R3NNiS

I confess, i still dont get what you mean by the reference to literal understanding of a metaphor. I am used to understanding "meta-phor" to mean something Higher than its literal meaning, not lower. So you believe that our notions of Spirituallity and religion simply came about as a primitive means to explain our experience of interactions, and self consciousness. Maybe so, but who is to say that such an invention was not precisely the means God intended to finally reveal himself to the creature?

Og

When I talk about literal interpretation of a metaphor I'm talking about the way the stories are interpreted. They are interpreted in terms of their denotation (what they actually literally say) instead of their connotation (what they are designed to illustrate).

As for something like god having an intention to reveal himself through spirituality, well, um.... It seems like that with all the various traditions that call themselves mutually exclusive due to a literal interpretation of their doctrine (i.e. islam, christianity, paganism), that the correct answer is that a literal interpretation has hardened humanity against one another and to the true connotation of the stories that they hold so tightly to their chests.

I don't see how you can come to terms with the mutual exclusivity of all of these practices which are taken literally.

This is something you certainly do not find in the eastern traditions. There's no ideology or theology. The final stage of spiritual growth in hinduism involves an annihilation of your concepts of god as the final barrier to the brahman.

Buddhism is an inward search along the same lines as the hindu tradition (i.e. buddhism is to hinduism as christianity is to judaism). Shintos have no ideology or theology, they just dance.

There's no exclusivity amongst these eastern religions. And they recognize the reality of the nature of the metaphor. And there's unity because of it. Buddhists can go and dive into islam and form their own new brand.. Or christianity.. or whatever. There's no problem from their perspective. It's the stories that point at us, not us that point at the stories.

The world that practices an appreciation of the metaphor for it's connotations is one that understands peace and unity. The one that grips the literal denotation of the metaphor finds pain and death and conflict.

I don't really see the value of the western idolotries as a vehicle for god's expression with that realization on the plate.

However, in the eastern traditions, mythology and religion have ALWAYS been means by which god is revealed. Brahman has always been illustrated through myth. Myth is the finger pointing at the stars, not the stars themselves.

I keep bringing it up, but it's a good example. From the movie "The Matrix."

The oracle told neo that he "was not The One." Was this literally true? No. Did it point Neo at his destiny? Hell yes.

Morpheus said: "You're going to find there's a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path."

And that illustrates religion as a vehicle to the divine, not the divine itself. That's in you.

Og

From the Matrix Revolutions:
At this point neo is defeated by smith. Smith is destroyed. A new age begins. Free will and determinism collide.

Og

Daniel Dennett - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This guy has some awesome work on a discussion of the evolution of religious thought along with the evolution of free will as a concept in the population. Very neat stuff.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

The reason this idea appeals to me so much is as follows:

1) I'm a neuroscientist and an electrical engineer and a physicist, so I see first hand that the idea of free will as myth is in perfect accord with modern science.

2) This casts all literal religions to which agnostics refrain from saying "i believe" or "I don't believe" as myths as well. It literally does. The literal interpretation of the modern western religions (islam, christianity, judaism) all require the actions of free agents to accept their paths to salvation. These religions also seem to claim that your behavior in this life will determine your status in the afterlife.

In fact, this interpretation of reality takes all of these religions and demonstrates them as myth in the same way that free will is a myth. Ideas of heaven and hell and of consequences for choice in life become the definition of internal constructs of the human population. It becomes a principle which governs the evolution of the population. It's proof positive that man created our notion of god

3) Anyone can see that this must be the case from playing pool to seeing the predictions of the weather getting more and more accurate over the decades. The ideas are basic to modern medicine and neurobiology and neurosurgery. There's a massive body of brain lesion and brain stimulation evidence in humans to draw a 1 to 1 correlation between experience and neural activity in the brain.

This casts religion's ultimate factual basis as ultimately false, but the effect it has on the human population is ultimately real. This realization is a basic expression of agnosticism. The question still remains: "Is there a designer, how does the universe exist, why does it exist, what's it's source"

It hoists the literal religions by their own petard, so to speak. The reality of free will permeating the religions is so central to what they do. It's the fact that people can make choices about how they live their life that drives these religions to make claims that they're THE path and to do missionary work and such. Like how the christians say that you must accept salvation for it to apply to you.

All of these expressions of belief and disbelief and even the ideas of good and evil are clearly demonstrated to be internal concepts to the human population and not ultimate to the universe!

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

How can heaven and hell have any meaning if there is no free will? Not having some control of your actions outside of causality means that if you end up in hell for behaving bad, it is literally the deity's fault that you are in hell because he organized the causal chain!

This is the silver bullet that science has to take literalist religion and annihilate it. The question of whether god exists or not is no longer necessary because the people posing on the "i believe" side have insinuated the idea of free will SOOOO deeply into their myth structure.

I think this realization has finally made me an athiest in the context of human society and an agnostic in the context of understanding of the universe (brahman) and it's source.

You can say: "Since free will is a construct of the human mind and not the ultimate reality, your notion of god is false given that the theology requires that humans act as individual moral agents."

The previously unprovable and undisprovable hypothesis is no longer relevant unless in the strict sense of universal consciousness as described in the hindu concept of brahman.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

R3NNiS

Wow, you have a lot to say. lol

You are right in saying that heaven and hell have no meaning in a deterministic, zero-freewill theory. Within such a theory, thereis no morality. Actions are neither good nor bad, they are simply the effects of neurons. Certainly, i am sure that atheists and agnostics value morality as it reshapes our barbarian youths into civilized adults capable of giving back to family and society. (I am not saying that they are immoral.)

