Is it Reasonable to Compare Gods with Bigfoot, Fairies, Unicorns, and Leprechauns?

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It is reassuring that we know enough to know there is nothing more. out there than what is defined by our rational brain. The problem is it does not feel that way experientially. When I went through what may be described as a "mystical" experience in coming in alignment with the goddess, my perception and relationship with the world was profoundly changed in what seemed like an instant. The degree in which my perception and interaction of our world seemed greater than what I could understand or explain in normal neurological network patterns. I felt a presence of something far greater than myself. The problem is I cannot explain it in words. They all fail to explain what I experienced from what I have learned from years of medical training and neuroscience. Reality for me had shifted from before this experience. I would like to stay open for views on this so maybe you can explain in our current knowledge and science what happens when we go through a mystical experience and a shift in consciousness.

That's not an uncommon experience, one commonly associated with psychedelics, sweat lodges, prolonged fasts and other situations prone to eliciting altered mental states. It's an intense feeling of connection and belonging, and of being safe and having purpose. I've had similar experiences (see my avatar). The difference between us is that I understand what I experienced as an intuition generated by my mind which has not led to any beliefs more than that nature is sacred and everything is connected. It doesn't cause me to speculate about gods whether natural or supernatural.

How do we measure awe and wonder empirically? How can we empirically measure love?

By experiencing it.

if those 10 people experience the presence of a land spirit, how would you know it is not real.

I don't, whatever you mean by real. I assume that the report of the experience is accurate, but not its interpretation. Let's assume that by real, you mean that these spirits exist independent of human minds, that they persist in time somewhere when they are said to exist or be real and are capable of sensing and modifying their surroundings - what we mean when we say a wolf is real. That might be interesting to know about, but I can't know that even if true unless it manifests empirically for ME, whether directly, or indirectly in a way that it is clear was the work of a conscious, potent, purposive agent.

Until then, I file it in the category of things people claim that I neither believe nor claim are impossible, and continue to live as if these things don't exist willing to be shown otherwise but pessimistic about the likelihood of that. In other words, it doesn't matter to me what such people are claiming is true for them, and I don't give your question above a second thought.

How can we be certain their experience is not real?

I'm assuming you mean that the experience was of something other than their own minds. I accept that they had some kind of experience, but of what? I don't assume that they are not experiencing something real. I don't have a means to rule the possibility out, but I don't need to in order to not accept their claims as meaningful.

It seems then if people as recorded in the audio records in Ireland that they directly experienced the fairy folk or other numinous beings, their experience would be valid.

I'll assume again that what you mean by valid is that they have correctly understood their experiences as revealing actual disembodied agents and aren't just naming aspects of unconscious nature. Or maybe you only mean that they are convinced of that whatever the reality. It's fine with me whatever they decide. It fine with me that you and Hammer enjoy this world whatever the reality. It must appeal to you both. It must comfort you both in some way, perhaps functioning as a lens to understand and organize reality for you. But the idea has no value to me and thus no appeal.

What does appeal is something akin to the Gaia hypothesis, but extended from earth to the cosmos. Reality is an interlocking whole, its elements affecting one another in a way that makes life and mind possible, which is mysterious, and which generates a feeling of warmth, inclusion, awe, and gratitude - the spiritual experience. I respect that, and consider it sacred, but I don't treat it like a person or a collection of persons, and I don't assume that it's conscious.

The standard for believing claims in a court of law is different from the standard for believing religious claims

Not for the critical thinker. In each case, you'd need to provide him compelling evidence before he'll believe, which is why we have atheists.

Nobody can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a religion is true or that God exists.

That's reason enough for the critical thinker to not believe either of those. You seem to be making the case for lowering one's standards for belief when evidence is unavailable. That kind of defeats the purpose of critical thinking.

The consequences of not believing the claim that you have cancer, as evidenced by the MRI scan, could be a matter of life and death, but the consequences of not believing a religious claim are not a matter of life or death

Forget for a moment that others would disagree with your claim about religious belief not being a matter of life or death, whether literal death (martyrs) or perdition in some afterlife (Pascal's wager). I can stipulate to that. How does that support your position that such claims should be evaluated using relaxed standards that don't require the evidence or logical rigor that critical thought does to justify belief?

The claims of the Messenger are not enough. It is the character of the Messenger, what he did on His mission, and what he wrote that causes me to believe the claim that He was speaking for God.

My problem with this statement is that it contains no evidence itself. It assumes that those categories of evidence contain individual acts and words which collectively point to a deity. When you do provide a glimpse - perhaps some words from the Messenger, or something he did - it's all so mundane. You would probably then say that one needs to assimilate it all and judge it in its entirely, but that's now how most of us go about making such judgments.

