Is belief in the supernatural an intelligent person’s game?

Greatest I Am,

I would suggest that if you are not going to respond to certain parts of the posts that someone sends you, that you simply highlight and press the delete button. It is not necessary to drag everything along with it into another post. The landscape remains more pristine that way.

Yes, this is true as the statement goes but if you are referring to me as the “you” then I do not think that you have taken the time to read what I wrote. Either that, or you enjoy playing games. You may take your games elsewhere.

Labels I suppose are really not that important except to clarify some things but as I do not BELIEVE in the so-called supernatural realm, which includes ghosts, angels, devils, fairies, vampires, witches, warlocks, whoever, (did I leave anything out?) nor BELIEVE in God, I am more than comfortable in labeling myself as an agnostic. An agnostic holds back belief and judgment and insofar as the above list goes, the only reality is within one’s imagination and creativity. It is far too easy within the fertile mind of the human being to have a seed planted, take root and voila these entities are born…but not into actual reality.

[b]Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable.[1][2][3] Another definition provided is the view that “human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist.”[2]

The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word agnostic in 1869, and said “It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.” Earlier thinkers, however, had written works that promoted agnostic points of view, such as Sanjaya Belatthaputta, a 5th-century BCE Indian philosopher who expressed agnosticism about any afterlife;[4][5][6] and Protagoras, a 5th-century BCE Greek philosopher who expressed agnosticism about the existence of “the gods”.[7][8][9][10]

Agnosticism is the doctrine or tenet of agnostics with regard to the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena or to knowledge of a First Cause or God,[11] and is not a religion.[/b]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

Yes, I am familiar. Many human beings love to proclaim their selves as this or that. It is called narcissism perhaps in the case of some pathological narcissism.

At this point in time though we were discussing the matter of GOD, the God who people believe created the universe, the one which people believe is a personal loving entity, the one which people believe will always be available to protect and save them from the world, despite what evidence they see to the contrary, the one who will have to take the blame in their eyes because who else could they blame for nature’s devastation.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing but so can no knowledge at all.

That is the part of the supernatural that I was basically referring to. The one seen as First Cause.

I can actually agree with the above and THAT is why I am agnostic. Too much mystery, too many unsolved answers to questions. No matter what we think we know we still cannot fathom that question because we cannot know everything and possibly what we think we know is in actuality some different kind of reality.

The supernatural world is not the only one to watch out for and we all march to a different drummer, do we not?
Many of us live in our own fantasy (non supernatural) worlds which are not real. Those are also the ones we have to watch out for and take stock in.

Naturopathy, Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine have their own colleges, universities and in some countries the state recognizes their legitimacy and collaborates with them.

Allopathy isn’t good and alt medicine bad, they’re competitors, naturally they talk smack about each other like competitors do.

The same goes with mainstream and alt media or anything mainstream and alt, mainstream doesn’t necessarily mean good.

The supernatural is a normally imperceptible higher plane or realm of being and its inhabitants.

The preternatural is a normally imperceptible parallel plane or realm of being and its inhabitants.

There’s no internal contradiction here, the only question is, do higher or parallel worlds exist, or are they merely products of our imagination?

I tend to think there’s some truth to them, but my approach to them is experimental and speculative rather than dogmatic.

The unnatural is something manmade or the product of a sentient mind.

Contradictions, lies, fraud and hypocrisy.

Regards
DL

“the one which people believe is a personal loving entity,”
[/quote]
Yes, a genocidal god that they want to get closer to.

That shows the full immorality of Christian thinking.

Regards
DL

No one or institution including mainstream academia has a monopoly on reason, research and publicly reviewing each others work.
We can all publicly review each others work as individuals, or members of an (alt) discipline.
There is no absolute authority if any.
For me, individual authority comes first, followed closely by the authority of the people.
We as individuals, and a democracy decide who the experts are, if there are any, experts aren’t self-appointed.
This is what I call epistemic populism, and it stands in stark contrast to academicism, rigid ideologues, scientism and religionism.

And it should be added that ‘witch doctor’ in contrast to some Western expert, in this case a doctor, is a colonialist cliche. It started as a smug contrast between cultures, where one had the power to eradicate the other.

Greatest’s main beef is with the Abrahamists. I doubt he intended to slight third world cultures however much he might judge religions and spiritual and health practices in these other cultures.

But one interesting thing for me is a certain kind of male hatred, in Western cultures, aimed at anything that seems to have to do with the supernatural, alternative health, organic food, spirituality, and alternative takes on current events. And it’s here the Abrahamists and the technocrats have long been allies.

Any individual who comes at these things differently than the sanctioned by authority - AMA, Pope, mainstream media take - is evil: a quack, some who fools dying people out of money, an anti-semite, an irrational nutjob.

Of course many men are on the other side of this and many women have a lot of bile against alternatives. But I seem to encounter the rage primarily in men.

In the religious/spiritual world, if you claim to have some insight into entities and processes not yet verified by science or via a process not yet verified by science, then it must be bullshit. And the various churches tend to want you out of the business also. God is transcendent, there are no regular human bridges to anything special.

Be small, you bags of chemicals and do what you are told.

We are too busy making our children into our image through indoctrination to teach them the type of critical thinking you want.

In fact, today, we seem to want to dumb down our population.

The dim are a lot easier to control and manipulate than the bright.

Regards
DL

Right over your head.

Regards
DL

Facile.

Greatest I am

No, not really. I do, for the most part, believe that people who actually do “see” a personal loving God want to get close to that God and wish no harm to anyone. That is not immorality.

It only becomes immorality when a particular creature, for instance, decides to bomb a city in the name of God. There is a distinction.

What I think that it is though insofar as the former is concerned is not taking the time to think things out, to think clearly and slowly, and to look at everything which surrounds them, including contradictions, in order to come up with a better judgment call.

We all do that and you yourself are not innocent of it. We are all biased in our thinking or many of us are at different times.

I agree with your last.

The Christian bias of idol worshiping a genocidal god while proclaiming he is good shows how immoral their ideology has made them.

Regards
DL

GIA

Who is it who proclaimed God a genocidal one?

The victims and the bible.

Have you read of all the times god kills en mass?

Regards
DL

GIA

So, what are you saying here? That you actually believe this garbage? Do you believe in a genocidal God? I sometimes get the sense that you do believe in some kind of a God. You seem to be so angry and you seem to feed that anger.

If you do not believe in God though, what do you say to people who do and who believe that their God is responsible for all of the misery in the world?

I would like you to show me how this is true, how they have become immoral because of this. Give me an example. The way I look at it, immoral IS as immoral does.

I am not a literalist and read the bible as myth, not history.

I am a Gnostic Christian and hold no supernatural beliefs whatsoever.

What I am angry with is a religion that is homophobic and misogynous and has somehow convinced half decent people that a genocidal god is somehow good.

If theists continue to praise a god who they see as directly creating all the evils of the world, then I would tell them that they are morally corrupted by their beliefs.

As to your last. Morals are a learned thing to a large extent. Secular law and few people will praise a genocidal entity yet Christianity does.

Where else would Christians learn such a foul way to think?

Regards
DL

I will respond to this shortly.

I read the bible when I did believe in … I hesitated here to capitalize 'G’od lol. It is confusing when you do not believe. Do you capitalize or do you not capitalize. God is sacred and real to many.
I do not read it now though I do realize that much wisdom can be found in it.
Can you tell me why you do read the bible since you do not believe at least not now.

I am the same way. There are times when I wonder if I have sacrificed something good but not where the weird stuff is concerned.

Why waste your breathe being angry with the religion per se. Be angry with those who perpetuate the Lie. Try to teach those who automatically believe these things because they feel that the bible is "the inspired word of _od. lol
I wonder how many of these people use the bible as an excuse to maintain theseout-dated beliefs?

I think that the problem here, GIA, is that they are not really connecting the dots and perhaps neither are you. I really do not believe that most intelligent, good, moral, ethical (did I leave anyone out) people who believe in God are actually seeing this God as deliberately creating all the evils of the world. Some of them are seeing God as “allowing” it and some have not taken it far enough to see much of anything. They just believe .

I am not even sure that one can actually say this because like I said they cannot connect the dots. They do not realize that in saying one thing about God, they may be actually creating a negative aspect of God. I posted something in ILP the other and after having read it, I realized that I portrayed God as being sadistic ~~ in other words, from my point of view, on the other side of that coin, without even realizing it, thinking one thing also created another thing. I may not have expressed that too well. The saying comes to me "Forgive them for they KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO or in the case THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY THINK.

We praise a lot of things and people who do not deserve it. I think it all comes down to not realizing how we are thinking. They are not literally praising a genocidal God.

[/quote]
Possibly from not learning how to really thing not being taught how to truly think by parents and schools.

See above.

GIA

We are all wrong because ultimatey we cannot really know. Anyway, in many ways, you and I think alike but we all have blind spots and boxes which we just cannot climb up out of it.

Can’t be evil and wise and can’t understand something without becoming wise, so “evil” comes from ignorance and if it comes from ignorance then it is not evil it is just bad, evil implies understood intent to do bad, it’s like when a child puts it’s hand on something hot, the child’s ignorance compels their curiosity and natural instincts, “evil” works similarly out of ignorance, yet then it is not truly evil.

The god is only good, for it is wisdom and wisdom is only good, can’t be both bad and understanding/wise. You can be bad and have knowledge, but my question would then be, do you understand that knowledge? If bad, then no because bad and wise don’t go together.