Creationism is still materialism isn’t it? The potter makes pots of clay (lifeless stuff with life breathed into it). The only difference between the Ceramic Model and the Fully Automatic Model is the creator: one is God and the other is the automatic process.
But what if the creator and creature are the same thing? No lifeless junk needing life breathed into it because the life is already there.
Do you know of anything that is superior to your mind? and
Do you honestly believe that any power or force which is inferior to your mind could have produced you?
Pernicious beliefs are like finding used band-aids in my soup. I never forget the moment I find them.
Or perhaps to avoid one. 
Ah, OK. It’s also a heuristic no one follows.
Yes, but how do you remember the brand of band-aid? I can never remember the quadratic formula; only how to derive it. I can retain processes, concepts, but I have trouble with abstracts. I guess that makes me a perspicacious dimwit 
Hmm… I haven’t thought about that angle. Can an object be a subject to itself? My supposition is that objectivity can never be realized because the moment there is an observer (subjective interpretation), it’s no longer objectivity.
This hearkens back to a conversation concerning the valuing of money. One position is that all the valuers constitute one entity and that makes it objective valuation. My perspective is each valuer is an entity of many, making it a collection of subjective valuations whereas objective valuation would be a value set by the government. The reasoning for that is the government dictation doesn’t require a subjective observer for it to be so: even if there were no trade occurring in the universe, the value would still be set in stone and therefore objective. My position is that objectivity doesn’t require and, in fact, cannot have an observer (subjective interpretation). Of course, we could still observe the government’s dictation of the value of money, but not through our own subjective lens of valuation (we can have no influence). The other point is that it’s still somewhat true of collective valuation: that the value is set by a higher entity which makes it objective. It’s a tough problem to sort out.
They say they do 
Superior in what way? My view is it’s impossible to have an advantage without also a disadvantage therefore there is no such thing as overall superiority. For instance your mind may be superior to my mind in certain ways and vice versa, but neither of us can be overall superior to the other.
Well, I was once a baby and now I’m not, so was I inferior then? If so, how did I get from baby to adult (inferior to superior)? How does a forest of trees come from one acorn?
Serendipper wrote:
Indeed.
Look at the stars in the sky, the entire universe with its galaxies, are they nothing short of spectacular, yet they don’t have a mind, they cannot think or reason or plan as you do. Perhaps you believe “this all just happened”? No master mind thought out and planned that complicated universe, brought it into being, you said yourself neither of us can be overall superior to the other. Wherever laws exist, there must of necessity be a lawmaker. The mind can invent and gather knowledge, sends signals to the moon, have the ability to annihilate all life from earth, but, there remains one thing no man ever has been or ever will be able to do. He cannot build or create anything that is more intelligent than himself.
I’m not sure.
No, life can’t come from nonlife.
I have a hard time believing that too.
But there are no laws. There are just regular happenings.
What do you mean by “build or create”? What do you mean by intelligent? Computers can compare 3 billion faces in 1 second.
If there is a monarchical god, how do you know you identified the right one?
Serendipper wrote:
Accidental Truths vs. Laws of Nature.
Computers. Built and created by an intelligent woman/man.
Entirely your decision. God gave you free will to decide for yourself.
“Accidental” seems too much like a mistake. I’d say serendipitous. “Truths” seem too much like laws. I’d say observed regularities.
But you said “there remains one thing no man ever has been or ever will be able to do. He cannot build or create anything that is more intelligent than himself.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GScdUIYXglA[/youtube]
We’re groping around in the dark looking for something to cling to that will save us, so what if we stumble upon or are born into the wrong religion?
How can you say we have freewill when we’re blind? How can you make a choice when you can’t see to decide?
Computers do not have feelings e.g. love, fear, anger etc, this fuels ambition and creativity and advances civilization.
Serendipper wrote:
We?
Jesus declared that even those who “knew not” the Lord’s will, but did things “worthy” of condemnation, will be punished by the returning Master (Luke 48).
What if truth about our origins and what type of beings we are is scattered about in all of the major religions in bits and pieces that need to be assembled to make a coherent explanation?
Yeah that’s true, but I’ve read that computers can generate art and play music and are projected to take every job known. Oxford and Yale University have estimated the years until all job are gone: sciencealert.com/experts-th … f-our-jobs
How do we know if they feel like us? How can we tell if they’re just mimicking? How can we tell when a psychopath is mimicking? Are some people just machines? Do some people not have souls? What about animals? Which animals? Bacteria? What about plants?
