Reality Hackers Net

Yet another article on the near death experience, with at least some attempt at balance. When dealing with the brain’s construction of reality, however, facts are less important than feelings – well, at least to the experiencer: Near-death experiences: Heaven can wait – The Independent

But there’s no consensus on what lies behind near-death experiences, even though they are being increasingly reported. Are they, as some people are convinced, signs of the soul leaving the body? Or are they, as others suggest, the last, dreamlike act put on by a dying brain?

News-Dailies Beliefs

Instructive as to how the things we now decry in the religion of others creeps into our own…. Fundamentally Flawed: Militant Religion and Modern Atrocity

News-Dailies Beliefs

The discussion about “antivaxxers” is an interesting one for multiple reasons. First, we see something about how pseudo-science operates. Second, we get a look at how these hucksters respond when they get exposed. And third, we can’t help but see the commonality between false beliefs in science… and religion: Antivaxxers and their trouble with truth | Discover Magazine
If you take apart the methods here, you will find it instructive for many areas of your life.

News-Dailies Beliefs

I find dreams to be entertaining but some people see them as messages from some supernatural realm. American are high on the dream/vision list – but that should come as no surprise since we’ve already seen that the average American already has more in common with  Iran than any other first world country.

So to many Americans, dreams are  full of meaning …even though, in typical schizophrenic fashion, they know they can’t rely on them as predictors of future events: Most People Believe Dreams Are Meaningful

“In other words, people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires … people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice. …Most people understand that dreams are unlikely to predict the future but that doesn’t prevent them from finding meaning in their dreams, whether their contents are mundane or bizarre.”

It’s like classical Christianity, then: God is in charge…except when he isn’t. He gets credit for anything good that happens but the bad stuff has to be put on something/someone else – free will, Satan, anything.

This is part of how we get the idea that dreams somehow predict things: When we dream of dramatic things that don’t happen (99 percent of the time), we forget about the dream. On the rare occasion when we dream about some weird event that later takes place (the time frame doesn’t matter much) we think, ‘OH, I had a dream about that! I must have been predicting it!‘ …Except…not.

News-Dailies Beliefs

Human sacrifice, coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Crazy? Sure, and also inevitable. Evangelical leaders push human sacrifice… Charges filed in man’s attempted ’sacrifice’

“According to police, Oumar Lam’s 26-year-old girlfriend arrived at their Queen Anne apartment Sunday to find him lying naked on a couch near a candle-lit altar. The woman told police she was seated on a bed when Lam attacked her from behind, pulling a pillowcase over her head and attempting to suffocate her.”

Oh sure, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and others will screech and whine, but I’ve already shown conclusively that their extremist evangelical doctrines WILL lead to human sacrifice cults. It’s only a matter of time.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

News-Dailies Beliefs

Since there are still thousands of children starving to death every day, you just KNEW Jesus had to be busy with something really important. Indeed, appearing in some woman’s kitchen tiles appears to be God the Son’s top priority!

Finding Christ in the kitchen

“Antonia Baker saw the image in the floor of her Lakes home for the first time three years ago during the Christmas season while she was recovering from surgery for an eye injury. Doctors said she had to keep her head down to allow her retina to heal. She wasn’t allowed to read or use the computer, so she had to stare at the floor for three weeks.”

Okay, sure… Jesus is on the woman’s floor… and he can’t get up! Look, if Jesus Christ is/was truly the Son of God, as opposed to just a story or some poor self-deluded fellow, you’d expect some sort of evidence for that, wouldn’t you?? WELL… here you go!

It’s the best you’re ever going to get, so enjoy it.

News-Dailies Beliefs, Pareidolia

This story goes back a ways, but it is an important reminder of just how easily most people are lead …often resulting in disastrous consequences: Ron Jones The Wave

“When a social studies student asked about the German public’s responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students “basically follow instructions” for a day.

“But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature – and a major weakness in public education.”

Ultimately, the roots of fascism and religion are the same: It begins with the idea that “it can’t happen here,” and “they must be telling the truth because look at what they’ve sacrified…” It is facilitated the the authority figure whether pastor or political leader who is willing to say with false confidence, “I have the answers” – and it ends with the enslavement of the human mind.

News-Dailies Beliefs

Death is one of those subjects that many people find difficult to discuss in frank, realistic terms. Oh, we live in a world where death is depicted everywhere; on the big screen, on TV, in stories… but generally we confine our view of death to surreal tales… where death is never really death, but something else.

The subject of death terrifies most clear-thinking people – which also allows death to be used as a big nasty club, a weapon against those who would ask too many questions and possibly demand actual evidence as part of the answers. Thus, all you have to do is listen to some sincere religious person trying to convert you to realize that mortality is the driving force behind religious conversion.

People are scared to death of death; they can’t handle the thought that they will cease to exist as a conscious entity. That great terror is what drives people to religion. As the centerpiece for the reason religion exists, one would expect to find many lurid descriptions of death and dying religionist tomes such as The Bible, and you won’t be disappointed.

Succinctly stated: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14,15)

An honest statement from the author of Hebrews: It is all about the fear of death. That’s the hammer that religion always has against reason. Fear is also used as a club to promote the other purpose of religion; its purported social control. i.e., without religion, they say, people would go wild and do all kinds of crazy things like commit incest and genocide.

Now, the amount of social control exerted by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is somewhat limited and even rather dubious due to the fact that these faiths hold to a rather extreme form of moral relativism, but nonetheless this fear works to some degree for social cohesion and control. Perhaps I will deal with the moral relativism of Christianity in some future post but let’s stay on track for now…

Read more…

Articles Beliefs, Death, Reality-Checks

There are thousands of religions in the world. I’m not talking about denominations of Christianity (of which there are also thousands) but different religions. And these religions each have their own god or gods and each represents the ONE TRUE FAITH in the minds of believers.

How did this happen?

Recent studies have suggested that there is a biological component to religion. This religiosity seems to lie in the temporal lobes. The more active a person’s temporal lobes are, the more religious they will be. But this does not explain how any particular religion – with all its rituals, rules and complexities – can develop apparently from nothing.

I began wondering about the many varieties in religion about the time I received my first Bible Studies diploma – around age 11. I couldn’t answer the question then, but I certainly found it to be perplexing. Over the years I continued to poke and prod at this issue.

Religion clearly flows from the nature of humans, as suggested, but the form of each particular faith is created initially by one person (the founder) and then taken in new directions by his/her disciples (the Inspired ones). So what we now see is that religion is created from two components: One socio-psychological and the other neuro-psychological. In this article, we will concentrate on the sociological process for the creation of a religion.

It has taken a lifetime of study for me to discover that a religion typically happens/arises/becomes “reality” in one of two ways. When you read about this process, you will immediately see just how natural it is.
Read more…

Articles Beliefs, Reality-Checks, Religion