All the arguments about mystery aside, the first few paragraphs seem to be from a completely different post about the Sacred Experience instead if Religious Foo.
I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; {...}
Leading up to:
Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.
Which is something I would strongly agree with. In my view, what this is saying is that the association of something being sacred is something that can only be created by the individual and is a private emotion, not something that can be conveyed as-is. Sure, you are able to describe it, but you should not expect the other party to have that same emotion. The other side of that would be that while an arbitrary number of people can regard the same thing sacred, but only by their own (subconcious) choice, not by being told that something is sacred. Standing in the Hagia Sophia may be a sacred thing or just cause admiration for the architects. Neither of those should be discarded, since it's about emotional response, not reasoning for anything.
Something that's reproducibly inducing that experience for me would be this video. You may try it (Big Screens help), and it may or may not do anything to you (besides impressively displaying scientific results; this is space, after all). I can't do anything about that, it's an individual experience. And regarding solitude... what could be more solitary than this very perspective from high above an entire planet?
I do realize that what I'm saying here sounds like "there's something that defies Rationality", but that what I'm trying to say. The idea is that it is a fragment of neural activity (and nothing more) that is something to be aware of, since it is something possibly affecting judgement. Apart from that, I don't see any actual reason for rational argument on this topic and also not for considering it evidence for anything by itself.
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
This reminds me of a conversation from Dumb and Dumber.
Lloyd: What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together? Mary: Well, that's pretty difficult to say. Lloyd: Hit me with it! I've come a long way to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances? Mary: Not good. Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred? Mary: I'd say more like one out of a million. [pause] Lloyd: So you're telling me there's a chance.
Good post.
However: apply 1:1E6 to 260E6 million people in the US in 1994, there's probably 130 couples like them.
Far from the "still not happening even if you flip a (weighted) coin every second since the big bang"- chance in the post, but since Lloyd probably did not do the math and just ignored the actual value... yep, classical example.