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That too. They survive BY MEANS OF their dogma and idolatries.
A fundamentalist is happy to use a cell phone or a leg splint, but those things don't contradict his pet ideas about the existence of god, how god spoke life and humanity into existence, how the Bible is both literal and inerrant in every particular or how people should behave sexually and so forth.
What's the difference between an Atheist who lacks the belief in existence of God/diety, and an Atheist who actively believes there is no God/diety?
Simple - one actively believes there is no god and the other doesn't. Kinda like asking what's the difference between a Christian wearing socks and Christian not wearing socks - the difference it that one is wearing socks.
How are the religious directly standing in the way of scientific progress? What/which experiments are they blocking?
I guess this depends at what stage in the process you want to look at. At the level of education for example I do not think the people protesting - almost exclusively religious - against the teaching of evolution or science related to an "old earth" - are a secret. Attacking the teaching of scientific facts - or the concept or basis of science itself (The Dover Trial people even tried to re-define science itself in their attempts to win the trials) - is an insidious form of hampering progress in science. There have been propaganda pieces and graphics also showing things like Christianity as being the basis of all good in the world and science or evolution being the basis of all evil. This one being one incarnation of many of the one many people would know.
Oft cited religious objections to things like Stem Cell research would be another example. Objections to it are very heavily religious or from the religious on religious grounds. Such as the idea that the soul somehow enters the zygote at conception and other such nonsense. When South Korean scientists announced they extracted embryonic stem cells from cloned embyos there was a chorus of back lash from religious spokesmen for example.
Those who believe in a forthcoming judgement day or return of Jesus are often strongly aligned against spending resources or money on the scientific inquiry into long term areas such as climate change. Why would you spend money on that after all - if you think the world is essentially going to end soon - possibly in our life times?
Even the scientific inquiry into religion itself is often protested by the religious. Leading to people like Daniel Dennett writing books and papers on the subject appealing for more research. And a scientific inquiry into things like Art and Morality can too result in a chorus of protest from those quarters - as such god given attributes and appreciations could not possibly be amenable to scientific inquiry.
Nor is this a new phenomenon. Take the muslim world for example. It used to be one of the scientific leaders of our species. Now look at them - and much of the cause of this stems from a handful of Immans declaring the manipulation of numbers to be the devils work. One might also like to go back and ask Galileo Galilei if religion or the religious hampered his progress.
So yea all this and more is what I mean when I talk about religion as an impediment to science - science education - science progress - the status of science and more. Hope that at least partly answers your question
That ANY version exists is enough to refute atheism.
Or looked at another way, your idea of god is so puny that it makes your theism indistinguishable from atheism. That's assuming you're sincere in your descriptions of it, of course.
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But I am pretty sure it all happens within our consciousness, NOT the physical world
The purpose of the Mystic definition of "God" (Everything) is to get its existence accepted. Once "God" is accepted, then the Bible gets dragged into it. I promise you.
Yep. The whole "god is just the universe" is the start of a bait and switch. Notice how his story about the nature of god changes when talking to a different audience :
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Yes because ONLY HIS human consciousness is connected to God's consciousness. All human consciousness can join with God ONLY through the human consciousness of Jesus that is "born again" as Spirit and abides with us in our consciousness as the Comforter. It is structural and has nothing to do with what we do or do not believe, think, or whatever.
Funny how things go from "humans create god's consciousness" to "you need Jesus to connect with the God consciousness we're separated from" depending on who is asking. If all of the word games were just honest confusion it would be one thing, but this is something different at work.
How are the religious directly standing in the way of scientific progress? What/which experiments are they blocking?
They are not blocking any because society and progress will not allow them to but they are certainly hampering scientific progress. Stem-cell research for one.
Or looked at another way, your idea of god is so puny that it makes your theism indistinguishable from atheism. That's assuming you're sincere in your descriptions of it, of course.
Another one who thinks everything that exists is puny by ignoring its attributes - what it does, has done and is capable of relative to us.
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Proof that consciousness is non-physical?
It is capable of violating any and all of the things that constrain the physical world via imagination.
Another one who thinks everything that exists is puny by ignoring its attributes - what it does, has done and is capable of relative to us.It is capable of violating any and all of the things that constrain the physical world via imagination.
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Originally Posted by wallflash
No one is saying the universe is puny as a physical entity . What has been said is that your version of God is puny relative to other versions .
But my version is entirely supported by science - both known and plausible. The others aren't.
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Care to elaborate with some actual examples of what this means ?
It will be necessary for you to understand the abstraction that everything that exists in our reality is real. You are probably under the typical delusion that what we create within our consciousness and imagination are NOT real. That is wrong from an objective perspective of the energy composites (energy/mass field manifestations) that comprise our reality. In other words, if it manifests within our reality, it is real. Normally, everything that manifests within our reality is constrained by the laws that control our reality. But the manifestations within our consciousness (what we call imagination) somehow violate those constraints with impunity. That is because our consciousness transcends the physical world that constrains everything else.
Typically our imaginings are not considered to be real, so I am not sanguine that you are amenable to understanding this abstraction or crediting it, so examples would be futile. But looking from the outside-in, the objective energy manifestations DO exist and are therefore real. In fact, we spend inordinate amounts of time enjoying them.
But my version is entirely supported by science - both known and plausible. The others aren't.
That the universe exists is indeed supported by science . That this universe is God is supported only by your semantical word games .
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It will be necessary for you to understand the abstraction that everything that exists in our reality is real. You are probably under the typical delusion that what we create within our consciousness and imagination are NOT real. That is wrong from an objective perspective of the energy composites (energy/mass field manifestations) that comprise our reality. In other words, if it manifests within our reality, it is real. Normally, everything that manifests within our reality is constrained by the laws that control our reality. But the manifestations within our consciousness (what we call imagination) somehow violate those constraints with impunity. That is because our consciousness transcends the physical world that constrains everything else.
Typically our imaginings are not considered to be real, so I am not sanguine that you are amenable to understanding this abstraction or crediting it, so examples would be futile. But looking from the outside-in, the objective energy manifestations DO exist and are therefore real. In fact, we spend inordinate amounts of time enjoying them.
In other words if I dreamed of making love to Jennifer Aniston I really did?
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