immortal

Yes, it does. Thank you.

That's exactly what my criticism is, you want to do away with god, can you atleast address my critcisms rather than acting innocent. Yes, it does. If one includes the pleroma of God as the fundamental nature of the cosmos then it drastically changes your worldview and hence I said that your worldview is incomplete. Yes, I need to ask you, it appears from here that you positively believe in advaita vedanta which falls under theistic religions and contradicts your claim of being an atheist.

We don't have to blindly accept everything that has been taught or said by the experts and that doesn't mean we have to go on making our own opinions, we can dig deeper and try to understand what is it that they are doing The reasoning for believing in the existence of quarks from what I read is that there is indirect evidence for quarks and it is something to do with a process called bremsstrahlung. http://www.websterworld.com/websterworld/scitreas/f/fundamentalparticles166.html How to find a Top quark - Essay How is it appropriate to call two years of hard work from physicists to analyse the data to test various hypotheses as pure faith i.e wanting to believe what you want to believe and also why are you comparing science with religion indicating as though science is somehow higher than religion, even religious scholars spend years of time in figuring out the truth, stop defacing religion.

Oh yes, when you reject the truth and accept things which only suite your worldview, how can you find disagreements. Contingent Muddle? The pleroma of God and his Aeons are very important for a practicing gnostic, one cannot just clear it away. Why don't you address this rather than acting as though there aren't any disagreements. The pleroma of God of the gnostics is as important as the unity, both should be known. If you accept one and doubt the other your view is incomplete which implies the knowledge that you're trying to gain is going to be incomplete too. And also how can you accept these things and call yourself an atheist, it looks like double standards to me.

Such characters who can cognize the events happened in the past and also the events which are about to happen in future anywhere in the world have been depicted in many religions. Yes, it would have been more intelligent if God had said "Yes, Abraham, I knew from the begining that you fear God and I also knew that you would give up your son for me". But in religions everything is seen as a play of gods and it seems god played his part in his play not that he didn't knew what was about to happen, this is my opinion though.

The problem between us was always about the type of scholars who form the highest authority in the field. You go with the view of S. Radhakrishna, I don't have any problem with what he says though I accuse him if he had compared this with science and used scientific terms and reasoning. But scholars like these are not the highest authority in the field. http://archive.org/details/Sarvepalli.Radhakrishnan.Indian.Philosophy.Volume.1-2 http://archive.org/details/Sarvepalli.Radhakrishnan-The.Philosophy.of.the.Upanishads To me the gnostics themselves are the highest authority and they have to be taken literally and not what a 21st century professor says about them. It is the gnostic scholars who form the highest authority. http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/index.html http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Brief_Summary_Theology.htm what do you have to say about this? For Gnostics god is very important, its not that gnostics thought that god(supreme or demiurge whatever) was a misrepresentation who should not be taken seriously, No, its not that god was just a misrepresentation to gnostics, no, you're misrepresenting Gnosticism. Your worldview is incomplete. If you have any thoughts like if we somehow dismiss god then we can combine all religions and then merge it with modern science you better drop that idea because you're terribly wrong.

Mondays Assignment: Die, the arguments in my post #822 are not baseless assertions, I'm coming from the proto Indo-Iranian religions which was a branch of proto Indo-European religions and similarities can be seen in later periods of religions which predated Christianity, there are religions older than that. According to these religions the pleroma of God exists in everyone and in these type of religions to have emotions like pride, anger, happiness etc was considered imperfect and God was seen as a perfect one whom we all should try to strive for. The imperfections are necessary and exists in the pleroma of God himself and god controls the nature(numinous) and not the other way around where the imperfections of the world causes varying emotions in him, No, he is not subjected to it. What is happiness to one might be sad to another, what is sweet to one might be bitter to someone else and hence its completely subjective and it hides many secrets of how consciousness works and that's what one can infer from reading these scholars.

