Anyone for Calbingo?

[Kate]

[Simone]

The Judge wrote

I am seeing a common theme emerging here between Simone and Cal. They appear to view the brain in it's seemingly infinite complexity as a steady state organ, and regard any observed or expressed deviations outside of that state as necessarily falling into categories of mental illness. This of course is wrong as it negates the richness of human experience falling along a wide continuum utterly missing the many nuanced similarities and differences between madness and religiosity.

Cal definitely fails at conceiving of any kind of spectrum of human experience and from (?)his posts thus far so too I suspect does Simone.

Oh and there's also there's that oh-so-Cal-like view of "irrational beliefs" being accepted or rejected that seems to conceal an oversimplified view of the human brain as a computer following an algorithm with a binary end point: "True" or "False."

No one denies the wonderful complexity of the human brain, and I have already said that the religious experiences are one of the many features of our mind. If you take an hallucinogenic drug and you start to see flying donkeys in the sky, the flying donkeys are real or are a sign of a malfunction? Reality is objective, not subjective, and our expectations, beliefs, emotions tend to falsify the clear perception of reality. Do you know the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZk5Ls7nhtA

[Simone]

The meaning of life is 42:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMGWy...eature=related

[The Judge]

Simone wrote

... If you take an hallucinogenic drug and you start to see flying donkeys in the sky, the flying donkeys are real or are a sign of a malfunction?

There you go with your dichotomous end points again
I thought you said you thought the brain was complex? Why then must you always shoehorn everything into either "Box A" or "Box B?"

In actual fact the answer here is "neither" because this would be a normal outcome following exposure to an exogenous hallucinogen.

Simone wrote

Reality is objective, not subjective

Pain is real and it is entirely subjective. In fact any emotional state by this ill-conceived definition is "unreal." Do you deny the reality of emotional experience or indeed pain?

Therefore by your rationale we must be less than human in order to experience reality since you are saying that in order to really "know true reality" we must be devoid of, "expectations, beliefs, emotions," as these "falsify" reality???!!!

You are making less and less sense, no wonder you idolise Cal.

[psychodiva]

The Judge wrote

Are you one of those people who likes the idea of Science but are utterly clueless when it comes to knowing what it's really all about?

And; "NO!" his ideas are not supported by "thousands of studies of neurotheology."

First off: The word "neurotheology" is a relatively new term so there simply have not been thousands of studies on this subject.

Second: Have you actually read even half a dozen of the studies that Cal references? Well I have (and many more). Most of the time he just reads the abstracts and skips to the conclusion/discussion part at the end. He is a worse cherry-picker than any theist!

Third: My main problem with Cal (aside from the factual, phenomenological and clinical inaccuracies) is his "dot-joining" and oversimplification of an incredibly complex facet of human experience. His "theory" is nothing more than a clumsily cobbled together collection of codswallop. I know this because I engaged with it, tested it and found it wanting on many levels. This is not prejudice talking.

If you were privy to the historicity of our correspondence (and it is buried deep somewhere in the annals of this forum) then you would see how I started out with an open mind with Cal and being in the field of clinical psychology at the time I offered to help tighten up some of his looser associations but alas my offers fell on deaf ears.

Cal has been given his chances on many many occasions and failed repeatedly. You're new here (so I am led to believe by our all-powerful mods) so I'm trying to do you a favour by giving you a brief history by explaining that there are many good reasons established over years of posts why people on this forum rightly regard Cal like the crazy, slightly weird uncle who pops up at family gathering and everyone is a little bit embarrassed about because he is a fool who will listen to no-one but himself.

ditto- also did the same with cal- in the same field and was given a tirade of insults and threats in return- simone- try reading some of the old threads on here- but then again why bother it's clear you are a clone- the sheep by the way was Dolly the cloned sheep and tough if you are insulted

[Whisper]

Um. Yeah. Wow. Way to go and get a Cal-hivemind Simone. Reading over what you've posted so far, you sound like nothing short of a direct clone of Cal, and therefore have little to nothing new to offer us. Unless you've found the fabled evidence that Cal never seems able to produce?

[psychodiva]

[Smellyoldgit]

[Sternwallow]

Simone wrote

Almost all the prophets, or the saints, are epileptics, St. Paolo di Tarso, father of the catholic church, or Moses, or Martin Lutero, or Caterina da Siena, for example, are epileptics. Temporal lobe seizures are proven be the cause of religious experiences and beliefs. This is an accepted fact in the scientific community. Temporal lobe magnetic stimulations ( or also transcranial stimulation) are proven, by Persinger, to be a possible cause for the sensed presence of god. You can find this site interesting about this argument:

http://www.shaktitechnology.com/index.htm

The "mystical" brain have an evolutionary logic to be. Our ancestors, for avoid the fear of death, create in the brain the idea of god or the afterlife and deputy to certain brain structures (the temporal lobes) to maintain these illusions.

Yes, we have heard this over and over and over and over and over and over...

