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17th November 2011, 03:17 PM | #41 |
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"If I actually believed that Jesus was coming to end the world in 2050, I'd be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails" - PZ Myers |
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17th November 2011, 04:28 PM | #42 |
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17th November 2011, 06:18 PM | #43 |
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"When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer . . . " - Stevie Wonder. "It looks like the saddest, most crookedest candy corn in an otherwise normal bag of candy corns." Stormy Daniels I hate bigots. |
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17th November 2011, 08:44 PM | #44 |
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Not at all, Limbo. You experienced what you experienced. Save for arguments based on the frailty of memory (before the peyote? really?), nobody is going to argue with *what* you experienced.
The argument comes from *why* you experienced what you did. One side (you) says that it was a supernatural event, but you have no evidence. The other side (us) says the most likely explanation was that it was a chemical response to drugs/stress etc, which has lots of evidence in it's favour. Im sure youve been told many times that pilots undergoing high-G training often experience euphoria and other associated sideeffects. We *know* how the brain can react. Drugs can make lots of imaginary stuff seem real. We *know* this. Nobody is arguing that these experiences didnt feel very very real to you. The only point of contention is the *source* of these experiences. We are happy with mundane explanations rooted in brain chemistry and evidence. You, on the other hand, are happy to extrapolate and involve a heapin-helpin of unnecessary, complicated and supernatural causes. Everybody, day to day, lives their lives relying on evidence. You wouldnt even get in a taxi if you didnt already possess strong evidence that it is, to a large degree, safe. Why do you struggle so much with the concept of people relying on evidence for other things, even when it goes against everything you want to believe? You make your claims without providing any evidence - therefore, they can be dismissed out of hand. We have evidence to backup our position on your experiences - you have none. The fact that you do not like the result is immaterial. |
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"Here we go again.... semantic and syntactic chicanery and sophistic sleight of tongue and pen.... the bedazzling magic of appearing to be saying something when in fact all that is happening is diverting attention from the attempts at shoving god through the trapdoor of illogic and wishful thinking." - Leumas |
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17th November 2011, 09:39 PM | #45 |
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Jesus reportedly put it this way: "Ye worship ye know not what." He had that right. Reality is unlike anything any weak-ass mystic can possibly dream up under the influence of drugs. That's because - and I have to be blunt here - if you think you need drugs or mystical mumbo-jumbo to get a peek at it then you are incapable of getting a peek at it. Only a cold, calculating clarity can reveal reality. But not from inside the box. And if you're into drugs and/or mysticism, then you are deep inside the box. The same box your ignorant ancestors were trapped in for millennia. You think you've experienced reality? No. You've only experienced it's shadow, and only an infinitesimal wisp of that. Here, let me prove it to ya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaZJFWOEzrc Sure, you know something is happening. So what? You don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VYhb...eature=related Don't get cocky, you skeptics. What can you possibly know? You won't allow yourselves to know anything that doesn't fall on you like an avalanche of certainty. None of you better be here when John gets here. Talkin out yer asses... |
17th November 2011, 10:04 PM | #46 |
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"Here we go again.... semantic and syntactic chicanery and sophistic sleight of tongue and pen.... the bedazzling magic of appearing to be saying something when in fact all that is happening is diverting attention from the attempts at shoving god through the trapdoor of illogic and wishful thinking." - Leumas |
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17th November 2011, 10:15 PM | #47 |
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It makes sense, if you don't think about it. - T-Mobile ad You're innocent when you dream. - Tom Waits Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool. - Samuel Clemens |
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17th November 2011, 10:22 PM | #48 |
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17th November 2011, 10:29 PM | #49 |
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"Here we go again.... semantic and syntactic chicanery and sophistic sleight of tongue and pen.... the bedazzling magic of appearing to be saying something when in fact all that is happening is diverting attention from the attempts at shoving god through the trapdoor of illogic and wishful thinking." - Leumas |
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17th November 2011, 10:39 PM | #50 |
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"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer "New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?' " - H. G. Wells |
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17th November 2011, 11:27 PM | #51 |
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A valid answer, but often meaningless for practical purposes. Most often, our decisions and actions are based on probability rather than an unobtainable certainty.
