+- +-

+-User

Welcome, Guest.
Please login or register.
 
 
 

Login with your social network

Forgot your password?

+-Stats ezBlock

Members
Total Members: 48
Latest: watcher
New This Month: 0
New This Week: 0
New Today: 0
Stats
Total Posts: 16867
Total Topics: 271
Most Online Today: 1208
Most Online Ever: 1208
(March 28, 2024, 07:28:27 am)
Users Online
Members: 0
Guests: 603
Total: 603

Author Topic: Human Life is Fragile but EVERY Life is Valuable  (Read 15631 times)

0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Ashvin said,
Quote
I distinctly remember even at that age sharing this internal feeling of rage with George who viewed their culture as both easy and degenerate. I view modern culture through this same lens.  We have in essence forgotten everything that was truly important and replaced it with with spiritual opium meant to make us feel good rather than to mature us or make us stronger.

As much as it may pain people like Michael Tsarion, John Lash, Jay Weidner, and Joseph Chiappalone all who claim to be “Gnostics”, we are here to be forged in the fires and trials of life so that when the time comes we are able and worthy to behold the face of eternity without turning away in shame.

Well said. I totally agree, not because of Az's fanciful idea that we are locked in groupthink, but because, nearing 70 years old, I HAVE tried out a lot of these belief systems seriously and found them wanting. And when I try something, I go for it 100%. I have the physical and mental scars to prove it.

I will add to what you said that a central issue here is the question of motive. Does a human seek comfort and bliss or Truth? New agers of all stripes claim that is one and the same. We know better. We know, from hard experience, that genuinely seeking the truth is PAINFUL. But that just gets us labeled as masochists by those who basically respond biologically, not spiritually, to spiritual truths.

That is, they AVOID PAIN like the plague and will go into every possible logical chain of unprovable, but nice sounding, premises they can come up with to justify comfort and bliss as EQUAL to Truth and any "groupthink" that does NOT put Homo SAP in the top dog position and advocates personal sacrifice in the service of a personal God is "ridiculous".

When the "ridiculous" label appears too transparently RIDICULOUS, then they go for the "you are being suckered by evil" meme in perfect Orwellian speak.  :evil4:
 
UB,
The adjective "ridiculous" is ad hominem baloney. f you disagree, argue the merits rather than cast aspersions on the narrative or the narrator.

Surly & GO,
Agreed. All this talk of aliens and reptiles are side issues that always come off as buck passing to me. The sin buck stops at Homo SAP. Many Homo SAPs just DO NOT WANT TO GO THERE. Submitting to a higher authority is just not their thing. And the very idea that said Higher Authority requires worship and obedience when that is "ridiculous" for a Supreme Being (all these new Agers of course know exactly how a Supreme Being should think because they are well on their way to Supreme Beingdom!  ;D ). And they are humble too...

Yes, they agree, the world is all **** up, but that's not their fault or some sky God's fault either... All that evil stuff going on out there has nothing to do with human fallen nature of fairy stories about sin and guilt, etc. That's just ridiculous and so boring.

The common thread in ALL belief systems that reject the existence of a Supreme Being that we owe our existence to is that they do not DO guilt, remorse or acceptance of Homo SAP as a sinful fallen being. We are just nice chumps in a random universe and the bad "____fill in this blank with ANY entity as long as it ain't human___ ;)_____" are ruining our spiritual, happiness and bliss by various sneaky techniques that we must banish from our threatened Homo Sapiness so we can all live happily ever after.  And these folks have the brass to claim Christians believe in fanciful fairy tales!  ::)

And when they read what I just posted, they do the Orwellian two-step and claim that is exactly what Christian "groupthinking robots" do!

It's "perfectly logical" that we can be puppets of reptilians/ETs/groupthink herd following/fear of death escapism/cowardice/mother-in-laws (just kidding!  ;D) and other dark evil forces "out there" in the twilight zone of the random multiplex of universes but it's "just silly" to believe that there is ONE God who has a plan for our salvation in a fallen world. ::)

Ashvin, I suggest you dwell on the subject of guilt. The responses (or lack of them) are quite revealing of the willingness of the debater to be objective about the human condition and the disposition (or lack of it) od the debater to seek the Truth.  8)

In summary, I wish to say that Christianity, as Homo Saps practice it, is far from perfect; but in belief systems, it's way ahead of whatever is in second place.  :icon_sunny:

Te conozco bacalao, aunque vengas disfrazado.


