Posts by Seraphim23

25

What have the 'myriads of angels' ever done for humanity?

by yadda yadda 2 in

think about it, myriads upon myriads of do-nothing, never lift a finger angels floating around, ignoring all the untold pain and suffering on this planet for thousands of years.

what have all these millions of angels ever done for anyone?

occasional random materialisations in ancient israelite times?.

Political correctness. What is it to you?

by Hortenzie in

i see it as a form of discrimination against non mainstream ideas and opinions.

that's why i don't understand why so many hold it as of a great value.

what do you think?.

In my experience in the UK, political correctness is only ever mentioned by people who either don’t want to think or care about others either intellectually or emotionally. It also tends to be a word used by the older generation, who for example might think that “in my day women didn’t mind being touched up” for example. People who won’t move with the times! It also gets trotted out often in connection with the denial and rejection of manmade climate change and gay marriage, which brings be back to my first points.

51

this site sucks

by Hortensia in

jw
friends

you all spend all your time bickering about religion and doctrine and god and evolution and atheists, not to mention all the discussion about athiests too.

you are totally ignoring an important subject.

we haven't had one fucking decent discussion of dr. who in at least a year!!!.

Seraphim23

Witness My Fury, try battlestar galactica, the remake version. It has a nice lot of swearing and sex in it.

25

What have the 'myriads of angels' ever done for humanity?

by yadda yadda 2 in

think about it, myriads upon myriads of do-nothing, never lift a finger angels floating around, ignoring all the untold pain and suffering on this planet for thousands of years.

what have all these millions of angels ever done for anyone?

occasional random materialisations in ancient israelite times?.

Seraphim23

I don’t know about myriads of angels as such, but mystery messengers may be something worth thinking about at least for some. After all the word angel only means messenger. When one hears of the proverbial story of a mother waking up in the middle of the night after dreaming some prescient dream of her son who is distant from her dying, or injured in some specific way and turns out to be so, it raises certain questions that cannot always be dismissed easily as brain chemistry and coincidence, using the word coincidence that is in its conventional way as something that simply coincides that seems significant but explicable in terms of processes that are understood.

Many people report such inexplicable contact or messages, often when a loved family member dies, sometimes without knowing they were ill. Other times in can be in times of danger. To be fair it is not known if so called angels are responsible from the biblical identification such entities are supposed to have. Certainly the meaning of angels being messengers seems to be at odds with the need for myriads of the things if a message is the purpose of such entities. One would seem to be sufficient particularly as time and space don’t seem to be barriers when such phenomena are looked at closely.

In many ways this topic mirrors the debate over the existence of God, which gets rejected on the basis of a rather specific literal interpretation of the bible, even though it is possible to talk about the existence of God without any reference to the bible or any holy book on the basis of other reasons that merit at the very least considered debate.

It is quite possible that such spiritual phenomena has been going on with humanity well before writing was ever invented, in which case the bible only reflects a human interpretation of such things that have been going on since timely memorial. Only those who have experienced such things with sufficient force as to be convinced by them that something radical is going will want comment in the same spirit as I have done, but most here will dismiss the reality of such things which is an end to the debate. For those to whom it isn’t, you’re not alone.

54

Religion vs. Spirituality

by Oubliette in

religion is for people who are scared to go to hell.

spirituality is for people who have already been there.

- bonnie raitt .

Seraphim23

I think that any talk of spirituality is meaningless unless we define the specific elements of the word we are talking about for the purposes of a conversation. Otherwise people will be talking past one another, as the word spirituality is an umbrella word for quite a few different things. To say that both the religious and the non-religious are spiritual doesn’t really tell us anything. To say that both atheists and theists are spiritual might cause some unaware people to think that both groups have something in common with one another, but what exactly is the thing in common? Can it unite both groups? Not likely, so what is really going on with this whole issue then?

Spirituality means many things, both primary meanings and secondary meanings and perhaps more. Take for example the feeling of a connection with something greater than oneself. This is a good primary meaning, although not the only one that the word spiritualty contains. As far as it goes, both atheists and theists can relate to this meaning if one doesn’t get bogged down with the philosophical meaning of `greater` too much. For an atheist, the connection is with the universe and each other through the common connection, caused by the laws of physics. If one feels daring, one might even sprinkle in the idea of mystery and the wonder at the existence of questions themselves, particularly those that have not yet been answered or those that have from the point of view that comprehension is more than just a fluke.

For a theist it is similar because the idea of connection is also central. The linking pin is not the physical universe but a person with the title of God. The universe can be acknowledged as linking physical things together in various ways but the wonder comes from idea that a person caused this connection primarily. Physics and so on is secondary to the primacy of personhood.

It is fascinating because both atheist and theist have personhood and the connection with personhoods as part of the spiritual definition, if talking about this primary definition of the word spirituality. There are other primary meanings which are why agreeing on one is a good start in talking about it. With theists personhood is made the central idea from which all things come. With the atheist deployment of `personhood` and its attendant `connections`, it is relegated to being secondary to all things.

More can be said about all this because there are yet secondary meanings to grapple with and other primary meanings of the word spirituality.

Personally I am of the view that the fundamental difference between atheist and theist spiritualty really revolves around the old philosophical distinction of mind and body. Are all things that exist really part of one primary thing or more than one? Are all things fundamentally only energy or do they devolve into energy and consciousness or personhood as distinct fundamentals of reality?

Whatever the truth is about all this, it reveals the real difference between atheist and theist spiritualty in my view, and still more meanings are contained in this one word we call spiritualty.

