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Post by fretslider on May 6, 2010 2:18:37 GMT -5
If you are saying that living things have an existence after death, is that qualified by what species etc it is? eg..... Humans only? Mammals only? Vertibrates only? Chordates only? Even the smallpox virus has life, does it too have an afterlife? If not, why not? Hmm. Very interesting question, Fret. Maybe all the icky stuff lives in hell? Our bodies die. Viruses don't die, do they? Don't they just move, change, lie dormant, whatever? Mosquitos die though. I've taken out my share. Do mosquitos have souls? Shoes have souls. This is the big fallacy in Christian thinking, presumably all animalia that has become extinct in the past, eg Stegosaurus, reside peacefully in this heaven. Nah.
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on May 6, 2010 7:57:29 GMT -5
It's a fallacy and it's not in actual biblical teaching or the liturgies. According to them, a few selected individuals get to a New Heaven while the rest of the believers get a physical life in a New Earth, nothing about Die and go to Heaven. None of it to be taken literally, I hope!
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Post by Wonder Woman on May 6, 2010 9:14:17 GMT -5
Fear not. You'll most likely be rejected anyway, like most interesting (but naughty) mortals.
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Post by fretslider on May 8, 2010 7:49:56 GMT -5
Fear not. You'll most likely be rejected anyway, like most interesting (but naughty) mortals. I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member
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Post by Erasmus on May 8, 2010 13:48:03 GMT -5
The trouble is the difficulty of discussion what, by definition, is beyond description. It doesn't matter whether it exists or not. It is quite possible to discuss all kinds of things that do not exist because as concepts they do exist.
People promote images and allegories and others come along and insist no taking those literally. Then they react rather like disappointed children learning that Father Christmas doesn't exist, that in that case the spirit of parental generosity and love that he represents can't exist either.
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Post by Dex on May 8, 2010 14:12:12 GMT -5
The trouble is the difficulty of discussion what, by definition, is beyond description. It doesn't matter whether it exists or not. It is quite possible to discuss all kinds of things that do not exist because as concepts they do exist. People promote images and allegories and others come along and insist no taking those literally. Then they react rather like disappointed children learning that Father Christmas doesn't exist, that in that case the spirit of parental generosity and love that he represents can't exist either. I see and agree. Sometimes some don't understand what the conversation is really about. Like for instance, if people are talking about astrology, somebody will come along and say - well I don't believe that because blah blah blah when what is the real subject is different personality types. Same thing for religion and practically any of the things here in the Beyond the mundane topic. Is that close?
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Post by Erasmus on May 8, 2010 16:18:15 GMT -5
Pretty much. I like the Father Christmas analogy because it's one that often gets applied to God. But my parents described Father Christmas as the spirit of Christmas. Now in that sense, as the spirit of generosity, of course Father Christmas exists and could even be said to possess parents at Christmas time!
The whole concept of God has to be beyond normal comprehension or it becomes possible to imagine there must be something greater and that is 'God', which roughly is how religions have developed. The problem then is that you need something to give it a handle and then you get a whole bunch that focus on the handle and lose track of what it stands for: A finger points to the Moon, the fool looks at the finger - and often worships it. If there are doubts about whether the finger exists, then there's a tendency to believe that the Moon doesn't either.
I put the Father Christmas analogy on one board and one atheist determined to miss the point started arguing that for some he can represent greed instead of generosity! In a sense I consider myself atheistic because by 'God' I don't mean a personal being as much as a perfect ground state that doesn't really 'exist' in any quasi-material sense that everything derives from and consists of but is further from perfection the more elaborate and physical its forms.
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2010 16:30:24 GMT -5
Lin and I went to a rather strange talk yesterday by a former Professor of Materials Science. I had the impression that too many years spent delving into the mysteries of chemistry had rather unhinged his sense of reason as he spoke of how we should all enter flotation tanks, place plastic bags over our heads and so on in order to be able to move up the chakras and perceive the inhabitants of the 10-dimensional universe such as fairies!
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Post by Erasmus on May 8, 2010 17:48:23 GMT -5
Yers well umm Maybe he'd got a bit too close to some exotic compounds All the same, I'm never quite certain when physicists talk about dimensions whether they mean it in the common sense or in some mathematical one that just means taking other things into consideration on a multi-dimensional graph. I suppose there is a possibility that raising a state of mind to be aware of abstract qualities as some kind of physical image might perceive them as 'beings' - a sort of abstract synesthesia. In any case, we tend to reduce everything to understanding as imagery so I suppose it could be possible to experience the life force of a tree as a dryad and so forth.
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Post by gabriel on May 10, 2010 6:02:17 GMT -5
Yers well umm Maybe he'd got a bit too close to some exotic compounds All the same, I'm never quite certain when physicists talk about dimensions whether they mean it in the common sense or in some mathematical one that just means taking other things into consideration on a multi-dimensional graph. I suppose there is a possibility that raising a state of mind to be aware of abstract qualities as some kind of physical image might perceive them as 'beings' - a sort of abstract synesthesia. In any case, we tend to reduce everything to understanding as imagery so I suppose it could be possible to experience the life force of a tree as a dryad and so forth. That's an interesting idea. What do you mean exactly?
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Post by Erasmus on May 10, 2010 10:25:11 GMT -5
Very hard to explain this because it needs thinking about things we don't even know exist and if they do are something we can't experience here and now. I suppose the closest thing is to imagine seeing some other sense. Most imagination is visual. We can remember a piece of music but few people really hear it. Imagine being a dog not just guided by smells but actually seeing them as trails and pools about the place, or a dolphin with sonar being able to see inside objects as well as their outside.
That's just in the 'normal' world. Then you hear of shamans and magicians going off on spirit trips and meeting all kinds of strange creatures. Maybe they really experience energies of some sort, other peoples' emotions or the kind of feel you can get about a place, as actual beings. Look at a tree and see its life energy as an actual form inhabiting it, maybe one that can even be communicated with. It doesn't have to mean that anything of that form really does live in the tree, just that that is the way we experience direct contact with its energy.
All those ancient gods and demons represented specific abstractions. Maybe there's a state of mind that actually sees and manipulates those abstractions in that form. Thousands of people have visions of the Virgin Mary. They could be just hallucinating but the visions all come with much the same list of warnings and commands (which I happen to find singularly unimpressive!) Maybe something is going on there that produces that kind of standardized figure in susceptible people. It isn't really a being as such (not even one pretending to be Mary) but some kind of free-floating typical Catholic worry with a sort of life of its own that is experienced that way - something like a created ghost.
Tibetans believe this sort of thing can be created deliberately or accidentally by cumulative belief: if everybody believes there is a demon in the bush, eventually they will create a demon and it might very well come out and chase them whether they know it's a haunted bush or not. Christians have had a very long time of standard belief to create a Mary with a standard repertoire. I'd like to follow up how many of the famous Mary sites were shrines before Christianity, so that something has been 'impressed' on them over millennia.
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Post by fretslider on May 10, 2010 15:26:19 GMT -5
Lets call a spade a spade.
Drop a microdot and listen to Black Sabbath at 78 speed and you will see god.
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Post by Wonder Woman on May 12, 2010 9:46:11 GMT -5
So, are you saying 'god' is what we perceive him/her to be?
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Post by fretslider on May 12, 2010 12:22:32 GMT -5
I'm saying its all in the mind
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Post by Deleted on May 12, 2010 17:06:06 GMT -5
Fret, do you mean that in the sense of the Copenhagen interpretation, the observer-created universe, phenomenalism a la Berkely or idealism in the style of Kant?
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