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Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions | Wired Science | Wired.com
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Add Sticky Notethe capacity for religious thought may have bootstrapped a primitive human brain into its current, socially sophisticated form.
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The Immanent Frame » Religion for radicals: an interview with Terry Eagleton
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NS: Back to issues of faith and reason—your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magesteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.
TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position. What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous. They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason. Then theologians can say anything they like. They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument. They’re now released from the tenets of science. Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism. But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason. The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason. Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself. But that’s a false way of arguing. Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.
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It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid. That betrays what’s wrong with this particular kind of new atheism: it casts the arguments largely in intellectual and propositional terms and doesn’t see that a great deal else is involved here.
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frank schaeffer
Frank Shaeffer
Have Frank Schaeffer Speak to Your Group
Frank's recent topics include:
* How the New Atheists Poison Atheism (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and the other "fundamentalist" atheists.)
* Faith in God For People Who Don't Like Religion Or Atheism
* Only Thing Evangelicals Will Never Forgive Is Not Hating The “Other”
* Writing: Why, How, When--The Nuts and Bolts Of Actual Writing As A Successful Career
* Confessions Of A Former Fundamentalist
* The Case For Spirituality in the Age Of Doubt -- Learning to Embrace Paradox -
Correlation between Pineal Activation and Religious Meditation Observed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging : Nature Precedings
I marshall a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting the pineal produces DMT, a powerful hallucinogen, during meditation. It’s called DMT. The Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2001).
Rick Strassman MD
University of New Mexico School of Medicine -
Concept of 'hypercosmic God' wins Templeton Prize - opinion - 16 March 2009 - New Scientist
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"There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments."
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So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.
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The Source of Paul's Gospel
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The gospel which apostles like Paul preach is likewise
never said to have had its source in Jesus or his ministry. Paul constantly
refers to the “gospel of God” (Romans 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 2:2); 1 Peter
4:17 condemns those “who refuse to obey the gospel of God.” Occasionally,
Christ is the object of the gospel (1 Thessalonians 3:2), but its
source is consistently God himself, and it comes to the minds of apostles
like Paul through the channel of God’s Spirit. -
And since neither Paul himself, nor anyone
on his behalf down to the present day, has ever claimed that his “seeing”
of the Christ was anything but a vision of a spiritual figure, this has
to imply that Paul regards the other appearances as being in the same category.
In other words, they were all revelatory experiences; none were thought
of as encounters with a bodily-risen Jesus of Nazareth. - 4 more annotations...
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