Is the Bible a magic book?

[steve_bank]

In the 70s I used to watch William Buckley's PBS show Firing Line. I was nofan of Buckley but I wathced him debate people.

When he was loosing an argument he had several things he did. One was to put on a condescending posture and and tone criticizing word usage and grammar saying something like 'You used this word but you should have used that word instead....'

Misinformation? You mean calling ethneogens drugs?

en·the·o·gen
/enˈTHēəˌjen,enˈTHēəjən/
noun
noun: entheogen; plural noun: entheogens

a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogn

Entheogens are psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior[1] for the purposes of engendering spiritual development or otherwise[2] in sacred contexts.[2][3] Anthropological study has established that entheogens are used for religious, magical, shamanic, or spiritual purposes in many parts of the world. Entheogens have traditionally been used to supplement many diverse practices geared towards achieving transcendence, including divination, meditation, yoga, sensory deprivation, asceticism, prayer, trance, rituals, chanting, imitation of sounds, hymns like peyote songs, drumming, and ecstatic dance. The psychedelic experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such as those experienced in meditation,[4] near-death experiences,[5] and mystical experiences.[4] Ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.[6]

It is a euphemism for drugs in the modern drug culture context. Like calling illegals undocumented.d.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entheog

A recent resolution by Santa Cruz City Council has made the municipality the third in the U.S. to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms. The unanimous ruling makes the personal possession and use of so-called entheogenic plants and fungi … a low priority for law enforcement

 

[DBT]

Does it explain the difference between natural and supernatural experience?

No, why would it? Quibbling over ontology is completely irrelevant to the clinical context.

Yet as matter of spiritual experience through the use of drugs came up, the nature of this spiritual experience, if supernatural, should be explained? As it stands, we only have words and terms without references.

Only because you seek to loudly overlook where it has been investigated as to where the border between "inside" and "outside" is believed to be, and how this inflects the experience.

'Inside' and 'outside' is not the point. What is natural and what is supernatural is the question. Nobody is claiming that our inner experiences are not subjective, just that some claim that they have 'spiritual' experiences of the supernatural kind, be it God, angels, prophesy, etc.

 

[DBT]

As it stands, we only have words and terms without references.

Incorrect. A word like "entheogen" or "psychoactive" connects to observeable phenomena and thus ALWAYS has a meaningful referent. What you describe is the situation of vague idea like "a drug", which may or may not have a real world referent, or which might be applied to very different referents by different individuals. Consider the responses you would get if you asked a room of five hundred people "Did you take drugs this week?" Almost all of them will have consumed a drug (like a "drink" or "medicine" or "allergy pill" etc) of some kind that week, but almost none of them woud respond affirmatively, because social conventions have drawn a taboo around the topic, and they have correspondingly become accustomed to a justification like "beer or Sudafed aren't 'real drugs'" to preserve their ability to save face, to the point they have forgotten those even are justifications and not just naturally existing categories.

Are supernatural events - be they external or internal and therefore subjective - 'observable' or testable? If so, what is an example of a 'meaningful referent in relation to supernatural experiences?

 

[Politesse]

As it stands, we only have words and terms without references.

Incorrect. A word like "entheogen" or "psychoactive" connects to observeable phenomena and thus ALWAYS has a meaningful referent. What you describe is the situation of vague idea like "a drug", which may or may not have a real world referent, or which might be applied to very different referents by different individuals. Consider the responses you would get if you asked a room of five hundred people "Did you take drugs this week?" Almost all of them will have consumed a drug (like a "drink" or "medicine" or "allergy pill" etc) of some kind that week, but almost none of them woud respond affirmatively, because social conventions have drawn a taboo around the topic, and they have correspondingly become accustomed to a justification like "beer or Sudafed aren't 'real drugs'" to preserve their ability to save face, to the point they have forgotten those even are justifications and not just naturally existing categories.

Are supernatural events - be they external or internal and therefore subjective - 'observable' or testable? If so, what is an example of a 'meaningful referent in relation to supernatural experiences?

Physiological states are observable, as are people's self-descriptions. There is no point in trying to prove or disprove Cartesian dualism as an antecedent to correctly classifying a drug.

 

[DBT]

As it stands, we only have words and terms without references.

