When someone says that the belief in god is spiritual and cannot be tested by science, what are they actually saying?

Many people claim that belief in god is not based on physical evidence and is not a scientific claim and that it should not be treated as such.  They claim that god is not physical.  If god is not physical, then what is god?  If they say god is spiritual, I ask what is spiritual?

If god is not physical wouldn’t that mean that god doesn’t exist? If  something doesn’t have a physical impact or body then it does not exist.  If there is a god, then god would have a physical existence even if it were something like light or energy or waves. If god interacted in the natural environment there would be some scientific evidence for the existence of god. There is none to date, still the belief in the nonexistent is wide spread and many toss out physical evidence that contradicts their belief in something that  is nonexistent.

Often times religious people use the term spiritual experience to describe why they believe there is a god. They don’t refer to their feelings of awe or joy as human emotion and usually they don’t admit or realize that people of other faiths or those who lack faith have similar experiences.  People who believe also claim that god is a spirit and that they have a spirit.  If there is such a thing as a spirit, what is it and what are its physical properties?

The so called spiritual experience cannot be used as evidence of god the same way that hatred or anger or confusion cannot be used to prove or justify a belief in god. If there is a god the only way to tell is if there is one is by physical evidence.  The only way we would believe anything else is with physical evidence.

Now some say we take things on faith all the time but I ask what do we believe that we could not be proven with physical evidence?

Like the idea of someone having a brain or if they care about us.???

It would be very easy to check if someone had a brain.  We just have to open up their skull and peer inside.  The reason why we know people have brains is because that is exactly what people have done.

For matters of abstract ideas such as love it is possible to prove someone cares about you by the way they treat and interact with you..  If someone tortures you or abandons you,  you can assume they don’t care about you.  If on the other hand they take care of you and treat you with compassion and kindness you can assume  that they care about you.  There is certain amount of physical evidence that a person cares about you or doesn’t. The word love is a label of a physical response in terms of emotion and action.   How people responds to us and how they treat us determines how we think they feel about us.  So as the question of love’s existence it is easy to tell by physical evidence because love or the lack of love have clear physical reality to our persons, even though we may disagree about what it means to love because love is a term used to refer to things that happen in the natural world.

So what do we believe that does not rely on physical evidence or that could not be proven to certain probability by observing the natural world?  Faith is the belief in the nonexistent.  This is very clear. Why do people believe in things that are nonexistent or have no physical evidence?

What is god?  Is it a feeling like love? Or is god believed to be like us, a physical being in the universe, not a word to describe an emotion or actions or chemical reactions that happen in our brain and bodies.  It is easy to prove that people believe in god in the same way we can tell if someone loves us.  We may be wrong or be misguided but there are physical manifestations. However when people say that god is spiritual and not physical what they are really saying is that there is no physical manifestation of god, which is the same as saying god is nonexistent or there is no god.  Who could say that about emotion or clouds or chairs that have a physical reality and impact on the natural world without being labeled as out of it?

If there is a god, god must be physical in the same way an atom or a wave or a rock is.  To say otherwise is to say that god is nonexistent. So the existence of god is in the realm of science and evidence.  When we say there is no evidence for god or god’s existence cannot be proven, we are saying that god does not exist according to the evidence that we have so far.

I have heard it said that believers of god(s) and atheists don’t share common ground and therefore can’t debate but I think they do because both believe that god is nonexistent. One just realizes the implications of nonexistence and other does not.

You and I are ugly cowards

who cling to the rational and practical

bound by the social constraints

of our reality

and time and town and positioning

who will never live under the water

or have a son or grow old enough together

That is the reality. The dream I whisper

in your mouth is just a trick to keep

your head above my liquid body

I think asking questions is a good thing to do even though it only leads to more questions. What could possibly be better? People want an answer to their death but the answer is not fulfilling to many people. How come we as a species haven’t come to grips with our death yet? Religion negates death, it says we don’t die but even a small child understands we die. The body decays. Our sense of self is a byproduct of mental functioning. It ends too. The heart stops beating. The brain is the same.   Can you honestly comprehend that one day you will no longer exist?

