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Is Atheism in compatible with a belief in the Afterlife?
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Pat D. Almighty wrote: »The proof of the pudding is in the eating I suppose. The concept of God, as described by most religions is there to be experienced subjectively. Some call it God, some call it the Dao, some call it emptiness, but whatever you want to call it, the substance and nature of it remains the same. Go take a bite. If you don't like the pudding, just pretend it was just your mind playing tricks on you. Whatever the means.
With respect, the concept of a God is not in any sense comparable to Taoism, as the former includes a deity and attendant mythology whereas the latter at its core is a philosophical approach to understanding the universe. If you read the Tao te ching, you won't find any Gods, Devils or miracles. For all that, I take your point that what they do have in common is that they are subjective understandings of our universe.
The problem arises when we refer to them as truth or fact, so while it is reasonable to state that this God or that philosophy is how you subjectively understand the universe, it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that this holds true for anyone else unless you can provide strong supporting evidence to that effect. Many religious people consider atheists arrogant for pointing that out, but then many atheists have been burnt at the stake for pointing it out in the past so I guess that's progress of sorts
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Pat D. Almighty wrote: »The proof of the pudding is in the eating I suppose. The concept of God, as described by most religions is there to be experienced subjectively. Some call it God, some call it the Dao, some call it emptiness, but whatever you want to call it, the substance and nature of it remains the same. Go take a bite. If you don't like the pudding, just pretend it was just your mind playing tricks on you. Whatever the means.
With respect, the concept of a God is not in any sense comparable to Taoism, as the former includes a deity and attendant mythology whereas the latter at its core is a philosophical approach to understanding the universe. If you read the Tao te ching, you won't find any Gods, Devils or miracles. For all that, I take your point that what they do have in common is that they are subjective understandings of our universe.
The problem arises when we refer to them as truth or fact, so while it is reasonable to state that this God or that philosophy is how you subjectively understand the universe, it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that this holds true for anyone else unless you can provide strong supporting evidence to that effect. Many religious people consider atheists arrogant for pointing that out, but then many atheists have been burnt at the stake for pointing it out in the past so I guess that's progress of sorts
With respect, I disagree that a belief in the concept of a god is not comparable with Taoism. It is of my understanding that the Tao is god.0 -
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Mod: Pat D Almighty, do not post on this thread again.
Why not? If you want people to learn, you have to give more than arrogant instruction. Otherwise you're just being intellectually lazy.
I've been accused of making an ad hominem attack, yet nobody has been able to point one out, apart from the hissy fit you're having about me using the word arrogant to describe someone's belief. You already agreed that the poster was being arrogant, so why not let it flow? Should I just stay quiet when someone asserts that my beliefs are deluded? If you want an echo chamber you should probably have posted it as a sticky note at the top of the thread 0 -
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Indeed. Please try to apply that excellent suggestion to yourselfPat D. Almighty wrote: »If you want people to learn, you have to give more than arrogant instruction. Otherwise you're just being intellectually lazy.
No, you called one or more posters "arrogant" which is an anti-social term to apply to another poster. Feel free to say what you like about the beliefs or ideas which are put forward by other posters as ideas, unlike people, do not need to be accorded respect.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »I've been accused of making an ad hominem attack, yet nobody has been able to point one out, apart from the hissy fit you're having about me using the word arrogant to describe someone's belief.
Best response is to show how the ideas and beliefs of other posters are deluded. Again, object to the idea, not to the person. And rebut the idea, not the person.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »You already agreed that the poster was being arrogant, so why not let it flow? Should I just stay quiet when someone asserts that my beliefs are deluded?
Please feel free to have another go on Thursday when your ban expires.0 -
Pat D. Almighty wrote: »Unknowable is a bad word to use to describe what was meant. Unknowable in most Eastern Cultures is often a mistranslation. The concept of something being unknowable in the east relates to attempts to project your beliefs and own personality onto God. Some sects of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions share a similar concept.
It would be useful if you could provide an example of a bad translation on this point.
Let's take an example: not a great one, admittedly, but it will do for our purposes. You may be familiar with a line from Laozi that is often reproduced on pages about Daoism (Dao De Jing, Chapter 56, 'The Mysterious Exellence'):
Those who know it do not speak about it. Those who speak about it do not know it.
