Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

[Xray]

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

The error in logic is certainly not on James Randi' part, but on Neil's.

James Randi debunked a liar, a trickster (Uri Geller) by exposing his tricks. Rand was was able to prove Uri Geller used trickery which exposed his claim of possessing superantural powers as a lie.

Whereas James Cameron never lied by claiming the trickery he used was in any way "real". Neil chose a completly inadequate comparison.

It is in an interesting phenomenon that the debunkers of myths are often blamed by the believers.

Here's another fraudster exposed: the religious guru Sai Baba, who his believers think has the superatural power to e. g. materialize "holy ash" in his hands, which he then strews on the believers' heads. But the primitive trick Sai Baba uses is crushing a little pill filled with ash between his fingers.

This and other tricks of the liar Sai Baba exposed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yblhsr1O4IQ

Edited January 3, 2011 by Xray

[Brant Gaede]

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

The error in logic is certainly not on James Randi' part, but on Neil's.

James Randi debunked a liar, a trickster (Uri Geller) by exposing his tricks. Rand was was able to prove Uri Geller used trickery which exposed his claim of possessing superantural powers as a lie.

Whereas James Cameron never lied by claiming the trickery he used was in any way "real". Neil chose a completly inadequate comparison.

It is in an interesting phenomenon that the debunkers of myths are often blamed by the believers.

Here's another fraudster exposed: the religious guru Sai Baba, who his believers think has the superatural power to e. g. materialize "holy ash" in his hands, which he then strews on the believers' heads. But the primitive trick Sai Baba uses is crushing a little pill filled with ash between his fingers.

This and other tricks of the liar Sai Baba exposed here:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Yblhsr1O4IQ

Not my hero, Baba!

--Brant

sob

[Brant Gaede]

Objectivism is not based on atheism, only its axioms.

The axioms of a philosophy are its premises. Rand explicitly formulated Objectivism's atheistic axiom: "No superantural dimension exists" (AR), which slams the door shut for any god idea to be snuck in through an epistemological backdoor, by e. g. boldly decaring that the supernatural is real, as Neil did. Neil was clearly trying to dissolve the boundary between subjective and objective here because he wanted to marry his "god" idea to Objectivist thinking principles; a venture which was bound to fail.

You are mixing up premises with axioms. All axioms are premises, but not all premises are axioms. Regards to premises, Objectivism has no negative premises. It can be said it has some negative formulations, like atheism, but they are all derivative. Objectivism has four basic premises, two are axioms. Collectively you can refer to them as basic principles though teachers like N. Branden broadened principles out to much of the corpus as in "Basic Principles of Objectivism."

--Brant

[william.scherk]

JNS wrote: "Why, then, do I persist in asserting the reality of the experience? Why don't I simply admit that I experienced a temporary break with reality and that my experience was fantasy cooked up by an imaginative brain that was stressed by dehydration and ketosis?"

[ . . . ]

So why indeed doesn't Neil then just accept that he didn't do the God-becoming? Because he "can't"; about which conviction he is emotional and sincere.

Very good post.

The most poignant moments for me in this thread were those where Neil gave in to special pleading with George -- if George granted him to be an honest reporter, then why oh why couldn't George grant that he what he reported could be true? Why not make the leap of faith?

Here is something that resonated with me -- the same poignant undercurrent of 'it could be true and unbelief is closeminded,' complete with shonky analogy.

These paragraphs are from "End of Days in May? Believers enter final stretch" at MSNBC. I could almost sense the spirit of J Neil "God" Schulman. The MSNBC story covers the latest in a long line of Rapture cranks, who have scratched a new date in May on their calendars, and utter a very Schulman plea . . . "If you still want to say we're crazy, go ahead," she said. "But it doesn't hurt to look into it."

Past predictions that failed to come true don't have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain.

"It would be like telling the Wright Brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn't even try," said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message.

For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God's compassion for people, and the hope that there's still time to be saved.

That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe.

"If you still want to say we're crazy, go ahead," she said. "But it doesn't hurt to look into it."

[J Neil Schulman]

Yes, I've continued to read this forum.

No, I will not jump back in except to say the following:

Since I resigned from this forum there have been numerous posts lying about things I've supposedly written here, and attacking straw men based on these lies.

Read it for yourself. Find where I ever called Joan of Arc's experience a hallucination, as Xray attributed to me. I explicitly refused either to affirm or deny anyone else's experience.

Starbuckle describes my experience as a "trance." You try taking a meeting with a lawyer during a trance. I double dare you.

Find where I ever asked George H. Smith to accept my experience on faith, as William Scherk asserts as a segue to lumping me in with end-of-the-worlders. I explicitly and repeatedly have denied faith as a basis to accept any fact as true, and have explicitly said I ask no one to accept my experience as true on faith.

I resigned from this forum because of the dishonesty here, which continues unabated in my absence.

Edited January 4, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[Starbuckle]

Schulman: "Starbuckle describes my experience as a 'trance.' You try taking a meeting with a lawyer during a trance. I double dare you."

I can't deal with lawyers even when I'm in full possession of my faculties.

To me it seems dishonest to call me dishonest because I used the word "trance" in re Schulman's state when he was occupied by God. (Sorry if "was," "occupied," "by," or "God" are also technically incorrect in some way.)

