Peterkin

Yes, in the same way. It's not a thing that is, but a process that happens. Concepts like colour and weight are non-physical attributes of physical entities (more correctly, products of an interaction between physical entities: a surface and light; a mass and gravity); what the entities do with these attributes is action or process, and how those actions manifest is in events and/or products. So, the brain exists inside a human being who exists and some of the activities that take place in the brain - the deconstruction, juxtaposition, comparison and reconstruction of input data - can be collectively described as imagination, which feeds processed ideas and images into a more focused brain function called creativity, which further refines those reconfigured ideas and images into a new product of invention.

Lazarus syndrome has been well documented since the 1980's, and a number of cases were reported long before that. In fact, in the 19th century, there was such widespread fear of being buried alive tht people had bell-ropes installed in their coffin, just in case. However, this is a cardiac condition: the heart resumes beating after a period of unresponsiveness. These days, death is not pronounced on the basis or heart and lung activity alone, but on brain-wave activity. Once the brain stops, it doesn't start again. That doesn't rule out the possibility of incorrect pronouncements of death, which is why people are not buried immediately - indeed, even the autopsy is not begun immediately - they arrive at the morgue. Medical personnel tend to keep trying to preserve life as long as there is sign of life to preserve. I don't agree that it's a good idea to bury people and dig them up again. Cremation is more definitive.

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I would guess, in the same sense as the images on our computer screen: as an interpretation of captured visual images that has been deconstructed to form a data stream and then reconstructed as pixels. So the ,mind's eye' doesn't actually exist (as a physical entity); rather, it 'happens': it's a metaphor for a process that takes place within a neural network.

Well, no wonder I couldn't get a handhold!

I'm thinking more like one of the minions snuck it past the supervisor for a giggle. The formatter and printer snickered, kept quiet and passed it on through the process. Or even, some smartass in the print department switched off the image.

How certain are you of its inadvertence?

This is incorrect. I decline further climb on that wall of text.

Many people suffer from mental illness. In the US, about 83 million people. That would make about 40,000,000 religious mad-men and -women However, only a minority of the mental illness fits the description of the madman in the parable, but they are usually bipolar, rather than PTSD or OCD patients. You said the H word. I'm gone.

What does it mean to "believe in" religion? We know the institutions that represent particular religions exist, and that organizations exist, and they they collect real tithes and services from real parishioners. It doesn't make atheists particularly happy, since we also know that these institutions wield oppressive political power. Do we believe that belonging to a religious organizations makes a great many people feel secure and validated? Well, I can't speak for any other atheists (since we're not organized and have no shared belief system) but I believe that. I also believe that it gives some people the moral authority to abrogate other people's autonomy. Do I believe that of believing in the specific content of a specific religious doctrine - certainly not as a general principle, no. I think some religions make many of their faithful miserable, angry, frightened or ridden with guilt and self-loathing. Do some religious beliefs make some people happy? Very probably, but I don't see it demonstrated that religious belief is their only pathway to such happiness.

None of the parts are the foundation. And you, like Beecee, keep dragging in your subjective moral judgment. People take both rational and irrational actions for reasons that seem wrong to other people. The morality doesn't affect the rationality, or vice versa. Personally, I would rather lie to a child than watch it suffer - and don't much care who condemns that attitude. Most adults lie to children all the time, for all kinds of reasons, about all kinds of subjects, and if I judge them at all, I do it case by case, not wholesale. But that's just my casual relationship with with truth - subjective.

You are forgetting the ones that have lasted for longer than 2000 years or do I sense a bit of favoritism? I didn't mention any particular religions, nor shown favour to any (in this instance). The time-spans I mentioned in comparison to the longevity of skyscrapers seemed to me sufficiently inclusive. This is no entirely true, though it also misses the point. Humans have rational and irrational ideas. Humans have rational and irrational fears. Humans have rational and irrational responses to the environment and to events in their lives. When irrational fears and desires create a crisis addressing that crisis is rational, even if addressing it means inventing an irrational response. A man's wife died recently. She used to read bedtime stories to their small child and he misses her, doesn't understand about death or why she abandoned him. Child can't go to sleep without the mother reading him stories, and he's starting to imagine bizarre things due to sleep deprivation. The father, not exactly in the grandest emotional condition himself, is worried. He has explained about how people don't want to die, but they do, and that it's forever; they can't come back. Child says father is wrong, because he's seen his mother. (this is a common occurrence ) No, the father explains, he was just dreaming (except he can't go to sleep, so he knows this is lie) or 'just' imagining things - as if imagination were a trivial thing! But the child is not convinced. And he can't sleep until his mother reads him a story. So, the father says: "Well, Mommy can't come back anymore, but she can see you from heaven. If you close your eyes and try to sleep, she'll be able to read you a dream. That's even better than a story!" Child allows himself to be tucked up and closes his eyes. And every night, until he's a big lout of 8 of 9, he goes to sleep confident that his absent mother will read him a dream and he feels less bereft. And even when he's grown, sometimes, in very stressful situations, he might go to bed, close his eyes and think, "Mom, can you read me the solution to this problem?" Was the father wrong to say that? In the sense that the statement was incorrect, yes. Did he believe it himself? Who knows - he probably wanted to, or at least wished it was true. Did he intend to brainwash the child? No, he intended to comfort his child. Whether it was the right or wrong thing to do,it was a rational thing to do - and it worked. (It's not his fault that it worked so incredibly well, and works so universally, that far more ruthlessly ambitious men than himself were able to parlay it into hegemonies of immense wealth and power -- all of them quite rationally based on semi-rational human psychology.) The foundation of a cult has been laid. What's irrational about an individual or elite group using whatever tools and methods are available to give themselves an advantage over others? Given competition for resources, mates, status etc., of course. Hierarchy, the drive to be top dog, top of the food chain, certainly predates H. sapiens by some 60 million years, and so does the pack impulse to take direction from a leader. If that's irrational, it's also unshakable.

