Philosophical Vegan Forum

Hi Johan,
welcome to the forum (sorry for the late welcome). Happy to have you onboard.

TheVeganAtheist wrote:Hi Johan,
welcome to the forum (sorry for the late welcome). Happy to have you onboard.

Thank you. I like your videos, so that's why I came over here.

brimstoneSalad wrote: You're the most interesting theist we've ever had here, and probably the smartest and most rational too.

Thanks, I think I don't fall into the traps many relgious theists might, because until relatively recently I was a real atheist myself. Not in the implicit sense but an actively educated anti-theist. I understand atheism and find it a completely rational position, until a person has personal experiences that do convince them that the source of the universe is intentional and loving. Don't believe until there is at least some evidence to do so.


With regards to your other post:

brimstoneSalad wrote:

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I guess to an extent claiming that the source of the feeling is external is just interpretation, however it does feel like that to me.

It can't feel like that, because there's no way to distinguish it. Although FMRI can and does show how these things work in the brain, and can show that the process of being overwhelmed by love looks the same as the process of being overwhelmed by anger or any other emotion (also generated internally).

There is quite a difference between being overwhelmed by an internal emotion, on which I have to retract my earlier statements -that is possible- and an emotion that feels to be coming from outside of me.

So it is possible to overwhelm yourself, like you said, because of parts of what I would call your soul, that you are unaware of, coming into awareness. I can feel overwhelmed by my own anger, fear or sadness, and my own love too, so I was wrong to use the argument you can't overwhelm yourself. But these feelings that have a potential to overwhelm yourself, were inside of yourself, but just in a repressed or unaware state. The feeling of overwhelm just results from the difference in emotional allowance between the repressed and the allowing state. New experiences, coming from outside of you, can overwhelm you too.

However, there's a difference between being overwhelmed from your own feeling of love, or from a feeling of being loved. Those are two different feelings. Say when you are in an embrace with a lover, the feelings of giving and receiving love at the same time might coalesce a bit, but the feelings are still separable and distinct. When I'm talking about receiving love from God, it is actually a quite distinct feeling from anything else you can feel.

I'd say in trusting my experience I have a way of differentiating between the feeling actually coming from outside of me or it just being created in my brain, creating the illusion it comes from outside of me. It's that I trust my feelings. But that is a choice. I don't want to ask myself if I'm just imagining things all the time, especially if the experiences have been strong, such as with receiving love from God.



As another small example, say you have the prayer (in other words have the real desire) to receive a small sign that God exists... Confirmation bias could and does account for people experiencing something they consider extraordinary, but to the subject experiencing it, that is not what matters at all. Your personal experiences of life are all you have. What's wrong with confirmation bias? :p I'm serious about the question.

As another example, there's the idea that there exists a law of attraction: the idea that events in life are attracted by the soul, in a way that is designed to help the soul grow in love. Once you accept that theory, or entertain the possibility of it's truth, things do appear to fit the theory, in other words there's a theory ladenness to your experiences/observations. In a way it even becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would be criteria to dismiss such a theory then?

I guess what I'm saying is that subjectivity is something (materialist) science doesn't deal with very well. That doesn't mean that things that are subjective should be discarded from life.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I understand atheism and find it a completely rational position, until a person has personal experiences that do convince them that the source of the universe is intentional and loving. Don't believe until there is at least some evidence to do so.

You're misunderstanding the concept of evidence. Personal experiences are not evidence; science is all about finding actual evidence that isn't corrupted by bias or brain generated delusions.

It's still rational to be atheist even if you have "personal experiences" that make you see hell first hand, for example, as the case of Rudi Affolter (an atheist) interviewed in the Horizon episode "God on the Brain", who had a horrible first hand experience of hell, but could rationally understand that it wasn't a real thing.

This may not be the best link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgcNRWV2h5I

This is NOT him being irrational, as you claim, to deny the reality of his experiences (although you're making a different claim about religion, we're still talking about experiences here). Quite the opposite: He is a shining example of rationality in the face of great adversity, in understanding that these experiences are NOT evidence.

People can believe anything if they give into their biases. It's a rallying cry of Christians that you are essentially just repeating in different, more obfuscated words, to "just have faith".
And those beliefs might be harmless, or they could be incredibly harmful. You never know if a delusion is harmful or not until you compare it to reality, which you can not do if you don't understand reality.

