• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Memories Vs Experience of God

SalixIncendium

अहं ब्रह्मास्मि
Staff member
Premium Member
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?
 

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?

I like your title. Things that make you go hmm.

Depends on the type of memory.
What is memory?

I think they're somewhat the same as they are both abstract. Some people believe God talks to them through dreams. People grieving have lucid dreams of their deceased and believe they actually visited them. Memories and dreams can be distorted.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if experiences with God is like dreams and memories are distorted as well.

When someone goes through trauma the gaps in memory may be filled with false events. That or if someone told them what happened and if they don't remember the mind encodes that false event did happen.

If God experiences are like that are we actually experiencing God or a distorted memory or lucid dream?
 

John53

I go leaps and bounds
Premium Member
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?

I don't understand how they can compare.

You can have evidence for a memory... I might say to the wife remember when we went on the cruise and she responds that she remembers.
 

rational experiences

Veteran Member
When my brother just a human man by human life and human want says I will.

He did. Just as a human.

Science is a human practice of I want and I will.

Determined as the scientist just a human like everyone else was what he preached was God. Just as a human.

Said it was mans owned status said it was his father.

Anyone knows a human baby gets conceived by human sex.

The bible however preached a one of man's baby was an especial human not born by human sex.

So you first have to face human reality. The subject owned a human teaching not being taught by humans.

So humans have to be allowed to think for themselves.

Previously the ability to self reason was outlawed by religious science idealism.

So if you ask just another human. Okay in your thinking just a human science is really special.

So you image yours and personal is just human presence to be an especial self vision of a human owning a higher purpose.

Powerful science dealing with gods energies. By human will and human want.

Science. The only other state in a natural humans life.

Science medical or occult owns thinking stories theories about life. The human. The human genetic living conditions. Owned just by the human present.

In the past the scientific term human stated was about human genesis.

Now if a human says to another human. Don't self idolise by self image human. And don't pretend my advice is special. Yet you ignore that advice.

Doesn't that advice state you are ignorant of another human experience and advice?

I believe in honesty.

So my brother in the past was sexually conceived as all babies are and had to explain why your pyramid temple science repracticed began changing his cellular bio body and blood into stigmata states.

And was witness to a lot of humans becoming irradiated sick and mutated.

So he wrote his personal atmospheric scientific advice from a long ago pre occult pyramid nuclear attack.

As to why his healed healthy man baby DNA had returned into his mother's O cell ova to why it once again was dying sick mutated.

Simply because he was born in the vicinity of the ground ancient radiation fallout attack around Jeru Salem Bethlehem area.

As natural human advised DNA genetic life and body health.

And humans today want to claim it spiritual advice about our first holy human father and first born human holy baby brother? As God terms.

In my life it was just human practical medical advice involving phenomena.

Scientific human god terms stated mass was held by a womb space holy mother science status in two places.

O the planets stone mass. One God.
The planets owned mass spirit gas heavens. God owned

Two God statements. One the God stone planet owned all alchemical hu man science practiced dusts.

The gas spirits formed the word as God O by G spiral O into DD sitting in space void deep burning sacrificed and cooling back as OO. Movement of spirit on the face of the great deep.

Spirit gases cooling in gods heaven.

Pretty basic human scientific God advice.

Only occultists as just humans claim they determine what God Sion fusion was as the particle.

Owning no status whatsoever in natural life existing.

The sexual father of human's only ever being a human in reality. Very spiritual his image heavenly recorded as was his voice.

Only because man designed machine transmitted transmitters thought by humans and controlled by human thoughts their own man selves.

Why and how hu man's believed that science practice made you an especial human.
 

SalixIncendium

अहं ब्रह्मास्मि
Staff member
Premium Member
I don't understand how they can compare.

You can have evidence for a memory... I might say to the wife remember when we went on the cruise and she responds that she remembers.

You can have evidence of an experience of God. I might say to the wife, did you just feel God's presence and she responds that she felt it.

Do you see how your example fails?
 

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?

I don't like to say that God has no evidence. I'd limit it more to 'God has no scientific evidence'. I wouldn't expect him to, necessarily.

But short of God communicating to me, I'm unlikely to find the type of evidence commonly cited as compelling. Merely evidence that I don't know everything...but I've never argued that I do, anyway.
 

AlexanderG

Active Member
I can provide evidence that my memories are real, because I can use them to make accurate novel predictions that I can then test in reality. I can then have proportional confidence that my memories are true to the extent to which they can make these accurate predictions.

For example: If I remember leaving my jacket in the car instead of in my closet, and I go out to the car and find my jacket there, then my memory corresponded to reality quite accurately and was "true" in that sense.

Note the emphasis on "novel" predictions, meaning using your conceptual model of reality to extend it to things no one has tested yet. We can instead post hoc rationalize any explanation for something we already know, and make non-novel predictions, but this has very little value for explaining reality. For example, "If my claim that fairies exist is true, then we will observe the sun rising tomorrow morning," is not a novel prediction because we already know the sun rises every morning. The same goes for, "If invisible magical turtles exist who cause trees to grow, then we will see trees growing over time. Since trees do grow, this is evidence for invisible magical turtles who cause trees to grow."

