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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
almost all NDE's (near death experiences) are actually memories of deeply submerged initial reactions to the birth experience.
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How do you know this exactly? I'm not pretending near-death experiences are visions of God, I would agree that they are subconscious projections, however, I am way too into Joseph Campbell, what you find buried in the subconscious mind IS reflections of God. The narrative of Adam and Eve suggests that at the beginning of human consciousness, be it 250,000 years ago according to strict evolutionary theory, or some other time, mankind interacted with the Divine. The archetypes of our subconscious mind are all projections from this first generations of humankind. Our religious literature and culture are reflections of the subconscious mind, we bring these indescribable archetypes from the nether regions of our minds to the forefront of our conscious experience. Religion and its explanations of God are merely a symbol for God, not inherently the real thing.
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The only thing that differentiates humans from other animals, and which is said plainly in genesis, is that humans know the difference between Good and Evil, and the difference between Life and Death.Other animals experience life and death but they do not live with that dichotomy looming over their thoughts.
Other animals do altruistic things (good) or hurtful things (evil) but they do not see it like humans.
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A gorilla who was fluent in sign-language was given a pet kitten. She loved that kitten, and repeatedly told other humans so in signed English no less! She painted pictures of the cat, and while they weren't very good in detail, they had the right colors and even general shapes. When asked about what she was painting, she was say, "This is my cat." When the cat died, as pets do, this gorilla had a profoundly human moment, she reflected and said, "My cat died, I am sad." She understood the cat was dead, not just missing, and further understood her feelings of grief. So how can we be so sure that animals don't experience life in the dichotomy of life and death, in moral and immoral? The trick with animals is that this gorilla aside, they rarely are able to communicate their experiences to other humans, so simply put, we don't know what their experiences are. We project our own superiority onto them, and we assume we live differently, more profoundly, even more caustically, but how can we ever know this? Elephants purposefully pause at graveyards of their kin, smell and touch the bones of their specific relatives who died, and even visibly cry and moan! They then also appear to console each other through touch and sound, just like grieving humans at a cemetery lamenting over the loss of loved ones.
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Because of this we seek explanations for WHY? why?? why??? why do good people die, and bad people live? why do children starve while steve jobs builds a massive multi million dollar yacht, even in death?
we decide, it must be GAWD!
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No. People did not invent God to describe unanswerable questions. There is plenty of crock science, superstition, and outright stupidity to fill in that gap..
Experiences of God are direct, dynamic, and personal. If they are just chemical fluctuations that is fine, but I don't dig into such simplistic explanations. It is a chicken and egg matter, what causes specific neurochemical release in the first place? If God is just a chemical, why don't ALL humans have this experience?