In short: There is absolutely no evidence for you to believe as you do. You do so on faith (which you are incorrectly labeling evidence). Claiming there is "evidence" is misunderstanding the concept of what evidence is.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:There is quite a difference between being overwhelmed by an internal emotion, on which I have to retract my earlier statements -that is possible- and an emotion that feels to be coming from outside of me.

No there isn't. All emotions are generated internally, although it's perfectly normal to be mistaken and feel that they are coming from outside.
For example, an object of phobia may SEEM to be radiating fear itself, and overwhelming you with it from outside. This is very typical. We do not, by default, comprehend that our emotions are internally generated.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I was wrong to use the argument you can't overwhelm yourself.

Thank you for understanding this.
I hope you'll understand that it's an arbitrary and unsubstantiated claim that any emotion can come from outside of your own brain.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:However, there's a difference between being overwhelmed from your own feeling of love, or from a feeling of being loved. Those are two different feelings. Say when you are in an embrace with a lover, the feelings of giving and receiving love at the same time might coalesce a bit, but the feelings are still separable and distinct.

They are distinct feelings, sure.
And you can be overwhelmed with the feeling of being loved by other human beings, by pets, or even from a toy or imaginary friend. You can be overwhelmed by a feeling of being loved by somebody who has only pretended to love you -- as is sometimes the case in manipulative relationships.
People can not tell the difference between the feeling of being loved that is stimulated by a source that loves them, and one that is stimulated by a source that does not love them. This can be empirically tested and proved.

Why? Because the feeling is stimulated NOT by the actual love present in that supposed source which is magically conducted on psychic waves, but by the BELIEF that one is loved by the supposed source, creating that feeling in the actual source which is the brain of the one feeling the emotion (in this case, the one supposedly being loved).

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:When I'm talking about receiving love from God, it is actually a quite distinct feeling from anything else you can feel.

The feeling of being criticized by a peanut is also a distinct feeling from anything else you can feel -- that is, a feeling you will feel if you believe a peanut is being critical of you. So?
Should I, if I had such an experience, advocate that as evidence that peanuts are critical assholes?

Feelings feel like things. That's how they do.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I'd say in trusting my experience I have a way of differentiating between the feeling actually coming from outside of me or it just being created in my brain, creating the illusion it comes from outside of me.

Circular reasoning, we meet again.

No, you do not have a way to distinguish the true nature of your feelings based on your feelings about the true nature of those feelings.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:It's that I trust my feelings. But that is a choice. I don't want to ask myself if I'm just imagining things all the time, especially if the experiences have been strong, such as with receiving love from God.

In other words, "Just have faith".
You're trusting something you have no evidence or rational basis to trust, and that you KNOW can be easily misleading and perfectly likely is not true.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Confirmation bias could and does account for people experiencing something they consider extraordinary, but to the subject experiencing it, that is not what matters at all.

It is what matters if they care about reality, and they want to believe in a reality that is true. It only doesn't matter if they don't care about reality, and only want to believe for the sake of believing.

But in terms of reality: That's what science is for, to give us knowledge which has been controlled for regarding biases to the best of our ability. It's objectively superior knowledge, and the only thing that would qualify as real evidence.

Even if you want to be authentically spiritual, you need to be scientific about it and not faith based.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Your personal experiences of life are all you have. What's wrong with confirmation bias? :p I'm serious about the question.

Your senses are all you have to perceive the external world by, but that's very different.
Senses are influenced by bias, but unless you're completely off the deep end and need to be institutionalized, they're only partially influenced by those biases. You might round up or down 0.5 to 1 or 0 based on your bias, but you'll have a hard time turning 0 into 1, or 1 into 0.

Your senses can and do deliver you information that proves your assumptions wrong, particularly if you engage in rigorous methodology (i.e. science) to control for those biases, such as double or triple blind analysis, and representation of data in forms that are much harder to misinterpret (such as clear numbers or yes/no values).

Biases are a form of noise in our society. If the signal is made strong enough, it can get through.

What's wrong with confirmation bias? Well, what's science useful for? Has science ever done any good in the world? Is it perhaps harmful to advocate the kind of thinking that celebrates bias and condemns scientific methodology?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:As another example, there's the idea that there exists a law of attraction:

Yes, it's called magical thinking. These failed hypotheses are supported only by confirmation bias.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Once you accept that theory, or entertain the possibility of it's truth, things do appear to fit the theory, in other words there's a theory ladenness to your experiences/observations.

