I don’t believe there’s any kind of “brainstorm” that you could get from meditation that you wouldn’t arrive at eventually from thinking normally. So, no, no, and no to that question.

My boyfriend got 7.5 points due to, IMO, excessively liberal interpretations of the questions.

Just curious Hemant, what did you get, if you don’t mind me asking?

I got a 0! (Surprise, surprise)

I haven’t gotten around to reading The God Delusion yet, so I’m unfamiliar with its stance on these things. If it really does reject tolerance and understanding I probably won’t bother. I’m not very interested in wasting my time with the anti-theist version of Ann Coulter… or any version of Ann Coulter for that matter.

You’re throwing around the words tolerance and understanding, but I really have no idea what you mean. The God Delusion definitely does not tolerate religiously motivated violence, the labels and indoctrination of faith imposed on children, and religious control on government and law. Richard Dawkins has much understanding of the positions he’s arguing against in the book, and of much more.

I think you will find a remarkable difference between Dawkins and Coulter. Coulter, who to me seems shallow of thought, demented in hate, and enjoys writing on matters in complete ignorance.

@I like tea: re question #5: Say someone has an insight to some mathematical proof while in meditation. This is clearly a new insight which directly leads to “new” knowledge (e.g., a theorem), even though it comes just from their brain. Meditation is simply a different state of thinking, and as such it can sometimes lead to new insights and thus knowledge.

The speaker clarified exactly what he meant when he said “not attainable through ordinary thought”. Discovering a mathematical proof counts as ‘ordinary’ thinking regardless of what you happen to be doing at the time, Maths is just pure logic. When he invoked meditation specifically he was clearly taking about prophesy or other miraculous insights impossible to reach by logical progression i.e An invariably reliable, specific and indisputably accurate foretelling of the outcome of fundamentally stoichiometric future events.

Tolerance is not a general goal worth persuing, that’s madness

Oy.

To be fair to the author, it’s named “The God Delusion Index” and Richard Dawkins is mentioned at the end.

I haven’t gotten around to reading The God Delusion yet, so I’m unfamiliar with its stance on these things. If it really does reject tolerance and understanding I probably won’t bother. I’m not very interested in wasting my time with the anti-theist version of Ann Coulter… or any version of Ann Coulter for that matter.

Did you anyone ever wonder what “batshit” really was? And why is it so crazy?