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Ashvin, I suggest you dwell on the subject of guilt. The responses (or lack of them) are quite revealing of the willingness of the debater to be objective about the human condition and the disposition (or lack of it) of the debater to seek the Truth.  8)

Ashvin said, "Very good suggestion! Here is a great paper about that. The following are two snippets, the rest can be found at the link."

http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAF006.pdf

CIVILIZATION AND ITS “MALCONTENT”:
SIGMUND FREUD AND THE PROBLEM OF GUILT

The Second in an Occasional Series on the West’s
Most Influential Thinkers
by C. Wayne Mayhall

SYNOPSIS

Sigmund Freud despised religion, theism, and the Bible, and, although his goal was to eradicate the problem of guilt, he is ultimately responsible for confusing it. His primary motivation for psychoanalysis was to transform guilt into neurosis and sin into sickness. Freud believed that guilt must be eliminated through self-analysis and that our struggle to transcend the stifling codes of culture is inescapable unless we are willing to break out of our moral prison. Freud viewed himself as a destroyer of conventions whose purpose was to dissociate guilt from sin, making it a problem for science rather than faith.

A careful study of Freudian thought reminds us that as long as people continue to believe in a view that relegates the problem of guilt to biological determinism and ignores individual responsibility, Freud is with us. Secular thinkers, for better or worse, consider him an architect of the modern mind, whereas Christian critics name him an unholy builder of said modern mind, in the line of Marx and Darwin.


...

GUILT AS MAN’S BASIC PROBLEM

In the summer of 1997, exactly one-hundred years beyond Freud’s first intense interaction with religious phenomena and the beginning of his own self-analysis in 1897, after two weeks visiting Nazi Labor and death camps in Germany and Poland, I came by Eurail to the foot of the Heumoz mountains in the Swiss Alps. There I boarded an incline for a ride up into the heart of Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship11 for a time of intense study and the opportunity, I hoped, to get my mind off the absurdity of Hitler’s “final solution.”

I arrived at the cozy retreat to discover it was between student summer sessions and virtually
abandoned. Alone in the Fellowship library, surrounded by hundreds of volumes of the thoughts of great thinkers, I came across a seventy-six-page book humbly titled Freud, 12 written by theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony.13 For the next few days, beginning very early in the morning and lasting long into the night, I explored his thesis that the central problem Freud confronted was the nature and character of guilt and the development of a method for its eradication.

As I write this article, a decade after that experience, I realize why I was so consumed by Rushdoony’s perspective. Five years prior to that trip to L’Abri, in 1992, I was an upstart professional freelance writer plying my trade for national magazines when I was commissioned by Harper’s magazine to do research on white supremacist groups in America. As I combed through stacks of their propaganda riddled with the rhetoric of hate and destruction, I was shocked when I came across a pamphlet blatantly denying that mass extermination of Jewish people had even occurred. I pledged right there and then to visit the sites of concentration camps myself one day, so that I could see it for myself.

At L’Abri, after fulfilling my pledge to wade through historical remnants of Nazi sewers of depravity, alone in that quiet place, my thoughts and experiences coalesced. I realized clearly the guilt of the white racist and the German fascist were cut from the same cloth, one denying the other fabricating a death machine responsible for the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women, boys, and girls. I saw in Rushdoony’s reasoning, how Freud’s desire to eradicate religion under the banner of illusion and eliminate guilt through the language of biological determinism let them both off the hook, with neither God to judge nor conscience to condemn them.



http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAF006.pdf
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Knarf,
I didn't know that. My main education on Buddhism has come from Ka and some scholarly and long videos posted here over a year ago of a former Buddhist turned Christian.

It's good to know that some forms of Buddhism accept the existence of God.


Ashvin,
I just read the Freud document. It confirmed some suspicions I had about his zeal in wanting to off religions in general and God in particular. One of my first posts here was on a document about Freud that Peter posted defending greed.

I argued vociferously against it and Surly agreed my argument had merit. So I started coming back now and then from TAE until RE recruited me into becoming a Renewable Energy NUT  author.