It's not a theory, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Of course they would, because you've succumbed to bias. The same way, once you accept that the King James Bible is the perfect and inerrant literal word of God, everything seems to fit with that. Or once you accept the Qur'an as the holy word of Allah, everything fits with that.

No matter what you believe, if you ignore all conflicting evidence, your beliefs won't be challenged and the whole universe will seem to correspond to your beliefs.
That's why we have real science, that controls for bias, and tells us the reality of things whether we like it or not.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:In a way it even becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would be criteria to dismiss such a theory then?

Well, for one, it's not a theory. Theories make predictions, and are supported by evidence. Again, the concept of what is or isn't evidence is important.
This is a failed hypothesis that you're talking about. Something incapable of being a theory.

So, it's dismissed outright on the grounds that it's inherently unscientific, and philosophically and morally it must be dismissed because it is at odds with knowledge (which is morally essential).

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I guess what I'm saying is that subjectivity is something (materialist) science doesn't deal with very well. That doesn't mean that things that are subjective should be discarded from life.

There is no "materialist science", there's just science. It's a methodology that helps us distinguish between what is actually objectively true for everybody, and what you only believe to be true (correctly or incorrectly).

Emotional experiences like what you're talking about don't have to be discarded, but they shouldn't get special treatment.
If there's a god causing these experiences, and it's actually distinct from a self generated experience in any way , that can be tested by science.

There's an unfortunate misunderstanding of science that leads people to believe that science is exclusively concerned with how things work, and that if it can't understand the how of it, it rejects the fact. Nothing could be further from the truth.

IF something has an effect in any way, through emotions, through "psychics", or anything, science can determine it.

If a Psychic can read auras, fine. Get a bunch of psychics, and have them read a bunch of auras without consulting with each other. If they report the same findings independently, then there may be something to it. If their findings are random and disagree with each other, then maybe not -- or maybe we just got a bad sample of psychics. Each failed attempt makes it more and more likely that 'real' psychics just don't exist.

Get them to figure out which person in a lineup is the killer (when the information is known and kept secret from them and the experimenters until after the data is gathered).
Anything!

Anything that affects our reality in a consistent and reliable way such that it can be detected at all can be measured in scientific ways.

If you think this stuff is real -- any of it -- then come up with a model, and think up and experiment that can differentiate that model from a materialistic one, or any other supernatural model. A real experiment.

If you can't do that, then the sum total of all you've said is "You have to have faith". No different than any typical Christian or Muslim, or any other fideist.

Hello AlexanderVeganTheist , Welcome. I am a new member too. I'm vegan like you however I'm an atheist, former theist. I've been vegan for about 5 years now and atheist for about 2 years. What influenced me to become atheist is Zeitgeist: the movie on Netflix, Religulous by Bill Maher, and Caesar's messiah on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVu6BzJ90Sk, among other things like how the Noah's flood story in the bible is copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh by the Sumerians which is older. Look up the epic of Gilgamesh and see for yourself how identical it is. The Jews were captured from Israel by the Babylonians so while they were living there they could have been influenced by their religion to create Judaism. It's called syncretism to combine old religions into a new one. Also, it was the Romans that created Christianity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVu6BzJ90Sk

I agree with all those points AtheistVegan = ) I don't believe there was a flood as described in the Bible. There may have been a time where the amount of floods was extraordinarily high, but that's just a scientific question, I don't care about the answer to. It has no bearing on my spirituality. I see many influences of other religions on eachother. I don't think any particular religion is true.

I didn't think Religulous was particularly good when I watched it with half an eye. I haven't watched the other two movies you mention but I used to really dig the debates Christopher Hitchens did. In this picture he reminds me a lot of Albert Camus, by whom I think he was probably influenced quite a bit:

brimstoneSalad wrote: It's still rational to be atheist even if you have "personal experiences" that make you see hell first hand, for example, as the case of Rudi Affolter (an atheist) interviewed in the Horizon episode "God on the Brain", who had a horrible first hand experience of hell, but could rationally understand that it wasn't a real thing.

This may not be the best link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgcNRWV2h5I

This is NOT him being irrational, as you claim, to deny the reality of his experiences (although you're making a different claim about religion, we're still talking about experiences here). Quite the opposite: He is a shining example of rationality in the face of great adversity, in understanding that these experiences are NOT evidence.

