The problem with God is that nobody has any real clue as to the nature of the mystery, and a lot of people are willing to kill over the interpretation. Unfortunately this finding won’t change the minds of anyone out there who is not willing to open their minds (pun intended).
The human brain does not contain a single “God spot” responsible for mystical and religious experiences, a new study finds.
Instead, the sense of union with God or something greater than the self often described by those who have undergone such experiences involves the recruitment and activation of a variety brain regions normally implicated in different functions such as self-consciousness, emotion and body representation.
The finding, detailed in the current issue of Neuroscience Letters, contradicts previous suggestions by other researchers that the there might be a specific region in the brain designed for communication with God.
If more people cared about respecting and cherishing life here on Earth they wouldn’t need to search for God.
Here’s the thing: try reliving 911 and force yourself not to say, “Oh my God!”
God DOES NOT WANT to be discovered through your toys. My God, that’s like a scientist being disected by his lab rats. Read your Bible so that you will know that the only way to find God is through faith. But why bother, He isn’t even lost. But are you?
By the way, who is the idiot funding this research? I think Dogbert might have a barge real estate to sell you. But honestly, who among you here had been hoping to find a God spot? Fess up nerds.
Did you not read the Scriptures and find that God is spirit. Gen 1:2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
And spiritual matters are discerned spiritually?
Did you not know that even farmboys knew that? Is there an inverse in proportion in your educational system? Such that the more degrees you get, the more ignorant you become? Psalm 53:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
#23: “One can believe in God without following a religion.”
I guess. If that is important to you. However, as soon as you start elaborating and describing this god, you get carried away in belief. Anything you try to claim as a “fact” about this god does not stand a chance in the light of science.
Of course one of the richest elaborations about any god is the Bible. But it’s all a result of mankind’s (read men’s) scriblings. And such scriblings are found all over the world describing all kind of gods. All it takes for one to be the leading authority, is power. 600 years of Inquisition comes to mind, or political leaders that favor faith before science….
#32: What are those “farmboys” you mention? Are they some kind of retarded, lower form of life?
#31: So your “God DOES NOT WANT to be discovered through your toys.”
Yeah, right. That’s a plausible way to explain lack of evidence 🙂
Why do all you superstitious types think you need something called a god, anyway? That sort of behavior hasn’t been functional since we left the Stone Age behind.
There really is nothing useful for society, families or individuals resulting from such silliness. It didn’t build your homes — or design the machinery and systems that provide work and improvement for our lives — superstition doesn’t advance medicine or education. About all you end up with is self-fulfilling rationales for your fears.
Build a fire. Illuminate the darkness outside that shadowy cave that is your mind.
I’ve yet to be convinced that God believes in me. $1,000,000 would help, though.
“If more people cared about respecting and cherishing life here on Earth they wouldn’t need to search for God.”
If we cherish life on earth, is there a good life and a bad life?
If there is who decides?
Does that mean you have no right to interfere with anything I do?
Or does that mean you have no right to interfere with consenting adults?
If two adult consent to have a duel, then do they have that right?
If one adult consents to be eaten, is that ok?
What does cherish really mean?
Who makes the decision as to what it really means, another individual?
What make their decision better than my decision?
A group of individuals, again what makes their decision better than mine?
Will be because they out number me and can kill me if I don’t accept their decision, or will they simply imprison me and destroy my life that way?
This won’t really make a lot of sense to anyone stuck on hating GOD, that they grabe at anything to justify their own hate.
The Golden Rule works for me, Traaxx.
31, 32: “Hal Jordan” is pretending to know the mind of his deity here, and has forgotten that his sacred books (and everyone else’s sacred books) were written by people who thought they knew the minds of their gods. Often said books were modified over the years to support some new or modified religion, and to ensure its profitability. Religion won’t survive if it’s not profitable, of course.
The Golden Rule, common to many religions, is a very good summary of how to live your life ethically, but unfortunately there’s not much money in it. So the founders of the various religions had to invent titheing, services, mantras, ministries, priesthoods, monks, mullahs, and all the rest.
yeah, I’ve heard that some might even summarize the whole of Judaism in what we call the “Golden Rule”
“Do unto others as you’d have others to unto you”
or, “Don’t do what you find detestable”
#38, I counter, that religion is strongest when it is not profitable…. maybe our mega churches close up, but the people themselves become better with strife.
