logical arguments for religion

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don't know which ones you mean by abahamic.

christianity and islam to be exact

Both of them have had sub groups of extremists, and particularly repressive periods but can't say as consequence that religion uses fear to convert people.
Can you come up with one intelligent/reasonable or logical argument for holding religious belief? That's what I thought this thread was about. I thought it was an unusual and interesting theme!

Just erased "positive" and discovered your comment! Timing huh!
But anyway, you can't find one , ok.

Last edited by ouinon on 11 Nov 2007, 3:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Intelligent isnt always positive, or reasonable. it will always be true reguardless of someone elses feelings. i thought this thread was more about trying to find logic in religion. wich i cant find any

I think religion was maybe an aspies incredibly ingenious and creative and powerful antidote for the experience of alienation, anxiety and unreality induced by food-opioids in gluten and dairy on AS brains.
But like the theory of relativity , invented by another aspie!! , the theory of god has had both good, and catastrophic consequences ! !

Last edited by ouinon on 13 Nov 2007, 5:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

I highly doubt aspies created religion. If religion were never invented, an aspie would be the LAST person to invent one. We are more likely to look for logical answers. Not saying there aren't religious aspies, but they've been conditioned that way.

Why except judaism? didn't they wrote the OT? and they had customs very similar to muslims back then, punishment, etc.

Yes, it may be ilogical for lots of aspies I suppose, by today's standards and culture, but not thousands of years ago, things, views and perception were completely different in any society at the time.

Also it depends on culture difference and environment people grow up, for example an aspie growing up in a religious environment since birth, and is educated with certain beliefs, how that person will be in adulthood, even if that person is logical? I know some people here have been christians when they were kids and changed their beliefs when becoming adults, from believers to agnostics or atheists, I am one of them, although I didn't get that from birth, don't know if that matters. My question is why some change and why some don't, it would be because of environment and external influences?

In my opinion, the more fundamentalist or conservative/rigid a religion is the more ilogical it becomes, I grew up in a conservative church, they were very rigid at the time, I think they are less now, which probably some of it might have be an influence for me to have doubts and change my belief.

Now, what about aspies who born and grow up in a different culture than the west, like in the middle east? are these people more likely to be religious or believers than other because of that environment and culture they grow up?

My view is that not everyone, aspies or not, are 100% logical, we are also emotional beings, affected by our environment, and religion can fill that emotional need even if it doesn't sound that logical.

I dunno, even if I had lived back then before the major scientific breakthroughs, I still think I'd have a hard time believing in dogmas. I'd likely just be a complete agnostic, I wouldn't even be able to guess at anything. But dogmas just sound so....... sci-fi to me...... It would take me actually seeing someone part the red sea or turning sticks into snakes before I could believe something of that magnitude, and even then I wouldn't be content without further investigation..... Things like that could also be far advanced technology from an alien civilization, although if I were living back then seeing any advanced technology, tell a telephone would have blown my mind.

Has anyone considered the possibility that just maybe (I'm not representing this idea as fact, just possibility) all the major religions are connected to evolution, and perhaps we were placed here by a far advanced alien species?
I mean the "miracles"=advanced technology.... Kinda like if you are carrying a lap top computer on your back and wandering through a south african rain forrest, and you come upon a tribe of jungle natives who have never witnessed the outside world... Chances are, they'd describe your lap top in mythological terms, because it would blow their minds, and they would not know how else to describe it......
Well our ancient ancestors were strangers to technology as well. This is just a theory.

OR, "rethink" ! ! maybe God is simply the name that was given to the altered state of consciousness experienced when on gluten and casein opioid "high"! ( like effect of peyotl on american indians), on those whose age-old genetic constitution meant that gluten was not fully digested, and whose intestines allowed gluten to enter bloodstream. Which "effect" only got identified as function of OUR mental processes ( in a bread and cheese eating culture anyway!), by Nietsche etc , a century and a half ago or so.

Maybe why when I STOP eating wheat, and even more if stop dairy too, I feel diminished, earthbound. I miss that sensation of being "up there", of "knowing" right from wrong, of omniscience!!
I "miss God" , "being" god, feeling like god. And why I long for Pizza, or my daily bread.

and Japan and China escaped this hallucination cos weren't exposed to either substance for many thousands of years to come!!

So, actually I'm not much of a supporter of religion after all!!

( sorry!)

The problem now is people are walking around feeling like God without any restraints!! What was called God is still alive and well, though finding the absence of explaining structure, and the absence of associated adulation and authority rather disturbing/annoying/unsatisfactory!!

Last edited by ouinon on 13 Nov 2007, 5:12 am, edited 6 times in total.

Actually that feels rather deliciously disturbing, like a good horror film, sends a shiver of uneasiness through me . The idea that what was once called God is still "alive" *. Unrecognised. And having its effect on things.
mmmm!.


* and will continue to "live" for as long as wheat and dairy are eaten by the susceptible!

The concept that God is a product of eating specific substances is rather fascinating. I have been eating all sorts of stuff all my life and never felt the need of religion. I have also been through some fairly rough experiences and found religious suggestions insulting. This is not a flame, merely a recounting of my personal experiences.

Maybe not so much that God (in the conventional form that we are used to, after several millenia of additions, projections, and distortions), is the product of certain foods effect on certain brains, so much as that that effect/experience of alienation, distance, out of bodyness, headiness, spaced out omniscience and "knowledge" of right and wrong, following on wheat and dairy consumption, was CALLED/referred to as, God , by the first people to experience this effect.
Whether they realised that it was a state of altered consciousness, to be restricted to certain members of tribe, who would carefully use the 'drug' (wheat and/or dairy) for decision making processes, or whether it was believed to be the path to communicating with a wise "being", ( and similarly restricted in use !) I suspect it was forbidden at some point, before entering society generally.
Western society has got used to it, in the same way as it has got used to cane-sugar syrup in crystallised form , which when it was first invented was used, a few GRAINS at a time, as an anaesthetic for surgical operations, and which has become a widespread painkiller to which we are so habituated we consume kilos of it each year!!
But just because Western society has largely dismantled the concept of God does not mean that the effect, ( on those susceptible to the opioids) of feeling and thinking like a "God", isn't still there.

Last edited by ouinon on 13 Nov 2007, 5:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

[quote=Sand]The concept that God is a product of eating specific substances is rather fascinating. I have been eating all sorts of stuff all my life and never felt the need of religion. I have also been through some fairly rough experiences and found religious suggestions insulting. This is not a flame, merely a recounting of my personal experiences.
[/quote]

Yes, and although I've cut out dairy, gluten, soy (consumed in Asia and containing a protein structure similar to that found in wheat and dairy) and most sugar I'm still one who finds joy, depth and meaning in fostering spiritual experiences via prayer, meditation etc and fitting my life into a theological framework. I think the two of us alone are evidence that the issue is a little bit more complicated, regardless of whether the explanation validates spiritual experiences or not.


Ouinon,

I think you are absolutely right in stating that the foods we eat have an effect on the brain and some of those effects might very well relate to those experiences we consider spiritual, but a) I don't think that is the only way to come to such experiences and b) just because an experience can be stimulated and observed does not mean that it has no validity. I think that's one of the fallacies that arises in materialism, the idea that, if something happens in the brain while something else is happening in the mind, then whatever is occurring in the brain is what's really going on and the mind stuff has no reality. I do agree that what we see in the brain is likely really happening while the other stuff, whether it has a correlation to some intrapsychic or metaphysical structure is up in the air. But just because one variable can be more easily verified and analyzed (as a first-person analysis of an inside view of the individual exterior) does not mean that it explains everything else.