Atheist on LSD/DMT/Psychedelics

"The human mind is extremely susseptible to hallucination."
- Richard Dawkins

 

You were being called on shit-talking. I neither know nor care whether you're right or wrong about the nature/existence of the soul. All I know is that you have no way of knowing, and that your insistence that such knowledge is glaringly obvious is a mark of the arrogance that characterises pretty much everything you post.

The soul should be the subject of inquiry, but just making brash statements about how it definitely definitely is/isn't makes you look every bit as foolish as Leviticus or Marshall Applewhite.

 

And not a single comment about my 4 other paragraphs explaining my point of view!

hmmm.... and who's all about the shit talking?

 

I was always agnostic thinking, I'll know when I die. Then I ate all sorts of chemicals. Now I'm an avid believer in infinity, though of course, never a 100% believer rationally. In simple, Infinity is everything and nothing, existing at all points and no points at the same point, all times and at no time at the same time. Infinity as a literal term.

This is how I describe God. This is how I believe all truly spiritual people experience God. The difference is, most people try and humanize all aspects of their spirituality because they are egocentric as human beings. He made us in his image, we go to heaven as spirits just the same as our human bodies and live there for all eternity in the same manner we did on earth. So on and so forth.

I'm very anti-religion, but very spiritual. I'm not very new age, don't believe much in ghosts or crystals or fucking ESP or whatever, but I also don't disbelieve.

I find it hard to like Athiests in the end. They end up being just as close minded and hypocritical as people of major religions.

What makes someone so egotistical that they think they KNOW anything? I'm an atiest, a follower of logic and science, and since MY logic and science can not PROVE this then it is ABSOLUTELY false. Thats egotistical and hypocritical in the same manner that fundamentalists say MY FAITH and BIBLE say THIS is the ONLY WAY, the ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

We're so small and insignificant, we can't even leave this planet in a universe, one universe, filled with billions of other galaxies each filled with billions of stars and quite a lot of planets. By the looks of what we do know we are very young, a very young race of beings.

What makes anyone think that the science we have now could even come close to explaining any of our unknowns. If souls exist, then someday, if we exist long enough, I'm sure we'll understand the science behind them, the science behind everything.

NOT A SINGLE HUMAN ON THIS PLANET has the ability to truly know whether or not there is more after we die, whether or not there is a soul, and so on. These are unknown questions for a reason, because we lack the intelligence and knowledge right now to truly explain them.

To people who say that psychedelics are just "In your mind, hallucinations" and whatever. I'm not here to tell you they are or aren't, just think about this. We are humans, we are limited as such. From what little we know and understand about the universe we do understand there are frequencies in light and sound that we can not experience because of the limitations of our human eyes and ears. How can anyone say for sure that there isn't more then just these limitations. In fact, logically, one must almost assume there would be a HUGE ALMOST INFINITE SPECTRUM OF EXPERIENCES that we as humans can not experience normally. Who's to say psychedelics don't enable us to experience things beyond our human limitations.

Athiests need to calm the fuck down and realize not everyone who believes in something they can't prove is a fucking Christian fundamentalist who wants to force their ideas on everyone. They also need to stop being so fucking condescending and egotistical, as if they understand any more of anything then the rest of us.

Those are my two cents.

 

I don't know any better than the rest of you whether or not there's a soul, or even what the hell it is. I tend to go along with Stoner Bill that the soul is "a concept more than an actual aspect of the universe we live in. IT is a very meaningful concept that refers to a number of things, but it is still just a referential, abstract notion that can not be understood in exactness but in generality." Well put! I guess a lot of people think of something like Casper inhabiting our bodies and going off to another place when we die. I don't deny that could be the case. I just don't have faith that it is. To me, the concept of soul is bound up with consciousness, which I think of as a product of brain activity. (Atheist Sam Harris, argues that we have no basis for making this assumption, which I guess makes me more of a materialist than he is.) A few posts back, Relaxx said (and this is rare) something I agree with: "a biological condition that occurs when billions of brain cells work in harmony to create a state more significant than their sum total. A fragile state called self-consciousness..." The fact that we have this conscious self-awareness is a phenomenon that some evolutionists have struggled with. What is its evolutionary advantage? Couldn't we be just as efficient as intelligent zombies, making the calculations necessary for survival but not having the inner life we associate with conscious self-awareness. Is this just an epiphenomenon, another of those happy accidental by-products of natural selection? Or is evolutionary biologist Ken Miller correct in saying that the universe is finely tuned to make it likely that a creature with this property would emerge by natural selection, with a propensity for an inner life which can find meaning in such concepts as "soul" and "God"?

Of course, our whole concept of brains and souls could be skewed by faulty perceptions. Eminent British astonomer Sir Martin Rees takes seriously the premise of The Matrix that "physical reality" is a virtual reality simulation matrix, so that "we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself." Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, agrees that there's a "significant probability" that we're simulated beings in a fake world in a computer built by an advanced being (or beings)--which would explain a lot. The "soul" is simply a computer generated self-reflexive set of electrical impulses; according to physicist Frank Tipler, it has the potential to move on to cyberheaven or cyberhell, as the interactive program determines, while the geeks inherit the earth. Which brings us back to the subject of psychedelic drugs.

