that, in fact I didn't even actively remember that verse being in the Bible). That's just a small thing that happened only once to me, but I mention it because the last time I talked about this the feedback was ‘you just talk about other people but nothing actually happened to you'. Just so you know that something did happen to me. But it's just one thing among literally thousands of such anecdotes I've come to hear in my life, many of which are more impressive than what happened to me.

As I said, none of this holds up to scientific scrutiny, but for me personally, the vast number of things I've heard and seen from both strangers and people I know and trust, and what happened to myself, is very convincing to me. I find it far harder to believe that all of these experiences including my own, are delusional. Yes, they're anecdotes, but I can't just dismiss such a vast number of anecdotes, even if I didn't experience what I experienced myself.

mxleader on 30/10/2022 at 01:20

I was once corrected by a Mormon doing their door to door salesmanship about the difference between believing in a god and theology. If I was ever on the fence about joining any kind of religion that conversation completely convinced me to never join a religion. Also, I try to stay away from cults large or small. It also drives me nuts that many people accept science, evidence and reasoning but instantly beat the war drum when the subject of their one god system comes up in any conversation. Then my mind goes wild in thinking that we are all just tiny thoughts in a massive universe that is this one god's brain. Also, the one male god system was designed to manage and manipulate an ignorant population. That being said what if we are all symbiotic inter-dimensional beings plugged into the human meat sack? Maybe this inter-dimensional being needs the human to be able to feel physical things and emotions. And the human body is just an evolved ape humanoid that would just sit and eat bananas without it's inter-dimensional parasite attached. I'm not talking Matrix here but a inter-dimensionally naturally occurring thing. Maybe Earth is just the nest within which the one giant god (male or female or both) deposits their symbiotic parasite into the ape like creatures. Then after the parasite goes through a few bodies it matures and goes on to live somewhere else. Maybe our beliefs are derived from the human body interacting with the symbiotic parasite that is immature in age and does not have the ability to fully understand its own nature while connected to the ape in this dimension. Bid daddy in the sky is just the big bug doing its thing. Maybe the big bug in the sky punishes the symbiotic parasite if it does bad things to the other parasites while docked to the ape because they are all family. What if religion is just leftover from a time when humans had not discovered enough technology and science to fully understand what their true self and nature is? Does anyone really need religion in this day and age of books and worldwide internet?

Sulphur on 30/10/2022 at 03:08

Quote Posted by Harvester

Here's my take on this: if a lot of people want to believe in something, they will. Especially if there isn't an immediate or easy material explanation for it, the kinds of rationalisations we come up with for events that occur in our lives may sometimes have basis in fact, sometimes not, but usually with a certain amount of faith given to some large and non-specific supernatural force because that's the simplest thing to grasp at rather than ascribe good or bad fortune to a complex set of environmental interactions and chance. And you know what, as long as it doesn't harm anyone, I think this is fine. It's a function of our psyches to use coping mechanisms, and faith is not something easy to give up, especially when it's deeply entwined with the hope for better. Perhaps everyone has a need for faith in something, because without that there is mostly nihilism; but it doesn't necessarily have to be god.

Science does not have all the answers yet, but its purpose is to push back the veil of ignorance and expose the flaws in our previous thinking; this doesn't mean it always gets it right, but the important thing about the scientific method is that it seeks a truer picture if the previous one was proven inaccurate.

Quote:

As for NDE's, they might not be scientific proof of an afterlife, but I've not heard a scientific explanation either on why they happen and why they're all so similar and in many cases even life-changing, of people feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and meeting loved ones. If it's just hallucinations, you'd expect there to be more variation, similar to drug-induced hallucinations which are vastly different from each other. But they all report more or less the same things, many overwhelmingly positive experiences (what you might think a ‘heaven' is like) and a minority of negative experiences (what you might think a ‘hell' is like). My father had a book from the library from a scientist who had an NDE, I think he was a neurologist, and he researched the subject and created a paper and then a book, and the Lancet took it seriously enough to publish it. I get why people don't think it's credible evidence of an afterlife, but then I'd like to see a more scientific explanation of why they happen and why the experiences are as they are and why they're so similar for most people.

You know, it's fairly easy to understand why an NDE would be life-changing: you nearly goddamn died. I sound facetious, but I'm being very real about this considering I've had massive trauma to my system in the recent past that I'm still recovering from. It's important to place the context of seeing everything nearly end juxtaposed with everything that you've done so far with the people who matter(ed) to you, and realise that maybe your trajectory was a teensy bit off. We're never so self-regarding as at the exact point of time we know that we are ending.

