silly "religious" answers to questions

[monumentus]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

I was made aware of the existence of God in an unmistakable way by my encounter in deep meditation

No. You were not. You had a strong emotional experience. That is all. And your failure to rationalise that experience led you to append the label "god" to it and then embark on a decades long attempt to retrofit "evidence" to that arbitrary labeling in order to define "god" into existence for yourself.

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

I was NOT insane or deluded

The former no - the latter very much so. As I said there is no reason to think that your experience was anything but a powerful emotional response. Those of us who engage in such meditation know exactly the experiences you speak of. Intimately. We simply have not used them as a platform from which to make a leap of illogic.

The majority of the rest of your post is just protestylising so at the risk of breaking the rules I can not respond to it. You are on your own engaging in rule breaches.

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

That is solid and more plausible (given our consciousness) than any of the competing hypotheses.

Then by all means produce some arguments supporting that hypothesis because thus far the only support you have offered is "I believe it - therefore it must be plausible". Which I think even you are compelled to agree is about as unconvincing an argument as it is to present around here.

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

That does not mean unscientifically . . . just not verifiable second hand.

The whole process of science is related to being able to verify things second hand. Look up the phrase "peer review" and learn about it and you will understand this. So yes your approach very much is unscientific - despite your need to declare it otherwise.

In fact the leap of "I had a poweful emotional response" to "Therefore god" really is a great example of "Silly religious answers to questions".

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

I have numerous posts explaining my synthesis repeatedly using both $10 words and simpler analogies and metaphors.

Alas the majority of those anecdotes were shown to be nonsense. Your attempt to declare energy was just mass vibrating quickly was decimated by trained physicists like Morbert and in the end you were forced to back pedal it to declare it was nothing more than analogy - but an analogy to nonsense can only breed nonsense. For an analogy to hold the thing you are making an analogy to has to itself be sensible.

[skoro]

Originally Posted by karen_in_nh_2012

This is more a rant than anything else.

Why is it, when religious people ask "Why didn't God answer my prayer?" (e.g. my kid died or something else awful happened), OTHER religious people answer with something like "God does answer all prayers, it's just that sometimes the answer is no."

Honestly, I read stuff like this and I think, Are you serious? THAT is your answer?

Do they honestly believe that that is a good answer?

Sometimes I just don't get SOME religious people. (Don't want to lump them all together ... I have friends who are religious but not fundamentalists and they would never answer the way I wrote above.)

/end rant

... exactly what is the purpose of prayer?

Does anyone really think their prayer will change the actions of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity?