Why is belief necessary?

Phat,Whaaaaat???? non sequiter. Let's say I said I can't destroy unicorns because they don't exist. How could that mean that I believe nothing greather than myself exists? Or how does that imply I'm placing myself at the apex of anything?Religions are human ideas, stories, and theories. It's one humans opinion against another, or one groups against another. Seems like it's being conducted generally on the same level. i.e. homo sapiens opinions.lfen

internal life OF God IN a believer? Did you mean God's internal life, or the believers internal life? i.e. is this closer to your thought:spirit is God in the internal life of a believerIf not could you expand on what you mean by God's internal life and what that means if it's in a believer?thanks,
lfen

Hangdawg,I found this translation: Antonio Damasio wrote a very good book on contemporary knowledge of brain function, Deschartes' Error.Thought is the ego and the ego's knowing of itself. Lying/telling the truth it's this oversimplification and use of false dichotomies that drives me to distraction with Christian apologetics.
They could be mistaken about some things in a myrid of ways. It's a continuum not a dicotomy!!!! And a multi diminsional continuum to boot.The human brain can create a good many extrordinary experiences and I am bracketing out psychosis and mental illness. The dicotomy of fundamentalism seems to allow only two choices. If you agree with the experience it is an infallible vision of God's truth, if you don't it is a totally false counterfeit by Satan. That's it. One or the other. My Christian sects authority says A,B,C absolutely true, all the rest X,Y,Z absolutely false and EVIL!!! We are good, everybody else the thralls of Satan!!! Join us, agree with us, or go to Hell!Can't you see a possible problem here? Is it so seductive to be one of the few select that you won't bestir yourself to look for other possiblities? I am not hating Christians, I am focusing on one aspect of your approach to religion that can be found in fundamentalist of other religions also. I decry the narrow chauvinistic black and white thinking that arises from a smug security or a desire for smug security.Your friends could have had an experience of something beyond the ego, a truly divine experience but afterwards in trying to understand it in their everyday ego state they unintentionaly misconstrue it. They could have had a vivid experience brought on by high altitude. They could have had an experience brought on by their intense desire to experience things they've heard about in their religious studies. It's interesting that Christians have Christian experiences, Krishna lovers experiences of Krishna, Buddhist have experiences of the Buddha, etc. They can be sincere and yet at the same time they are the source of their experiences which only feels like it is an other.Literal Christianity is a pre rational immature belief system. It's based on concrete thinking. There was a real garden of Eden, a real talking snake, a world wide flood, and a place called heaven. All things happen just like in the story book. Spirituality is beyond these literal stories. Most likely a majority of the people in the world find life easier to live with the traditional religious beliefs of their culture. When cultures come into conflict it can be religious conflict also. But there is something beyond these naive simplistic answers that serve to make the suffering we endure in this life bearable by the idea that another life will happen after this one that will free us.To use faith to cling to these ancients myths and keep the ego in harmony with the cultural community is a misuse of faith. It is used to provide conformity to what Pat Robertson, Falwell, the Pope, the Sunnis, the Shites, orthodox Rabbi's and so on and so forth want. It is religious (i.e. human cultural authority) rather than spiritual.I'm not saying one shouldn't choose to live a traditional faith but I am saying that for those with the intelligence to understand the world with more thoughtful perception it's irresponsible to defend a primitive literalism. There is a lot of wisdom in Buddhism and Advaita and Taoism and modern science and philosophy and semantics that is unavailable if you cling to literal linguistic understanding.lfen

Hangdawg,A thoughtful reply, thanks. It is time I reread: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
by Alfred KorzybskiOne doesn't have to abandon 2 value logic but can extend logic to include multivalued logic. But my memory for Korzybski's system grows misty once I write "the map is not the territory". I guess next time I'm by the University I'll have check out a copy and start rereading it.I don't think I've ever debated sidelined. I'm not much of a debater anyway. I think of what I do as more discussion than debate, but I've no idea if anyone else would agree. Good question You're trying to embarrass me aren't you?
I don't know how to put it exactly because none of this psychology stuff is well defined yet, but then I like mucking about in uncertainty. I don't equate ego and consciousness. Ego is the sense of self that we function with consciously. It is a set of skills, images, and feelings. It can be defined as self (small s) whereas Self (capital S) can be set equal to consciousness.Considerations: Most of the brain function is not conscious or of limited consciousness. The total physical organism constitutes a set of functions that is greater than the set that we are conscious of. The ego is what we think we are, our "I" which we think is unique, important, our identity. Different psychological theories will have different degrees of agreement and disagreement so I'm just trying to give a general pointing at the phenomena I'm talking about.I think of the ego as contents, as an object. Consciousness is the subject for which ego is an object. If I say I'm a nice but grumpy person for example, is niceness or grumpyness aware of being? Or is it being that is aware of those qualities? So I am not nice, or grumpy that is just the way we reflectively talk about the organisms awareness of it's qualities.The idea I was getting at comes from the nondualists. They deny that there is a thinker who thinks thoughts, and assert that the thinker is the thought (note, not denying there is a brain that thinks, but that that brain doesn't constitute a thinker in the sense of a self).When Descartes wrote "I think therefore I am", and if I weren't so lazy I'd go google to find what he wrote in French, I'm saying he was literally correct in a way I don't think he intended. I think he meant that thinking gave evidence that he existed as an entity, whereas I'm saying that he only exists as the thinking/talking/idea that he exists. By he I don't mean his body which is a sub process of processes that could be traced back to the big bang if there was such an occurance, two process called his parents contributed ovum and sperm and spun off another process (all this in the sense that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg, i.e. the whole selfish gene thing (am I just getting tired or am I really beginning to sound like Brad?))Just as a reference point, much of what I'm writing is my understanding of Ramana Maharshi's teachings. I wasn't being explicit enough. I was referring to stories such as the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Exodus, etc. Stories that I think are clearly mythological (meaning a form of transmission of teachings that is not historically literal) and yet which are sometimes offered as history or even science. I might say along those lines that the ego is the picture we have of ourselves. But consciousness isn't a picture it's what is aware of the picture. Consciousness is not tall, or red, or heavy, or big. We can't describe the subject, we only describe the object. As long as there is a dualistic separation of self/other subject/object we aren't the object but we mistake ourselves for the object (ego).I'm getting too tired. I'm not at this point understanding myself. Good night.lfen

The Freudian term is certainly one definition of it, but it gets used a lot as a more technical term for "I" or for the sense of being a conscious self, or the sense of being a person. And it's used by writers in English for Hindu and Buddhist references to the ordinary sense of self in much the same way as psychologists use it.lfen

Hangdawg and others reading this thread,Here is what dictionary.com offers: I'm most interested in the ordinary daily sense of self when people speak about themselves, or we think about our self. The sense of self for me is the pivotal point of understanding.My most significant criticism of near eastern religions and western thought is this sense of self has largely been taken for granted. One of the things that most impressed me about the Buddha was his examination of his stream of consciousness and his discovery that there is no permanent self. I think this is the key that unlocks our relationship to the divine. And this key makes belief unneccesary and instead uses direct experience and examination.The Christian contemplative tradition has produced writings that indicate a few Christians have awakened to this experiential "truth". I've started a thread to examine the possibility that Jesus might have been a Jew who had this experience but that Judaism and later gentiles couldn't understand his teachings on it and instead made of it an external religion of belief. As the evidence for Jesus ever living at all is very slim this can only be a hypothesis but except that it lacks centuries long institutional support it seems to me as likely as all the other theories (beliefs) put forward about the founder of Christianity.lfen