 

[Bear Wild]

That's not an uncommon experience, one commonly associated with psychedelics, sweat lodges, prolonged fasts and other situations prone to eliciting altered mental states. It's an intense feeling of connection and belonging, and of being safe and having purpose. I've had similar experiences (see my avatar). The difference between us is that I understand what I experienced as an intuition generated by my mind which has not led to any beliefs more than that nature is sacred and everything is connected. It doesn't cause me to speculate about gods whether natural or supernatural.

I agree with you. The work with psychedelics, trance states, and other altered states of consciousness share many things. In this experience for me I describe it as meeting the goddess or if you like mother nature, mother earth, Erce or whatever anyone else would like to call such a profound presence of being and interconnection that it completely changed my life. No there was no woman like figure as depicted in art or sculpture. I was not using any psychedelics, no fasting, no environmental stress when it happened that day. But calling her the goddess is only a word indicating a sense of something greater than the normal way we experience our world. I believe the problem in our current rational thinking when we use words like the gods or goddess, we visualize them in a discrete being typically with human form. This is not surprising since it is normal to anthropomorphize things so that we can relate to the familiar. The other reason I use the word goddess is because of the path I started following after this experience. The use of psychedelics crates and alter way of perception but as an isolated event without a context then it usually stops after the experience. There is no context to utilize the experience to go forward. In our colonized western society, we lost our original context that would give such an experience meaning. This is where contemporary paganism has made progress buy reshaping a context for such experiences. This was not an easy process for the ancestral wisdom of the myths had to be relearned within the context of being indigenous to the land. If you do not like the word goddess I understand and this presence I experienced was immanent and not supernatural, but your observations are well taken.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I agree with you. The work with psychedelics, trance states, and other altered states of consciousness share many things. In this experience for me I describe it as meeting the goddess or if you like mother nature, mother earth, Erce or whatever anyone else would like to call such a profound presence of being and interconnection that it completely changed my life. No there was no woman like figure as depicted in art or sculpture. I was not using any psychedelics, no fasting, no environmental stress when it happened that day. But calling her the goddess is only a word indicating a sense of something greater than the normal way we experience our world. I believe the problem in our current rational thinking when we use words like the gods or goddess, we visualize them in a discrete being typically with human form. This is not surprising since it is normal to anthropomorphize things so that we can relate to the familiar. The other reason I use the word goddess is because of the path I started following after this experience. The use of psychedelics crates and alter way of perception but as an isolated event without a context then it usually stops after the experience. There is no context to utilize the experience to go forward. In our colonized western society, we lost our original context that would give such an experience meaning. This is where contemporary paganism has made progress buy reshaping a context for such experiences. This was not an easy process for the ancestral wisdom of the myths had to be relearned within the context of being indigenous to the land. If you do not like the word goddess I understand and this presence I experienced was immanent and not supernatural, but your observations are well taken.

Our views aren't that different. We just use different language.

I don't object to the word goddess. I like it better than god. I don't use it myself, although I'll call reality Mother Nature without meaning that nature is a person or pantheon of persons.

And I enjoy poetry like that. This is from the Grateful Dead as are the two other citations, and I find them moving:

Reach out your hand, if your cup be empty​

If your cup is full, may it be again​

Let it be known there is a fountain​

That was not made by the hands of men​

​

There is a road, no simple highway​

Between the dawn and the dark of night​

And if you go, no one may follow​

That path is for your steps alone​

​

Ripple in still water​

When there is no pebble tossed​

Nor wind to blow​

A ripple in still water with no apparent cause or source. Isn't that all of reality?

And this:

Going to plant a weeping willow​

On the banks green edge it will grow, grow, grow​

Sing a lullaby beside the water​

Lovers come and go, the river roll, roll, roll​

​

Fare you well, fare you well​

I love you more than words can tell​

Listen to the river sing sweet songs​

To rock my soul​

How spiritual is that? Both passages are godless, but they don't preclude gods. They make the direct connection with nature without injecting agents, which are neither justified nor needed.

How about one more? I see this kind of thought as post-religious spirituality:

Who can stop what must arrive now? Something new is waiting to be born.​

Dark as the night you're still by my side, shine inside.​

​

Gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go, we just ride.​

Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams gone, both dream and lie.​

​

Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know,​

Feels like it might be all right,​

While lady lullaby sings plainly through you love still rings true.​

Never could reach it, just slips away but I try.​

 

[PoetPhilosopher]

So I put it to you. Do you think it's reasonable to compare gods to these creatures? Why or why not?

To an atheist, it is reasonable, because that's basically how some of us view them.

To a theist, no - because theists view them much differently.

 

[ppp]

So I put it to you. Do you think it's reasonable to compare gods to these creatures? Why or why not?

