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Originally Posted by RedFox
The in between part is the flat line scan. The pattern of neural connections are still there, just with no activity. If oxygen and fuel can get flowing again through the brain soon enough, it'd not decay and destroy the connections. The near death experiences happen when there is still firing, either during the shutting down or the restarting part, or both.
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But what I've been trying to get at is, what about people who are aware of events that occur during the time of complete shutdown? Can we truly prove when the near-death experiences are occurring--that there is not an upload that takes place as the brain restarts in which information gained by the spirit during the completely shut-down time is written into the neural connections?
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I think that people project their values onto their god(s). Who knows? With people like Fred Phelps out there, maybe there'd be somebody whose vision of a perfect god would mean a god that is a lying backstabber, at least to other people.
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I would say that Phelps has fallen victim to deception--be it self-deception or that from an outer source...his idea just doesn't logically work. And I do think that while not all matters dealing with God are logical, I think the vast preponderence actually are. To be clear, I do not think I have a perfect grasp of what God is like--I know better than to think I do. Nor do I think my logic is perfect. That's part of why I engage in discussions like this, to try to refine my understanding.
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That makes it look like god-dom is passed like family names can be.
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I'm not sure that's what it's getting at, though. I think the suggestion this is making is that no Person of the Trinity is inferior to the other (the Son is not lesser than the Father, for instance).
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The purpose of helping others is to hold people together, reducing the chances of groups falling apart within your lifetime or in the near future when younger people you know and people they will know would be alive. There is a drive to aid the survivial of one's descendants and members of one's group, which could include genetically unrelated, but memetically related people. In this global age, there are people who make the whole planet's population of their concern.
As we learned about the world, we've found that the end is likely to lie in the far future. We're not ignoring it because we know that our genes and memes would get diluted or changed. That is beyond our control. The drive to help others is primary for the people living now and in the near future, when things would still be familiar to us.
The world of the far future would seem different enough so there is less feeling of connection. We would still have a low-level connection to the people of the far future, because they'd still be people even if their cultures and gene pools would be different. So, we'd still help them in a basic, but important way, by doing things like reducing pollution to leave them a cleaner planet.
That world would belong to the people of that time, not us or descendants we would recognize as members of our families and cultures. If they face the end of humanity, it'd not be a problem for our family lines and cultures because those things would be greatly changed or gone by then.
There doesn't have to be an end-purpose for humanity, except to survive for as long as possible. It may be sad that humanity will end, but not too sad because, here, it says that over 99 percent of species that ever existed on Earth are already gone. Extinction isn't really unusual in geological time. We'd just be joining the ranks of the 99 percent already extinct.
We can create our own purposes for humanity through things like culture, which includes religion, althrough some religions could make their followers think that the religion dictates the only true purposes of life to hold onto followers to aid its survivial as a memeplex.
If we feel good about doing things hurtful to others, of course, the others would want to stop us and would try if they could.
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Looking at this, you seem to take a very immediately-focused view of the world. What I've been trying to get at is that if you suggest we must
create purpose--a thing that is artificial and ultimately meaningless--it is a form of self-deception. It ignores the true reality of the universe...we may try to survive as long as possible but ultimately we will fail at some point.
Yet often I see atheists (maybe not you in particular, but I've seen this in other forums) make the accusation that those of us who believe are essentially deceiving ourselves in suggesting that there is a higher purpose to things. This is sometimes used as the launching pad for an attack on the intellect of believers (that we must be inferior somehow). What I am trying to say is that if the atheist believes it necessary to create a purpose that is not real--that is to say, not an inherent property of the universe--then one cannot distinguish oneself from believers in that one is somehow more grounded in reality than the other.
I know I'm not going point-by-point with each paragraph you wrote, but I think this will suffice.