Join Illuminati Membership: 2019

Reiki

Reiki is a form of alternative medicine called energy healing. Reiki practitioners use a technique called palm healing or hands-on healing through which a "universal energy" is said to be transferred through the palms of the practitioner to the patient in order to encourage emotional or physical healing.

Reiki is a pseudoscience, and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles.

It is based on qi ("chi"), which practitioners say is a universal life force, although there is no empirical evidence that such a life force exists.

Clinical research has not shown reiki to be effective as a treatment for any medical condition.There has been no proof of the effectiveness of reiki therapy compared to placebo.

An overview of reiki investigations found that studies reporting positive effects had methodological flaws. The American Cancer Society stated that reiki should not replace conventional cancer treatment, a sentiment echoed by Cancer Research UK and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Developed in Japan in 1922 by Mikao Usui, it has been adapted into varying cultural traditions across the world.

Join the Illuminati https://www.howtojoinilluminati.co.za/
Illuminati symbols https://www.howtojoinilluminati.co.za/symbols-signs-illuminati.html
History of the Illuminati https://www.howtojoinilluminati.co.za/history-of-illuminati.html

Cognitive science of religion

Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences.

The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, neurotheology, developmental psychology, and archaeology.

Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

Although religion has been the subject of serious scientific study since at least the late nineteenth century, the study of religion as a cognitive phenomenon is relatively recent.

While it often relies upon earlier research within anthropology of religion and sociology of religion, cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories.

As such, cognitive science of religion was only made possible by the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of sociobiology and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially evolutionary psychology.

While Dan Sperber foreshadowed cognitive science of religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism, the earliest research to fall within the scope of the discipline was published during the 1980s. Among this work, Stewart E. Guthrie's "A cognitive theory of religion" was significant for examining the significance of anthropomorphism within religion, work that ultimately led to the development of the concept of the hyperactive agency detection device – a key concept within cognitive science of religion.

The real beginning of cognitive science of religion can be dated to the 1990s, however. During that decade a large number of highly influential books and articles were published which helped to lay the foundations of cognitive science of religion.

These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer, Inside the Cult and Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse, and Guthrie's book-length development of his earlier theories in Faces in the Clouds.

In the 1990s, these and other researchers, who had been working independently in a variety of different disciplines, discovered each other's work and found valuable parallels between their approaches, with the result that something of a self-aware research tradition began to coalesce.

By 2000, the field was well-enough defined for Justin L. Barrett to coin the term 'cognitive science of religion' in his article "Exploring the natural foundations of religion".

Since 2000, cognitive science of religion has grown,[citation needed] similarly to other approaches that apply evolutionary thinking to sociological phenomena. Each year more researchers become involved in the field,[citation needed] with theoretical and empirical developments proceeding at a very rapid pace.

The field remains somewhat loosely defined, bringing together as it does researchers who come from a variety of different traditions.

Much of the cohesion in the field comes not from shared detailed theoretical commitments but from a general willingness to view religion in cognitive and evolutionary terms as well as from the willingness to engage with the work of the others developing this field.

A vital role in bringing together researchers is played by the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, formed in 2006

Despite a lack of agreement concerning the theoretical basis for work in cognitive science of religion, it is possible to outline some tendencies. Most significant of these is reliance upon the theories developed within evolutionary psychology.

That particular approach to evolutionary explanations of human behaviour is particularly suitable to the cognitive byproduct explanation of religion that is most popular among cognitive scientists of religion.

This is because of the focus on byproduct and ancestral trait explanations within evolutionary psychology. A particularly significant concept associated with this approach is modularity of mind, used as it is to underpin accounts of the mental mechanisms seen to be responsible for religious beliefs. Important examples of work that falls under this rubric are provided by research carried out by Pascal Boyer and Justin L. Barrett.

These theoretical commitments are not shared by all cognitive scientists of religion, however. Ongoing debates regarding the comparative advantages of different evolutionary explanations for human behaviour[5] find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with dual inheritance theory recently gaining adherents among researchers in the field, including Armin Geertz and Ara Norenzayan.

The perceived advantage of this theoretical framework is its ability to deal with more complex interactions between cognitive and cultural phenomena, but it comes at the cost of experimental design having to take into consideration a richer range of possibilities.

Religious experience

A religious experience is a subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework. The concept originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of Western society.

William James popularised the concept. Many religious and mystical traditions see religious experiences (particularly that knowledge which comes with them) as revelations caused by divine agency rather than ordinary natural processes.

They are considered real encounters with God or gods, or real contact with higher-order realities of which humans are not ordinarily aware.

Skeptics may hold that religious experience is an evolved feature of the human brain amenable to normal scientific study.

The commonalities and differences between religious experiences across different cultures have enabled scholars to categorize them for academic study

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.

It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was of particular interest.

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. Miller and Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg as a pervasive influence on transcendentalism.

It was also strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads. A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Adherents believe that society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, and they have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters.

Transcendentalism is closely related to Unitarianism, the dominant religious movement in Boston in the early nineteenth century.

It started to develop after Unitarianism took hold at Harvard University, following the elections of Henry Ware as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of John Thornton Kirkland as President in 1810.

Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason.

The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead, they longed for a more intense spiritual experience.

Thus, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians.

Divine illumination

According to divine illumination, the process of human thought needs to be aided by divine grace. It is the oldest and most influential alternative to naturalism in the theory of mind and epistemology

It was an important feature of ancient Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, medieval philosophy, and the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy.

Socrates says in The Apology that he had a divine or spiritual sign that began when he was a child. It was a voice that turned him away from something he was about to do, although it never encouraged him to do anything. Apuleius later suggested the voice was of a friendly demon and that Socrates deserved this help as he was the most perfect of human beings.

The early Christian philosopher Augustine (354 – 430) also emphasised the role of divine illumination in our thought, saying that "The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord,"[3] and "You hear nothing true from me which you have not first told me.

According to Augustine, God does not give us certain information, but rather gives us insight into the truth of the information we received for ourselves. If we both see that what you say is true, and we both see that what I say is true, then where do we see that? Not I in you, nor you in me, but both of us in that unalterable truth that is above our minds.

Augustine Augustine's theory was defended by Christian philosophers of the later Middle Ages, particularly Franciscans such as Bonaventura and Matthew of Aquasparta.

According to Bonaventura: Things have existence in the mind, in their own nature (proprio genere), and in the eternal art. So the truth of things as they are in the mind or in their own nature – given that both are changeable – is sufficient for the soul to have certain knowledge only if the soul somehow reaches things as they are in the eternal art.

The doctrine was criticised by John Pecham and Roger Marston, and in particular by Thomas Aquinas, who denied that in this life we have divine ideas as an object of thought, and that divine illumination is sufficient on its own, without the senses.

Aquinas also denied that there is a special continuing divine influence on human thought. People have sufficient capacity for thought on their own, without needing "new illumination added onto their natural illumination".

The theory was defended by Henry of Ghent. Henry argued against Aquinas that Aristotle's theory of abstraction is not enough to explain how we can acquire infallible knowledge of the truth, and must be supplemented by divine illumination. A thing has two exemplars against which it can be compared.

The first is a created exemplar which exists in the soul. The second is an exemplar which exists outside the soul, and which is uncreated and eternal. But no comparison to a created exemplar can give us infallible truth.

Since the dignity of man requires that we can acquire such truth, it follows that we have access to the exemplar in the divine mind. Henry's defence of divine illumination was strongly criticised by the Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus, who argued that Henry's version of the theory led to scepticism.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Reiki

Cognitive science of religion

Religious experience

Transcendentalism

Divine illumination