Davidson Loehr

Duane, this is very silly. Try jumping up a foot off the ground, and staying there. Or toss a brick in the air and let it land on your head. It’s not mental or “spiritual.” You’re selling snake oil. Davidson

Duane, this is very silly. Try jumping up a foot off the ground, and staying there. Or toss a brick in the air and let it land on your head. It’s not mental or “spiritual.” You’re selling snake oil. Davidson

Brandon, On Eliade, I agree — that’s high school level. What he did that was so helpful was to see all religions as “languages,” dialects, ways of talking/framing life’s questions, rather than taking any of them literally. So it’s not that Biblical religions have God, it’s that they use that symbol as a way of framing life questions — unlike…[Read more]

Brandon, Well, one more. It’s empirically demonstrable that we know what we respect in a person, and what doesn’t rise to that level. Over about a quarter century as a minister, I officiated at a lot of memorial services, and always had an open mike policy so friends and relatives could share memories and stories. On Sundays, I would sometimes…[Read more]

Brandon, This all sounds very good. Two more offerings. I think etymology is very important. “Scientia” simply means “knowledge,” and “religio” basically means what we bind/tie/anchor ourselves to (the -lig is the same root as in ligament and ligature, and the “re-” means to do it again. I guess the thought is that we were once connected to…[Read more]

Brandon, OK, more on this. One object of this kind of education should be to help students back off from their certainties to test other assertions. Very few people of any age can do this. It’s important to keep from worshiping science — or capitalizing it! There are some excellent examples of scientists being dead certain and dead wrong, in…[Read more]

How should we differentiate between science and religion — or science and traditional stories? Many of the claims of science are true whether you believe the story or not. Gravity, evolution, star and planet formation, for example, have enough empirical data to establish that they are REALLY true (or just TRUE). All stories can give us an…[Read more]

Brandon, Nice to have your project going! I would recommend you check out Mircea Eliade’s books, especially The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return — though he wrote nearly 20, maybe more. He was one of those nearly unbelievable scholars, who created/invented the field of what most call “comparative religion” but he called…[Read more]

Duane, Your last post on intuition seems very wrong to me. What data support your sweeping claim that intuition “knows” something, or is “right,” as opposed to being merely a feeling or hunch that has no necessary connection to truth at all? People bet billions of dollars every day based on their intuitions, and almost all of them lose. Why on…[Read more]

Ed, I just read your last note to Jon, and it reminded me of something that might support your notion of ideas/consciousness that is transferred from one living thing to another. It comes from some experiments done a few decades ago. I think (but am not sure here) that I read it in one of Robert Ardrey’s books — so, 40+ years ago. The experiment…[Read more]

Ed, I think we may be near clarification. Math is a good example because it’s purely conceptual and mental, not empirical — no claim to experiencing anything like Cosmic Numbers. I’m talking about mental states, imagination, things which, like math, have nothing empirical involved, nothing out in the world. And the fact that lots of people report…[Read more]

Ed, I think I agree with you, with the qualification that science can only admit as “true, for now” things that can be tested and replicated — replicated in controlled experiments by people who do not believe or accept the theories they’re testing. A lot of people’s certainties are not empirical, and don’t exist outside their minds, and perhaps…[Read more]

Ed, Duane, Ursula et al, It’s hard to pinpoint what seems so fundamentally wrong about arguing from non-empirical opinions that can’t be replicated by those who don’t share those opinions. But a few days ago, I got an unusual video through “ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com” that seems helpful. Here’s the…[Read more]

Ursula, I think your university is an anomaly in this regard, though my information is anecdotal: some news stories, tales from friends who are professors here at the U. of Texas in Austin, from a few young acquaintances in IT or the sciences who have told me about avoiding humanities and other “soft” courses to be more competitive, etc. But the…[Read more]

Ursula, In broadest terms, I mean science curricula devoid of the humanities. It produces a lot of scientists who ignore the question of “How we should live, so that when we look back in ten or fifty years, we can be glad we lived that way.” Without including that question in any calculus of who we are and what we should be doing with our…[Read more]

Mike, I’d like to counter your response as one who is familiar with science, but educated in religion (Ph.D. covered theology, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science and Wittgenstein’s language philosophy). Analogies — like using words like “living” with very different meanings — can seduce us but not, I think, help us. The notion of…[Read more]

This is only partly a response to this topic, also just a general item. I submitted a video to Bill Gates’ contest for 60-90 second videos to answer the question of What it means to be human. Since I think there are necessarily TWO questions involved, and couldn’t think of a way to present information that’s outside the general boundaries of the…[Read more]

Duane, What do you want that you think you can only have if the universe is “conscious”? Davidson

<p>Ed, you wrote:</p><p> </p><p>Humans are products of the universe. Humans are intelligent. Therefore the universe IS intelligent – regardless of the means used to create us (multiple universes, coincidences or whatever) – because we ARE the universe. The prevailing scientific narrative – a faith-based belief born out of a backlash against re…[Read more]