retraction

the quote in the post I put up this morning was erroneously attributed to the poster. I made a mistake in who said it. It was actually abut something else, a response to sarcasm. Thus it's not fair to the poster.

I issue this apology and retract.

The Depths to which Atheist Hate Will Sink

these atheists morons really willing to compare true social science to KGB propaganda

We can see clearly the evil hatred of atheists in how readily they are willing to hurt others just to win cheap victories on message boards. Here is HRG who is almost worshiped as the atheist guru on CARM atheist, he defiantly the "grand old man" on the board for atheists. Although he's not so old. They all look up to him as a major thinker a real scholar. A mathematician with Physics degree. Yet when we look at the lengths he's willing to take how he doesn't care who hurts to proves he's smarter than me, that's pretty pathetic. He's once again leading the hate minute section on my 200 studeis. He's never read one, he has no idea what is invovled in the feild of psychology of religion. He's so certain the studies are no good, merely becuase I used them to back my arguments on God, that he's willing to slander and libel the major researchers in the field. He does this by making a false comparison between their claims those of the persecutors of soviet dissidents. There's no basis for the comparison an din fact the major researcher he's libeling is not even a member of any religious group and is not a Christian.

HRG:

Ridiculous. Those studies are of the same reliability as the studies by Soviet psychiatrists who showed that people who dissented from communism were depressed and mentally ill. The only difference is that the authors of your studies did not have the political power to lock people up in psychiatric hospitals.

I remind him he has not read the studies:

Originally Posted by HRG

Just you haven't read a single case study in the Soviet Journal of Psychiatry. Neither of us is a psychologist;

Meta:

that's an unwarranted assertion of the fallacy guilt by association. There's no reason why I should link this major researcher in a valid academic field who is lauded as top of the line, with being like some group of political hacks that he's nothing like. No reason to lump his work in with such deeds. Only becasue another little hank wants to use shameful and totally immoral tactics in destroying his reputation among a public of ignorant savages who don't' give a **** about truth.

what you are doing to destroy this guy's rep for no better reason than that you want to take away the ability to use his work of support a belief you don't like is a crime against academic work. It's an atrocity. You should be deeply of depths to which your immoral and unethical warped little mind will plunge.

you are totally unscholarly and unethical.

HRG:

however, there are people who are knowledgeable in that field (at CARM and at home - my wife has a PhD in psychology); and they have looked at some of your studies and concluded that they are either scientifically worthless or do not state what you claim they state.

Meta:
That's a ridiculous charge. If I got them you can get them. you don't want to find them that's the problem. i can get your wife on a conference call with Ralph Hood. I can get her on a conference call with other people who support Hood. ask her if she will talk to the guy If I set up OK?

Ive quoted other studies that say Hood is great. do you not remember that?



HRG

But you do ? Tee-hee. Where is your degree in psychology ?

where is your conscience liar? unscholarly hack.

My BA is in sociology

HRG:

P.S. And my self-esteem is higher than yours, neener-neener ...

Meta:

that's a mark of really poor self esteem. you have to best everyone else. you are willing to destroy the reputation of an academic whose work you never read, just to save face and prove you are smarter than a guy on a message boards. it's pretty transparent people with good self esteem don't act this way.

you are neither a gentlemen nor a scholar.

it saddens me deeply to see how totally unethical Hans is and how far he's willing to sink to hurt someone who he's never met and whose work he's never read. this is a real guy. He has relation to KBG or anything Russian. There is no basis for the fallacious guilt by association fallacy that Hans uses becasue there's no association. He's totally based it on hermeneutic of suspension, meaning, he has no reason in hell to make the association.

Hood is a real guy. He's done a lot of great scientific work and Hans is willing to damage that just to show that he's smarter than me! that's so stupid and unfeeling, unethical and sick.

I demand that he apoplectic now. Stop the little stupid charade trying to pretend that you've disproved a body of work you are not willing to study or read or understand or even hear about.

what this proves to me is that atheists have no morality. Is this the act of a person who is secure int his own sense of who he is?

so desperate to prove he's smarter than some buy on a message board that's he's willing to hurt someone whose work he's never read?

Look also at how unfair they are in argument. They can't just get the study and read it. They have been doing this same tactic for three years now. They never get a study they wont read a link but they keep saying the same things over and over again. They keep acting like they know all about the studies but they wont read one.

The bull shit lie that his wife has a Ph.D. in psychology but she can't get these studies that I got on inter-library loan. That's so stupid. I bet he never asked his wife.

The Travisty of Atheist Mendacity Contiues

The atheists continue their little message board assault, psychology rape and mugging. lies, cheating, refusal to play fair in argument. This know nothing who fancies himself a scientist Mat Hun (Yes Mat you I'm talking to you) ambused me. He began insisting that me beat my God argument fire in the equations. I told him I would deal with it. I told him I would debate latter, when I finished 1x1 with this know nothing calling himself "Blondie." What does he do but put up a thread and get a bunch of trolls to mock and ridicule my answers. Of cousre they insist he won.He attacks when I'm not able to focus on it but I put up some stuff he couldn't answer. But the army of trolls insist that he won.

I took the answers from the seven things he couldn't answer, which essentially prove my argument, I put on another thread. When I got through with the 1x1 I put up a thing for 1x1 with him. But he runs way and refuses to debate. This is like the ninth atheist who has ran away from debating me after agreeing to. He just got through watching me stomp "Blondie" the idiot in 1x1 round. That guy was truly an idiot and truly did kick his ass.

Of closure Mat wants to stay where his trolls can give him cover. Here's the post I put up in the separate thread, the seven things he couldn't answer. Read these answer well because they show how totally inadequate his arguments were.

Look at their answers:

Originally Posted by Metacrock

if they don't read this one I'll just put the other one up. The one you refused to debate.

Vespa

So speaketh ye olde verbose Master baiter...

Brian W.

You've received answers meta, and Matt is FAR out of your league when it comes to physics..though you may have an edge when it comes to constructing fairytales (theology) based on your rudimentary understanding of physics. You are just being childish as usual by moving the goalposts after receiving your answers, molding a completely unfalsifiable position for your invisible friend to occupy, and always insisting on having the last word. Grow up.

Grow up he says. But the answers I've received are on the thread and half of them are like "I don't' know" or they don't apply. Read them. I have proved the answers he gave me sx. The trolls give cover and just assert the value of their comrade's crap.

What does this prove but that atheists for the most part don't think and don't care about truth?


Maybrick

Its plain to see, because you have actually quoted them that he did answer them.

The situation seems to be that you don't like those answers.

Which is entirely your choice, but why the argumentative and overbearing tone?

