Even the Catholics put it on their website. You draw lines that don’t exist and then you just fall back, “well, like, that’s my opinion man.”
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:36, topic:8582”]
Who made that law?
I know there are male and female gods, but as gods as abstract concepts they are really genderless, making them gender-neutral.
Gender of God
Others interpret God as neither male nor female . The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Book 239, states that God is called “Father”, while his love for man may also be depicted as motherhood. However, God ultimately transcends the human concept of sex, and “is neither man nor woman: he is God.”
Gender of God - Wikipedia
No it’s my experience of all five Anglican congregations I attended for 16 years and my cult for 19, 7 years prior. I was accused of being a heretic in an Anglican church for merely shaking my head in horror at was being said. The horror was my opinion admittedly. And the RCC means doubt in general, not of its tenets. They all deal with general doubt with their apologetics. The lines that cannot be crossed are in the faith. Not in yours?
[And yes, you’re right, my apologies, I was vague about doubt, I didn’t specify doubts of dogmatic hermeneutics.]
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:22, topic:8582”]
Why you find it so easy to exclude our constant interaction with the physical reality we’re embedded within - I find mystifying.
Because it is the mind that processes all sensory information. Some people don’t feel pain and must be extremely careful because their neural system does not relay sensory information to the brain and it is the brain that makes you feel pain in your toe.
Homeostasis is essential an unconscious internal control process. It is the subconscious part of the brain that controls all your internal physical experiences and warns you only when things go wrong.
We aren’t sitting in a theater watching a movie unfold.
Actually the brain is sitting in a theater (your skull), experiencing the internal movie unfold as the neural network constantly transmits the external data .
You must remove your brain from direct contact with your body. It’s the same as your motherboard is removed from your camera and microphone. The only data your brain receives is quantized . This is why all recent proposals deal with “qubits” in the brain.
Consciousness
Quantum cognition
You’re repeating ancient wisdom, it’s turning out to be more complicated and transcends these categories and sharp edged definitions. Just saying, the story is in the full spectrum of evidence being collected.
Where in those definitions is the evolution backstory of consciousness brought to the fore?
Keep thinking you can compartmentalize that out of your definitions and understanding of human consciousness, I believe that is misguided and belies an incomplete awareness of the range of modern understanding.
No, you seem to think that I am proposing that consciousness happened all at once, while have repeatedly advanced the idea of gradual evolution of consciousness.
The much later chromosomal mutation of human chromosome 2 was a leap in intelligence, not consciousness.
Consciousness started with the first motile Prokaryotic bacteria and before that with sensitivity to pure chemical action and reaction.
Bacterial Motility
Motility is required for the virulence of many bacteria, particularly those infecting mucosal surfaces. Bacterial motility is mediated by beating flagella that consist mainly of the protein flagellin. It has recently been shown that the immunostimulatory activity of flagellin is mediated by TLR5 [6,47].
8 CONCLUSIONS
Motility is one of the common traits shown by bacteria. It is rapidly becoming obvious that this ancient activity has been adapted by different species for survival in their respective niches. While E . coli remains the useful paradigm for looking at bacterial motility, this system is very simple compared to that used by other species.
Bacterial Motility - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
And both motility and navigational skills began to evolve in the first Eukaryotic motile single celled organisms with “cilia” like the Paramecium which are true hunters and needed greater sensory awareness of the environment.
Paramecium swimming and ciliary beating patterns: a study on four RNA interference mutations
Abstract
Paramecium cells swim and feed by beating their thousands of cilia in coordinated patterns.
The organization of these patterns and its relationship with cell motility has been the subject of a large body of work, particularly as a model for ciliary beating in human organs where similar organization is seen. However the rapid motion of the cells makes quantitative measurements very challenging.
Here we provide detailed measurements of the swimming of Paramecium cells from high-speed video at high magnification, as they move in microfluidic channels. An image analysis protocol allows us to decouple the cell movement from the motion of the cilia, thus allowing us to measure the ciliary beat frequency (CBF) and the spatio-temporal organization into metachronal waves along the cell periphery.
Two distinct values of the CBF appear at different regions of the cell: most of the cilia beat in the range of 15 to 45 Hz, while the cilia in the peristomal region beat at almost double the frequency. The body and peristomal CBF display a nearly linear relation with the swimming velocity
Paramecium swimming and ciliary beating patterns: a study on four RNA interference mutations - PubMed
HOW DID EYES EVOLVE?
From Simple to Complex
Scientists think the earliest version of the eye was formed in unicellular organisms, who had something called ‘eyespots’.
These eyespots were made up of patches of photoreceptor proteins that were sensitive to light. They couldn’t see shapes or colour, but were able to determine whether it was light or dark out.
These unicellular organisms would use photosynthesis to create food for themselves, so being able to determine where the most light was coming from created a huge advantage for them.
Over time, the unicellular creature would evolve, and its eyespot evolved along with it. Scientists believe a depression formed around the light sensitive spot, creating a pit that made its ‘vision’ a little sharper.
Note: Without rudimetary awareness an eyespot has no utility.
