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Originally Posted by pan6467
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Who's evidence? If you believe in God, you cannot see, taste, hear, or physically "feel" God. It cannot be proven that you do. Yet millions of people throughout history have believed in some form they have, and it gave them hope and helped their lives. There are those who say that because of their belief they were able to stop drugs, that their diseases went away, that they became better people. Not by some scientific equation, but by their belief in a God, that there is no physical, scientific evidence to support.
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So what? Its not a debate on if theistic thinking reduces stress or makes you feel good. Its a debate if there is a god at all. I place religion right there with astrology, only with less good coming from astrology as a whole. Some religious charities and the like do help out a lot of people and I applaud them, even if I don't think the guy nailed to the cross had anything to do with it directly.
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Admittedly, it has also been the means for governments and the power hungry to create wars. Try as one might, you will never stop a religion. People will always practice their religion, they just may do so underground.
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Again, so what does that have to do with truth? If you want to dance naked at the equinox be my guest, I'm sure its a great time, but when you try to convince someone else that its a fertility rite to the earth goddess I'll be the first to tell that person I don't think so.
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Better example: I have a seriously bad day. I come home, have read books that talk about the metaphysical energies given off by crystals. They offer suggestions but recommend you experiment and find what combinations work for you.
My combination is thus: I grab my Kyanite necklace put it on, grab my Lepidolite and Malachite place them in my palms, kneel in my "altar" surrounded by differing Quartzes, raw emeralds, rubies, etc etc all placed in ways that I found through experimentation to be the most effective way for me. I clear my mind, being fully aware of what is around me, but I allow myself to draw the natural healing energies from the rocks. I believe the rocks have calmed me and helped me, my attitude has changed, my physical appearance has changed.
Have they truly helped me? The scientific community can say it is all psychological and that it worked solely because I wanted it to and I changed myself.
But, I had to work to find the right combination. I worked to find the right stones and place them in the right areas. Before I got the desired results I had to experiment and did so each time expecting "perfect results" only to find I needed to add or subtract or move something until I found the combination that attuned with my senses and psyche.
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As a stress relief, whatever floats your boat. I do the same by playing with my 3 year old and groping the wife a bit. Of course I'll tell you its psychological and if you think healing energy is coming out of the rocks, well to each their own, but again, if you decide to attempt to 'educate' others on the healing properties of rocks I will still be the first to say 'no they don't have healing powers, please, don't be silly.' People have been hurt by these wild and false claims, trusting they are true and avoiding medical help. Then you have the people 'cured' who, guess what, would have been cured anyways, but now they credit a piece of quartz. Yea for the evolution of human thought. Might as well start to sacrifice chickens. After all if sacrificing a chicken makes you feel better, who am I to say it didn't appease your angry god.
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We like to explain away and dismiss that which we do not yet understand.
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But we do understand it, its in your head. Its you who don't wish to look at evidence and rely on mysticism.
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How do you explain away that which science cannot come up with answers for?
2 parachuters jump out of a plane 5,000 feet above the ground. Neither chute opens 1 plummets to his death, the other walks away with a coupld scratches maybe a broken limb or 2 but relatively ok. Science proves he should have been dead. Now what happens, when the man says he felt his God save him? How do you prove him wrong?
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God musta had a hard on for the dead guy. Really science doesn't prove the other guy should be dead. Science said its most likely he would be dead. Its probability. In something like that where a body is traveling at terminal velocity, how you hit, what you hit and where you hit will determine if you live or die. Some come out with a broken bone or two, others are hospitalized for months, and most are dead. This is a bad example.
Near death can always be a 'religious' experience. When I was quite young my fathers friend was killed while they were together by lightning. This didn't make my father religious, in fact it made him atheist. His reasoning is that if a good man could just die like that out of the blue, there must not be a god. At the time, despite being an atheist myself, I didn't think it was good reasoning on his part, but its the shock that gets you thinking that way.
A better example would be 2 people in a 1000 degree fire for an hour, one lives one dies. There is a problem with this example, both will always die. God apparently can save someone from a fall but not fire.
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How do you explain away 10's of 1000's (probably far, far more than that) who yearly believe with their entire entity that they saw a ghost, talked to a dead relative, had a vision from God....etc.?
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I thought I saw ghosts as a child, I used to have very vivid almost religious dreams, I had a recurring nightmare that was almost identical to the alien abduction stories (only they weren't aliens). Should I assume there are ghosts, god talks to me in dreams, and that I was abducted by aliens? Should I expect to be taken seriously if I told everyone about it? Should I be offended if they said it was just a dream, and had an over active imagination? Well they were and I did.
Your senses are only so good, they try to interpret what they don't understand. You see a shadow and it looks like a man, because your brain tries to put that together to save time. If you had to identify every face/box/letter/location as if it were they first time you ever saw anything, it would take far to long to interpret and would be anti-survival. This has been shown scientifically. But just like a street magician can get people to think he levitates or makes their wallets disappear, so can the mind be fooled.
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A personal experience: I have "dreams" of future events in my life. I can awaken write down my dream and then go back to sleep. 2 days later, my wife, someone I am close to have that event, that I CANNOT have control over, and I tell them I dreamed it happening and show them the slip of paper I wrote 2 days before. Say that event was being stuck exactly for an hour in traffic because of a traffic jam AND I wrote down the exact conversation we would have. (Now, yes, one could say I could control the conversation... perhaps.) I'm not the only one to have ever had this experience or who experiences it. But what's the scientific explanation?
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Impossible to verify without more examination. If true I'd recommend you apply for that 1 million dollar para normal prize. They will set up the experimental design with you.
