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12-29-2018, 10:45 PM
God Exists
But not the way we envision it.
Yesterday driving on the ramp to a hangar I passed a chartered DC-10 parked on the tarmac unloading a military division, probably some contingent of Trump's Syrian retreat. I knew it was a DC-10 because the first thing I noticed about it was its tail engine as I approached it. After passing it I glanced at it in the mirror because it was more interesting to keep looking at than the empty ramp just ahead. With a shock I saw it was not a DC-10 but a 777. It had no tail engine.
How, I wondered, did I make so gross an error of identification. Seeing a tail engine where there wasn't one isn't some trivial bit of detail on an airliner 200 feet long with a tail 60 feet high. It bothered me so much I turned around and passed it again and went back to where I'd first seen it, then turned around to face it again. And found the "tail engine". Behind the airliner was a large hangar with an upper door section painted the same color as the vertical fin. To the inattentive eye it looked like a tail engine if that's sort of what you'd expect to see half looking at it while giving what it was disembarking more curious attention. Here, I thought, is exactly why eye witness testimony is worthless until corroborated, because I'd've bet money that was a DC-10 until I finally saw otherwise.
The episode was a misfire of sensory interpretation. Eyesight processing is more brain than optics, and hence subject to all kinds of distorting influences other than optics. It reminded me of an earlier theory I think Dawkins wrote about, that God is nothing more than a misfiring of normal cognitive processes, seeing patterns where there aren't any, seeing agency where there is none, because pattern recognition and agency attribution gave us survival advantage.
God exists, not as an external entity, but only as an artifact of intellectual consciousness, driven by subconscious synthesis of sensory input and store of knowledge and desires and fears to produce an answer we apply to help us function in reality. God ain't "out there"; it's an intrinsic "bug" in our mental faculty we have to learn to override - and that such learning of necessity requires acknowledging the fallibility of the very root of our identity: how we think.
It's a steep step, that acknowledgement. But it explains more about what god "really" is much more convincingly than the entirety of theology.
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12-29-2018, 10:50 PM
God Exists
It makes sense that god is a DC-10: obsolete and crash-prone.
On hiatus.
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12-30-2018, 12:36 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-30-2018, 12:44 AM by Phaedrus.)
God Exists
I understand what you mean, yet your analogy with the plane does not work. You see, the difference is that the plane does exist.
We can compare one plane to another when we misidentify a type of plane, but regardless it still remains a plane. We have never seen god, any god, and thus we have nothing to compare. From a logical point of reference, what we comprehend about our reality indicates god does not exist.
You would be correct that conceptually, as merely an idea, god does exist in the mind. As would any fictional concept. There is no disputing that. Yet just as we have ways of reasonably differentiating fantasy from reality, the only thing preventing religious people from identifying god as unrealistic is their stubborn insistence based on an extremely biased and fallible personal faith.
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12-30-2018, 02:24 AM
God Exists
It is a cool comparison.
I tend to use the psychological concepts of : low ambiguity tolerance, and high need for cognitive closure to explain religious belief.
People do need a "working model" for how things work and could make sense ... and religion serves that need.
Test
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12-30-2018, 06:17 AM
God Exists
I'd have to disagree that the misidentification of two planes that look very similar apart
from a single defining feature—in this case the absence of a tail engine—is analogous to the
theists' belief in their gods. Although the Boeing is larger (but its tail height is similar
to the DC-10) their overall proportions are similar, particularly when viewed, say, from a
rear-vision mirror.
I've often had the same sort of scenario, particularly with motor vehicles on the roads. For
example the Fiat 124 Spider and the Mazda MX-5 Miata are essentially the same car under
their skins, but on the freeway, lots of people would misidentify each... or both:
In this case (and your case) I don't believe that it can be seen as "a misfiring of normal cognitive
processes" nor as "an artifact of intellectual consciousness". It's nothing more than erroneously,
but unwittingly, processing what you're seeing physically, or think you're seeing physically.
Nobody has ever seen God, or any gods, which is where your analogy falls down.
I'm a creationist; I believe that man created God.
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12-30-2018, 09:17 PM
God Exists
I feel click baited.
