Describe these concepts with your words:

Atheshits need not answer the question as it’s obvious that they lack the intellectual vocabulary to discuss any experience of the mystical

It's all the same thing to me bro

all spooks

I can’t imagine going through life thinking I don’t have a soul.

Isn't soul, spirit and consciousness the same thing? Or is soul/spirit supposed to be the astral/etheric bodies?

cringe but truthpilled

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Did Pascal deny the soul? Isn't that hard to do as a Jansenist?

No he didn't. But he doubted, like every human.

That's of the time, either way I don't see it as representative of his views

Neither you nor anyone else has experienced "the mystical", but it's fine if you think you have.
From my end, it seems more surprising to assume souls exist. You can't demonstrate that they do, and supposing they do doesn't make the world make more sense.

>but it’s fine if you think you have
Can you tell the difference between genuine love for your captor and Stockholm syndrome? Because I sure as hell can’t. How is it any different with spirituality? “Thinking” you’ve experienced the mystical and experiencing it are the same thing dummy

>atheists lack the intellectual vocabulary to discuss any experience of the mystical
so much this lol.
as a former atheist myself (we were all young once) this is exactly what it is, a lack of experience, which equates to a lack of vocabulary.

I’m that user and I’d actually still consider myself an atheist, but I think it’s naive to assume that mystical/spiritual experiences aren’t “real” when so many people are motivated to action because of them. If these experiences have no basis in reality, then why is it that a religious experience is statistically the best cure for alcoholism? The addict who has a spiritual revelation and gives up his bad habits isn’t doing so through their own free will, to them it feels like submitting to a force beyond or bigger than themselves.

How? What makes you a believer? I've been struggling for years, reading the Bible and studying Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and others, but I've lost all drive or motivation to continue. The conclusion I've come to is that I don't have the 'gift of faith', and that I'm just aesthetically attracted to religion. Pray for me.

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>Soul
An common error in perception/understanding of experience
>Spirit
the parts of a being that go deeper than the physical/material form
>Consciousness
an illusory magic show
>Mind
combo of intertwined mental processes (sense perceptions, thoughts, conceptual proliferation, unconscious processes, averse/desirous reactions to sense perceptions)

When people talk about the mystical, I assume they're talking about things "outside" the physical realm, something that transcends the world as we experience it. If your mystical event is a purely physical event that you assign great importance to, how can you distinguish mystical from non-mystical events? This seems to make the mystical property totally impotent. The same line of reasoning applies to the idea that "God causes everything." Otherwise, for non-physical entities to interact with physical entities, you need a relation to causally link those entities together. You can propose one if you like, but since it won't stand up, we can continue. If the physical world is causally closed, then to believe you've experienced the mystical is to deceive yourself. In this way, thinking you've experienced the mystical and actually experiencing it are two different things, because one is impossible.

not the user you're replying to.
I personally would recommed "Wounded by Love" a collectoin of interviews and stories of Elder Porphyrios. The simplistic nature of this barely educated man who reached sainthood is Orthodoxy summed up in a few lines.

>soul
your spirit
>spirit
your soul
>consciousness
your soul
>mind
your soul

/thread

Illusions have real consequences. I'm glad that people get some utility out of religion, especially if it makes them better people. It's not relevant, however, to the ontological question of whether the mystical/spiritual is real or not.

Free will is also an illusion, btw.

>how can you distinguish mystical from non-mystical events? This seems to make the mystical property totally impotent
Not necessarily. One might make the same mistake about Spinoza's "God or Nature", substance, whatever you want to call it. The relation you're looking for is the relationship between substance and mode, or that which can only exist and be conceived of through another. The mystical, conceived in this way, becomes something immanent to and inseparable from the structure of reality itself. God is not some creator independent of his creation, he is both matter (substance) and the matter at hand (attribute/mode).

Spinoza's innovation was to construct an idea of a god that was virtually indistinguishable from the atheistic universe we already exist in, saturating it with divinity in the process. I'm not going to attempt to convince you because it inevitably boils down to a question of faith, the only thing I could do is point you to William Blake's poetry and wish you the best. It is irrelevant as to whether the mystical is real or not; the right question to ask is how can I use this experience to actualise things that would otherwise remain dormant? Take Joan of Arc for example– If a mystical experience produces something new in the world, who are you to deny its "real" or actualised existence?

