'higher powers': 2020-07-29 21:31:14 |
│ [20] │MASTER│ Rikku │ I love my wife │ • apex │
Level 61
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I have weak and very wavering faith (not sure could even use that term) in the idea of a Christian God. But whenever I become so conflicted as to decry it to myself I consider all the supernatural stories I have heard from people. And this once again reaffirms my knowlage in there being powers higher than humans and thus I default back to a limited faith in Christian God. I almost wish I had unwavering faith in anything even if it was wrong because uncertainty in this sort of thing is quite tiresome.
I'm aware that the presence of supernatural actions doesn't validity the Christian base but as it is most familiar to me it does tent to draw me back towards it.
Anyway back to what I really wanted to talk about. 'supernatural' occurances. While I understand many can be taken away as lies, unexplained lapses in the brain, chance etc some I feel can't. When people you know who have no history of lying earnestly tell you personal experiences it is hard to discredit it. There is one particular unsettling account but honestly makes me uncomftable talking about as if it it could some how invoke its wickedness
Even though I know in crime witness statements aren't worth much and writing it down makes me sound like a paranoid fool. And it's so far away from the rationalistic world of now.
Anyway what are your thoughts on this and the supernatural?
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'higher powers': 2020-07-30 02:18:26 |
Pepe the Great
Level 58
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXtLL1asy_QI don't have time to write much now, but watch this. It's basically an extended version of his original autobiography. The world right now definitely isn't rational, just look at what's going on.
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'higher powers': 2020-07-30 04:26:57 |
berdan131
Level 59
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*phone ringing*
Hello, inquisition? Yes, we've got a heretic. Cure him with what? Molten iron, ok, noted. Are you sure that will cure him though? All right, all right, I will try my best.
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'higher powers': 2020-07-30 09:20:57 |
Edouard
Level 56
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My understanding is that as humans our cognitive abilities are deeply insufficient to perceive the world around us. Humans are simply not omniscient. Therefore, the various ways we perceive the world would create different sets of "realities", each set unique to a person. I'd say the concept of rationality and reality is born out of group consensus. When things beyond what we could perceive with our rationality happens, we would label them as "supernatural".
Take this as an example: Imagine a romote island isolated for millenias. Its native popultion have always been red-green colorblind since their ancestors' arrival. These people cannot tell a ripe fruit apart from a green one, so they always take a bite to determine ripeness. Now, a group of travelers arrive at the island and demonstrate their divine ability to see beyond the mortal world by determining ripeness without even touching the fruits.
Put yourselves in their position. Now, would you call the travelers' ability "supernatural"? Many would, and doing that isn't lying since you are telling the truth, albeit it's your version of the truth. Since all of you and your ancestors are colorblind, there is no such things as red and green, and colorblindness is never heard of. Earth itself is like an island in the vast ocean and we are its inhabitants. The rather unpleasant fact is that we will never be able to know the world as it is, so I'd consider "supernatural" as a moot concept. They are just unexplained things that cause fear and worship.
This applies to religion as well. A believer of G(g)od(s) sees a world full of divine creations and interventions, while an atheist sees the world as a natural one. We just have to accept that there will never be a "true" truth-- there will be truths, always.
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'higher powers': 2020-07-30 19:44:09 |
goodgame
Level 57
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I'm pretty sure what he meant is that what we consider to be true and what we consider supernatural is 100% dependent on our perspective--what we do and don't know, out experiences in life, what we can and can't detect (like in his example, colour), and such. On top of that, due to our very limited cognitive abilities and even more limited sensual abilities, it is impossible for any or all of us to know everything that must be known in order to understand the universe and all in it. What we call supernatural is what we can't explain with our own knowledge and abilities.
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'higher powers': 2020-07-31 08:23:36 |
Edouard
Level 56
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Well, I don't REJECT the possibility that the world(the objective world, not the subjective one, if such a world exists) works in a single way, the "right" way. I did try to point out that the world we perceive needs to be PERCEIVED in order to be felt by us, and there will be different interpretations, resulting in different "realities". Note that "realities" as previously mentioned are only real in their respective individuals' system of thinking, which immediately suggests that they are not ABSOLUTE, contrary to the belief in an absolute truth, which is, as you have pointed out, a meta-narrative.
My counter argument is more like accepting the paradox rather than rufuting it, because I don't think that's possible.
