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This is priceless. Why atheists laugh at religion (satire)

Ah yes, a cut and paste from a paranoid narcissistic old fart that builds one huge strawman by misrepresenting liberalism. That Righter person needs some serious professional help.

Ha. Defending liberalism are you? After the absolute nonsense we've been seeing from these people in Houston, Washington, California, and elsewhere? You've got to be kidding.
 
Ha. Defending liberalism are you? After the absolute nonsense we've been seeing from these people in Houston, Washington, California, and elsewhere? You've got to be kidding.

Why does their location matter?
 
Ha. Defending liberalism are you? After the absolute nonsense we've been seeing from these people in Houston, Washington, California, and elsewhere? You've got to be kidding.

I see you can not actually be coherent in your accusations. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't just do mindless drivel. Of course, from that patterns you have established so far, that won't change.
 
I see you can not actually be coherent in your accusations. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't just do mindless drivel. Of course, from that patterns you have established so far, that won't change.

Just watch the elections a week from Tuesday to see how your views on that stack up with reality.
 
That's just your opinion against his! I believe that anti-Christian bias is now the only form of acceptable discrimination left in western society. I've seen it and experienced it many times.

The Christian Right is looking to be a protected class now?
 
Part One:

Paschendale said:
I've had an NDE as well. I nearly drowned as a child. But despite being confused at what I was experiencing, learning later on that it was simply my brain malfunctioning from lack of oxygen doesn't make every other thing I experience suddenly false.

If anoxia explained NDE's, I'd be inclined to believe so. But I don't think anoxia does explain them. My experiences have been unusual, for a couple of reasons. First, because I had an NDE. But second, because I was able to replicate the experience through the application of mystical exercises. I was clearly not in a state of anoxia during those experiences.

As best I can determine, the theories about anoxia are based on there being similar language used to describe NDEs and the phenomena that occur during anoxia. But they're only similar at a sufficient level of generality. For example, people who have the classic NDE describe seeing a light, and people who suffer anoxia describe seeing a light or lights. But when you read the more detailed descriptions of many cases of each, the comparison doesn't hold up.

Paschendale said:
I don't understand all of my dreams, either. To know how and why we experience what do allows us to interpret them and find out what's really going on. Sometimes we are deceived. Sometimes we simply don't understand. Keep in mind that likely the only reason you think that what you experienced during an NDE was an afterlife is because you were told to expect that from your religious ideas.

I have to make an aside here and point out that the issues you're bringing up have had whole books written about them, as well as countless journal articles, especially if you include the literature on the epistemology of mystical experiences, which I think bears on the topic. So there's no way to respond adequately in this kind of medium. To remedy this, I recommend reading an essay by Steven Katz, which supports your position, called "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism." But then also read Kabbalah: New Perspectives by Moshe Idel.

What I got out of this (and other similar reading) was this: There has been an ongoing discussion about the notion that religious experience is constructed from dogma--that is, that what mystics experience is entirely shaped by their religious milieu. Katz makes what I think is probably the best case for this idea, at least that I've ever read. To give him his due, I think he does a good job. The essay is very clear and well organized. However, unfortunately, his data is wrong. One of the centerpiece examples of the essay is to show that the kabbalists have no equivalent concept to the buddhist notion of nirvana, the complete absorbtion of the five skandas into emptiness. Moshe Idel does a good job showing that this is false, and that Katz was simply ignoring a great deal of kabbalistic literature to reach his desired conclusion.

My NDE happened when I was very young, and I hadn't been exposed to any religious ideas by that time. I think I had probably heard the name "Jesus," but hadn't ever been to church or anything. My parents became religious when I was older, but weren't at the time. So there doesn't seem to be warrant for the claim that my NDE was constructed out of my expectations. There is a whole sub-literature on the NDEs of young children, and the experiences exhibit surprising uniformity, even among children young enough not to have absorbed religious ideology.

By the time I began to practice mystical techniques, I had been exposed to a wide array of religious ideas. However, my experiences didn't resemble anything like I had been taught. I was expecting all kinds of things, but what I got was very different. And these, in turn, are the real reasons I tend to reject this line of argument.

But there are independent reasons also, most of which should emerge below.

Paschendale said:
That was certainly what I thought at the time, as well. But now I know more, and so I can apply my reason and logic to the situation, and understand what was really going on. I think you're being entirely hyperbolic here.

One thing that isn't explained well by the "dying brain" hypothesis is the change in personality that people who have NDEs undergo. And one point that has been lamentably understudied in academic literature on mystical experiences is the power that they import. Mystics are utterly changed by their experiences. In my case, the very first time I experienced the first real result of meditation, I was...well, I'm not even sure I know what to say about it. There is the time before, and the time after. It's the single biggest dividing point in my life. It was both supremely beautiful, but also terrible and destructive. Imagine finding out that every single thing you ever believed, including very basic beliefs about your self, other people, and the universe, were false. It was as if everything I knew had been ground down into dust.