Why is important to think about death or to ask these questions?   I suppose it is not.  One could stay focused on life and not worry about death…. but no one does.  Besides our understanding of brain and conscious is growing.  Does anyone apply mystery or supernatural transcendence to the leg or arm or heart?   When our brain is fully understood, will that kill the soul in the mythical and mystical sense?  How will humans live with this new knowledge?  Will large groups of people just ignore it and keep with their beliefs even though much of the mystery they base their beliefs on is no longer mysterious?  Is this clear or a cure?

I have no problem with mysticism or spiritual beliefs because I understand they are invention of humanity, mainly the human brain to make sense of the unknown.  No one who knows about weather thinks the storm or winds are evil spirits.  Once a scientific explanation comes from physical evidence and experiments creating a myth is no longer necessary.  I think as a society we are preparing ourselves for this.  We understand that there is “probably” no god.  Does that mean we want it that way?  Probably No. We like the predictable and small.  A ball you can hold in your hand is easier to understand than a ball that you live on.  As humans we can only comprehend limited number of parts of a whole at the same before the pieces become the whole and we can no longer observe all the parts.

But as we make models and understand the physical world what is called god or mysterious is no longer logical.  God is not a fulfilling answer to how an atomic bomb works or how the brain works…

This is the hurdle. Can you stop your mind from creating delusions to answer the unknown?  Do you have that kind of mental control?  Do you have enough knowledge at your disposal to fill the mysterious with natural explanations?

As a child I started this questioning.  It has taken 29 years of reading and thinking for me to be able feel alright with uncertainty and death.  I don’t want to die but I can look at my death as a natural process and find a measure of peace and understanding that like the blue bird, the ape and crow I am a part of nature and bond to the limits of nature.  I have stared into the face of death  and my friends, I am now liberated.  I can feel overwhelmed by the beauty of life.  That is something that peoples of faith don’t understand.  The fact that I am alive with you is enough for me to feel joyous.  I am not afraid of death nor am I enticed by it.  I value life because it is fleeting and we only get one life.  I would not go to war or kill someone because I believe to take another’s life is one of the most immoral things a human can do.  I don’t like picking flowers or putting birds in cages either.

I hope these clumsy words help put the atheist in perspective for you and as well encourage others in the search for knowledge.  Learning is not easy or pain free but for me, and many others the nectar of enlightenment is worth blistering  the mind.

what is the meaning of life

truth

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ham

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pinpoints

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death

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birth

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stuffing it

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what

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murder

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love

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pain

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cabbage

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sight

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delusion

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creating a death system from scum

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water

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ignorance

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blue jeans

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creation

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washing dishes

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the waltz

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smearing poop on the empire’s bathroom wall

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energy exchange

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determinism

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scotch

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picadors

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a sharpened double-headed ax

Let us begin at a place that everyone can agree.  There are too many poor people and too many wealthy people who do nothing to help the poor.  United States, for all its pomp and power is a nation of poor who are the backs that carry the wealth of the rich to their holding cellars.  Consumption, markets, fickle wants, ups and downs of demand and supply, the staggering affordable housing shortage, poor education, and lack of adequate health care are crippling my nation, my beautiful homeland, my resting place.  My mother is sick and the children are out in the cold at war with death’s promising door.

There are about 600,000 homeless people in U.S.A, that are counted for, and there are probably many more that have not been counted.  If a country with such wealth and resources, technology and potential cannot help its citizens, if in this great age of knowledge, there is no cure as of yet for poverty and instability, I must ask, is anyone looking for one?   If affordable housing is not available, where will the working poor live?  Or the sick?  Who are you working for?  What are you working for?  What are you living for?

Just in case no one ever told you, there is a better way.  Out, as far as you can perceive, the horizon of your hope and imagination, I ask you to sail the dangerous waters of the impossible, and tell me, what exactly can’t we do?

We have heard the old tales of competition and that the fittest survive, but the true tale of life and civilization, the bedrock of why we as species developed society, is cooperation.   The reason we have advanced is cooperation.  This is not some high in the sky bullshit.  This is truth; it is easier to carry a heavy load when you have help.

Freedom, potential, creativity, dreams and imagination, hard work, and fearless dedication to life, are the keys to the many locked problems that face us as the gardeners of earth.