The guy (Mowrer)  that rocked the psychoanalytic free-for-all that Freud started had it EXACTLY RIGHT about human nature:

Quote
He writes: “The basic irregularity is not emotional, but behavioral. [The patient] is not a victim of his conscience, but a violator of it. He must stop blaming others and accept responsibility for his own poor behavior. Problems may be solved, not by ventilation of feelings, but rather by confession of sin.”4

From his position of prominence within the Ivory Tower of the psychoanalytic culture, Mowrer realized that Freudian psychoanalysis turns out to be “an archeological expedition back into the past in which a search is made for others on whom to pin the blame for the patient’s behavior.”5

I'll go farther than that! UB and many here talk about the horrors Homo SAPs, many of them alleged Christians in leadership positions, are inflicting on the world. And all the other non-Christians, say YEAH! But Freud is THE guy that CONVINCED predatory capitalists in Wall Street (New York City is a MECCA for Freudian psychiatry!) that GUILT was WRONG and it DID NOT MATTER how much the USA promoted revolutions, slave labor, mafia tactics, wars for profit, fake religious "Christian Missionaries" backed by the CIA to keep the rubes humble and willing to work cheap.

OH NO! Feeling GUILT for that was neurotic and must be avoided in order to have a HEALTHY and HAPPY life of the APEX PREDATOR. THAT was PRECISELY what snowballed the **** Capitalism and Wars PRE-Freud to the world class, no-holds barred demonic blood fest and Bling craze we are NOW SADDLED WITH!

It was REJECTION of Christianity and God that allowed GUILT to disappear from our leaders, not the LIP SERVICE espousal of it.

Sure, elite **** have always been at that game. But NEVER was the rejection of common decency a guilt free exercise in business executives and government officials UNTIL Freud's bullshit became the "common wisdom". That "common wisdom" is that caring about other people or your employees is a WEAKNESS and NOT looking out for number one 24/7 is MASOCHISTIC. Only STUPID people do not put themselves above EVERYBODY else. What's wrong wid ya? Ya got an inferiority complex or sumptin'? Do unto others before they DO IT unto you! 

GAME THEORY came DIRECTLY from Darwin and Freud. Neither of those two paragons of prevaricating mindfork had ANY use whatsoever for God or Christianity.

MILLIONS of people have DIED and work in in slave conditions BECAUSE of Freud, Darwin and their bastard children, social Darwinism, Greed is Good, Guilt is Bullshit and Game Theory is how you WIN.  :evil4:

And then Christianity gets BLAMED for most of the 20th century EVILS  (that is THE century most people have been killed violently in numbers and as a percentage of the population as well!).

The ABSENCE of Christianity is the main CAUSE of those evils. Not that I expect non-Christians to admit it, but the reason they scapegoat Christianity so much is because THEY DO NOT WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE GUILT of looking in the mirror. 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
UB,
I understand your genuine concern for how unfair life is and the gamut of human talent, intelligence and societal opportunities or the lack of them that dictates fortune or misfortune in our lives.

But in essence, you are just rephrasing a quote from Freud:
Quote
“I stand in no awe whatever of the Almighty. If we were ever to meet I should have more reproaches to make to Him than He could make to me. I would ask Him why He hadn’t endowed me with better intellectual equipment, and He couldn’t complain that I have failed to make the best use of my so-called freedom.”33
 


Quote
Freud was a scientist not a theologian, more concerned with the psychology of religion than the nature of faith. “There was no reason why Freud should have been so engaged by the problem of religion—at least no obvious, psychoanalyzable reason. He had never gone through a phase of faith; no family pieties had stifled him so that he had to speak out,” writes Freudian scholar Philip Reiff. “His free-thinking father  :evil4:…raised his children in a secular atmosphere. After a childhood devoid of religious impulse and schooling, Freud was easily converted to the Darwinian gospel...”22 It was only natural, for Freud to address religious belief through  anthropology, “instead of dealing with guilt in terms of God, creation, and man’s fall.”23

http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAF006.pdf

Looky here, a Mking "free-thinker"    raised Freud!  So now you know what these "FREE-THINKERS" (otherwise known as evolution true believers  ;)) visit upon humanity...   

As to all the disparate opportunities Homo Saps have that makes a one shot deal at Salvation look irrational, thereby "justifying" a belief system that incorporates Karma math and reincarnation, I disagree. If God exists, He certainly has the faculty to judge fairly. He understands humanity rather well since He is the designer and creator of our physical and spiritual machinery so He is in an excellent (and logically superior to any human) position to judge human behavior.