None of this is hyperbole.

Paschendale said:
Consciousness isn't unexplainable at all. We may not be able to completely explain it at the moment, but there is no reason to think that these details will elude us forever. This is a bit of the "god of the gaps" argument. But either way, consciousness isn't mysterious. It's just how brains work. Non-human species certainly have some consciousness, and have thoughts, but their brains don't do as much as ours do. There is absolutely nothing to suggest some kind of non-physical component.

I lay before you the same challenge I've laid before others: just give me some barest hint of an actual explanation that doesn't suffer some obvious flaw. The problem is that mental properties and physical properties are completely unlike. How we could get the former from the latter isn't clear. At the very basic level, this is the reason to think a physicalist explanation of consciousness will elude us.

The more elaborate reason is what I already posted: calculationist accounts of consciousness all suffer fatal flaws (I'm prepared to discuss this in more detail at your pleasure). But so do non-calculationist models, all of which fall to Jaegwon Kim's supervenience argument, which seems to be decisive against them. And these seems to exhaust the physicalist possibilities. I take it as pretty decisive against a position that all its possible versions must be false.

This is another reason to reject the notion that a dying brain somehow explains NDEs--precisely because there is no explanation of experience from the brain in general, and so no particular case has an explanation either.

As a final point: people on your side of the divide have done a great deal of looking into how religious ideas have evolved. I agree with at least some of the points you make. I would challenge you to apply the same skeptical eye to the development of the ideas you seem to have embraced.

Paschendale said:
This doesn't speak to the validity of any wrong ideas, only that human beings, regardless of culture, still have the same kinds of minds. Every culture anthropomorphized the forces of nature in order to attempt to understand them. We understand human existence. In the absence of any other kind of understanding, we apply what we do understand. This was true for every budding human culture. This includes applying human existence to human non-existence, creating an afterlife.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to get at here. Specifically, I don't follow from the point about anthropomorphization to the next sentence about understanding human existence.

Paschendale said:
That sounds like you don't understand the arguments against you very well, and fail to understand the obvious problems with your own.

This is, of course, possible. I will only say that I don't think it's the case.
 
The Christian Right is looking to be a protected class now?

One can be charged with a hate crime for targeting Christians. One can also be prosecuted for discrimination in business.

How is it not a protected class?
 
Part Two:

Paschendale said:
Lots of very religious people have done lots of awful things. Spirituality seems to make people more prone to this, not less.

I think there is a distinction to be drawn between spirituality and religion in a certain sense, in that someone without any spiritual experience can adhere to a set of religious codes. Without the experience, those codes make no sense, and can often be used to "justify" some very evil acts.

The one point I can see in this that has some matter to it is that religions do seem to provide some extra reasons for doing bad things. For example, the 9/11 hijackers seem to have been motivated more or less exclusively by the drive to do damage to the U.S. because we are infidels treading on the holy land of the ummah, and we've funded a great deal of abuse, mayhem, and murder over the years in those lands. But to the extent that there is an element of revenge or retribution in this for crimes (real or imagined) committed, it seems like the case could go either way. Maybe a certain weird strain of Islam gave them the extra "umph" to do what they did. But maybe it was merely the most convenient justification for what they would have done anyway, and in the absense of Islam, justified via some other means.

Paschendale said:
Those hijackers actually thought that the myths they adhered to were true. Mohammed led armies and killed lots of people. Christian rulers did the same. Priests and bishops led inquisitions and purges and brutally murdered everyone in their path. All of these people were quite versed in the tenets of their religion, and their spirituality did nothing to stop them. Instead, either the delusion that their myths were true inspired them to violence, or they cynically exploited the myths to provide an excuse for their brutality. Likely there were many of both throughout history.

Yes, I think that's correct, with some caveats. There are plenty of people who are well-versed in the tenets of their religion. But because they lack spiritual experience, they fail to understand them.

Paschendale said:
And this is exactly how these myths are supposed to make you feel. So that you don't cling to this life. So that you'd be willing to toil it away in service to kings and priests so that their earthly lives can be fantastic.

What's valuable about life is not life itself, but what we can do with it. If everyone has a kind of divine self, then taking away a person's freedom, or their life, is only justifiable for reasons of survival, and for more morally weighty concerns like justice.

Paschendale said:
You just had a bizarre experience from injury or sickness. But you have hit upon the reason for this myth right here. It is to make you easier to exploit and to instill in you a set of rules (most of which center on submission to authority) that you have to follow for this mythical afterlife. You, and countless others throughout history, have traded their efforts and energies and any real enjoyment or fulfillment in their lives away in exchange for this invisible product.

