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Tag Archives: paganism

The Universe has a serious psychological disorder

19 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Dissociative Personality Disorder, paganism, Panpsychism, Psychology, Scientific American

O18.1Potamos

The authors of an essay in Scientific American have couple constitute panpsychism and Dissociative Identity Disorder as a mechanism for explaining the existence of consciousness in the material universe. A fundamental trouble of the materialist worldview is that there is consciousness and rocks don’t have consciousness — so how things made out of powdered rocks and water (human beings) have consciousness presents problem.

One way to solve that problem is to say the consciousness is just a physical property and so my electrons have a rudimentary consciousness. As the authors explain:

Under this view, called “constitutive panpsychism,” matter already has experience from the get-go, not just when it arranges itself in the form of brains. Even subatomic particles possess some very simple form of consciousness. Our own human consciousness is then (allegedly) constituted by a combination of the subjective inner lives of the countless physical particles that make up our nervous system.

This leads to a problem: how then can human beings experience their own center of consciousness? If there is one great consciousness which underlies the entire universe (it is inherent in everything), then how to we explain our individual identities?

This is where Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) helps: One human being can be the locus of multiple centers of consciousness which is known as DID. The same mechanism which permits one human body to have multiple centers of consciousness is the mechanism which permits individual humans to have their own center of consciousness separate from the universal consciousness in all things.

Essentially, the universe has DID and we are one of those personalities.

It should be noted that this is paganism: where the universe is animate. Indeed if you scratch this hard, you end up with tree spirits and water sprites.

Religious Insurance

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in New Testament Background, Uncategorized

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New Testament Background, paganism, Religious Insurance, Rodney Stark

classic Greek temple

As E. R. Dodds recognized, religious life in the empire suffered from excessive pluralism, from “a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe.”21 Moreover, since no god could effectively demand adherence (let alone exclusive commitment), individuals faced the need and the burden to assemble their own divine portfolio,22 seeking to balance potential services and to spread the risks, as Dodds noted in his reference to religious insurance. Thus, a rich benefactor in Numidia contributed to temples and shrines honoring “Jove Bazosenus…Mithra, Minerva, Mars Pater, Fortuna Redux, Hercules, Mercury, Aesculapius, and Salus.”23 Ramsay MacMullen reports a man who simultaneously served as a priest in four temples,24 while many temples served many gods simultaneously.

Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (p. 33). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

God didn’t create, but elves and trolls ….

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Uncategorized

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Creation, Culture, Iceland, paganism, religion, Science, secularism, Thesis

Iceland seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation, according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25 believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.

Read the rest

This story about Iceland seems related to this story about Icelanders: More than half of Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and trolls.

Huldufolk: A Secular Age looks rather old pagan

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Thesis, Uncategorized

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Culture, Elves, Huldufolk, Irrationality, paganism, Secular, Thesis

iur

The WSJ reports:

Not in Europe, however, where the churches, once so important, are now empty. For the champions of the secularization thesis, such a development is nothing to complain about: Empty churches are a sign of reason’s progress. Mr. Stark offers some amusing evidence to the contrary. Drawing on the Gallup poll, he notes that Europeans hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs. In Austria, 28% of respondents say they believe in fortune tellers; 32% believe in astrology; and 33% believe in lucky charms. “More than 20 percent of Swedes believe in reincarnation,” Mr. Stark writes; “half believe in mental telepathy.” More than half of Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and trolls. It seems as if the former colonial outposts for European missionaries are now becoming more religious, while Europe itself is becoming interested in primitive folk beliefs.

There’s more

 

The Religious Sentiment of a New York Times Science Writer

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics

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Apologetics, Cancer, Creation, Fate, Homer, Moira, Mutation, New York Tims, paganism, random

The article by the NY Times explained how much of cancer appears to be just the result of random mutations: It just happens without our ability to control the event.  It then ends with this bit of religious philosophy:

For all our agonizing, it can be liberating to accept and even embrace the powerful role chance plays in the biology of life and death. Random variation, after all, is the engine of evolution.

Because of spontaneous mutations in germ cells — sperm and eggs — each generation of our species is subtly different. Some of the variations confer an advantage and others a vulnerability. They are sifted by natural selection, and so we adapt and evolve.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/though-we-long-for-control-chance-plays-a-powerful-role-in-the-biology-of-cancer-and-the-evolution-of-life.html?ref=health&_r=1

Don’t worry about cancer, it’s just how nature creates life.

