Religous debates and questions [2]

chris63 wrote:

And we never knew!!!!

My first instinct was that this wasn't a huge news item since condemnations of ISIS from Muslim clerics and leaders come pretty regularly, but it's a perennial complaint that Muslims are somehow "not doing enough" so I figured I'd go ahead and post this one due to the numbers involved.

70,000 clerics issue fatwa against terrorism, 15 lakh [1.5 million] Muslims support it - Times of India

Eldorion wrote:My first instinct was that this wasn't a huge news item since condemnations of ISIS from Muslim clerics and leaders come pretty regularly, but it's a perennial complaint that Muslims are somehow "not doing enough" so I figured I'd go ahead and post this one due to the numbers involved.

70,000 clerics issue fatwa against terrorism, 15 lakh [1.5 million] Muslims support it - Times of India

chris63 wrote:

eyeroll.gif

that is encouraging, but I suppose it depends on what the fatwa entails.

{{Also saw that the Kurds have all female fighting unit, tasked with fighting on the front lines against ISIS.}}


“Isis is afraid of girls,” according to the female Kurdish soldiers driving the terrorist group back in northern Syria.
The Women’s Protection Units, a faction of the YPG, were formed three years ago and have been hailed as a vital force re-taking Kobani with its estimated 10,000 volunteer troops.



One of its commanders, 21-year-old Telhelden, told CNN the still rare spectacle of female fighters can be an advantage against Isis.
“They think they're fighting in the name of Islam,” she said. “They believe if someone from Daesh [Isis] is killed by a girl, a Kurdish girl, they won't go to heaven. They're afraid of girls.”
Efelin, a 20-year-old fighter vowed that if Isis tried to come back, they “won’t leave a single one of them alive”.
Nujaan, 27, told him Isis’s “target is women”.
She said: “Look at Shingal [in Iraq] where they raped the women and massacred the men. It is a matter of honour to defend ourselves first, and then our families and lands.” - Independent

{{{Good on them! We dont hear nearly enough about this sort of thing in the West- not because its not happening but for some reason our news outlets prefer to sell us the doom and gloom scenario }}}

Hand to hand fighting almost never happens anymore. No reason not to have women in combat. And they clearly have a few bones to pick with IS.

{{Yes, they certainly make it clear its personal- the commander has a 'battlefield name' that translates as 'Revenge'. But even with the chances of capture being probably not huge, its still a chance, and they will know if they are how much worse it will be for them most likely than for a man captured. So hats off to them to having the bravery to stand up and be counted even knowing that.}}

I have nothing but respect for these girls. they are so brave.

'More than half of people in Scotland now have no religion, according to research.
Findings from the Scottish Social Attitudes survey show 52% of people say they are not religious'- BBC

{{{{ We keep this up we might become one of the few sane countries in the world!}}

'The proportion who say they belong to the Church of Scotland has fallen from 35% in 1999 to just 20%.
Other religious groups, including Roman Catholic (15%) and other Christian (11%) have remained steady.
The number of non-Christians has remained at 2%.'

{{But even those claiming to be religious still arent very it seems}}}

'Two-thirds of people living in Scotland who say they are religious "never or practically never" attend services'

{{{I call those folk the hedge-betters }}

Always curious with these polls how many of the people identifying as non-religious people maintain some level spiritual or quasi-religious beliefs, but simply aren't part of any organized faith. Not trying to judge people who do that, just think it'd be interesting to know. I wouldn't be surprised if those two-thirds of religious people who don't go to services (and presumably don't consider their religious beliefs to be very important or strongly held) have pretty similar beliefs as many who don't identify as religious. That said, surveys also show self-identification as atheist and agnostic is on the rise too.

There's a wide spectrum of sort of mystical beliefs people have, which you normally don't suspect until you get them in a very trusting and bonding sort of situation, usually with bucky boosting the trust levels. I've had my mind blown several times by folks I thought I knew; but no doubt they find my eminently sensible beliefs to be similarly kooky. I think organized religion will subsume about half these tendencies, and without organized religion you're never sure quite what you'll get.

The move away from organised religion, in my opinion, can only be a good thing. Being a theist is one thing, but 'knowing' that you are right and in many cases going as far as preaching it (often involving threats) is where things get silly.

I think everyone with their private mystical beliefs "knows" they are right, but it takes organized religion to prop them up and give them the gall to talk about it.

My own personal mystical belief is that I have none, but for some people that's just bizarre. But I don't get together with like minded people and take it parading down the street.