But let's not make a big issue of it. Basically, I was joking. Skeptics are better than mystics. Except for the incredibly obtuse, stubborn ones. They're about the same as mystics. |
18th November 2011, 02:47 AM | #52 |
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1. But then you've just thrown away the whole pretense of finding any deeper common ground than "people believe stuff" about various religions, plus a few common tropes. I.e., the whole thing about looking past the superficial details and doing a comparative study of religions is bunk. If you're tossing out the whole meat of what those religions say, and find your similarities in just, basically, "uh, people get told stuff by 'spirits'", then you're not the one being less superficial, you're exactly the one being ridiculously superficial about it.
2. We must then accept that those spirits are an extremely unreliable source for anything from knowledge about the universe to morals, since different spirits say wildly different and incompatible things. They can't ALL be true. The only way to reconcile that with some mighty spirits is that the spirits lie a LOT, in fact most of the time, or are just as ignorant and, shall we say, the polar opposite of wise, as the tribes that worship them. 3. ADDITIONALLY some of those are wildly bogus. If you want to make everyone a shaman, we have to accept that some of those spirits actually told people that the Earth is flat and actually has four corners. Or that the dome of the sky has some windows through which the wind blows. (Don't laugh, actual shamanistic belief in the polynesian islands.) Or that the steam boats of the Europeans coming from beyond the horizon are actually coming from the spirit world and were sent by those spirits for the natives, the Europeans just fooled them into landing in their ports. (Again, actual 19'th century cargo cult belief.) Or that the airplanes of the Europeans are big birds sent by the spirits in the sky to bring goods to the faithful. (Actual 20'th century cargo cult belief.) Or that rabbits aren't subject to normal breeding cycles, but praying to the great rabbit spirits can get them to just make more rabbits pop out of the ground for your hunters, and thus you don't have to worry about overhunting. (Sums up about 90% of the tribal animistic beliefs.) Or that if you overhunted some animal after all, it's the dark magicks of another tribe's shaman that are keeping away the animals sent by the spirits. (Not just actual belief, but the #1 cause of endemic tribal warfare and why 30% to 60% of those people die a violent death.) Or that sex is not really a pre-requisite for pregnancy: a pregnancy just happens when a baby spirit chooses a mommy to be born to, and sex at most like candles in church, in that it helps get some attention, but otherwise not really required. (Common belief in pre-animal-husbandry tribes.) Or that a teen male can't produce his own sperm until he, erm, gets it orally from an older male, sorta getting impregnated before he can produce more seed. (Yep, at least one tribe has mandatory homosexuality.) Etc, etc, etc. THAT is the kind of thing you see when you actually look beyond superficial tropes. And that info is Bogus with a capital B. Not only you're not better off asking the spirits about anything than asking a random person on the street, you're probably actually worse off. Nowadays even someone who slept through school will give you more reliable answers than that. They'll have at least heard from SF movies, or the class's SF nerd, that the Earth is round or that animals need a mommy animal and a daddy animal to be born. Whereas the historical track record of those spirits is to be basically utterly and completely clueless. It's not the kind that I'd want to learn anything from. 4. It still doesn't answer the question of why people always find what their culture already knew, or had enough data to discover anyway. Or for that matter, why they always find the spirits they expect to find. Why don't we see the Norse coming back from Vinland with stuff like "dude, our witch went into trance to ask Freja, but this dude called Manitou was answering instead and telling us to qualify for the great happy hunting grounds instead of Valhalla. Weird crap."? Really, if there's such a great big spirit world, how come nobody EVER takes a wrong turn and talks to someone else's spirits? |
18th November 2011, 02:56 AM | #53 |
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Uh, duude... Unless you mean a brief clinical death -- which is known to produce hallucinations, and it's unsurprising too as consciousness is lost in a couple of seconds, but measurable brain activity continues for up to 40 seconds -- belief that one already died can be the Cotard Delusion, one of the relatively common delusions in schizophrena. Often accompanied by other classic schizophrenic delusions, e.g., being the one that has some special message from the gods/spirits/whatever and who must enlighten the others.
