oh ye of little faith! You know little of the powers of the mind.

There must be a misunderstanding of what is being talked here by the three guests.

As an observer, I, see two people in front of me, one who sees there is a 1 mile long cliff edge ie., a big drop, in front of him steps forward. The other [who is standing beside him] has Faith that there is level ground in front of him and steps forward.

What happens to the two men?

The equation which I have given is very similar to findings in quantum mechanics.
In QM, it is the "observer" who "materializes" the "probability". Unless observed everything remains a "probability".

I am calling this "observer" as god.
A VideoCam cannot be an observer. Even a human eye/brain cannot be an observer. Because they are all "matter", which require some observer to materialize them. Hence this observer must be non material, and he is capable of materializing "probabilities"

Your idea is interesting, though not novel. It's been around for almost a century now, since the birth of QM.

Some would say the collapse of the wave function is an illusion. Besides, QM is incomplete anyway. Let's remember the limitations of QM and any empirically-based science for that matter. There's only so much that QM can say about metaphysics, and some would doubt it has anything useful to say at all.

and besides that, you're just referring to a particular interpretation of QM, the Copenhagen interpretation. There are many different interpretations of QM. It's unwise to focus on one at the expense of other equally valid interpretations.

One man who sees in front of him a 1 mile long cliff edge ie., a big drop, steps forward.
Another man [who is standing beside the first man] has Faith that there is level ground in front of him and steps forward.

What happens to the two men?

If the one who has faith is enlightened then enlightened man keeps walking and the one that sees his reality as he believes it falls and dies.

As a rational person, i feel that i have to be agnostic on the issue... people who let dogma determine their actions frighten me, and yet deep down i think i really do believe there is a higher power.

I've yet to experience anything that gives me a clue as to God's nature or purpose, but that's not surprising given i'm neither omnipotent nor omniscient.

All i know is i've never missed a REALLY important deadline or appointment that couldn't be resolved somehow. I've never broken something that couldn't be healed (i'm convinced that praying to the porcelain god helps). I've never gone without something i couldn't go without, and i have family and friends who care about me and vice versa. I don't know if God exists, but i feel blessed.

Blessed by what/who.....
Would that be self blessed, blessed by an external source, blessed by the feeling of being blessed....
Define rational. A person who has to be agnostic because of a feeling?
I had a feeling once, and then I had another and then another...
Do you base you rationale on these feelings and are the feelings omnipotent or omiscient or permanent so to form a stable foundation or is this just a present moment ration of your changing thoughts and feelings?

Flame on....

I assume that rational people rely on anaylized evidence and experiences. Also you don't have to prove that God doesn't exist, you have to prove that he DOES exist. At the same time i can't see myself being so SURE that God doesn't exist that i'm an atheist. Just because i can't see something doesn't mean it's not there (e.g. round earth, heliocentricity).

I read a fantasy-fiction book called Wizard's First Rule. The rule is that people are ignorant. They believe something because they want it to be true or because they're afraid it is.

Joe that is how i see the situation rationally, until some real evidence comes up we might as well bring up a thread if you believe in magic, unicorns or dragons. This the culmination of alot of thought, self-reflection and self-analyzing on my part. It's not just some wandering vagrant 'feeling' that comes and goes.

and yet... and yet i feel blessed (by an external source)

for whatever reason i just can't dismiss it so easily. I just can't.

Guest you may be right. I don't view them as impovrished though, to me that's as religious as i'm capable of getting without further evidence or experience. I don't experience things through a 'holy filter' of sorts, so of course i will see less of God's work when i look at things.

Taoism says that there is a Power at work in the Universe, a Power so much beyond human understanding that attempts to know It in Its entirety are useless; a Power to Which humanity is as an ant, merely part of Its Creation. Human efforts to influence It (prayer) are doomed to failure, hence there is no need for a priesthood whose livlihood depends on payment from credulous congregations.
All we can do is to acknowledge Its existence, try - by observation - to discover Its laws and live in harmony with these.
Humanity being what it is, however, it prefers something more tangible than an impersonal abstract, so reifies various aspects of the Power and calls them gods and goddesses. The goddess Kwan Yin, for example, exemplifies compassion, but it is not she who is worshipped, rather she acts as a mnemonic for Absolute Compassion.

Hey Rocky.. wanna see me pull a rabbit outta my hat? Your rationale is certainly not based on any logic, perhaps changing thoughts and ideas, more probably denied faith.
But since you have to be agnostic to be rational, faith would not do, yet you admit you aren't really agnostic so you can't really make claim to being rational as you claimed previously. Yet there is something that can't be ignored......
I would stop while you are ahead and just quit trying to label yourself and this thing that you can't seem to deny.
That's sometimes the problem with God, he/she/it's niether, rational, logical or definable.

Ok i see where you're coming from, you're right in that i can't as i said both be a rational person and believe in God, by my own definiton no less!