But why is that a basis for your belief? How do you know what the bible says is true?
I can’t find Luke 48. What chapter?
That philosophy worked for Bruce Lee with martial arts. He took a little of this and a little of that and made a style that made him famous. That’s pretty much what Alan Watts did too.
Name all the major religions Alan Watts took material from.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. (Really not much from Juadaism, just the Yetzer Hara which is the evil inclination or what he calls the element of irreducible rascality.) Nothing on Islam that I’ve ever heard from him.
He said Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.
He surmised 4 models of the universe:
In the West, the ceramic model came first. That’s the potter working the clay. Then in the late 1800s, early 1900s that idea fell out of favor in light of scientific and astronomical discoveries, so they booted God out and kept the rest of the model (fundamental matter is lifeless “clay” that somehow forms itself into life automatically). He asserts that even people who say they believe in God don’t really believe because if they really believed they’d be shouting in the streets, but even the Jehovah’s Witnesses are polite when they come to the door. So, nobody ‘really’ believes in the God of the bible, but they think they ought to believe.
In the East, the dramatic model came first, then the same thing happened: they booted the Brahman out and kept the rest of it, which is the organic model.
If anyone can think of other models, that would be great! Plausible models! Not pink unicorns sprinkling pixie dust and the like 
Who booted God out? Certainly not all Christians or theists.
Is he really arguing that nobody believes in God? I can’t see any basis for that and what’s the fleshed out shouting in the streets argument?
Again who is they they?
Popular culture.
Yes he says people think they ought to believe, but they don’t really believe. He says if you honestly believed eternal damnation were a danger, you’d be going mad in the streets. I’ll see if I can find the video and cue it up.
Pop culture. It’s like an erosion of purity; decadence maybe. I don’t believe any of the religions are true to their own teachings.
FWD to 8:00 for the “people screaming in the streets part”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfNbmwiTIlE[/youtube]
Serendipper wrote:
Luke 12.48
But there are many theists. And popular culture includes pagan and pantheist and New Age ideas of God.r
There is some truth to that, i would guess and things like that used to drive me mad when I was a kid in a not religious household, but then no one believes in science either by that argument. One, all the matter in our bodies gets replaced in whatever number of years it is - that alone should drive any materialist mad. Real contact with other is illusory - given the filters of perception, reconstruction of perception inside the brain from transmitted information type theories of perceiving in science, with all of us ‘really’ suffering a kind of locked in syndrome, being alone, never having real contact with others - and certainly the upcoming eternal nonexistence threat that science indicates should drive them mad, but does not, and the lack of evidence, in scientific terms, of Good and Evil, putting us in a moral free world - should send some others into street screaming. I mean, anyone believing in science, doesn’t really believe in it, by Watt’s model, because they should all be screaming in the streets. And the same would hold for Buddhism. A few mystics in each system have faced their ego deaths and since Watts himself was never that disciplined, he never engaged in the kind of long term practices that are considered necessary in buddhism to clear out ego clinging and the rest, he ain’t one of those mystic. But let’s say he did, through some intuitive non-disciplined method arrive at enlightenment- when did he run around screaming in the streets? He never had that phase, he never believed anything really, then. So how would he know what people would do if they did believe? I think that damns his argument. He is claiming to know what people would do, other people, all of them, if they really believed in Hell, but he never experienced this himself in his Christian phase or in any other phase in relation to the frightening implications of other belief systems.
ALL the major current belief systems collapse under that kind of argument. None of would have real believers. Shamanistic, indigenous ones need not if they have afterlife/reincarnation schemes. I think there is some truth in this. I think people believe in ways that they do not realize, and lack belief or avoid noticing, in ways they do not realize. But I don’t think it is useful on the whole since many religions consider the religion itself as offering a way to move towards profound belief from more scattered versions, and this process generally includes some kind of dark night of the soul - a parallel to the screaming in the streets. People tend to think of belief in binary terms, so they deserve Watts’ judging their beliefs in binary terms. But it’s a bad way to look at beliefs so his error is still an error and a judgment he does not have the experience to justify. Only those who have screamed in the streets and move on to something else get to, and he is not one of them.
But that’s quite different from saying that no one really believes. Most people in those religions have some kind of conception of a deity and believe in it. Belief is not binary. They believe to various degrees in various contexts, have doubts and likely their beliefs mix paradigms in ways they may not want to notice, but that sums up everyone on earth including atheists, or even realists, in fact any belief group, including trivial beliefs.