I want to know the truth

[Truth3y3seek]

If atheism is true, and all religion is crap, as well as no afterlife, how would over explain things pertaining to having deja Vu? Feeling like you've been in a place that you've never to in this lifetime, or feeling like you've had a same conversation over and over again. For example, I have a memory of being in pre-school looking out the window across the street at a cemetery thinking (acknowledgement so to speak): "I am just starting out my life, but one day, I will be in that grave." How would a young child even know anything about life and death? Unless there is reincarnation?

 

[*SD*]

Welcome to the league!

There's a fair bit to unpack there but I'll try to keep this post brief. I don't know what the explanation is for deja-vu, or if there even is one, but whether there is or not is sort of irrelevant. Not being able to explain something is not an indicator that there is a God, afterlife, reincarnation or any of the other things you mentioned.

Further, what you described isn't really the deja-vu phenomenon, it's just a memory and there's nothing particularly remarkable about it. Children learn from an early age that we don't last forever, maybe a family member, or pet dies and that cues up the talk from the parents/guardians explaining that we die. Usually done in a flowery way, but at the very least it would be explained that our physical bodies aren't everlasting.

Your final statement/question is a non sequitur, a child, as above, can know that we die for any number of reasons, it doesn't follow that reincarnation must be real in order to know this. It's also an appeal to incredulity, basically "I can't imagine how this could happen/be so it must be X"(God/souls/spirits/afterlives/ghosts etc) - that's just not how reason works.

Again, welcome to the league, we hope you enjoy the site.

 

[We are Borg]

Deja-vu is when you mind works on different speeds as a child i got them all the time. Its ms work between what you saw or heard or both but your mind was not in sync with everything. Its one explanation but there are more then one.

Children from the age of 3 know that people die but they do not fully understand the concept what happens. As parents you tell something that is age appropriate by saying there a star in the sky and watch over us. Later they ask again and because they are older you tell something else this continue to around age 12 where they know the full concept of death.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

If atheism is true, and all religion is crap, as well as no afterlife, how would over explain things pertaining to having deja Vu?

The question is a non sequitur. All religions could be crap, and an afterlife could still exist. Besides, there are atheistic religions, so even if atheism were true, it would not follow that all religions are crap.

Beyond that, what does deja vu have to do with this at all? From my understanding, it is just happening in your mind.

For example, I have a memory of being in pre-school looking out the window across the street at a cemetery thinking (acknowledgement so to speak): "I am just starting out my life, but one day, I will be in that grave." How would a young child even know anything about life and death? Unless there is reincarnation?

It would help if you looked into memory and how bad it actually is, but I could have been that child. I have a large extended family, and at least once a year for my whole life, I have attended funerals. I had a working understanding of death from a very young age because of that.

 

[Wolfbitn]

i see that Aron is pretending to be everyone that answered this thread... how pathetic

 

[*SD*]

Well, he's not me, and he isn't HWIN or borg either, so you're already demonstrably wrong. Please stop being silly and disruptive. Thanks.

 

[Wolfbitn]

uh huh ok, sure lol... bro youre pathetic, no wonder this place is dead... just like your brand

 

[We are Borg]

@Wolfbitn please listen to admins.

 

[*SD*]

uh huh ok, sure lol... bro youre pathetic, no wonder this place is dead... just like your brand

Your weird assumption is entirely without basis and wholly without evidence. Do you just enjoy believing ridiculous and demonstrably wrong stupid crap? Any one of us can easily prove we aren't Aron, but we aren't going to because you clearly aren't worth the time of day. Stop derailing other people's threads with your delusional nonsense.

 

[trokolisz]

how would over explain things pertaining to having deja Vu?

To be honest deja Vu isn't explained by any afterlife either. It could be explained by time travel and visions of the future,( im not too creative to think of a third possibility), but neither of them require afterlife or God either.
Even if we don't have or don't care about a scientific explanation for deja Vu, it does not point to a God, so i think it is unreasonable to worship one specific God or religion for it. Until one God claims credit for it it could be any of them. And it is easier to worship none then all, and there is the possibility that none of the religions got it right so far, so it is even impossible to worship all, and most God would be insulted by you doing so.

 

[Desertphile]

If atheism is true....

Er, atheism is *NOT* true and no atheist has ever said it is.

 

[Sparhafoc]

If atheism is true, and all religion is crap, as well as no afterlife, how would over explain things pertaining to having deja Vu? Feeling like you've been in a place that you've never to in this lifetime, or feeling like you've had a same conversation over and over again. For example, I have a memory of being in pre-school looking out the window across the street at a cemetery thinking (acknowledgement so to speak): "I am just starting out my life, but one day, I will be in that grave." How would a young child even know anything about life and death? Unless there is reincarnation?

