New thinking atheist podcast is about a book called The Illusion of God's Presence by neuroscientist Dr. John C. Wathey . Seth Andrews speaks with the author.
I am planning to buy the book, looks very interesting.
For many it is a feeling of knowing that God lives within them or that the universe is somehow mindful and loving. Others experience the sudden and dramatic sensation of a divine presence, often in a moment of crisis or despair. I don’t accept the supernatural interpretation of these feelings, but the feelings are real. I’ve felt them myself, and I see them as a great puzzle of human nature that cries out for a scientific explanation...The book challenges the assumption that religious feelings are uniquely human by uncovering roots that go deeply into behaviors we share with many other animals.
I read that book and found his hypothesis interesting and compelling. I think I would also recommend reading Alpha God along with this.
I think that religion is good at binding us to it by tickling our latent neural model of our mother (as is explored in the book you are planning on buying) and by exploiting our instinct to follow a strong Alpha.
fetchface wrote:I read that book and found his hypothesis interesting and compelling. I think I would also recommend reading Alpha God along with this.
I think that religion is good at binding us to it by tickling our latent neural model of our mother (as is explored in the book you are planning on buying) and by exploiting our instinct to follow a strong Alpha.
Yes and I think this is why belief in organized religion is a net bad for society. It infantilizes the population when growing up, leaving parents, and learning to make one's own decisions should be the goal.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
fetchface wrote:I read that book and found his hypothesis interesting and compelling. I think I would also recommend reading Alpha God along with this.
I think that religion is good at binding us to it by tickling our latent neural model of our mother (as is explored in the book you are planning on buying) and by exploiting our instinct to follow a strong Alpha.
If you ponder in your own mind just who do you meet? No one is there but you. Now of course the mind can manifest almost anything you ask of it. You want a vision you will get one. You want to meet Christ he will show up and talk to you. No matter what you wish your mind can give it to you. Stop asking your mind to do these things and just be happy with yourself.
When Christ talked about the spirit of truth he was talking about you going inside and pondering by yourself. Don't bring anybody along for the ride.
Franktalk wrote:If you ponder in your own mind just who do you meet? No one is there but you. Now of course the mind can manifest almost anything you ask of it. You want a vision you will get one. You want to meet Christ he will show up and talk to you. No matter what you wish your mind can give it to you. Stop asking your mind to do these things and just be happy with yourself.
When Christ talked about the spirit of truth he was talking about you going inside and pondering by yourself. Don't bring anybody along for the ride.
Franktalk wrote:If you ponder in your own mind just who do you meet? No one is there but you. Now of course the mind can manifest almost anything you ask of it. You want a vision you will get one. You want to meet Christ he will show up and talk to you. No matter what you wish your mind can give it to you. Stop asking your mind to do these things and just be happy with yourself.
When Christ talked about the spirit of truth he was talking about you going inside and pondering by yourself. Don't bring anybody along for the ride.
There is something similar in TM. It's a bit like Joseph Smith's "study it out in your mind" part of the revelatory process. After some images and ideas come, you try to figure out what they mean and then pray for confirmation. The scrying process used by Edward Kelley when he was John Dee's "glass-looker" was similar. Dee would write down what Kelley described and then applied all sorts of interpretive tools to the result.
Maksutov wrote:There is something similar in TM. It's a bit like Joseph Smith's "study it out in your mind" part of the revelatory process. After some images and ideas come, you try to figure out what they mean and then pray for confirmation. The scrying process used by Edward Kelley when he was John Dee's "glass-looker" was similar. Dee would write down what Kelley described and then applied all sorts of interpretive tools to the result.
There is a part of me that still wants to believe in jesus and the LDS church, but it is not worth it because there is no good reason, and the Holy Ghost probably doesn't exists.
DoubtingThomas wrote:There is a part of me that still wants to believe in Jesus and the LDS church, but it is not worth it because there is no good reason, and the Holy Ghost probably doesn't exists.
Exactly what is meant by a contrite spirit and a broken heart? To me it means to cut the ties which bind us to this earth. For a moment let go of everything except for your own mind. Leave all earthly desires behind. Then ask your own mind to tell you truth, no matter what truth is. Have no expectations. Be as a child, open to everything.
It will start slowly. You will be led. I jumped at some ideas and instantly assumed way too much. Then had to backup many times. Over three years truth (which is only a few basic universal ideas ) came to me. Many things I did not want to be true. But after it all came in it made sense.
Now I know why I am here. I know death is an illusion. I see everything around me with a purpose. Even the stupid stuff. No religion is true. None of them.
Fortunately, we are not left with emotion alone to discern God’s hand in our lives. Reason, experience, counsel from others, and other forms of revelation may all assist us. In fact, I notice that emotion plays into only some of my spiritual experiences, and often only in a secondary way. More often the spiritual promptings and confirmations I receive come very quietly as something simply occurs to me with a kind of rightness that has no real emotion attached to it at all. Other times my emotions have been running high, but the clear voice of the Spirit is utterly calm and outside of the range of my thoughts or experience. Some of my clearest spiritual experiences have come as a question or statement in my mind that completely surprised me, or that took me a moment to take in and understand. Others have come as a pure love beyond my previous capacity to imagine. I have received impressions to do something that, when acted on, produced an amazing but utterly unpredictable result that was a clear answer to a prayer. And at least a few times God has simply told me something which was later confirmed but that I had no way of knowing by any other means. I expect that people from many religious backgrounds may have such experiences, and I am comfortable imagining God in many of them, but they are not easily explained away as a self-produced warm feeling. I am comfortable with being tentative about what I conclude from such experiences beyond the experience itself.
Wendy Ulrich, "'Believest thou…?': Faith, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Psychology of Religious Experience," Proceedings of the 2005 FAIR Conference (2005)