music and spirituality

[St Leo]

And many (including myself) use the term atheist only because it's an easy convenient label and generally all that people are looking for when they ask what your religion is, whereas discussing your speculations on the Fundamental Nature Of Ultimate Holy Reality generally makes people start looking at their watches in an obvious manner.

Why not go for Agnostic instead? Because of you people, I have to call myself a Hardc0re Atheist, a True Atheist, an Evangelical Atheist, or an Atheist Extremist.:P

What about....we know the human brain works on principles of "vibrations" (brain waves).

Indeed. In other news, light is the same thing as sound and xrays are the same thing as ocean waves.

Whether it's the placebo effect or not, it's given some interesting results.

I am sure it has. Weird sensory input always does. It's just that it doesn't directly interface with the brain proper.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Originally posted by St Leo
And many (including myself) use the term atheist only because it's an easy convenient label and generally all that people are looking for when they ask what your religion is, whereas discussing your speculations on the Fundamental Nature Of Ultimate Holy Reality generally makes people start looking at their watches in an obvious manner.

Why not go for Agnostic instead? Because of you people, I have to call myself a Hardc0re Atheist, a True Atheist, an Evangelical Atheist, or an Atheist Extremist.:P

Just to make sure that I won't be yelling at you loudly for naught... please define the word "agnostic".

[Buck Birdseed]

Originally posted by Elok
Buck: Does our ability to masturbate disprove the existence of love too?

Why do you seem to think that an emotion is worth less because the explanantion for it is naturalistic?

Do hallucinations of trees by acid users mean that trees are never real?

It'd certainly make me doubt the acid user's account if he told me he'd seen trees.

[Ben Kenobi]

"Surely, if sound can produce complete spiritual abandonment, mere simple vibrations in air, then surely that if anything is proof that God does not exist"

The key is in the word: complete.

Music can be spiritually moving, but to say that music completely encompasses the entirety of spirituality is completely false.

Surely, one can experience God without music.

[Dis]

of course, there are other art forms as well.

What would the world be without art of any kind?

[Gatekeeper]

I enjoy a variety of music, depending on my mood. Sometimes it's "spiritual" music — i.e., instrumentals, sounds of nature, "New Age" — and others times it's more conventional music such as country or soft rock/pop.

What's that old saying? Music calms the savage beast. Yep, that applies to humanity as well, thin veneer of civilization or not.

Gatekeeper

[Elok]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
Why do you seem to think that an emotion is worth less because the explanantion for it is naturalistic?
It'd certainly make me doubt the acid user's account if he told me he'd seen trees.

On an off-note, I just thought of an interesting motto for the OT: "This Space for Rant." What do you guys think?
Anyway, my point is not the value of any emotion, but that the ability to artificially cause a naturally occuring reaction to an unrelated stimulus says nothing about anything. Anything I "seem to think" is probably an artifact of perception on your end. We're only on the second page or so anyway. Let's not get personal until our little relationship has gone at least four pages more, okay?
You can OD on pills until you go grand mal, but that says nothing about epilepsy. It just shows that you used too much medication and suffered similar symptoms to those of epilepsy.
You can look at "The School of Athens" and perceive nonexistent distance, but you can still trust your eyes to show perspective in the real world. You've simply seen the unreal due to a very clever artistic technique.
In much the same vein, listening to music may be very similar to a religious experience(though my reactions to music and to moments of clarity are wildly disparate), but that says nothing about either of the two.

[Dis]

also I've heard about people who do not like music at all. What's up with that?

[Giant_Squid]

Why not go for Agnostic instead? Because of you people, I have to call myself a Hardc0re Atheist, a True Atheist, an Evangelical Atheist, or an Atheist Extremist.:P

Because when you say agnostic, people tend to think you mean something like "Well, I don't know whether the Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever) God exists or not...maybe He does, and maybe He doesn't" whereas I'm reasonably sure it doesn't work like that. Agnosticism seems to imply that you're still working within the traditional religious spectrum of "one of these religions is true" or "God doesn't exist at all in any form", which isn't what I'm trying to convey.

Indeed. In other news, light is the same thing as sound and xrays are the same thing as ocean waves

Sound gets converted into brain waves by the sense of hearing. I'm not saying the sound waves pierce your skull and have some kind of bizarre effect on your cells, I'm suggesting the possibility that maybe the brain waves produced by the sound waves affect other brain waves, which to me at least doesn't sound too far out.

[TCO]

Do you still beleive in Pyramid power? Has your Mom gotten over your poor behavior at Death Valley? Are you gay? Or just asexual?

[HolyWarrior]

Originally posted by Dissident
also I've heard about people who do not like music at all. What's up with that?

"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted."
William Shakespeare--Merchant of Venice: Act V Scene 1