Eventually, the pit’s opening could have gradually narrowed, creating a small hole that light would enter, much like a pinhole camera. From there, a retina would develop, as well as a lens at the front of the eye. Over millions of years, small changes that created a slight advantage for survival would change a simple light-sensitive structure to the complex eyes we have now.
If this scenario is relatively accurate, it demonstrates the gradual evolutionary complexity and refinement of the senses, along with the increased ability to mentally process the greater range and detail of the perceived data.
Scientists make these assumptions about how the eye evolved because eyes in corresponding stages to this sequence have been found in species that exist today.
How Did Eyes Evolve? - Science World
Ok, does that sufficiently satisfy your understanding of my perspective on evolution?
Awareness of the environmental conditions already started with purely chemically based reactions and evolution selected for increasing sensitivity.
Intelligent processing power increased along with increased complexity of incoming data, until the human chromosomal mutation caused a leap in brain size and processing ability , which evident today in human intelligence as compared to other great apes who followed a more modest evolutionary trajectory.
Pantheism- all god. The whole universe is god.
It can be atheistic, but then then it becomes Naturalism.
However, there is Spiritual Naturalis, but self as god, makes no sense, so where is the rationalism?
Rational and Ethical are humanistic qualities.
That said, so are feelings of transcendence, because such feels are neurochemical/neurological, which is part of the human experience, but it has nothing to do with a deity. We know this through science, which is also part of the humanist philosophy. I can go on and on, but what you are talking about is part of the human experience and that experience involves neurology, psychology, sociology, etc.
In part of course. The other quantitative 50% is the overreach to Heaven. Afterlife. Transcendent, sublime afterlife.
What? That doesn’t make sense. Please expand upon what you are saying.
You describe half of transcendence, the right hand, the natural, rational, grounded half. I yearn for the unnatural 
, supernatural, irrational, baseless half, the left hand.
I find that an appreciation for deep time and the folds within folds that are the layers of biology making up a creature, offer plenty of opportunity for transcendence into the seemingly magical, supernatural realms beyond our understanding.
‘Seemingly’ being key.
Because then, with time, discovering the various mechanisms behind that magical
provides yet more layers of amazement and fascination.
… and so on and so forth.
Aye. Seemingly. That’s where all our questioning leads. Before it ends in death.
Right, still isn’t part of the game, achieving a level of appreciation that takes the mystery and sting out of death? Achieving a feeling of understanding and belonging is another splendid reward to walk through our days with.
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We just have to be brave… together. Warriors. For peace, love, equity.
Even if it doesn’t actually exist, except in your mind?
That’s why we have mythology for entertainment, not as a lifestyle.
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It’s only there sometimes. In fact it’s only there as a habit, as an unexamined assumption as long as I don’t look at it. As soon as I do it disappears in a puff of rationality. That’s transcendent afterlife. God’s a different story. He tends to persist even as I push back rationally. A bit like the darkness in The Sound of Silence. And aye, we yearn for what we’ve lost, do we not?
One separates the two. I’d still go to church, for communion. It’s a powerful, beautiful, egalitarian (apart from the shaman), dignified ritual invariably in an appropriate setting. In St. Paul’s cathedral, built by taxing the coal of the poor in the ruins of London, it is utterly sublime. I’d put up with the concert interrupted by a lecture for it (my wife no longer can, don’t blame her at all, even in liberal evangelical and high church settings, so we don’t - although we Zoomed to Oasis during lockdown, they’re that good, ooh, and we did partake of the midday service at Southwark Cathedral at the end of August). And there’s the ‘fellowship’. Such as it superficially is (except at Oasis, superb, even on screen). It all ticks a lot of anthropological boxes. Young Dickie loves carol singing. We do it down the pub and all the young atheist students to a wo/man love it. I still volunteer with the char-con-evo church in which we were married as they have the biggest open hand I know. Apart from the Sikhs. Until you’ve taken a bunch of addicts abseiling you haven’t lived. I’ll even lead prayers when asked. I don’t feel compromised in the slightest. Far from it. If it’s good enough for Dickie, it’s good enough for me.
I’m sure your utterly appalled at my duplicity. And his feet of clay eh?
(I might sneak up to the cathedral for communion with the children murdering King, Richard III. You can do it with Katherine of Aragon in Peterborough and the shade of Mary Queen of Scots. It was her penultimate resting place. My local church is utterly exquisite architecturally, internally even more so. I miss it.)
It can take you a while to get where you are going, and even then it’s not completely clear. At least you do seem to have a legit destination. For me, mythology is not just entertainment, it’s there to express the things that can’t be expressed in single phrases. We melt it down to a quote from Shakespeare, but that’s not the same as sitting in the theatre for a couple hours then discussing it over drinks.
I assume when you say “Oasis” you mean the atheist gathering. You talk about the ritual, I’ve weighed in on that. I think we simply have a difference in labeling. You want to call something supernatural, something that is hard to name or define. It’s not baseless or irrational, but it doesn’t have a formula and you can’t put it in a test tube.
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What? Again, you don’t make any logical sense. As for yearning for what we lost, I haven’t yearned for belief or faith after I lost it. It has freed up a lot of space to learn more science.