“Bad habits are formed in Good times, Good habits are formed in Bad times”
For Example, the first century Christian church was not profitable, but very strong; in their poverty, doing much good for each other and the poor amoung them. Roman oppression seems to have had quite an impact.
These days life is much easier for much of the globe, we become too comfortable and the need to work together is forgotten, religion becomes rote.
There is one easy way to find your God Spot, just smoke some really good Weed.
By the way,
*The earth is not around 10,000 years old
*The earth does not have four corners (it’s not actually flat)
*Mentally handicapped persons are not possessed by demons
*The sun does not revolve around the earth
*The mustard seed is not the smallest seed
*Bleeding someone who has a fever does not help
*Believing in something you cannot prove does not affect how good a person you are. *The golden rule is not copyrighted by Jesus, it’s a basic human concept.
*The more fundamental the religion is, the more correct it is. (Leaving some things out of a holy book while leaving others in is not being true to that religion.)
*It’s against the law to burn reported women and children at a stake if they are feared to practice witchcraft.
*Most major religions believe, without a doubt, they are right and all others are wrong.
*Today it is considered to be wrong if a parent stones a disobedient child, even though the bible says differently.
*Today it is considered to be wrong if a Christian kills a non-believer, even though Jesus says differently.
The problem with man is that God created him at the end of a hard weeks work. God is a real artist, he just doesn’t have any particular style. You have the giraffe, the hippo, the elephant, the lion and all these different fishes. Man builds and you end up with mass duplication and suburban subdivsions without decent art museums. We’re on the second generation of gas stations around here and they all look the same after awhile. For some reason they aren’t building the new gas stations where the old ones were. The old ones are vacant eyesores for the most part. Research might explain this sort of thing. They should check all brains before declaring this to be true. They could just be looking at the wrong people. Von Braun said they always dreamed of shooting for the Moon and somebody said true, you guys just kept hitting England though.
Kids around here are always getting stoned Amber. I was getting coffee and a kid said they all got stoned last night. The other kid said he was stoned out of his mind and had the munchies.
#43
You know Amber,….. You got a point.
Quite a few actually 🙂
No matter how smart you nerdos think you are, I choose to believe in the Bible because it contains the words of Jesus Christ. Between all of you and Jesus Christ, I’d choose Jesus Christ anytime.
Believing in creation the way Moses described it is intrinsic in Christianity because Moses wrote about Christ:
John 5:46 For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me.
String Theory – highlights the possibility that there are alternate demensions that we just cannot currently perceive. (like an ant on a beach ball…). go watch PBS’ “The Elegant Universe” and see if that does not yield really interesting philisophical discussion..
Uncle Jim
God’s palette is DNA and his style is that of Fibonacci.
God is not all that original either. Of the animals you mentioned giraffe, the hippo, the elephant, the lion all have four legs and they are all composed of DNA. and all are of a warm blooded endoskeleton design.
god! that is so last epoch! lol 🙂
There is a lot of “duplication” in nature. You don’t have to look very hard to see it.
43: Faith may be strongest when a religion is poor, but a religion won’t take off until it’s making money.
47: Keep in mind that faith is belief in something without any evidence. That doesn’t make faith out as a good thing. I can have faith about the Great Pumpkin, but that’s a foolish belief.
The Bible (well, the Gospels anyway) contains the words of Matthew Mark Luke and John, each with his own spin on what he’s heard that Jesus said, all second hand. Paul get’s a miraculaous conversion (or maybe an epileptic seizure) then writes much more than the gospel writers did, and changes the religion completely. Christianity is more the creation of Paul than of Jesus.
Moses knew nothing about the evolution of species, so is a poor source of scientific thought.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we don’t have much control over our belief in God (or however you identify spiritual reality).
Either you have the capacity to perceive God, or you don’t.
The vast majority of humans have this ability. A few don’t. Those of us who perceive God will never convince an atheist otherwise.
Atheists, of course, could see this the other way: Either you have a more highly-evolved rational brain (like them) or you do not.
36: If we cherish life on earth, is there a good life and a bad life?
If there is who decides?
Is there some reason you can’t decide?
Faith does not mean belief without evidence. That is silly and no one believes in anything without evidence. Now with that said the evidence can be so bad or so personnel that the person does not wish to share the evidence. Do not give people who invoke “faith” a pass because then “faith” serves to be nothing more that a conversation stopper.