I still have to watch the video. Before seeing the video, it just sounds like he was very committed to keeping his beliefsystems intact. That has to sound familiar

Why? Because the feeling is stimulated NOT by the actual love present in that supposed source which is magically conducted on psychic waves, but by the BELIEF that one is loved by the supposed source, creating that feeling in the actual source which is the brain of the one feeling the emotion (in this case, the one supposedly being loved).

I disagree with that. An experiment we could devise is for example having a person in an enraged state and a person in a calm state behind curtains, and having sensitive test subjects guess which state the person behind the curtain is in. If they could do that with significant accuracy, it would prove a radiative model of emotion, or telepathy basically. This experiment would be hard, just because it's hard to be truly enraged for a long time... I've heard of somewhat similar experiments being conducted, showing no evidence of any remote-sensing, but I don't know if this exact experiment has been tried.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Once you accept that theory, or entertain the possibility of it's truth, things do appear to fit the theory, in other words there's a theory ladenness to your experiences/observations.

It's not a theory, but I'll get to that in a minute.

I was just using it colloquially. 'Hypothesis' would have been better.

No matter what you believe, if you ignore all conflicting evidence, your beliefs won't be challenged and the whole universe will seem to correspond to your beliefs.

I don't think there's any evidence possible that would contradict the hypothesis of the law of attraction, even though you imply that such evidence exists. I'd probably say it's unfalsifiable. It still helps people to grow towards ethics and morality though.

If a Psychic can read auras, fine. Get a bunch of psychics, and have them read a bunch of auras without consulting with each other. If they report the same findings independently, then there may be something to it. If their findings are random and disagree with each other, then maybe not -- or maybe we just got a bad sample of psychics. Each failed attempt makes it more and more likely that 'real' psychics just don't exist.

Get them to figure out which person in a lineup is the killer (when the information is known and kept secret from them and the experimenters until after the data is gathered).
Anything!

I've seen some pretty impressive stuff. But I've also seen some impressive failings. I'd think that a lot of people that claim to be psychics are just bullshitting themselves, and some maybe even intentionally bullshitting others. When I was about 15,16 I had a dream, that came true in the smallest details about half a year to a year later. This could be explained with a hypothesis that there exist spirits that can see the future. I think sometimes spirits can tell people all kinds of information about other people and future events. However reported instances of this are likely to remain anecdotes. Even within social/psychological sciences there are many many more factors that have to be discounted, compared to a physics experiment, so when it comes to claims of non-material entities, spirit people, we don't even have a model to begin to have an idea how to distill regularities from occurences. It's likely to remain individual stories, also in part because I honestly believe a lot of people are invested in a materialist worldview, so are opposed to even considering more structured research.

The following ebook was written in the interbellum by Dr. Carl Wickland, a psychiatric doctor, whose wife purported to be a medium: http://divinetruth.com/www/en/pdf/Peopl ... 20Dead.pdf

The book - which is worth the read even if you don't believe anything of it, simply because of its entertainment value - deals with 30 years of practice in his psychiatry, where he would use his wife as a medium, where the spirits causing psychoses to his patients would "jump into" the wife, who would then take on a different personality, including different idiom and a complete biography (with checkable details).

I believe that in order to completely disclaim mediums who claim to be taken over by spirits, (not the ones that just tell a person that pays them vagaries), and show a completely different personality (compare to people with MPD, who do this more or less involuntarily) with complete biography, you have to believe that a brain can instantaneously and unconsciously create a complete personality, where literary writers would take months to make up such a personality.

brimstoneSalad wrote: If you think this stuff is real -- any of it -- then come up with a model, and think up and experiment that can differentiate that model from a materialistic one, or any other supernatural model. A real experiment.

Well, the reception of Gods love is a subjective experience by its nature. Perhaps if you would experience it at some point in the future for yourself, you might feel different about it, who knows? I can't devise an experiment that conclusively establishes that the experience isn't caused in the brain. I haven't seen evidence it has to be caused in the brain as of yet. In my opinion, neuroscience can only find correlations. It's fallacious to draw conclusions of causation from correlation. Even things like brain stimulation and brain damage data don't prove the chain of causation starts in the brain. If you cut an electrical current wire, a naive conclusion would be to say the current started in the wire.

