Laird
Member
G'day all,
This is a proposal for a new forum, provisionally titled "Reasoning about reality", but of course open to your (especially @Alex's) suggestions/alternatives. Why this new forum? Because it seems to me that there are many threads on this board, across its multiple forums, asking, or ending up in the question, roughly stated, "What in the world is really going on in this reality in which we find ourselves, and how can we assess the possible answers based upon what we know about it?"
The most prototypical of these threads, especially if judged by its opening post(s), is @manjit's 2014 Speculation on the Nature of Reality. A little more recently (last year) we had a similarly-motivated thread by @Steve, I Think I've Found An Answer. @Alan Amsberg's 2014 thread, Do the entities sending us messages sometimes lie?, especially from page 2 onwards, gets into this speculative-reasoning-upon-reality theme too. Then, much more recently on this theme, we have the threads Gnosticism - The world is a vampire, sent to drain? Secret destroyers hold you up to the flames? by @Sciborg_S_Patel, Debate on British morning TV between Psychic and Magician (especially from page 3 onwards) by @Roberta, and, currently, There is no evil...? by @Selina. No doubt there are others that I have missed.
What do you guys, especially Alex, think? Is it worth splitting off a dedicated forum for these sort of exploring-what-might-really-be-going-on-here-especially-given-the-evidence discussions?
Here, for reference, from manjit's 2014 thread, featuring manjit's writing, is a sample of the more interesting type of discussion/question-raising that could be had in a dedicated forum:
This is a proposal for a new forum, provisionally titled "Reasoning about reality", but of course open to your (especially @Alex's) suggestions/alternatives. Why this new forum? Because it seems to me that there are many threads on this board, across its multiple forums, asking, or ending up in the question, roughly stated, "What in the world is really going on in this reality in which we find ourselves, and how can we assess the possible answers based upon what we know about it?"
The most prototypical of these threads, especially if judged by its opening post(s), is @manjit's 2014 Speculation on the Nature of Reality. A little more recently (last year) we had a similarly-motivated thread by @Steve, I Think I've Found An Answer. @Alan Amsberg's 2014 thread, Do the entities sending us messages sometimes lie?, especially from page 2 onwards, gets into this speculative-reasoning-upon-reality theme too. Then, much more recently on this theme, we have the threads Gnosticism - The world is a vampire, sent to drain? Secret destroyers hold you up to the flames? by @Sciborg_S_Patel, Debate on British morning TV between Psychic and Magician (especially from page 3 onwards) by @Roberta, and, currently, There is no evil...? by @Selina. No doubt there are others that I have missed.
What do you guys, especially Alex, think? Is it worth splitting off a dedicated forum for these sort of exploring-what-might-really-be-going-on-here-especially-given-the-evidence discussions?
Here, for reference, from manjit's 2014 thread, featuring manjit's writing, is a sample of the more interesting type of discussion/question-raising that could be had in a dedicated forum:
The question is, just how "benevolent" or "divine" (with all that term's loaded positive baggage)....or *honest* is the true nature of the many varieties of indisputably related phenomena we are dealing with (NDEs, OBEs, mediumship, reincarnation cases, UFOs, UFO abductions, spiritual practice "inner experiences", visionary experiences, ghosts, after-life communications, djinn/fairie/elementals, channeling, synchronicities etc etc).
Having both experienced & researching these areas to quite some depth, we are certainely left with some uncomfortable questions due to the blatant and often fundamental contradictions, negative after-effects, frauds etc. Without question there is a "trickster" element here....though it is not out of the question this "trickster" element may be a control-mechanism (in a "positive" sense) to prevent our true nature & reality becoming so obvious that it obviates the purpose of this human life (only through conditioned ignorance & forgetfulness can we participate in this world in any meaningful way.....for eg. if a "pure" unquestionable manifestation of the "divine", like Jesus say, appeared in todays small information-driven world, and raised the dead, walked on water etc and then posted it to youtube, then humanity would no longer be as it is, and we would not have the opportunities that we do to live unique individualised lives....even Dawkins would be a "believer", and we wouldn't want that would we!)