This is getting rediculous, as I look through the board I see utter disregard for other peoples beliefs. We all have a right to believe what we want to believe and to think what we want to think. It's not fair to simply bully those with religious beliefs.

Whether or not you agree with someones beliefs doesnt give you the right to completely and blatantly disrespect those beliefs.

Now im talking about the forum as a whole. How can we expect to get anywhere in expanding our minds by closing them off and bullying anyone who disagrees with the atheist perspective.

This should NOT be a left versus right argument, we are all here to better develop our understanding, to learn and to grow. Not to turn into some mob that bashes anyone who has religious beliefs, this is Brain-Meta not nazi Germany.

Debating and questioning is great, but seriously I am getting concerned with the utter disregard for beliefs that is going on across the forum.

i am in agreement... i have my standards and convictions...but i am not going to force what ibelieve on anyone.
just because I believe in God doesn't make me weak minded .... i enjoy a good theological conversation and seeing other people's sides....but i don't bash athiest....just state my opinion.... *shrugs*

Discussions can be tough ... especially when you have no evidence to fall back on.

(Edited: sorry in my enthusiasm I originally omitted the word "no")

Freedom of thought and freedom of belief are a two way street. Untenable religious notions shouldn't be coddled or considered a legitimate point of view. The obvious contradictions and short comings of a belief structure should be exposed. It's in everyone's best interest that this is the case.

It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. ~ Richard Dawkins

"The obvious contradictions and short comings of a belief structure should be exposed." What should we do with our obvious biases? For example, for monotheists the belief in a personal God who hears and answers prayers is a very tenable belief. It is a very legimate point of view. Are you inferring that atheists have no biases?

that is true...lol... I find that the problem is.. people just take what they have heard and decide it is fact. They have no reason and rarely know the fundementals of what they believe. People should learn not to debate what they do not know or really understand.
*waiting for people to start throwing rocks*

Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet Are we there yet.
Children when they are growing up and can't figure out why things aren't meeting their immediate expectations seem to take on the reasoning of their predecessors/parents/society etc etc.

It's sometimes difficult to stand back and allow one to make their own discoveries without interfering and projecting ones own beliefs to try and shore up the belief walls one more time. Anytime the universe seems to expand beyond ones own beliefs it threatens the ego and the ego fights to maintain everything it has built for fear of fading away and having nothing to stand on.
True spirituality threatens the ego because no thing is permanent other than the absolute which cannot be contained. Tho it can be spoken of in accord with ones own experience the need to protect ones personal experience often leads again to the condemnation of difference to protect the individual experience and all related perspectives.

You can't stop the choice to freely think and or take a position. The nature of the personal reality prevents interference with this even tho some believe that a mind can be influenced. The universe is still and always will be a reflection of ones desires and will. What seems to be happening to the individual is concocted by the individual before it happens.
This is the meaning of Man being created in Gods image. Man does create his own reality. Man cannot be contained simply within the meatbag, his thoughts extend beyond any experience and his consciousness beyond the body and experience. This is what the ego cannot accept and where the ego cannot maintain control. The ego would have to voluntarily surrender itself to something greater than that which it can covet and it will die first either through atrophy as conscious free will abandons concepts or through ignorance and the physical death of the body.

That's a totally untenable position. There is absolutely ZERO empirical evidence for the power of prayer.

And if there is a loving, caring personal God, then why do children get leukemia? Oh yeah, I forgot, it part of "God's plan". I guess we should believe that God bestowed suffering on man so that he would be appreciated? I've already heard this one. As those of us who have delved into evolutionary psychology are already aware, religious memeplexs are optimally evolved to be extremely virulent and virtually impossible to cleanse from the human mind. Everything must be reconciled with its preexisting belief structure so that it can maintain its boiler plate sense of meaning. Rationality be damned. Occam's Razor be damned. Religious believers believe what they believe and nothing can change that, because to change that would be the death of them and their trivial existence in fairy tale land. Clearly, a god who stands by passively and allows infants and small children to writhe in agony as the cancer slowly eats them alive from the inside is anything but loving and caring. They say that dying from bone cancer is one of the most excruciating deaths imaginable. And why would these babies and children deserve to die in such an agonizing way? What sins could they have committed when they've barely lived any life at all? No, I don't give a damn what kind of convoluted ass backwards logic they try to spin to justify their delusions, this is for myself and all rationalists DIRECT EVIDENCE that a "loving caring God" does not exist.

You will note above that I have edited my original post to include the word "no" that I unfortunately omitted due to a slip by my aging brain.

Following my first 20 years in a religious environment (including the actual practice and teaching within a church), and then a further 33 years in a scientific role (including experimental laboratory investigations and research) I feel that I have actually experienced practically much of what I discuss and debate, rather than simply uptaking what others might have spouted. How about you?

