Burnt please don't laugh at anybody's beliefs.

I don't think it's silly to wait until marriage for sex.



Your telling me it wasn't inteligent? WHATEVER was at the being of the Universe "contained within it all matter and creation, all that is and is not", it was nothing but information, energy and inteligence! In the purest form! It was TAO! The part in "" is from the Tao Teh Ching!

Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries are like Eastern Universities of non physical exploration (on the deepest levels possible)
They aim to find the source of thought so it can be quieted so one can experience things other than themselves.
I think Tibetan Buddhism, certain shamanism's and quantum physics are looking at the same thing from different cultural perspectives and the similarities in the structures and systems adopted by these sciences are un-ignorabley obvious.

It's far from beeing silly.

The problem lies within the term "religion" - it's hard to define this world, becausse there exist so many conceptions around it, you cant encompass them all with one word. One of the most popular definitions of religion is by Edward burnett tylor, one of the first ethnologists: "Religion is belief in spiritual beeings". But that doesn't fit with certain forms of buddhism. Some said, that this means, buddhism isn't a religion. But that's a real simple statement in my opinion. Most would propably intuitivly say that it IS a Religion.

We need to form prototypes of religious societys to get closer to the term "religion"....

There's much discussion..for instance, some scholars wouldn't count magic as religious behaviour. Most would say it can be a tool, a practice within a religion. Just like Shamanism itself is no religion but a set of practices.

Excellent post Phlux! However I have something to add... I think most religions and spiritual paths are all catching a glimpse of "God" or the higher power. As Phlux said-


All paths of knowledge including religion and science will one day converge.

It still seems that both Burnt and Ohayoco both have some sort of spiritual beliefs but they refuse to call them "religion"!

To me this is like (and please don't find this insulting, its just the best metaphor I can think of) when your friend tells your "she's not drunk, shes just buzzed" It's my personal opinion that if your feeling the effects of alcohol, you are in fact DRUNK, no matter how slight those effects may be... I also believe that however minuscule your spiritual beliefs may be... if you still have SOME spiritual beliefs than you are somewhat religious in some way! Go back and look at the definition of religion above if you'd like. I can pull a few more off other sites if need be.

If anybody believes totally in science and everything we as humans know is perfect and there is no magic of mystery left in the Universe than say so... but if you harbor the slightest inclination of something "more" than I think you are religious!

Saidin indeed well said thank you, Oh im a female


Much Peace

Contradiction much thats all i would like to say


Much Peace

Obliguhl

Thank you for this post I agree with what you said completely. I don't see my self as being silly I'm not some confused little girl i take my beliefs seriously and i am on a serious journey of exploration of the mind and consciousness ( in response to 'Coatls post saying what i said was silly) Indeed what i was saying was not silly thank you for pointing this out Obliguhl.


Much Peace

Not religious i am a philosopher of the mind big difference i must state that i take ideas and philosophies from Tibetan Buddhism i don't follow blindly or completely. I lead myself


Much Peace

swims experience with the spice so far has illuminated a lot of things for me
before i thought ritual was unnecessary and culture based - spice showed me otherwise
i now see Tibetan Buddhism as a cultural wrapping around the same universal truth discussed in quantum physics and shamanism.
When swim smokes spice, he has often gone to what he feels is a bliss realm emerging from a mandala, total clarity, in those realms he encountered beings that have showed him all sorts of things and on a few occasions during these experiences he encountered things known and described in tibetan buddhism but at that time unknown to swim - only when discussing the experiences with aegle were these correlations highlighted.
First hand experience beats what some random book says any day.
Now swim is not a Buddhist- some would call him a godless bastard but swim has his own customized system/structure based on facts, life experience and morals that he lives comfortably by - always changing as swim grows - we as humans are here to learn, the day we stop learning, growing and moving forward we may as well die right then and there - with Tibetan Buddhism one of the main pillars is to always ask questions and not to believe anything blindly - i think this is where most religions fail, its blind faith, don't eat from the tree of knowledge or u may realize this is all a money making scam, for sure most religions have true and worthy roots but as with anything in western civilization it has been poisoned with money, greed and lies.
I'm not targeting any specific religions here - most of what iv said applies to a lot of religions, no forum alone is enough to change such an important aspect of our lives that has been built on since we all were children and i usually stay out of conversations on religion as they have a tendency to get out of hand - just felt like sharing a little bit of what i have experienced in life on that side of things.