In a way I find the inconclusiveness of evidence for God a beautiful thing. Belief in a personal creator and a relationship with that source remains a choice in this way. It isn't forced on us, even by data. The choice is indeed faith based.

If you can't do that, then the sum total of all you've said is "You have to have faith". No different than any typical Christian or Muslim, or any other fideist.

With regards to the reality of experiences, faith is always required. We can doubt anything, as Descartes "experimented" with. So yes I am a fideist. I trust the reality of my experiences based on that they point to a loving God, and all experiences fit together. I don't care that it's circular. That doesn't make it false.


Before you try the experiment you want "objective" evidence that it's not your brain playing tricks on you, that's fair enough, that's your choice. However, you could go for the "experiment" and see what kind of feelings it brings you, and possibly the feelings themselves will convince you that there's at least a possibility it comes from an outside source... The way you want conclusiveness before you wager a try at the experiment yourself reminds me kind of of this channeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4gwRzdp3X0

This is also an example of a medium allowing another person to speak through him.

<double post>

brimstoneSalad wrote: This may not be the best link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgcNRWV2h5I

I watched the video. It was interesting, but basically the information could be boiled down to: "if we electromagnetically stimulate the temporal lobes of a person they sometimes get a sensation of the presence of another being"... This doesn't prove anything about the truth of the content of such feelings. especially in absence of electromagnetic stimulation. It could just be that such stimulation increases the sensitivity to actual presences. That hypothesis would explain all the same data. If we press on a persons stomach, certain sensitivities are increased as well. But then again, if we press on someones eyes, they might see colors that aren't actually there - doesn't mean colors aren't there. It could be that temporal lobe activity is useful in actual social situation, with physical people present and that feeling presences in other situations is just a misfiring... That could be, but it could just as well not be.

Anyway, I made a new thread about how trusting experiences always requires some degree of faith. I think we should chop up the subjects, because our posts are getting really long.

I don't deny I have faith, I just don't think it's blind faith. My experiences are pretty coherent, as in repeatable for myself, interrelated and systematic, fitting in with what other people, such as AJ Miller, describe.


I also kind of want to talk about a variation of Pascals wager, but that's for another thread.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I still have to watch the video. Before seeing the video, it just sounds like he was very committed to keeping his beliefsystems intact.

He just correctly recognized that what he experienced wasn't really evidence.

Do you believe the sadistic literalist biblical god of wrath and hell exist?
Because that's what he experienced. Do you think that's a good thing to believe in?

If you sincerely believe that what you experience is evidence, you would have to encourage him to also believe these things, wouldn't you?
And the Islamists who have felt the wrath of god through prayer convincing them to commit suicide bombings.

It's an incredibly arrogant position on your part to put your subjective experiences of a loving being above those experiences of others who disagree with you on the same subjective basis.

Do you not on some level recognize how wrong that is?

There is no means to differentiate you from a terrorist in terms of frame-of-mind and credulity. Only incidentally are your opinions and consequential actions divergent.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I disagree with that.

No you don't. You have no basis by which to disagree, and you indicate that you understand this to some degree.
You can not assert the opposite, you know you have no evidence for it. You even have some grasp of what such evidence would entail and admit it doesn't exist.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I've heard of somewhat similar experiments being conducted, showing no evidence of any remote-sensing, but I don't know if this exact experiment has been tried.

If an experiment like that were conducted, controlling for pheromonal conveyance, then yes, that could provide evidence. It's not really a difficult experiment to conduct either (it's not hard to stimulate rage).

But they have been conducted. MANY experiments like this. All failed, and showed results expected from guessing.
It doesn't matter if the exact experiment has been tried (that is not the only conceivable valid experimental setup); many tests for this notion have been.

Anyway, the reasonable thing to do is NOT to believe something irrational until somebody proves it wrong. And then, apparently, ignore that evidence after they do prove it wrong and continue believing in said irrational thing.

The reasonable thing is to withhold your believe until there's actual evidence. And no, your subjective feelings do not count any more than a Jihadists' count as evidence for their righteousness.
Objective evidence -- that's the name of the game.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I don't think there's any evidence possible that would contradict the hypothesis of the law of attraction,

That kind of claim is terrible.

You could say the exact same thing about the Bible or the Qur'an being the literal and inerrant word of a malevolent god.
No matter what 'evidence' you come up with to contradict it, somebody can just say "well, the devil planted that to trick you, so we're still right".

