Originally posted by red g jacks
so let me get this straight. dark energy is something we can't observe or describe but we can see its influence on the world around us,ghosts (if they were real) might be described as something we can't observe or describe but we can their influence on the world around us.
why is one supernatural and the other not?
Because the influence of dark matter can be observed and measured, and the influence of ghosts cannot.
One is real and the other is not.
so if a ghost was to interact with the world it would cease to be supernatural. say it starts slamming pictures around poltergeist style. i'm sure you could measure that. of course it doesn't really happen but i'm only using fake hypotheticals because i'm curious about how we define the supernatural. it seems to me that your definition of "supernatural" is "imaginary."
Originally posted by red g jacks
so if a ghost was to interact with the world it would cease to become supernatural. say it starts slamming pictures around poltergeist style. i'm sure you could measure that. of course it doesn't really happen but i'm only using fake hypothetical because i'm curious about how we define the supernatural. it seems to me that your definition of "supernatural" is "imaginary."
There is a problem with the idea of supernatural. We have the natural world around us. If there was a supernatural, it would be another natural world separate from our own. This is very possible if the multiverse is real. Each parallel universe would be supernatural to all of the others. The real argument is interaction. If a parallel universe is intersecting ours, how would the two universes interact? There is a very good chance that this hasn’t happened. Because if they had different laws of physics, the interaction would be so violent that the two universes might be destroyed. If the two universes where similar, then there could be an interaction. That could be dark matter, but no one knows. I have read an article were scientists are looking at the cosmic background radiation trying to find any indication of interaction with another universe, but it may take a long time to get an answer.
Originally posted by MF DELPH
So with the above stated Bentley do you believe Gods and Angels to be natural or supernatural? These beings allegedly have, at least per the Bible and numerous other Theological/Mythological texts from other cultures (like the Olympic Pantheon of Greece), interacted with human beings, to the point of being able to procreate with humans on multiple occasions, and produce demigod offspring. Or do you classify that under myth?
I think both Gods and Angels are expressions used very liberally, so it could be next to anything in context. Even if there was something vaguely storical about them, the Myth part takes precedence. Barring the idea of a animated creator of the universe, most supernatural creatures are know to us as stories and myths, their tellings are probably more important to us than what the (theoretical) phenomena that spawned was for us.
Again, from a philological standpoint, ancient cultures didn't predicate about strict historical fidelity. The idea of a realism as a basis to tell a story just didn't exist, or was so limited its influence doesn't matter to us. You cannot take ancient tales at face value since they couldn't have been written with that intention.
Stories get embellished with time, kings become descendants of heavenly creatures and their birth stories are altered in order to make their leadership seem inevitable. They also change in sense or morality depending on the culture that adopts them. But of course this is all speculation based in things we know about how folktales survive, I still wouldn't be shocked if most supernatural stories came from a rather simple original event imagined or real.
Originally posted by Bentleyi have another question. why would the supernatural necessarily be unpredictable? let's say the cause is outside our scope. there could still be an internal logic to that cause, couldn't there? and if it did interact with our reality in a consistent way then while we might not be able to determine the root cause we could still measure and interpret the results of said consistent interactions.
Supernatural is something external to our scope. If we can't predict something based in data that we can interpret, that can be considered supernatural. Truly supernatural things would be unpredictable from our perspective because, by principle, the elements that cause them are outside our scope.So yes, in this perspective some cosmic phenomena can be depicted as being supernatural. The Big Bang itself could be understood that way.
Originally posted by MF DELPH
Interesting.So what's your position on the existence of the "Nephilim"? I don't want to put words in your mouth and assume that based on the above post you flatly view them as myth.
I think the idea of nephilim is very interesting because it serves as a missing link between monoteistic myths and heroic myths from pagan religions. Almost any polytheistic pantheon needs to be structured as a family, with sons, illegitimate spawns and monsters. The idea of an angel race or a godly race as a kin it's very tribal in nature, it does a whole lot to appeal to people who live in tribes/families.
The historicity of interbreeding between humans and any kind of living beings it's extremely dubious, so the angels that bred with men to give birth to the nephilim, were probably just holy men feared and respected for living hermit lifes or living in a more animalistic lifestyle. Again, the concept of angel is quite shapeless as far a the christian tradition goes. It's entirely possible that some kind of people or some kind of animals were considered angels at some point.