Beautifully said


Much Peace

Then could every religion not be a philosophy depending on the way you practice it?

Do you see my point here?

Nope sorry


Much Peace

Actually I DON'T have any spiritual beliefs. I am just spiritual. I have my own personal hypotheses, but I don't bind myself to them being true, so they are not beliefs. I may have different hypotheses in 10 years time.

The only beliefs I hold are ethical ones, not spiritual nor religious ones. Yep, 'do as you will when it harms no other'. That is the only thing I believe to be true. But I made that decision after years of thought and study, after which time I rejected cultural relativism in its absolute form. My one belief is born out of philosophy, psychology and socio-political theory on encouraging social harmony, so even if it hasn't been 'proven' in the scientific sense I have judged there's enough evidence for me to commit to this ethical belief.
This is a big difference from reading an old book and deciding that those guys said that god said this is what happened so it must be true. The very fact that their reasoning is just 'god says so' should set off the alarm bells. Read Plato's Republic to see that Marx was not the first person to see through these tactics. Plato decided that his 'perfect' society would have to be a faschist state ruled by a priesthood legitimised by their made-up religion, with all dissenters executed. Sounds familiar?

Religion is not a philosophy. As Wikipedia puts it, "Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument."

Well I would consider those religious beliefs.

Y'all seem to have a very narrow definition of religion!

listen if you post here expect me to laugh at your beliefs. i am not one of these touchy feely politically correct people. thats why i made this thread so i can consolidate all my anti religious behavior here and focus on useful things like chemistry in the rest of the forum. i enjoy arguing religion with people especially people here because you all are smarter then most religious folks. plus more open minded. it helps me refine my arguments in the real world. so yea i already explained this to happy camper and its his/her problem if they get offended not mine. if this thread gets out of hand i have no problem with it being shut down. that's travelers choice and I don't intend to get this thread out of hand but i have no problem if he and others think it is, its everybodies forum. the point here is not to create a bad vibe but just to duke it out on religion. anyone who posts here should come to this thread with that attitude in mind.

DISCLAIMER: Burnt will laugh at your beliefs but all in good fun.

i don't think its silly to wait till marriage for sex either its someones choice. i just think its silly and backwards to think its a sin.



your missing something MAJOR. the whole jist of what evolution tells us is that we don't need anything intelligent or sophisticated to make all this complexity. you can start from a few basic building blocks and all this can arise through natural selection. all creation is not proof of god in the slightest. but it depends on how you define god. but if i say the sun is god because it made our earth is that correct? well its correct the sun made us and life possible but its not god its not intelligent its just a massive nuclear fusion object.

Well same here! But people get mad when I say stuff like that!



I agree we need some threads where we can just DUKE IT OUT!!! Let's go!!!



However.... I'll wait to see what the general consensus on this idea is before continuing further into DUKE OUT MODE!

Dude we are all God, but I think God (We or Tao) IS intelligent because well... think about the natural laws. Think about, for example Sacred Geometry, obviously the Universe is encoded with all sorts of information! Even the exploding, super hot "Big Bang" held within it the four natural laws. Gravity. Electromagnetism. The Strong Nuclear Force and The Weak Nuclear.

Science is religion and religion is science... but the edge we are on right now... the edge of science, we cannot continue on without the spirit in certain areas... Just read "The Universe in a Single Atom" and Watch "What the *BLEEP* Do We Know?", it's a great movie!



Who or what made up the laws of nature? Who made gravity? What DEFINES our natural laws? Tao (God) is like a tug... a slight pull in the direction of creation. Tao, in it's infinite wisdom created four natural laws to bring being, matter, nothingness and form (everything) into creation, as well as life.



What has N,N-DMT indicated on this issue? Is the Universe empty? Devoid of intelligence? Random? Chaotic? Or is there something "more"?

Yea I explained to happy camper I mean all this in good fun I don't think he/she has problem. I also don't want to be a hippocryte and create a bad vibe thread because I've been posting here a while but if someone else does it who is new they get flack. So lets make it clear this is not meant to be a bad vibe thread. I just enjoy laughing and poking fun at people and all that kind of nonsense. its hard to judge tone on the internet but imagine i (picture me anyway you want) am really drunk and being really sarcastic and laughing obnoxiously.

