From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 11:30:58 MDT
Not to get holy-roller on anyone here, but I agree with Samatha's conjecture
that if there is no God, then there is certainly room for one in a Universe
that includes suffering. What Samantha gets when she "recieves a lift" from
reading certain religious tracts is one of the religious experiences
described by 19th century psychologist Willam James. Having a God module is
good if it connects one up with a sense of a better ethical system. If it
leads only to the Inquisition torture chamber, then it's a bad bet. So I am
talking 'outcomes' here.
Ultimately, it may turn out that some advanced primate species (humans) once
had a God module as part of their brain, and it helped them develop computers
that colonized the cosmos, which in the end leads to an ultimate Mind (God)
which fixed things that needed fixing (since it has ultimate computing power)
and help resurrect people such as Samantha! This is more inspired from a
reading of Julian Barbour (The End of Time) as well as Tipler and Barrow's
Final Anthropic Principle. Talk amongst yourselves, i'm getting ver-klempt!
(sob!)
-Mitch
In a message dated 9/16/00 2:15:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
samantha@objectent.com writes:
<< But when the God module kicks in things happen similar to stuff in the
mystical literature. I don't levitate or anything really wild like that
but it feels as if my being is lifted up and sometimes turned inside out
and that I am within or in communion with or at least sense deeply this
much larger Presence, Power, whatever you want to call it. The "me"
disappears mostly or melts into whatever this is or gets recast
somehow. The emotions soar into the heavens. It goes beyond anything
I can put into words pretty rapidly. Often it will include what seems
like a tremendous amount of information and intensionality and directed
energy sweeping through me. I have guesses (ranging from faulty mental
wiring to too much religous upbringing to substances sampled in my
youth to Vingean powers looking for agents to ???) but no real
explanation for it. It just is - now and then. Thankfully rare enough
it doesn't totally sweep me away. It came close when I used to meditate
more. Whatever it is meditation intensified it quite a bit. So I
stopped doing that because shadows of whatever this is became too strong
to allow me to concentrate on my work easily.
- samantha >>
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