I believe in Gaia. its probably provable too. Thousands of years ago it was probably called Druidism. As for spiritual stuff, a lot of unexplained things do happen. I think there's some kind of karma out there where those who live by the gun die by it, etc. I don't believe in life after death, but I do think there could be spooks. its all very confusing. also I have had enough weird shit happen to know there are things out there we cant explain.

To clarify... weird things you can't explain and have ee no evidence to present to others to allow them to explain it. I tend to find most 'unexplainable' things are in fact explainable when the evidence is present.

Mrs Figg wrote:I believe in Gaia. its probably provable too. Thousands of years ago it was probably called Druidism. As for spiritual stuff, a lot of unexplained things do happen. I think there's some kind of karma out there where those who live by the gun die by it, etc. I don't believe in life after death, but I do think there could be spooks. its all very confusing. also I have had enough weird shit happen to know there are things out there we cant explain.

Im with Figgy on this, but I somehow think women are more prone to Wiccaism than men ? I trust the seasons, flora & fauna much more. You can read an awful lot by watching nature. The weather also. I dont half past give a shit if people think Im nuts, let them ! Ive been proved correct more than once. I go by herbal remedies & often make my own. I take out the muttly & bring home weeds etc that I know I can do things with. Finding my inner calm this way has helped me try to be a better person, I hope !

Lancebloke wrote:To clarify... weird things you can't explain and have ee no evidence to present to others to allow them to explain it. I tend to find most 'unexplainable' things are in fact explainable when the evidence is present.

unexplainable things are by definition an event which lacks logical scientific evidence, otherwise it would be fact. Some things are so bizarre, that they defy logic. like the widdershins side of Petty's kilt.

It took me a long time to understand that the very strong deja vu feeling is really your brain rescrambling past events with the present.

It became clearest to me when I was absolutely convinced that the former president of our hang gliding club had given the original art for a classic tshirt design to a young russian woman that I had brought to a party. It made no sense because she was only tangentially connected and that tshirt was a 20 year icon. For years I was convinced it happened even though it made no sense, and I kept remembering it because it just seemed so crazy I was amazed it had happened. I was trying to get it from her because I wanted to reprint it for the 40th anniversary, and she told me she never had it, what was I thinking? And he said he never gave it to her, what was I thinking? Turned out the event had happened in a dream, and I had eventually come to accept that crazy dream as rock hard reality. But I had kept rehearsing the myth until it became reality.

Our brain pieces things together: that's what it's good at. And it can sometime piece things together so fast it seems like a memory, when actually it's a rescrambling of memories to fit the present reality.

Figgy - yes, but that doesn't mean that lots of the things you have experienced/seen etc aren't explainable by science now or won't be in the future. It is just you didn't have the information available to explain and there was no study in place at the time of the random event (as you would expect there not to be) and therefore that thing never got explained.

But I agree with you on one point... science will never explain anything about that kilt.

ok try to explain this with logic.
One night I was driving home from a friends house and as per usual I started daydreaming and went on auto-pilot, and I suddenly knew that a black cat would be waiting for me when I got home. I got to my front gate and what do I find but a black cat waiting for me at my door. I had never seen it before and as soon as I opened the door it rushed into my house like a furry rocket. it then started to act very strangely, it made weird kind of on-heat movements that I have never seen a cat do before (and I have seen a lot of cats) it was so odd I pushed the cat out of the house and told it to go home. I never saw it again. I mean what the fuck was that all about?

The standard explanation, which may or may not be satisfying, is that you have these kinds of thoughts all the time; when by chance one comes true you remember it but forget all the others which did not.

I've seen lots of weird stuff too; but we tend to see patterns in randomness, and they often reflect what our mind is doing. That's what the ink blot test is all about.

Then again, my bent of mind is that I'll often filter out stuff that doesn't make sense, which means I may be missing a whole big picture of alternate reality that's just jumping up and down trying to get my attention!

I often wonder if our brains can pick up signals from their surroundings or other people, electric or otherwise mysterious vibrations, I always think remote viewing is quite fascinating.

{{{All comes down to the mystery of perception for me. The human brain is a tool designed to perceive- to turn energy patterns into electromagnetic pulses and then decode them into a solid sustained reality. Not one of us has ever seen what is outside or own bodies, even what we perceive as our bodies in all their intricate detail is determined by the brains ability to turn patterns of energy into a total visual, aural, tactile perceived universe- but I'd say from experience it can do a lot more than it ends up specialising in.