Do you understand how this is unethical?
It's unethical because it is in principal anti-knowledge.

It is an idea that people latch onto in order to substantiate any dogma they want -- whether evil dogma in practice or "harmless" dogma, the idea itself is evil because it is the mechanism by which evil thrives.

Without it, all we'd have is science. That wouldn't make everybody automatically good, but they'd have a lot fewer excuses for being overtly evil in the name of good.

Things that are anti-knowledge are evil, because they sabotage true enlightenment, which is the only real and reliable way to good. Anything else has led you on a detour which at best superficially resembles good, but all the more likely is far worse.

This is an important question: Do you value truth or knowledge at all? Or are you only interested in substantiating your preconceived notions, even if they're wrong?

Only if you have no interest in truly knowing the universe, or being ethical, could you support and advocate such mental corruptions. I hope you understand what I mean.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:It still helps people to grow towards ethics and morality though.

No. It does exactly the opposite. It is a device of evil that sabotages enlightenment. It reinforces ignorance to think like that.

The same thing you are saying could be said by fanatical Islamic extremists about suicide bombing or their dogmatic obsession with their hadith scriptures, that they're making the world grow towards ethics and morality.

What's the difference between your and their thought process?
Answer: None at all. You've only accidentally fallen into less harmful conclusions. The difference in action may be substantial, but the thought process behind them is identically anti-scientific and illegitimate.

There IS a difference between truly scientifically minded ethics and dogmatism; the former accepts correction based on empirical realism, and advances falsifiable notions by which to guide its philosophy's application. It is inherently pro-knowledge.

In practice, as long as you are honest, you can falsify the "law of attraction" the same way you can falsify extremist Islamic ideology; demonstrating contradictions in logic, or with overwhelming empirical evidence and methodology.

You can only defend these devices of ignorance and evil by attacking and condemning the devices of knowledge and good. As you do a few paragraphs later by attacking scientists with conspiracy theories:

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:It's likely to remain individual stories, also in part because I honestly believe a lot of people are invested in a materialist worldview, so are opposed to even considering more structured research.

That's an insulting ad hominem attack against all scientists. Like saying George Bush planned 9-11, it's a conspiracy theory of mainstream science against the spiritualists, when no such thing is true, and it's a libelous accusation.

Scientists are extremely interested in the paranormal; anything that doesn't make sense gets researched passionately, even if it has no known practical applications, because it COULD have amazing applications we just don't know about yet.
In the past, it had been extensively researched; the research just bore no fruit whatsoever and wasted huge amounts of money. And by that, I do NOT mean "we don't know how it happens, so let's give up". Not at all. By that I mean "Nothing is actually happening here at all; there's no measurable phenomenon to test".

If there's not actually a thing to test, there's nothing to be done.
If there's ANYTHING at all that can be demonstrated, it will be studied endlessly.

The reason we don't experiment with these things anymore is because it would be unethical to do so, wasting money on these subjects, when we have things like cancer to cure and there's never been any evidence that the spirit world exists.

There's at least two million dollars up for grabs for anybody who can demonstrate the paranormal.
All somebody, anybody, has to do is demonstrate it at all.
As soon anything could be shown to be there at all, the flood gates would open and the scientific world would be abuzz with experimentation.

You're quite disappointingly anti-skeptical here, and you're attacking positions you don't even understand in a very insulting way.

I hope you stop doing that, because it's mean spirited on your part to think of people in that way and doubt their love for knowledge like that.
If there were anything to it at all -- the tiniest shred of evidence -- we would be all over it.

If there is a spirit world, then you should be condemning the frauds, not the scientists, for the lack of ongoing research.
And you should be condemning any person who claims to have real power and won't subject his or herself to research for the good of the world to discover this entirely new dimension (there is still research available to anybody who will apply, and all it takes is one).

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:When I was about 15,16 I had a dream, that came true in the smallest details about half a year to a year later.

Did you write the dream down, to the smallest detail?
No. Then it didn't come true.

Our memories are not stone. They are highly malleable. More so than you imagine. We'll even incorrectly remember other people's stories as our own personal memories. When we look back, we edit our memories as we access them to add details.
This has been demonstrated time and again in experiment. Memory is proved to be unreliable.