Maximus your intentions are good. I have not seen bullying, I have however seen invalid arguments made and these arguments challenged. Surely the forum here exists to challenge and debate our views, minds and beliefs. I do not see why religion should be shielded from scrutiny.

Or, maybe in desperation, going for the sympathy vote?

Prayer is a type of thought or thinking.

How does our mind make us sick? There has been some fascinating research over the past several years which shows just how closely connected our minds are to our bodies: our habitual thoughts determine the state of our health and even our longevity.
One of the earliest and most interesting studies was performed on some rabbits at Ohio University in the seventies.
The scientists were attempting to prove the relationship between a toxic, high cholesterol diet and hardening of the arteries. They thought that if they fed the rabbits' high cholesterol food, they should logically develop high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries and the other symptoms we have learned to associate with heart disease, which is still the largest killer in the Western world. The experiment was going along very well, with most of the bunnies developing the expected symptoms, except for one group of rabbits that were not having the expected results. The scientists just couldn't understand it -- they were feeding the rabbits in this group the same high cholesterol food, but the rabbits just weren't developing any of the predicted symptoms. No high blood pressure. No hardening of the arteries. No hypertension. Nothing.

Fortunately for the study, and unfortunately for the rabbits, the technician who was feeding that particular group of rabbits fell ill. Almost immediately, her rabbits started developing the expected symptoms! Naturally the scientists were curious as to why and asked her what she had done differently. "Why nothing," she said, "I fed the rabbits the food as you told me to. I took them out of their cages, held them, stroked them, and sang to them, fed them. Wasn't this right?"

It was the same food, but the rabbits' minds turned the high cholesterol food into other channels, which protected their health! The scientists were amazed. They thought they were studying hardening of the arteries; they were really studying the effects of love.
They tried this over and over again and found that rabbits that were loved simply wouldn't fall ill as readily. Isn't this amazing? And this was just rabbits, not even people! How can love change the effect of food? So the moral is: if you're going to eat Big Macs, sit on your boyfriend's/girlfriend's lap while you're eating it.

We do exactly the same thing. Our minds control our bodies. You've probably heard of the placebo effect? 30% of patients can be given a chalk tablet and told that they will get well and they do get well. There is also a nocebo effect. A physician tells a patient, "I'm very sorry to tell you, Mrs. Jones, but your breast cancer has metastasized throughout your internal organs; you'll be dead in six weeks." If Mrs. Jones believes her doctor, her body will respond and kill her.

For decades, surgeons assumed that if you were unconscious during surgery, it didn't matter what was said in the operating room. But it was found that what is said affects the likelihood of recovery! If they open you up and say, "Oh, look at that, it's worse than we thought -- " then your chance of recovery goes way down. The more positive the surgeon's remarks, the greater the chance of recovery. The power of the mind is awesome.
In a study of four hundred spontaneous remissions of cancer interpreted by Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic there was only one factor in common -- every person changed his or her attitude before the remission occurred, fundamentally changed his or her way of thinking, became more hopeful, courageous, positive.
They somehow broke through the collective consciousness, through their self-destructive beliefs and programs and changed their minds on a fundamental level, deep inside. And so they were "miraculously" cured.
The collective belief system extends deeply into our minds. Did you know that our society has even given us a standard time to die? I'm not kidding! There is a day and a time when it is more likely you will die than any other? Do you know when that is? 9 AM on Monday morning. Why is that? It just seems easier to die than face another week of this horrible job! This is a truly remarkable achievement of our species. Presumably no other species recognizes which day Monday is.

The power of the mind is everything.