Also traveler seriously if you see people getting buck wild (mostly me) shut it down its not problem for me. But yea I wanna have this debate here because like I said people are pretty open minded here.



what the bleep do we know is wrong. If the universe in a single atom is along those lines I really don't want to waste my time reading it.



Anyway let me try to lay this whole issue out flat in as brief and to the point way as possible. *warning Burnt is drinking some rum and smoking bongs and is happy because just finished project that took many months*

Alright.......... the weed is working....what was I going to say?

Lets frame this in terms of DMT since DMT and other plant based psychedelics/enthoegens seems to be most people here's driving force for spiritualism and or religion.

So yea ok SWIM smokes DMT baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam woooooooooooooooo god is right f'ing there sacred palace bliss all that. There is beings out there they are communicating with SWIm or rather SWIM with SWIMself. SWIM never saw them though just communicated well thats kind of difficult to describe but I think you all understand. Pharmahuasca --> god shit over SWIM and the beings were pissed. Not really but yea SWIM got the smack down. Whatever the heck was out there beat the living shit out of SWIMs mind in a way that no psychedelic has so completely. Wow that was nuts. But what did it mean?

Then it clicked. SWIM doesn't know when it clicked perhaps its been clicking for a long time and SWIMs earlier psychedelic exploration certainly hinted towards a similar idea. But yea so what really clicked after using DMT a number of times was that all these psychedelic and mystical experiences are really just constructs of the mind. Our subjective view of reality is a construct of the mind we already know that. But that doesn't mean the DMT or psychedelic mystical state is necessarily more or less real in a subjective sense but in an objective sense they are totally less real and down right wrong in some cases and aspects.

There is a reality out there otherwise we wouldn't even be here asking these stupid questions. The only illusion is that what we sense in our normal waking state is all there is or that our senses represent a picture of absolute or true reality. Of course there is more to our senses but to experience things beyond your normal sense subjectively will seem real unless looked at objectively from oneself. The mystics really aren't that smart if a dumb ass like SWIM could see the same things they did and come out with the opposite view point which fits in with the rest of what we know about the world instead of just satisfies some weird psychological desire people have for "spirit".

I mean just look at it. People smoke DMT or take substances that act like neurotransmitters and they see gods and angels and all that. Dopamine, seretonin, (maybe even dmt) all neurotransmitters that are all involved in these weird experiences and so is a disease like schizophrenia. People in the world hallucinate ALL THE TIME. But we call it a hallucination because they are perceiving in a reality that is in consistent with what is going with the rest of the world. Image DMT + dopamine excess and subsequent neuron damage + seretonin all messing around in your brain because lets say from one simple thing goes wrong like you have a deformed monooxidase amine gene which makes a defective protein that breaks all these things down slower. Thats just one mechanism. If you mediate and do sensory deprivation you can experience these things too. But again all experiences that are clearly constructs of your mind when looked at objectively. It totally fits in with what neuroscience is discovering about our mind.

I mean just the fact that we as people who are not crazy or hallucinating can take a drug and hallucinate know some of it is a hallucination but then accept that some of it as real is just proof how capable the mind is of making you think you are experiencing something real when in fact its all in your mind.

Now from all this whatever I just said is the reason why I have lost all faith in all religion or any form of spirituality. Science has provided all the necessary answers to explain lots of different things that religion clearly has failed to do in the past. Not everything is explained and I don't think everything will be explained nor dose it have to be. There also have been and will continue to be many mistakes. Our capabilities as a species are finite but perhaps in the future may improve and be capable of far more then we can experience now.

Furthermore religion and spirituality based in a form of ignorance to aspects of reality is destructive. Just look at how brainwashed people are into fighting evolution theory in the U.S. because it conflicts with their religion? A complete denial of reality for something written down in a stupid book that is really old. Look at how a religion like Islam can make a human being willing to kill themselves to kill others for some holy cause. I mean I don't even need to go on about organized religion but it should be taken further to all forms of spirituality. Not in a sense that they should be wiped out but in a sense that they all encourage completely irrational behavior often for the benefit of those who are pulling the strings. Spiritual movements of the 20th century have led to so much crap being pumped out and confused as science. People think vaccines are the work of "evil scientists" trying to poison them. People are totally out of wack about environmental issues like global warming that they can't even critically think about it. People just straight up are getting dumb as fuck. I blame stupid things like spiritual supernatural beliefs for most of it.

Why believe if you can know...