Choosing a faith

The advancements in science simply tells us more and more about How a cosmic intelligence brought about our existence.The fact that science gave us a natural explanation of lightening doesn't diminish God in the least. It does tell us something, in a small way, about the gift of intelligence that we have been given.

I don't think we are just our brains. Rather, we are our brains, our bodies and our environment. They can react to things going on around them, but I would not call that "awareness". The belief that the placebo will help does likely have material effects on the brain.

Driven by our brains? What else would we be driven by? “We” are our brains enclosed in our own personal life-support system.

quote:

---

If we are driven by our brains, then are we really free to make decisions or are we simply driven by the chemical reactions within? On these grounds, how can anyone be held responsible for their actions, good or bad?

---

Determinism in this universe only limits the range of possible future actions. That also limits your free will.Within those limits, we humans don’t just act for deterministic reasons like a dragonfly or a bacterium. Our brain apparatus is well advanced. We act for reasons we consciously represent to ourselves and can explain to others. In that extended act of consciousness we find we have the agency to be responsible for our reasoning and therefore for our actions.That’s the limit of determinism in generating the illusion of free will. Then she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She is demonstrably wrong since a persistent vegetative state is a state of wakeful response to stimuli with no conscious awareness of the stimuli or the response. That is its definition. “Brain dead” is something totally different.If she is this sloppy in her neurological definitions, with her training and experience, I have to question her reasoning in a wide spread of areas, especially those on consciousness.

I don't see how that responds to her point which again was:

quote:

---

There are implications for free will. If we are driven by our brains, then are we really free to make decisions or are we simply driven by the chemical reactions within? On these grounds, how can anyone be held responsible for their actions, good or bad?

---

If we are just our brains then it takes us back to a closed universe. It is our consciousness that provides the variables of our existence. She is asking then, how can we be held accountable for our actions. She tells the story of a woman with a severe head injury that was completely comatose. Later it turns out that she knew who was in the room and heard all the conversations. She couldn't react but was aware. Yes, although no physical change took place.

Are you saying then that free will is an illusion and that what I will have for dinner a week from Monday is pre-determined, and that I am not really choosing what it will be? I was asked to put this into my own words and I did a poor job. Thanks you for the correction. She was suspected of being in a vegetative state but the MRI showed that she wasn't. Here is a quote.

quote:

---

Her brain hit the inside of the skull. It pulled from its moorings. Axons stretched and blood vessels tore as ripples of shock waves lacerated and bruised critical regions far from the point if impact.

---

Through all of that she was very aware of what was going on around her. Even with all of the trauma the brain had experienced she was still conscious.

Of Jesus? No. Of Jesus you only have belief.--Percy

That's not a real argument. Our interaction with our environment also affects the brain chemistry. The chemical reactions in the brain are responses to what is happening around us.Personally, I think we have some sort of free will, but I cannot define what that means. Then that woman was not brain dead and was not in a vegetative state. If there were material effects, there were physical changes. But those physical changes might have been too small to easily detect.

A week from now? I wouldn't think so, no. That is too far into the future to determine so precisely. There are too many variables still available before the march of time constricts those choices even more. The damage was not enough to destroy her consciousness. So she was neither vegetative nor brain dead. So what the hell was that part in Message 791 about? So what? This reveals no great cosmic truths. What does it mean that she lived and was conscious despite all the damage? I see this like hurting your hand but not enough to preclude masturbating.

What kind of evidence do you mean you keep getting asked for? Do you mean physical evidence, or material evidence, or real-world evidence, or whatever you want to call actual for-real evidence? Yes, we keep asking for that kind of evidence, because there is no other kind of evidence. If you think there are other kinds of evidence, as you argued earlier in the thread, then you have yet to make a case for it.Again, no one is challenging or attacking your spiritual beliefs. We're challenging your claim that you have evidence for your beliefs.About Dirckx:
​ If you can't argue it then you're just taking someone else's word for it.Your Dirckx quote is about free will, and then you go on to mention vegetative states and the placebo effect, but the point in question had absolutely nothing to do with any of that. The question was how the negative emotions are as much evidence for God as the positive ones.You're just doing more misdirection. Why don't you just answer the question? You've asserted that you could have as easily used the negative emotions as arguments for God as the positive ones, so go ahead and do that, please.
​ Your diversion onto Dirckx is a red herring.--Percy

You know that is not an answer to my question. Please try again. Why are emotions such as hate vidence of god?

