(no subject)
Humans are thinking animals. All animals are biological machines that perpetuate genes. Miracle is everywhere. That the universe has no creator is even more miraculous than if it did. Awe, wonder and religious grace are innate to the human psyche. Empirical reality can only enhance our spiritual nature.
Deistic explanations are a reduction of the singular amazingness of our world. They diminish reality by trivializing it, confusing it with mythology. Notions of an afterlife demean the sanctity and profundity of existence. Historically, belief in immortality has justified the slaughter of millions of human beings. Genocide incubates in the heart of monotheism.
The mind and brain are one. There is no immaterial soul distinct from the body. If you destroy part of the brain you also destroy part of what is called the soul. We intuitively assume that we possess an immaterial soul because our experience of consciousness is so smooth and continuous that we perceive it to be independent of its material basis. However, the biological conviction of our mortality and the absence of an afterlife is also intuitively, innately imbedded in our psyche. Deep down in every one of us is the frightening knowledge that the soul does not survive death. Part of our life task is to accept this mortality that is antithetical to the way we experience ourselves.
Death is an illusion. "You" never die because you are not there to experience your being dead. Only those close to you experience the finality of your absence.
Everything we think, feel and see is materially based, a series of impulses and reactions within our brains. This does not "explain away" consciousness, it deepens the miracle. It is miraculous that we are finite, that we exist at all. It is even more miraculous and frightening that the entire universe is finite and appears to have arisen from a singularity in the midst of a timeless, spaceless continuum inconceivably less than nothing.
From "The Secular Grail".
Deistic explanations are a reduction of the singular amazingness of our world. They diminish reality by trivializing it, confusing it with mythology. Notions of an afterlife demean the sanctity and profundity of existence. Historically, belief in immortality has justified the slaughter of millions of human beings. Genocide incubates in the heart of monotheism.
The mind and brain are one. There is no immaterial soul distinct from the body. If you destroy part of the brain you also destroy part of what is called the soul. We intuitively assume that we possess an immaterial soul because our experience of consciousness is so smooth and continuous that we perceive it to be independent of its material basis. However, the biological conviction of our mortality and the absence of an afterlife is also intuitively, innately imbedded in our psyche. Deep down in every one of us is the frightening knowledge that the soul does not survive death. Part of our life task is to accept this mortality that is antithetical to the way we experience ourselves.
Death is an illusion. "You" never die because you are not there to experience your being dead. Only those close to you experience the finality of your absence.
Everything we think, feel and see is materially based, a series of impulses and reactions within our brains. This does not "explain away" consciousness, it deepens the miracle. It is miraculous that we are finite, that we exist at all. It is even more miraculous and frightening that the entire universe is finite and appears to have arisen from a singularity in the midst of a timeless, spaceless continuum inconceivably less than nothing.
From "The Secular Grail".