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Man for thousands of years desired to fly but the "evidence" proved that he never would be able to. People, scientists in their day, tried hard as Hell to fly... only to fail. But, people never gave up on the idea, never allowed "science's" rational thought that stated man could never fly sway them, and eventually, we are able, within hours, to fly not only anywhere on Earth but to the moon and now it is a matter of finding the materials, money and so on to move onto Mars. 150 years ago the scientific community would have laughed at those ideas.
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War of the worlds was written in 1898, and man had been flying for quite a long time with gliders and balloons and it was sciences rational thought which allowed them to. Most of the detractors are in the age before the age of reason. These people believed in astrology btw
You are comparing the type of 'science' that thought mice were spontaneously generated by laundry to real 'science' which only started to flourish on a large scale for the last 300 years. Powered flight wasn't about 'flight' we knew about flight, it was all around us, it was about making smaller engines that could power it, something that steam power just wasn't good enough for.
Attempting to compare astrology or power crystals to mans quest for flight is wrong on another level as well. To find the solution to powered flight, man didn't just give up and call it 'undoable' instead using a lot of science, combining multiple inventions, using wind tunnels and mathematics some bright bicycle makers came up with a solution.
Astrology doesn't do that. It doesn't compare, it doesn't work out which is 'good' and which is 'bad', it doesn't peer review or self regulate. You are told to 'find what works best for you' but you are left in a sea of claims with nothing to go by. When it is studied it falls on its face, it proves nothing, and shows nothing.
If they put you in a room blindfolded one with and one without crystals I guarantee you would not be able to tell which one had the crystals but you don't want to hear that.
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50 years ago the idea that we would be able to have wireless portable computers would have been laughable to the scientist. It would be near impossible. But by finding the right radio waves, working on a solution and the belief some had that it could be done, it has become reality.
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Would these be the same type of scientists who predicted things like exponential growth in the powers of computing? While I doubt many would have been able to foresee the future, as precognition has never been proven either, using that to somehow justify that which has been never been able to show any valid proof is wrong.
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If forces act on everyone equally then the second above parachuter would have died with his friend. Everyone would get cancer from smoking, everyone who gets Ebola would die. And so on.
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I'm sorry but biology doesn't work that way. It would be far MORE remarkable if everyone died from Ebola than if some people survived. We are evolved to survive diseases as a species, some have the right locks to stop the bacterial and viral keys. The same applies to smoking or the para shooter, you are just wrong on how this works scientifically. Again everyone doesn't die from smoking, a disease, or even a para shoot jump gone bad but they do all die from an oven, or cyanide gas. One we have either evolved to survive or luck, the other will always be fatal.
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And yet, there are those occurrences that have no logic or scientific evidence to base the result upon. BUT THEY UNDENIABLY EXIST. But because we do not have the technology, or we have lost that part contact with that part of our mind, soul, spirit, Earth connection, God connection.... whatever: it is a freak experience and just one of those scientific oddities that can be explained but "we just don't have time to explain it" or "you wouldn't understand".
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But they do, seriously. There are questions in science we can't fully answer, but these are not those questions.
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My point is simple, our beliefs create the reality we control in our lives. I believe that both science and the paranormal, "occult", metaphysical... whatever you desire to call it, can and do coexist and draw strength and weakness from the other. That if you believe in just one and not the other you are doing yourself a disservice. I truly believe you cannot have one without the other in a growing society.
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Society can do just fine without witch doctors thank you. I truly believe that with proper education you can have science without superstition and that is what this is all about.
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If you rely only on "God" explanations, you open society up to be controlled by "those God put in charge". If you rely solely on a "scientific" explanation of everything you take out "the human factor" and if it is something that cannot have the results duplicated and be controlled it must not exist or be some "fluke". Sole belief in just one or the other, takes away abstract thinking, individuality, that which makes us, us.
Scientifically all kisses set about the same chemical reaction in everyone... yet, situations, psyche and so on also affect one's reaction to that kiss. You may have scientific answers for half the reaction but the other half... there is no explanation for and delve all you want, study, try hard and come up with all the theories that make you happy... the non-chemical, purely emotional, situational, psyche reaction will stay unexplainable.
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Honesty I don't think you understand science. Scientifically all kisses do not set off the same chemical reaction in everyone, science does not state we are automatrons. And while I do not 'approve' of them, science can very easily figure out how to make people 'happy', and its a thriving subset of the drug industry.
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I also believe that by creating an atmosphere where people can talk about their experiences and be able to work through them without being mocked without being harassed, without being told they are freaks, nuts, etc.... we as a society gain because eventually, some of what is believed "scientifically impossible" may tomorrow be "scientific fact".
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I agree with this, but not for astrology or most of the new age 'stuff'. There comes a point where you say, we looked into it, we examined it, we tested the hypothesis and the theory did not hold up. This is why we live now in an age of progress after millenia of slow advances. This type of thinking is what allows us to be having this discussion via the internet, do heart transplants, fly into space, and dive into the abyss.
You confuse lack of vision with lack science not having answers. Yes I'm sure if you asked a majority of scientists in 1960 if some day there would be a computer in every home connected via a world wide network they would have said no. This was the day of flipping switches to program and computers as big as buildings. That is a vision issue, that is not being a very good 'futurist' but it has nothing to do with the science. The science kept going right along making computers smaller and faster until we got where we are today, using experimentation, inspiration, and the scientific method.
When the same methods are applied to something like astrology it falls flat, and yet we are suppose to play nice about it, allow people to 'think what they want' and spend money on it, and quite frankly be fooled by it.
No.