Read the actual answers they say stuff like "I don't know."

no (1) (1) how can it be that nothing comes into being in life that we see but that it has a naturalistic cause. If something happens and we say it doesn't have a cause scientist say "O that's silly of course it does, everything has a natural cause."

Hunt

Simple, because nothing is unstable quantum mechanically, "nothing" (and you have to be precise on what you mean by nothing, as nothing isn't necessarily nothing, Krauss pointed this out in a lecture which is available on you tube) violates the uncertainty principle (which is something we have observed)

at this point his answer doesn't' even apply. I said "nothing comes int being I meant there's a regular seeming "law" that says things don't' pop into existence out of nothing because we never see that.

he starts talking about the primordial state of nothingness which is not what I said. Even so his answer is wrong:

I already said "noting" to a physicists means Vacuum flux not true nothing. you are not talking about real noting you know are you not tha'ts admonishment answer.

I quote Odenwald as proof:

http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/ask/a11831.html

"How can 'nothing' do anything at all, let alone create an entire universe?

"When physicists say 'nothing' they are being playful with the English language, because we often think of the vacuum as being 'empty' or 'nothing' when in fact physicists know full well that the vacuum is far from empty.

The primordial 'state' at the Big Bang was far from being the kind of 'nothingness' you might have in mind. We don't have a full mathematical theory for describing this 'state' yet, but it was probably 'multi-dimensional', it was probably a superposition of many different 'fields', and these fields, or whatever they were, were undergoing 'quantum fluctuations'.

(2)

the universe just comes to be without a case how do you know people cant' just raise form the dead without a cause? Just becuase you haven't seen it. Mat look at the contradiction! when people say they have seen it you go "O that can't be the cause it doesn't happen." how do you know their description isn't just better than yours? if there's no causes for things then there's no reason to think it couldn't happen.

I have answered this, you are (conveniently) ignoring the different length scales that I have been mentioning. The nuclear/quantum scales and the length scale for classical physics.

that is not an answer. that has nothing to do with different observations or biased view points.

his second alleged answer is meaningless. They don't indicate that the order isn't real nor do they even hint at an answer to the second question, which was why don't things pop into existence? all his answer really means is becasue "Quantum level is real little bitty and we are on the bigger scale." that's not really germane I asked why we don't see other stuff popping. he believed the universe popped up doesn't he?

why don't we see news in my tea cup or my bath tub?


(3)

why would Hawking say gravity caused everything if physical laws aren't needed for causes? It seems he's saying there has to be cause for the universe.

Hunt

I am not too sure,

that really answers it. his answer s I don't know. not sure. so that is not much of an answer.

that's the pattern for most of it. The other three were ideologically motivated answers about laws being descriptive but they don't do anything to demonstrate they there's this order out there.

He wont face me 1x1 in an orderly situation when I'm prepared to debate. It's got to be because he knows he's going to get creamed. why else?He's willing to waste his time on the message board saying frivolous things. It's no differnt then the fine tuning argument where he went 40 posts just his own horn as a scientists and not answering an argument.

Priceless Study: More Autism among atheists

Study by Catherine Caldwell Harris

Abstract
The cognitive science of religion is a new field which
explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive
processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency
detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper
investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief
will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning
autism being an extreme style that will predispose towards
nonbelief (atheism and agnosticism). This view was
supported by content analysis of discussion forums about
religion on an autism website (covering 192 unique posters),
and by a survey that included 61 persons with HFA. Persons
with autistic spectrum disorder were much more likely than
those in our neurotypical comparison group to identify as
atheist or agnostic, and, if religious, were more likely to
construct their own religious belief system. Nonbelief was
also higher in those who were attracted to systemizing
activities, as measured by the Systemizing Quotient.
Keywords: Cognitive science of religion; autism; cognitive
styles; individual differences
Introduction

This doesn't mean atheists all have autism it just means more autistic among them. Hispid on CARM introduced it and explained this way:

It makes sense if the major trait associated with autism is the lower functioning of "theory of mind" then it is also less likely that one would attribute natural phenomena to the workings of an uber mind.

In other words the autistic among them keep them grounded in reality. I think that might explain their inability to understand concepts, their refusal to consider philosophical notions, their childish mocking. That and low self esteem accounts for the really obnoxious part of the atheist community.

I'm sure Hermit will respond with outrage. the truth is I don't know what this means. I'm sure atheism is not the product of any mental defect.

We can't bury the research but we shouldn't make intellectual criticisms based upon the weakest opponents. We should only base intellectual criticism upon the strongest opponents. Unless we are talking about the bad behavior of an element. We can't criticize a whole movement on the weakness of a few.

I am Debating an Atheist 1x1 on Doxa Forums

I am having a debate on my boards with an atheist who thinks he's cool and thinks he's a genius is extremely insulting and was really trying to give me a hard time until I got him to debate, now I'm kicking his ass. It's really way too long to put up here.

The topic is that "atheism is the only intellectually honest position for the 21st century. It's pretty confused becuase he doesn't seem to actualy know what he means by the term (he's affirmative, he affirms the resolution, I'm "negative").

you believve in Global Warming, how about Eternal Warming?

The thing to do with Global warming is not to argue agaisnt it. Use it. Atheists are almost bound to believe it believe in it (I believe in it--not the point). Rather than argue against it as an example of bad lock, it's more useful as an example of good logic. This is so because the logic of Global warming is the same logic used in Pascals wager.

I have two observations to make before getting into this. The first one is about the wage itself. The second about the paradigm used for "risk taker analysis."

(1) Atheists mock and ridicule the wage extremely much, over doing it, becuase they don't understand it's function. Most Christian apologists don't understand it either, so no slight to our Atheist friends. Mine you the wage is an argument I never use. Most people take it as attempt at proving God exists. It is not an attempt to prove that God exists. It's meant as a tiebreaker. It's used after the massive collection of arguments Pascal wrote known as the Pensées Or "thoughts." Those aren't even meant to prove the existence of God but to clue one in on how to realize the reality of God. Although this is my phrase, you wont catch Pascal saying anything that awkward.

(2) The wager is a decision making paradigm not an argument to prove something. The paradigm is based upon Pascal's own invention, mathematical probablity. That's right all the arguments atheists use about simplicity and Baez theoums and all of that indicative reasoning the likelihood of this or that it all goes back to Pascal. He was not a dunce. HE was a mystic, however, and he was not interpreted in proving things logically. His tie breaker, the wager, demonstrates the probability of God being true.

