Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Fun. I was thinking recently that so much “religious experience” makes sense even when only including the emotional, and ignoring altogether physical facts and logic and memory. If you are praying in awe at God, then God can just be a placeholder, and provided the experience of “awe” occurs in relation to your life, it is a very beneficial experience to cultivate. Same with humility (a beneficial and adaptive state), petitions (salience of your desires), sustained worship (the training of our attention), thanks (the training of appreciation for things we ought to be appreciate of), apology (salience of wrongs), favor (confidence). We could be tempted to call a person who cultivates these feelings religious, even if it occurs entirely within one’s emotional activity and with no actual belief in God. And then, if there’s some scholarly theist who believes all the right things but lacks this emotional dimension, we would be tempted to call them totally lacking in God. It’s a fun thought: God as Divine Placeholder. God existing in periphery but lost as soon as we focus, like an object in the dark that can only be seen when we aren’t directly seeing it.
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