Some scientists at the University of Miami a few years ago heard of the rabbit study in Ohio and decided to do an experiment to see if this effect might also hold true for humans. They decided to do a study on preemies -- premature babies -- because in intensive care, they are very expensive and the rate of survival is not that high. What are we, seventeenth in the world for infant mortality? Not so hot.
So three times a day for fifteen minutes, wearing rubber gloves, the technicians stroked the tiny babies inside their intensive care units. They didn't call it "stroking," of course; they called it "tactile kinesthetic stimulation," which is the Orwellian term for stroking. God forbid we should call it love!
These scientists concluded that tactile kinesthetic stimulation is cost effective, for these preemies gained an average of 49% more weight per day, which meant that they were discharged from intensive care an average of five days earlier for a saving of $3,000 per admission.
The amazing thing to me about this study is that it ever had to be done!
How could our doctors and scientists have become so absurdly divorced from common sense to have to do a study to prove this, a fact that any mother knows? My heart especially grieves for the preemies in the control group at the University of Miami who didn't have the good fortune to experience tactile kinesthetic stimulation. But the good news is that most hospitals are embracing this information and are permitting more contact with newborns. Physical contact for newborns is vital to ensure proper development and growth.
Dr. Herbert Specter at the National Institute performed another study that illustrates this mind-body connection even more graphically for Health -- this one on some mice.
Dr. Specter divided the mice into two groups.
One group was the control group; he gave a potent immune-system-stimulating drug called Poly I-C to the other. Poly I-C increases the number of killer T-cells in the immune system.
When he gave the drug to the mice, he also exposed them to the smell of camphor. Do you know what camphor is? It is a pungent-smelling material that most drug stores sell in the form of little white cubes. People think it helps with congestion and breathing problems. It is impossible to forget the scent once you've smelled it. It's the active ingredient in Campho-Phenique.
Dr. Specter treated the mice for a few weeks with the Poly I-C and the camphor, and then took the drug away and just let them smell the camphor. Do you know what happened? Their immune systems were still stimulated -- they had become mighty mice -- no bacteria could make them sick, no tumors would develop if they were exposed to cancer- causing agents.
Another group tried this the opposite way at the University of Rochester. They took rats and administered a potent immune-system-destroying drug, cyclophosphamide -- cyclophosphamide is used in organ transplants, it keeps the body from rejecting the new organ -- and at the same time gave them a taste of saccharine-sweetened water, substituting this for camphor as a neutral agent.
After doing this, a number of times, they took the drug away and just allowed the rats to taste the water. With just the smallest taste of the sweetened water, they would fall sick, develop tuberculosis or pneumonia from the slightest intrusion of bacteria or develop cancer from a very slight exposure to a carcinogen.
Do you see what's going on here? The two groups were interpreting a completely neutral agent differently.
This shows how much our interpretation of reality influences our experience of reality.

If we have learned to associate bad health or unhappiness with our experience of life, it becomes a very difficult habit to break.

Think of a set of twins. Both have identical backgrounds, both have the same parents, the same heredity, the same environment; they are treated virtually the same.
What happens? One grows up to be successful and happy, has a wonderful family, lives to a ripe old age. The other becomes an alcoholic and is dead by thirty-six. What causes the difference?
The interpretation of reality.

Our society may have deeply programmed condemnation and judgment into us, and we may have learned to look at all of life and say, "Oh, bad, the glass is half empty." But it is just as easy to say, "Oh, good, the glass is half full." And that is completely within our power.

It is the mind that is dominant. In Massachusetts, a group of scientists were studying the risk factors for heart disease because about 50% of those who contract this fatal killer didn't fit any of the known profiles: they didn't smoke, they didn't have a high cholesterol diet, they didn't even have hypertension, and yet they had a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, and died.
Why?
These scientists found that they could ask two very simple questions to determine whether a person was likely to have heart problems. Do you know what these two questions were?
First, "Do you like your job?" If you could say, "Yes," to this, your risk of heart attack falls by 50%.
And second, "Are you happy?" And again a, "Yes," answer drops your risk of heart attack by another 50%.

What is the difference between health and disease? It seems more and more it is determined by our thoughts, our beliefs, the way we use our minds.

Another study showed that if you do happen to have a heart attack, your chance of recovery is virtually 100% if you are happily married. This was found much more important than diet, exercise or smoking.

The mind controls the body, not the other way around. The old thinking was that the body was dominant and the mind was a ghost in the machine, a fantasy. But if you take the body away, the mind remains! This was confirmed by Karl Lashley, a pioneer in neurophysiology. He trained rats to run in a maze, and then began to systematically remove their brain tissue. He kept taking out more and more and found that their brains worked just fine. He took out as much as 90% and the rats still could run the maze!

John Lorber, a British neurologist, found something similar in a human patient. His specialty is hydrocephalics -- people with water on the brain. A patient was referred to him with an unusually large head, but no other symptoms. The patient was a gifted college student, majoring in mathematics, with an IQ of 130. Dr. Lorber performed a brain scan on him and found that his cortex was only one millimeter thick! The normal is over 4.5 centimeters! Fluid had replaced over 98% of the neurons used for thinking, and he was still above average!