Occam's razor dictates that a JUST God taking care of business is far more logical than a complex Karma dance through multiple lives.

GO,
I understand much abuse goes on in childhood that causes inappropriate guilt. But the discovery, through psychoanalysis, that you were freaked out by seeing mommy making it with the milkman or as a child beaten, sold in slavery, ****, made to wear dresses if a male or not allowed to wear them if female, forced to have sex with parents or an older sibling, deprived of a normal IQ through undernourishment, born with Down's syndrome, the wrong color, etc. does NOT justify you perpetuating any anti-social behavior by claiming it's what you GOTTA DO to feel right after all the **** you went through. The VICTIM must NOT be blamed, of course. But the VICTIM has a tendency to BECOME THE VICTIMIZER if morality is a NON-ISSUE, Capisco?

This "He's just DOING WHAT he does" attitude given by Freudian shrinks to the immoral bastards that set up corporate charters of "limited" (institutionalized acceptance of immoral avoidance of responsibility) liability (LIMITED=ZERO LIABILITY=GUILT) is the misanthropic religion (Orwellianly claimed to free humanity from guilt)  that legitimized all the Wall Street War profiteering, soul destroying practices as "business as usual" (i.e. cognitive dissonance on steroids). It's world class mindfork. It's insanity labeled sanity and Game OVER Theory for Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, PERIOD.

We are all born with different opportunities. For those who say, well, if ya didn't accept Christ, you are doomed to hell, I say that if I didn't accept Christ, I would be doomed to hell. God is the final arbiter of who goes where. The bible says all things are possible for God. "All things" in the context of scripture does not mean He does reincarnation as a salvation mechanism IMHO. It means that He is the BOSS and He decides who goes where after the valley of tears.

It's far simpler for Him, for example, to compress 3 seconds of your last breath as a Hitler to years of instruction and revelation in order to get you to accept Christ than to rig up a complex Karma network of reincarnation. I don't KNOW if Freud went to hell or not! I am happy to get into it with fellow Christians about who gets the heavenly brass ring and who doesn't. I am far more liberal about that than many fundys because I HONESTLY believe that suicides DO NOT EVER go to hell. But that's just me.  ;D

The God I believe in is a JUST God. Regardless of the limitations of humanity to understand WTF God wants us to do (most humans don't have the literacy, brains or willingness to read ANYTHING, let alone religious documents like the Bible!), I'm certain the "math" is done by God to UB's satisfaction (and mine).
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
GO,
I agree that some people have been helped by this therapy. My point is that overall, Freudian Psychotherapy has harmed humanity, not helped it. A kind, patient Christian approach to a person's past of pain and abuse is far more efficacious in healing those hurts than Freudian Psychotherapy. Freud threw the baby out with the bath water, GO. We need to eschew any and all respect for Freudian Psychotherapy. It is wrong and morally abhorrent. But you are, of course, right in recognizing that there are people that have been helped by it.

I suggest you consider the possibility that you are confusing the God given human mechanism of compassion in listening and learning about someone's past that any human can have or pretend to have (as shrinks do for money) with Freudian Psychotherapy.

Freud hijacked compassion and fellowship for the healing of hurts where people console each other and seek God's guidance and twisted it into Psychotherapy. So they used tools that have been used in the confessional or among friends for centuries and charged for them by setting themselves up as the authority in place of God.   

You think that those who were helped to deal with their pain by Psychotherapy makes it worthwhile. I don't. I think compassion and caring helped them, NOT Psychotherapy. I think Psychotherapy legitimizes a Godless approach to healing abuse so it is wrong as well as being ultimately socially destructive. So we will have to agree to disagree.  ;D

 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Quote
154. Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander’s Near-Death Experience Defies Medical Model of Consciousness

