Religion in all its Forms

I won’t argue with you over that, believe what you want.

No, you’re right. I made a mistake, associated him with some of what Freud did.

I do have a rather dim view of psychoanalysis though, which probably explains my strong antipathy.

Mate, I spent the first 15-16 years of my life in a church family. I was confirmed after a year of bible study. I’m not as much of an outsider as you think I am.

A Christian criticising an atheist for deferring to authority is deeply ironic.

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No, somebody who believed in ghosts would say they were ghosts. I say I don’t know what they were. You’re aware of the god of the gaps falacy?

My being referenced without being referenced? Yep, common place. The only thing worse than talking about you is….

Of course there are. My childhood vicar was one. Lovely man.

But they aren’t mainstream. The very definition of an organised religion is that it organises around an authoritative doctrine.

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Yes, that’s true. There are interesting voices on the fringes though. Brian McClaren, Rob Bell, Steve Chalke…to name a few

Both of them were fascinated by early childhood complexes, and the role dreams play in our life, among other aspects. They developed a friendship which lasted ten years or so, and Freud saw him as his natural successor. But at some point, they fell out because Jung started to see that Freud didn’t want to develop psychoanalysis as a rigorously scientific method, but wanted to set it up as a set of dogmas, quite akin to a new religion.

When Jung started to question Freud’s fixation on early sexual complexes as the major explanation of all psychological problems, Freud told him to hold back because it would ‘harm the cause’ of psychoanalysis in the world. That was enough for Jung to break up their relationship.

He went his own way from that moment, and as a result, was loathed by Freud and all classical psychoanalysts until his death. But it didn’t hinder him building a monumental work going way beyond psychoanalysis, simultaneously to his groundbreaking work as psychiatrist.

Few people know that for instance the words ‘archetype’, ‘synchronicity’, ‘extraversion vs introversion’, ‘psyche’ or ‘collective unconscious’ have been created by Jung. They didn’t exist before he came up with them, and yet, some of them are commonly used nowadays. He’s an immense thinker and scientist, and I rest my case at this point. The writings are there and can be explored by anyone interested.

Probably need to explain as my understanding of that is basic , that if it cannot be explained by science then it must be an act of God ? Which if I understand would kind of be a strange thing for an atheist to attest to, also you do know what an apparition is ?

Just wondering as you saw 3 of them and believe what you saw was real whilst denying believing in ghosts :ghost:

This is the temporal lobe epilepsy thing - which is really interesting to me as I sometimes have sleep paralysis (which was terrifying as a kid)

Religious people experience it and ascribe it to demons and angels. People who believe in UFOs think they are being abducted.

If you are more rational you can understand it it’s a misfiring in your brain causing you to experience things that aren’t there.

Experiencing something unusual and thinking ‘that was weird and I can’t explain it’ isn’t weird. Experiencing something weird and deciding it’s aliens or a succubus is.

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He is saying he saw something weird which he can’t explain.

He did also say he saw a UFO btw :joy:

Pretty sure we all have sleep paralysis, fascinating Infinite Monkey Cage episode about the science of sleep:

It was unidentified, it was flying and it was an object. Does that make it aliens? Nope, again god of the gaps.

Only unidentified to you though.

Kind of need to get my mind off of things for a minute, so I’ll just write down some stuff on this. Not particularly well written or thought out, but there you go.
I completely resent the idea that everyboby who calls himself atheist or agnostic or similar things is just following ‘thinkers’ like Hitchens or Dawkins or whoever. I arrived at that point long before I had ever heard of any of these people and I would also like to add that the ones regularly quoted here are much more prevelant in the English speaking world.
Started in my childhood - none of the points that made me skeptical are particularly original, as I found out later, but essentially it was a growing feeling that the (in my case Christian) god I was told about seemed so…human…and so of the time and place the ‘story’ originated from. Completely lacking any ‘universal, timeless appeal’ I would have expected of a divine being that created literally everything. This also tied in to “why the hell would all the other religions be wrong - they feel as deeply and are as certain as well”? Again, nothing original.
I’ve never really studied philosophy or religion in any depth (I had some religious education in childhood), but essentially these simple doubts have never left me and then more added to it the older I got. But to me personally this was never a question about some sort of inbuilt morality of whoever believes or doesn’t believe in whatever on an individual basis. If we want to talk about that in anecdotal terms, I’ve had good and bad experiences with all types of people. The story of organised religion certainly isn’t pretty, though, tbf, most of the human story in general isn’t.

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I saw a UFO once. As in I saw something in the sky I couldn’t explain. Doesn’t mean I think it was aliens in a spaceship.

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How do you propose I identify a light in the sky a long way away that behaves seriously erratically? Curious on this one.

With your eyes, duh.

Regarding morality - Once you defer to an organisation (religion, nationality or employment) do you by definition become less moral?