Do you believe in God?

Tulpas are an interesting angle, not heard about that before. I'm curious if you reckon they can be developed "subconsciously"? I assume, as you're not a religious fellow, that you believe tulpas to be a psychological phenomenon than a spiritual one?

I'm not sure what would distinguish a tulpa from an imaginary friend - what I discovered reading about them is that they seem to primarily be something people intentionally cultivate, rather than something they're "surprised" by. Personally, it would surprise me if my experience emerged from the subconscious; I was raised secular, and explored basically every religion but Christianity, though of course there's no accounting for the social subconscious that comes with growing up in a historically Christian nation.

Curious about your thoughts on this.

Yes!

There's that thing: utter certainty that the 1st Century magic story is true. And challenging other on the certainty of their positions. It's a caricature of spirituality.

Yes I consider them psychological, but don't discount the spiritual angle (which in my model is just a subset of the psychological). Can they develop subconsciously? I would say yes. One can be powerfully under the sway of the beliefs of the culture, the environment, the cult they are exposed to, etc. ... and at some point it can be said to crystallizing into an entity within the mind. Much more commonly they are somewhat consciously cultivated, but most often perhaps religious idols are just casually claimed on the basis of what is expected, then overly professed in a "he protests too much" sense, meaning they don't maintain any real belief or practice.

For those seriously engaging internally with the archetype (it could be John the Baptist as well as Jesus, or David Koresh, or Jim Jones, some Egyptian spirit, Paul Bunyan, etc). They can take up residence in the psyche , yes usually via overt, concentrated adoption. Yup, imaginary friend is very similar ... created/taking form out of need.

Of course, to some degree, your argument can be summed up to a single point; that you believe I (and those like me) are deluded, in a literal sense. That psychological facets inaccessible to conscious thought drive religious belief.

I have to disagree in my own experience, but I can see why you'd come to that conclusion, considering some of the wild things people believe. Worth noting that even the hardened atheist is susceptible to his or her own biases and delusions.

As a fun aside, the idea of the collective unconscious came from Jung - A man who spoke overwhelmingly highly of Catholicism.

Either way, I wish you well in your journey, and pray that the Lord blesses and keeps you 😀 Ride safe, man.

I don’t know what you experienced so I can’t say you were deluded. What I do know is that before you experienced it you “cried out to God”. Why? Why didn’t you cry out to Vishnu, Zeus, Buddha, or some other entity? I would suggest that it is because your experience did not lead to your belief in God; it merely served as a confirmation for a pre-existing belief you already had. When you saw whatever it was you interpreted it as “the heart of Christ” rather than as a vision of Vishnu, a vision of Buddhist Nirvana or in some other way. You did so precisely because you were already predisposed to seeing it that way due to your pre-existing belief.

I’ll debate all day long about the merits of purported physical evidence for the existence of God or over the merits of various logical arguments. I will not question your experience or your belief in what it was. I merely am pointing out that your account reflects a belief in god that existed prior to that experience not an experience that led you to believe.

BTW that experience, at least as far as I can tell, didn’t involve anything specifically Catholic as opposed to any other Christian denomination. Perhaps your adherence to Catholicism also results from some pre-existing belief?

Well, I had spoken to a Catholic a great deal some months before these events. At the time, I didn't agree with him, and quite vehemently disagreed with him on many points. But something about them stuck in my mind; I couldn't help but feel they were logically sound, and wrestled with them from time to time. Certainly, this would be what lead to my honest cry. Prior to these conversations, the idea of God had always seemed silly to me, but I think the argumentation is actually stronger than most give credit for.

I didn't immediately go to Catholicism after this experience. To me, this experience was, broadly speaking, a purely Christian one. I then spent some months debating, researching, studying, before coming to the conclusion that, on the balance of the evidence, it was most likely that the Catholic Church was in fact the True Church, established by Jesus Christ during His Incarnation.

Something I find interesting about the whole experience is that I didn't want to be a Christian or a Catholic. I resisted quite heavily, but found that I needed to be intellectually honest, and that honesty lead inexorably to the Catholic Church. Having been intellectually dishonest most of my life, this I see as a great grace.

Fun tidbit - Prior to this, I was on record as saying, more than once, the following words:

God does have a sense of humour.

Yeah, surely it's hilarious to him how your Catholic brothers have raped and molested children for hundreds of years and then covered up their crimes.

I guess the conclusion is: Every catholic is totally fine with children being molested. Wurlitzer even finds it funny.

How many atheists / agnostics can truly say they don’t believe in the god depicted by AI in ‘The Matrix’?

The god that oppresses you through a hyperreality while he leeches the life out of you.

Why is that movie so popular? Because it has no reality?

One reason to believe in God is because the only way to overcome this matrix god is through a superior God. Only through a superior God can you dethrone the current god.

Understand that when you hymn and haw, and when you demand evidence as a justification for inaction, you are doing so from within the matrix.

When I point out someone else’s bias in interpreting a particular experience, it’s because I have had a similar experience and can help guide that person in a more truthful direction.

Pointing out someone’s bias to them when you have had no similar spiritual experience is completely douchey, insecure behavior.

No I don't consider religious belief delusional necessarily at all. More the tulpa thing ... you visualize it into existence within the psyche, it becoming a narrative within the psyche. This happens, that happens in your life... it's the god behind it. You begin to describe and explain your experience via the god archetype.