In Message 770 I said:

quote:

---

MY point is that you have not distinguished YOUR faith from any other faith. In a topic titled Choosing a faith, shouldn't we be comparing faiths instead of just making assertions about one faith?

---

What could be more to the point of the thread?

Yeah. Bad burritos. Whatever.So just what is this "Holy Spirit" and what does it do to us? I mean, what is that figure, about 45,000 different Christian denominations and sects? And the Holy Spirit had visited each and every one of those 45,000 different denominations and sects and gave each and every one of them a different set of instructions? ??? I completely forget who here came up with it, but the "Holy Spirit" does indeed end up just being that "bad burrito" or whatever form of food poisoning it takes to get you into that ultra-vulnerable state to accept whatever seems to work with your disoriented mind (I've been there a couple times, though never ever anything supernatural involved).

Someone's got a problem with simple English, and while I may not be God's gift to communication, it ain't me. How in hell are you separating in your mind credence and evidence? I have now twice mentioned the "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy, and all you can do is repeat yourself without once addressing or even acknowledging that you're committing a fallacy. Should I be keeping in mind Mrs. Blue's question to Forrest, or is it just that you're still rushing through posts trying to answer everything in a timely but woefully inadequate fashion.At one time most western people believed the world flat. How much evidence did all that credence lend that view? I didn't understand what dwise1 thought was a lie, but I didn't start out calling you a liar. It was you who accused me of calling you a liar before I ever used the term. I would much more likely have said things like that I thought you were dissembling and attempting to manipulate the discussion by deflecting and being evasive.You took that and somehow translated it into an accusation of lying. By that time you'd said you didn't care about the animosity directed at you, directly contradicting what you said in sentence one of Message 1 that that was the reason you'd stayed away, so I capitulated and agreed that lying was the right term for what you're doing.But I note that you have again successful deflected discussion by accusing others of mistreating you because they're calling you out on the unprincipled way you're conducting yourself in this discussion. There are several issues I've raised several times each that I have received no answer on. That's evasion. Of course I repeated it, because it's the same answer I give every time you repeat your claim that author intent matters more than evidence. You repeated your baseless claim, I repeated the answer. We can do this all day or you can try to support your claim. Come on, display some sanity. No, that is not true. Again, you repeated your baseless claim that author intent matters more than evidence.When you comment on the discussion it is unrecognizable. It's like you're having a completely different discussion in your head than the one that is taking place here. Either that or you have an extremely bad memory that you don't bolster by reading back in the thread.--Percy

I thought "heavy rainfall" was your sole real-world reference and that "myriad of other possibilities" was the woo side of things that you usually include. Sorry for the misinterpretation, but I wasn't expecting that you'd miss that what I said about floods causing water to gather was intentionally ridiculous in the same way as your emotions causing a brain response. It's not just my belief but what the evidence supports. Do you have other evidence indicating that emotions have existence independent of the brain? Thoughts are signals within the brain. No brain, no thought. If you have evidence of thoughts independent of brains then please present it.You believe that immaterial things have actual material existence independent of the medium in which they exist. It's like believing that waves or floods exist independent of water.--Percy

Maybe I misunderstood what you meant at the outset in Message 1. When you said that "As Christians we have to start with Jesus" I assumed you meant Jesus as a fact since your thread's title was about choosing among faiths. Did you just mean Jesus as a matter of faith?
​ But if you really did mean belief in Jesus as a matter of faith rather than evidence in Message 1, and that you just want to talk about pathways to God, then you don't want to talk about evidence at all. Right? Prior to moving to an SQL database in 2004 we needed the 300 post limit because messages were kept in text files. Once we moved to the database then thread length no longer mattered. The longest thread has over 5000 messages (Gun Control Again). Okay, so let's drop it, call it off-topic. Discussion of Bible and Bible-related evidence belongs in The Bible: Accuracy and Inerrancy.
​ Now I'm confused. Why is your thread called Choosing a faith if it's assuming Christianity is the right answer?--Percy