WHY MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE CANNOT BE DEFINED AS BRAIN ACTIVITY

Dateline - July 17, 2009  In discussions of whether brain activity indeed causes mystical experience or whether it simply runs parallel with it, one controversial issue has been the definition of mystical experience and how one confirms it. On the one hand, Metacrock argues that 1) researchers are not confirming in their work that their subjects are indeed having religious experiences – mystical experiences should be defined by use of the M-scale... Read more

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF JESUS CHRIST: THE PHARISEES ACCUSE HIM OF FALSE WITNESS

When Jesus proclaimed that He was the Light of the World, the Pharisees accused him of not only making claims about himself, but making false claims about himself, that is, bearing false witness, or breaking the ninth commandment. This sets up a discussion of epistemology – how do we know? What is truth and how can we know what the truth is? To witness is to testify, or present a testament, derived from the solemnity of swearing upon the testicles. ... Read more

Martin Buber: The Mythology of the Tree of Knowledge

In his book, “Good and Evil,” Martin Buber has written an essay that describes the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in mythological terms, in terms other than the literal one that the Pharisee – Creationist – Rational Atheist takes the story. The essay, “The Tree of Knowledge” is a good example of how we can reap meaning from the Bible by searching in the depths behind its superficial literal face. Buber begins his work by noting that... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part XI: The Embarrassment of the Logical Positivists

The unabashed aim of the Logical Positivists - a group of philosophers including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, a.k.a. the Vienna Circle or the Logical Empiricists - was the complete and total destruction of the metaphysical (everything transcendental or “otherworldly” and of course, religion and theology), which they felt were tools of social and political conservatives.   It’s important to recognize that they... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part X: Lord Russell’s Failure to Refute Hume

Bertrand Russell knew what he wanted to accomplish.  If there was anyone who could have established the foundation of objective rationalism from sheer intention and desire, it was Russell.  He was an adamant atheist, who wrote the book, “Why I Am Not a Christian,”  a precursor to Loftus’ “Why I Became an Atheist.”  Out of what I believe to be his personal embarrassment, Russell desperately wanted to prove that it... Read more

The Effect of Language on the Evolution of Man

Again, I wrote this about thirty years ago, but it may still have some useful thoughts in it.  It’s chilling to see that not only did I foresee the political correctness of language, I was actually advocating for it.  I had read 1984 by that time, but was focusing on what I believed to be the positive influence of language. Introduction Man is in the process of evolving; he is in the process of obtaining all true thoughts.  And, by knowing... Read more

Sartre on the Fruitlessness of Textual Criticism

As I was studying “A History of Western Philosophy:  The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre” (W.T. Jones) so I could blog about the human condition, I ran across this passage about the historian Roquetin in Sartre’s Nausea: “The Marquis of Rollebon, whose biography Roquetin is writing, is as inaccessible as any long-lost classical text, and what one thinks of as ascertaining the facts, as reconstructing the life... Read more

The Supposed Ways of Knowledge

This is a basic blog listing and commenting on the the ways philosophy / epistemology has asserted that a man gains knowledge. Let me explain why it’s important for the Christian. Christian claim to possess a certain truth - the reality of Christ, His crucifixion for our sins and His resurrection - that brings salvation to man. Man wants to understand if this claim is indeed truth and if so, how he can come to know that truth. How, for example,... Read more