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 viktor
psychotechnician
 
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand 
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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 Materialism is a Religion 
#24124888 - 02/27/17 10:09 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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I wrote this essay today after noticing how fervently a person online was defending the idea that religion was the same thing as believing that there is life after death.
Since few people outside of psychedelic drug users understand any of this, I post it here for us to consider.
* * *
The main characteristic of a religion, according to the bastion of the bluepilled, Wikipedia, is “a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to… an order of existence.”
A cynic might say that the true characteristic of a religion, aside from all that, is the fundamentalist belief in something that cannot be proven, and the absolute inability to countenance any possibility that one may be wrong.
As this essay will examine, this description perfectly fits the system of beliefs known as materialism.
The cult of materialism has its own creation mythology, in the form of the Big Bang story, which Wikipedia pompously describes as the “prevailing cosmological model”.
The Big Bang story falls flat on its own face in several regards, the most obvious of which is the failure to account for time before the Big Bang.
Invariably, this mythology is defended by high-ranking members of the cult, who dismiss criticism from any non-materialist on the basis that the criticism isn’t “scientific”, in much the same way that criticisms of Church dogma were dismissed as heresies in the Dark Ages.
In order to be considered “scientific” a person needs a postgraduate degree – and, because a person will only very rarely be motivated to get a postgraduate degree unless they are already “scientific”, the cult filters out those least receptive to its dogma.
Obviously what is meant here by “scientific” is, in fact, “materialist”, but it is a taboo in the cult of materialism to admit that one is a materialist – the pretense of ultimate objectivity must be maintained at all times.
And so materialist dogma is called “scientific” in the hope that people think “rational” when they hear “scientific” and so come to conflate rationality with materialism.
There is nothing rational in a sentence like “Approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially during which time density fluctuations that occurred because of the uncertainty principle were amplified into the seeds that would later form the large-scale structure of the universe.”
Such a sentence cannot be made sense of without the guidance of an authority figure, namely a physicist… and in that case you might as well just be listening to a priest on the basis that he is an authority on spirituality.
In the same way that the Sumerian and Babylonian creation myths referenced the early universe as being made of earth, water, air and fire, the Big Bang creation mythology views the early universe as a simple matter of protons, neutrons and electrons – it’s essentially the same story.
Likewise, the waves and particles beloved of quantum physicists are just yin and yang seen through a lens of materialism.
Anyone who has seen beyond, of course, knows that neither story has a superior claim to truth; people will believe in materialism if they trusted their high school teachers over their priests and religionism if it was the other way around.
The second major way in which materialism is like a religion is that it forces its followers to make faith-based assumptions about the nature of reality.
The most common of these assumptions is the assumption that the brain generates consciousness. One will find, even after the most exhaustive research, that there is no hard scientific evidence whatsoever to support this assumption.
The truth – which materialists know they are forbidden from uttering – is that this is an assumption made for the same reasons that we once assumed that the Sun rotated around the Earth: because it looks like it.
People with severe brain damage tend to die, and because materialists have already made the assumption that the brain generates consciousness, it follows logically that significant damage to the brain will impair its ability to generate consciousness, and so the consciousness that was previously present no longer is.
A moment’s thought exposes this line of logic as the utter bullshit it is.
For one thing, there is no evidence that any given person is conscious anyway, even before their brain is damaged. It is simply believed as an article of faith on the basis that they have a brain (a brain being both sufficient and necessary for consciousness in materialist dogmatism).
This is clearly a circular argument.
More specifically, scientific thought is very clear regarding the principle that physiological adaptations have to have some kind of selective advantage in order to evolve. God did not create the world and the creatures in it out of a whim; they evolved in their struggle to adapt to an ever-changing set of environmental conditions, the laws of which are mostly understood.
All well and good, but this cannot account for consciousness.
There is no selective advantage to being conscious, in and of itself. There are probably selective advantages to all other mental or psychological phenomena, but there is no advantage at all in being conscious of the operation of these phenomena.
All of the supposed benefits of consciousness suggested by materialists as reasons for why it might have evolved do not even require consciousness, e.g. an increased capacity to calculate or to think ahead, to remember weather patterns, to tell stories or to detect falsehoods.
For a computer can calculate anything that a human mind can calculate, and we do not generally make the assumption that a computer is conscious. It is only because of materialist dogma that one assumes consciousness exists where one has no evidence for it.
In short, materialism is a religion because its followers are not willing to reason in good faith. Were they willing to do so they would not be able to defend baseless positions such as the idea that the brain generates consciousness.
Original here.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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 OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group
Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 45,441
Loc: Under the C
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24124939 - 02/27/17 10:48 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Those stubborn, close-minded materialists. Now transmit that same essay to us on a device not based on materialist science and quantum physics.
TIA
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viktor
psychotechnician
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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Now that Icelander and Ped have gone and the younger generation of posters here have seen the emptiness in atheist physicalism and rejected it, I guess you're the High Priest of the Cult of Materialism on this forum now.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group
Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 45,441
Loc: Under the C
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24125127 - 02/28/17 01:32 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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And you win the prize for dodging a salient point time-after-time.
7 years here and you still have not passed the basics of debate - always choosing the personal rather than the topic. Why do you bother to start a thread if you would rather discuss me?
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viktor
psychotechnician
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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Yes, 7 years on this forum - long enough to remember when it was full of materialists, lost in Maya.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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blingbling
what you chicken stew?
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 2,987
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor] 1
#24125207 - 02/28/17 03:41 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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I think what your saying is both useful and problematic. It is problematic because materialism can mean very different things in different contexts. Its useful because there are religious elements to particular materialist ideologies like communism, capitalism and even science. But materialism doesn't give you the same level of morality or extension of meaningfulness into the cosmos that religions do. In this sense materialism is more of an anti-religion, in the sense that it corrodes morality and cosmic meaningfulness. So, in my opinion, you are both right and wrong.
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Kupo said:
let's fuel the robots with psilocybin.
cez said:
everyone should smoke dmt for religion.
dustinthewind13 said:
euthanasia and prostitution should be legal and located in the same building.
White Beard said:
if you see the buddha on the road, rape him, then kill him. then rape him again.
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blingbling
what you chicken stew?
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 2,987
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: blingbling]
#24125218 - 02/28/17 03:53 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Invariably, this mythology is defended by high-ranking members of the cult, who dismiss criticism from any non-materialist on the basis that the criticism isn’t “scientific”, in much the same way that criticisms of Church dogma were dismissed as heresies in the Dark Ages.
This definitely not true. Your essay is very hyperbolic.
In the same way that the Sumerian and Babylonian creation myths referenced the early universe as being made of earth, water, air and fire, the Big Bang creation mythology views the early universe as a simple matter of protons, neutrons and electrons – it’s essentially the same story.
This is a massive oversimplification.
For one thing, there is no evidence that any given person is conscious anyway, even before their brain is damaged. It is simply believed as an article of faith on the basis that they have a brain (a brain being both sufficient and necessary for consciousness in materialist dogmatism).
Your use of the word faith is disingenuous. The existence of anything beyond your own consciousness is a leap of faith, but some leaps are further than others i.e. it is a much larger leap to assume that consciousness exists outside the brain because then you have to posit consciousness existing in something other than what we can measure. There is an extra level of abstraction you have to account for. Its not that this is not possible, it is just that you can account for it without this extra add on.
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Kupo said:
let's fuel the robots with psilocybin.
cez said:
everyone should smoke dmt for religion.
dustinthewind13 said:
euthanasia and prostitution should be legal and located in the same building.
White Beard said:
if you see the buddha on the road, rape him, then kill him. then rape him again.
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sudly
Quasar Praiser
Registered: 01/05/15
Posts: 11,369
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24125234 - 02/28/17 04:18 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
Viktor said: The second major way in which materialism is like a religion is that it forces its followers to make faith-based assumptions about the nature of reality.
Here is a slightly abridged exert on summarising quantum field theory.
Quote:
The Dirac equation.
His equations predicted the existence of a strange new particle.
Just like the electron and yet at the same time very very different.
