Karla McLaren: skeptics and cultural insensitivity

[judy0...@gmail.com]

She writes to skeptics and the mystically inclined about the value of critical thinking and the cultural rift that helps prevent it from spreading.

-Judy

[Morgan Redfield]

Those articles are awesome. Thanks for sending them along.

Morgan

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 11:07 AM, <judy0...@gmail.com> wrote:

She writes to skeptics and the mystically inclined about the value of critical thinking and the cultural rift that helps prevent it from spreading.

-Judy

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[Brian Raszap Skorbiansky]

Those were a great read, thanks!

[Spencer Campbell]

On Monday, April 8, 2013 11:07:00 AM UTC-7, judy0...@gmail.com wrote:

She writes to skeptics and the mystically inclined about the value of critical thinking and the cultural rift that helps prevent it from spreading.

Wow. That's some impressive personal fortitude. I've seen plenty of people defect from one camp to another, but this is the first time I've seen someone do it without demonizing the camp they departed from. I'd imagine it's an absolute nightmare to resolve the two viewpoints in your mind, if you've spent your whole life with just one of them. Which seems to be the case, if all the references to agony and despair and whatnot in the first link are anything to go by.

We need more people like Karla.

[Eric Rogstad]

Agreed, those articles were great!  I'd like to think my conversion from evangelical Christianity was also demonization-free.  I forget, are there others in this group who had similar conversion experiences?

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[Kyle Hipke]

I converted and I did not have a demonization-free experience. Being around people who think it's okay for you to suffer eternally for not believing what they believe can really do something to your relationship with them.

[Andrew McKnight]

I very much enjoyed those two articles too.

I was Christian until I was about 17 and it was a demonization-free experience. However, I never told any Christians I knew, like my parents, so I'm not sure if my experience would have been more like Kyle's if I had.

PS. I miss you guys :( but there is a sliver of good news. I found a company in Seattle that is willing to interview me completely over Skype and if all goes well I could be back in Seattle within a couple of months. Fingers crossed.

[Matt Powell]

I was a evangelical Christian and a young-earth creationist.  Now I'm a materialist monist.

I don't hold grudges against religion, religious organizations, or religious people.  It may be that these things are inescapable to humanity.

I recognize the existence of religious experiences and their significance in the lives of those who experience them.  I had quite a few of my own.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Kyle Hipke <kwhi...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Jesse, please try to keep your educated opinion from trampling all over the ground-breaking and insightful work of a layperson.
-- Alan Taylor

[Daniel Davis]

From: Matt Powell <loser...@gmail.com>

I recognize the existence of religious experiences and their significance in the lives of those who experience them.  I had quite a few of my own.

I'd be interested in hearing you talk about that. I recently watched Dan Barker, former evangelical preacher discuss a little of his religious experiences in a talk on youtube, and how he can still have those experiences, even though he no longer believes. I'm taken with the real differences in brains and experience of people. We don't understand other people because we're busy projecting our own minds onto their experience, and we all just don't work the same.

- Dan Davis

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From: Matt Powell <loser...@gmail.com>
To: lw-se...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: Karla McLaren: skeptics and cultural insensitivity

[Matt Powell]

Got links?

I'm pretty sure our brains and experiences are almost the same.  The differences are minor and small, leaving out the neurologically atypical, like epileptics. 

I'm not in that field, so my understanding could be flawed.  I'd suggest checking sources, though.  Too many people repeat bad information about brains.

And yeah, I can still get something like "the indwelling of the holy spirit," feel "the love of god," and perceive my failings being forgiven by going through the motions of my old prayers, without invoking a higher power.  I needed that a lot more back when I first discovered I was an atheist.  These days I go months without.

But that's nothing.  Somewhere in the unmemorable haze of my drug use period I figured out how to trigger my pleasure center in a small way by imagining I'm stretching a muscle in my head, how to get the effect of a two hour nap out of fifteen minutes of almost completely giving in to fatigue, and how to go to sleep when I want to by observing my thoughts, catching the ones that don't make sense, and responding by changing posture.  When I was younger, I had asthma.  In order to avoid using the inhaler, I learned to stay calm and lower my heart rate instead of freaking out when it felt like I couldn't breathe.

