|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Choosing a faith | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Percy writes: The advancements in science simply tells us more and more about How a cosmic intelligence brought about our existence. But what religion explains keeps shrinking as it is forced to give up more and more ground to science. 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.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
She argues that if we are just our brains then free will is an illusion. Here is a quote. quote: I don't think we are just our brains. Rather, we are our brains, our bodies and our environment.
She also talks about how in her experience how people in a totally vegetative state, (I don't like that term either), or essentially brain dead. still can be aware of everything going on around them. They can react to things going on around them, but I would not call that "awareness".
She talks about the placebo effect. We know that placebos can have a healing effect of physical ailments. If we are nothing but the brain, then why would someone's condition improve? The placebo isn't actually changing anything material. The belief that the placebo will help does likely have material effects on the brain.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AZPaul3 Member Posts: 8527 From: Phoenix Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Driven by our brains? What else would we be driven by? “We” are our brains enclosed in our own personal life-support system.
quote: 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.
She also talks about how in her experience how people in a totally vegetative state, (I don't like that term either), or essentially brain dead. still can be aware of everything going on around them. 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.Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
nwr writes: I don't see how that responds to her point which again was: I don't think we are just our brains. Rather, we are our brains, our bodies and our environment.quote: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. nwr writes: They can react to things going on around them, but I would not call that "awareness". 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.
nwr writes: Yes, although no physical change took place. The belief that the placebo will help does likely have material effects on the brain.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
AZPaul3 writes:
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?
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. AZPaul3 writes: 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 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: 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.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7
|
Phat writes: All that we Christians have is belief, experience, and observation. Of Jesus? No. Of Jesus you only have belief. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
I don't see how that responds to her point which again was: quote: 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.
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. Then that woman was not brain dead and was not in a vegetative state.
nwr writes: Yes, although no physical change took place. The belief that the placebo will help does likely have material effects on the brain. If there were material effects, there were physical changes. But those physical changes might have been too small to easily detect.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AZPaul3 Member Posts: 8527 From: Phoenix Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
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? 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.
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. 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?
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. 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.Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
GDR writes: Percy writes:
Assuming that by "non-physical" you mean "not of the material world," if we look outside EvC Forum you're not in the minority at all. But believers are all in the same boat not possessing any evidence of this non-material world. How could there ever be material evidence of something non-material anyway?I agree, and its a big part of the point I was trying to make, but I keep getting asked for that kind of evidence. 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: Hopefully we don't get bogged down on this. I don't have the knowledge to argue it to any depth at all. 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. And again, just to establish her credentials she has a PHD in Brain Imaging. Your diversion onto Dirckx is a red herring. --Percy
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
GDR writes: IMHO, we have a deity that gifted us with a consciousness that perceives its existence in a world with an open future and with free will. We can choose the good as in love and we can choose the evil as in hate, selfishness, cruelty etc. Yes, we have free will and we can choose the dark side, that is evident in the war in Ukraine. You know that is not an answer to my question. Please try again. Why are emotions such as hate vidence of god?Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London. Olen Suomi Soy Barcelona. I am Ukraine. "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 432 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
|
GDR writes:
In Message 770 I said:
But I keep getting asked the same thing, and much of the time the questions aren't the point of the thread.quote:What could be more to the point of the thread? "Oh no, They've gone and named my home St. Petersburg. What's going on? Where are all the friends I had? It's all wrong, I'm feeling lost like I just don't belong. Give me back, give me back my Leningrad." -- Leningrad Cowboys
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
We believe that Paul *did* meet the Holy Spirit and his head and heart were never the same since.(not to mention the beatings) 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).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
GDR writes: Percy writes: I was not using that argument to lend credence to its accuracy but simply to say that it was evidence. These complaints make no sense. Counterarguments are not attacks. You claim that, "It was not a statement commenting on their reliability," but when you said "Many people gave them so much credence that they dedicated their lives to following them," that was absolutely "a statement commenting on their reliability." It's also the "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy. 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 have no problem with counterarguments. It is the language that gets used. Twice in this thread I've been called a liar. 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.
Percy writes:
Stating it another way, you don't accept that a work is accurate because the author said so. You assess the work to see how well the author achieved his goals of accuracy.You keep repeating this. 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.
Once again I was simply making the point that the Bible is evidence to be considered. It was not about whether it is good, weak or poor evidence. That is a different discussion. 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
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
GDR writes: Percy writes:
This isn't relevant to the discussion but about that last thing you said, the cause of floods doesn't have to be heavy rainfall. As we were again shown just this week with Hurricane Ian, storm surges can cause floods. Busted dams can cause floods, too, something that happened in our tiny town about 20 years ago. Spring snow melt can cause floods.Good grief, I really thought that would be assumed. 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.
Percy writes: Yes, that is your belief. But emotions are not tangible things that have a material existence that can cause things like brain signals. It's just the label we use for mental states caused by what's going on chemically and neurologically within the brain. 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?
I gotta admit, I was pretty happy to see the Blue Jays hammer the Red Sox last night. I assume that what you describe would be what you would see via a brain scan, but it is the thought of the vacation that spurred that action in the brain. Where did the thought come from? 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
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
GDR writes: It is just that I've been down that road before and and I'm not anxious to do it again. I primarily started this thread to try and convince some of the more fundamentalist Christians that God doesn't only care about Christians, and that Christianity isn't the only path to serving God. 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? As I said earlier, if this thread comes to a conclusion we can try discussing the quality of the evidence in the Bible. My only point here is that it is evidence. 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?
You used to work hard at keeping people on the topic that was made at the beginning and then limit it to 300 posts or so. 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).
Yes, claiming that the Bible is evidence can lead to the question of the accuracy of the evidence but that wasn't the point of the thread. Okay, so let's drop it, call it off-topic. Discussion of Bible and Bible-related evidence belongs in The Bible: Accuracy and Inerrancy. The point of the thread is that the doctrine that people choose to believe or reject isn't as important as the nature of the god they choose to worship. If a person be they Christian, atheist, Mormon, Muslim or anything has a heart that causes them to be willing to sacrifice for others then they are serving the God we see incarnate in Jesus of the Gospels. That is consistent with the Gospels and for what it is worth, CS Lewis. Now I'm confused. Why is your thread called Choosing a faith if it's assuming Christianity is the right answer? --Percy
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024