GODsturBATION: How we experience the Born Again tingly tingly... (page 2)

poppers

Absolutely brilliant, Terry.

Born again orgasm, so thats why those people have a glassy eyed grin on their faces.

LOL! How about calling it something like bornagasm

BurnTheShips

Terry, that's a rather offensive title for people that believe, don't you think? You're better than that.

BTS

PS: OK I read the whole post, I take it back a little bit.

I said I meant all this respectfully and I do.

Deputy Dog

Terry

You could apply your theory to almost any activity, couldn't you? Fishing, hunting, singing, dancing... I think you are getting the same tingly relief when you write stuff like this.

I can't speak for everyone, but, my faith isn't based on feeling.

BurnTheShips

No matter what we organize as fact in our frontal lobes, the limbic area is saturated with the God-category which brings satisfaction, pleasure, awe, security, emotional grandeur and the panacea of the moment.

All you are saying is that we are mentally wired to believe in God.

I agree.

BTS

Terry

You could apply your theory to almost any activity, couldn't you? Fishing, hunting, singing, dancing..

Well, not all at the same time!!

All you are saying is that we are mentally wired to believe in God.

I say that our parents WIRE us and we can't get rid of the "meme" once we are wired.

How about calling it something like bornagasm

Yeah, that's good. I like that.

So basicaly Terry, you are saying that religion is a wank!

I think that is how it is used, yes.

BurnTheShips

I say that our parents WIRE us and we can't get rid of the "meme" once we are wired.

That holds no water. Belief in higher powers is universal, and has always and everywhere existed in human history. Every culture. Every time. Every place.

BTS

Terry

I say that our parents WIRE us and we can't get rid of the "meme" once we are wired.

That holds no water. Belief in higher powers is universal, and has always and everywhere existed in human history. Every culture. Every time. Every place.

Naturally you are born with belief in a "higher" power because you are born helpless and ignorant! Everybody is higher.

Your parents and community and folklore and rituals fill in the blanks. Your map of the world is always local. The God-map is meta-local.

When an ancient Greek spoke about "God" he wasn't talking about the same thing at all that an Israelite would hold to be true.

A Hindu has a completely different "map" of his idea of "god" than a Chinese buddhist or a Presbyterian.

You can't lump all the "God" thoughts into the same category. The "Godness" of God is a carry over from infancy and that infantile longing to be cared for, cuddled, directed and filled with security.

My Mom and Grandmother taught me their map of "god" and it was my map until I met the JW friend who revised that map into the JEHOVAH mock-up.

Mainstream christians jabber constantly about "the Lord" or "Jesus" exactly the way Jehovah's Witnesses do about "Jehovah" and each clearly means something antithetical to the other.

I think you are being confused by the singularity of the term "god" shared by everybody around the world through all ages and times.

A primitive aborigine might hew firewood into an idol and worship it as "god". That takes far more faith than sitting in a cathedral with stained glass windows and organ music and praising "the Lord." Yet, the only similarity actually is the desire for comfort from a projected outside source.

Infantilism is infantilism is belief in a higher power.

BurnTheShips

Naturally you are born with belief in a "higher" power because you are born helpless and ignorant! Everybody is higher.

This does not compute.

We are as wired for belief in higher powers as we are for language. We are wired from the very moment we become complete individuals.

It is a universal human constant.

It is only recently that fundamentalist naturalism has conjured up an alternative faith based system. I say that it is an impoverishment of the human spirit.

I am not merely a collection of molecules. I am a child of the Greatest and Best.

My Mom and Grandmother taught me their map of "god" and it was my map until I met the JW friend who revised that map into the JEHOVAH mock-up.

I think you are being confused by the singularity of the term "god" shared by everybody around the world through all ages and times.

You received a different map from a Buddhist, or a Muslim, or a Jew.

Your symbolic language map is different as well.

Your mother and grandmother taught you English.

We all speak different languages. But we all have language. Mine taught me Spanish.

But both you and I learned to map things and ideas to sounds. It so happens that I know more than one map, due to how and where I was born.

There are spiritual-religious symbols, and motifs, that are universal in scope. We interpret them differently, because we use different words.

Take twins, isolate them from spoken language from birth, and they will invent their own new language. They will be the only humans in the world that speak it. They made their own map. This has happened. It is documented. Even the deaf.

We have language, to be connected to each other. We have spirituality, to be connected to the Source.

Symbolic language is part of being human. Spiritual belief is no different. An isolate from birth will experience the numena, and will eventually deal with it cognitively in some way.

He will invent his own spiritual language.

Religion is merely a shared spiritual language.

Infantilism is infantilism is belief in a higher power.

What you call infantilism is at the very core of what it means to be a true human being. And besides, infants represent vast, pure, raw potential.

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

Allow me to add, no one is born atheist just as no one is born mute--unless their cognitive faculties are in some way damaged.

Atheism is a learned behavior, and a poor, maladaptive one at that.

BTS

Terry

There are spiritual-religious symbols, and motifs, that are universal in scope. We interpret them differently, because we use different words.

Should I assume you read Carl Jung?

A.Fenderson

Awesome OP, Terry. Some of your ideas there remind me of concepts from the General Semantics of Korzybski--but edgier. :-)

Allow me to add, no one is born atheist just as no one is born mute--unless their cognitive faculties are in some way damaged.
Atheism is a learned behavior, and a poor, maladaptive one at that.

No one is born atheist in exactly the same manner that no one is born agnomist--the concept of god(s) or gnomes has to be introduced consciously/verbally before one can consider and then reject the idea, at least if we're using the commonly-accepted definition of an atheist (and by extension agnomist). Everyone, however, can be said to exhibit congenital nontheism, having neither belief (nor indeed concept) of god(s) at the moment of birth. Also, technically, everyone who has ever been born can simultaneously be argued to fit the description of agnostic, which is to say they have no evidence of the existence of God at the moment of birth. I would further aruge that everyone dies an agnostic for the exact same reason, but YMMV.

So atheism is admittedly not an innate human trait, but neither is theism--you may be born with predispositions towards beliefs (which, importantly, is absolutely no measure of the validity of those beliefs), but not beliefs themselves. How, though, is atheism "maladaptive?"

GODsturBATION: How we experience the Born Again tingly tingly...

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