There has been a revolution going on in the forefront of the medical profession during the past few decades. The old notion that the body is primary and the mind is secondary is being more and more deeply questioned.
The old thinking that the body is a frozen sculpture, never-changing, is falling by the wayside. We breathe in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of air with every breath. These atoms become part of our organs and tissues. With every breath, we breathe out part of our body, which goes to become part of other people's bodies.
For example, right now there are about a million atoms in you that used to be part of Michelangelo, about a million that were part of Da Vinci, about a million that were once in Genghis Khan. The body is continually changing, it is not frozen sculpture, and it is in a constant state of flux. You breathe today atoms that were yesterday part of a peasant in China.
Radioactive isotope studies have shown that we change 98% of the atoms of our body every single year. And the atoms in some of our body parts change even more quickly than that: we have a new skin once a month, a new liver every six weeks. Even the skeleton, which seems so solid and permanent, is changed completely every three months. We have a new stomach lining every five days; the surface cells, which contact the digesting food, are changed as often as every five minutes. We have a new DNA every six weeks. Even the brain cells (which do not regenerate as do the other cells in the body) weren't there last year in terms of the atoms composing them.
98% of the atoms in your body weren't there last year! It is as if we have a magical building, in which the building blocks are being replaced at the rate of 98% a year, and because we don't know any better, we keep putting the blocks in exactly the same places, over and over and over again.
If we have a tumor, we rebuild the tumor. If we're old, we rebuild the body old. If we're sick, we rebuild the body sick.
But if we could become the friend of the contractor who is directing how the building is being built, then we could change the order in which the bricks were being placed. If we could gain familiarity with the inner programmer who is directing exactly how those atoms are being replaced, we could rebuild our tissues and organs and cells in a different fashion. We would gain a truly awesome power for health.
This is possible because the body is really a thinking machine.

Scientists have found that the brain cells communicate in the language of neuropeptides. Neuro, because found in the brain, and peptide, which means protein molecule. This is how the brain cells talk to each other, not in Latin or Greek or Russian or English, but in the language of these chemical messengers. A cell produces neuropeptides, and other cells have receptor sites for these molecules.
This one says, "Hey, I'm unhappy!" and the other cells all get depressed because of these little molecules.
What is more interesting than this is that the cells of the immune system, the lymphocytes and killer T-cells and macrophages have also been found to have receptor sites for these neuropeptides. What this means is that the immune system is eavesdropping on our internal dialogue, it is responding to what we think. Every cell in our bodies has these receptor sites; every organ has these receptor sites. Having a sad heart is literally true. When you say, "I have a gut feeling about this," that is actually true. The body is a thinking machine.
There was a study done on rats, kind of a horrible study, in which the researchers threw the rats into a bucket of water until they would practically drown, then take them out, dry them off, throw them in again, over and over and over for about six weeks. At the end of that time, they killed them and performed an autopsy on them and found that they had the bodies of old, old rats. Their bodies were stiff and rigid and looked liked ancient decrepit rats.
That is the effect of stress. That is what is happening to us in our society.

The arteries of a child look like flexible plastic tubing. Those of the average octogenarian look like old brittle water pipes, rusty, leaking, filled with material deposits. The habitual thoughts of the average adult quite literally steal youth and health, and replace them with sickness, aging and death.
This shows why simply throwing a new thought in the mind occasionally -- like an affirmation -- doesn't do much good. It is the traditional thought, the habitual thought, the thought that continues to run and run and run that determines the body's response. You paste some very positive thought to your mirror -- "Today I will be happy, today I will succeed, today I will find True Love" -- and for thirty seconds or a minute you think that nice positive thought and the whole rest of the day you continue to think, "You can't have that," "You don't deserve that," or whatever -- to which thought is the body going to respond, the one that is put in for five or ten minutes, or the continual stream of 100,000?
But imagine if you could learn to still the internal chatter, learn to experience life again in the present moment. Then the full power of your mind would be available for you at any time. The mind is like a pond. The thoughts moving in the mind are like the waves moving in the pond. Have you ever dropped a single stone into a quiet pond? What happens? Perfectly concentric ripples spread across the water. This is like having one thought only moving through the mind. The mind is coherent, it is orderly, and it is powerful. What happens when you drop several stones, a whole handful into the water? The waves become very choppy. Some troughs end up on tops of crests, many get cancelled out. This is like the mind when it is caught by those continually running internal programs. It just keeps going and going and going and nothing comes of it.
Scientists have actually measured this. Hooking electroencephalographic leads onto the brain, onto the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes of the left and right hemispheres, they find that the measurement of the surface thinking level of the mind looks very much like a chaotic pond: the measurements show many different frequencies in the brain waves, very little coherence.
This kind of chaotic, disordered thinking is the way most adults think, but not everyone. There has been a lot of research lately about the Peak Experience and what has been found is that the human mind can become completely coherent. Do you know what Peak Experiences are? The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was a pioneer in studying the positive aspects of human psychology, defined them. He wrote, "These moments were of pure, positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses were left behind. Now self-consciousness was lost. All separateness and distance from the world disappeared..." These experiences are rare, but can come at any unpredictable time and completely transform life. People have adopted whole new belief systems from one single taste beyond the veil of the senses. These experiences have a curative power.