 

Yes the fact that these experiences can be induced in the brain by administering certain molecules, and even by exposure to certain patterns of electromagnetism is a fairly strong indicator these are perceptual artefacts created within the brain, not external to it. As an atheist who has taken hallucinogens I know that these experiences seem incredibly real at the time, but placed in context, their hallucinatory and unreal nature is fairly obvious. It would be foolhardy to believe such experiences when they are so highly subjective and do not stand up to proper scrutiny under controlled laboratory conditions. They are also well explained by an understanding of our innate psychological and perceptual mechanisms.

Our perceptual system is highly unreliable, highly prone to cognitive mistakes and illusions. It doesn't take much for us to make basic perceptual errors even when we're not on drugs or in strange situations. Drugs just highlight the subjectivity and error-prone nature of our perceptions. This is why personal experience is not good evidence.

Good thread

 

Like I said in another thread:

Atheism is often accused as a faith in disbelief but I do not see it that way. In the scientific method, if experiments fail to produce predictable results, if absolutely no logical explanation can be sustained, if all evidence brought forth can be debunked, then the answer is very clear! And the answer in this case of God is very clear. He is a product of mans imagination and nothing more.

Of course atheist point of view is hard to like, most people would rather hold convictions of ignorance based on imaginary fairytales and lies that their "self" is immortal. And those people ought to stay far away from artiest forums to avoid getting all upset and bothered.

If your in the pursuit of denial and bliss then spirituality and religion is the way to go. I am however more interested in truth, real truth, not the bullshit fantasy truth religious pamphlets that shows up at my door every month. My truth is that I have acquired enough evidence to personally know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God and spirituality are products of mans imagination and conditioned into the common mind through millions of years of evolution.

As it stands right now I'm the only person in this tread that has a 100% of ever knowing the truth, because I know and accept it now. If by some supernaturally minuscule chance I am completely wrong, I will find out eventually, but that will never happen because I'm right. The rest of you, if you are wrong, you have lived your whole life oblivious to the truth and will never know because after your life on earth, YOU are gone! If I knew how to get my point across without sounding arrogant, I would but that's just how it is. I fail to see where I am closed minded about any of this.

 

relaxxx, you sound arrogant because you do not *appear* to be admitting of the possibility of being wrong. In practical terms I am just about as strong an atheist as you, but it needs to be made clear that this position is an evidence based one, such that if proper evidence for the existence of gods were to be forthcoming, we would become believers in an instant, because we accept what can be proven using the scientific method.

The chance of such evidence coming to light is so vanishingly unlikely that in practical terms it can be written off, but the caveat still needs to be there. It's easy to forget that many people simply don't understand that scientific investigation includes this doubt and scepticism and openness to contrary evidence by design. Consequently we need to clearly articulate that this doubt, this openness to possibility is there, even if in some cases we may give it a less than 0.1% probability, and are for all practical purposes, certain...

This is really just an issue of communicating an understanding of the scientific method to people who simply don't know what it is.

 

And that's exactly the problem!

 

There is such thing as 'weak' atheists and 'strong' atheists.
strong atheists are the people you're talking about. Those are the people say there is ABSOLUTELY NO GOD. and they know that for sure. I find that ignorant, yes.

Weak atheists just simply don't believe in a god, gods, or dieties. I'm a weak atheist, because here just simply isn't any evidence supporting the fact that there is one. Science has proven many things that christsianity believes, such as the earth is 6,000 years old. It's something humans created. That's all religion is. At least to me. Like that quote I said earlier, humans DEFINATLEY are susseptible to hallucination. and I said in another post, as an example, the psychological disorder where you think you have a medical problem [such as a brain tumor] you actually get the brain tumor. I still forget the name of that. X) But it can be the same thing with gods. people believe in it so much, they feel like it's actually there.

And I don't say that my beliefs are the absolute truth. I just believe in it, I don't try to shove it other people's faces. So I'm not saying its the absolute truth, nor am I being egotistical.

 

Wah wah. Ever wonder if maybe you're not meant to be the centre of attention all the time?

 

Have fun with that point of view. You might as well be a fundamentalist Christian. Thats one of the most arrogant things I've ever heard an athiest say, be proud of yourself.

I'm not clinging onto my humanity. I'm not believing in an eternal human soul that will contain my notion of self after I die. In fact, I believe thats a very egotistical HUMAN viewpoint. Energy is never destroyed, so therefore, even if I do not continue on as a human, I will still have an afterlife of some sort because the energy which makes me me will no doubt live on in some other form. I don't know what that means, though I'm sure I wont have anything to think about the matter once I get there because I'm pretty sure there wont be a me to think about anything anymore anyways.