This is one of the reasons why I think that sex education should be taught in schools, even though many of our behaviours are hard-wired and the changes are quite natural and requires no extra information it is always good to know about it in detail. According to Kamasutra of Vatsyayana (Kama means all kinds of pleasure not only sex) both a man and a woman should have these following skills to be considered revered and he says by developing these skills in women too, they can live on their own without any man's support. The orthodox religious view treats sex in a negative way but some scholars who have studied the scriptures and who have wisdom take it positively and say that it is important and that it should be performed in a way so that it doesn't destabilize the society in any way and differentiate the kinds of women that one should resort for only carnal desire and for some special puropse and those who are prohibited from resorting to.

We expect in an ideal environment that a democratic system should be ruled by reason but this is not how the things are in the practical real world scenarios, we expect the people who we have elected to represent us to make reasonable arguments and come to a choice. Let's take an example of a particular scenario where the ruling party requires another two votes to pass a particular bill about a very important issue: 1. Now if two persons from the opposition vote against the decision of their own party realizing that such a bill is necessary and is important that it should be passed on then they are the ideal people we normally want to see in a democracy since their choices were based on reason and on high moral grounds and they could've even decided to vote in favor of their own party and made sure that bill is not passed if it had many defects in it. 2. Now if the ruling party gives some bribe to those two persons in the opposition party and make them vote in their favor then by default they are going to vote against their own party with out even reading or understanding the bad and good outcomes and short comings of the bill. In the latter scenario what mattered was, those two important votes to pass the bill not anyone's reasoning, this is how the things are in the real practical world. Majority wins.

No, wait. This reminds me of the Shakespeare's problem. A monkey is given a typewriter and it is asked to type the word SHAKESPEARE consisting of 11 alphabets. Now if the monkey starts typing randomly it is very unlikely that it is going to type the word SHAKESPEARE at one go or at one single attempt but if we intoduce a certain constraint that if the right alphabets are in the right places then the slots will be set to default and the monkey continues to randomly type for the remaining slotted locations. For example: if the monkey type it as S G I M E Z H U L R F Then the alphabets S, E and R are the right alphabets at the right position so we keep them up and try to jumble the rest. So it is very much likely that we are going to type the word SHAKESPEARE given enough time. Hence evolution works by accumulating good designs. This example might be misleading it looks like as though evolution has some predestined purpose to get the word Shakespeare it was just an example to show that how selection pressures operate to produce macro forms by accumulating good designs. In the above example we can get snapshots of how the word Shakespeare appeared, for example at one point in time it can look like S G I M E Z H U L R F it may transform into this after some time S Q U K E W P J A R B Or at the present moment to this S H A K E S P E A R E In this way evolution works by random mutations followed by non-random selections i.e evolution works by cumulative selection i.e accumulation of good designs. And also don't confuse evolution by natural selection with the origin of language and meaningful sentences, it is a different topic altogether and hence your analogy is irrelevant.

I think that's what he was talking of. http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/inaugural/infinal.html

There in lies the problem, Christianity says that Jesus is the only saviour and we have to recieve him if we have to enter the kingdom of god and Krishna says if you worship other gods you'll come back to this world again but if you surrender yourself to him you'll enjoy his everlasting dome and won't come back to this world again. Do both give us everlasting life? Whom to follow and whom not to? If you follow one and reject the other is it not that you are showing double standards? It doesn't look reasonable to me and therefore I decide not to take either of them seriously.

Some of the theologians and religious scholars have indeed earned our trust and in neither circumstances it is in any way justifiable for the apparent leap in faith for showing such a strong commitment, that's why it is called as faith. Many are convinced that god exists by holding such an active faith because they have seen god and I am sure there might be some who are convinced that he doesn't exist, that's how it answers our questions. That we cannot just go on without examining what the truth is. There are correlations, a single individual cannot practically study all the different traditions with his short life span and also he has to do something else to earn for his living, I don't think there is much financial support for scholars. It needs a collaborative work from people of different cultures who can study the literature with out any personal bias. Courses like this which are concerned of Near and Far east traditions is what I am talking of. http://web.mac.com/t...e/NFE_Info.html

There are components to such emotions which are not measurable, by running an MRI over their brain chemistry you are merely treating them as zombies, while I am very much open to the notion that these are emergent properties of brain modules and patterns, our apparent feeling that we are somehow more than machines and our inability to study such subjective aspects is one of the reasons for studying and believing in religion and such subjective emotions are not as disconnected to gods as you might think, it is very much connected to them and the ancients had a more better understanding of these emotions, they attributed that such emotions of pride, fear, happiness, anger, hatred etc were controlled by anthropomorphic gods and by worshiping such gods they were in control of such emotions according to their own will. I am not asserting that gods exists just because these established emotions exist but I think gods can be one of the possible explanations for such emotions and we believe in it to find some support of such assertions or even to abandon our hope of explaining such things through gods.

