Religious discussion (continued from “Christianity and Chastity”)

Discussion in 'Off topic discussions' started by Muppet, Feb 5, 2024.

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  1. Muppet
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    #151 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    I don’t see why the creation from sentience account leads to infinite regress any more than the matter & energy account. Any explanation will eventually reach a terminal point with some things that are just irreducible givens. It’s to be hoped that these irreducible givens will be simple and few in number.
    It your objection to the idea of a conscious prime mover that you assume sentience to be essentially complex? I’m not sure that this is necessarily so.
     
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    #152 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    Btw I’m not suggesting that the maths lies, and that sort of physics is very opaque to me. I do think there’s an interesting metaphysical question, however, as to whether the rules of mathematics and operational logic set constraints on reality itself or to human experience. If the latter, then it’s conceivable that some other kind of mind might operate in quite different ways. I’m not equipped to answer that myself.
     
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    #153 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    If logic and mathematics does indeed place a hard limit on everything that is, then certainly many of the central doctrines of Christianity cannot stand. For example that God is one God in three Persons, and that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, was born of a virgin whilst suffering no change, and rose bodily from the dead. And without that you’re left with a sort of hippy social worker who could eke out small rations to a large crowd. Even that last claim loses all significance compared to the Gospel claim that a two-person platter fed 5000 people and there were leftovers vastly exceeding the original provisions.
     
  4. Jay Sub
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    #154 Jay Sub, Feb 20, 2024
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2024
    I think it pretty safe to assume that any consciousness that could create a universe would be an advanced complex entity.

    It is not just that which feeds into my own narrative though...

    All around us we see that life starts with simple beginnings, evolves, and over time, some forms become more complex. When we look at the early universe we see that stars evolve too, in fact it is the evolution of those solar systems that produce enough heat and pressure to kick-start nuclear fusion, and create all the other elements. So things we observe about the universe always start simple.

    This logic, in my view is applicable to everything. So if there is God, then he must have evolved too. This doesn't get us to a prime mover, I know!

    Prove that we need a prime mover? I can't. So Big Bangs might just be something that universes do? There is a great theory about evolving universes out there that is very plausable, but not provable.
     
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    #155 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    One can contemplate models that posit an origin to the universe, or a circular one in which there’s just ongoing flux. As a matter of principle, one could ask of any such model “but what came before?” or “but what set the flux in motion?” and you’d have the same infinite regress, or else have to answer (e.g.)“because gravity” in much the same way as @JaySaysYes mocks Christians as saying “because God”. One could also say (with Wittgenstein) that there is a point at which explanation has to stop, because our capacity for knowing is suited to the part of a greater whole that we inhabit. Someone (don’t know who) once said: “if the brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we’d be too simple to understand it”. I don’t know if that’s a profound truth or just a clever joke, but to me it’s pretty intuitively appealing, and applies to the universe as well as the brain. We are of it, we ARE it; so how can we encompass it with our understanding? That seems like hubris.
    For me personally, I think the everyday experience of care (by which I mean emotional engagement with our world and other people) is always going to be irreducible to scientific explanation. Example: I know that romantic love is basically an endocrine response, the function of which is to bring male and female humans together for just long enough to fuck, have a kid and raise it to a point where it might survive independently. Then it dries up (and one hopes is replaced by a different kind of bonding). My point, though, is try telling that to a person in love… they will say “that’s as maybe, but when I think of Daphne’s smile I feel my heart could burst, and I would gladly die for her”. THAT is not “merely” electrochemical events. Or another example: we know that light waves are on a continuum without qualitative breaks - but we SEE yellow and blue etc and they’re beautiful. A flower is not just a plant’s sex organ, it’s exquisite.
    Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not at all suggesting that a flower is a plant’s sex organ plus some spooky extra thing. I’m a hardcore materialist, not a dualist. But I expect that at some point we’ll start to see that conscious subjectivity is not an epiphenomenon of individual brains at all. We are embodied creatures, social animals in a state of constant exchange with our surroundings, and I think that the material extension of my subjective experience is the material totality, as lived from a certain point in space-time. In other words that consciousness is a quality of the universe, not one body and certainly not one brain.
     
