Curt Doolittle

Theme: Religion

  • THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF THE SPIRITUAL —“What do you tell people who have

    THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF THE SPIRITUAL

    —“What do you tell people who have had very spiritual experiences that they attribute to their religion? Tell them they just imagined it? I don’t see how that’s going to work.”— Mitchell Ryan

    They had the experience. They felt it. That it was produced by imagination is no different than if they imagine a ghost in the dark, or a car coming around a corner that isn’t there, or an argument with a loved one that didn’t or might happen. We feel all these things. We experience both the imagination of the context, the imagination of what might happen, or is happening, and the feeling of being in it, and we remember it.

    Our brains work all the time by filling in with memory or prediction the ‘model’ our senses are continuously composing for us out of sense, memory, and prediction, with continuous recursion of the context.

    Those Experiences existed. The conditions that cause them are either real or imaginary. We possess the ability to predict or forecast. That is the purpose of memory. We can predict all sorts of outcomes and then ‘feel them’ (imagine ourselves in them).

    The fact that you can imagine yourself in a ‘religious experience’ or imagine yourself as king arthur and feel that experience, is just a matter of context you imagine and practice.

    Most ‘intense’ experience I ever had was being very ill with a fever, reading a conan novel, and then experiencing myself in his place. it’s STILL the most intense experience I have had.

    Is it a religious experience, or is a religious experience just a different story in just a different dream?

    The question is only whether you are an addict reinforcing your addiction or not.

    Most of us no. Some of us yes.

    The question is whether you retain your agency (and experience) or retain your addiction in lieu of agency (and experience).

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 10:32:00 UTC

  • “Q: WHY DO OUR BRAINS CONSTRUCT TWO OPPOSING EXPLANATIONS?”— Question: “Why ha

    —“Q: WHY DO OUR BRAINS CONSTRUCT TWO OPPOSING EXPLANATIONS?”—

    Question: “Why have our marvelous brains formulated two diametrically opposite explanations?”

    Answer: Cognitive Division of Labor: Predator (action, dominance, science) — vs.– Prey (mindfulness, submission, religion).

    Problem: Demand for mindfulness increases with uncertainty. Post tribal life removes resource uncertainty at the cost of social uncertainty (female herd equality, male pack hierarchy). Scale increases uncertainty. Production cycles decrease availability of positive reinforcement (status signals, fitness signals). Consumerism buys signals, at cost of increase in isolation. Diversity (market polity) increases isolation.

    Choices:

    (a) Personal Rituals: Stoicism (Self Authoring) > Sophism (Philosophy) > Pseudoscience (“Church of TED, Marxist Economics”) > Religion (Old Age) > Magic (New Age) > Occult (literature – post-reason).

    (b) Social Rituals: Hunting > Sport > Commerce > Civic Groups and Clubs > Politics > Religion (academy, media, cult) > Fringe Movements (outcasts) > Occult (‘escapists’).

    What’s the Underlying Problem? Neural Economy. (Physical Economy(Stress), Emotional Economy (Stress), Neural Economy(stress)).

    Regularity provides certainty and decreased neural cost.

    Plenty provides personal decrease in neural cost but increase in cost of collective coherence, consistency, correspondence, and (frame) decidability.

    In other words, manageable neural cost provides anti-fragility (mindfulness) and suppressed neural cost (infantilization) increases fragility.

    The problem we face satisfaction of demand for predatory ( consumption, acquisition, opportunity, signals/status) vs prey ( consumption, insurance, certainty, not-sticking-out/equality).

    Markets (Economy) in everything: Unfortunately we have constructed a cognitive model of monopoly under both universalist abrahamic religion, justificationary philosophy, universal democracy, legislation (rather than tort law), and constructivist mathematics (and positivist logic).

    Despite the fact that the uniqueness of western civilization’s ‘salvation’ of mankind from superstition, ignorance, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, endemic violence, child mortality, early death, tyranny, and the vicissitudes of nature – was the product of anti-monopoly “Markets in All Walks of Life” under individual sovereignty, tort law of reciprocity, evidentiary (testifiable) truth regardless of cost to face, status, dominance, or competence hierarchy, duty of the commons regardless of station, decision jury, judge and rule of law, leaving the only remaining method of cooperation “as markets in all aspects of life” that resulted in our innovations of reason, empiricism, and science.

    Ergo, between religion, philosophy, (and that counter-empiricism we call the ‘enlightenment’ and it’s capture of power) democracy, followed by the revision of monopoly Abrahamic Monotheism( judaism, christianity, and islamism), that we call Marxism(Pseudoscience), Socialism(Monopoly Property), Postmodernism (monopoly sophism), and Feminism (monopoly female control vs compromise familial control) – we repeated the same process as the ancient era (resulting in the destruction of every civlization of the ancient world) and attempted in the current era to undermine (destroy) that social order that made our salvation from natural condition possible: non-monopoly markets of competition (calculation) using discovery by trial and error at the cost of soft eugenics (suppression of the reproduction of those who force burden by moral hazard onto others).

    The questions are one of knowledge and one of choice. Lacking knowledge one cannot make a choice. Possessing knowledge what choice does one (or all) make?

    The answer is divided between the predator and pack’s preservation, or the prey and herd’s submission. 😉

    Maybe that will add to the discourse. 😉

    -Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 10:25:00 UTC

  • THE END RESULT. You see, I started at the very lowest possible level, and elimin

    THE END RESULT.