When the event happened, you retroactively edited this memory of your dream to match the event.

You have no idea how absurd it is to claim you remembered anything in detail. You have a lot to learn about how memory works (and how it doesn't). Trusting your memory is a very foolish endeavor, particularly to something so important.

It's things like this that show how you don't understand why anecdotes are not evidence. The human mind is NOT a recording mechanism. It does not record facts, it largely deals in and recalls feelings associated with notions and it reconstructs stories based on expectation. It is incredibly imprecise and inaccurate.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:This could be explained with a hypothesis that there exist spirits that can see the future.

That's logically absurd. The very hypothesis is illogical and incoherent. No, it can't be explained that way.
That's like saying "it can be explained by the hypothesis that 0 = 1".
No.

You can't explain anything with logical incoherence. It's fundamentally anti-knowledge.

Seeing the definite future is not possible, it creates logical contradictions. If you start to study physics a little bit, you'll be able to understand the profound measure to which this is essential on every level.

Also, what about the whole free will thing? You still need to reply to that topic.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:and a complete biography (with checkable details).

That's all you'd have to do for two million dollars, and to change the scientific world completely.

Don't insult us with accusations, and claims of a conspiracy theory against the paranormal.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I believe that in order to completely disclaim mediums who claim to be taken over by spirits, (not the ones that just tell a person that pays them vagaries), and show a completely different personality (compare to people with MPD, who do this more or less involuntarily) with complete biography, you have to believe that a brain can instantaneously and unconsciously create a complete personality, where literary writers would take months to make up such a personality.

This is a bizarre claim, because it should be so obvious, but here you show you know nothing about writing (seriously, talk to some writers about this before making up silly arguments).

It takes seconds to come up with a character. The idea that you feel like it's hard to do that on the fly is puzzling.
What takes months is the writing and re-writing. Most of writing is actually editing, revision, etc. A character is changed several times in the process; it does not take months to invent it on the spot.
A large part of the time consumption is second guessing, and personal insecurity about whether what the writer has come up with is good enough to show to others.

A realistic character is actually trivially simple, because we have a lifetime of experience with friends and family to draw on. An interesting and original character that will sell millions of books (which is often an unrealistic personality to some degree, but interesting) is much more difficult, but can still be done with a bit of luck or experience in a few minutes.

That said, these mediums don't do this instantly and without practice. They have plenty of time to come up with them in private, and since they have often been "channeling" for a long time, they also improve their technique over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jksKtGoz3og

Trivially simple. It's really baffling that you think this stuff is convincing or any kind of evidence.

I can come up with a character on the spot.

I was a farmer in 1823, I had two daughters, my wife died of consumption a month after my second was born, and I raised them on my own. My youngest ran away when she was 12 and I never saw her again. It hit my family hard, particularly Emily, my oldest, who stayed with me after her husband died, she never had any children and at the time it wasn't proper to remarry...

I could go on for pages easily. I'm just pulling that stuff out of my ass. I can go into as much detail as you want. As slowly or as quickly in an overview. I can tell you about my parents Megan and James, or my dog when I was six named skipper because I liked to play with my friend Sam at the lake and see who could skip rocks most and she followed me home.

Seriously, it's stupidly trivial. It doesn't take months. It can be done on the fly.
I can do an accent while I do it too, and act all somber, or excitable, or gender bend.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Well, the reception of Gods love is a subjective experience by its nature. Perhaps if you would experience it at some point in the future for yourself, you might feel different about it, who knows?

I know what it feels like. I can feel it any time I want.

Close your eyes, the shiver rocks down your spine and spreads through your body as you feel a kind of electric warmth, not a stuffy warmth, but like a radiant sunlit field pulling into the distance, and it goes on forever and is an infinitely powerful love you can't grasp the edges of or fully fathom the source of. Just overwhelming.

OK, fine. So?
It's just meditative emotional masturbation (not that there's anything wrong with that as long as you keep your head on straight).
If it inspires and motivates you to do good, that's awesome. If it makes you irrational, that's much less awesome. It seems to have done the latter for you as well, and I would like to encourage you to keep it to the former.

A feeling is a feeling, there's no reason to attach absurd illogical notions to it. You profane the feeling itself by doing so and making up stuff -- not less than an Islamist extremist does when he suicide bombs thanks to the spiritual feeling he gets in prayer.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:It's fallacious to draw conclusions of causation from correlation.