Interestingly, when one is asked to verbalize this narrative -- to list some of the things god is doing in their life -- it is almost always a virtual zero. The great majority of the time they won't even try to give details, sensing how mundane most of it is. "So many things, and you would 't understand" is the pat reply. "God found me a parking space, god helped us win the game, god saved me from death while he let millions of souls starve to death and die of cancer etc., god gave me an ineffable revelation" ... on and on.

It's a tulpa, an internal narrative, an archetype, a myth, a religious club. How many thousands of these conflicting clubs have to exist before that is realized? In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James categorizes them into healthy and sick, and dealt with the practical side of simply attributing strange and emotional experiences to some preconceived notion of god. In truth, when something strange happens, instead of going to physics or metaphysics for an explanation, they go straight to one of the pat god stories. Which god story they go to of course is heavily influenced by their immediate culture.

But when we have a strange experience, even a "miracle," we don't have any idea what strange force might be behind it. Ancient man couldn't quite attribute it to the quantum fields, could they? No, they went with magic men and magic stories.

Now direct this form of critical analysis at the archetype of the skeptic, and do it honestly.

It’s more obvious to notice the contempt the skeptic directs externally, but what about the more sinister self contempt? What’s up with that? You want to talk about it or no?

Which is to say when looking to understand the spiritual element of life, don't default to 1st Century beliefs any more than you would default to 1st Century beliefs in learning about chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy, biology, psychology, geology, etc. They were so ignorant about all those fields it makes no sense to start to take your cues from then. Just take a look at the common beliefs of the 1st Century, and it ends the tendency to adopt their metaphysics beliefs uncritically.

Funny, but FWIW, Wurlitzer didn’t seem to take any offense to what I posted. We had (it seemed to me anyway) a reasonable and polite exhchange about it.

Anyway, I think you’re missing my point, and I certainly wasn’t intent on insulting anyone or even doubting the experience in discussion. My point was that we all have experiences of one kind of another. We all interpret those experiences in light of our prior beliefs. Had I had a similar experience I almost certainly would have interpreted it in a nuturalistic way - a hallucination, a seizure or some other type of malfunction in my brain.

That point seems pretty uncontroversial and far from “douchey and insecure”. (In fact it is a bit douchey and insecure of YOU to assume that I have NOT had any experiences like the one Wurlitzer described, but I digress). The only other point I made was that Wurlitzer claimed this experience caused him/her to believe in God. Yet, according to the account, he/she “cried out to God” BEFORE this experience occurred. By his/hee own claim, he/she cried out to God before coming to believe that God exists. Why would someone cry out to a nonexistent entity? My claim was that this experience likely was not the cause of Wurlitzer’s God belief and that he/shw already believed when it happened. Once that is established it’s natural to think that this belief shaped the interpretation of this experience.

This is a summation:

Wurlitzer: “Here is my testimony of my transcendent spiritual experience.”

Skeptic douchebag who stupidly believes his map of reality is complete: “You didn’t actually have a transcendent experience. Let me explain to you why.”

Well if we apply logic then the case is crystal clear: Don't attribute something to invisible godman where the easiest explanation is "severe mental illness".

Sorry for you Craig, help is available but you are too arrogant to take it.

I thought Stembra70's post was neither 'douchey' nor 'insecure' behavior.

He's engaging a post in good faith in a religion forum.

I didn't see anything at all offensive or impolite in your post.

It's fine to disagree with Stremba70's point of view, but what's 'douchy' in my opinion is your ad hominem attack on a good faith poster like Stremba70.

Note well that Stremba70 and I typically disagree, so this isn't a case of skeptics 'circling the wagons.' I of course align with Wurlitzer's worldview.

Out of character for you to engage in name-calling. And you've done it in like three posts in a row.

For what it's worth - I'd prefer people not become offended on my behalf, heh. Everyone can be civil and mellow. I appreciate your defence, Craig, but try and be kind to others. We're all messed up in our own ways.

I do find the tulpa idea to be essentially equivalent to the idea that I'm deluded - I'm making a statement that I believe to be one of objective truth, and the tulpa argument is essentially equivalent to "It's all in your head." That being said, I don't find the response offensive; just frustrating. Perhaps more a frustration at myself. I used to be quite materialistic philosophically, and now I'm not, I find the materialism of the modern vogue to be particularly bothersome.

Why take cues from 1st century people for metaphysics... an interesting response. Well, it's one that can be thrown back at a lot of perfectly respected modern thinkers, who take plenty of their metaphysical cues from far older sources, such as Plato and Aristotle, and those who built on their work.

The nice thing about metaphysics is it's never out of date, and technology can never help you get closer to the truth. That's just a consequence of the field. Everything else you describe, biology, physics, mathematics, one can say that technology has given us deeper reach into those fields. Computers gave us more maths knowledge, microscopes gave us more biology knowledge, etc. None of those things gave us a jot of metaphysical truth, though.

Stremba and Bobtheslob are the same. The latter is just more honest and less deceptive about it.

You don't see a substantive difference between Stremba and BobtheSlob?

Stremba wants to have a conversation, gives arguments for his views and doesn't engage in name-calling.

BobtheSlob is nothing but a troll. He trolls even more in P&S.

(FellaGaga is kinda in-between Stremba and BobtheSlob imo.)

To each their own.

I'm largely just a lurker in this forum these days. Online religious discussions almost invariably produce more heat than light (in my experience).

I misspoke, they are not the same.

I have much more respect for BTS than Stremba.