Now I'm not saying that you ARE schizophrenic, because frankly that's not diagnosed over the internet, and people are good at acting crazy even when they aren't. But anyway, if that sums up your beliefs, you might want to see a psychiatrist for your own good. Left untreated, it tends to get worse and end up in drooling in a corner eventually. |
20th November 2011, 08:18 PM | #54 |
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It's nice to be nice to the nice. Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now seem very impressive: it was, that some people can do sums. - Bertrand Russell |
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20th November 2011, 08:40 PM | #55 |
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"This one time" () at a Phish concert, people were throwing glow sticks around and this guy in front of my group who was facing away from us lifted his arm above his hand and caught a glow stick that my friend threw right at that second, and the guy didn't seem surprised at all - it was as if he had expected to catch this particular stick even though he had no way of seeing it coming. We all thought that was kind of neat.
Oh yeah I guess I've had psychedelic journeys and all that but you wouldn't understand them. If you've had similar experiences you know what I mean. |
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20th November 2011, 09:40 PM | #56 |
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I cannot bring myself to pursue altered states of consciousness and hallucination experiences as a recreational pastime.
All of your body's organs have ways of letting you know something's wrong with them. When your lungs are unhealthy they become inflamed, and you wheeze and cough. When your heart is having to work too had to pump blood through blocked passages, it starts to hurt. When your intestines are irritated, you have diarrhea. Many times a general body infection manifests in a special way on the outside of your skin. And when the brain is exposed to chemicals, stress, or oxygen levels it shouldn't be exposed to, you have hallucinations (amongst other things), which are pretty much its most direct and unavoidable channel of letting you know something is wrong. I could no more seek to induce such an effect than I would attempt to induce diarrhea or an asthma attack for fun. I understand others may feel differently; I understand some folks have a sexual attraction to pain for instance, and I suppose inducing hallucinations recreationally is something like that. |
21st November 2011, 10:31 AM | #57 |
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^This. Growing up, all I wanted to do was feel "normal." I was under so much stress that I suffered panic attacks when it seemed like I was going insane, weird dissociation where nothing seemed real, nightmares, emotional sensations of dread, and similar things, which are part of the brain's typical reaction to intense stress, though of course I didn't know that at the time. It didn't help that my father was actually insane (paranoid schizophrenic), so I didn't even have reliable guidance about life or a role model of what was normal from my parents.
When I became a teenager, the last thing I wanted was to take drugs to make me feel weird or different or make reality any more confusing, and I've been that way ever since. It took me years to get over most of it and be able to travel, socialize, and experience life like most people do. I see ordinary reality now as a precious gift, not something to escape from. |
21st November 2011, 10:50 AM | #58 |
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21st November 2011, 11:10 AM | #59 |
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21st November 2011, 11:16 AM | #60 |
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21st November 2011, 11:50 AM | #61 |
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21st November 2011, 11:51 AM | #62 |
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I find subjects like this very curious. I can honestly say I've gone my entire 42 years on Earth and never once had a feeling that seemed to reflect any kind of "altered reality". I have moods and emotions just like anybody else, of course. I feel happy or bored or whatever, obviously. I've been falling down drunk and felt dizzy and sick and depressed because of it.
But reality just is what it is, regardless. All this kind of talk just seems like so much nonsense to me. Maybe I'm just really boring. |
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21st November 2011, 03:46 PM | #63 |
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Agreed very much. In my life, I've used drugs for recreational or self-discovering purposes dozens of times. Never ever ever have used it to "escape from reality" or as an emotional pickup when I'm in a bad mood. (Nevermind that, if you're in a sour mood, the rules of set and setting suck all joy out the experience anyway, its a guaranteed way to have a bad trip)
With that said, please be aware that the stereotype of recreational drug users as druggie burn outs with no life and no future is untrue in the vast majority of cases. Like anyone who enjoys alcohol, a tremendous number of people have enjoyed psychoactives view them as a net positive influence on their life. Speaking from my own point of view, psychoactives supplement and enrich my personal experiences, they're not an escape from them. |
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22nd November 2011, 04:23 AM | #64 |
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What are you agreeing with? We seem to be complete opposites when it comes to opinions about using drugs ourselves.