I think we have different points of view. I don't see religion - the concept or the institutions or the practice - from inside any particular belief system, but as an anthropological phenomenon. I don't see mythology as pernicious lies, but as the stories people tell about their origins, group identity and world-view. I don't think of religion as starting from a bronze-age dogma, but as an organic product of human imagination, curiosity and awe. I do draw a distinction - quite a sharp one - between ancient, primitive beliefs and modern religious institutions. So I don't think we're talking about the same thing, and doubt if we can.

Which is what some people in every age did. Actually, all people, both.

There is no such thing as a 'good' or 'bad' foundation. There are reasons for building a structure, and if the structure meets the needs it was designed to meet, it lasts. Ignorance and knowledge co-exist all the time. Every moment is the present for one moment. Every society, at every moment, is at the cutting edge of its evolution; every generations know all that is available for it to know, and yet members of the same generation vary greatly in what and how much of that they know. The Chinese of 2000 BCE had technology and skills and refinements that the Australians of that time lacked, and the natives of Australia were boat-builders and pioneers 60,000 years before that. Everybody knows something that other people don't know. That has nothing to do with foundations. Somebody had to have an idea before he could communicate it to anyone else. The little children were not told of it until long after any particular belief system had been established. There are no 'sides'. All human ideas can be applied by people with good and bad intention, for good and bad purposes, or even purposes that seem good to one and bad to another or that seem good in one situation and bad in another. All human institutions are subject to abuse, co-optation and corruption; an institution or capability or tool may become dangerous, may be put to the service of evil. That does not make its foundations irrational.

That's not about causation; that's about personal POV. The cumulative actions of masses of people cause social disaster, which then affect individuals variously. Also, the causes, origins and development of social disasters can be plotted in retrospect, and to a some extent, depending on the point in their development that the data is collected, social disasters that are about to take place can be predicted. In theory, collective reaction could prevent, mitigate or reverse them.

The foundations of religion [general term for a social phenomenon] are not interchangeable with the tenets of any particular religious belief. And yet the phenomenon of religion has lasted for thousands of years, if not tens of thousands; even particular religious institutions have lasted hundreds, and in some cases, at least two thousand years. What's "not very long" in the life-cycle of a skyscraper? Social structures are not like buildings; they have different foundations and serve different purposes.

All the same, I would not want the thread reopened and further trivialized. There is subject matter there that could be discussed to some purpose, but once it's become bawdlerized, there is little point in continuing. Perhaps the phrasing of the question was unfortunate.

In that case, any disasters you may cause are within your power to prevent. If that ability is projected onto other people, then they, too, have the power to prevent any disasters they might cause. If that ability is projected onto large collectives of humans, then they could all control the forces that cause social disaster; therefore social disasters are not caused in the same way that earthquakes, meteor strikes and natural floods are cause - by the unconscious, uncontrolled forces of physics.

Humans can now control geology and cosmology? That's very frightening news, given that humans can't seem to control their own greed, short-sightedness and power-lust. I guess hope does spring eternal. It doesn't show the whole picture of man-made social disasters? You may be right. I left out slavery, cultural genocide, child abuse, systemic discrimination, maybe a couple more. I suppose it's just too large a picture to fit into such a small frame.

Then please explain the flaw in my reasoning. P1. social disaster [is] just another natural disaster akin earthquake, flood, meteor strike, etc P2. Earthquakes, meteor strikes and natural floods are caused by forces beyond human control. C. Humans cannot control the natural forces that cause natural disasters. P1. Social disasters are natural disasters. P2. Social disasters manifest as human actions. C. Humans cannot control human actions. P1. Human action is required to take measures to protect against or prevent / minimize effects of natural disasters. P2. Humans cannot control the human actions that cause social disaster. C. Humans cannot take effective measures against their own actions. Evidence: Human History - nationalism, imperialism, religious zeal, oppression, crime, famine, pandemic, environmental degradation, cyclic economic collapse, war and climate change

And that has worked... when? What makes me think that if we can't control the action, we also can't control the reaction? Just a hunch.

I see. Okay, then, what measures are appropriate against the coming of an Alexander? The Persians had a largish standing army; so did the Egyptians, yet both nations were devastated. Ukraine had an army and could see Russia looming - and yet there they go, dying by the thousands, as usual. If human madness indeed a force of nature, there is no possible safeguard against it and no place for humans to hide from it.

I have no frickin' idea why Putin - or any other megalomaniac - does anything. But then, I've recently been informed I have no sense of humour, which may account for my incomprehension of massacre. You mean, what we do ourselves is as inevitable as geology? No will, no intelligence - just physics? If the proposition is true, the question is moot: our response to what we do is as inevitable and uncontrollable as the event itself.

Must be.