My Beliefs- GDR

I wrote a devastating answer to this but was rewarded with:Error: Dispatch table lookup failure, control does not exist:I'll see if I can summon the energy to re-write it.

This is wrong.What we call morality is an emotion; it's an instinct an autonomous, neurological reaction. We have no control over it because it's not a cognitive event, it's more like a knee jerk.What we do in response to the feeling is a cognative decision.The best analagy that I can think of is holding you hand above a candle - the pain response is automatic and can't be ignored. But it is possible to hold your hand over the flame if you're motivated enough or you're a James Bond villain that feels no pain.There is a difference though - and it's one that you keep missing. Morality is not absolute like pain - it varies between societies and over time and most importantly it's learned.Children learn right from wrong - or not - from their parents. Abused children have a different sense of fairness - a basic element of morality - than 'normal' children. Sociopaths and psychopaths are missing the empathy emotion, their brains don't light up when scanned with fMRI like normal people but they have learned society's rules. They can act nomally because they know that otherwise they would be punished but they don't know or believe their actions to be wrong. (ie they lack the emotion but they have the cognitive capability.)You want morality to be cognitive - it isn't, it's emotive and autonomous and also - crucially developmental; it can be programmed and reprogrammed by society. It's true that our intellect can be used to overcome our emotions to some degree, but it's harder for some than others and it depends when and where you're born whether you need to or not. It's not the Tom given absolute you want it to be.

False. eg.

Yet you offer no evidence for that. You cherry pick your own pleasant Western situation as the general and infer that things are getting better for the world. You ignore what we say about recent world wars, starving masses in Africa, meglamanic dictators in North Korea, coflicts in the Middle East, terrorism and potential future global disasters and so on.But even in those places where things are getting better, it is only very recently - since the enlightenment in fact. And ALL the improvements that have occurred come from our successful creation of secular institutions - banks (sic), law, schools, hospitals, police, infrastructure (road, rail, power, drainage, networks), stable economics etc etc.In fact, the further a society moves away from its primitive beliefs in their various Toms and spend their energy creating fairer societies for themselves the better off they become. This is why ALL the parts of the world which you think are getting 'nicer' are also secularising quickly and belief in established religion is plummeting. Why? When we say today is warm or cold we are comparing it to yesterday or the day before. What I call a warm day is not the same as what a chap from Syria thinks is warm. Morality, as we've shown over and over, is relative and changeable.

There you go again - desperate to fill the holes of your (and our) ignorance with the metaphysical. If the activity of thinking, seeing, hearing, calculating, moral processing and so on can be seen in the brain how can it be distinct from the brain?Where else is it occurring?

So you've answered you own question. What has that got to do with anything? Our societies have evolved - that's the difference between then and now; our knowledge has increased along with our technology which has allowed us to have easier, longer lives. It's purely developmental progress.The stuff you're struggling with - the strong emotions of morality - probably evolved millions of year earlier and probably only started to make large leaps when language developed.

This is bizarre. You know beyond all doubt that the thoughts in your head are in your head. Not your heart, not someone else's head, not another dimension; your own head.Even if you didn't know this simply because it's obvious, you can sit inside an fMRI scanner, think your weird thoughts and see the parts of your brain that are thinking them. The operators can give you moral puzzles and tell you, in advance, which parts of your brain will go to work solving them and you can see it happen.When those parts of the brain responsible for senses like sight, hearing, morality, cognition etc are missing, damaged or interfered with by drugs, those senses and emotions also go missing too.The input to start your brain working on these things is the environment which you experience through your senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell.The evidence is as strong as it could possibly be that all this happens in our brains and you have absolutely no evidence that it doesn't - just some sort of delusional wish for it not to be so.Why do you need to fantasise about this? What is making you deny such obvious truths?

where do YOUR thoughts happen GDR?

If we talk about dealing with a moral issue, in your analogy, we can see both the rock (the cause of the brain activity - in this case an external stimulus, the moral problem) and the effect of throwing it into the pond - the brain lighting up under fMRI.We can also see that if we remove the pond (watch a psychopath's brain) but still throw the rock (use the moral puzzle), there is no splash. (The brain does not light up.)It's QED. It's as simple as that - it all happens in the brain.
(That and the plain-as-your-face fact, that there's nowhere else that it CAN happen and no-one but you suggesting that it does) You do have an answer, science tells you the answer - the brain and the brain alone is responsible for your thoughts and moral feelings. But for some inexplicable reason you don't want it to be true. It's not a claim, it's a proven, scientific fact. If you can find a single neuroscientist that is publishing evidence that our thoughts and moral feelings originate anywhere other than our brain, please produce him/her. Meanwhile I'll point you to the hundreds of thousands of papers describing how the brain does it.

The 'screen' is the retina at the back of the eye. I suspect that's not what you mean - but trying to understand what you mean is difficult because your beliefs are confusing you. The image on the screen of the retina is interpreted into what we cause vision by the visual cortex of the brain.As usual with science, if you're not going to accept that as fact, you're going to have to do a lot of work to properly understand it, before making up stuff to contradict it. I don't know what that means. If you mean that we can see the thought process happening using fMRI, it certainly is interesting, but no more supernatural than seeing your bones using X-ray. We can only perceive that which we have receptors for. If we have no receptors for hearing ultra sound, we can't hear it. If we have no receptors for ultra violet, we can't see it.So far no-one has found a Tom receptor if that's what you're getting at. Though we do know that the need to believe in Toms is fairly universal - or has been in the past before we started to know more. The need to believe seems to be a side effect of consciousness - wanting answers to all questions. 'Tom did it' allows us to relax.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Well you've just invented a whole pile of woo for no obvious reason. If Tom exists he can do whatever he wants - he's God, for God's sake! If he want to interfere with our sense of morality he can and we'd never know. (There goes the entire oncept of free will, but never mind.)I've no idea why religious believers feel that they have to invent parascience inorder to shore up their beliefs. Faith has to invent pretty much every branch of natural science to sustain her beliefs - why can't you just say it's miraculous like they did when they invented the religions to start with?

QM isn't woo, it's been proven empirically - the fact that ordinary people don't understand it, doesn't make it woo. (Ordinary people don't understand TV either.) And anyway, what's that got to do with the price of pomegranates? A1. Because he's God. Doing anything he wants, is a defining charactistic of a God. You want a lessor god now?A2. I invoke the cart before horse protocol which you approve of:
you haven't proven that he can't do anything he likes and I know it in my heart that he can. I have formed that conclusion after extensive study of the nature of God. That's enough, apparently. And as I have outlined, It's our secular institutions that are responsible for whatever improvement in morality you think we are seeing. In those places where you think we are behaving better, belief in any sort of Tom is declining rapidly whilst our secular institutions are growing.You claim that our sense of justice is somehow proof of God. But our individual sense of justice is mostly our sense of vengeance; our secular laws prevent us from acting on our sense of justice - the eye for an eye thing is is closer to immorality than morality. It always amuses me that it's the christian right in your country that is all for hanging them high.Because you see absolutely anything as proof of the existence and influence of Tom - including, presumably, the decline in the belief of him in the areas that you see improvement - you won't be impressed with the argument that we are responsible for our own advancement. But it sure is hard for any objective onlooker to agree with you.And of course, even in the areas you think things are getting better, our nature has not changed. It would take very little for the progress we have made to disappear overnight - as we see from time to time during power cuts or flash riots. Only 70 years ago the world was on a knife edge, had Nazi Germany prevailed we'd be in a totally different phase now. Had the Cuban missile crisis gone the wrong way, you wouldn't be writing this. Who knows what's around the corner. It's wishful thinking again, I'm afraid.Go read Lord of the Flies or Philip K Dick's 'the Man in the High Castle'. Or look at the 'Never Again' memorial in the parade ground of Dachau concentration camp and then pick up any newspaper - you'll see, that 'Never Again' is a hope, not a promise. We weren't discussing Tom 'implanting a spark of knowledge in us' - whatever that might mean - we were talking about Tom directly intervening in our sense of morality. This kind of thing was done by an angel sat on your right shoulder back in the day. Now apparently it's by manipulating - well I'm not sure what - maybe you can tell me? Either way, interfering with our sense of morality is an interference with our free will (whatever that is.) A while back I went of a ghost tour of Edinburg - complete tosh, of course but good fun, all those dark passages, underground tunnels and Victorian murders. At the end the guide started spouting garbage about string theory and claiming it as proof of the existence of ghosts. Charlatans down the ages have piggy backed science to add credibility to their make-believe. It's just more snake oil - with added protem+ for shinier hair.Like you, the guide had no clue about the science. You also know even less about 'the nature of Tom' than the ghost tour guide knew about his ghosts. Just like him, you're just making this stuff up to suit your requirements.I've just returned from a visit to Flanders Fields in Belgium. Ypres and Passchendaile, the 1st World War cemeteries and the Ypres war museum. 550,000 men and boys lost their lives there. 1.5m fled Belgium as refugees. 10m died in that war. 'The war to end all wars' - but didn't. That's only 100 years ago next year.Where was your Tom then? A padre was killed, shot straight through his bible. Chlorine gas was used that killed everything from insects, to rats to horses to men. Where was that 'still small voice'? You can't answer that; no religious person ever has. The closest any came is to invent the fall and put the blame on us - but you don't believe that so you just try not to think about it, worrying instead about whether your Tom exists in another dimension - as absurd as counting angels on pin-heads.The first world war was started over Bosnia and Croatia - a conflagration which blew up again only a few years ago and is still smouldering. Religion and tribalism, power and control. Please don't tell me our morality is being guided by God - if it is he's a piss-poor leader and it's time we got a better one.

There's loads of stuff in your last reply that I find ridiculous but it's all be done over many times so I'm just going to leave it be. But this is something we hear time and again and it just baffles me. It's an idea that's been passed down through the ages in a really shocking attempt to justify evil and suffering: It's so crazy it hurts.The reason people are capable of doing harm is because our entire global ecosystem is dependent on creatures eating other creatures. It creates hunter and hunted, fear and distrust, kill or be killed. Everything hangs on those emotions - it's literally life and death. Over millions of years those drives (and others) have made us what we are.Tom was a carnivore, not a vegetarian; his 'still small voice' is a scream.

I'm going to assume that you're not deliberately misunderstanding me.The fact that we evolved from other animal species means that we have most of their traits and instincts. The reason we are violent is because the world we evolved in is violent, it depends on creatures eating weaker creatures in order to survive.That is the explanation of evil. Nothing mystical, nothing religious, just biology.There was no reason at all for your Tom to create a world where in order to survive we had to hunt, kill and eat his other creations. He could, for example, have given us all solar panels. But no he devised a system of kill or be killed.Kind and loving? Don't be rediculous.

The 'good' answer, is that we're animals like all others and that explains pretty much everything about our behaviours. It also shows that Tom, if he exists, is a bit of a git.But you can't square that within your beliefs, so you just ignore it.Now my personal belief is that all religious belief is founded on personal revelation - just as you describe. Once an individual has experienced that, s/he makes the reality of his or her life fit the belief. You've seen that Faith's revelation needs her to throw away practically all science and sense in order to maintain it. Yours requires you to throw away most of the biblical requirements of your religion in order to continue to believe.Everything that you learn about our natural world will confirm your beliefs in the Tom that you'd like to believe and everything that challenges it will be set aside. There is no argument, factual, scientific or philosophical that can make a difference to you, because you believe that you know the nature of God and have put him in a place where he can't be touched.It must be very comforting.