First, I'd like to go back to something in your earlier post...
tesla writes:
Unless someone has discovered a way to communicate with 'God', I consider looking for God a healthy thing for mankind to do.
How would someone confirm that an asserted method for communicating with 'God' is in fact what it is claimed to be? If someone opts to "look for God", what are they actually looking for, and how do they know whether they've found it?
I'm really having trouble trying to imagine any condition would make "looking for God" a worthwhile pursuit (regardless of it being "healthy").
You never know, perhaps some of the mystery of 'supernatural’ events might become ‘naturally’ understood dynamics of a beautiful universe.
Um, that's what has been happening all along, ever since the Enlightenment put the Dark Ages behind us. (And it was happening before the Dark Ages as well, e.g. in ancient Greece.) It's what normally happens when you put aside the notions and terms regarding supernatural entities.
Now, to your later post:
Imagination is simply ideas belonging to the realm of consciousness. So in the end, are we dealing with the idea that things have actual reality, or the actual reality of what has being?
Here we go with Humpty-Dumpty-ism again, and stoner logic to go with it. Well, never mind that part.
I think it's more accurate to say that notions of God are simply incompatible with any concept of 'proof'... particularly in any attempt to describe interactions between God and reality.
This is where I believe you are limiting yourself by defining 'God'. God is not currently definable.
I totally agree that 'God' is not currently definable -- in fact, it never will be -- at least not in any way that involves positive assertions that are falsifiable and allow for objective confirmation.
The statement of mine that you quoted was not an attempt to "define 'God'", any more than a statement like "the Easter Bunny is imaginary" defines 'Easter Bunny'. It's just stating what domain of experience the entity belongs to: imagination.
Suppose that when a person dies, their electrical energy ... transferred into the ELF spectrum.
Now let’s say some human minds [have] the ability to 'read' some of the ELF waves and 'see' past lives.
Is this supernatural, or natural? It’s supernatural without the explanation of how a person could see a dead person’s life. But with the understanding of how it was possible, and that its perfectly natural to how the universe works, it would be natural.
I really do understand your point here. What if it could be shown that a "psychic reader" or "clairvoyant" or "mystic" was able to convey accurate, unambiguous information about dead people that he/she could not have had access to by any
known natural means, and could do so with some measurable and greater-than-chance degree of success?
The last condition there is the crucial one. People have "demonstrated", on occasion, an ability to know things they couldn't have learned by "known natural means." Some people even put on shows where they demonstrate this ability to audiences.
Most if not all of the "regular performers" are in fact fooling their audiences with special tricks that reduce the audience's perception of mistakes and divert attention away from the normal, natural clues that the performer actually uses.
Meanwhile the "sincere" cases generally turn out to be isolated cases. Overall, when you put either type of 'supernatural seeing' under closer scrutiny, it tends to fall apart.
By the way, is "ELF spectrum" something you made up, or does it really refer to some sort of measurable phenomenon in physics? (I confess I'm not a physicist, and will risk asking a stupid question.)
Having brought my father into this in an earlier post, I'll now tell you something about my mother. She described, several times to various people, a few occasions when she had dreamed while sleeping and was able to remember the dream after waking. The dreams involved one or another person she knew (relative or neighbor or former schoolmate), and she found that features in the dreams tended to correlate with things that she later learned about the person.
In particular, when she saw the person at a wedding in the dream, she later learned that the person came to some physical harm or died; in fact, when she saw the person as a bride or groom, the person actually died (I don't recall whether the death happened before or after the time when she had the dream), and when she saw a child as a flower girl, she later learned that the child came to serious harm, but survived. When she saw a person in water, she later learned that the person came into some sort of good fortune, like overcoming a severe illness or getting an inheritance.
I don't know how often this happened; there were only 4 cases that I heard her describe (2 of each type) -- always the same ones whenever the topic came up. There's no way to know how often she might have had dreams involving people in weddings or water, but the "expected" result didn't come about. I do recall her calling me once, years after I had moved away from home, asking how things were, because she had had one of those dreams (maybe about me or maybe about my wife). Turns out it was a false alarm. I think this may have happened a few times, with other people.
So what should we conclude here? Did she tap into some unknown path of communication, or was it just coincidence? No way to know. If the apparent phenomenon were ever to be observed more reliably, it might be possible to start taking a careful look at it. But when occurrences are so rare as to be attributable to chance, when the available indicators show no predictive power, there's really not much you can do.
I've seen (but didn't fully read) a book titled "Seven Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation" (or was it nine? -- pretty sure it wasn't as much as 12). Is that evidence for reincarnation, or is it just a catalog of a few unusual observations that really could have happened by coincidence and pure chance? Let's see... 9 cases out of... several billion? What are the odds?
You'll say the problem is that we're not looking hard enough for these things, that it would be worthwhile to search really carefully and keep searching in hopes of understanding these amazing phenomena, to expand realm of what we know of as "natural". And you'll say it's bad that science and/or atheism discourages this.
I'll say that the scientific method doesn't shut the door on searching really carefully. It's simply the best way to search, and sheds enough light on these shadowy phenomena that they end up being revealed as just shadows. Nothing real here, folks. Move along, please.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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