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    #156 Jay Sub, Feb 20, 2024
    I am happy saying we don't know, we may never know, but let's keep an open mind as we search for the answer
     
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    #157 Jay Sub, Feb 20, 2024
    I don't think it will be long before we understand brains. They already have brainwave to speech working, it's probably only a matter of time before we get pictures, and really unlock the processes of the brain. My money is on us not finding anything that isn't explained best by the biological.
     
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    #158 Jay Sub, Feb 20, 2024
    Just because love is likely to be chemical, doesn't devalue it for me. Our social interactions give our life meaning and purpose, otherwise we really would just be masturbating pointlessly.
     
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    JaySaysYes I identify as someone that is always right

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    #159 JaySaysYes, Feb 20, 2024
    The purpose of life is death, and the purpose of death is to help us to live the one and only life we get.

    Fill your grandchildrens memories, teach them what iot took you 40 years to learn and alert them them to the ways you squianmdered this thing called life.

    Without death, the above is pointless.
     
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    JaySaysYes I identify as someone that is always right

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    #160 JaySaysYes, Feb 20, 2024
    You didn't read the muslim book, you read a daily fail headline, lol. I see you, the person that reached out and latched onto the neartest lifebelt and now thinks he owes it a favour.

    You should read some brian muraresku, preferably his book rather than soundbites on youtwitokagrambook.

    I listened carefully, and I heard your ego go "plop" as it fell out into it's surroundings.

    Anyone can eat a wafer, any day of the week. No prep needed. Large ego emanates out and causes you to think wonderous things. It's called psychosis, fella.
     
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    #161 JaySaysYes, Feb 20, 2024
    Don't involve me in your fantasy.

    Enquiring minds continue the pusuit with "and then what", but you christians stop with "because god" when your intellect hits it's eventual limit.

    ...because you are too simple, or more likely "because god".

    Yep, it really is.

    You'd have done well to start by saying "I don't know anything about electrochemistry but" and you would have save readers some time parsing your nonsense.

    No evidence so far.

    Why exactly do you believe that to be true?

    Right, so you believe we are animals that are somehow separate from our surroundings but have a constant exchange with our surroundings, like it's a symbyosis or something.

    Well, you are getting close, so well done god boy.

    As I said before, we are the surroundings, we are not "gods chosen animals", we can't be, we are an intrinsic feature of this planet equally as every aspect of the planet is, which is a feature of the solar system equally as every planet is, which is an feature of the galaxy, which is a featire of the universe, and on and on it goes. Turtles all the way down (or up, depending on how you hang I spose).
     
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    #162 Jay Sub, Feb 20, 2024
    I get where you're coming from.
     
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    #163 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    You appear to have a surprising degree of faith in your own powers of reasoning for someone who has taken psychedelics. Using mushrooms and LSD I have experienced a woman become a mountain; I have swapped bodies with an old woman in a park; ordered a beer in a pub and gone back to the bar to complain that it is sand and poured it out into a pile to prove my point. I experienced a 40 year life other than my own; travelled to the outer limits of the universe then watched it implode and explode about 3 times a second; climbed a stone cross in a churchyard, pissed from the top of it and in doing so conjured a lightening storm and torrential rain.
    These things didn’t really happen of course. They were illusions caused by my having ingested certain molecules that rewired my brain. The young woman stayed as she was and humoured the jabbering loon who said she was a mountain; the old woman passed me by on her way to bingo without for one second being bodyswapped with the punk rocker with the dilated pupils; the barman was pretty pissed off when I poured a pint out on the bar whilst madly ranting. The man whose house I had broken into was scared when he came home to find a druggie in his sitting room saying “get out of my house”; I wasn’t at the outer limits of the universe I was hanging out of an attic window listening to Teardrop Explodes; a storm just happened to break when I pissed from the cross.
    What I did learn from using psychedelics is that fundamental aspects of what we take to be the objective world are mental constructions and that chemical changes can rip reality to shreds like it was paper. And if that’s true on drugs then why should the complex manifestation I take for reality when straight be any more objective? Serious question, and I’d seriously be interested in your answer.
     