And none of that is special.  Everybody has learned or has had the opportunity to learn little neurological tricks.  If some people are better at theirs or know more tricks it is more likely to be on account of them taking the subject more seriously, doing something about it you know, rather than having a dramatically different brain.

-Powell

[Brian Raszap Skorbiansky]

You should definitely give a presentation

Sent from my phone

[Matt Powell]

As much as I enjoy it when a whole room is watching me talk, that doesn't sound like a good topic.  It's far too, "Look what I can do!"  Feh.

Perhaps I misunderstand your suggestion.

[Matt Powell]

Oh, here's a likely and right embarrassing possibility for that misunderstanding I mentioned: you were replying to the OP, not me.

Yes, a presentation on the topic of this e-mail thread would be a very good thing, and the OP or someone else should do that if that's the sort of thing they do.

[Erik Erikson]

Dan and Mike,

It appears to me that you are both right depending upon the definition of experience you use.  Are you claiming [Mike] that you and Dan have seen the very same exact things from the very same exact perspectives?  That the information absorbed by your brains, by which you understand existence in each of your phenomenological manners, is exactly the same?

I'll agree that the physical mechanisms of our brains are consistent so far as they represent patterns that abide by the physical laws and that the patterns that both your brains manifest in terms of information processing abide by the same theoretical laws of logic and the like.  However, the brain is a information absorption machine that [generally - the extent of this is up for discussion] interprets new information in the context of all absorbed information that preceded (ignoring matters like flawed transcription and the like) the current input stream.

Erik

[Spencer Campbell]

If you can teach any of those tricks in the course of an hour or two, Powell, that'd alleviate most-if-not-all of the bragging element. Even if only one person learns anything. And, as you say, you're not special; I'm sure there'll be someone there who can do something you can't, who would be willing to take some of the adulation off your shoulders.

That said, I agree with Brian. (I'm pretty sure he was talking about your thing, not the OP.) Even if you can't teach anything and nobody else knows any tricks at all, you still ought to do a presentation. It is good to remind people about the psychic powers they can actually have! That's way more worthy of a Sunday meetup than, say, pumpkin carving, in my estimation.

[Brian Raszap Skorbiansky]

I am strongly biased on this, but the pumpkin carving meetup was by far the best Meetup I ever attended :)

[Spencer Campbell]

I didn't attend, so I wouldn't know. "Pumpkin" is just an excessively fun word to use as an illustrative counterpoint. Accuracy is secondary to my purpose!

[Matt Powell]

I can't teach these in person any better than I can in writing.

Take classes in meditation.  Meditate.

If you want to have a religious experience, pray.  Believe.  Experience.  Then do the same thing without belief.

When you want to sleep get comfortable, be still, and let your mind wander.  Observe your thought and watch for the dream-logic.  Change your position.

To fight fatigue, sit down with good posture, close your eyes, and give in to fatigue.  Let it wash over you.  Let your one caveat be that you will keep your head up and your posture proper.  Do this for fifteen minutes.  (Turns out it's possible to do this with open eyes and while driving cross-country.  The decisions that led to discovering that were very bad and no one should make them.)

The pleasure center thing is very slight.  If pleasure were bold water then an orgasm would be like falling in over your head into a cold lake.  It surrounds you, permeates you, afterward you are soaked with it.  MDMA would be like walking in freezing rain.  It soaks through your clothes, it's all over you, but its not submersion.  A really good mood would be like walking in a cold mist.  It's on your breath and your bare skin, it chills but it does not soak.  And what I can do is like putting your head under the faucet and putting just enough water on it to soak through your hair.

Making it happen is like rolling my eyes back in my head, only it's not my eyes and nothing's rolling.  The strain is like the limit of how far you can roll your eyes, except its further back inside your skull.  I don't know how to describe it and have no memory of learning it.  I'd guess that MDMA was involved, so that might help someone else learn the trick.

It is not my profession to give any advice about any of this.  Drugs are bad.  Don't drive while exhausted.  There are no higher powers.  Meditation won't make anyone love you.

Did I miss anything?

[Kyle Hipke]

Thanks for the explanations. Your fatigue reduction thing worked really well for me (and, from my research, it seems that this is the same thing that some athletes do to reduce fatigue mid-game).