The first definition of "trance" proffered at dictionary.com is "a half-conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking, in which ability to function voluntarily may be suspended."

I got the impression from Neil's memoir that God had taken him over and was acting in his stead, or in combination with him, or some such, in Neil's view of it, during Neil's several-hour span of God-hood. If his condition during that period wasn't a trance in any way, shape or form, fine, I withdraw the word. I'm not convinced, however.

I think this kind of febrile nitpicking and unsupported extrapolative indictment of character is part and parcel of Neil's approach in this thread. I don't insist that his assailing of others in this way is generally dishonest per se; perhaps it is merely, at least with respect to me, confused, beknighted and misbegotten.

I think there are a few OL members who do tend to be dishonest, and they're on my don't-read list; I haven't read their posts in this thread either, so when Neil calls one of their posts "dishonest" I'm agnostic. I can only protest that I myself have not been dishonest.

In the course of a debate between fundamentally opposed sides, the fundamental disagreements will often engender different language and rhetoric to characterize the very same referents. Certainly this is the case when those referents are understood in vastly different ways, as, for example, Neil's non-trance.

Often the linguistic differences are connotative, but they are often unavoidably denotative as well, necessarily so in the case of Neil's experience. I think it should go without saying that the opposing sides on this kind of divide are not always going to be happy with how their own viewpoint is characterized by someone who believes it to be flatly and altogether misguided. A putative mischaracterization may well be dishonest; I've certainly found that to be so; but why would that be the _default_ assumption when no attempt of any kind has been made to seek clarification or correction?

Disagreements about characterizations of one's views are better aired by stating how one thinks an opponent has mischaracterized one's viewpoint than by simply assuming--without evidence--that only the worst motive can explain it.

Arguing in good faith will not ensure that one avoids offending the hyper-prickley sensibilities of someone on the other side of a discussion who is ready to pounce on and blow out of proportion any innocent turn of phrase that can possibly be pounced on and distorted. The only way to make sure of never doing that is to never say anything at all publicly in support of one's viewpoint.

Moreover, the substantive points in my post are obviously unaffected by dropping the word "trance" in favor of some other word to label Neil's temporarily abnormal state of consciousness. So lamenting my deployment of that word seems diversionary.

Edited January 4, 2011 by Starbuckle

[Starbuckle]

Scherk, I'll take that ten bucks now.

[Xray]

I explicitly and repeatedly have denied faith as a basis to accept any fact as true, and have explicitly said I ask no one to accept my experience as true on faith.

But when you were epistemologically challenged by those who did as you suggested, i. e. who did not accept on faith that you "met god", it did not sit well with you at all.

Read it for yourself. Find where I ever called Joan of Arc's experience a hallucination, as Xray attributed to me. I explicitly refused either to affirm or deny anyone else's experience.

You had better keep track of what you have written here before accusing others.

Ghs had asked you verbatim:

Are you skeptical of Joan's claim to have had visions and instructions from God? If so, why?

You replied:

I'd say I take it just as seriously as a football coach who attributes his team's victory to God giving him the winning play in a dream the night before.

Okay. From this one can infer that you don't believe Joan of Arc. Right?

Joan stated she had heard voices from God instructing her to go into battle. Right?

I'm going strictly by your premises in conducting this argumentation.

So if you don't believe Joan's account to be true, then she either lied OR had a hallucination. Right?

Which was it in your opinion?

If I was in error about leaning toward you opting for 'hallucination' in Joan's case, I'll stand corrected, but whether you think she hallucinated or lied, the inference to draw is that don't think Joan of Arc had a God experience.

More in the next few days. I'd prefer if you stayed here as an active poster, for I'd like to ask you some more questions.

Edited January 4, 2011 by Xray

[william.scherk]

Since I resigned from this forum there have been numerous posts lying about things I've supposedly written here, and attacking straw men based on these lies.

Read it for yourself. Find where I ever called Joan of Arc's experience a hallucination, as Xray attributed to me. I explicitly refused either to affirm or deny anyone else's experience.

This is true. Neil did not describe Joan of Arc's experience as a hallucination. He avoided all of George's questions regarding Joan. The most he did was to compare Joan to a football coach's report of god's special favour.

Which is the central problem several of us pointed out to Neil. We class Neil's claim in with the long list of other claims of divine contact. We wondered what made Neil's experience ring true to him, while Joan's experiences were not to be considered as 'real.'

Here's as close to answering that question that Neil was able to get:

George asked: "Are you skeptical of Joan's claim to have had visions and instructions from God? If so, why?"

Neil answered: "I'd say I take it just as seriously as a football coach who attributes his team's victory to God giving him the winning play in a dream the night before."

According to Neil he has a standing Google search on "I Met God," and has not yet found any claim worth following up. He apparently spent some time reading Walsch's report of god contact, but ultimately dismissed it as 'horseshit.'

Starbuckle describes my experience as a "trance." You try taking a meeting with a lawyer during a trance. I double dare you.

There is nothing about a trance that makes communication impossible, nor is it fiendishly dishonest to characterize your state of mind as a trance. Apparently the only thing that made your experience different from your usual state of mind was the belief that you could see in four dimensions and perceive other people's intentions. That would seem to add to human abilities to deal with legal matters, not lessen them . . .