Today I sit in a comfortable condo, off of the street and bitter cold drinking a hot cup of coffee.  There is food in my home, even a little beer and scotch.  There are plants and books and warm sweaters.  I have socks on my feet and I wear a gold ring on my finger.  Today, I am lucky and I am alive, and there are few who live better or have more joy.  I have pants, and underwear.  I have this machine that I write on that I can learn more than I can imagine.  I have music, piles of cds, files, records, and radios, and a tv.  I have everything that a woman could want.  I have tampons and nice fitting caps.  I have green tea and honey.  I have real maple syrup.  I have paints and canvas.  I have so much that sometimes, I don’t know what to do with it all.  Should I have tea or coffee?  Should I fold or hang my sweaters.  Should paint or write?  Should I listen to the public radio or Whitestripes?   Should I read the dictionary or world philosophy or physics?  Should I make a pumpkin pie or a pumpkin cake?  I am so well off that if the world could live as I there would be rejoicing and dancing and fucking, and peace, o, peace, would spread.  but of course, when I list off these things, they are not the same as a fat stack of money or a big house or a fancy car, or anything that my society considers to be wealth.  Its bunch shit.  Its bunch here today, gone tomorrow.  But what do you have that you take for granted?  Legs, arms, a full belly, medicine, a warm and secure place to live?

I know many think I am depressing or that this all negative, but for me it is the only way to exist.  I must be thankful and I must speak out, and I must bend my body to get the work done.   I have seen too much not to realize how truly wealthy I am.  Do I have needs that are yet to be met, yeah.  Do I have wants that may never be met, yeah.  Am I living an offensive life style on the labor and backs of others who suffer while I gain?  No.   Are you? And if you are, why?  If you are so damn smart and rich, successful and hard working, why don’t you help others?

So you’ve been on the road in your car for hours and the lightening is on both sides and you can see the bolt, and your daughter, who is still into stuffed snakes and dogs and cats shrieks in the back seat everytime the lightening flashes.   And then there is hail and realization that you don’t know if you are in the right lane or in more than one lane and there are thousands of cars behind you. Its Sunday night around bedtime, and so you wonder where are all the cars going to or from, as if you are the only who has anywhere worthwhile to come from.  You are not in a rush.  There is no time frame for you to plot, only a long way destination and the desire to put as much distance between you and roads and cars and lightening.  Your stomach hurts.  You haven’t had a quiet undisturbed bathroom visit for weeks.  You have been in a car for days -each day pulling further away from anything familiar.  This is right before the mountains. Mountains you will never climb and even driving through makes you nervous, aware of death and how it easy it will come to you.

You’ve seen enough to write a thousand stories, a thousand poems, a thousand paintings, and it’s rolling through your mind.  You don’t know who you are or your suppose purpose or if you are still on the right path. The road and the lights and the shadows of mountains grow larger, as the soft talking of daughter bounces off the interior of the car and traffic and wind noise. Where are you? Why did you think that a road trip could set some kind peace or meaning in you?  How does this help anyone, anything?  Then you realize something. For first time in your life you don’t give damn about what others need or want from you.  You come and travel because you can, because the road is there.  And this is the metaphor for your life. You are here because you can be like the stars being born or dying, the rotating planets of universe pushed by dark matter, pulled by gravity, highlighted by waves and electrons.  You say out loud, I have never believed in god, and saying this out loud, you are yourself. You are happy.  You are finally at the point where you will not a put mask on, and you will continue to live naked.  Of course you realize that this is where you are alone.  You cannot share this quiet wonder and joy.  There is no way to explain, no way to share it.  So, you hold your own heart and mind, and you love it.   Certainly there are others far or close who experiencing the same inner peace with existence and meaningless. But you don’t know them; you will never get inside their mind or behind their beautiful mask. That is what you come to grips with.  That is when you have changed yourself.  This is when you realize there is hope for the world. There is hope for life and it, although it will cease and decay, will be reborn.   The road is long between the west coast and east coast of north America and you cannot do it in one drive, so you pull up beside a motel, go in, and get a room, and despite being so tired, eyes that a few minutes ago couldn’t stay open, now are focused and awake.  The motel smells.  The TV is surreal.  You’ve forgotten about it somehow, and news, which you stay current in, seems fake. It is no longer important to you which laws are passed, or which war the president ends.  Only the mountains and badlands and roads and trees and prairie are real.  Only the beats of the hearts inside the motel room, readying for bed mean a thing to you.  You know what is like to be poor, to be rich, to somewhere in the middle. And tonight in a dank motel, another night in a town you’ve never slept in, you are at home.  Because even though everyone you love is not with, your daughter is and you’ve have gotten to know her in way that you have never gotten to know her, after 8 years, you see her as who she is.  And something about tomorrow is said, takes showers tonight, eat something, go to bed. But you are so happy. You want to talk the night off but you don’t. You don’t say anything you are feeling, you don’t try to make anyone understand.  You go outside and have a cig and a beer you smuggled in your bag, and smile.  Just smile, and it is a strange smile mixed with sadness and joy and human possibility, that you can’t share, that you will never share. But o if you could