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    #164 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    Btw obviously I haven’t yet been able to acquire and read the book you mention. It’s certainly true that early Christian monks got rewired by eating a restricted diet of mouldy bread with ergot whilst holed up in caves. Read Athanasius’ “Life of St Anthony the Great”.
     
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    #165 Muppet, Feb 20, 2024
    In fact the experience of receiving Grace through the Eucharist is of the ego dwindling almost to nothing. And anything good that comes through me is Christ in me. I surrender and God acts. No credit to muppet, I’m just a tiny speck.
     
  16. JaySaysYes
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    #166 JaySaysYes, Feb 21, 2024
    We don't exist in an objective reality, it's impossible. If you have ever had a friend that is colour blind then you'll have experienced a sober example of subjective reality, or if you have ever had a severely blocked nose and been uable to smell your own farts when eeryone around you is swooning from the stench.

    Our brains shield us from 99% of reality that our five gross senses experience. It would be like reading a book where only every 100th word was visible.

    We are consciously aware of a small fraction of what passes as reality.
     
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    #167 Muppet, Feb 21, 2024
    Indeed. But I think the point I was trying to make is that psychedelic experience shows that even the 1% is open to non-trivial skeptical doubt. So what we take for “common sense” or “self evident” is open to question.
     
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    #168 JaySaysYes, Feb 21, 2024
    Maybe. I'm not sure what psychedelic experiences might show since the experience itself remains part of subjective reality.

    Add another book to your reading list: "the spirit molecule" by rick strassman. Make sure you get to the end, though :p
     
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    #169 Muppet, Feb 21, 2024
    Well looky here - if I am going to obtain and read these books (which I’m minded to do cos they sound interesting) can I request that you resist the temptation to indulge in quite so much ridicule in our ongoing discussions? Yeah there are Christians who are closed minded, self-righteous and frankly pretty stupid. There are also “brands” of Christianity that are EXACTLY as you characterise them. But I am a critical thinker and have arrived at my current position through critical thinking. Also I have no interest whatsoever in “converting” you or “winning”. I want to understand where you’re coming from because it interests me, I have no agenda to tear apart everything you say.
     
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    #170 Muppet, Feb 21, 2024
    Also, I’ve got a pretty thick skin and can tolerate most forms of verbal pisstaking or abuse… but DON’T accuse me of getting my information from the Daily fucking Mail!!!!!
     
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    #171 littleguy3, Feb 21, 2024
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2024
    I don't know about this particular thread, but since I've been on this forum and particularly since I started reading the Chastity & Christianity thread and contributing to it, I have become much more certain of my belief in God & Jesus. Much of that has come from my personal study of the Bible as it relates to the topics of sexuality & marriage. I have seen God's purpose for sexuality & marriage more clearly and consistently from the opening chapters of Genesis all the way thru to the closing pages of the book of Revelation. Unfortunately, many of God's people written about in the Bible haven't always followed His plan and lived accordiing to His guidelines. But that makes the Bible even more believable and compelling; it exposes the warts in all of us and provides a contrast for understanding the wisdom of God's instruction.

    For example, one of the more compelling story lines is how the twelve disciples / apostles of Jesus were arguing right up to the week before his crucifixion about which of them would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus predicted that they would scatter like sheep when He was arrested and crucified. And He was right. Even Peter, one of His closest disciples, denied HIm 3 times on the night of Jesus' trial. Yet, once they met the resurrected Christ, they were transformed; so much so that they all willingly were tortured & died a martyr's death rather than deny their faith.

    The sanctity of marriage and sex are woven throughout the pages of scripture. And they are so important because they are metaphors for the relationship God wants to have with us. "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me." "I will never leave you nor forsake you." "Now this is eternal life, that they may know the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom (God) has sent." "I have come that they may have life and have it in all it's fullness."