Out of curiosity. Are you also vicariously insulted that I treat their god claims every other claim I hear? Or does the insult only come in with comparison to other supernatural claims?

 

[SalixIncendium]

Out of curiosity. Are you also vicariously insulted that I treat their god claims every other claim I hear? Or does the insult only come in with comparison to other supernatural claims?

I find insulting when one’s personal god is automatically compared to such creatures without understanding or asking about qualities and/or attributes of that god.

 

[ppp]

I find insulting when one’s personal god is automatically compared to such creatures without understanding or asking about qualities and/or attributes of that god.

That is both an avoidance of the question that I asked you, and simultaneously an example of the very behavior that you are impugning in that very dodgy post.

 

[Bear Wild]

Our views aren't that different. We just use different language.

I don't object to the word goddess. I like it better than god. I don't use it myself, although I'll call reality Mother Nature without meaning that nature is a person or pantheon of persons.

And I enjoy poetry like that. This is from the Grateful Dead as are the two other citations, and I find them moving:

Reach out your hand, if your cup be empty​

If your cup is full, may it be again​

Let it be known there is a fountain​

That was not made by the hands of men​

​

There is a road, no simple highway​

Between the dawn and the dark of night​

And if you go, no one may follow​

That path is for your steps alone​

​

Ripple in still water​

When there is no pebble tossed​

Nor wind to blow​

A ripple in still water with no apparent cause or source. Isn't that all of reality?

And this:

Going to plant a weeping willow​

On the banks green edge it will grow, grow, grow​

Sing a lullaby beside the water​

Lovers come and go, the river roll, roll, roll​

​

Fare you well, fare you well​

I love you more than words can tell​

Listen to the river sing sweet songs​

To rock my soul​

How spiritual is that? Both passages are godless, but they don't preclude gods. They make the direct connection with nature without injecting agents, which are neither justified nor needed.

How about one more? I see this kind of thought as post-religious spirituality:

Who can stop what must arrive now? Something new is waiting to be born.​

Dark as the night you're still by my side, shine inside.​

​

Gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go, we just ride.​

Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams gone, both dream and lie.​

​

Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know,​

Feels like it might be all right,​

While lady lullaby sings plainly through you love still rings true.​

Never could reach it, just slips away but I try.​

Well said!

 

[SalixIncendium]

That is both an avoidance of the question that I asked you, and simultaneously an example of the very behavior that you are impugning in that very dodgy post.

*smiles* If I was avoiding the question, I would have kept scrolling.

I told you exactly what I found to be insulting both in the OP and my response to your post.

Now…you can ask me to elaborate on specifically what addition information you needed, and we can have a productive discourse, or you can continue to make passive aggressive posts and I can avoid all interaction with you moving forward.

 

[ppp]

*smiles* If I was avoiding the question, I would have kept scrolling.

Apparently not.

I told you exactly what I found to be insulting both in the OP and my response to your post.

You did not. I provided two separate groups of creatures in my post - all or only supernatural.. Your usage of "such creatures" in your response does not specify which group you meant. At this point, you have manage to convince me that your rationalizations on this matter are all post hoc.

Now…you can ask me to elaborate on specifically what addition information you needed, and we can have a productive discourse, or you can continue to make passive aggressive posts and I can avoid all interaction with you moving forward.

Directly accusing you of dodging and stereotyping/profiling is all aggressive. Now, the "apparently not"...that was passive. Gt your mind in order. Oooo! So was that! And that! [grins]

 

[Trailblazer]

My problem with this statement is that it contains no evidence itself. It assumes that those categories of evidence contain individual acts and words which collectively point to a deity.

It does not assume that those categories of evidence contain individual acts and words which collectively point to a deity.
It is the evidence that Baha'u'llah was a Messenger of God.

As humans with completely different information in our minds and different ways of thinking we are going to view that evidence differently.
What is evidence to me is not going to be evidence to you.

 

[Bear Wild]

I find insulting when one’s personal god is automatically compared to such creatures without understanding or asking about qualities and/or attributes of that god.

I now find it amazing how little people know of not only the gods and goddesses but of the other numinous creatures. They combine them into one nice, neat box without knowing of their deep mythology. They do not see that many of these other beings. can have relation to gods when they are connected in the right context. But for that you would need to know enough to see the correct relationships. Most know of these from the commercial productions that commoditize these beings with no regard for what they do or did represent. Alas, It also very unlikely that most will take the time to know more. It is much easier to make fun of something you do not understand.

 

[ppp]

I now find it amazing how little people know of not only the gods and goddesses but of the other numinous creatures.

I think that in the course of this multipronged conversation, that between you, me and @SalixIncendium, that the only one who actually acknowledges the shape and depth of his/her/their ignorance is me.