Not when you control for variables and design tests made to establish causation.
This is a profound misunderstanding of science.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:If you cut an electrical current wire, a naive conclusion would be to say the current started in the wire.

And this is a misunderstanding of electricity...

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:The choice is indeed faith based.

It's only faith, and it's blind faith, because you have no evidence, and there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Don't forget the discussions on the illogical nature of this being.

You need to understand a lot more science before you realize how all of these things are also empirically false.
There is evidence, and it's strictly against your claims.

That said, faith? Yes, it is.
The same kind of faith that drives a militant Islamic suicide bomber to believe in his version of god and kill people.
Different conclusion, same thought process. You can not simultaneously defend or substantiate your choice of belief without doing the same for them. Faith is dangerous, it's like a loaded gun shot off into a crowd. You might be lucky and not hit anybody; you might land on something mostly harmless like Jainism. But the next guy to shoot into the crowd following your lead could kill people.

Do you not care about the kind of example you set by ignoring evidence, and requiring none for your world view?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I don't care that it's circular. That doesn't make it false.

Actually it does make it false evidence. It makes it invalid.

You can use circular reasoning for something, and accidentally be right. But your circular reasoning was not evidence for that thing.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Before you try the experiment you want "objective" evidence that it's not your brain playing tricks on you, that's fair enough, that's your choice.

You don't understand at all. I know what you're feeling. I knew it before you ever did; I've known it for decades.

I also know it's not evidence of anything aside from that I'm experiencing a feeling.
It doesn't prove Jesus, and that I should love people.
It doesn't prove Allah, and that I should blow myself up in a public place.

If it provided evidence for either of those things, it would equally provide evidence for the opposite; it's a bad kind of thought practice to pretend that feelings are evidence.

I hope you will understand that, and why it's so harmful to advocate that kind of thinking.
It's a gun shot into a crowd. The best you can hope for is that it will be harmless.

If you want ethics, morality, inspiration to make the world a better place, you don't need to look for pseudoscience, and faith in the supernatural. You just need to look to philosophy and science, which perfectly well substantiates good will and love on its own without all of the dangerous nonsense.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:This doesn't prove anything about the truth of the content of such feelings. especially in absence of electromagnetic stimulation.

I wanted you to see the interview with that guy. The rest is an interesting watch though.
The experimenters didn't claim anything conclusive.
Proof against god is more aptly sought for through logic, as I have done.

You make a lot of good points. I definitely moved a lot towards agnosticism the last week(s) or so. It would be an interesting addition to my already somewhat extraordinary biography to become an atheist again. I know some people prefer to think of the theist/atheist gnostic/agnostic divide as a quadrant diagram, but I think the spectrum representation with agnosticism in the middle does more justice to the actual psychology of the varying degrees of certainty people can have. So I definitely moved towards the agnostic side of things by things you said.

Just with regards to scientists choosing their research in certain directions. It's exactly like you said, they need to allocate time and resources to endeavours they think are likely to be fruitful. To think their assessment of fruitlessness in paranormal/psychic research is based for a 100% on past research is naive to me. There are other contributing factors, philosophical and personal in nature. I accept your point that most if not all scientists care a lot about the truth, but they are still bound by their own positions and beliefs. I never stated there was a conspiracy, that's just you putting words into my mouth. But there's no guarantee there aren't collective biases they aren't seeing.

And this:

I know what it feels like. I can feel it any time I want.

Close your eyes, the shiver rocks down your spine and spreads through your body as you feel a kind of electric warmth, not a stuffy warmth, but like a radiant sunlit field pulling into the distance, and it goes on forever and is an infinitely powerful love you can't grasp the edges of or fully fathom the source of. Just overwhelming.

It's a somewhat accurate description, the sunlight-like quality of it especially, but I feel like some of the words you put in at the end just display your sarcasm/cynicism at the whole thing, but maybe that's just my interpretation.
I cannot feel this feeling whenever I wish by the way. So could you tell me what your method is to arrive at this feeling?



Anyway I've also been thinking about what separates my method of arriving at conclusions from a muslim's, and I'm still thinking about it. I also want to revisit the threads about free will and the supposed illogicality of a god, but I really need to think about things, and want to take my time for that, I don't want to force myself to reply hastily. I don't think you've established the illogicality of free will or a god as much as you think.

Peace