The reason Is say the global warming and the wager use the same logic is because they are examples of what we in college debate used to call "risk taker analysis."An example: let's say I guy a hat. It blows off my head and over a freeway. I have to cross a busy freeway to get the hat back. I must ask myself "is having this hat worth risking my life for?" It could be only if having is worth so much that I am willing risk losing everything for it. A hat, not so much as they say. Now if the hate is a bearer bond worth a million dollars, maybe it is worth risking it all for that. Another aspect of this the risk can be minimized. So part of the equation includes the levels of reward vs risk. For example even a million dollars may not worth risking death for if death virtually certain. So wait until 2:00 am when there are almost no cars on the free way. That has to be balanced agaisnt the risk that the bond will blow away in the mean time. so risk taker analysis means doing a sort of calculus.

It will cost several billion dollars for the medical diagnostic industry to re tool and change from X-ray machines to second generation Doppler ultrasound.This is why they will probably never do it of their own accord. If they did they might save 24,000 lives a year (I am assuming that form of ultra sound can do everything X-Rays do, which it probably can't but in debate years ago we had journal evidence saying it could). Are 24,000 lives worth making an industry spend billions of dollars? What about the government subsidizing? This is just an example of the kinds of questions that one can ask using risk taking analysis. Of course it gets much more complex than that.

The wagers says "there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by following Christ and placing belief in God. But there is everything to lose and nothing to gain by not following Christ." So if that is true the risk taking analysis shows that the much greater risk is in not being a Christian, or whatever. That's breaks the tie between the realization of reality and the doubt fostered by nothing overwhelming direct proof. We can't totally prove it either way, but the greater risk is in not believing. The only thing to be gained by not believing is momentary sinful pleasure which in the long run always runs out and works against the experiencer.

Global warming risk taking analysis. Like the God question we don't have total proof either way. We can be sure that man made source so green house gas are the real cause or even the major catalyst, although there's a good probability that they are. So what is the loss vs gain ratio? does it justify the risk? The risk in believing in global warming is that we will spend a lot of money trying to switch over to non green house producing sources. That will cost profits and might result in economic problems. The worst outcome would be loss of jobs. What is the risk in not assuming it? Doing nothing:

(1) If the theory is right and we do nothing all life on earth might be destroyed at worst, at best, the earth will much hotter, storms more violent, major flooding in many parts of the wold., millions could die.

(2) vs if the theory is wrong and we do a lot to change it anyway, we could have an economic slump in the U.S.

So the risk of loss is much greater if we do nothing than the risk of loss form trying to solve it necessarily.

Of cousre there's the additional factor that we could try to solve but since the problem is not man made (assuming that answer) it would continue despite our efforts. Then we get the worst of both worlds. We die in a super heated world while having an ecnomic slump. Yet thta element is more remote becuase the odds are our life style is at least a contributor to the problem if we change it, even if the cause is not primary our life style it might compensated enough to help minimize the effects. The chances that we would get the worst of both worlds are very small.

We can see from this that both the wager and global warming are forms of risk taker analysis. They both have the same formation: everything to gain by doing X and noting or little to lose. They both have the element that the gain from rejecting action is temporary and self defeating. In terms of the wager one has pleasure form sin but it goes away as you get older, and it's bad for you so you lose your looks sooner and die younger. That's just a short term gain. The gain from rejecting the global warming hypothesis is short term to. As with sin the pleasures of keeping your extravagant life style going a little longer, are short term and offset by the evils of that lifestyle. It's pollution, it's fosters bad nutrition (people have lots of money to spend and they carve new things) it's the whole consumer culture that needs to be overhauled and all our habits changed. So in both cases the life style and the sinful pleasure are short term while the risk of loss is much greater and long term: in religion we risk eternal damnation and in global warming we risk destruction of the life bearing ability of the planet.

It's important to make atheists see that they have such a risk to take becuase the more analogies that stack up for their paradigm the sooner their paradigm (naturalism) will shift. It's very important to point out every inconsistency we can in atheist thinking. for them to know that acceptance of a view point they consider absolutely essential to their acceptance of science as the only way, requires that they also accept the logic of Pascal's wager.

Why athesits have no ears

Apologetics is not for unbelievers. It's not exactly for convincing oneself either. But it is definitely not for atheists. Its' pointless trying to convince someone of something that is contrary to their paradigm. Paradigms control all. People cannot and are not capable of seeing into a different world. They live in the world they are in, the world of the paradigm. Paradigm shifts only when there are too many anomalies to be absorbed by the old paradigm. Until that happens there's no convincing someone his paradigm is wrong. Now you might think this means that means we should go about the task of trying pile up anomalies. The problem with that is atheists are able to absorb vast amounts of anomalies into their paradigm and they employ a verity of methods to do so. Kuhn says this is what happens, the ruling paradigm can adsorb a certain degree of anomalies and until you get so many that can't deal with them any more and the paradigm starts to shift, they are just all absorbed and don't' seem to matter.

Now i think little by little the paradigm is shifting, it will eventually turn over. It will probably never be non materialists or "spiritualist." But it is clear that the old paradigm has given way in several areas and ideas that would once have been considered totally loony are not part of the new paradigm. The problem is the new paradigm is packaged as a continuation of the old; in other words, the old materialist paradigm has now given way to the new physicalist. The difference being that under the old paradigm (materialist)only materiel things were possible. Reality was thought of as the "material" realm. Then it was realized that energy is another form of matter, so it's not mater itself and thus more than just mater is possible.So the new paradigm (phsyicalist) says that only what is physical is possible. Spirit still ruled out (except it can come in the back door in the form of energy) but it is recognized that there are two media for existence, rather than just the material there is also energy (which is another form of matter).

Meanwhile, there are many areas through which the evil idealism has seeped into the new paradigm: healing in medicine, the idea of mind over matter, realms beyond that of nature (which is what string membranes are) but they have to be packed as "physical." As long as it all part of "the physical" (which is idealist enough as it goes, then it can have a place. So ideas which never have been considered fifty years ago are now front and center. But the only proviso is we can't acknowledge it. We have to keep up the charade that idealism/spiritualism is beaten and materialism (in the form of physicalism which allows for energy) prevails. But in prevailing it makes room for other realms beyond that of nature (space/time) mind over matter, healing in medicine, archetypes, here's a complete list:

(1) Quantum Theory (no need for cause/effect)

(2) Big bang Cosmology (realm beyond the natrual)

(3) Medicine (healing)

(4) Consciousness (invites concept of dualism)

(6) Maslow's Archetypes (universal ideas)

(7) Miracles (empirical evidence)

(8) Near Death Experiences (scientific evidence)

(9) Esp Research (the fact that they do it)

(10) Validity of religious experince (Shrinks no longer assume pathology)

(11) Mind over matter (pleacebo effect).


