Surely one must beleive all about enlightment, christianity, buddhism, etc. What happens if you can't beleive, and i mean cant. Iwas brought up in Northern Ireland as a protestant, but played quite happily for a time with Catholics, but as i grew older, i'm talking about 8 or 9 here i was beaten up for mixing with Catholics. Now to me there was no difference between Catholics or Protestants, only on a Sunday, as far as i know we both had the same God, but worshipped in different style. This experience has turned me off religion all my life but i have so wanted to beleive, but i cant. I envy people who have their faith, but i cannot beleive in a supernatural being whom sits in judgement on us. Can someone tell me why i should beleive ???

first, you have to get beyond your ego ('that' which you identity yourself with right now) to realize that your 'personal' identity is not so personal after all.

There are quite a few posts and threads here in this forum that should help you out, or at least point in the right direction.

No-one here is preaching about a supernatural being who sits in judgement over us.

It's not so much about belief as it is about experience. Focus on the experience. The particular beliefs are superfluous.

I know how you feel Spartacus 111. I lost my faith, like you, and since that day have been unable to have any sort of meaningful spiritual experience, not that my prior spiritual experiences were meaningful, looking back in hindsight. Sometimes I just don't think ppl can relate to what it's like for us. We haven't just lost our faith in a silly anthropomorphic boogey-man in the sky, we've lost faith in the teleological, our ability to believe in progress, in purpose. And then we are dismissed for being arrogant, self-serving atheists who sit in condemnation upon the superstitious and ridicule all things mystical. For some that might be true, but there is a large portion of us that are just bewildered by the endless sea of teleological narratives and they try to talk to us about why their experiences are more 'enlightened' than our own.

I'll just go back to my make-believe world and kill Hibernians 4tw.

Why should I believe?

Life is a sequence of experiences.
We (more or less) understand completely some of those experiences.
We have a vague understanding of some experiences .
There are some experiences we do not understand at all.

It is the existence of the last category that causes people to try and think of (detect) the mechanisms behind those experiences.
Because we have no proven knowledge of some mechanisms, we have ideas and we call these ideas beliefs. They are unproven knowledge.
The need to know (or to believe in a 'mechanism') stems from an inbuilt requirement for survival [I BELIEVE]. How do you cope with an event the next time it occurs, if you don't understand what caused it, how it happened, or why it happened? Most of us need expanations for everything! Social skills depend heavily on behavioural explanations.

Of course, many people have beliefs of their own.
One mans beliefs may or may not be accepted by others.
Each of us reads or hears of some beliefs and 'tests' them against our own understanding of the world (at that time) based on our own previous experiences.
Sometimes, one mans belief becomes accepted by many and becomes a widely held belief.
We are even indoctrinated with belief systems, usually to put us on a protective path until we can make up our own minds.
A lot of people never question their belief sytems.

In a search for knowledge (and belief when no knowledge exists), we are each free [and I believe, have associated rights and responsibilities] to assess anybody elses beliefs, and accept or reject or modify them for our own use.
Of course, we continue to update our beliefs with time as new experience gives us new insight.

We also need to be aware of falling into some traps which exist as we search for the truth or meaningful beliefs.

Delusions are beliefs in things having no reality.
They can be experienced through illness or making false assumptions yourself or accepting someone elses false words in good Faith. Many people have gone as far as giving their life in the belief that they will achieve 'higher experiences'; a recent example is terrorists expecting 72 virgins in heaven!

Hypnosis allows someone else to make you do or believe things which you cannot remember afterwards.

Hallucinations and ghosts are other 'aberrations'. I believe that these occur within the brain of the recipient only [maybe through chemical imbalance] and that no external-to-the-body factors are involved. I do not know the truth about them.

It is essential to test your experiences and the beliefs that you realise, or are stated by others, before you accept them. A safer way is to ensure that you adopt beliefs which are accepted by many people [though this does not mean that they are correct].

Above all, ensure that your beliefs make life comfortable for yourself.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
______
Incidentally, I have another concept which I call 'suspexion'. It is a pre-belief, ie., more than idea but less than belief.
As an example, I have a suspexion that the universe was not created and did not start with a big bang. It always existed and always will.
My suspexion is that the Universe we are living in is an oscillatory system. It oscillates between 'all material' and 'all spirit'.