Hi T - hope you don't mind me not typing out your username every time!

If you don't mind, I just want to break some things down.

First of all, atheism + truth. Atheism is a position that really should just be considered the null position. Either a god or multiple gods exist, or they don't. Atheism doesn't purport to offer a truth claim, or a series of positions other than there being no gods.

Thus, let's say deja vu is a real phenomenon, and let us even say that there is some mystical supernatural cause at work in deja vu... even then, it's not clear why this is relevant either to atheism or theism. If there's a cosmos of unknown forces, then why would you seek to make anthropomorphize them?

Atheism would have nothing relevant to say about deja vu. Perhaps some religions do, I can't think of any off the top of my head, but then religions make an awful lot of mutually incompatible claims.

Personally, I don't identify as an atheist - definitionally, I may well be one, but my non-belief in divine entities is not really very interesting for me personally, nor does it motivate the way I think about the rest of life, the universe and everything.

I am, however, a skeptical person by nature and by training.

From a skeptical position, I find your arguments interesting but also somewhat complicated as they contain relationships that you seem to have assumed rather than sought to establish. The main example of this is the last 2 sentences. You wonder how a child could know anything about life and death - unless there is reincarnation. I don't see how the two follow or necessarily have any relationship.

Children grow up in a culture, and they continually absorb cultural referrants at an astonishingly speedy rate. The concepts of life and death are routinely raised in most cultures. For example, a child may have a pet fish, feed it, watch it do stuff, then one day it dies and gets flushed down the toilet ceremoniously and lovingly buried. The child sees cartoons in which Wiley Coyote falls off a cliff and his ghost floats up from his body, or watches adult programing and sees actors 'die' on stage. Every child I've ever met has a concept of life and death through their interaction with society: with their parents, their pets, their friends, their schools, through general media, and just through the experiences they encounter in the real world.

However, let's assume for the sake of your argument that reincarnation is real: how then, if people's 'spirits' continue through a cycle of bodies do they manage to retain memories? Memories are stored in the neural circuitry of the brain, and that brain is basically just meat. When you die, the meat decays, and all those neural circuits dissipate, all the memories disappear. If reincarnation is real, then why do you believe that memories would persist from one incarnation to the next? If that were the case, and if reincarnation were real, then I think we'd all be quite well aware of it through having access to memories from our dozens of previous lives.

The same lack of coherent mechanism underpins your idea behind deja vu and an afterlife. An afterlife could be real without deja vu being related, just as deja vu could be real without it providing any justification at all for belief in an afterlife.

My personal take on deja vu is that there's some form of time lag occurring between your perception of the world and your brain's processing of it. You observe, data goes into your neural circuitry, the brain starts processing the incoming data, but your awareness - your mind - perceives the brain's processes as a memory rather than as an occurring event. Essentially, you're seeing a mental echo of the events which are happening now, rather than a recollection of the past. I can't really justify that position to any satisfactory degree, but were we to compare our two approaches, I think mine would at least require the introduction of fewer unknown entities than yours would. Mine wouldn't need to posit the supernatural, or forces beyond our detection. Mine could potentially - if thought through more and worded appropriately - be testable, and consequently falsifiable. Yours would remain forever a belief.

I think beliefs can be wonderful and inspiring things, but we should also be aware that the mere act of believing something doesn't confer any veridical status - hold onto your beliefs gently, and be prepared to let them go the moment they're no longer useful.

 

[Desertphile]

If atheism is true....

Er, atheism is not true and no atheist has ever said or written that atheism is true.

... and all religion is crap....

That is a demonstrable fact, given "crap" is a metaphor for "bullshit."

... as well as no afterlife....

Because there is no evidence for such thing as an "afterlife," other than being dead and rotting, the asinine hypothesis may be rejected out-of-hand. If you and/or your death cult wishes people to think there is an "afterlife," your first step is to produce evidence for an "afterlife."

... how would over explain things pertaining to having deja Vu? ....

Deja Vu: when one brain hemisphere lags behind the other hemisphere in observations, visual and audio. For most humans it is the left brain hemisphere that lags behind the right hemisphere.

Magic does not apply.

Welcome to the league!

There's a fair bit to unpack there but I'll try to keep this post brief. I don't know what the explanation is for deja-vu, or if there even is one, but whether there is or not is sort of irrelevant. Not being able to explain something is not an indicator that there is a God, afterlife, reincarnation or any of the other things you mentioned. [....]

My observation is that anyone and everyone who calls itself "truth seeker" is a liar: they do not seek truth--- they are terrified of that which is true. They have surrendered all desires to accept the truth.

As for Deja Vu, this is a product of left and right brain hemispheres not synchronous with each other.