Find where I ever asked George H. Smith to accept my experience on faith, as William Scherk asserts as a segue to lumping me in with end-of-the-worlders.

Sorry, but you miss the centrepiece of my observation. I equated your faith in your own god experience with the sad faith of the Rapture Lady that 'open-minded' folk would somehow get value out of her nutty insistence that the revelation of the end of the world might be true. You didn't find her special pleading poignant, but I did, and I found it corresponded to your own special pleading.

If you don't understand what special pleading actually means, or how to evaluate your own arguments for fallacies, then I feel very sorry for you.

I only lump you in with the Rapture Lady because of the poignancy of her appeal. The appeal is beyond reason, as is yours. The only way any atheist could accept your "temporarily abnormal state of consciousness" as a real mind meld with the eternal creator of the universe is to put aside reason and make a leap of faith.

It is very sad that you can't see that this stark reality.

I explicitly and repeatedly have denied faith as a basis to accept any fact as true, and have explicitly said I ask no one to accept my experience as true on faith.

But Neil, the only reason anyone could accept the mind meld hypothesis is by setting aside reason.

Straightforward reasoning suggests you had an abnormal (for you) psychological experience. You concede in several places that the most reasonable explanation for your mind-meld is psychological:

My most powerful communication was during a state of shallow breathing due to nasal and broncchial congestion, physical dehydration, and ketosis

One can say that I’m going through a psychotic episode at this point. Certainly the physiological conditions for a psychotic episode — ketosis, dehydration, lack of sleep — all of these various things can add up and say that I’m having a break with reality

.

-- you point to the problem that confounds you:

But the problem is that I’m not experiencing it as a break with reality.

So, bearing in mind that you concede that the circumstances suggest a psychological explanation, the only thing that convinced you of reality was a leap of faith.

What you ultimately are asking for is that those who accept the psychological explanation put it aside in favour of faith in you.

We can't do that, brother. We atheists don't accept your faith. And as you say, that is only a problem for you . . . that is the poignant reality.

Welcome back to OL.

[william.scherk]

I have found another case of god appearance. From a Texas newspaper's crime blotter (like Neil, I have made a standing Google Search for I Met God).

Blotter: Report: Man’s behavior turns strange

07:35 AM CST on Tuesday, December 21, 2010

By Donna Fielder / Staff Writer

Paramedics took a man to a hospital for evaluation Sunday after his friend reported to police that he was talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening her with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.

The woman said her friend asked her to accompany him to a movie, but she suggested they watch a movie at her apartment instead.

They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God.

He announced that they were going to have sex. She told him that was disrespectful and he insisted that they were going to have a sexual encounter and picked up a pair of scissors, according to a police report.

She ran into the bathroom, and he threw the scissors across the room and ran into the living room.

She was fearful for him and followed. She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room. She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door.

He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and “flying” around the room, she said.

He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She called 911 at that point.

She told police that her friend uses steroids and GHB, called the date rape drug, but that he did not appear to have taken anything when he first arrived.

Later she reported that he was texting her from the hospital that he was not sorry for what happened.

[Greybird]

I've never seen Neil wear a hat of any kind, let alone a fedora, but nonetheless ...

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY-zmJ1VCQI?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param'>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY-zmJ1VCQI?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY-zmJ1VCQI?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

(Jimmy Durante and Monty Woolley in "The Man Who Came to Dinner," 1942)

[J Neil Schulman]

I have found another case of god appearance. From a Texas newspaper's crime blotter (like Neil, I have made a standing Google Search for I Met God).

Blotter: Report: Man’s behavior turns strange

07:35 AM CST on Tuesday, December 21, 2010

By Donna Fielder / Staff Writer

Paramedics took a man to a hospital for evaluation Sunday after his friend reported to police that he was talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening her with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.

The woman said her friend asked her to accompany him to a movie, but she suggested they watch a movie at her apartment instead.

They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God.

He announced that they were going to have sex. She told him that was disrespectful and he insisted that they were going to have a sexual encounter and picked up a pair of scissors, according to a police report.

She ran into the bathroom, and he threw the scissors across the room and ran into the living room.

She was fearful for him and followed. She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room. She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door.

He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and “flying” around the room, she said.

He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She called 911 at that point.

She told police that her friend uses steroids and GHB, called the date rape drug, but that he did not appear to have taken anything when he first arrived.

Later she reported that he was texting her from the hospital that he was not sorry for what happened.

Find a witness who says I threatened anyone with a weapon between noon and eight pm on February 18, 1997. You won't. It didn't happen. But still you make this second vile comparison in your last two posts, the first one being to an end-of-the-worlder.

Edited January 5, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[J Neil Schulman]

I only lump you in with the Rapture Lady because of the poignancy of her appeal. The appeal is beyond reason, as is yours. The only way any atheist could accept your "temporarily abnormal state of consciousness" as a real mind meld with the eternal creator of the universe is to put aside reason and make a leap of faith.

It is very sad that you can't see that this stark reality.

For other readers, let me make the distinctions you are apparently incapable of reading with comprehension.

Question Number One: Did J. Neil Schulman have an experience that after extensive testing against his Objectivist premises he concluded was sufficient reason for him to regard as a real contact with a being that satisfies a non-faith-based, non-religious, non-dogmatic, non-scriptural, non-contradictory and non-supernatural definition of an eternal creator with a human personality?