82

Have you ever had a hallucination? What was it like?

by Nathan Natas in

i have almost never had a visual hallucination and i was wondering what they're like.

how "real" do they seem?

is there any kind of a hint you get that tells you they are not real?

Seraphim23

Years ago my cat went missing. Her name was midnight and I was very worried because she had been gone for about 4 days at this point when I had the dream. On a Wednesday/Thursday night I dreamed that she came back on a Sunday afternoon. Her left back leg had a big gash down it. It was not a nice dream to have. Anyway in real life on the Sunday and in the afternoon she did come back. She didn’t have a gash down her leg but her left back leg was broken. I took her to the vet and they operated. What struck me what that after the operation she then did have a nasty big gash down her leg like the dream, where the vet had operated. She died though of an infection to the wound.

65

Life after death OR Consciousness after death?

by Space Madness in

are we conscious after death?

if we don't understand why and how consciousness exsist now, how do we know it doesn't continue after death?

can consciousness survive the death of the body?

Seraphim23

1 Not read through everything she has written but I have an understanding of her position. I could ask you if you have read thoroughly through the work of any number of a select panel of experts who have high qualifications as she does, but who have the opposite view as her but I won’t play that game. If you have a point to make make it, after all you did say it was a discussion forum.

2 Your pink unicorn point is not really a point. After all the absence of a test doesn’t preclude a reality outside the domain of testing by itself, or the reality of such things to those who say they saw or experienced it or the possibility that in some cases such anecdotal reports correspond to something true, yet outside science.

3 I didn’t really have the enlightenment in mind, or the falsie Whig history version of the enlightenment that pits science as triumphant over the forces of ignorant spirituality. The actual history is far more complex than that if you ask historians that it.

I do wonder how you manage 9181 posts in 3 years.

65

Life after death OR Consciousness after death?

by Space Madness in

are we conscious after death?

if we don't understand why and how consciousness exsist now, how do we know it doesn't continue after death?

can consciousness survive the death of the body?

Seraphim23

I have an issue with Susan Blackmore in that certain aspects of NDEs and actual death experiences is evidence that gets edited out of consideration, or that evidence that doesn’t meet testable criteria is dismissed. One of the evidential aspects of this whole topic is the occurrences of phenomena of relatives to someone who has just died. The appearance of a light, or the feeling that someone close has just died at the exact time of death. Also with NDEs the reporting of conversations and details non local to the patient who was out of it and so on. These aspects challenge the scientific world view because it cannot be tested for or controlled for in experiments. So it is either put down to coincidence or anecdote. It is hard for anecdotal evidence to be taken seriously if one believes that science can in theory describe all that exists if such anecdotes cannot be tested because they deal in non-physical phenomenon. If ones world view doesn’t permit the existence of non-physical phenomena, no amount of anecdotal evidence will be allowed into the debate even if many people say they have the experiences.

It’s a problem I recognise even though I myself have experienced such things. I also recognise that because religions often claim things that are untrue, and many people believe these things, it makes it even harder for anecdotal evidence that challenges the paradigm of materialistic science to make any headway with those whose world view doesn’t allow for the existence of nonphysical phenomena.

How do claims that are not testable from a material point of view make headway? The issue to me is the idea that anything that exists has to be physical or material. I think it is a false view, but because we live in a material world, those like me are at a disadvantage in being able to prove it. It’s conceivable that other realms exist that are the opposite way round as with a realm of mentality but there would be no way to prove it of course. Some even think that experience itself is an illusion of the brain, and one who thinks this cannot be persuaded otherwise despite themselves.

Clash of the world views is what I call it, because the world view one has informs how one interprets evidence and even what is allowed to be called evidence. I think that some anecdotal evidence is of better quality than other forms of anecdotal evidence and this must be considered but it will always probably be anecdotal to some unless such things happen to those who think all it really is are mistaken stories. The fact that different world views exist should give some pause because paradigms tend to shift no matter what they are, or deemed to be.

65

Life after death OR Consciousness after death?

by Space Madness in

are we conscious after death?

if we don't understand why and how consciousness exsist now, how do we know it doesn't continue after death?

can consciousness survive the death of the body?

Seraphim23

A good researcher I’m rather taken with is Peter Fenwick. Reading his book at the moment called the art if dying. His TED talk is very good also.

65

Life after death OR Consciousness after death?

by Space Madness in

are we conscious after death?

if we don't understand why and how consciousness exsist now, how do we know it doesn't continue after death?

can consciousness survive the death of the body?

Seraphim23

Terry your definitions for life could be picked apart very easily. For instance there is some debate over the question of if a virus is a living thing or not and they do not have cells. Also consciousness is not included in these definitions for life, which is probably because the majority of what is generally defined as life does not have it as far as we know in any practical sense. So such definitions excepted currently could be changed to include viruses or even consciousness. Of course in doing so some of what is now defined as life would be edited out of the definition to accommodate these others elements of life. As it is the current definitions also seem to edit out certain things thought to be quintessentially limited to life. If for now consciousness is not part of life’s definition, it rather superficially allows for consciousness to not be part of the debate of what biological life is anyway. So one can say that consciousness is irrelevant to life, or does not have to be alive in a physical sense in order to have experiences.

Also reproduction is another problem if life is defined by the ability to reproduce, not just because some people cannot reproduce but because life itself was presumably from non-life at some point. A non-living parent reproduced without being alive one might say, or that on a general level all life’s parent was never alive, and so according to the definition of life all life is not alive because it didn’t come from reproduction as non-living things cannot reproduce.

The problem with definition is that it is not supposed to be an absolute but a tool. As more is discovered, the more the definitions of things change accordingly. One is never going to get 100 percent precise definitions which leaves open the door to other things.