The fallacious leap that you are now espousing, that Cal began here years ago, is to observe the manifestation of a very real malfunction (temporary, or permanent as in the case of actual schizophrenics), and then, by presuming the manifestation is the cause and not the brain miswiring, extend this presumption to everyone else in the world who shows behavioral signs very much like the manifestation. Thus all believers are presumed to have an actual physical, neurological problem.

This flies in the face of the otherwise quite normal behavior of the more than eighty percent of the US population that admits to being religious believers.

For not reason at all, Cal does not apply this hypothesis to the other areas of behavior that manifest in the general population, like politics and economics, in which a very few (less than 1%), possibly crazy people dream up systems and formulas and then the rest of the people, often without understanding the ideas, pick them up and try to fashion living behavior around them. Of the millions of religious believers, today, just how many have had the "road to Damascus" episode themselves? I am sure there have been no more than ten or so or about 0.05%.

It is common in informal speech to refer to religious believers as crazy, nutbars, woo-woo, nitwits ... and other synonyms for insanity, but the actual figures just do not support this as a serious analysis. Similarly it is said, by Cal and others, that we are all "poorly evolved crazy Apes", by which they mean that there are natural limitations to human cognition (as there will always be) which keep us from enjoying fullest fruits of rationality but for which we should not be blamed.

I submit that a shortage in thinking capacity or holding incorrect ideas that some of us are simply incapable of unraveling, does not constitute insanity, only the best brain we have working the best it can using flawed and incomplete information, in other words, "normal".

It is unfortunate that some wrong people have gotten hold of a kind of self-perpetuating and self-protecting bullshit that they are simply incapable of being educated away from. In reflex, it is unfortunate that some people, with inadequate training in reason, can acquire these same self-protecting ideas even in later life and even with a scientific career.

One mental talent that we have developed to a fine edge is our ability to compartmentalize our thinking. We can simultaneously think in a brain partition that embraces the edgy skepticism of the scientist and, in another partition, follow the fundamental rules that sustain religious ideas: "obey without question" and "curiosity is sin".

I do not hate Cal either. I have returned as good as he has given me on occasion and I do try to keep his hairy feet to the fire of reason. He has quite consistently returned feces for serious discussion. I may be the one on this forum who has attempted to engage Cal the most or the longest and I admit that some early interchanges had a funny and slightly loopy charm. His posts morphed into dreams of ass-raping me and others here, hardly grist for a rational mill.

[Sternwallow]

Simone wrote

Drugs (magic mushrooms, marijuana, DMT etc), mantra, prayers, drums, masochistic pain, shakti technology, sound and colors mind machines, and other methods, stimulate the temporal lobe for produce these experiences (god/gods/aliens/OBE etc.)

The chemical techniques were historically reserved to the shaman and not available to the general populace so then, as now, very few in the population ever have these transformative experiences. People mostly just do as they were brought up to by their parents under that "obey and don't question" order.

Cal does not discuss the religions that were made up without any TLE or chemicals but which have been taken up by otherwise intelligent people even so. Scientology and Mormonism are the current stars of this drama of bogus crap being elevated to full religious status just because they got a mental foothold and are self-propagating as, somehow, desirable to some critical mass of people.

I see no mental malfunction in Mormonism at all, just ignorance and stupidity, that is, the normal human condition, guided by bad information from a known fraud and charlatan.

[Sternwallow]

Simone wrote

Kate, have any argument that could be useful to the discussion?

Kate's arguments, in their elegant and terse pictorial form are not only useful, they often form exactly the needed capping or termination function for an argument that is going nowhere.

I am afraid that is also the case here where, for the first time in my recollection, someone has ingested Cal's foul fare and not spit him out again like a barbed-wire hairball.

[Ed-M]

Sternwallow wrote

I can believe that your penis is merely an overblown phallic symbol.

Good one!

[Ed-M]

Sternwallow wrote

That is funny, if only for the fine caricature of one of Cal's ancestors.

Yes, uncanny resemblance, innit?

[calpurnpiso]

psychodiva wrote

oh I like that one!!!

Is this the one you like DivaTard? I had many a Bigus Dickus LCTs on my Roman Tub, that I know you would love to have up your arse...is your name Incontinentia Hirsuta by any chance? I can see now more ignorance of bovina excreta emanating from your arse..

Didn't you know that a very distant relation of my genes is getting married this Friday on your land?
His grandmother is the head of your ChristPSychosis infected land....ta..ta..to my Roman pool in Arizona I must repair..



( I can see it now..ARGHHHH.....mommy Mod Smellytard, can you ban Calp again...he is making me jealouse and can stand it..so much truth...BAHHHHH )

[calpurnpiso]

Am I the only one LIVING UP this boring forum full of dumb stupid children?
Why don't you all learn how to make videos, be ASSERTIVE & truly TELL IT LIKE IT IS?

Hmm this would be awesome....I could see the faces of my ignorant, dumb, unassertive opponents that lack intellectual fortitude and be able to READ them..telling them the WHY tof their stupidity & ignorance.
I can read faces very well......like the one of this brilliant but ignorant fool unable to connect the dots..