• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Search results

  1. Shelter

    Bible friendly only: Theories as parables?

    Well, in science labs you will often hear talk about “finding the story in the data.” Data on its own is just data. To come to a useful understanding, you have to look at what story the data is telling you about nature. Sometimes the same data can be made into different “stories”, which (as we...
  2. Shelter

    Ritual and the brain

    Interesting- I might try that. Is there something about doing this with a group of people instead of alone that makes it especially effective?
  3. Shelter

    Ritual and the brain

    When my husband was in the US Air Force, he mentioned that some returning soldiers were going to the desert to do a ritual to transition back to life on the base. I think it involved burning some stuff and/or scattering it to symbolically transition from deployment to normal life. He said it...
  4. Shelter

    Blindsight and communication

    In one study, a man was blind in the left half of his visual field because of damage to his right visual cortex. His blindsight was found to be more accurate than his own normal vision (and more accurate than other sighted subjects’ normal vision) at a particular visual task. Blindsight: When...
  5. Shelter

    Blindsight and communication

    Certain findings in neuroscience show that our brains know/perceive more than we (our conscious selves) know. Individuals who have damage to certain parts of the brain become cortically blind- their eyes are not damaged, but they are blind because of an inability to process visual signals in...
  6. Shelter

    Fewer Americans are donating to charity — and it may have nothing to do with money

    I haven't donated on Gofundme, but I do think it's a good thing to give directly to people, at least for some of your donations. If you give in person, you don't need a website or any other middleman.
  7. Shelter

    Fewer Americans are donating to charity — and it may have nothing to do with money

    Perhaps that's part of why lower income people give more - they are more likely to be solicited near home, personally know people in need, etc. The article I quoted above also said that wealthy people who live in enclaves full of wealthy people are less likely to give than wealthy people who...
  8. Shelter

    Fewer Americans are donating to charity — and it may have nothing to do with money

    The graph about two-thirds of the way down in the Who Gives article is pretty eye opening. Several of the studies found that low-income Americans donate a higher percentage of their income than any other group except the very rich.
  9. Shelter

    Fewer Americans are donating to charity — and it may have nothing to do with money

    Another article to add to the discussion: Who Gives One of the studies it discusses did break out donations to secular vs religious organizations/charities. It found: "Finer-grain numbers from the PSID show that the faithful don’t just give to religious causes; they are also much more likely...
  10. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    I am coming at this discussion from a slightly different direction. I don’t think people can fly through the air using only their mind. I also think reality is “real” and not caused by consciousness or awareness. But, the problem for me is what we can know given that our minds (and their...
  11. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    Based on mystical experiences (and/or my later attempts to understand them), I have come up with hypotheses that should be testable, but for the most part I don’t have the right level of understanding or expertise to test them myself, or others came up with the same idea first (perhaps decades...
  12. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    I agree that there is a lot of innovative thinking going on, perhaps more so in some fields than others. Biology is very experiment-driven, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It seems like a lot of researchers press forward with more and more experiments without taking a step back to see if...
  13. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    One example of what I mean by “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is the strong tendency among biology and biomedical researchers to look to genetics first to find the answer. We have great and ever-improving tools for genetic and genomic research. As a result, I think many...
  14. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    That’s true, and it is a very good thing. It’s not a perfect process though. If almost everyone currently working in a scientific field has the same misconceptions or the same biases in a certain area, no one will have the insight to correct those biases or step outside the current paradigm...
  15. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    Scientists are human and are affected by all the flaws, cognitive biases, self-centeredness, cultural unawareness, etc. that affect all of us. This includes peer reviewers (I am speaking as a peer reviewer for several journals). And, if there is an unconscious bias that we don’t recognize is...
  16. Shelter

    The Mystic way of knowing (for the skeptics)

    @Swami Are you saying that Eastern thought and meditation can be used to directly make scientific discoveries in all fields of science (geology, biology, etc), without the need for the scientific method? The only area where I would expect it could make a direct contribution would be in the...
  17. Shelter

    Belief and Reality

    I think it’s likely that no one sees reality completely, because our brains evolved to keep us alive, not to show us the truth. It is natural and healthy for us to ignore a lot of reality. Sensory gating (our brain’s process of automatically screening out stimuli that are judged as irrelevant)...
  18. Shelter

    Hello!

    Thanks for the welcomes and nice to meet you all! Those cakes look delicious.
  19. Shelter

    Hello!

    Greetings from Upstate NY! I am Jewish and religious, but don't really fit into any of the denominations. I am an infectious disease biologist (I've worked on human pathogens and crop plant pathogens, but fortunately none that infect both!) and also do some science writing on the side. I'm...
Top