I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

The Mental Universe https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/

We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The virtual, "external" world, and its collectively agreed-upon rules, is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence, is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/

We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The virtual, "external" world, and its collectively agreed-upon rules, is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence, is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The virtual, "external" world, and its collectively agreed-upon rules, is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence, is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory. We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The virtual, "external" world, and its collectively agreed-upon rules, is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence, is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory. We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The external world and the collectively agreed-upon rules is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence, is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory. We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The external world and the collectively agreed-upon rules is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

Whereas the spiritual world, which is the basic foundational bedrock of our existence is actually reality. It is perceived only in the realm of the mind, therefore is not "provable" via the physical sciences, and has very clear and absolute principles. These can only be understood through experiencing them, and they, just as every other realm of existence, are approached through faith.

Faith is not a bad word.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex than can be expressed in any theory. We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The external world and the collectively agreed-upon rules is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.

I've noticed a telling bias, a monolithic blind spot, in many of the responses here.

The tendency for non-religious people to pretend that atheism and materialism is the defacto correct and "true" tenet, and that anything beyond what is "provable" via the scientific method is by definition "false" and also worthy of derision and ridicule.

I posit that the doctrine of materialism is itself both self contradictory and patently and provably wrong on every level.

First of all, you don't even perceive the universe itself, nor do you understand it. What you actually perceive is quite limited to your senses and immediate surroundings and makes up only the tiniest fraction of your understanding. The "universe" you live in is actually a mental construct. So the very "thing" (your mind) that you are using to deny the existence of anything extra-material is itself not a material "thing" at all. Your mind is consciousness. There is no physical or measurable or provable substance of "mind," and yet it is everything to you, everything that makes you who you are. Without it, your body would be essentially dead and worthless.

https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a

Our reality is literally constructed out of our BELIEFS.

So before you mock the concept of faith, remember that. We actually understand almost nothing of what we presume to be true. Do we understand gravity? Magnetism? Light? We know they "work," and we proceed accordingly, on faith. Because all of the explanations of what they are, really are assumptions with little more than big words and math added to them, and that has to be good enough. Because in 99.99% of all useful applications, those assumptions work, and the .01% of the time they don't work is not anything we're likely to encounter in our daily lives. Even theoretical physics is a long way from defining a unified theory, much less proving one. Because the universe is more complex that can be expressed in any theory. We make due with disjointed fragments of theories, because they work in the majority of cases, and we specialize in categories of knowledge even if other categories might seem contradictory at times.

But in the realm of the mind, we don't have math or easily "provable" theses so much as we have principles that we can choose to apply or ignore at our own peril. We can experiment and adopt these principles in our lives and see the results for ourselves. We can observe the outcomes of people who reject these principles. We can observe the dysfunction of society increasing as it collectively rejects these principles.

It is important to keep in mind that we live essentially in the spiritual realm. That spooky word "spirit" that is so easy to denigrate is our true reality. How we can manage to sleepwalk through life pretending to live in the physical world and ignore the most vital and fundamental part of our nature? By living in a collectively-manufactured "reality." Our individual mental constructs consciously adopt those of the society around us, so that we can pretend to live in an external world that is agreed upon by all of its participants. The external world and the collectively agreed-upon rules is necessary for us to engage with one another and to survive as a species, but it is still an illusion. It is created by faith.