Of course, there are also countless myths about shapeshifters and godlings that bred with humans, so in ancient logic it could be angels that became men temporarily. But maybe the simplest explanation is that according to christian traditions spirits can breed with people, fatherless kids could be considered nephilim if being orphans gave them a particular social role.
Originally posted by red g jacks
i have another question. why would the supernatural necessarily be unpredictable? let's say the cause is outside our scope. there could still be an internal logic to that cause, couldn't there? and if it did interact with our reality in a consistent way then while we might not be able to determine the root cause we could still measure and interpret the results of said consistent interactions.
I went with unpredictable because every natural phenomena up to a level is a mystery to us. Gravity is stupidly predictable and we can describe it properly, but we don't really know what it is. Actually qualifying certain properties of the universe it's really hard to do, because unlike living beings that have a limited lifespan and can be easily identified as separate entities, universal values tend to stertch over incredibly wide lenghts of time. You can always ask yourself "what's the content of an electron", and then "what's the content of a qwark" and by interrogating further you always arrive to some area that is beyond of your technological scope. But you still have to call that natural because it's a process that keeps happening and it intrinsic to the universe.
This is why I claim that opacity by itself does not grant a supernatural status to experiences. Nature can be ignored, but at some point it becomes evident and evidence isn't the kind of thing you try to prove.
Sorcery and witchcraft are very different depending on traditions, the fact that doesn't always align with the morals of a particular society makes it hard to evaluate for the very least. There seems to be something marginal about it, it's always something enclosed and distinct from the actual government, kind of a very narrow religion.
Our current society tries to use too much abstraction to describe primitive practices. We want to find a reason behind religion, but the practices were maybe more important than the ideas that founded each activity. Most magical rites emphasize the importance of what you do, a certain irrational activity that is only losely related with the goal wanted by the magician that carries some power. Magic seems to depend on some sort of belief, placebo may be a part of it, but in this case I think the practices are so wide that it's hard to fit them under a single description.
I actually find some kinds of black magic a bit more strange. I've only heard about this by anecdote, but the description of it seems to point towards psychical illness. The magician in question makes people crazy, but unlike hypnosis or mental suggestion, people don't need to know about the spell at all for the curse to work. I separate this magic from the others because it strays from the schematics of "belief affects people" that applies for most magical practices. This is at least somewhat cryptic, the part that keeps it real is the fact that everything functions like an actual mental disease.
Interesting. Sounds similar to a custom from the West Indies (Voodoo/Hoodoo) and Southern U.S. (Creole Voodoo/Hoodoo). It's called a "Root". It's a blood magic spell where allegedly women can use their menstrual blood and a few other ingredients to either make men fall madly, subserviently in love with them or curse them with bad health and bad luck when they are scorned. They put the concoction in the targets food or drink and upon consumption the spell activates.
Originally posted by MF DELPH
Interesting. Sounds similar to a custom from the West Indies (Voodoo/Hoodoo) and Southern U.S. (Creole Voodoo/Hoodoo). It's called a "Root". It's a blood magic spell where allegedly women can use their menstrual blood and a few other ingredients to either make men fall madly, subserviently in love with them or curse them with bad health and bad luck when they are scorned. They put the concoction in the targets food or drink and upon consumption the spell activates.
Pfft, women, amirite.
I have zero problem with the idea of metaphysics and the supernatural, and as stated in another thread, I wholeheartedly believe in a God.
The reason the bible is fiction is because it's physical cosmology is not accurate in the slightest of what actually happened, and is rather geocentric.
The bible's fiction can be found right in the start of Genesis. It states God created the Earth before the stars, which obviously is not true because Earth (and all chemical elements) are stardust.
That, combined with the fact that much of the OT is devoted to Israel's violent military conquests, dogmatic discrimination of women and homosexuals, support of owning slaves, merciless Yahweh, ritual sacrifices, the ethnocentric view that Jews are "God's chosen people", amongst other things, put the bible deeply into the realm of obsolete mythology. The NT hilariously tried to retcon some of the unsavory bits of the OT, but it really doesn't help.
So yeah, geocentricism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. Is it any question why the bible is fiction? And again, not saying God doesn't exist, but it clearly isn't Yahweh/Allah/any of the Abrahamic deities.