Christians beleive otherwise, not that our actions are outside of causality, but we believe in a higher order (the belief affects how we think and act no doubt)...a higher order by which we believe decisions can be evaluated (mostly in relation to love for God and for neighbor) And that we have freewill (how that looks alongside of causality, idk, not the expert) that our actions are not simply an unescapable sequence of events, but are in a unique way ours, and as such that they (and ultimately we) can be evaluated on such a scale.

Heaven and Hell are limited words with various meanings of paradise and prison, bliss and suffering, singing and gnashing teeth, but the meanings are primarily based in a belief in a relational God, and either being with God or without God. If you dont beleive in God or in a relational God, then you wont believe in heaven or hell.

The An-Jel

Og well said. You are a neurosurgeon and/or scientist, electrical engineer, and physicist. Where you have the time to think all this stuff is impressive. I would speculate that you do it during surgery.

Wow... why do you still say your a Christian though... just for the possibility that you might go to hell?

Og from Newbie - and a Christian

__________________
"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti - Royal Gibraltar Regiment

Og

I'm a neuroscientist, not a neurosurgeon. I do research on invertebrates with nanodevices (I'm almost done with my PhD, and do not have an MD). And when you're recording from brains and peripheral systems of animals, you realize these things in parallel. It doesn't take "extra thought" to realize this.

I guess christist is better? I was raised a christian. I don't believe in their mythology as literal fact. I'm with joseph campbell on this one. If you read it as a newspaper report, it loses all meaning. If you read it as poetry, it becomes illuminating.

So people tell me I'm not christian because I don't believe in the literal facts of the doctrine that the church has formulated for 1500 years. I tell them they're not christian because their interpretation of the texts as literal reports of facts misses the point of jesus' message. His message was one of human empowerment and connection with the divine. It's identical to the buddhist message.

It has value beyond the finality of the literal interpretation of the church's view of god and heaven and hell. And I was raised with it and it's part of my western culture. I've "transcended" chrsitanity. I did not reject it, I went through it and came out above it. I can lead inductive and deductive bible studies and discuss the realities of the time periods and sources of the texts that we're looking at. I can play praise music on my guitar and lead people from horizontal to vertical worship. It's still a real experience to the human minds involved even though it has ultimately no meaning in the realm of the universe we inhabit.

Personally, under this realization of no free will, it's clear that heaven/hell are motivating factors for people who still maintain the delusion of free will. Eternal suffering or reward is great motivation for acting good in few scant years of experience during life.

This kind of religion has been great for the history of humanity at keeping us somewhat stable. These days, it's got to go out the window lest we destroy ourselves and our environment.

Dumbo was given this feather by a crow and was told it was magical. And that was what allowed him to fly. Not because it was really magical but because of the confidence it gave him. One day he lost his feather and plummeted to the earth and at the last moment realized that he could fly without it.

Religion and free will are this feather. They are real in this sense. Science shows us that we don't need it and the test of the next 100 years is if we go splat or if we realize the potential within us and spread our own wings and fly under our own power.

It's why I'm going into science education when i get out of my degree program here. I think molding society in a direction based upon this realization is one of the most crucial things we need at this transition point in human history.

Just flaunting free will in front of everyone is not the solution. Then you're going to have people who become fatalists and there's going to be a real ugly reaction because they were doped up before on religion. The detox could kill us. It's going to take a slow transition of throwing off the shackles of the idea of original sin and moving towards the realizations that man can do anything.

I think the incorporation of yoga and other eastern traditions into the west can be good moving in this direction. It really brings in ideas of "human as divine" which is where I think the intermediate step is going to have to be between free will and human realization of free will as myth. We must continue with free will just like we have music and money. But we can have this realization and then act compassionately towards our enemies/criminals even when we must remove them from society for our own ultimate stability.

Thus, the teachings of jesus (compassion) can have a lot of value.

It's a very complex problem and not as simple as flaunting free will as myth in front of people's faces. I'm excited to see how it begins to unfold in our life times. And it's neat to be on the crest of the wave where this stuff is concerned.

On the reality of acting compassionately towards criminals, we can have a justice system and government based on human stability and survival (and the only way this is possible is with empiricists in charge). It throws off the emotionally and sometimes error prone ideas of fear and desire and good and evil (see this in the garden of eden) and allows us to act for the good of mankind when "punishing" criminals.

Survival becomes the goal. Thriving and enjoying the life that we have. This is ultimately what jesus and the buddha had in common. Jesus had this transcendent notion and is why he said turn the other cheek. The buddha's notions where around riding oneself of the motivating forces of fear and desire to rid the life of suffering.

These teachings have value and that's why I call myself a christian when around christians. But I'm a scientist. A compassionate agnostic.

The realization of free will as myth still leaves the questions of "what is this place? and how does it exst?" (if these even have any meanings as questions). We may or may not ever be able to address these questions and that's the agnostic in me.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

The main paradigm shift that needs to come is based on the quote in my signature. We are like flowers that emerge out of the universe. When we die, we don't really go anywhere, we re-integrate differently into the world around us is all. This matches wonderfully with the eastern ideas of "you as divine" and jesus' quote of "I and the father are one" from john. And personally, i'm excited to see what happens when I die! Though I've got a lot of enjoyment I want to see from life first!

This is fundamentally different than the religious paradigm of us as being souls inserted into this world and then removed from it when we die. The former puts us in harmony with our environment and experience while the latter puts us at odds with it.

Religion is a very real and very powerful tool that has shaped humanity. I don't call myself an atheist because I believe in the idea of Brahman from hindu theology. And I think that atheists chuck the baby out with the bathwater. These are REAL motivating factors in the human population and must be treated as such.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are