This kind of perfect harmony in brain wave patterns is also found in small infants when they are nursing, in pets when they are being petted and in adults when they are experiencing expansion of consciousness. What is being measured is a mind that is still, a mind that is in the present moment, not caught by regret for the past or worry for the future.
A mind that is working like this is creating a healthy body.
Your body is already spewing out millions of chemical reactions every second. When your mind is tense, anxious, nervous, your body responds by producing tense, anxious, nervous molecules like adrenaline and noradrenaline. When your mind is calm and peaceful, your body produces calm and peaceful molecules like Valium. Your body is already producing chemicals similar to any that your friendly neighborhood pharmacist will give you, but without the side effects. When your body produces Valium, it makes you feel tranquil but without also making you feel like a zombie.
When your body produces anti-cancer drugs or anti-bacteria drugs, these drugs have no side effects. The body does this absolutely naturally, in the right amount at the right time, ideally suited for the correct target organ, and all the instructions are included in the packaging. Your body does this completely spontaneously for you when it is not stressed.
How do we unstress the body? How do we keep new stresses from accumulating? How do we learn to maintain inner peace and tranquility in the face of the hectic pace of the modern world? How do we learn to stop undermining ourselves with destructive internal programs? How do we learn to expand our minds to our full potential?

Effective prayer..or also called "Right Thinking"

I know you tend towards theological extrapolation, but what has tactile stimulation got to do with a mind-body connection? And there's not even a full moon!

I guess there would have to be something to connect the mind and the body to facilitate the comprehension..

Ahrooooo.

God didn't want this for us..we brought in on ourselves... Sin is the curse ( and I know, i know...heard it before right?) the wages of sin is death..but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord

Some might think that eternal life would be a curse. Not me cos I don't believe in witchcraft .

20 years in a christian home... 5 of those were hell..and I was agnostic...denied God, His existence.. i mean .. how could He exist and love me and let me go through all that i did? at age 17 I was at the bottom of my rope ( and i know.... you may think i am weak minded) and I turned to God and basically said "Proove it"... i began to read the scripture and learn WHY i was even taught a God... why I believed in Eternal salvation.. why i was taught all my life to believe what i did before i gave it up. God showed me He is real. Although i went through 5 years of hell... There was a strength brought out in me that I didn't know I had. I learned that God loves me.. and He brought me through the worst part of my life... I started praying.... and ( although not over night..it took 3 more years) God brought my family around. My family is healing... and I see changes only a Divine Power could have manifested. I talk not because it is just a "belief"..i talk because I have seen it with my own eyes. The things i know, isn't because someone shoved it down my throat and said, "Believe this"...I know..because i found out for myself . Anything I stand on, I stand on because I have seen in the Bible and God has shown it to me in His Word. I am open to hear new things...and am very willing to listen to many sides... and rarely get offended... I will however put what I hear back in God's book and see if it agrees with what He says... if not.. i toss it.. if so.. i smile because i have a little more wisdom than i had the day before.
I have walked both sides of the fence. Life is the experience i have. A life with and without God.

Nice one!

Tech, you quote me (Lindsay) as saying:
"For example, for monotheists the belief in a personal God who hears and answers prayers is a very tenable belief. It is a very legitimate point of view."

Then you comment: "That's a totally untenable position..."
It may be, for you. Even for me. But note I wrote about monotheists, not about you and me.

Your comment about there being, "absolutely ZERO empirical evidence for the power of prayer" begs the question: What kind of evidence are you willing to accept?

BTW, I do not practice the beseeching and begging kind of prayers. In Aramaic, the major language used in Jesus' day, to pray meant "to connect with, to tune in to the universal power".

If it aint about you how could it be a "very legimate point of view." I'm assuming when you wrote legimate you were meaning legitimate.
Are you suggesting exclusive legitamacy?

I do sympathize with anyone who has/had a hard time, but we all have our cross to bear (whoops).

That sounds to me like a classic "blame the victim" attitude. It appears to be rather heartless. We should use reason to address the real causes of suffering.

No, God created a perfect world... i lasted until Adam and Eve broke the law of God bring Sin into the world.. Sin cursed the world...gave it famine, sickness, death.....

It would sound that way if we had no conscious experience of anything greater.

Sin is not a constant, it is a choice.

lol...that was funny..cute play on words
and trust me... that wasn't a sympathy call.. just a reply to your asking my experience

How have babies with brain tumors sinned?

Conscious choices made prior to inhabiting the physical body with the tumor.

wow, just...

wow

There is a scientific term for this type of comment - shite!

As in Shite happens..the theory of the manifest..

The application of prayer as a medium for health has worked many times. Now you all know that I am not religous so I can speak from a more centralized view.

The effect of the mind upon the body is something that has been studied by science for many many years. Those whom promote the scientific approach to studying a phenomenon should be the first ones to understand why prayer can work.

Whether or not this is because of a god is entirely up to you to determine. But we can never the less trace the effects of prayer and its ability to restore the body.

