| Subject: Acupuncture Atheists |
Author:
Ben
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Date Posted: 13:51:39 01/22/04 Thu
Al,
Your attitude is pretty good. I'll respond to Nick and Paul. Here goes.
I used to believe that the problem lied purely in "intent", "purity of heart", and "connection to God". This is tricky territory. You can get messed up from pressure in your life (I sure was). In this state, you are disconnected from the sense of life and vibrance that many kids have, for example. Their minds are not dominated by anxiety. It is because they feel flowing positive energy.
In my case, I lost that energy. I tried various things including meditation. They all had elements of sensibility to them. Ultimately, I found that I wasn't moving past a point because the years of turmoil had pinned my stomach into a state where it was tightening up over an ulcer. I found this out because a little old Vietnamese acupuncturist with a balanced, positive disposition spotted it and treated it. When my stomach "opened" it was an upheaval. Separately, I had a very positive reaction to, dare I say, Prozac (coupled with L-Tryptophan and Buspar). After I plateaued on them, I eventually got off them. I took them because a psychologist explained to me that the body responds to heavy trauma by chronically producing large amounts of stress hormones. These, in turn, cause your body to metabolize one of your principal neurotransmitters, seratonin, which regulates much of the transfer of nerve impulses across the nerve terminals.
As for acupuncture, as a whole, when it is properly practiced, you are being told a great deal of fully rational information, none of which is blasphemous. You are being told-- you feel healthy when energy is flowing properly through your brain and body. You're told that your anger and warped lifestyle creates blockages of this energy and that you require specific stimulation to break up the blockages. Enduring this requires the intent on the patient's part to confront the issues behind the stagnancies and work through them (so does taking Prozac, by the way).
Are there people looking for comfort from medicine without looking at the problems underneath them? Yes. But from what I've seen, people are mostly victimized by a lack of information. Most doctors in the West don't even see the obvious link between stress and illness. As for acupuncture, even the National Institutes of Health has studied it and found a scientific basis to it (http://nccam.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/).
There is this reflex that thinks that I'm talking blasphemy. But I can argue the exact opposite. I don't make the rules. This is how God designed us. If we are going to look for "truth", we had better start with objective physical reality. One can readily argue that the Bible represents the best that people thousands of years ago could do to communicate their sense of balanced life, without insight into how the nervous system (endocrine system, etc.) works. So to them it seemed mysterious and required words like “faith” and “conscience”.
As for “Finding God in Physics”, Roy repeatedly takes wrong information and runs with it. This includes the incorrect beliefs that: light slows down in a solid and speeds up on the other end, planets rotate because the atoms in them spin in the same direction, lightening comes from discharge from a layer surrounding the Earth, "light does not need its emitting source for power", photons should somehow slow down after they lose energy, like a “baseball”.
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