logical arguments for religion

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Re soya, where can i find this info, please? I looked briefly, so far nothing which says soya proteins are opioid.Please post link/site/ref. Thank you v much.

Re spirituality; in what way not within the frameworks of chem induced, morality, psychological growth/transformation, empathy etc? All I've seen or read till now seems possible to put in one or other category. Religion, involving belief in God, is anyway not nec same thing as spirituality.

Last edited by ouinon on 13 Nov 2007, 5:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

I can't point you to any studies but I can link you here. There are similar pages as well:

http://www.autismweb.com/diet.htm

where it says:



I had food sensitivity testing (different from allergy testing) when I was younger that showed a sensitivity to casein, gluten and soy but not to corn. The doctor leading the study was mostly working with children who had some form of autism.



I only saw your mention of chemically-induced spiritual experiences. I think your term "psychological growth/transformation" is a little vague in terms of either externally observable behavior or internally observable experiences. I do think that growth/transformation can be an element of a spiritual path, but I think it's a bit too broad to be alongside, for example, chemically induced experiences or even, if I understand what you mean by moral, a moral tug or push. States training is more specific, but that refers much more to activities than the actual states achieved and is distinct from levels training.

Thank you very much for that link. But re: soya :looks as if I shall have to carry on trawling to get anything more specific then. Thank you anyway.
Off on search.

So far; main constituents, apart from oils; phytates; enzyme inhibitors; haemaggluttin, which causes red blood cell clumping,and phytoestrogens ( isoflavons).
None of these are opioids. Therefore soya would not normally have any opiate-similar effects.

Just remembered that another explanation for soya featuring in an article on useful exclusion diets is that soya, along with corn/maize, crops up in USA lists of most common food allergies/intolerances, something to do with its over-frequent and over-processed presence in childrens diets in the States since soya became a multi-billion dollar industry!

Uhhh...errrr...nevermind!

Every myth has something real in it and every reality has some myth in it.

That being said, it seems to me that the particular religion of Christianity has many mythological factors that some people find hard to swallow, the virgin birth and Jesus rising from the dead, for example.

These events in Christianity did not follow the model we have invented in order to make predictions, Science. I think that makes them very improbable but not totally impossible. Many people think that makes them myth. One would have to think completely counter intuitively and non-rationally to have such beliefs. This type of thinking is what I consider faith. Throughout the Biblical scripture, faith in God is central, so it doesn't surprise me that the text is chalk full of these types of events.

I also think that it would be problematic and inconsistent for the God of the Bible to allow people to reach belief in God through our own reasoning, if that belief is truly salvific. Once the formula for God was known by the elite few, I'm sure that it's power would totally corrupt those who knew it.

Last edited by spdjeanne on 17 Nov 2007, 9:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's always Pascal's Wager.

There are different reactions to when someone says they don't believe in God. Though usually, when you say you don't believe in God, it just means you don't believe whatever is written in the bible about the world or the existence of God; instead of relying on what is written there, you'd rather trust the weatherman on when the next storm is going to happen, or what you learn in geography class about the shape of the Earth--if there is something in the bible that happens to agree with something scientists have discovered, you only agree with it because of the evidences the scientists have found, not because the bible says so. People can sometimes take disbelief in God to mean that you believe the opposite is true of whatever the bible says, but such a view of "disbelief" is too shallow and literal. If the bible states something as being true, you simply don't care what it says because it's too unreliable. It's simply a redundant, inconclusive statement that has no bearing on the real world whatsoever, and it wouldn't matter whether or not it's true or not, just as some science fiction stories have some real scientific elements in them, but are applied inaccurately or in a way that is too far fetched.

We're tired of repeating ourselves to reprobates?

Repeating what exactly?
If I'm not wrong, for what I have read here , it has been more like emotional and aesthetic reasons than a completely logical one.

This thread has diverged onto two or three different topics which are all interesting.
I have always been fascinated by the idea that some psychoactive substance lit the fuse on the explosion of human consciousness. But I don't really have anything to add to that.

The closest thing I have come up with to an "argument for god" is an argument for the existence of "the infinite." It goes something like this.

Either the something has always existed (is infinite), or at some point there was nothing.
The concept of nothing is a concept of the infinite, only negated.
Thus the infinite is or has existed.

It's not very well formulated, but it was a turning point in my thinking.

The other topic here seems to be the origin of the concept of "God."
I believe that this is a natural product of our human capacity for abstraction.
At some point this faculty reflected on and abstracted itself into a concept of "mind" this is probably the origin of the mind/ body problem. From there it is a small step to project this idea of mind out "there."