Clit should have an asterisk, at least if any linguists are ever going to use this software. (Clitic, enclitic, cliticization...)
12-- 'Bite my...' and so forth, would be overkill, though, unless there were a way to only catch those collocations in the imperative.
I only knew him through his writing-- his books and his posts here-- but he was right at the top of the list of fabulous writers I wanted to meet face-to-face someday.
Condolences to those who knew him well, and sympathy to everyone else who'll never have the chance to.
Greg: Science does not say that supernatural planes cannot exist because it can't observe it.
Peter: Agreed. However, science does say that it's more rational to not believe in such things -- or, more precisely, to not accord them the same degree of belief or acceptance. It's the principle of parsimony (aka Ockham's Razor): do you need to invoke the existence of supernatural planes in order to explain the world we observe? If not, then they don't have the same validity as, say, electromagnetic fields.
YES, thank you.
Greg, for Steve's "science," I think the right reading is not "atheism," but "a scientific mindset, which admits observation and logical inference as valid reasons for holding beliefs about the universe."
Beliefs in the supernatural or the spiritual may be made to fit into the gaps of the material world, or to overlay it without materially altering it, and those beliefs might not contradict the findings of science, but they're still only motivated by introspection-- not by any external evidence or chain of reasoning that reasonable people can agree on.
Science doesn't say the supernatural planes don't exist-- it says they don't need to exist in the same way that gravity needs to exist.
Xopher: People who haven't mastered the art of changing consciousness at will don't usually understand it.
More than that-- I think most people who haven't experienced the state of conciousness that you experience inside the circle have a very hard time imagining the appeal.
Speaking just for myself: I have no evidence that gods exist. While I suppose I have no solid evidence that they don't exist-- just that, if they do, they've never signalled their existance to me-- I also don't have any problems that I could solve, or make solvable, by assuming the existence of gods, at least not without creating much more vexing problems. I have no motivation to want to believe.
Being told that if I just mastered the right neurochemical on-switch, I'd be able to see gods is kind of like being told that if I just hit myself over the head with a hammer a few times, I'd be able to see the sense in the Republican party platform. It may well be true, but it doesn't begin to answer the question of why I would want to do such a thing.
With regard to what happened to Susan in the Narnia books -- although Lewis certainly had trouble with seeing women as fully people, the point he was making holds, which is, when people allow trivialities to possess them, they cut themselves off from spiritual connections.
Oh, no, I wasn't unhappy that Susan was shut out. I was overjoyed: the people who cared about Important Things got Narnia, and the people who cared about lipstick-- and, by a chain of associations that made perfect sense to me at the time, God-- didn't. Then I found out the book was a religious allegory, realized that Lewis meant Narnia, like everything else, for the theists only, and haven't picked up the books since.
Possibly I overreacted, but the sense of betrayal still hasn't faded twenty years later, and I don't expect to ever go back to them.
Ellen, God is always involved, everywhere, with everything.
If you're just pointing to everthing in the universe and saying "Yup, God's there, too," then what's the point? I mean, if there are equal amounts of god in everything, then god's presence doesn't distinguish anything in the universe from anything else-- it's like just adding zero to every term in an equation. Or like adding infinity, I suppose. But in either case, where does it get you? What can you perceive, or do, with the god-goggles on, that wouldn't work equally well if you filtered all the god out?
Lizzy: Um, Ellen: the idea that spiritual experiences are "wishful thinking" is not sustainable by research of any kind. And I don't see how you can claim that spiritual experiences "aren't real."
Of course they're real in the sense that people really do experience them-- I just don't think they're triggered by a sensory experience of something existing in the world. They're as real as any emotion-- or any hallucination.
The most you can say is that they aren't what the people who experience them say they are. I think what you mean is that spiritual experiences aren't "real" in the way that my chair is real. But if you are willing to admit a sense of wonder into your reality, I don't see how you can object to Teresa of Avila.
Because I'm not willing to concede that a sense of wonder requires a suspension of my usual criteria for assessing the world around me, or that it requires any sort of belief in processes not potentially explicable (if not explained) by materialistic explanations.
The universe is full of Really Cool Shit, absolutely. Human brains are designed by evolution to appreciate Really Cool Shit, for a variety of reasons. I don't perceive my own perceptions of wonder and awe as resulting from anything except me using my brain as it was designed; and the experiences that many people call 'spiritual,' I've always perceived as intellectual, or emotional, or aesthetic. I don't see the need to add another axis-- certainly not to add another realm in which the rules of this universe don't apply.
Many people do feel that need, obviously, and I don't think I'm ever going to get it. As I said upthread, I don't have the wiring. Whatever brain chemicals y'all are on, I don't have the receptors.
John: Spirituality is about what it is to be a human being. Human beings are material things, yes, but spirituality is to the material human as mind is to brain.