Quote:
This has nothing to do with stereotypes of recreational drug users. I'm talking only about the experience/perception itself, and assuming that altering it causes no other physical, psychological or social harm. As Checkmite said, people have different opinions about what's enjoyable or enriching and I have no problem with that. It's when they imply that something is enjoyable or enriching by definition, where I have a problem, because each person's opinion is, in the end, subjective. I could list things I find enjoyable and enriching, and you might find them pointless or boring, just because we're different people. Where we do agree, I think, is that these experiences of altered reality (for lack of a better phrase) are very common, both when chemically induced and when they occur otherwise, such as lucid dreaming when half asleep. People who experience them aren't special; the experiences are mundane and predictable biological reactions, like taking an emetic and then throwing up, or staring at a bright light and then seeing a dark spot when you look away. The personal significance or value that people place on them is something else though, and varies widely depending on the person. |
22nd November 2011, 07:26 AM | #65 |
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There's lots of talking in here about the drugs we use to experience altered states.
They are merely a mechanism that allows us to open the door to an altered reality. They are altered because of the substances we have used, when I say we, I mean whomever. If you want clarity, try fasting and cleaning your body first, then see what happens and I mean clean, no drugs, alcohol, smokes of any kind. There will be nothing to fool your eyes perception. At that point you will know what it's all about. If you don't go in clean, your impressions will be blurred and skewed. Then there is the manifestation of spirituality that breaks into our reality on its own. Unless the experience that you are having; is prompted by something greater than self, like God or demons or angels. At which point it could still be blurry unless you are clean and awake. I think most people in here are smart enough to know the difference of hallucinations, sickness or other ways these experiences are induced and what caused them. They are the most interesting when they make the connection into our reality with unknown proof that happens on a multilevel truth of some sort or another. For instance when someone comes back from an NDE and states a future event they couldn’t possibly know of; or that it would happen. Something truly dramatic, with a confirming truth, that proves itself. Like: Uncle Bob is going to win the lotto at the end of the month, I had a dream that showed me, it will happen and then he does exactly that on February 28th. My Father had a dream like that before he died and it all came to pass about his death and after his death, so Limbo is right about much of what he is saying in some respects. You’re not going to have clarity unless you go in clean and clear headed. |
22nd November 2011, 07:40 AM | #66 |
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Sounds like a recipe for woo to me.
Thanks, but I'll pass. |
22nd November 2011, 07:56 AM | #67 |
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23rd November 2011, 07:44 AM | #68 |
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23rd November 2011, 05:09 PM | #69 |
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23rd November 2011, 05:10 PM | #70 |
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23rd November 2011, 06:22 PM | #71 |
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Would this require an actual partner?
It's easy to write off hallucinations as being "caused' by drugs or feelings of love to be triggered by a certain person, and maybe they are. On the other hand we fall readily each day into hours of hallucination, during which we may experience a huge range of very strong emotions. And we don't really know why. I'm no Puritan but ultimately drugs may be just a bridge. It may turn out your natural mind delivers an even better high. If you're experimenting, be careful. |
23rd November 2011, 06:24 PM | #72 |
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"Here we go again.... semantic and syntactic chicanery and sophistic sleight of tongue and pen.... the bedazzling magic of appearing to be saying something when in fact all that is happening is diverting attention from the attempts at shoving god through the trapdoor of illogic and wishful thinking." - Leumas |
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23rd November 2011, 06:29 PM | #73 |
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23rd November 2011, 06:38 PM | #74 |
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Originally Posted by Pup
Seeing things that aren't there, haven't we all been there before... |
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23rd November 2011, 06:41 PM | #75 |
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For that experience, no.
I have no way if its in any way related, but some people can achieve the same thing while sober. Its probably in now way similar to my experience, but still really awesome example of the kinds of interesting things meditation can do for you. |
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23rd November 2011, 06:58 PM | #76 |
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