Dirac gradually became convinced that the new parts of his equation were describing something that could be thought of as an anti-electron, having opposite properties like electric charge. And in principle an anti-electron could form a part of anti-atom, and many anti-atoms could fit together to make an anti-matter object.
Dirac realised that if things and anti-things ever met they would instantly annihilate and turn all their mass into energy, disappearing completely.
Here finally was the answer to the riddle of empty space, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle had suggested that matter could pop into existence for incredibly short periods of time, now Dirac had provided the mechanism for which matter could be created out of the vacuum, and just as quickly disappear again.
Pairs of particles and anti-particles borrow energy from the vacuum for brief moments before annihilating and paying it back again.
When you bring Relativity and quantum theory together you have a notion of electron and anti-electron pairs sprouting out of the vacuum.
The vacuum goes from nothing to something teaming with matter and anti-matter creation.
Dirac's ideas were refined and envelopes into what is today known as quantum field theory, and these strange fleeting things within nothing became known as virtual particles.
It seems nothingness is in fact a seething mass of virtual particles appearing and disappearing trillions of times in the blink of an eye.
Willis Lam showed there is activity in apparent nothingness.
He measured the energies of the orbits of electrons around a nucleus.
If there were fluctuations this orbit would wobble ever so slightly. Like a plane flying along and hitting some turbulence.
Using lasers to probe electrons. The apparatus for experimentation has to be sensitive enough to pick up the minute behaviours in an electron.
Measuring the amount the electron is being wobbled about by the vacuum.
However hard we try to remove everything fro space we can never truly get it empty, space is filled with a vacuum that has a fro mysterious energy.
When using the mathematics laid out by Heisenburg, Dirac and others you can calculate the amount that the electron should be effected. When you run the real physical experiment the answer you get matched the theory to one part in a million. The theory of quantum mechanics is he most accurate and powerful description of the natural world that we have.
But we can see the effects of these quantum fluctuations in a dramatic way, because they are written into the stars.
Today our best theories tell us that as the universe sprang from the vacuum it expanded very quickly and this means that the rules of the quantum world should have contributed to the large scale structure of the entire cosmos.
At the size of an electron it is governed not by the classical rules we are familiar with but by the weird rules of the quantum world.
Our universe is the quantum world inflated many many times. Nothing really has shaped everything and we now have a way to see this.
Cosmic background radiation.
The first light that was released after the Big Bang was mapped with satellites by George Smoot and his team.
The application of quantum physics to cosmology as a whole was revolutionary and it change our entire perception of the evolution of the universe, because it turns out that quantum physics provides a natural mechanism through quantum fluctuations to see into the early universe with small irregularities that would later grow to galaxies, the thought is overwhelming, the idea that an object with billions of stars like the Milky Way began life as a quantum fluctuation, as what we call a fluctuation of the vacuum.
It now appears as if the quantum world, the place we once thought of as empty nothingness has actually shaped everything we see around us.
A quantum fluctuation in a vacuum becomes our galaxy.
The teaming, seething activity of the vacuum of nothing and the quantum fluctuation within it were the seeds that grew into the universe we see today.
This idea gives rise to one final revelation, today our best theories about the cosmos tell us that at the beginning of time the universe sprang from the vacuum creating not only vast amounts of matter but also the strange stuff that was predicted by Paul Dirac, anti-matter.
But the universe we see today is made of matter and nearly all of the anti-matter seems to have vanished.
We are simply the debris of a huge annihilation of matter and anti-matter at the begging of time, the left overs of an unimaginable explosion.
All these insights have arisen from trying to understand what nothing is, what we once thought was the void now seems to hold within it the deepest mysteries of the entire universe.
In the 400 years since Torricelli and Pascal began exploring vacuums here on Earth, we have begun to understand in ever greater detail the worlds at the very limits of our perceptions, and in doing we've uncovered the strange truth about reality itself, there is a profound connection between the nothingness from which we originated and the infinite in which we are engulfed.
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I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.
