i'm to angry right now to write a complete synopsis on the following article from the watchtower.
it regarding child molestation and repressed memories.
i'll put in one quote, and leave this rest for you to read at your leasure.. ps, probably worth copying this because i would be surprised if they will leave it up much longer!.
if someone has faith in a fantasy god, they have the legal right in the USof A and many other countries to be abused under their religious beliefs until they realize for themselves that their god does not exist and its time to call real authories and have their abusers locked up.
trying to force them to accept that their god is only a mirage will likely not help.
do you think people can stick around, like ghosts?
i think they can, and i think you can communicate with them.
i told my mom to haunt my house when she dies.
Well, firstly, dreams are entirely part of the dreamer. Unlike the objective reality of the waking world
this is an assumption and part of the problem, you are assuming we have knowledge of the true nature of reality when that is not established by anything more than our own experience, which of course may be hallucination, self invented, or dream or matrix like shared virtual reality.
, our dream lives take place entirely inside our minds. Dreams are created by the mind - the brain - of the dreamer and exist only there.
perceptions exist entirely inside the mind as well, they are just a different form of dreaming, one which is assumed to be linked to something external rather than internal...but that cannot be demonstrated except by assumptions based on, you guessed it, more perceptions alone... unless you have found a way to know something aside from perceptions that I have never heard about... please share.
Secondly, I'm not sure how you can claim consciousness is unaffected by brain damage. Someone in a coma is not conscious. You can claim that the consciousness continues to exist somehow, but if it does, it is in a discontinuous way and leaves no trace on the actual human being who wakes up. Whatever that may be, it is clearly very different from what we normally think of as consciousness, and as there is no evidence that such a phenomenon exists nor any known way by which it could exist, I take the default position of assuming it does not.
you get hit in the head and get amnesia and have no recollection whatso ever of many years of living.... you were not conscious during that time because you cant remember now? sleepstates are not unconscious states, but since much of it is not transferred to recallable memory for whatever reason, it seems like it never happened, yet by many sleep studies it has been demonstrated that in shared reality space, sleeping people do infact dream as many as 5 seperate times each night usually with a 90 minute gap of random incoherent thinking inbetween which can be recalled qith great great detail if the subject is woken before it all exists short term memory buffers... coma patients often report being fully conscious and unable to respond, and even if they recall nothing later, there is no evidence that they were any different from our sleeping subjects..simply without recall ability later. as to evidence there are plenty of sleep studies done all the time.
of of the more famous researchers in this field is Stephen La Barge
imagine in your mind any "evil" person: rapist, murderer, theif, addict, terrorist...etc.
now, if you were born with that exact dna, had that same brain chemistry and went through the same enviornmental stimuli and life experiences as they did, you would do the exact same "evil" things.
we only think we are "free.
why it does not make a difference on our level
freewill or no, you must caluclate some response in some manner to your current circumstance, and no one cares if you had any real freedom in doing so, you will be held accountable by some for whatever you do... you will be rewarded or punished by them no matter how your choice was actually made.
on the god level, it makes a difference
if there is no real freewill, then any all knowing god punishing people for what he knows they cannot do is insane
and if there is freewill, then any god who stands idly by and allows people to harm each other is criminal, as there is no defense
for not stopping an illegal act foreknown by some party [see criminal neglect]
imagine in your mind any "evil" person: rapist, murderer, theif, addict, terrorist...etc.
now, if you were born with that exact dna, had that same brain chemistry and went through the same enviornmental stimuli and life experiences as they did, you would do the exact same "evil" things.
we only think we are "free.
if my actions have causes, am I free? if no causes, do I will them? is there another option?
I believe freewill is an illusion to a degree.... namely we feel like we are initiating the act and no one else is pulling our strings, so there is no one else to blame and we must accept the consequences of our actions.... so I can say that I did x, y, and z and you can jail me or pay me for it.... and that is as free as any act need be, right?
however in the grand scheme of things, I had no control over being human [that I recall], no control over my parentage, heredity, DNA structure, neighborhood, childhood associates, school, religion [until I turned of an age where my parents gave me some say = 12]
many of the beliefs that my mind became programmed to accept as truths have been overturned by experience, feedback and new information, none of which seems free but all connected by events that I had to live through.... and conclusions and beliefs my mind has come up with on its own are not my choice either, as Logan said, they sort of just pop into my head when they feel like it.... try as I might I cannot force my mind to invent the next great invention...etc.
from another angle.... the present moment seems to be the last event in an eternally long chain of parallel events which has brought each and everyone of us to a specific 3 dimensional location. and so far no one has demonstrated any ability to change any event in that long chain.
the last link of that chain according to quantum physics was about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ago and there was no possible way I could chose anything in that time till now... when I make a choice it takes about 0.3 seconds for me to become consciously aware of it [THE USER ILLUSION] which means that my decision making process takes a huge number of clicks of the quantum clock with my brain chugging along at the speed of chemical reactions using trillions of neurons in parallel to decide which way to go.... I find no place for freewill in this mechanism.... no room for the ghost in the machine to do anything but notice what is happening and perhaps give its input which must be from some other processing which would naturally take time as well.... no free lunch, no freewill
the anthropic principle .
by dr. norman geisler .
the anthropic principle (greek: anthropos, "human being") states that the universe was fitted from the very first moment of its existence for the emergence of life in general and human life in particular.
here is a fly in the ointment
granted all things seem VERY finely tuned for human life....
but for how long?
in about say 5 billion years, our sun will nova and about 10 billion after that just about every sun within walking distance will likewise crap out on us....
leaving us where?
heat death is expected to take several quatillion years, which is a long time for no life before the next burt of creation....
the universe only looks fined tuned to us for now but it has not always seemed that way nor does it look like it will stay that way for long
so if the intent was eternal human life, something is obviously messed up.
do you think people can stick around, like ghosts?
i think they can, and i think you can communicate with them.
i told my mom to haunt my house when she dies.
