Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

No problem at all AS LONG AS ITS IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY!

Why do we allow subversive cults into western countries at all?
Because only in western countries do we tolerate this. In Islamic countries you can't even build a church but meanwhile we have to bend over backwards to accommodate Muslims every wish here.
there are churches and places of christian worship in the majority of 'islamic countries'.

not to disagree that the west isn't more tolerant. but isn't that our whole strength and unique selling point? you want to critique islam's intolerance and ... become more intolerant ourselves? great plan.
"unique selling point" is a magnet for the less tolerant.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

Jay wrote:

Our country was founded on religious tolerance.
Your country was founded by religious extremists who couldn't assimilate in their birth country, we've had this discussion before.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Because only in western countries do we tolerate this. In Islamic countries you can't even build a church but meanwhile we have to bend over backwards to accommodate Muslims every wish here.
there are churches and places of christian worship in the majority of 'islamic countries'.

not to disagree that the west isn't more tolerant. but isn't that our whole strength and unique selling point? you want to critique islam's intolerance and ... become more intolerant ourselves? great plan.
"unique selling point" is a magnet for the less tolerant.
yeah and your 'world culture war' alternative is so much better, as globalism and free-trade squeezes us all closer and closer together.

didn't you grow up in a gulf state, literally imbricated in 'someone else's culture' by oil and commerce? and now you want to say 'hey, you guys, stay in your lane!'

Last edited by uziq (2019-05-29 06:59:06)

KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

macbeth, have you ever been out of new jersey? What's the furthest you've traveled from the city you grew up in?
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

Our country was founded on religious tolerance.
Your country was founded by religious extremists who couldn't assimilate in their birth country, we've had this discussion before.
Some, yes. Puritans founded Massachusetts, Quakers founded Pennsylvania, Maryland was founded for Catholics. Escaping persecution by the Anglican church was one thing that drove people over here. Our Bill of Rights has Freedom of Religion in the First Amendment so that no national religion would ever be created to persecute minority religions again. It's done a pretty good job keeping the tensions down and even let new religions like the Mormons flourish (after some persecution and forced exiles).
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:


there are churches and places of christian worship in the majority of 'islamic countries'.

not to disagree that the west isn't more tolerant. but isn't that our whole strength and unique selling point? you want to critique islam's intolerance and ... become more intolerant ourselves? great plan.
"unique selling point" is a magnet for the less tolerant.
yeah and your 'world culture war' alternative is so much better, as globalism and free-trade squeezes us all closer and closer together.

didn't you grow up in a gulf state, literally imbricated in 'someone else's culture' by oil and commerce? and now you want to say 'hey, you guys, stay in your lane!'
I spent my first two years in Doha, two years in Algeria, four years in the UK as my father was in the diplomatic service - hardly related to oil at all.

I haven't advocated a culture war, although many other cultures are bent on one. The solution is cultural isolation - its what the people of America and Britain voted for and what China, Russia, the muslim nations etc practice fiercely.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
DesertFox-
The very model of a modern major general
+794|6655|United States of America

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

Our country was founded on religious tolerance.
Your country was founded by religious extremists who couldn't assimilate in their birth country, we've had this discussion before.
I don't think anyone disagrees on that with regard to the American colonies. Less so the USA.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
This is why people shouldn't be exposed to religion.

Newberg and his team take brain scans of people participating in religious experiences, such as prayer or meditation. Though he says there isn’t just one part of the brain that facilitates these experiences – “If there’s a spiritual part, it’s the whole brain” – he concentrates on two of them.

The first, the parietal lobe, located in the upper back part of the cortex, is the area that processes sensory information, helps us create a sense of self, and helps to establish spatial relationships between that self and the rest of the world, says Newberg. Interestingly, he’s observed a deactivation of the parietal lobe during certain ritual activities.

“When you begin to do some kind of practice like ritual, over time that area of brain appears to shut down,” he said. “As it starts to quiet down, since it normally helps to create sense of self, that sense of self starts blur, and the boundaries between self and other – another person, another group, God, the universe, whatever it is you feel connected to – the boundary between those begins to dissipate and you feel one with it.”

The other part of the brain heavily involved in religious experience is the frontal lobe, which normally help us to focus our attention and concentrate on things, says Newberg. “When that area shuts down, it could theoretically be experienced as a kind of loss of willful activity – that we’re no longer making something happen but it’s happening to us.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2019052 … n-instinct
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uziq
Member
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what a ridiculous reading of ritual experience on your behalf. the whole age-old wisdom of these things is that it is PRECISELY desirable to experience states of selflessness, ego death, a diminished sense of self/greater collective belonging, and a loss of wilful activity. those are EXACTLY some of the benefits that spiritual experience brings to us: deep personal lessons of humility, of belonging to a higher-order (whether social, natural, supernatural, whatever flavour). all that seems to be is an MRI scan that confirms the vague outlook of, say buddhists and the goals of their meditation. experiencing nothingness and negation can be powerful personal lessons.

i really do feel sorry for you. i've never been in the least bit religious but if you really think that in this modern world, where we are all literally consumed with self-absorption, social media broadcasting, personal branding, and overburdened with work, stress, noise, notifications, etc. ... if you read an article that talks about how ritual/trance and religious states suspend all that and think 'pah! religion is evil!' then i think you truly are an idiot.

look at the huge success of 'mindfulness' apps to the younger generation today. people who wake up and spend 15 minutes of their morning in silence, or something like a guided meditation using an app. this speaks volumes for the huge hunger for something equivalent to that 'religious' state described above.