By being part of the human species, I fully accept my limitations as a human. So my beliefs are as subjective as other people's, not more true nor more untrue. Of course, I believe in my beliefs, but I do not treat them as the universal truth, so that does not amount to meta-narratives. On the other hand, that might result in something like this: "I believe in my beliefs." "But why do you belive in your beliefs?" A. "Because of human subjectivity." "But then why do you believe in anything? Isn't that illogical?" B. " Because I think they are true." "But why do you think they are true?" C..... "Alright I try to find intrinsic meaning when there's none"
Now that amounts to a paradox, but I may just embrace the paradox and count it as an intrinsic part of one's life. Someone who tries to seek the universal truth while acknowledging human subjectivity would probably realise the absurdity of it, so I'd consider it as an inevitable paradox. So yes I consider that I believe in absurdism, and the fun part is that I don't even need to worry about whether my interpretation of absurdism is correct.
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'higher powers': 2020-08-02 22:59:02 |
│ [20] │MASTER│ Rikku │ I love my wife │ • apex │
Level 61
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Until (if it does) science explains them people are going to me mystified and perturbed by many 'supernatural' events. Expecially if the happen to oneself which thankful never has. And I do get that the brain is so little understood and many things could be complex malfunctions.
The main one that unsettled me was hearing that shortly before my aunt died (a day or possible two). She dreamed that she would die and the face of the local undertaker who she had never met on account of them moving recently. Anyway then she died in a household electrocution accident one day after her 20th birthday. And the undertaker was as she described. (BTW village rural England in the 1973~ for context)
Now of course it could be explained as a fictitious tale or an malicious succide but I don't believe those to be the case. Perhaps that is hard-headed foolishness, I wouldn't know
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'higher powers': 2020-08-03 22:14:11 |
l4v.r0v
Level 42
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^ I also find it really odd that Rikku is lumping Christianity with unexplained premonitions and generic tales of the supernatural. Pretty sure at least some of that would fall under occult practices.
Rikku's reasoning seems to be an argument from ignorance, which doesn't do justice to either reason or Christianity. There are things that we can't explain, therefore the Christian God likely exists. I just don't see the connection.
Rikku, have you ever been on holiday and met someone from your hometown? E.g., you're in a foreign country and run into someone who lives just a few houses over from you back home. What are the odds of that, right? Running into that person, at that place, at that time, so far from home?
But what are the odds of running into someone you know somewhere far away? Over the course of a lifetime, pretty high. Flip a coin enough times and you'll have sequences where it lands on heads 100 times in a row even though the odds of 100 coin flips in a row all landing on heads are hardly distinguishable from zero. This is called the birthday paradox: the odds of you and a specific person having the same birthday are low, but the odds of you and someone else in your life (or in a medium-sized room with you) having the same birthday are pretty high, and the odds of 2 people in a room of 30 having the same birthday are actually about 70%.
Even in a metaphysically naturalistic world, chance still plays a role. Spooky coincidences will individually be unlikely, but the odds of something extremely unlikely happening during the course of your lifetime are rather high- as long as you're not specific about what that spooky coincidence is. The odds of something like your aunt describing some detail of her own death are pretty high. The reason we struggle with this is because we paint a bullseye around the spooky thing that happened and focus on that specific outcome, but that's like asking "what's the odds of these 6 coin flips landing on exactly HTTHHT?!" or "what're the odds that I was born on the 63rd anniversary of this one specific skirmish during the Korean War?!"
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'higher powers': 2020-08-03 23:41:18 |
goodgame
Level 57
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Is it just me, or is "paradox" an overused word?
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'higher powers': 2020-08-04 00:10:31 |
The Voynich Manuscript
Level 56
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Paradox paradox paradox, paradox paradox, paradox paradox. Paradox paradox paradox.
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'higher powers': 2020-08-04 04:18:20 |
LND
Level 60
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^ I also find it really odd that Rikku is lumping Christianity with unexplained premonitions and generic tales of the supernatural. Pretty sure at least some of that would fall under occult practices. I just want to quickly say that I don't think Rikku is saying that all these supernatural experiences are from the Christian God; I think what he means is that he cannot reject the idea of a god, because supernatural things happen that would not occur if there was no god. Because he therefore concludes that God exists, he then chooses the Christian God. So yes, I agree that some of the things Rikku described are likely of an occult nature (i.e. from Satan not God), but I don't think he was saying they weren't.
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'higher powers': 2020-08-06 19:51:33 |
│ [20] │MASTER│ Rikku │ I love my wife │ • apex │
Level 61
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^ yah basically LND Rikku's reasoning seems to be an argument from ignorance (+cognitive dissidence prolly) I agree was thinking similar when making the OP. Interesting responses anyone has an recommended further reading material
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