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I never remember not believing in God. My mother was a very devout woman, and she modeled the love of God in the way she poured out her life for her family.
You can measure and objectively observe experience in any number of ways, brainwaves, skin response, behavioral changes, etc. However, to understand the content or the view of the meaning of that experience you have to rely on what the person tells you, or have a similar experience yourself.
As stated in how you interpret the Bible, to be more precise. Your argument here is like the Creationist who denies science because according to them, the book of Genesis is a scientific account of creation, not an allegory about the human existential dilemma. Their problem isn't Evolution. Their problem is how they read the Bible, literally, which was not its intention. They reading Modernity back into ancients, premodern texts, presuming a modernist mindset!
Ditto.
Tell me what you understand about Brahman. Let's start there, to see if you do understanding different ideas about the Divine. I've head many atheists claim to reject all ideas of God, when the only one they actually have in their minds they are rejecting, is the mythic-literal view of the Christian God out of fundamentalist American Protestant religion.
All idea of God or our ideas of reality itself, be that theistic, atheistic, scientific, etc, all include our imagination. Everyone uses their imagination in trying to "think" about reality, or anything at all, including God.
Good. Then hopefully what I am sharing might help expand your own understanding of why what I have seen most people call themselves atheists over, is the same thing that I myself don't believe in. And when I hear them saying "all gods everywhere", I've yet to meet one that actually understands what that means.
You fail to grasp what I am saying. It is understood as a door by us, and is a door to us, because that is what we collectively undstand it as and call it that. But to another culture, for instance, it might be understood as something entirely different, not just another word for door, but as having entirely different meaning and symbolic significance. It could be a "gate to the underworld", like a mirror is a gate to the world of the undead, rather than as we see is as a device to see ourselves in.
Which makes the experience subjective, i.e. not independently measurable. And there is your answer: experience is not real.For that, you have to rely upon what the subject tells you that experience is. Or.... have your own experience and find out for yourself.
No, I got the point. It's just absurd and not factual. I've seen other theists repeat similar things. I've never read any experts in science say any such thing. Between religious people trying to find gaps for their God to be shoe horned into and experts in cognitive sciencee, guess who I will defer to.
Why not cut to the chase and explain where you think consciousness is if not in brains. Do you think thoughts are magic?
And where do these people get the idea of having "mystical experiences"? Religious actions derive from exposure to religion. I have questions when a believer claims to have experiences that are quite extraordinary at face value, and to a skeptic's mind there more reasonable, alternative explanations to what they believe.
Yet is there any actual underworld that doors represent, or just a myth their culture asses on from generation to generation? What is to be said of some of the new generation open minded to what doors actually do, and they do not really revresent an underworld that no one can define or confirm exists outside of traditional lore?
Try telling that to astronauts who are trusting your hard physics as they go into space. Or in surgery where focus and precision matters. Or engineers who designed the plane you are on.
I suggest some of this compexity is how people can adopt illusions and fantasies and not understand they are illusions. They believe the illusions are profound and offer them some advantage. I don't see any advantage clarified. It can even be a disadvantage, as we see in this who are creationists, or have some level of contempt for what science has discovered and exlpained of how things are.Those are where language and symbolism and imagination really take hold and define for us our experience of reality. I know you know life is more complex than understanding what a door knob is, and extrapolating all reality out from that simple object.
On their way back from Haight Ashbury, and in the Tribe of Doobie?
Any mental or physical action derived or influenced by exposure to religion.
I defer to science to explain questions about how things are. Any ordinary person can invent answers, but are they worth anything?
That is irrelevant to the point I was making. Their understanding of reality is based upon their collective views of what reality is, tied to their language, and their entire frameworks with which they translate their experience of the world through. That is reality to them. It is irrelevant whether you think it is real in the way they do or not.
Generally the new generation just carries on the language and ways of thinking about reality to the next one. That's called tradition. When they begins to shift, is when environmental pressures, such as social or cultural shifts begin to occur, such as an Empire bringing disparate cultures together in a cosmopolitan setting. That's when the older traditional ways of thinking about things, begin to fail to properly translate anymore.
Again, you miss the point. Reality is more than rocks. It is also the experience of the ineffable. It is also the experience of love and connection with life and others. These are much less simple than mere physics. If physics and math was all there was to human reality, we'd be nothing but organic calculators or computers blindly running programs with no real subjective reality. This is in fact what the whole myth of Mr. Spock was written to capture. Being human is more than just being logical.
Why are you a Buddhist if you think there is no relevance to human living in understanding the nature of our existence and being? Why not just work, eat, sleep, make babies, get old and die? Why seek Buddha Mind? How is that relevant to living, if it's all just physics anyway?
I would say there is an advantage to seeking something, rather than just kicking back and not doing anything at all to further understanding, even if the answer is in fact beyond comprehension. This is like asking, why does a plant reach for the sun, if it knows it will never reach it anyway.
And it is human imagination that is responsible for every single progress we have made since crawling out of caves millions of years ago. You don't understand this?
Exactly. Like having highly sophisticated scientific models of the universe and assume this is reality.
Maya.Exactly my point I've been making. But do you not see that that is what you yourself do too?
I see a great deal of similarity between creationists and materialists. It's both a type of myopic perception that sees only it's perception of reality as valid, and the rest as just "imagination", not knowing that even that is imagination itself.
Subjective experience is not real??? Experience is not actual? It doesn't actually exist? No experience actually occurred??
You are, like many, confusing reality with existence. Is the White Rabbit real? No, but it exists in stories by Lewis Carroll. Reality is the physical subset of existence. All real things exist but there are things that can be unreal and exist (in multiple ways).
EVERYTHING is an experience and the idea of that experience, to us. Whatever else there is, is unknown to us. Which is itself also 'just an idea'. The real myth here is the 'hard reality' that you presume to exist apart from our cognition. As in fact, EVERYTHING that exists to us, exists cognitively. It's ALL experience, and the ideas those experiences generate. It's ALL subjective. Objectivity is the myth.