Yes.

Question Number Two: Can J. Neil Schulman rationally demand any other human being to accept his experience as real, or his interpretation of the experience as valid?

No.

Question Number Three:

Is anyone else's disbelief sufficient reason for J. Neil Schulman, after concluding his experience was real, to deny it?

No.

Question Number Four: Is a report of anecdotal evidence from a person who denies faith as a basis to accept a report nonetheless of potential utilitarian value to those who take such reports as a reason to keep an open mind?

Yes.

That's why atheism as "God is impossible" as opposed to atheism as "I do not have sufficient reason to regard God as real" is the religious dogma I came here to challenge.

You're as much of a religious dogmatic as the Pope, but not honest about it.

Edited January 5, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[Brant Gaede]

Question Number One: Did J. Neil Schulman have an experience that after extensive testing against his Objectivist premises he concluded was sufficient reason for him to regard as a real contact with a being that satisfies a non-faith-based, non-religious, non-dogmatic, non-scriptural, non-contradictory and non-supernatural definition of an eternal creator with a human personality?

Yes.

Question Number Two: Can J. Neil Schulman rationally demand any other human being to accept his experience as real, or his interpretation of the experience as valid?

No.

Question Number Three:

Is anyone else's disbelief sufficient reason for J. Neil Schulman, after concluding his experience was real, to deny it?

No.

Question Number Four: Is a report of anecdotal evidence from a person who denies faith as a basis to accept a report nonetheless of potential utilitarian value to those who take such reports as a reason to keep an open mind?

Yes.

That's why atheism as "God is impossible" as opposed to atheism as "I do not have sufficient reason to regard God as real" is the religious dogma I came here to challenge.

I take issue with the last sentence in that I'd substuitute "a Supreme Being" for "God." It's not much to harp on. I don't recall taking issue with your questions and answers as such.

--Brant

[william.scherk]

Did J. Neil Schulman have an experience that after extensive testing against his Objectivist premises he concluded was sufficient reason for him to regard as a real contact with a being that satisfies a non-faith-based, non-religious, non-dogmatic, non-scriptural, non-contradictory and non-supernatural definition of an eternal creator with a human personality?

Let us unpack this jury-rigged mess.

Did J Neil Schulman report a 'mind meld'?

Yes.

Did J Neil Schulman offer both spiritual and non-spiritual explanations for his experience?

Yes. Neil offered the explanation that dehydration, sleeplessness, 'ketosis,' and paranoia could be responsible for his experience. He also offered the explanation that the spirit of the universe melded with his personality.

Which of these two explanations is plausible -- which makes the most sense, which explanation does not require belief in invisible spirits?

Neil, can you get your head around the notion that the first explanation is most likely to reasonable people?

The first explanation fits well with what we know about the world. The first explanation fits all the facts. The first does not add entities or postulates or hypothetical assumptions about the world.

It is that simple, Neil. To accept the second explanation as most plausible one has to posit an invisible spirit, and accept all the ramifications of that spirit.

You are asking folks to choose the least plausible explanation.

That is the 'leap of faith' -- to accept the god/spirit hypothesis folks have to reach beyond the reasonable into the World Of Woo.

You surely grasp the difficulty . . .

Edited January 5, 2011 by william.scherk

[Starbuckle]

Neil writes: "Question Number Three:

"Is anyone else's disbelief sufficient reason for J. Neil Schulman, after concluding his experience was real, to deny it?

"No."

No, not disbelief as such, regardless of the reasons for that lack of belief. But the fact that Neil's interpretation of his experience is unwarranted is indeed sufficient reason for him to reject that interpretation.

Neil also writes: "Question Number Four: Is a report of anecdotal evidence from a person who denies faith as a basis to accept a report nonetheless of potential utilitarian value to those who take such reports as a reason to keep an open mind?

"Yes."

No. Look at the matrix of the report, for details of which see Neil's memoir and Neil's posts in this thread setting forth his many untenable ancillary claims, and see also the posts by others in this thread explaining the untenability of those untenable ancillary claims. But the other question to ask is: Why would anyone take such unverified and unverifiable reports of impossible happenings as a "reason to keep an open mind"? People can regard instances of any category of claims as a reason to "keep an open mind" about whether the claims are valid. But whether people are justified (logically) in doing so depends on the nature of the claim category in general and on the nature of the specific instance (when the claim category has not already been disqualified).

Neil furthermore writes, "That's why atheism as 'God is impossible' as opposed to atheism as 'I do not have sufficient reason to regard God as real' is the religious dogma I came here to challenge.' "

I suppose I could be in error about my trance-like belief that God, even the hobbled yet still identity-warping, wonder-wielding Schulmanian version of God, could not possibly exist. Well, no, I don't suppose that I could be in error about this, myself; but I suppose others could suppose it. But I wonder if Neil would also regard as "religious dogma" a belief that an impossible thing which he himself acknowledges to be impossible must, in fact, be impossible.

For entities to act in a way contrary to their nature is impossible. Yes, I know, I know, I know: Neil has insisted 473 times that he wholly and consistently agrees, affirms, accepts, endorses and otherwise promotes and reveres this metaphysical fact, this self-identity of the existents. He also reports that he was God or God was him for a little while and that it's the functioning of the multiple universes that enables us to reckon that the identity of things is not really being contradicted by the existence and doings of the Neil-God even when it seems that the identity of things is being contradicted thereby. However, the center will not hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Stony sleep vexes to nighmarish cradle-rocking of rough beasts slouching. Sorry if I'm using any of the wrong words.