By that (very vague) definition, how does spirituality differ from neurology? From cognitive science? Evolutionary psychology?
Lizzy:
I read and reread and desperately loved the Narnia books, but I haven't been able to go back and read them since I learned they were religious allegory, and in fact I've blocked most of them out of my memory entirely. All I really remember is that Susan was barred from returning because she'd become too invested in conformity (lipstick and invitations, I believe.) At nine, I took that to mean that the theists wouldn't get in. Someone should probably have warned me that reading those books as a refuge from religious persecution was just setting myself up for terrible heartbreak.
"Even in your world, that's not what a star IS, that's only what it's made of." Leaving aside scientific accuracy and the fact that this is a children's book written in the 1940s, this answer pretty much delineates for me the problem of saying that "All there is" is material.
I'm trying really hard to see the distinction there, and I don't think I'm quite getting it. Do you mean that a really complete definition of, e.g., a star, includes all the associations it has, the things it symbolizes, all the baggage it's picked up? That's true enough, certainly. But I don't see that cloud of associations as being outside the realm of material existance and cause-and-effect-- I mean, all the poetry and myth that goes with stars was created by humans, using material brains, working within the material world. Consciousness isn't an argument for some ill-defined mystical ectoplasmic other realm.
But to answer your question, I think God does have observable effects on the material world. She made it, for one thing, and She sustains it, all of it. But does God make it rain, or make the heat wave that is currently tormenting the East Coast, or did God make Katrina? Yes, in the absolute, and no, in the relative.
And there you just lost me completely. How would any of those things have gone down differently had God been definitely not involved.
With regard to worship -- my own belief is that God doesn't "need" worship; human beings need to worship. It's hard-wired into us.
I'd certainly believe that, though I missed out on that bit of hardwiring-- I left the Unitarians because they were too woo-woo and spiritual for me.
If spirituality is not a study of material things, of causes and effects, of "doing" something, then does it still exist? Or is it nonsense like the sound of one hand clapping?
Now I'm the one who's confused by phrasing. I don't think that you're saying nothing nonsensical exists; I'm sure we could both point to a lot of very real examples of nonsense.
Certainly spirituality exists in the sense that many people claim to have spiritual perceptions or experiences, and I don't think they're all lying about it. Whether the things they perceive are real, or just wishful thinking or a side-effect of other mental processes, is another question altogether.
the notion of God getting "squeezed out" of natural processes isn't likely a problem with God. It's a problem with humans who are attached to the idea that God makes it rain.
I guess my real question is, if God doesn't have observable effects on the material world, what's she good for?
(And in 'the material world,' I include all the things that we humans do with our physical brains: emotion, aesthetic appreciation, sensawunda, all that good stuff.)
Lizzy L: Adamsj said: Yeah, Greg, but so far as explanations for the operation of material world, science is winning, hands down.
I believe the correct response to this is... Duh.
If not for explanatory power, then why?
There must be some other way in which having a god adds to your understanding of the material world-- something worth going to the trouble of justifying why God hangs around being unnecessary. Or else you must perceive some non-material domain in which a god can operate (though I'm not sure how you would perceive a non-material world with a material brain and sense organs.)
Or both, I suppose. Which?
Any scientist worth the name knows that there exist both non-observable realities and observable unrealities - what else is quantum theory about, let alone imaginary numbers?
Yes, but no one claims that the imaginary numbers work by the grace of god and are outside the domain of mathematics; and quantum interactions are natural processes-- not directly observable, but inferrable from the observations we can make.
Any god worth the name can explain everything, both natural and supernatural (see above).
Well, yes-- but for the natural world, it's a redundant explanation; if you assume a god, you have to assume that either she spends a lot of time sitting on her hands, or that she micromanages processes that work just fine by themselves. God is a concept with too much explanatory power to be of much use explaining anything.
Greg: er. is that "except" in the right spot? Think I need to sort that out first, since it might completely flip what you're saying.
Sigh. I do read the preview screen, I really do...
Saying that god can explain all the things that aren't natural processes in observable reality is an argument for non-overlapping magisteria only if you already believe there exist non-natural processes and non-observable realities (or possibly observable unrealities.)
If you don't, then it relegates god to overseeing an empty set, and leaves the entire set of Things Wot Exist for science.
And overseeing nothing at all is a pretty small responsibility for something as big as a god.
Jumping very late into a fascinating thread--
Greg: Saying that science can explain everything except natural processes and observable reality is an argument for non-overlapping magisteria if you already believe there exist non-natural processes and non-observable realities (or possibly observable unrealities.)
If you don't, then that argument says science explains everything except for an empty set.
If you (generic you) are going to argue that you still need a god to take care of the non-material world, you need first to argue that there is a non-material world, or at least explain what you get out of choosing to believe in one.
Joy: Well, there's Suoidea, the clade that includes pigs and peccaries, which is also notable for having all five vowels in reverse order.
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