rocky mountain national forest

Look past the first line of trees…. the red goes on and on and on….

the pine beetle is native to north america.  The experts say drought and warmer climate is leading to the spread…

they don’t mention fire. but to say that fire is a natural part of the forest (opens the cones and allows the seeds to come out).  Pine beetles fly to the tree.  Pine beetles usually eat the dead and older trees, or the remains of a tree after a fire but because of their population increase they are now eating young and healthy trees.  And spreading to other areas that used to not  be affected or target by the beetle.      I think the lack of fire is a problem though.

Because of life and money, we control the fires but this forest is a time bomb.  Even the green trees can be infested.

Fire will spread very quickly in a forest of dead trees, which may be the only way to impact the beetle. or not.  Perhaps fire will cause the pine beetle to travel on to another spot or tree.

nasa stardust mission

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news115.html

free online courses from mit

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

For the past few days I have been working on a story.  This is not the first story I’ve written but by far, it most outrageous and longest piece that I have attempted.  I will not be posting it on here.  It is a long way for being done or resembling anything coherent or readable, but my friends, I’m having a fun time.  It is science fiction.  It is an adventure story.  It will not be too weird.  When I have it sorted out, I may post parts of it, but I hope it will grew too big to put on a blog.

Already the characters are coming alive.  They are budding more characters.  I often times write a story and then realize somewhere in the process, that is going nowhere.  This is one is different. I already have thirty pages, and the plot is getting more complex and so, even if it does come out as total trash, it will be the longest trash I have written to date.  I can tell now that it will be at least 100 pages of trash.  And if I want it to be good, it will have to be a bit longer. Of course, I am trying too much for one story maybe. But perhaps it will grow to more than one story.  I am not sure yet. But I am excited.  I’ve been bouncing ideas off husband and one of my brothers, and both have given great feedback, and have said, that it sounds like a good story.  Lots of times my story ideas are boring. Like I am going to write a story about dog that eats bones. That is not a good plot.  A dog eating bones. Ha. Laughable.

My goal in writing poetry and flash fiction has always been to learn to write a decent line, a decent sentence. Then it was to write a group of sentences that were decent.  I wasn’t sure I was ready to move on, and I certainly won’t stop writing shorter pieces but with the advice of my family, I have decided to move on to a bigger project.  Will it work out?  I don’t know.  Will it be worth the effort?  Yes, maybe. Is anything?

So if you have written long stories or novels successfully, please feel obligated to give me advice that I will no doubt ignore, and wish later that I had followed (hehe).   What are some of the things you learned during your writing process?  How many of you worry about the word count?  How many words should make up a chapter?  What is the best way to stay motivated and excited?  When should you let someone else read the story?  When your done or halfway done, or as you progress?  What about editing and shifting?  Do you do it as you go along or do you plough through the whole story and go back?

Should you let yourself write the ending as it comes or do you plan it out before you start writing?  How much information does the reader really need?   Does reader need to know how, say a space ship works, or just that it does?

Of course, I have my own process, and it’s going smoothly now but I’d love to learn how others accomplished the same goal. So if you have the time, throw some words this way.