Doubtless at least a few and perhaps more than a few of the non-believers who have participated in or been reading this thread belong not to my ilk of atheist but rather to the laid-back, beach-strolling, happy-go-lucky breed of atheist and/or agnostic that Neil Schulman prefers: they merely attest to "lacking sufficient reason to regard God as real," without actually going out of their way to stress in so many words that the impossible things are impossible. But has Neil given them any reasons to believe in his or any God that can survive fair logical scrutiny? Answer: No.

BTW, God mind-blended with me a few minutes ago and denies having mind-blended with Neil. "I never met the man," God, in a trance, told me. Lest anyone doubt the truth of this report, let me further report that I used a Report-Truth-Detecting machine to verify the truth of it, and that the arrow flung itself all the way to bright green (that means Strongly Verified). If you think I don't have such a machine, let me assure you that I do. Meanwhile, the arrow on my Lame Pretend-Anecdote Detector did not even flicker. Amen.

Edited January 5, 2011 by Starbuckle

[william.scherk]

But I wonder if Neil would also regard as "religious dogma" a belief that an impossible thing which he himself acknowledges to be impossible must, in fact, be impossible.

I wonder too. To put a sharper point on my wonder, does Neil find it impossible that he could be mistaken in his interpretation of his godfusion experience? Does he regard as impossible that the psychological state he was in at the time could explain the odd experience?

In other news, I have experienced a communication from at least a remnant of FusionGawd. The communication came direct to my email inbox and consisted of a riff on 'you fucking lying asshole.'

Apparently the most awful lying lower sphincterish nastiness of all comes in saying I think Neil is implicitly asking for a leap of faith.

[Starbuckle]

WSS says: "Apparently the most awful lying lower sphincterish nastiness of all comes in saying I think Neil is implicitly asking for a leap of faith."

Neil can be read as asking for or hoping for a leap of faith from others, but in light of his repeated explicit denials of this, I am willing to stipulate that he is not asking for a leap of faith from others. He is, though, hoping for acceptance of the legitimacy of his own leap of faith, which he insists is not a leap of faith.

Perhaps no one who feels absolute certainty about an unperceivable, uncheckable claim about the nature of reality experiences his certainty as being a consequence of faith-leap rather than of self-evident perception either of God himself, directly, or of a revelation from God or the supernatural. But even a seer (#1) who claims to have the special perceptions will deny the validity of the special perceptions of another seer (#2) when the values and insights "confirmed" by #2's sighting conflict with #1's own.

Thus, Neil is offended by a comparison of his experience to that of a man who was "talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening [a friend] with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.... They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God."

In reply to Scherk's reference to this story, Neil says: "Find a witness who says I threatened anyone with a weapon between noon and eight pm on February 18, 1997. You won't. It didn't happen. But still you make this second vile comparison in your last two posts, the first one being to an end-of-the-worlder."

Sequitur, meet non. Non sequitur.

What was being compared and what is the point of the comparison? Is to show that others with similar experiences must have identical a] values and b] beliefs in purported consequence of their purported experiences--or to show that they can have starkly clashing values and beliefs as either inherited from their pre-experience selves and/or as revised, amended or distorted by the info purportedly conveyed during the purported linkup with the purported beyond?

It is obviously something about the objectively assessable nature of the values and beliefs of the witnesses that allows us to make judgments about the knowledge-content/claims and values content/claims generated by the witnesses' contradictory experiences of the purported beyond and the lessons they take from their experience of it. It is something about the this-worldly, mutually perceivable and mutually checkable and communicable nature of those values and beliefs that enables us to decide which of those values and beliefs are reasonable and which are not reasonable.

But if _that's_ the case, if it's the objective reality that every normal adult can perceive and infer about which allows us to make these fundamental determinations about which supernaturally-conferred values and beliefs are correct and which are not--judgments that no contradictory claims about the supernatural and deities may properly be allowed to override--then Neil's experience can have and should have no epistemological or ethical bearing on what he believes about the world or what he chooses to do in it. I don't mean that he should pretend that his experience of the God-takeover never happened, not grapple with it nor report on it, only that he ought not credit any insights or knowledge claims mystically conveyed thereby which cannot be independently confirmed by the sensory perception and logic that are the only intelligible bases of knowledge to the standard-issue, identity-limited mortals among us.

If Neil deems the natural causes of his experience as outlined in his memoir and as cited in this thread to be inadequate to the task of explaining his experience, then that experience ought in reason be allowed to reside in his memory only as a novel but as-yet-unexplained phenomenon.

If not, why not?

But if, instead, that experience ought properly to substantively shape Neil's beliefs and values because it is so vivid and persuasive to him, would he be willing to concede that similarly empowered Islamic terrorists also justified, on the basis of their own vividly experienced revelations and unshakeable convictions, in knocking off a few thousand WTC denizens cuz Allah said so? The terrorist Islamicists, too, think life on earth is just a temporary way station. No biggie, in their view, if a true believer also dies in the holocaust; they'll just pop over to the celestial gates for post-mortal processing. The dreams in which Allah told them so may have been as clear and vivid as anything that Neil experienced.

