curtisdeltablues wrote: I think I figured out something important concerning the dialog between theists and atheists. When theists argue against atheists, it usually concerns the actual existence of a God. The arguments are often at the most abstract range of philosophical discussion where metaphysics and ontology (the study of what exists in philosophy) wander into a local Starbucks, and after ordering bloatedly caloric peppermint and gingerbread lattes,sit together eating cake balls off sticks (actual Starbucks overpriced confectionery)like a couple of dorks.
If I hear one more theist announce that you "can't prove that God does NOT exist" as if proving a negative is even logically possible for anything, I might just have to replace all those Starbucks' cake balls with C4 plastic explosives, order my $1.53 coffee-of-the-day, and sit down to enjoy the fireworks. (Surprisingly little brain matter gets splattered from the cake-ball-on-a-stick eaters.) Wow, sorry about that. I didn't realize my homicidal rage at this faux Tootsie-pop till I started writing. But in my defense, I sat through the whole mini cupcake fad without a single peep. It was only when they covered the little bastards in chocolate and put them on a stick that I had to say my piece. So where was I...so easily distracted by food... Oh yeah, the problem atheists have has nothing to do with the existence or non existence of any of the various god ideas that people enjoy. And the move by theists to frame the discussion in those terms can now officially cease with this post. I have never heard any atheist (and I've read a few) make a case for the non existence of God. The actual existence of God is not an up topic. It literally doesn't come up much. It is completely eclipsed by the actual problem atheist's have is the theist's claim that anyone knows what God wants. That is the problem atheists have with theism. They don't believe that any of the self-appointed managers for the big guy, are actually receiving W-9s (Yeah, God never gives health insurance benefits of fulltime employment just like Maharishi. We are all independent contractors to save on taxes.) with heaven listed as the address of the employer and the employment ID number being Pi. So if someone holds up say, a Bible, and says, "this is the word of God and we are going to follow everything in it except the part where we need to kill people for working on the sabbath because we might run out of Bud-lite during the football game and might need a 7-11 run including but not limited to pork rinds and Yahoo. And we can't openly support slavery or beating women with a rod the thickness of your thumb, but when you try to bring these cases in front of a judge, don't worry we will work something out for you. But that thing that says that gay people are an abomination is the word of God, and we are the right ones to be making these distinctions..." the atheist puts up one of his fingers and says, "I don't mean you are number one". It has nothing to do with the possibility that there might be some kind of super being out there, or in here or wherever, it has to do with whether or not it is credible that this particular book can be distinguished from any other wonderful examples of people making shit up and repeating the stories again and again until other people forgot that someone made it up. And back in the day before celebrity publishing dominated, the catch phrase for anything someone wanted to promote as the next best seller was that God wrote it, or dictated it, or had it ghost written for him or her or him dressed like a her.(Yes I mean you cross-dressing Krishna. The Christian Bible says you are an abomination with your blue Jersey Shore spray tan.) So this is my cause for the New Year. Bringing up this critical distinction between what atheists actually are saying, and what many theists want them to be saying because it would be much more convenient if the burden of proof could be shifted away from the person claiming to speak for God. I want to start the New Year off right by stating unequivocally that I have never met any human being who I believe is so different from the rest of us that this specialness can only be explained by actual contact with the creator of the universe. What I do see are one out of a million of us, audacious enough to claim to have this connection, and whole bunches of the rest of us deferring to this claim without demanding more proof than that he stays up late a lot, giggles at his own jokes and one time a plane or boat didn't leave without him when it usually leaves on time. (actual proof offered of Maharishi's special state of mind) I am resisting the temptation to stick the landing with some cutesy reference to those damn cake pops to tie this whole post together because I'm serious this time. Atheists don't know if there really is some God being. Neither do theists. Or if they do, they have not made a convincing case to atheists. But that is a moot point. The real point is that nobody knows that God hates gay people so lets get the F off their backs (unfortunate image I know) and let them enjoy the hell of marriage like straight people. Because we may not be living eternally, but being married can sure make it feel as if you are. That's as stuck a landing as I'm gunna get. turquoiseb wrote: <snip> Interestingly enough, I've been thinking about this same subject, but from a slightly different perspective. I think that some people just react badly to someone suggesting to them that they don't really "know" the things they think they "know." Whether it's a theist arguing that they "know" there is a god, or a grudge-holder arguing that they "know" the true motives of someone they hold a grudge against, it's the same scenario IMO. The "crime" is not believing what you believe, it's *not* believing what they believe. "You know you've created God in your own image when he hates the exact same people you do." - Gordon Charrick jedi_spock (Jason) wrote: Basicaly, there are two types of Gods. The personal god of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. And the god of the Spinoza, absolutely impersonal having no special people and no active interst in causation. Do you think a babbling moron like Robin can make distinctions between the two? jedi_spock (Jason) wrote: It's not clear to you [Curtis] because what he posts is a huge pile of shit. It's only a fuckin moron like Robin can learn so much from Maharishi and yet go back to a religion that is slowly dying and will soon become