You as a individual are capable of doing many incredible feats which most people would brush off as meere illusion. It is within the human capacity to regenerate cells, to fight off cancer and to restore ones own health.

In fact, in a study done in hospitals, simply having artwork in the hospital boosted their patients recovery rate.

Somwhere around 90% of all sickness is mental. So when you get a cold - your body doesnt actually have a cold, rather it is your mind causing your body to display symptoms of sickness.

Did you know that there is a very LARGE diffrence between the number of people sick on a monday and those sick on a friday? Im not talking about just calling in sick - more people actually become sick on mondays than fridays - alot more.

There was a test with body builders, they lifted the absolute maximum weight they possibly could - then they were placed under hypnosis. After recieving a suggestion that they could lift much more, they lifted 25% more weight than what their maximum was.

It is not that they are physically incapable of doing such feats - it is that they mentally weaken themselves through preconcived notions.

There was a prisoner of war, trapped in korea for two years and every day he played a round of golf in his head. Every game he played he managed to hit a hole in one, for two straight years.

Then when he was finally rescued he played a real round of golf, on his very first shot - he hit a hole in one.

He had not played golf in two years and yet on his first shot he hit a hole in one. This is the power of belief, whatever the mind can concieve and believe it can achieve.

I'm certainly not disputing the therapeutic benefits of positive thinking. There is evidence out there (though not nearly as "solid" as I'd like in order to make definitive statements) to support this contention. However, this type of "positive thinking" phenomenon in no way refutes the physicalist paradigm. The fact that there are still vaguely understood physiological mechanisms at work, possibly some type of unique interaction between emotional response and the genome, doesn't imply anything mystical or magical.



So you're talking apples and oranges. Let's not confuse the issue here. The "power of prayer" is made in reference to divine, "super natural" interventions and has nothing to do with the power of positive thinking. The two lines of inquiry are separate and distinct.

Get thee hence, Satan!

Well Dianah, regardless of one's metaphysical commitments, I do think there is an important distinction to be made here. This isn't really even very controversial IMO. Positive mental states could be conceived of as an aspect of one's physiology. It doesn't matter if you subscribe to some dualistic notion of mind because (1) you must still recognize the presence of other competing interpretations (2) to remain intellectually vigorous, you must isolate the thesis which you are trying to demonstrate.

IOW, showing that positive thinking has a real effect doesn't in any way demonstate the existence of anything "super natural", nor does it refute the physicalist paradigm.

If there was any evidence of real effects from praying for others (and without them knowing) it would be a devastating falsification of physicalism (at least as it is presently conceived of). This is what the study I referenced was all about. Millions of dollars thrown at an attempt to falsify the dominate paradigm within philosophy of mind.

To date there has never been any scientifically credible evidence that consciousness does not reside on a physical substrate. If there was, this news would travel across the global at the speed of light. After all, there are a multitude of individuals who would like nothing better than to see physicalism refuted.

To date there is no scientific method to bottle the infinite, or trap it in a single everpresent form.
There is however, over 5000 years of experiential documentation in the Vedic Texts and the Western scriptures. Translations of these texts vary due to the degree of understanding of the languages, and the context in which they were written.

And through all of that time there has been no experimental evidence to substantiate a supernatural being.In science we try to be unambiguous so as to enable replication of the evidence.

Because there is no such thing. What is called supernatural is similar in reference to a caveman calling television magic, or a witch hunter labelling television satanic.
Science hasn't yet become omniscient, it's limited by the human ego.
A child can't imagine being an adult with any accuracy because it hasn't had the experience.
Experiences can't be handed down labeled and set on a shelf. But they can be shared.

Elementary, my dear Watson!No it's not similar. A television can be shown to have a mechanism of operation and through education humans can understand these mechanisms. There is no demonstrable mechanism to a supernatural anything.No, it is limited by time, the time that has been available to date to investigate and explain credible phenomena.Depends what YOU mean by imagine being, but children, through insight, actually mimic adults very well.Perhaps you are distant from a library.

There is no demonstratable mechanism to something that is considered supernatural until it becomes understandable and taken out of the supernatural context.

As I said Science hasn't yet become omniscient, Time is a constraint of the ego.

Mimicking is through a quality of perception while standing outside the actual experience of being, otherwise it would be being instead of mimicking. That's what I mean by imagining being.

A book does not transfer the experience of the author, it may describe in words an experience but words do not transfer the personal experience of one nervous system into the nervous sytem of another in the same form it first took. You could take your interpretations of what you heard or read and imagine your own experience or mimick the experience according to what you will imagine, but you cannot own the authors experience.