While consciousness isn't fully understood, it appears in every measurable way to be a function of the brain. Physical or chemical changes to the brain alter consciousness in ways that are well-understood (and indeed, some that aren't). It is not at all clear to me how consciousness could continue to exist when the brain that caused it does not. To me, it's like saying that when you write off your car, that as well as some of the metal being recycled to repair other cars or to make washing machines, that there is a sort of intrinsic "car-ness" that lives on, independent of any matter or substance driving around in a car spirit world without an internal combustion engine. When talking about machines, the idea seems patently absurd. I consider it no less so when applied to life forms.
you are assuming things which are not validated. 1st off, the world you know is not reality but a dream world you mind invented to interpret reality.... it does not have to be an exact match and there is some slight experiencial evidence many have had to indicate that the shared world we are currently calling real is no such thing, but closer to the matrix, a shared invented dream world without substance outside itself. that you cause changes to people by monkeying with their vehicle used in playing this shared game is no suprize, but is not proof that the vehicle generates and sustains the driver of said vehicle....no more than damaging a car and making it run eradically and drive funny means that any damage to the driver exists... consciousness is a question mark no doubt about it...but all damage done to a brain does not seem to effect consciousness one bit, but it does effect memory, perception, thinking, or in other words the items one is conscious of.... while this is not easy to see, they are fundamentally as different as the dreamer is from anything he dreams.
uncharacteristically, i am not going to give my definition of evil at the outset.. i want your opinions and discussion of exactly what you think it is.. after a number of posts i'll weigh in.. 1.is evil an actual "thing" or a state of mind?.
2.is evil a part of the universe or only a consequence of something having to do with mankind?.
3.what causes evil?
good and evil are not simply opposites of each other, they are both evaluations by comparison to some ideal.
what harms the ideal is evil, what supports the ideal is good.
often overlooked is the fact that an ideal is a mental invention which stands against reality as a rejection of the true course of things and a belief that reality should be other than it is.
reality is perfect until you compare it to something its not.
the absurdity of sin arises from the fact that an all knowing god is condemning people for being the exact reality he eternally knew by comparison to a fantasy ideal he likewise always knew to be a lie. insanity-- doing the same thing expecting different result?
how can a sane omniscient god ever be angry for people doing EXACTLY what he always knew they would?
which brings up another distinction.... we can divide reality into many judgements besides good and evil based on norms, averages
why didn't god make the bible more clear?
there wouldn't be thousands of different religions around the world, and people killing one another in the name of god.
why didn't god make the bible clearer, and easy even for even the dummest person to understand?
every book the WTBS makes basically tells people that they truly believe that God was incompetant and needs their help
why didn't god make the bible more clear?
there wouldn't be thousands of different religions around the world, and people killing one another in the name of god.
why didn't god make the bible clearer, and easy even for even the dummest person to understand?
words are triggers for experiences and instructions on how to order them... if you do not share the experiences
of the author your mental imagery will do the best it can based soley on what you imagine he might mean.
the bible suggests that this is overcome by some magic called the holy spirit that will compensate for the lack of
shared experiences, though I have never found any religion which could demonstrate such existed.
JWs do parrot the same basic answer to the same basic questions, however when you ask them to clarify what they believe that answers means you get as many different opinions as you find with all other pretenders to the knowledge of the truth.
As one of my favorite authors says the bible is a mirror of your souls. No monkey looking in will find a god staring back.[Robert A Wilson]
do you think people can stick around, like ghosts?
i think they can, and i think you can communicate with them.
i told my mom to haunt my house when she dies.
FACT-- the only body I know anything about exists in my own mind... just a symbol. I have no evidence whatso ever that the physical world is more than a dream. I know I can have dreams within dreams, but I dont have any evidence whatso ever that matter and eenrgy no matter how they are arranged can ever be conscious...
I have never experienced a moment when I did not exist, and cannot do so... as I must exist to expeirence anything at all.
if my past life regression experiences are at all accurate, what happens is sort of like the matrix, you wake up into a different level of dreaming where this world is seen as a shared dream and the new level is another shared dream with people not currently playing in this game.
looking at it the otherway if I did not exist and came from nothing, and I returrn to nothing what is to prevent this nothing from spitting me up again at some other point in time? which makes this very odd active nothing very mysterious, no?
from all that I can gather, there is an eternal ultimate reality which is dreaming on many levels and I am one of the parts of this reality dreaming my own living story.
