The Theist - Agnostic - Atheist Poll

 

Doesn't this belief conflict with your assertion that the Bible must be understood in the conext of its time? Is this your logical reconciling of miracles in the Bible, or are you recognizing that the Bible introduces the concept of higher physical dimensions? If it doesn't then does this belief of yours conflict with your goal of trying to interpret the Bible as a product of its times, supposing you're applying concepts to understanding it that its writers may not have had any idea about. (Though it could not be entirely unheard of, given that the concept of atomism was in a primitive form among certain ancient Greek philosophers.)

 

All agnostics are atheists, they just don't know it yet.

 

This is what I think: Meditation is controlled thinking, nothing can come out that wasn't derived from data put there in the first place by our nine (or 21) human senses. Using this sensory data we perceive the world and build our own spacial model of what we sense. We also use that perception to extrapolate what we cannot sense directly, we can be creative with the known data to build abstract spacial models, some that fit the sensory data, and some that deliberately do not fit it, we can interpolate between two or more sets of known data and create scenarios that work for any missing data or values for missing data that fit the working models. 

 

So even abstract thoughts (and imagination, intuition, visions, revelations, etc) are based on (and described by) information our senses detected and transmitted to the brain where they were stored as memories for latter collation, consolidation and comparison. That data-processing can be conscious, unconscious or subconscious, it can be concentrated through contemplation, meditation, REM sleep or simply thinking about something, it can appear to be "out of the blue" or intuitive, it can take apparent short cuts and leaps of faith, but it is all derived from what we took in. Using our senses of hearing and vision we can accumulate information derived from the computations of other brains and add that to our store of knowledge whether we understand it or not, whether we believe it or not - as long as that other brain could relate it by a process of communication in a form we could perceive and process ourselves. Therefore any ideas, notions, concepts that we dream-up come from our own minds, they are the product of what we already knew and understood, even if we do not understand the process that put them there or the merest fraction of that information individually.

 

For example we all know what a rainbow is because we were taught at an early age by our parents & teachers the name of the band of coloured light that appears in the sky when it rains and most of us understand (to some degree or other) the physics of refraction because we all have seen the cover of Dark Side Of The Moon and remember some of our physics lessons at school. We know it is not the simple result of sunlight through a single raindrop because our logic tells us that a) the raindrop is moving and b) the refraction and reflection of a single drop cannot produce a rainbow of sufficient luminosity to be seen across the whole sky, therefore we can deduce that it is the effect of sunlight on a myriad of raindrops; simply understanding the geometry of light refraction can tell us that each colour band is the effect of sunlight on a group of raindrops in close proximity so that the incident light is at the same angle, the same geometry will tell us that the angles are different for each wavelength and that what we see is determined by the angle between us, the drops and the sun; because the rainbow moves when we do it tells us that each of us sees a slightly different rainbow in a slightly different position in the sky; that the coloured light hitting the eye has taken a slightly different path, refracting and reflected through different sets of raindrops; we know from our understanding of how the eye perceives colour that each wavelength excites one or more of the three types of cone-receptors in the eye; we know that this stimulus transmitted to the brain via the nervous system and the whole image is recognised and by comparisons with memories we can name that phenomena and understand how it is made. Using all that information we can make a myriad of conceptual deductions, for example we can guess that creatures with different eyes to us will not see the rainbow as we do; that light from a different sun will produce a different rainbow; that if we stand in the right place at the right time we should see a rainbow over a waterfall and that armed with a strong spotlight and a lawn sprinkler we can make our own rainbows in the middle of the night. We also know from memories of things we read in a book that a long time ago people looking at a rainbow and comparing it with observations from refracted light in crystals created experiments to calculate all the maths and physics that we now take for granted, and from that other people used that maths and physics and the same experimental apparatus to observe the light radiation from burning chemicals and other people used that information to observe the light from distant stars and deduce their chemical composition and that someone else could look up in the sky and have an innate understanding of how light works and how it interacts by sheer careful observation without understanding any of the maths and physics, others can make abstract assumptions of covenants with a supreme being or use it to form a spiritual bridge across the Milky-Way between star-crossed lovers (an old Chinese legend), or some can simply paint not just what they see, but also what they feel:

 

 

Awesome indeed.