For this reason I am willing to think that the paradigm will eventually shift. It probably wont ever allow for "supernatural," but it will contain supernatural like ideas masquerading as materialist/physicialist. We already see it now in the mind over matter of the placebo effect.

Nevertheless, despite this movement, the materialist/physicalist paradigm can absorb an almost infinite amount anomalous of behavior simply because "energy" covers a multitude of idealist propositions. Anything not material can always be sold as "energy." Pure idea can be sold as brain chemistry because it has to be transmitted that way. Thus Dawkins insists there cant' be a mind without a brain. But what's really being said there is that any form of ideal or idea or "mind" or anything not material can always be coopted as "energy" and thus it can never be anomalous under a physicalist paradigm. But there's another reason as well why it will take a long time for a big paradigm shift. There is no end of atheist incredulity. The physicalist paradigm lends itself to incredulity because we know it works. We don't know the range of its limitations because we can't produce evidence under the same paradigm of things beyond the paradigm, so of course we can exclude any hit of actual anomaly. Of course we can't expect evidence under the paradigm that would legitimate anomalies of that same paradigm, then they wouldn't be anomalies. The incredulity factor always allows one to put it in the magic pressure cooker and (whish wish) it's gone!

Here's an example of what I mean. Here's an example of a Saint making miracle from my miracles page. It's no longer found on the URL it once was, so the link doesn't work. But it was there:

Society for the Little Flower (Website) FAQ (visited 6/3/01) St. Theresse of Lisieux

http://www.littleflower.org/therese/faq.html#4

"Regarding St. Therese, in 1923 the Church approved of two spontaneous cures unexplained by medical treatment. Sister Louise of St. Germain was cured of the stomach ulcers she had between 1913 and 1916. The second cure involved Charles Anne, a 23 year old seminarian who was dying from advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. The night he thought he was dying, Charles prayed to Therese. Afterward, the examining doctor testified, "The destroyed and ravaged lungs had been replaced by new lungs, carrying out their normal functions and about to revive the entire organism. A slight emaciation persists, which will disappear within a few days under a regularly assimilated diet." These two miracles resulted in Therese becoming beatified."

The atheists on carm treated this with total incredulity. It has to be a lie. First they said I made it up. then I lined to the site and they could see it was their and howled with laughter. How stupid could I be? It's a religious site dedicated to that saint to of course it's a lie! I gave all the evidence on miracles pages about the rules of miracles in RCC and showed that they use medical evdience, there x-rays of the lungs and so on. But they insisted this is not good because its not in a medical journal. So I emailed a member of the committee, a medical expert who does research for the medical committee, and he vouched for its authenticity. That's no good, he' on that committee so he's lying. I brought up the x-rays, well I don't have the x-rays so its' still lie. I would have to have the x-rays in my hot little hand before it could actually be accepted. If i actually get the xrays from the Vatican, which were taken in the early part of the 20th century, (like that's a fair requirement that I some little guy in Texas, a prot, with no official connections could get these xrays), if I did have them don't you think they would still say its a lie? x-rays can be fabricated. So it's an anomaly and it will always be an anomaly because one may always doubt.

I recently had a discussion on my message boards about my mystical experience arguments (The Trace of God). I was as clear as anyone could be, and i worked several times to meet the evidential burden required by the atheist dialogue "partner." But this guy just played dense. He refused to get it. But I think a Chrsitain poster named "Wordgazer" really summed it up best:

FWIW, I didn't have any trouble following or understanding Metacrock's reasoning, and I do think he addressed each of Marxiavelli's concerns. What it looked like to me was that Marxiavelli was looking at things through his scientific materialist worldview, and was either unable or unwilling to shift to a different perspective. For example, he seemed to think Metacrock was using the religious experience argument to prove one particular set of religious beliefs, and because they didn't do this, Marxiavelli appeared to think that this trumped all rational warrant for a belief in anything non-material at all. But Metacrock was not arguing for Christianity; he was arguing for the interaction between humans and something Divine that was undefined. What I was seeing was something that I myself have experienced-- the challenge by an atheist to prove theism, but only within the atheism box. Invitations to climb out of the box and look further, were apparently misunderstood as not answering the questions. There were a few times that Metacrock got frustrated, but I really don't think he was being "extremely and unnecessarily aggressive."

We live in different worlds. The world of the atheist is not the world of the theist and they don't want to see into my world. They want to reassure themselves that it's ok to deny my world is valid and to secure their own world. One can hide a lot of anomalies that way. As Wordgazer said it's really just a matter of who wants to see what. Of course they would impune my motives for wanting to see the validity of my world, but pat themselves on the back and rationalize their biases as "hard nosed critical thinking." Hard nosed critical thinking that does not want to see.

This is why the realizing God (existential phenomenological who ha) is really the only tenable approach. Until one is willing make a realization, or until one does make such a realization, the anomalies will always be absorbed into he paradigm. "Realizing God" is nothing more than a change in the ground, a shift in consciousness, a paradigm shift. The materialist paradigm is front end loaded with built-in incredulity as a defense mechanism against shifts.

But all of this really biols down to is good old fashioned sin. "5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." (John 1:5). No amount of evdience will ever shit them and no amount of logic will ever read them.

Now this doesn't mean that I wont continue the friendships I've made. I have made freinds with some atheists, and some who are good people who I really like. I will continue those friendships and we can discuss anything. But I wont discuss God with them or God arguments. There's no point. The literal reading of the "great commission" (the Bible doesn't call it that) says "where ever you happen to be going, tell them the truth." I did tell them. They didn't want to get it.

Hug a dyxlexic today

I keep getting email form some ninny who thinks it's his duty to tell me that my spelling is bad. Like spending years at Scottish Rite Children Hospital Language lab working a way to get around dyslexia didn't give me a good enough clue that I can't spell. This was written a couple of years ago and posted on Metacrock's blog so the person in it giving me a hard time is not the person who sent an comment in recently to this blog talking about my spelling. I thought it would in order to put this up for any who may be concerned.

People who worry about spelling are fools. Spelling is to intelligence. Poor spelling is not a sign of low intelligence and good spelling is not a sign of high intelligence. Spelling is a petty thing and in the old days when the schools systems were good no one worried about it.Now I find people acting like it defines intelligence. It does not. Most dyslexics have above average IQ's. People who can't tolerate spelling problems are petty minded.

Dyslexia is not the result of low intelligence. An unexpected gap exists between learning aptitude and achievement in school. The problem is not behavioral, psychological, motivational, or social. People with dyslexia also do not “see backwards.” For all the little snide arrogant twits who know nothing about dyslexia and who have no concept of wht it means to have a high IQ and be treated as an idiot because you have a condition that prevents your brain from processing information the way others brains do.

Northeast Tarrent country Dyslexia Council

People are odd. They are always confusing emotional reason with logical ones. One poster sends in a comment, which I did not publish because I will not publish comments that are attacks on personalities. This all knowing commentator deems to know that event though I'm Dyslexic I am still "just being lazy," when bad spellings appear in this blog. Let me clue you in on something, a person who does not have to look up every word he uses has no right to speak of Lazy to a dyslexic. No dyslexic could get as far as I got in school and be lazy, because to get that far without spell check means I did a hell of a lot of looking up. I did not have a computer until I was in doctoral work. that means I got my Masters degree while typing on a typewriter and looking up every word in the dictionary or paying someone to proof the papers.

This poster wasn't there in class with me as a child in the 1960s when no one knew what dyslexia was, and when teachers humiliated me for being lazy. I got my little butt whacked with a board because I was "lazy." I was lazy because I looked at the words on the paper I could not see the same things the teacher saw. Just imagine you are wearing special glasses that scramble the words you look at. you can't take them off they are somehow attacked to you. So what good would it do to look up words when the definition will have mistakes in it? This commentator, the all knowing one, was not there when the teacher would call on me to read and I was in a six grade class and only read on a second grade level. Why is she calling on me anyway? Then making some snide comment about "this is how not to be." Everyone was laughing their little heads off. But I'm lazy. I'm just so lazy I just love to be humiliated in class. Hearing classmates whispering "he must be really stupid." It was so fun being hauled down to the principle's office and told I was bad, and I was lazy I was no good and then having my butt whacked with a big board for some reason I could not phantom.

This was before anyone got any special treatment for being "challenged." No one with a problem was "challenged" in those days, they did not have that concept. If you could not walk you were crippled. If you had a problem they did not understand, you just weren't trying hard enough. This all knowing commentator who deems to decide that I am lazy was not there when a fine loving mother driven to despair because her two little twin boys has some strange problem no one could understand, would jump up an down literally thrashing the table with her belt (she never hit us with it) and banging her head on the fridge cried "maybe you are lazy!." I would think, as the horror that the one person who still believed in me didn't anymore, and I would whine "I'm sorry I'm bad mommy!" But the all knowing one knows all about this I"m sure. He must know because I didn't. I had no idea what they were talking about because when I looked at the words they didn't say the same things. "Saw" was "was" and Elise was Elsie, and 29 was 92 and so on.The authorities of the school board had a talk with my parents. They already had it worked out, either we were retarted or we were lazy. they sent us to a testing place, certain that the test would show our IQ's were lower than average. The testing people had a nice little chat with us. I remember they were really friendly and I liked what we were talking about. So I got into it and chatted amiably. My mother would keep saying "I know they are smart. I know they are."

They kept dragging other researchers in and saying things like "tell him what you think about Daniel Boone," or "explain to Dr. so and so why oil floats on water." I knew the answer because my father told me. My Dad was a tool design engineer in air craft. He loved to give long winded technical explanations. My eyes would glaze over and I would think "I'm sorry I asked." But tried really hard to remember what he said. The funny testing people said we were "geniuses." They said there was no way we could be retarded. They told my mother our IQ's but she wouldn't tell us at first. They were real high. Then the people back at the school decided to work on plan B. If we weren't stupid we had to be lazy. My parents worked really hard in all kinds of ways to get us to learn. They thought lazy meant we needed to be spanked, but they also tried more intellectual activities. When nothing worked they became frustrated and started beating the table as though we would feel the pain through the table and shape up. I know it caused them a great deal an anguish. It made me feel that I must be just bad because they said I was bad (lazy = bad right?).

I remember we first heard of dyslexia because our family doctor had it. He had stories of how hard he had to struggle in the 30's to become a doctor when he could not spell. Through him I guess we found Scottish Rite Children's Hospital in Dallas, their "language lab." Back then I think it was called "Hospital for Crippled children." But they can't use that word today. Going to a hospital to have my spelling worked on made me feel that I must be crippled in my head. I was marked out as a special wounded freak from early childhood. I will never forget Luke Waites. He was a great man and a pionier. He discovered dyslexia. He wore a while lab coat and ran the "language lab" (which today is named after him). He was my friend he worked at treating every kid in the program like his friend.In those days that was the only program in the country, and it just happened to be where we lived or we would not have gotten to go. When I went to college he wrote a letter to my professors saying I was smart but couldn't spell and that there were scientific reasons why I could not spell. They didn't meet with the Scottish Rite guys once, the had a million meetings. Those guys had to deprogram them of years and years of having it pounded into their heads that something was wrong with us we must be stupid or bad. It was the major thing in my life for a long time in childhood.

I will never forget how happy and relieved my parents were to learn about dyslexia. I will always hear my mother's voice telling everyone she knew over and over "there aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, there's a reason why they can't learn to spell." Even though it was like finding a miracle cure (although one cannot ever get over dyslexia--the language lab just taught us tricks like phonetic spelling)it still made me feel like a wounded special helpless freak. But my parents were so relived. Then began a life long journey of looking up words. This all knowing poster, who must know all of this, even though he was not there, has the nerve to tell me I'm lazy. The one word I would use for that part of my childhood is "anguish."

The little brown shirt atheist thugs on message boards quickly discovered that spelling is a weapon to use against me. "your spelling is horrible." After a 25 post thread in which I've batted down all their arguments, here comes the stuff about spelling, like clock work. That's all they have to say so they use that like a weapon. Even after I got firefox they still say it even when there are no mistakes. I know mistakes get through but clearly its' better. But they still feel called upon to point it out. I even put up a thread saying "isn't my spelling better?" they all agreed they could tell a difference. btw I used to hypothesize when I was a child that someday they would invent a technological device like spell check that would spell for you. I was elated when I first heard of spell check.

When I first got saved I prayed that I would see Mrs. Messenger, my old Scottish Rite Language Lab teacher, so I could tell her "thanks." I'll be damned if I didn't see her in an air port just a few weeks latter! What are the odds? She lived in another part of the country by then, the odds are I would never see her again. I did thank her and told her about the prayer thing. She was really happy.

So this is why I will not post comments telling me "your spelling is horrible."


Here is a link to the best dyslexia site I've found. The NTDC If you think your child might have learning problem I urge you to read this site.

Link to a Page by Scottish Rite

Extaordinary Calims argument (ECREP)

Carl Sagan

Atheists are fond of dismissing Atheist Watch (My "other" blog) as my own private hate fest. But the truth is I've been using it to construct a theory of atheist psychology. The major conclusion I've reached so far is that there is a calculated ideology that someone constructed (not to sound so mysterious--by "someone" I don't mean atheists "men in black" just the normal evolution of argument and the contributors to the same). One of the standard leavers of that ideological/propagandist approaches used in their movement is development of a standard for proof which enables them to constantly raise the bar so no amount of evidence or reasoning can ever count against their position. It's a rhetorical device not a rule of logic!


Carl Sagan made this statement popular in its current form, it was originally used by Hume, Laplace and other early theorists, but atheists have sense taken it as a major slogan for their decision-making paradigm.


Marcelo Truzzi tells us:



In his famous 1748 essay Of Miracles, the great skeptic David Hume asserted that "A wise man...proportions his belief to the evidence,"and he said of testimony for extraordinary claims that "the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more unusual." A similar statement was made by Laplace, and many other later writers. I turned it into the now popular phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (which Carl Sagan popularized into what is almost the war cry of some scoffers).




This slogan allows them to raise the bar for any Christian claim, while lowering it for their own purposes. Ed J. Gracely explains the basic logic of the bromide.



First, it is important to understand that the strength of a conclusion is a function both of the quality of the evidence provided in its support and the a priori probability of the claim being supported. Thus there can never be a single standard of "acceptable evidence" that will suffice to render every claim equally plausible. Suppose, for example, that a reasonably reliable source tells me (a) that President Clinton has vetoed legislation that places restrictions on trade with China and (b) that Newt Gingrich has switched to the Democratic party. Most people would be much more confident of the truth of the first report than of the second, even though the source is identical. The difference lies in the a priori plausibility of the claims.


A more precise formulation requires us to cast the a priori probability of a claim into the form of "odds" in its favor. A proposition with 90% probability of being true has 90 chances of being true for every 10 of being false. Thus the odds are 90 to 10, which reduces to 9 to 1. A proposition with 20% probability of being true has 20 chances of being true for 80 of being false. The odds (in its favor) are 20 to 80 or 0.25 to 1. It is more natural to translate the latter case into odds of 4 to 1 against the proposition, but the calculations require us to work with odds "in favor of" a proposition, even if they are fractional. Pieces of evidence alter the odds in favor of a proposition by a multiplicative factor in proportion to the quality of the evidence.





While it is clear that not all evidence weighs the same, some evidence is better than other evidence, nothing in this explanation indicates why evidence must be stronger for “extraordinary claims” than for “normal claims.” Assuming we can even indicate what “extraordinary evidence” is, what makes it more proven than “ordinary” evidence? The statement above merely indicates that probability is higher for a proposition backed by more direct evidence, nothing more. The rationale says that the least likely proposition is less probable, then the assertion that the evidence must be more “extraordinary” (whatever that means) rather than just accurate or valid or to the point is not demonstrated. Most assumptions about what makes evidence “extraordinary” or “ordinary,” or a proposition likely or unlikely is going to be largely a matter of prejudice. Consider the following statement, also by Gracely:



The principle is clear; the difficulty lies in the application. How likely, for example, is it that homeopathy or therapeutic touch really work? Proponents argue that we need to open our minds to new possibilities and grant these systems a fairly high a priori probability (say, 50-50 odds). Then, even modest-quality evidence would make the claims quite probably true. Skeptics argue that these systems violate known laws of physics and their validity should therefore be considered remotely improbable.


Who decides how likely it is that homeopathy is valid or invalid medicine? One would need a statical average for cure rates to compare with controlled group using orthodox practices to see this. He admits that “modest quality” evidence would be proof if it is granted a high probability. Without the proper studies why not so grant? What if one has found such treatments effective already in one’s own life? This is nothing more than prejudice to judge something improbable on the basis of guesswork and matters of taste. No that does not mean that believe those forms of healing. Why shouldn’t a standard of evidence adequate for proof of the issue under consideration, be the issue? I have so far been unable to find an atheist who can tell me what extraordinary God evidence is. I’ve seen attempts on message boards, where they argue absurdities like “why can’t God make all the stars spell out the phrase “burn pain is the worst pain, Jesus is Lord, convert now.” Or God could appear at the UN and hold a press conference. I have yet to see an atheist give me a valid option for “extraordinary evidence.” More importantly, we are talking about God, not about finding Bigfoot. God is off scale for empirical investigation. How can the basis of reality be studied as though just another “thing” in creation? What could be used as a basis of comparison? How could one ever establish a base line comparison to determine probability of God? Dawkins tries it but he merely assumes God would be on a par with any other physical object. What basis is used to establish the probability of something that is said to be beyond our understanding?


Gracely argues:



An alternative I have heard suggested is to drop the extraordinary proof argument and instead to hold paranormal and alternative medicine claims strictly to the ordinary requirements of replicability and good research. This approach sounds sensible but it has a serious flaw. Skeptics are not willing to accept the plausibility of most paranormal claims unless the evidence is extremely strong. We risk being perceived (correctly) as disingenuous if we call for solid quality research, then revert to the extraordinary claims argument should it in fact appear.(Ibid)


Correction, most skeptics are never willing to grant anything to para normal claims regardless of the evidence, this is obvious to anyone who has ever argued with atheists on message boards. I have 200 studies with replicablity, double blind, proved comparison methods, published in scholarly journals, peer reviewed and indexed, and the atheists on CARM treat them like comic books. The only reason they nit pick to death (ploys such as once attacking the bibliography becuase it had a source they didn't like rather than looking at the studies themselves) is becasue the studies contradict their world view.

This standard (normal scientific protocols) is the one I have been proposing for years. The term he doesn’t use, the proper term for “ordinary” level of proof would be a “prima facie case.” He may have a point if we are talking about acupuncture or UFOs but the flaw he sees in it is attitudinal, not logical or methodological. The attitude of skeptics is out of line anyway. Atheists are not willing to accept any level of evidence. The experience studies are fine studies, they are scientific and a huge body of work backs them up. For all practical purposes, they are “extraordinary evidence.” Let us not forget there is no set standard any skeptic can offer to define that term. Skeptics are quick to brush aside the experience studies as “subjective” without reading the studies or thinking about the arguments. They never define what “extraordinary” evidence would be. Gracely observes that skeptical attitudes are similar even in other areas:




In some areas of paranormal investigation, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), the research is already often better done than much orthodox scientific research, with controls and double-checks most scientists would regard as overkill. Skeptics mostly still feel that the intrinsic implausibility is so great that nothing short of airtight and well-repeated research would be sufficient to support ESP. Little or none of the existing research rises to that level, so we remain skeptical. (Some recent work has been of high quality, see Ray Hyman's article, "The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality", in the March/April 1996 Skeptical Inquirer, pp 24-26.) Had skeptics said some 40 years ago that all we wanted was reasonable quality replicated research, we might now be having to eat our words.




Skeptics are never satisfied. I have seen this problem over and over again. When their demands for evidence are met, they just raise the bar again and again. The tyranny of “extraordinary evidence” so long as one never defines it, allows for this sort of abuse all the time. More importantly, why should God be subjected to the same standards of proof as empirical objects? Here the skeptic is just in the position of arguing “God is improbable because I don’t believe in him.” Truzzi documents the “catch 22” designed into the extraordinary proof standard:



But it is important to remember that the proponent of the paranormal has an uphill battle from the start. The chips are stacked against him, so his assault is not so threatening to the fabric of science as scoffers often characterize it. In a sense, conservative science has "the law" on its side.

In law, we find three varieties in the weight of burden of proof:

1. proof by preponderance of evidence,

2. clear and convincing proof, and, in criminal law,

3. proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

In conventional science, we usually use (1), but when dealing with extraordinary claims, critics often seem to demand (3) since they demand all alternative explanations must be eliminated before the maverick claim is acceptable. This demand sometimes becomes unreasonable and may even make the scoffer's position unfalsifiable. Since the anomaly proponent is already saddled with a presumption of "guilt," it would seem to me that (2), clear and convincing proof, might be the best standard, though proponents may reasonably wonder why standard (1) should always be denied them.(Ibid)


The poly just described is SOP for atheists on message boards. Since every alternative, however unlikely, must be exhausted first, they will put a 0.2% probability claim over a 50-50 claim any time just because the alternatives must be exhausted and that means nothing ever has to be granted to belief. In this way all other forms of knowledge bu the pseudo science of the atheist ideology is rejected, thus the ideology of the atheist and its propaganda protocols become like a template.This serves to reinforce the ideology because all anyone need do is compare the God argument to the template, or course it wont fit, it is then judged "unscientific" (becasue the template has come to replace real scientific procedure in the mind of the atheist) and thus all belief is always wrong!


But we must also keep in mind that God is not “paranormal.” Truzzi and Gracely are speaking in general of any sort of “paranormal” claim, including the claims of alternative medicine. God is not paranormal, but is status quo, normative for human belief. Nor is God a scientific question. It is absurd to expect us to limit evidence to only the scientific when the question about belief is epistemological. More on this aspect of belief and it is import for evidential standards below. But this does raise a further question about the extraordinary evidential standard:



In addition to defining the term “extraordinary evidence” there is also a need to define the term “extraordinary claim.” Why is God an extraordinary claim? Here the atheist is truly in the position of arguing “God is improbable because I don’t believe in him.” Atheists make up 3% of the world’s population at best. The overwhelming majorities of people alive today, or who have ever lived, believe in some form of God. Our brains are hard wired to have thoughts of God. Our physical and mental health work better when we believe in God (as will be seen in latter chapters). Obviously we are fit for belief, why would belief be extraordinary? Why should we allow the minor little 3% minority to define what is normative for humanity? Belief in God is far more than just the average belief; it is normative as a standard of human understanding. It forms the basis of our psyches, it forms the basis of our legal system; it is the chief metaphor regulating meaning and morality. Belief in God illustrates all the aspects of a prima facie case. This is at least so for RE. Marcelo Truzzi makes the same point:



The central problem however lies in the fact that "extraordinary" must be relative to some things "ordinary." and as our theories change, what was once extraordinary may become ordinary (best seen in now accepted quantum effects that earlier were viewed as "impossible"). Many now extraordinary claims may become more acceptable not when they are replicated but when theoretical contexts change to make them more welcome.(Ibid)


Of course what he's actually talking about is Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift. Trussi doesn't say it but what he described is basically that, the way anomalies are absorbed into the paradigm and dismissed as unimportant until there are too many and they are too problematic, the paradigm shifts under it's own weight and the new paradigm is taken in; the anomalies under the old become the "facts" under the new. Kuhn says that a paradigm is defended just like a political regime. When it first starts to show signs of are its followers do damage control just like the Nixon White house under Watergate or the Reagan White house under Iran/contra gate, or Bush under the lies about WMD. In a sense a paradigm in scinece is propped up by an ideology that is driven by that paradigm. In quasi scientific mimicry of atheism which flatters itself as scientific, the paradigm of "physicalism" is surrounded by the ideology of atheists that protects it. ECREE is just a propaganda device that enables the ideology to knock off any counter claims.


Skeptics have argued that religious experience is not regular or consistent because such experiences are all different. Not only do you have so many different religions, but also even from mystic to mystic things differ. Over the years as one develops a disciplined life of prayer, one does encounter growing diversity and newness, but a certain sense of the familiar as well. Experiences become regular and consistent in that the presence of God is usually found in prayer, the sense of the presence is always the of the same quality (although varying intensity) and the sense of God can become familiar enough that it is always recognized as the same, This sense of the familiar is communicable and can be recognized form one believer to another. The mystical and devotional literature presents a kind of ordered sameness. One can read accounts as different form one experiencer to another as those between St. Augustine and A.W. Tozer and still find passages that seem to be talking about the same things. This is amplified times millions of believers in the history of the church who have experienced the same things. Even though there is diversification and difference there is still sameness. This is not even confined to mystics. The same can be said of conversion accounts that the same aspects keep popping up. Once can recognize the work of God from one person to another, form one time to the next, from one culture to all cultures. But, the skeptic will ask, what about the vast array of different religions? These differences are due to cultural constructs. One experiences God beyond words, and when one tries to speak of such experiences one must encode them in a symbolic universe, that is to say, in culture. These differences in symbolic universes over time have spelled out the differences in the many religions. But there is a cretin unity even between all the differences in religion. The data presented long term effects of religious experience (see articles on RE in this blog) represents typologies, which can be used to compare "peak experience" with that of other phenomena. The Peak experiencers can be grouped together into a collection of those who have experiences X. They are not isolated assortments of differing phenomena. These studies do represent differing cultures and times. Thus, religious experience has a consistency to it even between cultures.


Archetypal symbology universal.



Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Abraham H. Maslow

Appendix I. An Example of B-Analysis


"...Jungian archetypes which can be recovered in several ways. I have managed to get it in good introspects simply by asking them directly to free associate to a particular symbol. The psychoanalytic literature, of course, has many such reports. Practically every deep case history will report such symbolic, archaic ways of viewing the woman, both in her good aspects and her bad aspects. (Both the Jungians and the Kleinians recognize the great and good mother and the witch mother as basic archetypes.) Another way of getting at this is in terms of the artificial dream that is suggested under hypnosis. It can also probably be investigated by spontaneous drawings, as the art therapists have pointed out. Still another possibility is the George Klein technique of two cards very rapidly succeeding each other so that symbolism can be studied. Any person who has been psychoanalyzed can fairly easily fall into such symbolic or metaphorical thinking in his dreams or free associations or fantasies or reveries.




Archetypal Symbology linked to Peak experience.



The link from Archetypes to religious experience is supplied by Maslow as well, in a quotation already sited in Religious Experience Arguments. He argues that the ability to relate "B knowledge" to "C knowledge" where the female (Or the male) is balanced in the perception of the other between goddess and whore, and the proper ego relation is sorted out, is the managing of the sacred and profane. He points out that anyone can learn to see in this manner and that it is indicative of primitive people in their religious experiences as they explained the world through the sense of the numinous.

d) Anyone can have peck experience --universal to humanity



Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences

Abraham H. Maslow

Appendix D. What is the Validity of Knowledge Gained in Peak-Experiences?

"To summarize, the major changes in the status of the problem of the validity of B-knowledge, or illumination-knowledge, are: (A) shifting it away from the question of the reality of angels, etc., i.e., naturalizing the question; (B) affirming experientially valid knowledge, the intrinsic validity of the enlarging of consciousness, i.e., of a wider range of experiencing; (C) realizing that the knowledge revealed was there all the time, ready to be perceived, if only the perceiver were "up to it," ready for it. This is a change in perspicuity, in the efficiency of the perceiver, in his spectacles, so to speak, not a change in the nature of reality or the invention of a new piece of reality which wasn't there before. The word "psychedelic" (consciousness-expanding) may be used here. Finally, (D) this kind of knowledge can be achieved in other ways; we need not rely solely on peak-experiences or peak-producing drugs for its attainment. There are more sober and laborious—and perhaps, therefore, better in some ways in the long run—avenues to achieving transcendent knowledge (B-knowledge). That is, I think we shall handle the problem better if we stress ontology and epistemology rather than the triggers and the stimuli."


2) Why Does God seem Hidden to SO many people?

a) God is not strictly speaking "invisable."



According to Hartshorne, "[o]nly God can be so universally important that no subject can ever wholly fail or ever have failed to be aware of him (in however dim or unreflective fashion)." Now the issue of why God doesn't hold a "press conference" has do do with the fact that God does not communicate by violating normal causal principles. In process terms, the "communication" of God must be understood as the prehension of God by human beings. A "prehension" is the response of an occasion to the entire past world (both the contiguous past and the remote past.) As God is in every occasion's past actual world, every occasion must "prehend" or take account of God.


It should be noted that "prehension" is a generic mode of perception that does not necessarily entail consciousness or sensory experience. In previous postings I explained that there a two modes of pure perception --"perception in the mode of causal efficacy" and "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." If God is present to us, then it is in the presensory perceptual mode of causal efficacy as opposed to the sensory and conscious perceptual mode of presentational immediacy. That is why God is "invisible", i.e. invisible to sense perception. The foundation for experience of God lies in the nonsesnory nonconscious mode of prehension. So now, there is the further question: Why is there variability in our experience of God?. Or, why are some of us atheists, pantheists, theists, etc.? Every prehension has an initial datum derived from God, yet there are a multiplicity of ways in which this datum is prehended from diverse perspectives.


I agreed with Hume that sense perception tells us nothing about efficient causation (or final causation for that matter). Hume was actually presupposing causal efficacy in his attempt to deny it (i.e., in his relating of sense impressions to awareness). Causation could be described as an element of experience, but as Whitehead explains, this experience is not sensory experience. From Hume's own analysis Whitehead derives at least two forms of nonsensory perception: the perception of our own body and the nonsensory perception of one's past.

b). Atheists basically deny the validity of religious experience because they assume that all perception is sense perception.



Or, they deny sense perception to theists when they actually presuppose it themselves (Hume is a case in point).

c) All people experience the reality of God or the "Holy" all the time.



But this is at an unconscious level. However, in some people, this direct prehension of the "Holy" rises to the level of conscious experience. We generally call theses people "mystics". Now, the reason why a few people are conscious of God is not the result of God violating causal principle; some people are just able to conform to God's initial datum in greater degree than other people can. I don't think that God chooses to make himself consciously known to some and not to others. That would make God an elitist. Now, the question as to why I am a theist as opposed to an atheist does not have to do with me experiencing some exceptional religious or mystical experience. Rather, I believe that these extraordinary experiences of the great religious leaders are genuine and that they do conform to the ultimate nature of things. It's not necessarily a "blind leap" of faith, as my religious beliefs are accepted, in part, on the basis of whether or not they illuminate my experience of reality.


The upshot of all of this is religious belief is normative for human behavior. It is not merely "normal" but "normative" meaning it sets the standard. Belief is basic to human psyche, to our understanding of the good, of meaning in life, the ultiamte limits of reality, the grounding of nature and being itself, there is no way belie in God can be thought of as an extraordinary claim! We might think of it as extraordinary in the the sense of being unique, like no other claim, but in that case it makes no sense to subject it to the regular canons of science as though God's presence is given in daily empirical data. Obviously the more intelligent evidential standard is that the evidence has to be fit for the claim. Fit, not dazzling, not impossible, not amazing, no beyond our ability to produce, but it has to fit the case. It has to be rational, and able to stand a prima facie burden, and it has to fit the proof attempted.


Thus the atheist ploy has achieved a standard where all other forms of evidence save scientific data, why they blithely refer to as "facts," can be used to bolster certain shallow claims of "proof" for a straw man world view that is quasi scientific and supposedly an alternative to religious belief while denigrating all other forms of knowledge (including scinece that doesn't agree with them) save the selective list of "facts" deemed pertinent to their case. The effect being that civilization take one more hit as all forms of thinking and knowledge are eliminated save this one, a quasi-scientific approach to knowledge which is ideological in both tone and function.


Part 2 of the argument "more contra ECREP"

sources:



Marcelo Truzzi “on some unfair practices toward claims of the Paranormal.” This article was published in slightly edited form in:Edward Binkowski, editor, Oxymoron: Annual Thematic Anthology of the Arts and Sciences, Vol.2: The Fringe, New York: Oxymoron Media, Inc., 1998. It is also found on the website Skeptical Investigations: http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/anomalistics/practices.htm visited 7/7/08

on line version of Truzzi article


Ed J. Gracely ”Why Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof. This article first appeared in the December 1998 issue of Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT). Dr. Gracely is Associate Professor of Community and Preventive Medicine at the MCP*Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia. This article was posted on July 24, 2003. It is now found on:Quackwatch http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/extraproof.html


Abraham MaslowReligious Values and peak Experience,

text online: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/maslow.htm


url for my RE argument: http://www.doxa.ws/experience/mystical.html