Comments by "June VanDerMark" (@junevandermark952) on "Big Think"
channel.
-
42
-
27
-
15
-
4
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
Those in religions, that are certain that they know absolute truth, yet kill each other over who has the correct information from the gods, believe they are "critical" thinkers. This religious scientist, (which is an oxymoronic statement) Anthony Leewenhoek was certain that suffering could only occur because God had willed it to be so. From the book Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif … published 1926 … “Life lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will,” he pondered. If a scientist is asked the question, “Do you believe that the universe was created,” and the scientist answers, “Yes,” that is not critical scientific thinking. That is “I accept as truth, whatever I was taught in my personal religion.”
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
If you are adamant to idolize the myths in your own personal religion, you probably won't be able to relate to the following information ... From the book … The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body … author … Frances Ashcroft
Who Am I?
Precisely what consciousness is has occupied philosophers and neuroscientists for centuries and we still lack a definitive understanding. Yet it is something that each of us is so familiar with and that we all experience. “I think’, said René Descartes back in the fifteenth century, ‘therefore I am’. But what, exactly, am ‘I’?
In Descartes’s view, the mind and body were separate entities. But the profound changes in our personalities produced by drugs, disease and brain damage provide the case – our minds are the product of our brains.
Despite our very powerful sense of self, neuroscience reveals we are no more than the integrated electrical activity of our brain cells. Uncomfortable as it may seem, there is no separate entity, no soul, and nothing that lives on after death – a fact that catapults science into direct conflict with many religions.
Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are entirely separate entities, placed the human soul in the pineal gland. It was here, he said, that the material brain in some magical and mysterious way communicates with the mind and with the immaterial soul. I don’t know what he would have said if he could have seen my patients looking at their own brains on a video monitor, as some of them do when I operate under local anaesthetic.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@sopanmcfadden276 If the universe always existed, that would explain that consciousness did not start because of a conscious creator, but rather consciousness always existed, because the universe always existed.
Having been taught religion, I also was heavily indoctrinated to believe that a god was responsible for all life.
I left religion at age 70, after all those years of always asking question about why nothing I was taught ever made sense to me.
I'm 83 now, and believe that when I die, thought will be no more.
Peace ... at last.
Until then, I know that if I want to be content, I have to try my best to be as kind to others, as circumstances allow.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@TacTicVa4a On our own we are not at all "intelligent." Example ... If there hadn't been any math in Einstein's day, who, today would even know his name? He was only able to use math, because through the eons of time, others kept learning from those before them ... bit by bit.
Yes, I do believe that we evolved from an ape-like species, and that if we had evolved with either hooves, or paws, neither science, nor religion would exist.
And if we go extinct, and the planet is not completely destroyed concerning forms of life ... those forms of life on earth, won't miss us. And they will keep suffering ... which is nature's way.
Much ado about nothing ... Shakespeare
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1