Incorrect. A word like "entheogen" or "psychoactive" connects to observeable phenomena and thus ALWAYS has a meaningful referent. What you describe is the situation of vague idea like "a drug", which may or may not have a real world referent, or which might be applied to very different referents by different individuals. Consider the responses you would get if you asked a room of five hundred people "Did you take drugs this week?" Almost all of them will have consumed a drug (like a "drink" or "medicine" or "allergy pill" etc) of some kind that week, but almost none of them woud respond affirmatively, because social conventions have drawn a taboo around the topic, and they have correspondingly become accustomed to a justification like "beer or Sudafed aren't 'real drugs'" to preserve their ability to save face, to the point they have forgotten those even are justifications and not just naturally existing categories.

Are supernatural events - be they external or internal and therefore subjective - 'observable' or testable? If so, what is an example of a 'meaningful referent in relation to supernatural experiences?

Physiological states are observable, as are people's self-descriptions. There is no point in trying to prove or disprove Cartesian dualism as an antecedent to correctly classifying a drug.

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual. Some claim that their conscious subjective experience, dream or vision was spiritual in nature. As in an event stemming from beyond the physical realm where they were in the presence of dead relatives, supernatural beings, visions of the future, etc. That is the issue here.

 

[Jarhyn]

Does it explain the difference between natural and supernatural experience?

No, why would it? Quibbling over ontology is completely irrelevant to the clinical context.

Yet as matter of spiritual experience through the use of drugs came up, the nature of this spiritual experience, if supernatural, should be explained? As it stands, we only have words and terms without references.

Only because you seek to loudly overlook where it has been investigated as to where the border between "inside" and "outside" is believed to be, and how this inflects the experience.

'Inside' and 'outside' is not the point. What is natural and what is supernatural is the question. Nobody is claiming that our inner experiences are not subjective, just that some claim that they have 'spiritual' experiences of the supernatural kind, be it God, angels, prophesy, etc.

Yet again your inability to parse becomes your enemy. Yet again, you don't seem to be able to understand that whether someone parses the experience as "natural" or "supernatural" hinges entirely on someone's views of what is "inside", what is "outside", and what nature the inside/outside border has.

Inside/outside is 100% the point because when someone externalizes an internal experience, they are inventing the idea of the supernatural.

I don't know any clearer way to explain this to you, that this perspective of "outsideness" of "internal" stuff is where supernatural claims first originate, and that makes it entirely the point.

 

[Politesse]

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual.

Not true. If slap you, I do not have to literally feel your pain to objectively observe that you are feeling pain; I can observe your flinch, listen to your vocalizations, observe the reddened imprint of my hand on your face, observe your angry behavioral reaction, or simply ask you what you're feeling. All of which generate a record of the facts of our interaction. We are never entirely aware of what's going on inside another person's head, that is true, but it doesn't mean the social sciences have no objective facts to work with at all. Nearly every social interaction results in a verbal, behavioral, or physiological response that is empirically observable. We may be spiritual beings in some floaty cosmological sense, but beyond doubt we live in physical bodies, in a physical world, where the scientific method applies and all behaviors are facts provided there is someone there to observe them.

 

[DBT]

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual.

Not true. If slap you, I do not have to literally feel your pain to objectively observe that you are feeling pain; I can observe your flinch, listen to your vocalizations, observe the reddened imprint of my hand on your face, observe your angry behavioral reaction, or simply ask you what you're feeling. All of which generate a record of the facts of our interaction. We are never entirely aware of what's going on inside another person's head, that is true, but it doesn't mean the social sciences have no objective facts to work with at all. Nearly every social interaction results in a verbal, behavioral, or physiological response that is empirically observable. We may be spiritual beings in some floaty cosmological sense, but beyond doubt we live in physical bodies, in a physical world, where the scientific method applies and all behaviors are facts provided there is someone there to observe them.

You see the outward expression of someone's inner experience. You have no access to what is happening within someone else's brain or mind, or how they consciously experience self and the world. You infer that they are conscious by observing their response.

 

[Elixir]

You slap someone you may be feeling their pain, in your heart and in your hand. But you’re not feeling what they are feeling, you’re just sensing that they’re feeling it.

 

[Politesse]

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual.

Not true. If slap you, I do not have to literally feel your pain to objectively observe that you are feeling pain; I can observe your flinch, listen to your vocalizations, observe the reddened imprint of my hand on your face, observe your angry behavioral reaction, or simply ask you what you're feeling. All of which generate a record of the facts of our interaction. We are never entirely aware of what's going on inside another person's head, that is true, but it doesn't mean the social sciences have no objective facts to work with at all. Nearly every social interaction results in a verbal, behavioral, or physiological response that is empirically observable. We may be spiritual beings in some floaty cosmological sense, but beyond doubt we live in physical bodies, in a physical world, where the scientific method applies and all behaviors are facts provided there is someone there to observe them.