Notice that this is a creative force is chance and necessity, randomness and fate. But if we think a bit more, by “chance” or “random” we really mean things which happen but we just don’t expect them. If we knew more precisely all the intricate details of the forces upon cell reproduction, we would be able to accurately predict the mutations and thus it would no longer be “chance”. “Chance” is merely a measure of ignorance. Fortuna is an ancient goddess of chance.

This leaves us to fate. In the Illiad, Book 24, line 209, we learn that Moira, the Fates, spin out the length of one’s life at birth. This belief in the Fates is an odd sort of “liberation”; it is merely a passive resignation: there is nothing to be done with death.

That, however, is an overtly religious and pagan sentiment. It appears reasonably and rational, but that is because it is spoke as the language of believers. Nothing sounds more reasonable, more rational to believers than to hear their belief expressed in words where it cannot even be questioned.

There is another level of paganism here: the belief that inanimate forces have the power of life and death; that atoms in motion in time are gods and are capable of creating personhood in human beings. It is an odd belief if you do not hold it: It is odd to think that hydrogen atoms left alone for a few billion years will eventually write poems, fall in love and look wistfully upon their ancient parent, matter with the power of creation. There is no “advance” upon paganism here, the Sky and the Earth creating all. Sure, the names have changed and the story has become more complex.

However it is not the only story.

The Materialist Magician

28 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in C.S. Lewis

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Adolphe Monod, C.S. Lewis, D.A.Carson, intolerance, Jesus Temptated in the Wilderness, Materialist Magician, Metaxas, paganism, Prayer Breakfast, Screwtape Letters, secularism, tolerance

In the Screwtape Letters, Letter 7, Screwtape writes to the younger demon Wormwood,

When humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, only believe in us, we cannot make the materialists and ethics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotional lies and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to believe in the Enemy. The “Life Force,” the worship of sex, and other aspects of psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce are perfect work — the materialist magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshiping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits” — the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey orders.

CS Lewis published his book Screwtape Letters in 1942. Since that time, Screwtape’s dream of a “Materialist Magican” has come to be.  In January 12, 2012, article, Dr. Peter Jones wrote:

When I was studying the Death of God theology, I never thought that years later I would read an academic book entitled Postsecularism (Cambridge: 2009). Its British author, Dr. Mike King, describes how secular humanists are becoming spiritual, open to questions of the spirit while retaining, of course, the secular habit of critical thought. However, not all “spirits” can apply.

The “in” spirituality includes

Quantum Physics, which shows “the human being as joyously co-extensive with and co-creator of that cosmos”;

Transpersonal Psychology, since it is both scientific and spiritual (it is actually occult shamanism);

Nature worship, which gives us both morals and spirituality;

Goddess worship, practiced by cutting-edge modern feminism.

This intellectual openness allows only one spirituality—pagan spirituality, or One-ism. Two-ism is unthinkable. Postsecularists seek to be liberated from two opposing “extremist” forces: traditional religion and atheistic secularism. Post-secularism delivers us from both these dead ends. While atheism is no longer valid, neither is traditional theism. For the postmodern the way forward is pantheism.

http://truthxchange.com/articles/2012/01/27/io-86-your-spiritual-but-not-religious-neighbor/

Christianity at heart is not merely an option among many. It is a historical religion which makes truth claims which will not devolve into a generic spirituality. Aldous Huxley’s “perenial philosophy” sound s true and good in a world were “true” and “good” merely subjective evaluations and we all just want to get along.  However, such a philosophy runs square into the claims of Jesus:

5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” John 14:5–7 (ESV)

Now, Jesus’ claim to be the sole way does not prove his point. However, it does prove that he is not willing to share “truth” others. Pilate may ask, “What is truth?”  Still Jesus will answer, “I am.”

In a gracious, though uncompromising way, Eric Metaxas made this point at the national prayer breakfast:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/02/03/eric-metaxas-at-the-national-prayer-breakfast/

And thus, the non-Christian positions which seek to reduce Christianity to merely a subjectively mediated recognition of the one universal truth, are not tolerant of other positions. Rather, they are totalitarian of a single position to which all forms of thinking must devolve. On the matter of tolerance and intolerance, see D.A. Caron’s recent book on tolerance:

http://andynaselli.com/tolerance

Adolphe Monod wrote in Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness, “The Battle”, “Today you are placed in teh presence of unbelieving and profane world that tolerates everything except what is holy and true.”

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