It's a paradox and a maybe a hypocracy...

lol oh well, just call me schizophrenic then cause i stand by it

Rune i've never really done too much reading into eastern philosphies. Some dabbling in a high-school course, but anyway Taoism sounds quite interesting. Thank you for bringing it up, i'l probably follow that up with some googling.

you're doing the same thing that St. Thomas did, you're presupposing that God already exists. That's not something a 'rational' person would have to assume.

given a head/tusks/legs/trunk i can see an elephant, those are valid things that you can easily draw the conclusion from the evidence. I've seen an elephant before, i know they exist.

I see insects, animals, oceans, mountains, sun, stars and the moon. i see people, cultures, relationships, literature, philosophy. I see change, in culture and ways of thinking. I see religion but no basis for it except attempts to explain the unexplained, another way besides nationalism for humans to sub-divide ourselves into armed camps and continue to be xenophobic towards each other.

it's as if you handed me a bunch of molecules on 1,000,000 different slides that MIGHT make up something called a Unicorn but i don't know that cause nobody's ever seen one and i'm not equipped with a microscope to judge for myself.

I just had a thought, i'm assuming everybody consideres God sentient, and not just some force that IS like gravity. That's an important distinction.

"Wait a minute.... You claimed to be rational meant?"
i don't think that's a sentence or a complete thought. perhaps a rephrase or an edit?

agnoticism by it's very definition presupposes nothing. It's the very essence of 'i don't know'. You may be confusing it with atheism.

as for the last quote, it was just an interesting thought i had. It's more of a question without a question mark. I can see understand what Rajesh is saying better if he see the 'holy ghost' aspect of God. Something like God isn't sentient but he's in every atom in existence.

interesting picture...

For religion, as for sex, I commend you to "Stranger In A Strange Land".

Thou art God.

I grok you!

Rajesh, if you can find a dictionary that includes "uncertainty" in a definition for the word 'rational' please inform me.

If I see a rose in front of me there is a rose in front of me.
When I suspect that I may be suffering delusions, illusions, hallucinations, I will ask someone else what they see in front of me [who isn't suffering from any of those things]. If they say 'a rose' then I will know there is a rose in front of me. If I have any doubt I will place my hand forwards and see if blood oozes from my thorned fingers.

When you suspect you are delusional how would you trust your perceptions of another? You might take your delusions and misinterpret your point of reference, or your point of reference may also be delusional, maybe more so than you!

Not all roses have thorns.

while beng rational means being in a constant state of uncertainty, it's a decieving way to look at it. It also means accepting things that have been theorized and tested in your own experience and observing the experiences of others and aggregating them to the point of being ''pretty damn certain' but maybe not 100%.

in other words if i put my hand in a fire 50 times and i burn my hand every time, i see the fire burn 50 other people's hands 50 times, then it's a fairly safe bet that fire will burn everybody's hands. I don't KNOW this but you can reasonably assume it, and test it again if you need to. This is an easily repeatable experiment (that i really wouldn't suggest you try). Staying out in the cold rain makes you sick. Get all 6 billion people on the planet to stand out in the rain for several hours and see how many of them get sick (but far enough away they won't get it by spreading). Given the results of many such experiments, we can use all the gathered information to make new theories and test them. That is the essence of rationality.

I've yet to see a test or experiment that can or will ever prove the existance of god.

Going back to my 1million atoms analogy, to me it looks like you're seeing an incomprehensible mess, pointing at it and saying "that's definately God" with no decernable reason. Why is it God?

Think of it like a holy ink-blot test. A rational person sees a splash of ink that might look like something by accident or design of the 'artist'. He knows what ink is, he knows that people draw and write things with ink and can put them into any shape they desire. He's done it and seen thousands of other people do it. He knows ink is a liquid, and it's drawn on paper because he's also written on paper thousands of times with similar result.

From a rational perspective, you're seeing something that there's no logical reason to see. There's no reason to assume God is the reason for ANYTHING in existance. The building blocks of knowledge (fire burns, rain causes sickenss etc) at NO point adds up to an obvious conclusion that God exists.

As much as you can argue the ability to be objective, there has never been a repeatable successful test of God's influence (may God strike me dead if i'm wrong, etc). That leads me to believe that seeing or feeling God is an entirely subjective experience with absolutely no basis in objectivity.

(anyone who doubts all levels of objectivity, go stick your hand in a fire or stand out in the rain ). Nobody believes in things that are easily proven wrong with experimentation anymore (like the earth being flat, heavy things fall faster than light things, you can survive on ocean water), it's only the impossible to test theories, like God, that people believe in. The idea is to narrow down the level of uncertainty in all areas in until we know everything.

When i say as humans we sub-divide ourselves, i mean exactly that. Along cultural lines, territorial borders, language, skin colour, and religion which all makes people seem more alien because we don't really understand others. It's the lack of familiarity with the different people that makes them different. There aren't many people who can go to absolutely any place in the world and feel at home. We're creatures of habit, and different way of dress or talking will draw the eye or ear to those things that make them different. We commonly identify and stereotype ourselves and others based on those differences. English people like soccer(football), french people like wine, Korean people like Starcraft, Swedes like Counter-strike, Americans like democracy, Canadians like hockey. There ARE alot of truth to these statements. They certainly aren't always true but stereotypes are there for a reason.