You see the outward expression of someone's inner experience. You have no access to what is happening within someone else's brain or mind, or how they consciously experience self and the world. You infer that they are conscious by observing their response.

Correct. The "outward expression" os factual. The "inner experience" is partly speculative, partly inferable fron said outward expressions. Anything that becomes behavior, also becomes an observable fact. And not just behavior, as the apparatus of consciousness is also a physicsl, observable organ about which we know sone things.

Such as what an ecstatic religious experience looks like physiologically.

 

[DBT]

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual.

Not true. If slap you, I do not have to literally feel your pain to objectively observe that you are feeling pain; I can observe your flinch, listen to your vocalizations, observe the reddened imprint of my hand on your face, observe your angry behavioral reaction, or simply ask you what you're feeling. All of which generate a record of the facts of our interaction. We are never entirely aware of what's going on inside another person's head, that is true, but it doesn't mean the social sciences have no objective facts to work with at all. Nearly every social interaction results in a verbal, behavioral, or physiological response that is empirically observable. We may be spiritual beings in some floaty cosmological sense, but beyond doubt we live in physical bodies, in a physical world, where the scientific method applies and all behaviors are facts provided there is someone there to observe them.

You see the outward expression of someone's inner experience. You have no access to what is happening within someone else's brain or mind, or how they consciously experience self and the world. You infer that they are conscious by observing their response.

Correct. The "outward expression" os factual. The "inner experience" is partly speculative, partly inferable fron said outward expressions. Anything that becomes behavior, also becomes an observable fact. And not just behavior, as the apparatus of consciousness is also a physicsl, observable organ about which we know sone things.

Such as what an ecstatic religious experience looks like physiologically.

So how does all this relate to 'dreams and visions' that are believed to be supernatural?

 

[Politesse]

Conscious phenomena cannot observed by others, just subjectively experienced by the individual.

Not true. If slap you, I do not have to literally feel your pain to objectively observe that you are feeling pain; I can observe your flinch, listen to your vocalizations, observe the reddened imprint of my hand on your face, observe your angry behavioral reaction, or simply ask you what you're feeling. All of which generate a record of the facts of our interaction. We are never entirely aware of what's going on inside another person's head, that is true, but it doesn't mean the social sciences have no objective facts to work with at all. Nearly every social interaction results in a verbal, behavioral, or physiological response that is empirically observable. We may be spiritual beings in some floaty cosmological sense, but beyond doubt we live in physical bodies, in a physical world, where the scientific method applies and all behaviors are facts provided there is someone there to observe them.

You see the outward expression of someone's inner experience. You have no access to what is happening within someone else's brain or mind, or how they consciously experience self and the world. You infer that they are conscious by observing their response.

Correct. The "outward expression" os factual. The "inner experience" is partly speculative, partly inferable fron said outward expressions. Anything that becomes behavior, also becomes an observable fact. And not just behavior, as the apparatus of consciousness is also a physicsl, observable organ about which we know sone things.

Such as what an ecstatic religious experience looks like physiologically.

So how does all this relate to 'dreams and visions' that are believed to be supernatural?

I have no idea. Those of us who were marginally on topic were talking about entheogens and how they might have been connected to the composition of the HS.

 

[DBT]

Fair enough.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

IMO: As far as the question of whether or not the authors of the bible were on shrooms (or whatever), I think the answer is overridingly no. Some of the stories are borrowed, copied more or less, some are histories with elements of the supernatural, and do not overridingly look like someone tripping out of their mind...even if there is a lack of rationality. I mean, we wouldn't say that someone was on drugs if they wrote the Code of Hammurabi in 1750 BC and so I wouldn't think so for writing the old Mosaic laws either.

That said, since there were quite a few authors and many books within, there are exceptions to this rule. Revelations, for example, was a sub-topic that had come up because of the curse at the end and Revelations does have a lot of imagery of various monsters and prophecies and supernatural things...so it could potentially have been someone on drugs or whatever term you want to use for someone altering their mind to see things or increase creativity.

Here's some random guy on the Internets about this topic:

Revelation: A Psychedelic Vision? - Entheology.com

Introduction Uncovering the use of entheogens in Early Christianity has been a subject of my research for quite some time now. The more I dig, the more obvious it becomes that an entire portion of Early Christianity has been systematically deleted, especially when it comes to the use of...

entheology.com