Last edited by uziq (2019-05-30 01:06:16)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
"the parietal lobe...the area that processes sensory information, helps us create a sense of self...deactivation of the parietal lobe during certain ritual activities"

"loss of willful activity"

Sounds great if you're running a religion.

Its a brainwashing process designed to create easily manipulated sheep with no sense of self hooked on dopamine from a different source.

"slaughter the infidels/blow yourself up in the name of <insert name of leader/deity here> it'll be the greatest rush ever!"

You feel sorry for me because I don't 'get' religion? Not a problem.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-05-30 01:16:31)

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uziq
Member
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i don't think you understand neuroscience, which isn't surprising. you can't deactivate your parietal lobe permanently without being on a coma scale. they are ritualised/trance states that people go into, selectively, as part of an individual or social experience. it's supposed to bring a benefit, some temporary respite, some 'other' psychological state that will help you momentarily lift your burdens, step outside of yourself, reflect, see things from a different perspective, etc. etc. choose your cliché.

your reference to dopamine is, frankly, bizarre. dopamine from a 'different source'? it's an endogenous compound.

how are you horribly misreading this as a 'brainwashing' pamphlet? people who commit terrorist acts are not in a ritualised frame of mind. they are not in a religious ecstasy. they are people who have spent months reading up about and poisoning themselves with ideology. to brainwash yourself with an extremist ideology is the very opposite of the states of suspension and temporary inactivity described above.

the part of the article to which you are referring in quotation is about the observable effects on the brain when people are engaged in intense and introspective activities such as prayer and meditation. no shit that parts of their brain to do with processing external stimuli go into sleep mode when people are knelt with their eyes closed, thinking about their own self and place within the universe. you transposing this to someone walking around an underground station with a bomb in their backpack is laughable. these states are meditative -- how the FUCK would they even monitor it in an MRI scanner otherwise?

Last edited by uziq (2019-05-30 01:44:44)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Did you even read the article?

At my Pentecostal Church, drugs were talked about somewhat differently. We didn’t need them, we were told, because we could get high from God. God could do the same thing to our brain – give us a rush, a sense of euphoria – but our brains wouldn’t end up scrambled. God provided all the “positive benefits” of heroin with none of the damaging side effects.
Clearly they did monitor these things with an MRI scanner, I don't know what the issue is for you.

Of course meditation, introspection are good things. There's no need for them to be bound up with mumbo-jumbo and becoming locked into a medieval life-directing cult.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
you do not understand basic neuroscience, again. you can't monitor someone in an MRI scanner who is having a pentecostal experience at a church. MRI scanners tend to be ... slightly enclosed and ... stationary.

you are conflating two aspects of the article that describe very different experiences.

the neurology stuff regarding the parietal lobe, people (supposedly) losing their "sense of self ... [through the] deactivation of the parietal lobe during certain ritual activities" ... and the frontal lobe's "loss of willful activity" ... all the supposed 'science' that supports your claim that religion 'brainwashes' people: all of that comes from MRI scans of people in deeply introspective and meditative states. you're right that you don't need religion for that, but religion does give a moral and behavioural framework with which to integrate those experiences. i literally pointed out a secular version of this same 'good' experience in the popularity and proliferation of mindfulness and meditation apps today. young people are into it.

in short, it's a desirable mental state, whereas you tried to make it seem like a sinister conditioning routine to train extremists. extremists are indoctrinated by an ideology, an idea that takes root, it's an active mental process, someone becomes obsessive and fanatical; the meditation stuff and frontal/parietal lobe scans attest to an exactly opposite state. if there were a way to 'brainwash' someone to commit acts in some sort of trance/catatonic state, then it would have been weaponised by the CIA and the soviets in the fucking 1950s. they did lots of experiments on that sort of stuff, often involving mindblowing amounts of very strong psychoactive drugs. none of it worked. 'the manchurian candidate' was not a documentary. religions have no ability to 'brainwash' people on a neurological level. ideologies do that and, as you said, they don't need to be "bound up with mumbo-jumbo and becoming locked into a medieval cult". people bomb public places and assassinate people for political reasons all the time.

