Christians

[QDRPHNC]

But the difficulty here is that it is hard to redefine things that are horrible from a humanist perspective into things that are argued as being necessary and even beneficial from a spiritual one. This is understandable, emotionally, but not logically. "How can children being raped in Africa be beneficial to anyone?" Quite. It is not something one can dismiss with a flick of the hand. However it is not something that is impossible to explain either. You just have to keep to the context of the hypothesis and dlsallow emotional "But that's just horrible!" reactions.

Alan Watts called it levels of magnification, and gave the metaphor of the cells in our body. If you were a cell, you would undoubtedly consider your existence one of chaos, war and suffering. But it is because of all that, we exist.

[Zetetic]

I mean, strictly speaking, if the spirit exists at all then it must exist in the universe and be governed by some sort of process. The only reason it's regarded as "super" natural is that we haven't figured out what these processes might be yet. If you really want to know the truth then everything is perfectly natural.

Would I be correct in reading that as you believing in a causal closure, indeed a determinism, of spirit and physics?

If you were a cell, you would undoubtedly consider your existence...

I started doubting about here.

[SockPuppet]

Alan Watts

Died an alcoholic, it seems, and an adulterer as well.

Lots of enchanting videos on Youtube, it has to be said.

[HappyTree]

Would I be correct in reading that as you believing in a causal closure, indeed a determinism, of spirit and physics?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. All I can say is physics as we currently understand it only describes what we most commonly see and measure. Unusual things are hard to define, by definition, and we haven't any idea what kinds of things might be happening in areas we've never seen. I am fairly sure that there are universes out there that exist as mathematical sketch pads and don't operate at all along the lines we recognise here.

You might find this article interesting.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SUB-QUANTUM PHENOMENON

You can ignore all the biased bits about it proving supernatural effects and just try to get the idea of the intelligent ether organising itself. I find it rings a few bells in my mind according to things I've experienced.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

I believe the concept of non-overlapping magisteria is a relatively recent development, at least in the West.

The term was invented by Stephen Jay Gould in the last 20 years. However the idea that empirical sciences and non-sciences simply do not conflict with each other has been in circulation for a long while, in many different forms. Even the logical positivists like A.J.Ayer had a version of it, since they held that moral and religious statements were cognitively meaningless, and thus could not conflict with meaningful scientific ones.

Genesis literalism had been in and out of fashion a few times before Darwin came along. Debates about evolution vs. design were going long before him in the Enlightenment, see Diderot and La Mettrie.

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

Well, yes, by "recent" I meant "last few hundred years".

[QDRPHNC]

Died an alcoholic, it seems, and an adulterer as well.

What does that have to do with anything?

[NoSleep]

He drank spirits.

[rudi]

At my age, drinking spirits guarantees there'll be no second coming...

[Nuclear Optimism]

Hold on, where do midichlorians fit in all this?

[Still Not George]

Hold on, where do midichlorians fit in all this?

They put them in swimming pools, IIRC.

[El Unicornio, mang]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/things-i-learned-at-the-largest-christian-music-fe