Non-praying Mantis

Were you also taught the correct answer?

Answer: the egg, by hundreds of millions of years

NPM

[ June 14, 2002: Message edited by: Non-praying Mantis ]</p>

jenn

Non-Praying,
No I wasn't taught that. My point that I was making was I was not taught to believe in anything.I was taught to figure it out for myself.So I did.

Icarus

Where did you go Typhoon? I have a question for you.

How acute has your survival instinct been throughout your life, as best as you can remember? That might, might have some bearing upon your lack of a 'spiritual sixth sense.'

I'm strapped for time, but would like to take a stab at your provocative question. Let me know. I'm off-line most of this weekend, but will get on this as soon as I can.

Occupied, yet intrigued,
Icarus

rainbow walking

Hi Typhon,
My two cents worth, (I seem to be getting more than my monies worth here lately). Like you, I see it as entirely psychological only, instead of attributing the chemical triggers in the brain to a special god complex, I think it satisfies a deeper need of belonging to a group and recieving confirmation of ones personal identity. I think our physiological development includes, as a primary function of our individuality, the development of a personal identity. I see this identity as having its basis and foundation in the group effect. I believe this evolved as part of our nature from a survival of the fittest scenario. A person who struggles for acceptance will find it easy to engage their personal identities in a group that deems everyone as fucked up from birth. From this perspective I would say that the religious experience is more akin to an identity crisis resolved and motivates folks to suspend critical thinking in favor of personal confirmation derived from the group. People who haven't had this experience are likely people who were fortunate enough to have found their identity in other ways, so they basically view religion as incomprehensible.

St. Robert

Samhain,

Is it illogical that someone (God) has no beginning and no end?

St. Robert

Rainbow walking,

The search for identity and purpose is key. Why do you identify yourself as rainbow walking?

rainbow walking

For the sake of originality. I personally view originality as a hallmark of free thought and free thought as a value added quality making my identity competetive in the world of identities and ideas. Why do you call yourself St. Robert?

Typhon

Hello Icarus,

Hmm. I'm not sure how to answer that one. I believe my survival instinct has been reasonably strong. It has certainly gotten me this far and over some rough territory.

I'm fairly cautious by nature. I take risks, but normally, calculated ones. I am unsure how to exactly rank my "survival instinct."

I'm curious to see how you correlate this with my lack of supernatural or spiritual experiences.

Cheers,

.T.

[ June 14, 2002: Message edited by: Typhon ]</p>

Typhon

More Of Gods And Need

Thank you all for the feedback on this topic.

After reading over the many posts, and further considering my own experiences on the topic, I'd like to pose a theory. Mind you, this is rather speculative, and I have little but my own experiences to use as test data.

I would not be surprised if the studies which show a link between naturally occurring, even perhaps, "hard-wired" mystical or spiritual brain chemistry are valid. Valid at least, in that certain thought processes or even physical and/or psychological methods, can create or trigger such unusual or altered states of actual brain chemistry and/or activity in humans.

Perhaps the reason why we identify this as a primarily spiritual experience, and here I'm talking about the neurological science aspect of the brain's actual response, not arguing for a link/cause in a true, hypothetical "spiritual" or metaphysical reality, is because gods and the supernatural is what we would have had, before we had any naturalistic explanations for these states.

Early man developed religion, including the concepts of gods and supernatural, I suspect because that was the best workable explanation at the time, given our limited tools and experience. In other words, perhaps the only reason we identify this as pertaining to a religious experience, is because traditionally, and up until recent times, this is all we could attribute it to.

This could be why I've never found slightly or moderately altered states to instill a feeling of spirituality or connection to a supernatural reality. As I don't believe in either sort of hypothetical meta-reality, I have no reason to interpret these brain signals as confirmation of just this sort.

I suspect it would be rare for extremely young children and infants to experience the kind of unique mental states that most commonly cause these phenomena, i.e. ritual techniques, meditation, psychotropic drugs, mass induced frenzies, deliberate fasting, etc.. It might be that by the time a member of a society would typically experience such an event, they would have already been exposed and taught the prevailing culture's world view, including in the case of early societies, as well as our own, religion, spirituality, and belief in the supernatural.

In other words, if a subject had no pre-existing belief in gods or any ingrained cultural reason to suspect a spiritual or supernatural link to this experience, none might be expected, as in my own case. Now, I've been exposed, but in my case, the exposure didn't take, or was consciously rejected. Thus when I experienced these mental states, I didn't find anything particularly supernatural about them.

I personally think our brain chemistry would have developed first, and then our belief in gods. Of course, one might wonder IF this very brain chemistry, had any link in our creating a belief in the supernatural in the first place…

Thoughts?

.T.

Samhain

As an entity? Perhaps so and perhaps not. I wouldn't say that it it is logically impossible for something to have no beginning, bu as far as human logic it is unfathomable by the human mind, and therefore such a quality means nothing, so there's no point in discussion of the quality of "timelessness" as we only have a vague and undefined concept of what the word itself even means, let alone are we able to truly define it in its entirety and apply it to a being.