 

[SalixIncendium]

You did not. I provided two separate groups of creatures in my post - all or only supernatural.. Your usage of "such creatures" in your response does not specify which group you meant. At this point, you have manage to convince me that your rationalizations on this matter are all post hoc.

First, if you reread your post, it wasn’t clear on the two separate groups.

Even so, I’m not sure why you apply a “supernatural” qualification, because not all gods are supernatural.

And this is a perfect example of what I meant in my post. Some atheists apply qualities and attributes without knowing the qualities and attributes of the deity being discussed.

So all or supernatural is irrelevant to the why one might be insulted, because by using the terms in the OP, one is qualifying their preconceived qualities to any god.

 

[SalixIncendium]

*Mod edit*
I’ve now given you two opportunities to be civil. You just burned your last, because anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m as honest as they come.

So I’ll just leave you with the word salad with which you addressed me in the post in question.

Are you also vicariously insulted that I treat their god claims every other claim I hear?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I find insulting when one’s personal god is automatically compared to such creatures without understanding or asking about qualities and/or attributes of that god.

Fairies and leprechauns are literally aspects of other religions, though. Why would comparing one religious belief to another be an insult?

What you describe in the OP seems to me to be attempts to encourage a theist to engage with the outsider test for faith: people list off things that they see as equally supported as your god(s), but - presumably - have no emotional baggage for you.

You don't think those things are fair analogies for what you believe in... fair enough; but what would be? Can you name anything that you would agree is a fair analogy? Or is there no way for you to engage with the outsider test?

 

[SalixIncendium]

Fairies and leprechauns are literally aspects of other religions, though. Why would comparing one religious belief to another be an insult?

The qualities or attributes one's god(s) may not be comparable to those of fairies and leprechauns.

You don't think those things are fair analogies for what you believe in... fair enough; but what would be? Can you name anything that you would agree is a fair analogy? Or is there no way for you to engage with the outsider test?

I have no personal gods, so I am unable to answer this. The onus would be on you to learn from the person whose god(s) with which you want to make an analogy their god's qualities and attributes, because not all gods have the same ones.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

The qualities or attributes one's god(s) may not be comparable to those of fairies and leprechauns.

Sure. No two different things are exactly alike. Analogies can still be useful, though.

I have no personal gods, so I am unable to answer this. The onus would be on you to learn from the person whose god(s) with which you want to make an analogy their god's qualities and attributes, because not all gods have the same ones.

The key issue in the outsider test for faith is level of support, not specific qualities and attributes (except to the extent that those qualities and attributes impact level of support).

For instance, two beings that have no measurable impact on the observable universe have the same level of support, regardless what the purported qualities of each one are supposed to be.

 

[Bear Wild]

Fairies and leprechauns are literally aspects of other religions, though. Why would comparing one religious belief to another be an insult?

It would be best to compare Fairies and leprechauns with the Irish gods and goddesses the Tuatha de Dana where there is a connection. The problem comes from the misunderstanding of these terms within the culture where they exist. It would not make any sense to compare Disney's fairies with the Tuatha de Dana. Big foot is not a numinous being if any culture I am aware of. Unicorns have a deep meaning in their appropriate cultural context. Even comparing giants, land wights, elves and trolls with the fairy folk and leprechauns can be useful if done understanding the cultural context that they are a part of. The objection of using them to compare to other people's gods has to do with using modern media representation of these beings which is so far removed from how they were or are perceived in their cultural context. Look how many serious native American practices were inappropriately imaged in our media and have nothing to do with Native American spirituality. So, if one wants to make these comparisons, they should take the time to understand these beings in and appropriate comparison.

 

[ppp]

It would be best to compare Fairies and leprechauns with the Irish gods and goddesses the Tuatha de Dana where there is a connection. The problem comes from the misunderstanding of these terms within the culture where they exist. It would not make any sense to compare Disney's fairies with the Tuatha de Dana. Big foot is not a numinous being if any culture I am aware of. Unicorns have a deep meaning in their appropriate cultural context. Even comparing giants, land wights, elves and trolls with the fairy folk and leprechauns can be useful if done understanding the cultural context that they are a part of. The objection of using them to compare to other people's gods has to do with using modern media representation of these beings which is so far removed from how they were or are perceived in their cultural context. Look how many serious native American practices were inappropriately imaged in our media and have nothing to do with Native American spirituality. So, if one wants to make these comparisons, they should take the time to understand these beings in and appropriate comparison.

No. The issue is not with what it is being claimed to exist The issue is that the humans claiming fairies, gods, and spirituality lack any ability to distinguish their claims from fantasy. It's not your the subjects that make your claims unbelievable, @Bear Wild. It is the fact that you are incapable of demonstrating a difference between your claims and your imagination. Your complaints about cultural context a pointless posturing. You avoiding the actual issue.