extinct in a couple of decades. [by the way the Jedi and Mr. Spock, though imaginary characters, did not talk like this] curtisdeltablues wrote: That is the God of the deists I think. I don't see how any atheist could have a problem with such ideas as a theory about how this all began. I certainly don't. But there is a gray area where people claim special mental states that align them with say abstract natural laws so they can claim as was claimed about Maharishi, that they are nature speaking English or have spontaneous "right" action. The claims line gets kind of fuzzy with the claims of what "higher" or "altered" states mean. Abstract philosophers don't cross into this gray zone but most yogic claims do. Robin hasn't really clarified or expanded on his theological views. I believe he does make this distinction, but has given priority to the personal as being more real in some unexplained sense. authfriend wrote: Actually he's done quite a bit of explaining of this very point. It may not be clear to you--and it's not all that clear to me either--but he's taken a number of stabs at it. One of the most detailed, in fact, was in a discussion he and I began about a quote from MMY. I got bogged down in the complexities and had to promise him I'd get back to it eventually, which I haven't managed to do yet. His last contribution to the discussion was post #295624, if anybody's interested. He put particular importance on a quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins that appears about two- thirds of the way down the post. It doesn't necessarily cover all the bases, but it does provide a rationale for the priority Robin gives to "the personal as being more real." I think Curtis' view is a good one. I think Robin's problem is he cannot let go of the personal. You cannot control people without personal interaction. Enlightenment is about passing beyond the personal to the impersonal, letting the ego dissolve. In my brief interaction with Robin, he seemed to make a big thing about relating to the 'person of Xeno', and he did not seem to be able to deal with an impersonal interaction. In Maharishi's scheme, one passes to unity via glorified state of perception, in which one's previous programming seems to give center stage to that programming's illusion of god. He said something like Buddhists experience Buddha, Hindus experience Krishna, Christians experience Jesus - something like that. He did not say what an atheist would experience, he seemed to find this idea of atheism distasteful, but it seemed clear from what he said that what you believed is what would inform the experience of 'god consciousness'. After that, some time would go by and eventually, unity would dawn, and this is the beginning of the experience of the impersonal level of existence which would eventually dominate all experience, the culmination of this process being termed 'Brahman Consciousness', the terminal state of unity. In the earlier years Maharishi seemed to indicate that one could waffle between the impersonal and the personal here as unity was growing, but does not seem to have mentioned it much or at all later on. In the early years the term 'cosmic consciusness' was used by him for all these states (now CC, GC, UC, and BC) without much distinction. Now enlightenment is supposed to resolve this question of god or no god. The arguments of god or no god are a logical minefield. This level of experience is 'transcendent to conceptualisation', and even Maharishi says that here, if we attempt to describe it we descend into absurdity. We get confronted with logical contradictions that cannot be solved. We can experience the resolution, but cannot describe it. This is what awakening is, what self realisation is, except when we use the term 'self' it seems to imply an entity, and tends to suggest some kind of personalisation, which is hardly what this is about. Whenever you have a god, and a relation thereto, you have duality, you do not have unity, or perhaps you have a broken unity. To have a relationship, there has to be a separation between you and whatever is not you. I do not think Robin, as Jason suggests, is an idiot. No one can write like he does and be an idiot. This is a subject about which eternal confusion exists. I think he is unwilling to give up his conception of god. If you are religious, this is the last barrier you have to give up to find out what that term 'god' represents. Enlightenment is not about gaining. It is about losing our illusion of what we think the world is all about, and when that illusion cracks, our personal world is bye bye, and that is a major stumbling block for many. The 'self' as opposed to 'Self' is an illusion. The 'Self' conceived as something even remotely like a 'self' (but maybe only bigger, better, grander, loftier), is an illusion created by our own mind. It is just a placeholder, like 'god' for an experience that cannot really be described to someone who has not had it. Kind of like you have a piece of blue jeans in your hand, and you show it to someone who has never seen the sky, and say 'this is what the sky looks like'. Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, a British philosopher (1910 - 1989) had this to say about the theist/atheist question: To say the 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false.... Not to confuse this view of religious assertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics.... [Agnostics] hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; [atheists] hold that it is at least probable that no god exists... Our view [is] that all utternaces about the nature og God are nonsensical... If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. As for the agnostic... he does not deny that the two sentences 'There is a transcendent god' and 'There is no transcendent god' express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling which one of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in question do not express propositions at all. And this means that agnosticism also is ruled out. The 'person' who is supposed to control the empirical world [but] is not himself located in it.. is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used [the G word] as if it named this 'person' but ... it cannot be said to symbolize anything.... The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. None of those who have compared the world to a vast machine [made by the Great Watchmaker] has ever made any serious attempt to say what the machine could be for....