The whole point of having cake is to eat it
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12-30-2018, 10:09 PM
God Exists
(12-30-2018, 09:17 PM)adey67 Wrote: I feel click baited.
I feel chick baited, so there!
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12-30-2018, 10:41 PM
God Exists
(12-30-2018, 10:09 PM)Dancefortwo Wrote: (12-30-2018, 09:17 PM)adey67 Wrote: I feel click baited.
I feel chick baited, so there!
So long as nobody was dick-baited.
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12-30-2018, 11:03 PM
God Exists
(12-30-2018, 10:41 PM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: (12-30-2018, 10:09 PM)Dancefortwo Wrote: (12-30-2018, 09:17 PM)adey67 Wrote: I feel click baited.
I feel chick baited, so there!
So long as nobody was dick-baited.
I can't be dick baited, vaginas baited yes, dick baited not a chance in hell.
The whole point of having cake is to eat it
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12-31-2018, 12:47 AM
God Exists
(12-30-2018, 11:03 PM)adey67 Wrote: (12-30-2018, 10:41 PM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: (12-30-2018, 10:09 PM)Dancefortwo Wrote: I feel chick baited, so there!
So long as nobody was dick-baited.
I can't be dick baited, vaginas baited yes, dick baited not a chance in hell.
I think we're all just victims of our atheist pheromones .
But I think the OP is on to something, as our gods seem so very human because they have been constructed from the most intelligent things we know of.....us.
I imagine the dolphins have a dolphin god, who's Satan is not a snake, but a net. I think the Whale's Satan is a Japanese whaler with a harpoon.
"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are." - Captain Picard
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12-31-2018, 01:00 AM
God Exists
OP, just wait till you get cataracts and have the surgery. You'll trust your vision less and less.
Being told you're delusional does not necessarily mean you're mental.
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12-31-2018, 08:50 AM
God Exists
(12-30-2018, 09:17 PM)adey67 Wrote: I feel click baited.
I feel master baited.
I'm a creationist; I believe that man created God.
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12-31-2018, 09:50 AM
God Exists
I have to disagree with the OP. When you try to compare something that is clearly visible to the human eye, to something that can't be proven to exist, because it's never shown up anywhere, that's where the comparison ends. And no matter how many times one tries to creatively spin that god exists, unless that entity comes to earth and presents itself for human inspection - then it ain't real. Period.
The only thing that can be compared to the airplane is religion - because just like the plane, that too is man-made.
Christianity:
God meddles in the affairs of humans in a small part the Earth for 1500 years, giving one tribal society rules to live by.
He stops all direct contact for the next 2,000 years, leaving us with a metaphorical set of instructions.
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12-31-2018, 09:52 AM
God Exists
I think the point isn't that he misidentified a plane, the point is he saw an engine, wholesale, where there was no engine at all, because of a visual trick and because of the look of the plane, his mind expected an engine there.
So I think it's a pretty good analogy. This is much like the example given by, I think it was Hitchens, about the rustling grass. The grass is there, it's rustling. But do we identify the rustling as simply the wind, or as something with agency, like a tiger?
The creatures that assume agency and see patterns even when none exist are more likely to survive.
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12-31-2018, 04:26 PM
God Exists
What we see in the physical world isn't necessarily obvious or accurate.
This is a single photographic image, with no digital manipulation or trickery of any kind:
The same setup, photographed from a different angle is here...
I'm a creationist; I believe that man created God.
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12-31-2018, 09:05 PM
God Exists
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12-31-2018, 09:39 PM
God Exists
(12-31-2018, 09:23 PM)Smercury44 Wrote: (12-31-2018, 09:05 PM)Snoopy Wrote:
You’ve made me a believer
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12-31-2018, 09:41 PM
God Exists
Switch a couple of those letters around and it reads God's Exits
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12-31-2018, 09:55 PM
God Exists
(12-31-2018, 08:50 AM)SYZ Wrote: (12-30-2018, 09:17 PM)adey67 Wrote: I feel click baited.
I feel master baited.
Hahahaha ^ ^ ^ good one.
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