I don't suspect, I know--I'm not merely stipulating but actively affirming--that Neil unequivocally rejects the values and beliefs of the Islamicists. But what if, after a suitable period of physical self-deprivation, Neil were to experience a second God-takeover that is equivalent in power and persuasiveness of the first, but in which God made clear that that the conduct of the 9/11 thugs does indeed meet with his divine approval, that this sort of thing is, after all, what is on the right track, not the libertarianism and the O.J.-is-innocent stuff? What then?

Edited January 5, 2011 by Starbuckle

[Brant Gaede]

Did J. Neil Schulman have an experience that after extensive testing against his Objectivist premises he concluded was sufficient reason for him to regard as a real contact with a being that satisfies a non-faith-based, non-religious, non-dogmatic, non-scriptural, non-contradictory and non-supernatural definition of an eternal creator with a human personality?

Let us unpack this jury-rigged mess.

Did J Neil Schulman report a 'mind meld'?

Yes.

Did J Neil Schulman offer both spiritual and non-spiritual explanations for his experience?

Yes. Neil offered the explanation that dehydration, sleeplessness, 'ketosis,' and paranoia could be responsible for his experience. He also offered the explanation that the spirit of the universe melded with his personality.

Which of these two explanations is plausible -- which makes the most sense, which explanation does not require belief in invisible spirits?

Neil, can you get your head around the notion that the first explanation is most likely to reasonable people?

The first explanation fits well with what we know about the world. The first explanation fits all the facts. The first does not add entities or postulates or hypothetical assumptions about the world.

It is that simple, Neil. To accept the second explanation as most plausible one has to posit an invisible spirit, and accept all the ramifications of that spirit.

You are asking folks to choose the least plausible explanation.

That is the 'leap of faith' -- to accept the god/spirit hypothesis folks have to reach beyond the reasonable into the World Of Woo.

You surely grasp the difficulty . . .

If we posit the existence of God then why couldn't number two help lead to number one? Your premise is the non-existence of God. Period. I share that premise, but I've generally avoided arguing with Neil. Why? Because his position is invulnerable in spite of what seems to be great defensiveness on his part. So, we have a never-ending battle because Neil keeps sallying forth from his fortress his swords cutting the air with great swishes and the rest of us exclaiming "You missed us! You missed us! Here's why you missed us: You're sitting on your horse backwards!" Naturally enough, Neil is pissed off. I think he wants to at least draw some (metaphorical if not metamorphical) blood.

--Brant

[Xray]

The axioms of a philosophy are its premises.

You are mixing up premises with axioms. All axioms are premises, but not all premises are axioms.

Sorry about not having worded it more clearly. I did of course not mean to imply that all premises are axioms.

[bolding mine]

I have found another case of god appearance. From a Texas newspaper's crime blotter (like Neil, I have made a standing Google Search for I Met God).

Blotter: Report: Man’s behavior turns strange

07:35 AM CST on Tuesday, December 21, 2010

By Donna Fielder / Staff Writer

Paramedics took a man to a hospital for evaluation Sunday after his friend reported to police that he was talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening her with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.

The woman said her friend asked her to accompany him to a movie, but she suggested they watch a movie at her apartment instead.

They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God.

He announced that they were going to have sex. She told him that was disrespectful and he insisted that they were going to have a sexual encounter and picked up a pair of scissors, according to a police report.

She ran into the bathroom, and he threw the scissors across the room and ran into the living room.

She was fearful for him and followed.

She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room.

She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door.

He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and

“flying” around the room,

she said.

He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She called 911 at that point.

She told police that her friend uses steroids and GHB, called the date rape drug, but that he did not appear to have taken anything when he first arrived.

Later she reported that he was texting her from the hospital that he was not sorry for what happened.

It looks like the woman was every bit as delusional as the man if she saw him "levitate" and "flying around the room".

Neil can be read as asking for or hoping for a leap of faith from others, but in light of his repeated explicit denials of this, I am willing to stipulate that he is not asking for a leap of faith from others. He is, though, hoping for acceptance of the legitimacy of his own leap of faith, which he insists is not a leap of faith.

Imo you have distilled here and put in clear words exactly what Neil is hoping for.

Is Starbuckle right in his assessment, Neil?

Edited January 5, 2011 by Xray

[william.scherk]

Neil can be read as asking for or hoping for a leap of faith from others, but in light of his repeated explicit denials of this, I am willing to stipulate that he is not asking for a leap of faith from others. He is, though, hoping for acceptance of the legitimacy of his own leap of faith, which he insists is not a leap of faith.

Imo you have distilled here and put in clear words exactly what Neil is hoping for.

Is Starbuckle right in his assessment, Neil?

I am having an interesting email exchange offlist with Neil. He rejects the 'leap of faith' idea as applied to him.

He does accept that there is something that could be called a leap of faith, and illustrates his notion of leap of faith with the example of scientists at the Large Hadron Collidor "when they decided to see if they could reproduce the Big Bang without being absolutely sure they wouldn't set off a chain reaction that would destroy this planet."

He may be hoping folks accept his interpretations, but asserts strongly that faith had nothing to do with it whatsoever, "[m]erely curiosity, such as any scientist might have."