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viktor
psychotechnician
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: blingbling]
#24125251 - 02/28/17 04:41 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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How much consciousness can we measure in the brain? It appears to be absolutely none to me.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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zzripz
Stranger
Registered: 12/23/08
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Loc: Manchester, UK
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor] 2
#24125266 - 02/28/17 04:56 AM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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yes materialism and the church of scientism. It is very amusing how many atheists refuse to believe in the term 'scientism'. I wish I had copied every refutation of it from them.
I always sense with materialists, especially when they lash out at you if you dare 'magically think', that this lashing out is coming from FEAR! And it is of course fear of the mess which was/is superstition and seen by them as an extremely dangerous thing which needs fighting against. So in a way their fear is kinda justified, because ignorant superstition about people being possessed by the 'Devil' etc etc can be really destructive, BUT they then throw the baby out with the bathwater, refusing to deeply look at any anomalies which cannot be measured by the criteria of their scientific method. What cannot be measured becomes none-sense/illusion/delusion, even dangerous. Experience is cast out. You are not to trust it.
They usually are mythically naive and will not apply critical thinking to the subject of mythology, and this is why you see them in never-ending fruitless confrontations with theists where the argument is limited by the rigid views--both sides.
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blingbling
what you chicken stew?
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 2,987
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24126474 - 02/28/17 04:35 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
viktor said:
How much consciousness can we measure in the brain? It appears to be absolutely none to me.
Again, this is a disingenuous question. Its not that we necessarily measure consciousness. We measure particular neurological functions that we commonly associate with consciousness and then infer that these functions must have something to do with consciousness. It takes a further level of abstraction (which may or may not be a useful way of understanding consciousness) to say that consciousness emanates from outside these neurological functions because now you have to explain how the ghost gets into the machine, so to speak. Its a much leaner theory (which we may find is inadequate) to simply assume consciousness is an integration of various neurological functions.
In my opinion most of the time when someone argues that our best bet is that consciousness does not emanate from neurological functioning, it is because they are obscuring the facts so they don't have to deal with the inevitability that these neurological functions will break down, that they will die. This is what I meant by materialism having a corrosive effect on cosmic meaning. Religion promises life everlasting and materialism takes it away.
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Kupo said:
let's fuel the robots with psilocybin.
cez said:
everyone should smoke dmt for religion.
dustinthewind13 said:
euthanasia and prostitution should be legal and located in the same building.
White Beard said:
if you see the buddha on the road, rape him, then kill him. then rape him again.
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viktor
psychotechnician
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: blingbling]
#24126482 - 02/28/17 04:40 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
blingbling said:
a disingenuous question. Its not that we necessarily measure consciousness. We measure particular neurological functions that we commonly associate with consciousness
Why are these neurological functions associated with consciousness? There is absolutely zero evidence that they are.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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blingbling
what you chicken stew?
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 2,987
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: zzripz]
#24126484 - 02/28/17 04:40 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
zzripz said:
yes materialism and the church of scientism. It is very amusing how many atheists refuse to believe in the term 'scientism'. I wish I had copied every refutation of it from them.
I always sense with materialists, especially when they lash out at you if you dare 'magically think', that this lashing out is coming from FEAR! And it is of course fear of the mess which was/is superstition and seen by them as an extremely dangerous thing which needs fighting against. So in a way their fear is kinda justified, because ignorant superstition about people being possessed by the 'Devil' etc etc can be really destructive, BUT they then throw the baby out with the bathwater, refusing to deeply look at any anomalies which cannot be measured by the criteria of their scientific method. What cannot be measured becomes none-sense/illusion/delusion, even dangerous. Experience is cast out. You are not to trust it.
They usually are mythically naive and will not apply critical thinking to the subject of mythology, and this is why you see them in never-ending fruitless confrontations with theists where the argument is limited by the rigid views--both sides.
I agree with much of this. I know your qualifying your statements so not to paint all materialist into a corner, but your post still reads with some contempt towards materialism. I think that if you actually sat down with a physicist or biologist and had a conversation you would more than likely find them to be far less dogmatic then you let on. These are smart people, and they are usually quite aware of the limitations of science.
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Kupo said:
let's fuel the robots with psilocybin.
cez said:
everyone should smoke dmt for religion.
dustinthewind13 said:
euthanasia and prostitution should be legal and located in the same building.