For example. If you are married and say to someone you have good sex with your wife. You could tell someone about it even write a book about it but they could not have your experience. Even if you let someone have sex with your wife it would not be your nervous system experiencing the sex it would be another. Whether the other person had an attraction or an aversion to the way your wife looks smells and acts would be different than your sensory experience of her. Then whether your wife would treat the other as being more attractive than you or not may add to the quality of her performance and maybe if she liked the other guy better he may claim to have better sex with her than you.
Either way you would never really know unless you could inhabit the form and the experience as it happened in the other body.

The relationship one has with God is similar in that we are uniquely given the opportunity to qualify God and make choices to integrate ourselves in a relationship or not.
We as a species with a free will to feel and make choices about our relationships with freinds or our God integrate our experiences accordingly.
This can not be passed on or handed down from parent to child tho a child may observe and according to their imagination mimick the relationship from an observers point of reference assuming the relationship exists.
Science as it seeks to understand from an outside point of reference is sometimes like the child that would pretend to understand and mimick the observed, or completely deny the observed or unobserved because of a missing experience.
If it (Science) can make an agreement between observers than the scientific protocol may make a claim to being an authority able to make claims to fact as they see fit.
Being that scientific means are evolving and facts change along with evolving theories Science cannot maintain the absolute within the relative changing world any more than you can maintain the same thought without the intrusion of another thought for an indefinite amount of time. One can surrender ones self to the infinite but one cannot contain it in any scientific manner, and never will.
This constant change is closer to the God concept than is often imagined, but the ego which is currently dominant in identity of scientific nomeclature finds it difficult to be as flexible as God and so the two don't appear to come to unification if one or the other refuses to budge from a point of reference in a relative form and structure.

You'd better come up with a better example IF you can. As the TV is a human creation then it is NEVER (actually) supernatural, simply misunderstood by some other humans until explained. Thus it's mechanism of operation is always explainable. You are attempting to equate this with something (god, whatever) that YOU consider to BE supernatural (make-believe). It doesn't work! But hang on, are you suggesting that someday, when you understand it, you would be able to take your god out of the supernatural classification? I wonder how the taxonomy will work? Maybe it'll be 4 Domains: Bacteria, Archaea, Eukaryota and Equanatural.No, time here is the sequence of orderly occurrences with prior elementary occurrences preceding more complex occurrences leading to aggregations of data and more satisfactory explanations.But being an adult is largely consolidating the mimicked experiences having moulded them via gene-given facilities into a you. You said "A child can't imagine being an adult with any accuracy because it hasn't had the experience." and that is just not true however convoluted and diversionary you attempt to make your argument about being.In that case we are lost, for books (and their audio, visual, olfactory, tactile, etc counterparts) are how we have transfered experiences that have made humans what they are and how they will proceed still further. You are not so different that when you tell me the pin in your ass hurts I cannot fully appreciate it. This is the nub of the problem you have - you want to be so special that even a superdupertrooper "god" thinks you are special and wants to save you. You will suffer life, die and become nothing, like the rest of us. Have the courage to accept this. I will help you - really! I like you. You are a humorous, intelligent, emotional person and these values are important in natural selection processes. If we can get you over your illness, your life will be transformed. In the future there may be gene therapy, but for now you will have to go "cold turkey" - no praying, no signs of the cross, no more fairy stories. But it will be worth it, for you will see the openness of the scientific world, the truthful insights, the on-going discoveries of the nature of the universe and its human-appreciated beauty, and especially the wonder of the human animal demonstrating how far evolution can take organic chemistry (and it hasn't finished yet). Come, take the plunge ... before you know where you are you'll be talking in a coherent and unambiguous language, you'll be able to dispense with the gobbledygook, you'll be free!!! (Wish I could have inserted some music here!)

Then could the same argument not be applied that what is supernatural to one is natural to another?

Prehaps supernatural is in cohesion with the laws of science. Lets look at it this way, 500 years ago we thought everything was made up of wind,water,earth and fire. Now we believe that everything is made up of atomic elements or if you go deeper, made up of strings.

Whose to say we are right? I mean 500 years ago it was so blatantly obvious that everything was made up of earth,wind,water and fire that should you question it - you would be outcasted.

We are no diffrent than we were 500 or 2000 years ago, alls we do is fix one problem and create another - call the last generations theories incorrect and come up with new ones of our own.

Hell theyre even questioning gravity - yes i said it. The most cutting edge area of quantum physics is questioning the existance of gravity itself.

Sure this may seem like blasphamy and utter disbelief but think about it really.. it used to be blasphamy that things were not made up of the four elements.

We are no more or less correct now than ever before, alls that exists is the illusion of progress by fixing on problem and creating another. People are no more happier and even not all that much healthier. Sure we may live longer, but it is a suspended state of illusion.

Overall.. we have no solid way of confirming that we are more right now than we were 500 years ago. We just have new theories that tell us one thing about science is right, wait a couple years and a new theory will say the last theory was wrong.

