Atheists vs Law of One-ers

[rva_jeremy]

My friend had direct experience of being out of body and flying around, but he still dismisses it as workings of the brain.

This makes perfect sense to me.  After all, mind-body or spirit-body duality is simply a model.  It is a way of thinking and reasoning about our sensory experiences.  But it is not the way things "are" in some objective sense.  It is not itself "true" or "false"--it either helps us explain our experiences to our satisfaction or it does not.  It just depends on what model you're using as a way to orient yourself as we flip through the catalog of experiences that is our life, our consciousness, our waking and sleeping narrative we weave to make sense of it all.

I think there's tolerant and intolerant strains of atheism.  So you have Richard Dawkins types who think all religion is actively evil and justify extreme Islamophobia on this basis.  You also have atheists who accept the theism as a moral symbol that doesn't need metaphysical certainty to be significant.  I try to remember that I don't know everything about reality, either, and that atheists have something to teach about establishing one's approach to life on one's own terms.  That has been something I've found the Law of One very useful for relative to other philosophies, and I've notice that atheists tend to show interest in the Law of One when I stress Ra's technical and somewhat detached approach to human affairs.