Whew.

Well, after your other post about being worried about how you come across, I must admit, I was looking forward to seeing your response here . Anyway, the problem is that I can't really counter your arguments as a scientist, which is making me feel really stupid. I want to be very clear on my wording on that, because I most certainly do NOT mean that you are making me feel stupid.

First, then, an apology. The last time I had this conversation, it was with someone who considered himself an agnostic, not an atheist, and it had a very similar feel to it. I did not mean to suggest that they are the same thing, but that this particular argument/discussion was common to both.

The basic misunderstanding or difficulty lies here:

"Aren't you mixing up human interpretation of the world with the actual physical state? I live in a different plane of reality then, let's say somebody colourblind. But both of us can understand the physical properties of colours just as well. The goal of the scientiffic language is to minimize the room for interpretation, (hence all the boring maths). I'm sure that with enough shrooms I can see god, that will never be any proof for gods existance. We all know that our senses aren't particularly fine tuned. So we can't really trust them. You do agree on that one, right?"

No. I'm not mixing up physical reality with personal interpretation. I'm saying that personal interpretation reveals or creates another reality that is equal to physical reality. And as far as trusting senses, we really only have a few sources of information:

1. our senses
2. our logic
3. other people/hearsay, which is filtered through 1 & 2.

Logic cannot create data, therefore ALL our data about the world comes, in some way, from our senses. There was apparently an experiment done in which they somehow proved that if no one was looking, a single particle of light could be in two places at once, but if someone was looking, it was where they expected it to be. Again, I have no way of knowing if this was true, but it's really interesting to me. This is sort of what I believed before I heard about the experiment anyway. For example: love. How do you know you love someone? It feels a certain way to you, physically and emotionally, but how do you describe that to someone who's never felt love before? How do you convince them that it exists, at least for you? I'm not trying to tell you you should believe in something spiritual or supernatural. I'm trying to explain why I do. For me, the feeling is as great as the feeling of love, and yet it's different. It's like submission, but it's different than that, too. When I do magic, it's like being dominant, but different. It's not something I can easily explain, since it's well, like an emotion. It's the same sort of feeling as reading something really well-written and feeling your skin shiver at how -right- it is. Not necessarily nice, but -right-.

Now, as for the moral code -- there are a couple of problems here:

1. You seem to have an assumption that in any relationship between the supernatural and the natural that the supernatural must always be right, or that the supernatural is somehow separate from the natural or that the supernatural is way more powerful than the natural and thus you end up in a Might makes Right situation. I don't believe that at all, so your three possibilities don't really make sense to me. What I really believe is that I am God, and everything exists within me, and at the same time, I'm not God, and everything exists outside of me. Everything is God. And Nothing is God. Everything else we "call" God is just faces that make sense to us as individuals. But I don't think that God, in this sense, has any desire other than to learn more. I think we are souls in bodies because bodies do allow us to experience things through our senses, which are less accurate, but deeper and more "real" than the view God would have. Which is another tangent from the discussion about why I believe what I do and whether the existence of the supernatural means it's either irrelevant or defaultly demanding blind obedience. Again, if there's a supernatural "moral code", it would be to experience things through our senses, and really, I think it's true that we can't really escape that too easily or for very long, without having major nerve damage. So, I guess we are in agreement on that one.

The other thing is that I don't think the lack of a moral code makes the supernatural irrelevant anymore than any other emotion is irrelevant. Yes, they are irrelevant when trying to look at the world in a purely logical manner, but not when trying to actually live *in* the world. A smile at the check-out is not really relevant to completing a purchase, but it's generally appreciated, and thus not irrelevant to the people engaged in the smiling. Similarly, an angry comment would affect the two people as well, and the more negative aspects of spirituality can cause equal problems.

*rereads* Whoops... I haven't been responding rightly. I forgot what the context was. As for *that*, the problem is that I don't believe in omniscinet or omnipotent deities. I think they get their information as much from us as we get it from them. I'm going to go back to the whole dominant thing:

Let's say you tell your submissive to wash the dishes. But in some way, washing the dishes is causing harm to someone, and you don't see that, but she does. So, she doesn't wash the dishes, and then explains why. What do you do? Or what if you tell her to eat something with eggs, not knowing she's allergic? Should she eat them blindly, or inform you of the allergy?

In the case of the supernatural, I think that if there's some sort of intelligence, rather than just random spiritual energy, it is aware of how little we know about it and thus does not expect more than we are capable of and trusts us to do what we decide is right (i.e. our own moral system, not an imposed one).

As for my Goddess... I don't think she is omnipotent or omniscient or It. She is a form, just as we are a form, and equally connected to the source and separate from it as we are. I think that, being somewhat between, she has a greater impersonal awareness, but a lesser ability to experience individual moments in their totality.

I think I'll close on this:

"That anybody in that situation still chose to believe in "the godess" is well....strange. "

*grins* Well, I've never claimed to be normal And as for Shrodinger's cat: I believe it is simultaneously alive and dead and in the process of dying all at the same time. And probably pretty angry, as well, no matter what state it's in.