Second, to #40, if strife really made people into better human beings then the nation with the most prisoners (USA) would soon be completly out of prisoners to house, and yet our prisons continue to grow in size and population. And before anyone claims that our prisons are not that bad, try living in one for a few months.
Yoose guys… atheist vs theist arguments are the worst, they really really grate on me, being a theist in the essentially materialist western world. I’ll put my beliefs out there. That God exists is a no brainer to those who have experienced himher. Jesus is excellent. The Bible sucks except Isaiah and the Psalms and the red letters in a red letter edition. The URANTIA BOOK rules. There is a miracle in the strickly material world and it’s name is WEED. Atheism was invented by the luciferians, historically everybody believed in some kind of higher power. What prooves atheism to have no common sense to me is that these people waste time trying to disproove something that can’t be prooved or disprooved by current material science. Why!?
We who have experienced things beyond the material know what we’re talking about…as well as anybody can.
There are no atheists in foxholes or mushroom dens, ehehe. Youse guys…
There may be a lot of dupication in nature, there just aren’t many straight lines or much uniformity. You can spend a lifetime studying botany and never figure it all out. I had a sunflower grow in the garden. It just grew there, needing no care or no help. I planned the garden and the sunflower wasn’t part of my plan. The bees came along and munched on the sunflower. The corn is doing great. It’s wrapped up on the stalk, so nothing can eat it until I’m ready. The corn isn’t uniform, it’s organic so it’s growing at different rates. I’m sure you could modify it and have mathematically perfect uniform corn by recoding it. I guess that would be smart corn. I’ve got dumb corn, the way nature intended it. Maybe the corn has a God spot but no brain. We could develop the six million dollar corn, we can rebuild it and it will be better, stronger and faster like the six million dollar man.
The problem with looking for evidence of a God spot is that man has not even found where the Think spot is! Did you honestly think that the Master of the Universe, who has designed a voice-activated universe, will be a simple matter to toy around with your elementary science. My God, the world can’t even design a proper instant-on crash-proof PC, prevent SPAM and here you nerdos are in this forum, arrogantly contemplating about the non-existence of God.
Unless you are in New York, where forensic evidence (like those of the WTC attacks) would be hurriedly shipped out of the country, the procedure is to gather the handiwork and use this as a tool to profile the criminal mind.
The same is true with your search for God. Look at God’s handiwork and see, taste, smell, hear, and feel. Then read your Bibles and get the entire picture. But the hardest student to teach is one who says, “Don’t tell me-I know better than you.”
But hear this out. If you don’t learn the truth from nature and from the Bible, you will have to learn it the hard way-through the consequences of your convictions, or lack thereof.
Uncle Jim
“The corn isn’t uniform, it’s organic so it’s growing at different rates. I’m sure you could modify it and have mathematically perfect uniform corn by recoding it. I”
Look up the Fibonacci sequence. God is the one that uses math more than man.
There is a very strong mathematical perfection to all of nature. As well as masterworks of art.
I know it seems harsh and un-inspiring to view nature that way but that is the way it is.
I see a great deal of beauty in the mathematical precision of nature. I am sorry if you can’t
For the one that said reduncance is profe on the none existance of God. Let me put down why it is not proff for the none existance of God.
I am a programmer, there are times when I have to write code simulare to something I have writen before (but not the same) I will just c-n-p the original code and change it to fit the need (if it the same stuff, I will cut it out of the original and make that its own function)
Code reuse is a good thing in programming, why could it not be a equaly good think in createing the world/universe
56: But hear this out. If you don’t learn the truth from nature and from the Bible, you will have to learn it the hard way-through the consequences of your convictions, or lack thereof.
This is where your line of thinking goes completely off the rails. You are saying “I think this way, and if you don’t agree with me you’re going to hell.” You see what you see when you look at the world and everybody else sees what they see. Why does it irk you so much if everyone doesn’t see things the same way you do?
For the record, I have no interest in convincing you or anyone else of anything regarding this subject. It is a basic human right to believe in whatever one chooses. So stop proselytizing. It’s not going to do you any good with people who have already formed an opinion.
With the help from all the gods, let post #60 be the last 🙂 😉 :-O