Bucky
Member
Hungry? :DI tend to think that when people do not feel threatened, are not hungry and have an education not based on bronze-age religions, they are kinder, less selfish, and less violent.
Hungry? :DI tend to think that when people do not feel threatened, are not hungry and have an education not based on bronze-age religions, they are kinder, less selfish, and less violent.
Ugh.In the past, Nobelists like Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Charles Richet, John William Strutt, and J. J. Thompson and others of the best scientsts such as Sir William Crookes, Sir Robert Boyle, and Louis Pasteur studied psychical phenomenon or expressed "heretical beliefs" because funding for research was handled differently than it is today.
I just ate! Thank you for asking.Hungry? :D
I tend to think that when people do not feel threatened, are not hungry and have an education not based on bronze-age religions, they are kinder, less selfish, and less violent.
But that's the optimist in me.
Science shows that racial prejudices are just nonsense, at a genetic level, we are all very similar to each other. I assert that the rising tide of morality and moral acuity (being able to see what is moral because you are less dumb) did have something to do with the rise of education and scientific progress.
Nope. If that was true, the God crowd would still have a much stronger hold on us. Many faith traditions make claims about reality that science has shown to be false. There are still people who say that reality is wrong because it does not conform to what their religion says, but the cognitive dissonance for these people is incredible. To try to hold two mutually exclusive concepts in your head (reality v. 'god') must be exhausting and probably manifests itself in other anti-social behaviors.
Let's just not give all the credit to science. That's all I'm saying.
Well, there's the Old Testament, and the New Testament, lumped together from the earliest days of Christianity. Our present-day morality isn't primarily from the Old Testament. To be fair, the New Testament speaks much more closely to modern notions of morality. Some religious people who base their morality on the NT won't be going far wrong: the NT, particularly the four Gospels, presented a system of morals that was well ahead of its time.
This is the slight of hand at the heart of the materialist paradigm: Their press kit is always going on about how the only thing that matters to them is concrete fact - and that this is what sets them apart from those other people who resort to self-rationalizing metaphysics that are never definitively articulated or understood. When materialists resort to the same sort of metaphysics to fill in the gaps in their worldview, they just assert that 'that's not what we meant'. When pushed to explain, they inevitably default to "we haven't figured that out yet...but we know we will one day". So much for basing everything on concrete fact. It is a system that has a constant moving of the goalposts built into it so it can never be wrong.
I think the trick for intellectuals today - if you dare call yourself an intellectual - is to attempt to see beyond the blinders that are forced upon you by the current orthodoxy of your time. The current orthodoxy of our time - is clearly this reductionistic materialistic philosophy that has commandeered "Science" - as if the two were one and the same. What perhaps is even more astonishing with today's orthodoxy of materialism, is some of the best scientists of the 20th century (Wheeler, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Von Neumann) reached a conclusion about reality that was far from "materialistic".
I agree strongly with the corresponding attitudes of "true belief" between fundamentalism and fundamaterialism.There are certainly differences, but I see far more similarities. Personally, I would like to see us move past this mythological structure. I keep coming back to Skeptiko because this is where I see a lot of people rejecting the false dichotomy of "science vs religion". Once we (as a society) get past that, maybe something beautiful can emerge. Until then, I'll just sit here in my bubble of chaotic uncertainty :)
I tend to think that when people do not feel threatened, are not hungry and have an education not based on bronze-age religions, they are kinder, less selfish, and less violent..
Then you need to be willing to concede that some very valid scientific methodologies are being applied to consciousness studies... and there is scientific evidence pointing at the possibility that mind does not necessarily = brain.I concede that point, well stated.
I don't think we can 'science' our way out of all problems, my rhetoric in this forum has been tilted in that direction as a reaction to the discussion.
I think the answer, "I don't know" is a valid position to take. It is also valid and appropriate for me to question whether or not someone else's answer is based on evidence or faith (pretending to know things you do not know).When pushed to explain, they inevitably default to "we haven't figured that out yet...but we know we will one day". So much for basing everything on concrete fact. It is a system that has a constant moving of the goalposts built into it so it can never be wrong.
... he makes this extraordinary claim for so called "moral emotions" for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever ...Then he makes this extraordinary claim for so called "moral emotions" for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever and comes across as nothing but an attempt to use mythological narrative to account for morality in terms of a materialist belief system.
The statement, "I am sitting in a chair" typed on a keyboard and appearing on a computer forum is probably true. Given your body of knowledge and your opinion of me, that probability might go up or down.And yet these are the same people who go on ad nauseam about "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" for everybody else.
I tend to think that when people do not feel threatened, are not hungry and have an education not based on bronze-age religions, they are kinder, less selfish, and less violent.
Not you :)I just ate! Thank you for asking.
Richard, are your a researcher?Ugh.
YOU can do the research, if you want to. The problem is that the research that has been done is all pointing one way -> no extra sensory perception,
Then get to citing, because I have been reading a lot of articles and papers and I have not seen anything I would consider valid in this area. If you can demonstrate something, you should immediately apply to the James Randi educational foundation and get you that million bucks they are offering to anyone who can prove a claim like that.My guess is that you have never even looked at the data from research on the subject of non-physical communication.
Ha. I'm reminded of the fish who screams 'There is no such thing as water!'There is no 'materialist belief system'.
I get that you were going for a cut, but now I don't know what the cut was supposed to be.Not you :)
What you wrote...
And I am reminded of the time I didn't want to get out of the pool so kept diving under the water when my mom tried telling me that it was time to go home.Ha. I'm reminded of the fish who screams 'There is no such thing as water!'
Then get to citing,