Frojjjjjoo

>It's not relevant, however, to the ontological question of whether the mystical/spiritual is real or not
Why not? There is no way for us to know or predict the ways in which the divine or the mystical manifests itself. Scientific methodology cannot confirm or deny the embodied "reality" of a mystical experience, it can only comment on external observations. There is no metric for what should qualify, apart from maybe statistical outliers (IE. miracles). So I would argue that if these personal experiences have definite and large-scale consequences on the world, then there is always a case to be made in favour of it.

>Free will is also a delusion
ftfy. Just like schizophrenic paranoia and demonic possession. Reality becomes irrelevant when you are no longer in control of your own mind and body, which is the essential kernel of the determinist argument.

So if I murder someone and claim "the devil made me do it", is the devil 'real and actualised' enough to get me off the hook? No, of course not. While I wouldn't go out of my way to disabuse people of benign illusions that benefit them, it's obviously still important for us to distinguish fantasy from reality in an intellectually honest and logically consistent manner.

I'm not familiar with Spinoza's work, so I might run into some points that are already dealt with here. My worry is that by "saturating [the world] with divinity" you rob God of any real power. You really whittle any claim of divinity down to an axiom that doesn't allow you distinguish God-things from non-God-things, making the divine property impossible to point out.

On Joan of Arc, I don't deny the reality of her experience, I just want to contest its nature and the utility of framing experiences as mystical in the present day.

I think this comes down to an aesthetic preference for how you prefer to conceive of the background of the world. I don't find it useful to include the divine in mine, because it involves fewer commitments, and those commitments that divinity adds don't improve my ability to understand the world.

>is the devil 'real and actualised' enough to get me off the hook? No, of course not
It wouldn't and shouldn't get you off the hook, that's not my argument. My point is that if humanity, morality, reason, consciousness, etc. are all modes or attributes of the one substance (which we should agree on, if as a materialist you see consciousness as an emergent property of matter), then its simply a question of whether or not you believe your actions are determined by natural law or God (either way, everything is already predetermined). My point is simply that there is no functional difference between Spinoza's God-as-substance and the atheistic universe, there is only the interpretative lens which dictates which invisible hand we invest in.

It's not relevant because it isn't evidence. If my igloo melts and I say it's because aliens zapped it with their spacegun, that doesn't mean it wasn't actually the sun. Your argument is basically 'anything could be the case, so we can't discount anything', but this unreasonably indiscriminant attitude erodes the basis of all knowledge. Furthemore it's dishonest -- you don't actually live this way. You assess most knowledge in your life on the basis of evidence and probability, but suspend these logical standards when it comes to certain questions you're sentimental about.

How can reality ever be irrelevant. You're perspective isn't very coherent.

Then the obvious question is why default to the more complicated (as in extra steps of assumption) 'God' as opposed to natural law? Clearly the notion of God isn't as neutral as you're pretending it is in this specific instance... You invest in God's hand because to you it represents something more -- not equivalent -- to natural law. You're being disingenuous.

>It's not relevant because it isn't evidence
I'm not trying to provide evidence. I've said before I have no intention of convincing you because it's a twin-pincered question of faith and perspective, is right in that its an aesthetic preference as much as it is a metaphysical one. However, if we define God according to spinoza's logic, then there's no evidence as to why a materialistic universe is more likely than one without god, as both are functionally indistinguishable. You should also be aware that Spinoza was ostracised because of the way his Ethics suspends the judgement between atheism and theism, even if he himself might have swung one way or the other. He was always the OG agnostic

>You invest in God's hand because to you it represents something more -- not equivalent -- to natural law
Spinoza literally defines God as "“the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator”. You're making a lot of hyperbolic assumptions about what god represents to me that can't really be traced back to anything I've said. All I've argued is that there is no functional difference between your reality and mine, its simply just a question of how you tint your glasses.

come back and take the Explanatory gap Pill.

>Soul
where all the immaterial me moves
>Spirit
something to do with my will
>Consciousness
awareness
>Mind
where everything gets processed and interpreted

Then calling it 'God' is a pointless artifice. You know full well that it's a loaded term -- an anthropocentric projection. If there's no functional difference, then why is the nomenclature important to you? It's important to me, because I recognize that terms like 'God', 'mystical/magical', 'spiritual' and even 'metaphysical' are employed as intentionally vague and undefined smokescreens for whatever fairytales people prefer to believe in. Why do you care if it's called natural law instead?

Also, what does faith have to do with anything, and what would there be to convince me of, if we're just talking nomenclature?