    You see, I started at the very lowest possible level, and eliminated falsehood at every single incremental stage of complexity, and ended up with aesthetics religion and education last.

    It produces a single coherent, consistent, correspondent, existential, complete, system of thought from the subatomic world to the rational, calculative, and computational – and from Metaphysics, to Epistemology, to Psychology, to Ethics, to Sociology, to the Law, to Politics, to Group Strategy, to religion education and aesthetics.

    What narrative one produces to ‘teach’ unders that system of thought is constrained only by the same rules.

    Everyone wants the easy way out, which is to just ‘imagine’ from the top down.

    Truth is enough. The Natural Law is enough. A small number of revolutionaries are enough to impose the Law, that forces Truth, that causes the chain of consequences, that results in ethnocentrism, nationalism, sovereignty, reciprocity, truth, duty, rule of law, markets in everything, and transcendence of our people – and all others if they do the same – into the gods we imagine.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 09:20:00 UTC

  • I told ya. Religion was the hardest problem in social science. The rest was triv

    I told ya. Religion was the hardest problem in social science. The rest was trivial by comparison. But once you understand religion as a science, you are no longer bound by the limits of your experience.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 08:58:00 UTC

  • SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PRAYER AND A SPELL? (Don’t be misled. This i

    SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PRAYER AND A SPELL?

    (Don’t be misled. This is a profoundly important topic.)

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 08:31:00 UTC

  • help: what is the name, begins with an ‘M’, of the format of magic spells in wes

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merseburg_charmsmemory help: what is the name, begins with an ‘M’, of the format of magic spells in western verse. “… bone to bone, sinew to sinew…” Most ‘spells’ follow the same structure, much like a poem. These are effectively western man’s ‘prayers’. And I can’t remember the name ….

    UPDATE: FOUND IT.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merseburg_charms

    Source date (UTC): 2018-11-05 07:36:00 UTC

  • An Example of Why Religion Is More Moral than Science, Engineering, Philosophy or Magic.

    by Adam Voight An example of why Religion is more moral than science, engineering, philosophy or magic. “Saruman” – Old English for “engineer”. Of course, over the long run the difference between religion and magic is contested and variable. This is why Odin is the sketchiest Sky Father ever. He is both Gandalf and Sauron, whom Tolkien split up into Good and Evil facets. The clue is the Nine Rings of Power given to the Ringwraiths: Odin’s Ring produced nine rings every day, and the giving of rings is typical of the lord’s gifts to his men. The phrase “Lord of the Rings” is only used once in all of Germanic lit: it refers to Beowulf, but it is so used late in the story, just before the fatal dragon episode (I cannot find it now. it mentioned during some swimming episode, perhaps in recounting his expedition against Grendel’s mom or swimming to Finnmark.) It seems that Tolkein saw the modern era as a struggle within the soul of Europe, between the good Odin and the bad Odin. Notice that Gandalf officiates at a wedding, something that Odin would never do; the Vanir and Thor were best for this purpose. Wagner also made Odin the crux of the conflict in the Ring cycle, by making Odin’s one lie to the Giants the tragic flaw that brought about Ragnarok. Odin in this version is more of a villain than in the Eddas, but shares the villainy with Alberich. In the Eddas, he is a good guy, but still crazy. Praying to him before a battle could bring victory, or it could bring you death with induction into the Einherjar. (CD: Thank you. exactly.)

  • Religion was the hardest problem in social science.

    (FB 1541426321 Timestamp) I told ya. Religion was the hardest problem in social science. The rest was trivial by comparison. But once you understand religion as a science, you are no longer bound by the limits of your experience.

  • An Example of Why Religion Is More Moral than Science, Engineering, Philosophy or Magic.

    by Adam Voight An example of why Religion is more moral than science, engineering, philosophy or magic. “Saruman” – Old English for “engineer”. Of course, over the long run the difference between religion and magic is contested and variable. This is why Odin is the sketchiest Sky Father ever. He is both Gandalf and Sauron, whom Tolkien split up into Good and Evil facets. The clue is the Nine Rings of Power given to the Ringwraiths: Odin’s Ring produced nine rings every day, and the giving of rings is typical of the lord’s gifts to his men. The phrase “Lord of the Rings” is only used once in all of Germanic lit: it refers to Beowulf, but it is so used late in the story, just before the fatal dragon episode (I cannot find it now. it mentioned during some swimming episode, perhaps in recounting his expedition against Grendel’s mom or swimming to Finnmark.) It seems that Tolkein saw the modern era as a struggle within the soul of Europe, between the good Odin and the bad Odin. Notice that Gandalf officiates at a wedding, something that Odin would never do; the Vanir and Thor were best for this purpose. Wagner also made Odin the crux of the conflict in the Ring cycle, by making Odin’s one lie to the Giants the tragic flaw that brought about Ragnarok. Odin in this version is more of a villain than in the Eddas, but shares the villainy with Alberich. In the Eddas, he is a good guy, but still crazy. Praying to him before a battle could bring victory, or it could bring you death with induction into the Einherjar. (CD: Thank you. exactly.)

  • Religion was the hardest problem in social science.

    (FB 1541426321 Timestamp) I told ya. Religion was the hardest problem in social science. The rest was trivial by comparison. But once you understand religion as a science, you are no longer bound by the limits of your experience.