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"Central issue" . . is NOT synonymous with "everything." You still want to evolve or emerge our unique capabilities that are completely alien to material objects without any conceivable precursor for their existence whatsoever in a dead material void. I realize that may be too philosophically remote for your preferred pragmatic world view.
Sorry but your superficial explanations PRESUME origins (life, consciousness, etc.) NOT explained by a completely dead materialistic void. These are the facts which fundamentalist atheists simply ignore or don't want to discuss rationally (which is exactly what most of you have been doing).
How do you think life and consciousness originated?
What reason is there to believe a God had anything to do with it?
To go back to the original question of respecting beliefs, I find one issue that I find particularly insulting and disrespectful has cropped up several times, and for whatever reason it is generally with Christians.
I don't have a problem with someone believing I am wrong, believing I am holding an illogical belief, or that I am interpreting evidence incorrectly. What really bothers me are statements like this:
I find it very disrespectful to be told what I believe or do not believe. I have a specific view point, and it may be wrong or misguided, but it is mine. Accusing someone of being a liar, and claiming that you know what goes on in their heart and mind, without even having the benefit of ever meeting them!?! To me that is the height of hubris, arrogance and disrespect.
In short, I think that a minimum level of respect necessary for civil discourse is to at least grant someone the right to their own opinion and belief. You may think it is wrong, illogical or intellectually dishonest, but at least acknowledge that it exists!
-NoCapo
P.S. Contrary to your assertion, I am both an atheist and an agnostic, and I do honestly hold both positions. It stems not from a desire to eliminate a god, but to honestly evaluate the evidence at hand and to draw a conclusion only where the evidence warrants it.
Well said. What is my "truth" may not be yours and vice verse. What irritates me is when people tell me that my beliefs are "wrong". They may be "wrong" relative to you, but they are "right" to me.
I don't want others to try to get inside my head and change my mind. It's scary in there.
I wish i had a dollar for every time i heard these pop misconceptions . This will straighten out your errors : Answers for Atheists and Agnostics
Many horrendous things have been done in the NAME (only) of God even though they were not OF him....but in the last century alone, atheist Leaders Stalin, Lenin, Musilini, Hitler, and Tao collectively murdered over 100,000,000 innocent people IN THE DIRECT IDEOLOGY/PHILOSOPHY/and CONSTRUCTS of Atheism promoting survival of the fittest extermination 'for a better race' . Today, atheistic/secular ideology and lifestyles encouraging moral relativism account for over 60,000,000 innocent deaths thru the murdering of unborn developing Americans while in the womb since 1973 due to sexual hedonism gone further wrong resulting in pregnancy .
Is this the kind of good secular system you were alluding to in the last century and present day America ?
You're words only validate your willful ignorance.
How do you think life and consciousness originated?
Our reality itself has to be consciousness (Universal Field). There is no way for such an alien characteristic to exist in an otherwise dead materialistic void.
Quote:
What reason is there to believe a God had anything to do with it?
If our entire reality is consciousness . . . THAT cannot be anything OTHER than God.
Our reality itself has to be consciousness (Universal Field). There is no way for such an alien characteristic to exist in an otherwise dead materialistic void.If our entire reality is consciousness . . . THAT cannot be anything OTHER than God.
Science would indeed be incapable of explaining consciousness if mental experiences were the properties of non-material souls, whose operations would have to remain totally mysterious from the perspective of the mechanisms that physicists, chemists, biologists, and psychologists use to explain what happens. But there is scant evidence for the view that minds are anything more than brains, so non-materialism does not seem to generate a barrier for explaining consciousness. Another possibility is that consciousness is just too complicated to be understood by human minds that evolved to find food, water, shelter, and mates in simple environments. But these minds have been able to create marvelous cultural tools such as written language, mathematics, and scientific instruments from telescopes to brain scanning machines. So it would be premature by centuries to give up on the attempt to find scientific explanations of mental processes including consciousness.
Check out some of the researchers the article mentions.
Hhhhmmm , invocation of various ideological despots as a defense of the ills of Christianity............thought folks had given that one up.
And all of it tiptoeing around th 800 lb Gorilla in the room , the issue of Christo-Fascism. And any who doubt that Christian Reconstructionism and Christian Identity are fascist in nature better look again , and they are both behind the more "sanitary" Dominionist movement.
Check out some of the researchers the article mentions.
Can't rep you yet, but that's a good response. The fact is that there is some research that indicates that consciousness is something particular to the individual, like sight and body warmth (though of course general to humanity and indeed other animals) and the arguments about unanswered questions about where it came from or in what way it relates to sight and warmth elsewhere are pretty academic questions used here as fallacious arguments designed to create Gaps for God.
Consciousness as evidence for 'god' (let alone God) is just another piece of theist bamboozlement designed to find anything that will make God- belief look like it is supported by evidence.
Libet has another string to his bow, however, inasmuch as his general theory of consciousness is also designed to offer a foothold for free will, along with the subjective experience which in his view sustains it: free decisions are conscious decisions, and conscious decisions require subjective awareness. He proposes a conscious mental field (CMF) intended to account for the various mental phenomena which don't appear to be natural consequences of the firing of neurons. Like other proponents of field theories, Libet believes that the prescence of such a field helps explain how the diverse activity of the brain is bound together into a single, unified conscious experience. Unlike Susan Pockett or Johnjoe McFadden, however, he does not see this field as a straightforward physical phenomenon. Libet, who says that when young he was convinced of the truth of determinist materialism, no longer believes that conscious mental activity is explainable by or reducible to, neuronal activity, although it certainly requires it. He is not, at the same time, advocating any kind of dualism or spiritual theory: instead (and rather obscurely, I think) it seems that his proposed CMF is an emergent phenomenon: something that arises from the combination of active neurons but amounts to something distinctively more than, and different from, the sum of brain activity.
However, Libet’s conclusions rested on the use of Readiness Potentials (RPs).
Quote:
There were two interesting results. One was that the same kind of RP appeared whether the subject pressed a key or not. Trevena and Miller say this shows that the RP was not, after all, an indication of a decision to move, and was presumably instead associated with some more general kind of sustained attention or preparing for a decision. Second, they found that a different kind of RP, the Lateralised Readiness Potential or LRP, which provides an indication of readiness to move a particular hand, did provide an indication of a decision, appearing only where a movement followed; but the LRP did not appear until just after the tone. This suggests, in contradiction to Libet, that the early stages of action followed the conscious experience of deciding, rather than preceding it.
Thanks for that. The link is a fine discussion forum for this very important subject (Consciousness is now one of the stronger arguments for 'god' - even ahead of 'quantum') and thankfully has input from both sides and in a way that is reasonably comprehensible.
Wrong. Here is what secular (atheistic) authoritative Sources are still spewing to the gulliable populace :
"Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was
almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful
winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were
deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules
together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life
began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny
protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the
ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in
their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment
feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one-celled
organisms evolved all life on earth " (from the Emmy award winning PBS
NOVA film The Miracle of Life; quoted in Hanegraaff, 1998, p. 70,
emphasis in original.
There's nothing in here related to your previous claim that ideas like this lacked reason and intellect. Try again.
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