AliEnvy
Refugee
So we have the power to create our spiritual experiences?
I believe it was Jesus who said the Kingdom of God is within you. I imagine most other religions have a similar theme.
So we have the power to create our spiritual experiences?
I'm sure it says it somewhere in the bible that there's some other set of rules for a child who dies in Africa before they can ever even know about Jesus.
Or they'll just guess
I think it threatens because it would probably mean a lot of people in high places with religion would lose a lot of their controls and power that they currently posses.
It would be very damaging to sit there and constantly tell people "This is the way, the only way" only to be proven completely wrong. Who would listen to them going forward?
Would it really make a difference, as if there was facts towards some divine being, wouldn't it just make life a lot easier to know?
It seems like you're saying the brain is pure, while the mind is a mess. It is the brain's job to clean out the mind of its negativity, anxiety and so forth, yes?
Probably we are getting into what is the mind and all, but I really doubt the brain and mind are the same. If the mind is where one person could think up negative thoughts, and the unconscious brain then brings up something more rational, then the two are not the same.
This is what I believe - the mind may be our creation, while something else is more real. The soul? The unconscious brain? Who knows?
Just after creation Sin entered the world, yep the word that most people try to hide from or delete from dictionaries and common language. its what seperates us from God and caused the downfall of mankind, sadness, pain, suffering, you name that is why it happens. All due to Sin.
Since her brain injury 18 months ago, my mother no longer seems to have anything resembling a spiritual life, apprehensions of the existence of God, independent desires to pray, or what have you. I doubt her case would be considered particularly useful or illuminating from a 'neurotheology' standpoint, because she's clearly profoundly lacking in higher cognitive functions, period--she does observe, ponder and comment on her surroundings, but it's largely confabulatory nonsense; she can still read aloud any passage you show her in any of the 6 languages she knows with easy, perfect acuity, but evinces little to no comprehension or feeling for what she's just read; she shows considerable personality change--she's among the 'fortunate' minority of TBI patients who actually become more cheerful, smiley and friendly--but there's no apparent explanation beyond the injury for this; etc. But it's of interest to me as perhaps the most prominent indication that she no longer has what we might call an 'inner life.'
Why did Charles Darwin change from being a follower of God to his greatest human enemy? Well tragically his daughter died and he blamed God... and so all he wanted was revenge on God.. and so he did.
Dawkins? well he's disabled and has many physical problems and obviously wants revenge on God also. He's gone crazy lately with all his theries, evolutionists are even disowning him now he's gone so far down the athiest path, all he wants to do is defy God.
God works in mysterious ways....
Since her brain injury 18 months ago, my mother no longer seems to have anything resembling a spiritual life, apprehensions of the existence of God, independent desires to pray, or what have you.
No need to apologize. It puts a human perspective on what can otherwise be a very sterile argument. Its kind of you to share with usI didn't mean to inject a morose tone into the thread; it just spontaneously occurred to me while reading it that perhaps to a point she's an illustration of these often-mysterious connections between brain and mind, mind and spirituality, etc.
It is high time to no longer ScapeGoat man for what God has done
It may be a bit off-course, but what I was immediately reminded of when I read his explanation of the results was the (admittedly somewhat dated) theory of "mindblindness" with regard to autism--that one of that condition's signature features is difficulty formulating a "theory of mind," the attribution of mental states just like one's own (emotions, beliefs, desires, intentions etc.) to others, whose behavior can thus be responded to appropriately and even predicted....In this experiment, published [in 2006] in Developmental Psychology, we invited a group of three- to nine-year-old children into our lab and told them they were about to play a fun guessing game. It was a simple game in which each child was tested individually. The child was asked to go to the corner of the room and to cover his or her eyes before coming back and guessing which of two large boxes contained a hidden ball...A short time was allowed for the decision to be made but, importantly, during that time the children were allowed to change their mind at any time by moving their hand to the other box.
...In reality, the game was a little more complicated than this. There were secretly two balls, one in each box, and we had decided in advance whether the children were going to get it "right" or "wrong" on each of the four guessing trials...Children who had been randomly assigned to the control condition were told that they had been successful on a random two of the four trials. Children assigned to the experimental condition received some additional information before starting the game. These children were told that there was a friendly magic princess in the room, "Princess Alice," who had made herself invisible. We showed them a picture of Princess Alice hanging against the door inside the room (one that looked remarkably like Barbie), and we gave them the following information: "Princess Alice really likes you, and she’s going to help you play this game. She’s going to tell you, somehow, when you pick the wrong box."
...For every child in the study, whether assigned to the standard control condition ("No Princess Alice") or to the experimental condition ("Princess Alice"), we engineered the room such that a spontaneous and unexpected event would occur just as the child placed a hand on one of the boxes. For example, in one case, the picture of Princess Alice came crashing to the floor as soon as the child made a decision, and in another case a table lamp flickered on and off...The predictions were clear: if the children in the experimental condition interpreted the picture falling and the light flashing as a sign from Princess Alice that they had chosen the wrong box, they would move their hand to the other box.
What we found was rather surprising, even to us. Only the oldest children, the seven- to nine-year-olds, from the experimental (Princess Alice) condition, moved their hands to the other box in response to the unexpected events. By contrast, their same-aged peers from the control condition failed to move their hands. This finding told us that the explicit concept of a specific supernatural agent—likely acquired from and reinforced by cultural sources—is needed for people to see communicative messages in natural events. In other words, children, at least, don’t automatically infer meaning in natural events without first being primed somehow with the idea of an identifiable supernatural agent such as Princess Alice (or God, one’s dead mother, angels, etc.).