So, I wouldn't suggest using the 'leap of faith' argument with him, as this seems to lead to reactions like "go fuck yourself."

[william.scherk]

Your premise is the non-existence of God. Period. I share that premise, but I've generally avoided arguing with Neil. Why? Because his position is invulnerable in spite of what seems to be great defensiveness on his part. So, we have a never-ending battle because Neil keeps sallying forth from his fortress his swords cutting the air with great swishes and the rest of us exclaiming "You missed us! You missed us! Here's why you missed us: You're sitting on your horse backwards!"

Among the points Neil makes in my email exchanges with him is that I misunderstand Objectivism/Rand, which is almost certainly true. My most recent misunderstanding of this type was when I asked him about George:

George doesn't accept that god mind-melded with you. So what? Why does that matter to you? No non-believer in a spirit world is going to accept your account as you interpret it without a leap of faith. It's just the way things are in the world.

Neil replied that it is the ridicule that annoyed him, not the non-acceptance, and that George was "denying the Objectivist premises we share."

That stumped me, of course, so I asked, "Which premises has he denied? A basic Objectivist premise like Atheism?"

Which point reveals me as sitting backwards on the horse, since Neil says that atheism is not in any way a premise of the philosophy, and that to so assert is a lie.

Some kind soul has put together some excerpts from Rand's TV appearances with Phil Donohue and Tom Snyder -- where she speaks of faith and reason, god and atheism. I am hoping another kind soul with a top-drawer grasp of Objectivism can tell us where atheism actually fits in Objectivism, if not as premise . . .

Edited January 6, 2011 by william.scherk

[J Neil Schulman]

Neil can be read as asking for or hoping for a leap of faith from others, but in light of his repeated explicit denials of this, I am willing to stipulate that he is not asking for a leap of faith from others. He is, though, hoping for acceptance of the legitimacy of his own leap of faith, which he insists is not a leap of faith.

Imo you have distilled here and put in clear words exactly what Neil is hoping for.

Is Starbuckle right in his assessment, Neil?

No. The question self negates by assuming its conclusion that the only way I could accept an experience as real is by faith. If the eight-hour event of 2/18/1997 had happened in isolation I might have been able to negate its reality by reducing it to a ketosis/dehydration-caused waking dream, albeit one which had the remarkable feature of allowing me to function normally while overlaying the perception of imagined features. But both prior and subsequent events gave me benchmarks for testing the experience as real or unreal; and a long period of my attempting to negate it as real, and failing to do so, finally convinced me it was real. Having satisfied myself that it's real, I reject and -- frankly, I'm insulted by -- the charge that it requires an act of faith for me to decide an event which I've thoroughly tested against my Objectivist-inclusive premises was real. Accepting the experience as real and its content as tested valid, no good Objectivist could "fake reality" by declaring it otherwise.

Now, this still leaves the question of my hopes and expectations regarding how others react. I'm an author. I always hope, with anything I write on any topic, that others find what I write compelling. When I label something I write fiction I also hope they find it entertaining and sometimes didactically useful. When I label something I write non-fiction, I hope they find it has useful real-world applications.

In the case of my "Vulcan Mind-Meld With God," where by my own standards of skepticism I can have no reasonable expectation that someone else who has not had an event in their own life which makes it possible for them to regard my experience as real can regard my experience as anything but unreal, the best I can hope for is to accept my account as a personal report of use only as anecdotal evidence of something rare, and if I have succeeded in negating the contradictions and claims of the impossible, as something that might later find scientific proof. I have no expectations; I hope for people who say they prize reason to keep an open mind and not act like dogmatic cultists.

I have found more dogmatic cultists in this discussion than people with scientific curiosity. I certainly have found few I regard as an Objectivist in the school of Ayn Rand and the Brandens. They never regarded the existence of God as impossible and atheism as a primary tenet of Objectivism. Their atheism never went further than demanding that faith not be the basis for concluding the existence of God, and that God not be undefinable or unknowable, and that the supernatural not contradict the natural or known laws of existence and identity, and that if extrasensory perception existed concepts built from it would not contradict knowledge gained from the other senses.

I have met these challenges. I don't expect anyone here to accept that statement, but I've been a friend of Barbara Branden for many years and when we last discussed it this past summer she was far from dismissive.

Edited January 6, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[J Neil Schulman]

Your premise is the non-existence of God. Period. I share that premise, but I've generally avoided arguing with Neil. Why? Because his position is invulnerable in spite of what seems to be great defensiveness on his part. So, we have a never-ending battle because Neil keeps sallying forth from his fortress his swords cutting the air with great swishes and the rest of us exclaiming "You missed us! You missed us! Here's why you missed us: You're sitting on your horse backwards!"

Among the points Neil makes in my email exchanges with him is that I misunderstand Objectivism/Rand, which is almost certainly true. My most recent misunderstanding of this type was when I asked him about George:

George doesn't accept that god mind-melded with you. So what? Why does that matter to you? No non-believer in a spirit world is going to accept your account as you interpret it without a leap of faith. It's just the way things are in the world.

Neil replied that it is the ridicule that annoyed him, not the non-acceptance, and that George was "denying the Objectivist premises we share."

That stumped me, of course, so I asked, "Which premises has he denied? A basic Objectivist premise like Atheism?"