Do i think humans could be more unified? yes of course we could. In the sense that we could all be alot nicer to each other. I don't really have any reason to think we're all shards of the same broken pane of glass, there'll always be differences and different theories and ways of thinking for different entities.

I think of us more as 6 billion individual hot-dogs from the same package. After we're out of the package anything can happen. Some people get mustard poured on them, some people get ketchup poured on them, some get relish, hot peppers, spicy thai sauce, mayonaise, but still each person is a whole hot dog, not 1/6 billionth of a hot dog that all makes up one hot dog. I have no reason to believe we can combine with each other to make a super hot-dog like they do in transformers.

Well given that you believe God is in everything but doesn't have a will of his own, could we exist without God 'running things'? Is he then equatable to a battery or nutrients that we use without any knowledge thereof?

(we both had alot to write here, if i missed any of your points please reiterate so i can focus on them)

i read my post over again and now i'm really hungry!

First caveman: "If we paint animals on the wall, wear special clothing, dance and sing in a certain way, there's a Higher Power that will send animals our way and we'll have a successful hunt!"

Second caveman: "Nah, mate! The animals are migrating, the wind's in the right direction - that's why we'll have a successful hunt!"

The debate continues................

I won't reiterate but add to. When you are pretty damn sure but maybe not 100% then there is room to evolve.
When the paradigm shifts and the fear that creates the edge of the world dissappears, new ways of thinking creates new realities.
There are some who will put their hand in the fire and not get burned but it may not be within your concepts of probabilities therefore not something that is of interest or importance and certainly not something that you will truly desire to bring forth into your creation.
When you are intellectually and spiritually ready for that evolutionary step your mind will take a new direction.

I'm not sure where you get the idea of God not having a will of its own, but if you are interested in knowing the reality of God then you will have to turn your attention towards that to absorb any realization of that other than campfire stories that are entertained because there is nothing better to do.

Generally speaking most peoples interests are in other more repetative constructs such as instant self gratification and they tend to follow their past experiences to try and recreate the same experiences over and over again or recreate new ways to experience the same feelings.
But people evolve eventually. Like a child who yearns for a GI Joe or a Barbie doll and gets certain pleasures from the experiences, they inevitably grow into greater things of enjoyment like Sex, Money and posessions of personal value.
When a person stops looking outside of themselves to define who they are they begin the process of looking someplace they have not habitually turned to but is not completely foreign either.
Union is not same thinking but finding the source that is within us which connects our essence with our sensory stimuli or manifestation of the perceptions thereof. The connection of the spirit with the physical reality.
One is tangible by the human instrument and the other by the instruments of the manifest.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein-

...the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson-

Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen W. Hawking-

The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.
- The Upanishads-

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-

Man did not weave the web of lifehe is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle-

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
- Albert Einstein-


You cannot see anything that you do not first contemplate as a reality.
The above are all useful quotes inspired by personal experiences and it is within each of us to find what is real. Our potential in greater awareness are not in the paradigms of habit and the present experience but in the surrender to that which is greater than the present understanding. As long as we are not so arrogant to presume that what we know now is the only reality we can empty our cup to have it filled with more.

I think it is a statement of his experience.

Ditto

Ooh you're such a debaser Dan, have you ever seen a UFO? Is there any way anyone could convince you of their existence? Hell for that matter, is their any way i could convince you that I exist?

Why would anyone try?
Knowing what is truth is not dependant on outside confirmation. Faith can carry you into the experience but the truth is still the truth before it is experienced.
Reality is co-dependant.

I've seen what I can only explain as a UFO, although my observation consisted only in a point of light behaving in ways that I can not reasonably explain assuming convention. As for 'science working', it is reality that is working in specific ways that scientists tend to universally observe. Thus, for whatever reason reality decides to behave the way it does, I as a scientist, can choose to bet that it will continue to work that way in order to make money

hmmm, as far as i'm aware your science cannot provide an acceptable test for consciousness. Until it can, I will be free to state whatever I want about how consciousness can control things

science is simply the mapping of observed structure, a mapping that serves the end of intelligent interaction with experience. The present structure of the universe may not be the only possible structure, but it is the present structure and it does behave rather persistently. If one knows of alternate 'unconventional' action in the present structure, then surely they could demonstrate it?

I don't need a dictionary definition Dan

I'm not necessarily talking about the universe, could i demonstrate an experience i had where i went to an unearthly place in a meditation or while or on drugs?

An MRI may give you some brain activity, maybe a mumor showing i recongised the experience from before, but that's it!

Remember this is a philosophy board Dan Does science have an explanation for the UFO you saw? In fact how can you even bring definitions of science into a discussion of God, what does God care about your science?

I am God, and I care about science!

Well i'm God too, and I say science conforms to peoples expectations of it, rather than science revealing underlying truths that always existed

Dan you worship Science like it is a God, you are part of a religion like any other, you will defend your God rather than question him using the very same scientific attitude that you hold so dear.