In the original Chinese, this is:
知者不言，言者不知
If you don't have Chinese support enabled on your OS you won't see much there, so let's reproduce it in Pinyin.
zhi zhe bu yan, yan zhe bu zhi
Spoken Chinese is notorious for it's homonyms, but this isn't usually an issue in written Chinese, where different characters are used. Zhi 知 means 'to know, be aware of', and zhe 者 is a particle added to a verb or adjective to indicate a continued action or state, so here 'zhi zhe' means 'knowing, or being aware of'. Bu is a negative and can mean 'no, not or won't', and yan means 'say, talk or speak'. The characters are then inverted, so we have 'yan zhe' (speaking) 'bu zhi' (not know). So a very rough translation would be:
knowing not speak, speaking not know
Based on the context of the Dao De Jing, we can expand this to the above rendition (Those who know it do not speak about it etc etc).
As I said, this isn't a great example, but it's the first one that came to mind reading your comments. If you have a better example of what you would consider to be a bad translation from the Dao De Jing, please produce it and we can discuss it further. 0 -
I will edit out the petty insults and reply to the rest given the mods have already dealt with that behaviour.............Pat D. Almighty wrote: »I understand that you have an emotional attachment to the concepts agreed upon with atheistic circles, but until you experience something yourself, I don't think it's wrong for me to call it arrogance if you automatically decide that the person experiencing something doesn't understand what they experienced.
Says the person who "automatically" decides and assumes that my not buying the narrative people build on their experiences must mean I do not, or can not, understand the experiences themselves. So really you are projecting your own failing of understanding, which you are making, onto others, who are not making it.
And the things you claim you DO understand, such as my "emotional attachments" are wholly invented and false. I am sure you understand your own narratives and fantasies. But that neither makes them real, or true. You do not know me, and as far as I know have never spoken to or with me before, do you have no idea what my emotions or attachments are. You just pretend to in order to, as I said before, engage in dismissal of what you can not actually respond to. Pretending to know me after one post, and attacking attributes and biases I do not actually hold, is certainly an example of the "ad hominem" approach you engage in but then deny when accused of it.
That said, I have not heard of a single "experience" espoused by the religious that I fail to understand. So not only do I not know what you are talking about, you make it seem YOU do not know what you are talking about. In fact I have heard few experiences espoused by them that I have not myself experienced too. So the "you do not understand" narrative you are selling could not be more false than it is even if you tried which, I suspect, you are.
What is not being understood, because such people abjectly refuse to explain it in any way, is the leap that is made from such experiences to the conclusions and narratives they claim off the back of them. And that is a VERY different thing. If someone comes out of deep meditation saying they experiences a oneness and connection with everything then I not only understand that experience I have and often continue to have it myself. When they leap from that to "therefore we are all part of a huge plan by a designer god" however then it is not their experience I am failing to understand, but the narrative they have invented off the back of it.
But just like flinging insults of arrogance around, flinging claims of "you do not understand" around is also very easy to do, but much harder to actually make stick. CLAIMING someone does not understand something is something anyone can do. Actually showing, explaining, and laying out what it is that they are not understanding, and how, is harder. And you have yet to even make the attempt, let alone do so.
What makes this even more a fail on your part is that so keen are you to call everything and everyone arrogant, you have to invent things they did not actually do or say. For example when you write "I don't think it's wrong for me to call it arrogance if you automatically decide that the person experiencing something doesn't understand what they experienced.". That is a massive "if" you slip in there because what you write describes something I have not even remotely done. I have made no such assumption. You wholesale invented that narrative of assumption yourself. Where DO you get all this straw? How wonderful a word "if" can be when it allows one to bypass ENTIRELY replying to what someone actually did write and slip in a response, couched behind the "if", of something that did not even remotely say. Perhaps reply to what I HAVE said next time rather than the ..........."IF you said something else other than you did then........" approach you are so reliant on here.
So what I DID say was that their behaviors and lack of even the remotest ability to substantiate their claims om evem the smallest way leaves one WONDERING IF they in fact understand their own experiences in the first place, rather than the people they espouse those experiences to and that I would be more likely to SUGGEST the former BEFORE I were to suggest the latter.
See the difference? I simply, in no way, made the assumptions of which you speak. I said A) It leaves me wondering and
if I WERE to make assumptions there are assumptions I would make BEFORE the assumption you are demonstrably engaging in about all and sundry on the thread.
