Originally posted by Starrman
I don't disagree with any of that save for Plantinga's conclusion, though I conceed it is a matter of how I personally percieve the universe.
All I was intending to say was that there are less people like RBHILL in the atheist camp.
Raymond Smullyan hypothesized (in his
The Tao Is Silent) that perhaps it is analogous to a hypnotic suggestion, perhaps nurtured and deepened over time by cultural conditioning. And maybe for those of us who cross religious boundaries fairly readily, even as non-theists, but nevertheless find some profound aesthetic value in various religious expressions, and spend so much of our time there—
—perhaps in such a case, the suggestion remains, not in terms of a particular religious content, but in how we think about things (as well as the aesthetics).
I’ve been thinking of this in light of the Zen counsel, in meditation to ignore any conceptual imagery or content that arises as
makyo, bedeviling illusions. The trick may be, in meditation, not to re-hypnotize oneself. Also, how koans may act to crack the hypnotic shell; and why, once one has experienced clear-mind, one (okay, myself) almost compulsively seeks to return to what is a more familiar way of viewing the world, over and over again... But I’ve also wondered if one could use a self-hypnotic suggestion to unravel all prior suggestions or conditioning...