Alienated from the Supernatural, and the Spiritual, or not...

starm greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 12 hours ago • edited How can I be alienated by something I know nothing about? 🙄 I have no interest in wasting my time until I get a coherent definition of the word. I'm certainly not interested in reading any more of Karen Armstrong's or any other abrahamic apologetics, haven't heard of the others. • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop starm • 12 minutes ago • edited Well, Dawkins knows next to nothing appropriately balanced about religion, nor is he aware how alienated he is. I wasn´t keeping close track of your comments and their meaning beyond vaguely, and without much effort perceived your perception of God disproved and the like. Oh, yeah, and "mental aberrations." That smacks more of Dawkins "God Delusion" and Hitchens´"religion is poison" than my high school inclination, "I wonder what my dad´s book by Huston Smith says.....?" Yet, no biggie. Glad to engage with a toe in the water. First off, let me wax nostalgic and recall my high school angelic revelation when the Yin-Yang appeared with wings and descended from the Himalayas in a cloud of beef with broccoli. Just kidding, basically. So there I was, an atheist humanist dad with a house stocked with books, and my love of learning kindled and igniting. My buddy asked me, "Are you an atheist?" in the middle of Soc Sci class, and I nodded noncommitally. That was that. It never came up again at that time. I was at home at some point after that and picked up scholar Huston Smith´s book World Religions, and flipping through stopped at Taoism, a Chinese religion. He wrote, or I discerned, "The Tao is a creative continuum that is always accessible." I recall that as a bridge concept from "science" to self-transcendental awareness. I thought, "If there´s a God, that´s it for me." At 16. It was a non-objectifying notion, I can reflect now, in my relationship to "the Universe type- Source of the Universe type Higher Force/Power. Key psychological insight enriches that shift, that "scientific materialist" thinking can obscure. Piaget observed the development of our human object-oriented cognition. Elizabeth Bates, I think it was, studied affective-relational development. L Kohlberg studied moral development. My own political eco-social justice activist development also reflected those dynamics. In ecology class in college, they focused on the science, with one odd mention of what now can be called sustainability, and "sustainable yield." Fish, and how quickly they reproduce, or not. After college, I knocked on doors for consumer advocacy, including environmental protection. Environmentalism has to do with my/our perceiving the ecology in relation to myself/ourselves. Chemicals dumped in a local residential lake will not delay long to pose a threat to residents. I also visited Woburn that faced that faced a well-publicized problem as in John Travolta´s lead in the film A Civil Action, like Erin Brockavich. After reading fairly casually on my own time some Alan Watts and more about aspects of Taoism and Zen Buddhism and more, I went to a Zen Temple for an hour of meditation or so. I had stretched plenty as an athlete, so it was not totally unfamiliar. Yet, it was also a bit like an isolation chamber, might be a Western kind of image. Yet, seeing the "Universe and its potential Source" as the "Tao" and "myself as not-just-flesh-and-blood-brain-object-oriented materialistic mind" meant I was embracing different assumptions than materialistic science. Meditation and prayer has already begun to be studied by science, and basic material, and conventional psychological, benefits found. As a Bio Anthro major, my interest in rituals by then made my first contact with Mircae Eliade´s notion of the "sacred" meaningful. With that all as a foundation, it doesn´t end there. I´ll stop there, and ask you, How far did you stick with me? I´ve dipped a toe in the water, so let´s see what kind of pinky you lift. enoc ard greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 5 hours ago So, what is supernatural? • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoc ard • 3 minutes ago • edited OK, good question. As I recall, you brought Fibonacci´s historical contribution in math to my attention one time. That makes a useful case to build a materialistic philosophical framework, and the implications of multidisciplinary philosophy. Hindu-Arabic numbers allowed a new level of arithmetic activity in the West as Christians advanced proto-science and Islam´s scholars felt the ground slipping away beneath their feet. By DesCartes, he whipped up the keys to analytic geometry with variables as Galileo took Benedictine Bishop Raymond´s Toledo Archimedes and so on to Newton, and so on. While math is a kind of symbolic philosophy, its impact on human empiricism and constructive actions assumes a new level, a whole greater than its parts, and part of emergentism. Reductionism is more commonly employed, but constructionism and emergentism are clearly spoken too little of. Fritjof Capra, since writing the famous Tao of Physics, has done great work in elaborating around emergentism and sustainability. As part of that, Capra also explored psychology, as with S Grof and RD Laing. In the scope of implications, I can refer to related approaches by M Rosenberg, Alice Miller, and J Bradshaw to touch on the power and magnitude of human emotions and psychological cognitive states. Whoever noticed brain waves, all that psychology relates to brain wave graphing. And then come holographics. Neurologist K Pibram and physicist D Bohm noted the significance of what happens when an electron microscope laser beam is split, one half reflected off an object, and recombined on photographic film. It´s a phenomenon and paradigm related to complex wave mechanics. Interference pattern type stuff basically that interrelates with information theory. And the metaphysical philosophy of the supernatural. In his work, Bohm postulated the known explicate order, and the unknown or unperceived implicate order. That´s a whole mix of material that can help begin to map out the multidisciplinary dimensions of perceiving the relevance and character of the supernatural. I referred somewhere else here to the Greenbrier ghost murder trial around 1899, and more recent cases of murderers turning themselves in and the like with a fine listverse compilation and noting how the murderers reported being haunted. More formally, UVA´s Dept of Perceptual Studies was founded by I Stevenson MD studying reincarnation, and now B Greyson PhD studying NDEs, and more. All noteworthy empirical material to consider. How´s that work for you? How far did you get with my overview here?