Did Jesus Exist? Joseph Atwill Vs. Steven Crowder |386|

I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve had an OBE, but a few days ago I laid down in bed and my head just...started buzzing. It wasn’t like being lightheaded, which happens sometimes when I start breathing too deeply too early in meditation, this felt like I had a handheld electric massager inside my head. From what I’ve read in the links you’ve all provided, it’s apparently some sort of vibrational state?

It’s definitely something I haven’t felt before, have any of you felt anything like it?
 
I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve had an OBE, but a few days ago I laid down in bed and my head just...started buzzing. It wasn’t like being lightheaded, which happens sometimes when I start breathing too deeply too early in meditation, this felt like I had a handheld electric massager inside my head. From what I’ve read in the links you’ve all provided, it’s apparently some sort of vibrational state?

It’s definitely something I haven’t felt before, have any of you felt anything like it?
I havent no, but yes it is very commonly reported by people saying that they experience this just before leaving their body. Its very commonly reported, even amongst the more popular/famous OBErs.
 
Mainstream science is getting in on the obe action, and appears to be one step ahead of us:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality


... Then, in 2003, he heard from a Swiss neuroscientist named Olaf Blanke, who had learned how to give people out-of-body experiences when they were fully awake. While treating a forty-three-year-old woman with epilepsy, Blanke had applied electrical current to a particular area of her brain, and she had the experience of floating upward and looking down at her own body.
 
Mainstream science is getting in on the obe action, and appears to be one step ahead of us:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality

Fabulous article. Thank you for finding and sharing it. Its good to be reminded that VR is also part of the picture.But I think it adds another dimension that merits deeper thought and exploration, courtesy of tech, rather than being a competitor. It may be a generational, thing but I think that for some VR takes over what imagination used to do, so it adds that concrete discipline of playing with tech whereas we never imagined that imagination could have that level of structured inquiry.

For me reality is contingent and contextual in any case, and it is what we say it is, but not always shared and consensual. Even if VR is machine generated imagination it can provide real experiences, which may be more valid simply because they are not 'imagined' and hence unreal.

Its a pity VR is not more a part of our shared discourse. It plainly has a lot to teach us.
 
Fabulous article. Thank you for finding and sharing it. Its good to be reminded that VR is also part of the picture.But I think it adds another dimension that merits deeper thought and exploration, courtesy of tech, rather than being a competitor. It may be a generational, thing but I think that for some VR takes over what imagination used to do, so it adds that concrete discipline of playing with tech whereas we never imagined that imagination could have that level of structured inquiry.

For me reality is contingent and contextual in any case, and it is what we say it is, but not always shared and consensual. Even if VR is machine generated imagination it can provide real experiences, which may be more valid simply because they are not 'imagined' and hence unreal.

Its a pity VR is not more a part of our shared discourse. It plainly has a lot to teach us.
come on Mike, these are materialists neuroscience nerds... they are doing their own version of shut-up-and-calculate:

“It’s not real, but it doesn’t matter,” Slater said, watching me. “In some sense, it’s a real experience.”

well sure... I mean if you believe reality is "out there" (i.e. outside of yr mind)

happy to host (roast :)) any of them on Skeptiko.
 
Have been meaning to respond in this thread for a while now...

Kevin, I very much appreciated your post on the first page of this thread re the significance of Christianity and the error of Joseph Atwill's thesis. It provided very welcome balance and recognition with thoughtfully presented detail. Kudos!

That said, it took me a while to decide to press the "like" button because of qualms re your second list:

Some of the great contributions Christianity has made through the centuries

In particular, I'm not totally convinced that all of those contributions are (1) unique or original to Christianity, and/or (2) attributable to Christianity as a religion or ideology versus simply happening to have occurred in a society in which Christianity is/was the dominant religion/ideology. For example, re item number five on your list - "representative government, particularly as it has been seen in the American experiment" - the Six Nations or Iroquois Confederacy practised a system of participatory/representative democracy prior to European invasion, from which inspiration was probably drawn in developing the system that is the American experiment. Another example is item number four on your list - the development of capitalism and free-enterprise - which seems to me to be at least potentially antithetical to the Gospels, in which Christ preached not working for material wealth but donating all that one owns to the poor and then following him; not the principle of free enterprise (based on mutually beneficial exchange) but of freely giving to one's brothers and sisters (based on pure altruism).