Quote
Interview reveals how a near-death experience changed everything neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander thought he knew about consciousness, spirituality, and life after death.
You may listen to the 52 minute interview at this link or read snippets from the taped interview below.  I really enjoyed the butterfly wing experience.
http://www.skeptiko.com/154-neurosurgeon-dr-eben-alexander-near-death-experience/
Quote
What I do remember from deep inside coma, for one thing my first awareness was I had no memory whatsoever of my life. I had no language, no words. All of my experience in life, knowledge of humans, Earth, the universe, all of that was gone. The only thing I had was this very kind of crude existence. And I call it in my book the “earthworm’s eye-view,” because it really was just a crude, kind of underground.
I have a vivid memory of dark roots above me and there was a kind of monotonous pounding, a dull sound in the background pounding away eternally. It was just murky and gross. Every now and then a face, an animal or something would boil up out of the muck and there might be some chant or roar or something. Then they’d disappear again.
It sounds very foreboding to talk about it right now, but in fact, since I knew no other existence I don’t remember being particularly alarmed when I was in that setting. I think that that was the best consciousness that my brain could muster when it was soaking in pus. It turns out that that seemed to last for a very long time. Given that it was my first awareness of anything, it actually seemed to be years or eternity. I don’t know. It seemed like a very, very long time.
Then there was a spinning melody, this bright melody that just started spinning in front of me. Beautiful, beautiful melody compared to that dull pounding sound that I’d heard for eons. It spun and as it spun around, it cleared everything away. This was the part that was so shocking and so hard to explain. It was as if the blinders came off and the reality there was much more crisp, real, and interactive and fresh than any reality I’ve ever known in this earthly existence. That part is very shocking and hard to explain when you go through it, and yet what I’ve found since then is that a lot of people who have had NDEs discuss the same kind of hyper-reality. But it’s very shocking to see it.
For me, I was a speck on a butterfly wing. I had no body awareness at all. In fact, I had no body awareness through this entire kind of deep coma experience. I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them.
Quote
Of course, as I healed—it probably took three or four weeks for a lot of my neuroscience and neurosurgical training to come back—all along that time I was still writing all this down and not reading anything. I was very tempted but my son had told me, “You want this to be worthwhile, don’t read anything else. Just write it all down.” I just was shocked; I was buffeted because my neuroscience mind said, “No, that couldn’t happen.” The more I heard about how sick I was, my cortex shut down, “No, that’s impossible, your cortex was down.”
Of course, for a while I was going after the hypotheses that involved formation of these very complex, intricate memories either right before my coma or right coming out of it. That really did not explain it at all. Part of the problem, when you get right down to it, is that whole issue of remembering the melody because that was a very clear part of it. I remember the elation when I figured that I could just remember that melody and that spun the melody in front of me.
Then all of a sudden, boom! Everything opened up and I went back out into that valley, so crisp and beautiful, and my angel was with me, as I came to call her, my companion on the butterfly wing. And then out into the core, outside of the universe. Very difficult to explain in that fluctuation.
I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, ”or“ That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.
Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not hearing something.
Quote
It seems to me that they’re really barely making a dent in the medical model that we have. The medical model that we have sees us as these biological robots and death as kind of the ultimate Boogeyman. Can we really believe that we’re really going to change such an entrenched system?
Dr. Eben Alexander: I think so. I think that is very much a possibility. There’s this whole issue of mind and brain and duality versus non-dualism and the physical material reductivist models. I go into this in great detail in my book but I think you have to go back about 3,000 years to really get to the beginning of the discussion and to start to see why certain things have transpired.
I think most importantly was the part of this discussion that happened between Rene Descartes and Spinoza back in the 17th Century. They started us into our current era. Our current era is one of mind/consciousness/our soul has been put in the realm of the church more-or-less. There was kind of a truce of sorts that I guess Descartes came up with back then to say there’s mind and then there’s body and just let the natural scientists, those with an interest like Francis Bacon and Galileo and Newton, let’s not burn them all at the stake. Let some of them survive.
So I think it was a good thing to have that truce so that science survived. I mean, I’m a scientist and I love science and the scientific method. I’ve just come to realize that the universe is much grander than we appreciate. So I have to simply broaden my definitions.
I think science is still very important to get us there. Getting back to that mind/brain issue, what happened over time is science kind of grew up and got to be more and more powerful at giving us many things. Science has been a real wonder. But I think that it’s been somewhat at a price and that price came from splitting out mind and body back then and that dualistic approach because as science gained more and more of an upper hand, people were losing track of the kind of mind part of it, the consciousness part.
Quote
Can we really then hope to get out of the consciousness loop that we’re in now? Is it just going to be a matter of a philosophical shift like we had back in the 1700’s? Or is there something fundamental to the way that we’re constructed that’s going to keep us limited in how much we can really tap into and understand that knowing that you experienced?
Dr. Eben Alexander: In my view, what I think is going to happen is that science in the much broader sense of the word and spirituality which will be mainly an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness will grow closer and closer together. We will all move forward into a far more enlightened world. One thing that we will have to let go of is this kind of addiction to simplistic, primitive reductive materialism because there’s really no way that I can see a reductive materialist model coming remotely in the right ballpark to explain what we really know about consciousness now.
Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.
Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.
Any of the scientists in the crowd who want to get in on this, what I would recommend is there’s one book I consider the bible of this. It’s a wonderful book but it is really for those who have a strong scientific interest in it. It’s called Irreducible Mind, Edward Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Bruce Greyson, Adam Crabtree, Alan Galt, Michael Grassa, the whole group from Esalen and also based in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, have done an incredibly good job. Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is the subtitle and that’s exactly what it is.
I felt their book was quite illustrative and of course it caused a huge splash when it came out in 1987, but again a lot of the reductive materialists like myself were not really going to put in the work to go through all of that. We just thought, “We can’t understand it so it can’t be true.”
Quote
Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say for one thing I think that a healthy skeptical approach to all this is a good thing because it helps us get to the truth. It helps us know the answer. What we have to be careful of, of course, is not getting in the trap of having our prejudices rule the day. A lot of these experiments and studies, how you interpret them will depend a lot on what your prejudices are going in.
I found early on in my experience, I had to do as Descartes recommended when he was talking about getting to the truth, and that was to really ignore or to reject everything I had ever accepted as real. That was the only way to start getting to where I could figure any of this out. I
know that a lot of the reductive scientific crowd out there—I have a favorite quote from Stephen Hawking. He says, “There’s a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority or imposed dogma and faith, as opposed to science which is based on observation and reason.” What I would say is I think his statement is true as a general statement but that science, and certainly those who believe in science and scientists, are as prone to addiction to imposed dogma and faith as our religious zealot. So one has to be very careful to really step back and want to know the truth. That’s what I think we all would like to know.
Quote
Alex Tsakiris: In this case, if we really do step back one of the things that’s troubling to me, and you touched on it a minute ago, is how overwhelming the evidence seems to be. At this point, we can confidently say that near-death experiences didn’t just start happening in the last 20 years since we had advanced resuscitation techniques.
We can confidently say that 4% to 5% of everyone who has a cardiac arrest is having this. There’s obviously hundreds of millions of people over time who have had these accounts and we have thousands and thousands of well-documented, consistent accounts across cultures, across times. These are the measures that we would normally use to say, “This is a real phenomenon.”
And then when the skeptics, and really the mainstream scientists have pounded against it for 20 years with really what amounts to a bunch of very silly explanations but ones that have been carefully looked at and dismissed—was it CO2 , a fear of death, other psychological factors? Is it all the different things like REM intrusion? All these things.
Clearly this would normally be something where we’d be putting a lot of attention into it. Or that it would then become the presumed explanation for it. But none of that’s happening. They have managed to hold back the dyke, you know? So what do you make of that?

Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay, I think in trying to get back to your original question with the previous guest, to me one thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over several years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.
And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul of us that is not dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.
But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get. It’s far more profound than I ever realized before.
That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this.
Not only that but as you mentioned a few minutes ago, people don’t even have to go to a near-death situation. There are plenty of mystical experiences that have occurred over millennia that are part of the same mechanism. That’s why all this talk about oxygen, tension, CO2 and all that you can pretty much throw out the window. You really need to be working towards explaining all of those phenomena. Part of the problem is they’re hard to explain but that is a clue.
Willy Lomans was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Well, same kind of thing. They are hard issues and the whole understanding of what consciousness really involves. I came a lot closer to that in my coma experience and coming out of it and in doing all the very intense homework for the three years since then to try and understand it. It’s a difficult question because it’s close to the real truth that we’re going after. If it were easy it would be widely available. It would already have been written up by somebody who wanted to publish or perish. That’s not how it works. It’s not that easy.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
UB does the fallacious argument(s): 
Quote
Blaming freud for influencing our current state of affairs is also like blaming the wright brothers for the disapearance or downing of malaysian airlines planes.

You ignored Darwin as the CHIEF influence on Freud. How **** convenient of you. You ignored Freud's influence on Wall Street through his nephew Bernays. You DID THAT because you KNOW HOW influential and TOXIC they were. How **** convenient of you.

