Orion said:
Why do we need peer reviewed evidence for the most obvious phenomena you could possibly observe?
It seemed blatantly obvious not too long ago, to some people without much astronomy knowledge, that the sun orbits the earth. I mean think about it-as anyone with eyes can see by looking up, it circles around the world once a day, just like the moon and all of the stars (whatever those dots even are). Its understandable why the idea that the earth actually is spinning and orbiting the sun would be immediately dismissed because the sun going around the earth is "the most obvious phenomena you could possibly observe"
My point isn't that we should wait until everything is peer reviewed before believing in it (i'm very critical of that whole system, having participated in it, and am annoyed at times by people who don't consider anything until its been peer reviewed), but that just because something may
seem obvious to us doesn't mean that its the truth, or that we should believe in it because its "probably true".
We litereally don't
perceive the world at all...We
experience our minds interpretation of a teeny tiny part of the perceivable universe, which is itself a teeny tiny part of the actual universe... We could be so completely and utterly wrong about our understanding of the universe that it will have seemed laughable in a few thousand years...sort of like an Ant claiming to have summed up all of existence into a few sentences, and believing them to be truth.
Although i agree with you here, if anything, the eternal/universeal oneness energy is just a metaphor for what actually 'is'. I probably say it ad nauseum around here, but the map isn't the territory.
Orion said:
It's a scientific way of thinking, to take the stance that everything is connected in some way
In some ways, yes. But you could just as easily say that science is the study of breaking things down (literally and conceptually) into the study of a things smallest constituents, while too often disregarding the complex connections between interacting whole systems.
Orion said:
There is absolutely nothing religious about such a stance.
(not aimed at you)But there is something distinctly religious in flavor about people who dogmatically cling to a particular scientific model with such conviction that it mine as well be a belief system, especially if that model has been overturned by evidence; which is something that has been seen countless times throughout its history. But we had that argument before in the sheldrake thread so lets not have it again lol
Anyways I think what steppa was getting at was in the spirit of Robert Anton Wilson: our internal reality-tunnels of the world are fictions, not the world as it "is"... and when you give into believing in them, and confuse your internal symbols with the world itself, it mine as well be like your own personal religion.... Most people don't use the word religion that way, but I see where he's coming from