Look, my argument still stands. What makes you think that 100, 200, 300, 400, or 10,000 years down the line our understanding of this universe uncovers something that you think now is impossible because of our limited knowledge and intelligence.

I don't even believe in God persay, I believe in infinity. I believe that time is infinite, and that even if our universe is not infinite, there are an infinite amount of universes. If those two things are true, then everything is possible, everything. There would be an infinite amount of infinitely similar universes to our own, with only tiny small minute details you and I could never notice. As well as an infinite amount of infinitely similar universes to our own, with only one giant blaring difference. Or a few, or a lot, or completely different. Infinity is infinite, no limits, no boundaries, no points, no nothing. Infinity is everything and absolutely nothing. So maybe death is the nothing side, and Atheists have something right? That still doesn't mean there isn't more to existence then what humans can perceive. In fact, who the FUCK IS ANYONE TO SAY THAT THE ONLY THING TO EXISTENCE IS WHAT HUMANS CAN PERCEIVE? That's the same kind of egotistical human thinking that leads to my self will live on forever. Like I said before, other animals can perceive more or less then us, or simply differently then us, what makes any of you think that that kind of phenomena stops there, in a universe thats so mindbogglingly giant, what makes anyone thing there isn't some other completely different form of existing or existence that we as human beings aren't aware of or aloud to access?

The knowledge we don't have, is so much more GIANT then the knowledge we do have, it's crazy that you would base any idea about anything unknown on what we currently know. And any idea about any unknown would then be a complete hypothesis, and thats fine.

I'm only asking you think about things LOGICALLY, and not adhere to ANY belief even NON belief because it's illogical to adhere to anything when what we know about EVERYTHING is so limited.

 

relaxxx has shown itself willing to just make up whatever he wants about his "opponents" on this forum. It's pretty much the textbook example of a "dumb atheist", angry at religion rather than in love with reason.

 

Okie, you say my failing to see is the problem. Well I say the real problem is you refuse to even look!!

Hoatzin, I don't know what button I pushed to make you loose your sanity but I hope you can find the off switch someday.

Lunatox, I never said I knew the truth about the entire universe and its source of energy. I'm talking about the truth of God spirits, supernatural consciousness and eternal consciousness. Sorry that your out of place objections are completely irrelevant and misguided. Next time you post you might want to make sure you know or remember what is being currently discussed.

 

Are there any smart Atheists in here??

 

I think the smart way is to be Agnostic. Socrates was right.

 

Your probably right. However I tend not to enjoy being a fence sitter.

 

Id say the smart way is to be indifferent :cheers2:
Life is beautiful with or without our opinions.

 

To me, that IS part of the universe and it's source of energy. Anything supernatural is only supernatural because it is unexplainable. Therefore, what one might find supernatural now, might turn out to be completely natural later when we find a way to explain it through science and understand completely how it works. Think about the history of humanity so far, before we understood the sun, we thought it was a God. How do you know that what people are experiencing and describing as God isn't some explainable natural occurrence in our universe that we can not comprehend right now? Just because it's explainable later doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't God.

I'm not for any major religion, and I don't like the way most people describe any sort of God because they tend to ALWAYS put a human spin on it because they are looking at things with a limited human viewpoint, unable to accept that the universe does NOT revolve around us.

As far as super conscious beings, states of super consciousness, planes and realms of different existence, again my argument is legitimate. What makes you think that these things and places are just BEYOND what we can experience as human beings while living here and now. What makes you think that we can't create some sort of advanced technology that would enable us to traverse those planes in the same manner we could possibly create a time machine, or a machine that allows us to hop into parallel dimensions, or anything else of the sort.

Certainly you don't think that time travel is as IMPOSSIBLE as say traveling either physically or NOT to a different realm of existence and communicating with super conscious beings that only exist in that realm. I think that's just because you get caught up in the way people throw this mystical magical bullshit over all spiritual and new age shit. If it exists, it's explainable.

We don't even FULLY COMPREHEND HOW OUR BRAINS WORK. We're almost there, but not quite. And even then, until we understand just how micro the micro world is, there could be stuff inside our brains and bodies and entire world we can't even SEE because of our limited technology that changes certain ways we think about HOW and WHY things work. How do you know that the "force" or "infinite consciousness" doesn't exist in some super micro manner?

I'm sure people in the distant past thought a lot of what we understand now about science couldn't possibly be true because of the limited knowledge they had then. What the fuck makes you or any other scientist so fucking sure that down the line we'll not uncover some sort of door inside our brains that grants us access to alternate consciousness.

You are limiting yourself because you are an EGOTISTICAL human. You have no idea how much you DO NOT KNOW. You don't know whats smaller then the smallest thing we've been able to perceive, you don't know whats bigger then the biggest thing we've been able to perceive. You don't know whats beyond our universe, you don't even know about every single thing IN our universe.

If you fail to see how anything that we are talking about could exist in any of those places, any of the corners of our concrete reality that we still don't know ANYTHING about, then you're not thinking LOGICALLY at all.

 

okay then, you explain.