And the incredibly disjointed and illogical comparison of the accomplishment of powered flight with the destruction of an aircraft is shamefully silly. You are using the "all cats die; Socrates died; SO Socrates was a cat" silliness to attempt to ridicule my historically accurate statement. And you are DOING IT because you DO NOT WANT TO DISCUSS GUILT. And you completely avoided the illogic of you claiming to tap into super healing powers from a source that is CONTROLLED by the power of YOUR MIND (something LESS powerful than the powers you claim you obtain). How **** convenient of you.

You don't want to talk about God.  You don't want to talk about guilt The issue was never whether Freud is the bad guy, but if pretending GUILT is the "bad guy" is wrong or right. I say it's wrong and from Darwin to Freud and on down the line, the godless butchery of the 20th century is the result of rejecting God and guilt from disobeying him. You claim it has ALWAYS been that way in human affairs.

Bullshit. You know better but are an evolution true believer so you won't even consider the possibility that your religion has boosted human evils. SO you claim all this is old hat and has not really changed anything,... Never mind the number of violent deaths in the 20th century and the LACK of belief in God beyond lip service of the leaders of those countries that were responsible for all that violence...

You accuse me of the fallacious argument called using a bad analogy. You are wrong.

Quote
Bad Analogy:

claiming that two situations are highly similar, when they aren't. For example, "The solar system reminds me of an atom, with planets orbiting the sun like electrons orbiting the nucleus. We know that electrons can jump from orbit to orbit; so we must look to ancient records for sightings of planets jumping from orbit to orbit also."

Or, "Minds, like rivers, can be broad. The broader the river, the shallower it is. Therefore, the broader the mind, the shallower it is."

Or, "We have pure food and drug laws; why can't we have laws to keep movie-makers from giving us filth ?"

This is what YOU are doing to avoid discussing the key issues.

Poisoning The Wells:
discrediting the sources used by your opponent. This is a variation of Ad Hominem.

Psychogenetic Fallacy:

if you learn the psychological reason why your opponent likes an argument, then he's biased, so his argument must be wrong. (Agelbert hates Freud so Agelbert must be wrong, thinks UB!)  ;D

Changing The Subject (Digression, Red Herring, Misdirection, False Emphasis):

this is sometimes used to avoid having to defend a claim, or to avoid making good on a promise. In general, there is something you are not supposed to notice.

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#analogy

I'm done with this topic. It's clear that you are smart enough to know that you must avoid a topic you cannot counter on the merits. I don't do subject changes as to eschewing guilt by rejecting God as being the culprit in our "modern" dystopia. You do. Have a nice day.

GO,
Thanks for flipping Knarf's argument on its head. That was brilliant, excellent and logical. Knarf won't go there. Knarf has been NOTABLY silent EVERY TIME I brought up the fact that the new age movement, which convinced millions and millions of people that faith in God was bad, silly, stupid and caused all sorts of evils and wars by "neurotic" religious "straight jacketing" of humans, once DISCARDED, would usher in an age of peace and enlightenment.

The result was that every bad aspect of society and civilization, as a whole, got worse. But those who reject God are one-trick ponies and never tire of reminding all of us of all the "horrendous evils" of Religion and Faith in God. The 20th century, the Century of Self, is the first century in human history where religion DID NOT play any role in the wars and DID PLAY AN INSIGNIFICANT role in human affairs. The result is affirmative evidence that rejecting God and Guilt is a path to societal destruction.

They don't buy that and NOW they claim it's MOTHER EARTH that is going to "throw" us off the planet. God is an illusion but MOTHER EARTH, well, she is ANGRY, and has big arms to get rid of the human vermin. ::) Then they rush to say it is just a metaphor and we are being silly to talk about the metaphoric mother earth.

Pin them down and they will FINALLY tell you what they REALLLY believe.  ;) Ya wanna know what that is?  Just Google ANY scientific article about species origins and adaptation. ANY amazing and still unexplained mechanism in life forms is ALWAYs explained by "Evolution" provided this and "Evolution" did that and so on. We OWE this to the GENIUS of  Evolution!!! Thank EVOLUTION for small favors (and apex predators!)!

God = Mother Earth = Evolution
  Get it?