There is an another arena according to Kierkegaard where we do that in our life i.e in love. People just trust in an another person without any proof about the righteousness of that person and show commitment. Similarly, in religion, people trust the scriptures and show commitment by leading a practical life based on faith. The joy of such faith comes in the end when we get the answers for our most important questions. Physicists have a job on their hands until they provide accurate explanations for the correlations seen in quantum entanglement and the theists too have a job on their hands to give explanations for the correlations seen accross different religions existing in different cultures at different timelines and faith is the tool that they use to test such assertions in the religious scriptures. So I don't think we somehow display low standards for accepting something as true when it comes to religion.

I have honestly admitted that I have no knowledge of Gods, someone else's revelation cannot give knowledge for me, its only useful for them. Belief in the Wisdom literature is not equal to having posterior knowledge about them. I have a prior knowledge about such literatures and argue based on such literature taking their notions of reality for granted and accepting such literatures. Now you and others can reject such literatures just as you reject any other religious scriptures, I am not requesting you to show respect for such literatures. The literature itself is what needs to be addressed and it deserves some valid explanations before rejecting it, saying that all of it is wish thinking and pure imagination is not going to do any good for anyone, you cannot convince anyone with your personal opinions. I am not asking you to start believing in such literatures, you can call people who believe in god whatever you want. I embrace both scientific as well as religious speculation and I'm not in for minimizing any form of thinking as long as it doesn't harm anyone, by minimizing religious thinking you're blocking a possible road to reality and we will not have any problems if we define the boundary of religion from the real world and just because someone accepts god for a small aspect of his life doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be irresponsible to society and they can pretty much go on as though god doesn't exist when they are interacting with the society and keeping their religious speculation personal to themselves. I'm not coming from science and neither I want to elevate religion to the level of science. Any loopholes and refinements to scientific theories has nothing to do with this, this is not science. An idea doesn't always have to be intended to fill a scientific gap, it can be quite unparallel and deserve merit from a different worldview. I would be pretty happy if science could address such wisdom literatures and give natural explanations for it. Different scriptures advocate different laws, if religion should be taught in schools then teach all religions or don't teach religion at all, why only the Bible or only the Koran or only the Bhagvad Gita. The bad thing is that people who advocate such things are already into politics and use religious groups as a tool to win elections and are in support of such religious dogmas. We should make our society as secular as possible. I'm pretty religious and I have my own notion of religion but I don't have to enforce my beliefs on others and whatever I do, I do it for my own intellectual satisfaction. The success of the scientific method doesn't in any way invalidates religion, not all religions are concerned of explaining worldly phenomena, some religions are purely metaphysical and are in no way concerned of the workings of this world.

In a religious forum where the scienific method is applied to evaluate religious statements there is obviously no scientific evidence for god and there is no need for god. According to me this is the death of all wisdom since if one can slightly step out of such scientific thinking and look honestly there is so much evidence for god in the form of revelations and that shows that for people who believe in god, faith indeed works, one cannot rationalize faith, one cannot justify the amount of commitment that is shown to god by entrusting yourself to a religious tradition and it is faith which gives them access to the numinous world of god. Therefore if god exists then faith should work, I don't know whether faith works or not and hence I don't know god exists or not. Now why I still cling on to my position is mainly because the literature of people who believe in god shows that faith works. My position is broken? I don't know, I may very well be wrong.