In my experience, religious claims can only be supported by this kind of post hoc rationalization. "The universe exists, and this is evidence for a being that can create universes."
I have never seen any theist use their theological model of reality to make an accurate novel testable prediction that was then tested and confirmed. Prayer studies are one example, where we would expect prayer to cause a statistically significant increase in good outcomes for healing, but studies reliably show its effect to be identical to the control group, meaning no effect.

If an idea cannot be extended to accurately model previously unobserved reality in this way, then it is very likely an imaginary idea. Memories do not fall into this imaginary category, by and large, whereas religious ideas apparently always do.
 
Last edited:

Spirit of Light

Be who ever you want
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?
If God "spoke" to me personally, Do I have to prove it to others? If God has truly spoken to me personally, is it not a personal experience and not a collective one and should not be shared?
Trying to prove a personal experience of God seem less and less possible because people are not open to what they can not hear, see or feel them self :)
 

John53

I go leaps and bounds
Premium Member
You can have evidence of an experience of God. I might say to the wife, did you just feel God's presence and she responds that she felt it.

Do you see how your example fails?

Explain to me how you feel Gods presence and I might agree otherwise it seems to me you're comparing apples to oranges
 

JustGeorge

Imperfect
Staff member
Premium Member
You can have evidence of an experience of God. I might say to the wife, did you just feel God's presence and she responds that she felt it.

Do you see how your example fails?

Happened to my husband and I once... we were at our temple, and it became apparent that one of the murtis suddenly felt very conscious. We both jumped and turned at looked at it at the same time, then looked at each other, and knew we had both felt the same thing. (We talked about it when we were in a quiet enough place to do so, as well.)
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?

To me you are making a variant of the problem of epistemological solipsism.

Here is how I view it. I in general trust my experiences and memories, but that doesn't rule out that my experiences and memories could be not real.

So here is a list of problems involved in what knowledge and evidence are:

- Both are cognitive and normative and rate different cognitive and normative versions based on a cognitive and normative version. That leads to Mûnchhaussen's trilemma in that all thinking(cognitive and normative) are either tautologies or unable to show what version is correct. In other words for one of your words, there is no evidence for what is real, because real is an idea in the mind.
- Then there is all the versions of reality not being fair. The classical one being Rene Descartes's evil demon, but there are also modern ones.
- Then there is the problem of assuming that my experiences of reality are real and then declaring that because it appears subjectively to me in mind that they are real, they are objectively real. That is a version of magical thinking.
- Now here is the one that in practice is the most serious one, namely cognitive relativism. I.e. there is no positive privileged position in metaphysics and thus different people can get away with different claims of what objective reality really is. Or in other words, we can't reduce all of our experiences down to just science: https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_12
- The one above relates to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Current_approaches. So science is in effect a set of beliefs, that appears to work, but it is not the only set possible and there is no way to tell which one is objectively cognitive or morally correct.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Explain to me how you feel Gods presence and I might agree otherwise it seems to me you're comparing apples to oranges

And it seems different to me. Seems is a relative different subjective standard and your version of seems is not only one possible.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
I can provide evidence that my memories are real, because I can use them to make accurate novel predictions that I can then test in reality.

That applies to some memories but not all of them. Maybe only some of your memories, the ones you can use to make novel predictions, are real and some of the rest are false memories since no proof one way or the other is possible. False memories are well known.

Explain to me how you feel Gods presence and I might agree otherwise it seems to me you're comparing apples to oranges

That's like someone who has never had a headache asking what a headache feels like.

My experience is not entirely what is in this song, but the song contains the essence of my answer to your question.

 

Aupmanyav

Be your own guru
So tell me...Are your memories real?
Of course, momories are real. Like the calmness which I experienced sitting on a platform in the Eklingji Shiva temple of Udaipur. As for God and Goddesses, I am now an atheist / Advaitist. For me, all things are Brahman. Evidence - the prevailing cosmological model, Big Bang, when there was a ball of high temperature / high pressure plasma.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Of course, momories are real. Like the calmness which I experienced sitting on a platform in the Eklingji Shiva temple of Udaipur. As for God and Goddesses, I am now an atheist / Advaitist. For me, all things are Brahman. Evidence - the prevailing cosmological model, Big Bang, when there was a ball of high temperature / high pressure plasma.

All versions of evidence are as far as I can tell in effect subjective in regards to the ontological/metaphysical status of objective reality.

To me, all things are what works for me and some things might work differently for you. You are confusing science with philosophy and religion.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
Many say God isn't real and cite lack of evidence to support their statement.

So tell me...Are your memories real? Can you provide evidence of your memories?

How are your memories any more real than God?

So are you saying god is of the mind? I can agree to that.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
So are you saying god is of the mind? I can agree to that.

Yes, in practice God is of the mind. But the joke is that your version of what correct evidence is, is also of the mind. In effect a result of the western culture's obsession with evidence, truth, proof, real, rational, knowledge and all of these cognitive words in the mind is this:
https://iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/

So while in practice a part of the world works for evidence, it doesn't work for what is the real life, because real is in the mind just like God.
You just use words in the mind that are non-religious, but you haven't been able to avoid positive beliefs, which have no evidence. That is the point of cognitive relativism and that also applies to me. I just admit it
 
Top