More curious, though, was the fact that the slightly younger children in the study, even those who had been told about Princess Alice, apparently failed to see any communicative message in the light-flashing or picture-falling events. These children kept their hands just where they were. When we asked them later why these things happened, these five- and six-year-olds said that Princess Alice had caused them, but they saw her as simply an eccentric, invisible woman running around the room knocking pictures off the wall and causing the lights to flicker. To them, Princess Alice was like a mischievous poltergeist with attention deficit disorder: she did things because she wanted to, and that’s that. One of these children answered that Princess Alice had knocked the picture off the wall because she thought it looked better on the ground. In other words, they completely failed to see her "behavior" as having any meaningful connection with the decision they had just made on the guessing game; they saw no "signs" there.
The youngest children in the study, the three- and four-year-olds in both conditions, only shrugged their shoulders or gave physical explanations for the events, such as the picture not being sticky enough to stay on the wall or the light being broken. Ironically, these youngest children were actually the most scientific of the bunch, perhaps because they interpreted "invisible" to mean simply "not present in the room" rather than "transparent." Contrary to the common assumption that superstitious beliefs represent a childish mode of sloppy and undeveloped thinking, therefore, the ability to be superstitious actually demands some mental sophistication. At the very least, it’s an acquired cognitive skill.
Still, the real puzzle to our findings was to be found in the reactions of the five- and six-year-olds from the Princess Alice condition. Clearly they possessed the same understanding of invisibility as did the older children, because they also believed Princess Alice caused these spooky things to happen in the lab. Yet although we reminded these children repeatedly that Princess Alice would tell them, somehow, if they chose the wrong box, they failed to put two and two together. So what is the critical change between the ages of about six and seven that allows older children to perceive natural events as being communicative messages about their own behaviors (in this case, their choice of box) rather than simply the capricious, arbitrary actions of some invisible or otherwise supernatural entity?
The answer probably lies in the maturation of children’s theory-of-mind abilities in this critical period of brain development. Research by University of Salzburg psychologist Josef Perner, for instance, has revealed that it’s not until about the age of seven that children are first able to reason about "multiple orders" of mental states. This is the type of everyday, grown-up social cognition whereby theory of mind becomes effortlessly layered in complex, soap opera–style interactions with other people. Not only do we reason about what’s going on inside someone else’s head, but we also reason about what other people are reasoning is happening inside still other people’s heads! For example, in the everyday (nonsupernatural) social domain, one would need this kind of mature theory of mind to reason in the following manner:
"Jakob thinks that Adrienne doesn’t know I stole the jewels."
Whereas a basic ("first-order") theory of mind allows even a young preschooler to understand the first propositional clause in this statement, "Jakob thinks that...," it takes a somewhat more mature ("second-order") theory of mind to fully comprehend the entire social scenario: "Jakob thinks that [Adrienne doesn’t know]..." Most people can’t go much beyond four orders of mental-state reasoning (consider the Machiavellian complexities of, say, Leo Tolstoy’s novels), but studies show that the absolute maximum in adults hovers around seven orders of mental state. The important thing to note is that, owing to their still-developing theory-of-mind skills, children younger than seven years of age have great difficulty reasoning about multiple orders of mental states. Knowing this then helps us understand the surprising results from the Princess Alice experiment. To pass the test (move their hand) in response to the picture falling or the light flashing, the children essentially had to be reasoning in the following manner:
"Princess Alice knows that [I don’t know] where the ball is hidden."
To interpret the events as communicative messages, as being about their choice on the guessing game, demands a sort of third-person perspective of the self’s actions: "What must this other entity, who is watching my behavior, think is happening inside my head?" The Princess Alice findings are important because they tell us that, before the age of seven, children’s minds aren’t quite cognitively ripe enough to allow them to be superstitious thinkers. The inner lives of slightly older children, by contrast, are drenched in symbolic meaning.
...This sign-reading tendency has a distinct and clear relationship with morality. When it comes to unexpected heartache and tragedy, our appetite for unraveling the meaning of these ambiguous "messages" can become ravenous. Misfortunes appear cryptic, symbolic; they seem clearly to be about our behaviors. Our minds restlessly gather up bits of the past as if they were important clues to what just happened. And no stone goes unturned. Nothing is too mundane or trivial; anything to settle our peripatetic thoughts from arriving at the unthinkable truth that there is no answer because there is no riddle, that life is life and that is that.
To interpret the events as communicative messages, as being about their choice on the guessing game, demands a sort of third-person perspective of the self’s actions: "What must this other entity, who is watching my behavior, think is happening inside my head?" The Princess Alice findings are important because they tell us that, before the age of seven, children’s minds aren’t quite cognitively ripe enough to allow them to be superstitious thinkers. The inner lives of slightly older children, by contrast, are drenched in symbolic meaning.
...This sign-reading tendency has a distinct and clear relationship with morality. When it comes to unexpected heartache and tragedy, our appetite for unraveling the meaning of these ambiguous "messages" can become ravenous. Misfortunes appear cryptic, symbolic; they seem clearly to be about our behaviors. Our minds restlessly gather up bits of the past as if they were important clues to what just happened. And no stone goes unturned. Nothing is too mundane or trivial; anything to settle our peripatetic thoughts from arriving at the unthinkable truth that there is no answer because there is no riddle, that life is life and that is that.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Princess Alice wouldn't work for most of the adults I know. Not sure about a few of them, though. How sophisticated an experiment would you need? I'm guessing not as sophisticated as we'd think. But I would be interested to see the layering. It's an intesting concept, though. How sophisticated do our thought processes have to be to deceive ourselves?