But as I said you would need to be more specific about which experiences you are talking about because in YEARS of engaging with this subject and topic I have yet to hear ANY experience that I do not understand quite well and I have not heard MANY experiences that I have not myself had.
But that people have experiences they do not understand is something we see all the time. The brain plays tricks on us all the time and there are a wealth of subjective experience that people have for which they do not have the knowledge to explain or understand. And quite often they build entirely fantastical narratives to explain them, when a simple talk with the average neuro-scientist would explain them quite roundly.
Hell people do not even understand their subjective reaction to things like "art" half the time. But meanwhile real scientists are actually formulating a theory of artistic appreciation which explains it nicely. Despite the fact people historically were prone to claiming science could never touch the subject at all.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »The concept of God, as described by most religions is there to be experienced subjectively.
I have never sat down and done a comparative study of religions to understand what "most" religions are claiming. Perhaps you can show your workings on this one as to which "concept of god" you are specifically referring to and how you have established it is "the" concept that "most" religions describe.
However speaking of my own personal experiences, the majority....... nay pretty much the totality..... of religions I have encountered are founded on the core claim that the concept of their "god" is a non-human intelligent and intentional agent.
Evidence for the existence of any non-human intelligent or intentional agents is at this time precisely zero however. Both in AND out of our universe. A fact not changed by anyone whinging that some guy in the corner has had an experience (s)he has not understood and therefore no one else has either.0 -
nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »I will edit out the petty insults and reply to the rest given the mods have already dealt with that behaviour.............Pat D. Almighty wrote: »I understand that you have an emotional attachment to the concepts agreed upon with atheistic circles, but until you experience something yourself, I don't think it's wrong for me to call it arrogance if you automatically decide that the person experiencing something doesn't understand what they experienced.
Says the person who "automatically" decides and assumes that my not buying the narrative people build on their experiences must mean I do not, or can not, understand the experiences themselves. So really you are projecting your own failing of understanding, which you are making, onto others, who are not making it.
And the things you claim you DO understand, such as my "emotional attachments" are wholly invented and false. I am sure you understand your own narratives and fantasies. But that neither makes them real, or true. You do not know me, and as far as I know have never spoken to or with me before, do you have no idea what my emotions or attachments are. You just pretend to in order to, as I said before, engage in dismissal of what you can not actually respond to. Pretending to know me after one post, and attacking attributes and biases I do not actually hold, is certainly an example of the "ad hominem" approach you engage in but then deny when accused of it.
That said, I have not heard of a single "experience" espoused by the religious that I fail to understand. So not only do I not know what you are talking about, you make it seem YOU do not know what you are talking about. In fact I have heard few experiences espoused by them that I have not myself experienced too. So the "you do not understand" narrative you are selling could not be more false than it is even if you tried which, I suspect, you are.
What is not being understood, because such people abjectly refuse to explain it in any way, is the leap that is made from such experiences to the conclusions and narratives they claim off the back of them. And that is a VERY different thing. If someone comes out of deep meditation saying they experiences a oneness and connection with everything then I not only understand that experience I have and often continue to have it myself. When they leap from that to "therefore we are all part of a huge plan by a designer god" however then it is not their experience I am failing to understand, but the narrative they have invented off the back of it.
But just like flinging insults of arrogance around, flinging claims of "you do not understand" around is also very easy to do, but much harder to actually make stick. CLAIMING someone does not understand something is something anyone can do. Actually showing, explaining, and laying out what it is that they are not understanding, and how, is harder. And you have yet to even make the attempt, let alone do so.
What makes this even more a fail on your part is that so keen are you to call everything and everyone arrogant, you have to invent things they did not actually do or say. For example when you write "I don't think it's wrong for me to call it arrogance if you automatically decide that the person experiencing something doesn't understand what they experienced.". That is a massive "if" you slip in there because what you write describes something I have not even remotely done. I have made no such assumption. You wholesale invented that narrative of assumption yourself. Where DO you get all this straw? How wonderful a word "if" can be when it allows one to bypass ENTIRELY replying to what someone actually did write and slip in a response, couched behind the "if", of something that did not even remotely say. Perhaps reply to what I HAVE said next time rather than the ..........."IF you said something else other than you did then........" approach you are so reliant on here.