As another example, I have a suspexion that the 'rubbish' [apparently useless code sequences found in the human genome rersearch] will turn out to be very useful to the human race, perhaps as codings to allow recogniton of infecting agents.
I do not believe my suspexions; they are just ideas which beggar belief at the moment.
I have no way of testing either of these suspexions

Hi Spartacus 111,

Your current belief is that, "there was no difference between Catholics or Protestants, only on a Sunday, as far as i know we both had the same God, but worshipped in different style". You also don't agree with Religion as you have witnessed it. I agree with you on both of these [including Sunday] points.

Your search for Truth and belief has begun.
Good luck
Best regards Bill.

Belief is absolutely not required !!
Abraham Maslow did some scientific research on what he called the Peak Experience, Not subject to any belief, lifestyle or culture anyone can fall into the experience at any time. It is experienced by joggers as a runners high, mothers giving birth, people staring at the stars on a clear night, or standing on top of a mountain while looking out over the world.
For a breif moment all thought leaves and the experiencer feels almost overwhelmed with a peace or an exhilaration of awe and wonder. It can be accompanied by feelings of deep praise, gratitude or love.
Scientifically measured, the brainwaves of the occipital and parietal lobes are connected to a machine and measured before and after the experience. What happens is the left and right hemispheres come into a cohesive order where as under normal activity they are random and chaotic.
The left and right hemispheres are different in that one is more emotional and the other more rational or mathematical. Typically the male is left brain dominant and the female right brain dominant.
There was another study done by a scientist who mapped out the changes in brain activity during meditation and prayer. He made a comparison to Maslows studies and found that when the thought process was quieted and the spiritual or emotional centers of the brain were activiated the intuitive centers of the brain were enlivened.
Enlightenment or spirituality has labeled these experiences as God experiences, where all that is left in the mind when the thought has left is the experience of stillness and the experience of the self experiencing the Self.
If you are so used to the chatter of the mind and the habit of returning to this, the silence of the absolute is mostly ignored as nothing, but it is much more than nothing, and there is something to the nothing.
Science has not yet determined what this nothing is but the activity of the brain while experiencing the nothing is something

Hi joesus,
I believe it will be found that serotonin enables the peace you describe.
I witnessed its effects when overcoming depression.
The experience for me was so stange that I thought I was dead; realisation of my body was so amazingly different to anything I had ever felt previously. But, I was still myself, I was still thinking normally and life seemed continuous. I had no major intuitive experiences. On the other hand, sleep was a break in life, a blackness I had not experienced before, in which I did not think and my self was lost.
I still don't believe in God or spirits. I know brain chemicals affect our every thought and feeling and belief and experience.

Interesting idea. I wonder if the brain achieves the same level of measured coherency under the influence of drugs.

[quote author=Joesus link=board=6;threadid=2923;start=0#msg14577 date=1065812809]
Science has not yet determined what this nothing is but the activity of the brain while experiencing the nothing is something
[/quote]

this is sort of a holy grail in neuroscience, determining activity in the brain in the absence of any stimulation, during the experience of 'nothing'. Some people refer to this consciousness as 'basal consciousness' or the 'basal field of consciousness', and believe that external stimulation and thought forms merely produce modifications of this basal field. Such people recognize the importance of the basal field of consciousness, and believe the answer to the 'mind-brain problem' is to be found there, in determining the neural activity correlating with basal consciousness. I think it's a promising area to investigate.

In fact, some of my work has involved that, though it's not currently published. Specifically, using techniques I'd rather not like to get into at the moment, I've looked at the whole brain activity, at single-neuron resolution, in monkeys while they were doing nothing but sitting in a chair in the dark, in the absence of any stimulation. You certainly see activity in certain brain regions, including limbic areas, but it's not clear how to dissociate the activity corresponding to 'basal consciousness' from the activity corresponding to homeostatic mechanisms (or other activities not associated with basal consciousness), though more work could, and should, be done here.

The religion of Christianity is no longer based around enlightenment or living for their "god." It is all a massive organization made only to collect money to spread its false teachings. It is a religion full of few rituals, and the ones that are partaken of, consist in no way of worshipping their "god." Christianity can only be regarded as possibly the world's largest and most influential cult. For this is all it is.

What on earth is that thing flapping up and down on bluebottoms left shoulder?