Hi Steve;
Steve Petermann wrote:
> I've had a lot of discussions with atheists and the one thing that is both a
> hallmark of religion and a non-refutable aspect is religious experience. By
> religious experience I don't mean just some rare dramatic event. What I am
> referring to is the underlying sense of the sacred that is universal to all
> peoples and is talked about all through scripture and characterized in
> ritual and piety. Atheists must always deny any objective validity to those
> types of experiences because they point beyond the material world. Also,
> even though religious experience is not empirical evidence, per se, as a
> universal phenomenon it also cannot be dismissed out of hand. Atheists
> often try to explain it away as a strictly psychological aberration or
> phenomenon with no objective truth, but if so, they should be obliged to
> provide convincing arguments to support that position. They cannot,
> however, do that because just as God cannot be the object of empirical
> proof, God can also not be disproved by that means or even by reason. Even
> parsimony is not a valid final argument against theism because of its
> universality. In the final analysis the belief or disbelief in God is a
> matter of faith. For those who are open to the sacred in life, they may
> without hard proof choose to believe in God or not.
Well, OK but ..... I think the recent experiments subjecting human brains to
electrical stimulation which thereby produces "religious like" effects in the
patient is pretty strong support for the atheistic side and needs to "keep in
mind" :-)
I think the best responce is to agree that all religious experienc is in the
mind. Where else would it be?
We are very, very physical.
George A.
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