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Old September 24th, 2017 #21
Emily Henderson
Intellijintly Dezined
 
Join Date: Jul 2016
Location: Pre-Rapture, USA ⚛️
Posts: 3,871
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Smithwick View Post
I guess I've observed the Logospathos then. You're very intelligent (I didn't know of that distinction).
I didn't mean to combine the words---like here, I put a hyphen between them to make two different points, but I put only one hyphen and it looks like I meant to make a special word that doesn't exist, a-la George Dubya.

What I meant to say was Logos=logic, Ethos=ethics, Pathos=emotion.

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Smithwick View Post
To put it plainly, there's something panentheist about this reality, as opposed to strictly pantheist/atheistic (although that might just be semantics in terms of the difference between panentheist and pantheist). In other words, there's something reactive about the mind and nature that can't be explained by mere coincidence (IMO).
I reject panentheism, as there is no evidence for it. I'll touch on what you said in your next paragraph re your reason for embracing it, but why I reject:

It is, as Geisler said, a 'mutual admiration society' for the 'god/universe' setup. It goes back to 1300 BCE, the idea of 'Divine Power' having a hand in all that humans do, and that we have an ultimate 'destiny'.

Multiverse theory-which we have tangible evidence for, even if some reject it-blows that concept out of the water. There is more evidence against organization and destiny than for it. And it replaced the flawed steady-state theory of Hoyle and Gold (the belief that there is no beginning or end).

We know that time began at the moment of singularity, and it only happened once. This Universe is 13.8 billion years old. All of this is very tangible at this point in human history, which is amazing.

No wonder Pope Paul II told the Scientists to stop trying to establish the moment of creation....he did so right after Hawking released one of his papers on the topic.

Richard Feynman actually developed the theory that multiple universes are created out of nothing, Hawking built upon it.

The right circumstances happened this time around for human life--is that not special and amazing enough? Why insert a god you can't ever put your finger on into the mix? There is actually a reason people do this, which I'll touch on.

Panentheism is one of the ways they do it. In Panentheism, god is always 'growing' but never achieves anything. So you have your 'Supreme Being' who exists in everything, and everything in it/him/her.

Yet who is it--an intangible thing you can't make heads or tails of.

It is Christianity-lite, as it provides that all-needed comfort of believing you have a special destiny, ordained by something intangible outside yourself and within yourself..rather than the idea that there is no such being.

To touch on the 'reactive mind'--that is pseudo-science. What we actually have is a subconscious mind, and it is always recording and affecting us. But there is no such thing as L. Ron Hubbard's 'reactive mind'. What he did was borrow things from reality and turn it into cult crud.

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Smithwick View Post
From my experiences, there's "something", perhaps that should be spelled with a capital 'S', that can do things, like make a thud sound in perfect tandem/synchronicity (as Dr Jung once described) with my thought(s) (so that I hopefully internalize a value or concept (I've eventually noticed)). Now, I don't have any evidence of this thing / phenomenon. A camcorder going wouldn't necessarily help because you couldn't read my mind when the subtle, seemingly insignificant and boring event happens (although, if there were a verbal exchange with someone (the way Jung and Freud once noticed, when there were a couple of knocks behind Jung's bookcase when they were discussing ideas about the paranormal and "catalytic exteriorization phenomena"), then that might be considered a type of evidence worthy of documentation). Tom Campbell's 'My Big TOE' is a type of update on this theory.
John: what you are describing ties into the fallacy of Panentheism, Christ Insanity, and the 'reactive mind' all rolled into one.

You could call it many things, but it's a by-product of evolution. Our brains haven't quite caught up. Dr. Shermer calls it 'Agenticity'--where we believe things that happen are that way due to some 'outside agent' that made it so. It is a protective mechanism left over from our more primitive days.

https://michaelshermer.com/2009/06/agenticity/

Excerpt:
"..Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real. .."

Our brains are hard wired to lean toward making 'type I' errors, leading people to make erroneous connections all the time.

And I do this, too. We all do. Not opening an umbrella in the house and giving power to fortune cookie advice are two good examples.

We are self-aware animals who are amazing yet flawed in our development, because this whole 'life' thing is imperfect.
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