Studies show that in young children the brain is doing a hell of a lot more than it does as an adult, it lays down all sort so new networks, but then something odd happens, it starts to kill loads off, destroy entire connections- it refines, it focuses on a set few and disregards the rest. Lost forever.
Now that's internal- but what's happening externally to cause it?

I interpret that as the perception of the child is being narrowed and focused on the same range of perceptions as the people around them. Everyone a child meets during that stage is helping them, just by interacting with them, narrow down all that energy they can perceive and to interpret and refine their perception to fit the ever day perceptional range of modern humans. This helps us all, more or less see the same universe as each other out of all the possible ways the brain has of interpreting the information coming in.
But the brain is quite capable of perceiving in different ways even after the childhood culling ends.

In my youth, under the influence of magic mushrooms I once stood before a stereo 'listening' to Hawkinds Masters of the Universe, except I wasn't listening at all, the entire song was perceived as vibrating waves of colour which washed over me and through me, emanating from the stereo but still the same song as the colours and the vibrations corresponded to the musical sounds, just no sound, no music, it was a purely visual interpretation. I was perceiving sound as vibrating colours.

There is in fact a medical condition where this occurs- and it is demonstrative to me of three things- one the brain learns to do things like perceive sound as a noise rather take the same information in through the ears and interpret as colour say- its quite capable of doing so, but at some point it learns not to. And secondly it is possible as an a adult to perceive the universe in such means again, if your perception is altered enough-either naturally through trauma, illness ect or unnaturally through drugs of some sort. And lastly it also happens naturally when you go to sleep and dream every night.

The problem with using something like LSD or magic mushrooms for this is that there is no control, its chaotic, random and takes its own course like water finding its way down a hillside, and long term just as corrosive.

But in such states I have experienced telepathy, the ability to see perfectly long distances in the complete dark and the above perceiving sound as vibrating waves of colours.

All of these things are real in the sense that they are things which have happened to me, just as getting out of bed this morning was a thing that happened to me- on the basis of perception all things are equal.

And I have always thought, from a slightly more scientific perspective, that given we know tons of stuff exists but falls outside the range of human perception- infra-red- wifi- radio-waves, gravity-waves, and god knows what else, we are walking through an invisible soup all the time- and we only know the soup is there because they affected in some way things we could perceive.
It must follow therefore that if there is stuff we can't perceive, but which we can detect because it effects stuff we can see, there must also be a lot of stuff that we cant perceive which doesn't effect anything we can either- so we would have no way of knowing it does exist, even if it does. We would have no way of ever finding it.

That leaves a very large scope for possibilities in a universe.

The question is what is the range of human perception really? Is it just the one we use everyday? Or is that just one we have learned, a refined down, honed in perception, honed by both evolutionary factors such as the need to distinguish food from poison, threat from friend ect and immediate environmental factors, how those in the culture you are born into perceive- the end result is a very solid reality but only because its so narrowly focused.

Another weird one is lucid dreaming- I learned of this some three or four years before I managed to first achieve it- and the shock of doing so the first time woke me up it was then a further year and a half of trying before it began again- now I lucid dream fairly regularly.
From that experience its seems clear to me that during sleep, when we dream, our perception 'slips' it moves from its usual fixed spot of work as it were when we are awake and just drifts about randomly, the new energy it encounters we interpret into our dreams (the bulk of which is just generated by the brain from everyday worries, imagery and feelings).
When you lucid dream it seems to me what you are doing is focusing your perception like it would be were you are awake, whilst maintaining the natural drifting- this gives you the ability to still perceive the new energy encountered, but to think about it and act as near to rationally as is possible within that state as you would if you were really there and awake.

Or to look at it another way- when you are awake you interpret the energy that is around you as a total world. When you are doing lucid dreaming you bring that ability into the dream-state, and can apply it to any new energy you encounter and get an equally total world (from my experience 90& of stuff in dreams is generated imagery of the mind, phantoms of the awake psyche nothing more, but the other 10% is completely different and I would class as times when perception is encountering and interpreting new energy not usual to everyday perception, but still within the total human range- just like happens when under the influence of psychedelics).

So basically I am arguing that there's almost certainly more stuff in the universe that we are incapable of perceiving than stuff we can, and that humans are basically a brain which interprets energy patterns into solid realities. But it learns which bits of energy to interpret by refining downwards from lots of possibilities to a few specialised ones. We then accept this interpretation of what is really out there utterly because it seems complete and total to us, and we forget that its only a tuning in on parts of what's out there evolution and culture has deemed useful to us in surviving thus far, and not actually the total range of human possibility when it comes to how we can interpret the universe, and how much of it we are capable of perceiving and turning into total worlds.}}}