thomas p. wrote:
> It would be more interesting if any theist gave an objective reason why
> anyone should take their fantasies seriously.
Before Native Europeans came to rely on a sacred text- because the
emperor found that politically useful- there were shamantic practices
that produced altered states of consciousness.
And while the results with retardation and/or mental pathology can
easily be dismissed as mere fantasy, the consistency of a direct
experience of the divine across time and distance by rational sentient
beings is not so easily dismissed. Eliade, Campbell, & Gimbutas, among
others have collected snippets of myth from widely separated obscure
rural sources and collated them using the principles of etymology to
reconstruct the original Aryan cosmology. To wit:
Chaos is the primordial essence, not god. But as anyone who's studied
random numbers and chaos theory can tell you, or demonstrate iterating
on a computer, eventually a self-replicating form emerges. DNA is not,
by any means, the only possible example.
But again, replication can only go on so long before there are errors,
or mutation that nevertheless continues to replicate. Your position is
that such replication cannot produce the divine presence which those who
have experienced an altered state of consciousness repeatedly describe.
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