So what I DID say was that their behaviors and lack of even the remotest ability to substantiate their claims om evem the smallest way leaves one WONDERING IF they in fact understand their own experiences in the first place, rather than the people they espouse those experiences to and that I would be more likely to SUGGEST the former BEFORE I were to suggest the latter.
See the difference? I simply, in no way, made the assumptions of which you speak. I said A) It leaves me wondering and if I WERE to make assumptions there are assumptions I would make BEFORE the assumption you are demonstrably engaging in about all and sundry on the thread.
But as I said you would need to be more specific about which experiences you are talking about because in YEARS of engaging with this subject and topic I have yet to hear ANY experience that I do not understand quite well and I have not heard MANY experiences that I have not myself had.
But that people have experiences they do not understand is something we see all the time. The brain plays tricks on us all the time and there are a wealth of subjective experience that people have for which they do not have the knowledge to explain or understand. And quite often they build entirely fantastical narratives to explain them, when a simple talk with the average neuro-scientist would explain them quite roundly.
Hell people do not even understand their subjective reaction to things like "art" half the time. But meanwhile real scientists are actually formulating a theory of artistic appreciation which explains it nicely. Despite the fact people historically were prone to claiming science could never touch the subject at all.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »The concept of God, as described by most religions is there to be experienced subjectively.
I have never sat down and done a comparative study of religions to understand what "most" religions are claiming. Perhaps you can show your workings on this one as to which "concept of god" you are specifically referring to and how you have established it is "the" concept that "most" religions describe.
However speaking of my own personal experiences, the majority....... nay pretty much the totality..... of religions I have encountered are founded on the core claim that the concept of their "god" is a non-human intelligent and intentional agent.
Evidence for the existence of any non-human intelligent or intentional agents is at this time precisely zero however. Both in AND out of our universe. A fact not changed by anyone whinging that some guy in the corner has had an experience (s)he has not understood and therefore no one else has either.
In the majority of religious traditions, there is a way to experience what is called God/The Universe/The Dao etc. From what I gather from your posts, you've already experienced the nothingness that one is said to feel when at union with 'it' . I am assuming that you hold the belief that consciousness is generated in the brain. If my assumption is true, then could you explain to me what your understanding is of incidents where people in deep meditative states are able to obtain information that they would not have been previously aware of?
For example, there is enough proof that 'remote viewing' is, to use a clumsy word, real. This would suggest to me that there is a higher conscious intelligence other than our own consciousness.0 -
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Pat D. Almighty wrote: »In the majority of religious traditions
Again I have not seen any such workings, least of all from you. So I will have to take your word for it. All I can say is that the majority of traditions I have been exposed to personally have a concept of a non-human intelligent intentional agent. Some of them claim you can commune or experience it in some way. Some don't.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »I am assuming that you hold the belief that consciousness is generated in the brain.
It is not that I hold to the belief as such, so much as I have seen absolutely zero evidence of any other source of it, and plenty of evidence that the brain is the source of it. So the conclusion that it is generated in/by the brain is the only one currently open to me.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »could you explain to me what your understanding is of incidents where people in deep meditative states are able to obtain information that they would not have been previously aware of?
I can not explain incidents I have not been made aware of. I am aware of no such incident, let alone in any controlled situation that would verify such a thing has actually occurred.
The same is true of much NDE experience, which you mentioned on another thread. Under controlled situations NDE experience pretty much falls away. When appealing to anecdote in completely uncontrolled situations however there is always plenty of claims of people "obtaining information they should otherwise supposedly be unaware of".
So perhaps if you can give some specific examples of what it is you are talking about, I can work with them further. But I am afraid vague questions can only result in vague answers.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »For example, there is enough proof that 'remote viewing' is, to use a clumsy word, real.
Indeed? Well by all means present this "proof" for consideration because I am A) entirely unaware of it at this time and not likely to simply take your word for it.Pat D. Almighty wrote: »This would suggest to me that there is a higher conscious intelligence other than our own consciousness.
That would be quite a leap though. Even if remote viewing were to be verified as "real" that would just be evidence of some new faculty / attribute of our own intelligence that we were previously unaware of.
Going from that to "Therefore there is some other conscious intelligence" is an unjustifiable leap. A complete non-sequitur.
Some new discovery about our own consciousness does not magically mean there are OTHER consciousness out there.0 -
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