This is your brain, this is your brain on god

[Nero]

To be honest with you i have not read this article so I don't know its view point but I have read other articles on the subject and really did not feel like taking the effort to look for them.

http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/magick/createsgod.htm

The point of this post is mainly for the hope it might help someone make sense of themselves. The article mentions something along the lines of there being a part of the brain that gives you the feeling of a religious experience. Dispite this somehow individuals interpert this as proof of religious experiences being something more than experience. How they make it to that conclution various but in the end they think they know the answer even tho the person next to them just had the same thing happen in their brain and is completely convinced in themselves of a different truth.

[Pyramidsonmars]

oops...nvm

[Pyramidsonmars]

quite intresting really.

The idea that we might physically account for religious experience is something that can be used both ways. One might argue that a religious experience is less "magical" because we can physically see how the brain "creates" things, but on the other hand the Bible says our bodies are "temples", with our "selfs" being somewhere inside that temple.

We tend to be demystified when we can account for spiritual things in a material/physical way, but in reality we have to understand that the creation, and the law of nature that comes wiht it, is the medium that God uses to reach us. His own laws of nature are not ones that are ever broken, but perhaps altered by the "programmer/creator" God. Jesus says he is God, and that he can turn water into wine. First hand we take this as a bending of the laws of nature. "How can the chemical components change due to the authority of one man's will", but on the other hand the bible says that God sustains and controls all existence. So when the roots of a vine dig into the ground, draw water up, produce fruit from that water that can be fermented we can conclude that Jesus (by whome the world was made) is correct in saying this without any unbelievability to it.

I odn't know how on topic I remained; I hope there is leneancy for being stoned

[siSTARindigo]

I don't think that Jesus ever said he was god, anymore than we are. All a spark off of his divine flame. Jesus was no more god than we are, and I have never heard of him claiming such. He said he was the son of GOD, which again, we all are. We are all a piece of him. Jesus just had ascended high enough to know more than most in his time. He had tapped into his higher self, just like Mother Mary, Buddah, Dali Lahma, St. Germain.



Eva

[siSTARindigo]

I tried to edit this and timed out. So here is what I forgot. I am stoned too, I think most of us are stoned when we are on this site. Either stoned or really bummin'.

Science and spirituality are both so alike. This article is like the prosecution in the Emily Rose case.

People need to be a bit more open minded, after all it is just a nice way of saying your narrow minded.

Just because YOU can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. And I know what part of your brain they are talking about. The pineal gland, aka your third eye, aka your 6th chakra.

[Breukelen advocaat]

NY Times 1/22/06

The Nonbeliever

Questions for Daniel C. Dennett about his book Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

The philosopher and author talks about why he feels sure there is no God, how a scientific study can be applied to religion and what it means to be a "Darwinian fundamentalist".


Q: How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist's microscope to something as intangible as belief? I don't know about you, but I find St. Paul's and St. Peter's pretty physical.

But your new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," is not about cathedrals. It's about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease. That itself is a scientific claim, and I think it is false. Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can. I think the time has come to shed our taboo that says, "Oh, let's just tiptoe by this, we don't have to study this." People think they know a lot about religion. But they don't know.

So what can you tell us about God? Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world - that's a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.

Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him. Isn't it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don't need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.

Didn't religion spring up in its earliest forms in connection with the weather, the desire to make sense of rain and lightning? We have a built-in, very potent hair-trigger tendency to find agency in things that are not agents, like snow falling off the roof.

There was so much infant mortality in the past, which must have played a large role in encouraging people to believe in an afterlife. When a person dies, we can't just turn that off. We go on thinking about that person as if that person were still alive. Our inability to turn off our people-seer and our people-hearer naturally turns into our hallucinations of ghosts, our sense that they are still with us.

But they are still with us, through the process of memory. These aren't just memories.

I take it you do not subscribe to the idea of an everlasting soul, which is part of almost every religion. Ugh. I certainly don't believe in the soul as an enduring entity. Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.

That strikes me as a very reductive and uninteresting approach to religious feeling. Love can be studied scientifically, too.

But what's the point of that? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile to spend your time and research money looking for a cure for AIDS? How about if we study hatred and fear? Don't you think that would be worthwhile?

Traditionally, evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould insisted on keeping a separation between hard science and less knowable realms like religion. He was the evolutionist laureate of the U.S., and everybody got their Darwin from Steve. The trouble was he gave a rather biased view of evolution. He called me a Darwinian fundamentalist.

Which I imagine was his idea of a put-down, since he thought evolutionists should not apply their theories to religion. Churches make a great show about the creed, but they don't really care. A lot of the evangelicals don't really care what you believe as long as you say the right thing and do the right thing and put a lot of money in the collection box.

I take it you are not a churchgoer. No, not really. Sometimes I go to church for the music.

Yes, the church gave us Bach, in addition to some fairly spectacular architecture and painting. Churches have given us great treasures. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
DEBORAH SOLOMON

[siSTARindigo]

I hope the above poster doesn't mind, but I will be copying this into another thread. It is a great article, thank you!

Eva

[Pyramidsonmars]

I don't think that Jesus ever said he was god, anymore than we are. All a spark off of his divine flame. Jesus was no more god than we are, and I have never heard of him claiming such. He said he was the son of GOD, which again, we all are. We are all a piece of him. Jesus just had ascended high enough to know more than most in his time. He had tapped into his higher self, just like Mother Mary, Buddah, Dali Lahma, St. Germain.

Eva

Jesus says that he is the Son of Man. You're right in saying he never said "I am God", but he implies it in a way that, unless you choose to ignore it, would mean he was at least of divine nature. Jesus said: "Even before the creation, there I am". "I am" is the name God gives himself in the bible a couple of times. The one who simply "is" without any beginning or end, who needs no creator. Jesus also implies that he has authority to forgive sins, which the pharisees say is blasphemous because "only God can forgive sins".

To quote my favorite author CS Lewis:

'I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunaticâ??on a level with the man who says he is a poached eggâ??or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.'

[siSTARindigo]

I am running into this a lot here. The problem is your taking "jesus's word" from the bible. Jesus knew that duality was all part of the 3D "school" we call life. The time of Jesus was WAY different then now also. You can't take his word for word statements THEN and try and explain the now. Especially since most of his word for word statements came from the bible, that was written by men. Then edited by the church. There are now about 30 versions of the bible, all of which have been translated at least as many times.

Jesus knew he was a piece of god, just like you and me and everyone else. He didn't walk on water. He was a mear human, yet he had tapped into his higher self. Something we ALL have. Jesus isn't the only one to have accomplished this. Buddah, Dali Lahma, Mother Mary.

And your quote is a bunch of crap too. Was the author of this quote there when jesus spoke? were you? This is how rumors get started. People blab about things that they didn't witness. And this debate is so old, people have been blabbing about it for a long time. Just because there is a lot of crap out there doesn't mean there isn't a true story hidden away. It isn't like we can just walk up to jesus and ask him what really happend on Fox news.

Eva