[Seth-Trips] Fwd: [SANE] - 4/25 - God, The Limbic System and Knowledge

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Ca's "Students for a Nonreligious Ethos" student group has a lot of
interesting events under its belt, including a Richard Dawkins speech.
Here's a speech tomorrow by Burl Grey, who actually was an atheist in the
foxhole!  It's on the UC Berkeley campus.

Students for A Nonreligious Ethos wrote:
>
> The next SANE meeting will be Wednesday, April 25, in 220 Wheeler Hall at
> 7:00 PM. It will be a presentation and discussion by Burl Grey entitled
> "God, The Limbic System and Knowledge: How our cognitive blind spot
> threatens civilization." Burl Grey is a 77-year old SANE community member
> and benefactor who has lived quite an interesting life, banished from his
> home at age 14 for being an atheist, was an atheist in many foxholes in WWII
> (1944-45), and accredits a non-religious outlook to saving his life. He is
> also member of the American Society for Cybernetics.
>
> ***
> a brief abstract (from Burl):
> It is significant that sacred propositions and numinous experiences are the
> inverse of each other. Ultimate sacred postulates are discursive but their
> significata are not material. Numinous experiences are immediately material
> (the actual physical and psychic states) but they are not discursive.
> Ultimate sacred postulates are UNFALSIFIABLE and numinous experiences are
> UNDENIABLE. Thus, in the union of the sacred and the numinous the most
> abstract conceptions are bound to the immediate and undeniable experience.
> This results in a remarkable spectacle: The unfalsifiable supported by the
> undeniable, yields the unquestionable, which transforms the arbitrary and
> the conventional into the correct, the necessary and the natural.
>
> a broken-down abstract (attempt by Alex):
> Scriptural propositions and self-professed spiritual experiences are inverse
> of one another: ultimate scriptural postulates give no material form to
> spirituality, while self-professed experiences are very much rooted in
> material occurrences. Scripture is by this basis unfalsifiable (and
> untestable), and spiritual experiences are undeniable. So, through this
> strange union, abstract, immaterial conceptions are tied in to immediate and
> material experiences. This results in a remarkable spectacle: The
> unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable, yields the unquestionable, which
> transforms the arbitrary and the conventional into the correct, the
> necessary and the natural.
>
> ***
>
> While the above is a bit dense, knowing Burl, it should be fairly
> interesting, as he's one sharp, friendly guy. He also runs a website at
> http://burlgrey.com/ devoted to "Systems Epistemology, identity,
> relationship, love, community and ecology."
>
> Very few, if any, other SANE members have quite as much life experience to
> base one's worldview on, and I know for sure that *I* don't have any stories
> about being pinned down by Nazi machine gun fire.


Forwarded to Seth-Trips by Sumana Harihareswara
teacher and student at the University of California, Berkeley