As for the similarities, the reason why this is so difficult to study is because running an experiment on dying people is sort of not a great social look. However, we have inferences from collected data, and with time we'll be able to find out the real physiological reasons for how and why this happens. For now, the hypotheses are based on the mechanisms of what happens to people when blood and oxygen flow to the brain are cut off, which more often than not eventuate similar phenomena even when a person is not dying. See: (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-near-death-experiences-reveal-about-the-brain/) this article. There's also an interesting (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/811885v1.full) paper (not peer-reviewed, I think, but worth a little attention anyway) exploring how the likelihood of having an NDE is correlated with migraine auras.

As the first article spells out, though, there's just so many things that happen when your body is shutting down that are localised to just your brain pan that it is extremely difficult to isolate a simple answer to it. We're still delving deeper and there's much more work to be done; but I suspect that to most people this is unsatisfactory as a reply (and it is to some degree, recognising we've yet so much more to understand about ourselves) and activates a fallback to the position of, 'if we can't explain it [yet], then it must be beyond our ken and mystically profound.' To me, this merely exposes our innate bias towards putting faith in something beyond any of us. Again, I can't discount the utility of that from a psychological standpoint -- why not believe in something beyond that is inviolate, perfect, and unable to fail us exactly because it is so intangible and nebulous? Faith in material reality, its imperfections, and the possibility of it disappointing us at random cannot compete. It's a powerful coping/defense mechanism, and I don't blame anyone for falling back to it (to a point - the broader problems of how easily organised religions always eat themselves and people up can't be ignored but then we already know that). Spirituality in the religious sense just doesn't work like that for me, though, given that I know why we do it.

Which I guess brings us to the point of what my spiritual beliefs are. Would it be too facile for me to say that I have none? Well, yes. I do actually believe in something more than any of this, but I don't think I can articulate it here in any great depth. Maybe in another manner, some other time.

Side-note: I actually have been to a thing or two where people were speaking in tongues. I was young enough that it irked me to a large degree that someone thought rolling their eyes into their heads and lolling their tongues in gibberish was supposed to be ecclesiastical, and my mom, one of the most deeply religious persons I've ever known, was so profoundly disappointed/upset with what the people at the charismatic retreat had done to her incredibly strong but also un-fanatical conception of Catholic faith, that she told me she'd never take me to one of those things again. For my part, when I was at that retreat, they gave us a banana to eat - that was our food for the entire day - and I would have stuck it into the mouth of the person gibbering next to me if it meant they'd shut up.

If I'd coined the technical term for it, I'd call it 'babblemunch', not glossolalia.

SubvertizingOrg on 30/10/2022 at 08:02

Quote Posted by Nicker

Afterlife is a misnomer anyway. In all likelihood, what must happen is that that DMT just gets released and your mental-emotional state enters a stasis which is experienced as an eternal review of your life-in-time. That experience of eternity will include with it all of the features of any NDE account, such as feelings of guilt, a sense of transcendental love and perfect peace, an affirmation of your religious beliefs if any, a review of your life's doings from the perspectives of the people who've suffered the consequences of those actions, etc. I personally don't see why that's any reason to discount that the experience is actually spiritual, immaterial, and the manifestation of the soul. Thoughts are not material, are they? Yet we think, and thinking exists. (I hope you can agree with me on that one.

Quote Posted by Nicker

No, it's a commonly-used name within the realm that describes scientists who swear to the doctrine of empirical evidence as the only thing worth qualifying something as existing. It's not an official term, but it's a term. It's also a very tasty nugget of name calling, or whatever, if you think so bro.

Quote:

Please explain why anyone should accept supernatural claims when, not only do you have no credible evidence to support them but that they contradict everything which we reliably do know about reality?

I never expressed supernatural claims nor do I think that word has any meaning or is a word I would ever use... and if you're really equating reality with nature here then I have absolutely no way of responding o_0

Qooper on 30/10/2022 at 13:29

Judging by this thread, people here have a lot more to say about this topic than I originally thought. That just shows how poorly I know you guys and gals. If there's ever another TTLG meet, it would be cool to see you guys. Also Subvert/Mriya, you seem like a pretty interesting fellow. I want to say something about what you've written here, but right now I'm unfortunately short on time. Also Nicker, I didn't mean to end our exchange so short. Once I have time to really sit down with a cup of coffee, I'll write more. Take care everyone!