That's the RELIGIOUS "Evolution" of the FREE THINKING, GUILT REJECTING folks that get highly bent out of shape when you want to "devolve" them back to THEISM!  ;D
 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
« Last Edit: September 21, 2014, 07:07:20 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Re: Human Life is Fragile but EVERY Life is Valuable
« Reply #39 on: October 17, 2014, 11:32:43 pm »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m_OMaT5_gc&feature=player_embedded
For Seeing Eye® alumni, Mollie and Jeffery, their dreams to be ordinary, involved parents and active community members have been realized through their partnership with Seeing Eye® dogs. Watch and listen to their inspirational stories in their own words in the above video.


https://www.seeingeye.org/Donate.aspx
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIccl8ZvD3g&feature=player_embedded
It takes a special kind of puppy, but with the right breeding and training, a special few get to grow up and take care of one of the most important jobs a dog will ever do. In the above video, watch and listen to some of our puppies as they begin their adventure to becoming Seeing Eye® dogs!

Please give generously today and help us continue to breeding and training these incredible puppies that go on to create life-changing partnerships.


http://www.seeingeye.org/aboutUs/Default.aspx?M_ID=656
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Giving the Gift of Sight


Quote
In Nepal, a blind person is called a mouth with no hands.   :(


See global ophthalmologist Geoff Tabin describe his experiences performing cataract surgeries in Nepal and Africa.

By The Scientist Staff | October 1, 2014

GREAT and INPIRING video at link! Don't miss it!


http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/41123/title/Giving-the-Gift-of-Sight/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
Re: Human Life is Fragile but EVERY Life is Valuable
« Reply #43 on: November 08, 2014, 04:54:53 pm »
Astonishing Story Of Survival   :o

This is by far one of the most shocking videos we have ever seen on human self sufficiency in the wilderness.  


 In this documentary from 2013, the VICE team introduces us to Agafia Lykov, a woman of 70 who is still living in the shack deep in Siberia where she was born, 160 miles from the closest town.

 In 1936 her family, who were members of the Russian Old Believers Christian sect, journeyed deep into the Siberian wilderness to escape persecution and protect their way of life. They lived on the edge of famine, and all of her 3 siblings died when geologists came to study the area and they were discovered, presumably of infection from contact with other humans.

 Today, she is the last surviving Lykov, living in near total seclusion.

 When this documentary crew came to visit by helicopter, she wanted 2 things: a goat and a rooster. She doesn't listen to the radio ("Why should I listen to news of people killing each other?") and she lived through World War 2 completely unaware of it- but astonishingly she points to the sky when she sees chemtrails being sprayed and she knows it comes down and does damage!

 As an addendum, we recommend this article on the Smithsonian's website, which gives even more background information on how the family lived.

 "Famine was an ever-present danger in these circumstances, and in 1961 it snowed in June. The hard frost killed everything growing in their garden, and by spring the family had been reduced to eating shoes and bark. Akulina chose to see her children fed, and that year she died of starvation. The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop"

 What a fascinating, haunting tale.


 --Bibi Farber

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68&feature=player_embedded

 This video was produced by VICE
http://www.nextworldtv.com/videos/homesteading-skills/woman-surviving-70-years-in-the-siberian-wilderness.html#sthash.WPJxybRk.dpuf

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 36274
  • Location: Colchester, Vermont
    • Renwable Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsZsHHOQx-Q&feature=player_embedded

A real life Jonah! Three days in air bubble in a sunken SHIP and rescued!
   


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

+-Recent Topics

Future Earth by AGelbert
March 30, 2022, 12:39:42 pm

Key Historical Events ...THAT YOU MAY HAVE NEVER HEARD OF by AGelbert
March 29, 2022, 08:20:56 pm

The Big Picture of Renewable Energy Growth by AGelbert
March 28, 2022, 01:12:42 pm

Electric Vehicles by AGelbert
March 27, 2022, 02:27:28 pm

Heat Pumps by AGelbert
March 26, 2022, 03:54:43 pm

Defending Wildlife by AGelbert
March 25, 2022, 02:04:23 pm

The Koch Brothers Exposed! by AGelbert
March 25, 2022, 01:26:11 pm

Corruption in Government by AGelbert
March 25, 2022, 12:46:08 pm

Books and Audio Books that may interest you 🧐 by AGelbert
March 24, 2022, 04:28:56 pm

COVID-19 🏴☠️ Pandemic by AGelbert
March 23, 2022, 12:14:36 pm