In many of my posts I use circular reasoning, I assume the revealed truths are the real truths and go on explaining about the myths, such an assumption is not self-evident and hence my logic is inconsistent, its more important for me than for you to know whether God is just an imaginary object or a real existing entity so that I can ensure myself that my reasoning is consistent. Therefore I don't wait for god to fall from the sky instead I go about looking for revelations. If you have any creation myths about the truth fairy, unicorns etc I would really like to read on how they created this world. When I was ignorant of religion even I used to wonder about the extraordinary claim of a God creating all the wonderful things in the cosmos but after I got curious about religion and understood things from their perspective it wasn't that extraordinary and that unlikely and therefore I doesn't want to show disrespect for someone believing that a truth fairy created the world before reading the literature about it, there might be a new way of thinking that makes them believe in such things. If someone said moon is made of cheese I can verify about it and dismiss such a claim but if someone said your observed reality isn't real, how would you go about verifying it when they are asking you to abandon our universal logic, you can either stick to your critical thinking or either test whether their claims are indeed real. The latter choice requires you to give up critical thinking and surrender yourself to god, I don't know if such thinking works or not (i.e in providing us the truth) and therefore I don't know whether people who believe in god are broken. Therefore I doesn't want to try and minimize such thinking by directly attacking FAITH and if someone causes harm to others in the name of faith then I'll let our judiciary system to punish them.

This is New Atheism of the highest order, iNow. I have said many times in other threads that religious claims are not empirical claims and a discussion cannot even begin if I'm asked to back up with evidence for every single religious claim I make. You seem to disagree with the very basic premise of my position, that non-theists should not be intolerant towards religion and you want to do exactly the opposite of it. I doesn't want to say anything more than this.

If scientists did what they do the best i.e do science and theologians and religious scholars did what they do the best i.e think about god then there can be no harm to anyone, the conflict arises when we try to force others to believe or to conclude that something exists or does not exist without providing any evidence for it, if someone wants to be a religious scholar let him be, let he express his views and his worldview, there is no need to call him broken when he has given the reasons for his belief as long as he thinks that his reasons are not sufficient enough to convince others. I think you should let the persons who differ with your opinions to breathe as long as they don't interfere with your life.

The onus is on you to show where evolutionary biologists have made a trend of making models of New synthesis of darwinian theory of evolution based purely on faith from the literature which I cited to you. Its your thread and you made that claim.

I do follow documentaries of bigfoot, lochness monster and other commentaries about different views about aliens, its not that I have double standards when it comes to gods. You don't know what scholarly works that I have studied, some of them are not translated to its english version yet, it might be easy for you to dismiss it from your perspective but I have got my own reasons as to why I cannot dismiss it, my position is not that I accept it as valid, I have problems with dismissing it and go on doing my work as though they don't exist without investigating it.

If you're pretty sure about it then its good for you, Tar while I want to probe and analyze it. From what I have read, such understandings indeed has many advantages to the one's who have it, their entire functioning of the sense organs changes dramatically, they say that they can see things through their legs and they don't even need their eyes for seeing. Weird claim. I am not here to convince others to listen to them, it seems the word "broken" has become relative and starting to mean different for different people, while you've concluded that such revelations are mere dreams, I'm yet to conclude that that's what they are.

The people who wrote the book hardly knew a thing about Modern Science and its inappropriate to think that they wanted to fit their god with science, they didn't had any motivations of that sort. As to this thing about "To God a day is like thousand years, and a thousand years like a day" is not an idea existing only in Abrahamic religions, similar ideas exists in other disconnected religions as well, something to think about it, isn't it. A misuse of an idea doesn't mean the idea itself is broken or that the people who developed such an idea is broken, there might be genuine reasons as to why they wrote it like that.

There are anecdotal evidences for anthropomorphic deities and such an evidence is sufficient enough for me to cling on to my position to doubt the existence of god rather than dismissing it completely. How do you know it was purely based on faith and wish thinking alone, they might assert such extraordinary truths because they might have had such extraordinary profound revelations. I don't have any personal bias to either say that the idea of god was purely an imaginary concept or to say that god exists in reality for sure, I like to hear the arguments from both sides and I have learnt a lot by holding such a position. Not if your so called empirical reality is a virtual reality and the objective reality that these people have access to is the real reality.