Atheists & Agnostics
Related: About this forumOh lordy.
I've been proven wrong.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017459381#post5
safeinOhio
(34,209 posts)to find out.
Me too.
Brainstormy
(2,433 posts)mountain grammy
(27,345 posts)"Do not fear death. You were dead for billions of years before birth and not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it" the post losely attributes this to Mark Twain.
We are stardust!
Duppers
(28,260 posts)mountain grammy
(27,345 posts)Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)Seriously,
Suppose this reality actually is a simulation as some serious physicists and philosophers have suggested. And suppose it's a very advanced, fully immersive, muli-player, virtual reality video game we are all playing. What happens when your game is over? You re-emerge in the "real" reality (some call it an "afterlife" and hang out with your friends until you're ready to dive into another fresh round of the game. From within the game itself, as a player, what would you call this fresh game life if not "reincarnation?"
Personally, I'm a staunch atheist, yet I consider reincarnation to be a possibility. Carl Sagan did not believe in reincarnation (as some wrongly claim), but he did believe it deserved more serious study: There are claims in the parapsychology field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study, with [one] being that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.
It's easy enough to simply ridicule something and pretend that ridicule is falsification of that which is being ridiculed. But it's not. The problem is that some things that should be taken seriously get lumped in with a load of crap that is utter nonsense. Reincarnation gets lumped with astrology and psychic mediums and numerology and healing crystals and a whole host of outright nonsense and foolishness. As a consequence, it gets painted with the same broad black brush, without being given serious consideration.
I spent a couple years going deeply into the study of astrology, for example, and came to the conclusion, after much investigation, that it is nonsense. The same for several other "paranormal" areas. All nonsense. The exception being that after a careful study of the available academic material (not the mass market paperback bullshit) I was forced to conclude that reincarnation remains a possibility. What I won't do, under any circumstances, is to dismiss out of hand some claim because I think it's fashionable to do so, or because I think it makes me look intelligent or smarter than somebody else. I'm at least willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Mostly it leads to nonsense, but in the case of Dr. Stevenson's work, it leads to the conclusion that it is NOT irrational to believe in reincarnation. That said, however, it is also NOT irrational to disbelieve in reincarnation.
Duppers
(28,260 posts)This doesn't relate to reincarnation but an equally strange purported phenomena.
As I said in the other thread I have experienced a "ghost" and became friendly with "him."
Will tell some stories when I've more time. Hubs ridiculed me until one evening he was astounded at what he heard.
Voltaire2
(14,816 posts)Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)The evidence, however, dragged me kicking an screaming to the truth.
I'm not talking about reading newspaper horoscopes here. I'm talking about digging seriously into the math of casting and interpreting horoscope charts. There are a dozen or more different ways the boundaries of the "houses" are calculated, and what sort of corrections should be made regarding latitude and longitude. The math involved is not trivial, and cannot simply be dismissed "just because". To falsify a theory you must understand the theory and understand what constitutes falsification. I won't have it said that I dismissed something out of hand "just because". I will not hesitate to call B.S. on something that turns out to be B.S., but I will not call something B.S. just because some renowned "authority" tells me it's B.S., or because "all the cool kids" call it B.S.
As a result, crackpots often tell me I'm a hard-nosed skeptic, and hard-nose skeptics tell me I'm a crackpot. So I must be right smack in the middle of the sweet spot.
Voltaire2
(14,816 posts)the basic assertion that somehow the "alignment" of celestial objects orders our lives is ridiculous and is obviously so after a few minutes of honest reflection.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)"Obviously" an electron must pass through one slit or the other. It's ridiculous to assert that it could somehow pass through both slits and interfere with itself. That just takes a few minutes of honest reflection to realize.
Nature has many ways of surprising us with things that are not only not obvious, but downright bizarre. Closing one's mind to the possibilities before examining the evidence is the opposite of science.
A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought.
Stephen W. Hawking
In A Brief History of Time, (1988, 1998), 80.
Duppers
(28,260 posts)Last edited Sat Sep 30, 2017, 07:32 PM - Edit history (1)
Curious.
No, seriously?
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)My hypothesis (FWIW) is that consciousness is elemental, just like space-time, mass-energy, there is consciousness-information. That side steps the issue of how consciousness emerged from unconscious matter. But anyway, I won't try to prove it because it's just a crazy-ass hypothesis. But, suppose that consciousness can "occupy" any organism with a complex enough brain to support the "interface" between matter and consciousness. That implies two things: 1) Single-celled, or multi-cellular pre-chordates in general, do not have the hardware to support that interface. and 2) any sufficiently complex computer AI could act as a host to consciousness.
Anyway, as crazy-ass half-baked hypotheses goes, at least it has a certain consistency to it.
For the most part, however, I don't take any of my crazy-ass hypotheses seriously enough to worry about such details.