    Sexuality is such a powerful aspect of our humanity. It ensures the longevity and growth of our species. But is also the most significant draw away from living according to God's design for a covenant love relationship in marriage and with Him. When I discovered CM and found so many men willing to lock up their penises so that they could maintain their integrity in their sexual relatiionship with their partner, and so that they could retain their sexual energy in order to demonstrate their love and devotion towards their partner, I was hooked. This is what the biblical model promotes. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love others as yourself." Locking up my cock so that I could overcome my sexual addiction and love my wife sacrificially unlocked the mystery of God's design for marriage & sex.

    My in depth study of the sexuality in the New Testament revealed that sexuality is the greatest threat to Christianity, but also to mankind, something that's evident in the tabloid newspapers today. I found 14 different Greek words referring to sexual immorality more than 148 times in 24 of the 27 NT books. The only 3 books that they don't appear in are the 3 shortest books which are 1 page letters. The emphasis on covenant love and warnings about sexual immorality are clear in the Bible. As I have casually read through the Old Testament, I find this emphasis throughout, something I never noticed before.

    There are about 40 different authors of the 66 books of the Bible (a few are unnamed and difficult to ascertain their authorship). They were written and compiled over a few thousand years. Yet the consistency of their message is incredible. Only now with our vast knowledge of the universe and our humanity including our understanding of the brain and how it works can we fully comprehend some of the truth written in scripture. Example: lust, porn, and sex outside of marriage are sins against your body (1 Corinthians 6:18). How so? Because it wires our brain to be drawn to unhealthy behaviors that cause addiction and draw us away from healthy relationships. See Gary Wilson's website, "Your Brain on Porn", for evidence of the effects of unhealthy sexual activity on our brains. That said, I don't think these 40-ish authors could fully grasp the consistency of the message they were weaving without divine inspiration.

    Nothing that science is discovering about our universe and our humanity threatens my belief in God. I see scientific discovery as another form of truth. It's impossible for the Jays or anyone else to disprove the existence of God. We can study the universe looking for clues of an intelligent designer or lack thereof. I believe there is strong evidence in the biblical accounts to support the existence of God. Science is gathering good evidence to determine the How, What and When of our existence. But what It can't supply that the Bible provides is an explanation for Who and Why. We all have to remain inquisitive and open-minded to discover the truth. If scripture is true, our eternal fates rest upon our beliefs about those truths.
     
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    atxmtb Long term member

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    #172 atxmtb, Feb 21, 2024
    Excellent contribution. It is really a shock and quite apparent that so much of the New Testament is about sex. I suppose it shouldn't be shocking, after all, it is an extremely powerful component of humanity. Those images of blue haired ladies clutching their rosaries is not who the New Testament is targeting. It's normal guys and girls with strong desire for life with all the urges we experience. The more I dig the more truth I read.
     
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    JaySaysYes I identify as someone that is always right

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    #173 JaySaysYes, Feb 21, 2024
    Wow, I didn't know you could read ancient hebrew, aramaic, ancient greek, and nabataean.

    Thankfully, the editors of the books you now read have hacked them into such a state they no longer resemble the orginal stories from the roman era, and that is where a consistent message comes from. Good work modern editors, you made magic happen that fools so many.
     
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    #174 Muppet, Feb 21, 2024
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2024
    This is where the whole “sola scriptura” bollocks is so harmful.
    I’m very impressed that you ARE able to read those things in the original, @JaySaysYes, Hebrew looks very hard, let alone Aramaic. Plus of course one would need to know a great deal about the culture of the time to really grasp the nuances of the text as it would have been for a contemporary readership.
     
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    Jay Sub "Smaller is better"

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    #175 Jay Sub, Feb 21, 2024
    At no time during any of my hallucinogenic experiences was I unaware of the reason I was having hallucinations. You know it's not a normal situation.

    If we can't agree that we experience, under normal circumstances, the physical world in similar way to each other as sentient individuals, then debate is in trouble. We're back to simulation theory or other possibilities.

    When you say "a complex manifestation I take as reality"
    Are you 100% sure, nothing could change my mind? I can only say I'm 99% sure you are wrong, but I'm open to hearing more evidence
     
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