spin

No, sorry, I have better ways of wasting time than wading through that swamp. Evidence. It's all about evidence. If you've got none you can't talk.


spin

lulay

why spin, old chap, with that kind of attitude you surely will win glittering prizes from academia!

Clivedurdle

What is evidence is one of the main issues in this discussion!

To summarise as I see it, there are two main world views, one analytic, rational, the other holistic. I think these are related to how our brains work, left and right, but they are also linked to male female, scientific religious and other two sided ways of seeing.

Xianity is an example of a formalised doctrine based religion with fluffy edges in pentecostalism, St Francis and various mystics.

Discussions about interelationships with paganism, the divine female and similar should not be rejected out of hand. They may feel psycho therapeutic and archetypal and similarly non scientific, but if you know anything about neuroses incorporeal non physical ideas like minds are definitely involved.

Maths is dependent on concepts like imaginary numbers! We really should not reject so called woolly concepts out of hand - there may be flaws with particular definitions of woolliness, but we must be very careful about this. We do seem to be able to work very well in non verbal ways - we need to explore that. The power of religion is that it does touch on these symbolic issues, and that should be accepted as real phenomena!

Clivedurdle

And these religious phenomena - feelings of communing with the Christ, forgiveness of sins, etc should be understood as part of our humanity, not using old goddit hypotheses.

lulay

with you, though you put the situation in your own unique way of course.
you see, one thing we know. science is presently very interested in consciousness. especially 'subjective' consciousness, which is is calling
the 'hard problem........
to understand about what we are discussing here, we been to be generalists. ie., aware of that--in science--and how that quest may relate to mythology, including the cultural mythology

not many i am assuming will admit we are living ina myth NOW....! this is not so unusual. usually paradigms people live in are kind of 'invisible', like th water a fish swims in--though i dont presume to know what a fish thinks. i am using it as a metaphor
take for example medieval theocracy--which was a paradigm. Noone in the midst of that questioned it. Even so-called herietics would rebel within its remit. Of course the emergence of scientific questioning caused ruptions, yet still many of the sceintists would still have been 'religious'...?

So we are in the scientific age. and science depends on facts...that from its 'method' comes solid facts. YET as surely anyone senstive can see, therer exist HUGE gaps in our understanding. for example, we are drilled into beliving in a matrialist-mechanical understanding of things. an objectification. subjectivity is VERY dis-trusted....dont know if you agree with that?

spin

If evidence is not important to you, well, fine, but it is the only think that helps you know what you think you know.


spin

lulay

again spin, i feel you ar missing me. of course i am not anti-evidence. i appreciate science, and the need for evidence. what i aM saying is that THAT has become THE myth...! so that to try and explore things ALSO intuitively/associatively/...is considered 'taboo'--as you say 'you cannot talk'...that means taboo

so, we have to explore how we can get around this impasse. to integrate factual and intuitive. this conundrum is at the heart of current scientific theory, being termed its 'hard problem'

spin

Nothing is intuitive when it comes to evidence. Youmay get to evidence intuitively, but then you have to apply the evidence using strict rationality. If you can't, then the intuition is probably wrong. Intuition is a short-circuiting of traditional thinking processes. Once you arrive you have to establish where you are in order to make sense of the intuition. I use intuition a lot, but it's usually a personal process. You don't intuit in public, because others won't understand, especially when you haven't understood yet, being only in the intuition phase. You get there. You check your intuition for its validity, then you know how to get there by traditional means and then you can go public.


spin

Vorkosigan

Here....maybe....

john_v_h

Because there is power in institutional religion, and many people crave power.