This seems to be confined to sects of Christianity from western and northern Europe (and not even all of those), and to a lesser extent, some of the Vedic religions. I've never met a Buddhist, a Taoist, a Muslim, or other such who seemed to think this way, and from what I understand of their beliefs, they tend to regard it as pretty bogus to think this way.

Most religions are gnostic, in the sense that no human intermediary is required between human beings and...well, God, heaven, the spiritual realm, nirvana, whatever we call it. I belong to a gnostic religion, not an agnostic one. I don't have to follow any particular rules or give vast sums of money to someone for spiritual aid or something. Neither do any of my fellows, and it looks to me like that's more common among the world's religions than the peculiar mix of theological weirdness that infests parts of the U.S.

Paschendale said:
That's not "purpose". That's just disposition. That's something internal. It's in you. It doesn't come from somewhere else. It's the result of your genetic makeup and your life experiences. It's no different than the elements that cause you to have a favorite color or a preferred type of music or food.

It seems purposive to me. As for the rest of this part, these seem like bald assertions to me. Why should I believe them?

Paschendale said:
That sense of "rightness", as you call it, is just dopamine. You can hook up gadgets to someone's brain and watch it happen.

When asked why he believes the brain is responsible for the mind, the philosopher Paul Churchland likes to say that there's a 1:1 correspondence between brain states/events and mental states/events. I spent a little over 15 years educating myself on the areas of neuroscience that are relevant to philosophy of mind (there's lots of neuroscience that has nothing to tell us about the mind). What I discovered is that this is a false claim. There are brain states/events without any identifiable mental state/event. There are also mental states/events without any measurable brain state/event. The latter could be due to measurement problems, but the former are a little more difficult for a materialist to explain.

Moreover, the fact that dopaminergic receptors tend to increase reuptake when certain feelings are present isn't evidence that the one causes the other. The causation may work in reverse, or both may be caused by some third thing, or there may simply be no causal relation.

Paschendale said:
Because there is no reason to think otherwise. Really, this is a very complex answer full of details to debunk myths and dreams and ghosts and all manner of things. But it ultimately boils down to there being absolutely nothing to suggest an existence outside of this one.

This is where I disagree. After picking through those arguments and attempts at debunking, I reached the conclusion there are plenty of reasons to think so.

Paschendale said:
No spirituality is required here. We all know that we're all humans and are all mostly the same. It is by understanding that, not through myths and legends, that we come upon these tools.

This is not the Mystery of Universal Brotherhood. No doubt most anyone who victimizes someone else would agree that their victims are human beings. I don't want to say that someone who has direct experience of this mystery would never commit violence or transgress against others, but no such person would ever do so gratuitously or for egotistical reasons. No intellectual argument is sufficient to compel someone to reorient the most fundamental foundations of their doxastic structures, which is just what it takes to realize this mystery.

Paschendale said:
The story might say that god tells us the golden rule, but it is only a good idea because it fits with how we are. We do not like to experience suffering and fear, and so we understand that we shouldn't cause others to.

Wait a minute. Tell me what you would say to someone who said something like the following: "I agree that I don't like to experience pain and suffering. I have made myself exceptionally strong and tough so as to avoid pain and suffering. But I visit pain and suffering on others because I enjoy it, and because there's simply no connection between how much I do to others and what they do to me. If anything, the relation runs counter to what you've said here: the more hurt I cause others, particularly if I'm insidious about it, the less pain and suffering I endure. I've made a ton of money at this, and so I can hire people to do the things I need others to do."

Paschendale said:
We evolved as empathetic creatures. It is in our biology to care for one another.

This is true, but so are impulses to harm and transgress against others.
 
One can be charged with a hate crime for targeting Christians. One can also be prosecuted for discrimination in business.

How is it not a protected class?

I am aware of that; why didnt you quote jwilliamson1189 instead? He seems to be the one that needs to know that.
 
One can be charged with a hate crime for targeting Christians. One can also be prosecuted for discrimination in business.

How is it not a protected class?

Let's just make everybody a protected class. Straight, gay, trans, not-trans, white, black, orange, Christians, Muslims, Shintoists, liberals, conservatives, into S&M, not into S&M...

As a straight, white, Christian, liberal, male who isn't into S&M, I find this offensive!
 
Let's just make everybody a protected class. Straight, gay, trans, not-trans, white, black, orange, Christians, Muslims, Shintoists, liberals, conservatives, into S&M, not into S&M...

If we go down that road we will have about seven billion different protected classes.
 
Let's just make everybody a protected class.

That's how it is. US hate crime legislation and discrimination law protects all groups.
 
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