There very well could be multiverses and we could have a unknown neurocell attribute that could otherwise be known as the soul. There is no real way of telling whether the reality we experience is what science tells us, what religion tells us or what philosophers tell us. This could all be a dream or prehaps a computer simulation, maybe.. we already are in the Consciousness Singularity and this is just a way of entertaining the singular consciousness, who could otherwise be known as god.

Put your own beliefs into question, before you question others beliefs, look at your own and ask - what makes my beliefs diffrent than any others?

A Dragon Fly lives for 24 hours, do you think he will waste his time fighting with other Dragon Flies?

Quit arguing and start working together.

Dianah, while I fundamentally agree with what you are saying, I am having a hard time understanding how it is relevant to my original point. Either explicitly or implicitly we all make epistemological commitments. My argument is derived from certain commitments, which I have been rather explicit about while posting here at brainmeta.

I can have very "real" experiences that, based on my acquisition of knowledge through stringent epistemological standards, I can recognize as not being veridical. For example, as a volitional agent I can not avoid the sense of free will that I possess, even if I'm a hard determinist and a free will denier (which I'm not btw). Experience itself can not be eliminated by philosophizing, but the interpretation of its actual nature can be altered.

Working together is arguing together. Sometimes a “tough love” must exist between intellectual companions.



(In case this wasn't apparent to some, Nietzsche's use of the term "war" is metaphorical. I have noticed a general pattern where people consider Nietzsche a war monger. These sentiments indicate a basic confusion over the meaning of Nietzschean philosophy.)

Nope, I've explained it to you already and you still don't understand the idea. This would exemplify the idea that if an individual such as yourself does not accept something that doesn't fit in a certain box then the ability to stretch perception beyond boundaries limits understanding.

Well then why be satisfied with your current experience of life in relationship to science and spirituality if a more satisfactory understanding is forthcoming? Why perpetuate suffering? Wouldn't it be wise to free yourself from any attachment to your current level of understanding and open your mind to the forthcoming possibilites?
By the way do you decide when something more acceptable is present or is it another that acts as the authority for you?
For example: Christopher Columbus wants to sail around the world but everyone knows that the world is flat. Being that no one has had the experience the idea of the world being round can't be integrated until someone impresses upon another the new idea.
Chris comes back and says, "We didn't fall off the edge, the world is round" and everyone believes him. Do some think maybe the flat extends further than we thought or the world is actually round?
Does time become the factor that actually makes the world round or is the world round before time grants a bigger vision of reality?
Will science deny what is real until time grants it the ability to have a bigger vision or does time deny what is already there?
Science is not omniscient. It is often restricted by the ego and the egos need to hang on to what it has before something greater pries the past from its fingers.


This is somewhat true but it only exemplifies what I said before. Being an adult is imagined and the imagination then is made real by a choice to take what is imagined and make it real. The average adult lives in an illusion of imagined perspectives of itself and reality.
The average child mimicks the adult version of the childs imaginings of reality. Illusion is passed from generation to generation by example. The average adult is like the monkey you described in its ability to become self aware.
Fortunately this is not the limit to human nature nor human consciousness.
Genetic makeup is flexible enough so that at higher states of conscious awareness the DNA becomes more active and guides the genetic makup of the individual into activating physical properties that allow greater awareness of physical realities than that of a chimpanzee.


No not lost, just mimicking the past experiences of others is not the extent of human ability.
We do have the ability to intuit and visualize beyond the experiences of the past.


If you have or have had a pin in your ass, yes. But what if I share my spiritual insights? How do you choose to appreciate that? (By the way that was rhetorical)


Now we are getting to the crux of the matter. You would rather I suffer in the same manner as you than believe that anyone could rise above suffering.
You believe all of this suffering leads to naught and are pissed at the idea that if there is something greater it doesn't show itself or you can't find it. This is typically what creates such animosity towards spirituality in people.

Have courage to rise above the belief in suffering.


My illness being non comformity and rising above suffering?


Music with suffering and a future that leads to nothing is still suffering.

Actully, being an adult requires that various adult brain structures be in place. It has recently been reported that some pre-frontal cortex structures (essential to judgement) are not in place until a person is in his or her early twenties.

Truly Maximus, the sky must be falling.

As far as I can tell, you’ve given a long list of value judgements. What would you argue constitutes *progress*, *knowledge* and *the path to enlightenment*? I really am curious. I have my answers fairly well developed, but I can’t ever recall reading about your proposed agenda.

"I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry." ~ Richard Rorty

And thus we take the linguistic turn...

Agenda for what?

Dictionary.com - Agenda: a list, plan, outline, or the like, of things to be done

Does one "philosophize with a hammer" or succumb to sophism?