pentecostals and people who believe in the holy ghost, being taken by the spirit, etc. are just ultimately participating in a group ritual. it's no different from africans dancing around a fire, amazonians participating in 3-day-long dances with psychedelics, or islamic whirling dervishes; or even people in nightclubs all night, exerting themselves and causing some 'higher' elated state through physiological means. lots of shouting, rapid breathing, group psychology, etc all contribute to an ecstatic experience. again, it's a temporary rush, not altogether unlike what you'd get from being at a street protest or in a giant sports crowd. it speaks to something animalistic, for sure, but where's the brainwashing?



repetitive, ritualised movements like this can certainly occasion a euphoria or release akin to being high. just like those indian gurus prescribed a phoney form of hyperventilating-ecstasy through repeated heavy breathing followed by jumping. these are just primitive shortcuts to feelings of a higher-state. i don't really see anything sinister or lasting in it. for people to become dangerous and indoctrinated, they need the literature to read, the videos to watch, the gradual obsessive consumption of their intellect with one fixed idea; they need a social framework, a family, real or imagined, to compel them and bully them along to their ends. none of those are religious specifically and none of it has shit to do with processes in the brain. quoting some scary (to you) sounding stuff about the parietal lobe, as if unearthing some mind-control mechanism at work in all religion, is illiterate.

Last edited by uziq (2019-05-30 05:01:30)

coke
Aye up duck!
+440|6679|England. Stoke
Sorry but Dilbert clearly has no understanding of social human interaction.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-48466623

it sucks that these people never integrate into western society
Larssen
Member
+99|1858

Dilbert_X wrote:

I haven't advocated a culture war, although many other cultures are bent on one. The solution is cultural isolation - its what the people of America and Britain voted for and what China, Russia, the muslim nations etc practice fiercely.
There is no neutrality in branding other cultures problematic and unwanted. It's also impossible to practice cultural isolation if there is no economic, political or physical isolation. In fact, conflict would become inevitable.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
All of the Catholic church's sex abuse scandals are a result of gay people sneaking their way into the clergy. Of course when the media wants to slander the church they bring up child abuse but never point out that the gay people are abusing boys while little girls aren't being hurt by straight male priest.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
DesertFox-
The very model of a modern major general
+794|6655|United States of America
I don't remember pedophilia being a huge principle of the gay community.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

SuperJail Warden wrote:

All of the Catholic church's sex abuse scandals are a result of gay people sneaking their way into the clergy. Of course when the media wants to slander the church they bring up child abuse but never point out that the gay people are abusing boys while little girls aren't being hurt by straight male priest.
the church creates this environment. the catholic seminary is a gay factory. you take people at the peak of their sexual-reproductive cycle and stuff them away in an enclosed institution with lots of ritual, hierarchy and sexual symbolism. no surprises that people's sexuality expresses itself in the only way available. there have been a few really decent books written on the church's institutionalised sex abuse.

the idea that gay people have tried to 'infiltrate' the church is hilarious. why would they need to do that? modern society is way more accepting of out-and-out gay people, leading normal mainstream lives, than it is of perverted and sexually corrupted (by their own estimation) priests. bizarre thesis.

why do you want to exonerate the catholic church so much? this reeks of stockholm syndrome or something. the white man doesn't love you. they are not going to accept your second-world ass no matter how much fealty you pay. let it go.

Last edited by uziq (2019-06-06 05:43:01)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
Uzi proves himself to have been the real racist all along. Most Catholics are non-white. The Catholic Church is the great uniter of mankind. All men are welcomed into the universal church.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

the church creates this environment. the catholic seminary is a gay factory. you take people at the peak of their sexual-reproductive cycle and stuff them away in an enclosed institution with lots of ritual, hierarchy and sexual symbolism. no surprises that people's sexuality expresses itself in the only way available. there have been a few really decent books written on the church's institutionalised sex abuse.
The church doesn't abduct people and "stuff them away", its exactly what they choose.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Uzi proves himself to have been the real racist all along. Most Catholics are non-white. The Catholic Church is the great uniter of mankind. All men are welcomed into the universal church.
yeah, right. keep thinking that. obeisance to the same church doesn’t equal equality. it’s still bizarre you wish to excuse institutional sex crimes and abuse and blame secular gay people who couldn’t give a toss about peasants in the philippines and their superstitions.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

the church creates this environment. the catholic seminary is a gay factory. you take people at the peak of their sexual-reproductive cycle and stuff them away in an enclosed institution with lots of ritual, hierarchy and sexual symbolism. no surprises that people's sexuality expresses itself in the only way available. there have been a few really decent books written on the church's institutionalised sex abuse.
The church doesn't abduct people and "stuff them away", its exactly what they choose.
no shit. but the point is that it’s rules enforce a sexual atmosphere of repression. you have to submit to the code to qualify. people’s faith and wish to take up religion gets admixed with all sorts of biological and hormonal early-life fuck-everything intructions. it’s a very charged atmosphere which is why so many priests have gay relationships. i’m not comparing a seminary to an actual prison.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
Some Muslims beat two lesbians on a bus. Awful. Religion of Peace.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

at least you won't have to watch them kiss?

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