White Beard said:
if you see the buddha on the road, rape him, then kill him. then rape him again.
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blingbling
what you chicken stew?
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 2,987
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24126485 - 02/28/17 04:42 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
viktor said:
Quote:
blingbling said:
a disingenuous question. Its not that we necessarily measure consciousness. We measure particular neurological functions that we commonly associate with consciousness
Why are these neurological functions associated with consciousness? There is absolutely zero evidence that they are.
Honestly, I'm not going to argue this point. I suggest you do some reading on the subject of cognitive neuroscience. I know that this is a cop out, but I don't have the time nor the expertise to effectively argue this point.
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Kupo said:
let's fuel the robots with psilocybin.
cez said:
everyone should smoke dmt for religion.
dustinthewind13 said:
euthanasia and prostitution should be legal and located in the same building.
White Beard said:
if you see the buddha on the road, rape him, then kill him. then rape him again.
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viktor
psychotechnician
Registered: 11/03/10
Posts: 4,293
Loc: New Zealand
Last seen: 2 years, 16 days
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: blingbling]
#24126514 - 02/28/17 04:52 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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I've got an M.A. in Psychology, mate, if you can't argue it with me you don't know what you're talking about.
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"They consider me insane but I know that I am a hero living under the eyes of the gods."
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi
Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 27,619
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24126526 - 02/28/17 04:59 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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The crass naive materialist thumping the table and saying, 'And isn't this real?' is in denial of the ineluctable dominant cognitive component of every perception.
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Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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DividedQuantum
Outer Head
Registered: 12/06/13
Posts: 9,858
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: blingbling]
#24126544 - 02/28/17 05:04 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
blingbling said:
Quote:
viktor said:
Quote:
blingbling said:
a disingenuous question. Its not that we necessarily measure consciousness. We measure particular neurological functions that we commonly associate with consciousness
Why are these neurological functions associated with consciousness? There is absolutely zero evidence that they are.
Honestly, I'm not going to argue this point. I suggest you do some reading on the subject of cognitive neuroscience. I know that this is a cop out, but I don't have the time nor the expertise to effectively argue this point.
viktor is right. There actually isn't any existing scientific evidence to support the supposition that the brain produces consciousness, despite everyone's apparent assumptions. If you could provide this missing evidence, you'd be the first.
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Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,169
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maybe like Trump about Global Warming, you will keep an Open Mind.
Concsiousness is produced in the brain.
No brain, no consciousness.
Some brain - some potential for consciousness as long as the body is healthy and intact.
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 _  🧠 _ 
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LRG
Supernaut
Registered: 04/04/16
Posts: 871
Last seen: 4 years, 4 months
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Re: Materialism is a Religion [Re: viktor]
#24126574 - 02/28/17 05:16 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
viktor said:
How much consciousness can we measure in the brain? It appears to be absolutely none to me.
It's only measurable by the vessel it is contained in. People reject that idea because it can't be measured for everyone to see. It's not measured in the brain btw. You need to look deeper, HIIIYAAAAH!
I also wouldn't call it a religion, just an idea.
Edited by LRG (02/28/17 05:17 PM)
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi
Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 27,619
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Use an analogy to illustrate how the brain and consciousness are linked, and why one causes the other in the order of matter>mind or mind>matter (anyone notice the glaring problem already with this?).
Please - I am curious as to why you think that either is true. I do not I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that this should be treated like a question of order and/or first cause, like the "chicken or the egg".
I have another take, which seems to be a very old take, better to call it timeless perhaps.
What remains,
experientially, after all belief in any substantial reality
whatsoever has been expunged? When our meditation,
our insight into the nature of mind, reveals the wondrous
essential truth that the external world and our experience
of it, and the inner world of thought and emotion, is all
contrived by the intellect, that it has no substantial
existence, at that time the understanding of maya dawns.
Both inner and the outer are illusory. It is all magical
display. It is unitary maya.
- excerpt from The Intro of Longchenpa's Maya Yoga, translated by Keith Dowman
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Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
Edited by The Blind Ass (02/28/17 05:26 PM)
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