OGHoosier

These paintings look beautiful. Here's hoping we get more information about them. @Sevenbak, how old were those paintings in Southern Utah which you examined?

I never said that. You're looking for @Robert J Anderson.

Rorty is back in style. By the way, I'm back on the board for a bit. Let's have some fun.

I don't know, wouldn't the birth experience be painful for the infant? Don't children who die before the age of 8 still experience pain? I'd say they do. Enough at least to know for themselves some disadvantages of a fallen mortal condition, or separation from God. I'd say that children, just by virtue of their however-brief separation from divine light, learn enough by being in life. They taste enough bitter to know what good is. In any case, I am not convinced that we know enough about conditions on the other side to truly make a judgement. We don't know what these children may have en

I took a break to focus on some other things, but I think I'll pop back in for a bit.

You read the Dispatch too? I know this strays close to politics...but still, good taste.

Thanks for the article. I did read it. I'm afraid that I believe he missed the point. He didn't address spiritual experience and its causes so much as handwave it with an appeal to aesthetics -"The intellectual and moral stains of the world’s religions—the misogyny, otherworldliness, narcissism, and illogic—are so ugly and indelible as to render all religious language suspect"- and promissory naturalism - "a maturing science of the mind should help us to understand and access the heights of human well-being." We've been around the merry-go-round on The Moral Landscape before. Suffice it to say

Are you holding to a North American geography then?

K-LOVE is a radio station which broadcasts Christian pop music. It's ironic that I denounce it as it's actually my favorite. I enjoy the songs and they're more uplifting than most, so I often listen to it if it's just me in the car. However, the songs are all very fluffy, positive, encouraging, Jesus-loves-you, the-only-scripture-we-ever-reference-is-John-3:16 stuff. There's a ton of songs which address themselves directly to the Savior and basically serenade Him, which I find a little strange given my LDS upbringing which emphasizes a certain formality and decorum when referring to or address

Fair enough, I should be more respectful of people's development.

As you might expect, I would like to raise objections to some of your comments. I disagree. If by "accept" you mean "acknowledge the existence of", sure. They don't have a choice. However, for the settled naturalist, accepting the veridicality of the experience is impossible, so the content of the experience must be dismissed in some way and causally attributed in some way to a form of deception, whether intentional or otherwise. That is not acceptance. That is not taking it seriously. On the contrary, the point of most of these is that God, or at the very least outside s

Double post, sorry.

Oof, sorry about that. I've edited the OP, hopefully the new link works. It'a a link to JSTOR, but this particular paper should be public access. Dumsday doesn't go for the throat in this paper. He brings up a few prominent atheist philosophers like Mackie who have commented that they think spiritual experience is unreliable because it often follows cultural lines, which his data obviously contradicts. The cultural-reinforcement and confirmation-bias arguments against religious experience don't work under these conditions. He includes an addendum at the end saying that it may be easier fo

Shame, I liked his music. I will probably continue to like it, but I can't empathize with his exitmony in the slightest. Me too. It looks like boilerplate non-denom therapeutic-deism K-LOVE fluff complete with the standard eisegesis of the woman at the well and the women in adultery. I can't regard that sort of pseudo-theology as anything even resembling rigorous. The continual modern eliding of the so-called "dark sayings of Jesus" and the entire Old Testament in the name of nigh-idolatrous modern zeitgeist is incessantly frustrating.

Hey everyone! As you may know I've lurked on the forum on and off for about a year, occasionally chiming in on matters of history and philosophy. I've never started my own topic before though, until now, but this is an intelligent community and I want to pick your brains. Philosophically speaking I am deeply interested in the philosophy of religious experience, primarily since religious experience is the root and ground of my own Restored Christian (a demonym I prefer to "Mormon" or "member of the CoJCoLDS") faith, as well as that of the vast majority of believers throughout the ages, and

600 BC. I found that website too. Shame they didn't give their sources, finding scholarly work on the firing techniques is proving to be extremely difficult. Everything I've found so far compares pottery based on stylistic elements and incisions, not firing techniques. Also, "coil-firing" doesn't sound right to me since from what I can see coiling was a way to mold the clay prior to firing. I would like some clarification but I'm not tossing it out yet.

This is remarkably fascinating as there is one commenter on here who has discussed ancient American pottery as a point of contention which helped crack his faith. Can I PM you? I would like to learn more about your journey.

Not sure where you're going with the ETA, I never contested that religious activity can't be harmful. That said, you can also do obscenely harmful things in the name of service to things like the state, your family, your friends, and that does not eradicate the worth or even the goodness of such concepts. As for them still being man-made, I'm going to lodge my disagreement. Man-influenced, yes, but I'm open to a broader spectrum of spiritual and divine involvement. Neither do I. I think it works fine, seeing as I embrace a certain pluralism when it comes to spiritual involvement

I'm honestly skeptical that most religions are man-made in the sense that they are knowingly fabricated. Even someone who's not a theist (and I know that you do believe in God, so I'm not directing this comment at you specifically) must admit that there's a lot of weird stuff out there which historically have been grounds for religion. Global reports of visions, incidences of intuitive knowing, events interpreted as miracles...these things obviously happen, whether materialist science can ever sufficiently explain them or not. Perhaps I have an overly charitable view of humanity, but I think i

Paul's Acts 26 courtroom drama is crazy enough.

I'd say that that is extremely unlikely. Joseph Smith was a student of Hebrew in that he possessed several Hebrew textbooks and took the equivalent of 1 introductory course in Hebrew under Joshua Seixas. He attained the status of talented amateur, with special focus on biblical Hebrew. The identification of the canopic jars as cardinal directions, however, is Egyptian and extremely unlikely to be associated with introductory Hebrew materials.

I'm not sure there's any way to determine whether or not Abraham himself would have been familiar with it, since all we have about Abraham is pseudepigraphic or written by a later prophet. There's no control to compare to.

I too would like to sidestep getting a Scribd membership, so this is good advice. Thanks! I came away from Robert's paper with the impression that he was referencing the Bible stories as traditions, not necessarily historical facts. So I think it might be somewhat applicable even for those who don't take the biblical stories literally. But your general point remains valid: those who don't approach the study from a believing perspective will likely find it less instinctively agreeable than those who do approach it from an already-believing perspective.

Fair Dinkum's assessment is reasonable. Dale Morgan once put it that, since he couldn't accept the existence of God, he had to look for any other explanation than what the Church puts forward. So be it. For those who don't believe in God, there's not much that our scholarship, which includes God existing as a point of departure, can do. There will always be another explanation, even if it comes down to the blindest of blind luck. Whether that is likely or not is something for each individual to judge. It's impossible to define when God satisfies our subjective belief-conditions, but I would ho

I absolutely love that story. Dr. Pibb it is.