Which point reveals me as sitting backwards on the horse, since Neil says that atheism is not in any way a premise of the philosophy, and that to so assert is a lie.

Some kind soul has put together some excerpts from Rand's TV appearances with Phil Donohue and Tom Snyder -- where she speaks of faith and reason, god and atheism. I am hoping another kind soul with a top-drawer grasp of Objectivism can tell us where atheism actually fits in Objectivism, if not as premise . . .

I subscribe to every premise Ayn Rand puts forth in this video -- including her statement that substituting faith for reason is psychologically destructive and that faith-based religion is damaging to human self-esteem and reliance on reason.

Nowhere does she assert that God can not exist. She only says it is irrational to accept the existence of God on faith without proof.

Now, Rand did say no one can prove the existence of God. She was half correct. No one can prove the existence of God to someone else.

I do not accept the existence of God based on faith. I accept it from personal experience which I've tested with my reason and found impossible to negate as unreal. Having done so, to deny it would be exactly what Rand condemned: the denial of reality of someone without the confidence in his own individual reason.

Edited January 6, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[J Neil Schulman]

Thus, Neil is offended by a comparison of his experience to that of a man who was "talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening [a friend] with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.... They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God." ...

What was being compared and what is the point of the comparison? Is to show that others with similar experiences must have identical a] values and b] beliefs in purported consequence of their purported experiences--or to show that they can have starkly clashing values and beliefs as either inherited from their pre-experience selves and/or as revised, amended or distorted by the info purportedly conveyed during the purported linkup with the purported beyond?

It is obviously something about the objectively assessable nature of the values and beliefs of the witnesses that allows us to make judgments about the knowledge-content/claims and values content/claims generated by the witnesses' contradictory experiences of the purported beyond and the lessons they take from their experience of it. It is something about the this-worldly, mutually perceivable and mutually checkable and communicable nature of those values and beliefs that enables us to decide which of those values and beliefs are reasonable and which are not reasonable.

But if _that's_ the case, if it's the objective reality that every normal adult can perceive and infer about which allows us to make these fundamental determinations about which supernaturally-conferred values and beliefs are correct and which are not--judgments that no contradictory claims about the supernatural and deities may properly be allowed to override--then Neil's experience can have and should have no epistemological or ethical bearing on what he believes about the world or what he chooses to do in it. ...

But if, instead, that experience ought properly to substantively shape Neil's beliefs and values because it is so vivid and persuasive to him, would he be willing to concede that similarly empowered Islamic terrorists also justified, on the basis of their own vividly experienced revelations and unshakeable convictions, in knocking off a few thousand WTC denizens cuz Allah said so? The terrorist Islamicists, too, think life on earth is just a temporary way station. No biggie, in their view, if a true believer also dies in the holocaust; they'll just pop over to the celestial gates for post-mortal processing. The dreams in which Allah told them so may have been as clear and vivid as anything that Neil experienced.

I don't suspect, I know--I'm not merely stipulating but actively affirming--that Neil unequivocally rejects the values and beliefs of the Islamicists. But what if, after a suitable period of physical self-deprivation, Neil were to experience a second God-takeover that is equivalent in power and persuasiveness of the first, but in which God made clear that that the conduct of the 9/11 thugs does indeed meet with his divine approval, that this sort of thing is, after all, what is on the right track, not the libertarianism and the O.J.-is-innocent stuff? What then?

I'm going to do something I haven't yet done in this discussion. Quote scripture.

Matthew 7:16 - 7:20 attributes to Jesus "By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them."

Luke 6:44 For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.

Some source of this scripture had heard of Euripides, who'd said four centuries earlier:

Judge a tree from its fruit, not from its leaves.

The point is, if one claims that God is "good" and is acting on orders from God -- and God's orders are to go out and slaughter innocent people -- a rational person with a decent set of values smells a rat. It's one of the reasons I refuse to take anything in the Bible as -- er -- Gospel. Too many human beings writing scripture justify appalling crimes and vilely evil legal codes by an appeal to divine authority. Either they're lying or God is capable of acting like a drunken child-beater, and despite the Book of Job needed to get sober and make amends to his kids. I suggested in my novel Escape from Heaven (and much earlier in some lines I gave Victor Koman which he used in his novel The Jehovah Contract) that God taking on a human body, walking a mile in our moccasins, and getting himself nailed onto a cross for blasphemy seemed like a repentant God taking his medicine. I don't know what God could have done for the first two steps which require reliance on a higher power, but deciding not to interfere further in our free-will decisions would have been a good Step Nine for him.

The person I mind-melded with has a good heart. He didn't tell me to kill anyone. He did prove to me his respect for life, reason, and individual liberty. If Ayn Rand met this guy she'd like him. I may have been too harsh on Joan of Arc -- who was, after all, a patriot defending her country from invaders -- but George H. Smith's standard that God is more interested in talking to people with swords than people with pens strikes me as curious, considering how much effective use of media to spread stories is part of a whole lot of claimed human contacts with God.

I've said before, only half joking, that in my case he was sick of dealing with amateurs and wanted someone with a Writers Guild Card. But just maybe that I'd written Stopping Power -- which is all about defending the innocent from criminals and invaders -- had as much to do with his choice. (And it did have an endorsement from "Moses.") :-)

Edited January 6, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman