The Arrogant Atheist Forum

The point of it? I don't think there is a point.
Science is not about searching "the meaning of something". Science is about what the facts are and what the theory is behind it.
We both know that.

So i don't really care about what it means. The whole problem is simply that there is less proof of "nothing" than there is for "something".
What we are experiencing right know is all we have at the moment. And it is real. I say that there is no real proof that it will ever disappear, while others say: "well, someday it will disappear".
Then i ask: "ok and that is based on what?"
And then eventually we see it's only based on how they are looking to a death body.
A death body does not talk, breath or think. So some conclude: "well, he's gone".

I would not say he's gone: He's still there.
If you say he's gone, then you are actually convincing yourself that there is something like a soul, which was there before, and is now gone.
That's what you are saying when you say that there is nothing after death.

I say: "well, no, there is no proof of that". When you are death you are still there. The only thing that happened is your body shutting down. But you are still there, nevertheless.

It depends on how you look at it i guess.

This is the same as the following:
A man comes towards you and says you are walking on a giant ball that is travelling around another giant ball at a speed of 30 000 kms / hour.
And then you say: "ofcourse we all know thats bullshit, do you feel you are moving? ridiculous".

I think this discussion is kind of the same way, you really have to shift your mind a little bit.
But you believe whatever you want ofcourse. It are not things someone else should tell you, it are things you have to find out on your own, and i'm just willing to help you a little bit because i believe i'm close to the truth :-)
I still am one of the most hardcore Atheist on earth, don't forget that. I don't believe in souls. For me we are nothing more than a stone or a tree. And that's why we will always be.

Posted By: PaganKLHI do and I hope I am right.
Sure base a lot of my beliefs on this idea."Faith Is Much Better Than Belief. Belief Is When Someone Else Does The Thinking"

Name the ways of importance that this belief actually has on your 'current' life then OP.

Why do you think this so strongly and what would it mean for it to be false?

Posted By: Seppe Cools@TheBlueFalconX
The out of body experience sounds very nice, i've never had it before, but the explanation of it is very simple by the way.

There is a part in our brain that has an image of our body, and thanks to this image we know where our body is in relation with our brain.
When you have a out-of-body experience, this image gets disorted and our brain is moved in for example the Z-direction of this 3 dimensional image.
Then we see that our brain is "here" and that our body is 1 meter in front of us.
And there you have your out-of-body experience.

This can happen in all the different directions, all of them resulating in what we call the "out of body experience", but the only thing that happens is just some error your mind runs into when looking at the mind relative to the body.
So it has got nothing to do with a possible soul, as you've discovered by yourself already.

I still haven't experienced it in my life, but i know that it is possible in a lab to recreate this, by using electrodes on the right parts of the brain. But i'm not gonna get my skull drilled to experience it.

Hmm, okay some good points. I agree that it can be induced via manip. the brain in certain ways. Ofcourse, in order to achieve OBE you need to have the right vibrations in your brain anyway. (Akin to the brain frequencies of sleep).

In my experience I left my room and went downstairs and was gliding through the living room. I could see my grandma sleeping on the couch, and my cat walking from the back sliding door to the hallway. I remember vividly the way the parking lot light shone through the tiny glass window on the heavy front door.

At both points in time I was aware of myself laying in bed: the fee of the covers on my skin and the wind from my fan blowing air on me. And yet, I also knew I was downstairs in the living room, taking it all in. Very surreal feeling to be able to locate yourself in two places at once.

At one point I swooped down towards my cat and she got spooked by something, ran off making a weird meow sound and I was startled by her reaction. At this point I felt like I was reeled into my body at the speed of sound. BOOM. I felt it in my ears. Imagine falling off a 100 story building and smoking the ground, minus the pain of it all. That's how it felt. Any who, as I felt being reeled in and was "back in my body" my eyes immediately opened casually and I could remember it perfectly. Not like a dream where details are skewed and places and faces are confused. I just smiled as I opened my eyes, cause I knew I finally had one.

Oh and as I entered the OBE, my whole body and mind was vibrating, almost violently, it seemed. I felt like I was sitting on an old dryer, ya know the shakey ass kind that move back and forth.

They may be recreatable in the lab, but.. doesn't that just verify their existence? I say it's a real phenomenon.
How it works I have no clue. I don't plan on bowing to the OBE gods just cause I had one. I know better.

Posted By: Seppe Cools

Posted By: TheBlueFalconXIn my experience I left my room and went downstairs and was gliding through the living room. I could see my grandma sleeping on the couch, and my cat walking from the back sliding door to the hallway. I remember vividly the way the parking lot light shone through the tiny glass window on the heavy front door.

oh this is still something else you are talking about, thats another kind of OBE (more to the extreme) i've never dug into, so i can't really say anything about that,
but a wild guess would be that it's a mix between what i said before and a dream,
but i prefer experiencing this myself first

What i do want to state is that not a single part of you did actually go to that living room. That's something i don't believe.
What i do believe though without any problem, is that you remember that it really happened.
We know that the memory is storing wrong experiences a couple of times. Things you are absolutetly sure about right now, but have never happened. So it's probably a mix of all these things.

I've considered all these things as possibilities. I wasn't trying to suggest that a part of me was there, not physical anyway.

I dream almost EVERY night. Multiple dreams also. I know what a dream feels and looks like. When you feel this, you'd know immediately.

I hope you experience this phenomenon sometime. No matter what it is, it's amazing nonetheless.

If you are curious in making an attempt. Try it under these conditions:
1) Pick a time during your life or day, where stress is a minimum. No worries or anything. Pay your bills, have sex with the girlfriend and so forth.
2) Read up on some OBE's. Find some good sites with tips. Preparing for what signs to look out for helped me majorly.
3) Attempt to calm your mind by meditating, possibly with some soothing/calming music.
4) and the hardest part I find... when your laying in bed falling into a sleep state... keep your mind awake and aware at all times. Its so fucking hard to keep thinking as your dozing off. You may want to try it both falling into a sleep and the coming out of sleep.

Going into sleep has worked for me.

Yes, my focus was on the nonsense of the cohesive soul concept and the bullshit that is the concept of duality. However, I did not address your particular flavor of reincarnation and for that I make no apologies. Reincarnation as a belief follows my analysis in ridiculously high number of cases, but not all. To that end, I will rectify the small gap you imply.

Is there reincarnation as Seppe Cools implies? Now, let me paraphrase his lines so that it is very clear what it is that he is referring to.

Lets see. He said:

"The consciousness that we experience, is the universe itself instead of an individual experience attached on your DNA."

"Every single part of your body at that time, is GONE. Your left leg is in Europe. Your right leg is in China. Your left arm is in Canada and your right arm has just been absorbed by the sun. Now tell me, - now you know that the body you had at the moment of that memory, has been totally disconnected and moved to untraceable places -, what has happened with the consciousness of that moment? The body that you had at that moment, has died and all those body parts, including your brain, have been disconnected."

So, what he means by reincarnation is that since the pieces of me are not locked into position, those parts may be halfway across the universe by now and the consciousness that I had when they were there went with them? Consciousness is the universe itself in some manner? I use question marks as I may be misstating this, so I leave room to err.

It is an interesting thought, no doubt, and it lies within a number of other similar "new-age" style beliefs. Consciousness is universal, it's everywhere. We are but expressions of the universe consciousness and so forth. The particles and atoms that I have within me right now will leave me in time and travel to remote locations, possibly even off world to an extent. So is this possible or reasonable, logical or rational?

No. It is new age "hocus pocus" with a coat of physics paint to make it all seem legitimate, but it is still nonsense. It relies on altered meanings of consciousness and reincarnation to support itself. The first problem is that consciousness is the act of being aware of ones surroundings which I am due to the interaction of all of my bodies and brains cognitive functions. My DNA is not aware as it has no such mechanism to be such. My arm is not aware as it has no such mechanism. It takes most of the systems of my brain to be aware. I am not aware simply because I am alive and my particles are not aware because I am aware. It might sound logical to conclude that, but it is not. It is a logic fallacy - Division fallacy which is the act of attributing to the parts properties of the whole. An example: the Rand Corporation is a smart company, I work for Rand therefore I am smart. Things do not work that way. You need a strong evidential basis to apply properties of the whole to its pieces. The brain is another excellent example. Each part of the brain contributes to the main function and it is this gestalt that provides us with our awareness. Be that as it may, that does not mean that my eyes are aware. They do not share in the property of the whole brain; rather, they are there simply to process light information and transmit the data to my vision center for analysis and interpretation. It is an easy fallacy to make and it actually has a corresponding reverse situation - the properties of the parts are not necessarily properties of the whole, despite what you might think is logical in that situation. An example is the tire of a car. It is pliant and rubbery, but the car it is attached to do not share these properties as a whole. Parts are rigid, parts are solid yet pliant and so forth.

The particles within me will not be there in a few minutes. Sure, I believe that such a statement has a rational basis, but no proof has been provided to imply that something of me leaves with each atom. Rather, the only proof we have is that our body is designed in such a manner so as to utilize materials as fuel and then discard them. It may give you some form of "mind fuck" realization that a component you just used was in an elephant some time ago and will be consumed by a lemur sometime in the future, but this is the nature of living in a biosphere wherein materials are recycled on a relatively constant basis. It is why the system works, actually. None of those atoms are the property of the apple I just ate or the fruit fly that will eat part of my leavings. However, for the duration that they exist within my homeostatic system, they are mine. I control them and they serve me only to be rejected when they are of no further need.

Will these parts I reject get used by someone else. Yes. Will it continue to do so for the next 10,000 years? Yes. Doesn't that mean that I have been reincarnated. Not at all. My parts are not me once they leave. They are waste materials to be recycled into the system. They will continue to get reused for many eons and it will mean nothing to me when I die. When I am gone, I am gone. My conscious dies with my physical form. The gestalt of my brain will be no more and all will be left is dead matter - lifeless components to decay and become the food of microbes and such. To be recycled into the system. That gestalt holds everything that I am and when I die, it dies. You might find comfort in the thought that your body will serve other life forms. Technically, this may even be called reincarnation - the act of being made flesh again. But then, my waste is already flesh again somewhere else which has absolutely no worth to me as a conscious entity. Reincarnation as a phrase is used to refer to the continuation of you as a person, not the continuation of waste materials you expelled at age ten. In this manner, there is no reincarnation. Again, you might find comfort in emotionalizing the recycling process, but that should not be called reincarnation. Call it "contributing to the system", if you like.

Thank you, BlueFalcon. That summed up the point nicely :bigsmile:

I do not own the carbon atoms in my body. I'm just using them. :smile:

We are all made from the same things. Yet I am not you.

@ TheBlueFalconX,
i perfectly understand why you say what you are saying,
therefore i also can see what "mistake" you are making,
unfortunately i can't bring it in words to make clear what the problem is...

But i am going to try it anyway, through a series of questions, it's up to you wether you want to answer or not:
You are here today experiencing life on this very moment in time with this very specific body.
From all the 6 billions bodies out there, you are experiencing life through that particular body.
Why is that?
What makes you feeling alive through this body, instead of through the body of someone on the other side of the world?

Depending on your answer, i'm going to ask you a second question, to eventually (hopefully ) get you stuck somewhere so you can see the problem for yourself.

To make things easy to follow (for everyone, and for you), i'm considering this as an individual question to you and i'm only going to continue with your answer only.
I have an answer on this question, and i am going to share it with you from the moment the time is right.
Keep in mind that this is not a discussion where we want to both defend our ideas. Instead, this is a thinking exercise where i'm going to try to show you things you probably haven't seen before.
I'm going to try to show you the problems i ran into when i was thinking your way when i was younger.
It's an open invitation so it's up to you.