Anyhow, though these might be minor quibbles, having "liked" your otherwise excellent post my conscience prompted me to share them.

Thanks again for your post.
 
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The we live in a simulation theory
Isn't that theory almost identical to the Maya illusion? I see science is still digging up secret occult stuff and passing it off as new theories

Mainstream science thinks their slick... Big bang was developed by a priest, all they did was delete God out of the picture.
 
come on Mike, these are materialists neuroscience nerds... they are doing their own version of shut-up-and-calculate:

“It’s not real, but it doesn’t matter,” Slater said, watching me. “In some sense, it’s a real experience.”

well sure... I mean if you believe reality is "out there" (i.e. outside of yr mind)

happy to host (roast :)) any of them on Skeptiko.
Hey Alex

I mean only that VR opens up ways of engaging that are closer to the metaphysical than the physical. It breaks the rules that tie us to thinking that reality is out there by creating a medium of experience that has no physical location beyond a piece of tech.

I think most tech is analogous of magic, or psi, in any case. It collapses time and space, and negates gravity. Even the humble 'smart phone' gives us the capacity to see and communicate remotely using the least possible physical media. What was once exclusively open to possessors of mysterious powers is available to 'ordinary' folk for the price of a tiny device still anchored in the physical.

Tech opens up what is possible to be imagined, not just assembled as a physical thing. I remember in Mack's Abduction reading about a woman who complained that ET had 'made' a conference room because they interpreted her desire to 'conference' in a literal way. That's pure VR to me, albeit with a level of sophistication way beyond what we can do.

VR is also the tech version of what we older folk remember as imagination, whether finely honed as visualisation or not. Now you can get even better affects with VR. So maybe its a case of moving out of what we are deluded into thinking of as 'solid' reality in to what we know is way more fluid and tenuous.

Astral travellers report that some folk end up captured in domains of their own beliefs. We seem to go willingly into fabricated experiences via movies using 3D tech and complex sound systems intended to immerse the viewer in a convincing experience. And then the movie is over and they come back to 'reality'. Humans will find any excuse to 'escape' the constraints of the material world.

My VR device used to be a novel.

Of course these nerds are doing materialistic science, but they are dismantling the foundation of their own beliefs as they do so - but don't yet know it. Tech dismantles materialism because it is all based on a metaphysical premise - what we imagine we are is more real and valuable than what we physically are. We are not using tech to help meet biological and physical imperatives, but psychological and metaphysical ones. Tech is dematerialising us. The more it evolves the more the physical (time, space and gravity) is just an annoying legacy of a past that is better transcended and forgotten. Tech heaven is to transfer consciousness into a post biological medium, usually thought to be tech based.

Er, that would be the spirit/soul guys. That problem has already been solved, but you keep on worrying your pretty little materialistic heads about it and keep us entertained - and save us having to imagine stuff.

I like VR precisely because it is a crude analogue for a disciplined imagination. It stimulates discontent with the materialistic, even while imagining it is getting somewhere that has materialistic credibility. The latest data is the we humans are becoming more religious. I do believe that that is partly down to the fact that our tech taps fundamentally religious impulses in us (well apart from blowing the crap out of people we don't like - but even so?). That impulse is magical and animistic in essence and tech validates both - we can know stuff, talk to and see people from a distance, and do so using a tiny device that talks to us. In a century what is that tech going to look like? Will we not seem to be clairvoyant, clairaudient, all knowing and god only knows what else?

VR will get us there - that's what I am saying.
 
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